There's a possum in the garbage bin

Some time ago our green wheelie bin had a bit of an accident and it's been missing its lid ever since. We should probably contact the council and get a new one but not having a lid doesn't really stop it doing a good job as a bin, and while this may change as we really come into summer, it hasn't really smelled much or attracted many flies, so we haven't bothered.

Today we discovered a reason why we should probably make the call to the nice council people on Monday. I went out this afternoon to throw down some rubbish, and when I looked over the edge of the deck, I could see a little furry grey body sitting in amongst the garbage. A brush-tailed possum had obviously been looking for some food, and had fallen in and been unable to get out.

We turned the bin on its side and encouraged it to come out, whereupon it scampered up one of the brick pilings supporting the house and found a place to rest at the top, sitting on one of the wooden supports of the deck. The poor thing is still there, probably waiting until dark so he can make his way back home. He doesn't appear to be hurt in any way, just quite freaked out.

Well, I think I would be pretty freaked out if I'd fallen into someone's garbage bin and couldn't get out!

Random stuff Friday

I'm tired today. I've managed to get rid of most of my cold but the last creepy tendrils are just hanging on, and I've got a bit of a headache and all I want to do is curl up on the couch with a cup of tea.

That, combined with the fact that nothing phenomenally momentous is happening, has led me to invent "Random stuff Friday", where I will cover a few random things which don't need much description, explanation or philosophising.


Random stuff 1. - A finished object - Ribbon Tied Wool Vest from Erika Knight's Simple knits for cherished babies. In Bendigo Woollen Mills Luxury 4ply, colour Oceania. Modeled here by the gorgeous and talented Bernie Bear.

This has already been wrapped up as a giftie for the soon-to-arrive son or daughter of a colleague from work. (Just the sweater, not Bernie, who has gone back to his place in The Boy's bed).
I love this yarn. It's beautifully soft and knitted up like a dream. I found the 8ply that I used for The Boy's jumper earlier this year to be a bit pilly, but the 4ply was smooth and sleek and lovely. I'm thinking of getting more of this yarn to try some lace with.


Random stuff 2. - Our new Boss started at work this week. He seems nice, and experienced and knowledgeable, all of which strike me as quite important.

Random stuff 3. - The Brisbane Stitch n Bitch group who meet at The Three Monkeys from 7pm on Tuesday nights, have proven to be lovely and friendly and inclusive people and I feel a bit silly for ever being nervous about going to meet with them. They also seem to be really great people to talk to, with whom I have a lot in common beyond the sticks and string, and Tuesday night conversations have been funny, intelligent and bawdy, sometimes all at the same time. I've always had trouble making friends, but, while it may be too early to tell, I think I just made a huge bunch of friends without much effort at all. What is it about knitters that makes them such nice people?

Random stuff 4 - One of the really nice people from Stitch n Bitch has invited me to a costume party, so I'm having all kinds of ideas about making a costume. Since most of the party guests will be crafters, I want to make an effort to make something a little bit clever, so I'm off tomorrow to see what bits I can get at op shops. I'm not good at sewing so it will be a minimal sewing effort, but I've got high hopes for a good result. I want it to be a little bit of a secret, if not until the party, then at least until I can work out if I can pull this idea off, but there will be photos later, I promise.


Random stuff 5 - There has been yet another baby at work. That makes 4 born in the last month in addition to the one to come that I mentioned earlier. I didn't know about this one - I work with the Dad, and he was keeping secrets, so I have another Felix's Cardigan to start on the weekend. Good thing they're such a quick knit. The fact that they look amazing is a bonus.

Random stuff 6 - And to finish off, for no other reason than they were the most random thing I could see easily from my desk, here is a photo of my old, crusty collection of Smurfs. They are all dirty and some of them are broken, but I love them just the same.

Ooh - a giveaway, and it's Malabrigo!

Not here, although I'd love to have enough Malabrigo to be giving some away.

