still here! (and by here i mean....there)

yes. so, i reluctantly left krakow, spent one day in glasgow, found first grey hair, am now lying low in canada because the shock of going straight back to glasgow might have killed me.
for the moment i've given up on the complicated shawl because i've come up with a non-complicated project. i'm knitting my friend a sweater and she's fixing my computer. good deal. and we got to go to romni wool and the staff think we're weird now but that's okay. she got really nice merino though it's actually quite heavy. i got fabulous knitting needles made of some weird dairy protein. they feel sort of like my favourite pair of bendy plastic needles but better. and they're pretty. but they do smell weird.
in the meantime, getting back to glasgow early morning on the 5th then scrambling for a place to live.

okay,got to row 7 of charting my lace pattern.then my friend called and invited me for coffee. which turned into a mini-cafe marathon followed by movie and now i won't have time to finish it until saturday.

ravelry! it's eating my brain! and making me late for things!
in the meantime, i was going to knit myself a kitty but those needles are in.....The Suitcase and thus this will have to wait because i like to limit moving the suitcase on account of it being giant and heavy and used as a table and thus covered in things.
so i'm working on inventing a lace pattern which is not something i've ever done. i'm practicing on bigger needles with bigger yarn because what i'm going to use when i've made up the actual pattern is teeeeeeeny tiny.
it hasn't worked so far but i think i've figured it out via an epiphany on a bus.

vacation! yes, i had one!

went to olomouc and brno in the czech republic. brno is where i will likely be living for a semester next year. it only has one hostel that's very grim and only open 2 months a year but otherwise is lovely and full of chinese food and surrounded by forests. it's quite quiet but has excellent travel options so i think it will be nice. it also has a branch of my most very favourite yarn store ever, MarLen so i hiked all the way up to the end of town and bought more cotton!


and today my friend and i went on a daytrip to bielsko-biala which was also very nice.
in the end i got into my new room after i got back from brno. it's basically the same as my old room but in much better condition.
and i grudgingly bought a plane ticket back to glasgow. and mailed my second box of yarn to my parents.hopefully it will get there before i leave toronto.

i ripped out the front of the shirt the other day when i realised i had no idea what i was doing and came up with a new plan doing the front in 2 parts each based on the multidirectional scarf so it will still be triangly and hopefully ribbons will still fit themselves in somehow. the only hard thing was binding off for the arms so far.

today....well, tomorrow's the last day for students to move out of the dorm....what this means on floor 5 is hideous hideous smells as rooms where students have been living are suddenly aired out.
i was hoping to move [very quickly and efficiently] today but the person still hasn't moved out of the room i'm moving into and thus i can't move in because there is no key and a person in my bed. i guess i'll check after my laundry but i think i'll just wait til tomorrow morning now as that way i can maybe work an extra hour. unless there's no work today in which case i'll move today hopefully. man, i have no idea.
meanwhile, my retro task of the day is transferring my casettes to mp3 format for my train trip on sunday.
also meanwhile, my ex-thingy was supposed to have left on tuesday and i was ever so happy on tuesday but the airline screwed up so much that i'm stuck in the same city as her for 2 more weeks! agh! lucky thing i'm going to brno.
and it looks like i might have enough room in my suitcase to knit myself a cat.
and the last complicated scarf reached my friend. and i mailed my first box of yarn to my parents' house the other day. it will be a race to see who/what gets there first.

am working on this sleeveless shirt as per my traditions of post-heartbreak AND exam session knitting [according to the first, it will have stripes and according to the second i must finish it in time to wear it to the oral exam! you know.....for when i run out of things to say].
i've started organising my stuff for various future moves.
the front of the shirt is starting from the corner and worked diagonally. i had no idea how to calculate it but the back was 66 sts. across and 66 rows until binding off for the sleeves and it just turned out that by the time it was time to deal with sleeves on the front it was 66 sts. along the um.....hypoteneuse! thus causing me to be very excited about math.
i have to mail my yarn to my parents as it's vastly exceeded my suitcase.

didn't knit for the whole week after she left. quite odd. then had a rampant burst and hurt my wrist finishing complicated scarf part 3.
it's pallette from knitty but with dinky needles, the yarn is Elian Lusy, a czech brand. i think it's 4-ply. i can't remember how long it took but it seemed long.

now i'm working on a sleeveless top, not sure what the front will be like but i've done most of the back in a couple days because it's very very straightforward after all the complicated scarves.

superstitions, complicated scarves, restlesness etc.

we were talking about superstitions in class and i was saying how among knitters it's considered bad luck to knit for a significant other too early in the relationship because then there will inevitably be a break up. black cats are internationally bad luck. thus, i suppose, knitting a black cat for someone you fancy is a dumb idea.
so, there was fighting on wednesday night and i got silent treatment from then until saturday when she said yeah, we're still friends and then she moved out.
so....even though it's for the best because it's soooo much less complicated without her! but....yeah, obviously we were never actually together but it still feels like a breakup. and i guess i always feel like this when someone i'm really attached to moves out. i have an epic, epic emotional hangover.
am currently dealing by unravelling the sock yarn and dividing it into 2 equal balls so i can make toe up socks and they will be the same length. i find unravelling yarn very therapeutic....except this big knot i've just run into. i seem to lack the ability to post pictures at the moment, i guess that's alright.
i also intend to finish all my homework now that i don't have anyone to distract me. and finish complicated scarf 3. and stop knitting complicated scarves for the moment now that i'm not sharing a room with someone i'm madly attracted to [although....i'm actually over her....that doesn't make me less sad, though] and thus might not need to fidget as furiously.
that all said, i miss my knitting groups :(

knitting in public in poland

knitting in public is one of the few ways of making people smile at you here. people always look amused at me in cafes. the other day i was knitting on break at school. the secretary, who is generally tired of our complaining about anything and everything, was quite amused. then one of the bulgarians from our class came out and was really excited because she used to knit with her mom and her sister and the other night had had a dream about knitting. then various yarn vocabulary came up in class and that teacher was also impressed with Complicated Scarf pt.3.

