bad impulses

Halloo! Greetings from the Enchanted Land of Secret Knitting. Soon enough (though it's been so long it feels like never) I will be able to show you some things that I've pried off the needles recently. (This also means: Mom, time to go stand by the mailbox.)

Let's focus for now on the Land of Relatively Exciting Recent Developments. Exhibit A: Juno Regina.



This shawl/stole/wrap/lump o' lace is a bit longer than pictured here, after many days of train knitting and train frogging/tinking. Although the entire middle section is a dead simple 2-row repeat (one of which is a purl row), I have made two or three mistakes that resulted in the frogging of inches and inches of knitting. I count it a success if I get through a session and stop farther in the ball than where I started, and I do not always succeed. A quick look at the ball now indicates that the last session involved massive failure.

Despite my two-steps-forward-one-step-back progress, I have a new resolve to concentrate and carefully inspect every row before going forward, and it is growing, slowly.

It is my second shawl for 10 Shawls in 2010, and it's almost June, which, when subjected to cold reason, does not seem to bode well. Also, the sheer will that it's taking to write this post rather than winding yarn and casting on for Icarus is probably another bad sign. Even worse: I just did an advanced pattern search for blankets in laceweight.

Blankets. In laceweight.

I'm actually counting that a victory because it only came to favoriting and queueing, rather than scrapping the Icarus idea, winding the laceweight, and hunting down my 60" size 6 circs.

Speaking of things I probably shouldn't cast on, I've cast on for Snickets:



I've zipped through the first repeat and a half of the cuff, interpreting the pattern in a way that yields a sock like the picture but that does not seem to be strictly accurate. There is some kind of wonkiness with the first and last stitches of the round to stay in pattern. Whatever, I'm just doing what it seems like one would do. It's working so far.

Finishing stuff is important for morale, though, so I've talked myself out of starting Icarus for now. Plus now I'm not really sure I want to blow all that laceweight on a shawl instead of a blanket.

Holy neglected blog, batman!

Wow! It's been over a month! I've got so much knitting to chatter on about and show you.

Let's do socks first.

These:



are socks I made for Mom out of STR lightweight in Titania. They are the Negative Bricks Socks by Sockbug with a small Hunter-Hammerstein-esque variation: on the purl row that precedes the slipped stitch row, I set up for the slipped stitches by wrapping each stitch to be slipped around the needle twice instead of once. On the next row, when slipping the stitch, I dropped the extra wrap off the needle. I modified this because the slipped stitches seemed to be awfully tight without that extra length, and having those stitches under such high tension made me uncomfortable. It also scrunched down an already-dense fabric, which didn't really fit with my goal of making the socks as tall as possible.



I think that in addition to soothing my OCD tendencies, the double-wrapping helped to break up the colors a bit more than otherwise would have happened. I think that this is a great pattern for yarns like STR, especially ones with high contrast or many different colors. You might be able to tell from the double ribbing on the cuff how the yarn would have spiraled in a more regular pattern.

Next up are my Twisted socks for summer, complete with dramatic balcony shadows:



This is the medium size (64 sts) in Regia Bamboo Color that I've had in my stash ever since I decided that I wanted to make long, sock-weight tube scarves out of Regia Bamboo Color, knit the first one, discovered that this yarn is not really soft enough for scarves, and then put the yarn away for four years. Yeah.



I changed nothing about the pattern, and the only thing I thought about changing was the woven-look heel:



My sock heels need to be sturdy -- I've worn holes in three pairs of socks, all, so far, smack in the middle of the heel flap. Having exposed horizontal threads of yarn doesn't seem like a good idea for my particular socks, even though it looks pretty cool. But, I knit a pair of socks out of a different colorway of this yarn in 2006, and have had no problems with holes and although the heel flap has pilled a little, the fabric is so sturdy that I have trouble pulling the pills off with my bare hands. So I figure this yarn can take it.

Oh yeah! These socks are also the first pair in which I used my brand new, handmade, teeny tiny stitchmarkers:



I spent a lot of time on a recent visit home making dozens of little circles.



