Over the last weeks, I'v finally gotten around to get some more knitting done, too, taking the needles into hand in the evenings. So after working on it on what feels like ages, my Moyen Age sweater is finally nearing completion - yay!



With the shorter sleeves that I opted for and the rather large neck opening (which is part of the pattern), it will be a summer sweater more than a winter thing. It is a pleasantly written pattern, and it was nice-ish to knit. Nice-ish only because I did discover that I don't care much for sweaters knit all in one piece; I find the huge chunk of stuff it becomes towards the end fairly cumbersome and annoying on the needles. So the next ones will definitely be knit in pieces again; I'll take the bit of seaming them up over handling a gazillion tons of wool on each round any day.

 

... in Baton Rouge, heading for the trains...

It's finished, finally - I dealt with all the ends on Friday evening and got to wear it for the first time on Saturday. It's lovely, it's silky, and it is surprisingly warm yet light and not sweat-inducing... and it still gives me that earworm.

I'm talking, of course, about the silk Baton Rouge, and here it is:


I'm very, very happy with how it turned out. I'm also freshly in love with silk as a material, and there are wild plans for future knits quietly coming into existence in my head.


I made a few modifications (of course!) to the pattern - it's a bit longer overall than the original pattern calls for. The gauge is different too, so I basically knit size S, the smallest size given in the pattern, to end up with XS (about once the difference between S and M smaller than S). There's no shoulder shaping in the original, so I added the one from Vignette, and I knit a bit more straight up in the bottom front than the original demands, starting the V a bit later so it could actually close more in front.


I might add invisible press buttons to the front edge later on, but for now I'm happy with just the brooch to close it. Which was a wedding gift, and now it finally has a really appropriate place to sit and keep things together!

And here you go again, with an assortment of links in various flavours!

Maybe you have seen the claims that the Voynich manuscript has been deciphered - this has been debunked right away. Bonus article about how it's not been solved.

BBC Travel has a post about the last woman who works with byssus (the silk-like fibre harvested from the mollusc pinna nobilis).

In case you ever wondered where you'd end up if you could tunnel straight through the planet (who hasn't?), here is Antipodes Man and his map to finally solve this for you. (Spoiler alert: Chances are high you'd be swimming. Better pack those swimming clothes, and probably even better: a boat.)

If you're in the UK, UK Handknitting has a workshop list for all kinds of courses and workshops around knitting and crocheting... just in case you are looking for one (or maybe want to offer one).

And that's it for today. I hope you found something of interest!

The current knitting project, Baton Rouge, is coming near its end - the lace border around the front is almost done, and what remains now is to sew the (already blocked) sleeves together and sew them in - and then I'll have a nice new silk jacket.

There were a few tangles at the end (metaphorical ones) - I picked up more stitches than the pattern called for to have sensible spacing between the stitches in the first knit row, then worked k3tog instead of k2tog in the first lace row, after trying with the original setup for a bit and quickly finding that it made the lace too squished together.

The second, bigger, tangle happened about where the picture was taken - there's supposed to be four rows with yarnover holes as per the picture in the pattern. Which will happen if you make row 11 a p2tog, yo row and not, as the pattern also tells you, a p row (there are two listings for r. 11, and guess which one is first in sequence? Right. The purl one, which is the wrong one). So I purled a bit, then found the mistake, tinkered back and did the correct r 11.

Soon now. Sooooon. And once this is finished, I'll get back to the sleeves on Moyen Age!

Talk Like A Pirate Day is drawing nearer again (September 19!), and that is a good reason to pull out the Pirate Robert hats again and take some more photos - especially since the hat pattern is going to be featured in an article soon (and I'm utterly excited about that!).

Some things, though, are notoriously hard to take good photos of. Gold embroidery, or gold brocading, for instance - the glittering gold has a tendency to mess with the exposure time calibration of cameras, and this tends to result in really bad pictures.

