Please redirect your browsers, bookmarks, favourites and links to my new home:
http://needleandhook.co.uk/journal

To fit size: (32, 34, 36, 38, 40) (42, 44, 46, 48, 50) inches
Finished size: (33, 35, 37, 39, 41) (43, 45, 47, 49, 51) inches

A neat and tidy button-through vest. Has a small single pocket, and optional tubular cast- ons and offs to all ribbed edges. Easy to wear, easy to make - what could be nicer?

Knit in a DK weight wool blend. Debbie Bliss Cashmerino DK is a wool/microfibre/cashmere blend with a stated tension of 22 sts x 30 rows to 4". 50gm (110m [119 yards]) (5, 6, 6, 7, 7) (8, 8, 9, 10, 11) balls

Gauge: After blocking, 22 sts and 30 rows in St st, to 10 cm (4 inches) using 4 mm needles.

Skills: Knit and purl stitches, ribbing, tubular cast on, tubular (sewn) cast off, buttonholes, increases, decreases, picking up stitches

NB: Read more about the tubular cast on method here.
And more about the tubular (sewn) cast off method here.
More about buttonholes here.

£3.00 - you will be sent a link to download the pattern as an electronic (pdf) file, approx 0.35Mb

However, inevitably, I get a number of error messages and bouncebacks, and so not everybody gets their new copy. If you have a version of a pattern which does not have its errors corrected, and you would like one, contact me with details of your original purchase and I will send you the latest.

Baby socks for my yoga teacher. Swatch for a ginormous cabled cardigan, now knitted and only awaiting blocking and buttons. Swatch in blue heather Cascade 220 for a fitted, asymmetric, princess-seamed equestrian jacket - knitted but awaiting seaming. Swatch in glorious Fable Alpaca, with a zig-zag slipstitch pattern, design fully conceived and awaiting download from my brain and into written instructions. Swatch in Debbie Bliss Pure Silk – a leaf pattern in stranded colourwork, but not reading as clearly as I would like. Maybe green out of white would be easier to see than white out of green, or maybe it's more trouble that it is worth and would be better in a nice houndstooth or herringbone instead.

You see, as previously intimated, I have this weekend signed and returned in triplicate a contract committing to producing one entire book by February next. Which feels terrifying and ridiculous at the same time. The thing won't be in print until Spring 09, so I take some comfort in knowing that no actual knitter will ever read said book – by then we will all have knitted through our stashes and be finding creative outlet through macrame, or Fimo.

In consequence, Fashionable Life bulletins are likely to be somewhat thin on the ground for the next six months, although I hope to keep you sweet with the occasional project which I can share, and self-publish too. Dear reader, I know you are forgiving. If you demanded daily, even weekly updates, you would long ago have cancelled your subscription to these irregular pages.

And now, as any good procrastinator should, I'm going to avoid knitting by sowing seeds for this year's vegetable garden. It is a glorious spring day. The irony is not lost on me that, in previous years, I have procrastinated on sowing seeds by knitting instead.

This is the risk, I suppose, with precious, memory-laden handknits that are so readily removable. At least it was loved, and used, very much while it lived with me. I hope it's happy in its new home.

Well I wracked my brain for days on end, struggling really to come up with anything strange and arriving eventually at the only logical conclusion that I am quite the most normal girl who ever was.

So the tagging lay fallow, the meme went no further. But I did catch something from Alicia and it was far more pernicious.

Because I don’t have anything more important to do than make a queen-sized crochet blanket… like come up with twenty five original designs, for example. On a deadline.

Let's mark this up as items 1-12 in the list of most absurd things about me. I have not yet stopped (the fever will pass, it always does), but I have forced myself to slow down, limit the squares to one per day. Then, when the twenty-five original designs are delivered, I should be ready to join them all together and make the edgings.

Anna, you are absurd.

Here's a secret: many of the pieces I design, I hardly ever wear. My day-to-day style is somewhat, let us say, understated. So when one works its way into my wardrobe like Pippa, or Jemima (now well and truly exhausted, worn out, and needing replacing), or now this, it's unexpected and comforting.

In Scotland, my favourite job was feeding the sheep. They lined up in a perfect, orderly queue to come in for their breakfast (headed by Precious). After their breakfast, they trotted, again in an orderly queue, back out to their field. Lovely.

My second favourite job was reorganising my aunt's wool/fleece/yarn/fibre stash. She has wool at every stage of production from 'on the hoof' (see above), through fleeces, tops, rovings, handspun and machine processed. It was quite an undertaking.

