Rox Talks

Ugly Christmas Sweater

2011-12-16T14:25:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I decided I needed a Christmas gift for a family we know, so I thought an ornament might be a good idea.

As I searched through the Ravelry pattern database looking for something to inspire me, it occurred to me that an Ugly Christmas Sweater would make a fantastic ornament.

I was right.

I'm not publishing an official pattern, but I am happy to share the charts and the general process for anyone who wants to make their own Ugly Christmas Sweater ornament.

I used Knit Picks Palette but any fingering weight yarn would work (I bought the original complete set of 30 balls when it first came out, so I had all the colors on hand), I used size 2 needles, which gave me a gauge of 7.5 sts/in. The final measurements are about 3" across the sweater body (not including sleeves) and 3.75" in length.

Click on the image to embiggen.

Gray boxes indicate "no stitch," which means CO 22 sts, then inc 1 st in Row 4. At the top, they show where the neck bind off occurs and additional rows are worked for each shoulder.

Black dots represent purl sts (i.e. first 2 rows are k1p1 ribbing)

Single squares of color (like for eyes or buttons or nose) indicate French Knot.

I knit the front and the back, using the intarsia technique, although I did strand the white across the back of the tree trunk and the star, since they were so small. Later, I added French Knots for the snowman's eyes and buttons, as well as the reindeer's eyes and nose. I knit in the reindeer's head, but used duplicate stitch to add the antlers.

I left the shoulder sts live for the front and back and joined using a 3-needle bind off. I picked up the sts for the sleeves and knit down to the cuff. For the sleeve with the snowflakes, I knit it all in green and embroidered them on later. The snowman's arms were embroidered using outline stitch.

For the tree, I had some stretchy silver beading thread that I used to string the "lights" and the tinsel was silver metallic embroidery floss, which was a real pain in the rear to work with. Oh, and I added some fringe to the snowman's scarf with short lengths of the green yarn and I embroidered a carrot nose, too.

I did all the embellishing and wove in ends before doing the seaming.

I seamed using mattress stitch (just a 1/2 st each side for the sleeves, but a full stitch each side for the body).

I didn't bother picking up sts and knitting a ribbed neck, although I originally planned to.

Happy Birthday, Mother!

2011-12-13T07:52:00.002-06:00

Today is my mother's 74th birthday, and I'm hoping that the package I mailed out to her on Saturday hits her doorstep today.

This fall I've been knitting a lot of things of my own design. Some have been relatively mindless knits, and can hardly be called "designs," like the plain stockinette socks I made for my daughter and her boyfriend (no, they aren't matching pairs, although the socks within each pair match, because I'm one of Those Knitters).

I'm back to working on Michael's Aran sweater that is part of my Level III work for the Master Hand knitting program.

I've done a lot of swatching of stranded designs for the Fair Isle hat (also for the MHK program), and have finally come up with a set of stitch patterns Sophia likes that I will turn into a hat, possibly over winter break.

I designed a shawlette pattern that I quite like (still not sick of it after knitting it three times) and it is currently with test knitters.

There was a cabled earflap hat of someone else's design that I completely re-engineered.

The package my mother will receive today (I hope!) was one of the few items I knit this fall that was not of my own design or heavily modified.

My mother had back surgery in September and has been recovering well. The pain meds have dampened her appetite and she still isn't very mobile, so she's been complaining about being cold. Back pain means that it's a big deal for her to put on clothes and take them off, so I wanted to make her a shawl that would be easy for her to put around her shoulders if she needed some extra warmth and would stay put, even when she got up and moved around. This is especially important, because a couple of weeks ago she fell and broke a vertebra above the ones that were plated and pinned and screwed together in September. She's going to be encased in what she describes as an "Iron Man suit" for the next month.

The pattern is Fundamentally Faroese, by Cheryl Oberle, and is knit bottom-up. What I like about Faroese shawls is that they are structured so that they stay on the shoulders. When blocked and finished, the upper edge curves where it will lie across the shoulders. The day after I finished it, I wore it all day, including while teaching, just to make sure I didn't need a shawl pin. It stayed on my shoulders, no problem, never once slipping off.

The yarn is a handpainted, 2-ply DK from Rovings and is 70% Polwarth wool and 30% mohair. I got this yarn from a Canadian vendor at Yarn Over a few years ago. It has a gorgeous sheen and a wonderful halo.

If this shawl wasn't intended for my mother, I don't think I'd have the strength to give it away.

Designing a Hat

2011-11-02T11:09:00.000-05:00

I've finished my Level III swatches and I'm moving on to other parts. I designed the Aran sweater this past summer and knit the back, without knowing for sure what the requirements were. I had a fairly good idea of what they were, plus I've knit several Aran sweaters, but I put it aside to rest after finishing the back, just in case there was a problem.

I've been doing research on the two traditional knitting styles I'll write about for one of my reports, and since one of those is an Aran sweater, I thought I would let the sweater marinate a little longer while I dig into the history and traditions of the Aran sweater.

Meanwhile, I've been pondering my Fair Isle hat design. Originally, I intended to knit a tam, but I do like to make projects for the MHK program that can be used later, if at all possible, so when Sophia mentioned she would like a hat with ear flaps, I reconsidered my hat style choice.

In my mind I could see a Chullu-esqe hat, with earflaps that were double-sided, to be warmer and to lie flat. (Either knit in the round, or double knit, although with double knitting I would have to contend with a difference in gauge and also, I kind of hate my selvedges in double knitting.) I want the transition from main body of hat down to the flap to be continuous, and I don't want to have to sew anything. I wasn't sure what to do about the hat cuff: ribbed, or hemmed, or straight stockinette with applied i-cord around the edges of the cuff and earflaps...

First, though, I needed some measurements. That's not what I did first, but it is what I needed to do first. No, first what I did was to wing it.

I searched around online and found that ear flaps are not centered at the 1/4 and 3/4 points of the round (assuming the round begins at the back of the head). They are actually set further back, so that one flap sits entirely within the first 1/4 of the round and the other entirely within the last 1/4 of the round. Someone mentioned that the midpoint of one ear flap, running around the back of the head to the other flap midpoint was about 1/3 of the circumference.

Knowing Sophia's head size, I calculated the flap positions and decided a 3 1/2" flap would be good. I "knew" that my gauge on size 5 needles using worsted weight yarn would be 5.5 sts/in, so I calculated stitch counts, and cast on.

After several problems with third grade arithmetic in which I decided that 37+37+56=110 (Hint: it does not), which was followed by deciding that the ear flaps needed to be moved even further back (Hint: they did not), I took the incredible step of actually measuring Sophia's head to find out where her actual ears were situated on her actual head, and then to take a second measurement in which I determined the correct ear flap width would actually be better at 3" and THEN I measured my stitch gauge and discovered I was knitting a bit looser than I anticipated, which meant that in addition to placing the too-large earflaps too far back on the hat, the hat was too big.

You can see now how it is that I am this close to becoming a master knitter!

Here's my revised plan for ear flap placement and stitch counts.

Circled numbers on right indicate stitch counts

While struggling with arithmetic, I did manage to come up with a good idea for how to work the ear flaps into the hemmed edge.

It occurred to me I could use a trick I thought of a few years ago, when making mittens with peasant thumbs. There are a couple of techniques typically used in that scenario. One is to knit the stitches where the thumb will be with waste yarn, return the waste yarn knit sts back to the left needle, then knit them again with the main yarn. Later, the stitches above and below the waste yarn can be put on dpns, the waste yarn can be removed and the thumb can be worked in the round, using those live sts.

Another technique is to bind off the stitches where the thumb will occur, and then on the next round, cast on that same number, basically creating a button hole. Stitches are picked up around the hole and the thumb is knit. This creates an edge inside the thumb where the cast on and bind off sts were, but having the hole there as the mitten is knit allows the mitten to be tried on, so that you can be sure of how it is fitting and when to do the top decreases.

A third technique is a hybrid, which is to place the sts on waste yarn (threading waste yarn through the sts, rather than knitting them with waste yarn), and then casting on over these stitches on the same round. When picking up sts later, you have a ridge only along the cast on edge.

My method, I think, gives the best of both worlds: it provides the thumb hole, so the mitten can be tried on as it's knit, but it leaves no edge inside the thumb when stitches are picked up.

It goes like this: slip the stitches onto waste yarn, and leave an extra long tail at the end of the held sts where the working yarn is hanging. Now cast on with the LT cast on, using the waste yarn tail as the thumb yarn and the working yarn for the index finger yarn. This creates a provisional cast on edge. When it's time to put the stitches back on needles, the cast on edge has to be picked out, but you're left with live stitches.

So that's my idea for the hemmed hat as well. On the purled turning round, when I get to the stitches where the ear flap will be, I put the number of stitches the ear flap will span on waste yarn, and then I cast on that number of sts, using the waste yarn tail and the working yarn, then I continue purling the round until I get to the next ear flap location.

Waste yarn holds sts resting on thumb and is used to cast on new sts.

Round is complete. That hole will become the live sts needed to knit the earflaps top down.

Hem is fused. Earflap holes are ready.

Master Knitting - Level III Begins

2011-10-10T12:25:00.000-05:00

I sent my re-submits for Level II a few days after I had received my initial review from the committee, and on Saturday, Oct. 1, I received notification that I had passed Level II. Yay!

In her email to me, the co-chair who reviewed my work said the following:

I said in my letter that it was truly a pleasure to review your work. And, I want you to know that I mean that. Yours was by far one of the best Level 2 submissions I have seen as a Co-Chair. The quality of your knitting, the quality of your written work, and your commitment to the program is outstanding. You are “oh so close” to being a Master Knitter!

I'm still glowing from the praise!

I promptly ordered my Level III materials, but it took a few days to receive them. I dove right in and have already knit quite a few of the 19 swatches and answered many of the questions.

Having just come off Level II, I'm very conscious of how to write the swatch instructions and the importance of writing them while I knit them! For me, the hardest thing about writing the instructions is not being allowed to use photos or videos for steps that are particularly fiddly, tricky, or unusual. The Twisted German cast on and the closed circular cast on are not easy to explain with just words!

My goal is to submit my binder by March 24, which is my 50th birthday. I'm confident I can do it!

2011-09-25T16:55:00.000-05:00

Master Knitting Update

I sent off my Level 2 binder for the Master Hand Knitting program at the end of July. Yesterday morning, I received it back, along with a letter from the co-chair of the committee who reviewed it. (Level 2 is reviewed by two committee members and a co-chair.)

I am happy to say I have no knitting re-submits to do. My knitting book reviews were all accepted, as was my History of Knitting report. Overall, they were very complimentary about my submission, and told me it was "one of the most skilled Level 2 submissions that we have seen."

Resubmits consist of the following

Patterns for three swatches: one lace swatch, one cable swatch and the cable flare swatch.
Gauge worksheet and answer for Question 8.
Question 12 was accepted, but clarification was requested.
Question 14: "Your discussion is excellent." Please resubmit paragraph with directions for swatch.

They also suggested I submit a pattern for the vest I knit, even though it's not a requirement for Level 2. I had made extreme modifications to the vest pattern. The only things I actually used from it were the dimensions and stitch gauge. The original pattern was a two-color stranded design knit in the round with steeks. My vest was knit flat and seamed and had a cable-lace pattern in the front. I had thought I might need to write the pattern, and did about it at the Knit and Crochet Show. At the time I was told it wasn't necessary (and they're still saying that), but they're recommending I do so because it'll be good practice for Level 3. I'd just as soon get feedback now on my garment pattern writing skills, since it's clear I need some work on my swatch pattern writing!

On the whole, I'm very happy. Level 2 was a LOT of work and I'm glad there are so few re-submits. This means I will be able to jump into Level 3 very soon!

More news on the knitting class front

2011-08-31T15:04:00.000-05:00

I forgot to mention the other day that I will continue to offer monthly clinics for people working through the Master Hand Knitting program. These clinics are a way for knitters to get support for their work, to set monthly goals (if that helps them), and to learn techniques in the program they may not have known previously.

During the fall, I offer these clinics on the third Saturday of the month from noon-2pm. The rest of the year, they're on the 4th Saturday. That seems to work out best for avoiding major holidays.

The Master Hand Knitting program is a three-level correspondence course offered by The Knitting Guild Association (TKGA). It's an educational program, and the time to complete any given level is unlimited. Each level consists of swatches that demonstrate particular techniques (with questions associated with the swatches and techniques), reports and/or reviews, as well as projects. Design and pattern writing is also covered. As you complete each level, you send it in to a committee who reviews your work and then each swatch/project/question/report/pattern is reviewed and is either accepted, or subject to resubmission. Once everything has been accepted, and you've passed the level, you can get the instructions for the next level. You can find out more about the program on TKGA's website. The Education menu has a link to the Master's Program page.

I have found the program to be an invaluable learning experience. It's not for everyone, and not everyone who starts with Level I will want to see the whole program through to the end. Whether your goal is to simply be a better knitter, or to be able to design your own garments (to sell patterns or not), or because you have an obsessive need to learn all about something that your enjoy doing, you may find the program fits with your goals as a knitter.

Fall Project Classes

2011-08-27T20:19:00.003-05:00

In addition to beginning knitting, intermediate classes, techniques classes, and Thursday night clinics, which I announced in my last blog entry, I'll be teaching several project classes this fall at Needlework Unlimited. You can sign up directly online, in person, or by calling the shop.

Cookie A Sock Club

BFF - a Sept/Oct Sock Club Selection

I love Cookie A's sock patterns and I'm not alone. Thousands of knitters have bought her two sock books, Sock Innovation and knit.sock.love. If you're one of those knitters who have her books (or want them), but haven't gotten up the nerve to actually knit any of the patterns, the Cookie A sock club might be just the thing you need to get started on Cookie's fantastic, well-written patterns.

For each class, I've chosen two sock patterns that are similar in their construction or their nature, with one sock pattern being easier and the other being more of a challenge. Each student selects the sock that suits his or her level of adventure.

For all the socks, we'll talk about re-sizing options and other fit considerations, plus tips and tricks for getting the best finished results.

For the Sept/Oct sock club I've chosen socks where the pattern is set up in columns of cable patterns. The easier sock (and probably the easiest Cookie A pattern of all) is BFF, which has columns of 4-st rope cables.

Marilinda, the more challenging
Sept/Oct Sock Club Selection

BFF is easy to size up or down, and isn't too much of a step beyond a plain sock. If you've never tried cables, or reading a chart, or just haven't tried knitting with finer sock yarn, this might be the sock for you.

The more challenging sock is Marilinda. This sock also has columns of the repeating stitch pattern, but the number of stitches and rows in the repeat is greater, and includes several different techniques. Amongst those techniques is the exact same cable crossing the BFF sock has, but also a faux traveling cable as well as a Japanese faux cable. This sock also continues the stitch pattern down the back of the heel.

Both patterns for the Sept/Oct sock club are in Cookie's newest book, knit.sock.love.

Foot detail of Kai-Mei

November's sock club features one sock from knit.sock.love and the other from her first book, Sock Innovation. These socks are both asymmetrical (there's a right sock and a left sock), with the pattern traveling across the leg and/or foot.


Pointelle, the November Sock Club challenging sock

The easier sock is Kai-Mei, from Sock Innovation. This sock has a plain, ribbed leg, and then the magic occurs when a simple, but unusual and beautiful pattern travels from the outer ankle across the instep.

Pointelle, from knit.sock.love is the more challenging sock for the November sock club. The pattern travels down and across the leg and the foot, using a more intricate lace pattern than Kai-Mei.

But wait, there's more!

In addition to the sock club classes, I'll be teaching three project classes from another favorite designer of mine: Ysolda Teague.

There's a hat, a scarf and fingerless mitts, all from Ysolda's Whimsical Little Knits Two. These projects all include techniques that are not typical in hats, scarves and mitts, making them much more interesting to knit for those who have knit these types of projects in the traditional manner. It's great to learn new techniques on small projects. Plus, any of these would make great holiday gifts!

Kicking off the Ysolda love-fest is a two-week class for the Scroll Lace Scarf, which I'll teach Saturdays, Sept 17 and 24, 10 am-noon. This is the least boring scarf I've ever knit--it's no 6-foot long rectangle! There's a provisional cast on, and a lace pattern that is simple enough for first-time lace knitters, but not boring for those who are more experienced.

Stitches are picked up for the body of the scarf, with short rows worked to create the depth at the center. The short row technique I'll teach is a German method (no wraps!) that gives the same result as Japanese short rows without all the pins hanging off the back of the work. Finally, there's a picot bind off that complements the larger picot look of the lace edge. Lots of great techniques packed into one great little scarf!

We'll also discuss how to block the scarf to open up the lace and get the best finished result.

Shorter version of Ripley
with the lace band.

Mondays in October (the 3rd and 10th, 6-8pm), I'll be teaching the Ripley, hat. This hat also has some great techniques, but with several options to suit your preference. First, the band can either be simple garter or simple lace, but whichever you choose, the band is knit sideways, then grafted to form a tube. Stitches are picked up around one edge of the tube and the hat is then knit in the round. The gathers are done using a tuck stitch technique, and can either accent the side of the hat (for the short version) or provide support for at the back of the hat (for the longer, slouchy version) .

Saturday, Nov 5 and 12, 10 am-noon, I'll be teaching Veyla fingerless mitts.

Like Ripley and the Scroll Lace Scarf, Veyla starts with a lace strip but ends with buttonholes. Stitches are picked up and the hand is worked in the round. The thumb gusset increases are unusually placed YOs, and there's a final lace inset at the knuckles. These mitts are not identical, and we will discuss the differences in the charts. We'll also cover how to block the lace for the best finished result.

All three of the Ysolda patterns include charts for the lace. If you are new to chart reading, this is a great way to learn how to read them!

Fall Classes

2011-08-26T14:59:00.001-05:00

There are tons of classes scheduled for this fall at Needlework Unlimited, my neighborhood yarn shop, and the place you can usually find me teaching several times each week.

You can find out more specifics on the Needlework Unlimited website, as well as sign up online.

Classes for Beginners
If you know someone who is interested in learning to knit, I teach Knitting 101 and 102 every
month, rotating the days and times when I offer it. Knitting 101 is two 2-hour sessions long and covers casting on, knitting, purling, and binding off, but often covers more.
Knitting 102 is one 2-hour session tailored to the students who take it, whether it's getting started on a new project, or learning more techniques. Some students take this class several months in a row as they start new projects and need to learn new techniques. K102 is typically scheduled a week after K101 ends.

Clinics - Thursdays 6-8 pm
I am at the shop (almost) every Thursday evening from 6-8 pm for knitting clinics. If you're having problems with a project or want help mastering particular technique and you need some one-on-one help, this is the time to get it. Cost is $15 for two hours. (No clinic Sep 8 or Thanksgiving)

For students enrolled in my project classes, you can stop in for my clinic and receive extra help on the class project at no charge (while the class is still going on).

Techniques classes
These techniques are not project specific, but offer alternative methods for familiar and/or traditional techniques.

Cabling without a cable needle. Saturday, Sept. 10, 10 am-noon
This class is for knitters already familiar with cables. There are times when you just can't get around using a cable needle, but other times you can work cables without a cable needle. This is particularly handy for cables and twists of just a couple of stitches that occur frequently, when a cable needle can really slow you down. This class will teach you how to cable without a cable needle, whether you are working basic 2-stitch knit twists, knit/purl cables, or traveling (possibly twisted stitch) cables. You'll need needles with pointy tips.

Knitting in the round without dpns. Saturday, Oct 8, noon-2 pm
Magic Loop, Traveling Loop, and Two Circs are methods of working small to medium circumference items without the need for double pointed needles. This class will cover all three techniques, including when it's possible to use each technique, when the techniques are interchangeable and when one technique has an advantage over another. We'll also discuss the application of these techniques for larger circumference knitting.

Continental knitting. Saturday, Nov. 19, 10 am-noon.
This class is for knitters who "throw" or "flick" the yarn with their right hand and are interested in learning to knit with the yarn in their left hand, either as a substitute for their current method of knitting, in order to manage one color of yarn in each hand for stranded color knitting, or simply to expand their repertoire.

Intermediate Knitting Techniques
I'll be offering three techniques classes aimed at knitters who want to move on to becoming intermediate knitters. Each class meets once for two hours.

Increases and Decreases. Wednesday, Oct 12, 6-8 pm
This class will focus on various single and double increases and decreases. Some patterns specify a particular type of increase or decrease and some leave it up to the knitter. This class will cover not only how to do each type of increase, but when and where they are best used, allowing you to select the one that suits you and your project best, regardless of what the pattern says.

Cables and Lace. Wednesday, Oct 19, 6-8 pm
Cables and lace are among the most commonly used techniques for textured designs and run the gamut from very simple to highly complex. This class will teach the nuts and bolts of each of these techniques, allowing you to step up the complexity of your projects with confidence.

Reading patterns and charts, Wednesday, Oct. 26, 6-8 pm
Written patterns are full of abbreviations and short hand, which can quickly get tricky if you don't understand the rules behind their structure and how to read and interpret them. We'll cover the basics of how written patterns are set up, as well as delve into the more complex, such as the infamous "AT THE SAME TIME" instruction.

Charts can seem overwhelming until you understand that the symbols aren't random and that they can actually help you see what you're supposed to do as well as act as a way of checking your work and seeing where you're headed. We'll discuss charts for knitting flat and in the round.

Tomorrow, I'll update you on the project classes I'm teaching. If you can't wait, you can find information on all the fall classes at NU on their website here.

It's State Fair Time

2011-08-25T15:27:00.000-05:00

I love going to the Creative Activities building at the Minnesota State Fair to look at all the hand crafts, particularly the knitting. Until a couple of years ago, I never looked into how to enter a knitted item into the competition, and certainly never planned my knitting during the year with the idea of entering the fair.

I entered one item a couple of years ago in the "vest, textured pattern" category. I had done a very nice job on the finishing work for the vest I had knit for Level II of the Master Hand Knitting program. I didn't win a ribbon, although I got quite a high score (in the mid 90s). It was apparent that vests that won ribbons had texture patterns on the front and back, rather than just the front, as mine had. The sweater categories are divided out by "limited texture" and "texture," but the vests aren't, so it worked to my disadvantage that my vest had a plain stockinette back.

Last year I didn't get my act together in time to enter anything, but this year, I managed to look up the dates before the deadline had passed. (I really ought to put those dates in my calendar!) I had a couple of things I wanted to enter, but as I inspected the two pairs of socks that I was particularly proud of, I could see that neither pair would do, as there was obvious wear on the soles, either because of some felting on the inside of the heels in one case, or soiled soles in the other. (Again, I don't plan ahead for fair-worthy items. I ought to put them away until after the fair is over, but that never occurs to me.)

I decided to enter just one wee hat, and as it turned out, the competition was Garment Making, not Needlecraft, as it was an infant's hat and baby items are not part of the hand knitting categories.

This morning and afternoon, I received two separate text messages on my phone with attached photos.

Here's what my friend Rosemary sent to me.


Second Premium Garment Making, Infant's and Toddler's garments, Bonnet or cap, knitted

Yarn Over and the Technical Trio

2011-05-02T10:49:00.001-05:00

Yarn Over was this past weekend, and I had a fantastic time. I took two great classes - one from Susanna Hansson and one from Fiona Ellis and both were great. I love to see how other teachers teach, and it's even better when I learn something new.

Perhaps the best part of the weekend was having breakfast Sunday morning with TECHknitter and Joan Schrouder. We've been planning this breakfast for months, and I couldn't wait to lay my eyes on TECHknitter. Who hasn't wondered about the face behind the fabulous knitting blog?

We had a fantastic time geeking out and mutually admiring each other and talking about Ravelry, which is what really brought us together. When the waiter brought our breakfast, we asked him to take our picture.

