Bad Bolero

When I started this blog, I mentioned the Bad Bolero from hell.  I am relieved to say that it is no more.  It was quite difficult having to pull it all out - after all, I put a great deal of work into it.  The back knitted easily, as did the sleeves. But the front curve boggled me completely.  I was so puzzled by the pattern that I had to write to Rowan (twice)(the first address must have been wrong or old) and got a very nice reply with VERY precise instructions.  So I was able to finish it off.  I then had to knit the front rib on circular needles.  Having not ventured into the world of circular needles, I decided to knit a Very Very Long rib and then sew it on afterwards.  Except it was too wide.  So I pulled it out and knitted it again.  It rather resembled a narrow scarf.  Bizarre!  I then battled to sew it on, despite my new-found knowledge of mattress stitch.  Well, frankly, it just looked bad!  And when I tried it on, I wanted to cry.  Horrible!  It got stuffed at the back of the Disaster Drawer and stayed there for the next two years....

Since then, I've realised WHY it went wrong:  it was the wrong yarn, for a start - FAR too floppy for the pattern.  Secondly, I'm not a bolero person.  I've always thought they were utterly daft but some people look fab in them.  Not me!  I wouldn't call myself Amazonian, but somehow I look like a bodybuilder in such a teeny weeny cardi!  

It's taken me a while to decide what to knit with the wool:  Debbie Bliss Prima Viscose/Merino in a pale coral no longer available (yes, I bought it on a sale....obviously!)  I rather fancied a lacy top I discovered on the Vogue website.  If you register, you get access to their free patterns, which are rather fantastic, though not necessarily easy knits (aside from the fact that it's all in US knitting language).  But I couldn't manage the lace pattern, so thought I'd use the lace rib I'd successfully knitted before.  I have a scarf in the same Debbie Bliss yarn in a pretty lace rib - brilliant, I thought.  I never wear the scarf.  It's far too scratchy (you'd think bamboo/wool would be soft...) so I'll rip it all out and knit this fab lacy top.

Hah.  Because the Prima was a much finer wool, I had to cast on about a million stitches to get the width and was lost in the rib barely five rows in.  So I studied all the lace stitch patterns I had and found another one.  Needless to say, those ten rows or so I've managed have been utterly abandoned, the needles rattling with bobble stitch markers.  It was going to take me nine hundred years to knit this lace top and frankly, the wool just isn't good enough for lace.  It wasn't going to work, no matter how good a knitter I was.  It was time for simplicity.

And simple it is:  I found a free Debbie Bliss pattern for a very easy vest top.  The tension and needles are identical for the wool required (I can't actually remember what you're supposed to use....will check it out and blog it next time) so I haven't had to do any mad knitting maths.  I'm really bad at working out tension stuff, anyway!  I'm knitting it in k2,p2 rib, which is about as simple as it can get.  I love this rib.  It's so relaxing!  So I am now very happy knitting away on this while watching thousands and thousands of episodes of Springwatch.  My daughter loves it, though after a while, one dead baby bird begins to look rather like another.  All too tragic for me.

Photos of my current knitting plus the pattern I attempted plus the pattern I'm using will come up in the next blog.  In the meantime, here are some pictures of my bolero.  Belly laughs guaranteed.  

Nice colour...shame about the crumples and fold lines....

In fact, shame about the whole thing.  What a disaster!

Butter Yellow Poncho

It was hotter than hell last week and there I was, finishing off a poncho!  Typical!  The cable edging was the most boring thing under the sun to knit, so I was most relieved when it was done.  I've not done anything like this before and was delighted with the outcome.

Debbie Bliss Como.  Colour:  19017.  90% Merino wool, 10% Cashmere.

The pattern for the cable edging couldn't be simpler:

Cast on 8 stitches.  Stocking stitch for 7 rows starting with a knit row.  Eighth row is the cable row:  knit two, put four stitches on a cable needle to the back, knit four, knit four from cable needle.  Repeat these eight rows several thousand times and you've got your edging!  

