Friday is for Finishing, Fine Bags and Finking Of New Stuff

Two-thirds of Britain are enjoying a heatwave. Meanwhile Glasgow is 14C with light drizzle. I dream of blue skies, warm weather and sitting outside with an iced coffee. Maybe that is why I'm making a summery bag? Actually, this was the very first pattern I ever queued on Ravelry: Inga's Haekelbeutel. An easy bag assembled from 16 crochet squares. I'm teaching a session on crochet squares next week, so I'll be able to use my bag as an example of what you can do with squares. The square Inga's bag uses is very plain, but you can obviously use which ever square you want (Ravelry examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5). The assembly is pretty ingenious - I'm saying this before I have assembled the bag - and you can even use knitted squares if you don't like crocheting. And did I mention that the pattern is free?

As for the real reason as to why I'm making this bag right now.. well, I had a long and tiring day at work yesterday, which made for some comfort yarn shopping. I got a full bag of Rowan Milk Cotton DK for £12 (down from .. £47, I think?) and some select balls of Pima Cotton which I knew would be perfect for this Haekelbeutel. I'm pondering what to do with the Milk Cotton - I'm thinking either Anais (which a girl in winter has handily just made),  or maybe just a quick top-down raglan a lá Japel's Cropped Cardi (but with different neckline, a lace pattern, buttons and .. totally different, really).

Summer knits on my mind and the summer is nowhere to be seen.

The Mosswell Shawl is off the needles and currently being overdyed. I'm a bit sceptical about the dye solution, but we'll see..

Hold Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand

Via Lori:

Midway

The 4-ply cardigan has been pushed aside for a little gratuitous shawl knitting. The shawl has been worked on and little now and then, but I feel so frustrated with my cardigan that I thought I would give Mosswell (i.e. Aeolian) some love. As always, a shawl actually works up quickly once you pay it some attention. I zipped through the Set-up Edge Chart and am now midway through the Main Edge Chart. Another few rows and I will have a finished object. I feel almost faint. Still not head-over-heels with the pattern. It is exceedingly well-written, well-charted and well-explained, but it does lack a certain oomph. Perhaps I expected too much from the woman behind Laminaria (still my favourite shawl pattern), but I thought the stitches would flow into each other far more than they are. This is not to say that I am not enjoying knitting my Mosswell (because I am) but it is a different experience to what I had anticipated.

It is also very green which is why Mosswell will be given a little dye-bath once I have bound off. I hope to give a slightly more, er, "mossy" look. If not, I'll just rename the darn thing. Blackwell. Brownwell. Mudwell.

Oh, I nearly forgot.

Come autumn I will be releasing a couple of patterns for some scarves (just in time for Christmas knitting - you'd think I had planned this).One of the scarf patterns is currently with test knitters, but I thought I would let you catch a glimpse of my swatch. Once Mosswell comes off the needles, I will start working on the scarves in earnest and write more about the design process.

Oh, but for more hours in the day.

A couple of links:

• The early reviews of Christopher Nolan's Inception are in - and they are frighteningly GOOD.
• I chuckled at this list of imperfect Romance heroes/heroines. Oh no, Lady Alys is tall and odd-eyed! Prudence Lancaster is bespectacled and plain!
• 'Till Derrida Do Us Part' is the loveliest thing I read for some time. Other Half read it and said: "your mother would kill you". I replied: "I'm pondering if having a wedding ceremony just to interrogate the idea of "the vow" would alter the contextual meaning-making of the vow to such a degree that it could no longer be said to be a vow but rather an avowed non-vow?" Then he threw me out of the living room. Men.
• This method of making iced coffee looks very inviting - and possibly also a bit too daunting to someone whose idea of a good cup o' java is wholly dependent upon how much sleep she has had.

Books 2010: Faber - The Crimson Petal & the White

In my Copenhagen-dwelling days, one of my greatest pleasures was to tour the second-hand bookshops in search of English-language books. I had a favourite haunt - just around the corner from my home - which had pile upon pile of ridiculously cheap books in all languages. The owner opened the shop whenever he felt like it and that was my only problem: I had to be Constantly Vigilant or I could miss the one day in three months when he felt like opening the shutters. The other second-hand shops had fewer books, were more expensive and tended to have the same selection of books. The first Bridget Jones novel was in heavy supply, as was The Celestine Prophecy, Dan Brown's numerous tomes and .. Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White. In my head I yoked Faber's book together with these other books of dubious quality and so I never read it, although I had plenty of copies to choose from. Fast-forward some five or six years.

Michel Faber's Under the Skin, a 'strange, disturbing, genre-defying short novel', turned out to be one of the most fascinating reads in recent memory (I must revisit it soon). Of course I am eager to read more books by Faber, and so another second-hand shop (in another city in another country in another life) delivers yet another copy of The Crimson Petal and White.  This time I bought it. It bears no resemblance to Bridget Jones, Dan Brown, nor The Celestine Prophecy. Instead it reads like Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet written by the step-child of John Fowles.

