Unter einem Regenschirm am Abend

So, last night was the Max Raabe concert at Schloss Augustusburg. For reference, this dude in this place:

Unfortunately, to say that the sky wasn’t quite as blue as in the photo would be the understatement of the year. The concert was open air in the courtyard, it was pouring rain, and as far as I could tell, we were the only ones without any sort of protective garb. We were slightly overdressed in little black dresses and blazers.

Needless to say, I didn’t wear the yellow Swallowtail Stole. It needs reblocking from being carried across the street in my backpack, I’d hate to see what would’ve happened if I’d actually exposed it to two and a half or three hours of pouring rain.

But other than the pouring rain, the horror that was the drive back (downpour, curving streets, and my rear lights were mysteriously broken, wtf), it was amazing. I think the rain made the contrast between the timeless glamour of the Golden Twenties onstage and us sodden lowlives even more striking.

It was classic.

It was definitely unforgettable.

I’ve never been that wet in my life.

This is me, after 160km (about 100 miles) of driving, halfway dry except for my dress, which I’d periodically wrung out during the concert and that had gotten clammier than clammy on the drive back until my kidneys were just about to jump out of my body.

But that’s okay. We had a great time yesterday, we’ll talk about this for years, and we put the dog in a Union Jack hat today.

Glamour shots

Excuse the double posting, but I really wanted these to have their own post.

It is so pretty, I swear. And so light too, with gorgeous drape and the perfect size, and the color, and… just everything. It even goes with the dress I want to wear it with.

I can’t be the only one who picks clothes according to what will go best with the accessories, can I?

Max Raabe tomorrow. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

I’m excited.

Beau’iful plumage

Did I mention my Swallowtail Stole is done? Finished, finito, fertig?

And in just under four months, too. A time that could have easily been cut in half if the poor thing hadn’t languished in various corners. For no reason other than that I was too lazy to do a couple of minutes worth of math, to figure out how many stitches I had to fudge for the transitions from one chart to the other.

Either way, here it is, in all its blocking glory. After Python: African and Python: European, I present Python: Norwegian Blue. Beau’iful plumage!

Swallowtail Stole, based on the charts of Evelyn A Clark’s Swallowtail Shawl, 4mm bamboo circs. Yarn: LaceMerino handgefärbt from Die WollLust. Converted to rectangular shape and knit in the round following Marianne Kinzel’s Instructions for Oval and Oblong Designs from her ‘Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting’.

Ended row 5 of the Lace Edging chart with 560 stitches, row 7 with 700 stitches (70 scallops). Dimensions: 50cm by 140cm. (Much better size than the Big Green Monster)

Days left till deadline: 5.

Oh, I rock.

Burning of the Midnight Lamp

After doing pretty much nothing else for two days, let me just humbly announce…

HELL YES THE DAMN SWALLOWTAIL STOLE IS FINISHED. FINISHED I TELL YOU.

All I need to do is block it tomorrow morning (cause I don’t fancy sleeping on the floor), and then I can leave for my parents’ in peace.

And did I mention it’s perfect? The dimensions, the proportions, the color… perfect. Everything. And no mistakes. I can’t wait to show it off next week. Oh, the cleverness of me!

I’m TNT, dynamite!

After finally getting around to buying darning needles, I’m on FIRE finishing stuff.

I finished knitting and blocking the TARDIS-cowl I made for the KAL in the Who Knits? Ravelry group. Like I’ve said before, it’s made from butter-soft, light, teal alpaca, and while it’s a bit big, it was a joy to make and I can’t wait to find buttons for it. I want very light mother-of-pearl ones, and I hope I won’t have to wait another half year, like for Tempest.

And then… Haruni. I don’t know how exactly, but the edging just flew off my needles. Contrary to what the pattern said, it took only a quarter of the yarn, and that despite the middle being larger: I have eight pairs of leaves on each side instead of six.