The whole time at breakfast, I kept wondering how TECHknitter could eat breakfast with that giant black rectangle strapped across her eyes. Amazing. Also, I could swear my cardigan was completely buttoned up when I left the house that morning. And doesn't Joan look gorgeous in that blue shawl?

New Pattern, New CraftEDU Class

2011-02-09T15:48:00.000-06:00

I've been busy lately working on a new design and new class for CraftEDU. The pattern is also available for sale as a Ravelry download for $4.50. buy now

It's a sideways cabled hat that incorporates short rows for the shaping, plus lots of other techniques not normally found in a hat, like grafting in pattern and picking up sts. Yarn weight and needle size allow you to size the pattern up and down. I used Koigu KPPPM and 3.0mm needles for the baby hat in the tea cup and good old Cascade 220 and size 7/4.5mm needles for the magenta and periwinkle hats above.

There's a free Preview of the class at CraftEDU, and we're running a BAZINGA! through noon tomorrow (Mountain time) that will give you a discount off the price. The class includes in-depth photo tutorials with lots of voice over naration, as well as video tutorials, and runs close to an hour and a half in length. There are even tips on designing with a graft in mind! A boatload of great techniques to learn with just one hank of yarn!

Once again, the great thing about a CraftEDU class is that you can skip the parts on techniques you already know, or watch the techniques that are new or troublesome over and over again.

I plan to offer this techniques-packed class locally, too, so stay tuned for more information.

Teacher, teacher

2010-12-09T10:05:00.008-06:00

This fall I've been a busy, busy knitter, although you wouldn't know it based on my lack of blog posts! Much of what I've been knitting has been samples for my January to April-ish (and beyond) classes at Needlework Unlimited, which I will post more about in a couple of days. (If you're local and you can't wait for that, at least some of my upcoming classes can be seen on the Needlework Unlimited class schedule here, or if you stop by the shop, Marcy has been busy putting up the samples on the wall.) Karen's first grandbaby arrives this spring, so we have lots of baby-centric project classes planned. I will offer additional classes in the late spring, but those can't get posted until I finish the samples and get my course descriptions written!

In the midst of my sample knitting, I was asked to become an instructor at CraftEDU, which is a website devoted to teaching all sorts of crafts, particularly at more advanced levels. The project classes at CraftEDU will all be my own designs. In the past, I've tended toward custom design for one-off projects and have rarely written up the patterns. I'm looking forward to building my portfolio of pattern designs as well as teaching these projects. My classes will provide the opportunity to expand my students' technique repertoire as well as demonstrate how to fix mistakes common to the specific project (I am well-familiar with any mistakes that can be made, because I make them myself. And then I fix them!). I will also offer pointers on adapting the techniques for students' own designs.

The classes are structured as "broadcasts," which combine photos and tutorials on the techniques used in the class, along with more detailed audio explanations for the information covered on each page of the broadcast (think of it as sort of a PowerPoint on steroids). I have the ability to embed video, too, when that works better than photos. When students buy a class, they get 12 views of the class or access for 12 months, whichever comes first, so they can work on the project and review it at their own pace. So whether you can only watch on weekends or at 2 am or you live in Australia or the U.K., you can take the class. They'll get downloadable PDFs of the class screen shots, plus a copy of the pattern. There are free previews of each class that allow you to hear/see more information about the class, the materials required and the techniques that will be taught. I'm really excited about this!

You can join the CraftEDU community here. Once you are a member, you can join my online classroom here. You can post comments, ask questions, find a link to my classes, amongst other things. As a member of my classroom, you'll get notified when I post new classes. I hope you'll join me!

My first class at CraftEDU will be the Reversibly Cabled Scarf I introduced a couple years ago. I taught it at NU several times. Needlework sells the pattern as well. Monika's Quilt and Yarn Shop, in Park Rapids, MN carries it, too, and it can also be purchased as a PDF download on Ravelry.

I'm always interested in hearing what my students would like to learn. If you have ideas, whether it's for a class you'd like to see me teach at NU or a class you'd like to see on CraftEDU, please let me know!

I get around..and so can you

2010-10-28T16:49:00.007-05:00

I've been working on handouts for a class I'm teaching Saturday morning at Needlework Unlimited, and it occurred to me that I ought to work harder at letting the world know what and when I'm teaching.

So here's what's on my teaching schedule through the end of the year.

Saturday, Oct. 30, 10 am-noon
Knitting in the Round without DPNs
There's no need to use dpns for small circumference items, and no need to switch from a regular circ to dpns when you've done too many decreases to continue with dpns. This class primarily covers Magic Loop and the Two Circs methods, but I'll also cover the Modified Magic Loop and Traveling Loop techniques, and cover when one technique might be preferable over another. We'll also discuss needle types and lengths that are best for each technique.

(It's not too late to register for this class -- there are still a few spots left. More information here.)

Tuesday, Nov. 2, 10 am - Noon
Continental Knitting
A day time class for knitters who throw the yarn with their right hand and want to learn to "pick" the yarn while it is held in their left hand. You must know how to knit and purl already.
More information here.

Wednesday, Nov 3 and 10, 6 - 8 pm
Knitting 101
Do you have a friend who keeps telling you she/he wants to learn to knit? Get 'em signed up!
They'll learn to cast on and knit in the first class and purl in the second. Additional skills taught to those who catch on quickly.
More information here

Saturday, Nov. 6, 10 am - noon
Finishing Techniques
Bring your projects that need to be put together and learn to seam properly, pick up stitches for those button bands, or you can practice seaming on swatches.
More information here.

Saturday, Nov. 13, 10 am - noon
Oops! Fixing Your Mistakes
Tinking, frogging, laddering down -- you name it, I can teach you to fix it.
More information here.

Tuesday, Nov. 16, 6-9 pm
Twinkle Mittens
Cozy mittens made with super thick and soft Twinkle yarn can be completed in just a couple hours.
More information here.

Wednesday, Nov. 17, 6 - 8 pm
Knitting 102
Never learned to purl? Don't know how to read a pattern? Have no clue how to decrease or increase? Whatever you want to learn next, I'll teach you.
More information here

Saturday, Nov. 20, noon - 2 pm
Third Saturday Techniques and Master Hand Knitting Clinic
Through the end of the year, I'm having drop-in (or register ahead of time!) clinics. Anyone is welcome to come for help, but this is also a time for knitters working on the Master Hand Knitting program to get some feedback on techniques, ask questions and get some guidance for resources. It's also a nice time to connect with other knitters in person who are going through the program. I always bring my Level I binder (with the judges comments) and my in-progress Level II binder. (Starting in January, I will be offering Saturday clinics more frequently.)
More information here.

Tuesday, Nov. 30 6-8 pm
Finishing Techniques
Same as above. Get those holiday projects finished up!
More information here.

Saturday, Dec. 4, 11, 10 am - noon
Knitting 101
Give a friend or relative a holiday gift they won't forget -- the ability to knit!
More information here

Wed., Dec. 16, 6-8 pm
Finishing Techniques
Once again, I'll be at the shop ready to help you get 'er done.
More information here.

Saturday, Dec. 18 10 am - noon
Knitting 102
Learn whatever skill is next on your knitting to-do list.
More information here

Saturday, Dec 18, noon- 2 pm
Third Saturday Techniques and Master Hand Knitting Clinic
Drop-in (or register ahead of time!) clinic. Anyone is welcome to come for help, but this is also a time for knitters working on the Master Hand Knitting program to get some feedback on techniques, ask questions and get some guidance for resources. It's also a nice time to connect with other knitters in person who are going through the program. I always bring my Level I binder (with the judges comments) and my in-progress Level II binder.
More information here

Toot, toot!

2010-03-29T08:58:00.002-05:00

That would be the sound of my own horn.

I found out yesterday I won Ravelry's Bobby Award for Most Educational Raveler. A great honor, and a very big thrill!

Ask a Knitter archive page

2010-02-19T16:41:00.001-06:00

For any of you who have clicked on the sidebar link to Ask a Knitter archives and have been frustrated by the fact that you couldn't actually get to the archives, then today you are going to be thrilled by this news:

The archive link works now.

That is all.

Novel(ty) Hats

2010-02-16T14:08:00.003-06:00

So I've decided that my heroine's brother is a Firefly fan, the type of guy who would go to Comic-Con if he could afford the airfare, and that my heroine is going to make her brother a Jayne Cobb hat. It's the perfect project for a new knitter - the worse it looks, the better, as Ma Cobb was not an expert with the yarn and needles. That's perfectly fine for Jayne, after all, as Wash said when Jayne first put on the hat, "A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he's not afraid of anything."

I hied myself to Michael's the other day, to get me some Red Heart Super Saver. All I can say is: wow. I am not anti-acrylic. I used it often for baby sweaters, and only last year I used it to make mittens for my LA-based nephews, who don't need wool, but I've always bought it at my LYS, Needlework Unlimited, which has very reasonably priced acrylic yarn and best of all, the stuff they carry is soft and the colors look good, not garish.

Not so the Red Heart, which is kind of the point, I guess, when it comes to making a Jayne Cobb hat, although I wonder if Ma Cobb would have used wool, possibly sheared from her own sheep?

I looked through several existing patterns for Jayne's hat, and compared them to what I saw in the clips.

Most of the patterns call for working 4 or more rounds of ribbing (some k2p2, some k1p1) before switching to stockinette. It's clear from photos and screen shots that there is not that much ribbing, at least around the front of the hat.

I think the reason none of the Jayne hats I've seen look quite right (aside from the fact that most knitters have appallingly even tension) is that Ma Cobb may have been doing some stealth short rows. The front of the hat has only about 6 or 7 rows of orange, and one row of k1p1 above a long tail cast on that is done in k1p1 pattern, but over the ear flaps, the orange stripe is wider, as is the ribbing. (59 seconds in to the video, you can see the side of the hat more clearly.) The hat looks like it's actually shaped to curve around Jayne's face. Cunning, indeed.

So now I have to decide if I want to make a Jayne Cobb hat that a beginner could actually make, or do I want to replicate the actual hat, which was clearly made by a very good knitter who was only pretending to be bad.

I may do both. When I fired out an email to my writer friends, asking who was a Firefly fan, three of them replied. One said, "Shiny!" and other mentioned she loved "Captain Tight Pants," and the other, when I revealed that there might be a terrible hat giveaway, raised her hand and said something to the effect of "Me! Me! Pick me!!!"

Novel Knitting

2010-02-09T09:22:00.004-06:00

So I'm back to writing fiction again after a 5-year hiatus that coincides with my complete obsession with knitting. I had previously had a very intimate relationship with knitting, and then took a 5-year break during which I spent a lot of time writing and merely nodded to knitting once a year on the occasion of a baby shower. Five years ago, I became a knitting stalker. No one has staged an intervention or presented me with a restraining order, but it's only a matter of time.

The knitting obsessiveness came in response to losing my writing voice. Writing was torture, my internal critic sat on my shoulder and bellowed into my ear with an megaphone, "You SUCK!" and nothing I wrote -- even emails -- sounded like me. I wanted to remember what it was like to do something creative for the pure fun and joy of it. So I came back to knitting, and I came back hard.

Eventually, my voice did come back, and I found myself writing more and more, but still not fiction. This fall, when I decided I wanted to write fiction again, NaNoWriMo sounded like a great idea to me, except for the part where I didn't actually have an idea for a story. I had an idea for a character, but I didn't know much about her. I had no ideas for other characters, no idea about setting, plot, nothing.

Turns out that when I have to write 50,000 words in one month, there's no time to think about what to write, and no time for my internal critic to haul herself into a comfortable spot on my shoulder and dish out negative self-talk. I owe the world to the guy who created Write or Die. If I hadn't had that program reminding me to keep writing (no thinking!), I wouldn't have made it.

So that was November. I let the book marinate for December, and signed up for a "Working on Your Novel" class at the Loft that started a couple of weeks ago. I knew I would need concrete goals and deadlines to work through revisions on this book, and the threat of public humiliation if I didn't meet goals, because I have the least amount of discipline of any person I know. Big personality flaw, but that's who I am.

Turns out that most of what I wrote will be thrown out (no real surprise), but the good part is that I have characters, those characters have external goals and internal conflicts, which means I can have plot and character arc (always good news).

One of the things I do to get the theme of the book nailed down - what it's really about - is to make a collage of the characters, the setting, and main plot points. I have collected a lot of photos and little objects that represent the book, but I want to do something else, too.

This book has knitting in it - one of the characters is an indie dyer and her grandmother/great aunt (not sure which yet) has a yarn shop she's ready to retire from. While the book doesn't center around the shop, this older woman is the catalyst for the chain of events that is the plot and she is very important to all the other characters, including the antagonist.

I want to keep my two creative processes joined, so that when I take a break from writing to knit, the knitting keeps me in the world of the story. To do that, I want to knit something that represents each character in some way.

So, for example, the older woman--Franny-- has lace curtains hanging in her kitchen. So I'm knitting a lace curtain. Not a full size one -- I would go insane doing that -- but a smaller one, shorter, and with fewer multiples, so I can get the thing done.

"Rose Leaf" Design
Curtains
First Book of Modern Lace Knitting, by Marianne Kinzel (this book would have been new when Franny made her curtains).
Yarn: Coats Opera 30 crochet cotton (the pattern calls for #60 crochet cotton, which is not half as thin, it turns out, but is harder to come by, so I settled for #30, of which Needlework Unlimited had plenty of, in lots of colors, and which seems fine enough to me)
Needles: US 1/2.25mm

For the hero, who I named Hank, even before I knew there would be yarn, I need to knit a pair of socks - the socks the heroine sees him pull on when she first meets him. Something interesting enough that she would notice them, but manly enough that a guy like him would wear them. He's a Mr. Fixit guy with carpentry skills, on a break from what he normally does to earn a living (professional poker player). He's having trouble moving forward in his life because he keeps trying to fix the past/keep things as they've always been. So I need a sock pattern that fit his personality.

The heroine, Penny (not crazy about this name, I'm open to suggestions), has never knit before, but will learn how. She's all about the future, wants to forget her past and where she came from. She's also an expert in deceptive language. I have a scene where she's in the shop, having walked for quite a long distance in heels and she has blisters. She puts on a pair of felted slippers on display in the shop which are shaped like cowboy boots. They're not conventional, which scares her, because she's pulled herself up from a financially strapped background, and she works hard to fit in and not appear different. But she loves those slippers. I want those slippers. I may have to design them myself. Don't you think red cowboy boot slippers, with needle-felted swirly designs on the leg would be really cool?

(Edited to add photo below)

Only felted. A search of Ravelry reveals that there are crocheted cowboy booties (not felted). Clearly, this is a void waiting to be filled.

The indie dyer (I'm calling her Sookie) needs something funky - either an asymmetrical cardi, or a funky shawl or hat or maybe fingerless mitts that make A Statement. Something that represents her artistic self and independence, and uses color in a unique, but beautiful way. This is going to be hard for me. Unique color choices scare me, because I have some color vision deficiencies.

Sookie has a love interest, a more traditional guy who owns a downtown bar. I'm thinking some sort of subtle scarf that could be tucked into the neck of his wool overcoat. Like Henry, only not Henry, because while that is a terrific looking scarf, I think I would poke my eyes out with my needles if I had to knit it. On the other hand, there's nothing that says I can't knit a very small Henry scarf. Considering the size of the lace curtain I'm knitting, I could get away with a scarf about a foot long and 3 inches wide. Hmmm.

The heroine's brother is a young guy - never went to college, but smart, works manual labor jobs, a nice guy, but with simple tastes. I'm thinking a watch cap. Navy blue, maybe gray. Or maybe he's not like his sister. Maybe he doesn't care what people think about the way he looks. Can't decide.

The antagonist is another older lady, one who needs to control her world. She's getting something made of acrylic.

The heroine's mother is awful. So awful I don't know if I can even knit for her. She's the kind of person who would find fault in anything you knit for her. The kind of person who'd rather have a lottery ticket than a hand knit anything. Huh. That's interesting. I'll have to use that.

So I'm looking for pattern ideas. Anyone?

Soft and Shiny

2010-01-17T17:43:00.000-06:00

Sophia needed to do some research this weekend at the History Center's library in downtown St. Paul, so while she was doing that, I stopped in at Treadle Yard Goods on Grand Ave. and shopped for buttons for my Bristow Cardi.

At knitting group the other day, I was sewing in the sleeves and the subject of buttons for the Bristow came up. I told the other women I was thinking of gold buttons, but when there was a simultaneous cry of "No!" from the group it occurred to me that I might be on the wrong track. I can knit people, but I'm not the best accessorizer.

The cardi is mostly stockinette, with most of the detail occurring right next to the button bands. I was instructed to get something that wouldn't pull attention away from the knitting. Something plain. Not shiny. A dull pewter, maybe. Or mother of pearl. Maybe a matte black button.

Armed with that information, I walked into Treadle Yard Goods and headed for the counter where the buttons were on display. A lovely woman asked what she could help me with, and boy was I glad she asked. Turned out she was a knitter, too, so she understood the necessary properties of a sweater button. She had a great idea about the right color, too: some sort of pearlized black would be good, she thought.

She was right.

This afternoon I sewed on the buttons, and after the Vikings game was over Michael took photos.

Can you see the buttons?

Kind of hard to get good photos of them.

I hate seeing that gate in the background of my indoor photos, so I had Michael take some outside, too. It's downright balmy here in Minnesota -- 35 degrees! -- so no outerwear necessary.

I made a mistake where I always seem to make mistakes - right at the bust - so I'm taking more advice from my knitting group and I'm living with the error for now.

If it still bugs me after a few wearings, I'll do some surgery and fix it.

Pattern: Bristow, Knitty, Winter 2005
Yarn: Knit Picks Andean Silk (Alpaca, Merino, Silk)
Needles: US 6/4.0mm for the seed stitch borders and cuffs, US 7/4.5mm for the rest of it.

Ask a Cat

2010-01-16T22:04:00.003-06:00

Michael was hanging over my shoulder tonight with the digital camera, shooting video of me working various types of right and left twists for my upcoming Ask a Knitter column on Ravelry (should be posted Monday or Tuesday).

I got some unsolicited help.

Or maybe unsolicited criticism, not sure which.

Slipping onto the Bandwagon with Felted Feet

2010-01-14T11:45:00.002-06:00

A month or so ago, I kept seeing a thread in the Ravelry Patterns forum entitled "French Press Felted Slippers" which I interpreted (without reading the thread) to mean that someone was using a French coffee press as a device for felting slippers. You'd think I would have read the thread, just to confirm such an oddity, but I did not.

A while later, the Yarn Harlot posted about discovering a pattern she was all over called French Press Felted Slippers, which it turns out are felted slippers designed by a woman who designs under the moniker French Press. They were supposedly a super-fast knit (90 minutes!), making them ideal for Christmas gift knitting.

It also turns out that the slippers were very cute, so I bought the pattern via Ravelry (as did hundreds of other people), and cast on with Patons Classic Wool in red. Either I was paying too much attention to the streaming video on my laptop, or I'm simply not a turbo-fast knitter, because the knitting took me about twice as long as the 90-minute claim. Of course, I was also practicing a new method of Continental purl, so that may have had something to do with it. (A new method I am now insanely happy about, but which I will save for another post. Or maybe an Ask a Knitter column. We'll see how it goes.)

At any rate, I knit the pieces, and then (as is often the case) had no fortitude to sew them together, so they sat for a week or two, little rolled up tubes of stockinette, on the floor of my office.

A few days before we left for Sedona, I decided I needed to finish up those slippers so I could wear them around the hotel room. I sewed, I felted, I let them air dry for a couple of days, and then I packed them in my suitcase, along with the decorative buttons, planning to sew the tabs on when we got to Arizona.

Here they are, felted, but unfinished.

When I pulled the slippers out of my suitcase, I realized I had forgotten to bring any yarn or thread with me with which to sew on the buttons. Lucky, lucky me, the hotel was fancy enough to have pre-threaded needles in a sewing kit, right there in the bathroom. There was just enough red to sew on the tabs at the wide end. I used the brown to sew on the buttons through both layers of fabric.

I wore them the entire time I was in the hotel room, then packed them in my carry on luggage for the flight home so that I could wear them, rather than my UGG boots, on the 3-hour flight.

I love these little slippers. My winter footwear consists mostly of UGG slippers and UGG boots. My UGG slippers are bulky and keep my feet warm, but I like to fold up my legs while I sit, which is somewhat problematic with slippers as sturdy as the UGGs.

These little babies are nice and soft and pliable, like wearing an extra-thick, but stylish, wool footie.

Gray Silhouette

2010-01-13T21:32:00.002-06:00

This year I'm all about sweaters, it seems, which hasn't been what I've been about, knitting-wise, for quite a while.

I first learned to knit while I was living in Dublin on a 3-month work visa in early 1986, when I was half the age I am now. I had three flatmates: Winnie (short for Winnifred) from County Roscommon, who was engaged to a boy back home, and two sisters from County Meath, Catherine and Anne, whose parents owned a shoe store. Winnie was training to be a cook, which with her accent sounded like "kook." Catherine was a nurse, and Anne worked as a secretary. I met them all when I called John, a guy I had met on a beach in Greece, on the island of Thira (aka Santorini). He and his brother were there making a video for their travel company in Dublin. I was there on holiday, taking a break from living and working in London. I had plans to get a visa to work in Dublin when my British work visa expired. They gave me their business card and told me to call when I got to Dublin. So I did. Anne was their secretary and they knew the fourth girl in her flat had just moved out, so they arranged for me to stay with her for a few days until I found a place to live. Before I had a chance to find a flat, the girls invited me to live with them for the duration of my work visa.

Our flat in Dublin comprised the entire first floor of a house. A couple of other young women lived upstairs, and our landlady, Franny, lived across the street. We had no central heat, just a coal fireplace in the sitting room. All the electricity was metered. One meter kept the lights and outlets running and the other was for the small water heater in the shower. When I say "small," I mean just a gallon or two of water. There were no long, leisurely showers. If you turned on the water just long enough to get wet, then soaped up and shampooed your hair, you'd have barely enough warm water to rinse off. If you had to shave your legs, you could either stand in the shower shivering for 10 minutes while the tank heated up again, or you could stand in the shower shivering while cold water rinsed off the soap from your legs.

We didn't actually use real coal for the fireplace. It was some sort of coal replacement, but it was delivered by a coal man in a horse drawn cart, just the same. There were several coal men who delivered on our street, and each one had a unique call he'd shout out that identified him, kind of like an ice cream truck, so you had to listen for him as he came down the street when you were low on coal.

In the evenings, we'd all sit together in the closed-off sitting room watching television and eating our respective dinners. Catherine and Anne usually cooked together, and it was Catherine's duty as the sister who made it home from work first to put potatoes in the oven to bake. The first thing Anne would ask was, "And did you put spuds in, Catherine?" Only she pronounced her sister's name "CAH-trin." Also, she complained about the way I pronounced her name, with my Midwestern nasal intonation. "My name's Anne, not 'AY-ann," she'd say. So we'd all be sitting there, eating, watching the telly, Catherine would light up a cigarette, Anne would bum one off her, and then the everything would go black. One of us, usually Catherine, would have a 50p coin ready and would run down the hall to the closet where the electric meter was. In went the coin, and back on came the lights.

I shared a bedroom with Catherine. I envied her electric blanket, because the bedrooms were cold (see: no central heat, above), but the girls dug up a spare hot water bottle for me, something I'd read about but had never seen, and I learned to put on the kettle a half hour before bedtime so I could slide into warm sheets at night.

My wages were heavily taxed while I was there, so I didn't have money to travel around the countryside on weekends. My flatmates would go to their parents' houses in County Meath and County Roscommon, leaving me alone in the cold, damp flat. I would spend Saturday and Sunday in the sitting room, tossing fake coal on the fire and watching television (there was no cable or satellite TV, and it was daytime weekend programming, so you can imagine how interesting that was). There was a large water tank behind the fireplace, and I learned that if I ran the fire all day long, by the end of the day I'd have tepid running water available from the taps rather than ice-cold water.