We agreed that there were several largish lots of yarn that could be 'let go', to find new, loving homes where they can fulfil their destiny, after years of waiting. They were inherited from my uncle's mother, who sadly can no longer knit having lost most of her eyesight to macular degeneration.

I'm selling eight lots on auntie's behalf, including some gorgeous fuchsia pink 4ply (I wish it was my colour) the bubblegum pink laceweight above, some Jaeger Celticspun... won't you take a look and see if anything takes your fancy?

I'm four balls short of that cabled cardi-coat I was on about. While I continue to phone every Jaeger stockist in the country, Darlings, please scour your stashes, gather your remnants, and sell me, at inflated price, your EFM Chunky in 'Teal': or I shall surely perish.

(While I have your attention, what is your very favourite yarn to knit with? I know, I know, how long is a ball of wool - but for garments. For a classic ladies’ cardigan? What about for a baby’s layette? You see, I’m over-relying on Rowan, Jaeger, Debbie Bliss, and an American readership may not take kindly. Is anything out there really comparable to Rowan Wool Cotton?)

Anyway, the upshot was finding other people’s designs immensely more compelling than my own feeble ideas (for the love of all that is holy, what made me think that an interminable tube of stocking stitch would keep me interested for as long as it would take to knit it?). Most especially, Stella McCartney’s knit coat, dangled in front of me by both Andrea and Jo. Over and over again I visited Get Knitted adding skeins of Blue Sky Dyed Cotton in Indigo to my shopping cart. Click away. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

I’ve negotiated a compromise: enough Kilcarra Aran Tweed (cheap, and quite soft) to make ‘Harvey’ (Oh Harvey! How we miss you still!) from Rowan Studio Issue 1. Which, to bring us full circle, I bought on Andrea’s suggestion to see how they engineered pleats in the thought that I might replicate the technique for a Stella-coat.

I’m away up to Scotland on Wednesday, for a few days. I may learn to spin! If on my return, and having finished ‘Harvey’, I’m still distracted, maybe I’ll buy that cotton - after all, there’s only a small matter of 16 new designs to attend to. I’m hoping the crush will wear off, as they so often do, and that by then I’ll be enamoured with my own adventures in yarn once more.

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Carol Ann Duffy

---

Poetry reading by Grace's Poppies via Cara.

The 'jewel' at the point of the shawl is my biggest error: a rather sweet beaded stitchmarker, a memento of my absent-mindedness, knitted in to the shawl. My hands just did not want to take the wire cutters to it - so it can remain, until Mother finds it annoying and snips it out herself.

Earlier on in the progress of the shawl, when working the Lily-of-the-Valley chart, I was given cause to again acknowledge that I am not one to struggle to execute 'P5togs' and the like. Life is too short to walk, eyes open, into such a vale of tears. My method for working the nupps was as follows: K into front, back, front, back of stitch. Return all 4 sts to L needle. K 2 tog twice. Lift the first of these sts over the second and off R needle. Nupp complete. The attentive among you may note that this creates a four- rather than five-stitch nupp, but this is easy to work and not, I believe, to the detriment of the appearance.

Yesterday I girded my loins to tackle Dad's cardigan. Armed with your words of caution, wisdom gleaned from past experience, and expressions of concern, I swatched, readying to experiment with feed dogs, tension, and scissors. While knitting, a comment niggled the back of my mind. I looked long and hard at the offending seams. Jaws had said, "If it doesn't create too much bulk… you could also split the old seam open after you've put the new one in, and spread the excess away from the new seam, and do some sort of internal reinforcement."

The original seams were carefully opened, and re-mattress-stitched to the correct measurements. At that point I could have zig-zag stitched on the machine and cut away the excess - but it seemed quicker, easier, even neater to steam and press the new seam open, and catch the excess down against the inside of the body pieces with a few discrete stitches. Maybe it was the coward's route, but my first adventure in sewing and cutting fabric knit by my own fair hand awaits another day.

I am pleased with the result, and delighted to be rid at last of this albatross. I'm also very much looking forward to seeing dear Dad cuddled up inside it, in time for the cold snap predicted for this week. If I'm very kind, and his mood is very good, he may even deign to model it for a Fashionable Life photo shoot.

Christmas is long enough passed that I can talk about it again (it feels like months ago already). I promised to show some of the gift knits, so here's the run down. Many are still unfinished. Sigh.