I finished it yesterday afternoon, with a bind-off that took almost exactly two hours. Two hours with a crochet hook in my hand – not my favorite way of spending time. But it did give me opportunity to listen to a Horrible Histories audiobook, and start with Lois Lowrie’s ‘The Giver’ again.

Blocking took another very cramped half-hour, and by the end of it my thighs were trembling uncontrollably. But… it was totally worth it.

It’s Zitron filigran Lace No. 1 in a wonderful denim blue, on 3.5mm needles. It’s also slightly bigger than the TARDIS cowl.

I also finished a sock last night, nothing extraordinary, just a high-shaft 1×1 rib sock for cold days, and I’ll probably try and finish the first Tadpole sock tonight. Man, I started the Tadpoles in March, it’s been such slow going with my knitting recently. Half a step before the finish line, I somehow lose interest.

Like the Swallowtail Stole: I’m done with the Lily of the Valley motif, I have been for a while. But there’s some mathematical inconsistency, the number of stitches I have isn’t divisible by 8, but I can’t get myself to calculate how many stitches I’d have to add, look where I could put them, and do that whole shebang. So the poor thing’s just languishing there, in the corner of my desk, and sometimes I feel bad.

Which isn’t stopping me from participating in the Rav SPN group’s loosely wing-themed Summer KAL. I’m doing Garden of Alla for it, I just need to decide between yarns: fingering-weight Kauni or laceweight Drachenwolle.

They’re both gorgeous. Ah, decisions, decisions.

Jaws was never my scene and I don’t like Star Wars

Summer’s kind of starting out in full force this year, which means that my summer lag of knitting  less and lazing around in the sun more has hit early this year.

Or, you know, instead of lazing around I’ll be studying vocab and cursing the gods and my own stupidity for taking Spanish. Ah, well. Honestly, if I’d put a fraction of the work I put into uni into high school, I probably would’ve gone out of there with a 1.0 and a reputation of being no fun at all.

Either way, I do actually manage to knit, occasionally, so in the past two weeks and a half, I’ve managed to make… a hat. (Marnie McLean’s Chapeau Marnier, 3mm bamboo needles, Drachenwolle Leinen/Merino)

And three quarters of a sock. (Tadpoles by Jenna Swanson, 2.5 and 2.25 mm DPNs, Drachenwolle)

Aaaaand a bit of the swallowtail stole, which is coming around gorgeous and doesn’t look as 70s as the photo would make you believe.

Making progress on the Stole, which looks more and more like this giant yellow ruffle, is sort of a tedious business: with 500+ stitches to a row, the patience and perseverance I learned on the Green Monster are coming in quite handy. So what if I need a good 20 minutes for one row? It’s practically meditation. And I am making good progress; I’m already on the second half of the Lily of the Valley charts.

Even so, striking out rows on a chart has never felt so good. Ever.

Belting out Sunlight

I have a new orchid. It’s gorgeous. I originally wanted a white one, but this one was just too huge and pretty to turn down. And when the sun was out in full force today, I took a couple of pictures.

Speaking of being out in full force… Ricky Martin came out via his blog yesterday. Which, huh. I guess the only ones truly surprised are a couple of grandmas in Iceland, but still, I wouldn’t exactly have expected it. Especially not so beautifully worded, in English too but in Spanish even more so: “Hoy ACEPTO MI HOMOSEXUALIDAD como un regalo que me da la vida. ¡Me siento bendecido de ser quien soy!” (Today I accept my homosexuality as a gift that life gives me. I am blessed to be who I am!)

Now. Less pop culture, more knitting. The Swallowtail Stole, aka Python: Norwegian Blue. Yesterday I tried my hand at the set-up round again, finished that one and the plain round after that, and then realized… I hadn’t started or ended the second long side with the edge stitches, but jumped straight into the pattern. So I decided, screw it, and did this:

And when I cast on again, I’d learned from my previous mistakes. I left a long tail to sew the middle together in the end. I put down markers every 30 sts on the long sides, and between the sections where I needed them. Which, believe it or not, helped a lot. So now, just about 28 hours later, I have this:

Which doesn’t look like much, but here’s a secret: I actually have twice that width. Cause I’m just that awesome.

