Knitting keeps on lifesaving

Not a great couple of weeks for reasons related to the bad stuff that happened in November. Wonder where I'll put all my knits and purls of unhappy once this blanket is finished? Into a clapotis perhaps, or more socks. Off home for ten days tomorrow night. This is definitely A Good Thing - I need space and air and a change of scene to clear my head and get some perspective.

Knitting as lifesaver

My granny was a great knitter and taught me some basics when I was little, but I was never that interested and had forgotten everything when about eighteen months ago, out of the blue, I got the urge to knit. There's a little haberdashers just down the road from me, so I went in and bought a pair of 8mm needles and a couple of balls of chunky black wool and produced a basic garter-stockinette-mix scarf, which I proceeded to wear ALL winter and which, I'm surprised to say, garnered quite a lot of compliments.

The knitting bug had bitten, but things just pottered along gradually with a scarf here and a scarf there, until the bad times hit in late November and I found myself spending a lot of time sitting at home, feeling deeply unhappy and struggling to chase away bad thoughts. I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that knitting kept me sane this winter (at the very least it stopped me veering totally off course and into a ditch).

Lots of repetitive, don't-think-about-anything-but-stitches work (I knitted a ginormous and ridiculous K1P1 scarf of fingering yarn that must have about a hundred hours of work in it and will be frogged as soon as I resign myself to doing it) slowly turned into slightly more complicated projects, like bags and hats and bootees, as I picked up courage both in life and in my ability to knit. Last weekend, I turned a corner and decided I was ready for socks. And yesterday, I finished my first one. I'm not quite back to normal yet, but I'm getting there. I wonder what the knitting sign for "normal, properly ready to rejoin life again" will turn out to be?

Scherious scheep-based schopping in schunny Stockholm

I was away in Stockholm most of last week for a convention which I stretched out into a weekend. The convention was fine and the weekend was fun and there were lots of boats, but it was faaar hotter than the weather forecast.

I'd packed for 12-20°C and it ended up being 28°C. Which meant that instead of my nice little skirt-and-warmish-top / trousers-and-t-shirt combinations, I had to work the skirt-and-tee angle and boy oh boy but I had NOT considered that option and ended up looking like a mismatched clown most of the time. We're talking formal-black-linen-skirt-with-blue-striped-pirate-t-shirt-and-strappy-silver-platforms clown. I'm not great at working it at the best of times, but this....

Ah well, fortunately there are yarn shops run by nice older ladies with sufficiently broken English that it's all smiles but no need for conversation. We have Malabrigo. Yeah. I'm embarrassed to say that I'd been staking out my Stockholm yarn purchases and was all set to go to Nysta and KnitLab and buy all sorts, especially my first-ever Malabrigo. I'd actually started dreaming about the Great Malabrigo Purchase. But it turns out that Nysta and KnitLab have both closed and so I found myself wandering the streets, bereft and lonesome, which is when I walked past the Anntorps Väv window and hope bloomed in my little heart again. I trotted back first thing the next morning and had a great old time. I could have bought half the shop, especially where this stuff, Östergötlands Ullspinneri Pälsull, was concerned:

That's my sister-in-law's colour and this yarn will end up being her Christmas present - just have to decide what to turn it into. There were some great yellows and oranges too. And a few skeins of Malabrigo. I bought 100g of black lace-weight (with a project in mind) and can't wait to get started on it. I also bought this monster chunky wool-and-soy, although that was in another shop that I passed:

Also fortunately, when I changed to my non-convention hotel, I got a tiny noisy room that looked right onto the hotel bar. I'd booked tiny, so that wasn't a problem, but I'd also booked (and wanted) quiet so, for once, I asked to change. And they gave me a gorgeous double on the fifth floor with a balcony and let me stay there both nights. Not the best photo, but it was very luxe and very lovely.

And then I got home and washed my windows and oiled my wooden worktop and watered my plants and all was well with the world.

Double needles, aka "getting too big for my boots"

After feeling very smug about how nicely my mistake-stitch scarf turned out (the black in the second picture is accurate - don't know where the navy blue in the first comes from), I'm now getting my comeuppance in the form of double-pointed needles. Oooh-là. Not easy. I'm trying to make mittens to accompany the world's most boring scarf (the mistake scarf was knitted as a Christmas present for one of my favourite people). I'll persevere for the moment, but this may well end up being one of those projects that isn't spoken about in polite company.

One day, I will finish my kitchen windows.

But for the moment, I'll just keep on sanding away. Lots of sanding last night and tonight - I'm now just about ready to oil the easy half and am in the middle of a little experiment with the iron-protector cream, which is really more like shoe polish than anything else, to see how it copes with rust.

Anyway, I'll post pictures of that and of gorgeous beaches as soon as I get them off my camera and sorted out. In the meantime, here's a photo of the little blanket I knitted for my newest nephew:

Not remotely complicated, but quite pretty for all its simplicity and I think my brother and sister-in-law were pleased. My nephew responded with a small vomit, but given that he doesn't have a lot of other ways of expressing himself yet, I'll take that as a positive...

Here's my very first video post. Doesn't show the full glory of the beaches, but heck, what could be cooler than an airport where the plane has been known to be put in a holding pattern, not because there aren't any landing slots, but because there's a fat seal lying in the middle of the beach. :)


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