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labellementeuseBefore you read my pointless knitting story: caramarie made another incredible Avengers vid, this time for Loki (incorporates footage from Thor as well as from The Avengers). I am far from a Loki stan or even fan, so when I say I've watched this vid five times, you need to understand what I mean. It's brilliant. Incredible editing and timing that give a very complete and kind of terrifying character study of Loki.
So I started knitting seriously again a few weeks ago, when it got cold. This has been kind of silly in that I've done hardly anything but knit and read fic and watch hockey since then (and go to work, but that's like the only remotely responsible thing I've done), but it's also been kind of great - I made a baby jumper for a baby my mother knows, then I made some cabled fingerless mitts (which I made because it was FREEZING but then it hasn't been so cold since then?), then I found a completely knitted shawl just waiting to be blocked (a EZ Half-Circle Camping Shawl and frankly it's gorgeous, I'm so proud of my past self; at least I hope it was my past self, because I have no actual memory of knitting this shawl) hanging out in my stash so I blocked that, and then I was like, well, now I want to knit some lace but I have a brand-new shawl, what am I going to make?
And then I realised that what I really really wanted was a lace blanket knit in the round, like Hemlock, but not that pattern because I don't care for its shape (although the flower at the center is beautiful). No, I decided I wanted a square lace blanket, but then there weren't any on Rav, so I determined I had to do it myself, and then I had a minor freakout and decided that I was just going to turn a triangular shawl into a square one (on the basis that a lot of triangular shawls seem like they could in principle be half of a square if you just played around with your cast on and your edge stitches) and lo and behold! Four hours later I had knit through a whole skein's worth of a square version of the Adamas Shawl, a shawl I've actually knit before. I did have to do some funky playing around and I'm not sure how big it will actually get - I have ten balls of an 8 or 10 ply, but I'm hoping that like most lace I'll be able to get it to block out much larger than it knits up and it might come out bedspread or at least couch blanky sized!
So I'm learning two things from this project:
- The Adamas was one of my earliest lace projects and I found it really difficult. I am now absolutely breezing through it and am confident there are no errors in the project as it stands. I always say that knitting is basically just the knit stitch and the purl stitch and if you can do those you can knit anything - but it's nice to be reminded that there is a learning curve, and that I have moved up it.
- I'm learning that if I have ten balls of wool, and I knit through one of those in about four hours and still get to bed at a reasonable-ish hour and take it to work, I am going to be asked "so, how long do you think it will take you to finish it?" And then I'll say, jokingly, "Well, if I knit four hours on it every night, I'll be done in ten days."
And then a voice at the back of my head will say, "Challenge accepted!"
Goddamnit. I'm hoping I'll be able to talk the voice at the back of my head out of it, but I've done four skeins in three days now (two yesterday) and because it's early days of the project it's progressing pretty quickly. We'll see how I feel in another two days when a round is half a skein just by itself, and I'm pretty nervous about running out of wool half-way through a round and having to tink back a billion stitches so I have to figure out a way to do that kind of maths. Somehow.
Things that didn't make it into this post, but I hope will soon: a more-than-140-characters version of my rant about how the Pokemon theme is the song that best describes generation Y, and a post about last week's episode of New Zealand's Hottest Home Baker, feminism and homophobia.
caramarie made another incredible Avengers vid, this time for Loki (incorporates footage from Thor as well as from The Avengers). I am far from a Loki stan or even fan, so when I say I've watched this vid five times, you need to understand what I mean. It's brilliant. Incredible editing and timing that give a very complete and kind of terrifying character study of Loki. So I started knitting seriously again a few weeks ago, when it got cold. This has been kind of silly in that I've done hardly anything but knit and read fic and watch hockey since then (and go to work, but that's like the only remotely responsible thing I've done), but it's also been kind of great - I made a baby jumper for a baby my mother knows, then I made some cabled fingerless mitts (which I made because it was FREEZING but then it hasn't been so cold since then?), then I found a completely knitted shawl just waiting to be blocked (a EZ Half-Circle Camping Shawl and frankly it's gorgeous, I'm so proud of my past self; at least I hope it was my past self, because I have no actual memory of knitting this shawl) hanging out in my stash so I blocked that, and then I was like, well, now I want to knit some lace but I have a brand-new shawl, what am I going to make?
And then I realised that what I really really wanted was a lace blanket knit in the round, like Hemlock, but not that pattern because I don't care for its shape (although the flower at the center is beautiful). No, I decided I wanted a square lace blanket, but then there weren't any on Rav, so I determined I had to do it myself, and then I had a minor freakout and decided that I was just going to turn a triangular shawl into a square one (on the basis that a lot of triangular shawls seem like they could in principle be half of a square if you just played around with your cast on and your edge stitches) and lo and behold! Four hours later I had knit through a whole skein's worth of a square version of the Adamas Shawl, a shawl I've actually knit before. I did have to do some funky playing around and I'm not sure how big it will actually get - I have ten balls of an 8 or 10 ply, but I'm hoping that like most lace I'll be able to get it to block out much larger than it knits up and it might come out bedspread or at least couch blanky sized!
So I'm learning two things from this project:
- The Adamas was one of my earliest lace projects and I found it really difficult. I am now absolutely breezing through it and am confident there are no errors in the project as it stands. I always say that knitting is basically just the knit stitch and the purl stitch and if you can do those you can knit anything - but it's nice to be reminded that there is a learning curve, and that I have moved up it.
- I'm learning that if I have ten balls of wool, and I knit through one of those in about four hours and still get to bed at a reasonable-ish hour and take it to work, I am going to be asked "so, how long do you think it will take you to finish it?" And then I'll say, jokingly, "Well, if I knit four hours on it every night, I'll be done in ten days."
And then a voice at the back of my head will say, "Challenge accepted!"
Goddamnit. I'm hoping I'll be able to talk the voice at the back of my head out of it, but I've done four skeins in three days now (two yesterday) and because it's early days of the project it's progressing pretty quickly. We'll see how I feel in another two days when a round is half a skein just by itself, and I'm pretty nervous about running out of wool half-way through a round and having to tink back a billion stitches so I have to figure out a way to do that kind of maths. Somehow.
Things that didn't make it into this post, but I hope will soon: a more-than-140-characters version of my rant about how the Pokemon theme is the song that best describes generation Y, and a post about last week's episode of New Zealand's Hottest Home Baker, feminism and homophobia.
