Attention!

I'm moving this blog to:

http://fucknits.feministy.com

It's a bit of a mess right now as I get my head around Wordpress and dust off my long-neglected FTP skillz.

Please update your bookmarks! Both of you!!

Hurray!

I leave Paris tomorrow!

Goodbye smell!
Goodbye spending four hours a day on public transport!
Good riddance children and your terrible toilet habits!
Good riddance expensive cafés!
Au revoir disgusting men!
Adieu everywhere closing at 9pm!

Hello pubs!
Hello plentiful taxis that stop for you so you don't have to ride a bike in the freezing cold at 1.30am!
Hello properly cooked meat!
Hello meat that's been cooked at all for that matter!
Hello food that's been killed before serving as well!

So. Tired.

Sleepy as fuck but I keep putting off updating this and I'm actually getting a backlog of FOs!

I leave Paris in about a week and a half and then I have no idea what I'll be doing with my life or where I'll be living. I really should do what I've been saying I'll do for about three years and buy a campervan.

I've been doing lots of ice skating this week, there's two rinks been set up at Montparnasse and Hotel de Ville. I've been wearing the cabled hat I mentioned in my last post (toooooo tired to link). Click here for a like, totally rad (I'm so not down with the kids anymore...) video of us displaying our mad skillz (both on ice an with yarn).

I finished the Sari Silk earflaps hat and I love it to bits. When I wear it I can hear the silk creaking, it's got such a nice, thick texture. The best bit is, just as I'd finished I was crocheting a border around it and I came to a knot (first one!) The ball changed from a bluey-purpley colour to an orangey-greeny one. I don't know if you can tell from the picture... but I'm so pleased, it's like two for the price of one.

So here's the hat, and a close up of the fabric:

...and here's the Calorimetry I knocked up with the second colour. Nice pattern, I'd never looked at it closely before and didn't realise it was made with short rows.

(I think you can click on the photos for full size... if so that close up makes a great desktop wallpaper, although it's a bit busy).

So now I've mastered magic loop, I had no excuse not to buy an 80cm long 2.5mm circular needle and get started on some socks for Simon I'm making with some really nice Regia. My first toe ups! Going along great so far...

I got him to measure his feet over the phone the other night and he says they're 265mm (10.5 inches) long and exactly the same circumference. Does that sound wrong/strange/freaky to anyone?

Late night, overdue update from a wino

A quick FO first of all...

A hat I knocked up out of Phildar Kadischan (I'll check the name in the morning) and using this cable pattern from the Lion Brand website that I've had my eye on for a while. I've been wearing it constantly. It fits over my ears and my (still minuscule) ponytail perfectly.

I have loads I wanted to write about the huge behemoth craft fair I went to on Monday, but I've had a crappy week and I've kept putting it off. Happy thoughts now: thanks to the wonderful Sylvie Chez Plum I was provided with two free tickets. I planned to go on Saturday but I was left holding the baby. Ok, stop it - back to the happy thoughts! I went on Monday instead, and it was cool. Not a massive amount of knitting stuff, besides a nice, big Phildar stall, some ridiculously silky stuff from Mercredi & Cie (right) and a stall from Namaste Sathi, where I finally gave into temptation/curiousity/lust and bought 250g worth of recycled sari silk for €15.

Look at it, it's beautiful, even though that picture doesn't do it any justice because I was too impatient to wait until the natural light was good enough.

I searched Ravelry for patterns and could only find bags TOMORROW WHEN YOU'VE HAD SOME SLEEP AND SOBERED UP PUT LINKS TO BAGS HERE, which I kinda needed anyway and I've just had to retire my old bag so I could bastardise it for the zip and lining. But for some reason I couldn't get excited about a bag. I began to worry I'd turn into one of those terrible 'stashers' and just keep the ball on display forever, fondling it occasionally. (Wrong, wrong, wrong, in so many ways. Keeping yarn that isn't on a set of needles is like keeping booze that isn't for drinking. Wrong.)

Then as luck would have it, I had Tuesday off and spent some time wandering around Le Marais. I found a couple of hippy/incense burning/free Tibet type shops that happened to have a few scarfs made out of sari silk. Then I saw a hat, with ear flaps made out of the stuff. I tried it on and the deal was done. I was pretty sure I could make this without a pattern, but I Ravelled it anyway and bought this pattern from 'Woolly Wormhead' just to make sure.

The pattern is top down, and required starting out with 6 stitches. I tried about 3 times to do this on dpns but they kept slipping out and I nearly blew a blood vessel. So I did my first attempt at Magic Loop, and even though the yarn meant the stitch definition was almost non-existent so it was like knitting in the dark, I was pleased with the technique. I've one earflap left now.

Mmmm.... what else? Oh yeah, confession time. I was in a vintage clothes store in Le Marais and found myself all alone in the basement. I couldn't resist it so I tried on a fur coat. Someone came down the stairs after about 10 seconds and I quickly threw it off in shame but fuck me, that was the most amazing coat ever. I looked a million dollars, even in my £6 Primark jeans. I think I might have to move to Russia.

