You may remember back in March I had fun with undyed yarn and Kool-Aid, and ended up with a beautiful (if I say so myself!) skein of blue and cream sock yarn. It was originally intended to be the background colour in a sock design for submission to an online publisher. I knitted up the sample sock and submitted my design, but unfortunately the publisher decided not to go ahead with the pattern collection after all. I was left with a part-finished pair of socks (one sock is not much help really) and a draft version of the pattern.
After a bit of thought and putting the sock into and out of a drawer, I decided I loved the yarn more than I loved the pattern and decided to re-purpose it rather than make the second sock. In a move very rare indeed for me, I frogged the sock.
However, that also created a problem as I had only dyed up one 50g skein which isn't enough for a pair of socks for myself. I toyed with striping it with something else, and then my problem was solved by my five-year-old asking for another pair of knitted socks. I can easily get socks for him out of one skein, and since he has admired this colourway frequently since I dyed it, I decided to use it to make his socks.
And here they are!

They are just basic "plain vanilla" top-down socks, but here is the pattern anyway.

To fit a child with UK size 10 feet - approximately 7" foot length, and 6.5" foot circumference - 4-5 years old or thereabouts

You will need about 165 yards of fingering weight/4-ply weight yarn, and 2.5mm needles for working in the round. You will also need 2 stitch markers and a darning needle.
The pattern uses common knitting abbreviations.
K - knit
P - purl
Sl - slip
K2tog - knit two stitches together
P2tog - purl two stitches together
SSK - slip slip knit (slip two stitches one-by-one knitwise, return to left needle and knit together through back loop)

Socks are identical - make two! Once markers are placed, slip them each time you come to them. The start of round marker does not move when you switch to working flat for the heel or when you then switch back to the round for the foot.

Cuff
Cast on 48 sts and join in the round, taking care not to twist. Place marker for start of round.
Rib round: *(K1, P1), repeat from * to end.
Work Rib round 10 times in total.

Leg
Working in stocking stitch (i.e. knit all stitches), work 30 rounds.

Heel flap
The flap is worked back and forth in rows across 24 stitches.
Row 1: Sl1, K23
Row 2: *(Sl1, P1), repeat from * to end.
Work rows 1 and 2 eleven more times (12 in total).
You will now turn the heel, still working back and forth in rows.
Row 1: K16, K2tog, turn
Row 2: P9, P2tog, turn
Row 3: K9, K2tog, turn
Row 4: P9, P2tog, turn
Repeat rows 3 and 4 until all the live stitches either side of the centre group of stitches have been worked.
You will now return to working in the round.
Knit across heel stitches, pick up and knit 12 stitches from side of heel flap, place "side" marker, knit across instep stitches to "start of round" marker, pick up and knit 12 stitches from side of heel flap, knit all the way back around to the "start of round" marker. You will now have 24 stitches straight across the instep and 34 stitches around the heel.

Gusset
Round 1: K1, K2tog, K to 3 stitches before side marker, SSK, K1, K across instep stitches to start of round marker.
Round 2: K all round.

Repeat rounds 1 and 2 until there are 24 stitches across the instep and 24 stitches around the heel.

Foot
Work straight in stocking stitch without further shaping for 32 rounds. (If you need the foot longer, add extra rounds here)

Toe
Round 1: K1, SSK, K to 3 sts before side marker, K2tog, K1, K1, SSK, K to 3 sts before start of round marker, K2tog, K1.
Round 2: K all round.

Repeat rounds 1 and 2 until there are 12 stitches remaining on instep and heel stitches.

Using Kitchener stitch, graft toe closed.

And the name? Well, I knitted each of these socks in less than 4 hours. In theory, I could knit the entire pair in a full working day, with a break for lunch. In reality, I wouldn't recommend anybody knit for a solid 8 hours in one go unless they want to end up with very sore hands, wrists and shoulders, but it just goes to show that knitting projects can be quick and still achieve a finished article.

