Blah Blah Blah Kiss!!

Well, I'm going to see if this works.
The computer I'm forced to use at the moment doesn't seem to like blogger at all, and whenever I've tried to blog, it logs me out and I lose what I've written, but it seems to be okay so far, so let's see how it goes.
I have so much to say. Have to get everything in order. First thing, skull bag. All the knitting is finished, or has been for a while. After going my own way and just making up bits of the pattern, I decided that it looked awful, so I frogged the bottoms of the bag itself and the unas and did them all flat instead of three-dimensional, and I think it looks a lot better:

And here's the back, with the hidden una revealed under the large una:

As for the shoulder strap, well I just can't seem to be bothered to hurry up and finish it, so I do about a centimetre a day before I get bored and do something else. Here it is so far:

I'm not enjoying it at all, I just have to finish the damn thing and then I can use the bag - at least after I've woven in the ends and sewn up the floats. So that's just around the corner.

Next thing, dyeing. Every two or three years I get a sudden enthusiasm for dyeing with native Australian plants. There are some amazing colours, especially from eucalypts, so I've been doing some of that, but I'm not doing very well so far. I've been using lichen, and I know that once I managed to get the most beautiful dark brown from rock lichen, but I've never managed it again. Maybe the lichen around here has absorbed too much pollution. So these were my attempts without a mordant:

Wow, you would not believe that 24 hours has passed since I wrote that last sentence. I have had that much trouble just getting this picture to show. Anyway, back to the point. So I ended up with two revolting colours. The one on the left could possibly end up okay if used amongst more interesting colours. The one on the right is about as beautiful as jute twine. So today I finished dyeing a couple of skeins with alum and Argyle Apple, a type of eucalypt. It's well known, at least in my family, for its dyeing properties. I got the most beautiful bright orange from it, but tomorrow I'm going to double the amount of material and try for something closer to crimson. Here's the pot on the stove:

I've gone a bit crazy with the dyes lately, and it's good to finally see some good results.
In other news, I bought a lace knitting book on eBay. It mostly has doyleys and stuff and these beautiful lace tablecloths which I think would make great shawls, so here's the one I think I'll knit one day, when I've knitted the millions of other things I want to knit:

I hope it won't just look like I'm wearing a tablecloth...
The book is called First Book of Modern Lace Knitting, and it's by Marianne Kinzel.
And finally, there's my day yesterday. My brother had headaches and nausea at the breakfast table, which were the problems he was having before they discovered the tumour, and then he discovered some pus on his head. We all started freaking out a bit, wondering what was going on. He starts radiotherapy on Monday, so something going wrong right now is just not good. So mum drove poor Alex to the GP, while I drove my aunt and grandmother to their thing they had to go to, and then I got a call from the girl I live with saying that the landlord had given us one month's notice to leave! So I went over to my place. I live in a sort of granny flat thingo out the back of the house which my friends live in. The flat is all mine, and I love it. It's rundown and is freezing in Winter and boiling in Summer, but it's so cute and funky. Maybe I'll put up some pics sometime. So I talked to Cara and Miguel, and they said that the landlord was either going to sell the place, or raise the rent, but he was going to come around and look some time. We were all upset, because we really enjoy it there. So I was pretty bummed, and I went to my front door...and there was a package...a package from the UK...a package with squishy things and hard things inside, so I opened it and.....

