Kirchentag

Last week the Deutsche Evangelischer Kirchentag (German Evangelical Church Congress) took place in Dresden. I had to work most days, but on Thursday I took the tram downtown and immerge myself into the going ons.

Most participants did wear green scraves, but it looks like Mr. Luther thought he looks better in pink (it certainly is a nice touch of color)


The streets were pretty growded. Taking a car downtown would have been a excercise in futility. Most people got around on foot or with a bike, though for the more adventures one also could choose a horse drawn carriage.

Music could be found on every street corner.


And, if you were at the right time at the right place, one could brush elbows with the famous and powerful.
The gentleman in the center is Christian Wulff, the President of Germany. He might not be as powerful as some other president, or even our Chancellor, but he's still our head of state. I knew he had been at the Kirchentag the day before, so when I saw the car with this special licence plate, I took a guess on who might show up eventually.
When he came out of the hotel and saw the growd waiting for him on the other side of the street (which was as close as we've been allowed to go), he came over and shook hands.

116

... patches I've made on the new blanket.

It's a rather wild mixture, so I will have to see how it turns out in the end. I concentrated on blues and greens last week, but guess I will have to dip into the reds soon. Currently I guestimate I'll need 500 patches all in all, for a afghan 25 x 20 patches, which would make it 225cm x 180cm (more or less), big enough to cover my queen size bed.

Kusha Kusha

The Kusha Kusha scarf is one of those immensly popular pattern (there are currently 643 projects on ravelry alone) that is extremely simple to knit up and has a quick, interesting result. It is worked from a stainless steel/silk yarn (if you can call something that is the thickness of human hair yarn, that is) together with a soft wool lace yarn, and, once finished knitting, gently fulled (or felted, what ever you prefer to call it)

The process of fulling gives, a) a sturdy body to the whole project, b) takes care that the whole think lays flat (it's knit in stocking stitch, which normally leads to curling on the edges), c) adds warms to the whole thing and, finally, d) softens the whole thing considerably.

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to wear it to, but it's super light and rather pretty.

I might dye it though, as the grey is a bit on the boring side. I aimed for elegant, but it didn't turn quite out that way.

With the Iceland afghan out of the way, I've started a new big, long term project. The idea is to finally use up my pile of left over sock yarn. Having discovered recently that I like to crochet once in a while, I started a patchwork blanket. The pattern is available for free from drops and once you have the five row pattern down, it's super simple.

I've already made about 30 of those patches and they work up really fast. It is fantastically portable (a small ball of yarn, a crochet hook, that's all). Going through my bag with left over yarn, I've noticed I've got a lot of reds - I'm not so sure I want to go that way, but for now I've got still enough other colors.

Iceland Afghan in Moritzburg

Last weekend I finished the latest afghan in my collection. It is knitted with yarn I've bought mostly in Iceland two years ago, originally planned to be used for a cardigan. The yarn is Lett Lopi, it comes in a billion different colors and is dirt cheap (especially in Iceland).
Eventually I decided to not do the cardi and knit a blanket instead. I added a few more skeins of different colors to match the original set and started knitting.


Each square is 24 stitches wide and 48 row long in garder stitch. I used a little bit under 2 skeins for 7 squares, so in the end the blanket / afghan came out as 9 x 7 squares. For the border I used another 2 skeins. I made a really, really long circular needle by connecting three cables from an interchangable needle set. With this circular needle I picked up around 770 stitches all around, then I increased by two stitches in every corner every other row.
When I got the the cast of, I held my breath if the yarn would be enough. I wouldn't have been, if not for some pieces of scrap yarn I pulled out of my trash (it was on the top, and I washed it before I sliced it to the rest, so the yuck factor was not too bad). In the end I had about 10cm left *phew*

The afghan is super cushy.
I dragged it out to the castle in Moritzburg the other day for a photo session (spot the afghan in the picture ;))



I'm madly, deeply in love with that afghan. I do love everything about it.

And it's mine.
All MINE!

To knit, to crochet, to weave

Knitting: The Kusha-Kusha scarf. Interesting concept with using steel/silk yarn together with normal wool. The wool is going to be felted once the scarf is done.


Weaving: I'm trying to weave a wrap-faced band. Normally an inkle loom is used for this, but I thought I give it a try on my rigid heddle loom. So far, so good.


I also wove a scarf using Noro Kureyon sock yarn. Weaving with that yarn has its challenges, mostly because the wrap broke serveral times. The colors, though, make more than up for that.

