Last week, a colleague unexpectedly offered us the use of an apartment in Plymouth for a week. Plymouth is on the Southwestern coast of England, from which one can explore southern Devon and Cornwall and the moors. We have never been to that part of the country. How fast do you think I said “Yes”? We rearranged our calendar, hopped in the car, and took off.
This is the last Bank Holiday weekend of the summer, which means traffic. Lots of traffic. The highways were packed driving down here, so we got off the main drags and toodled along little country roads, making a 3.5 hour drive into 7, and enjoying every turn of the road. Since we are staying here for a week, we decided to stay close to Plymouth for the first few days until the holiday crowds diminish.
Yesterday, we drove onto the Torpoint car ferry and explored the little villages on the Rame peninsula and Whitsand Bay, just west of Plymouth. The guidebook said that GPS devices were unreliable out here. This is certainly true. Here is the road the GPS told us to take:
We stopped in the charming little town of Cawsand:
Cawsand has an interesting pirate vibe happening; apparently it has a history as a smuggling port. (Dig the parrot!):
We chatted with some locals about the best place for a walk and they pointed out a stretch of the costal path which leads from the tiny beach at Cawsund, up through a lovely wooded path filled with ferns and glimpses of sea, and lined with flowers:
The trail led to the top of the rise and beautiful views:
We found a little folly and spent some time watching the sea and the boats.
Since this is a knitting blog, it is my duty to tell you that knitting may have occured at this point:
What a spot to knit! Here is a better parspective:
We were on a promintory. So, although it looks like I am sitting with my back to the view, I am actually gazing out at a glorious expanse of blue water. Now, here is the funny part. I am afraid of heights. I clambered onto this piece of rock, took out my knitting and sat there happily knitting away; Doug took some photos; I enjoyed the view. Then, I looked down, and realized that I was sitting at the very edge of a 30-foot drop and I hadn’t even noticed! (Emma and Leah, are you reading this? Are you thinking “Who are you and what have you done with my mom?”) This is where I sat and knit:
Egads! I was totally oblivious, blown away by the views, and now it gives me goose bumps to even think about it.
After our walk, we drove farther west along the beach, checking out many of the towns. We stopped at the town of Polperro, which was overrun with tourists, and looked as if a mad PR guy had designed the place for maximum tourist expenditure. I found it kind of creepy, but id did have some great views at the bottom of the tourist crawl:
Today is Doug’s birthday, so I am off now for a quiet day by the seaside with my guy.
I spend an inordinate amount of time checking out new knitting patterns. I pay attention to trends, see what’s happening with colour and shape. I have a favorites list where I keep track of anything I especially like. This includes things I would like to knit, things I would love to wear, things that would look good on my daughters, men’s knits, garments that I think are interesting or arresting or different, knits that utilize interesting construction details, etc. This week I noticed that the two garments I had just favorited were both dresses.
The first was the Bryn Mawr dress by Alex Capshaw-Taylor (of worldknits), published in the latest issue of Interweave Knits:
I think that this is gorgeous. I want to knit it; I want to wear it. I really love this dress. It jumped right away onto my “Must Knit” list.
The second dress is one that combines a really tailored look with some positive ease. It has very sophisticated details, like in the saddle shoulders and colour blocking, and a gorgeous line, but also looks so comfortable. This was knit by RIlilie (here is a link to the Ravelry project page). She has knit two of them, one in lime and cream and the other shown below, that are prototypes for the pattern which will be released in September. This would look great on either one of my daughters, but they might have to fight me for it. Rililie’s blog, knittingtherapy, can be found here.
copyright rililie
I love the ease of this. It is knit with a wool and cotton blend and has such great drape. I could see wanting lots of these in your summer wardrobe. All you need is a strappy pair of sandals (flats, nonetheless) and you’re set.
