It’s funny, for the whole of October I was looking forward to November and getting really organised about my blogging and knowing what I was going to say every day and planning in advance and scheduling posts. You know how it is – it’s like your Ravelry queue of all those things you really are going to make one day and you even have the supplies for and ooh, look, the pattern all printed out.
Except when it comes to it, you pick everything up and there’s something not quite right about the whole thing. It’s how I feel about my current project, and it’s how I’m now feeling about my grand blog plans. I’m quite enjoying winging it each day, writing what comes into my head and generally making it up as I go along. I’ve always done my best work while improvising, and I’m loving just sharing snippets, the odds and ends as they come to me.
Sadly, I’m not loving the project I showed you yesterday. It’s not the technique, which is unusual and interesting, and it’s not the yarn, which is springy and lovely. It’s that somehow, they just don’t go together. I’ve gone up a couple of hook sizes, frogged a couple of times and re-started, but it’s just not happening.
BTW, it’s not normal Tunisian, which I’ve done quite a bit of. Aoibhe uses a very unusual method, whereby your Tunisian ‘rows’ are the stitches, so you get long vertical stitches worked using a normal hook and Tunisian technique, and they’re worked into a chain or stitch foundation. It’s not so slow once you get in the swing of it, but it’s just too fiddly for me at the moment, and I don’t think the yarn likes it very much. The pattern I’m doing needs something much, much smoother, preferably with no halo at all, so that the stitch definition is much stronger. If you want to know more about Aoibhe’s Tunisian lace technique, I heartily recommend her video here
Sometimes, you just have to admit it and move on to something else. One of the reason I picked this yarn is that I’m taking part in a challenge in the Yarn Yarn Ravelry group. It’s a yearlong challenge to knit through the rainbow. We started in September with red, for which I’ve entered my Boteh scarf. Now we’re onto orange, and I’m determined to use this yarn to make something. The problem is that I’ve been determined to crochet with it and I think it wants to be knitted. I’m going to give crochet one more go with this pattern, but if it doesn’t work, I’ll be back for some advice on what I should be making instead!
Oh, and it’s not the only square peg in a round hole today:
To be fair, Sainsburys never promised that the handle of the brush would be square all the way down, but even so, I can’t help feeling that it’s going to look rather odd when (if! the screw is on wonky) we get it put together. Based on recent experience, I would be very, very cautious about ordering from Sainsburys online for non-food stuff again, and only do it if I absolutely have to. Definitely not impressed!
Made in Oxford 
It sounds very like linked stitches. There was a discussion about these and how similar they are to Tunisian in the Ravelry Tunisian group. I love Aoibhe Ni’s shawls, one day I shall probably treat myself to Venus, that’s the one I keep admiring, though I might try Pax first.
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