2017: more of the same

Christmas has been and gone, the New Year blew in on a cold wind and things are slowly getting back to normal - work this week; school again next week. 

Like everyone else I am starting my new year thinking about what and where we are going next. Last year we made the first steps towards moving our family to a new (different) home. This year will be about making the move itself - selling our current home and finding a new nest for our family to grow. It's no mean feat seeing as we live in about the most expensive part of Edinburgh and would really like to continue living in the same area. But, I am a firm believer in things working themselves out, so I am looking forward to it and trying not to be daunted. 

For the moment then, my priorities are about preparing for these changes. Decluttering and tidying up unfinished projects, organising stashes and paring back my (our) belongings ready to move. 

Last night I sat down and tackled the mending pile: 

• one skirt with a falling-down hem 
• one cardigan with a hole in the shoulder/neck seam
• repairs to a shoddily-made RTW hat 
• knee patches for the littlest boy
• a side seam split repaired in a school gym skort
• a hole in a t-shirt repaired

I had the house to myself, a stove to sit next to and an unending supply of tea and music. It was an hour or two well-spent - with things restored to cupboards and wardrobes rather than languishing in a pile. 

Next on my list are the unsewn Christmas projects which didn't quite cross the finish line: 3 pairs of pyjamas, 1 nightie and some zippered pouches of one type or another. 

Happy New Year everyone! 

The tale of a hat: Newhaven (FO)

I'm a hat knitter and a hat wearer. I'm wearing one now - sitting at our dining table, typing on my lap top - sitting inside. It's a bit chilly, and I'm going out again in a short while, so I decided just to keep my hat on when I got in. 

I seem to come from hat wearing stock. My dad used to wear tweed flat caps in the 1970s and 1980s when I was growing up, and my brother wears something on his head most days, usually one of the scrap hats I have made for him.

To go back to the story: I wear hats a lot in the winter, and over the last few years I have made quite a lot of hats for other people. My own hat stash was wearing fairly thin. I have a green, striped scrap hat - the original prototype and starting point for my scrap hat recipe (but the tassle fell off last year) - and a lovely red hat, knitted in a soft red yarn (Rowan Kid Classic) using a pattern from a dim and distant Rowan magazine.  If it's cold I wear them both. 

Some time last winter I decided that I need to augment my hat collection. I wanted a blue hat to work with all of the blues in my wardrobe. I put it down on my shopping list for the Edinburgh Yarn Festival, and came home with a skein of completely on-message Wollmeise DK and a copy of Ysolda Teague's Newhaven hat pattern. Tick and tick. 

I also snagged a skein of Ysolda's kitten soft yarn, Blend No. 1 which I bought at the same time as the pattern. Naughty, but very nice. 

Obviously, as the grey yarn wasn't on my shopping list, I wound that first, and then used that to make my first Newhaven hat. The hat has short rows and charts and texture, but before you know it you are at the top and trying to work out how to turn the thing inside out for the 3 needle bind-off. 

Once I figured that out, I put it on my head and I haven't really looked back. It's my new favourite. I can't remember if I have washed or blocked it yet (why bother?!). 

I was wearing the hat the other morning when I saw Ysolda herself, having her morning coffee. I waved and pointed at my hat, and she waved back and gave me a thumbs up. Then she wrote about it on her blog. Ah. Light and love and things to cheer us up. Happy knitmas one and all. 

2016: a retrospective

2016 has been a challenging year. 

Brexit and Trump mean it will have a lasting political impact on the world, but there are other things too. Smaller things about my own life which have been difficult and challenging and which will have ongoing and long-term effects. And, just like Brexit and Trump, these things are also changes that I do not want, that I do not support, and which I have done my best to resist. 

It seems - sadly - that I will have to learn to live with them. To work round them and to rethink my future. 

To get back to the other challenges for 2016, I set myself several crafty objectives earlier in the year, and it's time to take stock. 

1. Tame the stashes 
I did a good job of reducing the yarn stash, and knitting from stash a wee bit (tank top or two, plus a few other accessories), and then bought a sweater's worth of lovely yarn from Skein Queen to make myself a jumper, and two skeins of yarn for hats. 

I did sort the fabric stash, and move a few things around and get rid of some fabric I thought I would never use. But, that didn't shrink it much, and then I found I needed to order some more for a project or two that I had planned, so I don't think I am any further forward. 