I've found that commercial stitch markers can get expensive, and the sets I've seen (a bendy purple and neon green, and a rigid blue and red - can't remember the brands) don't include very many of the smallest size. Because I mostly knit socks and am doing Ten Shawls in 2010, most of the markers that I need end up being way smaller than most of the ones I have. I lean toward not using them if I can get away with it - maybe because I've been used to not having the right size.

Well, not any longer. I think I ended up with five dozen slightly wobbly but still circular and usable stitch markers when I was done. It took longer to make each one than I was expecting, so these represent a big investment of time. And I've already lost two of the green ones, no idea how.

Finally, I've resurrected Apres Surf, now with reservations about whether it should turn out to be a hoodie.



I've given in and acknowledged that I simply cannot keep track of side decreases and increases on the fly and should not try. Instead, I charted out all the waist decreases before knitting, which allowed me to figure out how that would affect the lace pattern on each row before putting needles to yarn. It's currently stalled because I need to chart out the bust increases and haven't done that yet.

Does anyone else do it this way? Why is it that sweaters aren't routinely charted? Are people really able to do all that in their heads? If so, I am impressed.

Even though it's slowing down my progress, I really don't mind having to make the charts myself. Kind of feel like some kind of scientist, with my graph paper.

Tea Leaves Cardigan

This, my people, is a finished Tea Leaves Cardigan:



And here is the back:



I'm very happy with it, although the going was rocky there for a while. And despite the fact that I finished it immediately before the weather broke and probably won't be able to wear it for a while.

There are a bunch of notes on my project page, so I don't want to repeat myself too much, but I would like to reaffirm how much I love Twisted. It is spongy and soft - not aggressively soft, just passively soft - and very warm. This sweater, despite not even closing down most of the front, actually makes me noticeably warmer. I suspect Twisted would make a lovely blanket yarn for this reason.

I frogged Wicked and meant to steam the skeined yarn to get some of the kinks out, but then I didn't get around to it before it was time to cast on. The resulting fabric was nubbly and wonky, which I hoped would come out in the blocking. I'd wet-blocked Wicked, so I'd been expecting the yarn not to bloom or expand as much the second time around. Well, the wet-blocking totally took care of the nubbliness, but it also made the whole thing much, much bigger. I could have dealt with it being a little bit bigger, but it was more like this-is-a-disaster bigger. So I laid out the sweater as neatly as I could, then came back around three or four more times in the first two hours of drying to try to scrunch it down to be shorter and narrower. That actually worked, pretty much. It didn't grow once it dried and I put it on.



I did end up frogging back to the last ruffle and eliminating the last two (I think) sets of increases. Before blocking, this resulted in the ruffled yoke kind of sticking out strangely from the body. I thought about frogging back to the collar and doing all of the yoke increases more gradually, but then I decided to press on and hope it came out in the blocking, and it totally did.

Overall I'm really happy with the sweater. If I ever make it again, I'll definitely make and wet-block a gauge swatch, and then plan the yoke increases accordingly. I also knit a couple extra rows on the front button bands because I wanted them to be a bit wider, and I like how that came out. And I used three buttons instead of two, as I think the pattern calls for.

Captain Jack says to look at the moon.

I am feeling queasy, and I was going over and over what I ate and wondering how it could be making me feel queasy, and then I realized that maybe I'm feeling queasy because I've spent about 9 (nine) hours today working stockinette stitch in the round. Blerg.

The good news is, my sleeves are really, really close to being done. The bad news is, closing ceremonies were a little bit ago, I still have button bands to do, I don't even have buttons yet, and the notion of working sixteen more rows of garter stitch in the round makes me... well let's just say it would probably be better not to think about it.

Motion sickness always, always sneaks up on me. I hate it.

