Tag: knitting

Runners may not give a hoot about this post

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This is one of my purely knitting posts.

She doesn’t know it, but I owe a  debt of gratitude to the lovely Hels for bringing on my knitting skills over the past month. It started when she asked me to knit two garish hats for some newly arrived twins. Although I’ve knitted in the round using double pointed needles and I’ve knitted straight using circular needles, I’d never actually knitted in the round on circular needles (which seems silly now I think about it). To knit the teeny tiny hats (from this pattern), I mastered the ways of the magic loop method. Whilst I did like using DPNs, it’s a little bit like wrestling with an angry hedgehog at times and I suspect that this is one of the reasons that my ongoing sock project has remained ongoing for nearly three years now.

I have discovered that one of the downsides of having big feet is that the foot of the sock takes even longer to knit

Armed with the skills of the magic loop, I announced my intention to knit a Kindle cosy. Now, it might be a hangover from the time I served with the Brownies, but I do like an owl and owls seemed appropriately bookish for this project. Searching Ravelry for a bit of guidance, I ended up going for an amalgamation of this cabled Kindle sleeve and this owl coffee cosy. However, to do this I needed some more new knitting skills – how to do a magic cast on to join the ends of the sleeve and how to cable without using a cable needle (I can barely cable using a cable needle…).

Cabled reverse, no owls. The cosy is nice and stretchy, the flap needed a little bit of blocking to get the correct shape

 

So not only do I have an owlish cosy for my Kindle, but I also have a little stash of new knitting skills to add to my bag.

Completed cover with owl

Oh, and having learned to love magic loop, I went to my nearby lovely wool shop to get some 2.5mm needles only to find that they were out of the long length that I would need. The end result of this is that the owner showed me yet another technique that I had never understood in the past – how to knit in the round using two short circular needles. I did suspect that this may be a ruse to sell me twice as many needles, but it’s so easy that I have actually finished my sock!

One done, one cast on.

I aim to have finished the pair before 2015.

It must be glove

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I have really rubbish circulation in my hands. I’ve had it for years and eventually mentioned it to the doctor on a visit a few months ago. The conversation went something like this.

ME: Um, and I think I might have Raynaud’s phenomenon. Hang on… (fumbles in bag for phone, finds photo of scarily white fingers, shows doctor)
DR: Yes, that definitely looks like it. Do you want to take anything for it?
ME: Not really. I’ll go and knit myself some gloves.
DR: Good idea.

I paraphrase somewhat (mainly so my GP doesn’t get struck off) but that was the gist of it.

I’ve always been somewhat suspicious of fingerless gloves until I tried on a pair of Ginge’s and found that I could still type and do stuff, but without my fingers going numb. With this in mind, I got searching for a pattern. Whilst I can knit on dpns, sometimes I can’t be bothered and I was relieved to find a Sirdar pattern for mittens/gloves/fingerless gloves that is knitted on straight needles. It’s also knitted with 4 ply yarn meaning that I can either put a dent in my stash of sock yarn (I love sock yarn but don’t knit socks) or I have an excuse to knit to buy more sock yarn (did I mention that I love sock yarn but don’t knit socks?).

I bought some gorgeous wool from Knitty City on our trip to New York last May.

The ball on the right became mittens, the ball on the left is a pub knitting work in progress

My plan was to knit something special to remember the holiday and when we got home, I launched myself into a shawl pattern from the book in the photo. I’m not sure what possessed me to knit a shawl and I’m not sure when I would ever wear a shawl, but let’s not worry about that. It was a fairly straightforward pattern repeat and yet I couldn’t get going with it. I’d do a bit, cock it up, start it again, do some more, make a really stupid mistake (like knitting it on completely the wrong size needles for a while), start again… I kept persevering until I had a moment of clarity.

This is as far as I got with the shawl on the nth attempt…

Even though the yarn was lovely and the pattern was lovely, it wasn’t coming together. With knitting, just as in life, sometimes the individual parts are right, but together they just don’t work and no amount of perseverance will force them to do so. What I love about knitting is that you can do this…

Riiiiiiiiiip it right back…

A day or so after I frogged the shawl, I found the glove pattern and thought ‘ah ha!’. Not so long later (it’s a really simple pattern) I had myself a pair of gloves. One is a slightly looser tension because I knitted it straight but on circular needles (to make it more portable), but not so you’d notice. They’re a lovely fit, despite the fact that I have quite big hands (on photos I end up with really long fingers like Nosferatu) and I think they show off the wool much better than the shawl ever would.

Like a woolly Nosferatu

Glovely!

