Achoo!

(Yes, that is a 1940s quilt/blanket) I am hiding under my quilt clutching tissues, listening to my iPod, occasionally working on my new pattern, but mainly just dozing as I am bravely battling the common cold.

So, here are some things I have enjoyed recently.

• Fallen London - a nice little gothic Victoriana browser game.
• Critical Hit Podcast - A guy at my new RPG group recommended this and it is ace.
• Nyan Waits. Tom Waits meet Nyan Cat. I am so sorry.
• Wind Map. It is beautiful.
• Patrick Wolf - Lupercalia. Still.

Short & Sweet

A short and sweet story: This morning I found a handknitted shawl in Glasgow City Centre. I worried because if I had lost a shawl, I would be absolutely heartbroken.

I picked up the shawl and sent out a tweet: Did you lose your knitted shawl in Glasgow city centre this morning? Nip into John Lewis Glasgow haberdashery dept & describe it!

A lot of lovely people retweeted me, but I still fretted. I posted on Ravelry too and though I got some lovely notes, I did not get any leads.

So, after work was done, I sat down to look through the Ravelry project database. The yarn was easy to identify: 218 pages of projects!? Ughr! I decided that it would be quicker to look through the Ravelry pattern database and thankfully the shawl pattern was fairly distinct with just 52 projects to its name. Using the combination of yarn and pattern I found the project - and the knitter.

The knitter is in Germany which threw me. However, I twigged it was a knitter with Scottish connections and I sent her a tentative Rav message: I know this is a long shot but..

And you know what? It was the right knitter! And the knitter's mum will be reunited with her handknitted shawl! Isn't the internet (and especially Ravelry) a wonderful, wonderful place?

Coffee & Bagl

Spring arrived and so did a little baby. A good internet friend had a baby boy and in the grand tradition of knitters everywhere, I made a little something for the baby. I knew these things before I started knitting: 1) the little family lives near the sea, so I wanted a nautical flavour to the project; 2) it was going to be a boy; 3) plenty of people would be knitting for the baby, so I would be wise to knit something slightly bigger than a new-born size; 4) the mother expressed a love for modern Scandinavian-style childrenswear; and 5) the mother is a knitter so she'd appreciate whatever I made.

With all these things in mind, I narrowed down my pattern choices quite quickly. The Latte Baby Sweater was a big contender but I had problems sourcing a 4-ply yarn with a suitable colour range here in the UK. Denme was released just as I was pottering around on Ravelry, but the style was very much geared towards newborns as was the sizing, although the sizing issue would not have stopped me. Beach Baby ticked so many of my boxes but I was unsure about how much knitting time I would have on my hands and how much I would have the alter the yoke shaping (the notes on Ravelry were very helpful).

So I ended up choose Elizabeth Smith's Little Coffee Bean Cardigan and I am so very glad that I did. It was a very easy knit - it is a top-down raglan cardigan which is as easy as it gets - but it was made even easier by how much attention the designer had lavished on the tiny details that are easy to overlook.

An example: when you move from ribbing into stocking stitch, you have a row of fabric that is ever so slightly distorted. Elizabeth Smith knows this and works around this in her pattern, so your stripe sequence is not distorted. It is a tiny detail - just one row - but I really appreciate the designer caring about this one row. If she cares this much about a free pattern, I'm looking forward to seeing what she does with her commercial patterns.

Back to the Coffee & Bagl cardigan. So, I chose my pattern and as it was written for worsted-weight yarn, I quickly decided to use Cascade 220 which is available in a gazillion colours from Get Knitted (among other places). It is a good workhorse yarn and for baby items that is exactly what I want.

Going back to the nautical theme, I decided against the obvious navy/white colour scheme and plunged for a softer, more vintage-looking combination of beige and muted teal-blue. I really like the combination - it is subtle and looks classy.

As for the buttons, I opted for some coconut buttons I once scored in a really good eBay deal. I have used them before and I still have a few left. I really do like how they pick up the brown tone of the beige yarn.

As you can tell, I really liked this project and I was very happy with the end result. It came out exactly how I pictured it. How often can you can that? I took my time getting the finishing just right so all-in-all I probably spent about a week's knitting time on this little nugget - and finished it just in time for another little nugget to enter the world.

Welcome to the world, Baby Bagl.

On Education, Where Life Takes You & Knitting Patterns

Recently I was contacted by a spammer who wanted to pay me for allowing him/her to post on this site. Needless to say, I ignored them but the suggested topic about higher education did stay with me. I am currently working on translating Danish knitting pattens into English. I am working from extremely well-written and lucid knitting patterns which makes working on them an absolute joy. However, they are also written in a typical no-nonsense Scandinavian style with very minimalist instructions. The designer knows her knitters will be familiar with that style of instruction and trusts that they know what she means. The actual knitting part of this translation is very straightforward - 2r is easy to translate into k2 - but bridging the gap between two pattern traditions is the actual challenge. I want to be utterly faithful to the original pattern while also making the English version easy to understand for knitters accustomed to patterns which guide you through every step of the process.