So, we could talk about how my failure to finish the sweater before the closing ceremonies might have something to do with the fact that I started my planning about a day before the Winter Olympics started. That seems logical. Or it might have something to do with how insufficiently dedicated I was to this project, spending valuable knitting time on mittens (that also aren't finished, aarg). Or maybe the ridiculously lax approach I take to issues of gauge continues to seriously impede my forward progress. Or it might have to do with my vulnerability to distraction with shiny new projects.

We could talk about those things, or we could focus on some shiny new projects! Chagrined about my lack of planning for the Winter Olympics, which I had known were coming up for, oh, about three-odd years, I started planning well in advance for Malabrigo March.

Years ago, I went to my LYS in search of some nice red Malabrigo for a scarf. In desperation and not-so-great indoor light, I convinced myself that Geranio was red enough. Geranio is about the pinkest pinkest pink that any pony-owning, fairy princess nymph worth her salt could dream up:



but I got some and cast on for a one-row scarf anyway. The scarf was too wide, and the needles were too long, and it was all just so grotesquely pink that I put the project down and wandered off for three years.

So of course the middle of the Knitting Olympics is the perfect time to make one's first foray into Kool-Aid dyeing in preparation for Malabrigo March!



The What a Kool Way to Dye group on Ravelry has a ton of useful advice on Kool-Aid dyeing, so I read what they had to say, hunted down a bunch of packs of Black Cherry unsweetened soft drink mix, and went to town.


I used 9 packs of Kool-Aid for two skeins of worsted, and I now know that I should have used more. The rule of thumb seems to be one pack for every ounce of yarn for a nice color, but the more you use, the darker the color.

Husband came up with the brilliant idea of boiling a pot of water without any precious, feltable yarn in it, and then turning the gas down until it stopped boiling. My plan involved waiting until it boiled, freaking out, and then way overcompensating by turning it down way too far, then swinging back and forth between too hot and almost off over the course of several hours. His way ended up taking longer than the about-30 I was expecting based off of internet tutorials, but probably still short of an hour.

Probably the best thing about Kool-Aid dyeing is that you know exactly when it's done because the water turns clear, the dye having been all sucked up into the yarn.


Here it is in a nice, possibly deceptive, low light.


Still pink, but a pink I can live with. My original plan involved making the Daphne Hat and a Saroyan scarf -- in accordance with my new "Make Things That Actually Match" Initiative, but I'm not sure if there will be enough yarn. Maybe I'll start with the hat and then see what kind of scarf/cowly thing can be made out of whatever's left.

There is an end in sight with the sweater, and the mittens, and maybe not so much the socks, but I'll start new socks soon, too.

Solving for X.

I knit like an Olympian yesterday. I knit for hours and hours. Today I find myself ready to do the waist decreases (that I'm adding), which means that after dividing for the sleeves, I've knit 8" of stockinette.

In other words, now is the perfect time to find out that early gauge measurements were Lying Liars who Lied.

Here's a shot from yesterday, right after dividing for the sleeves:



And here's where we are now:


Newer gauge measurements reveal that I'm getting 17 sts/4" instead of the 20 I should be getting. Because I like the fabric I'm getting and don't want to go to a smaller needle, it's time for math.

Given the number of stitches that you're supposed to have after the last yoke increase, I'm finding that, with the given gauge, the piece should be 49.4" at the widest point. Measuring around the widest point of my shoulders in the shape of the sweater (i.e., not straight across but draping down a bit at the middle), I'm finding that I measure about 40.5", or 41" at the drapiest.

Now, my math could be borked. That would be par for the course here. But I did it both by cross-multiplying and the other way I could think to do it, and got 49.4".

At first I was thinking that I'd frog back to the last yoke increases (SOB) and then decrease for some kind of back-dart-y thing, but now I'm going to probably just re-work the numbers and increase to a number that's not nearly as big.

...Or, because my target number is pretty close to the number left before some of the sets of increases, maybe I'll just forget those.

Aarg.

Not quite the same as going 80mph headfirst on a track of ice.

But at least it's a step up from sitting around eating cheetos while you watch people do that.



