Tight Lipped Tuesday #33

Another brief visit for a Tuesday.

Remember my struggles with the Fisherman’s Rib stitch?

Every mistake shows and is difficult to put right.

Well, I persevered and finished it and as every cloud – and there have been quite a lot of them – has a silver lining, it’s still cold enough to wear it in the middle of May.

Farewell Fisherman’s Rib – I’d like to say it’s been fun but it hasn’t so I won’t be troubling you again.

Do you have something in the artsy fartsy/crafting line you’ve tried once and decided once was enough?

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I’m Having a Knitfest

Remember me struggling with the fisherman’s rib stitch jumper?  The stitch makes a great looking fabric but every mistake shows and it’s very hard to put them right.  Anyway, having undone almost the whole thing once, I persevered and now I have a back, front and almost one sleeve so it looks as if I might have a wearable ‘slob around the place’ jumper at the end of it after all.

I need another blanket/quilt/throw like a hole in the head but I was sorely tempted by this knit along (KAL) run by Black Sheep Wools and designed by Sarah Haddon.  It’s called ‘A Day Out’ and I liked the idea of lots of squares made with different knitting techniques so I thought I’d do it and call it a learning curve.

The above example was made with one of the colour packs put together by Black Sheep Wools but it’s a merino wool which is not as easy care as acrylic and, much as I would prefer merino, any home furnishings in this house need to be as dog and cat proof as much as possible. So I tried to find similar colours in the alternative yarn (Sylecraft Special Aran) but couldn’t see a similar purple so substituted a dark charcoal.

So, full of good intentions and unreasonable expectations I joined the Facebook support group and cast on for the first of many 20cm squares.  The new squares have been introduced weekly on Tuesdays and some new (to me) techniques were involved and looked a bit scary

Week one was fun and we had to make four of these.

I finally gave in and bought some foam interlocking mats which were much cheaper than proper blocking mats – although I did treat myself to those rather cheerful rainbow blocking pins.  A lot of people don’t block at all – let alone acrylic yarn – but I find pinning the squares out to size and giving it a couple of squirts with the steam iron held a a few inches above, not touching the yarn, works wonders in getting the size right and opening out the pattern.

Week 2 was mosaic knitting which I thought would be very scary.  However, it wasn’t scary at all and I enjoyed it.  Quite difficult to see the effect in the subtle colours I’ve chosen (I have lots of crochet blankets in bright colours so wanted a change) but this square proved to be my undoing in the process of trying to keep up in the KAL as we had to do eight of this particular one and I just don’t knit that fast or that often.

So, once I made five I decided to come back to this one and carry on with the following week and, up to now, have managed at least one of the new blocks released each  week just to try them and give myself some encouragement and will go back and finish the others in the fulness of time.

Here’s week number three’s square, a pretty lacy sort of design.

Week four looked very scary but it turned out to be one of my favourites and was actually quite simple. You make the inner cabled square and then, one side at a time, pick up the stitches on each side and do the stripy garter stitch to make it into a 20cm square with the inner square on point.

I was also happy to see my charcoal coloured yarn introduced into the three colour mix as there are only  three colours and I was getting fed up with only using two.

I love this mosaic square for week five.

Week six was a bobbly pattern which involved a different technique than the usual one for making bobbles which some liked, some didn’t, There have been quite a lot of mavericks on the Facebook group going off in different directions or substituting different blocks for the ones they found too difficult or just not to their liking,

Week seven was one some people weren’t keen on,  It could be worked flat or in the round – I’m not keen on circular needles so did mine flat.  It was quite fascinating the way it started off with a lot of stitches then gradually decreased in a clever way until it looked all frilly on the needles.

Then, when you cast off, and after sewing up one seam, it turns into this square.

Clever eh?

Fascinating to make but it’s not my favourite and we have to do eight of them.  I’ll probably make four and do a different pattern for the other four – somebody on the FB group has come up with one that looks nice so I’ll use that, I’m not proud.

Anyway, this is where I am up to so far.  Long way to go  but there’s no rush.

Which is just as well because now I have my knitting mojo back I bought this….

to make this

and this

to make this.

What am I like?

