My eternal ink is finished, finally! I blame a number of things for it taking so long - among them, yes, the pandemic, as that seriously cut down on our opportunities to sit in a café and knit while enjoying some coffee. Travel times also were reduced greatly, though that was not as much of an influence, since the cardi is knit in one piece, and I have this rule about not taking along any projects that will not fit into my project bag. Which is rather small, because, you know, travel.

(I tend to lug along a plethora of things anyways, and usually way more than I will use or need, so it does make a lot of sense for me to limit myself.)

So here is some picture proof of the finished thing:



I'm very happy with it - the only thing left to do now is to sew in the zip so I can close it. The original pattern intends for it to stay open, and I've worn it a few times already now without a closure... but I like to have the option of wearing it closed, too. In case I end up not liking it with the zip, well, I can always take it out again.

The wool is very, very soft and nice to wear, and I also really like the colours. The stripes are not too blatant, but I think they add some interest, and the cables are also rather subtle but nice.



Also - I managed to tweak the pattern a bit while I was knitting so it fits me really, really well. Which is also a nice thing!

If you're interested in historic knitting (which has its start in the Middle Ages, but its heyday in the Early Modern times), I hope you've already heard of the KEME database.

If not, let me fix this for you. The KEME database is a collection of knitted items, and the acronym stands for "Knitting in Early Modern Europe". Using the database is free, but you need to register for a login with password due to copyright restrictions. The database started with caps, which were one of the main pieces produced in Early Modern knitting, and there is a lot of them to find in there. It has recently been extended and now includes nearly 100 examples of knitted liturgical gloves - plus there are plans to add stockings in the future as well.

You can also subscribe to the KEME newsletter on that page. For the caps, there already have been Citizen Science projects as well, including a still-running one for the search of wool which will result in a cap texture and surface like that of the originals. Other projects might come up for stockings and gloves. Just in case you are a knitter with a love for history, and are looking for things to knit...

Naomi Parkhurst is making knitting stitch patterns (which sometimes include mosaic patterns) out of words, using a special encoding technique. Fittingly for this time of year, she's encoded the word "bake", and I think it looks really pretty. You can take a look at it here.

Speaking of baking - we're done with all the "necessary" seasonal baking. Though there's some egg white left that needs to be taken care of, and I'm intrigued by a Finnish seasonal thing called Joulutorttu. So there might be something in the near future still!

There's been surprisingly little knitting time happening here - too many other things have been done instead, predominantly gardening stuff. There's also been some mask sewing this week, as it will be compulsory to cover mouth and nose in shops and public transport from Monday on. I can report a bit of progress, though: The sleeves on my Ink cardi are finally finished, and I'm back to working on the body.



The yarn is very soft and very nice, and I also like the cable pattern, which is surprisingly hard to photograph. I still have a good long way to knit, though, before it will be finished...

Speaking of knitting, if you are looking for some inspiration, there's a nice and varied bundle of knitting patterns, called Spring Knits, available for 9.95 USD upwards from PatternChest. That's a new website, a spinoff from the Bundle of Holding, which sells bundles of roleplaying games.

You can pay the base price and get the basic bundle, or pay more than the threshold price (which gets adjusted on the basis of what people pay on average), and receive the basic bundle plus the bonus pack. Five percent of the price paid will get donated to a charity supporting healthcare workers, the rest of the payment is split up between the organisers and the designers.

There hasn't been that much knitting in the past days and weeks as I'd have liked, but somehow other things happened or were done or taken care of. (Including some mending of socks and t-shirts...)

There is, however, some progress now. I'm getting closer and closer to the point where the sleeves will be finished, and I'm very much looking forward to that - and the fact that I will then be able to continue with the body of the cardigan. Hooray!



(Yes, that is Madam the Cat's tail in the picture.)

Working both sleeves at the same time using magic loop does work nicely in reducing my personal "Aaargh!" factor. It's a little awkward at times, as the two strands of yarn tend to do things they should not be able to do (as in they wrap around one of the sleeves, or suddenly are not both on the same side of the cardi anymore), but that is a relatively minor nuisance.

And soon, it will be over, and I'll go back to nice and brainless back-and-forth for a little bit, until the increases and the pattern shifts start. Already looking forward to that!

There's a stack of things happening here, though almost all of them are boring-type background things. There are some minor issues with the website, including some updates and some other small nuisances that I'd like to fix, but still haven't. In some cases, I'm not good enough at programming or understanding how the website innards work, and I just can't find where to tweak stuff so it works as intended. Most of these things are also not crucial, so I tend to have a go at them when they catch my eye, which they do once in a while, and after an hour or two of fuddling around, I put them to rest again. Sometimes I change a small thing only to find out (days or weeks later, if things go badly) that my things-look-better-now tweak actually was a things-look-better-here-now-but-shittier-everywhere-else thing. Sigh.

The most current problem was a deluge of spam coming via my contact form. It seems to have been solved now, at least mostly - I'll see if what I did was enough in the next few days. There's a plugin installed now that should keep bots from posting while doing nothing (and adding no extra steps) for regular, living and breathing human beings. If that will not stop the spamming, I'll have to add one of those wonderful "please answer this simple maths question" thingies - something I did want very much to avoid. But if the alternative is to get about 200 spam emails each day, plus the same amount in "Undelivered Mail Returned To  Sender" messages, that decision does get a lot easier.

There's also some more maintenance and ordering of things going on with the computer. Most of the transferred programmes seem to work fine on the newly setup machine, but there's a new backup procedure to be implemented, and it's a good opportunity to do some additional housekeeping, so that's also going on, and - as usual - it takes a long time and is a little annoying.

In other, more happy news: There's been some progress on the Ink cardigan, as can be proved by this very bad, very blurry photo:



I've progressed past the raglan increases and into the main body. Next step will be knitting the sleeves. I've found out with my first knit-it-all-in-one-piece piece that I absolutely hate knitting the sleeves as the last bit. There's just too much finished object to turn around with each round of the sleeve to make it comfortable... which means I'll do the sleeve-knitting right now, at the earliest possible part. That way I can also see if things fit, or if I have to go back a bit and adjust stuff.

 

You have probably guessed correctly that I have, of course, started a new knitting project since finishing the Cat Hat - it's "Ink", by Hanna Maciejewska. I have a beautiful, soft, dark-blue-to-purple wool for this, in sock wool thickness, and it does knit up nicely.



I'm not very far along yet - the pattern starts in the middle of the neck with the collar, then progresses on to increases for the raglan-style sleeves, and that is where I am now. There is not so much knitting going on at the moment, too, as it's the time of year for the baking spree...