2. Use the stash!
Knitting: I made a cowl for myself, a tank top for the bean, another scarf for myself, and a lovely hat. I used the stash to remake a hat for my brother, and knit a Christmas hat for my daughter. I made a slightly too big pair of socks that ended up going to my dad. My needles are currently clacking away on a pair of fingerless mitts for my brother's girlfriend. 

Newhaven Hat by Ysolda Teague

knitted in Ysolda's Blend No 1 

wee scrap hat (own design)

modelled by little bean

scrap hat revisited - own design

I made this for my brother using some frogged yarn from an old scrap hat of his, which was disintegrating from use/wear and washing. 

Sewing: I have made myself two jersey skirts suitable for work, three very small raglan tees for a friend, two pairs of school leggings and a nightdress for the jelly bean. I also made a few upcycled projects using fabric recovered from old t-shirts.

3 x recess raglan tee (See Kate Sew)

made with upcycled fabrics; the fire-engine motif was rescued from a toddler t-shirt and attached using bondaweb

4 x upcycled dusters or polishing cloths. Made from old t-shirts

3. Make some things to fill gaps in my wardrobe: 
I made a cowl, a navy jersey skirt, a lovely raspberry coloured scarf, and a grey hat. It is so satisfying to make things that fit right in to the palette and styles that I wear everyday, and which immediately go into rotation. I also made a gorgeous multi-coloured skirt which didn't really fit into my careful plans, but has been a useful me-made addition nevertheless. 

 Bias stripe scarf (Purl Soho)

Knit with some lovely but anonymous raspberry sock yarn from the stash, and striped with some odds and ends

 

4. Finish the UFOs
There has been progress here. My WIP pile has reduced significantly. I think I just have one long-range UFO in my knitting bag, which I am eyeing up as a Christmas gift. My sewing UFO pile ebbs and flows, but I think it has reduced in size a little. 

5. Continue to work on mending. 
There has been a lot of mending this year. I have darned, sewn, embellished, and ironed-on patches. I even managed to do some of that with friends. 

I haven't blogged much.  But I have been stitching. And I made myself some things. I might not have achieved everything I planned, but I can happily tick quite a few things off the list. Hurrah for that. 

Stash. Bust.

Howdy folks. 

Some kind of crazy tidying and organising bug got me over the holidays, and even before the New Year bells rang, I began whittling away at the accumulations of things around me, those little drifts of stuff that collect here and there, in a drawer, on a window ledge, above a fire. Then when the rain stopped long enough for me to sprint across the garden to the shed, I tackled a stash. 

[Side note: not The stash, but A stash - more specifically my stash of yarn.]

Last year, we remodelled our bedroom and substituted a gargantuan built-in wardrobe for something slightly smaller. While all of that was happening, my stash of yarn - organised into 4 clear plastic boxes - was sent to the shed to await repatriation. Over the summer my knitting mojo has been fairly elusive and not much has happened (see this if you don't believe me), but with Christmas and all, I picked up my needles again and the mojo was back. 

Kondo's approach to tidying/decluttering is to discard first and then organise. She advocates gathering things into one place, and handling everything as you decide whether to keep or not. Her test involves asking yourself if something gives you joy. For the stash I used a 'do I want to knit with this?' test. 

It was surprisingly easy to part with a lot of stuff: novelty bobbly yarns; squeaky acrylic; single balls of chunky yarn; half a pack of green wool yarn - I used the other half to knit a nice cardigan, but couldn't imagine making anything else in that colour; a whole pile of slubbed cotton yarn in bright pink, and something similar in black which I've had since the 1990s, Habu paper yarn which I've had for about 5 years but never worked out what I would do with...

I also let go of two very lovely handknit Aran sweaters that my maternal grandmother made. They were made for my dad, and I have had them for at least 10 years. I tried them on (again). They still made me look like a lumpy sausage. My husband tried them on too. They made him look like a badly dressed schoolboy, wearing a too small hand me down. I hope they find good new homes with people that they fit.  

Other things were definitely on the keep pile - all of my nice hand dyed sock yarn, and plain 4 ply for baby things, small piles of nice DK yarn, some odds and ends of mohair, and some cones of grey and teal yarn that I have distant plans for. I managed to hunt out all the little project bags concealed around the house and gather them together. 

The end result was a big pile of things 

To 

Go

Away.

We donated it to a local charity shop later that day (the Bethany Shop next to Summerhall in case you are interested). 

And, the rest of the yarn was organised into 2 clear plastic boxes, and stowed without drama in the wardrobe. Tada! 

One box is mostly DK or heavier weight yarn, and the other is 4 ply, sock yarn, lace weight and other special skeins. 