Then, the new issue of Twist Collective was published, and once again, I noticed a cute dress:
This is Ossel, by Alison Green. It reminds me so much of a dress that I knit for myself in the early 80s with all-over cables. Knit in worsted weight yarn, with cables within cables and a moss stitch background, it should be chunky, but as you can see from the back, this one is clingy and sexy:
So, what’s going on? Is the dress really making a comeback among knitters? Ravelry has a feature in its Patterns section, where you can enter a common category, like “socks” and it will tell you the top 100 patterns that are trending in this category. I frequently type in something (like “cardigan” or “fingerless mitts”) and see what the top patterns are. I noticed long ago that this doesn’t work well for the category “dress”. Why? Because if you do, virtually all of the top 100 dress patterns are for babies and toddlers. Apparently, knitters knit dresses mostly for the under-3 crowd. (There is an advanced search option, but that misses the point I am making here.) I tried this yesterday and there were only 7 adult dresses among the top 100. These included Still Light (#3), Caviar (#25) and Allegheny (#48) which are all discussed below. The other four are either beach cover-ups or tunics. Despite this evidence, there are some knockout patterns for knitted dresses being released. Here I present a selection of dress patterns released within the past few years that have caught my eye. (There are tons more, so please run your own search too.)
Still Light, by Veera Välimäki of Rain Knitwear, is a very popular pattern. As of today there are 1456 Still Light projects on Ravelry. The original pattern, shown below, is knit in alpaca, but this has been knit in every imaginable yarn and in many different lengths. It has an interesting and unusual shape and is really a great, throw-something-on-to-walk-to-the-shops kind of dress. Easy and comfortable but still fun.
I love the Caviar dress, by Yoko Johnston. If I was a few decades younger, I would knit this in a minute. I think it is adorable, and at the same time looks so comfortable and wearable that you could live in it:
The Allegheny dress, by Thea Coleman, published in Brooklyn Tweed’s Wool People 1, is a great classic office dress. It has lovely features including a chunky, assymetrical cable, fake belt detail, and a cowl collar:
Kirsten M. Jensen is a colourwork master. I love her knitting, and her way with colour and pattern is amazing. (Her Sant’Angelo sweater is a masterpiece; I aspire to it. Some day when I grow up I want to knit like her.) She designed the cute Mekko dress which is “inspired by the Marimekko designer Annika Rimala and her iconic graphic designs as well as the mod styles of the 1960s.” I love it:
(I showed this post to Doug and Mekko was his favorite. Do you think this is because it is so short? Or, do you think it’s because he can remember the 60s and it makes him nostalgic. Hmm….)
Another dress that recently caught my attention is Icon, by Kari-Helene Rain of Purl Alpaca Designs:
I think this has lovely lines, and I love the way it flows. I would definitely not make it in alpaca, however, as in the photo, nor in a natural coloured yarn. I can picture this in a beautiful silk blend hand-dyed yarn in a vibrant jewel shade. Red, anyone?
Emma loves the dress pattern called 50 Shades: Ash, designed by Allison Hendrix. This has very similar lines to the Icon dress, but is distinguished by its deep, plunging back.
I think I would have some problems with all of those buttons down the back. They may be hard to sit on, but there is no denying they look really cute. It is a young, stylish, sexy dress with lots of swing.
The very talented Sarah Wilson of The Sexy Knitter has two dress designs that I really admire. First, is the Principesa dress, which I have showcased on this blog before:
It also has a sexy, plunging back. The front of this dress is really classy, however. It is a great combination, with a stylish front view and a sexy back:
At my age, I love the classiness of the front view, but have troubles with the undergarment question. What could you wear under this? So although Emma is drawn to this for it’s plunging back, I could easily see knitting it for myself with a back that matched the front. It would be uber-elegant and clingy. In a totally different vein, Sarah designed the absolutely fabulous dress Miss Holloway, inspired by Mad Men and vintage 60s style:
photo copyright Emily Brewer
Another fabulous pattern is Audrey Totter, designed by Kristen Hanley Cardozo of Knitting Kninja:
I think this is so elegant and beautiful. I love the gauzy scarf, which makes a really dramatic statement, but I’ve noticed knitters making it without; as you can see, the dress has gorgeous lines by itself. Thus you can make this as a wonderfully fitted but simple shell, or add the scarf for a real statement piece. (I do know if I wore this, the scarf would get tangled around my legs as I walked; I would love to wear it to lounge against my collection of vintage cars, though – I wish!)
Another really cute dress pattern using colourwork is the Woodstock dress by Heather Dixon:
I think this is a great office dress. I love the striped side panels, and also the little shock of colour at the pocket linings. I would, however, make this in a yarn with less of a halo; I think it deserves a crisper silhouette.
I am going to end this post with a dress I simply adore. This is the Katie Summer Dress by Andrea Rangel:
This is a fabulous dress! Look at the back:
Wow, if only I had beautiful, toned arms like this model, I would never take this dress off! Andrea Rangel is a fairly new designer who is creating some really cute and clever designs. She is really someone to keep an eye on.