This is my tea leaves cardigan, in reclaimed Twisted. The pattern looks to me like a rather understated, formal-ish sweater, but in the screamingly turquoise yarn, I'm not sure what the effect will be. Other than AWESOME.

Have I mentioned how much I love this color and this yarn? Yes? Okay, here's another picture.



Here it is before I started back on it today. I'm using the 6s and 7s called for in the pattern, and the cords are shorter than the 32" called for, so the last ruched sections were rather unwieldy. And that fact also makes it difficult to tell how it's actually looking, because it's all scrunched. I'll divide for the sleeves soon, and should have a better idea then.

Despite this being an Olympic commitment, I've been rather flighty about it so far. Some days I really don't have the time to work on it, and that's acceptable, but I've been spending train time on my cute owl mittens, which are coming along. And my co-intern's baby is arriving sometime between now and the end of March whether or not her blanket's done, so that has been getting some attention, too.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I have no idea how long this will actually take me to make. I've gotten the question before about how long it takes to make a pair of socks, and the best answer I can come up with is "somewhere between 10 and 50 hours." To be specific.

Maybe the sleeves are small enough to be train knitting. This weekend isn't packed with schoolwork, which I shouldn't say too loud and which will probably never happen again now that I've typed it, but maybe I should set some kind of goal for progress by Sunday night. Hmmmm.

Black Socks and a sudden urge to knit a pillow

Hidely-ho, pagarinos! After deciding on about three separate occasions to just plow through and get it done, I have finished the Dipper Socks Project.



the heel, which I love:



and, a weirdly smaller long shot:



These were started all the way back in July. Dang.

The second pair of finished black socks was started in November or December, and were slated for completion by 12-25.



Whoops, that didn't happen. It's okay, Husband says, if you get them done by January 25th, I can wear them for my first class. That would be cool.



Whoops, how about if I get them done by Valentine's Day instead? Because that, apparently, I can do.

So what have I been doing, with a second shawl, colorwork mittens, a blanket, and yet another pair of socks on teeny tiny needles? Working on a sweater for the Knitting Olympics, of course!

I finally frogged Wicked, and after several days of considering sweater possibilities, I decided to go with the tea leaves cardigan from Madeline Tosh. It's a nice, sedate sweater and I'm doing it in Screaming Turquoise, so I'm not sure exactly what tone the final product will strike, but I'm really liking it so far. I'll post pictures when it's further along - right now I'm wrestling with one of the ruched sections, which doesn't really want to fit on my circ because it's a few inches shorter than what the pattern calls for. It's looking bunchy and radioactively beautiful. Once I separate the sleeves, it may be more recognizable as a sweater.

In other news, I seem to have lost the little hand socks I made out of STR Pirate's Booty, which is very unfortunate, because my hands have been just freezing, and none of my other fingerless mitts are conducive to knitting in. I've been considering making replacements with my skein of Falcon's Eye, because I've noticed that the black shoes I wear my handknit socks with tend to make the lighter colors look grungy after a while. So the decision about what rib-ish pattern to use for those has been tumbling around my head, too.

And finally, I've been saving my yarn scraps (and fabric scraps) for forever, planning to use them as pillow stuffing. Short lengths of yarn seem like great stuffing material, because they're so warm and sproingy. My little rubbermaid containers are really starting to overflow, so a pillow project is starting to form itself in my head. Any suggestions for patterns (knit or crochet) that are really comfortable to really use as pillows, rather than just as decoration?

Buckle your knitted seat belts, y'all.

OHAI. I've sat down a couple of times to write this post, but then I think nahhh and then toddle off and cast on something else, digging that blogging hole deeper and deeper until I'm pretty sure that there will be at least one project left out of this post.

Really, I feel like I just went on a casting-on bender and now it's the next morning and it's time to fish the keys out of the toilet, screw the arms of my glasses back on, eat some crackers, put on some pants, and head out to try to find the car. (This is just a metaphor.)

Let's see. Okay. I haven't talked about these yet, the Socks = Love. This picture is sucky, but even more sucky is the fact that after I took it, I spent two hours locked out on my balcony in several layers of pajamas and my husband's sneakers when it was 25F. (This is not a metaphor.)