It's nice having my yarn nearby again, so I can squish it whenever I want. It feels like a good to be clearing out and clarifying like this. 

My next target is books, and then after that I will have to take on 

the 
fabric 
stash. 

Cue scary music.  

2016: making stuff happen

The theme for this year is making stuff happen. It's easy to make plans, but this year is about really doing it.

There are a few big things that we are trying to do which will affect the whole family (to do with where we live), and there are lots of crafty goals too.

This is the crafty list (believe me, you don't want to see the Other List - it's very long and very dull):

1. Tame the stashes (yarn and fabric, oh and patterns and craft books)
Progress: The yarn stash has already been halved; fabric is up next...

2. Use the stash!
Progress: one knitted WIP

3. Make some things to fill gaps in my wardrobe: 2 jersey skirts for work, one black, one blue; make a cowl and a new hat; use some of the jersey in the stash to make some tops for work.
Progress: pattern for skirt ordered.

4. Finish the UFOs
Progress: currently working on some sock repairs and some sewing that was cut out before Christmas but not completed.

5. Continue to work on mending,  exploring different techniques and making mending a social thing too by doing it with friends.
Progress: have invited a friend to come over for a mending session after she complained about holes in the knees of her son's trousers.

S I M P L I F Y

We've started the New Year with a bit of sorting out and shifting a few excess things. My motto for 2013 is S I M P L I F Y.  Yesterday, I spent a little bit of time clearing out my knitting basket - putting things back into the stash, and lining up the few projects I want to concentrate on in the next weeks. 

One of my big tasks for 2013 is to rationalise and simplify my stash of fabrics. My yarn stash now fits fairly neatly into 4 clear boxes, which I can easily access. And, having it to hand has meant that I have a much better of idea of what is there and can use it! My fabric stash is a different story. It is currently hiding in 3 - or maybe 4 - different places: mostly in not very accessible under-bed boxes and a vintage trunk that belonged to my mother - and I am always surprised when I look through it, at all the things I had forgotten about. 

I want to clear out the trunk for the children to use as their dressing up box, so some serious sewing and crafting is required to get the stash down to size. So, I have plans to whip up quilt tops and mats and bits and bobs. With baby no. 3 due to appear in a few months, there is also the need to build up some piles of washable wipes, dribble bibs, muslins and changing mats. 

Part of my simplifying routine will thus be about making time for sewing. I'm good at fitting in knitting here and there - on the bus; in the evenings; watching TV. But sewing is harder to pick up in between times because of all the getting out, setting up and organising that needs to happen (in my house at least). So, I'm going to have a sewing night each week, and see if I can't whip up a few more of these.... 

New Year's Evolution

Like many people, I can't resist making New Year resolutions. This year, like most years, I am trying to make positive and small changes. My overall goals for the year are two fold: do more exercise, and simplify our lives where possible.

Rather than throw myself into a New Year routine of running, swimming and working out - which is likely to lapse well before Easter, this year I am trying a different route. I am trying to build things up, to evolve our routines and patterns slowly - making more time and space for physical activity. Some of the opportunities will - I hope - be about us as a family, and some will be just about me. If it works, then by the end of the year things should look and feel a bit different. I'd like to be a lot fitter, if nothing else.

So far, we've resurrected our habit of going for a family swim at the weekend. Swim is a loose description of what we do, but that's not really the point when you've got two preschoolers! In addition, I've dropped my pilates class in favour of something a bit more aerobic - my core muscles may be strong, but my fitness level is pretty low - and that's my priority at the moment. So, I'll be swimming instead...

In other news, I have finally abandoned the lovely, but (for me anyway) completely unknittable Betty from Rowan Winter Kids. I love the look of this jumper, which I was trying to make for a friends daughter - but I have failed at every turn. Although this is a lace pattern, there are no charts, only a written description of the 4 or 12 row patterns involved. I can follow those okay - but get into bother when it comes to accommodating either increases or decreases and find myself and the correct pattern parting company making a unholey mess rather than a lovely lace fabric. I have cast on cuffs, sleeves and back in an attempt to get this going. To no avail - I think I have ripped back about 6 times now. Grrr.

2012

It's going to be quite a year:
there's a fifth birthday;
a 65th birthday;
two 70th birthdays;
a visit from our American cousins;
a trip to London for the Olympics;
a new kitchen and utility area in our house;
and, the bean will be starting school.

No doubt there will be other things as well. Some knitting and sewing and baking and making of all kinds. I'm trying to change a few other things too - but I'll save that for another time.

Happy New Year.