The sweet irony is that when I finished these, I thought it would be a bit unseasonal to blog about them in June (especially as I have some lovely Polaroid sunglasses waiting for a review). However since then, I have worn gloves more than sunnies. In June.

I would like to register a complaint about this.

Juneathon 9/30 – cutting it fine

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Today I played chicken with Juneathon.

My original intention had been to get up early and try to spot a Parkrun t-shirt at Pennington Flash Parkrun. Unfortunately, I overslept. I then realised that I didn’t actually want to do a morning run despite that fact that I was due to have my hair cut at 12. This might be a girl thing, but if I’m having my hair done I don’t like to do anything to mess it up afterwards – I just enjoy basking in the all too brief hours where it has been blow dried by someone who knows what they’re doing. Unfortunately, last time my hair had been cut, I had to have a little cry afterwards and I was absolutely petrified about this appointment (my hair has just about grown out to the length that I wanted two months ago. And my hair grows fast). Anyway, I figured that if it was just as traumatic, I could always go for a run afterwards and see if that helped.

As it was, my hair turned out exactly how I wanted to and I celebrated by buying a new frock and some soup. You’ll notice how none of this counts for Juneathon. I went home, I ate my soup, I mixed up some chocolate and black treacle biscuits from Marian Keyes’ book Saved By Cake, I realised that leaving the page covered in splatters of biscuit mix is bad form when it’s a library book (you can tell all of my favourite recipes by the fact that the pages are like a Jackson Pollock rendered in butter, sugar and flour), I ate the mixture off the spatula more times than I should have done, I did many things. None of which were Juneathon.

One of our local pubs is having it’s annual folk festival this weekend (the weather is always rubbish this weekend, it’s as if god doesn’t like banjos) and I do enjoy embracing my inner folky. Conveniently the pub is bob on a mile away from our house (I know where the half mile markers are located in all directions from our front door) so we pootled up, listened to a nice bit of folky bluegrass and enjoyed a few pints of Hobgoblin (Ginge) and Marston’s Pedigree Diamond (me). Sadly these aren’t local ales for us (they’ll be local to someone though) otherwise I’d be able to tick that one off the list.

Special drinking beer outside gloves – to be blogged about at a later point

There had still been no Juneathon action at this point. I had however made preparations; Miles was in my bag, I was clad in appropriate foundation garments and I was the height of sartorial elegance by wearing running shoes to the pub. Keeping an eye on the clock like Cinderella at the ball, I was playing Juneathon chicken right up to the wire. I wasn’t helped by my last minute nip to the loo being held up by the woman in front of me seemingly having a bladder the size of a zeppelin.

If you look closely, Miles says 23:41

Despite this, I made it – a one mile run (in a surprisingly decent time, all things considered) from the pub (suggested by the Queen of the Athons herself) arriving home with 3 minutes to spare.

In which I actually run THREE TIMES in a week and find that my leg doesn’t drop off

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I don’t know what I did when I had free will and didn’t get blindsided into doing Athons avery few months. Well I do, I chose sofa and didn’t run as much. Since declaring myself as part of Viceathon, I have managed to stick to some kind of plan (although today’s exercise hasn’t been done, so there is a potential weasel on the horizon).

The week has seen an early morning run, a yoga class followed by late night gym, an evening run (which surely would have been otherwise weaselled because I was a bit knackered), a rest day (which was appreciated all the more for being guilt-free) and a nice 6 miler in the brief spell of sunshine that we had yesterday. Today has been declared run or gym, but judging by the steady drizzle, I suspect that I’ll be heading down to the gym.

I did a lamb run the other week, they're lovely - very gambolly.

Happy Easter!

PS: note tiny knitted chicken (from a Mochimochi Land pattern – warning:contains many teeny tiny bunnies…)

Sessions weaselled = 1
Miles run = 12
Minutes gymmed = 45

Wrap Up and Run

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I feel that there been a lovely symmetry to this week. On Friday, I finished a spectacular piece of knitting, namely my Scarf of Doom. The Scarf of Doom is the work of graffiti knitter Deadly Knitshade who was invited onto BBC Breakfast to talk about knitting a few weeks ago. She was asked to knit a bright, chunky scarf while she talked, which she did, only for elements of the online knitting community to be hypercritical of, well, pretty much every aspect of her telly appearance. Her response was one of the most graceful, humorous and quite frankly bloody marvellous things that I’ve ever read (you can read the full story here, please do – my summary doesn’t do it justice).

