Meisenwahn

There are few yarns in the knitting world that cause a hype such as those sold by the Wollmeise. A couple of years ago it was still possible to simply go online and order the yarns in the colors you wanted – you could even ask for different shades (light/medium/dark).

Nowadays, you have to be there (online) right on time when the weekly job update happens on Friday mornings. Still, there’s a good change that between the time you manage to put a skein in the color you want into your shopping basket and the time after you dug your credit card out of your purse in the living room, the skein will not be available anymore. This has let to skeins being sold on ebay for ridicules amounts of money. On Ravelry, skeins of Wollmeise being offered in trade are gone within seconds. People downright horde skeins. “My precious” is heard more than once as proud owners cradle their skeins. One might get the impression they are made of gold.

Other than buying online, there are very few places you actually can go and buy this yarn. Here in Germany there is a brick and mortar store in Pfaffenhofen (close to Munich), but this is only open every other weekend or so, which makes going there a little bit difficult for the average working stiff. Except, once per year (I think), the shop is open for a whole week. However, you can’t buy the regular yarn during that week, but only second choice, the ‘unlucky fellows’ (aka ‘Unglücksraben’) that didn’t quite made the cut, may it because the color didn’t quite come out the way they should have, or because there are knots in the skeins, or because the skeins are under weight.

Still, even with those little flaws, the yarn is still very, very pretty.

So, on Thursday, on my way from Frankfurt to Dresden, I took a little detour. What is 300km for some Wollmeise yarn, really? I know of people who fly from the US just to shop there (though, I guess, usually they try to sell it to their family as a jolly good vacation in the lovely country of Germany).

I arrived around 2pm in Pfaffenhofen and quickly found my way to the store. Overwhelmed by wool fumes and assaulted by pretty colors I stumbled back out 45 min later, a good part of my money gone, but with 10 skeins of sock yarn in blues, green, red, honey and white and 2 skeins of lace yarn in blue.

For the lace yarn I plan on making another Featherweight cardigan and the sock yarn calls to being knit into a nice colorful blanket and/or maybe even into socks.

But for now, I’m going to sit next to my pretty new yarn any time I can and pet it a little bit now and then.

General Update

I've now got 329 patches for the scrap sock yarn blanket. I decided to put them together on a bias using off white sock yarn. The reason I picked the white is A) I have at least 4 skeins of it as I bought it a long time ago with the intention of dying it and B) the white is nicely neutral and doesn't swallow the other colors in the blanket. I gave it a try putting five rows together and I do like it a lot. It does curl a little bit at the corners, but I hope with some light blocking this will go away. The stripe is 200cm wide with 16 patches across.

I would love to go on putting those squares together, but as I still have about 150 - 180 patches more to make and I don't know what colors I'll end up with, I had to put a stop on it. It's just too much fun picking up a patch at (more or less) random and see how it goes with the others around it.

Those socks have been finished some time ago, but only now I got around to take the picture.

The yarn is Opal Handpainted in the colorway 'Asien' and the pattern is Spring Forward from an older issue of Knitty.I now wish I had made about a half repeat more on the leg section, but, well, it is what it is. Besides, the left over yarn is already used up in the blanket (you can even see one of the patches in the top picture)

Then, I pulled out my loom again and using up some yarn I bought because I liked the color very much (and it is still a great color), but when the yarn arrived I discovered that it is one of the most scratichest yarns I've ever got and certainly not usuable for socks (I think it was labeled a sock yarn, but I'm not sure now).

Anyway, I added some golden yarn to the mix and going to weave a piece of fabric I then plan to make into a small project bag.

Sockenwollerestedeckeupdate

Update on the scrap sockyarn blanket project.

Last Friday, I put all the patches I've made so far in one big pile and looked at it.

Looks like plenty, I thought.
Then I spread them out on the floor, in mostly random order, into a 15 x 16 patches retangular (plus 4 patches) and looked at it again.

First thought: Pretty!
Second thought: This is not enough, damn.
Measuring I get about 132 cm across the 15 patches, which is not quite the 180 x 220cm I'm aiming for.
*Sigh*
Back to the crocheting.