One Sunday evening, Catherine came back from County Meath with a knitting project. She was using a nubbly cotton yarn to make a V-neck pullover with dolman sleeves. Always a crafty person, I was immediately smitten with the idea of knitting in the evenings while we watched the telly and waited for the room to go dark. I worked not far from St. Stephen's Green and Trinity College, so a couple days later on my lunch hour, after picked up my check from Kelly Girl, I walked to a department store downtown which had a knitting department, picked out a pattern, needles and yarn, and took my supplies back to the flat.

I didn't know how to cast on, so my flatmates showed me how to do that, and then I tried to remember how to knit, which I had learned one afternoon in 5th grade and then never did again. They corrected the direction I was wrapping the yarn around the needle, but they hesitated to correct anything else, because they didn't want to traumatize me. Apparently, the nuns used to whack them on the knuckles if they held their yarn and needles wrong (knitting in school, can you believe it?). I spent the rest of the week hunched over my needles and yarn, practicing. Then it was the weekend again and they all left town, so I was left to my own devices to figure out how to purl. "It's just the opposite of knitting!" they called out as the door slammed behind them. I couldn't work it out, and I didn't have money to buy a knitting how-to book, so I spent several hours at a bookstore studying the pictures in knitting books until I could figure it out.

From that time on, I was a knitter. That first project was a sleeveless V-neck top, made with the same nubbly cotton yarn Catherine was using for her sweater, but I jazzed mine up with a red cotton yarn for the ribbing. (Big mistake. Turns out that red cotton yarn will bleed all over white cotton yarn once the combination hits a sink full of cold water. First sad knitting lesson learned.)

I knit nothing but sweaters for years. The pattern books I bought, including all those great Kaffe Fasset coffee table knitting books of the 1980's, were full of sweaters. I just never thought to knit anything else.

When I came back into knitting about five years ago, I had no thought of knitting sweaters. I knit things I'd never thought of knitting before: beaded shawls, afghans, socks, scarves, mittens, gloves, hats, even a few toys. I hadn't completely abandoned sweater knitting. About 4 years ago I started an Aran sweater, which took me a couple of winters to finish. I wear it all the time and it's probably one of my favorite items of clothing. Soon after that, I knit an entire cardigan in about a week and a half, then spent 2 years trying to sew a zipper into it before I gave up and sewed a clasp at the neck.

In December 2007 I started knitting a cardigan while we were at Disney World. I got about 75% of the way done before it went into hibernation.

In December 2008 I started knitting a cardigan shortly before winter break. I got about 70% done before I realized I was using the wrong needles. I ripped it out and re-knit it up to that point before it went into hibernation.

In October 2009 I started knitting a bulky knit pullover. I finished it a month or so later.

Then I pulled out the Dec. '08 cardigan and finished that one.

A couple of weeks ago, I pulled out the Dec. '07 cardigan and finished up the knitting on that one. I sewed the sleeves in today. There are a few ends to weave in, and buttons to find, but other than that it's finished. (More photos when it's finished finished.)

I have one more sweater in hibernation. You might guess that it's from December 2006, but you'd be wrong. It's from 1990, and I still like it.

I'm fairly certain all the knitting is finished on that one. Just need to sew a few more seams, weave in some ends, and find some buttons. It's a Louisa Harding design from Rowan 6. It's practically vintage and I've never even worn it.

In the meantime, I've started something new.

Yes, it's a sweater. A cardigan, actually.

It seems my love affair with sweaters is back.

And it's all because 24 years ago I met an Irish boy on a topless beach on the island of Santorini. Fancy that.

New Year, New Socks

2010-01-07T20:55:00.005-06:00

My kids don't wear socks unless they have to. We live in Minnesota, and when the temperature the past few weeks has been above zero, it hasn't been by much. This weather situation does not, for my kids, constitute a "have to" condition for wearing socks. (There was an argument the other morning about whether or not a coat was necessary. It was -9 F.)

So you can imagine my surprise when Sophia's knitting request this fall was a pair of socks. Not just any socks, mind you. Knee socks. Nothing fancy, just something she could wear around the house, but with the possibility of going out in public while wearing her UGGS so that only the top of the cuff was visible. I was game, because she asked for socks, and I love knitting socks, and she asked for them. She was not interested in self-striping stockinette socks, so I was bracing myself for the idea that I might have to knit plain socks with plain yarn.

Then she picked out the pattern. Lissajous, by Cookie A.

Not so simple, after all, and she insisted on the heel flap detail, even though she never planned to wear them in public except when they were stuffed inside a tall boot. The heel flap, is, you know, a flap, which means it's knit flat, back and forth. This is a twisted stitch pattern, with stitch crossings on every row: twisted knit crossing to the right over a purl, twisted knit crossing to the left over a purl, twisted knit crossing a twisted knit, twisted knit crossing a plain knit. All that variation keeps you on your toes when you can see the right side of the fabric. It's a completely different matter to work a row of that from the wrong side.

I measured her feet, her calves, her ankles. Interesting, I thought. She has the same foot and leg measurements as her mother, who it turned out was the person knitting the socks. Which meant that reassignment of sock ownership in the future could be possible if the socks were abandoned at some point.

After I finished the first sock, she said something I never expected: "This is really cool." And she went off to look for her Birkenstocks so that she could wear the socks to school as soon as I finished knitting the second one. Which took a while, as Lissajous is not for the faint of heart.

As soon as I finished weaving in the ends, I held up the socks to admire them, and what should I see, but this:

Sophia didn't want to hear about my mistakes, nor did she want me to point them out. "I can't see them," she said. "Don't show them to me. They don't matter."

In other news, we were in Sedona between Christmas and New Year's. Michael and I took a hike late one afternoon as the snow was falling. He had his fancy camera with him and I was wearing my reverse engineered bulky sweater that I didn't have a photo of yet. I whipped off my coat and insisted he take pictures of me.

I'm thinking I should have whipped off the snow pants, too. Not a great look. But the scenery -- wow.

Celebrate

2009-11-30T12:41:00.002-06:00

That is all.

Posts about knitting will resume tomorrow.

I don't think that word means what you think it means

2009-11-21T09:55:00.001-06:00

I have a friend who once talked me into a project which involved sewing 100 pencil cases from cotton duck fabric. Each pencil case was going to need a 10" zipper, so I went online and found a zipper company that could make me as many zippers as I wanted in whatever color I wanted and with whatever kind of zipper pull I wanted. The only problem was that (at the time) they had a completely unsecure method of ordering through their website, which involved clicking on a link that brought up a blank email, into which I was supposed to type a) what I wanted and b) my credit card number.

Well, not being a complete idiot, I didn't do that, so I called the company instead and got a person whose first language was not English, which was okay, but it turned out that sometimes what you say to a person is not what they hear.

Our conversation went something like this:
"I would like to order one hundred 10-inch zippers."
"Okay," he said. "How many do you want?"
Puzzled, I said, "Uh, I want a hundred."
I then went on to tell him what color I wanted, and all the other zipper-related details, and then I gave him my credit card number.

A few days later a somewhat larger box than I expected arrived at my door. Since my friend wasn't due to come over for a few more days to work on the project, I didn't open the box right away, but when I did, I realized something had gone horribly wrong with my order. Inside the box was 100 zippers, in exactly the right color, each of which was 110" long. I ordered one hundred 10-inch zippers, but he thought I was ordering 110-inch zippers.

I mentioned the other day that there is a sweater I want to start. I've had the yarn for months now, having ordered it shortly after I bought the book the pattern is in.

One thing has puzzled me since I bought the book and the yarn. The yarn called for is a sport weight yarn. Now, I'm not a slave to using the yarn called for in a pattern, because I understand how to make substitutions, but the yarn and the pattern have confounded me since I first laid eyes on them, because both specify using the same needle size, but each indicate a very different gauge, not just from each other, but also different from the gauge I would expect to get with that needle size.

The yarn is a sport weight yarn, and the label says it works up at 6 sts/inch, which seems about right to me for a sport weight yarn. Here's the confusing part. The yarn label says to use a size 6 needle to achieve that gauge.

Now, I am a knitter who almost without fail achieves the gauge on the label using the suggested needle size. In this case, I think it would be impossible. I have no doubt I could get 6 sts/in with this yarn, but I think it would take a size 4 needle to do it. As I said, I am an on-gauge knitter. The theoretically average knitter yarn companies label their products for.

I once did an experiment where I knitted up swatches for three different yarn weights using three different needle sizes. I used a fingering weight yarn, a worsted weight, and a bulky. I used size 3 needles, size 7 and size 10 (maybe 10.5, I can't remember for sure).

Typical gauges would be as follows:
Fingering on size 3 needles would give me 7 sts/in
Worsted weight on size 7 needles would give me 5 sts/in
Bulky weight on the size 10 or 10.5 needles would give me 3.5 sts/in

What I wanted to see was what my gauges were for these yarns when I used different needles.

The fingering weight yarn worked up at 5 sts/in on size 7 needles, and 3.5 sts/in on size 10 needles. The 3.5 sts/in swatch was like cheesecloth, of course.

The worsted weight worked up at 3.5 sts/in on size 10 needles.

When I used smaller needles than the yarn typically called for, the sts could only get squished so far, but my experience has shown me that I *can* get DK gauge on DK needles with worsted yarn, which is only one yarn weight thicker than DK. I can get worsted weight gauge on worsted weight needles with Aran yarn.

So knowing that, and knowing that sport weight yarn is a thinner yarn than DK and worsted, I would expect to get about 5.25 sts/in on size 6 needles for any yarn worsted weight or thinner.

Now, looking at the *pattern*, I see that it calls for using this yarn with size 6 needles, but it indicates a gauge of 5 sts/in. Again, not the needle size I (the theoretical average knitter) would typically use to get 5 sts/in, and certainly not the *gauge* I would want for a sport weight yarn if I didn't want the sweater to lose its shape.

I wrote to the yarn company, suggesting that there may be an error on their label, perhaps they meant to put Size 4 needle, not 4.0mm (which is what a size 6 needle is), helpfully explaining that I am typically an on-gauge knitter, and that 6 sts/in on size 6 needles seems unlikely. Their response was as follows:

Suggested needle size is just that, a suggestion. It's a starting point. It was decided that a size 6 needle would give the desired gauge for the average knitter. I know that I would start swatching on a 4, because I'm rather loose knitter. But
as you know, everyone is different.

Can you hear me bashing my head against my keyboard?

In the meantime, I swatched on size 6 needles, and washed the swatch. It did seem to grow while it was wet, but once dry, returned to its pre-bath size. 22 sts and 30 rows/4". I swatched on size 7 needles and got 5 sts/in, but the fabric just seems too flimsy to me. I'll have to modify the pattern based on the gauge I got which means I'll need more yarn than the pattern calls for. Luckily, I ordered more yarn than the pattern requires for my size, because by ordering more, I got a discount, making it cheaper to get 9 or 10 balls than it was to get 8. Crazy.

In other sweater news, I am chugging along on my Diagonal Rib sweater.

I'm about half way through the second sleeve, so I hope to finish up this weekend. I'm starting to get paranoid about how this thing is going to fit and I'm still not sure how I like the front neckline. I think the cable stitches (what's left of them) should perhaps extend up the side of the neck, but I also think that would make the neck too narrow.

We'll see how it goes. Easy enough to rip out the neck and redo it, if necessary.

The whole process for this sweater has been much too easy. Maybe because I'm not trying to follow someone else's pattern and dealing with conflicting gauge information from two sources. There's a lesson in there somewhere, I'm sure of it.

Finally -- I am at the brink of 36,000 words on my NaNo novel. I'm so happy to be doing this with so many of my online writing buddies. It's been an exhilarating month of don't look down writing. If it weren't for the Write or Die software, I'd have too much time to think while I was writing, and I'd stop in my tracks.

Sadly, I must mourn the loss of my "M" key. It was acting up for a couple of days, and then yesterday, it flew off the keyboard.

Broken bit

I replaced it with a key I never use

It's no wonder it flew off. Apparently, my fingernails are hard on the keys.

They are scarred for life.

At Last

2009-11-18T07:33:00.000-06:00

I am happy to report that due to the genius that is Write or Die, I am still alive, and I'm ~~nearing~~ way past 25,000 words on my NaNoWriMo novel, which is good news for so many reasons.

Other good news:
My Manon is complete.

This is the cardigan I knit 70% of twice last winter before putting it into a time out due to my being completely sick of it.

Here it is from the back.

I took it out this summer and knit the sleeves, and one evening while I was at the yarn shop, Brian, knitter extraordinaire made a comment about how certain yarns, like the one I made the Manon from, have a tendency to grow when washed.

This type of yarn, where where are lots of plies that twist many times in a short period. I've heard that referred to as a tight twist, but the yarn itself isn't especially tight. I mean, it isn't firm. I wish I knew more about these things, but that would no doubt lead to learning to spin and I am actively avoiding learning to spin. I don't have room in my knitting room for a roving stash, and my backyard is too small to keep sheep (because you know that would happen eventually).

The cardi went into a time out again while I contemplated my future grief regarding the growth of my knitting.

After a search of Ravelry this weekend, I noticed that in the comments on the yarn I used (Sublime Cashmere Merino Silk Aran), one Raveler specifically mentioned that this yarn had more drape after washing, but that it did not grow. That gave me hope. I sewed in the sleeves.

I still haven't washed it. It could use a wash and block, to calm the cables at the sides, but I still have a niggling fear at the back of my mind. This yarn is wonderfully soft, shows cables really well, and the sweater fits me.

Oh, Manon, don't let me down.

Now that I've finished the Manon, I have permission to start another sweater, one for which I already have the yarn. Except I remembered that I already started a new sweater last month, without permission, so I think I should finish that one, too.

It's my Reverse Engineered Diagonal Rib pullover, only guess what? I apparently didn't write down much of anything when I knit the back, at least not on paper. A search of my hard drive revealed a chart for the diagonal ribs, and eventually I finally discovered some fairly cryptic instructions in my project notes on Ravelry. It was enough to get me started, at any rate. It's bulky yarn, and an easy stitch pattern to memorize, so I'm clipping along. I finished the front, and I'm about 1/2 way done with the first sleeve. I may rip out the neck and re-do it. I'm not sure I like the way the cables end abruptly.

The question now is: do I have to finish up one of the other two nearly-complete cardigans in my closet (one is from 1990) before I get to start the new sweater? Will knitting two more Quincy hats be enough of something new to work on to keep me from starting a whole new sweater, or will the fact that I've already knit three Quincy hats make me feel like it's the same old, same old? I also have Sophia's second Lissajous to do, but that's just repeating something else.

I wanna start something new.

A Quincy on the Head Can be Quite Continental

2009-11-10T03:00:00.003-06:00

I loves me the Quincy hat.

So stylish. So asymmetrical. So cool.

This is the first one I made (some time last month, I believe) and it's for me. Yarn is Classic Elite Ariosa, soft as a cloud and I love the color. (It's the same color I used for Nina's Urban Outfitters knock off cabled hat.) I managed to cross it the opposite way intended, but I love it just the same.

The last time I got together with some of my local writer friends, I showed them my Quincy. I can tell when people really do like something I've knit because they instantly ask me to knit them one, too. These are women who I would lie across railroad tracks for, among the few who receive gift knitting from me, usually just at the holidays, but sometimes other times, too. I always cook for them when we get together (everyone brings something, but I cook the entree), it reminds me that I used to love to cook before I had kids who complained about the food on their dinner plates. My friends appreciate that I cook for them, they think whatever I make is delicious, and I don't have to clean up. You can understand why I would lie across the railroad tracks for them.

So this Quincy is for one of those friends.

It's my third. (The second was for a toddler in a DK weight, stitch count adjusted for the size needed) There aren't many patterns I return to over and over. Usually, making something once is enough, but this is one of those rare patterns I will want to do over and over.

The pattern calls for a bulky weight yarn, so I'm using Malibrigo Merino Worsted doubled to achieve gauge of 3.5 sts/in on size 10.5 needles. It ends up exactly the same size, but a bit more dense than the one in Ariosa. I love this color, it's a beautiful cobalt blue that Malibrigo calls "Buscando Azul," which translates to "looking blue" (I like "Buscando Azul" better, don't you?). Two of them requested deep blue hats, so I bought three hanks. I used just over one for the garter strip, so I figure by the time I'm finished with the two hats, I'll have 3/4 of a hank leftover to do something else with. Perhaps a pair of Fetchings.

I took a break from NaNo-ing yesterday afternoon to rake 5 more bags of leaves, bringing the total bag count to approximately 1,873,491 (give or take a million). I followed that up with the Quincy graft, delighting myself by getting it right the first time, no swearing involved. Go me! The first hat took me so long to graft the garter stitch correctly that I couldn't remember what I finally did to get it right. The second one I ended up grafting so that I have a row of stockinette on the inside of the hat, but because it's reverse stockinette (purls) on the outside, it hides well. I finally figured out that you have to work an odd number of rows for the graft to work (the pattern tells you to knit an even number of rows).

I'm working very hard not to do any knitting until my word count goal is reached. I don't think grafting counts.

Yesterday's word count was just under 2000. Not bad. Today I've already done 1000, in just a 30 minute block, thanks to the Write or Die website. Exactly the sort of psychology that works on me. I may just be able to catch up to my overall goal with the help of Dr. Wicked and his dastardly tools. Mwahahahaha.

Forget the apple, hand me some candy

2009-11-09T09:00:00.000-06:00

The weekend got away from me. It was fall yard cleanup weekend at Chez Rox, so no writing on Saturday and Sunday. This here's a post about Friday's results.

Here are the completed Bella mittens, a holiday gift for a Twilight-loving friend of mine. I had Nina pose with my snack of choice, which is not an apple. (Although, really, this is not my snack of choice. My snack of choice is chocolate, but I did not want to reveal to my kids where I had it hidden.)

These mittens will keep my friend Chris far warmer than Edward Cullen ever could.

Also accomplished: I exceeded Friday's1667 word goal. Actual word count: 1809.

The housework goals are never fully realized, even when I'm not doing NaNo, but I did manage to terrorize the dog with the giant sucking wand and horrifying wetness spreader. Laundry is still piled up in the laundry room. Oh, well.

I have found a better procrastination activity than housework, one which involves writing (although, sadly, does not count toward my NaNo word goal). I went through my Ask a Knitter column list of questions, and wrote a bunch of them on green post its (a glance across the room tells me there there are 11 green post its on the wall at the moment). So when I take a break from the novel, I work on answering one of those questions and try to figure out how much knitting and picture taking the answer is going to involve. What's sad is there are a ton of other questions in my Ravelry inbox, that haven't even made it to the post it stage yet. I fear that by the time I answer some of them, the knitters who asked the questions will have moved on to crochet or quilting out of disgust.

I just looked at how many words I wrote while procrastinating. More than I wrote for NaNo. It's a lot easier to write stuff that you know is true than it is to make up stuff you know isn't true.

Thursday I couldn't find my camera battery charger, which I felt sure must have been buried on the end table next to my chair, amongst the various PDFs of knitting patterns, mysterious notes I have written to myself that say things like "p2, X, p2, dec \" with an arrow pointing to a line drawing a 5-year-old could be proud of and many, many miniature candy wrappers. I wish I could say I sorted through all the papers and filed them appropriately, but really what I did was move them all to the card table I set up across the room as a sort of photo studio. (The card table has not improved my photos, but it has improved my ability to stack more papers.) What I found under the end table made my heart swell:

Little Bo Peep has found her sheep. My Lantern Moon Black Sheep measuring tape, that is. I thought I had left it on the plane in Milwaukee.

Meanwhile, the battery charger was located in my laptop case.

Today's writing goal: 2500 words (to help make up for none this weekend). Also, one question from my Ask a Knitter pile.

Today's knitting goal: I am this close to having my Manon cardigan complete. I sewed up the seams and put in the set-in sleeves this weekend. I need to do the decorative stitching to hide the jog in the ribs at the seams, and then wash it. I'm teaching tomorrow night and I would love to wear it to class. I also made the garter stitch strip for my third Quincy hat, and will try to at least do the graft some time today.

Also, there are still many leaves on the front lawn, even though we raked and bagged 35 30-gallon bags full of leaves, so that will be today's active procrastination activity. I have to do something to get myself off my butt. It's going numb.

Writing: 1, Knitting 0

2009-11-06T09:35:00.000-06:00

I'm back on track with the NaNo writing, having exceeded my daily goal of 1667 words yesterday. (I'm still behind on my total word goal, but I can't let myself get worked up about it.)

As for the knitting, I was at an afterschool event for 7th and 8th graders and their families. There was a lot of sitting and listening, so perfect time to knit, right? I was at the point where I needed to move the thumb gusset stitches to waste yarn, but I had forgotten to bring any along. I improvised from the contents of my sparsely supplied notions bag and used a bunch of those those interlocking stitch markers, about 3 sts for each one, and praised myself for my resourcefulness. I was practically like MacGyver. I worked all the way up the hand of the mitten until I started the decreases and right off the bat I saw I was short by two stitches.

I put too many stitches on those itty bitty markers. This is what is so great about NaNoWriMo. I don't ever delete any words. They can be crappy, but they stay. Not so much with the gift knitting.

Yesterday's To Do list looks like this now:

Oddly, I did not manage to get my procrastination activities done. I blame it on a college friend, Karen, who found me on FaceBook and immediately added me to an email list of other women we shared a house with in Ann Arbor for a couple of years. It took me a while to read through what they're all doing -- lawyering in Florida and Colorado, living on a horse ranch in Australia, running a consulting firm in South Africa. You can understand why I had to skip the vacuuming, right? Reading about all that accomplishment made me too tired to push a sucking wand around the kitchen floor.

Here is today's to-do list, written with Sharpie so that humans can read it without the aid of forensic computational devices.

That looks doable, right? The only one I'm worried about is the one on the lower right.

If it's Thursday, I must be writing

2009-11-05T11:23:00.006-06:00

Oh, NaNoWriMo, how you taunt me with your promise of "just writing through" the story. You make these promises that you expect me to keep while I'm wandering around in the dark with a broken pencil, no paper, and no freaking idea of what it is I'm writing through.

By the end of Tuesday, I was at 4000+ words. I can't remember exactly how many, it's not important. What's important is to know that I failed to make my Tuesday goal (I hit 675 instead of 1667), because what is writing about if not an opportunity to criticize yourself for not writing enough, for writing crap when you do write, and for finding other things to do to fill your time that do not involve writing. Things like eating leftover Halloween candy.

So yesterday I was frustrated, but I had knitting group in the morning, which always makes me feel better, even if I get an appallingly small amount of actual knitting done. There was pumpkin cheesecake and Earl Grey tea, and good conversation, and then I went home to write. Ha!

I haven't been at the start of a brand new story in a long time, so I forgot what my process was, or if I ever knew, it's changed since then. I hadn't really done any pre-NaNo "pre-writing" activities, like coming up with a plot (I'm afraid no amount of pre-writing will ever help me come up with a plot, mostly because no amount of actual writing seems to do the job, either) or figuring out who my characters are and what they want that's tangible. I'm very good at coming up with their emotional baggage and what they want internally. Not so good at finding the tangible representation of that emotional goal. Which would be the plot.

Turns out I actually have to have my characters interact with each other before I can figure out what they want and why they want it. Who knew?