I just pinned the middle together, and I really really hope it doesn’t look like that when I sew it… I might have to try it on a swatch before. For reference, I got the idea (and technique)  from The Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting by Marianne Kinzel. She has truly gorgeous designs in there, which were the reason for buying the book in the first place, and one day I’ll knit myself half a Balmoral thistle as a shawl. Since right now I’m gathering experience with having a gazillion stitches on my needles. Well, right now it’s ‘only’ around 400 (and I can’t believe I wrote ‘only, either), but it’s still enough to look like a lovely lacy ruffle on the cable of my circ.

One day I’ll have to make those lacy ruffle cuff thingies. I have a thing for pretty, lacy, delicate, girly, useless things, which is… basically the opposite of everything else I wear. But who says butch-ish girls can’t enjoy pretty things?

Even if I enjoy a good breakfast even more. (Seriously, best breakfast ever.)

Mach das Radio an und dreh richtig laut auf

Holy crap, I haven’t blogged in a while! I guess it’s mostly because I felt like I didn’t knit that much, but now that I look around on Ravrav and in my apartment, a couple of things have accumulated. Plus, recipe recommendations!

I still haven’t duplicate stitched a huge letter on my Weasley sweater. I still haven’t finished Haruni. I haven’t knit a pair of socks in a long time. And I haven’t been out and about so much in quite some time.

I have, however, learned to double knit, and it’s a TON of fun. So much fun, in fact, that I kind of never want to do anything else. (I’m sure that effect will wear of sooner than later, but I’ll bask in the glow as long as I can.) I love the HOLY CRAP! effect you get when you first show people the one side…

and then you say SURPRISE! and turn it around.

So, yeah. What I got there is really a glorified swatch that is kind of like a really oversized potholder but in reality is too big and unwieldy to be a proper potholder. It still hangs in the kitchen, on the potholder hook, cause I’m that proud.

Knit with Rico Creative Cotton (1 ball yellow, the other four colors left over from washcloths) on 3.5mm.  It’s a colored version of a washcloth design, cut by 10 stitches because in my head, 20+17 is apparently 47, not 37. It turned out to be a blessing that I cast on too few stitches, because the yarn was just barely enough. As in, there was barely enough yellow left to weave the end in after crocheting around the edge. The next DK project I’ve planned: Winchester Potholders. Oh yeah.

Speaking of Rico Creative Cotton, I finished my kitchen towel the day after my birthday, and it’s okay. We mostly use it for drying off hands and pans, cause it kinda lints. Which is weird, for cotton. But it does, and because it’s bright red, the lint looks really unappealing on white plates and glassware. Good thing that’s not an issue for the two washcloths I churned out, one red Knit Apple Cloth for the kitchen and one blue Stargate Earth for Saskia. Man, those two aren’t even on Rav yet.

On a less successful note, I cast on for the Swallowtail Stole a couple of days ago, and… holy crap, it’s kicking my ass. A puny little 6-stitch repeat is kicking my ass so hard I can feel it in my throat. Meaning: I still haven’t gotten beyond the set-up row. In fact, I haven’t gotten beyond half of the set-up row. Granted, it’s like 350 sts or something, but man. Six-stitch repeat. Of a pattern I’ve knit two shawls in. And I keep tinking back and fixing things and realizing forty stitches later that I shouldn’t have fixed that. It’s terrible. I don’t know what it is, either. I know it’ll get better once I’m past the set-up round, cause then I can read the pattern in the knitting, but shit, I am so close to giving up on this. Or I was, until my stubbornness kicked in and I realized I refuse to be beaten by, you know. A six-stitch repeat.