So, is this the beginning of a strong new trend in knitted fashion? I don’t know, but I sure hope so.
A few days ago, I pulled my half-knitted Exeter jacket out of storage to start knitting again. I was about a third of the way up the back when I put it away a few months ago. Exeter is a very densely cabled jacket. In addition to the cable pattern, which requires some concentration, the jacket has some slight A-line shaping. The perrenial problem I face when I try to start up again on a project that has been put away for awhile, is trying to remember exactly where I was when I stopped knitting. In the case of Exeter, the 16-row repeat of the cable pattern is fairly easy to read from the knitting itself; a few minutes of thought and I could figure out which row of the repeat I should be on. The decreases for the A-line shaping are a different matter. How many sets had I made? When to make the next one? Easy peasy. Here is the piece I was working on:
See the little green removable stitch markers on the right side? I put a stitch marker on each decrease row. This means that I don’t have to count. I always know where the decrease was made.
Perhaps this doesn’t seem revolutionary to my fellow knitters. Perhaps you have always been marking your knitting this way. However, this is a new thing for me, discovered about a year or so ago. This is the way I used to keep track of increases and decreases:
I would write everything down. The one on the left is from my Laresca pullover. It has a chart, in which I note the left side decreases, center decreases and right side decreases in three columns; each row is numbered and circled as I finish the row. The one on the right is from the purple pullover I knit for Leah; this is just the sleeves. I write down every row, numbering each one in turn, and then putting an arrow under each decrease row. You might be able to make out that the first sleeve was too tight, so I ripped and started again. The second I called “sleeve – mach 2”. After finishing it, I knit the second sleeve making the decreases on the same rows.
This is the system I used for years and it has a number of very big drawbacks associated with it. One – it means I have to interrupt the rhythm of the knitting every row to grab a pencil and make notations. (This is a bigger drawback than you may think. The rhythm of knitting is intrinsically pleasing and part of the reason I knit.) Two – I sometimes forget to write down a row. This can be disastrous. Three – it makes my knitting much less mobile as I have to juggle paper and pencil in addition to knitting. And four – if I lose the piece of paper, I am screwed. I cannot tell you how often I have done that – I usually make these scribbles on the backs of receipts, or on napkins, or other such scraps of paper.
It was about a year ago that I noticed (in a way that it sunk into my psyche) that the really good knitters whose work I admired on Ravelry always marked everything (increases, decreases, buttonhole placement, pattern repeats, etc) ON THE KNITTING ITSELF, rather than on a piece of paper. I bought lots of removable stitch markers and I have never looked back.
Above is a photo from when I was knitting the Audrey sweater for Emma. You can see that I use different colour removable stitch markers – green for decreases and orange for increases. I cannot even begin to tell you how much easier this makes my life. For example, I almost always increase and decrease at a different rate than the pattern calls for. If I do this, and don’t keep careful track of what I did, then I can’t make a second sleeve to match the first, or match the front to the back of a sweater. Now, I don’t worry about it, the markers show where everything happened, and I leave them in until all of the knitting is done.
To me, these removable stitch markers are nothing short of a miraculous tool for the modern knitter. Why did nobody tell me this when I started knitting?
Now, I will indulge in what may seem like a sharp change of topic. (It won’t be, but you have to stay tuned for the punch line.) In June, we went to Lebanon for a fabulous family holiday. My husband is a second generation Lebanese-Canadian. His grandparents immigrated to Canada circa 1905. Doug has been to Lebanon many times to visit with his extended family there, and finally succeeded in convincing me and the girls to visit. (I have always been worried about the political situation there which I felt would not be safe.) It was the most lovely family holiday I can remember, with beautiful scenery, fabulous food, and lovely people.
Our cousin Amira planned a great day of extended sightseeing, which ended up in the late afternoon in Byblos (Jbail). Here is a snippet from the Wikipedia entry for Byblos:
Leah is fanatical about history and standing in Byblos was a magical experience. You can stand on the site of Phoenician, Roman and Crusader ruins, along a beautiful coastline. Among the ruins here are the Temple of Baalat Gebal built in 2700 B.C.E. and Byblos Castle, built by 12th century Crusaaders (from the remains of Roman ruins). Byblos is also thought to be the birthplace of the alphabet.