Knit Picks Stroll in Black, 72 sts, size 1 nickel-plated needles. These are taking freaking forever, a fact that's not helped by the fact that I'm knitting pretty tightly and therefore they have some significant negative ease going on, which Husband says he likes, but makes the length downright impossible to eyeball, and I've had to rip out THREE TOES (sock toes, not Husband toes) and I'm still going. The cuff length looks good, too, until he puts them on and then they stretch width-wise and get shorter length-wise. Grr. Note to self, try 80 stitches on the next pair, if you ever finish this pair.

Next: I might have mentioned that I spent a serious amount of time after Christmas giddy at the possibility of casting on any project I wanted and upon sharing my giddy indecision with Husband and him saying that I should cast on whatever I've wanted to knit the longest, I decided to cast on a Hemlock Ring Blanket. I'm not ready to claim that it's what I've wanted to knit the longest, because that would take an archaeological dig and some creative historicism, but three skeins of Cascade Eco in Natural have been in my stash since a WEBS sale, oh, at least three years ago for this project, so it has been marinating for plenty of time.

So then I spent about seven hours (I exaggerate) winding the ball, knit 25 rows, and then haven't come back to it. I also, while photographing this project, spent an hour (I do not exaggerate) getting a back window of the apartment cracked about 4 inches, then generally making a public spectacle of myself, straining various muscles and using distinctly unladylike language while perched on the ledge of the window before realizing that there were locks preventing it from opening any further. I bruised both of my palms and also got a wicked splinter. I didn't cry, though, mostly because I was afraid the tears would freeze.


So then I got a hankering for a pair of socks on the needles. Next up in my sock queue was a pair of Springgrass socks made from Sunshine Yarn Soft Sock in the Grassroots Overdye colorway. It's been in my stash forever, and when I saw the Springgrass pattern (also forever ago), I immediately planned that pattern and yarn would go together. So I balled the yarn, called up the pattern on Ravelry, and hit a roadblock: it was toe-up and I wanted to knit cuff-down. Well, whatever, I'll just knit it backwards. That's worked before. But it had taken me a bit to even figure out that it was toe-up and not cuff-down, and then the pattern was not charted, just directions. Well, whatever, I'll just follow the written directions, that's worked before. La la la. Knitting knitting knitting. After half a repeat it was clear that the pattern didn't look great with the level of variegation in the yarn, and also the yarn seemed to be a little too thin for it and would therefore yield too small of a sock. So I frogged, decided to go with about 5 rows of garter for the top of the cuff, added a purl stitch here and there, and tried again.

Got about a repeat and a half in when I decided that that wasn't working and put it aside. I went looking for a sock pattern that called for a higher cast-on number so I could go down a needle size. I also wanted to go with the garter at the top edge because I thought it looked smashing, but I ended up chucking that plan and casting on for the larger size of Pyroclastic, which is in the latest issue of Knitty.

And get this: I decided to use size 00s.

OOOOOOOh.


Isn't that a pretty picture? It'd better be, because the 00s let me down - I was hoping I could use one to pick the lock that automatically locks when the balcony door closes* but that turned out to be a pipe dream. Spending several hours contemplating the possibility that I would freeze to death if I had to spend the night out there, and calculating the odds that I could get a stranger to help me escape from my second-floor balcony/fire escape/but really fire cage, considering that the bottom of it was essentially a locked metal box, and cursing myself for figuring out that it is indeed possible to lock oneself on the balcony on the one weekend in two years that my husband was out of town for three days and not, say, sitting five feet from the balcony door -- all of those things were a small price to pay to prove that it is actually quite difficult to break into our apartment. Which it is. Well, it got a little easier when I did what it became clear was necessary and put a small gardening shovel through one of the panes and reached in to unlock that* lock. But then it got a lot harder, because with the big hole in the glass next to one of the locks, we figured we should fortify, and oh did we fortify.