So, what am I working on this week?
After a couple of weeks with three or, at one point, four different works in progress ("WIPs") I am now back in my comfort zone of two current projects. I don't like having too many WIPs. If I'm not seeing good progress on my work I get antsy so two is usually my limit but I had deadlines. Needs must....

Firstly I'm working on a pair of socks using my favourite Wollmeise yarn. This pair uses Twin sock yarn (80% wool, 20% nylon) in colour way Hamam. The picture isn't quite right colour-wise. The yarn is a gorgeous emerald green but slight blue-green shading.

Project number two is a circular shawl. Part of an online KAL (knit-along) this is my second ever circular shawl and the first of my own design. It's based on Elizabeth Zimmerman's Pi shawl principles, which doesn't have anything to do with 3.14159....etc. Instead you simply double the number of stitches every time you double the number of rounds and, hey presto, your shawl lies flat! This one is made from Valley yarns Colrain lace, merino/tencel blend in colour way Merlot, a gorgeous bright red. The yarn has a very slight halo but not anywhere near enough to hide the lace pattern, and it comes on a 1540 yard cone so no need to join any ends. The whole thing is made from one continuous length of yarn.

Between the two projects I have the perfect combination to keep me happy. One large keep-at-home project to get my teeth into in the evenings and one portable lunch-breaks-and-on-the-move knitting.

What are you knitting this week?

Like many kids, mine love to help in the garden. A lot of their "helping" is more of a hindrance, but you have to admit it is fascinating to plant a seed and watch it grow into a plant. And even more fun if it's a plant you can eat! The main issue for my children and gardening, though, is it's just too SLOW! When they plant a seed they want it to grow before their eyes. Carrots and lettuce and peas just don't do that!
And then I remembered cress. OK so it doesn't quite grow before your eyes but it does grow quickly. "Plant" it on damp kitchen towel one day, it has grown roots by the next day, and green shoots appear the day after that. Within a week, you can "harvest" your "crop".
We laid out two lots of cress seeds, in the shapes of the boys' initials. They were both excited to see whose cress would win the race to grow. Of course, side by side in the same container, the race was pretty much guaranteed to be a draw but that didn't spoil the fun.
A sunny windowsill and extra water each day meant that by the end of day 5, the cress was ready to cut!

Over the last week or so I have been trying something new - linen yarn! My preference is knitting with wool, or at least a blend with a good amount of wool in it, and I'm especially a fan of merino. I like the springiness, the warmth as it runs through your fingers, the softness of wool.
I haven't always knitted with wool. In fact it's a fairly recent preference in my knitting materials. Until a couple of years ago, I knitted pretty much exclusively with acrylic blends, mainly due to familiarity and cost. I had been led to believe that I was allergic to wool. I remember my mum telling me she had to make my sweaters using synthetic fibres as "wool makes you itch" and once I started making my own I went with what I knew. Sirdar Snuggly was my go-to yarn for everything for a long time. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that yarn, and I actively choose it for gift-knits, especially for children's stuff as it's so easy to wash and dry.
Now I realise it wasn't an allergy at all, just probably the slight scratchiness of wool against a small child's sensitive skin.

I have used cotton before, mainly for dishcloths though. On trips to the USA I have stocked up on Sugar n Cream and similar worsted weight cottons in bright colours, because you can't get them as easily here, and certainly not as cheaply. Balls of cotton that cost a dollar or two there are several pounds each here. I've also used Rowan Cotton Glace for baby sweaters for the summer. Cotton can be harder on the hands than wool to work with. It doesn't have the stretch of wool which makes it feel taut when you're knitting it, and achieving an even tension takes a different sort of knitting action than working with wool, for me at least.

