Day 5, belatedly

I missed posting about day 5 of the Blog Hub Swap yesterday because I spent the whole day trying to drown a sudden cold in herbal tea and soup. Things are well in hand today, but I'm going to keep up the tea guzzling just in case. Also, the weather was terrible yesterday and there was no light for photographing things. But today, there's even a little sun!

So. Day 5 in the package from Stephcuddles contained fun gadgets.


(Yes, the backdrop is my ironing board.)

A knitting spool and a row counter. I had a knitting spool when I was little and had so much fun making a family of snakes. I have visions of super-fast i-cord happening with this one, though. What fun!



A closer look at the row counter reveals that it has a handy stitch-marker attachment. I've had row counters before, and they always seem to run away, (okay, so I lose them), so maybe the little ring will make it stay put for longer. Brilliant!

Blog Hub Swap Day 4: Embellishments!

The fourth package from Stephcuddles brings goodies related to embellishments.


A button tin! I definitely need one of these, as I fear I will quickly amass a large button collection.


And inside, the beginnings of a button collection! Little clay elephants that have stolen my heart - I do love elephants - and some sweet little shell hearts. Other than these, I currently own two buttons, which will soon take their place in the tin with the rest. I also love the green spotted ribbon. What shall I use it for? Hmmm. I know I'll save the cute strawberry label after I find the use for the ribbon, though.

Close up of the adorable elephant buttons:

Blog Hub Swap Day 3

First order of business:

Soxonfox, aka Pip of the Sock Yarn Shop has received the package I sent her in the Blog Hub Swap and is blogging about it here complete with really great photos. I'll admit I was a bit intimidated when buying yarn for a sock yarn connossieur who sells it for a living! The legendary K1 Yarns came to the rescue, since they stock some really beautiful yarns.

Second: I survived 8 hours on the coach to Birmingham, 8 hours following my boyfriend around a bit cluelessly at UK Games Day (we both have life-consuming hobbies and obsessions - one day I'll take him along to a knitting festival), and 8 hours on the coach back to Edinburgh. Whoosh.

Third: Swap day 3!

I think Stephcuddles is determined to destroy me with sweets. Heh. (This is clearly not a bad sort of destruction). Day 3's bundle contained one large chocolate bar...



And several teeny tiny ones in the form of cute stitch markers. Aw.



Now little chocolate bars will garnish my knitting. A good combination, I think. Thanks, Stephcuddles!

Blog Hub Swap: Day 2

As it turns out, package #2 is the squishy one, so I didn't have to wait long before encountering exciting new yarn.

Contents:



1 ball of Zauberball in the Cranberries colourway. So pretty! And soft. I've wanted to try Zauberball for a while, so this is excellent mind-reading on the part of Stephcuddles. (Or rav-stalking, whatever).

I also received Eskimimi's lovely Simple City scarf from Stephcuddles directly in my ravelry inbox yesterday, which calls for one ball of Zauberball... Brilliant. I see where this is going! I actually have a load of Noro Kureyon Sock that might work for this scarf as well, but it's not nearly as soft and neck-friendly as the zauberball. Decisions, decisions. Maybe I'll make it with both!

But there was more:



Haribo! Yum. I'm going on a long long long coach ride tonight, so I'll bring this along for when I need a bit of sweetness.

On that note, Day 3 will have to wait until Monday, because I'm spending all night on a coach to Birmingham... And then much of the following day on the coach back, it seems. Quite possibly the longest coach ride of my life so far - we'll see how it goes.

Blog Hub Swap: Day 1

Today has been awesome, especially in terms of mail. This morning, our router came finally, so I am on the internet in our flat for the first time since moving to Edinburgh. Excellent. Then, this afternoon my swap package from Stephcuddles arrived! Extra exciting.



I eagerly opened the box to reveal several numbered colourful parcels, and a note from Stephcuddles saying that I could eschew the order and open the squishy one first if I wanted... Heh. Tempting, but I decided to follow the order Stephcuddles has set up.

Package number 1 contained these goodies.



Candy and a fun little notebook! Candy is always welcome. Mmmm. I find blank books very useful, and small ones like this are perfect for carrying around with me everywhere. Unfortunately I have a habit of forgetting to look at the lists I've written... but it's a start, right?

I'm excited to see what number 2 contains tomorrow!

Thanks Stephcuddles! And thanks again to Eskimimi for organizing the swap.

Swap!

I'm participating in a swap in the Blog Hub group on Ravelry, and have finally gathered together all the various things for my swap partner. I hope the recipient enjoys this as much as I have!

Here's the pile before being stashed away in their box.


Peruse a pile of polkadotted packages!

Off it goes, at the mercy of Royal Mail. Cross your fingers for me...