Head over to Salihan Crafts and enter for the chance to win two skeins of Malabrigo of your choice!

(and stay and have a bit of a read while you're there, Salihan is great, and her amigurumi pears are seriously gorgeous. They make me want to learn to crochet properly!)

The need for speed?

Over on Ravelry, it's not that hard to find a discussion about knitting speed on the forums. It seems to be something of importance to a lot of knitters.

I must admit that I'm not overly concerned about my knitting speed now, but that could be because I've reached a skill level and speed with which I am content.

Out of interest, I timed myself the other day. On my current primary project (still the alpaca vest for Dad), which is a round of 246 stitches on 3.25mm needles (KnitPicks options, 60cm circular), I'm getting about 45 st per minute. At the moment, this project is plain stocking stitch with no shaping. I haven't timed myself on ribbing or moss stitch or on purling, but those would be significantly slower.

This is snail's pace compared to Miriam Tegels, who holds the world record at 118 st per minute. I have no idea what the average knitting speed is, and whether I'm faster or slower than other knitters with my amount of experience, but I've decided that it doesn't really matter.

I think what's much more important is how I feel about my own knitting speed. I used to get frustrated when I was much newer to knitting and it seemed to take forever to get to the end of a row. I knit English Style, or by throwing, and when I first learned, I did as many new knitters do, and held the right needle from above with my right hand, supporting it with my left fingers at the point and removing my right hand from the needle every time I made a stitch. It was very slow and my tension was all over the shop.

The person who had the most influence on how I actually form knitting stitches, and by extension, my tension and speed, was my beautiful Mother-in-law, a talented knitter herself, who made the simple observation that things might be better if I held the right needle from underneath, hooking my thumb under the needle, and not removing my hand to make the stitch, but rather putting the yarn round the needle by the action of straightening the first fingers of my right hand. Now that my knitting action has settled down into a pattern reinforced by years of use, it takes little effort and movement to make each stitch. I keep both elbows pinned to my sides, courtesy of many years knitting on crowded public transport, and there is virtually no movement of my wrists. I can knit for hours with little risk of cramping and about the only weird thing I've noticed about it is that while the first three fingers of my right hand are never completely straightened during the process, my pinky finger stays pointed straight out the whole time. There's no purpose to it, it's not involved in maintaining tension or anything like that, but I've tried to keep it bent out of the way and my hand starts hurting after less than a minute. So I've learned to ignore my silly pinky finger.

I taught myself to do Continental knitting once, in the interests of seeing if I could get any faster using that method. I can do the knit stitch, but I accept that I would need to go through a learning curve with it, and I'm happy enough with the speed I get using the method I do now, and I'm really proud of the even tension of my knitting, so the Continental knitting had never been something I've been prepared to persevere with enough to get good at it.

I think overall, for me at least, the most influential factor in how much I get done is not how fast I knit, but how much time I get to knit. I guess you could say that I'm fairly obsessed with knitting. I think if you got anyone who knows me to describe me, the fact that I knit would come up pretty quickly (probably just after the fact that I carry many more bags than seems sensible). It's really unusual for me not to have at least one project with me. At the moment I'm carrying two projects to work with me every day - Dad's alpaca vest, and since the vest is now too heavy to knit while I walk, a Wrap With Love square which is tiny enough to fit in my handbag. (Earlier today, when we could hear fire alarms and thought they were lower down in our building and we would need to evacuate, I made sure that I had the square with me so that I could knit while we waited to get back into the building. It turned out that the alarms were coming from the building next door, which I think was having a fire-drill). I knit at almost every chance I get - in the car (as a passenger only), in the bus, waiting in queues, at lunchtime, in the evening while watching TV or listening to Audio Books. I even have a device called an Easy Read, which I use to hold books while I knit.   I once tried knitting in a work meeting when I needed to listen and contribute but not take notes, but people tend to think you're paying attention to your knitting rather than the meeting, even when you're holding your own in a fairly robust argument!