So yesterday while I wasn't writing I came up with a list of 10 scenes that I need to write for the story setup (the first Act). I know who the scenes' protag/antags are for each one, and where they take place. And an idea of what I think the point of the scene is. Note: I do not know the actual point of those scenes. I only think I do. The actual writing will lead me to the point. Eventually. Long after NaNo is over, most likely, because it's through the rewriting and polishing that I discover the real point. Damn subconscious. Some day I'm going to invent a writing efficiency machine that will allow me to know my point before I start. I'll make millions.

Now that I have my list of 10 scenes, I have a little flashlight in the dark which I used to find the pencil sharpener and some paper, so today I will write.

I found my camera, by the way. So here are the Bella mittens (or the first one, anyway) that I started on Monday.

I'm about half way through the second one.

Here is today's to-do list, on the wall of my office:

Here's a little surprise I found in my Ravelry projects page:

Someone favorited my husband. Or maybe it's the hat they favorited. Better be, because even though he says he looks like someone on the 10 Most Wanted List in that hat, he's still my favorite.

In other news, this morning while I was drinking coffee and not writing, I figured out an insanely brilliant way to pick up stitches in a situation that is not common, but not rare, either, and way better than the existing known options. I love it when my brain comes through on esoteric knitting techniques. Some time this week I will write this up. Come to think of it, this would be a way better procrastination activity than mopping floors. I don't know what I was thinking.

Is it Monday already?

2009-11-02T05:13:00.000-06:00

NaNoWriMo word count
Day 1: 2022
Day 2: 1456

Knitting score: one Bella mitten. If I could find my camera, I'd post a photo.

Also looking for conflict in my story.

BloKniWriMo

2009-11-01T11:15:00.000-06:00

Here's a little number I knocked off this weekend.

It's a knock off of an Urban Outfitters hat Nina wanted. I reversed the cable crossings.

I'm calling it the Knock it Off Cabled Hat.

Yarn: 2 50g balls of Classic Elite Ariosa, 90% extra fine merino, 10% cashmere. A delightful, 1 ply yarn that is consistent in thickness. This color is Azalea.
Needles: Size 9 for the ribbing, size 10.5 for the body of the hat.
Gauge: 3.5sts/in in stockinette.

The photos are a little dark because I took them with no flash last night.

It was a nice mental challenge, because of the way the cables moved diagonally, so I had to figure out how to deal with the beginning of the round so as to avoid a jog. (Thank you, Cookie A for your Sock Innovations book that has a nice chapter on working with patterns like this.) Then I had to figure out how to deal with the decreases so they worked out nicely, maintaining the pattern as long as possible.

Nina seems to like it. Sophia seems to like it more. She's been wearing it all morning. I'm guessing she's getting away with that because Nina is still in bed.

In other news, it's NaNoWriMo time (National Novel Writing Month), and I'm participating this year, plunging myself back into the world of fiction writing with a new book that I don't know much about yet. 30 days and (I hope) 50K words from now, I'll know a lot more.

I've got some friends I'm doing this with, and we'll be cheering each other on, which is good, because I'm terrified. I'm hoping to post a little update every day, both with my writing progress and whatever knitting I may have done, too. So it's really BloKniWriMo (Blog Knitting Writing Month) for me.

Mmmph. I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew.

ETA: Nina just woke up. First thing she said was, "Get that hat off your head."

Hippy hippy shake

2009-10-30T09:06:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I came home from knitting group, checked caller ID and saw that my mother had called. She never leaves a voice mail, so I didn't bother to check and just called her back. Al (her husband) answered and after a confusing couple of minutes in which he assumed I had listened to a voice mail he had left me and I had continued to assume I was calling my mother back, not him, I got the point. My mom had fallen the night before and broken her hip and had just been rolled into surgery for a hip replacement.

They live just about a mile or so from the hospital, so Al was at home checking on the dog, having left the hospital after they rolled her into surgical prep.

That call was on a Wednesday, and as the next couple of days passed, I made plane reservations so that I could be there when she got out of the hospital and help out where needed.

Most of my help consisted of sitting around and knitting while my mom was napping, or talking to her while she was awake. Al normally takes care of the cooking, cleaning, and laundry so I didn't really have much "work" to do there. He's a former career Army mess sergeant, so he always has everything well under control. Also...the food at Chez Mother and Al's is top notch.

I took a lot of knitting with me -- my Manon which needed to be sewn up, little Quincy-ita, which was in progress at the time, a pair of socks for my sister-in-law that I'd been knitting as a demonstration for my sock class, and just needed to finish the foot. I also brought yarn to make Bella Mittens for a Twilight-loving friend, as well as two balls of sock yarn. I was prepared.

I was not prepared for my direct flight to be canceled and to be re-routed through Milwaukee, where I left my notions bag in the seat pocket. The notions bag that contained, you know, all my knitting notions, like my black sheep measuring tape, two very expensive Signature Needle Arts dpns, a 2.5mm circ for knitting socks using the sock yarn I brought with me, my scissors, my needle gauges, stitch markers, crochet hooks that belonged to my grandmother, and all my darning needles.

I finished knitting my SIL's second sock while waiting for my flight out of Milwaukee, which is when I discovered I no longer had my notions bag. It was too late to go back to the other gate, which was in another terminal. Milwaukee's airport is set up like a wheel, with each terminal coming out of the main ticketing terminal like spokes. In order to get from one terminal to the other, you have to go through security. I didn't have time to go through security twice with all my stuff in order to report a missing notions bag. So I couldn't graft the toe. I also therefore couldn't graft the Quincy-ita hat band. I couldn't start a pair of socks with the needle holding my SIL's sock, and I couldn't start a new pair with my other sock needle, because the other sock needle was in my notions bag.

I decided to start the mittens, only it turned out I hadn't brought the pattern, I had brought a PICTURE of the original Bella mittens used in the movie, which I had slipped into a page protector. It wasn't even a picture of the pattern mittens, so I couldn't just read the knitting in the picture and figure it out. Besides, the picture was a bit blurry. You can imagine how happy I was at this point. Luckily, I had my Kindle with me, too, so I could at least read.

My mom lives in Ludington, Michigan, a lovely resort town on Lake Michigan which is inconveniently located to any sort of mass transportation hub other than the Lake Michigan carferry, which was closed for the season. So after a delayed flight, notions bag loss, and a 2 hour drive from the Grand Rapids airport to Ludington, I finally got to see my mom, who amazingly, was ambulatory. Sort of. We had a nice long talk, and the next morning, I headed out to the excellent local yarn shop, Nautical Knits, intending to rectify my notions deficiency. I bought a new notions bag, darning needles, a needle gauge, and interlocking stitch markers. I figured that would get me by.

Okay, I also bought two balls of sock yarn, but that's to be expected, isn't it?

Back at Check Mother and Al's, I grafted SIL's sock toe, and moved on to weaving in all the ends on my Manon. Done. I was ready to sew in the sleeves, except I couldn't because I forgot to bring along the yarn to sew it up. It turns out that when you forget things like patterns and sewing-up yarn, and lose 2.5mm needles that can't be replaced out of town, bringing all that other knitting stuff isn't as big a packing overkill as it first appears.

I started a pair of socks on the freed-up 2.0mm circ using yarn I had brought with me, a beautifully bright yarn from Regia's Kaffe Fasset line. The two original Fasset lines were Mirage and Landscape. Landscape had defined stripe sequences (that's what I made my brother's Big Foot socks from), while Mirage came in the same colorways as Landscape, but worked up as a variegated yarn, appearing more like a camo pattern.

This yarn I brought with me was called Exotic Color (colorway: "zany") I was intrigued by the striping pattern, as there were places where the transition between stripes worked out to be more like interconnected waves. It was pretty neat. I started the first sock Tuesday afternoon and was finished with it some time Wednesday. I then started the second sock, and the pair was complete Thursday evening. Fastest pair of socks I ever knit, in terms of total elapsed time from start to finish. My mother exclaimed that they were beautiful. Our feet are the same size, so I had her try them on. They're hers. The woman was sitting in a chair with a walker next to her. How could I not give them to her?

I took some photos of them on my own feet out on their deck.

When I got back home, I called the airline about my missing notions bag. You're supposed to contact the airport where it was lost, but because of 9/11, airports don't post their phone numbers on their websites anymore (I know, I don't get it either), so the woman at the airline called three different numbers at the Milwaukee airport and no one would pick up the phone. And they don't have voice mail. She suggested I drive to the Minneapolis airport (well, first she suggested I go to the Milwaukee airport), make a claim at their lost baggage counter and have them forward the information to Milwaukee. Whatever.

My mom is doing very well now. She's ditched the walker in favor of a cane, at least for part of the time. I'm betting she'll be back at Pilates in no time at all.

Reverse Engineering

2009-10-29T10:22:00.000-05:00

The first three weeks of September in Minnesota were warm and balmy. Those weeks were the summer we didn't have in July and August, and it was heavenly. Then, like Minnesota weather is wont to do, the weather turned on us and in one day we switched from capris and sandals to wool socks and jackets.

I began plotting ways to keep warm. There weren't enough hours in a day to knit. I needed warm sweaters and I needed them now!

About the same time, I started re-watching my Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs as a way of immersing myself in long story arcs (I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year). I began to covet some of Buffy's bulky knit turtleneck sweaters that she sometimes wore while patrolling the graveyards, and figured that would be a nice quick knit that would get me covered in wool ASAP.

As luck would have it, an email from WEBS arrived announcing a sale on discontinued yarns. I could get Cascade 109E (a bulky weight wool) for something like $3.99 a hank. In the meantime, I began designing a simple, but not too boring, sweater in my head. I looked through patterns on Ravelry for inspiration, but didn't find anything that was quite what I was looking for.

Eventually, I decided that I would make the sweater in a 2x2 rib, with maybe a simple rope cable going up the center and then splitting to run up either side of a V neck or possibly two simple cables that would run up the front, spaced so that they would land at the shoulders on either side of the neck front on either side of the neck. Perhaps with a turtleneck. After another compulsive check of Ravelry, I happened upon this number (Ravelry link)

It was exactly what I had been looking for, only with a great addition, which was the diagonal ribs at the sides. I had a fairly good idea of how they were probably worked, but I wasn't sure I was up to figuring out the whole sweater on my own. I wasn't confident of calculating the set in sleeves, plus maintaining the diagonal rib design element, so I figured I'd just buy the pattern.

Well. The pattern is from Rebecca Magazine, which is a German publication, which was not good news. Then I discovered they also print an English edition of the magazine (starting with the issue I wanted). Terrific! But the issue I wanted was from 2005. Not so terrific. It turns out it's still available (yay!) but with the exchange rate and shipping, it was going to cost me $22 to get it (boo!) Even sellers who have it here in the States want to charge $8 to ship it, which would still make it close to $20. For one pattern.

In the end, I decided to reverse engineer it, which made last week a lot of fun. First, I figured out how the diagonal ribs were done, which was fairly straightforward (increases at the edge to compensate for decreases near the cables, and in this case those increases are YOs), but it took some experimentation to figure out the exact decrease sequence and placement, as some decreases are single decreases, and one is a specific type of double decrease. And then I had to make it work with the cable crossings, as each set of decreases ends before the cable crossing row.

The back was a piece of cake up till the armhole, and that's where I thought I might have to experiment and rip things back, but things seem to have worked out okay. I worked the shoulders, using short rows that were wrapped and turned in purl columns, so I didn't even bother to pick up the wraps later, as they can't be seen from the RS.

Here is the back, unblocked.

Looks so skinny, doesn't it? I pinned it out to make sure it would stretch to the dimensions I wanted and it did. It'll relax a bit on its own once it's had a bath.

I really like the Cascade 109E. It's too bad it was discontinued, although, really, you can just double Cascade 220, which comes in a gazillion colors, and end up with pretty much the same result.

Other things:
This past summer, Nina asked me to knit her some gloves for fall. I made her some glittens (convertible fingerless gloves with a mitten flap) a couple years ago using Regia Silk sock yarn. She liked them a lot and wore them all the time, but she has since decided that she would prefer gloves that don't convert and that are made of thicker yarn. She wanted a cable on the back of the hand. She did not like anything I showed her. She is particular, but not terribly helpful about describing what she wanted, only eliminating things she disliked, which was everything I showed her.

Eventually, I pulled out my copy of Elsebeth Lavold's Viking Knits and found a cable that was unusual, but very cool. The S-hitch cable.

I swatched.

She liked.

I knit the gloves, the weather grew colder, and she took them. The thumbs are a bit wonky, but otherwise they're fine. I increased too many times for the gusset on the first glove, so I increased less on the second one.

Socks for the Sockless
Neither of my kids wears socks, unless forced to, such as when we're hiking up a mountain in Arizona and they're wearing new tennis shoes, and even then it's under a great deal of protest. While we're here at home, the idea that they ought to wear socks just because they live in Minnesota, where it's winter six months out of the year is just more crazy talk from their crazy mother.

Nonetheless, much to my surprise, Sophia has asked for socks. She asked, so she shall receive, although it may take a while.

She wants knee socks. Fancy knee socks, which she apparently doesn't plan on wearing in public, but just around the house. There was no talking her out of the fancy heel pattern, even though she has already told me that if she *does* wear the socks out in public, they will be inside her UGG boots. Since she now has feet and calves that are the same size as mine, I have agreed to her request with the small hope that she won't care about them in a year and then I can take them for myself.

Sophia has good taste. She chose a Cookie A pattern, Lissajous.

I have turned the heel, finished the gusset and am onto the straightaway part of the foot. With just two cables per round now and the rest in stockinette, I feel like I'm zooming along at Warp Nine, phasers set at fun.

Quincy
Like many others, I fell in love with Jared Flood's Quincy pattern and I knit one up in the recommended Classic Elite Ariosa. It's a single ply bulky weight kind of like CE's Twinkle, only thinner and even softer. Both girls loved the softness (90% extra fine merino, 10% cashmere), and Nina looks great in this color, although she would prefer me to reverse engineer an Urban Outfitters cabled hat using the same yarn. And now Sophia wants a cabled hat, too, only in a different color than her sister.

In the meantime, I figured out how to downsize Quincy for a toddler, but using a DK yarn (Rowan's Cashsoft...um, maybe it's Cashsoft Baby? Not sure.) Ended up with more rows and stitches for this hat than for the adult version, but that's gauge for you.

I call it Quincy-ita

Oh, there's more stuff, too, but I'll save that for another post, shall I?

Free and Easy Fingerless Mitts pattern

2009-09-10T15:59:00.007-05:00

My beginning students often ask what kind of project they can make after they've learned to cast on, knit, purl, and bind off. I developed a pattern for fingerless mitts that incorporates all of these techniques but doesn't require them to knit to a specific gauge.

Introducing Easy Fingerless Mitts, available as a free download.

download now

My students learn to knit using worsted weight yarn and size 7 or 8 needles. These mitts can be made using their classroom yarn and needles. The pair will take about 50g of worsted weight yarn (mine actually took a bit less).

The mitts are worked sideways until they are long enough to fit around the hand. The cast on and bind off edges are sewn together, with a gap left for the thumb hole. The garter borders at the cast on and bind off edges keep the thumb hole from rolling, and the garter stitch borders at the sides act as ribbing for the cuff and fingers.

This pattern is for personal use only and is not to be copied or distributed without prior permission.

Better luck next time

2009-09-09T14:59:00.005-05:00

This year I finally got my act together and entered a knitted item in the Creative Activities competition at the State Fair. They gave five ribbons in my category (sleeveless sweater or vest, textured or plain), not a single one awarded to me. I was sad about that for a few hours after I found out (I couldn't stand the wait, so I checked the results online), and then I went to the Fair and found all the ribbon winners so I could see if I could figure out what their entries had that mine didn't. I have to admit that aside from the first and second place winners, I wasn't sure what had distinguished the other ribbon winners, so I waited patiently for the Fair to end so I could pick up my entry and scorecard. I did have the feeling that I may have been marked down for working only the front in the textured pattern, while all the ribbon winners appeared to have patterning on the front and the back.

Here are the results:

Score: 92
General Appearance: Excellent. "Nice use of lace cable pattern. Tough competition in this lot."
Color and Design: Excellent.
Construction/Workmanship: Very Good
Level of Difficulty: Very Good
Choice and Handling of Finishing: Very Good

And that's it. No other comments. The scorecard criteria don't seem to match what's listed in the Creative Activities registration booklet, so I'm not sure if each of those 5 categories are worth the same number of points, or if some are worth more than others, or what.

There's always next year!

Back to school

2009-08-30T05:19:00.006-05:00

We take pictures of the girls every year on the first day of school in front of the garage door. Also of the dog, but that's usually inadvertent. He just wants to make sure he gets to go through that door, too, for the car ride to school. Notice we have the same drawings on the garage door. I think they've been there for a good 10 years.

Nina was a 6th grader in 2005 Now she's a sophomore

Sophia was a fourth grader in 2005 Now she's an 8th grader

The Big and the Little

2009-08-25T15:37:00.000-05:00

In the past week or so, I finished two pairs of socks I started earlier this summer.

One pair is for my friend Barb, who is 5' tall and can fit both feet on a single piece of paper.

The other is for my brother Carl, who is 6'3" and can fit one foot on a piece of paper.

Provided the paper is turned diagonally.

Barb's feet are 7" in circumference at the ball. Carl's are 11".

For Barb's socks, I used the Devon pattern (Ravelry link) from Cookie A's Sock Innovations. The pattern calls for a thicker fingering weight -- Mountain Colors Bearfoot, which I love, and is probably more accurately a sport weight yarn. The problem with using the specified yarn was that I would have had to adjust the pattern to lower the stitch count to fit her. So I used Cascade Heritage, instead, which is a fairly fine fingering weight yarn. (Lots of yardage, and a great price!) They are very soft after washing, and show stitch definition really well. I was able to knit the pattern as written using the thinner yarn and smaller needles, without adjusting stitch counts.

They look good on her.

She stopped by this weekend to pick them up and agreed to model them.

Good thing for her that she has small feet. I would have had a hard time parting with them if they fit me!

Carl came for a visit in July and while he was here he went to the yarn shop with me when I offered to knit him socks. I envisioned endless 90-stitch rounds in tan or grey, knit over many boring months.

He took one look at a Kaffe Fasset colorways from Regia on a mannequin leg, fondled it and said he liked that one.

"Really?" I asked, trying to keep desperate hopefulness out of my voice. Could it be true that a man would really want this colorway? While I had always considered it fairly manly, I couldn't see my husband finding it acceptable, if he ever allowed me to knit him socks, which he doesn't.

Besides which, I had socks in the same colorway in my drawer at home, as you can see here.

"You don't mind the flash of turquoise?" I asked, still not believing he liked it, and trying hard to feign apathy. Mustn't let him know I'm excited. "No," he said. "I like the turquoise."

Hallelujah. Even if the socks would take forever to knit, they wouldn't be boring!

Then I got to thinking. My socks were made from 4-ply (fingering weight). I remember knitting 9 sts/in, 64 sts to the round. This yarn is 6-ply (DK weight). Guess how many sts/round? 64! (for the leg, but a bit bigger for the foot) They did not, in fact, take me months and months of begrudging labor to make. Just a few days per sock, spread out over six weeks, of course, because I rarely knit two identical socks in a row.

A brother-sister sock photo

He lives in Michigan, and no one else I know has feet big enough to model them, so I put his on over my other sock, in an attempt to make it fit better.

Look, if I adjust my foot position, the stripes match perfectly because we have the same stitch count per round.

The last time we had brother-sister matching garments was back in 1968.

How to Purl

2009-08-24T10:49:00.002-05:00

This is for my beginning students, who need a review on how to purl.

Go ahead, Ask a Knitter

2009-08-13T08:25:00.011-05:00

If you're a Raveler and you read This Week in Ravelry, perhaps you've seen this week's issue.

(In case you can't read that, it says, "Rox's TWiR debut with the very first "Ask a Knitter" columns)

The first column includes:

Closing the hole and weaving in ends for a closed item, such as a toy
Gaping edge stitches
A video tutorial on "backwards" knitting

There have already been requests for an easy archive reference or index, so I'm working on the best way to do that for both the column and the blog.

You can also see the backwards knitting video here:

Amazing Grace Dishcloth

2009-08-08T16:16:00.000-05:00

I'm a garment knitter. Twenty-three years ago when I sat down to learn to knit, I started with sweaters, lots of sweaters, nothing but sweaters aside from the occasional hat or two for, oh, the first fifteen years of my relationship with yarn and needles. Then there was the period of Very Little Knitting ("Sweaters are too hot, Mommy!"), which ended abruptly with the 5,000 bead linen-lace shawl and immersion in the Master Hand Knitting program.

From there, I dove into socks, was forced into scarves (due to several requests), dabbled in mittens/gloves/fingerless mitts/convertible glittens, did an afghan here and there (not my favorite thing, but sometimes necessary for surviving the Minnesota winter), a few felted slippers, a felted bowl (undertaken for its moebius-ness), a felted bag (meh), and a couple of toys (excessive amounts of finishing and shaping for such small items). I once started a Kitty Pi bed, but never finished it (the recipient would never show appreciation, I'm afraid). I made a string bag this spring and hated everything about it. I could write a poem about that bag. I would call it, "Rant to a Green Shopping Bag" and it would start out, "How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways..."

So what have I learned?

I have learned that I do not typically enjoy making non-garmenty things.

I have learned that a pattern has to have enough going on that I don't stab myself with my needles (scarves have to have an interesting pattern, or else 6 feet of it isn't happening). Garter stitch rarely fills that need.

A pattern can't be so futzy that I am chained to the chart (this is where toys really fall down for me -- too much shaping, sometimes every row, too many things to sew together, and totally not a garment. Also, if it's made with a novelty yarn...well, let's not go there).

There are exceptions.

This blanket buddy is a toy, of sorts, knit mostly with garter stitch, but there were YOs to keep me alert with simple shaping, and then the head was made using double knitting (which I had never done, so I got to learn something), and there was NO SEWING UP, unless you count drawing the tail through a few stitches at the top of the head, which I do not. Also, the yarn, while technically a novelty yarn (Wendy Velvet Touch), is easy to knit with, and the stitches were easy to read. I'm just waiting for a baby to give this thing to.

Other things I have learned

There can't be too much counting.

I once made a Petal Bib that turned out adorable, but tried my patience during the entire knitting process, because the short rows had to be counted and re-counted and re-counted again, and the gauge for the cotton yarn was sufficiently tight that my hands hurt. Counting is the hardest thing in knitting. A sad statement for a former math major to make, but true nonetheless.

Finally, the item has to be for a human. (The dog booties I knit this past winter -- that's not happening again, I don't care how pathetic the dog is when he limps in from the cold, and how adamant Michael is that knitting socks for the dog is "logical.")

Given all those knitting criteria, it's no surprise that there is one item I have persistently avoided knitting.

Dishcloths.

I use sponges to wipe the counters, and if I have to wash a dish by hand I prefer the skimpiest, thinnest dishcloths I can find. I don't know why. It's probably what we could get from the grocery store (and what we could afford) when I was a kid, and that's what I got used to. Also, the thick ones tend to smell sour the next day or two because they take so long to dry.

So there are three strikes against the dishcloth: cotton, not a garment, and smelly.

My brother and sister-in-law were here for a visit a few weeks ago and my SIL Kathy mentioned how much she likes knitted dishcloths. I asked her why and she told me. I explained why I couldn't understand them. She shrugged in a suit-yourself way.

I started noticing discussion threads on Ravelry regarding dishcloths. Threads remarkably similar to the "Why knit socks?" threads that come up every so often. I may have explained why, exactly, I refuse to knit dishcloths in one of those discussions. I'm not sure anyone cared. I did learn a few things, though. Apparently, sponges are the least sanitary things in the kitchen. They trap bacteria, so while I'm wiping crumbs off the counter, I'm smearing germs all over it. Considering the amount of Clorox Cleanup I use on my white Corian counter, I have my doubts, but still, that was a surprise.