Please note, dear reader, as evidenced in the above photo, how very tiny these stitch markers are. How, you may ask, could this help in the aforementioned predicament? My response: never underestimate the ingenuity of a knitter!
Sitting here in limbo
But I know it won’t be long
Sitting here in limbo
Like a bird without a song
– Jimmy Cliff
The girls left yesterday to move to Canada for university and I am officially an empty nester. Instead of throwing a party, I am feeling rather sad. As a matter of fact, the very thought of their imminent departure has had me in a state of both melancholy and crankiness all summer, and as a result I have not been getting much productive knitting done. Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I interrupted my lovely Exeter jacket to knit a Haruni shawl, which I interrupted to knit a Neon cardigan, which I interrupted to make a Viajante shawl/poncho, which I interrupted to make an Enchanted Rock cardigan. The only one I have managed to finish was the Neon. I can’t seem to commit to any one project because I am melancholic and cranky in equal measures. (Did I mention sad? I am also sad.)
Over the weekend, I decided (rather foolishly) to continue in this interrupted vein to quickly knit a skirt for Emma in the few days before she hopped on the plane. The skirt was very cute – Chevrolette by Antonia Price:
I didn’t have the time to source out any yarn for it, however, and we ended up picking out something that didn’t quite work. It was too tweedy and rough, it hurt my hands to knit with (thus not lending itself to a quick project) and my gauge was too big. I knit like a mad woman on it for a day and a half before realizing it was a futile pursuit. I really like the pattern, however, so I will search out some better yarn for it and make it later in the year.
Despite the fact that I have so many projects on the needles, I keep staring at my knitting basket, wanting to knit something but feeling unmotivated by everything. Now that the girls are gone, I am thinking I need to get my knitting mojo back on track by knitting things that are deeply appealing to me now, even if it means putting some things aside, being selfish or being unproductive.
I realized this morning that I am not enamored of the Enchanted Rock cardigan at the moment. I think it is the colour, which while it looks lovely in the photograph:
really doesn’t suit me. I have decided to put it aside for now. Maybe when I am finished being cranky and out-of-sorts, it will once again appeal to me. I am also putting away the Haruni shawl. I am not liking the variegation in the yarn:
I have actually knit it up to the point where the lace pattern begins, so quite a bit more than this photo indicates. I have realized that all of the Harunis which I like are very simple and plain, with no variegation in the colour. I think that later I might continue with just a little ruffled border and then end up with a small shawl that I could wear more like a scarf. Again, I am not in the mood for it now, so into the basket it goes. I will not feel guilty about putting it aside, even if it is Wollmeise.
This leaves me with the Viajante and the Exeter. I feel as if I keep knitting and knitting the Viajante but the ball of lace never seems to get any smaller. It will be beautiful, however, and it is mindless knitting, so I will persevere. Also, it is purple which is intrinsically pleasing, so it can stay. Right now, however, I will pull out the Exeter jacket again, which I adore completely, and hopefully it will kickstart my knitting mojo. For those of you who can’t remember, here is a photo of Exeter, which is designed by Michele Wang:
I have both sleeves finished:
and about six inches of the back. It is the type of knitting that takes concentration, and I haven’t been in the mood to concentrate on much of anything for a while, but maybe that is what I need right now to keep me distracted. Besides, I can’t wait to wear this and envision snuggling up in it all winter.
If these two don’t push my buttons, I have some other projects simmering on the back burner. I have wanted to knit the Maxfield Cardigan by Amy Christoffers for a long time now. Here is a photo:
I bought the yarn for this months ago. It is Skein Merino Silk Sport, which is 50% silk, 50% merino and 100% lucious:
And if these aren’t enough to keep me happy, I am busy trying to find the perfect sweater to knit for Doug (my options will be the subject of a future post) and I am seriusly considering the Soumak Scarf Wrap from Rowan 54, designed by Lisa Richardson:
In a change of subject, I would like to thank Vi (pronounced Vee) from Girl Meets Yarn who nominated me for a Word Press Family Award. I hadn’t heard of Vi before, but I went and checked out her blog which is really cute. It is hard not to like someone who not only knits and writes well, but plays the flute in a marching band! Thanks, Vi!
And I thank all of you, dear readers, for putting up with my rather distracted and poorly crafted post today. Hopefully I shall pull myself out of limbo soon, get some knitting done, and remember how to write.
