Denmark is pretty

So. I've spent the last week in Copenhagen, Denmark for work. I'm staying in a rather astonishing place: I decided that since I would be here for nearly two weeks, I would try to find a self-catering apartment rather than a hotel. I wanted to be able to do my own laundry and cooking.
What I did find in the same price-range as the hotel the client would have put me up in was a corporate let. Well. It has two bedrooms, a dining room and a lounge room, all white and light a spacious. It's slightly larger than my flat in Sydney... and I've been enjoying it very much. Not that I've actually spent all that many hours here not working, but it's still nice not to have to live in one room mostly occupied by a bed for two weeks.
My partner came over for a few days and a friend came over for the weekend. All very satisfactory and Copenhagen is a lovely city. I would love to live here. It snowed. Pictures will follow. We are happy little Australians and we frolicked.
Did I do anything textile related? Well, Clapotis comes along slowly but steadily.

I've just cast on for my Sari Silk Sideways Scarf, and I did find a couple of yarn shops:

Uldstedet - Very nice basement shop. Lots of yarn for fair-isle, some very nice felt slippers and buttons. A good range of the usual suspects like Debbie Bliss and Rowan as well.
Strikkeboden - Lovely little shop, has a good general range as well as Noro and its own brand of 100% alpaca. Lovely. I nearly broke and bought some, even though I can't wear it. Maybe someone I know can...

I also came across a couple of unexpected fabric shops, and bought a length of fabric which was probably the most expensive thing in the shop: a wool felt, almost thrummed. Picture to follow, it went home with my other half due to my already too-heavy suitcase. In another shop, which was full of the most beautiful silks, I found some viscose jersey remnants, some in purple, some in black, which I hope to run up into a shirt of some sort. The silk. Mmmmm. The range of wool fabric here is also superb.
In non-textile related news, we went to Georg Jensen. When I was a little girl in Sydney, if we went into town with my mother, one of my treats would be to visit the Georg Jensen shop. We never bought anything, just wandered around and drooled. This time bought ourselves a tree-topper from their christmas range: essentially just a star on a spring, but exactly what I've been looking for and it will add that extra niceness to every Christmas.
Due to the present-like nature of the other things I bought they shall not feature here.
Shopping is not cheap here, but due to the fact that we're earning pounds, it's not horrifyingly expensive, either. Not the way it would be if we were earning Australian dollars...

Weaving

I'm travelling this week and also seem to have a permanent headache. Clapotis is coming on steadily, just a few rows shy of the point at which I get drop my first stitch. The colour of the yarn is lighter when knitted up than I expected, so I'm not sure it's something I would wear, but I can probably find someone who would.
I bought an Ashford Rigid Heddle Loom 6 months ago, and I've been doing a little weaving every now and then. I like weaving: it eats yarn and I feel that less of it is Voodoo (you know, you're following a knitting pattern, it says 'put pointy stick through the loop in this way, do something complicated with the working yarn, say an incantation. Do this umpteen times and voilà! suddenly you have a garment).
My main issue is warping. I warp on the loom, and it's not really that difficult, but it is backbreaking and requires a lot of thought. Plus, in this flat I don't have a weaving post... I have a cabiner attached to a door handle with some string. Not ideal.
I did manage two cushion covers both in Paris yarn from Texere. Unfortunately I don't like the feel very much, but they were interesting experiments. Dicontinuous weft, while slow, does produce interesting results.



I am in the middle of a bag made out of Paton's Symphony yarn. I love the way this stuff works in weaving. It seemed the perfect yarn out of which to make a shoulder bag: comfortable, washable and casual.

I've done the bag body, now I just have to warp the loom for the strap. I've needed to do that for the last 4 months.

One Row Scarf

I'd been looking for a scarf pattern for a while, and stumbled across the Yarnharlot's One Row Handspun Scarf. It looked like fun, and I thought I might want to use it for a silk scarf I had planned (plans have since changed). So I grabbed some yarn I had lying around, cast on and started a swatch.
Things may have got out of hand. I now need to order two more balls of Patons Symphony yarn so that I can have a scarf.
It's not handspun. It's not even a natural fibre. But I like it.

bowl finally felted

I have finally felted my other knitted bowl. I'm quite happy with the way it turned out, maybe a little wobbly but not too bad, and not too many holes, either.