The good, the bad and the fugly

The Good
This weekend has been FUN. I've been out every night and shopping/sightseeing/church going* in the daytime. On Saturday we found one of those make-your-own-jewellery shops in Le Marais. Normally those places don't appeal to me, but this one was packed full of pretty, shiny things and it was also cheap. I made myself this necklace...
Also, it was Pamela's birthday on Friday so I knocked up (i.e. crocheted) a beret for her in some really nice Monoprix Husky (50% merino 50% acrylic I think, and super chunky). I didn't get a chance to buy the yarn until Friday itself but luckily I managed to get most of it done on my bus journey home from Monoprix.
The Fugly (I'm saving the best til last)
This ring was only 50 cents. That's all I have to say in its favour. Ugh, it gives me the creeps!
The Bad
On Friday night someone mentioned how they'd been in Montmartre and realised after a while that they must have appeared on about 10 different photos taken by tourists. We laughed and joked about doing it on purpose - getting your face onto photos that would be seen around the world. Then I thought - ooh, imagine doing that in the See You Next Tuesday Hat! That would be totes lolzworthy, yes?

Update on the Pomatomus/yarn barf situation: the yarn is now split into two separate balls. I had to cut. I learnt how to spit-splice (bleeeerrrgh - especially after drinking wine and not brushing my teeth... whoops, TMI - but at the same time a very effective technique). I'm 75% through the first sock. Worked out the deceptively simple Chart B (hint: ignore those blank squares. They don't mean k1. Start and finish at the thick black lines) and managed to do a fair portion, from memory, at 3am on the nightbus home, after a good few glasses of Merlot.

*Vespers at Notre Dame. It was somewhere warm to wait for Jenny ;)

The knitting gods obviously don't approve of my bad language...

I'm on the second chart repeat of Pomatomus, getting along great and I've just found my rhythm.

Then the Ball from Hell decides to spew out this:

Apparently this phenomenon is called 'yarn barf' but in this case the ball pretty much turned itself inside out. I'm furious.

I have about the same sized tangle that took me 4 hours to undo. My options seem to be:
1. Pouring myself a stiff one and trying to untangle, however I have my sock-in-progress attached to one end so that will be even harder/potentially risky.
2. Knit a bit, untangle a bit, knit a bit. No, I get stressed out just typing that.
3. Putting the work I've done on a holder and starting the second sock from the outside of the ball. Pain in the arse and I'm not looking forward to another 10 rows of 1x1 rib (knitting into the effing back loop).
4. Cutting. I'll be fucked if I have to cut into a ball of wool that someone (admittedly not me) spent a good sum of money on.

I'm of no doubt now that ball winding is a skill in itself, time consuming, and requiring at the least a good level of ability and at the most a ton of equipment. I'm not here for that, I'm here for the knitting.

Fuckity fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

See you next Tuesday x

Some people may find this hat in bad taste. But I happen to like pom-poms, ok?

Behold the master!

I am now a knitting guru. This is because I have a protegé, Sylvie-Claire, another lost au pair in Paris I met through Facebook. We totally cyberstalked each other, she left a message in an au pair group and I spied her dreads and was like, yeah, she needs to be my friend! And when we met she was like, "you knit too! so do I!" and I was like "OMGZ that is SO COOL I don't know anyone else in real life who knits! what do you knit?" and she was like, "scarves" and I was like, "OMGZ you really need to get into making other stuff coz it like totally rox!"

From what she told me and the pics she sent of her stuff I could see she was well ready to progress. I know that if I hadn't found the amazing Stitch and Bitch books I'd still be doing flat pieces and... um... hats made out of three panels of knitting. We went shopping last Saturday at La Droguerie and she bought some mohair for a scarf and some wool for hat. By about Tuesday she sent me a pic of her stripey scarf which was already massive. I was like, "girl, now iz the time for you to be makin hatz".

She was given a hat pattern along with her wool in La Droguerie, but it was all in French. So I sent her these instructions that I cobbled together in an email.

Tonight she came online around midnight (I'm stuck at home babysitting, she's stuck at home because of the transport strike) and needed some help... I talked her through finishing off her hat. The conversation was kinda like talking something through delivering a baby (or so I'd imagine) concluding in the ecstatic, moving climax when she emailed me pics of the finished object. I confess a tear almost welled up in my eyes.

The next step is to teach her how to make hats emblazoned with expletives...

I win

My willpower has been amazing lately. On Saturday I took Sylvie to La Droguerie, where she bought two balls of mohair and some wool. We waited about ten minutes amongst all the gorgeous wool for the balls to be wound and I managed not to buy anything.

Yesterday I went to Le Bon Marché because I needed a set of 5 dpns for my Pomatomus socks, and managed to walk away with only the needles, although I was sorely tempted by a scarf kit, of all things, produced by La Droguerie.

I got lots of moral support after posting my ball winding woes on Ravelry. Glad to see I'm not the only one. Strikes me as weird though that as we speak, 4 people have clicked 'agree' on my post, and 4 have clicked 'disagree'. How can anyone disagree with my post? Are they disputing I spent 4 hours untangling 200 yards of wool? I guess some people must just really love making balls... good for them. Perhaps they should start advertising their services.

aaaaaaand...

... now I realise I never posted my last, amazing FO. The impact will be lessened slightly seeing as Halloween has passed.

Pretty hat yes? No! Click here for a fright. People with heart conditions are advised to proceed with caution.