There's more news. Shocking news. It turns out that other folks use a clean dishcloth every day. I know. Who knew? Raised in a barn, that's me. Get this: if you use a new dishcloth every day, you avoid the sour smell and you avoid smearing germs all over everything. What you're supposed to have in your kitchen drawer are stacks and stacks of fresh dishcloths.

All the love for dishcloths I kept reading about got me thinking. I didn't understand socks initially, either. I remember reading comments people had online about how wonderful socks feel on your feet, and how there's no going back once you put on your first pair of hand knit socks. I also remember thinking that commercial socks weren't exactly uncomfortable, so how great could the hand knit ones be? As soon as I grafted the toe of my first sock, I tried it on, and the journey toward Commercial Sock Removal from My Sock Drawer began. My mind had been changed.

A few months ago, I decided it was time to knit a Baby Surprise Jacket, for no reason other than to see what the 40-year fuss was about. I had never cared for the look of the BSJ, but I felt that it was worth knitting in order to understand the construction and perhaps to find out what its appeal was to other knitters.

It was garter stitch, but there was enough other business going on to keep me interested.

Check out those shoulder seams.

Nice, eh?

In the end, I enjoyed the process of knitting it, but I can't see myself knitting more of them. Socks changed my knitting life. The BSJ did not.

So a couple of weekends ago I decided to knit a dishcloth, specifically the Ballband Dishcloth, because that seems to be the BSJ of dishcloths. I came to realize that it's dishonest to disparage a particular beloved knitting project without trying it at least once. Turned out it was Dollar Days at Michaels, so lots of things were on sale, including Sugar'n Cream cotton yarn. I bought 4 balls for $5, Sophia bought a boatload of embroidery floss to replenish her friendship bracelet supplies, and that was that.

That night, I cast on for the dishcloth and I finished it the next morning.

I loved the way it looked, although it was even thicker than I expected. I really couldn't imagine using it. It was just so...big. And thick. I showed it to the family. Michael noted, "It's very bright." (He finds it safer sometimes to make an observation rather than to state an opinion.) Sophia liked it, but didn't think it should be dirtied up because I had "done all that work knitting it." Nina had no comment, because she was in her room. (She's 14. She's always in her room.)

A couple of nights later, when we were cleaning up the kitchen after dinner, I sent Sophia up to my office to get the dishcloth so we could try it out and settle the matter of The Hand Knit Dishcloth: Yay or Nay?

Yay.

It goes against every knitting tenet I have, but I love it.

A few days later the girls asked to go back to Michaels to get more embroidery floss. (They're on a friendship bracelet making binge.) I obliged, because I am nothing if not an obliging mother, at least sometimes.

I may have picked up a few more balls of Sugar'n Cream. It was still Dollar Days.

And I may have knit a few more dishcloths.

I may have even knit a dishcloth with matching Swiffer cover.

...was blind, but now I see.

Long Tail Cast On Tutorial

2009-04-27T10:59:00.005-05:00

This is just a little video reminder for my Knitting 101 students who may forget how to cast on after they leave the class.

Keep practicing!

Ah, Spring!

2009-04-03T12:48:00.004-05:00

Know how I can tell it's spring in Minnesota?

The tap water smells funny.

Oh, sure, the snow is gone, leaving yellowed, dormant grass exposed, and the city winter parking rules no longer apply. In four or five weeks, we'll have tiny, tiny leaves on the trees. The daylight hours are extending, so that's another clue. Mostly, though, I can tell because when I turn on the water, out flows a stream of stink.

Here in the City of Lakes, in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, nature excretes and decomposes daily, but during the winter, all that natural goodness freezes. Come the spring thaw....mmm a winter's worth of stored up smells all melts and runs off into the Mighty Mississippi and eventually through our water pipes. Get a whiff here. (I'm all about the links today, aren't I?)

I'm all about spring, because we've been on Spring Break here at Chez Rox. We flew south, to AZ, where it's brown year round, and it was a balmy 72 during the day. We ate outside frequently. I drank iced tea and ate salads. The first evening and the second day, I was knitting all the time. (All airplane knitting had to be ripped out due to my inability to count.) I knit an entire sock in a 24-30 hour period.

Folks, I actually got sick of knitting. So I turned to my Kindle, which it turned out, was totally out of battery and I forgot to bring the recharger. Michael, my knight in shining Mercedes (borrowed from the FIL) drove to Radio Shack to get me a micro USB cable so I could use what he calls "that piece of plastic." As in, "Are you still staring at that piece of plastic?" To which I respond by clicking the Next Page button.

I spent the next five days reading Susan Wiggs's Lakeshore Chronicles (there are five books in the series so far and I read one each day, but not in order. I started with #5, then #2, 3, 4 and finally, #1) until my eyeballs were too sore to read anymore (except I also read a 6th book by a different author, the name of which and whom escapes me.) I also got to see Bonnie, my best friend from high school, twice, for hours at a time.

Then I started on the second sock and we headed for home. I'm just getting going on the gusset at the moment. Perhaps I'll finish it this weekend.

Yarn: Mountain Colors Bearfoot in the Huckleberry colorway
Needles: KnitPicks 2.5mm, 32" fixed circ (That's a US 1 1/2, although they call it a US 1)
Method: cuff down using Magic Loop
Gauge: 8 sts/in, 56 sts

Let me eat cake. Or pie.

2009-03-24T15:15:00.003-05:00

It's my birthday and I'm doing laundry (we're leaving for Arizona tomorrow, and packing is in progress). I had two kinds of pie for dessert, though, on top of an extremely delicious meal at Lucia's, so all in all, a very nice birthday.

Also, I've decided to look at aging in an entirely new way.

Today I'm 32. In base 15. This will work for another 7 years, until I hit 3A, which will confuse too many people, so I'll switch bases again. I'm thinking base 18 will be a good choice at that point. I'll be 30. I liked being 30, it's the age I was when I met my husband. He of course, was only 29, and he's always reminding me that I'm older than he is. But I have a plan now.

He's staying locked in base 10.

Who needs jewelry?

2009-03-19T11:26:00.008-05:00

I was just finishing up my chronically late update on the state of my Master Hand Knitting progress when the mail arrived inside the front door.

I opened the door. Amongst the mail was a cardboard tube, addressed to me.

Inside, another tube. This one plastic.

Hold on. What does that label say?

Oh, baby!

Inside, the most bee yoo ti ful needles I have ever had the pleasure of slapping my eyes on.

14" straights, stiletto points, Teardrop Cap in sizes 5, 6, 7 and 9

But that's not all!

set of 5 5" dpns in size 0
set of 5 6" dpns in sizes 1 and 2.

An IM to my husband, upon opening the package, received the following reply:
"Happy early birthday." (It's next week.)

Sigh.

On to MHK news (or not)...

I've totally dropped the ball on Master Hand Knitting stuff this past week. Yesterday, I knit swatches and then embroidered initials on them using duplicate stitch for no reason. Well, there was a reason. Sort of. Some of the Level III knitters on Ravelry were discussing the duplicate stitch swatch and how it's kind of tricky to do well, and then the co-chair who hangs out on the board mentioned it's the swatch most likely to need resubmitting.

So I decided to worry about duplicate stitch in Level III rather than to block my lace swatches or work on my History of Knitting report for Level II.

I really don't need to worry about duplicate stitch, mostly because I'm not working on Level III yet. Years ago, I made a few sweaters for my niece and nephew that called for duplicate stitching some motifs on them, and I don't recall it being particularly difficult. I never thought anything was particularly difficult back then. I didn't know anyone who knit, so I figured if I followed the directions and it looked all right, then I was doing it right. But I had to know -- is duplicate stitch something I do in an acceptable manner?

I think so.

I ran out of yarn while duplicate stitching my initial. Sophia took a look at what I was doing and and asked if I would make her a swatch with her initial on it that she could put up on her bulletin board. So while I watched "Life" last night, I made her this:

I didn't notice all the sewing thread bits that were lying across the swatch until I uploaded the photo. They are from my attempt to block this swatch, which actually has to do with Level II.

English Mesh Lace
A Treasury of Knitting Patterns, p. 193
I attempted to use the thread along the edges as a way to block without pins so the edges wouldn't be all wavy. I failed miserably. I can't figure out a good way of anchoring the thread ends.

The #$%@ lace swatches continue to be the bane of my existence. I don't think my seed stitch border is long enough on the above swatch. I thought I could block it so that it would be, but for some reason, the border is longer at the bottom than at the top, even though they have the same number of rows. I think it might have something to do with the direction the YOs pull the knitting above rather than the knitting below. Or some other reason. Gah. I hate lace.

How come no one ever complains about the lace swatches?

Monday night video

2009-03-16T20:13:00.002-05:00

Here it is folks, the long-awaited Friday the 13th video. Hey! Maybe it was cursed because it was Friday the 13th!

I have no idea why every transition ends with a "Boom!"

Still not completely happy with the video quality as it appears on YouTube. We're still working on getting the best resolution possible for the uploads.

Two steps forward, one step back

2009-03-16T09:21:00.004-05:00

The Pink, pink, pink socks are complete!

The Car Ferry socks are marching along!

I also cannot help but start the occasional new project, despite the back log of UFOs and Master Hand Knitting work that needs work.

I made a cupcake. Which I can't find at the moment (bedside area is a bit of a mess), so you'll just have to take my word. It's for a little girl who's turning 1 year old just about now. Last year she received a cupcake hat and mittens as a Welcome to the World gift and has happily worn them all winter. So I made her a stuffed cupcake. Which I will give to her mother just as soon as I locate it.

The stinking Friday Video is finally done. And, I think, much better than the videos I made using stinking scourge of the Microsoft apps, Windows Movie Maker.

I won't go into the gory details about the delay, but suffice it to say that the problems I had after I gave up on Windows Movie Maker were the result of a bad card reader (the kind that reads the little SD Flash Cards that go into my digital camera and the digital cam corder.)

So, whew on that.

I like iMovie. It's going to make Friday videos seem more like a good idea and less like I would rather be sticking my vintage Aero 14" straights into my eyeballs.

The video will go up later. YouTube has been "waiting for acknowledgement" for quite a while during the upload process, promising me it would happen in less than a minute for about 15 minutes now. I stopped holding my breath.

Curse you, Movie Maker

2009-03-14T08:19:00.003-05:00

The Friday video will be up sometime this weekend. I'm giving up on Windows Movie Maker and its infernal crashing. This means I have to learn to use iMovie and re-record a few things.

I'm sure this is some sort of growth opportunity for me.

Thursday is the New Wednesday

2009-03-11T07:07:00.006-05:00

Progress, people. I've made progress! (Yes, I know it's Thursday. Again. More on why this post is late down at the bottom.)

So. While cleaning up the "knitting office," to make room for the bookcases that used to be in the living room but which are now in my little office, I found my buttonhole swatches, plus my notes on how I knit them. They need to be typed up, ends woven in, and tagged, but I don't have to re-knit them. Yet.

K1p1 ribbing with buttonholes

K2p2 ribbing with buttonholes

Seed stitch with buttonholes

Here's the swatch with buttonholes evenly spaced.

I need to check the instructions. I have this nagging feeling there should be five buttonholes, not four.

The mitten. My third attempt wasn't any better than my second mitten, and actually turned out worse, because after I finished the Fair Isle portion, I saw I had made a mistake in the pattern. I re-evaluated my second mitten, and while it isn't perfect, I really think it might be good enough. I finished weaving in the ends and crossed it off my to-do list.

Here it is:

(Ack! While taking pictures, I noticed a weaving-in problem. Must fix. Blech.)

I went through my lace swatches last weekend and decided I needed another one done in lace weight. When I started work on Level II, I bought both fingering weight yarn and lace weight yarn, as either one is considered acceptable for the lace swatches. While I had knit lace before, I hadn't ever knit with lace weight yarn and didn't understand what needle size to use. Working an inch of seed stitch seemed like it would take a billion years. I didn't like my swatches worked in fingering weight yarn, though, because they seemed too dense and I was really limited to fairly simple stitch patterns. So I sorted through my lace swatches, flipped through the first Walker Treasury and found a lace pattern to knit.

Still needs to be blocked, tagged, ends woven in.

Here's one I knit last fall:

There's a mistake somewhere near the base of the lace, a mis-placed purl stitch, but for the life of me, I can't find it now. I'm not sure whether to cop to it in my notes or not, given that I can't find it.

Last night, rather than posting this blog entry, like I was supposed to, I decided I was still short on adequate lace swatches, so I knit this:

Just needs the top seed stitch border. Plus blocking, ends woven in, tags, pattern writing, etc.

Here is what else I've been working on:

My History of Knitting report.

Still haven't finished the report on Knitting Without Tears. That book is so different, and I have so many mixed feelings about it, that I'm finding it difficult to review it in an articulate and rational manner. Which probably means I should persevere rather than take the easy way out and review something more straightforward.

So many books, not enough shelves

2009-03-09T06:52:00.008-05:00

First, knitting project reduction progress:

Slow but steady. And somewhat obvious that switching needles at the heel flap of the first sock has affected the matchy matchiness of the pair. I'm a little OCD about sock matchy matchiness, and thus was faced with the dilemma of what to do -- keep on knitting, or rip out the second sock and re-do it so that it matches?

When I found this project, it was on four size 1 dpns (the coated alumninum kind, probably Inox/Prym). When I use dpns for socks, I like to have five. Rarely will I "make do" with four, as the triangular formation is too rigid and causes the needles to poke me in the hands. I don't have many sets of size 1 needles (true size 1's - 2.25mm - not 2.5mm, which is really a US 1 1/2), and the fifth needle was nowhere to be found, so all I had available to switch to was a 32" Harmony circ. Turns out there is enough drag on the Harmony needles to cause me to knit just a bit looser than I would on slick metal needles, which meant my gauge shifted slightly.

It's not easy to keep this sock on the needles, rather than ripping out the second sock, buying some new needles and reknitting the leg (switching to the Harmonies, of course, at the gusset, so that the feet will match on both). Instead, I will knit on, and show them to future sock knitting classes as an example of how same-size needles of different materials can affect gauge.

Oh, but it hurts.

Otherwise, we worked on the living room this weekend, picking up some shelves and a chair that the World's Best Mother-in-Law ™ won't be taking to her fab new apartment.

There is one other shelf unit, but we haven't decided whether to put it next to these three, or find another location.

See all that decorative stuff on the top shelves? That, my friends, is the first time we've had tzotchkes in our living room since having kids. (The kids are 11 and 14 now.) I dug these things out of cabinets and off high shelves in the basement. We're starting to live like grownups again.

The new shelves are much nicer looking than the shelves we used to have, but they leave us with a problem. Where to put all the books? These new shelves are more decorative than utilitarian, as far as book storage goes.

This pile will be given away

but these two boxes are keepers

as they are either books I re-read occasionally or books written by friends.

Thank goodness TWBMiL™ gave me one of these for my (upcoming) birthday.

Which will help keep the constantly-expanding number of books down to a manageable level, as I am running out of places to store books. I need it for yarn.

And guess what? There are a few knitting patterns available to download to the Kindle. I was also able to email a Cookie A sock pattern PDF from my laptop to the Kindle. Pretty cool. The downside of the Kindle is that I do most of my reading in the bathtub. I'm not keen on having the Kindle read to me. A Stephen Hawkings-ish voice reading fiction aloud doesn't do it for me. Such problems I have.

The new-to-us chair is temporarily in the kitchen, until we can move the 4th shelf (which is lying on the across the living room floor) to wherever it will go. We also need to move an existing living room chair upstairs.

Cotton quite likes the new chair, which is why it is covered with towels. He often comes in from the backyard or the garage (both of which are accessed through the kitchen) with wet and/or muddy feet. It'd be nice to keep the pseudo-suede fabric clean at least until it makes it into the living room, where he won't have ready access to it.

In other news. things are marching along on the Master Hand Knitting front. I may actually make my goal of finishing Level II before my birthday! (March 24).

See you Wednesday!

Friday video - leaning decreases

2009-03-06T07:11:00.003-06:00

This week I have some tips for

Selecting which decrease to use (k2tog or ssk)
Placement of decreases
How to remember which one leans left and which one leans right
How do do these decreases from the purl side

Next week I'll talk about when to switch the direction of the decreases.

Have a great weekend!

What was my point?

2009-03-05T06:47:00.008-06:00

Those of you who follow my blog in anticipation of my incredibly instructive posts regarding my Master Hand Knitting Level II progress may be doubting that I am actually making progress, given that Wednesday MHK posts have, er, not been posted. Or rather, what's been posted is either lame or late or, more frequently, lame and late.

This post is late, but, I hope, not as lame.

I will have you know that yesterday I wrote three -- THREE -- book reviews and made progress on the fourth, and I must thank lipizzanknitter on Ravelry for the great check list of what to include in a book review to ensure completeness. Her check list gave me the structure I desperately needed to avoid being too terse or (more likely) rambling on and on.

There are two things I struggle with when I write: finding my point, and giving my point structure. I have no trouble spewing words, but presenting those words in a format that makes sense to someone else takes time.

I need to have a basic structure, or form, for whatever I'm writing, and the structure varies, depending on if I'm writing a business letter, instructions for the Make 1 increase, or a scene in a novel. I didn't have the form I needed for the book reviews, and that kept me from feeling good about checking them off my MHK II list as complete.

Form is not formula. For example, if you're building a house, in order for the house to be a house and not an industrial complex or a truck or a swimming pool, the house has a certain form. Every house has a foundation, walls, floors, ceilings and a roof. Most have windows, electrical wiring and plumbing. And to differentiate it from a commercial building, it has bedrooms, a kitchen, and at least one bathroom. So if you were going to build a house, you would include those things, and there is an order in which those things are done. For example, you start with laying the foundation, and you do the wiring before you put up sheetrock, which can't be done until the studs are up. It's the other stuff you put into the house that makes it unique, or makes it something you can live in. How many bathrooms does it have? How many bedrooms? What is the floor plan? Are there multiple storeys? A basement? Is the kitchen a galley style, or is the main floor an open floor plan? Having the same form -- a foundation, walls, electricity and a roof -- makes it a house, but it does not make it the same as every other house.

In contrast, formula is what a suburban housing developer uses to build houses: a couple of floor plans and four colors of taupe exterior paint. It's the same house over and over again.

And so it is with writing. Each fiction genre has a form, but not a formula. The reader has expectations about what will be included in the book, while at the same time demanding something new and different. While it's true that there are suburban housing developers within any genre (i.e. formulaic writers), some readers who dismiss entire genres as predictable (i.e. formulaic) miss the point of those genres. It's like dismissing a house for its form: having a kitchen and a bathroom, just like every other house. There is an expectation of a kitchen and bathroom in a house. What makes the house different or special when you walk through it is discovering how the kitchen and bathroom are placed in the house and how useful or beautiful they are.

In fiction, early in a book, the writer lays out a story question. The climax at the end answers the story question. For example, the story question of a romance isn't, "Will the hero and heroine end up together?" (Will the house have a bathroom?) Readers of romance aren't stupid. They *know* the hero and heroine will end up together -- that's why they're reading a romance. That's what a romance is - a courtship story. The story question of a romance is, "How will the hero and heroine overcome their conflicts so that they can end up together?" It's seeing that process play out -- watching the courtship -- that entertains them. Think about it. Does anyone sit down with a mystery and say, "Oh my god, this is so predictable. I totally know the protagonist is going to figure out whodunnit." I sure hope so. That's why it's a mystery.

So, back to knitting book reviews and finding my point. The one I'm always searching for. For the MHK reviews, I wasn't happy with what I had written. The writing wasn't bad, but I didn't have that elusive structure (form) on which to hang my review. I had found my point for each book I had chosen, but I hadn't found a good way to present that information. I didn't have the form.

With lipizannknitter's help, I found it.

So, for anyone curious about the written work for Level II, one requirement is to write four book reviews of at least one paragraph. I'm not clear on how to write a one-paragraph review (that sounds more like a summary to me), so mine are each about a page long, single spaced.

I chose the following books to review:
The Knitter's Book of Finishing Techniques, by Nancie M. Wiseman
A Treasury of Knitting Patterns, Barbara G. Walker
Vogue Knitting The Ultimate Knitting Book, by the editors of Vogue Knitting Magazine
Knitting Without Tears, by Elizabeth Zimmermann (this is the one I'm still working on)

There are several types of books I could have chosen -- like those that are devoted to specialized topics such as Aran sweaters or Fair Isle Tams, or which are full of patterns of a certain type (socks, for example, or baby sweaters). I felt like this was a good mix of general reference, knitting techniques, a stitch dictionary, and knitting philosophy.

Oh, I also have this half-finished Fair Isle mitten.

Still not happy with my edge tension,which is why I stopped.

I'm knitting it inside out to keep my overall tension correct. This works on the straightaways, but not so much around the corners. When I knit right side out, I end up with corners pulled too tightly, as the yarn cuts across the corners. I tried to keep the yarn firm around the corners this time, but I realized I didn't pull tightly enough. I'm thinking of ripping back these few rows and trying them again. Basically, I think it's nearly impossible (for me, anyway) to maintain even tension from one needle to another in Fair Isle. I much prefer being able to work on larger circumference items when I do stranded knitting. This is just aggravating. I will figure it out. I will.

Time I will never get back

2009-03-02T10:28:00.006-06:00

Despite my fervent desire to not start any new projects until I get more of the existing ones off my plate, I was talked into something yesterday I still can't believe I did.

Yesterday was March 1, which ostensibly means we are past the subzero temperatures, and since the dog needed a hair cut the other day, I told them to give him his "regular" cut rather than the longer cut I'd asked for the past two times. We figured he needed a bit more coat Dec-Feb, because this winter was been so awfully cold. But the weather has been balmier -- in the 20's and 30's, and (we thought) wouldn't get back down so low again.

Yesterday morning, I let the dog out -- it was exactly 0 degrees out (did I *mention* that it was March 1st?), and the dog came back inside doing that thing where he keeps holding one foot up and then the other, and then sucking on his frozen feet. Michael decided that we had to make some booties for our poor widdle puppy dawg, so I dragged the sewing machine and a yard of fleece upstairs to the kitchen, and he found some velcro cable ties, and we set to work. We tried three variations of fleece tubes: different lengths for the first two-- do we go past his ankle? up to his armpit? and then for the third one I tried a circular base with a tube around it (basically a cylinder), which wasn't much better. At that point, Michael surrendered, but I was just getting started. I understood how to make a sock to fit a human foot. I should be able to use that knowledge to construct a fleece bootie.

Michael thought I should just knit him some socks. "That's the next logical step," he said. He has previously told me not to knit *him* socks, because it was a waste of time when he could just buy some at Costco. But since I hadn't been able to find booties to fit Cotton at PetSmart, it made sense to Michael that I should make the dog some socks. We would put some non-skid goop on them later.

So Sunday afternoon, I knit our Shih Tzu socks.

What? You've never seen a dog wearing socks?

The front socks.

The back socks - an inch more ribbing than the front socks.

Oh, I also finished a human sock. (I've been working on Master Knitting stuff, too, but more about that on Wednesday)

Friday video - long tail cast on part 2

2009-02-27T19:58:00.004-06:00

In which I demonstrate how to recover from a dropped cast on stitch without ripping back and then I show four (count 'em - FOUR) ways to cast on in pattern. And then the video ends abruptly.

I really do intend to get better at this.

Also, apparently I forgot about Wednesday Master Knitting Update. I actually have made some progress (not a lot, but some), which I will try very hard to update you on next Wednesday. We'll see how that goes.

Meanwhile -- enjoy the video!

If anyone has further questions about the long tail cast on, or would like to see specific video tips they haven't seen anywhere else, leave your questions/requests in the comments or in the Rox Rocks group on Ravelry.

Sock it to the socks

2009-02-23T07:22:00.003-06:00

Project update:
The good news: I've reduced the number of unfinished projects by two!