I had lots of fun with this, my first ever swap. Shopping is not my favourite activity, but shopping for knitting things, bits, and things that are not strictly required is quite fun. It also gave me a chance to poke around and discover shops I might not have found right away. A good introduction to more places to spend money in Edinburgh. Maybe that's not a good thing, after all.

Yarn!

Enfuriatingly, I still have no internet access at home. I am considering taking matters into my own hands somehow. I'm also still unemployed, but that's to be expected at this point.

But! A friend came up to visit me last week, and she gave me yarn from the Isle of Skye. It was really good to see her, and it was fun to have someone to hang around with now that my boyfriend has started working fulltime. (I will get a job soon, I promise)

Anyway, about the yarn:


It's greenish-black, tweedy, and wooly. The yarn label says Skye Knyts, but the internet doesn't yield a whole lot of information about this company. Does anyone know anything about them?



Still, very pretty! I don't know what I'll use it for, since it is fingering/sport weight and quite rough - maybe something with a lining. Any suggestions?

WIP tease

Still no internet access at home, but I have been testing out the flat as photography space. Here are some teaser images of my current WIP. Socks: two at a time, toe up, and knit in Tanis Fibre Arts Blue Label.


Looks grayer than real life. Imagine Vibrance!

This is the sole: these will be a gift, so I don't want to ruin the surprise.



This is my first use of Tanis Fibre Arts yarn, and I'm really enjoying it so far. The colourway is Mallard, which of course gets distorted since I photographed it on the kitchen table. It's blue, teal, green, and even pale yellow-green in spots. Mmmm hand-dyed semisolid goodness! Am kicking myself for not buying more than one skein when I was in Montreal, but there are more lovely yarns on this side of the pond to discover.

Hello from Edinburgh

The move went well, and we are settling in. Still no internet connection: 5-7 working days, my foot. Free wifi in the pub next door, though. Awesome.

Seeing the flat again for the first time in a month, I immediately noticed all sorts of things that I hadn't noticed at our viewing. For example, lack of right angles. Ah, character.



We picked a great/terrible time to move to Edinburgh, depending on your point of view: it is festival season, and the Edinburgh Fringe has taken over the whole city. We knew that going in, but it's still a pretty weird atmosphere to form first impressions in. I've been here as a tourist before, and I sort of still feel like a tourist. Maybe when the Fringe-goers go home and there are fewer tourists around we'll get used to living normal life in Edinburgh.


The Scottish parliament is a frankly confusing building up close. I think it comes together rather well from slightly further away. Art? Or monstrosity? You decide.

Not a whole lot of knitting going on between unpacking, assembling flatpacked furniture, and going to Fringe shows, but we did get out and climb up Arthur's Seat the other day. I've been up several times before when visiting Edinburgh, but every time the views of the city startle me. The spires in the centre of town help form an impressive skyline.



I love that there's a huge hill right in the middle of the city.



So far so good.

One last foray on Dartmoor

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently spent a day out hiking on Dartmoor. Hiking, or walking as they tend to say here, is pretty much the only athletic activity I feel any good at. During the time I spent in Devon a few years ago, I took advantage of the proximity to beautiful hills, tors, and moors: I joined a walking society and went hiking most weekends. My boyfriend and I met on one of those walks, and the rest is... geography? Har har. In any case, we both like to walk, and this is a great place to do it. We set out for a final walking daytrip before moving to Scotland.

We started out in Okehampton, followed a proper trail for a way, and then struck out onto the moors to clamber up and down some tors.


For a while, all the views were like this. Nice. Luckily the weather is very changeable. Over the course of a short walk between tors, we might lose sight of our goal completely, even if it was less than 100 metres away. And then it would reappear. And maybe disappear again in the fog.


Blunt enough.

We wandered into the danger zone which covers a large portion of Dartmoor, but there were no military exercises going on. Remnants of past military activity cropped up every so often in the form of shell casings and rusted bits of metal, but nothing big and scary.



It's hard to capture the extremeness of the landscape in a little rectangle. The scrabble, gorse, and tumbled rocks give the whole place a bleak look in the fog and rain, but shine out starkly in the sun. Groomed fields contrast the wildness on all sides of them. On occasions when the fog did lift, the views from the top of the hills and tors were startling and beautiful.


And yet, it all looks so piddly when I try to take photos of it.


And of course there were lots of sheep about. These rams looked like they were having some sort of meeting. A Conference of Rams. New collective noun?



This is my last post before moving to Edinburgh - lots to be done around here, and I'm not sure when I'll next have a reliable internet connection. Exciting times, though! See you soon, blogosphere.

FO: Herbivore

Two FO posts in a row? It may never happen again. Or maybe it will.