Crocheting (or, as some people call it: hooking): I'm using up some stash yarn. By my calculations I might be able to get up to 100 of those patches (I've got 8 so far) - eehr, correction, I should get 50 patches, not 100. I've got 250gr of the yarn and 8 patches weigh 40gr, ergo, 50 (minus maybe one or two due to snipping off ends)

Not sure what I'm going to do with them once they're done. I baby blanket (which, given I don't know any babys is maybe a bit useless), a pillow or maybe a bag.

Registration

With ravelry it's fairly easy to keep track of one's stash. This is quite useful when one is not at home and needs to do a quick check if you have this or that yarn or if you have enough of it.


When my mom gave me all that yarn a short while ago, I decided when I have the time to finally update my stash.
So, today, I put all of my yarn into one room, and started to go through it and try to get it into some order. I also set up a little photo studio (a white piece of paper taped to the wall, my camera on the tripod) and took a picture of every yarn that had not been registered so far. All in all, I took about 50 pics, though not every one of those was actually new stuff (new in the sense that I didn't have it before. Some of the yarn I've added was bought more than 30 years ago).

After updating the list in ravelry, I now know that I have 106 different yarns in my stash. I also have 41664 meters of yarn to work with. This is more than 40km!!!
... and this doesn't even include the cottons and the uni colored sock yarn. I just couldn't be bothered with those.

One should think this is enough yarn to keep me busy for a while and I certainly don't need to buy any more yarn in the foreseeable future.
I'm not so sure of this, though ;)

She Smiles

It's been a while since I updated the last time on Queen Nefertiti back in December.

She now has a mouth and also a good part of her neck is done.

Quick Update

My mom is cleaning out her cupboards, so a whole bunch of yarn and stitching material has come my way. There are several individual balls of yarn I have no idea what to do with, but I'm sure eventually something will come up. For the stitching threads (there's cotton and wool) I'm thinking of weaving, but so far that's only a pretty vague idea. As already mentioned the last time, I've finished the Dawn shawl. It looks quite lovely and is surprisingly warm for something so thin. Lately I've came across a nice pattern for a short sleeved cardigan I thought would look good on me. In my stash I've found a yarn I think works well with the pattern. I thought I might have enough of the yarn to finish the cardigan as written in the pattern, but I have the feeling it will be a bit short.

As the cardi is knitted top down I've now stopped working on the body and decided to finish the arms first. This way I can use up every scrape of yarn I've got to make it as long a possible. Keep your fingers crossed it will be enough.

Break Out

Seemingly over night, summer has broken out here, pretty much skipping spring in the process. I feels like only last week it was freezing, and suddenly people left and right throw off their winter clothing and got out to the ice cafes to sit in the sun getting sun burned. You almost can watch how the leaves and the blossoms work their way out of their winter shell, dibbing the world in fresh colors of green, yellow and pink. Every bicyle in Germany has been pulled out of winter storage and people who haven't had any excercise in the last six month bike or jog or nordic walk through nature. Barbeques are pulled out and the smell of burned meat mixes with the scent of flowers. Yup, it's spring. On the knitting/weaving front, I've finished the retangular blue and red scarf. It's blocking in the other room, but I hope to get some pictures soon. I've started another pair of socks from 'Socken aus aller Welt'. This pattern is called 'Kieler Sprotte'. It's not that I think I'm going to need socks soon, but it's always good to have something small and portable on the needles. Finding other uses for sock yarn, I wove this scarf with various left over sock yarns in blue and green (more blue than green though). I'm not so happy with the drape of the scarf - even after washing, the material is somewhat stiff - but the colors are to die for.

Call of the Wild

Close to Hanau in Klein-Auheim is the Alte Fasanerie, a kind of zoological park in a natural environment with mostly local fauna. The park was founded more than 400 years ago, though at this time is was not open to the public and instead was used to raise and keep animals the rich and famous could then hunt for fun.

I have some vague memories of going there when I was a kid and I actually believe there is some super 8 footage of me and my family being there, but I think it's been a good 30 years if not longer since I've visited.

I've had a couple of days off this week and the weather was gorgeous, so I decided to pull out my camera and and see if I could get a couple of good shots in. When I was there yesterday I saw that the park also has a falconry which offers shows once a day. As I had no time for it yesterday, I decided to come back today and have a second go.

Before the show you could get pretty close to the birds and they (at least most of them) obliged to pose for photos.

Not for the first time, I realized that getting a good photo of a bird in flight is damn hard. But with a sufficient amount of tries, at least one or two had had to come out all right.

