"Craft" fair

On Saturday I went to a sewing and craft fair with my mother. She was looking to expand her stash of quilt materials and I was having a look see for some ribbons for tassles.

Mostly it's scrap booking .... acres and acres of scrap booking. I do not understand scrap booking. Is it a photo album? Is it a diary? What's with all the stickers? Don't get me wrong, I found my old sticker collection (scratch and sniff's do not age well) and it was huge, I have nothing against stickers but why put them in a book on top of other pieces of paper? I just do not understand the appeal.

Of course I have my share of totally useless hobbies (see large cross stich works which take 12 months to complete) so should not throw stones.

However despite the scrapbook theme to the day I did succeed in getting some tapestry to canvas to restore the pipetable backing. Or rather create a new backing and then start to recreate the old one. The pipetable is a family hierloom and probably a bit over 100yrs old (could be as old as 150yrs) and the back is a hand embroidered (by my mum's paternal grandmother) Norwegian style motif. It's completely faded now, and parts of it are rotting (or just disintegrating) - the back however is still in reasonable shape so I hope to be able to recreate the pattern and colours from that. Despite searching the interweb I have not found much in the way of information on traditional Noggi embroidery... of course I haven't.

In the meantime however I will start work on a new backing - I have found two motifs from the arts and crafts movement that will look ok I think. So at Christmas I will be measuring up and starting work.

Is it a bad sign that the lady at the canvas stall called me very brave? Or is she just lacking in vision?

To fail and fail again

When instructions say they are failproof, or simple or any adjective indicating that success is a cert you can be certain of one thing ... and that is that it will not go to plan.

I wanted a slouchy beret shaped hat thingy to go with the socks I made for K. The socks by the way were difficult and I changed some stuff in the instructions but they've worked - so I am not a knitting dunce. So there. However, the hat instructions were simple, knitting it from the top in the round would avoid all that messy tinkering at the end. To make it warm I added a thread of green alpaca to the sock yarn (Sweden is cold in winter) which matches the colour way and gives it a mottled rather than stripey effect. All seemed well as I cast on and fiddled a bit with the first few increases. Then I lost a needle (still haven't found it) which proved challenging as I now had more stitches than the needles could realistically cope with. I improvised with a long needle (not a good idea). The instructions called for a number of decreases before you got to the end ribbing and this seemed like a fab idea, giving the hat some shape. I cast off, tried it on and realised I had made the equivalent of a head bucket. A very shallow bucket. It's so depressing I couldn't take a picture.

This failure puzzled me. I went back over the instructions and decided that I must have got something wrong. Ripping it back without understanding what to do to correct matters struck me as foolish so as it was a fast knit I cast on for a purple hat for myself (also with sock yarn and alpaca). I knitted this one on bigger needles (can you see where things might go wrong here?) and more slouchy. I decreased before the ribbing as before (taking notes) and cast off. The 'hat' would not even go on my head. It is far too small. Now either I expect to make the same mistake especially when I go out of my way to exagerrate the problems (bigger needles people, more increases!!!) or that following the instructions will leave me with something wearable. Making an entirely different type of failure is not helping me figure out the first one.

So I ripped back hat the 2nd and reknitted the end and cast off and now it sodding fits. I am no closer to understanding why the first one did not work. grumble guess i'll just rip it back and reknit humpf