Pattern: Herbivore, by Stephen West

Yarn: Sweet Paprika Messa di Voce

Notes:
This scarf/shawlette took far less yarn than expected. The pattern calls for 430 yds / 393 m, so I figured two skeins of Messa di Voce would do it. In fact, the scarf was full pattern size after one skein, but I dipped into the second skein because I was nervous it would be too small. I only knit about an extra inch before the bind-off - about 13 inches deep instead of 12. It's a good size and blocked a little bigger anyway.

The colour is a bit brighter and slightly yellower than the photo shows. It's exciting to use indie hand-dyed yarn! (And Canadian indie yarn, no less.) The yarn bled quite a bit when blocking, so I will probably avoid this yarn for colourwork. I really enjoyed knitting it, though, and it's super soft.



I wore Herbivore while hiking on Dartmoor yesterday. More on this in another post: it really is an astounding place. I hoped to use the landscape in some suitably dramatic FO photos, but none of them really show off the knit or the landscape. Ah well. It kept me warm!


Herbivore's test-run on Dartmoor: photofail, warmth success!



This deserves blocking wires. It would look so much nicer with crisp straight edges than my straight pins can provide. Wibble wobble. Also, after one wearing, the edges are already rolling, so I think I should have blocked more vigorously. One day I'll get proper blocking wires!

FO: Noro socks of pinkness

The noro knee-sock saga has come to a close, and it's so exciting.

Pattern: Delicious Knee Socks by Laura Chau

Yarn: Noro Kureyon Sock

Notes:
As previously noted, I ran out of yarn 1.5 socks in. The pattern's handy yardage chart is great, but you have to actually use it for it to help you. *headdesk*. I decided to order more yarn after all, and I'm glad I did.

I did not attempt to match the two socks, instead deciding to see where the Noro took me. The tops ended up nearly matching anyway, through no extra calculation of my own.



My gauge was much tighter than the pattern required: 32 sts / 3.5 inches rather than 32 sts / 4 inches. Even so, I still ended up going down a sock size, knitting for foot circumference 8 instead of 9 inches. I think if I use this pattern again, I will go up to a 2.25 mm needle, instead of 2.0 mm. The fabric is really dense and warm.

These socks are super fun, but now that I've completed them I can't imagine ever wearing them in public. And yet, they are too fabulous to be hidden under trouser-legs.

Olive bread success

I have a long-awaited FO to show-off in the next few days, once I can get some decent photos when it stops raining, but in the meantime, I made bread. It was delicious. I have been baking more bread lately than in my whole life, since bread is something the whole family will eat - my boyfriend's family includes a vegan who eats almost no fat, so cookies are out. In any case, half my attempts at cookies here have been horrible failures. (I blame the oven's mad vendetta against me and the surprisingly lack of baking trays.) My bread attempts have been moderately more successful, but this one is the best-received offering yet.



My lacklustre photos on dirty counter top do not do it justice. The thing was devoured in minutes! Or maybe hours, if I'm honest. Luckily, I made the two loaves at once, so there's a whole other loaf hidden away. It will disappear by tonight, though.

I used the recipe for Sun Dried Tomato and Olive Bread on the BBC, but left out the sun dried tomatoes. I didn't use as many olives as required, either, but I should have used the full amount. I also used loaf pans instead of making round loaves since there were no flat baking sheets to be found. I also used active dry yeast instead of fresh yeast, using this conversion chart. This was my first time baking with a recipe that called for weights as opposed to volumes. I used a kitchen scale and everything! I still have all my North American volume-measured recipes and have meauring devices suitable for those, but I'm excited to venture into these British recipes as well.



Not going to lie: this is my second attempt at this particular bread. The first attempt looked promising until I cut into the middle and realized the centre of the bread was still doughy, even though the outside was very brown. It never cooked, despite hours and hours more in the oven on low heat. Fail. Reasons for failure are probably two-fold. 1. boyfriend's oven is a temperamental beast that hates me; 2. I tried to make it as one loaf rather than the two called for in the recipe. Bad idea.

Anyway, the second attempt was a resounding success. Fluffy, moist, olive-y, crusty, mmmm.

Fall Twist: best issue ever?

I think this is my favourite issue of Twist Collective so far. The photography and styling in Twist is always beautiful, so I love looking through it even if the individual patterns don't appeal to me. In this issue, the photos are gorgeous but I also want to make practically everything, so it's all a bit overwhelming!

I can't pick one favourite, but as it turns out, many that jump out at me are from Mary-Heather's colourful story.

