There has been a bit more knitting going on here - some on the train, some in the café, and some at home... which means my current project #1, Vodka Lemonade, does have almost two sleeves now:



I've opted to do the sleeves earlier than the pattern states (which, as usual, lets you knit the sleeves once the body is finished), as I was so annoyed about having the large, heavy rest of the thing hanging around when I was knitting the sleeves on Moyen Age. There's still a bit of residual annoyance with this now, but it's not as bad by far - and I'll find out how much the sleeves will annoy me when I knit the rest of the body.

The brioche stitch travel knitting needs some loving attention with an awake brain at the moment, as I have managed to drop a stitch and now need to figure out how to get it back up into line again... which is not as straightforward in two-colour brioche as it is in normal knitting.

While we're at the topic of knitting, here's the record of train delays as documented in a scarf by a woman commuting in Germany.

It's time for a link roundup again - here you go:

In German: Why a bicycle manufacturer sends his bicycles in cartons with a TV printed on them.

There's a knitting card game on Kickstarter - where you can knit (virtually, and thus much faster than in real life) objects based on actual existing patterns, with actual existing yarns. The video doesn't show much about how the game is played, but if you are into knitting and card games, it might be interesting for you.

Medieval Histories has an article about Viking dress, more specifically: about royal Viking dress.

BBC has an article about women explorers in the 19th century craze for getting mummies and related artefacts out of Egypt and into museums and collections... and modern researchers as well.

Anne Marie Decker has put her presentation about "Charting the Nalbinding of the Nile" online. If you're interested at all in nalbinding, do take a look at this - if only for the pictures!

So... I've swatched (to get an idea of how to do the brioching thing), I've cast on, and I've made sure the travel project actually does fit the "travel project requirement" - which is, coincidentally, "fitting into the project bag".



You can see all the stuff that lives in there, permanently or temporarily. Permanent inhabitants are: measuring tape, a pencil (with eraser endcap), a needle gauge/ruler, endcaps for the interchangeable needle cables, a bit of string, my row-counting ring, the little bag for stitch holders and darning needles and cable needles, and last but of course not least an emergency cookie and emergency chocolate. (You never know.)

Non-permanent residents are the needles for the current project, the yarns for it and the printed instructions (or in some cases, when the instructions are on my phone only, a bit of paper to scribble notes on).

Unfortunately, the bag is not bigger on the inside, probably because it's the Exploding Tardis motif and not the proper, normal, intact one.

In any case, to be deemed a travel project, the thing has to fit inside. In this case, it just does:



So. Train pastime - checked.



And since this is rather slow, meditative knitting, I will surely not run out!

 

While my honeypot Vodka Lemonade is progressing nicely - I'm a bit below arm separation now, and it's mostly plain stockinette for the moment, nice, breezy, easygoing knitting - it really is too cumbersome to take along on a train trip now.

So I spent a little time on Ravelry in search of a nice portable project, preferrably some kind of scarf that would be reversible. (Speaking of reversible, here's a fun little article about how to make reversible cables. Which is sort of genius - I'll have to try this one day!) After a while of looking, I finally found a shawl pattern called "Arabian Nights"... something using two-colour brioche stitch, worked flat. Aaah. New things to figure out!

Brioche stitch, for those of you not clued into that yet, is a combination of slipped stitches and yarnovers. It makes a reversible, rib-like, cushy fabric. Worked in two colours, you get the one colour as knit-looking on one side and purl-looking on the other side... which is something I find very nice in general, and the Arabian Nights pattern looks mesmerizing to me with this effect. Here's a tutorial in case you are curious on how to knit brioche in two colours. The downside? Much as in illusion knitting, you need to work two rows to get one visible row, unless you do wild shenanigans.

Anyway, I'm now going to find out a bit more about this, and fiddle with it a little so I can have a project with me when I travel to Liège on Friday. One needs to fill one's work breaks somehow, right?

I mentioned knitting being done in those past days, right? Well, here is the current status of the result of knitting:



That is "Vodka Lemonade" by Thea Colman, a cardigan with raglan sleeves, knit from the top down. I'm using Margit's naturally-dyed "Understatement" yarn, and the colourway is called "Honigtopf" (honeypot).

I'm already looking forward to wearing this thing, both the feel and the texture are just so nice! There will, however, be need for something additional, small, for my needles for the upcoming travel to Méry, where I won't want to lug along a half-finished cardigan...

(There's still a very few spaces left, by the way - so if you want to join in at the Weekend Weaving Workshop, you still can!)

My current holiday knitting has finally been finished! Now winter can come (it was a scarf).

It is actually already blocked and the (two) ends are sewn in, so it really is finished and not just in the "finished but not completely so" stage that a lot of my knits spend a while in.

And because knitting progress is much nicer in pics... here you go:



This is what came off the needles - and the tiny ball of yarn is what was left. I modified it a tiny bit by leaving out one of the repeats of the middle section, though in retrospective I could have done that and still have one or two repeats of the last section - this way, I have three of the last section. Also good.

This scarf was supposed to measure about 150-160 cm in length after blocking, with about 20 cm of width.

Well...



Mine turned out more than 2 m long, and significantly wider than 20 cm. So I now have a really long, really wide scarf.

 
(I also realised that blocking a plain straight edge is better done from the middle outwards than from one side... made a huge difference. One day I will learn how to block, I'm sure.)



It is a really nice scarf/stole, and it was nice to knit as well. The pattern is Siren Song by Louise Zass-Bangham, yarn was my handspun.



One happy knitter.

There has been holiday knitting, and there has been non-holiday knitting.

The difference between those categories, by the way, is that holiday knitting has to be

a) easy enough to be worked on trains, buses, and planes, so no utterly elaborate lace or other things that require me to look into instructions all the time,

b) a large enough project to make sure it will last the whole of the holidays, yet

c) small enough (or divisible into small enough parts) for me to take along.

Non-holiday knitting does not need to be any of this. Now an almost-finished cardi definitely does not fall under holiday knitting, so Cushing Isle stayed at home, where it has seen some more action now. So much action, in fact, that both sleeves are now finished and have been blocked.



As you can see, I'm still not the Queen of Blocking Things To The Same Size On The First Try... they did get to be similarly sized, though, eventually, and now they are waiting to be seamed up. Then they will be waiting for the button bands to be finished (I'm still picking up stitches for that), and then, eventually again, there will be a new cardi in my wardrobe.

Which is nice - because there's the next project already waiting!