Vic’s Knits

My knitting has been neglected of late, but last I managed to find time to get back to it and boy, was it great to pick up the needles again!

I’ve been quite busy lately and also suffering with hayfever, which means that my eyes have been quite sore and itchy and so when I have had evenings in, I just haven’t felt able to physically focus on the knitting in hand. I’d also got to a point with the tunic dress that required a bit of concentration to work out and I kept putting it off.

But last Tuesday I went around to a friend’s house for a craft evening and I took one of the blanket squares which have been piling up on the “to-do” pile. I’d been feeling quite stressed because not only do I have to renovate a whole house in the space of 4-6 weeks, I had to play a couple of flute solos in a concert on Thursday and I was getting very nervous as the day approached.

However picking up those needles (and off-loading my worries to my friend) really helped to de-stress and I went home feeling much calmer.

I’ve since made several blanket squares and finished the entire back piece of the tunic.

I’m off to Malawi on Saturday morning for two weeks with a group from my church and won’t be taking any knitting with me (which is a shame because the journey is going to be very long!) but I’ll be certain to crack on with the tunic dress when I get back.

I’ve been asked a few times where people can get hold of copies of the Art of Knitting magazine if they don’t live in the UK.

In Australia back copies of the magazine are available from

Back Issues Dept
Bissett Magazine Services
PO Box 3460
Nunawading Vic 3131
03 9872 4000
www.bissettmags.com.au

It has been days if not weeks since I picked up the needles.  I’ve had quite a few things going on in the evenings, a youth group session to prepare (takes me ages!) and then we went to Holland for a few days.

I need to make a concerted effort to get on with my tunic dress as there are loads of other things I want to start, but I’ve made an agreement with myself that I won’t start anything new because otherwise I’ll never get the dress finished.

I’ve also been getting a few more comments about the Starsky and Hutch jacket that I finished at Christmas.  I really ought to get on with writing my own pattern for this jacket.  I’ve also been asked if I’d knit them for other people but I don’t really have the time right now and knitting on commission seems a scary prospect.

I love bank holiday weekends and we had a very relaxing one here. I got lots of knitting done and it felt so indulgent to be knitting on a Monday afternoon in front of the TV, catching up on “Flood” from the previous night.

Mostly blanket work the past few days and I’ve got lots more done. I’m almost up to date with all the squares (just two left to do) and I sewed another two blocks of squares together.

I wasn’t very happy with my seaming though. I haven’t been all along really. The magazine suggested backstitch to sew the squares together, but that looked dreadful. I had been doing mattress stitch which looks neat, but leaves a ridge on the back and that’s what I wasn’t happy with. I think the fact that I’m using acrylic for this blanket, makes the ridge even more prominent and quite stiff. So I with these blocks I decided to seam them slightly differently.

I am much happier with the result. The pieces lie much flatter now and I won’t have knobbly bits should I want to wrap myself up in it! It does sort of show on the right side of the blanket, but it looks like a feature rather than just a seam, so I’m going to go back undoing all the bulky seams on my other blocks and redoing them. It will be a nuisance to do, but I’ll be happier in the long run.

I have to say this thought has crossed my mind whilst knitting the dress and I was wondering whether it would have been quicker in the long run to knit the skirt part in the round - I wouldn’t have to do purl rows then and I’m much quicker at knit stitch.

However this morning I noticed someone ask the same thing on Ravelry and the replies are worth remembering so I thought I’d make a note of them here:

• As with sweaters, you want seams to keep the garment from stretching out. A skirt knit in one piece can stretch as you wear it and make the holes bigger and the skirt longer. Not something you want. By having a sewn seam at both sides, it helps keep the skirt from getting longer. (From YarnFloozy)
• knitting in the round is actually knitting a spiral, and spirals tend to twist. If you knit in two pieces, you are knitting straight rows, and you won’t get that sideways torque that spirals develop. Knitted skirts tend to stretch out when sat in, and the spiral knit emphasizes that. (From mehitabel)

I have been doing a fair amount of knitting, honest. But this dress is just not growing very quickly.

