WIPs (A.K.A. Playing Catch Up: the June & July Edition)

It's been a while since I've done much knitting or the like, or so it feels, so I'm glad I finally have something to post. Let's start out with the good news: I'm knitting a lot out of my stash!

Warning: this is going to be pretty long.

Is there such a thing as too many flounces? I think I might be hitting that point.

Mokoshi is very well-written & easy to follow, so it's not the designer's fault mine turned out rather loose. I know the reason, at least: my gauge was way off, in addition to which my gauge swatch lied to me (it's actually surprising it fits at all and isn't two times as large as it is!), so even though I tried to compensate for it, I compensated incorrectly. Knowing what I do now, I would definitely make the smallest size next time, maybe even scaling it down one more size from there. That being said, I'm not sure whether it's supposed to be this loose or if it's because I chose the wrong size/used the wrong yarn & needle size combo (went down a needle size to accommodate the linen of the Louet Euroflax). I can live with the positive ease though.

See that middle back bit that's coming out where my hands are? That's all extra!

What I'm really not 100% sold on right now is the second flounce at the bottom. Am I pushing it a bit with this super voluminous detail? And should I compound what might be an egregious decision - keeping the second flounce - by following the pattern for the fluttery cap sleeves too? I'm overstating it a bit, because I actually like it a lot, and it's just that frills aren't too much in my wardrobe at all. So it's just a question of whether to remove the second layer or not, and whether to knit the flutter sleeves or make them long sleeves with one layer of light frill at the end, in the fashion of eritml.

Vestigial, in colourway Starry Night - pretty fitting, no?

Socks! For me! Finally! Using that Eden Cottage Yarns BFL Sock that I purchased in England a while back! I've knit a pair of socks before, but they didn't really fit well and they felt pretty half-baked, to tell the truth, so I've stayed away from them till now. But no more! Apart from the slightly tight cast-on for the first sock, these fit me so well I want to wear them all the time, never mind that it's summer right now with humidexes upward of 40C some days. Truth be told, the BFL isn't as soft as I'm used to with my socks, being a bit prickly and all. I'm not sure whether that's because of the heat or if it's the fiber though. What I am positive about is that I will much appreciate these once winter rolls around.

I knit Vestigial, which is a free pattern and coincidentally offers only one size. I also could not spot where the gauge was listed in the pattern itself - I might just be blind though - so thank goodness they fit! I'm pretty smitten with the finished socks, so I'd say it was worth blindly following the pattern this time.

No pictures of the finished Summer Bralette yet. There may never be.

I set about translating the Summer Bralette pattern from Swedish - thank you Google translate! - the day it came out, cast on the day after, and finished the day after that, only to realize it was waaaaaayyy too loose. Needless to say, I didn't do a gauge swatch in between any of those steps, and although there was a nagging suspicion that the size looked way too large, I figured I might as well finish it and see what to change the second time around. The first try came out with positive ease. Not what you want from this pattern! So I got rid of the 16cm of garter stitch at the beginning & end (reducing it to 4 rows each), changed to a provisional CO, cast on half the stitches for the straps (50sts instead of 100 - I tried 75sts the first time and it was still too much), then did a 3-needle BO to the provisionally CO sts.

I do want to make a note, in case anyone else is using Google translate. It actually does a pretty good job with translating the pattern, except for some misleading parts: where it says "purl", it actually means to "knit" (you want stockinette for the most part), and when it says to "have 16 stitches wormed"/"bind off 16 stitches", it actually means that 16 stitches have already been bound off, so don't bind off another 16!

Not very good depiction of the lace here either though.

I've also started on a vintage sweater pattern that has an allover lace pattern, which the photo depicting said sweater does not actually depict at all. You can vaguely make out there's lace, but you can't for the life of you tell what the lace pattern looks like. And now you do, though admittedly not much clearer. Knitting on 2.0mm needles for a 1x1 rib is a bit torturous though, and I'm not sure I would recommend it to anyone to follow the pattern blindly as I am, especially given the lack of clear gauge - by which I mean I have no idea what the finished garment size is supposed to be, though by my own gauge of 24 sts = 4" in pattern, the finished garment will have +14" ease on me. I'm kind of doing this in good fun to see where it'll take me, but I'd probably want to just recalculate everything and give myself maybe +6" ease total for this. On the upside, I am using the Spellbound Fiber laceweight merino that I got from an installment of Fiberista Club, so that's going to be knit completely from the stash. I might have to supplement it with colourblocked sleeves or maybe the lower 3/4 of the back can be yellow? We'll see how it goes.