Which is just plain pathetic.

Speaking of plain, I’m thinking about ripping back the Ghostproof sweater to the salt line, add a couple rows of plain brown, and then… possibly just go on with the ribbing, and just do salt lines around the arms. Maybe the neck. Maybe just duplicate stitch fornicating moose on one shoulder. I thought the salt line placement wouldn’t bother me, cause, you know, it’s so damn smart and I was so damn proud, but honestly, I don’t think I could’ve found a less flattering place for it. So yeah, there’s that. And it was such a perfect fit, too.

***

Now, one of the reasons I haven’t been knitting a whole lot is that I’ve been baking and cooking like crazy. It’s kind of ridiculous, really, the amount of flour and butter we go through here. Especially flour. Which is in everything, from homemade pasta to brownies. And baking is just so satisfying, especially when you’re like me and getting your ass kicked by a six-stitch repeat and *trails off, grumbling*

So, here my go-to baked goodies:

Biscuits. Good, old-fashioned biscuits. Or the ones with parmesan and thyme. I loved them when I was in the US, and when I wanted to do biscuits and gravy here in Germany, I dug up this recipe site, and let me tell you: you won’t need any gravy with this amount of delicious.

Focaccia. Italian flatbread with herbs and garlic. It takes its time, being a yeast dough and everything, but pounding the dough is just about the most satisfying thing ever, plus your hands are butter-soft and smell like herbs and olive oil afterward. Alternatively, leave out the herbs & garlic and replace with ‘a goodly amount’ of sugar and cinnamon, and make 12 delicious cinnamon balls with it.

Caramel Apple Sticky Buns. Speaking of cinnamon. Oh, my.

Quintuple Chocolate Brownies. I know I’ve linked the recipe before, but man, these would probably be on my short list for a last meal. Along with the Sticky Buns and a steak with green beans.

Running circles in my head

I slept five hours tonight due to bad planning, and on top of that I slept badly. Now that I’m back from my grandma’s, I wanted to catch up on sleep, but of course my brain is too wired from the caffeine intake needed to not crash the car, so, yeah. My thoughts have been skipping from dogs to cars to forests to gossip to knitting to interior design to dogs, and back to knitting, and I just had a really good idea.

Saskia and I are going to see Max Raabe again this summer, and I need a new shawl. I’d say I could totally wear the green monster if it wasn’t so freakishly big, but truth is, I’d want to knit a new one either way. Cause I still have 200g of yellow laceweight merino, and what else am I gonna do with it?

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been researching shawl patterns, and I just don’t know what I want. I like wide borders, and I really like Estonian lace patterns, and there’s just so many patterns on Ravelry, but somehow I can’t find the perfect one.

The only one that comes to mind, that has a wide, entertaining border combined with a relatively simple center motif, is the Swallowtail Shawl. It’s not a secret that’s my favoritest shawl pattern ever, I’ve made two of them in different weights, it’s lovely, it’s entertaining, it’s just amazing, and more than 6000 other people seem to think so, too.

But I’ve made two of those, and the problem is also that with laceweight, you need more center repeats to make it a decent size, and that kind of negates the wide border aspect, ratio-wise. And truth to be told, I didn’t really want a triangular shawl for the occasion, anyway.

So I’m thinking… a Swallowtail Stole. A rectangular version of the Swallowtail Shawl. Cast on the center repeat provisionally across 30 cm or so (ish, I’d have to measure the border width of the laceweight version to make sure I don’t end up with another stole of impractically monstrous dimensions) plus two or three garter stitches on each side, knit that for a bit (like, 150 or 180 cm), then pick up stitches all around and go for the border. The border corner of the triangular shawl is a 90° angle so I wouldn’t have to worry about that, it’d be all charted out already in the original pattern. The edging would be knit in the round, so the plain rows (well, and the ones featuring the p5togs for the nupps) would be knit instead of purl, which would make the whole show go much faster. Apart from the fact that I’d have a ridiculous amount of stitches, but, oh well.

