Book Review - Jane Blonde: Sensational Spylet

I find there is something a little special about going back to a book you loved as a child, and reading it through adult eyes again.

When moving out of my parents house, I had a chance to go back through my belongings and sort out what I was going to take with me and what was to go and find a new home. I have always had a love for books, so had a good few to look through to see what I wanted to bring with me. Among those books was the series of books about a school girl spy, Jane Blonde.

These books caught my imagination when I was a young girl at school, and from the little I remembered of them, they were fun and exciting to read back then. These feelings were brought back to me when I pulled the books off the bookshelf and I decided to read through them again, in order from the beginning. My memory of what actually happened in the books was very clouded, only remembering little bits here and there, so I was excited to get reading. Once I had started I really was hooked and chapter after chapter just kept on coming. What I enjoyed was that the book, by its nature written for children, was incredibly easy to read and was finished quite quickly. 

The story line, while a little bit far fetched for the real world - but who really cares in a children's book, or one about spies in general! - it did have some really touching parts which brought about emotions that I don't recall feeling when I was reading the book as a child. I enjoyed the way that you could see the story developing, and every next twist and turn you could see being built up and drawing on the things that had happened already. Because of this I feel even more attached to the series, a book written seriously about something completely unserious.

I really have enjoyed reading this book back through as an adult, and am going to love working my way back through the series. Even for a book aimed at people a lot younger than me, it will be an enjoyment for sure.

Finished Object - A Leftover Shorty Sock

After Ripping out my Arbor Vitae Jumper, I felt like I needed something new to work on. I wasn't really feeling like I wanted to make much of what I already had on the needles and was itching for something else. The thought of a family weekend away looming, got me thinking about train knitting and knitting that could be done when chatting to other people and being social. So I decided on a sock. In the back of my mind I was still feeling the need to work through what I had, so I decided it was time for another leftovers sock.

The leftovers sock is something I have been doing with the leftover yarn when I have been knitting other pairs of socks, be them for myself or other people. I will make one shorty from the yarn, the remainder of that ball will be wound up and put with my other scraps. I find it's a nice way to have a reminder of all the socks that I have knit before, especially if they have been for a gift.

So in my draw of bits of projects and things, I found the leftovers of the pair of socks I knitted for my Dad (Ravelry Page, Blog Post). I then had a look at what needles I had free and my set of Knitpro 2.5mm DPNs were empty, so that was the plan made. They were packed up into a bag and taken with me when I set off on my journey to see my family.

I cast them on in a coffee shop whilst waiting for my train, with 60 stitches, and I started on the cuff. I worked them top down and knit an inch of 2x2 ribbing. I had forgotten to bring a ruler or tape measure with me, so I knitted the length of the top portion of my thumb, I measured the length of the ribbing when I got home. It's nice to know I have an inch long thumb section - makes for easy quick measuring!

I knitted a plain knit round after the ribbing before starting on the heel. It was a german short row heel, the easiest I find to remember. I knitted the foot until it was about an inch and half below the top of my big toe then I started the toe of the sock. Quite a few of the shorty socks I've made before have a habit of slipping down my foot during the day, which is probably down to them being a little too short. So after I finished the toe decreases, I added two straight knit rounds, and then grafted it together.

Overall I am pretty pleased with the outcome, it was made really quite quick, (less than a week!) and the fit is really good, better than previous attempts. Maybe I should play around a little bit more with my leftovers socks. I'm feeling the creativity right now, so I may have to go cast on another!

A Lesson in Gauge - The Arbor Vitae Jumper

My Best Friend Trying the Jumper on.

The progress I've been making on my Arbor Vitae Jumper has been stopped and the jumper almost completely ripped back, and on purpose too. The jumper had a complete body, and I had started on the first of the sleeves, having done the short row sleeve cap and just started to work in the round for the main part of the sleeve. When I got to that point I decided to try on the jumper to see how the sleeve was doing. I had tried the jumper on before when I had completed the body and the neckband, but back then I didn't think much about the bottom ribbing of the jumper being a little loose - Admittedly when I tried it on the first time I was on the train and at risk of looking more then a little odd, so didn't keep the jumper on that long!

This time I really noticed the loose-ness of the jumper, and it got me thinking about how I wanted the jumper to sit, and how often was I going to wear it if it didn't have the characteristics that I wanted. It was then that I decided that it was too big for me, and it might be an idea to start over again. Now I didn't know that much about gauge and swatching. I did swatch for this project, and I knew that my gauge was larger, but my inexperience with it all lead me to believe that it would only be an inch or so larger than it was meant to be. I also didn't really know what to do with the gauge information once I had got it.

Luckily when doing some research I managed to come across a few websites explaining gauge swatching in more depth then I had really looked for before. The For Dummies website (here) was more of a help then anything I had found before. It gives a brilliant run down of what you need to do, followed by a little bit of maths to work out the size of the knitting using the gauge and the stitch count. This came in really handy, and had my little geek brain all excited to be doing a little bit of maths to help out my knitting.

My best friend tried on my jumper when I was working out a little bit of the maths before I started frogging. She is a few sizes bigger than me and it fitted her almost perfectly. Shame it wasn't for her!
I worked out in the end that the jumper was about eleven inches too big, just a little too large for my liking. The second gauge swatch I did with a 2.5mm needle, which was the smaller needle size used for the ribbing and such in the pattern. My gauge was a little closer, but unfortunately not as close as it needed to be. We were looking at a gauge of 7 stitches per inch pattern gauge and 5.5 stitches per inch my gauge. With the maths all worked out, if I knit the smallest size, the outcome would only be a little bit bigger than it should be (actually an inch bigger, not eleven!) so I went with that, worrying that any smaller of a needle and then I might end up with a fabric which has a feel I don't like as much.

The Arbor Vitae, three months in progress, and only an hour to frog completely. I wasn't as sad as I thought I would have been ripping it out. I know that the yarn is a nice yarn that has a meaning to me, and the pattern is one that I feel I will enjoy wearing. So I am quite pleased to be able to have a second chance at getting it right, one of the things that I love about knitting.

So as the phoenix rises from the ashes, I have cast on and started the Arbor Vitae again, this time on a smaller needle and in a smaller size. But also with a much better understanding of gauge and how it affects the knit, and what to do about it when it isn't what you want. I feel so much better for finally understanding gauge, and I think I do feel a little bit differently about swatching now. I think I will enjoy it a lot more.

Book Review - What If?

This Christmas the boyfriend did good, with a selection of books which I am pretty excited to get my teeth into. The first being the book What If? by Randall Munroe. I wanted to finish reading this book in the new year, so it would become my first finished book of the year. But I had several long train journeys and it was a rather addictive book. Sam told me I was cheating anyway...

The book is based off the authors website https://what-if.xkcd.com/ (it is brilliant, go check it out) which was a favourite of mine a few years ago, but had slipped out of my mind. The basis of the website is that people submit their wonderful, whacky and hypothetical questions, that get answered with science  and research from across the globe. I find them very amusing and love the nerdy science part of it as well. The book takes some of the best questions that have been asked and puts them into print, with a couple of strange and unanswered ones for good measure.

It was a really enjoyable read, it made me laugh out loud and was really quite educational, without being too confusing or patronising. Broken down into individual questions and answers it was perfect pick-up-put-down book that was readable in bite sized chunks. Always perfect for any occasion.

I've decided to give number rating books a miss for now. I'm struggling to work out an intuitive system that works for every kind of book. I've decided that I will just give my thoughts and opinions for now, until I find the right thing.