Knitted with two strands of double-knit on 15mm needles. The wool is from my stash (from the top it was bought for a tea cosy, the same tea cosy, pizza bases, various vegetables, flower petals and beaks, grapes/aubergine)

As someone who responds to the question “So what kind of things do you knit?” with some slightly embarrassed foot shuffling and “Um. Dinosaurs. And um, chickens. And peas. And tiny hats. And stuff….”, I was liberated by Deadly Knitshade’s definition of ‘squeeeee knitting’ (it might be made out of scratchy, fluorescent acrylic yarn, but people look at it, want it and go ‘squeeeeee’). In the spirit of solidarity, it seemed only fitting that I should knit a Scarf of Doom. Also, Deadly Knitshade promised a medal for those who made one. As Ginge will testify, I have a Muttley-like love of medals and the lure of something shiny is all that I need to motivate me for a lot of things.

Monkey's disappointment at not getting another medal was soothed by his new scarf.

Sadly there was no medal on offer on Sunday’s Wrap Up and Run 10K in Southport. This was organised by Age UK to raise awareness and funds to help keep older people warm during the winter months. I entered on a whim this Wednesday, when the weather was balmy and spring-like and I couldn’t help but think that maybe Age UK’s campaign was a little mistimed. Ha. The Met Office promised heavy or light rain and temperatures of around 5˚C (which would feel like 1˚C). When we arrived in Southport, there was a bitter wind that chilled the steady drizzle and resulted in me looking spectacularly grumpy (there is photographic evidence of this. I won’t be sharing it with you).

I was cold enough to consider joining in with the warm up. At my only previous race where there has been a pre-race warm up (Liverpool Women’s 10K) I avoided it because it looked like it required far too much coordination for my paltry skills. Today I muttered darkly about not being here to jump up and down, I like running and if I wanted to do jumping, I would go to…jumping practise (I said I was grumpy). My grudging participation was rewarded by the friendliest, most laid back, random warm up (given that the chap who did it didn’t look like the ‘Camilla’ who had previously been introduced, I suspect he was a last minute replacement) that ended up with him accepting heckled exercise suggestions from the crowd.

The only downside of the warm up was that I landed slightly awkwardly when we were jumping (typical, it turns out that I need that jumping practise after all) and twanged my ankle. As I lined up at the start, I tried to ignore the fact that it felt like a slight sprain (twelve hours later, I had a dull ache and some slight swelling in my right ankle) and concentrated on the task in hand. I haven’t been following a training plan, in fact my running has been a little erratic of late, so I was intrigued to see how I would get on in my pursuit of a sub-60 10K.

Setting off, I was very,very cold. My feet were numb, my hands were freezing. As we ran along the coastal path into the wind, I really started to doubt my sanity. For those of you who don’t know Southport, it is extremely flat and there is a dearth of tropical palm trees to act as a windbreak from the breezes off the Irish Sea. If I’m honest, there’s a lack of anything to act as a windbreak. If I’m completely honest, there’s usually a lack of sea as well. Anyway, I abandoned being able to consult Miles in favour of pulling my sleeves down over my hands in a pathetic attempt to retain some heat. This led to a breakdown in communication between me and Miles as I managed to press his stop button and didn’t realise for what turned out to be about half a mile (when I realised that I had been running 0.69 miles for ages).

I can only apologise to the poor woman with the lovely knitted ear-warmer who I sidled up to and stalked for a bit so that I could get a proper look. And also the very tall man who ran with his feet turned out and I followed because he looked like a hi-vis emperor penguin. Apart from the soul destroying part at 3K where you could see the marker for 4K just to your right, but had to run around the boating lake to get to, the KMs seemed to pass fairly quickly. I felt strong and comfortable and we didn’t always have to run into the wind. At 8K, I ended up grinning like an idiot at the sight and sound of the drummers who welcomed the runners into the home stretch. My legs, trained to keep my feet to the beat with AudioFuel, took on a life of their own and my pace ramped up to 8.34min/mile as I bounced cheerily past them.

The finish line in sight, I managed a bit of a sprint at the end, collected my water, t-shirt and mars bar, was reunited with a well wrapped up Ginge and risked charges of indecent exposure as I changed tops in the car park. I was very pleased to get cosy with my woolly hat, a flask of tea and my Scarf of Doom and within minutes of arriving home, I’d had a text to confirm my chip time as 1.00.31. All in all, it was a rather good morning.

UPDATE: I forgot to credit Ginge with the Southport photography. He definitely manage to capture the bleakness of the day. Though he didn’t manage to capture me flicking the Vs at him during the bouncy warm up.

Throughout March, there are some more Wrap Up and Run races coming up in Coventry, Exeter, Cheshire and Yorkshire – if Southport is anything to go by, I would heartily recommend them no matter what your running experience.