That second pattern with the star in relief wouldn’t have caught my eye if I’d just seen the pattern leaflet but, when I went to the local ‘town’ the other day, I noticed there is a yarn/fabric/haberdashery shop – Glory Be! – and they had the finished article in blue on a mannequin in the window and it looked really good. So it is now in my ‘knitting whilst watching (although nothing with subtitles)’ queue which has to be simple knitting otherwise I go wrong.  Those squares have to be done with concentration so have to be ‘fully conscious during the daytime’ knitting and that’s probably why I’ve fallen behind.

The only thing is, I have taken up a whole bedroom in the new house as my workroom and I tend to knit downstairs so Mr. Tialys is starting to doubt the wisdom of that decision.  This means I have to get back on to that sewing machine but I really do have too many clothes already and my patchwork mojo is decidedly absent at the moment.  I have made a few new items for my Etsy shop but, since the ‘B’ word and the ‘P’ word (Brexit and Pandemic) I’m only selling within the U.K. so my audience is limited and, therefore, so is my enthusiasm for it.

Not to worry – I find that, unlike fly-by-night crafts I sometimes indulge in, my regular enthusiasms are on a constant turnaround  – what happened to my dog portraits for example? I would do those in my workroom.  I’d better get back to them at some stage as I have the national collection of wool fibre in assorted colours – probably enough to make a life-size dog, let alone a 2D ten inch square portrait.

I got up at 6a.m. this morning – the sunlight glinting off the frost woke me up – but I wrote this post instead of knitting another square.  Maybe that’s where I’m going wrong.

Who Wants A Baggy Jumper Anyway?

Back in January I showed you a pattern for a rather comfy jumper, perfect for lockdown.  I thought I might be able to get it finished for Miss Tialys the Younger’s birthday on 24th February.

This was the pattern

This was how far I’d got with it when I wrote the blog

and this is how far I’ve got with it now.

Yes, yes, I know it’s exactly the same photo enlarged but the sad truth is that really is about where I’ve got to again  having had to start from scratch on more than one occasion.  At one point, I had knit up almost the whole thing, excluding one sleeve, knowing there were two or three mistakes but thinking they wouldn’t show.  How wrong I was.

Fisherman’s Rib.  It seems like a simple enough stitch to do – a variation of k1, p1 rib in that you knit into the stitch below (k1b) instead of the usual knit stitch – and it is!  The problems come if you should make a mistake by not putting the needle in the wrong bit of the knit stitch or, heaven forbid, drop a stitch altogether.

Not having the heart to take one of my own before ripping it all out, I’ve tried to find a photo of ‘a mistake in Fisherman’s Rib’ to show you the horror but couldn’t, even though the fact there are many, many tips, tricks and YouTube videos showing you how to put them right means I’m not the only one making them.  I tried unknitting (or tinking, or frogging) then I tried unravelling rows and picking the stitches back up again but I couldn’t get them back on the needle the right way round.  I thought I had succeeded at one point so carried on knitting but it left an obvious line through the back of the jumper and I knew I’d never be satisfied if I left it there.  Nightmare.

In the end I undid it all right back to zero and was just going to leave it.  I don’t like giving up though so I thought I’d try one more time and use a lifeline.  For the non-knitters amongst you – and heaven knows why you’d have read this far as the pants would surely have been bored right off you by now – that means threading a piece of wool through a row so that, if a mistake occurs later on, you don’t have to rip out the whole piece but only as far down as the lifeline.  Obviously, as you progress with a few inches of faultless knitting, you take out the lifeline and move it up to create a new one.

Needless to say, since inserting a lifeline I haven’t made a mistake but there’s still a long way to go and it’s last chance saloon for this jumper because, although I really like the effect of that raised rib, and I’ve been able to use stash yarn, life’s too short to grapple with it repeatedly when I could be getting on with something else.

Anyway, the 24th of February came and went with no jumper for Miss T. the Younger.

However, I’d spotted on a blog somewhere, something else I fancied having a go at so I abandoned the needles for a hook, found some double knitting yarn in the remains of my stash and made these instead which, as she’s just moved into a new flat, served as a little house warming gift too.

Ahh! I’d forgotten the more ‘instant fix’ joys of crochet.

If you are a knitter, have you ever tried Fisherman’s Rib and, if so, did you manage to get to the end of a project without tearing your hair out?

If you are not a knitter, I apologise for the non-quilting/dressmaking/general crafting/gardening/animal based content of this post and, be assured, I will be back to one or other of those subjects -or something else altogether – before too long.

In the meantime, and as compensation, here’s another couple of woolly jumpers.

Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.