It took nearly 300 rows to get around the poncho!

Doesn't it look just like a rope?

I overlapped the end and added a button just for show.

Now I just need a cold day to wear it!

ps.  A virus recently attacked my computer (everyone's nightmare) and I had to restore my computer back to factory settings.  I managed to save everything that was important onto a memory stick, but not my photos.  I still had all my photos on the camera card, though, so it wasn't the end of the world, but I have lost all the cropping and crimping and work I did on the photos.  I can't imagine doing it all again!  Fortunately, the best ones are still here, on my site, for my pleasure, at least!

Self-portrait

Not the best pic of me (are they ever...) but just wanted to give an idea of the "rescued yarn" cardi.  It's actually quite warm and comfortable...bit of a home cardi, but still.  I just so pleased that I managed to get something wearable out of a failed creation!

On the needles (5)

My daughter's poncho was so successful, I decided to knit one for myself.  I fancied one in an elegant cream with a simple cable and twist pattern.  But then I remembered my huge stash of Debbie Bliss Como in pale, creamy yellow (17) and thought I'd use that instead.  The trouble with chunky wool that although they make lovely, er, BIG cardies or jumpers or whatever, you can't wear them under a coat in winter, which means you're stuck wearing them at home.  Honestly, I've got enough ancient jersies to wear at home, so it was an ideal choice for the poncho.  I bought it on a sale at least two years ago (or was it only last year.....?!) and liked the colour so much that I bought another bagful, thinking the colour was about to disappear forever.  There are a few places on-line that you can buy it but the colours that remain are lovely.  On some websites, the colour looks very yellow - it isn't.  It's quite a gently creamy yellow.

I then started work on the cable pattern.  I think I did this really just to relax - I haven't had so much fun for a long time!  Turned out to be a huge waste of time but it doesn't matter.  It's nice to know I can do it.  I used Excel, about which I've forgotten more than I ever knew, and by the time I got to the end, I began to feel quite expert!  This is the cable pattern I came up with.  It's part of another, very large cable pattern.

I then got going, only to discover several crucial factors.  It's murderous cabling with a very soft chunky wool.  No matter how tightly you pull the wool when knitting, you end up with a ladder next to the cable.  Also - time consuming!  And not the sort of thing you can do while watching TV!  Well, I can't anyway, not being any kind of cable expert.  I was hugely impressed with my twisted stitch though, as I've not managed that before.  The thing that finally turned me off though was the realisation that cabling tightens a garment which means I would have ended up with a very small poncho!

Oh dear....

So I restarted it and in less than two days, am already more than halfway!  I'm going to knit a cable edging to go around the whole thing.  I thought that would be a bit more grown-up than tassels!

Wool with a history

At last - something to wear

Followers of this blog might have become familiar with this cream wool and it's long and (not so) illustrious history.  It started life in South Africa, where my mother knitted me a cardigan, using two strands of wool to make it thicker.  And thick it was, so thick and stiff that it was virtually unwearable!  It was too tight and there was something odd about the sleeves - there seemed to be too much of them under the arms!  A couple of years ago I braved old memories and pulled the cardigan apart, reknitting it into another cardigan, with short sleeves and two buttons at the front.  It was still too thick and too stiff so I never wore it.  Time to think of something else....

Unraveling the second cardigan was murderous, but finally it was done and I began my own creation, copied from a Rowan pattern.  Except that it was supposed to be a softly draping silk yarn.  Disastrous.  I didn't even photograph the final result because it was just too hysterical for words.

By this time, I'd finally realised that half of what was wrong was the wool itself - those two strands knitted together just didn't work.  So I decided on another cardigan, knitted with a single strand.

Have you EVER unraveled two strands of yarn????!!!

Torture!  It took hours and hours and hours.  The knots were Biblical in proportion.  I thought I was never going to get it done.

