Episode 1
Well hello my lovely people! It’s great to be back on this page once again. I hope you weren’t hit with the January blues as much as I was. Apparently it’s blue blood moon this month. So you may get to see another full moon this month. Personally, I’m not a star gazer but certainly do look up to the skies when I walk out of the takeaway at night when I finish and heading home.
Anyways, before I ramble on I’ll swiftly move onto a little catch up shall we before all the good bits of this crafty blog.
Catch up
Since the last blog, I’ve had a fairly steady month. It’s not been particularly great nor bad. My emotions gets influenced quite easily especially from hubby. When he gets stressed out something, it’s hard to tell but when his bubble totally explodes I get smacked in the face with it. I guess that is how I’m feeling at the moment. Its the kind of stress that won’t go away until the whole matter has been properly dealt with and out of the way. Where is it coming from? This isn’t something I’d want to share about on the inter webs however, it’s only fair that you know where I am at with regards to the dark tunnel that I’ve been talking about in the previous entries. Certainly not where I want to focus all my energy on at the moment so enough of this dull behaviour from me.
I’ll be going to Baa! The new wool shop that will be opening this coming weekend in Stonehaven, which is a good 40-50 minutes drive from where I live. I am in the main city but right across the other side and into the real suburban area of it. I’m excited to see this new venture starting up that is almost close to home. The other reason is, I’ll get to have a proper chat with Eva, the director of
Perth Festival of Yarn. You can find her on instagram and facebook as Perth Festival of Yarn. [www.facebook.com/perthfestivalofyarn]
I’ve also visited Yarn Studio, which is in Inverurie, slightly closer to home but still a good 30 minutes drive for me. Yarn Studio, was formerly known as The Colour Corner. At the same time I had a quick coffee morning with Clare of Cookston Crafts. You can find her most active on instagram as Cookston Crafts, she does lovely hand dyed yarn and she also runs workshops from her home. I feel that it’s great to be able to meet up with others who are like minded when it comes to crafting as we both agree, none of our friends would share the same passion as us or understand why we like doing certain things e.g. why would we knit socks? Purely it’s just not the same as shop bought.
Enough of what I’ve been up to. There is a lot more that I could talk about but this is a blog, not a podcasst so your not having to spend an hour reading this. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate you spending a little bit of time reading this and thank you for sticking with me to this far even before getting to the good parts.
Of course, you have the choice to just skim read the blog or post as you would have th choice to skip ahead when it’s a podcast episode on YouTube.
Needles
I have several items on the needles at the moment. I have 4 new projects started since the new year. I now have 3 wips from 2017.
The 4 new ones are, Soirée and Anniversaire which are both garments from the Pom Pom Quarterly magazine issue 21.
For Soiree I have used Colinette Parisienne base (she has ceased business) and Midwinter yarns, Ullcentrum 3 ply Swedish wool which I bought whilst at Perth Festival of Yarn 2017.
Now I had Colinette before getting Ullcentrum as it was on sale. When I was browsing around the market place in Perth, I was semi on the hunt for a matching colour 3 or 4 ply yarn for Soiree. Lo and behold, I found MidWinter Yarns. They had a great range of colours on this base so I just had to pick something that was very close to what I had. The colour is almost like a fuschia purple, it’s colourway name is Cerise on Grey. This yarn is super squishy and smooth, not what you’d expect for a rustic yarn. The blend with the Kid Mohair on Colinette makes the garment really soft and silky. So far, I am almsot half way on the body section but I’ve been on and off with most of my projects.
I need to wind more yarn since I’m close to the end of the first skeins of both yarns.
Anniversaire, I bought Eden Cottage Yarns, the Whitfell DK base, 100% baby alpaca base. It is luxurious and super soft and cosy against my skin. Again, I bought this in the sale from their website. [www.edencottageyarns.com] I picked Dogwood colour which is a really deep red colour which I love. I don’t normally go for reds purely because it makes me feel like I’m a big fat red packet. For those who don’t know, it’s the red packets that contain money and its given to children and adults who are not married during the Chinese New Year.
As for progress on this, I’ve completed the body back and fronts. I’ve managed to pick up the stitches for the sleeves and do a bit of the short row shaping after seeking for help. I’m trying to decide whether I want to continue the sleeves on magic loop or 9” circulars or dpn’s. There are cables to do on the sleeves so I don’t know what would work best when you have the weight of the body on the needles too.
Next, I have a cable sweater designed by Debbie Bliss. I’m using Debbie Bliss Bluefaced Leicester Aran in the really dark brown colour. As per usual, this was purchased in a sale. I find that I tend to get garments worth of yarn when it’s on sale as some could be really expensive. Pennies are tight for me so I have to wait for a sale or find a substitute.
