WIP Wednesday: Everyone's a Winner Edition

Over Christmas, I read the delightful but rather batty decluttering guide The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Maria Kondo. This book is massively popular and has inspired the much-maligned but completely fantastic practice of KonMari. Basically, with KonMari you gather all of one type of item (clothes, kitchen stuff, books, etc) and go through it item by item, deciding what brings you joy and what has irreplaceable use. If the item does not do either of these things, get rid of it. I realised after reading that book that I have wool and needles and projects squirrelled all over my house that are in desperate need of a sort and declutter. I really had no idea how much yarn I even had! It just seemed to be too big a job to even get started on. However, last Tuesday I woke up with an unexpectedly clean slate and thought, well, let's go. 30 minutes later, my bed looked like this:

It's hard to tell from this photo but that pile of knitting, yarn and needles was about 1 metre high. It includes every piece of knitting and knitting paraphernalia that I own.  I found some crazy stuff - half balls of wool left over from projects I knitted *twelve* years ago. I unravelled a ton of never-to-be-finished projects and tossed everything that looked tired and done.

Three hours later, my stash is neatly sealed and sorted and fits into these three boxes:

Excellent! The KonMari process was dusty and time-consuming but also very rewarding.  I now know what wool I have, how much of it I have and what needles I own. I'm excited about using it all up and my house is just unbelievably neater. (I also discovered a huge pile of UFOs that just need like an hour of work to be completely finished, but that's a story for another day.

In Other News

One thing that is giving me immense joy is my sock yarn blanket.

It's so big now that it's hard for me to get all of it in one photo unless I stand on something (this is not as exciting as it sounds - I am only five foot tall). Unfortunately, I have had to put it aside briefly because of boring deadline knitting. Boo!!!

First up, a pair of the world's most boring brown socks. They were requested by Sam for his birthday, which is next week, so I am Getting Them Done. But seriously, how boring?

Because I could only handle so much brown, I also cast on a pair of socks for my dad's birthday, which is coming up soon.

They are kind of based on the Cable Rib Socks from my favourite sock book Favorite Socks but I increased the stitch count and didn't read the instructions properly so it's really more of an "inspired by". I think it'll look good, though, and it's not made out of brown, which is really what I'm look for at this moment. 

The best thing is, once I get these socks done, more yarn scraps for my blankets. Everyone's a winner in this week's WIP Wednesday :)

FO Friday: The Knit-Purl Blanket (2014 FO #13)

I am back! But only briefly, so please don't tell my supervisor I stepped away from my thesis for a bit. This is our little secret.

The last few weeks have been pretty crazy, uni-wise. I have put on without exaggeration 1.5kg from spending so much time sitting on my arse (both working and eating chocolate). I've been trying to take breaks and go to the park and the beach but the truth is that the final part of any research project requires a bit of slogging to get to the end and there's no just no way it can be avoided. Fortunately, slogging away is an activity that goes remarkably well with stockinette stitch, which means lots and lots of finished projects.

For example, this baby blanket is finished TWO MONTHS before the baby is due. This is an event that surely has never happened in the history of knitting baby blankets before.

Where's the tension? Where's the desperate race to finish it before the mother leaves hospital? 

The pattern was simple - I cast on 100 stitches and then knit it until it felt big enough. I then picked up stitches all the way around and knit the border in garter stitch until I felt it was big enough, then I cast off (yarn is Bendigo Woollen Mills Luxury 8ply in Citrus, Frost and Ghost. I used maybe half a ball of the Frost and Citrus and about 160g of Ghost. There are lots of leftovers).

It felt seriously weird not to be weaving in ends on the way to meeting the baby for the first time.

Of course, Lucy helped me block the blanket.

