I’ve been feeling out of sorts the past couple of days, nothing serious, just a case of the blahs. Of course, that means that there’s very little worth blogging.
What’s contributed to it? Lots of little things, some of it knitting related. Staying up ridiculously late on Thursday night to try to score some Wollmeise from The Loopy Ewe probably didn’t help! I loooove The Loopy Ewe. I spend far too much time checking out what’s new over there anyway, but I knew that Sheri was listing her latest Wollmeise order at some point this week, and it had been narrowed down to late Thursday night (really early Friday morning) local time, so I sat up, intent on getting my hands on some.
Unfortunately, I blinked at precisely the wrong moment and I missed it. Five minutes, people! The whole lot was gone in five minutes! I’d click on a colour I liked, and it was gone. Click on another colour, gone. Gone, gone, gone.
I’m consoling myself with the fact that the last thing I need is more sock yarn, and at least it wasn’t the Wollmeise Lace weight.
The Easter Show results haven’t gone up yet. I’ve stalked the website since Thursday (judging was Tuesday and Wednesday), but Sally found a message on the site tonight that the results won’t be posted until Wednesday. Fortunately, Ailsa and I are going to the Preview on Tuesday night, so I’ll find out a little earlier, but the anticipation may be the end of me.
And the ennui has extended to my knitting, I’m afraid. I finished a Monkey sock, but I can’t be bothered grafting the toe. (Hands up anyone who is actually surprised by that!).
So I sat down tonight to work on Hyrna Herborgar instead, and realised that I’d made a stuff up 4 rows back, and it took the best part of the night to rip back four rows of 300 stitches and re-knit them.
And that’s the sum total of anything even vaguely worth reporting, or not.
I think this means the next post should be bursting with lots of wonderful things!

First off, Congratulations to Cathy, KSee and blogless Rhiannon who won the various skeins of mis-dyed yarn!
I finally caved and bought a new camera on Monday, and it’s been so nice to take some nice clear pictures.
Pics of Twinkie of course.

And of Emily.

And of course, Hyrna Herborgar.

This section is much easier than the last. There’s a nice clear centre stitch, which helps, and it’s a very easy 4 row pattern repeat, so it’s flowing much better now.
I’ve had a few questions about this book, Three-Corned and Long Shawls by Sigridur HalldÛrsdÛttir. (ISBN 9979-70-032-7)
I got my copy from Schoolhouse Press, and it came with an English translation by Marilyn Keppel. It isn’t cheap, but there are patterns for 27 different Icelandic shawls and scarves inside, and they’re all lovely.
Here’s a better picture of the back cover, which shows all the shawls.

(click for big)
If you’d like an even better look at the pictures of the shawls, I’ve uploaded all 27 to Flickr here. When I was trying to decide whether to buy the book, I found it really hard to find pictures of all the shawls included, so I hope this helps some one else to decide.
Personally, I think it’s well worth the cost. The English translation is not extensive, but I don’t know if it’s the translation, or if the book itself didn’t have a lot of detail in the patterns. Between the translation and the charts though, it’s not too hard to follow.
There’s a nice variety of rectangles and triangles, and there are single coloured shawls as well as shawls with some different colours incorporated.
Most of the shawls in the book are knitted in Icelandic lace weight, but I think that as with most patterns, you could substitute another yarn at your discretion. Gauge isn’t essential in a shawl or scarf, so it’s entirely up to you. The yarn I’m using for Hyna Herborgar is a heavier lace weight, and so far it seems fine. On Ravelry it appears that Hyrna Herborgar has been worked in a variety of yarns, and they’re all lovely.
Do I recommend the book? Highly! Although I would recommend that you have some experience in lace and reading charts first.

I am so glad that so many of you like my dyeing mishaps! I’m leaving the hats open for a few more hours, and I’ll draw some winners tomorrow.
I wore my Buttercup out to lunch today, and I love it. I got a bunch of compliments on it, and it was just lovely to wear, it made me feel all summery and cute.
In other project updates, the Lacy Cable Sweater is moving along nicely, I finished the back yesterday.

It looks a little long and narrow, but I’m hoping it’s the ribbing effect doing that. I’m about to start the sleeves, so I can do both at once. And because they have a reasonable amount of ribbing, 5cm instead of 18cm!
And I gave in to the itchy fingers, and started Hyrna Herborgar in the Possum blend.

What a fun knit! The only problem I had was getting used to the fact that there is no clear centre stitch on some of the rows. But I’m at the end of the first section and about to start the second.
I apologise for the crappy pictures of late, but our camera started to die halfway through our trip, and it’s getting gradually worse. It’s getting really hard to get pictures that are nice and clear.
I delivered my shawls to the Easter Show yesterday, and my there is some stiff competition, particularly in the Shetland Shawl category. There was one particular shawl that was made of handspun in the finest yarn imaginable. I’m not getting my hopes about about that category!
Twinkie is getting the hang of this being picked up malarkey. She’s figured out that if she lets us pick her up, there’ll be a pellet or two when she’s put down again.

