In the Making...

For my wedding all the table centre pieces were little hurricane lamp style vases filled with roses. I gave most of them away after the wedding to the guests but I kept two for myself. They'd been kicking around and not getting used. So I decided to decorate them with glass paints so they could be used for either vases or decorative candle holders. I made these awhile ago and didn't share them. The glass paint was a little tricky to master. It worked better with smaller areas to paint, as the brush strokes were very obvious. Plus, I didn't have a simple way to draw directly onto the glass. You can draw on paper and put this inside the glass but this didn't appeal. So I did some freehand painting, which was very interesting and quite cathartic. The first is a meandering vine with little flowers. The second is meant to be meadow flowers. The blue flowers are my version of little cornflowers and the pink ones are a (very) artistic impression of a da...

I'm doing Sockdown again, this month. You'd have thought I'd been all socked out by now. I'm doing a pattern from the "Underappreciated" category - so any sock pattern that has less than 15 projects on Ravelry. I'm doing Phaeodaria by Hunter Hammersen , which is absolutely gorgeous and have no idea why it hasn't got more projects - though it's a relatively recent release. Incidently, the pattern was in the Sock Report , which are all patterns using sock weight yarn and there are some really gorgeous patterns in it. I "accidently" (imagine I said this with lots of irony!) bought all the patterns. It's a twisted cable pattern and there are a couple of stitches that I'd not encountered before. Twisted decreases - described in the pattern by k2tog tbl and ssk tbl. I thought k2tog tbl was pretty self explanatory but was struggling to find a clear description of a ssk tbl. If you slip, slip and knit through the back loops, then i...

I finally got around to using my yarn that I picked up at the Big Coffee Morning yarn swap at A Good Yarn . Nicsknots  brought this gorgeous Easy Knits skein to swap and I was lucky enough for my ticket to be drawn first. The pattern is Rubbish Mojitos by Woolly Wormhead . I was very impressed with the pattern for the Mystery KAL this year and thought I'd try another. I didn't realise the crown had such beautiful swirls on it before I started. So that was a lovely surprise. The yarn ended up make spirals for the main body of the hat, which I thought was cool. Though being mainly purl stitch it hides it a bit. For some reason I decided that I was going to knit the hat inside out; so I was mainly using knit stitches instead of purling. Not that I have any particular objection to purling. I think it was more an exercise to see if I could work out how to reverse the knitting. I read the instructions from the end of the round and worked out what would be worked ...

I recently purchased some Knit Pro Karbonz DPNs. For a start off, they are a work of art. I think they look sleek and quite unusual. My usual DPNs are the Knit Pro Nova metal ones. I prefer the metal ones to wooden because the stitches move quicker, it speeds up my knitting and I enjoy the process more with metal needles. I've knitted a pair of socks in the Karbonz. The pros are that I can see is they are lightweight, flexible, warm to the touch (a benefit for those with arthritis or other issues with their hands) and the stitches are less likely to drop off the needles (they have a similar surface to wood, which is a bit more clingy than metal). In general, I prefer them to wooden needles. Though lightweight, they have a better balance to them than say the Symfonie wooden range. They have the benefits of wooden needles but with the extra pointyness of metal needles.  If you are a knitter that prefers wooden needles then it is seems to be a good middle groun...