Short and sweet

It’s just a short blog post from me today. The bank holiday weekend is upon us here in the UK and the race is on to enjoy the warm sunny weather before the inevitable rain hits us. On the bright side, a rainy bank holiday is the perfect excuse to hole up inside and crack on with the knitting.

As I’m sure you all know by now (obsessed - moi?) Stash Dash has now begun and I can finally get round to liberating some sock needles from a lingering pile of sock WIPs.

The sun is shining and I’m outside with my sock knitting and my coffee. The house is quiet as everyone else has a lie-in so it’s just me and the cats. And the neighbourhood peacock trying his best to wake every living soul - but I’m ignoring him.

This photo was taken yesterday where I was doing much the same thing but obviously much more presentably attired. Trust me - no one needs to see my morning self with crumpled PJs.

In my head I envision a weekend full of a parade of finished socks lining up in front of me. As the house wakes and domestic duties take over I will still cling grimly to that hope and keep my knitting with me at all times to get the odd round in here and there. And if nothing else - I can use an emergency DPN to stab that infernal peacock,

It's all about the knitting - top tips for maximising your knitting time

At the risk of sounding a trifle obsessed my focus today is all about getting ready for Stash Dash - which starts tomorrow! I may have mentioned it once or twice before.

Success in Stash Dash (whatever your goal is) depends upon maximising your knitting time, and at the risk of stating the bleeding obvious you need to spend as much of your free time knitting and avoiding having to tink back or stop to hunt for supplies.

 With this in mind I am putting together a few project bags which have all of my essential supplies needed for socks and shawls - stitch markers, tape measures, waste yarn etc. I don’t know about you but in my house I can easily lose 10 minutes searching for a tapestry needle. And that crucial 10 minutes knitting time can be much better spent putting in an afterthought heel.

I know that not everyone shares my obsession but this year with time tighter than ever I have put together a few top tips to help me reach my 10K goal - I will report back later on how successful they are:

1. Round up all essential supplies and set up a “sock bag” and a “shawl bag” where my current projects can live while they are being worked on.

2. Do a quick inventory of larger projects and check what stage they are at. Do they need trying on or a decision made about length/fit/gauge - now is the time to decide so that you don’t waste valuable knitting time later on in a state of chronic indecision (no prizes for guessing how I know this).

3. Do you need to order more needles? I’m not joking - nothing is worse than getting to the crucial stage of a project and realising that you need a different size or that something is lost or broken.

4. Plan to curb screen time. This is a big one for me but I need to get my screen time under control if I’m going to make the most of my free time. I’ve downloaded an app called QualityTime to help me monitor how much time I spend online on my phone and I fully expect to be slightly shocked. If I manage to cut my screen time by even a quarter - that’s time that can be more gainfully employed.

5. Gather up local takeaway menus and put them on the fridge. I’m not planning to feed the kids pizza every night (although the thought did cross my mind) but a few easy meals and minimal kitchen time will mean that I can spend some of the precious early evening hours (before I’m too tired to function) getting some solid knitting time under my belt.

If you have any tips for squeezing more knitting time into the day I’d love to hear them. Every little helps, as they say.

A bit of perspective

I’m going to apologise in advance for this blog post which takes the form of a mini rant and isn’t in my usual style. If you’ve popped in looking for the knitting, please feel free to pass this one by and pop back tomorrow.

I’m well aware that in the knitting industry there is a perception that all knitters are lovely, and indeed the vast majority of them are. But there is a small but significant minority of knitters who I’m afraid are anything but. Now I am well aware that in saying this I am sticking my head above the parapet and I may well lose some customers or subscribers as a result. But I feel strongly about this and I feel that by pretending everything in the garden is rosy we are doing everyone a disservice.

What am I talking about here? One word - courtesy. Specifically courtesy when speaking to people online. It’s a well known fact that people behave different to each other online than they do in person and that comes as no surprise. What has surprised me though is the response to a recent event, where I offered a free copy of a shawl pattern if people signed up to receive my regular newsletter.

To recap slightly, I designed the Fuss Free Festival Shawl in conjunction with Fluph Shop and the Little Grey Girl for an Edinburgh Yarn festival collaboration. The shawl then went on general sale on Ravelry and I decided to offer it free for a limited time as an incentive for my email subscription. All was fine for several weeks and I had a steady stream of subscriptions, then by a stroke of fate the pattern appeared in the Ravelry news pages. By the wonders of Ravelry the shawl shot to the top of the Hot Right Now page and stayed there for 24hrs or so.

The volume of new subscribers became a flood and my poor email service struggled to keep up. Now I'm not for one second complaining about this. It was a huge boost to my mailing list and my profile and was very welcome. What did irk me though was the tone of some emails and messages I received from people trying to access their free pattern.

These are a selection of genuine emails I received during a 12hr period - anonymised for obvious reasons.

“I signed up to your newletter expecting to receive your pattern as promised. It has NOT arrived”

“I really want your pattern but haven’t got it yet. Where do I get it?”