Finally decided on what to knit with this Llama Lace!

I waffled a bit with choosing what to knit with this, from Rhaedr to Citron before finally settling on Divinity. I actually cast on for all three of these, and there's nothing wrong with any of the patterns, but it didn't really seem to match the yarn. The cables of Rhaedr looked like they'd be lost (besides which I messed up the cables pretty early on, so I simply didn't try a second time, knowing it wasn't going to be the pattern for this yarn). And while Citron is a tried & true, I wasn't sure the Americo Llama Lace was actually going to be soft enough for my neck, not to mention I noticed I was having some difficulties breathing easily while knitting with it. I'm assuming it's due to all the fibers coming loose from the yarn that I'm subsequently inhaling, but I didn't think putting that yarn anywhere near my face for long periods of time would be a good idea. So I searched high and low for a lacy clothing pattern that I could squeeze out of my 765 yards, and Divinity's been on my list for a while, so that was that.

The one on the right.

And I also knit myself a Hitofude cardigan, which has been in constant use since it came off my needles using the Julie Asselin Merletto (in Cove) I purchased during the Lettuce Knit closing sale. I still don't have any photos of the cardigan itself, which is almost ridiculous, but seeing as it's been on me more often than not, let's excuse the lack of actual photos. Very well written, and I love the construction! Only two ends to weave in, as long as you only used one skein: the CO and the BO.


Now the slightly more painful bits:

Nips & tucks, here and there, left and right.

This has been in this state for about a month or two now. I had grand plans to wear this to the Team Up reception - I didn't make it in time due to some issues with the sewing - and now I have no particular motivation to finish it apart from having it done and out of the way, now. I also cut off a couple of inches from the original pattern, but realized that the hem is way wider than I thought, and looks better wide, so I'm going to have to undo the hem and sew an extra piece on that turns in as the hem. The collar also didn't work out at all, so that plan flew out the window pretty quick, in addition to which the lack of shaping, combined with the cotton fabric I'm using, don't work well together, giving me what looks to be a baby bump. So I've had to add vertical bust & back darts to fix that problem. Maybe if I were using something super smooth or slinky it wouldn't be as much of an issue?

Seamwork Hayden shirt... still in pieces. Crinkled after months of sitting under itself.

... So this is supposed to be Hayden. I'm 98.2% sure (+/- 1.8%) that it's too small for me. It might be a perfect fit if I could ever get it over my head and shove my arms through, but I'd never get it off again. I cut out size 36, which measurements should fit me perfectly. The realization of which got me so down I still haven't sewn it together. In addition to which I belatedly searched up reviews of the pattern and noticed a couple of negative reviews mentioning size & fit issues, so it's probably, sadly, a bust. There's still only one way to find out though. But that would mean I'd have to actually sew it up and face reality to see what I can do to fix it - uhh... cut a larger size? - and that doesn't really appeal to me currently. Now I understand why my very capable friend, Haley, who learned how to knit in an incredibly short frame of time and delved right into lace & cables after some encouragement, felt like dropped stitches and other knitting mishaps like accidental increases or decreases were such big hurdles. I assured her they aren't, at all, so maybe I should just administer the same medicine to myself: suck it up and truck through!

On that same note, I searched up reviews on the Moji pants while I was at it, because those were what I really wanted to make, and found negative reviews concerning the lack of ease in those, too! Now, I can't actually razz on Seamwork patterns just yet since I haven't technically sewn anything from it, but I'm already getting bad vibes because of the reviews, so I've temporarily cancelled my subscription. It's probably for the best, considering how much - how little - sewing I actually do.

Primrose? More like butter!