One of the main reasons I went for the park was that I read an article the other day that the wild boar now had their young and if the weather was nice and warm enough, they would get the little ones out.

The park also has a group of three lynx. Yesterday they proved to be rather lazy, but luckily today they were far more active (in case you're worried, they one on the right is washing the face of the other one. Really, it was adorable)

The grooming didn't last long, though and soon they were chasing each other around the enclosure. While I was watching, one suddenly jumped a good three meters up a tree and made itself comfortable up there.

The wolves, on the other hand were not exactly active. But if you look like this one, you don't need to.
They also have a group of three polar wolves. A lady I was talking to, told me they had a little concert earlier in the day, but in the afternoon they mostly enjoyed the sun and didn't do much.

Search for the Right Angle

Remember one of my Works in Progress from two weeks ago?

I don't have a pattern for the shawl and try to muddle my way to something that looks sort of like what I want.
The problem I have with this is that when you decrease on both sides while knitting stocking stitch, it will not result in a 90 degree angle, in something a bit pointier than I'd like.
Through trial and error (and a little bit of actual thinking) I figured a decrease in every right-side row PLUS a decrease in every third wrong-side row (a total of four decreases in six rows), should get me the angle I'm looking for.
Looks like I've got it sort of right now.



However, as my first attempt (as seen in the previous post) was not what I wanted, I frogged the other side. Not being one to waste perfectly good yarn, I wrapped them all in nice little balls.


As I actually will knit less rows now to get to the end (the stripes are somewhat narrower now), I should be fine.

I'll see.

Meissen

The town of Meissen is about 25km away from Dresden, situated on the banks of the river Elbe. It is probably most famous for the Meissener porcelain, the first high-quality porcelain that was ever made outside of China and the orient.

Founded over a 1000 years ago, it sports a large castle (the Albrechtsburg) and a nice old town center. Within the confines of the Albrechtsburg is also the old cathedral.



I took a tour around the place. I might not be a devote church goer anymore, but I still admire the architecture.
One of my favorite things in the Albrechtsburg were the many little details, like the iron door knocker and the old door handle. I also took a dozen pictures of the floors, with their repeating patterns (though showing them would sort of overload this blog today)

However, what loved most, was the spiral staircase in the Albrechtsburg. I just love those things, and finally I got a decent picture of one. I think I might blow that one up and hang it on my wall.

Works in Progress

As a knitter, I almost never have only one project going. Usually I have at least one small, portable project, like a sock. Then I may have a a long term project, one I can pick up any time, knit a little bit on it, and then go one to something a bit more interesting. I also like to have one project, which is more or less mindless TV knitting, where the fingers know what to do and I can concentrate on whatever is going on on the scree. Sometimes I also have a proper project, like a sweater or a cardigan. Those are usually more of an investment in time and money. And then I like myself some lace knitting, or fair ilses, which is a challenge and demands more attention.
Of course, any of those projects can be a combination of the above mentioned things. Mindless TV sock knitting - can be done. A lacy, complicated sweater - no problem.

Right now, I have those projects ongoing:
Dawn is a pattern in a book I don't possess. When I saw the pictures I thought it would be simple enough to figure out how it's done. I started and all looked fine, but now I have a problem. The angle on the left hand side should be a right angle. But it's not. And I should have known that before. When you decrease every other row when knitting garter stitch (knit back and forward), THEN you get a right angle. But when you decrease every other row when knitting stocking stitch, you don't get a right angle. That's because stocking stitch has a different row to stitch count. If you take a square of a stocking stitch knit fabric, you will have more rows from top to bottom than stitched from left to right. Unlike garter, where the row count is almost the same as the stitch count.
So, what to do?
I guess I'm going to rib up that section beginning at the darkest stripe and knit that part again but doing some decreases also on the wrong side of the fabric. Maybe every sixth row. Only problem with that is, that I then will get narrower stripes than before.
Ah, well, I will see. As the 'small portable' project I have a pair of fingerless glowes. That is, it's not a pair yet, but only one glove. That one glove, on the other hand (pardon that pun), I seriously love. Nice, tight fit and the yarn (a 100% merino) is super soft.

In the 'not really knitting' category, I've got a nother weaving project on the loom. This may, or may not, turn in to a kitchen towel. It is narrower than I hoped it would be, so the dimensions are off, but on the other side, nobody ever said a kitchen towel can't be long and narrow, right?

Then, I have actually one finished project, which are the Feuerland socks for my mom. The fit and have gotten the latex dots one the sole for better grip, so they will be handed over as soon as I see my parents again.