It's a lot of fun.

I have an academic background and I often encounter people who wonder why I "wasted" eight years of my life at university when I could just have walked straight into my current freelance life. I look at it very different. I think I use my educational background every single day in everything I do.

Pattern writing? My time teaching technical writing at university taught me a lot about building structure and parsing complex information in limited space. That ability is worth its weight in gold and extends into many, many aspects of my current working life.

Translating? Listen, if you are serious about translating from one language to another, you need to understand how languages work. You also need to understand cultural and social concerns of both the original language and the target language. Your biggest challenge is to render all your hard work invisible for the target audience. Six months picking grapes in Spain will not prepare you for translating Lorca, in other words. I spent years having to learn how to tell one kind of subordinate clause from another. I am not saying I still remember them all, but I can delve into the minutiae of language as a result.

Teaching? It goes without saying that I still use all the tricks I learned whilst teaching at university and at private companies. I learned to deal with different learning styles, different skill levels, and how to make students feel confident enough to go problem-solving on their own.

Finding design inspiration? As unlikely as it sounds, I also use my education here although it was in a non-creative field. I love early 20th century culture and my two main mood boards on Pinterest reflect this. I did a lot of work on early 20th century poetry (and typography - hat tip) and these things still influence me: I attempt to pare things down and reduce design elements. I think about why I want certain designs to look a particular way and I try to maintain a certain structure throughout key designs. Maybe if I had gone to art school I would approach designing differently? More organically?

I was lucky. I went to university in the mid-90s and early-00s. I did not have to pay tuition fees and I was at liberty to pursue niche interests at great length (as weird as it sounds, specialising in modernist print culture doesn't make you hugely appealing to the private sector. Who knew?). I did not have to get a part-time job as the Danish state funded me and I have no student debts now. Needless to say, those days have gone and young people are facing uncertain futures.

My message is, though: education is never wasted. You may not end up doing anything that has anything obvious to do with your degree but if you are serious about your studies, you will end up with a set of skills that'll last you your entire life. No matter where it takes you.

Frontier & A Bike

My knitting mojo seems to have returned - although I probably jinxed it by saying that. I have finished two things - neither of which I can show you right now - and I have cast on for a new project. Luckily I can show you this one.

This is going to be Frontier by Julia Frank. Julia is a knitwear designer that works within the realm of deconstructing traditional knitwear ideas: she works with relatively fine yarns knitted at very loose gauge and with dropped-stitch patterns worked across large areas. Her work is a tiny bit more commercial now she is designing for Rowan: Frontier interprets the loose gauge and the dropped stitches within the context of a cropped summer cardigan. (Oh, and I also really, really like Julia Frank's Clara jumper from the recent Studio 26. Knitted bottom-up in the round with a yoke .. but this traditional construction just seems so fresh in Frank's hands.)

Anyway. Frontier. I am using Rowan Pima Cotton in "Bark". I am always wary of knitted with inelastic fibres like cotton or silk, but my hands are doing just fine. It has been a quick knit due to knitting a DK yarn on 5.5mm needles using a drop-stitch pattern. I had to adjust to the double whammy of a loose gauge and dropped stitches (either is fine, combined they are interesting). It helped when I changed from my customary circs to straight (bamboo) needles to stop the wraps getting tangled. I am just one ball into the project but I'm already at the arm hole shaping for the back.

In lieu of any photos of my two FOs, here is a photo of the delicious vegan date cake I had at Artisan Roast during one of my bike trips.

Yes, the bike arrived this week. I cannot begin to tell you what a difference having a bike has made to my emotional wellbeing.

When I lived in Denmark, I used to bike everywhere - it is simply part of the Copenhagen lifestyle - but I have been reluctant to get a bike here for a number of reasons (traffic & health being two major ones). Recently I have seen a rise in the number of people biking around Glasgow and I decided I might as well join them. I am so very glad I did. Apparently I never feel quite at home in a place before I can navigate it on a bike. Glasgow belongs to me  now.

I am also very amused by the male bikers on their 17-gear racers who look at me with disdain as they race past me - and whose facial expressions turn positively green with sourness when this skirt-wearing lass on a three-gear classic ladies' bike catches up with them at the red light.

And, yes, I wear a helmet and I am significantly less suicidal on a bike than I was back in Copenhagen (where everything goes if you are biking). Don't worry.

Happiness is a red bike.

Start Stop Move

I finished a little knitted thing this week but I cannot show you any details until the little knitted thing has been gifted to a very special expectant mother. And I cannot show any of the works-in-progress for various reasons. I finished no books this week either (though Other Half returned a book to me so I can get finally finish it). No sewing. No general crafting. No exciting road trips.

However, I did have a design submission accepted and my design is off Somewhere Else being knitted up and photographed! It'll be interesting to see what it looks like. I also bought a bike so I can Copenhagen-ise Glasgow a tiny bit. And I had a most wonderful latte somewhere in the still-bohemian outskirts of the almost-gentrified West End.

And in the spirit of things that make me happy: