knackeredpsycho

Perspective.

Last night a work colleague passed away. She was young. She worked way too hard. She tried to accommodate many unreasonable requests for her time. She dealt with rudeness and impatience with grace.

Last week she had a stroke. Last night she passed away.

Life is too short to spend it doing things you think you should instead of the things you wanted to.

Take action. Prioritize what you love. Don’t let others tell you what your focus should be. In your heart you know what it is. Do that.

Life is too precious to play compromise with it.

So the chaos is starting to subside – boxes are being emptied, only to be reoccupied by my cat – a massive Maine Coon who fills a banana box on her own and has assumed they have been emptied for her benefit. My daughter also grabbed four of the boxes to create her own rocket, complete with jet boosters (made from Smirnoff boxes we got from the supermarket, which makes it look a bit like someone needs to call social services.

The kitchen looks brilliant, and now makes the rest of my home look awful and so we are going to crack on with redecorating, renovating and frankly just plain cleaning the rest of the house. Small person wants to bring her friends over for play dates, and at the moment only the mummies trusted not to be too judgemental have been allowed over the threshold. Small wants her next birthday party to be at home. So the clock is ticking if this miracle of home organisation and cleanliness is to be achieved in time…

On the crochet front, as promised I have a new pattern out on Ravelry. Its the DK Dizzy Socks, and I am so thrilled with how they have come out. I will be honest, I would have never attempted crochet socks without a nudge from someone else, as I tend to associate them with the very talented Sarra from Magpie and Goblin who makes the most brilliant crochet sock patterns on top of everything else this wonder woman does. But Sam from Unbelievawool asked if I could come up with something similar to the knitted sock patterns she had designed, and I fancied a challenge. I expected to come back with a ‘no’, but in the end I just decided to follow the same process as a top down knitted sock and it seemed to work. They are so comfy, but I now really need to work up a pair in the beautiful merino Sam dyed for them. I can see some in people’s Christmas stockings this year!

A nice distraction

knitting, patterns, technique, yarn

It has been chaos here at Knackered Psycho HQ whilst some (much need) home renovations are going on. The kitchen is the main focus. Some would say it is just a very expensive excuse for replacing my microwave following the now infamous ‘blue dye’ incident, when my friend and I (in a desperate attempt to exhaust some blue dye we had used on some yarn) heated the bowl of yarn until it exploded. Top tip kids – leave blue dye to the professionals!

Anyway, my yarn room has become a dumping ground for the contents of my kitchen (along with every other room in the house), and I have taken solace in learning how to brioche knit. When I was at Wonderwool, I met the lady behind Coop Knits, and she was wearing an amazing brioche wrap that she had made with yarn scraps. The texture of brioche knitting is so tactile and colourful and I was desperate to give it a go.

After starting and ripping back five failed attempts I finally got my head around it and now I am totally addicted. I am making a Stephen West briochexplosion wrap using blue yarn dyed for me (I learned my lesson) by Rox of Lollipop Guild Yarns, and various yarns by Hutch of Dye Candy. The effect is exactly what I was hoping for and so far (touch wood) I haven’t screwed it up too badly. I can’t wait to get it finished.

My next post will be a reveal of a new crochet pattern – something I probably would never have tried to make without prompting, but I am so pleased with it. Watch this space!

Nidhogg Shawl

crochet, patterns, Shawls, Uncategorized

Shawl 5 of Shawl Club came out about a week ago, and it is the Nidhogg Shawl. It got its name from a conversation with Hutch of Dye Candy, who commented that an early prototype looked like a dragon’s wing.

There is already a well known Dragon’s wing pattern on Ravelry so I needed a new name. With a bit of googling I came across the Nidhogg, a Norse dragon who apparently gnawed on the bodies of horrible people. For some reason that appealed to me (can’t think why…!).

Anyway, Sam dyed two colourways for this shawl – a green and black one, and a purple / red and black one, which sadly I don’t have to show you. I love this shawl – it is really adaptable to different tensions and styles. It also suits being made in softer colours and can be worn as a shallow scarf rather than a large shawl. Its all in the tension, the amount of yarn, and how much you want to block it. I love the texture it has, and it is a relatively straightforward repeat. It is just an asymmetric triangle, so you increase on one side only to get the shape. You can also add a thicker stripe down one edge with the border yarn, or leave the border off altogether.

Neglect!

baby, crochet, patterns

Hello folks. I hope you are all still out there!

Where do I start? The last two weeks have steamrollered me. Work has rapidly picked up pace and I have become a glassy-eyed work drone. Get up, get washed, get child up, dressed and out the door to school, go to work, attend back-to-back meetings (each one generating actions that I am unable to act on because I have another meeting to go to), run from work to car in blind panic, collect child and attempt to be semi-functional parent (or when possible stay late in attempt to be semi-functional work colleague), feed child, put child to bed, make a cuppa, stare at WIP bag, knit two rows of a sock, give up, go to bed. And repeat.

Child says “Mummy, tomorrow try to sneak out from your meeting a leeettle bit earlier.”

Sigh.

Today I am frozen with guilt. I have a chapter to write which should take me a month and needs to take me about four hours, as that is all I have available to me. I am being kind to myself in the hope that the muse will find me if I can relax a bit. Writer’s guilt stops me from picking up my hook to crack on with things I need to do. But tomorrow we will see Grandpa, and that will be OK. I will get some time to hook in the car. I have been asked by Sam to see if I can come up with a pattern for something other than a shawl for a nice change and I am enjoying the challenge of it. That will be my treat at the end of all this. Plus there is a yarn sale online tonight, and I plan to treat myself there too. Not a big splurge. Just a skein for a specific project I am hoping to knit as the nights draw in.

So, I need a bit of time to reset the head. I feel I have nothing to show for my labours at work this month so I am going to invest more time making. Yes, it’s time I don’t have, but it is time I can at least share with the small person. I can make things for her. Show her that I love her.

In other news, my great, yarn cataloguing friend, has her baby last weekend and he is beautiful. Just perfect. It reminds me of when my one was small. I was learning to crochet at the time and I would spend the quiet hours of nursing and holding her trying to make granny squares. I feel like I have come a long way, but I often wish I had those quiet, child-cuddling and crocheting hours back.

A few of my favourite things…

knitting, socks, yarn

Yesterday I had happy post. As regular readers will know, I have been on a yarn ban since Fibre East to try to get my stash down to respectable levels. However, temptation is all around and sometimes I see something that I can’t resist because it is in ‘my’ colours. Step forward Lady Margolotta by Helen at Bare Threads. I love blacks, and purples and blues and there they all were, perfectly combined. It was late at night. I was browsing Etsy after a long and tiring week back at work. I was weak. It spoke to me. I was good, and stopped at just the one skein, even though Helen’s shop had others that I would have loved to buy.

In the same late night Etsy session, I also was looking at Down the Rabbit Hole – a shop that sells nerdy jewellery (this is a good thing). She had a sale on. And I saw this.

It is a serotonin molecule. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter linked to feelings of happiness and reduced levels of it are implicated in a range of psychological conditions, including depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. So as a psychologist, and as a human being, serotonin is pretty significant so I fell for that necklace too.

So both things arrived on Saturday and I felt pretty happy, and I starting thinking about my other favourite things. My logo I still absolutely love, even though the brain isn’t quite as it should be, but somehow that makes it more appropriate as most of the time I am sure my brain isn’t wired the way it should be. In particular it doesn’t have a motor cortex. If you have seen how clumsy I am, you would wonder if I do too.

The mug is a favourite thing too, not least because it contains tea. I drink tea constantly. And I do mean constantly. It is a miracle I achieve anything really between trips to the kettle or the loo. But it is a daily ritual that makes me feel settled and content and that is no bad thing. Tea is a comforting thing when everything else is crazy. Including me.

Finally, something else that makes me happy is seeing my makes going to a new home where they are loved. Today I gave a pair of slouchy slox to a friend of mine, and she seems to genuinely adore them. I got this picture of them on her toes tonight. I feel like a superhero. My work here is done.

All Change…

crochet, knitting, Shawls, socks, yarn

Small person is now at school. After a blissfully long period away from work, chaos ensues. The working day has been chopped and changed to try to fit everything in around the new routine of the school day because I don’t want small person to be stuck in after school clubs unless we really have no alternative, or because there is something she really wants to stay late to do. To be honest, I think we are doing better than I thought that we might, but already I can see that the only way I am going to get everything done this month for the day job is going to be through some very late ones where I can sneak them in. Small person is coping well, other than having a strained lunchtime relationship with a boy who claims to be allergic to peas. My insights into her world are often piecemeal and a bit surreal…

A random positive from this is that now that I am back at work I am now into the routine of crocheting in the car on the way into and out of work (not when I am driving, obviously), and to and from work meetings on the train. These regular but shortish bouts keep me on track, which is just as well as I need to test some of the shawl projects that will come out later this year, as well as crack on with some birthday and Christmas presents. I have a lot of knitting to get through on that front, so little and often will be the way to go. I think everyone will be getting socks this year…

That includes me. Maybe. I decided I needed a treat so I am working on these slox in a yarn by Made by Jude. I haven’t bought her yarns before but I saw this yarn in Etsy and fell in love with the colours in it. It has worked up even better than I dared to hope. I even have a little flame up one side of my heel. I am hoping I can replicate this colour pooling on sock number 2! Not sure whether to keep them or not but I think I will, just for a change. The response to them on my Facebook page has been great though, and I think I need to explore more of Jude’s yarns. The depth of colour in the yarn is just beautiful.

Taking Refuge in Tea

crochet, patterns, scarves, Shawls, yarn

Well, today has been one of those landmark days that I have been trying not to think about. My small person had her last day at nursery today. They had a little party planned so we parents all packed them off this morning with cake and other sources of sugar, deposited them at the nursery door, and ran before anyone could get too emotional or before the nursery staff realised how much sugar the children were due to consume and tried to call us all back. I was kind. I put booze in the teachers’ goody bags to get them through it.

While I have been on leave I have taken to nipping to Toft once a week for a brew and some crochet time, and my friend has started to join me. Toft is pretty local to me so it is a nice place to go and hang out and they don’t look at you strangely if you get out a hook and start crocheting as that, after all, is what they are all about. Today I headed there to distract myself from the events of the day, and indulge in my other daily ritual / obsession – tea drinking. I take tea drinking to Olympic levels, and have to regulate my intake. Most of it is driven by the ritual of doing something comforting, and so tea and yarn go hand-in-hand for me. Plus a cheeky cake. Nom nom. They do a fine brew and chew at Toft. Plus you get to say hello to their adorable alpacas and fondle yarn.

Toft Studio is a barn conversion with a cafe at one end, a workshop space at the other, and lots of yarn and other knitting and hooking goodies in the middle. It has the most peaceful atmosphere and the friendliest staff working there. You feel welcome there, and welcome to linger. I don’t make many toys, although I do have a copy of Edward’s Menagerie, but I have made one of the Toft shawls. It was in a fine alpaca and silk mix yarn (which was a so-and-so to frog when you needed to fix a mistake), worked on a tiny 2.5mm hook, but the finished scarf looks amazing (much better than these pictures would suggest) and it is one of my favourite makes, even though it was one of my early projects and therefore full of mistakes.

Anyway, back to today. I managed to finish the new version of the Christmas shawl (minus edging) and get that on the blocking wires before I headed out for my cuppa. So I was bathed in an air of mild smugness that only comes from finally nailing something that was on the to do list. Fruit crumble shortbread was in order. With tea. I think this habit of going there once a week is one I am going to try to maintain when I am back at work. It has been good for my soul.

I have test shawls to make for the pattern photos, but other than that I feel on top of my ‘must do’ commitments. The problem I now have is that I am itching to either make something totally new so I can challenge myself a bit, or something that is just as a treat for me (i.e. socks in one of the special yarns I have been keeping for just such an occasion). I am not sure which way I will wobble. I probably just need to find the right thing in my masses of books and patterns. And a brew will probably help too.

The Frogathon

crochet, patterns, Shawls, yarn

So this week hasn’t quite been the hive of creativity that I had hoped it would be. On the positive front, I have finished Shawl Number 6 and I am really pleased with how it has come out, and Shawl Number 5 has come back from the pattern testers with a thumbs up and only minor tweaks and so all I have to do now is one final check of that one and it will be ready for uploading.

On the less productive front, I finished and then frogged the Christmas Shawl I was working up. The pattern was getting very complex and the finished product was a bit too flouncy and old fashioned. I like traditional shawls, but this was just a bit meh. So I sat and re-balled the whole skein I had just used, slept on it, and came up with something much better. I am now whizzing through this new one and it is much better. Phew.

Frogging and generally screwing up a good idea is an essential part of my design processes. I often start something full of enthusiasm and high expectation only to find myself staring at it after each row, worried that it isn’t working, or that parts of it seem ok but others are not, and the decision to either frog or even bin the thing has to be taken. I don’t bin very often, but there are various abandoned projects around my room, like this wrap (see below) that I started and had to give up on. I kept what was left because I liked to colour mix, and I liked some parts of the stitch pattern, and I wanted to remember that. What I need is a big yarn scrapbook to stick these remnants into.

But messing up a good idea, or accepting that the idea wasn’t good enough in the first place, is always a good thing in the end. It makes me focus on what doesn’t work, and the brief of what I am supposed to be doing, rather than going all self-indulgent. And goodness knows that I am self-indulgent enough in other ways. You just have to look at my stash to know that.

I was planning to get some garment designs nailed this week but I just haven’t had the time. Lots of family stuff and a small person who just seems to be in overdrive at the moment means that I haven’t managed to achieve the list of 1000 jobs I had set myself. Anyway, I have some more time before I have to go back to work for playing with yarn. I will see what I can achieve in this short time. Maybe I will get the Moo-Ra pattern out finally (still need to type up the updated version) and a few other bits. But I have to remind myself that this isn’t a race. I will get it all done eventually. I just need to be patient with myself.

Sketching with Yarn…

Uncategorized

So last week was all about roughing out some new shawl designs, but I have been trying to reflect a bit on how I go about coming up with a design. It has been pretty hard to pin shown, as I guess most creative processes are. It is also a pretty personal process and so this is just how I manage to do it and I am sure it is a process that I will refine as I do more of it.

I tend to start off with a bit of a concept that I am trying to explore. Often I will sketch out (usually on a piece of scrap paper with a biro) the type of shawl (or other garment) that I want to try to achieve. I have a think about the stitches I could use to achieve the shape or to create some texture in the pattern. At that point I have to grab some yarn and a hook and start to play with some opening stitches.

At this point the yarn tends to inform how the pattern and shape of the shawl will develop. Often I succeed in recreating in yarn the design I had in my head, but somehow it lacks interest once it is made up, and I will end up frogging the work to start again. Free-styling stitches until I find a combination that pleases me seems to be the best way to develop a project. It feels a lot like I am still sketching, but with yarn rather than with pen and paper.

Once I have a few rows nailed I can start to write up the instructions for the pattern as I go. I have to work a few rows at a time, as sometimes you realise that Row 10 isn’t working because of something about Row 8 which needs to be tweaked. For the shawls in particular what I am aiming for is to find a set of rows which can be repeated (and memorised) and which will maintain the shape and texture that I want to achieve.

I don’t always have a fixed shape for the shawl in my head. I like to try out different shapes, just to see how easy they are, and sometimes I will see how the shape develops as the shawl grows I enjoy playing with the overall shape of the shawl and the shapes I can create within it. I try to keep the stitches fairly straightforward so that a beginner could achieve the final project. Often it is the use of hand-dyed or variegated yarn that makes a pattern look special, or the use of colours (as in the Beating Heart Wrap), rather than the complexity of the pattern.

I wish naming shawls came a little easier to me. I find that part really hard. It is hard not to come up with something really obvious or really naff. So here is my challenge to you: give me some new shawl concepts to work with by suggesting some names that could inspire me to create a shawl around them. Maybe that way it will be easier, and you can join me on my creative fumblings!

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Author: knackeredpsycho