Now I want to try a one in cream and beige... I've been having a neutral homewares phase recently, which is odd for someone who spends most of her life dressed in various shades of dark red and black.

Your Ideal Pet is a Cat

You're both aloof, introverted, and moody. And your friends secretly wish that you were declawed!

What's Your Ideal Pet?

A number of my friends say there's something feline about me... and now I know what they mean. Sniffle.

Clapotis Continues

I have been slowly knitting up Clapotis, only two more increase sections to go before I can start dropping stitches... My hands are complaining a little, but I'll see how that goes.

You are The Wheel of Fortune

Good fortune and happiness but sometimes a species of
intoxication with success

The Wheel of Fortune is all about big things, luck, change, fortune. Almost always good fortune. You are lucky in all things that you do and happy with the things that come to you. Be careful that success does not go to your head however. Sometimes luck can change.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

I don't usually pay much attention to tarot and I certainly don't pay much attention to random web quizzes, however the questions in the quiz above unexpectedly helped me solidify something I'd been thinking about for a while: what I wanted to aim for. I'd considered the word 'serenity', but it sounded too close to being dead, or a nun. 'Balance' is the word this silly quiz helped me with. I'd like my life to be more balanced. (As for being a wheel... I may be rather round, but that's going a little far.)

Clapotis (contemplated for over a year)

I've had this lovely thick and thin merino/lambswool yarn bought off ebay (from The Knittery, who now have a lovely online store) ageing in my stash over 3 years and two countries. I've got around 750 metres of it (calculated by putting the skeins on a swift, measuring the circumference of the skein and then counting the number of strands. Very high-tech). The idea that it might have a Clapotis in it has been hovering around the edges of my brain for over a year, but I wasn't sure that a thick and thin Clapotis should be done. I finally got my act together, looked on the net, where there was proof that think and thin Clapotis have been knitted and, in an unusual fit of practicality, even made a swatch.

The yarn is now wound into 3 balls (actually 4: I caught some of yarn around the winder axle and by the time I noticed it was so badly mangled that I had to cut it. However, this just means that ball 1 is in two parts: an important distinction for ensuring that I don't run out of yarn). I am going to use the technique given here of knitting the first ball, working out how many repeats I've done, knitting the second ball and then joining the third ball and doing the same number of repeats as I got out of ball one before starting the decreases.
I cast on and finished my first increase row before getting off the train this morning.

You like yarnporn, lady? For you, five dollah...

To view, maybe. A little more than that to buy.

I have a mild sensitivity to wool. My skin can cope with wool everywhere but my neck and chest: v-neck jumpers not a problem, trousers not a problem. Woollen coat facings against my chest? Nasty redness and itchiness. Woolen scarf around my neck? Ditto. Woolen hat against my forehead, ditto, although I'm not really a hat wearer, so this bothers me less.
All I have to do it hold a ball of yarn up against my neck and I can tell. Superfine merino doesn't work, alpaca doesn't work. Intense moisturisation of my neck and chest doesn't work either.

I really want to knit a scarf. Yes, I could knit one out of polyamide, but the only non-pastel colour I've been able to find is black; I could make one out of fleece, and indeed I already have one. But... I could also knit one out of silk. It has superb insualting properties and isn't made out of plastic. Plus it's luxurious, and isn't that the point of this hand-knitting thing?

I looked at available pure silk. I wanted at least dk weight, because I'm a slow knitter, so my choice was pretty limited. Debbie Bliss Pure Silk? Feels lovely, but the only colour I like is black. I like my colours on the darker side. And it's expensive to buy and subject to my rudimentary dyeing skills, given that I am limited to Kool Aid due to living in a flat with no outdoor area or laundry (the mad british don't seem to understand laundries), so it's the kitchen or nothing.