The youngest siblings got (from L to R) a stripy cashmerino scarf, and two berets. One is the tweed beret from winter 2006 IK, and the other is Kate Gilbert's from an earlier IK, which I made back in February. All were very well received - the only really difficult part was persuading the twins to stop fighting each other long enough to take their picture. Fourteen. It's a delightful age. And they're still fairly evenly matched in size and strength.

This lovely cardigan is the cover design from Debbie Bliss Simply Soft, and it knit up very quickly in DB Cashmerino Chunky. Not quickly enough to be finished in time for my sister's birthday on Christmas Eve, but enough to buy another bundle, in yellow, for a short swingy jacket with big black buttons.

My step-mother seemed pleased with her Flummery socks, and well, we all remember the saga of Dad's present, the cardigan, which I hope will be much improved with new side seams. Thank you so much for all your words of encouragement and advice - I'll be putting them to use this weekend.

This is a Shedir hat, for my step-father, in Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted. He so loves the Here and There cable scarf I made for him last year, I thought something in the same yarn would be a good idea. Honestly, I doubt he will wear the hat as much as he does the scarf, because he already has a quite dashing sheepskin flighter-pilot-type hat, but being bald, there's always room for another layer when it's especially cold. This will be finished in time for his skiing trip this February.

My brother, being a cyclist, would make good use of a neck-warmer, I reasoned. Being a psychologist and a magician, he would appreciate the questionmark fairisle pattern I designed, specially for him. But in his typically frank manner he told me that the jacket he has keeps him quite warm and, questioned further admitted that he doubted he would use a neckwarmer. So of course I could not continue (luckily, I had knitted less than half an inch). It's troubling that I can't think of anything to make for him instead: I can't bring myself to make him socks when I know what a battering they would take.

Finally, the piece which is breaking my heart. In December, I went with Mum to Stash Yarns to pick out some sock yarn for her present. Connoisseur that she is, she immediately picked up a skein of Handmaiden Sea Silk in Sangria (hot orange red with shots of bright pink, coral, yellow), and asked so nicely if she could please have a small scarf made with this instead? The yardage was exactly right for the Swallowtail Shawl in IK Fall 2006 and I made great progress. By Christmas, I had completed all but the last edging chart.

Then, festivities packed up and over with, I picked up the shawl, ready to knit the last chart and cast off. Disaster. I have turned the house upside down and inside out and my copy of the magazine is not to be found. I must turn to you once again. [Thank you Ruth for coming to my assistance!]

Lastly, since I'm posting let me just show you this: it's le Slouch by Wendy. A quick fix of chic: less than an evening's work, less than a full ball of Rowan Scottish Tweed Aran. I was mildly disconcerted to notice that I was wearing the exact same style as an elderly lady cursing loudly to herself in the aisle of a nearby convenience store - but that didn't last long. After all, what is life without a little crazy. Mine has certainly not been without.

It's so difficult to take a photo of oneself in a hat, but really, I just love this one. I'm not usually a 'hat person', but I've been wearing this pretty much non-stop, and getting lots of compliments on it. "Nice hat, Anna". I'm thinking of making another one in blue.

Good knitting, until next time.

I'd like to do a roundup of 2006's knitting too, but for now I need to ask your advice.

Months and months ago, back in April it must have been, I started this cardigan for Dad. I finished it, and tried it on him, and various adjustments needed to be made. It was too wide around the neck, too long in the sleeves. (Do not ask me why - I took meticulous measurements from a favourite cardigan). Much unpicking of ribbing, unzipping of seams, reknitting, ripping, re-reknitting, tears and tantrums later, and the cardigan was tried on for (I hope) the last time on Christmas day. The neck and sleeves all fit much better, but either Dad has shrunk around the middle or the jacket I took measurements has considerably less 'give' that this knitted one, and it is rather too voluminous. Also it needs two more buttons - but that I can manage.

Now my question is this: I lack the emotional strength to rip and reknit the whole body, for the sake of a couple of inches. If this were your predicament, would you machine sew the sideseams, with something resembling an overlocking stitch, and trim away the excess? This would be my first attempt at machine sewing something handknitted. Is this a recipe for disaster? Would a seasoned steeker attack the adjustment without so much as a second thought?

In case it is pertinent, the yarn is Rowan Yorkshire Tweed Aran.

All love and good wishes for 2007,

Anna
x