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!

The Library Digitisation Unit of the University of Southampton has a Knitting Reference Library with Victorian knitting manuals and other old and really interesting knitting reference books and instructionals.

They also have, under the section slightly misleadingly titled "Knitting Patterns", a lot of title pages of 1950-ish and onward printed knitting patterns, all of them for men's upper body garments. Unfortunately, it really is only the title pages, so there are no actual patterns to be gotten. However, it is wildly interesting to just take a look at all of the title page pictures with the garments modeled: Some of the sweaters and cardigans look really timeless, and you wouldn't be surprised at all to see them worn today, or a pattern for them sold, or a garment like that on a hanger in a clothes store.

Some others, though? To my modern eyes, they look really, really weird. Some of them remind me of Captain Kirk, some of them loudly scream "Nineteeneighties!!", and some of them made me think "That looks like a dressing gown or pyjama part, that was worn on the street? Wow!"

Mind you, though, when I browse through modern knitting pattern magazines, I sometimes also wonder who would actually wear this. Those things are looking weird in a different, more up-do-date way, though.

So - if you enjoy looking at slightly weird older knitted garments - have a rootle in the Knitting Reference Library's 164 "knitting patterns". You might be as delighted as I was.

I sometimes complain that my knitting projects all take ages and ages - though I know very well that this is not due to my knitting really slowly. My actual knitting speed is more of a medium speed, but I tend to not knit most of the time. And if you let that half-finished pair of socks languish on the needles for half a year... well, then it will take more than half a year to make a pair of socks.

Anyway, current knitting is more or less progressing, for a change - though in the case of this sweater, the wool has already sat around for a long time, so maybe the languishing is all dealt with and I can finish this (astounding thought!) without too much downtime:


It's the Moyen Age sweater, and I really like the cable motif (though I have no clue why it has the name it has). It hits a nice balance for me between mind-numbingly plain stockinette (booooring!) and excitement and fingerwrestling with the cables (tight knitting has its downsides), so I'm happy to knit on it, and I'm already past the waist decreases and starting to increase again.

The other knitting-related thing is not progressed much - the first bobbin of grey Gotland yarn is finished, but the second still is in this sad state:


I haven't gotten around to sit and spin in the evenings these last days (or weeks? Time flies), but it's on my list, and some day, it will be full, and then it will be plied, and then there's a gauge swatch in the future, and figuring out how to combine that yarn with the half-Gotland-half-colourful yarn. And then, eventually, a garment.

Just in case the sweater is finished before the spinning is, though, there's something else hanging out here in the stash. I was accosted by this yarn a few days ago - it sat in the "really really has to go so is really really reduced"-bin in a yarn store I happened to pass. Well, what can I say - it's silk, it's blue, and it was cheap. And obviously, it's now mine.


Also... it should be sufficient for a small jacket. For summer chill. (Next summer, obviously!)

Textile craft stuff just is so versatile, and here's two examples of it. First of all, a really nice article about knitting spies and knitted secret messages - though I'm rather convinced it's not a dropped stitch that actually happened, but something like a yarnover.

Knitting codes is definitely fun - the most patient husband of them all knit yoga socks that morse code spell out "Yoga socks", and he had a lot of fun with that. I've yet to do something similarly geeky, but it is on my list. (Though not very far up the list, I'll admit.)

The second link is not knitting, but crocheting: the clinic in Hannover is giving hand-crafted cuddly snails to children getting cochlea implants (German site). These children are born deaf, and they are getting the implant operation at a very young age - usually still a little less than a year old - which is of course quite exciting and frightening for them and their parents. So the staff of the clinic in Hannover has started a project back in 2015 where each of the about 100 children getting the implant each year gets a hand-crocheted snail to cuddle. It's intended not only as an emotional uplifter for the children, but also as a token of appreciation for this very big step in their lives.

In case you have itchy fingers now, the (German) pdf instructions on how to crochet the snails are linked from their site. And if you love the idea of the snails getting handed to children - all snails are crocheted by volunteers, and the clinic is always looking for snail donations, which are much appreciated.

I've told you about my spinning project, and my glorious decision to ply the yarn spun from the dyed top with nice, grey Gotland yarn, to get more length. Well, it is finished now, and it looks really nice. It also knits nicely, and results in a pleasing fabric. Only problem?

It's not much. I have 278 g of yarn, but this weight only runs to a scant 458 m according to my length-measuring thingie. (Damn you, high twist resulting in high-density yarn!) Which is definitely not enough for something sweater-like... so now I have the usual not-enough-yarn problem again.

Sigh.

Maybe if I spin up some more plain Gotland, ply that, and use the two threads alternatingly?