Charting & Swatching

Designing is a laborious process. First there is the idea, then there is sketching, followed by charting, swatching and finally writing before any proper knitting can occur. It is laborious, frustrating and fun to pursue an idea and see it become an actual piece of knitting. This past week I have spent countless hours stuck in the charting and swatching part of the process. I have a tonne of ideas and a thick sketchbook, but while I can chart a thousand things, you never know how things really look until you swatch: One beautiful chart turned out to look male genitalia once knitted up; Another chart turned out to be awfully, awfully challenging to knit; Yet another chart turned out beautifully but once knitted it was clearly destined for a cardigan I'm yet to design and knit.

And do not get me started on charts that do not easily slot into triangular shawl construction: I have one gorgeous chart that turned out to have an 82 row repeat once I applied it to a typical shawl construction. I had several tense moments when promising charts collapsed under the strain of even increases.

Happily all of this is behind me now and I am now in the writing and knitting phase. That means that, yes, a new shawl pattern will be available come December. I hope you will like it.

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Kaffeslabbaras

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Ah, everything Danish is super-hip in Britain right now thanks to The Killing/Forbrydelsen and mid-century modern design yadda yadda yadda. Did you know that I am Danish? I don't consider myself super-hip, though, and I had my reasons for leaving Denmark. But it is lovely to see Denmark + fashion + knitting. It makes me feel proud (and very homesick) to see this video:

KAFFESLABBERAS // MADS AND ERNA (SUBTITLED) from Kaffeslabberas on Vimeo.

'Kaffeslabberas' is a knitting club in the Copenhagen neighbourhood of Amager. Its members are female pensioners, whose rich history and zest for life overshadows their advanced age. This project partners up these ladies with Danish artists and designers, with the intent of creating a connection across generations, through the strengths of craftmanship, diversity and experience.

I wish the subtitles were grammatically correct and the spelling was better, but we can't have everything.

Thank you to Angela for pointing out the article and video.

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Arboretum

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Visual poetry: a poetry form in which the shape of the poem is as important as the words themselves. The Scottish poet and gardener Ian Hamilton Smith combined gardening, sculptures and poetry to great effect. The woods around Bennachie yield beautiful surprises as you walk around in them:  words carved in stone, sentences arranged amongst branches and trunks.  I live far from Bennachie, but I live very close to The Glasgow Arboretum (you can almost see my home in the photo) where you can also find fragments of poetry scattered among the trees. My winter mitts? A fairly quick, uncomplicated knit. I used a pattern I found in The Knitting Book and yarn given to me by my mother. I have tiny hands, so went down a few needle sizes and I also added thumbs. The yarn matches a cowl and a hat I made earlier, so I'm all set for winter now. Bring it on.

I am spending today swatching for a future project/design. I played around with charts in Excel earlier and now I'm trying to figure out which texture I like best. It is always fun trying to strike a balance between my personal aesthetics, an imagined level of difficulty, and the actual purpose of the pattern.

I had a quick Twitter exchange with a few people after I came up with a true lace chart (i.e. lace knitted on both sides). I loved the idea of the pattern, but when I started to work it up in 4ply I knew it did not work in such a relatively heavy yarn. Twitterati consensus was that true lace is scary. I don't think this is necessarily true, but I know that this is what many people feel. Honestly, this project is not one for 'scary' lace so that chart was shelved alongside many other charts. Hopefully I will find the right project for it at some point.

Meanwhile I have come up with another chart - or, rather, four different versions of the same chart. I am busy swatching trying to figure out which version works best. I'm using some leftover Old Maiden Aunt merino/silk for the swatches. I need more of this yarn, I really do. It's beautiful to work with on my new Addi bamboo needles.

Finally, the soundtrack for work: I rediscovered this album this morning. The light is pale and thin. Like you. Has it really been 19 years?