But until this month I had never worked with linen yarn before. Willow Yarns Feather is a new linen/cotton blend yarn which I was sent as yarn support for a pattern design. The pattern itself is due to be published by Willow Yarns in the autumn, so until then the actual design detailed are under wraps, but it has been an interesting experience working with the yarn. I hadn't actually thought to work with that one particularly, but Willow suggested it as being suited to my pattern, and having knitted up my sample they're right. As I said, linen is new to me as a fibre. It feels a bit like knitting with string! That doesn't sound a desperately attractive experience and it certainly involved consciously changing my knitting tension to make the fabric even. I found at first my stitches were very loose but once I got the knack of the different "hand" of the yarn from my usual wool it was good to work with, just different.
Thinking about it, it does make sense for there to be some fibres within the yarn. After all, this linen/cotton blend is made of two plant materials. It did make the yarn a little scratchy in places though and I had to be careful when removing them not to damage the yarn.
Blocking the finished piece was also different from blocking wool. I hadn't anticipated at all how very very absorbent the knitted fabric is! To block a wool piece I usually fill a basin with warm soapy water and drop the knitting on the top and wait until it sinks, by which time it is soaking wet. This piece not only sank, it also seemed to soak up most of the water! Again, when you think towels are made from linen and cotton, it makes sense that the fibre should have this property. It took a lot of blotting and squeezing to get it from sopping to damp to block properly. 
I wasn't sure how aggressive I could be with the finished piece so as not to damage the yarn but it seems to cope well with being pushed and stretched to size. It had stretched a long way widthways while soaking but it seemed quite happy to be manhandled back to size!
Finally, it has taken some time to dry. It has been 24 hours now and it still isn't quite dry yet, and it's been a warm day. I am pleased with the final result though. The colours are pretty, the stitches are nicely defined, and Willow's adviser was right - the pattern and the yarn are very well suited. I look forward to the autumn when I can introduce you to the pattern itself. Watch this space!!

My latest shawlette pattern, Furrows and Corn, just launched on Ravelry, has been some time in the making. The concept itself seemed pretty simple.
Last autumn I was driving past some recently ploughed fields. I couldn't help thinking the parallel rows of furrows in the fields looked like the ridges you get with garter stitch. I was coming towards the end of a year-long garter stitch blanket project (which will be a whole other post in itself) so garter ridges must have been on my mind. 
A few days later, browsing on Pinterest, a cable pattern caught my eye. It looked like a long ear of wheat. I immediately put the two images together in my mind. The idea started to develop into a triangular shawl. I like the asymmetrical shape of my Yarnshine shawlette but this time I fancied working it the other way.

The main problem with this design has been actually writing it down. There are knitters who prefer written instructions and knitters who prefer charts, and I very much prefer charts. It's a regular pattern, regular increases and regular cable placing so I thought this would be a nice easy chart. Oh, how wrong I was! The frequency of the cable crosses and the increases and the spacing between the cables just didn't mesh to form any kind of regular repeat and I soon found if I was going to chart it I was literally going to have to chart every single stitch of the entire work. Back to the drawing board....

Once I'd resigned myself to written instructions, I thought the regular spacing between the cables would make it easy to set up the first couple and then leave the knitter to follow the steps I'd set them off on. Wrong again! Having run the pattern past a couple of testers it became very apparent that, in order to be able to do what I was asking, the knitter needs to be able to read their knitting. Personally I find this very easy so it doesn't always occur to me that other knitters, even experienced ones, can't do it. Asking someone to use the established work to continue with the next section doesn't work if they can't look at their knitting and tell you how many knit stitches or purl stitches there are without referring back to the pattern and counting each one individually.

I ended up writing out line-by-line instructions for the shawlette. Long-winded but it works, and if it means that more knitters can make and enjoy my pattern then so be it!

May is Indie Designer Month at UK websiteLoveknitting.com. Buy any pattern by an independent designer and get 10% off your yarn purchase. As long as you have a paid-for pattern from an independent designer in your basket, you'll get 10% off any yarn bought at the same time. The picture below will take you through to my patterns, but the offer applies to any of the independent pattern designers who sell on LoveKnitting.com (and on their sister site LoveCrochet.com too)

Well, the 2015 UK general election is tomorrow and I think I am what they call a "floating voter". Never mind "floating", it seems more like bobbing about aimlessly! I genuinely do not have a clue who to vote for!