“ Why don’t you just put the pattern free on ravelry and then I can get it from there. I don’t want to give you my email address”

“On ravelry you promised a free copy of the shawl pattern. I have not received it. Is this some sort of scam????

“My pattern has not arrived as you promised. Please rectify this immediately”

I kid you not. These all genuinely landed in my inbox. The sender of the last email proceeded to send 4 or 5 more in tones of increasing anger at 1 hour intervals. Ending with a threat to report me to the unspecified authorities for fraud. Unfortunately they were in a different time zone to me and I was asleep.

Now obviously, people may get frustrated if they don’t receive something they have been promised. But on the Ravelry page and the subsequent email chain I did explain in detail how to access the free pattern. I think the Mailchimp did get a bit overwhelmed at one point and so the automated responses may have been a little slow, which didn’t help.

But the immediate reaction, to dash off a hasty and yes, rude email shows a basic lack of courtesy and a lack of appreciation that they are dealing with a real life human being. A real person who has worked an 8-hour day outside the home. A real person who has dealt with homework crises, mundane domesticity and a dead washing machine. A real person who is presently trying to achieve the impossible of 8 hours quality sleep.

I did receive many lovely thank you messages too - which outnumbered the rude ones by quite some amount. I’m not asking for sympathy and I’m aware that in the scheme of things this is a very small thing.

Nevertheless I feel it shows a real lack of awareness on the part of a very small number of people. I’m sure that none of those people would have been intentionally rude to me in person, but put a keyboard in the way and their communication style was very different. And at the end of the day, this amount of angst over something which can be purchased for just under £3.50 (around $5) seems to be lacking somewhat in perspective.

Courtesy. A small word but such an important one. Please and thank you cost nothing whether you are speaking online or in person.

There, rant over.

As you were.

Serious preparation required

Time for some serious list making today as Stash Dash looms large in my knitting calendar. My basket of unfinished objects is starting to make me a little twitchy, I must confess but they have to wait until May 26th until I can gleefully cast them off and count them towards my 10K goal.

Because Stash Dash is all about maximising your knitting time I am taking advantage of my restlessness now to compile a list of all my stash dash projects. I have them listed in Ravelry too but as a committed bullet journaler I like to have all the information to hand in my trusty journal too.

I've tried many knitting trackers and apps over the years but I always come back to the tried and tested paper option. In order to try and minimise the amount of time spent faffing with lists I tend to use Ravelry to track my progress and yarn amounts used. But I can't help being drawn to some beautiful ideas on Pinterest for tracking project progress. This idea in particular really caught my eye - but don't say you weren't warned. The combination of knitting and bullet journalling is a complete Pinterest black hole.

How to create a slipped stitch shawl edge

If you have knit the Fuss Free Festival Shawl you will have noticed that it has a slipped stitch edging which helps to give it it’s distinctive relaxed crescent shape. Whilst it is isn’t difficult to work a few people contacted me for help as they found it hard to visualise how the stitches should look.

So to help I thought I would just create this mini tutorial just to show how the stitches are slipped.

To start with, all slipped stitches in the pattern are slipped purlwise, by which I mean that you insert the right hand needle tip into the first stitch on the left hand needle as if you were going to purl it.

The instructions say to Sl 1 pwise wyif - ie to slip 1 stitch purlwise with the yarn in front. To do this you start with the yarn hanging down at the front of the work. Leaving the yarn where it is, insert the right hand needle tip purlwise into the first stitch on the left hand needle and slide it across to the right hand needle. You don’t knit it or do a yarn over - the stitch is simply slipped, unworked to the right hand needle.

Then, move the yarn between the two needle tips to the back of the work ready to work the next stitch.

The next stitch is an increase - where you knit into the front of the next stitch, pull the loop through on your right needle tip but don’t slip it off the left hand needle. Instead, insert the RH needle tip into the back of the same stitch. Pull the loop through onto the RH needle tip and then slide both stitches off the LH needle. This creates an increase.

The next stitch is slipped purlwise in the same way as the first. So bring your yarn between the needle tips to the front of the work and then slip the stitch purlwise.

I hope this helps you to visualise the beginning of the shawl. Once you get into your rhythm you will find it to be a relaxing and fun knit - I promise.

Yarn with a mind of it's own

Don't you just love it when yarn has a mind of it's own? By which I mean that it virtually shouts at you what it wants to be. It saves so much time spent dithering around, trying out and rejecting ideas, endless Ravelry surfing and general indecisiveness.

As soon as I got my mitts on this delicious alpaca yarn from We Are Knitters it practically shouted at me "Make me into a cowl - now". Then it added "Please", because of course it is a polite and well behaved yarn.

So, who am I to argue? This 100% alpaca yarn is listed as a worsted weight but part of its appeal is that it can be worked on a range of needle sizes depending on the effect you are aiming for. I am thinking of a relaxed, drapey cowl - ideally one which can be wrapped once or twice around the neck. 

For this reason, and also because I am planning a little cable action too I'm thinking of starting off with a 5mm needle and will see how I go from there.

First things first, coffee and a quick scout around for my needle case, then I can crack on and let the yarn do it's thing.