I haven’t had much progress on this, casted on the back piece, done the ribbing and the first 4 rows of the pattern. I think for such a heavily cabled pattern I will need to create a spreadsheet to keep track of where I am and what I’m supposed to do on certain rows. There isn’t a tell tale of what your meant to do when your looking at the stitches on the row below especially the right side ones.
Next, is my own design. How exciting!! I bought some Noro yarns from my local yarn shop, as you may have heard the news about Designer Yarns being bought in liquidation, some of the brands they carry have been affected. Noro included. I’ve never bough a single ball of Noro before as I was put off with the price, the fibre content and the colours. Well, what better opportunity to try them when it’s on sale. I looked at each of the different bases and couldn’t really tell what kind of weight each one was. I had to look at the recommended needle size to get an idea. I ended up getting 8 balls of the Kibou base, which is wool/cotton and nylon. Daring eh? I thought so too. I got a bit too excited about it as I didn’t want to waste time looking for the right pattern for it so I purchased a 4mm knit pro Karbonz needle tip and a short cable. This was so I could knit up a swatch whilst at work that day. So I did, got home, blocked it so I could get measure the gauge I was getting. Using that swatch, I then did the maths for it. Almost the same formula that I used for one of my other sweaters I knitted 2 years ago.
So far, I have 2 sleeves completed. I’ll move onto the body soon enough as I want to see how it has worked out with the maths. Once its complete, I may write up the pattern for myself. I don’t know how to grade a garment for different sizes. I’d love to hear from you if you could point me in the right direction. I could sit down and work out all the maths of it and it’d be like a recipe rather than an actual proper pattern. If you know what I mean. IF you are a tech editor and have a little spare time to help a little human like me, please do get in touch.
Wow!! So far, this is 1457 words and I’m only half way?! Ack well! Who knew I’d be able to write so much in such little time. Lets move on shall we?
Sewing
I have had little sewing time, the time that I did have, I only managed to get 2 project bags done. Both are rather cute if i must say so myself. I certainly enjoyed creating them. To get a picture, please head over to my instagram which you can find me as
@KalokShekEllen
Last but not least, I’m getting sleepy now.
Happy Mail
At the start of January, I was browsing though some of new to me indie dyers on etsy. I found GamerCrafting shop and seen the subscription sign up for January. I knew I had to get one as the theme was Women Power. Now, this conjures up a lot of different images for me e.g. female superheroes. Now, I haven’t signed up for any subscription boxes of any kind before. This is the first one I’ve done. I totally forgotten about it until this week when it arrived in the post. The day it arrived, I was out in Inverurie as I shared at the top of this post. I didn’t want to open it quite yet until I could take pictures or even do a live video. Each time I tried, something went wrong. So I decided not to but to try my best to describe it all.
100g skein of a sparkle base yarn with 75%/20% merino/nylon 5% sparkle named Miss Congeniality. So that’s a hot pink and a little medium tone of baby pink with some purple speckles.
20g mini skein on the sparkle base in the hot pink colour.
A stitch marker in the shape of the female sign with some glitter that is attached to a light bulb shaped pin.
3 stickers that had different characters on them.
1m of Wonder Woman ribbon.
Angie included a note to explain why she chose the certain items for this box which I thought is lovely. For me, I’m never up to date with all the latest films, or books and I haven’t watched much movies from the past. So it helps to know where it’s all coming from. So, thank you Angie!
That is a lot for a box and I certainly did enjoy opening up the package even though I’d already seen what was inside as Eva did hers live. I missed it but replayed it as soon as I got home to tune in. I totally loved the stitch marker that I put it straight onto whatever project that was closest. It was the Noro sleeves at the time and I did need to mark the beginning of the round. I’m still thinking about the skein and what I’d knit with it, could be a simple pair of socks or a shawl. The next months sign up is currently open [http://gamercrafting.com]. Angie has a link to her etsy shop there if you are interested. The theme is Steampunk.
Another happy mail is from Eden Cottage yarns, that was the Carlisle mini’s bundle I got form the previous update. I’ve just placed another order from the latest update. That should be me with purchases until EYF 2018! Who’s going?
Right, I’m sure I’ve bored you all with my nonsense here. So I’ll sign off here for the time being. Remember, I’m most active on Instagram, if you want to keep up to date with what I get up to. I would have said you can find me on Ravelry too but I haven’t created a group of any sort but if you do want to have a nosy, it’s ellieshek.
Buh bye for now! Happy crafting folks!