That doesn’t mean there’s any dignity involved though!

So I mentioned the other day when my new shawl book arrived that it had given me itchy fingers. I resisted for a few days, then I could resist no more.
I went stash diving to see what I could find to knit Hyrna Herborgar. It calls for Icelandic laceweight, which I don’t have. I did however, find this anonymous cream single that I got from eBay years ago. No idea what it was, it was just advertised as laceweight wool, but I figured it was close enough to Icelandic Laceweight. I had just over 100g, and that was around 800 metres according to my calculations.

But I didn’t want to knit in cream again, so I decided to dye it. Here’s where all the dramas started. I decided I’d like to knit in blue for a change, so I pulled out my dyes and decided on Gaywool acid dye in Iceberg. The colour on the label was a nice light blue.
What came out was much closer to grey than I wanted.

So I redyed it with just a tiny bit of Landscapes Opal. This time it was a much prettier blue, but not exactly light blue.

But that’s okay, I liked it. So I cast on, and got going.

Problem. I’m not happy with this project in this yarn. Back to the old drawing board.
I thought about it overnight, and decided that I wanted my Hyrna to be red. The only red laceweight I have is earmarked for another project. But that’s okay, because I have some Gaywool “Garnet” dye in my dye stash, and garnets are red, aren’t they?
So I wound off around 500 metres of Zephyr in Ladyslipper (Pink) and dyed it with the Garnet dye. It turned a kind of rusty colour.
(I should point out right now that there are three colours that I’m really, really not fond of. Orange, Brown and Yellow. This will make sense in a bit)
I did not like the rusty colour, so I decided to throw some hot pink dye at it and see what would happen. What happened? Not much. So in my infinite wisdom, I threw some purple dye in the pot, hoping to brighten it up.
Hmmm. It didn’t exactly brighten it up.

It’s brown. I have Brown Zephyr. It’s a kind of purply brown, but it’s still brown. With hotspots of rusty orange and purple, where I had the skein tied too tightly.
Not happy. I figured that the mistake must have been either the silk content of the Zephyr, or maybe starting with pink yarn. So I dug out some KnitPicks bare in laceweight (880 yards), and dyed that with the Garnet dye.

This is not Garnet. Garnets are red! I bought Garnet dye, because I thought it would be RED! I cannot make my yarn red.
And I’m tired of trying, so I pulled something else out of the stash instead, and I’m going to use that for Hyrna, because I’m easily frustrated.

Fibreworks Possum/Merino Laceweight in Pink Correa. If I can’t have a red Hyrna, I’ll have a pink one.
If you’d like one of my misdyes, let me know, and it’s yours. Just tell me which one you’re interested in. I’ll leave it open until Sunday night. If more than one person is interested in one of the yarns, I’ll draw names from a hat.

Buttercup is done, and I love it!

I finished her in the middle of last week, but didn’t get around to photographing it until Sunday afternoon. It fits prefectly, and I’m over the moon with it.

I made a few changes to the pattern. On the front, I only did half as many picots as called for, as I just wasn’t happy with the way they looked. I omitted them entirely on the sleeves and the band, because no matter what I did, I just could not get them to look like they did on the pattern.
And I completely rewrote the sleeves, because that itty bitty sleeve was never going to fit around my arm.

Project Specs:
Buttercup by Kim Hargreaves. Only available as a kit, directly from the Kim Hargreaves site.
Yarn: Rowan 4ply Cotton in Bleached. The kit came with 6 balls, I only used 4.
Needles:2.5mm Knitpicks Options.
Time: I started this back in November, but it got put on hold while I was overseas, then again while I finished the Shetland Shawl. If I’d worked on it non stop, it would have been much, much quicker.
The pattern was pretty easy to follow, although the shaping got a bit hairy at times. The stitch counts change on each pattern row, so making sure you were decreasing correctly got a little confusing. Apart from that it was fine, but the band got really boring really quickly!
The yarn was good to work with, although I’m not a huge fan of cotton. This didn’t make my hands hurt as much as some cottons do, but even though it’s Rowan, I didn’t find it any different to other cottons I’ve used. I’m idly thinking of knitting this again for Emily, but if I do, I’ll just use 4ply cotton from Bendigo Wool Mills, where I can get 200g for $AU11.50. The Rowan wasn’t bad, I just didn’t find it any better than any other cotton I’ve used.
Overall thoguh, an A+!
An the weekend, Emily managed, somehow, to coerce Twinkie into something she’s never done before.

They sat like that for an hour. Too cute!