The bad news: I didn't actually finish those projects, I've just permanently abandoned them.

First, the red sock. I was working with Handmaiden Casbah, a delightful blend of superwash merino, cashmere and nylon, wonderfully soft and cozy. At 9 sts/in worked in stockinette, the yarn lost a lot of its charm. The sock was too stiff, not terribly stretchy, and the sock was plain boring. I wasn't having fun knitting it, and when I tried it on, it felt like it was cutting off the circulation at my calf. I'm thinking that if I knit a yarn of that thickness to a gauge that tight, I might not be able to have as much negative ease as I'm used to (an inch). So rather than finish the sock, and then never get around to the second one, I decided to frog and wait for Cookie A's sock book that's coming out this spring. I'll knit at a gauge more suitable to the yarn, and take advantage of the near-solid nature of the sock to use a great stitch pattern.

Second, the green mitten. God, I hate that mitten. I hate the color, I hate the mitten pattern that came with it, and I hate the resulting mitten. I can't think of any situation that would compel me to make another one.

So, what have I actually made progress on? Well, I worked on the pink sock yesterday, while at the Minnesota Knitters' Guild annual tea.

Mostly, I've been working on Nina's bedroom. All painting is complete, the shades have been re-hung, the closet is finished, the curtains have been hemmed and hung, and the fabric has been washed, ironed and cut for the slipcover I'm making for the couch that will go in her room. She set up her old bed (it'll be a few weeks before the new one arrives), but she has the new bedside tables and lamps in place.

many hours later...

The couch slip cover is complete. I'm pretty happy with it,.

and Nina is too, which is a relief.

Friday Video - I did it!

2009-02-20T15:07:00.004-06:00

I am still fighting with Windows Movie Maker, although we have come to an agreement in which I copy the AVI files from my digital camera to my laptop, import them into individual WMM projects save them each as a WMV file, then re-import them into WMM in order to use several of these video files together with the wmv files my web cam creats into one Movie Maker Project that I can edit and save without my laptop blowing up. Which I then save as one big wmv.

It's not very elegant.

I realize there are issues with different sound levels depending on which camera I was using, and I realize I'm not the smoothest talker and I have an annoying habit of tsking at the beginning of every sentence. Also, I could use some hand cream. Nothing like filming your hands with the macro setting to make that abundantly clear.

I'll work on it.

I'm just so delighted that I *did* this. It's not easy to knit yourself a movie!

Behinder and behinder

2009-02-19T17:50:00.003-06:00

Yesterday was supposed to be Master Hand Knitting update day, but apparently I'm still thrown off by the Presidents' Day weekend.

Progress: I wrote one paragraph for one of the knitting book reviews. Whoop dee doo.

I also went to Home Depot for the 18th time in the past week. I seem to have some sort of measuring deficit disorder.

Nina's closet door is six feet wide. Inside the closet, to the right, is a recessed area two feet deep that was formerly occupied by a built-in dresser. We pulled out the dresser (the drawers always stuck, so she never used them) and she wanted a closet rod installed crosswise in that little alcove. So I measured it. Twice, because that's what you're supposed to do, and I wrote the measurement down. I used a measuring tape I don't like, but it was the only one I could find. Every foot, it starts the inch count again, so if you want to know the total inches you have to do the conversion yourself. This is not difficult for me. I am so good at mental math that as a sixth grader, when my brother and I rode our bikes to the grocery store to do the weekly shopping, I would add up the grocery total in my head as we went through the aisles, to make sure we had enough money for everything. I was accurate down to the penny, including the tax on taxable items. (We had a single mother who was re-writing her PhD dissertation while in her first semester of medical school. Grocery shopping was the least we could do.) Nina's closet is 27" deep. I know this, because I measured it twice. And wrote it down.

I went to Home Depot to the Closet Maid aisle and got a 3' closet rod. I asked one of the workers to cut it down to 26 1/2" inches. I planned to put caps on the ends of the rod, and wanted enough clearance in case the wall width varied anywhere. I also got a 6' shelf cut down so I had 2 26 1/2" shelves. And I bought a 3' hang track which I would have to cut down myself with a hack saw.

I carefully measured the hang track, marked it, and sawed off the end. I took it to the closet and held it up against the wall. It was too short by about 3" on each end. I measured the track. 26 1/2". What the heck? I had Michael measure the closet depth. 2 feet 7 inches. It seems I somehow forgot that a foot has twelve inches. Michael charitably proposed that perhaps I thought the U.S. had actually converted to the decimal system. So back to Home Depot.

I'm not going to go into how I bought a 6' closet rod to hang curtains which will replace her closet door and came home with a rod 5'8" long.

What I did on my Presidents' Day vacation

2009-02-17T11:33:00.005-06:00

So I realize today isn't Monday, but yesterday was President's Day, the kids were home and we were working on a big weekend family project, which is still in progress.

Before

(these are actually the after pictures from the last time we did this particular project)
The girl in that photo had just turned 10 years old.

She is now 14 and has very different ideas about what her room needs to look like. Her plans included painting parts of her room black. So this weekend, we painted. And so far, the room looks like this:

Tonight we will install the closet shelving system. Over the next few weeks various other things will arrive to fill the room, such as a new bed, bedside tables and lamps (courtesy of Nana, aka The World's Best Mother-in-Law™, who is moving to new digs), curtains to cover the now-doorless closet, plus a new bedroom door with mirror. We have a few things left to pick out, like an area rug for the floor. Her dresser is moving into the closet, so she's going to have more floor space and will need another piece of furniture, such as a chair or couch (we just haven't decided which of the two pieces we have will look best yet.)

In knitting news, I finished the I-cord edging for the garter stitch blanket and wove in the ends. What a difference the I-cord made -- the rippled edges are gone, and it looks great. I still need to wash it to give it a final finished blocking, but that will have to wait for another day.

First Friday Video Failure

2009-02-14T07:49:00.002-06:00

So you may have noticed I didn't post a video yesterday. Apparently, Windows Movie Maker is not a real, working piece of software. It merely pretends it is. If I want to edit wmv files, I merely have to endure random software crashes. If I want to introduce some AVI files, well, I can hardly expect the program to play video at a particular starting point, now, can I? I also can't expect the software to show moving pictures. That's just silly.

Crashing software makes Mommy cranky, so you can imagine how the rest of my day went after I was recruited to drive three 7th graders to Mall of America to buy an outfit for a party and one 9th grader to IKEA to buy bedroom accessories (we're painting her room this weekend).

It appears I will be using iMovie, which is on the Mac Mini which is attached to our "media room" system. This means I will be able to use the actual knitting video I shot, but none of the webcam video. It also means learning to use a new piece of software, which wouldn't be so bad, except did I mention the Mac Mini is attached to the media room equipment? This is the same equipment that requires three remote controls and the memory of an elephant in order to remember how to turn the system on so I can watch live TV.

This ought to be fun.

I do, too, finish things

2009-02-12T16:35:00.015-06:00

Just apparently, not nearly as often as I start them.

I've been sorting through the "knitting office," detangling balls of yarn, throwing out scraps of swatching experiments, finding missing needles, filing away miscellaneous patterns, and bagging up UFOs with their associated yarn.

Here is the box of yarn that needs to be put away in the craft room.

I really enjoy starting new projects. I've noticed in the past year or two that I'm doing a lot more projects that take less than 6 hours to complete. I'm pretty sure I do that so I can start another project right away, but still end up with some completed items.

Even so, I still have too many projects on the needles that take longer than 6 hours, and Ive gotten to the point where I'm feeling overwhelmed by all the incompleteness (it happens a couple times a year), so it's time to introduce a little self-control and discipline, something I have very little endurance for.

I went through my Ravelry projects and looked at my Works in Progress as well as my Hibernating projects. I deleted anything that was an Ugh! because today I either threw it out (so long Peaches n Cream crocheted string bag!) or I frogged it months ago to use the yarn for something else (out of my projects list, thrummed hat!).

That leaves me with 15 unfinished projects. Fifteen. That includes the Level II stuff I have to complete, like that damned Fair Isle mitten and those lace swatches. That is, the Level II stuff altogether counts as one unfinished project. Of epic proportions, but I'm trying to feel optimistic.

I have vowed to complete three things before I allow myself to start anything new, and I am going to try really, really hard to complete more than three things before I start anything new, but given my track record, my low levels of self-control and my complete lack of discipline, I'm already losing my grip on optimism.

#1 - Master Hand Knitting Level II - I found the two finished Fair Isle mittens, but not the partially completed third.

Or maybe I did. I found something that resembeled a mitten (no stranded knitting done on it yet), it wasn't on needles, and it was completely entangled in a bunch of other yarn. So I threw it away. I have a feeling I'll be casting on for a mitten this evening.

Blankets
#2 and #3 - The Garter Stitch Blanket and crocheted afghan from the other day. I'm not going to take pictures of those.

Cardigans
#4 - The Manon. I got back to the point where I had been when I ripped the whole thing out, and I lost steam. There are photos of that thing elsewhere.

#5 Bristow cardi

It's been in a time out under the bed since a year ago when I knit the first half of the second sleeve on a needle one size smaller than the first sleeve (and the rest of the sweater). This is possibly the worst photo I have taken of any knitting ever. Sorry.

#6 Alpaca cardi, circa 1991.

When I sorted through all my knitting stuff a year or so ago, I found a copy of Rowan 6 and was amazed at how great the patterns looked so many years later. I really found myself drawn to one cardigan in particular. Later, I found all the pieces of that cardigan in another bag, already knit, but could not locate any memory of knitting those pieces, although I am certain no one else in this house did, given a) they don't knit and b) I didn't know anyone in this house at the time (most of the other people in this house weren't born when this thing was knit). It needs to have button bands and a collar, but otherwise it's mostly done. (Actually, maybe that long rectangle of magenta chenille is the collar. Hmm. At any rate, I still like it. I hope I'm not too big for it when it's done. I was 20 lbs lighter in 1991. On the other hand, the styles ran larger back then.

Socks
Uh, there are 7 pairs of unfinished socks.
#7 The red socks - my "current" project - made from Handmaiden Casbah, a blend of cashmere, merino and nylon. No photo at the moment. The yarn color is similar to the Bristow cardi, so my guess is any photo taken at the moment would give it the honor being the second worst knitting photo ever.

#8 The car ferry socks

I made this one on our trip to Ludington to visit my mom last summer, which included 4 hours each way on the car ferry.

#9 Barb's Pomatomus

These have been dormant for almost two years. I have finally come to terms with the fact that while I loved knitting the first pair of Pomatomus socks, I have no interest in knitting a second pair. These will be frogged and turned into something that I will finish so that Barb doesn't have to listen to any more excuses about why the socks I am allegedly knitting for her have yet to appear.

#10 Pink socks

I started these last spring and then abandoned them. Interesting. I was knitting them on dpns, I think just to remind myself that I still like dpns, even though I mostly knit Magic Loop these days.

#11 Bright Stripes socks.

I love this yarn (it's some sort of Regia 4 ply). What I did not love was the discovery that I did not have the right number of stitches on the sole when I grafted the toe. I miscounted or something, and ended up with a foot 1/2 inch too big around. The sock has been in a time out since then. I appear to hold my grudges for a long time.

#12 Blue Tweed socks

This yarn makes reading my stitches nearly impossible, and the subtlety of the color changes makes finding the same starting point problematic. I would be okay with fraternal twin socks if all the stripes were blue, but there's one white stripe that would make the fraternal nature too obvious for my obsessive matchy-match syndrome. I'm not sure if I'll ever have the fortitude to knit the second sock.

#13 Poseidon

This was a fun sock to knit, and I did so on a cruise a couple years ago, but I never got around to finishing the cuff (I kept screwing it up and then as is my habit, I put the sock in a time out and forgot about it). I'm actually not sure where the sock is at the moment, so I present you with a photo of the kit.

Mittens
#14 Thrummed mittens

I knit the first mitten as the sample for a class I taught last fall, and then I worked on the second one while I taught the class. I got about 1/2 way through it, and then wandered off. Given this is incomplete item #14, this most likely comes as no surprise.

#15 Fleece Artist "Favourite mittens"

I made a pair of mittens from a different colorway (or "colourway," as they say in Canada) a few years ago for a friend of mine, and the yarn was a delight. I bought a second kit, thinking I would make these for my sister-in-law, who wears quite a bit of green. I ordered the yarn online, and the color wasn't quite what I expected so I didn't knit it up. This fall, I made the first mitten one day while watching NetFlix movies, but ended up with aching hands for several days after that. I'm still not sure if it was the fault of the yarn/needle combination, or just too much knitting in general (I was knitting like crazy this fall, getting Christmas gifts done). I also don't have an intended recipient, so these are pretty low on the priority list. Also, I think they're horribly ugly, so that's another point against it.

But, hey, I'm not a complete slacker. I finished my Koolhaas hat last night!*

One down, fifteen to go.

*And thus, my ability to knit cute hats continues, as does my inability to look good wearing them. Sigh.

Master Knitting Wednesday - Part 1

2009-02-11T12:46:00.004-06:00

So today is Master Knitting Wednesday, which means I need to provide an update on my Level II progress, which I said I was going to do every Wednesday until I get this thing done.

First off...what the heck have I done so far? It's been since some time this past fall since I've had everything out and looked at it.

It's off to my "knitting office" to see where everything is...

Swatches
Panic time. I found a couple of ziploc bags on the floor (because where else would I keep this stuff) with a couple of swatches, but that was it. When I looked up in dispair to shake my fist and curse, I noticed a binder on my shelf labled "Master Hand Knitting Level II." Guess what was inside? Swatches 1-10 and 14-16! How organized is that?

Swatches 11-13 are not in the binder. Those are the lace swatches, and possibly the thing that's given me the most fits in this level. I have several done (that's what I found in the ziploc bags), but I'm not sure which (if any) are going into the binder. I want to submit things sufficiently complicated, and yet I'm not a big fan of lace knitting, so I'm not sure what I'm trying to prove. This whole process is about me learning and stretching myself, but there gets to be a point where I snap if I stretch too far.

Swatches 17-20 are the buttonhole swatches. I have several of each, all stuffed in a ziploc bag and none tagged. I found my hand written notes from what I did on the last reknit, but I will have to study them to see which swatches actually correspond with the notes. (Have I mentioned lately that detail is not my forte?)

I have two versions of Swatch 21, which is the picked up stitches for the simulated neck, and I have a couple of inset pockets (Swatch 22). They all look better than they looked to me when I was working on them last fall, and I'm fighting the urge to knit that pocket one more time.

Mostly what's missing are the sheets that are to be included with most swatches that describe the technique used, plus references. I somehow missed that instruction when I first knit everything, because I treated the swatch instructions as all about knitting, and the questions as being the related written work. I remember now ripping out all the seams in my swatches last fall to see what I had done when I had knit them the year before, because I couldn't remember.

Action:

Figure out which buttonhole swatches are the ones I will submit.
Make sure I have sheets in each of the swatch sheet protectors that have to identify the technique used for that swatch.
Figure out if I am going to submit any of the existing lace swatches, and then select the patterns to be used for any swatches that still need to be knit.
Select which of the Swatch 21 and 22 choices I will use

Questions
I have all 19 questions done, with the exception of #13, but that one is in rough draft.

Action: Finish answering question #13

Reviews
I have 2 book reviews done, with a 3rd started. There need to be 4 altogether.

Action:

Finish 3rd Review
Write 4th Review

Report
I have none of the history report done, although I've done plenty of reading. Which I will need to read again, because I didn't take notes. I'm not sure what I want to focus on in my report.

Action:

Figure out focus of report
Write the report

Projects
I have 2 of 1 argyle sock done. I actually wove in the ends and blocked the second one. There is one weird seamed stitch on one of the gussets that I have determined is due to me ripping back the gusset at some point, and then not getting the selvage stitch back on the needle correctly, so that when I seamed (using a 1/2 st on each side), it looks strange. The only way to fix it would be to rip the entire foot back to that point. I would rather acknowledge and explain the peculiarity in my notes. I can't imagine the sock would fail on that basis. There are plenty other worse things they could say about it.

I have 1 of 1 vest done (and beautifully so, I must say). I'm so proud of the vest. Provided I submit in time and get it back in time, I plan to enter it in the State Fair this year.

I have 2.5 of 1 Fair Isle mitten done. None to my satisfaction. I couldn't find any of them this afternoon. I did find two boxes full of yarn in the upstairs room I'm trying to pretend is a knitting office. I sorted through that tangled mess, which will soon go down to the basement craft room.

(Hey --I just got my YarnOver registration confirmation from the Minnesota Knitters' Guild in the mail today, and I'm taking Sally Melville's Two Colors, Two Hands class in the morning. Score! Of course, I'm hoping to have the binder sent off by then, but in the event the judges scorn my Fair Isle mitten, I will have new skilz to impress the judges when I resubmit. The other class is Joan Schrouder's Entry Level Entrelac, which I will need for Level III. Because I will finish Level II very soon.)

Action:

Find partially completed 3rd Fair Isle Mitten
Finish 3rd Fair Isle Mitten
Stop angsting about the Fair Isle Mitten

To be clear, those action items are all the things that have to be done, as near as I can tell. I'm not going anywhere near the "proof read all tags" aspect until I get all that other stuff done. I'm too easily distracted and overwhelmed by thinking about that kind of detail before it's time to do so.

Photos would probably help here, wouldn't they? I will add later, if I remember. I have to make dinner now...

Outline Stitch Bind off

2009-02-10T15:30:00.022-06:00

I'm having a printer crisis, which is going to be a problem for one of the knitters in my Reversible Cabled Scarf class tonight, because I have 4 students, but only 3 handouts and my printer wants to print only on the left side of the page, in weird colors. This is a problem, given my photos are on the left and the text on the right.

So in an attempt to make it up to one of those students, I'm posting a slightly modified version of handout for the Outline Stitch Bind off, also known as the "Casting-On/Cast Off."
The edge of a long tail cast on is made up of a series of backwards loops that resemble cursive letter e's strung together.

The Outline Stitch bind off is a type of sewn bind off that matches the long tail cast on. If you're knitting a scarf, or other item that has both the cast on and bind off edges exposed, it's a nice technique to have. (Note: when I say this is a "type" of sewn bind off, I mean just that. It's not the bind off known as "the" sewn bind off, which produces a different edge. Incidentally, the tubular bind off is also a type of sewn bind off.)

The bottom set of blue loops represents the backwards loop portion of the long tail cast on (the part created from the long tail hanging over your thumb). The "heads" of those loops wrap around the base of the stitches above them. At the top of the drawing is the path of the Outline Stitch bind off, which (if you turn the picture upside down) wraps around the base of those stitches. In truth, the loops wrap around one leg of one stitch and one leg of the stitch next to it, so (as with grafting pieces together that were knit in opposite directions), the bind off is actually a 1/2 stitch off from the cast on.
Here's how to do it:
Work the last RS row of your fabric (assuming the smooth side of the cast on is the RS). Keep the side just worked facing you.

Cut a length of yarn 3 times the width of the area to be bound off.
Thread the yarn through a tapestry or darning needle.

Hold the yarn above the knitting needle. Insert the darning needle down through the center of the 2^nd stitch ...

..and up through the center of the 1^st stitch.

Let the 1^st stitch come off the needle.

Repeat across the row, inserting down through the center of the 2^nd stitch and up through the center of the 1^st stitch, then letting the 1^st stitch come off the needle.

Make sure you hold the yarn up above the knitting needle and out of the way of the threaded needle that's being pulled through the loops. You don't want to pull that threaded needle through the big loop of yarn, the way it's shown in the photo below.
If you're just the teensiest brave and you can see your stitch orientation, you can pull the knitting needle right out and sew directly into the loops.

If it looks sloppy when you're finished...

...tighten up the loops, starting at the left edge and pulling gently on each loop.

>Does it really match the cast on edge?

Depends on which side you look at

Garter and Seed Stitch

Not so great from the “smooth side” of the cast on/bind off, as the top row is knits, interrupting the continuity of the stitch pattern.

From the back side, garter looks good

and seed stitch isn't bad, either

Stockinette looks great on both sides

And ribbing looks pretty good.

That's all for now -- I have to eat and then head over to the yarn shop!

What's going on in my knitting bag

2009-02-09T10:01:00.004-06:00

Excuse me while I blow the dust off this blog...

I started this blog a few years ago so that I could keep track of my projects. I'd been knitting for 20 years and had almost no photographic evidence of the hundreds of items I'd knit. The blog was a big help to me in keeping track of what I was working on, but I was never a prolific blogger, and there were plenty of projects that never got documented. Then Ravelry came along, and my whole world changed. It's easier for me to track my projects as complete units, keep notes I can refer back to, but I also love the Techniques forum, where I get to share what I know about knitting with people who want to hear what I have to say.

In the meantime, the blog has suffered. That's about to change, because now I have a way to use my blog differently than I have in the past, but also in a way that is different from what Ravelry does for me.

I'm going to try to blog three times a week. On Mondays, I'm going to do show and tell on my projects in progress. Wednesdays are going to be Master Knitting Wednesday, at least until I finish Level II, because I'm close to the end, but I have some loose ends to finish up (and some writing), and I just want the thing done with. Early April will mark 2 years since I began, and I'd like to finish before then. On Fridays, I'm going to try video blogging, demonstrating various knitting tricks and tips. I have some ideas about how to make knitting videos different than they usually are. Hopefully, they'll be interesting and informative, too.

So here's what I'm working on at the moment:

Koolhaas Hat, in Mission Falls 1824 wool, color 029 (it's a nice raspberry red).

It's been a year or so since I've knit any 1x1 cables, and these are mostly a ktbl over a purl, so it took me a round of doing that with a cable needle to realize I would never last through the entire hat if I didn't remind myself of how to cable without a cable needle. (Hey, maybe that will be my first Friday video tip!) Next time I take a photo, it will be better. Can you see the purple Magic Loop cable in my hair, and the needles stitcking out of the back of my head?

Next up is the Garter Stitch Blanket from Elizabeth Zimmermann's The Opinionated Knitter. I started this monster at the end of December, and finished the knitting in just a couple weeks. I used two strands of Great Wool bulky from my knitting buddy, Julie, who has a sheep farm up in Sauk Centre. Her sheep are Rambouillet ("French merino"), and I have to agree they produce "great wool." The yarn has a wonderful springiness to it that makes it fun to knit.

This weekend I seamed the pieces together. I had some help

Sometimes, I had too much help.

It's hard to seam when the dog is lying on your crochet hook. At about 1/2" thick, this is one comfy spot to sleep.

Here's the whole thing seamed, but without ends woven in.

I still need to work attached i-cord around the circumference, then wash and block the thing, as it's a bit rippled. It weighs about 5 pounds at this point, so it's not a portable project.

I think I will love this blanket for its warmth and cushiness. I liked the puzzle piece aspect of this afghan, but I wasn't crazy about EZ's instructions. While I wholeheartedly endorse her efforts to teach knitters to think, she doesn't always do a good job explaining what *she* was thinking when she used a certain design element, which I think is important when the design is so unusual. I love to think for myself, and substitute design elements, but the reason for some of her design choices weren't clear to me even after I swatched alternatives, so I made some changes, and then later realized what she was thinking, and why.