Alternatively I could do the thing with the center provisional grafted-together cast-on they have in Modern Lace Knitting (like so), which would save me the pain of having to pick up a gazillion stitches AND there would be no purling involved whatsoever. Plus I think it would be the more elegant solution, but I’ll have to see how stretchy that center-cast-on-thing is. I could mirror the lily-of-the-valley in the middle of the sides, so they would point to the corners as in the shawl.

It would be amazing. Largely because it would pretty much be all border.

Or I could do something completely different and do a half a Daffodil, which would go nicely with the color of the yarn, and I could name the project ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’.

I still have a little time to think. Maybe inspiration will strike while I’m winding the mile or so of yarn. But if I may say so, that right there was pretty inspired.

Let’s dance to Joy Division

One last little blog post before what are by default going to be ten comparatively analogous days – I’m not taking Grahahm, but I will pop online occasionally from one of the boys’ laptops.

I AM EXTREMELY EXCITED, though honestly, right now, I’m kind of too tired to jump around and be manic about it. As complained about on Twitter, the wonders of three and a half hours of sleep. Maybe four, tops. I’ll probably sleep some more on the way to Düsseldorf, or on the plane, but I have a feeling I’ll be too full of manic travelling energy and too excited and I’m gonna drop like a stone around 6 or 7 pm. I can already see it happening! Crossing my fingers and hoping for the best is probably my best shot.

The Rose Line Mittens, as I’ve decided to call them, are finished. Did most of the second one Saturday night, right up to the red line, only to realize in the morning that the thumb hole was two rows or so too small. So I sighed, tore at my hair a bit and ripped back, but now it’s all done. Though the gauge is slightly off on the second one… must have knit tighter. Why does this always happen with me and gloves? At least it isn’t as painfully obvious as with the Endpaper Mitts though.

Why Rose Line? Well, I wanted to call them something London-y, but what I started with was some Doctor-Who-ish stuff, titles of soundtrack songs, since I listened to them a lot while knitting. But Gallifrey just didn’t seem right (though I would’ve loved that one), and by ‘Hanging on the Tablaphone’, a song I can’t stand but is awesome in the actual episode, I came to line, something line, the zero meridian’s in London, ROSE LINE! Rose! Line! I figured it was only appropriate, with the thin red line around it, not meridian-ally, but hey, you can’t have everything. So, Rose Line Mitts it is. I don’t have any new photos, but I assure you, the second one looks much like the first one, except I reversed the colors.

(Subtle way to reuse photographs, isn’t it!)

So. I did pack fingerless mitts, but they’re the thin cotton pair, and probably quite useless, or at least less useless than these merino babies here. I also have my teal hat and Baktus in my carry-on, and the DW scarf, the Atlantic Cowl and the Swallowtail in my luggage. And the Tempest cardigan, for which I’m hopefully buying buttons. Finally. That’s I think all of the knitwear I’m bringing along – well, that, and ten pairs of handknit socks XD Okay.

I’ve packed and repacked – I’m gonna weigh my luggage again after I’m done showering, and hoping I’m back to under or around 13kg (which would leave me 2kg worth of stuff I could buy). There’s two books plus paper journal plus the TARDIS sock plus stuff for a camera case (incidentally enough, the same yarn I used for the Rose mitts. Creative, ain’t I just being!) plus my ipod in my carry-on. One might think I was terribly afraid of getting cold or bored. I hope that’s all I need.

Oh god, I’m a little afraid I won’t be able to stand the guys after these ten days, and I’m a bit afraid the hotel is totally crappy, and I’m a bit afraid London’s gone to the dogs and it’s at all as awesome as I remember it, and I’m afraid I’ve forgotten something or that I’ll lose my backpack or my jacket… but I’m mostly excited. I’m all fluttery.

Hell yes, I’m going to LONDON!!!!