Travelling from Belfast to Glasgow

 

I am writing this as a separate post in case it helps someone in the future. There are flights between the two cities but we eliminated this option due to timing and cost. We decided to go the ferry route but it was frustrating that the options I kept coming up with involved having to get to Belfast Harbour, take the ferry to Carnyran, then coach to Ayr, then train to Glasgow. This seemed like too many changes and it wasn’t clear what happened if any of the transportation was delayed would the coach and/or train would wait.

Eventually in my searching, I came up with an option to get on a coach at Belfast Bus Station that would take you to the ferry and then in Scotland the same coach would take you to Glasgow Bus Station. The advantage of this in addition to not having to worry about connections, was not having to carry luggage. The downside was having to leave Belfast early or arrive in Glasgow late – we went for the leave early option.

WIP Situation

 A little interlude in the travel stories to talk about my WIPs as it is that time of year when the Ravelry group finishes all their projects ready to start the next year fresh.

Although I have been trying to keep my WIPs low this year, the long trip caused a buildup. I had some projects that I didn’t manage to finish before the trip and didn’t want to take with me and there are some projects that I didn’t quite finish while I was away. So I am starting this WIP season with nine projects. Which is the same number as last year, the difference being that last year I had started a few projects to take on a trip.

Three of these projects are blankets and were on the needles last year; one of the blankets is an ongoing project and will not be finished anytime soon which leaves me eight projects to finish in three months. Usually I would work on the projects in order of cast on but two of the projects have a small amount of work required to finish, so I will work on those first. Then I will finish the mitred squares blanket. I am on the last border and it is all knit but it is big so have to be in a comfortable position to work on it. Four of the projects are relatively easy knitting, although one is a fingering weight double layer hat so although the knitting is easy there is a lot of it. I will probably leave that one to last or second to last depending on the other blanket. This is one of the year long blankets I made last year. It is in three strips which need to be joined, and I haven’t decided how I want to do that. I know I don’t want to sew them together and I don’t really want to pick up stitches and join them. I’m thinking of some sort of crochet join. But what sort has not been decided.

Hopefully by the end of the year I will have completed six of the eight projects.

Choosing Modes of Transport

It is unnecessary to list all the different modes of transportation but I had wanted to write in this blog about some of the choices we made in choosing our travel options. Obviously, if you are on an island the choices to get off that island are limited, otherwise there is not only the choice of how to get from A to B but also which company to use.

Once we were on mainland Europe we travelled by train or bus (coach). This is because the depots are in town, usually within walking distance of the center and you don’t need to get to the station until 15 minutes before departure. Compare that with a flight. The airport is usually a little out of town so you have to add on the time to get to and from the airport plus however much time you need to get to the airport in advance, bus or train makes more sense.

So how to choose? Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was toss a coin. Although you would think that Google Maps would be a great resource, it wasn’t as useful as you would expect. And using it on a phone was a different experience to using the web version on a laptop. And ferries were not included as an option in most cases. Results differ if you input address to address or station to station. But Google Maps is a good starting point as you can see how far apart two places are and if there are any places between your A and B that you might want to stop at.

An internet search will come up with many blogs/websites/YouTubes of people’s travels, which can be interesting if they are relating their experiences or really want you to use their affiliate links or use their travel services. Through searching I found a travel blog describing a couple’s experience of the Flam Railway which impressed what I was beginning to think that it wasn’t going to work for us this trip. But searching also came up with a better way (for us) to travel from Belfast to Glasgow. I did find that individual blogs were train centric.

The first thing I would look at is if the journey is direct or requires a change. A direct journey should have less problems. After that I look at total journey time. For shorter journeys, there is often not much difference between the travel time by train or bus. I will also look at departure and arrival time and how that fits in with our accommodations. And then I look at cost. Yes, cost is not my first thought. You’d think that as the mode of transport is not changing (i.e. the train is the same regardless of price) that cost would be my first consideration but all the other factors are important considerations in choosing if it is worth paying more.

