I am officially done with the thesis that has repeatedly been referred to as the f***ing thesis! I handed it in today. I feel free as a bird.
This means that my 8-year career as a university student is over, at least for now. I've enjoyed it but I sure as hell won't miss the guilt trips over weekends taken off. Now I can just knit on, free of worries. Yeehaw!
I'm off to drink beer. Have a great evening!
More than one person has pointed out to me that my stash reduction strategy could be better. There were the wristers that I knit with ultra lightweight wool (not good for grammage) and then the fact that I seem to be only knitting very small items, like socks on 2 mm needles. A certain someone said that I should be cranking out sweaters and getting serious with the grams. The problem is that so far I haven't been stashing sweater yarn. I have difficulties in buying huge quantities of yarn without a pattern or idea in mind, so I always end up stashing either sock or shawl yarns. Managable quantities, you know, always useable. The only sweater yarn I've stashed is the heathered green Nalle that I used for the Bubble pullover. I do have enough of that left for another sweater, but it would be weird to knit two sweaters in a row using the same yarn. Wouldn't it?
But I agree. A pair of anklets on 2mm needles,
a pair of knee-highs on 2 mm needles,
wrist warmers on 1.5 mm needles,
a pair of Selbu mittens on 1.5 mm needles,
and a mohair stole (what's up with the yardage of that mohair stuff? It's endless),
are not exactly going to bring the weight loss very high up, considering how much time each of these projects take. But here's the thing. I'll be shipping all the stuff home and in shipping it's all about volume, not weight. So actually my strategy is very sensible, now that I think about it!
After some heel trouble, I got my Hedera's back on track and finished. As I mentioned, it was under Terhi's influence that I started these socks and as I have now discovered, her influence didn't stop there. After I had taken pictures and uploaded them to flickr I was browsing the Cookie A group pool and bumped into Terhi's photo of her sock. In her photo, the background is a woven rag rug and now look at my photo:
creepy, or what? Incidentally the background rug was my first project in the weaving class I took this winter.
This brings the stash reduction to 1394 g. The only downside of the project was that Koigu and the 2 mm KnitPicks needles didn't go too well together. Koigu is a little bit stiff before washing, and as it's thicker than many sock yarns, knitting it on 2 mm steel needles was a bit hard on the hands. Still, I love the outcome so who cares!
The funniest thing happened last week. Did you know that big companies that publish textbooks send copies of their books around to professors and teachers at universities? It's an advertising trick. For the past two years I've been responsible for a first year physics course at HUT and my name was listed in the study guide as the organizer (which made me proud enough to cut out the page, I collect stuff like that). One day last week, when I got to work, there was a big package from Wiley on my desk, and inside? Fundamentals of Physics, a rather popular textbook in basic physics. It was hilarious. I mean, I'm a lousy graduate student, not a fancy professor. Looking at amazon.com I noticed that the book costs a freaking $110 so now I'm thinking, hey, maybe I should try to sell it! It's not as if I need another book about Newton's laws.
But onto other, more important books. I recently got Favorite Mittens by Robin Hansen from the fabulous postman. There's a bunch of nice patterns in there, but the first one to really catch me was the one for Chipman's check wristers. I used some leftover plötulopi singles from my last lopi cardigan. Now, I know that lopi is very lightweight, but this project proved to me just how lightweight it actually is, and I was truly impressed. The pattern notes tell you that you'll need 64.5 g of the main color and 25 g of the contrast color, now guess how much I used! Less than half, or 28 g of the MC and 12 g of the CC. Isn't that quite amazing?
Specs:
This brings the stash reduction to 1308 g. The wristers are warm as hell so I don't think they'll be wearable for the next few months. It doesn't matter much since I think they're going to the gift basket and will end up as someone's birthday present. I've sort of already decided who.
Yesterday evening, the Eurovision song contest finals were held in Helsinki. I didn't have a ticket for the show but went instead down to the Senate Square, along with 50.000 other people, to watch the contest on a big screen. It was fun!
But onto today's small project.
Last year I was in Germany and bought some yarn, of course. Among the yarn I bought were two skeins of self-striping Regia sock yarn which I've never really felt like using. I'm not the biggest fan of self-striping or self-patterning yarns. In my efforts to reduce the stash, and especially use up yarn that I'm less thrilled about, I took one of the self-striping skeins and knitted up a pair of socks.
Specs:
I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised when I found that I actually quite like these socks. That'll teach me not to pass jugdement too early. This brings the stash usage up to 1268 g.
I have a bunch of smaller projects finished that I haven't blogged about so I'm hoping that for the next few days I'll get them photographed and onto the blog, which seems to be starving!
First up is a pair of pretty socks. These are designed by Cassie and she kindly sent me the pattern to test knit.
The yarn I used is very lightweight and extremely soft, making a pair of luxury socks that I'll be careful about wearing as I don't think it'll hold up well to friction. I love the pattern, it's easy to memorize the lace and produces such pretty results.
This brings the stash usage up to 1190 g. I went last weekend to a local yarn shop and bought a whole bunch of yarn, probably just as much as I have used from the stash. You might think that I have broken some sort of yarn diet, but that's not the case at all! This effort of knitting from stash was in fact designed so that I could buy lots of nice yarns that I can get here but not in Iceland. The idea is to knit up the not so special yarns to replace them with oh so special yarns. Good plan, right?
This week I got an invitation to join the Selbuvotter pool on flickr. I've knit mittens which are in a similar style as Selbu mittens, but never done the real thing. So, of course I took the invitation as a dare to knit original Selbu mittens.
I had some Rauma Gammelserie (2-ply wool) in the stash, actually from when I ordered a booklet with Selbu mitten patterns - you had to buy wool to get the booklet. I chose a pattern from Håndplagg and cast on. I remember that when I got the Rauma yarn I wasn't too impressed. It's a little ... rough, and I can get plenty of rough wool without ordering it from abroad. But as the mitten grew, I grew to like the yarn more and more. It's sticky and fuzzy and the knitted fabric has a felted feel, and I think it suits these mittens very well.
I'm really enjoying the process of knitting them. I'm using 1.5 mm (US000) needles and ... well ... there's something about those tiny little stitches, you know.
