Hearts and Stripes

As announced, I have knitted another mobile-phone cover, and this time it was a blue one with a purple heart. I did some measuring and tinkering with the instructions, and arrived at exactly the right measurements for my phone (a HTC Desire Z, in case anyone is interested). Which was good. Unfortunately, due to my new design some small holes appeared in the thing, exactly at the point where it was the narrowest, and every time I put my phone inside it snagged and the small holes became bigger holes. This must be the reason they suggested you line it with another fabric. Hmmm.
It did not work.
So I decided to make a Third and Ultimate phone-cover-pouch-thing, this time dispensing with any hearts or girlyness, but just making a nice stripey one. I prefer stripes anyway, and there was no chance of pulling any holes in this one. So here we are then...

Three little phone-cover piglets.

You can see how big the first one is by comparison, that would really never have worked with my phone. You can also see how much the second heart is still pulling in the middle, and how the third one has loose ends all over the place. Ah well, I didn't even sew one side together properly, but who cares, it's something I'm going to use, not something I (or anyone else) will put up on a pedestal to admire.

Anyway, in case anyone is interested in how I made the last one; cast on 15 stitches, then alternately knit and purl until you have 76 rows. If you want the stripy thing I did, change colour every 4 rows. Then you knit the first and last stitch of every knit-row together until you are left with 9 stitches (still purling another row after every knit row). End by casting off and sewing the sides together (with more patience than I did). Done!
I dispensed with ironing or pressing this time, because the curly sides go on the inside anyway, and although it makes sewing them together a bit more of a challenge, it is more of a hassle to get your ironing board out than to pay a little attention to what you're doing, I think. And then my final discovery of the day; after doing 3 of these, you get kinda fed up with them!

Mobile love

So you may all have thought that I had forgotten about my knitting craze, but I can assure you that that is not true. I was veeery busy with an important school assignment, which took more energy and life out of me than I would have thought, and left me without any for colourful pursuits. But that is handed in now, and I have some time on my hand, while my newest project was laying ready to be put together.
Now there are a lot of fashionable things in the "Knitting for cool girls" book that I will never attempt to make or even see the point of (a cardigan for your dog, to name the most obvious example) but there was one thing in there that I had been looking for for ages; a mobile phone case. I keep my phone in an old sunglasses-protection-bag (refusing to pay 25 Euros for the ugly fashionable one that fits my phone), but that doesn't work very well and in the book there was a great example of one. Now it does have a heart on it, which will immediately take 10 points off my IQ and condemn me as a girly-girl in many eyes, but I tried looking for a star-pattern (which I would really like) and couldn't find one. So, green case with purple heart it was.
The knitting went great, apart from the fact that I didn't leave enough thread on the back when doing the hearts, so that they look kinda squashed together. I may have to do another one just to satisfy my ego on this point. Here is what it looked like post-knitting:

A phone-case sausage.

So obviously it needed to be pressed (which basically means ironing it with a moist cloth between iron and wool), and there were instructions for that in both knitting books (I bought another one!) I have, although the one said to put the good side facing up and the other to put it facing down. Knitting really is just like baking a cake; you get a load of conflicting instructions and just try to make sense of it. You can see which option I chose;

Hideous background, aka our iron board cover!

Now this may be the very first time in my life that I actually used pins for what they were meant to be used for. I have two small boxes of them, but I only used them to tack posters of boy bands on my wallpaper when I was a teenager (my mother despaired of having no pins left, which is I have to boxes full).
Anyway, the case was pressed, dried, pins removed (although one book suggested first removing the pins and then letting it dry), and then I sewed it together to form (still not following any method, I mean, the stitches will be on the inside anyway);

Mobile love, baby!

Done! Okay, it is way too big for my phone (which you can't see in this picture, because the picture was taken by my phone, but take my word for it). But it's the effort that counts, right?
Oh yes, according to the book I was supposed to sew an inner pocket first, as a lining, and then sew the two together using some weird form of dark magic (or at least a very incomprehensible set of instructions). Not going to happen. I do not have the patience to sew one thing together, let alone two. Also, I am supposed to put a little heart-shaped button on top, but if you think that I happen to have heart-shaped buttons laying around you clearly do not know me. So I guess it is done. Whether I will actually use it will be another question.