Technology and Transportation - A Good Thing

 In my last post I talked about technology and why it might not always be the answer. Transportation is definitely an area where technology is helping the traveller. Firstly just being able to check different routes and different modes on your internet enabled device. (That sounds old-fashioned but so many options now.) makes it easier to pick the right one for you, rather than the ticket office giving you one option because there is a long line behind you. With the added benefit that most transportation websites have an English option.

Tickets can be purchased and sent to your phone. Nothing to print which is difficult when you are not at home. Although I have been surprised by how many people have printed tickets. But it is a good back up. What if your phone loses power or you can't access the app? I take screen shots in case of an internet problem but that doesn't help with the power problem; so you have to keep an eye on battery level if you've been using your phone throughout the day.

Now at railway stations not only do they have the information on the next trains arriving at the platform, when the train is about to arrive the screen will indicate the number of carriages, which are for bicycles and first class and where they will be at the platform and in the UK the screen shows how full each carriage is. 

But even with all this information at your point of departure, you can follow the journey of your bus or train to see where it is and follow along once you are on. This is very useful when buses do not have information inside to indicate the next stop.

Although all this technology can cause angst, like when we were waiting for a bus in Finland at a stop with no screen just the timetable and the bus stop sign. The website had been very helpful in getting us from our hotel to the bus stop but watching the passage of the bus arrive and leave "our" bus stop was very worrying and while trying to decide what we should do, the bus turned up. We were at the stop after the one we thought we were at. We never did find the original stop and wondered if it was one of those places where the locals knew the buses stopped.

Technology and Museums - Not Always a Good Thing

We have visited many museums of many different types and it has been noticeable how they are changing -  the displays are becoming tidier and cleaner and more information is being provided. Quite often you can scan a QR code that takes you to a link where you can hear and/or read about the item. Information is provided in at least two languages - the home country's and English so many more people can learn about the displays.

So why is this not a good thing? Many museums have now added touch screens so that you can read about the objects. The problem with this is that it limits the number of people who can read about the items. You may be able to read over someone's shoulder depending on how the touch screen is placed but that doesn't help if they are reading in a different language than the one you want. Also, so much information is provided on these screens that a person could be standing at one for quite a while.

Therefore you can have two different reviews of the same museum that are both true:- great displays with much information stayed longer than expected; boring museum, not much information, not worth the money we paid.

Like anything, you are not going to please all the people and museum curators are passionate about their subject and want to spread the information and this is an easy end result. Although I am sure that it is much more work than a numbered display.

Personally, this is a dilemma, I appreciate the information but found that sometimes I was spending more time reading than looking. Technology is a good way to provide information but not the only way.

 

Blogging About Our Trip

Remember in the early days of social media when you were warned not to post that you were on vacation, at a concert etc? And now everybody's lives are spread all over the internet. 

Way back when, but only two posts ago, I wrote about choosing yarn to take on a trip, and have been silent since the end of March in a way indicating that that trip was taking place. Initially it was so that I was not giving away the exact dates of our trip and then posts were delayed because I was wondering what to write about. If it was just about knitting, there wouldn't be much to say. How many variations of, long train journey spent knitting, out all day hiking/touristing too tired to knit, could I make sound interesting?

I was unsure what I could add to what is already out there, if I wrote about the places we visited. I thought about just writing about why we chose the different forms of transport when travelling between cities, in the hopes it would be of use to someone but I wasn't sure that would be of much interest to most people. In the end I've decided to just do what I have always done for this blog - write about my crafting and whatever else interests me.

And if anyone had wanted to take the time to find my exact address during this absence, they would have been disappointed to find that there were people living in it.

 

The Yarn That Keeps on Giving

In 2014 on the first San Diego Yarn Crawl, I purchased four skeins of madeline tosh sock yarn to make a specific cardigan. I was concerned that I would not have enough yarn so I went back after the Yarn Crawl and purchased the last skein. Luckily it was the yarn store closest to me.

I actually didn’t use the yarn until 2022 as I could not get gauge for the original pattern I had chosen and working a different size to compensate etc wasn’t an option. Finally I found something I liked and worked with my gauge and I love it but, I used only four skeins. Yes, the original number I had purchased.

