When in doubt, read the instructions

Winter is my favourite season by far. The more clothes I'm wearing, the happier I am. Boots, socks, coats, gloves, scarves – especially scarves. I like my clothes to fly well under the radar; I'm not confident with colour or the way I look, so I wear mostly black, but in winter I like to spice it up with a burst of colour in the form of a scarf.

With the weather cooling down here now, I want more scarves, so I've dropped the unfinished projects and the things I've been making for for other people. Right now it's me, me, me, sweetie.

The latest project is a lace scarf in lovely Malabrigo yarn that I bought last winter, in the appropriately named shade of Hollyhock.

It's a thickish (maybe 10-ply/Aran or so) single-ply wool yarn with
a lovely felt-like feel to it. I'm knitting it on 6mm needles.

 I started it on Easter Thursday in preparation for a weekend away. Being impatient, I didn't test out the pattern first, even though it was a new one, and much more complicated than any I'd tried before.

This, predictably, backfired on me. After two days of pretty solid knitting I had about 30 centimetres done. It wasn't right, though. The repeats kept going wonky and I couldn't work out why – until I realised I'd simply skipped part of the pattern. As my father used to say: 'When in doubt, read the instructions'.

'Do you think it's worth it?' my mother said, as she watched me rip back all but the first six rows and start again. And later: 'I think I'd give up if I were you.'

I didn't, though. I finished one end and am now doing the other separately, so they'll be symmetrical. I'll do stocking stitch or rib for the central section – I need to have a play and see what looks best – then graft them together. I don't think I'll block the whole thing as I really like the honeycomb effect, but I will block the very ends just so they don't curl up.

The pattern is a 16-row repeat called Leaf Lace and the idea for the scarf came from one
that took my eye on the highly distracting Purlbee site, which is full of lovely projects.

'How many scarves do you need?' a friend once asked me. I think her reasoning was that you've only got one neck, so you only need one scarf – but if I followed that kind of logic I'd only have one pair of undies. I think that with scarves, as with undies, more is more. Every couple of years I have a cull, and give to charity the scarves that have gone out of favour. I like knitting scarves as they are an achievable project for the easily bored and distracted (like me), you can generally do them in front of the telly or on the bus, and they give you a chance to try new patterns and new yarns without having to shell out masses of money.

And they make great presents, when I can stop thinking about myself.

Perfectionism vs pragmatism

Another project I've just resurrected is a scarf I made last winter. Although it was nominally completed, I've never worn it because I couldn't quite get the finishing touches right. I thought I'd finished it once, then I tried to block it. Blocking, for non-knitters, is a technique often used for lace knitting. Unblocked lace can tend to look like an old dishrag, and blocking makes the lace pattern open up nicely so that it's more distinctive. To do it, you wet the finished knitting, stretch the bejesus out of it, pin it out on the floor while it's damp and then let it dry.  

What it will look  like if I ever get around to blocking it.
I did this by sticky taping the scarf to the table.
If only real blocking were that easy.

What blocking also does, sometimes, is make the thing about twice as long as you thought it would be. So it was with this scarf. Once I'd laboriously blocked it, it ended up more than three metres long. I unpinned it and ripped it back to a less stupid length, but I still didn't know what to do with the ends. Fringing, a different lace pattern? I tried two different types of fringing but the ends kept curling up and looking stupid, and I couldn't think of how to prevent this other than by adding beads to the fringe, which I knew would just clack about frantically every time I moved and irritate the hell out of me, so I chucked it in the knitting basket and ignored it for a year. 

Last night it got to me, so I just decided to fix it as best I could. With one eye on Paper Giants on the telly* and another on the scarf, I undid the fringing, ripped back the curling ends and cast them off again. Then I replaced the fringing. 

Fringed but as yet unblocked.

Neat edges! Ever since I learnt that you can neaten your edges
by slipping the first stitch of every row, that's what I've done.
It doesn't matter on edges that you won't see, such as in the seams of a garment,
but it's nice for edges that are on show. 

 

The scarf still not the way I wanted it to be, but I just can't get it to match the idealised but vague mental picture I've got of it. However, a scarf around the neck is worth several in the knitting basket, and I really like the the stitch pattern and the yarn (Filatura di Crosa Multicolour, a mohair with subtly morphing colours). 

 I might or might not get around to blocking it again, but in the meantime, I'm going to wear it just so I can tick another project off the list. Roll on, winter!



* I enjoyed Paper Giants, but were the 1970s really that groovy and daggily glamorous? Maybe they were if you worked at Cleo and got to photograph nude actors and write articles that would make religious conservatives rant themselves into non-existence. But if you were a brainy, bookish teenage girl growing up amid the beach culture of the Central Coast … not so much.

The rewards of tidiness

I’m neither tidy nor untidy. I seem to be a 50–50 hybrid of my very untidy father and my exactly-the-opposite mother. I often let things pile up a bit, but never to the extent that I can't invite friends in unexpectedly because the place looks as though junkies have ransacked it or a rubbish truck has overturned in the kitchen. I don’t like tidying up, but I hate clutter and disorder too — or at least the visible sort. What goes on in cupboards and drawers, out of my sight, rarely bothers me.