Was I content with these new WsIP? I was not.

I made a shawl! The 10 Shawls in 2010 group is... making 10 shawls in 2010, and I got very excited to join them.



Really excited!



So! Very! Excited!


Well, okay, not that excited, I just wanted to show you those pictures. It's done, there was mis-counting and frogging and happy coincidences and all of the chicanery that is usually involved in me trying to knit things, but it's in the past and on the rav page and I prefer to leave it there.

Am I done? Sigh. I am not done.

I've also cast on for the Owlmittens by SpillyJane, which I'm loving and are awesome and I've only marginally screwed up so far, but I plan on missing the directions for the thumb soon and then having to frog about 15 rounds. Also, I haven't photographed them because Husband is back and there's no point in locking myself on the balcony again.

Alas, despite the four substantial new projects and four or so others that have been on the needles for awhile, there was still a small danger that I would finish something else this decade, so I went ahead and cast on for Juno Regina in Knit Picks Gloss Lace, the Malachite colorway. The plan for that, which I originally thought was genius, was to get it to the point where I could just midlessly knit the middle section on the train to and from Job-ish Thing. Instead, it has halted progress on everything else and had me seriously reconsidering my fitness for lace anything.

I am bad at lace. I miss yarn overs like it's my $80,000/year job, and can't read lace for shekels. There was some early talk in the group of non-lace shawls being not as challenging and therefore not as worthy of counting towards the 10 shawls, but it was eventually decided that any object that was significantly shawl-ish should count. Thank goodness, because while I've gotten to be a pretty proficient knitter and can generally turn out FOs to the approximate specifications of the patterns, I get through lace shawls on a combination of rage-fueled adrenaline, tenacity, and all my free time. And yes, of course I can see the benefit of challenging myself, but sometimes the rest of my life proves remarkably adroit at challenging me, and it's those times that a simple stitch pattern - or even, horrors, stockinette - is what I really need.

I can't think of anything else I've cast on. Let's get out while we can, shall we?

*dumb.

Back to it!

I thought I could finally sit down and write about the explosion of cast-ons that seem to have happened since 1/1, but it occurs to me that I'm not quite done with Christmas. Because, you see, my awesome family has given me many knitting-related gifts.

This is a straight needle organizer from my husband:



And here it is full of needles:



Very nice, huh? Pretty and practical. Much better than the jumble of needles held together with rubber bands I'd stuffed in a tupperware container. Then some of the rubber bands break down and leave sticky gunk on the needles, which are now no longer grouped together and then you have to take a needle sizer and go through everything again. No more! I might go through and add size numbers to particular pockets, once I figure out which slot should be for which needles.


Next, CotLin in Kohlrabi:



I'd been hoping to use this for Hey, Teach! for a long time, even though I think that pattern calls for worsted and this is a DK. Then Kohlrabi vanished, and I was sad. Then it reappeared as a Last Chance color, and my mom grabbed it for me. Yay! What a nice color.


Finally, this:



This is a gift from my brother, P. and his girlfriend. Yarn, yay! But it's more than just yarn; it's yarn from local alpacas and llamas. AWESOME. 10 oz, 600 yds. I've got to find something spectacular to do with it.

Matey Christmas, everyone!

My Christmas visit home involved a lot more visiting someone in the hospital than I'd initially banked on (which was actually none). Luckily, sitting in a hospital room yields a large amount of knitting time.

My theme of untenably-large gauge, plus foolish continued refusal to swatch or even measure gauge, continued to bite me in the ass this Christmas.

I planned to make for the males in my family (a father and two brothers) colorwork hats out of Telemark. The first hat I whipped out over about a weekend, not counting some subway knitting of the lining.

It came out pretty large (SURPRISE), so I decided that that one would go to my Dad, whom it would be most likely to fit.

Yarn: Telemark
Pattern: Ufserud
Mods: Took out one 10-row repeat and left off most of the bottom stripes.

Here is a positively terrible picture of it:



It does actually fit okay.