The small amount I had left over from the fourth skein went into my scrappy crochet blanket and the remaining complete skein was saved for socks. I used the yarn pretty quickly after finishing the cardigan but the pattern I chose was two colours so I still had more than half the skein remaining. I put that to use this month as I used it in another two colour sock. This time combining it with yarn from my friend’s destash to knit a pattern that I had been "given".

I have been destashing full skeins of yarn that are left over from projects and have just asked for payment of postage. Rather than people have to deal with PayPal or Zelle or similar I decided to be paid in patterns. Very handy when I am only supposed to be using patterns I own.

I followed the pattern as written, reversing the colours for the second sock. Unfortunately I did not have enough of the multi-coloured to complete the toe. So I worked it in the grey. I don’t think it looks too bad, but my preference would have been for cuff, heel and toe to all be in grey. In a previous post I had written how quickly a project grows when that is all you work on and having completed these socks in three weeks, I understand how I was able to complete two pairs of socks in a month.

Preparing Yarn for Travelling

 

Over the past few years, most of our vacations have involved driving to our destination. This is very convenient as you can just throw whatever you want in the car. Though I am at the stage where I know what I will need and pack just that; from a knitting/crochet point of view it means that I can take all my tools and just in case projects. I have gone away from the cast-on-something-new-on-the-first-day as this has not always worked out for me and now I am just as likely to take a work in progress in addition to unused yarn.

But what to do if the journey involves different forms of transport, you are limiting your luggage but you want to use your stash?

Over the past couple of months I have been thinking about what I would like to knit when I am away and what yarn I would like to knit with. At first I thought it would be fun to make a garment but there are too many down sides to that. What if I run out of yarn, what if there is a problem with the pattern and I can’t or don’t want to continue. I would have to work an easy pattern knit in pieces so that it covered all knitting occasions but did not become too big to carry around. In the same way I dismissed a crochet blanket as an option because the yarn could be spread around the luggage but a crocheted blanket would get big quickly.

I am not against buying yarn while we are away but I’d rather not be in a position where I have to buy yarn. Plus it would be nice to come back to a diminished stash.

Looking at my stash, socks and hats it is. Wouldn’t it be nice to use up all the sock yarn I have purchased? For a flight last year I knit on a double layer hat and I have plans for that again this year and I will get it started before we leave so that I am confident with the needle size and number of stitches.

I had put to one side all the yarn I was considering and last week I spent a morning evaluating what I had chosen and winding up the yarn that had passed the extended vacation test. I immediately dismissed one option – the leftover Advent yarn - I would like to make a cowl with it but this will definitely be a project where I will worry about running out of yarn.

I wound up a few skeins of sock yarn and a couple of skeins of DK weight yarn. There were a couple of skeins that I had originally chosen that I did not wind, I have a picture in my mind of the type of pattern that they would be suited for and I do not want to take them and then be forced to use them in a less than ideal pattern. Never fear, a couple of other skeins replaced them.

Before we leave I will get some projects started - the aforementioned hat, some socks and a crochet project. That way I will always have something to work on.

The Joy of One Project Knitting

 

2024 was the year where I really tried to reduce the number of projects I had on the go at any one time. I didn’t help my cause by starting two yearlong blankets but I had two sweeps during the year to get the numbers down. And now I am enjoying this effort by having very few WIPs and reducing the ones I work on over the same period of time. 

I have put all the blankets into one category of –well,-blankets – so that I work on just one until it is finished before working on another. Sometimes a blanket comes under the easy category and sometimes under the requires concentration category which means that I have to have an easy project ready to grab when both my main project and the blanket project are at require concentration stage. Not quite one project knitting.

In addition to the blanket project I have a main project. And, does it go quickly when that is all you work on. I wrote a post in 2021 that a project will take the same amount of time whether it is spread over a month or a year. Although that is not strictly true as if you are working consistently on the same project you are not delayed by having to check where you are in a pattern which happens when you haven’t worked on something for a while.

I have said many times, I do not know when I became a multi-project knitter. I think it comes from making a gift or participating in a knitalong and when that item is finished, not going back to the project that had been put aside. And that morphed into starting all the things at the beginning of the year so everything I wanted to knit, or thought I wanted to knit got started and then all the projects were worked on throughout the year. This resulted in many finished items in the last quarter of the year but gave me little to show during the year for all the time I was putting in to knitting.