About three years ago I knitted myself a lace scarf in a fine variegated yarn, in sombre tones of black, dark red, charcoal and purple. I absolutely loved it and used to wear it all the time in winter. Then, a year or two ago, I lost it. One day it was there, around my neck; the next it wasn't. I looked everywhere, but couldn't find it. I figured it had slipped off or been left behind somewhere; so, as it was obviously gone, I decided to just hope that someone else had found it and was enjoying it. 

Yesterday, I took it into my head to sort out the Chest of Shame — the big wooden box into which craft around here goes to die, or at least to be ignored for a decade or so. I'd pulled a heap of stuff out of it a couple of weeks ago, to show a suitably incredulous friend the extent to which the unfinished projects have got out of hand, and yesterday the mess got to me. In the process of tidying up I scrabbled about behind the chest, and found a few useful odds and ends — plus the lost scarf. I'd looked in every logical place in the house and a few illogical ones too — but it had never occurred to me to look behind the chest. Finding that scarf totally made my day. Even the discovery that bits of it had been fairly enthusiastically chewed by marauding micro-vermin couldn't dampen my joy. I don't think I've got any of the same yarn left over to repair it with, so I'll darn it with something else and not let the repairs worry me. I'm just really glad to have it back.

Something else I found was a linen skirt, in a deep burgundy shade which is the nearest I get to flamboyant. I think I started it last summer, and I'd completely forgotten about it. It was finished except for the waistband. It fits okay, it looks okay; I've no idea why I abandoned it. I found the leftover fabric, too, so immediately made it a waistband. Then I decided to experiment. One of the disadvantages of linen, if you care to look at it that way, is that it creases extravagantly. I love wearing it so much — it's so cool and swishy and perfect for Sydney's hot, humid summers — that I don't care. I figure all those creases are a sign of quality, and should be worn insouciantly. 

I like deliberately creased fabrics, too, and decided to have a go at really hammering some creases into this linen skirt, just to see what would happen. I saturated it with hot water, squeezed most of it out, pleated it roughly by hand, twisted it into a pretzel shape, trussed it up in a lingerie bag then chucked it into the tumble-dryer and left it thumping around in there for an ecologically unjustifiable length of time.

I wore it last night and by the end of the night the creases had pretty much dropped out. Turns out that linen is easy to crease unintentionally and hard to crease deliberately. Go figure. Still, I've decided I might give up ironing linen skirts and crease them intentionally all the time. Less housework can only be a good thing. Except I might tidy up more often. You never know what you'll find.

Morris Mania

I've been pretty obsessed with quilting over the last couple of weeks, and have just finished a quilt for my friend Diana. It was meant to be her birthday present last year, but I didn't get it done in time. I didn't get it done in time for her graduation in December either, but it's finished now. Her birthday is not until May but, never having been able to delay gratification even slightly, I've given it to her early (or late, depending on how you look at it).

The fabrics are William Morris reproductions that I bought at least twelve years ago. I've always loved Morris designs and I had more than forty different prints in mostly autumn tones that I was saving for a special quilt. I'd toyed with ideas for various quilt patterns over the years, but none seemed quite right. About three years ago I cut up some of the fabric to make a simple quilt of large squares, laid them out on the floor to see the result – and hated it. Plan B was to recycle some of them, broken up by plain fabric, into a quilt for my friend Angela. She and I both liked the result – plain but effective.

That still left me with a whole lot of both cut and uncut fabrics. Then Kathy Doughty of Material Obsession kindly gave me a pattern that I knew instantly would be perfect. It's just a random arrangement of squares in three different sizes. It works well with the Morris fabrics, despite their busyness.

My favourite of all the fabrics is the one with the flame-coloured
sinuous pattern in the centre.

I originally wanted to hand quilt it with a rambling, Morris-esque floral pattern, but for once I realised my own limitations and decided that was just never going to happen. Instead I got it professionally machine quilted by Belinda Betts, who did a lovely job for a very reasonable fee. It now sits on the arm of my sofa all year round and I totally love myself sick every time I look at it. It's the only quilt I've made so far that I'm completely happy with.

The border of the backing, which is the only fabric
quiet enough to show up the nice quilting.

 

Even after that I still had yet more Morris fabric, so I cut out quarter-circles for Diana's quilt. The original layout was a lot busier than the one below and the fabrics ended up fighting each other. I pared it back to this variation on the Drunkard's Path pattern (the choice of which is not meant as any reflection on Diana's habits!).

The binding

Two of my favourite patches of red

 

The backing fabrics. The khaki one is the only fabric in the quilt that isn't Morris.

Working out the pattern for the border involved a lot of mathematical cogitation and puzzled prodding of the calculator, and even more trial and error in pencilling on, then rubbing off, various lines until I got them right (more by accident than design; it felt a bit like the quilting equivalent of infinite numbers of typing monkeys eventually bringing forth Shakespeare.) My stitches got a bit smaller in the border, but that's okay. Quilting the border only took a couple of evenings, and was quite enjoyable.

I'm still left with the remaining quarter circles, which I intend to make into a quilt  resembling one on Elinor's bed in the Emma Thompson film of Sense and Sensibility. (Are there any totally tragic and/or sharp-eyed Jane Austen/quilting fans out there who know the one I mean?)

Not even that project will exhaust my supply of Morris fabrics, though. But I reckon I might have done enough Morris-themed quilts for now.