The biggest problem was the matter of the selvages. EZ suggests slipping the first stitch of every row and purling the last stitch in order to give the edge a nice chain effect. This works if you slip knitwise, which is a common, but not obvious choice for selvages. Her method of seaming these edges didn't appeal to me when I tried it on a swatch, and since I've had some experience seaming garter stitch edges flat with a nice result, I decided to do that. It wasn't until later, when I realized I would be seaming cast on and bind off edges to side edges, not just edges to edges, that I realized my potential mistake. EZ's method would provide a 1:1 chain match up for seaming, whereas I had some ridged edges and some chained edges. On the other hand, I still didn't like her method of seaming, so I pushed on, deciding this was a freaking afghan for the basement, not an heirloom, so I would figure out the seaming later. I searched around Ravelry, and saw brooklyntweed/Jared Flood's method of single crocheting the seams and decided to try that. I used one strand of the bulky for the seams, and tried a few ways to seam: by incorporating both legs of both edge stitches in the seam, just one leg of each edge, and finally, one leg of a garter stitch edge with both loops of a bind off chain.

In the end, I chose to seam only one leg of any given garter stitch edge to another edge. When the other edge was a cast off chain, however, I did use both legs of the chain. If I used just one leg of the cast off chain, the other leg was obvious on the reverse side, which wasn't true of the garter stitch edge.

But wait, there's more
Before I crocheted the seams on the afghan, I decided to become better at crocheting. I tried to learn last summer, but I chose the wrong project (and wrong yarn) to start with, and gave up. This time, I worked through learning all the basic stitches: slip stitch, single crochet, half double, double, triple, and double triple. I'm using Crocheting for Dummies as my reference. I find it speaks to me in exactly the way I like, particularly as someone who is starting from absolutely no background in crochet. Every question I have is answered and explained thoroughly.

So here's my crochet project: a stash busting afghan

I'm using worsted yarn from my stash (I got some help from Nina to make sure the colors I chose worked together), and most evenings I do a row or two before bed. Since I learned to crochet, I've been studying the crocheted acrylic ripple afghan my paternal grandmother made that I've had since high school. The ripple pattern is slightly different than the one I'm using, so I had fun figuring out how she did hers. In the process, I realized Granny didn't crochet "correctly." She crocheted every row by going through the chain (just like you have to on the first row) , rather than under both loops of the chain. It's still good work, but it took me a while to figure out why my double crochet didn't look quite the same as Granny's. I kept thinking I must be doing something wrong!

There's one more project on my needles at the moment, a sock in a merino/cashmere/nylon yarn, but I seem to have misplaced it. I thought it was a nice contrast at 9 sts/in to the 2 sts/in garter stitch bohemoth. Must locate.

That's all for now. See you Wednesday for my Master Knitting update!

Merry Manon

2008-12-25T09:55:00.004-06:00

I decided to handle re-knitting the Manon in a somewhat systematic way. First, there was no way I could just rip it all out, even though I was pretty sure I was going to re-knit the whole thing.

Instead, I started by ripping out the top back and front stockinette sections and then knitting the center back triangle with that yarn to see what sort of difference that would make in the size and drape of just that piece. Turned out I liked it quite a bit more, so I cast on for the right triplet and picked up stitches along the right side of the center triangle. I finished the right triplet before I ran out of yarn.

Here's how the original, too-drapey, wrong gauge peplum looks next to the new, improved, just-right drape, correct gauge peplum. Or rather, how the new peplum looks on top of the old one.

Here's an up-close look at the original center triangle

And here's a look at the new center triangle

It's really hard to see a difference unless you hold it in your hand. With the original one, it felt like it would end up stretching out over time. The new one feels like it will hold its shape.

I made one change to the pattern based on two things: the way the picked up stitches for the stockinette looked in the original knit job, and another knitter's modification that made that transition point look better.

After you work the back triangle, you're supposed to cast on a mess of stitches, which will be the base for the horizontal ribbing for the right front as well as the two triangles that are not attached to the center triangle. Then you pick up stitches along the right side of the center triangle, which will become the base for the third triangle of the right triplet, and then you cast on 18 more stitches, which will be for the ribbing across the right side of the back of the sweater. The pick up row is a RS row. On the following row, the pattern says to establish the 18-stitch ribbing by working (p1, k1) 9 times. That would give you a knit column for the selvedge on the RS, and would give you a purl column next to the edge of the adjacent triangle. When you then go to pick up stitches across the ribbing selvedge, that knit column ends up on the inside of the sweater, and the stockinette transitions from the purl column. Here's a really crappy picture of how that looks:

That purl column ends up looking like a sloppy pick up. The notes I read from another knitter showed that she changed the ribbing so that it was established on the WS as (k1, p1), which meant the selvedge column on the RS was a purl column. This puts the stockinette at right angles to a knit column, giving a much neater appearance. It also puts a knit column adjacent to the edge of the triangle.

There was one other thing that had bugged me the first time I knit it, and which sent me back again and again to check the instructions the second time to confirm I wasn't missing something. The center back triangle has 3 garter ridges at the base (6 rows), but the triplets have a base of only 2 garter ridges. I went ahead and knit it this way, even though it bugged me and it wasn't until I was well into the second triplet that I looked closely at the photographs illustrating the pattern. The photograph clearly shows 3 garter ridges on the triplet. The inset photo showing the back detail also shows that the ribbing was worked as (k1, p1), not as the specified (p1, k1). The errata for the pattern only corrects stitch counts for the right triplet, and not these two other errors, neither of which affects the shaping of the garment, but only some fairly minor aesthetic details.

Onward and upward. I'm well into the left triplet now. I had to rip out the original peplum in order to recover the yarn to do it, so all that is left of my original knitting are photos. I expect to finish the left triplet some time tonight, and then it's on to the stockinette back...

The way I knit, sometimes

2008-12-16T05:59:00.004-06:00

Like many knitters, I'm self-taught. I learned to knit while I was living and working in Ireland, back in 1986. There wasn't much to do in the evenings other than huddle around the coal-fed fireplace and watch television. The biggest excitement was when the electricity ran down and we had to feed another 50p into the meter.

One Sunday, my life changed forever. One of my flatmates came home from a weekend in County Meath, where her parents lived, and she was knitting a sweater. I wanted in on that action.

When I got paid that week, I went to the department store near where I worked and bought a pattern and yarn. (Isn't that cool that you could by yarn in the department store?). I had learned to knit when I was in 5th grade during "X Period," a once-a-month afternoon where we could sign up to do a fun activity, but then, as now, garter stitch didn't excite me, so I abandoned it, not knowing what else I could do.

In Dublin, though, I had three flatmates who all knew how to knit, having been taught by nuns (and corrected with a ruler smack if they didn't hold their hands just so) My flatmates showed me how to cast on using the knitting on method, and corrected me when I wrapped the yarn in the wrong direction, without the use of corporal punishment.

Then the weekend came, and they all left town again, and I wanted to learn how to purl. So I went to the bookstore and found a book on knitting. I had spent that week's disposable income on yarn and needles, so I couldn't afford to buy the book, so I studied the pictures, trying to understand exactly what to do. By the time they all returned Sunday evening, my hands were cramped and my neck hurt, but I had managed to cast on and make progress on the bottom k1p1 ribbing.

I learned a lot from books and patterns after that, as I was good at following directions (I even helped my flatmate with her sweater when it came time to do simultaneous neck and shoulder shaping), but what I never managed to do was get the yarn tensioned around the fingers of my right hand so that I could hold the needles and wrap the yarn for stitches. What I did instead was to develop a style of knitting that worked for me, which was to avoid holding the right needle at all. I anchored the right needle at the junction of my hip and thigh. The nuns would never have approved.

I still use this method when I knit flat (I knit continental with dpns and circs) and I find it extremely comfortable, physically. The weight of the knitting is held by the needle, not my hands, so I don't get fatigued, and I have nice, even tension. Because my right hand isn't holding the needle, it is free to do other work. The yarn is tensioned against the palm of my hand with my ring and pinky fingers. When I wrap the yarn, my thumb and index finger take over tensioning the yarn while my index and middle fingers do the job of wrapping the yarn. When the stitch is finished, the yarn is back in my palm, held there by those ring and pinky fingers while my other fingers move the new stitches down the needle shaft.

Here's a video of me working a row of k3, p3

I won't win any speed contests, but it's efficient enough, and as I mentioned, very comfortable physically.

Alpaca my bags

2008-12-15T13:05:00.005-06:00

One day last week, it was really cold (maybe 10 degrees), overcast, and snowing. By 4:30, it was completely dark outside. Michael IM'd me.

"It's like Ice Station Zebra out there."
"Just think," I IM'd back, "In one month, it'll still be this dark and desolate."

Turns out it wasn't much better inside his office, where he gets little sunshine in his northwest corner office even when it isn't overcast. It wasn't snowing inside, but it's possible there were icicles forming off the edge of his desk, it was so cold. I noticed he was adding extra layers in the mornings before he headed out. He worries about his server room overheating when all the machines are running, so he worked it out with the building maintenance people to not send too much heat his way. While good for computers, it has an obvious downside for humans. Last winter, he would sit in the office with his coat and hat on, typing with fingers encased in thermal-lined leather gloves.

Over this past weekend, though, the temps soared to the mid-thirties, melting some of the snow, and making us believe that winter wasn't so bad. But yesterday, a new weather system hit Minnesota and one look at the Monday forecast (high of -6 F) had me digging through my stash.

Here's what I whipped up yesterday for my alpaca-loving husband.

Fetching (what else?)

I used a sport-weight alpaca I bought at Shepherd's Harvest over Mother's Day weekend, held double and used size 7 needles to give me a slightly firm stockinette gauge of 5 sts/in.

Modifications:
CO 50 sts, rather than 45
4 cable crossings at the wrist, rather than 3
22 rows of k4p1 for the hand, rather than 16.
A second cable crossing and one more plain row before casting off with a regular bind off (not the picot bind off)

I think I made the hand between the cables and the thumb hole too long, as it's bunching up a bit. I probably could have done without adding those extra 5 sts, perhaps making some of the palm multiples k3p1 rather than k4p1. Ah, well. He likes the extra length above the thumb covering more of his fingers, but that means there's extra material on the palm side that interferes with his typing.

Next time I'll make him a pair of fingerless gloves and give him a proper thumb gusset rather than a peasant thumb.

Never underestimate yourself

2008-12-13T13:19:00.005-06:00

I am plugging along on the Manon. In fact, the entire back is complete, and I just finished the front left. I am part way into ball #8.

I was contemplating whether to do the right front or one of the sleeves, checking the schematic to see what the sleeve length was and trying to figure out where the top of the sleeve cap would hit my shoulder when I decided to check the width of the sweater back. It's supposed to be 19" and even though I always hit gauge, sometimes a small fraction of a stitch difference in the 4 inch swatch measurement can add up to 1/4" or more for the entire sweater back.

The back is a little more than an 1" too wide. Which means the sweater will be more than 2" too big around.

This is not good.

I laid the measuring tape across the back expanse of stockinette, where I should be getting 18 sts/4". I get 17 sts. I measured again, in a different area. Same thing.

I checked my needles, thinking I had somehow used a size 10's instead of the size 9's the pattern specifies. Nope. 5.5mm. That's a US 9.

I swatched back in September when I knit the back triangle the first time (and ripped it out for a pretty lame reason) and I know I got 18 sts/in. I made a nice big swatch, too. I almost always swatch even though I always get the gauge on the yarn label using the needles specified. For certain projects, you can use the project itself as a gauge swatch, but this was to be a sweater and this particular sweater doesn't have much stockinette until you get to the upper back. I couldn't just cast on the first triangle and use it as a swatch. There's too much texture and cable action going on. So I swatched, because I am nothing if not a conscientious knitter.

After this horrifying confrontation between my assumptions about my knitting and reality, I accepted the truth, but I couldn't understand how it happened. I stared at the gauge specification in the pattern when a horrifying realization occurred to me. I didn't use the yarn specified in the pattern, which calls for size 9 needles to get 18 sts/4 in. I used a different Aran weight yarn.

I pulled out a ball of the Sublime Aran yarn and examined the label.

Yep, I always get gauge when I use the needles specified on the yarn label. What I don't always do is remind myself of changes I have made by noting those changes in the pattern book.

Crafting=Cheap=Cognitive Dissonance

2008-12-11T15:20:00.002-06:00

One of the Minnesota-related Ravelry groups linked to this Star-Tribune article. A number of crafters were insulted, both in the article's comments and on Ravelry because she suggested that hand made gifts were not the way to go, the implication being that they were cheesy. Or just plain awful. I spent a good amount of time today hand crafting an email response to Kara McGuire, and in the process I've decided that maybe she wasn't wrong to discourage the making of hand made gifts.

First, the article is about giving gifts this year when you don't have much money. Anyone who's spent $25 or more on hand painted merino wool sock yarn knows that homemade does not necessarily mean low cost.

Homemade=inexpensive is a reality that evaporated along with U.S.-based manufacturing. Nobody sews their own clothes or knits their own socks because they can't afford to buy them. They do it either because they enjoy the process or because it's impossible to buy something ready made that fits right.

Second, the focus of the article is about price tags and perceived value of things, and how to give someone a gift that appears to have a price tag of $X, without having to actually spend $X. For example, she suggests exchanging credit card rewards points for gift cards. You can give someone a $50 gift card to Best Buy, for example, without forking over a dime, and the recipient will have a gift worth $50. Easy and painless, and the recipient feels like you "spent" $50 on him or her.

Calculating how much a handmade gift is worth is incredibly complex. It isn't simply a matter of knowing the value of the materials. It's a matter of knowing the values of the people involved in the gift exchange. Will they understand how much time you spent on them? Will they care? In a good way?

Third, Selecting the right gift -- whether it's hand knit fingerless mitts to ward off frozen typing fingers, or a gift card purchased using rewards points -- is about knowing the recipient.

If what your recipient cares about is what the price tag on the gift says, then the absolute wrong gift is something hand made. By all means, go get that gift card.

Giving something you made by hand is far riskier than giving someone a gift card acquired by cashing in your reward points. Just think of the psychological ramifications of receiving a gift someone made for you that clearly took a lot of time and effort. More than one boyfriend has been scared off by a hand knit sweater or scarf. Worse, what if all that time and effort was put into something completely wrong for the recipient? What does that say about the relationship? A gift card is impersonal enough to make the recipient wonder if the giver cares at all, and possibly impersonal enough for the recipient not to care either, but what if the gift is a hand made lime green, fun fur hat with doggie ears? What does that gift say? What if it's a cashmere, cable knit pullover in just the right color and fit, and you've only been dating three months? When you give a hand made gift, you're giving a bit of yourself, too. Sometimes the bit you're giving is more than the recipient wanted.

I will say that exchanging rewards points for gift cards is a good idea. We got Target gift cards for the four of us a few weeks ago by using our rewards points. The first thing Nina bought was supplies to make a scrapbook of the Disney vacation her Nana took us on last winter and the trip to LA Nana took her on as an 8th grade graduation gift. Nana doesn't need a gift card, and no amount of money or rewards points could buy the time and effort going into that scrapbook. Nina knows her recipient.

It takes time to develop skill in a given craft, so I think it's fair to steer the uninitiated crafter away from making holiday gifts two weeks before Christmas and Hanukkah. Aside from the stress of mastering a new craft sufficiently well enough to make presentable presents, it's freaking expensive.

Man, oh Manon

2008-12-09T14:08:00.011-06:00

Last spring, for my birthday, The World's Best Mother-in-law™ took me to lunch in NE Minneapolis and while we were waiting for our lunch to arrive at the table, she handed me a birthday card. Inside was a gift card (for a sizable amount) to a newish yarn shop I hadn't yet been to (Bella Lana). The shop is on the same block as the restaurant, so after lunch we stopped in and I got to see a shop filled with nothing but luxury yarns. I didn't mention that in addition to the gift card, she gave me a sizable amount of cash (in case I didn't want to spend it my whole gift all in one place). This is only one of many reasons why she is The World's Best Mother-in-law™.

I knew I wanted to knit Manon, but I didn't know how much yarn I needed, so the shop owner let me log onto Ravelry from her computer so I could look it up. I bought enough Sublime extra fine merino/silk/cashmere yarn to do the job, plus I got a new ball winder, as mine was not behaving, and went home, happy with my bag of charcoal yarny goodness and upgraded yarn winding capability.

I have used the ball winder countless times since then, but until a few days ago, I had done nothing about knitting my Manon. Okay, that's not entirely true. In September, I knit the center back triangle, but decided for some reason it wasn't satisfactory, so I ripped it out.

(This is the triangle I knit the other day, but it looks exactly like the one I knit in September.)

I think I thought the k2togs on the right edge looked big and sloppy. whereas the SSKs on the left edge were tighter. They looked exactly the same this time around, only I wasn't as anal about it. I was coming off a stint of working swatches for the Master Hand Knitting program and I tend to get perfectionistic at those times, which causes me to step away from the MHK program for a few months (without understanding why). I do this over and over again. My path to self-actualization is full of clueless detours. My unconscious self knows me far better than my conscious self. Perhaps I should spend more time being unconscious.

For now, I am knitting for pleasure and for myself. Here is the Manon so far:

The bottom half of the sweater is complete. I picked up the back waistband last night and worked about 2" (the part that's curled up along the center back) and I'm about to start the armhole decreases.

Here is a closer shot of the left triplet

I'm knitting for myself because on Friday night I distributed all the Christmas knitting I did at the end of October. The occasion was Christmas Dinner at a Restaurant with the Princesses. (It's a long story. Suffice it to say that we are all writers and all mentally about six years old. I am Princess Fiona.)

It was at dinner that I bestowed upon each princess a pair of Fetching fingerless mittens. I then forced them to model the mitts even though the cuffs were held together with yarn and a tag. You could say they were handcuffed.

Here we have Tina (Princess Xena), in a cobalt blue handpaint from Cascade

Monica, pronounced mo NEE ka (Princess Jasmine), in maroon Cashmerino from Debbie Bliss

Mary (Princes Leia) in Reynolds Odyssey (blues) 100% merino

Rosemary (Princess Buttercup) in Odyssey (purples)

Helen (Princess Wannabe) also in Odyssey (reds)

Chris (Princess Frostine) in Odyssey (greens)

Becky (Princess Aurora) in Odyssey (oranges)

Then there was Katie (Princess Quay of the Milky Way), who received sage green Cashmerino mitts. Katie's favorite color is red, and I knew it, but somehow while I was knitting all those Fetchings (including several extra pairs, because I couldn't stop myself), I didn't count up how many pairs of red mitts I needed and compare them with the number of princesses who love red. Instead I ended up with two extra pairs of green mitts, plus a twin to Tina's cobalt handpainted mitts.

I brought all the extras to the restaurant and told her if she wanted, she could exchange the sage Cashmerinos for whichever ones she wanted. She looked at the other choices in the dim light and decided she was happy with what I had given her until I told her there was one other choice. I pulled a Branching Out lace scarf in cranberry from my bag and before I could even explain what it was she said, "I'll take that!" and snatched it before I could blink.

Monica tried to protest, declaring the situation unfair, because she wanted the lace scarf. While Monica is famous for talking anyone into or out of anything, she had a tough time selling her point because a) she had received a pair of Fetchings in her favorite color (red) and b) she had laryngitis. Plus, I think if it came down to it, Katie could totally take Monica down. Through a flurry of hand gestures and notes written on the backs of receipts, Monica did manage to extract a promise from me to knit her a lace scarf for her 40th birthday, which is coming up in a few months. I guess she won after all. Hmm.

Here is Katie

I can't explain why this photo is so bad. One of us might have been the slightest bit tipsy when it was taken. We were, after all, in the wine cellar of Amore Victoria. Or maybe she was just drunk with happiness, because I let her keep the mitts, too.

I'm starting to think Katie and Monica are conspiring to achieve maximum hand knit acquisition.

Look, Ma! I'm a Designer! With my own Shop!

2008-12-03T16:36:00.005-06:00

I blogged a while back about a reversibly cabled scarf I created for a class I taught this fall. I gave no thought to selling the pattern, as I created it because I wanted to teach a class on reversible cables and I couldn't find an existing pattern with enough interest in it. The existing patterns were either nothing but plain rope cables, or they were all-over woven cables. I wanted something that would hold my interest over 5 balls of yarn, something that would teach knitters something about cables in general and reversible cables specifically.

So I designed this scarf:
(Isn't that cool? You can buy it from Ravelry, even if you aren't a member)

Which I think of as the Scarf o' Love, because of the OXOX cable pattern up the center. (Makes a great Valentine's Day gift, don't you think?)

I had in mind that the people who would sign up for the class would have had previous experience with cables and would take this class to discover the secret of making the cables reversible, perhaps preferring to convert cables of their choice into their own scarf pattern.

Turns out people signed up for the class because they liked the scarf. Most of the students had never done a cable of any sort. No one was interested in designing their own.

Sophia (my finicky 11-year-old) asked me to knit one for her.

I brought Sophia's scarf (which ended up being the scarf I demonstrated techniques on to the class) to knitting group one morning, and the women in my knitting group wanted to know if they could have the pattern.

The sales staff in the shop told me people were asking to buy the pattern. People on Ravelry were sending me private messages asking if I was planning to sell the pattern.

I really couldn't have been more surprised.

Because I hd originally created the scarf as a teaching tool, I had to modify what I had into a pattern that was just a pattern, and not a series of handouts. I watched my students to see where they had difficulties or confusion following the pattern and altered the instructions accordingly.

Then I signed up as a Designer on Ravelry so my pattern could be listed, and then I signed up to have my own Ravelry Shop so I could offer the pattern as a downloadable PDF.

So as of today I am a Ravelry Shop Keeper. Go me!

Quite Fetching

2008-11-03T11:07:00.010-06:00

My name is Roxanne and I'm a Fetching-holic.

Behold:

The above were all made using Reynolds Odyssey, worsted weight, 100% merino wool, 104 yds/50g on US 6/4 mm needles. A nice yarn, with just enough leftover that I didn't feel the need to panic as I headed toward the end of the second mitt of a pair. The orangey-red colorway was the first pair I made. The pattern is easy to memorize, once you've made a pair correctly. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring the pattern with me the day I knit the first one, and left the 3rd cable crossing off. Rather than ripping it out, I just made the 2nd mitt to match. They still fit, they're still pretty, and unless you compare them to a pair done correctly, you'd never think there was anything "wrong" with them, right? Right?

These two pairs were made with a different yarn...

... the yarn specified in the pattern, Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran, 90 m/50g ball. I ran out of yarn on the first pair (the rust colored ones), ending up with a thumb exactly one round shorter than the thumb of the first pair. I'm debating whether to leave them that way, or to pick out the cast off for the first thumb and rip a round out so they'll match each other.

For the second pair, I made sure I had only about a 3" tail after my cast on was complete (I ripped out the first cast on each time in order to make sure I didn't have too long a tail), and I eliminated one round on each mitt by crossing the first cable one round early. [ETA: actually, I just looked at my mitts, and I thought I was crossing them a round early, but I actually crossed them where the pattern calls for. ] I waited until both mitts were complete before I did the thumbs. I divided the yarn left after knitting the two mitt bodies, so that if I ran short, I could run short the same on both thumbs. In the end, I had about a foot extra (after allowing for a 3-4" tail after cast off) hanging off each thumb.

For these, I used Cascade 220 Handpaint. One hank was enough for two pairs.

Other stuff:
In August 2007 I went to Nantucket for a long weekend with a friend. There was a great yarn shop on the island and aside from the Kaffe Fasset Regia sock yarn I bought there, I also bought a single hank of Tilli Tomas Rock Star, a 100% silk Aran weight yarn with glass beads threaded through it. It cost me something like $45 for that single skein, and I had no idea what, if anything, I would ever do with it. I kind of thought I'd just keep it as a pet. Then I thought maybe I'd make a scarf out of it. A scarf with lots of yarn overs to extend the meager 150 yds this single skein of silky goodness contained. I tried a few things, but wasn't happy, so I put it in a ziploc bag and stuffed it in my bedside table.

A few weeks ago I was clearing out my bedside table and I came across that ziploc bag. I looked around on Ravelry to see what other people had made with their Rock Star. By the next night, I had this:

I believe the pattern is Lace Scarf, by Debbie Bliss. (I pretty much figured out the pattern by looking at the pictures.)

