Back into the swing of things

That is the girls hopping on the school bus this morning.  One of the perks of life in Hong Kong is that there are supervised school buses for children from pre-school age. You can see the “bus mother” helping older daughter up the stairs. Can you tell that I am relieved to have them back at school? I am not ideologically opposed to home schooling, but it is definitely not anything that I would consider for our family.

We had an epic trip from Sydney involving a flight delayed by 8 hours, and an unexpected detour to Manila, and an extremely bumpy landing, all due to Typhoon Nuri.  The girls were a little perplexed as to why we were landing in “Vanilla”, and older daughter went so far as to proclaim that she could smell the “Vanilla” while we were seated on the plane, on the tarmac at the airport! Luckily, before the rather stressful return, we had a lovely holiday in Australia.  We spent most of the time in Port Macquarie, staying at my parents’ place. It is a wonderful antidote to Hong Kong, and I love it during winter.  We had picnics at beautiful locations, and encounters with co-operative wildlife.

The girls loved feeding the kangaroos! I did buy some yarn, but have not photographed it yet.

As for knitting – I did finish a Noro striped scarf for myself on day 1 of the trip to Australia, and immediately starting wearing it. I love knitting this project (this is my second), and love wearing it too.  While I love the colours of the Noro Cashmere Island, I had a few issues with the yarn this time.  I used colours 7 and 11 (2 balls of each) that I had purchased in Paris. One ball of 7 weighed only 42 grams (instead of 50) and was noticeably smaller after winding into a ball.  The yarn seemed much less evenly spun that the Cashmere Island that I used for my husband’s scarf. Project details here, and I varied the pattern in the same way as the my first version of this scarf. I stopped knitting when the scarf was as long as I am tall.

Of course, the trip to Australia was during the Beijing Olympics, and I should not have been working on the striped scraf, but instead on my Skater’s Overtop (Ravelry link). I did make progress on it, but failed to complete it during the Olympics. There were a number of contributing factors, like international travel, being a sole parent to a 4 and 5 year old while travelling, my complete inability to process the simple arithmetic required to keep track of 2 lace patterns (one repeating over 8 rows, and the other over 20 rows), actually wanting to watch the Olympics, and so on and so forth. I think that the photo below was taken at row 45, and I would estimate that every row between rows 30 and 40 was knitted at least twice. The infamous rows 34 and 35 were knitted thrice, and for that, I blame the finals of the women’s uneven bars. 

 

So for now, its back to work. Despite my expectations to the contrary, orders for Yarn Workshop continued to come in while I was away, and I commenced working (with a real web developer) on a new site for the business.  We received stock of our Knit Picks needles (and have already sold out of the Deluxe Harmony Options sets), and I’ve got new yarns coming in left, right, and center.

Book review – “Knitting Classic Style”

This is hardly an impartial book review – I am an unabashed fan of Veronik Avery, the designer behind Knitting Classic Style.

I bought Knitting Classic Style  from Amazon with a bundle of other knitting books, and all the others suffered in comparison with it.  Veronik Avery really is an amazing hand knitting designer, and the photos of the patterns in the book are also lovely. 

With a few exceptions, these are not patterns for the faint hearted, and this is most certainly not a “learn how to knit” book.  Thankfully, Knitting Classic Style assumes that the reader is an experienced knitter, and contains only 4 pages of relatively advanced technical tips.

There are 35 patterns in the book, and most of them are very desirable.  One of my criticisms of the book is in its organisation. The patterns are not listed by name in the index, and also are not listed in the table of contents.  The Table of contents does break the patterns into 4 categories “Fashion Mavens”, “Tomboys”, “Global Travelers” and “Thrill seekers” but these titles bear almost no relevance to  the patterns within. While I can see the “Military Jacket” pattern above fitting into the Tomboys theme, this theme also contains the Mohair Potrait Scarf (photo below):

I am not sure that any part of this scarf is tomboyish! I love this pattern, and am having difficulty resisting the urge to cast it on.

I am making the Overtop from the “Layered Skater’s Top” (above) for the Ravelmpics (a double entry in both the Sweater Sprint and the Laceweight Longjump for Team Oz), but will be adding substantially to its length, and dropping to smaller needle size around the waist to add some de facto waist shaping.  My other criticism of this book is how abbreviated many of the sweaters are. I would also complain about the prepnderance of raglans, but most of the knitting world doesn’t seem to share my passionate dislike of raglan sweaters. Raglans look awful on me, something to do with my narrow sloping shoulders, I suspect. As for the midriff issue, let’s just say that I was not that keen on midriff tops before having 2 children.

Apart from the general beauty of the patterns in Knitting Classic Style, they are also very practical, and all come in a wide variety of sizes.  I have already made a “Montreal Tuque” in the child’s size (substituting Zara for the recommended Cashmere yarn), and it got a good workout on our trip to Provence earlier this year.  

 

(edited to add) P.S.  Have you seen Twist Collective? Gorgeous patterns – I am finding Linden very tempting.  I guess I just can’t move away from Veronik Avery! There is also an ad for Yarn Workshop in there.