The Week That Was

The week in brief: One Karise shawl. This one was knitted in Old Maiden Aunt alpaca/merino laceweight. I used around 325 yards - an amount I find freakishly low. Okay, this is not a huge shawl, but it is decently sized. Weird.

One shawl pattern put up for sale. It has been really exciting and heartening to see the response. Thank you everyone whether you have commented on the shawl, added it as a favourite, queued it, or even bought it. Heck, I'm thrilled by it all.

One book launch. Tracey S. Rosenberg came to Waterstones to promote her first novel, The Girl in the Bunker. I was thrilled to get a signed copy at the meet & greet. I primarily know Tracey as a poet, so it has been really interesting to see her move into prose.

One Danish friend has been visiting. She graciously agreed to go along to the book launch, but we've also explored The West End and visited the new Riverside museum. Her visit has made me think long and hard about linguistic identity. Hopefully I'll remember to blog about this later.

One dinner with friends. A lovely Turkish-Mediterranean dinner which has left me reeling for the rest of the week. Something was clearly not okay with the food because I have been groggy, sluggish, and nauseated ever since Monday. I'll spare you the nasty details, but I'm still not feeling good.

One adventurous sweater surgery session. I took scissors to my red alpaca cardigan yesterday. I hope it works or I will have wasted a lot of expensive yarn. I also feel slightly sick thinking of this. I'm now re-knitting one sleeve. Onwards and upwards, eh?

One major news scandal just continuing to unfold. The News International/News of the world scandal has been the gift that keeps giving for this news junkie household. Whilst I have been feeling out of sorts and reclining decoratively on the sofa, this news story has kept me completely enthralled. And appalled.

Who knows what next week will bring..

FO & Pattern: Karise

Yesterday I cast-off the laceweight version of my Karise shawl. Today I tweaked the charts one last time, had a final proof-read and, with a deep breath, uploaded the pattern to Ravelry. Karise is now available to purchase, in other words.

A few words on the pattern.

Karise is designed to be modular. That means that it is entirely up to the knitter how many times the various charts are repeated. I have given my own suggestions, of course, but because the charts flow organically into each other you can do exactly what you like.  You want to knit Chart A once but Chart B thirteen times? Or maybe Chart A 5 times and Chart B two times? Go for it.

Secondly, I have given a suggested yardage of 370-420 yards, but my shawl (pictured above) took less than 300 yards as did my laceweight shawl. I suspect I may just be  a freak, so I upped the yardage just to be on the safe side.

And the name? Karise is named after a small town in Denmark. These days Karise is mostly famous for being mentioned in a terrible, terrible song, but the Danish 19th romantic play Elven Hill takes place just outside Karise. Seeing as the original sample uses the colourway Ghillie Dhu - which means 'guardian tree faerie' - I could not resist.

Karise is pronounced Ka-REE-Seh, incidentally.

I have a few more design commissions, so watch this space. I also have the best idea for a shawl/scarf thingy but I'll need to play around a lot more as this idea is slightly outside my usual comfort zone..

Unwritten

I always say that the best blog posts I have ever written are the ones I never post. Recently I had conversations with other long-term bloggers (I've been at this for over a decade) about why we continue to blog. One remark stuck with me:

Because I love it. Many new bloggers think it is a quick and easy short-cut to fame and fortune. It is not. It is hard work. I do it, because I cannot NOT do it.

I have been thinking about blogging and my blog's various incarnations. The posts I will never post but which I have written in my head so many times. Posts that would increase traffic, get linked and re-blogged, and maybe even get some attention from outside the blogosphere. Stories that will never be told because they are not mine to tell. Two go back six years. One goes back just a few weeks.

I am thinking of these blog posts as I watch big-scale news unfold here in the UK. People who told stories that were not only not theirs to tell, but also obtained illegally (allegedly, I hasten to add). I have a hard time believing that they told these stories because they loved writing or because they truthfully believed them important stories to tell.

Words are powerful - even in these increasingly visual times.

And I am sitting here on a Friday night and I think about my little, totally insignificant blog and I think about the written word and readership.

And.

I have been very good at walking away from my blogs when they became too unwieldy and too .. too widely read. I was always very proud of Bookish, my literary blog, but I was also relieved when I pulled the plug.

Fourth Edition has grown into something to be proud of as well. It chronicles my journey from being a stuffy academic to an odd-ball creative type. And I meet so many lovely people thanks to this blog. Sometimes I get a bit overwhelmed too. I continue to walk the tightrope: I am continuously torn between my desire to maintain my privacy and my need to write these blog entries.