I've been working on a project inside the confines of my mind that plays with recipe weight ratios and thinking about weaving my interpretation of several recipes up. The yarn is here. I finally got the right shade of yellow for the butter (the first round of yellow might do for Meyer lemons, but it's not butter as far as butter goes in Canada, from what I know). And I have absolutely no excuse to not have even calculated exactly how to warp this up. In fact, by my own timeline, I should have already finished a couple of scarves and started applying for exhibitions and marketplace stalls by this point! Alas.

It appears as though knitting is still my game, with sewing and weaving falling far far behind just now (and spinning having fallen off the radar altogether), which is quite unfortunate, but at least I'm knitting.

Reading May to July

While July hasn't officially ended just yet, I don't think I'm going to be finishing anything more. Possibly Naked Statistics (stats outside of the classroom? I honestly don't know what I was thinking when I put it on my list, but I'm enjoying it so far!), but unfortunately not much more than that. I'm trying to make my way through my seemingly never-ending pile of borrowed material from the library, which never seems to diminish by even one book despite my efforts - I'm sure my continuing to borrow books doesn't help - so that I can finally focus a bit more on my own bookshelf. Meanwhile my own collection continues to grow.

May

1. The Name You Carry - watched on the plane
2. Tic Tak(?) - a short animation on the plane
3. Blood: The Stuff of Life by Lawrence Hill
4. Childhood's End by Arthur Clarke
• See my previous review of it.

June

1. Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid by Wendy Williams
2. SPQR: An History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard
3. The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us by James Pennebaker
4. Bad Blood (Coisa Ruim) (2006)
5. Everyday Sexism by Laura Bates
6. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal
7. A Life in Stitches: Knitting My Way through Love, Loss, and Laughter by Rachael Herron

July

1. The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
2. City of Men (Cidade dos Homens) (2007)
3. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
• It took me a good 3 times trying to watch this film to actually get through it, and the third time I jumped to where I had left off the second time around. Not that it was a bad film, but for some reason or another, I couldn't stay still enough and have this story told to me. Sorry love, but this recommendation I'd say was a miss.
4. Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit by Joseph Epstein
• As with Snobbery, a delightful read. Slightly more self-conscious than in Snobbery, I found, perhaps because of the distasteful notion of gossip, even in this context of trying to discern gossip from the non-gossip.
5. Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis
• I couldn't wait to be done this novel. And I don't say that kindly. I didn't really care about any of the dogs, and the style of writing made it distanced in a way that prevented me from getting into the plot. It was obvious where it was going, and I hate to use this description once more, but the style seems very self-conscious, restrained, and as though trying too hard to be loftier than is within the limits of the author. That could have been done on purpose, as the narrator is hierarchically speaking in terms of the novel above even the gods themselves, but still. I couldn't get into it.
6. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
• Yup. All the while I felt as though I was reading a somewhat more acceptable version of what I assume are Harlequin paperbacks (though I have yet to read one of those) except with a slightly more empowered heroine (who nonetheless has to be saved by her hero many many times, and whose tantrum that once I could not for the life of me understand the inclusion of - oh, and, her prince charming appears at first glance a poor boy, except, surprise! he still has money & land, if only he were to be able to get back possession of it, and now that he's married, if he's gone, it all goes to her! Thank goodness that's settled.). All that as an aside though, since I honestly did enjoy the novel - Gabaldon has a wonderful style of writing - and devoured it within a couple of days.
7. Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat
8. Work Clean by Dan Charnas
• Well done, but nothing I don't already know and/or try to implement. Unfortunately, for me, pretty use.
9. Moon (2009)
• WHOA. Wait what? The description at the back of the DVD case did not prepare me for this at all, in the best of ways. The ending, though, I'm still undecided about.
10. The Thing with Feathers by Noah Strycker
• I didn't realize there were pigeon races. I was also surprised - somewhat disappointed - there wasn't more about corvids in this. I'm biased, of course, being a bit of a fan of that particular subset of birds. Otherwise, a pleasant and sometimes surprising read.
11. The Triumph of Seeds by Thor Hanson
• 100% agree that a career goal has been reached when you get to buy candy bars & coffee and call them work expenses.
12. Animal Farm by George Orwell

I've been trying to re-read The Art of War (Machiavelli), in addition to finish The Fruit, the Tree and the Serprent, not to mention If This is a Woman: Inside Ravensbruck, all of which have been in my possession since before I left in April, to no avail. The newer books have me in thrall whereas the half-finished, half-started ones seem to become less approachable with every passing day, so it's gotten to the point where I'm not sure whether I can even stir myself to finish them up before passing them along.