The Crimson is a Victorian novel written for the 21st century. Like Waters' first few books, it explores the underbelly of Victorian society in a way that Charles Dickens could not: the prostitutes, the corpses dragged from the Thames, the blood, the gore, the shame. Faber has a writerly touch which infuses the book with tiny postmodern flourishes - an omniscient narrator breaking the fourth wall, texts within texts and many characters being authors themselves. His touch is light enough not to irritate, but occasionally it is almost too light:  mid-novel it almost disappears only to reappear just before the end. Knowing references to "proper" Victorian novels abound. Readers who have read Collins' The Woman in White, Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Dickens' Great Expectations will savour Faber's small nods; readers who comes to The Crimson without any 19th C novels behind them will enjoy The Crimson as a rollicking good read.

And it is a very good read. I find it difficult to find faults with The Crimson, but at the same time it did not captured me in the same way that Under the Skin did. It is significantly less raw and more conventional (by current standards - certainly not by 19th C standards!). I finished reading it today and found out that the novel has been commissioned for a four-part BBC drama. And perhaps that sums up my sole problem with the book: it is a novel thriving on exploring the dark side of society, and yet it is polite enough to become a Sunday evening BBC costume drama.

Kimfobo at Reading Matters has a superb review, as does Tom of A Common Reader. Maybe The Crimson Petal and the White is still just  tainted in my mind by sharing those shelves with Bridget Jones et al all those years ago.

Findings

Find of the day week month year: Alice Starmore's Scandinavian Knitwear, mint condition, for £2. My hands were shaking slightly. I'm doubly pleased because I actually really like the patterns in the book and can see at least three future projects ("Skåne", "Halland" and "Blekinge" (sorry, Danish joke) "Delsbø"). I also bought John Allen's Fabulous Fairisle for a mere pittance. It is not a collection of knitting patterns, but rather a compilation of traditional fair-isle patterns. I particularly like how Allen explored the use of colour and how different colour combinations affected the chosen fair-isle patterns. Some of the patterns were shown in non-traditional colour combinations (pinks, greens and yellows on bleached white background!?) which was admittedly interesting, but also slightly off-putting.

Stranded knitting is definitely on the agenda later this year. I have no excuses left (bar lack of time).

A few days ago I was contacted by a staff member of a search company who informed me that the company was about to launch a Top 100 Most Influential UK & Ireland Knitting Blogs. Seeing as the company had included this very blog on the list, would I be interested in offering some critique? I pondered this whilst feeling mildly dubious (which I always do with such lists) Later I notice that an Irish felting blog* has now posted the entire list, and my lingering feeling of mild doubt has become less .. mild. Where is Needled? Ysolda? Attic24? Mooncalf Makes? And that is just off the top of my head. It is flattering that I should be called one of the top five most influential UK knitting bloggers, but it is also completely tosh. Who would you include on your list of "influential" UK knitting bloggers? And what is this "influential" thing about, anyway? Bah.

Still knitting that 4-ply cardigan. I'm contemplating cheating on it with a quick little knit - a hat or a cowl. The weather has turned decidedly autumnal today, and I'm tempted to knit a small bow-knot scarf. Just to get that "just completed something" glow, you see. It has been a while since my last Finished Object..

*) I don't know why I'm so surprised to see blogs devoted to felting, but I actually am..

Spot the Mistake

Sorry about the size of the picture, but I thought I would share what happens when you knit on five hours of sleep (I know other people do just fine on five hours of sleep, but I'm a nine-hours sort of gal). This happens.

The project is my Harmony cardigan made with Rowan Fine Milk Cotton. I'm currently knitting the left front. The button band is integrated with the lower half of the pattern: you knit the lace pattern, then knit nine stitches in a rib pattern and finish with a K1. It is easy and looks elegant. No problems.

Problems arise on the purl side where the pattern has you P1, then knit in rib pattern before purling back across the lace pattern. I blame my lace-knitting ways for instinctively slipping the first stitch instead of P1. I did not realise my error until much later - to be honest - I'm not going to rip back some fifty rows to fix this. I know this means I'm a bad, bad knitter, but so be it.

Besides, the right button band will overlap the left one and we are talking about something that'll be around lower-belly height. I would have ripped back had I made that mistake somewhere much more visible, believe you me.

Speaking of mistakes, I made the mistake of looking at my knitting queue and then looking at the local yarn sale. My planned 2010 Stash Slam Down is going seriously wonky, because I came away with nine balls of Calmer in a rich chocolate brown (which will become Still as soon as I finish Harmony) and four balls of Kidsilk Aura (destined to become Opal). I had my eye on some Pima Cotton in Caftan too, but thankfully I was reminded that I am not much of a cotton knitter (nor do I wear pink). Thank you, Paula, for talking some sense into me. Although there's always Daisy...

No. Well. Anyway. Stashdown.

In wholly unrelated news, I have finally listened to the new Crowded House album and, oh, it is not good. It is really not good. I have been composing an essay in my head for a few days now - all about the trajectory of Neil Finn's creative output (starting with Split Enz, then the various incarnations of Crowded House, through to the Finn Brothers albums, his solo output and collaborations) but I think my 3,000 word essay might just have to stay in my head, because someone else have already said pretty much what I wanted to say.

Heroes should never be allowed to grow old. Or grow a moustache.