But then it was...

Same pattern as my last cardi - wonderfully simple and very smart

Held together with a hair pin!!

I knitted into the back of each stitch for the first row, giving a neat edge

Why bother?  Why all this work for wool that is some kind of cheap acrylic?  Nice colour but was it worth it?  Yes.  It was the last thing my mother knitted for me and I wanted it to be something that would please both of us.

A Poncho for Easter

For fun I thought I'd knit a poncho for my daughter, using up old wool and the easiest pattern of all:  cast on three stitches, make one stitch at the start of every row.  But the edge didn't look very neat so I thought I'd try it by making two stitches at the centre of every knit row.  It took me several goes - and much pulling out - to get to this point.  Except I had no idea that this kind of increasing, though it leaves a pretty lacy hole, also does something to the knitting that "bends" it i.e. it wasn't flat.  A poncho really needs to be flat!  I'd had so much fun sorting out the different stripes I was going to do but realised after several days of intense knitting that this was going to be disastrous.  The wool was too thin and it wasn't ever going to lie flat and it was going to take me nine years to finish the poncho!

So I did the next best thing:  I found a pattern for a super chunky poncho, bought some Sirdar Squiggle on sale at Black Sheep and in less than ten days, I had one completed poncho, ten thousand tassels and all!!  In fact, I was tying the last of the tassels while my daughter was hunting for easter eggs on Easter Sunday!  Needless to say, she hasn't taken it off since, except to bath and go to bed!

This is probably the most popular thing I've ever made!  I'm so impressed I think I might make myself an elegant cream on and cable it, with a cable edging rather than tassels (otherwise they'll end up in my illicit mugs of coffee....!)

Fantastically easy to knit - you end up with a large rectangle with a bite taken out!

Ready for blocking

The weight of the wool drags it down a little so that it hangs well and ends up quite long!

The pattern asked for a cast-on and cast-off neckline - I knitted two rows to make it stronger

We love this Squiggle wool - easy to knit with and great fun

Take care to cut all the tassels EXACTLY the same length - Squiggle is very curly and we inadvertently ended up with different lengths!  Much shouting ensued but in the end, you don't notice it too much.  Tying the knots for the tassels is very easy.  When I first looked at this pattern, I thought it was crochetted!!

The pattern used is Sirdar 2359 for Denim Ultra.  Yarn used is Squiggle shade 0603 Funkadelic.  Currently on sale at www.blacksheepwools.com

Success!

At last I've knitted something I not only like but can actually wear.  Something with practical use!  Isn't the colour just glorious?  It's Sirdar Escape Chunky (Shade 0197 - I can't remember the proper name for it!) which I got on sale.  It was a spontaneous purchase, completely unplanned.  I then glanced through my knitting magazines and discovered a simple cardigan pattern for a chunky wool.  It's supposed to have a fur collar, which was the main feature, not really my thing, but the plain garter stitch collar I thought worked out really well.  It's warm without being too thick, just right for the wildly random London spring weather.

It looks particularly fantastic closed with a shawl pin I got free from a copy of Simply Knitting.  At the time, I didn't like the colour much as it isn't a colour I wear, nor did it match anything, but by chance, it looks fantastic with this cardigan!  

Details:  Pattern is from Simply Knitting Issue 89.

Things I would have done differently:  the hem.  You're supposed to cast on with the thumb method but I have no idea what that is.  I presume it gives a neater edge?  Whatever, without a rib, it naturally curled up several inches.  I blocked it carefully with damp cloths and about ten thousand pins but it began to curl up again.  Realising this was going to be a problem (AFTER I'd finished the back and front sections), I decided to do a proper sew-up hem for the sleeves which was also a mistake.  Too chunky!  What I should have done was just knit the first row into the back of the stitch.  I'd forgotten about this!  It produces a neat edge and might even have prevented all the rolling up it does.  

No matter.  The delicious colours and practicality make up for any errors!