Second, I decided to make each of my brothers a We Call Them Pirates hat. Unfortunately, I made this decision after I'd knit the Charcoal and one of the Cream skeins into most of another Ufserud hat. Turns out sitting in a hospital room is also an excellent place to frog.

There was much more frogging of pirate-ness, but I ended up with these two (terribly photographed, and in one case, not yet blocked) hats eventually:



(Cream and Charcoal, pattern knit reading chart correctly)




(Cream and Black, pattern knit reading chart incorrectly)

Lessons learned:

1. Read the directions about which color represents which yarn in the chart before knitting the entire hat.
2. Try to finish gift knitting before the sun starts rising on Christmas morning.
3. I really need to just assume that I should go down a needle size or two with colorwork. Because it only takes three data points to indicate a trend, and I got about 17 data points. Use smaller needles, already, self, jeez.
   

Finally, the Christmas piece de resistance:



Pattern: Fireside Stocking, by Kate Gilbert
Yarn: Knit Picks Palette, held double
Mods: Knit cuff-down instead of toe-up

I started working on this around September, and was done with it before December, I think. I knit it on a 16" size 5 circular, although the pattern might have called for dpns.

Here's a closeup of what I did for the hanger:



The pattern called for a single i-cord, which seemed inadequate to the job of keeping this sucker up, so I braided three i-cords together in the lightest, middle, and darkest colors. It was kind of hard to anchor in the corner of the top. I didn't want it to distort the edge, or stretch weirdly, and it wasn't going to be completely flush with the body of the stocking, even with jamming the sucker through a stitch and then trying to sew it to the inside of the lining. I ended up doing that and then wrapping it tightly a zillion times with a strand of the bare yarn, and I think that actually worked pretty well.

I knew the instant that I saw the pattern however long ago that I would eventually make this for Mom.

Finally, a closeup of one square in the sunshine:



I'm going to go several months without thinking about Christmas 2010.

note:

Removing the extra rather precious rosewood dpn from the plastic bag I was storing WIP in: smart.

Not having any bloody idea whatsoever where I put it to keep it safe: stupid.

How can you knit while holding that crack pipe?

Christmas gift #1: A Selbu Modern for my Mom. Using the palette she got and didn't need for her purse (in pimento) and cream.



I worked dilligently for several weekends, listening to the same Burn Notice episodes over and over again. Would sneak in a round or two in the evenings that I didn't immediately crash into bed on returning home. By the crown shaping rounds, my tension was looking really good - barely any puckering to speak of.

Finished. Off the needles. Thing was... huge.

No! Not huge! Slouchy! Extra hip! It might make up for the beret that I made her last year that was more like a slightly loose beanie.

I had twisted the knits on the 1x1 rib, and used the size needles actually called for, so it stayed on fine. But -- and this is where it gets astonishingly stupid -- I had gone up a needle size for the body because I didn't have the called-for size in a 16" circ, but I did have a size bigger. What's .25mm between friends, right?

You can see where this is going. For a few days, I contemplated the only options I could fathom: felting it or going through every single stitch and pulling it a little bit tighter, ending with a long tail of unneeded yarn, thereby changing the gauge. Felting it would change the drape of the thing, possibly working and breaking records for the warmest beret ever, possibly ruining it. I have never heard of anyone actually going through and pulling every stitch tighter. Genius innovation, or utter folly? (That's not rhetorical -- I still haven't frogged my Wicked because I still might try that.)

Still hopeful that it might just be really, exceptionally cool, and maybe not even so huge as it looks, I considered blocking it over the recommended 10" dinner plate. Well, the hat ate the plate and then asked for a casserole dish and a mug of ale to wash it down. No go. So I frogged back to the ribbing and started over after a trip to the store for the right size needles. (Of course I didn't write down what size I needed, and had a moment of panic in the store when faced
with 2.25 and 2.75 16" circs. I guessed right, though. Phew.)

Coming up will be more Christmas knitting (and Christmas frogging) and presents of yarn and yarn-related things.

so...