Eeeeeep! You just made my day secret pal!!! I was so touched with how well thought out the presents were. You could obviously tell that I'm a bit of a daggy old hippy, at least it seems you could, because there's this amazing 100% bamboo yarn, which is really right up my alley, and organic chocolate - I'm constantly trying to move to the organic lifestyle, and failing when I realise I'm too poor, and Kool-Aid! I've heard so much about this mysterious Kool-Aid stuff, about dyeing wool with it, and I'm pretty sure you can't get it in Australia; Whenever I see stuff about it on the net, I just pass it off as another weird American junk food, but now I can give it a go! Thank you so much. Even though I've been expecting the package, I didn't realise how wonderful it would be to get a present from someone I don't know on the other side of the planet. This whole experience is ten times better than I imagined it would be. The bamboo yarn is amazingly soft, like silk, and the colours are so subtle and beautiful. I've showed it to all of my family, and they're amazed. My dad in particular just can't get over it. Whenever he sees it he just goes "wow, that's incredible, how do they make that?". It's quite a feat, because my dad is rarely amazed by "girly stuff" as he would think of it. I should get him knitting, I'm sure he'd find it much more fun than he imagines. Maybe when he's old and grey and I'm looking after him, I'll threaten him with a nursing home unless he takes up knitting. Sorry, getting a bit side-tracked here. I've decided what I'm going to knit with the bamboo yarn, I just decided then. Of course I could change my mind, because I'm a pretty inconsistent person. I think I'll try Branching Out from Knitty. I've been wanting to do it for a while, but now I'm pretty sure this yarn would be perfect. It'll make a beautiful Spring scarf.
The point is, secret pal, I want to kiss you, I couldn't be grumpy after that. And in the end it turned out that Alex (my bro) just had a bit of an infection from the brain surgery, and after some antibiotics, it's cleared up reasonably, so he can start his treatment tomorrow just fine. As for my flat, well I'll just have to wait and see.

And another thing...

I particularly like this chart.

Aaargh!

You wouldn't believe it, I just wrote a really long and fascinating blog, and then somehow the browser screws up, so I just spent the last 45 minutes trying to fix the problem, and now I've forgotten what I was talking about. Hmph. Here goes again.

Here's where I'm up to with the skull bag:

There are these pockets on the outside which the Andeans call unas. Basically, while you're knitting the body of the main bag, where you want the una openings you knit in a bit of scrap yarn. When the body's finished, you pull out the scrap yarn, pick up the stitches and knit the una/pocket. The opening's on the inside, and the una's on the outside. They look a bit like testicles (sorry). So, all I have left is two and a half unas, drawstrings, shoulder strap, skull beads, and I need to sew down the floats so they don't catch on things when I use the bag. Quite a bit to go, but it's all good fun.

Now for a bit of a whine:

Whine No. 1: Badly written patterns. Andean Folk Knits is a fantastic book, I love it to bits, it has the most fascinating patterns and social history and customs etc., but the patterns are really badly written. Or I shoud say, drawn. They're all charts, which is fine, since all of the patterns are so intricately decorated, but the chapter on techniques just isn't detailed enough, and there are some major flaws, which I wrote into the post that didn't work, but I think that it was really a bit boring, so it's just as well it's gone forever. Anyway, the result of this was that I basically ended up re-designing the whole bag, which is pretty cool, because it's much more fun to design your own stuff than just follow someone's directions. Well, I think it's more fun anyway. So, after much stuffing around, I decided to just do whatever I wanted with the pattern, so I did this to the bottom of the bag:

Yes, it's that star thingo, where you K2tog evenly spaced around each and every row. I love it. So simple, yet effective. Also looks great on sock toes. You can hardly see it in this photo, which brings me to:

Whine No. 2: Crappy digital camera lighting and colours. Just look at the state of those two photos! I can't get the damn things right! That last pic was the best of about 20! 'Nuff said.

Oh yeah, and you may have noticed that I've put up a piccie of me. Scary stuff! Luckily the photo's too small to be too offensive!

Back At Last

Here I am again. What a bad start to a blog. I get a few days in and my brother gets a brain tumour up in Newcastle and I leave town for 2 weeks and have no access to computers at all. By the time I get back, I am so behind at uni and the rest of my life that everything is far too hectic to update, much less knit. I couldn't take my knitting to Newcastle because I had 2 seconds to pack and could only take hand luggage, so I figured I probably couldn't take my lovely steel needles. However, while I was there I knitted my bro a horrible beanie to cover up his lovely scars and new haircut. Everyone else insists that the beanie is great, but I loathe it. Every time I see it I just want to rip it. I started a pair of socks for him, but they are too big and I hate them anyway. I had grand plans of the most incredible socks the world has ever seen, but they just turned to crap, and what with the trauma of waiting for the operation, watching his recovery and just generally wanting to scream, I just didn't have the heart to knit! Can you believe it? Anyway, I'm going to rip that sock half and start again with a much less planned, more instinctive design. I realise that from now on I have to trust my instinct when it comes to design.
So, there are no lovely piccies, because there's nothing worth showing. I want to finish my skull bag, because I desperately need a handbag. I might get on to that in just a sec.