TEAM UP! a Printmaking Show

Coming to a gallery near you..

Please come join us for the opening reception! Or drop by throughout the exhibition dates anyway if you can't make it for the reception. I'm super excited to see everyone's work, and to get the final portfolio, of course!

Souvenirs, Etc.

Souvenirs.

These are the souvenirs I got my friends while I was in Hong Kong: 3 wooden bug magnets & a gudetama chopstick holder. While I'm sure you can only find these eggs and bugs in HK, it's not as though I would really get bug magnets (from PMQ) and a gudetama chopstick holder for my friends on the regular even if I saw them here. (Gudetama has grown on me. I didn't get the attraction or the reason for his popularity until I saw him every day in the Circle K promotion displays and started desperately wanting to shop at Circle K and collect their stickers just so I could redeem them for gudetama merchandise. That being said, I've been told the reason he's so popular is because he's really existential & consequently lazy, which baffles me... or is it because his reason for laziness reflects the mindset of the people?) One of them - a stone paper notebook - I already sent forth, but these little guys are patiently awaiting their turn since they're rather fragile (ironically, the egg is the sturdiest of them all).

Attention to detail! The little butt delights me. Really, it does.

I did a bit of shopping for myself while I was there as well, the bulk of which came in the form of clothing (subsequently the bulk of which came from Uniqlo, although I hear we're getting one soon in the Eaton Centre space?). In my defence though, half of the clothing I brought back was given to me as hand-me-downs by my aunt after she discovered I would take them.

I got a watch strap replaced at Ap Liu Gai, and it has since been worn continuously after coming back, which is great considering my usual watch has withstood probably over 10 years of use, leading to the many scratches on its face (I wear the face on the inside of my wrist for that one) and signs of wear on the leather strap. I'm sure it'll appreciate some down time.

New watch for rotation, wood mosaic from Hakone, ring from PMQ (with bugs)

There were mosaic woodwork stores everywhere we went in Hakone! Maybe excepting up on the mountain (we walked up to the amazake chaya by the stone paths alternating with the side of the winding roads), but quite literally everywhere else. We even got some wooden postcards, though we were too afraid they'd crack in the mail to send them out.

Books, letter-writing set from Le Petit Prince Museum (Hakone), notebooks, and stationary

I sent out a variety of postcards while I was in both Japan and HK (none of which are pictured since they've since been delivered and hopefully received), and was pleasantly surprised to see some responses once I got home! It's been a really long time since I've actually had letter mail that didn't come from work, the government, or school. So I went on browsing a lot in the stationary areas pretty much whenever I saw them, which also meant I came home with a number of notebooks and memo pads, in addition to a letter-writing set from Le Petit Prince Museum in Hakone (why there's a Le Petit Prince museum in Hakone of all places is beyond me, but I'm not complaining! It was really quite lovely.) and a grand total of one whole book purchased on my entire trip: Fashion & Sustainability: Design for Change. The notebooks I'm going to try at least to justify myself: I'm almost done my moleskine! There's a couple pages left that I'm not sure will ever be filled since I'm obviously ready to move on to a new one at this point. And not because I don't like moleskine; I was originally considering getting the exact same one to replace my current one, but I saw the plethora of choices available to me in HK and decided to try something new. The small red pocket notebook (Muji) came in very handy throughout my vacation as a travel log: it's the perfect pocket size, with a soft cover that gave enough protection against water that I could minimize damage when it threatened to happen. The paper itself I also quite like, since there isn't much tooth to it at all, which made an easy transition from my moleskine.

Presents!

Soon after coming home, I got a bit of a surprise in the mail in the form of books & movies! They're completely outside of my usual fare, and they come on recommendation, so I'm looking forward to making my way through them once I get some free time.* I've been going non-stop from work to going out with friends since coming back, so I didn't hesitate too much when I went out with my mom to get myself a gift:

Gift to self. Nothing to do with my vacation, really.