Knitting also cropped up in a popular BBC programme this week - Holby City (which is a hospital drama for those who don’t know it).  A patient was admitted with two knitting needles embedded in her tummy!  She’d been knitting on a bus, when it swerved off the road.  She was about to cast off an angora scarf but became impaled instead.  As she was taken down to theatre she asked if they could do their best to save the scarf because it was good angora!  And after the op, the scarf was returned to her, neatly cast off by someone or other and without a drop of blood on it.  Amusing storyline!!

Simply Knitting magazine gave all their spare swatches to The Alzheimer’s Society in Doncaster, who used them to make blankets for Alzheimer’s patients.

If you’ve got any spare swatches, then it sounds like the Alzheimer’s Society would gladly receive them.  They can be sent to: Jill, Alzheimer’s Society, 1st Floor, 58 Balby Road, Balby, Doncaster DN4 0JL

Read more here on the Simply Knitting blog.

I recently read about this appeal from Oxfam which is calling for knitters to knit a square for a giant blanket. This blanket will be handed into the Government as a ‘patchwork against poverty petition’, to demand a world where everyone has access to free basic healthcare.

Now whilst I’m all for a ‘world where everyone has access to free basic healthcare’ and supporting charities that are trying to achieve this (see www.medicmalawi.org), I wonder is knitting a giant blanket really a worthwhile task?

What’s going to happen to this huge blanket once it’s been handed in to Number 10? Apparently it will be made into smaller blankets and sold to raise money for other projects. (Someone said at places like Glastonbury!) They don’t send them abroad anymore because it is cheaper to source blankets in the country where they are needed. A fair point I guess.

But will making this blanket really make any difference to anyone’s life? 250,000 squares, which is what Oxfam aims to collect, would make an awful lot of regular sized blankets, which could be given to people who really need them - the homeless and those in extreme poverty both here in the UK and in the Third World.

I thought the same about Water Aid’s giant knitted river last year, however the river appears to have been used well since its creation - only a portion of it was handed in to Number 10 and the rest of it has been displayed at various places where it has apparently raised an awareness for the Water Aid campaign not otherwise possible. So as a marketing tool, the giant knitted river seems to have worked well for them.  I’m not sure how I feel about helping with an organisation’s marketing though.

This topic was being discussed on Ravelry recently and someone posted this link to Feed The Children which seems like a very worthy cause if you want to do some charity knitting. A friend wrote on her blog about  Save the Children UK who are also asking knitters to make hats for newborn babies in developing countries. As part of the campaign they are also asking the knitter to fill in a card, to be sent with the hat, which will go to the Prime Minister asking him to do more to help children in the Third World. I like the way they’ve done this. The knitted item is still useful, and you can still ask politicians to do something to help. The only thing I don’t like is that it’s all a bit vague as to what you can ask the PM to do.

Here’s the cropped cardigan that I finished recently.  It’s knitted on circular needles, top-down, in one piece so no need for seaming and I made it with Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Chunky which I’d bought half price in a John Lewis sale.

I followed the designer’s suggestion for a smaller neckline as most people on Ravelry were saying that the original was a bit too big.

But following the revised instructions it said just continue until the arm sections are wide enough to wrap around your arm, then put them on holders and carry on with the body.  I did this, but when I tried it on, the arms looked quite baggy at the back and I wasn’t happy.  So I ripped out quite a bit and made them much smaller.  It’s much better now.

I’m not convinced that this particular pattern fits my body shape but it’s still comfy and the kind of cardi I will probably wear to work a lot.  I love the colour and the yarn.

It feels like it’s been ages since I last blogged. I was away last week at an event called New Word Alive, with a group from my church. I suppose you would call it a Christian Conference and it was held at a holiday park in Pwllheli in North Wales, which took FOREVER to get to from where we live in south Devon.  It was a good week listening to talks from excellent speakers, learning new songs to sing in church and generally having fun with friends and teenagers from our youth group.

And now for some knitting news…

• I never got time to blog about my cropped cardigan before I went to NWA, which I finished a couple of weekends ago. Report coming up…
• My friend Nikki from church, who is also a knitting fanatic, has started her own knitting blog here and she’s getting into Ravelry now too. I’m looking forward to reading more on her blog.
• I’ve started work properly on the Tunic Dress. I successfully wound another hank of the silk yarn without making it go too fluffy (by putting it around a couple of chairs back to back) and have started the back half of the skirt.