One question remains, though. My original plan was to crochet all those patches together using black sockyarn, but looking on the patches lying on the ground like this, I wonder if I should use something lighter in color. I'm thinking of an off-white or cream.
And suggestions?

Canada Vacation - Post 05 - Stuff

Just Stuff that somehow didn't fit into the other posts.

The streets of St. John's
The entrance to the harbour of St. John's (aka the Narrows)

Our ferry from Argentia to North Sydney

Moose advertisment:

Actual moose:

Canada Vacation - Post 04 - Birds

Seagulls, Puffins and Gannets, oh my!

Black-legged Kittiwakes:
Puffins:

And gannets:

Canada Vacation - Post 03 - Landscapes

Sometimes bad weather (as in wind and fog) has an advantage. Take a rocky coastline, add some atmospheric mist in the air. Some wind for the waves, and one has a fantastic picture.


Well, one of the reasons we went to Newfoundland was because the Northcoast is also known as 'Iceberg Alley' as during spring and early summer the icebergs that have broken off months ago from the glaciers in Greenland travel along the coast and can be seen from land. At least in theory. During the time we've been on the island, however, icebergs had been rather scarce. We only got about three and for two of thoe we had to take a boat tour.

The advantage of taking a boat tour is that you can get really close to the bergs and see details you just can't get from land.

One of the icebergs even had a guest.
One more typical picture.

Canada Vacation - Post 02 - Lighthouses

I've always have loved lighthouses. I'm not sure what it is that calls to me, but if I know there's a lighthouse somewhere I will try to get there and make a picture of it.

The first one pictured, is actually the last one I took a photo of. It is the lighthouse in Peggy's Cove and quite posibly the most fotographed lighthouse in Novo Scotia, is not in all of Canada. It was Canada Day (1st of July) and our last day in Canada. Luckily we arrived early enough to beat the crowds. The weather was brilliant and it was for the first time in three weeks we actually saw a clear blue sky.

This lighthouse (and the sky behind it) is more typical for what we had for most of the trip. It is the light house in Cow's Head on the West coast of Newfoundland.

This lighthouse is the one in Cape Spear, the Eastern most point in North America. Again is was foggy and the first sound we heard when we arrived there was the deep bass of the foghorn blowing every minute or so. This is actually the new lighthouse there, there's another historical building a few meters away that is the original lighthouse.

The funniest lighthouse (in my opinion) was this one in Bonavista. This is the more traditional style of lighthouses, where the lighthouse is actually more of a house for the lighthouse keeper and his family living on the premise. Today, all the lighthouses are automaticized (is that a word?), though, so no lighthouse keepers needed anymore.
This last building is obviously not a lighthouse. This is the Cabot Tower in St. John's, marking the place John Cabot on St. John's Day 1497 (24th June) set foot for the first time on North American soil.
This place is interesting for at least one more historical reason. It is the place where in 1901 Guglielmo Marconi received first wireless transatlantic signal from Cornwall in England, basically jump starting the modern communication age.

Canada Vacation - Post 01 - Nova Scotia

Some may have wondered why I haven't posted anything for the last three weeks (some may not have wondered, because they knew). I've been away on vacation to Canada. A friend and I rented a motorhome and went from Halifax to Newfoundland and back.

When we arrived in Halifax, the weather was great, nice and warm.

The Clocktower in Halifax:

We went down to the harbourfront and took a tour on the Harbour Hopper, going through downtown Halifax and then into the harbour itself.

Of course we also saw tugboat Theodore Too (isn't he just too cute - he got his own tv-show)

The next day we picked up our camper. It also had started to rain, which was pretty much the mode for the next 2 1/2 weeks. If it wasn't raining is was foggy or windy.

Compared to some others we saw on the road he was downright smallish, but for us he was just the right size. When we returned him, we had driven more than 5000 km.

Before heading to the ferry and up to Newfoundland, we drove along the Cabot Trail, a very beautiful strech of road on Cape Brenton Island.

From the trail we saw quite a few times fishermen pulling up lobster baskets full of yummy North Atlantic lobsters.

Of course, it didn't us long before the first lobster landed in our cooking pot (though, we didn't go for life lobster. I don't think either of us could have manage the kill the poor thing by drowning it in boiling water - we left that dirty job to others)

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.