What I made, by Sharon

I planned on making Laar, while I was away, and I did so. It was the perfect knitting to start on a long plane trip, because the picot cast on is quite fiddly, and by the time I finished it I was happy to proceed with simple knitting for the rest of the flight. It's very important to me to have good knitting for these long flights, because I don't sleep on planes, and everyone else does. I'm always to tempted to run up and down the plane screaming WAKE UP, WAKE UP, out of sheer boredom. Instead, I knit on Laar and listened to a wonderful recording of Pride and Prejudice .   This was perfect trip knitting, both because it was interesting and still simple and because I failed to pack a cardigan. I finished it a couple of weeks into the trip and got a lot of wear out of it. I knit it in Dublin and Portugal and had it pretty much done by the time we flew to England. I bought buttons at Liberty, but after sewing them on decided they were too big and replaced them with a s...

Unlike my last big trip, this one was full of fibre highlights. The weather in Dublin was shocking - it was colder than in Melbourne, so I bought myself some laceweight and went and had a beer. The we went to Portugal, where they sell yarn by weight - unlabelled, but lovely, and super, super cheap. I bought nearly a kilogram of yarn for a jumper for Leon. I ended up posting that back sea mail, which is good because I did quite a lot of shopping later on. I wanted to get a picture of the yarn shop there, but they didn't speak English, and were not overly friendly, so I thought I had better not. I met up with Jen   in London and she took me on a yarn crawl. It was lovely to see her, and the yarn shops were amazing. Then I went to Cockermouth and met up with Nicola and her sister Rachel , whose blog I read. It was amazing to see Nicola and so nice to meet Rachel in real life, although I feel like I sort of know her already. Woolfest was amazing. There were some shee...

Some people plan a holiday by booking accommodation, working out train and plane travel and deciding what to do when they get there. I have a husband who travels like that. I plan around one thing: knitting. So, Leon and I are heading of for Ireland, Portugal and England. My plane knitting is Laar by Gudrun Johnson , in some Wollmeise lace weight. I expect this little cardigan will take most, if not all of trip, since it's lace weight and I'm making it with long sleeves and slightly longer through the body. If it doesn't the Cookie A sock club pattern will be waiting on my email and there will be plenty of opportunity to buy yarn.   Ahh shopping. If you recall, the last big trip I did was a bit bereft of yarn . The trip before that I went to Sock Summit 2009. This trip has a fibre focus, at least near the end. We're going to London, where I'm finally going to th e Victoria and Albert Museum -    I can't believe I lived in London and n...

After I finished the red shawl for Elise and the red spinning I started knitting a red vest for myself, which I utterly failed to mention, here on the blog. I've really enjoyed knitting this, it's Firelightfrom Knitty . I was thinking earlier how much I love Knitty, not just because it's free, but because it's easy to navigate, the patterns tend to be well written and I love being able to print out spare copies.This pattern fits the Knitty model, and it had clever details, like a seamless construction and wonderful fire cables. I knit this on some unlabelled 5ply direct from ACS , which is probably Bluebell. It's a cabled yarn, which I don't always love, but I think it looks amazing in the reverse stocking stitch. It was a little bit splitty, but nothing terrible and I love the smooth but slightly woolly feel. Most of all though, I love the way this fits. I spent quite a lot of time considering the length, particularly as I have ...