It's still not blocked (a theme in my knitting lately, as I'm sure you noticed nearly every pair of those Fetchings has yarn tails hanging off them). It's not terribly long, either, and I'm still not sure how I'm going to wear it. I'm not much of a scarf-as-accessory person. (Let's face it, I'm not much of any kind of accessory person.) I'm more of a Holy Crap, it's 20 below outside, I need something wool covering my face so I can breathe outside kind of person.

Vestibular Knitting

2008-09-04T08:48:00.009-05:00

Well, I failed miserably at the whole Ravelympics thing. I got my argyle sock done, but didn't even look at the yarn for my vest, nor did I finish the zipper installation for the Samus cardi.

However.

I did get started on the vest last week, and let me tell you, I was a machine.

I started with Eunny's Deep-V Argyle Vest pattern and using my powers of knitting conversion I did a reverse twist on the trick most knitters want to master: I took a perfectly fine pattern meant to be worked in the round in order to avoid pesky seams and converted it to be worked flat so that I could seam it. I also eliminated the two-color stranded knitting pattern and replaced it with plain stockinette on the back and a lace and cable pattern on the front. Stranded knitting is beautiful, but not my cup of tea. I love texture. Since I'm not a vest wearer by nature and I wanted to make something I would wear, I chose a vest shape I loved and added a stitch pattern I would have fun knitting.

Level II focuses on finishing techniques, much of which involves things like seaming and picking up stitches. The judges will accept vests that are knit in the round and steeked for traditional stitch patterns, so I think if I had done the two color stranded pattern, I would have been okay. The thing is, I've never done steeks, and I really didn't want my first steeking effort to be sent in for judging. I've seamed a million sweaters and I love knitting flat, so I basically tossed out Eunny's directions (although I did read through them, and that is one great pattern), and used the chart for the silhouette so I knew which rows to decrease and increase.

I swatched and worked out how to deal with the neck decreases eating up pattern stitches.

I made a spreadsheet that reminded me where cables crossed and where decreases and increases occurred, and which calculated exactly how many stitches the vest had, so I could feel assured that I had enough yarn.

Then I sat down in front of my computer and watched a series of fairly awful "Instant Play" movies from NetFlix while I knit.

Yesterday morning, I did this:

I had some help:

Cotton loves the smell of wet wool.

I like the look of the lace and cable design.

Today...let the seams begin! (I even have enough leftover yarn to seam using the light gray color)

I'm no Usain Bolt

2008-08-21T10:25:00.003-05:00

I am one of those Ravelympic athletes whose shining moment ended after the opening ceremonies. All smiles and thrilled to be there, with no chance of making it to the medal stand.

The Argyle sock is kicking my butt.

I have spent fewer hours knitting in the past 10 days than just about any other 10 day period I can think of in the past 3 or 4 years, because unlike a normal 10-day period, I have knitting I'm "supposed" to be doing, so if I have problems with it, I can't just go do some other knitting project for fun while the problem item sits and thinks about why it misbehaved.

I work on the argyle each night, first tinking back to the mistake I ended with the night before, re-knitting, tinking back to fix an entirely new mistake, rinsing and repeating until I get fed up and the sock gets stuck on the night stand, crossing its arms and sticking out its lower lip. Or maybe that's me with the stuck out lip.

There was an issue with my gusset seam the other night. I'm using a 1/2 stitch from each selvedge to make a less bulky seam, and I came to a funky selvedge stitch that didn't look right when I inserted my tapestry needle through it, and didn't look any better after I pulled on the seaming yarn a few stitches later. I ripped back, reseamed, still no better. I deduced that I must have mounted the edge stitch incorrectly after frogging the instep diamond to correct a mistake I'd made in the color pattern. When I picked up the stitches again, I must not have mounted that edge stitch right, causing me to work in garter rather than stockinette.

I pondered whether the judges would notice and whether it would disqualify me, like the two runners who stepped on the line of the inside lane during the Mens 200m sprint. I decided they would notice, but I didn't want to risk being disqualified. So I ripped back. Then I began reknitting the instep diamond, and made a mistake in the color pattern. I tinked back to avoid an improper dismount, reknit, had the instep finish line in my sights and noticed another mistake, this time with the contrast line diamond. Tink, and tink again.

I seamed the gusset and it came out looking great. I joined the instep and gussets in the round and knitted along for several rounds, realizing I had 2 stitches too many on the instep. I designed the instep with selvedge stitches so that when I seamed the gusset, the edge stitch for the contrast line wouldn't be half-eaten by the seam, but I forgot that once I was done seaming, I'd need to get rid of that extra stitch by doing a decrease on each side.

So I have to rip back again.

It's Thursday. What do you think my chances are of finishing this sock and then knitting an entire vest by Sunday?

I didn't think so.

In which I compare myself to Michael Phelps

2008-08-13T06:50:00.006-05:00

We both attended the University of Michigan. I graduated (eventually).
We are both homo sapiens.
He's an Olympic swimmer
I'm a Ravelympic knitter
He is 23 years old. I am 23 years old (times two)

Last night's Olympian efforts resulted in:
Two gold medals for Michael Phelps
One fixed argyle sock for me

Why you should always listen to yourself

2008-08-12T16:41:00.004-05:00

Ravelympics update:
I am cranking on this argyle sock. Cranking so hard I'm impressing myself. I made a mistake on row 2 of the pattern and caught it right away, tinking back to the beginning of the row where I made the error (intarsia is not the sort of thing that can be laddered down and corrected in one spot the way cables can be). I expected to make more errors, but somehow the lessons of Argyle Sock #1, knit last winter, stayed with me. The spots where I was likely to make an error were the spots where I instinctively stopped to check the color chart. Things were going so well, in fact, that as I sat in the car outside the school waiting for Nina's swim practice to end, I said to Sophia, "I can't believe how well this is going. I keep expecting to look at this and see some huge error."

I knit a few rows at lunch while we waited for the check, and then after we came home I decided to finish the second complete diamond sequence (which would complete the leg). Hmm, I thought. I really came close on my yarn estimate for the dark pink. All the other colors had a lot left over. No matter, though, because I had enough to complete the leg. Next stop: instep.

Then I took a look at what I had knit.

Sigh.

In other news:
Here's the Reversibly Cabled Scarf I was working on.

The biggest problem I had with the yarn (which is Lana Grossa Bingo) is that it is superwash and therefore I had to deal with weaving in ends on a reversible fabric that's knit at a fairly loose gauge, which meant little frayed ends were going to pop out no matter what. Unless....

Dritz Fray Check. Magic in a bottle. Keeps the ends from, well, fraying, and glues them to other bits of yarn, keeping them in place. I hid most of the ends in cable crossings. Very handy.

Swimming, Serial Killers, and Scarves

2008-08-11T11:34:00.003-05:00

We had the Olympics on the new "media room" HDTV, but I wasn't interested much in yesterday afternoon's offerings, so I sat at the kitchen island with my scarf, watching Season 1 of "Dexter" on NetFlix Instant Play. First sympathetic sociopathic serial killer I've ever seen. And I seem to knit faster while watching him. Or time flies faster. Or something. Because I finished the reversibly cabled scarf last night, except for the weaving in of the ends.

One snag with the casting off portion of the scarf. I used the Long Tail cast on and did what I've been doing lately, which is to cast on in pattern, using the normal knitted Long Tail for the knit stitches and Norwegian purling the purl stitches. It's a perfect edge as far as I'm concerned, but I didn't consider the fact that Elizabeth Zimmermann's Casting-On Cast Off is a match for the Long Tail only if you cast on in a completely knitted Long Tail. After some experimentation, followed by staring out the window trying to visualize what I was doing wrong, I realized the problem: the matching cast off is off by a 1/2 stitch, the way grafting pieces knit in the opposite direction are off by 1/2 stitch, so there is no way to truly match the cast on I did. So I ripped back for the 800th time and did a regular Casting On Cast Off. Another knitting lesson learned the hard way.

In which we compare Fencing with Knitting

2008-08-10T12:38:00.003-05:00

How they are alike:
Two long pointy sticks cross each other like a big X
There can be yelling

How they are different:
Knitting has yarn
Fencing has helmets
There is no protective gear in knitting to protect you from sharp points
When knitting, you sometimes yell if you make a mistake
When fencing, you sometimes yell (or scream/shriek) when you score a point

Ravelympic progress: still working on that reversible scarf due to 6 hours sailing on Lake Minnetonka yesterday evening.

More sporting comparisions to knitting: In sailing, when you heel the boat turns on its side
In knitting, you can turn a heel and no one gets wet.

Let the Games begin

2008-08-09T08:56:00.004-05:00

The Ravelympics games, that is. Let's just hope I can catch up with what I have to get done before I start on what I want to get done.

I have two projects to finish that will be samples for classes I want to teach this fall. I'm hoping to get both done this weekend. One is a reversibly cabled scarf and the other is a thrummed hat. I have only the crown shaping to complete on the hat, although I'd like to re-do the ribbing on larger needles, but we'll see how that goes.

For Ravelympics, I've entered two projects in WIPSwrestling. One is the Samus cardigan I knit two Augusts ago and which I take out every 8 months and attempt to do the zipper. The last time I worked on it, things were going fine, but I got bored with hand sewing I wanted to be knitting. The second project is the second argyle sock for the Master Hand Knitting Level II program. I only need to submit one sock, but since I intend to wear these, I'm making the second and will submit the best of the two. I made an error in the line diamonds across the instep, which no one except a judge holding it two inches from her face would notice, but since the judges will be holding the sock two inches from their faces, I have to make one that's error free. The other issue with the first sock is that I was working out the best way to deal with weaving in ends and joining a new length of the same color. Superwash wool is supposed to be feltable with extra friction, but I haven't been successful at getting a good join this way. The Russian join isn't great (either that, or I'm just not proficient enough at it), and my standard reverse duplicate stitch weaving shows up too much from the front, in that the extra thickness seems obvious. I finally hit on splitting the plies and weaving half along one row and half along another. In addition, I plan on making bobbins large enough to handle three vertical diamonds in one color, in order to eliminate as much additional weaving in as possible.

The third project will be my Level II vest. I'm going to use the silhouette for Eunny's Deep V Argyle vest, but knit it flat and with a texture pattern instead of in the round with color and steeks. Given the gauge will likely be different, too, it's hard to say if this is a variation of her pattern, or simply the use of her schematic. Either way, I'll have to write up my version and chart the cables and lace stitch patterns I'm planning to use. I decided against steeking because I've never done it before and this project is too important for me to try a technique like that for the first time. Also, the committee wants to see seaming, as much of the focus of this level is on seaming. I'd like to use as many of the swatch techniques as possible in the vest in order to show that I can apply those techniques to a project.

Alas, I am already behind, and the argyle sock will likely take me a good portion of a week, leaving me with only a week to get the vest done.

Master Knitting - back in the saddle

2008-06-02T10:41:00.011-05:00

This has been in my draft folder for more than three weeks. Rachel complained that I don't blog enough (because I'm always over on Ravelry). She demanded photos of knitted items. After I post this, I'll write up a photo-heavy post just for her.

After a frenzy of swatch-making last spring, I completed nearly all the swatches before the kids got out of school and we went on a 3-week trip to Europe with extended family. I never got back to the swatches, although I continued my quest to create a great argyle sock. I made the first sock, cast on for the ribbing of the second, and then wandered off. I think another extended-family vacation was involved, in which argyle sock making was deemed to require too much brain matter after a day in Mickey's wonderland.

Recently, though, I decided I needed to get the Fair Isle Mittens out of the way. Selecting multiple colors to use in one project is an exercise in frustration for me, for a couple of reasons. It's difficult to find four colors of the same yarn that will work together and that I also like. I angst over whether the colors really do go together (I have some color vision deficiencies that make me insecure about matching colors), and then whether they work together, which I think is a different matter than whether or not they go together.

I have a range of colors in Cascade 220, including quite a few pinks. Sophia wants the results of the Fair Isle Mitten project, and therefore wants them to be pink. The problem was that while the three pinks plus the natural yarn all looked good together, they didn't work well for the pattern. There are color theory issues to deal with when knitting Fair Isle patterns, and I didn't deal with them well:

Sophia thinks it looks fine, but she's not a judge on the Master Hand Knitting Committee.

I re-read Ann Feitelson's The Art of Fair Isle Knitting to get some pointers. My second attempt came out a bit better.

Aside from a better color combination, my rusty stranded knitting skills were coming back. I'm still not entirely happy with the tension, but I didn't want to just try a third time and hope for the best.

There are a couple of problems with the required mitten pattern supplied by the TKGA. One is that for reasons too boring to go into here, I have a photocopy of the instructions rather than a PDF, which means the photograph of the mitten accompanying the pattern is too dark to see well. (I just emailed TKGA for an updated PDF, since my copy is more than a year old, and it turns out having the PDF doesn't help all that much.) Next, while I can maintain relatively good tension across the straightaways, I sometimes have trouble maintaining good stranded tension when I switch needles. This is a problem whether I use dpns (like I did in the old days) or a long circ for Magic Loop (like now). Because the stranded yarn has to come around a bit of a corner, rather than being kept straight, I either strand too loosely or too tightly.

Given the variation from row to row in the distance the carried yarn must travel, it's difficult for me to be consistent along that column of stitches.

Also, what a pain to weave in the ends! The circumference of the mitten is so small, it's hard to flip it inside out and back in order to check the tension of stitches connected to yarn tails that need to be woven in.

I decided I needed to work on a simple stranded project that could help me improve my Fair Isle tension on an item with a larger circumference than a child's mitten. Like a hat for an adult.

I went shopping down in the craft room (no further progress, by the way, surprise, surprise) where I pulled a ball of Noro Kureyon and some black Cascade 220 from the shelves (I love that I can weigh my yarn and the Ravelry stash management tool figures out how many yards I have.)

The fruits of yesterday late afternoon/evening yielded most of a Fake Isle hat:

Oh, oh. I almost forgot. Look what else I made this weekend.

Can you die from cuteness overexposure?
Yarn: Dale Baby Ull, doubled as a substitute for DK
Needles: US 7
Gauge: 5 sts/in

Little Shop of (not) Horrors

2008-05-27T19:29:00.020-05:00

So this weekend I decided to reorganize the craft room. I attempted to organize it when I first acquired it, but without as much success as I would have liked.

It's in the basement. The basement is technically unfinished, but one of the previous owners walled off a corner back in the '70s in order to create a darkroom where he played his 8-track cassettes and moaned about how gas had hit $1/gallon while he developed his archaic camera film.

The room has a door (which can be used to close out pesky family members and pets), a largish closet, and luscious overhead fluorescent lighting (old school, unflattering, dressing room fluorescent -- none of this full spectrum lighting business).

When I first set it up, I had a vision of a room like you see on Clean House, where a team of people come in and take everything out of the room in your house which has become a Pit of Despair and then talk to you about your particular psychological issues that led you to not let go of your crap.

My issue is not that I have a psychological problem or a history of emotional trauma I haven't recovered from which has haunted me so that I am compelled to collect things and never get rid of them, my issue is that I'm a slob who can easily ignore piles of crap for a really long time.

The best part of shows like Clean House is the reveal when they show the pack rats their new room(s), all freshly painted with new furniture and cool storage shelves and containers. I wanted a room like at the end of Clean House, where I could have all my crafty tools and materials right there at my fingertips. A place where my sewing machine would always be set up, where I could wind balls of yarn to my heart's content, and where all my yarn was stored in one place.

I had a couple of problems achieving my Clean House dream. First, you must understand that I am not a Type A person. I am not the kind of person who makes lists and then goes down the list, item by item, crossing each thing off as it's completed. I am the kind of person who makes lists, runs around doing all sorts of things she thinks are on the list, and then is stunned to find out that absolutely nothing she's done was on the list. (I have learned to add those finished tasks to the top of the list and cross them off.) I am driven by enthusiasm for something, not so much by duty. Once I get about 85% of the way through a project, it's usually done enough for me. My second problem was that I decided I had enough plastic drawers and bins and shelving in the house that I could achieve Rox's Dream Craft Room using only existing supplies, plus one new shelving unit from Costco.

So two years ago, we called 1-800 Got Junk and had them haul off the broken lawn mowers and various other useless items stored in the basement room, and I gathered all my craft stuff from around the house. I sorted through everything: patterns and pattern books, all my knitting needles, and my yarn. (I had a bit of sewing stuff, but really not much. I'm monogamous when it comes to sewing, and I tend to give the leftover fabric to the school art teacher.) This may not surprise you, but I had a lot of yarn. I wasn't surprised, myself, I was shocked. I don't think of myself as a yarn hoarder, but I guess after 20 years, yarn accumulates, as do UFO's.

Some of the yarn had to go, because it smelled musty. (We'd had a storm once where water came in through the window wells and some yarn got wet. I dried it out, but some of it didn't dry well enough or soon enough.) Two garbage bags full of yarn went to the dumpster. A large box of usable yarn went to the school's knitting club teacher. Most of that yarn was light blue and tan mohair (What was I thinking when I bought that? Oh, yeah, I was thinking, "It's the '80s! Mohair is in!")

The final (that is to say 85% done) results were disappointing. The shelving I had wasn't conducive to the way I wanted to store my yarn (The Costco unit was 6-shelf heavy duty wire number on wheels, which would have been great if I had fewer balls of yarn and each of them weighed approximately 50 pounds.) The yarn, which I had sorted by weight was left in cardboard boxes, or stuck in opaque plastic bins and drawers. Because I was using what I already had in the house, saving my money for more important purchases, like more yarn.

I set up a big folding banquet table where I clamped my swift and ball winder and where I have my sewing machine and serger set up. I had thought there'd be room to keep my knitting machine set up, so I could actually use it (once I remembered how to use it), but that was not to be. In the two years since then, the craft room became the Craft Pit of Despair. I used it to wind hanks of yarn into balls, and for the odd sewing project. I still couldn't remember what yarn I had, so if I needed something, I bought yarn, and then put it in in whatever box was closest to the door.

So Saturday afternoon I was in the craft room, sewing a seam up a length of sun dress fabric from Joann for Sophia and I looked around, wishing the room were more like my original vision when the urge to reorganize hit me. For one thing, we've been doing another major declutter in the house to convert the office into a media room, and a laminated bookshelf was empty and available. Two trips to Target to buy some canvas cubes (I got over the idea that I could "use what's in the house" to make this room work), and the rediscovery of some clear nylon zipper storage containers from American Science and Surplus, and my vision started to take shape.

Here's what I have so far:

This is the Costco Heavy Duty shelf. You can't see the top two shelves, but those have scrapbooking and sun painting supplies on them.

The next shelf has some of my pattern books (the rest are still upstairs), fabric swatches and some office supplies

Next we have the clear zipper bags full of sport weight cotton yarn on cones, from the days when I designed and sold baby sweaters using my knitting machine. I'd like to get my knitting machine set up again so I can use up some of that yarn. These used to be stored in huge semi-opaque plastic bins that took up several shelves. There's room now for me to stack them on top of each other if I need the space.

The bottom two shelves are sewing supplies, in a location I like very much. I can just turn in my chair and grab a bobbin or spool of thread, or a different foot. I used to have to get up and walk across the room, which meant nothing ever got put back, because I'd have to get up and walk across the room to do so, right in the middle of whatever was way more important than getting up and walking across the room. (The zebra print thing is a dress I'm making for my older daughter because we have been to the mall three times looking for an 8th grade graduation dress. She likes this dress, but it's not really appropriate for 8th grade graduation, either. But I digress...)

Next to the Costco shelves is a stack of plastic drawers. I'm not fond of the plastic drawer system for my yarn because I can't see what I have. So I got out the label maker, which helps a little bit. On the top I have a pack of KnitPicks Palette to be used for Fair Isle projects without fear that the colors don't match. I have some color vision issues and trying to match more than a couple colors is very stressful to me. Probably why I like textured knitting so much.

The pink drawer contains more cone yarn, mostly acrylic, but some superwash wool, too. The white drawers are a few oddments -- fingering yarn destined to be dyed, some handspun samples from a friend, the four balls of laceweight yarn I own. That sort of thing.

This is the part where I can pretend I live in a yarn shop. This is the shelving unit I just acquired after we cleared all the kids' books off and stored them in boxes (destined for donation).

The top shelf is miscellaneous crap, because I have to put miscellaneous crap everywhere I walk. There's a needle felting kit, an Unoriginal Hat made with yarn I bought at Shepherd's Harvest, a small bag of 5 or 6 balls of Noro Kureyon in different colorways, and 3 cones of DK merino/cashmere from Colourmart UK.

Next, we have cotton worsted (I have no memory of buying Sugar N Cream cotton) in the middle are some cotton/synthetic blends and some wool/acrylic blends, with acrylic and acrylic/wool blends in the far right.

The next two shelves are worsted weight wool, and then there's a shelf of baby wool, mostly Dale Baby Ull, but quite a bit of Reynold's Superwash Baby Merino, too.

On the floor are some boxes with fabric scraps, and a semi-opaque plastic box of socks with no mate (and the yarn to make the second sock for each). There are various reasons why these socks have no mates, but so far none of the reasons are compelling enough for me to frog the socks or throw them away.

This is the original laminate shelving unit I had in the room. I used to keep my sewing stuff on here, but as I mentioned, it's all the way across the room from my sewing machine (that's at least three steps).

On the left is sock yarn. Self-striping in the left-most cubby, hand painted in the right, with solids on the shelf below.

On the right is DK weight. Synthetics and various blends are in the left cubby, and wool is in the right cubby and the two cubbies sitting on the plastic bins below. Between the top two cubbies is cotton DK.

On the bottom left is bulky weight yarn, and the two plastic bins on the right contain UFOs. One is all the pieces for a cardigan. When I sorted through all my patterns, I found an old Rowan (#6) pattern book and I flipped through it. There are a bunch of intarsia patters that look dated, but almost everything else is still great. I saw a cardigan in there I liked a lot, so you can imagine my surprise when I came across all the pieces of said cardigan in a bag, with no memory of having knit it. (Eventually, it came back to me, but I thought it was weird that I didn't recognize that I had knit that entire garment when I saw the photo.) So those pieces are in one bin, along with most of the body of a man's Norwegian sweater. I'm thinking of frogging it and repurposing the yarn. In the other bin is the back of a crazy multi-colored men's pullover and all 16 colors needed to complete it. Except that my husband wouldn't wear it, even if he were transported back 15 years onto the set of the Cosby Show, and I can't finish it and wear it, because it would be ridiculously huge. I'm thinking of frogging that one, too, and maybe designing a sweater for myself that uses the yarn and stitch pattern. Because I love the colors.

But wait, there's more.
On top of the unit are wire baskets with miscellaneous sewing notions I haven't found a new home for yet. This yarn, however, is a 150g hank of (I think) worsted weight in a variegated colorway that I seem to buy over and over from various yarn manufacturers in various weights. I have some 8 ply Checkheaton superwash that looks just like this, and the super bulky yarn I bought at Shepherd's Harvest looks just like it.

The only problem is that it is a complete tangled mess.

This is Charlie, my alpaca yarn pet. I bought him at Shepherd's Harvest and have promised to make Michael a pair of fingerless gloves for next winter. His office is kept at a very cold temperature in order to keep all the computers from melting. Luckily, there is a lot of Charlie, so he can go to the office, but stay at home with me, too. I think I ended up with three (maybe four) yarn cakes from the 650 yd hank.

This is my future Manon (Norah Gaughan design) cardi.

And this is some more sock yarn (mostly cotton/wool blends).

I love this version of my craft room. I will continue working on it through the weekend (at least until it's 85% there) and take more photos when my 6th grader gets back from her class trip to Washington, D.C. She has my camera. She better bring it back.