I thought well, I could buy cheaper white silk and dye my own with Kool Aid. I decided on black cherry and grape, because I'd used them before, and I thought I'd try Texere's wild silk number 8. It's not very expensive.

Double disaster:

• finding black cherry and grape in sufficient quantities (1 sachet per 25g yarn = 4 sachets per 100g = 16 sachets per 400g) in this country is not easy. After poring over knitty's colour examples, I decided grape and tropical punch might do and ordered some, along with some orange (that's another story). When it arrived... due to stock levels I got 6 tropical punch, 12 grape and oodles of orange. Plus extra orange because they were sorry that they didn't have the colours flavours I wanted.
• yarn arrived. It looks and feels like string. I knit with it a bit. It still looks and feels like string. I returned the remaining 3 cones.

I had been eyeing off the Woolpeddler's recycled silk for some time. I met some recycled silk in the form of scarves at Camden market, and I've been attracted to it ever since but didn't really want to buy it by mailorder because of the colour variations. I may have a mild control issue with colour. Stephanie and her Silk Solids range solved that problem. I've been mooning over it ever since, and after the disaster with the texere silk, decided to order. My sister-in-law gave me a strangely suitable amount of money for my birthday and I hadn't spent it so...

I love the dark red. It's... dark and silky. What did I expect? I don't know, but nothing this divine. I feel perfectly safe putting this on the blog even thought there's a limited supply because a) no-one reads it anyway and b) I went and ordered 6 more skeins of the red alone. I couldn't help it.

Now, what to do with it all? I'm thinking sideways because I like lenthways stripes and I'm way too lazy to do it by intarsia. Knitpicks' Moguls scarf looks like it could work, too, although I do have three colours and the original is knitted in a different yarn weight... My other thought is sideways stocking stitch, changing yarn every row, fringing the end. I am attracted to this due to pure laziness: if I start each row from the same end I can get stocking stitch with nary a purl row. I am not a virtuous knitter.

So, I appear to have started a blog

I read quite a few blogs, mostly knitting blogs which give me great pleasure. I have no idea if anyone will read this one, but I am blogging partly to amuse myself, anyway.

Because I travel a lot, it often feels to me that I don't get much done in the textile related realm. I'm hoping that having a blog will

• encourage me to finish things so that I can post something other than '[project x] still gathering dust' or 'completely failed to start [project y] due to [business, inertia, unexpected travel, illness]'; and
• give me the ability to look at what I've done over time and not feel so bad about my lack of productivity.

Typically, somehow, my first post is only partly textile related. My lovely darling of a partner gave me an enormous set of pixelblocks for Christmas. They're so cool. I had a little difficulty photographing them due to issues with the light at this latitude at this time of year, but I'm trying.
There are a couple of other things I did actually manage managed to get done in 2006 and earlier:

Some time in 2005 (I think I finished it for Christmas) I knitted my other half a scarf. It was sideways knitted garter stitch on 4mm needles in Rozetti Panda (which I have never since found on the net or in a shop and which knits up into a cozy fleece-like fabric) and some other (gedifra?) fancy yarn which has both loops and fluffy bits. It took me something like 3 months of daily train journeys to knit, thus proving that I am not and probably never will be a fast knitter, is about 300 cm long and 15 cm wide. I may have overestimated the number of stitches to cast on and I cast off much more loosely than I cast on (I'd read rather more about knitting by then) and it displays some interesting curvature as a result, but the recipient likes it and it allowed me to convert to continental knitting, which I find easier on my hands.






I knitted two bowls and have felted one. We keep keys, coins and random pocket-dross in there.
Both bowls are knitted in Twilley's Freedom Wool, bought while on holiday in Ireland. They were possibly knitted with on 5mm needles. The creature is from Barbara Walker's Mosaic Knitting.
I also started some experimental knitting based on hyperbolic surfaces due to reading this article and this article on crocheting hyperbolic surfaces, and this pattern. I frogged my first attempt, not really frilly enough (although it frilled up a little when I took it off the needles) and I'd prefer to try it in the round anyway. Laugh if you wish. I am at home with my inner Aspergers child.