I think all that extra time I get to knit is what's making me a much more productive knitter now. Although I suppose that's easy to say when I knit twice as fast as some people I know. To the question "How do I speed up my knitting", all I can say is what worked for me, which was finding a technique which was comfortable, and practicing on getting good at forming the stitches well in a consistent rhythm, without concentrating on the actual speed. If the real question is "How do I get more done", then my answer is to knit every chance you get, and ensure you always have a project with you, so that you can take advantage of the knitting opportunities you weren't expecting.

(Of course, there are also the times when knitting is my meditation, when I concentrate on the feeling of making each stitch. At those times, speed is completely inconsequential, it's all about the rhythm and the flow and (dare I get all hippy-chick and everything), being at one with my knitting!)

The alpaca vest is now 35cm long, so I've only got 4cm to go until the armholes. (I haven't taken another photo so please just imagine yesterday's with an extra 4cm on it) Dad was blown away when I told him on the phone today that I had that much done. Don't you just love having someone who thinks you're a genius even when you're only knitting round and round in stocking stitch?

Bits and Pieces

It's not been a particularly exciting weekend. The cold I have been trying to fight off for the last week laid me flat on the couch for most of it and I haven't felt like doing much of anything, including knitting. I haven't even really been able to concentrate enough to read Unseen Academicals.

We took the Boy to his first swimming lesson yesterday. He seemed to go okay but he has trouble relaxing in the water, especially when he is on his back, so we will have to see how that goes. We've booked him in at the pool at his school, which is just around the corner from home, so the 9am lesson on a Saturday morning is very convenient. The teacher seems better and more attentive than the teachers he had at the last place he did lessons so I'm hopeful that he will get something out of it.

I've got 31cm done on the alpaca vest - there's 8cm to go before I split at the armholes and knit back and forth for the fronts and backs.

 

I searched through all my easily accessible knitting boxes (the ones in the house as opposed to the countless ones in the shed) yesterday in an unsuccessful attempt to find my runaway 4mm KnitPicks options tip, and found the Ribbon Tied Wool Vest (rav link) that is destined for the soon-to-be-born child of a colleague and has been sitting nearly finished in a box for over a month. I need it for before L goes on maternity leave in November, and yet I've been ignoring it and working on a vest Dad won't be able to wear until next winter. I'm not certain why, except that the Wool Vest needed sewing up and stitches picked up and the collar knitted, and the alpaca vest was just mindless knit stitch round and round and round. I forced myself to get the Wool Vest out this morning and now I only have the collar ribbing to knit so I'm hoping to get that finished tonight, after I go searching for a more elastic cast off than the bog-standard one I normally use.

While going through all the boxes I kept coming back to the 10 balls of Rowan Kidsilk Haze in Daffodil that I won in Jacqueline's competition for those who had donated to the Victorian Bushfire appeal in March this year. I've been a bit stumped with what to do with it, because, while it's gorgeous, it's not really a colour I would usually (or ever) wear. I'm thinking of making a Kiri (rav link) and deciding when I finish whether it's something I would ever use, or whether I will give it away.

I don't think it's going to be the next thing I start though. I've been thinking about my wardrobe lately and realised that I would really like some more cardigans. I wear them virtually all the time in the office as the air-conditioning can often make it quite cool. I've been surviving on three or four that I got years ago at a cheap clothing shop but they're starting to look fairly tatty and I'd like to replace them with some basic cardigans I've made myself. I'm thinking of a couple of Chicknits Eyelet Cardys in Bendigo Luxury, and maybe a Franken-Cardy using the top of the Eyelet Cardy, the concept of the February Lady, and a lace pattern I haven't chosen yet.

I've also got more babies to knit for, and there's always the Cabled Cardy I promised Mum, and the jumper I'll knit for the Man when he picks one he likes. I think perhaps there's just a little too much on my plate!

Oh well, I've got to start somewhere, so I'm off to try and finish that wool vest.