While knitted hats are usually not suffering from exposure time problems due to gold thread, small cables also have a tendency to look really obvious in real life, just to suddenly and quietly disappear into invisibility on a photograph. Human eyes and human brains are just really, really good at seeing 3D and making the most even of small differences of light and shade.

So I was very happy about having two nice little photo lights, and a good tripod, and some time for fiddling. And some more time for fiddling. Then some more. There were also some, um, alternative supports for the two photo lights so that I could adjust them juuust so - a few millimetres, or a few degrees of the head angle, already made a huge difference in the outcome.

[caption id="attachment_3367" align="alignnone" width="816"] Lamps, a styrofoam head with the hat, a camera on a tripod. And some motivational coffee (not shown).


In the end, though, I did get a few decent pictures - so I'd say the fiddling was well worth it!

Some more stuff, while I am prepping for Bielefeld in the background and still trying to get on top of the heap...

Here's a free Dragon Lace pattern - for you knitters among us. The really fun thing about it is that its creator, Naomi Parkhurst, uses a special method to encode a word into a knitting pattern - and in this case, it really looks like dragon heads...

If you prefer to be creative in a totally different way, there's a competition thingie run by the EU parliament. Your goal is to de-bunk one of the EU Myths (such as "cucumbers have to have a certain shape to be able to sell them") in a comic or caricature. The page I found is German only, and it seems it originates from Austria - but if you read German enough to understand what you can do, you should be able to join in, I think. It's the EU, after all.

If you are using Twitter and have received the note about a change in the TOS, and are now wondering about said changes - a kind soul has made a difference check that you can see here.

EscapePod, my favourite science fiction story podcast of all time, has put up a list with a few suggestions for new listeners... so in case you need a story or two, that might be a place to start.

All the sitting and standing in line at WorldCon, by the way, meant prime knitting time for me - and I think I haven't ever had two weeks of holidays in which I have knitted so much.

I left the mostly-finished Moyen Age sweater at home, because a knit-in-one-piece-seamlessly thing, even in a small size, is not a good thing for travel knitting. Instead, I packed up the blue silk yarn I bought back in July, together with a print-out of a simple pattern for a jacket with a bit of a very basic lace pattern, and that was my holiday knitting.

The knitting necessities for that (and just that) - the pattern, a crochet hook in case of Bad Things Happening, a darning needle, a measuring tape, stitch markers, a key to tighten the screw-on tips (because if you don't bring one, they will loosen up), my row counter ring, and of course needles and one ball of yarn went into my little Exploding Tardis knitting bag. (Usually there's also a piece of emergency chocolate in there, but I ate it before the journey. It had gotten rather old, and needed to go.)


So there was knitting - on the way to the airport, in our apartment in Helsinki, in cafés, and in the lines at the WorldCon as well as at the Stitch'n'Bitch they had there. And in most of the panels I went to, as they were talking people only, and if you're not tall and seated quite far in the back, you can't see the speakers anyway.

The choice of pattern proved to be a good one for knitting like that, as it is really quite simple - no waist shaping, very little armhole shaping, and the lace pattern is basic and easily remembered, not needing much attention at all. I did change the shoulder and neckline shaping a little, based on the Vignette cardi, as the original pattern just binds off straight, and that seemed a little bit too boxy to me - but these things were rather quickly done, and did not need too much attention either, or were knit when I was able to concentrate.

Which means that I left home with the pattern and six balls of yarn, and came back with the body of the jacket all knit, and parts of the first sleeve, too.


It got a bit of blocking for the body parts, and here they are, partly sewn up already - waiting for the sleeves to go in and the neckband to be knitted on. And in case you were ever wondering whether blocking is a good idea, or really changes things? Here's a picture of the unblocked sleeve beside the blocked parts (folded up):


Even though it doesn't change the measurements of the finished piece, it does make a world of a difference appearance-wise. About one hundred more rows to go on the second sleeve, and then... more sewing together, and knitting the neckband. Yay!

The pattern, by the way, is called Baton Rouge. Which meant I had an earworm many, many times!