*I've actually finished reading Childhood's End, and enjoyed it immensely. That being said, I don't know if the style of writing just didn't sit well with me or what, but I found it rather stiff at times on top of being very self-conscious - it was as though Clarke was trying to maintain a certain detached voice but missed the mark just a bit. It might just be that I have grown much too used to different genres and their accompanying styles of writing. Or perhaps it's because the subject matter at hand is not natural as we know it, so why should I expect its mode of delivery to be? (Although I would make the argument that it is natural, in a sense.)

Tai O (HK)

Tai O is one of the many islands in HK that you have to take a ferry to get to. It doesn't take very long - about an hour or so - and there are several stops along the way. It really saddens me to see all the garbage that gets thrown into the water along the harbour, including styrofoam boxes (used for keeping fish, I believe) and lots of plastic bottles:

Styrofoam box on the rocks

Inside of the ferry waiting area

Outside, along the harbour

The main street is packed with food vendors, especially dried seafood stores, and as you continue on along the street, you encounter more and more houses that look as though they're about to crumble, squished between two newer houses or stores with no space in between them, as well as empty lots that were overgrown with plants. While the description sounds really bleak, I think these were absolutely beautiful.

Looking out from a dessert shop (doufu hua & black sesame)

End of the main street, looking back at housing

Breaking down, but beautiful in its own right.

And of course, stilt houses all along the shore. We walked into the streets, but I'm still not sure whether those areas are actually open to the public: they are houses after all.

Stilt houses

And even further along the path (we were the only tourists around), there was some incredibly beautiful scenery to be experienced:

I believe the copper-coloured building was for burning articles (as part of worshipping ancestors)

I wonder who lives in that complex?

Suffice it to say I was enchanted by Tai O. While part of me hopes it never changes, half the island already has higher rise buildings than the areas we walked around, and I'm not sure any amount of wishing will make those buildings stay where they are and leave the rest alone.

If You Miss The Plane I'm On... (Japan)

There are still a couple of rolls of film that have to be developed & printed since we didn't make it in time while we were in HK, but these give a pretty good idea of our stay in Japan, I think.

Beside Tokyo Skytree, the rail at night

Vending machine on our way home

Parking lot on our way home

We stayed in Tokyo for a couple of days at an airbnb, went off to Ito for a day (airbnb again), followed by Hakone for two days and one night (ryoukan), and then back to Tokyo for another two days (returning to the same airbnb), the second of which we left for Hong Kong.

The main street close to where we stayed in Ito

We went off on a day trip in Ito to do a walking tour and see the Jogasaki suspension bridge (which turned out to be about 10 paces to cross) and the surrounding area.

Fisherman out there on the rocks! He wasn't the only one, either, although the other one had a ladder also.

It was about evening when we got back to the station (close to where we stayed), so we walked around the neighbourhood a bit more to get food, taking the chance to check out Orange Beach while we were there. I don't remember whether I had taken any photos of that particular stretch of road or not, since not all the film has been developed yet. A lot of the redscale photos also didn't turn out at all, which I'm pretty miffed about, though you can still make out some of them:

Post offices were basically everywhere we went in Japan.

I'm not sure whether we just happened to notice them while we were in Japan, but we kept seeing post offices wherever we went! Which was great for me since I was sending out postcards, but I wonder if it's so much easier to send out mail/pick up mail because more people use the system than here in Canada? Or perhaps I simply don't use the post offices as much while I'm home (though if one didn't know to find them in Shopper's Drug Marts and the like, it might be pretty hard to locate one).

A store along the street at night where we stayed

We did a LOT of walking in Ito & Hakone, mostly uphill (or at least I don't recall much downhill or even just walking on flat ground... it might be me selectively remembering the hikes, but I think it's pretty representative of our stay there).

Walking up to Moto-Hakone

Stone paths for most of the route

A marker along the path, though I'm not sure it's helping anyone anymore.

The walk up to amazake chaya was stunning! We were blessed with beautiful weather also, so the greens seemed all the more vivid. And all throughout the hike up along the stone paths, I got the feeling I could understand how some of the lovely scenery from the Miyazaki films came about. It'd probably do wonders for my health if I could do that hike every day!