Nothing if not fickle

Dear Alpaca Vest

I have something to tell you.

It's not easy to say this, but I think we need a break. I know that yesterday I said that I loved you and only you, and that l wanted an exclusive relationship with you and, well, most of that is still true.

I do love you. I think you're lovely, and I still really enjoy spending time with you. It's just that, well, something new and exciting has come into my life. I wasn't looking for it, I thought I was happy just to hang out with you, but sometimes things just happen, opportunities arise and you've got to see where they take you.

Today, on my way to get some lunch, I walked past the bookshop. Now, I will admit I've got a bit of a weakness for books. It's just part of who I am and I'm afraid that you're just going to have to learn to live with it. Anyway, as I was passing the  bookshop, l glanced at the new releases table at the front. Just glanced, by the way, it's not as though I was looking for something new, just so you know.

Well, you see, during this glance, I noticed out of the corner of my eye the new Terry Pratchett novel ''Unseen Academicals '' and you know, if you know me at all that I just can't resist a new Pterry novel. There's no use even trying, I just can't.

I think "UA" and I will be inseparable for the next few days.

But this doesn't mean I'm abandoning you, just that I don't want to be exclusive any more. And you know that I'll always come back to you - I can't go for too long without knitting. This is just a bit of a fling. I don't think the story even has any knitting in it so you know it won't hold my interest forever.

And I'll try and find time for you, I promise. Maybe while I'm watching TV.

I'll even understand if you need to be with other yarn or with the February Lady sweater for a bit.

This is just something I have to get out of my system.  You understand that, don't you?.

Lots of love
Lexyjane

(Phew. I think l may have got myself out or that one. But if anyone tells the vest that I picked up a copy  of Stephanie Pearl- McPhee's Free Range Knitter at the bookshop while I was there, there may be trouble.)


* I've stolen borrowed the concept of writing letters to my knitting from the stunningly talented and clever Yarn Harlot, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. She does this much better than I do.

The benefits of monogamy.

I've been noticing over the last few days that monogamy has its benefits. I'm talking here about staying faithful to one knitting project, not about staying faithful to one person, although that has its own fair share of benefits as well.

I normally have a large number of knitting projects on the go at any one time. I choose whichever one I feel like working on depending on what sort of knitting I feel like doing, or the situation I'm going to be able to knit in. So when I'm going to work, where I'm likely to get a short, frequently interrupted bout of knitting at lunch, and about 20 minutes on the bus home, I like to have something simple and not too bulky, so I don't have to carry a pattern, and I can fit it easily in a bag. Something that I can knit on while I'm walking or standing at the bus stop is a bonus.

At home, on the couch, where I can settle in for some dedicated knitting time, I might choose something more complicated, like where I might need to constantly refer to a pattern, something fiddly like sewing together a garment, or something bulky like a big afghan.

But for the last week or so, apart from a brief affair with a wrap with love square that was small enough to fit in the handbag I took to the Queensland Youth Choir concert on Sunday night, I've been committed to Dad's alpaca vest. There are other unfinished items I could be working on, there are many new patterns in my queue and yarn in the stash for new projects, but concentrating on the vest feels right at the moment.

After the struggle to get the gauge and the ribbing right, it feels good to be finally getting somewhere, and because I'm knitting on this one project every chance I get, I can see the progress. I got 6cm done yesterday and I've done 4cm so far today. The body is now 16cm in total, and there's only 23cm to go before the armhole shaping.

My cold hasn't got any worse but neither has it got better so I'm not feeling up to anything complicated, and going round and round in 246-stitch-long stocking stitch circles seems to be exactly what I need. I can lose myself and the stress of the day in the rhythmic action of stitch after stitch. The Bendigo Alpaca feels soft and luxurious in my hands and the fabric feels and looks beautiful.

So I think the vest and I are going to stay exclusive for a bit longer. (I'd better not catch it fraternising with my February Lady Sweater!)