Thursday, March 08, 2007

Sock it to me

So, thanks to a thread on MSE that I began only a day or two ago, I now have lots of useful (and recommended) knitting links, and also I have discovered some fabulous knitting blogs to entertain me. so, I thought it might be worth a post about them. I am also seriously considering having a knitting blog. I worry, though, that like the failed recipe and book blogs I still have but don’t maintain, if I split it out, the blog will cease to be. So, in the meantime, those of you who are not interested in knitting will just have to skip past the knitting related posts. Sorry about that.

The knitting blogs I have visited so far are as follows :
Knitting Mama is a nice little blog by Robyn about knitting and her baby son, Sean. It’s quite an endearing read, and I’m looking forwards to seeing her next baby-knit project.
Lolly Girl is another American lady’s blog, but looks promising. I haven’t had time to dig through the archives of this blog yet.
Katie Knits is my latest discovery, courtesy of the MSE community. Katie has just finished a herringbone sweater, which looks lush! Also, she lives in London – a British knitter’s blog! So I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

I have also found a sock knitting pattern on Knitty which doesn’t require circular needles or double pointed needles. It’s not that I'm afraid to use either of those, but I have lots of normal needles (varying lengths, varying widths, varying colours) and I have only a few double pointed (dp) needles in a limited range of sizes and no more than four in a set. I have absolutely no circular knitting needles yet. That means that in order to knit up the random selection of wool I have, I need patterns which allow me to use my existing needles, otherwise it’s going to become expensive! The only trouble I am having at present is that some of the needles I have are plastic rather than metal. While they then do not make a huge noise when I drop them on our laminate flooring, they don’t feel quite so nice to use, and they don’t slide quite as well as they aught.

I also like to work on more than one project at once. Variety is the spice of life after all. Sadly, the next project I have lined up requires the same needles I am already using for a current project. I haven’t picked another for after that yet. The vast amounts of eyelash yarn I have means that I’ll be needing the same needles yet again! Perhaps I should get some duplicates of this size, though I could probably knit up the fancy stuff on the next size up or down without too many issues.

Once I got used to knitting the pink fluffy stuff, it was quite nice to work with. It knit up pretty quickly, although the scarf I’ve made is rather short. I may use two balls of the blue and see what that length is like. I still have a ball and a half of the pink, plus three of the blue, and three each of the red and white eyelash. I also have a ball of chunky pale pink, some slightly less chunky pink and cream (for my strawberries and cream pompom hat) a ball and a half of multicolour DK, most of two balls of white DK, most of a ball of black DK, a ball each of purple and orange DK and about half a ball of pink DK. Not ideal for doing anything bigger than socks or mittens. There’s also the minor drawback that because it’s mostly cheap stuff it’s not 100% wool. In most cases they are 100% acrylic in fact! That’s okay for scarves because they’re nice and warm and not on your skin as much, but for a sock I’m not so sure. I guess I’ll have to try it and see. Once I’ve managed a basic sock (which I think will take half of a 100g ball per sock) then I may have a go at putting some pattern to them (either with colours of wool or with patterns from my pattern book). It’s all exciting, but I have a problem too. I spend so much time at work that I don’t have much time for knitting! And I don’t even have an especially long week.

I did KIP (Knit In Public) more than once recently. I did it on the mini bus between my office and the other offices in town. I also did it in the waiting room at the hospital. So that’s not taboo now, but I have to remember to bring whatever I’m knitting with me. It’s quite hard to knit something with a pattern away from home though – I refer to the books quite a lot and might need photocopies for that to work. Which gives me an idea for going down to London! I will take some knitting for the bus.

Knitting links I will be trying over the next week or so If they’re good, I’ll add them to my links on the right there. I’ll probably write another post about it too.

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