The joy is working on one project and seeing it grow and knowing that when it is finished I can start something new and not go back to a project that was started months previously.

This piece was originally titled The Joy of Monogamous Knitting. Many knitters that work on one project at a time call themselves monogamous knitters. As I was writing and mentioning projects and blanket projects and back up projects, I realized monogamous was a misnomer but as I was searching for synonyms the definition of monogamous always came up in relation to a human relationship. Thus, I felt it was inappropriate to use in a title

 

 

An Unpopular Opinion

 

For the purpose of my discussion I am talking about wool, not cotton, linen or other plant-based/man-made fibers that have different qualities.

Also, this does not apply to 100% of knitted garments.

There is a trend to add darts to knitting patterns. Ostensibly to make the garment fit better – whatever that means. And for some people with big differences in various circumferential measurements, darts might be helpful but for the majority of people darts are not necessary.

Why is this? Knit fabric made from wool is a stretch fabric. Stretch fabric moves and drapes in a different way to woven fabric so openings, fastenings and shapings are not the same. Imagine using a T-shirt as a pattern base for a cotton top and then you try to put it on. Even if you do manage to get into it, it is not going to look or fit the same as your t-shirt even though they are both the same size. That delicate little button and loop at the back neck makes a lot of difference in being able to wear the garment.

Knit fabrics have less seamed shaping because any stitching stops the stretch of the fabric. Which may be what is required to stabilize the garment but if the fabric needs to stretch where the seam is placed what is going to happen? The seam will break.

Knitted garments have been fitting fine (not always perfectly because knitters and wearers are human after all) for many decades but now garments need shaping. Why this change? Let’s blame the internet. The internet has been good for the proliferation of knitting patterns and hand dyed yarns but this comes with the downside of the influx of people who have no idea what they are doing. They learn to knit, add some colourwork to a basic sweater design and know they’re a designer. But they know nothing about design or fabric characteristics. And with so much poor quality work on the internet, they are too inexperienced to know if the sweater pattern they are using as their base is any good or not. So a garment doesn’t fit, let’s add shaping rather than analyzing the problem.

The other reason for the change? Designers need a new thing to draw attention to themselves again. So let’s make a size-inclusive pattern with horizontal bust darts. And the person who can drum up the most attention for their pattern is the expert even if they were not the first nor the best.

February’s Socks are Finished

 

I did not start any new socks in January as I still had a pair on the needles from December. But as I had a dearth of projects in February, I cast on a pair. I had been tempted to cast on this pattern in January as they fit the theme of Colorwork but held off as that theme would always come up again. But when February’s designers were announced and this pattern was by one of those designers, I knew I had to cast them on.

This pattern also fit my own guidelines as it has been in my favorites for a little while and added bonus that it is a free pattern. And I would like to say that it is a pretty amazing pattern to be given away.

So what is the pattern? It is Film Reel Socks by Alex Parker Mooney. There are five sizes and four different ways of working the short-row heels. Pretty amazing for a free pattern. Looking at the various iterations of this pattern, I decided that it didn’t matter what the contrasting colour was but it was best if it was very tonal. (Although there is one lovely pair where a different colour is used for each section.)

I used the white and orange left over from these socks and the black was left over from these ones. I was worried that I would run out of the black yarn but finished with about 1g left.

The colour pattern was five stitches and I could have stranded the yarn but chose to practice the ladder back jacquard technique as I have used it just once since making this hat. This was an easy pattern to use the technique as I was making extra stitches from a row of black stitches and getting rid of them in a row of black stitches. Before I started I read other resources as well as the hat pattern and it is interesting that some resources say to make all the stitches with a backwards loop whereas the hat pattern said not to do this for all t the stitches. At some point I will have to see what the difference is.

As I said it was easy to use this technique on this particular sock pattern. I used it on the entire sock but now they are finished, I wonder how comfortable the sole of the foot will be.

 

As this is a colorwork pattern the designer suggested going up a needle size. I’m not a fan of that so I worked a size larger than usual but went down a needle size for the foot.

I hope you will agree that they are a lovely pair of socks with the kudos going to the designer and yarn dyer.