She is going to be so annoyed when she realises the blanket is not actually for her.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Sleepy time and 2010 FO#16: Baby Surprise Jacket in Green

I work from home, so I have a lot of flexibility in how I structure my day.  I'll admit that some days that means I work in my pyjamas until half an hour before Sam is due to get home and I don't apologise for it!  But my day does usually involve getting up, doing stuff on a computer for six to seven hours and then cooking dinner.

However, today I woke up and I just wasn't feeling it.  I was sleepy, cranky, cold and a bit petulant. I may have stamped my foot when I couldn't get two bits of bread to separate so I could toast them.  So when Lucy jumped onto the bed for her morning nap, I popped right on the bed beside her her and slept my morning away.  I'm not a big napper because a) I can't get to sleep at night a lot of the time, let alone during the day and b) I always feel like time napping is wasted time, even if all I would done in that time is watch The Real Housewives and played on Ravelry.  After today's lovely warm cuddly morning, I'm reviewing my napping policy.  I think I could really get used to sleeping in the day, plus who says no to extra pussycat huggles?  Certainly not me!

You know who else naps a lot? Babies do.  So, let me show you a baby jacket I finished in December for a new baby, also called Lucy (was she named after my cat? I think so, although the mother denies it.)

How good was my segue? I'm improving.  Soon I'll be making dad jokes and bad alliterating puns on the Internet - it's only a matter of time...

This is Elizabeth Zimmermann's very famous Baby Surprise Jacket, knitted in Knit One Crochet Too Ty-Dy Socks in green.  The pattern deserves its reputation as a much-lauded must-knit - it's all tricky short rows and nifty geometry held together by the knit stitch.  It didn't take much actual knitting time to finish the jacket but it is a very small jacket - suitable only for teeny tiny newborns.  I used 3mm needles, but I'd go 3.25mm or 3.55mm if I was to knit it again in 4ply. I hope the mum likes it and it keeps the baby warm, because even though it's summer in Melbourne it snowed yesterday! Oh Melbourne, your weather is so bloody annoying charmingly unpredictable.

I'm slowly catching up with my blogging. A few more posts to go...

No Blanket For You!

About two years ago, I started knitting a Moderne Baby Blanket (rav link), mainly because I had a huge pile of 5-ply crepe that I wanted to use up and I have a bit of a problem with delayed gratification - if I get into my mind that I will do a certain thing, I want to do it now.  After knitting three and a bit stripes, it was put away and forgotten about.

Then, when doing my WIP Round-up last year, I pulled it out of its storage place to take a photo of it.  This is how it looked when I last blogged about it:

Because it was out in the open again, I occasionally picked it up and worked a random row.  There was a baby due in February, and since this is a baby blanket I thought it was a match made in heaven.  Then there were complications with the pregnancy, so the due date was moved to the middle January, and I started working harder on the blanket.  This is what it looks like now.  I love knitting on this blanket!  It's nothing but row after row of mindless knitting.  Every now and then you need to cast off a few stitches and then pick some up, but not very often.  It's a wonderful project for knitting in front of the TV, and as a plus it looks ridiculously stylish and much harder than it actually is.  

The couple I was knitting the blanket for are Sam's second cousins.  They're really nice and we see them about six times a year, but only as a group and at family functions.  We never see them outside the family, and even though I like them immensely, I don't know them very well.  So I started thinking ... I love this blanket - will they?  Will they understand the hours of work that have gone into creating this modular masterpiece?  Will they appreciate the gift of my time and affection that it represents and take care of it accordingly?  In all honestly, these people may be the No.1 ticket holders in the fanclub of Handmade Stuff International.  They may appreciate my work, time and effort.  But I don't know them that well, and I am not prepared to gift 100 hours of my time to someone who may or may not appreciate what they are receiving.  

I really grappled with this decision, and I eventually found a solution.  They're getting a knitted hat instead - it's super cute (it has a pompom!), super quick, made from stash and I am not invested enough in the hat to care if they use and appreciate it or not (of course, I hope they do.  See how cute it is?).  Now, everyone's happy. Me especially.