My next project will depend on whether I can get the right wool and needles I need. The little wool shop in the city centre is very expensive and the woman working there does not understand what I'm talking about, so I may have to resort to online-ordering, which is annoying because then I can't feel the texture of the wool or see whether colours work together properly. I may just do another phone case first, because this one is too big and the hearts are clearly pulling on the threads in the middle and I am getting less satisfied with it the more I look at it. Which is good, because as I said, frustration breeds creativity! There are some neat patterns in my new knitting book which I can try, and in this day and age, one can never have too many phone accessories!

Stripy Sensations

(Two posts in one day, within 2.5 hours of each other... What has the world come to?)

So I was getting at the intermediate Innocent hat level, which is no more difficult than the beginner level, in my opinion, it is just more of a hassle with having two balls of yarn attached and moving them around so that you do not accidentally knit in a thread you're not supposed to (did not happen, but might have happened if I didn't pay enough attention). I choose the "thirsty caterpillar" colour combination from the website, because it looked cool, and then I wanted to do some sort of "piggy in the middle" thing, but the pink thread was so much thinner than the green thread that it would have looked really odd, so I just went for purple and light blue. Safe to say, these took me somewhat more than half an hour;

Ugly picture, macro is not my phone-cam's thing!

Yup, the second one is taller, which gives it the impression of falling over. It looks less hat-like, but it was easier to do, so I may just keep doing that (look at me, changing a knitting pattern with less than a week's worth of experience... I can feel this going down the "baking" route).
So the whole "sewing together" bit is still going a bit wonky, there must be some simple trick to this that I am missing, but as the point here is knitting and not sewing I can't be bothered to look up how to do it. And some of the hats I got from the bottles have far more thick and grotesque lumps on their insides (yes, I checked the insides of the other hats, I am that obsessed).
So next up is a more fancy and difficult pattern on one of the hats, and I think after that it is time to check out some other things, because I have the feeling that this whole hat-knitting thing is going good enough as it is. I do still have to make the little pompoms for the top, of course, but that I did in primary school, so how hard can it be? Time to check out my "Knitting for cool girls" book to see what cool things I will be knitting next (looks like a contradictio in terminis if I ever saw one)!

The Mad Hatter Knitter

Somewhere in my first post here I let drop that I wanted to learn to knit. Now I know that knitting and "wild knitting" or "Yarn bombing" are very popular and hip and trendy, (which you can also see from the title of the knitting book that I got for Sinterklaas, which involves knitting for "cool girls" with advise for how to set up your own "knitting group") but that wasn't the reason I wanted to learn how to knit. No, it was those little Innocent hats. "Everybody" was making them, and we have about 8 in the house because my boyfriend kept bringing them home to me, and I kept getting more frustrated that I couldn't make them myself. And I think that frustration breeds creativity, so no other excuse was needed; I wanted to know how to knit!
Now I could have learnt how to knit in primary school, but I didn't want to, because I preferred doing things with wood and glue and paint (not that I was any good at those things, either). I could have learnt how to knit like most little girls do, from their mother or grandmother, but as all of use have very little patience, don't want listen to anyone's advice, and I was not one to sit quietly for 2 days, stitches slipping away, hands cramping, without poking one of my needles into someone's eye, it made sense not to learn it that way.
But lo, I learnt it myself! Well, with the help from several instructive YouTube clips and knitting website, most of which were in Dutch, because the knitting jargon is confusing enough as it is, and I have heard of "recht" and "averecht" and "insteken, omslaan, doorhalen, af laten glijden" before, but not of "purling" or "the long cast-on". And it worked! Well, not immediately of course, and I dropped a lot of stitches, and there was some swearing and hissing, but I got there in the end. I still miraculously keep having more or fewer stitches than I start out with, and I have no idea where they are coming from, but I now feel experienced enough to deal with that in a calm manner instead of throwing everything across the room. I cannot read a knitting chart or anything, but I can follow the beginners instructions on the Innocent website, and thus create.... (drumroll)

The colours are much nicer if they're not killed by the flash of my phone-camera!

Hats!
Now the first one was a disaster, because I had the wrong number of stitches to begin with, and then when it came to the decreasing of the stitches, I suddenly did the purling the wrong way around (don't ask how) and I ended up with the mess on top you see there. The second one went fine, but the thread kept unravelling as I was stitching it together, so I had to cut off pieces to thread it through the needle again, and I almost ended up with an open-bottomed hat (and we wouldn't want that!). The third one went eazy-breezy, no problems at all, and took me about half an hour! That must be some sort of record!
Next on the agenda, the intermediate hats! Stripes! New methods! More that can go wrong!
I'll keep you posted!