It feels like this election has been in the news forever. Since they changed the law last time to make a 5-year fixed-term parliament, everyone has known the election was going to have to be held this May and both the politicians and the media have been exploiting that knowledge, for months it seems. There has been campaigning and TV debates (and debates about the TV debates!), so many leaflets through the letterbox that I could have re-papered the spare room with them, but so far none of it has made me decide whose box I want to put my cross in tomorrow.

There is a school of thought (albeit a somewhat defeatist one, some might argue) that the area where I live has such a strong tradition of voting for one specific party that a vote for anyone else aside from them is nothing more than a protest vote. If I support them, I can vote, or not, because everyone else will likely vote for them so my one extra vote won't sway the result. On the other hand, if that's not the party I want to support, it exercises my democratic right to protest against them by voting for someone else, even if that someone else doesn't stand a chance of actually being elected.

I decided to do a little research to make sure I was making a truly informed decision about which candidate to vote for. I started out by looking into who is actually standing for election here. (No point pledging my allegiance to a party with no representation where I live!) There are eight candidates. Two are standing for parties I've never heard of; two are standing for parties I know I definitely do not support the political views of. That narrows it down to four. A bit of poking about online brought me to a website that I thought I would find really useful. Voteforpolicies.org.uk offers a survey to help you to decide which political parties you sympathise with. OK, I thought, let's give this a go. You pick which (or all) of a number of policy areas you are interested in (education, environment, health, economy, etc) and then the site gives you a list of anonymous policies to read through. You pick which ones you might consider and eliminate the ones you disagree with, then, from that short list, you choose which one you support the most. After completing that process for each policy area, you are presented with a pie chart showing what proportion of your answers aligns with each political party, and it also reveals which party's policy you had actually picked in each area.
I read the policies, I made my choices, the program gave its verdict. My allegiance seems to lie with.......all of them. In equal measure. It appears I believe in one party when it comes to the economy and welfare, a different one for health and the environment, a different one again for immigration and education, and so on. 

So now I'm no more decided than I was. All I know is that I am apparently some kind of weird political mishmash of ideas, with no obvious sympathy with any one of the current mainstream parties. Who I'm going to vote for tomorrow is still a mystery, even to me! I guess I'll have to decide between now and tomorrow. 

In case anyone's wondering, I definitely intend to vote. I might not know who I want, but I do know who I don't want, so I don't want any apathy on my part to mean I don't get the chance to vote out someone whose party policies I don't believe in. In the meantime, I'll just float along here and we'll see how I feel tomorrow.

I was chatting with my Dad on the phone yesterday. He's in the process of organising some charity fundraising events to benefit Beaumond House hospice in Nottinghamshire. He hasn't done anything like this before, but the main event he's planning is a dinner-dance with a 1940s theme. This year marks 70 years since the end of World War II so he thought he would go with that as the theme for the charity dance. He's got a venue booked, and a band, and he's also trying to put together a raffle to be drawn on the evening. He was asking me for some ideas for prizes that would appeal to women. He has been pledged some vouchers for "experiences" that would appeal more to men but, aside from a spa voucher, he's not had much that might tempt ladies to buy raffle tickets. I suggested what I know best - knitting! So we have agreed that I will design and hand-knit a lace shawl or wrap to offer as a raffle prize.

Now I just need to make a few decisions. Yarn weight, colour, shape, style, it's quite a list. Dad is leaving the design decisions to me - all he asked is that I attach a label with the care instructions and saying that it has been designed and hand-knitted by me.

I have no intention of branching out into commissioned hand-knits. For me, the business side of things is in the design. The knitting itself I do for love, which is mainly why, so far, I design items that I want to have myself, or that are intended for a specific, special individual. Knitting takes time and lots of it, and if I'm going to use my precious time to knit I want to get an item I love at the end of it. I work, I have a family, there just aren't the hours in the day to add in commission knitting as well. But commission designing? I can do that! And for my Dad, I'll find the extra hours to knit it too. He's worth it!