Orange Pop is awesome. I've never considered using the "wrong-side" of fair-isle as a pattern in itself before, but leave it to Norah Gaughan to come at knitting from all sides. So cool. I would leave off the turtle-neck on this, probably, and I suspect I would use less popping colours, but still. Cityscape is adorable. I would add waist-shaping if I made it for myself, though. And socks! Manolo is so elegant. I've never been attracted to designer shoes, but I would totally make these socks, even to hide them in my unfashionable footwear.

I also like the soft, muted colour palette of "Une histoire comme les autres" - extra bonus points for Montreal and French!

Acorns is pretty and looks infinitely wearable, as does Metro.

Finally, I've always wanted to make a coat, even though I'm not sure how practical it would be. Maybe Red Oak is the one.

I'm so glad fall knitting is around the corner.

from the beach to the metropolis

Last week we went up to Edinburgh for a quick two-day tour of rental properties, criss-crossing the city on foot and seeing it in several different lights.


Edinburgh emerging

When we got into town from the airport, it was early morning, and the spires were shrouded in mist.

By the time we left in the evening the following day, the city was glowing. The few times I have visited Edinburgh, I have always admired how the light hits the stone, so I was excited when the sun finally came out.



We found a flat, and paid a deposit, so fingers-crossed everything runs smoothly from here! I am beyond excited that I get to live in this city I've admired so much as a tourist -- I know there are many more interesting things to see and do that the tourists never find out about. But now I have to find a job.

Adventure!

The other day we set out for a great adventure. (All my adventures are great.) We went to Bantham beach, and enjoyed a sunny day by the sea. I swam in the Atlantic ocean for the first time! The water was pretty cold, which probably goes without saying, but I had so much fun.



From Bantham, you can see Burgh Island, the real-life inspiration for Agatha Christie's island setting of the book And Then There Were None. I find that kind of exciting, since I grew up on Agatha Christie, and always loved that novel in particular.



Getting there was an adventure in itself, since we got lost and had to ask for directions 4 times. We also encountered a tidal road that floods and becomes impassable during high tide. Luckily, it turned out we didn't have to drive down that road to get to our destination. Fun times.

FO: Shrug thing

Pattern: Top-Down Shoulder Warmer, by Laura Chau

Yarn: Cascade 220



Mods:
I knit the sleeves in the round instead of flat, since I didn't see the point of doing the seaming. When I knit the sleeves, I thought they were turning out too short, so I did 3 inches of sleeve ribbing instead of 2.

I only knit 3 inches of collar ribbing since I was running out of yarn. Be aware that although the pattern says 430 yards is enough for the 36 size, my 2 skeins of Cascade 220 (440 yards) was just barely enough to knit it with my mods. The shorter collar ribbing works just fine, though.


It bunches a little in the back, but I don't really mind. I think that's what raglan increases do naturally.

Notes:
I want one in every colour. I love it. It is so simple and brilliant. This was (gasp) my first project in the ubiquitous Cascade 220, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Maybe I have inexpensive tastes after all? Haha. I will use it again if the opportunity arises. I look forward to seeing how it wears, since it was so cheap.

Catching up

Before I left Ottawa, I did one last fit of yarn dyeing to distract myself from packing. I'd bought some Wiltons Black months before and hadn't tried it yet, so this was a good opportunity.

I overdyed this gray sock yarn with streaks of blue and green from a previous dyeing experiment that I eventually decided was too subtle for me.

Before:


After:

trying to do a Madelintosh style yarn-pose

It's still gray, but I like it a lot better this way. Knowing that Wiltons Black tends to do unpredictable things, I decided to let it break and see what happened.



I'm pleased that the gray has more depth to it now, because of the red and blue that separated out and stuck. The blue is more obvious in the photos, but there are so reddish streaks as well.

Made it.

So many roses in these parts

The first leg of my big journey is complete, and I'm sort of settled in the sunny south west. At least, it has been very sunny and warm for much of the last week. Today there were some thundershowers interspersed with warm sun - I had forgotten how quickly the weather changes here. The flowers and trees need the rain, since it has been so dry.



I've been having a lot of fun taking pictures of the plants and flowers that I haven't already photographed a hundred times. Fruit trees are so exciting!



There is a massive thistle growing in my boyfriend's backyard. It's practically a tree! Kind of fitting, since the next leg of our big moving journey will end in Scotland. Exciting times, but lots of organizing ahead.

Aerial word... Saturday

I've fallen behind on my word-learning since coming home from Quebec. Must get back into it. Since I have flying on the brain, here are some airplane words.

cabotage

1. navigation or trade along the coast.
2. Aviation. the legal restriction to domestic carriers of air transport between points within a country's borders.

~Dictionary.com

aeropleustic
pertaining to aerial navigation

~Dictionary of Difficult Words

I'm losing the battle with my suitcase and the airline weight limit at the moment, but I will prevail. My next post will be from England - I will see you on the other side!