Don't think I have not thought about walking away from Fourth Edition (because I have) but I also know I would just start over again. Lather, rinse, repeat..

I guess there was a point to this entry but I lost it along the way. I just remember what I was taught and what I went on to teach: always look for the gaps, the absences, what is not being said.

This is worth keeping in mind. Not just for blogging but also for news coverage.

A Visit To Old Maiden Aunt & Other Knitting Plans

Old Maiden Aunt yarns had an open studio day/housewarming yesterday, but as I could not make it, I travelled out to West Kilbride to help Lilith set things up. Her new studio space is marvellous: there is a real shop front where she can display her yarns and host workshops with a huge, airy workshop space in the back for the dyeing and drying of yarns. Now, Lilith and I go back years (our friendship is an ace story I must remember to blog at some point) and I am over the moon that she has managed to build her business to a point where she has been able to get such a wonderful space for Old Maiden Aunt and that she has such a huge amount of support from the knitting community. It makes me so damn happy. It could not have happened to a nicer person.

Gushing over ;)

Lilith and I spoke about my Karise shawl and I realised that my inner diary was out of sync. I thought Knit Nation was this forthcoming week when it is actually the following week. I was going to release the Karise pattern tomorrow, but instead I am going to take advantage of the extra week to work out the laceweight instructions. I was always going to include laceweight instructions but thought I would have to do that with a later update. Not so .. huzzah!

My head is buzzing with shawl design ideas and I've begun using Pinterest as a way of creating micro-mood boards (Polyvore might have been more obvious, but I don't like that community all that much). I was watching a documentary on the Ballets Russes the other night and started looking through my old source books on early 20th C design. I've also been swatching a tiny bit, but I need to finish writing Karise before I let myself begin something new.

At the same time I am also yearning for a big, big project. This year has been a year of small projects that I finish relatively quickly, but I want to sink my teeth into a really juicy project. One that I won't finish in two weeks. I just have to bide my time, because I know my big juicy knit will be a colourwork project from Rowan Nordic Tweed (out on August 1st). I'm torn between three projects from that book, actually: a cardigan with intarsia reindeers(!) knitted in Rowan Colourspun and Kid Classic (it has a sort of faded, vintagey sense of glamour to it), a lusekofte-inspired jumper in Rowan Tweed (very fitted, very lovely), and a cool shrug/bolero/sleeveless cardigan with selbu-motifs done in a sort-of positive/negative colour way which is also knitted in Rowan Tweed (very, very cool looking and knitting it might hurt my brain).

Perhaps I should start by ripping out two half-sleeves and reknit them before I contemplate doing anything. A month .. I should totally be able to finish that red cardigan of mine..

Background Details

It's been that kind of morning.

"So, which textile degree did you do?"

"No textile degree, I'm afraid. I have a degree in English with a specialisation in print culture from a Danish university."

"Okaaaay, why did you move there to do your degree?"

"I'm .. Danish?"

".."

I posted this exchange on a certain social networking site and some good friends tried to reframe things for me.

Can't you just invent an explanation? "Well, I was really going to study in Rwanda, but then the plane crashed and ..."

"and after fighting of the packs of lions and the rabid wildebeests, I thought I'd..."

"... I thought I'd knit myself a fishing net so I could get some food. And then my clothes had got all tattered, so I knit myself some new ones, and that inspired me to go into designing."

"That's why most of my garnments are green. Jungle-inspiration."

Yeah, it has been that kind of morning: quite odd but very funny.

Hang on. Most of my days are quite odd but very funny. Hmm.

Weather With You

Hello. Excuse me while I pretend I constantly hang about grey wooden panels wearing a red woollen dress and a gawjus mossy green scarf/shawl. Okay, so I actually do that quite a bit but I rarely wear matching lipstick and have my photo taken whilst faffing, so there is that.

In short, we had a photo shoot for the Karise shawl yesterday. For some reason the sun came out just as I took off my cape and the sunshine just made everything so much easier. I am never comfortable in front of a camera (stand straight, suck in tummy, smile, look natural) but the photo shoot wasn't too bad.

Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you..

Hopefully that means tomorrow will be sunny too. I am heading out to West Kilbride to see Old Maiden Aunt's Lilith and her new studio. Her housewarming is on Saturday but true to form I shall be working, so instead I am heading out to lend a hand prepping the place for the hordes. Some sunshine would be most welcome as my train will have a view of the Isle of Arran - and Arran is just prettier when it is sunny.

Oh, hell. Here you go. That song. I don't actually like it, you know, but it is the sound of summer..