I'm online again!

Ooh, I've had a couple of sleepless nights about my abandoned blog! But now I'm back, in my new apartment with an adsl line up and running.

First, to respond to ekgheiy's comment:

"Your basket is absolutely awesome!! Nice work indeed. Did you use a pattern or did you wing it?"

Thank you very much, I've been putting it to good use to keep my bathroom products tidy. I used a pattern from the magazine "The Art of Knitting", issue 4, called "Woven Basket". I added the stripe, which was not present in the pattern, and also turned the stitched basket inside out, while the pattern suggests keeping the stitching on the outside.

Anyone can wing it by casting on an odd number of stitches and knitting 4 blocks using knit 1, purl 1 (moss stitch). If you knit the blocks to be square, you can knit 5 identical blocks, but in my case the sides were rectangular (a deviation from the original pattern) and so the fifth base block will be longer than the side blocks, to form a square. I knitted a block per day, so it's a quick knit. And yes, an absolute gem for stash-busting, since you can make many different coloured rows and use up every last bit of yarn.

Since moving into the new apartment, I have not been knitting at all, I've simply been too busy. Now that I am online again, with access to my blog, I simply have to make time for knitting again, to my delight.

In other news, my Ravelry invite arrived and I'm excited, but I haven't had a chance to do anything on it yet. I am not entirely sure where to start, either, but I'll make a cup of tea soon and then browse through it at my leisure. Luckily I already have a Flickr account, so uploading pics of my minute stash shouldn't be too difficult.

Lastly, because I like to include something to look at in my posts, I found some old magazines from the 1980's during my move. They had knitting patterns in them, so I'd like to share some images. I don't have a scanner yet*, so these are photographed. I couldn't find the really bad ones right now, but some of them were really terrible. These ones aren't completely horrendous, but we've certainly come a long way since the eighties, both in fashion and in yarns. Thank goodness for that!

I used to wear my hair like that in the 80's. But with scrunchies, not ribbons. The design is quite pretty, actually, although the shape of the garment is all wrong.

Wait, are those shoulder pads?

By the way, this is a unisex piece, according to the article.

That doesn't look very cool to me, in any sense of the word.

Hmm...

They have a lot of dodgy looking handknit toys in these magazines. I think today's toys look far better, no doubt because we've got much nicer yarns with which to recreate fur and other yummy textures. Compared to some of the other toys I've seen in the magazines, this clown isn't half bad.

Now maybe you're thinking "I don't know what Prazzie is smoking, but these are all terrible!". That is because you weren't privy to the atrocities in the Sewing Section of these magazines. I offer you now a glimpse of the madness, the horror, the pure insanity of it all:

Suddenly a unisex sweater with shoulder pads seems like an awfully good idea.

*I also don't have a couch yet, because I need to find someone willing to carry the couch I want up four or five flights of stairs, since it won't fit in the service elevator. I think this is why I haven't been knitting - knitting on a dining chair is not fun. Also, there is a waiting period for the couch (they manufacture on demand) and they've already closed the order book. I can only order the thing next year. Until then, knitting in discomfort is my only option.