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..

Small Problems Are Good Problems

Where can you buy titanium pins? The laceweight version of my Karise shawl is now off the needles and is blocking on the living room floor.

(When we move from this place, I shall miss the awful wall-to-wall carpeting .. when I block shawls)

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.

Evidence of Knitting

"You know, you never post anything about knitting anymore," my friend said. When I looked back at recent blog posts, I was startled to find that she was right. I write a lot about potential knitting but I rarely post about Stuff Wot I Have Knitted. Clearly I need to make amends although I have not been knitting super-exciting things. The Skald shawl. Looks pretty, non?

I chose to knit Spring Trellis by Linda Choo which is a free Ravelry pattern (and well-written too). I ended up running out of yarn and had to omit the nupps on the border. I quite like the contrast between the lace and the solid border, but would have preferred the shawl with nupps.

The yarn was Sirri Tógv 1ply - a Faroese wool which I purchased on my last visit to the mothership Copenhagen. I loved working with it: it was rustic, sheepy, woolly, and beautifully unprocessed. However, it took five rinses to get all the natural lanolin out and instead of the soft, gorgeous fabric I had imagined, Sorri 1ply had bloomed to such a degree that my shawl looks like a cat has slept on it. No, like a cat has slept on it for weeks.  The marriage between pattern and yarn proved to be an unhappy one - the yarn would have worked far better in a simple garterstitch shawl - and lessons have been learned.

I have more Sirri yarn kicking about. I'll need to think carefully about what to do with it.

I got as far as the yoke on my Fenris jumper when I realised I had to rip it out. I loved that yoke, I tell you. I had combined Nordic motifs that I've known and loved my entire life - particular that wheel design which reminds me of the Trundholm Sun Chariot. The Chariot was found very close to where I grew up and the Bronze Age wheel motif is so .. it is part of my psyche, you know?

For the body and sleeves I used a pure wool aran (sold to me as bulky!) which I bought at a very favourable price in my mum's local supermarket. Denmark's great for yarn, I swear (although not so great in other ways but that's for another day). I used remnants of New Lanark aran for the colourwork yoke. A big thank you to Paula and Bronwen who gave me scraps that I'll incorporate - in that way the jumper won't just represent Denmark but also Scotland.

A bit of a departure for me: baby knitting! A colleague is expecting a baby and I wanted to make her something she'll actually use (rather than a fancy baby cardigan that'll languish in a drawer).

The patterns are from Erika Knight's excellent Natural Nursery Knits (probably my favourite baby knitting book) and I used oddments of Patons Washed Haze DK. I really like the booties, actually. They are knitted flat, then seamed quickly up the back. I managed to squeeze out a pair during one knitting group session. Score.

Finally, a black hat. I still need to do a modelled shot, but the weather has been too good!

I used some workhorse aran (again from my mum's supermarket) and got the general gist from a Norwegian hat pattern although I didn't follow the pattern exactly (I lost it, ok?).  I knitted this with winter in mind. Last year I knitted Intuitive and loved it for about two weeks before I lost it on a northbound bus. I am not going to face another winter without a black hat.

I'm currently working on a laceweight version of Karise. There won't be a separate pattern for the laceweight version - just some extra numbers added to the pattern.

So, yes, I do knit. Look! Evidence!

Larisa & the Halfway Point

How can this be July already? To celebrate, my Larisa scarf is now available to download for free from Ravelry. Recent events in Casa Bookish:

• We went to see the new Riverside Transport Museum here in Glasgow. It is smaller than you think and the interior is painted a strange lime-green hue which makes everybody look jaundiced - but it is an interesting space. It'll be good to see more imaginative projects shoot up alongside the Clyde river.
• When Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus: The Ring of Solomon is the third-most intellectually challenging book I have read this year, you know I'm in trouble. It was hugely enjoyable, actually, but I feel guilty for not reading Clever Stuff. Maybe I should consult this.
• Don't knit lace when you are tired and stressed. Trust me on this one.
• As a household of news junkies, D and I have been glued to BBC News 24 and The Guardian's coverage of the UK phone-hacking scandal. MetaFilter has a great primer if you are unaware of the scandal (and stay for the comments).
• I had a stressful day trying to upgrade my blog software which turned out to be incompatible with my host company's servers. As you can tell, I managed to work things out, but I'm always thankful for UK hosting suggestions.

Glasgow had her annual Two Days of Summer but we are back to heavy rain, grey skies, and woolly-wear appropriate temperatures, huzzah! I am tempted to re-start Fenris which I had to rip out as I had grossly mis-calculated my measurements vs sweater measurements. Are you still working on your summer knitting?