Our destination: amazake chaya

We had our doubts and were tempted a couple times to wait for the bus instead on our hike up, but we ended up walking the entire way to amazake chaya, where the snacks & drinks we ordered disappeared so quickly I had no time to take a picture of them. I don't know if everything tasted better because we had been walking so long, but everything was lovely, from the atmosphere (minus the endless bugs) to the food to the staff. We did take the bus back to our ryoukan though, which was very close to Gora Park.

The vividness of the plants was stunning

The second day, we took a trip to Gora Park (above) and Le Petit Prince museum (below). The museum was darling, and had a bunch of figures of the characters the little prince met on his journey, and at the end, of course, a souvenir shop. There was also a restaurant that we didn't end up trying, but everything just fit together so incredibly well!

Le Petit Prince restaurant inside the mostly open-air museum in Hakone

On our way back to Tokyo that day, we stopped by to see the Odawara castle, where I saw these adorable little guys:

Tiny little offshoots coming out from tree bark!

Try to recognize those next time you go!

Another instalment of photos to come for Hong Kong & Macau.

Chevron Cardigan, Finally.

It's been done for a while now! Long enough to stain a shirt!

Am I even still knitting? Is that a thing?

This took way too long. Even longer to get pictures done.

The button bands have been done for a while and were just waiting to be soaked and blocked to length, before being sewn onto the fronts (see more below), and the neckline (picked up and knitted up) took all of maybe an hour, and that was with 3 failed impromptu attempts. But I finally hunkered down and did the whole sewing of the button bands to the fronts in a day, as well as improvising the neckline because I had run out of buttons and couldn't just knit it straight up.

Perfect fit. Except the arms could have maybe 1-2" more ease.

It's a hot pink-verging-on-red cardigan/bomber jacket-cardigan thing, and I think it will fit very well into my wardrobe (or any wardrobe, really, because this colour would likely go with precisely nothing in particular). I love it. But there are a couple of things I already want to change:

1. WHY DOES THE PATTERN HAVE NO POCKETS? And why did I not think to add them along the way? I realized this little dilemma after I had sewn the body together & tried the thing on to make sure it fit the way I wanted it to - which it did - only to reach down... and find that there was nowhere to place my hands. I guess I'll have to awkwardly hold them beside my body now like a regular person and try not to fidget all day long. So here's my advice to you, if you're considering making this cardigan: add pockets. I would probably make slanted pockets, but that doesn't seem like such a great option right now because it would interfere with the chevron pattern, so maybe even just vertical slit pockets 1/4 of the way into the fronts from the side seams. As it stands, I might just steek pockets into the fronts.
2. For the button bands, I would definitely have just cast on those stitches at the bottom of the fronts & put those stitches on hold. There's really no advantage that I can see with sewing completely separate bands onto the fronts.
3. I might even go so far as to say don't bind off the button bands at the top, instead knitting across while simultaneously picking up the neckband stitches. That way you'll get a smooth transition into the neckband. As it was, I had cut the yarn, so I ended up picking up half the stitches of the button bands, every stitch at the front neck & back neck until the curve started, where I picked up 3/4 of the stitches. Also, along the back, where the shoulder seams are, I only picked up 2 stitches for the first & last 4 bind off stitches. Then 1x1 ribbing up approximately 12 rows, complete with BO 1 at front edges 6 rows before the end, BO 1 & dec. 1 at each front edge, then BO 3 sts, then the final row was just BO all sts. That gave me the curved top of the neckband.

Dark spot of shame: remember to remove your buttons before long soaks!

So in addition to stashbusting this madtosh dk (67g remain), I also stashbusted with the buttons! (Obvs. Just look at how I had to alternate.) I was waffling between these and wooden buttons, but because it turned out more of a cardigan than a coat/jacket, alternating between these two types won out. And as you can see, I clearly ran out and had to use another one that's gold/black and fit in well enough with these two other ones. I think it turned out pretty well!

And of course, my previous rant about this madtosh bleeding scenario. The black that bled out of the buttons seems like it's here to stay. And I'm still not sure whether I can wear this with anything light in colour. Or anything that is any other colour. Which is a pity, because this would look amazing with white.