crazy cat lady

I've always said when i become a crazy cat lady, my schtick would be that all my cats would be handknit. so this is Wonky's wee comrade Slightly Wonky who has been mailed to a friend in canada. i'll probably make myself a matching one....and another one and another one....
this was made with opus 80% acrylic 20% mohair that i got from the market hall in wroclaw.

prague! hug prague!

yes. was in prague last week. it was great. i'm usually there by myself but was with my mother this time so got to go to restaurants and do all the touristey things i couldn't do because they were too expensive.
i went to the kotva department store [near namesti republiky metro-it's the ugly black box of a building] where they have a decent yarn selection. i got some olive green boucle stuff there 2 years ago with the intention of making a sweater then later discovered it wasn't nearly enough and have been looking for that yarn ever since. unfortunately they don't even have it there anymore. but i got other nice stuff including sock yarn which is mysteriously hard to find in poland.

then i went to MarLen [http://www.marlen.cz they don't have an english page, though] at ul. karolina svetle 12 [not open on weekends!] and was consequently spoiled for all other yarn stores ever possibly even romni in toronto.
it's a small company that makes really nice textiles and yarn and things and there was so much nice stuff! including lots and lots and lots of really nice cotton that isn't heavy and unpleasant like most cotton i come across. i couldn't tell what the prices were, there was a scribble on the label that i thought was the price and i was all set to pay 250 kr. for the grey cotton which is probably what it would cost in britain if it existed there but it turned out that scribble was the meterage and all the cotton only cost 55 kr.!! which is absurdly cheap. i got 4 things of the grey cotton which will be some sort of sleeveless shirt dealie, one thing of olive green dk cotton which will be a summer shawl thingy and some black wool of varying textures which i can't describe but it's really cool. and i got to practice my czech with the woman who worked there and another customer who was really impressed by my willingness to knit something out of 700m of dk yarn.

that weekend i posted all the last stuff i also finished this scarf. it's branching out from knitty, for my friend's birthday which was indeed in february and i've still not mailed it yet. yeah.

i've mostly been occupied lately with midterms [complete and utter train wreck! mostly due to admin screwing us over and the test being written by someone who has nothing to do with the course and in the end consisting almost entirely of things we didn't cover. we were also given less than a week's notice and still no one's been able to tell us what it counts for, if anything. anyway] and last weekend the wonderful culture for tolerance festival which was full of really interesting events and the march went surprisingly well.

in the meantime, i've been plodding away at palette but using really tiny yarn and really tiny needles. looking at the pattern again it would probably look nicer knit looser on bigger needles but i wanted something finickey and i've got these nice old metal needles that i've never used before and i quite like them. this is for a friend who's birthday was in march.

in other exciting news, i'm employed! and i'm going to prague next week! which means i will be coming back with much more yarn!

the wonky cat of mis-pitched woo

smittenness caused me to knit someone a wonky cat. while stuffing it, it transpired that my SSK-ing left a lot of gaps and it kinda looked like the poor kitty had been involved in a drive-by shooting. once i patched up most of the gaping holes it looked a bit less bedraggled, though all the sticking needles in it that involved gave the whole thing a sort of voodoo like air so i decided to believe perhaps that it's akin to 'like wonky voodoo cat for chocolate' and the well-intentioned smittenness i poured into might somehow rub off on the recipient.
in the end, she thought it was adorable and hugged it a lot and general cuteness abounded. i reinforced the head but i hope the arms don't fall off.

catcat

i'd been wanting to make a cat for my roommate who left her beloved real cat back in the states and is pining. i was planning to try to make an amigurumi cat but i can't seem to crochet without hurting myself so quickly gave up. but lo! i found a pattern here http://ysolda.me.uk/wordpress/index.php/patterns [and i cannot seem to make a decent link to save my life at the moment. i could once, really][and once i saw the woman who wrote the pattern at a craft fair in glasgow and it was the first time i'd ever seen a real live person who'd written a knitting pattern before!].

so the bits of yesterday that weren't spend in line at tesco stocking up on fancy chocolate were spent knitting a cat. it was very easy except that using needles that were smaller than the yarn would normally want hurt my fingers.

anyway,

materials: black slightly bulky acrylic bought at a market in Kłodzko and leftover from a sweater,

3 plastic double pointed needles, size 4.5mm more or less. i don't know, they were from a charity shop...there was never a label or a 4th needle

chocolate bar with advocat filling

bbc2 and cbc1 online

copious amounts of earl grey.

some sort of stuffing and embroidery dealies will happen.

but seeing as how it's easter and all, anywhere i could possibly buy stuffing will be closed until tuesday at which point my roommate will come back thus i will probably have to finish it while hiding in the closet if i want it to be a surprise.
in the meantime, it is an empty cat:

well.
this is the blog that chronicles the knitting obsession and general craft-nerdery. i'm at the beginning of a phase of lace-type scarves on account of being unrequitedly smitten and thus frustrated and in need of fidgeting.
this here to my right is just referred to as 'the complicated scarf'. it was from a pattern from the 70s knitting book i got at a used book store in
Łódź and is the first knitting pattern i figured out in Polish. i blocked it, but i may as well not have because it's still very bunchy although it manages to hang very nicely when i wear it.
it's schachenmayr micro-100% acrylic but very soft.
i used embroidery thread and my really really rudimentary crochet skills for the border.

am in the middle of another scarf for a friend whose birthday was in february-see, part of the surprise is when the present arrives. then i have 3 more in the queue.