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Reader, I Knitted The Cardigan

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There is a lovely bit in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre where the housekeeper, Mrs Fairfax, says something in the vein of, "Oh, hang on a sec. Must. Finish. This. Row." I smiled in recognition when I came across it during my recent re-read of the book. I first read Jane Eyre when I was fourteen. I had this mad, mad notion of 'reading all the classics' before I turned fifteen. My school library had the Danish equivalent of Everyman's Library, and so I just started with the first book in the series. I did not get far, of course, because I read indiscriminately and without any real understanding of what I read. Jane Eyre was one of the books I did read (alongside Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights) and I remember thinking it was 'okay but a bit dull'.

Then I decided to revisit Eyre a few weeks ago and I am so very glad that I did. It took my breath away. What an intelligent, passionate, fierce book it is. Then I took it upon myself to watch a few adaptations of Eyre: the recent Wasikowska/Fassbender film was difficult to pin down (this is a compliment of sorts) whilst the 2006 BBC mini-series was atrocious and hammy. Eyre is an oddball of a novel - it is easy to describe it as an exterior novel because so much happens on the surface with storms raging and mad women running around, but I actually read it as an extremely interior novel with so much thinking going on. No wonder it is difficult to adapt satisfyingly. I won't leave it another twenty years between reads.

I finished my Red Cardigan of Doom during my Eyre marathon. Want to see?

Pattern: Patsy by Kim Hargreaves Yarn: Rowan Baby Alpaca DK Verdict: Mneh.

I started this cardigan last summer and finished knitting it around Christmas 2010. I did some provisional seaming just to see how it looked, and it was Not Good. The sleeves were particularly problematic because I have quite long arms and there was some weird chicken-fillet-dangling-in-the-wind action going on somewhere south of my elbows. Don't ask. It wasn't good, mkay? So this cardigan languished and languished until I finally decided to perform some sweater surgery (complete with scissors and assorted weirdness). I finished the cardigan on Wednesday and wore it to my meeting on Thursday. I still haven't found the buttons I bought for it last year, so I'm just wearing it with a shawl pin.

And I'm really unsure about it. The yarn is heavenly soft, drapes so beautifully and is wonderfully warm - I'd use it again in a heartbeat - but I'm really not sure if the cardigan suits me. I do like Kim Hargreaves' patterns but this one was perhaps not the right choice for me.. or maybe my body shape just doesn't work with Kim Hargreaves patterns which is also a point worth remembering.

I have another Finished Object to blog but that is for another day..

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Right Here Right Now Is No Other Place I'd Rather Be

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This month my Karise shawl has been the subject of a knit-along on the Old Maiden Aunt group on Ravelry. The response has been absolutely overwhelming and I love seeing what people are doing with my pattern. It is amazing to watch how something I sketched on paper has sprung to life and - get this - people like it. Yikes. You still have time to participate in the knit-along - and my Karise shawl pattern is actually available with a 20% discount code until end of the knitalong (end of November)! To purchase the pattern go here and use the code OMAKAL - of course you don't need to participate in the knit-along, but I have really enjoyed following the group throughout these last few weeks.

On this side of the table, I am working on a few new things. Most of these things are still in the sketchbook stage, but I have started one new proper project. A couple of years ago I had a misguided attempt at designing a jumper on the fly before I understood things like "fibre-properties" and "planning" and "fit". The result was a hideous jumper I have worn twice. I stuck it in the washing machine the other night and felted the bejeebus out of it. It came out beautifully felted and just the right size for a tea pot cosy. I'm now playing around with sewing it together and decorating it. Pictures will be up on Monday, but I really like it so far and I love being able to get some proper use out of some very lovely yarn. If the tea cosy works out really well, I will put together a tutorial. Gosh.

And this is pretty much what life is like nowadays. My crafting is automatically translated in my head as "how can I communicate this to other people" and "how can this become accessible to others". These days crafting is more about you than me. I am not sure when the shift happened but it has happened in a very definite way. I love creating, making, and crafting but I love it best when I can get other people on-board.

Apropos of nothing: writers and their libraries. Everything is as you would expect - Philip Pullman is thoughtful and lovely (and I'm delighted to see he adores Fernando Pessoa and poetry anthologies too) and Junot Diaz is a hipster who mixes post-colonial literature with geek classics - but books do furnish a room.