Hey! I just flipped through my camera and I have literally no photos of knitting that I can show you right now. And that is kind of a bummer.

I do have this:



Which is a very lovely pile of swag that I got from the International Traveling Hoar Tin (tm?), which is essentially a nice way to trade yarn we don't want but that is still nice and worthy yarn. I've been "needing" 3 skeins of variegated Koigu for a pair of Diamond Patch Socks, a pattern that my dear Mom got me a couple years ago for Christmas, and which I promptly looked through, concluded were some Master-Level Uber-Knitter socks, and then hid from myself. Someday I will make those socks, and that day just got closer because here is a nice pile of three skeins of Koigu.

There's also some sportweight sock yarn, a set of five buttons that actually match (three more than any of the button sets I currently own, for some reason), and a lone stitch marker of awesomeness.

What I'm doing these days is pretty much:

a) frantically finishing schoolwork and yet another round of applications
b) freaking out over how incredibly close Christmas is, and how incredibly soon I'm leaving town to go be around the majority of my knitted-gift-recipients
c) reassessing my Christmas Knits list and concluding, over and over again, that there is no fat left to trim
d) working even more on the schoolwork that will not end
e) sleeping
f) considering with trepidation the need to order more yarn for gifts that are on the Christmas Knits List Bubble
g) indulging in dreamy reveries about all the things I'm going to knit just as soon as this Christmas knitting is done
h) knitting.

Progress is being made. Mom's Steering Wheel Cozy, matching Gear Shift Cozy, and matching Short Shorts* are done, blocked, and ready to be wrapped. One other gift is done, three are in progress, and one is waiting in the wings. When I list it out like that, the un-done part seems like a lot and I feel like I need to sit down even though I'm already sitting down. So perhaps we should move on.

The things I'm planning on knitting after Christmas include an Amanda Hat in green malabrigo left over from my My So-Called Scarf, Wavy in fingering-weight Woolen Rabbit and Sundara, striped (although this pair of yarns might go better in a linen stitch or even woven...), an Old Shale Smoke Ring in some KP Bare sock yarn that I dyed with soda ash before I found out that soda ash basically destroys wool, rendering the Bare probably unfit for socks but still nice for something else, and mittens with owls on them. Among other things.

I've noticed that not only do I not have knitted woolen items that appear to be part of a set that go together, nearly everything I have that I've knit clashes violently with everything else I've knit. Doesn't seem possible that so many things could all not match - shouldn't you reach a point where you've come full circle and run out of colors? - but yet, that's where I am with it. So my black Coronet hat (knit before Ravelry) gets a lot of wear. This year I'm going to try to turn over a new leaf of if-not-matching-at-least-coordinating-for-the-love-of-Pete. We'll see how it goes.




*with Fun Fur, of course, the kind with the little puff balls every 2-3 inches

In which I nearly Kinnear Ysolda Teague, but decide that I'm not a celebrity stalker and also I couldn't get my camera out fast enough.

Dude. I went to Rhinebeck.




And what do people do at Rhinebeck?



They take pictures of sheep to post on their blogs. (Check aaaand check.)

Other & I went on Sunday. There was not, in fact, a trail of bodies leading directly to the STR booth, but maybe we got there late enough that the dead had already been carted off. The booth was pretty wonderful, and I'm lucky that the only BFL sport they had was a variety of browns, because otherwise it would have been significantly harder to talk myself out of them. I did do a very good job of not gathering up a big pile of STR and burying my face in it for all those wool+vinegar fumes, if I do say so myself. It was very exciting to see all that Blue Moon in person.

I got some Corriedale from Wild Apple Hill Farm -- "Coral" is pictured below, and I got another skein of "Natural," which I wish were called just "Sheep," because that's what it is.


At the booth, I tried to convince myself that this was not pink -- no, no, it's a light red, see -- but in this picture, its pinkitude is undeniable. So be it. It is pretty.

My other purchase was some Malabrigo Sock in Solis:


And yes, it is probably kind of silly to get up at the crack of dawn, drive miles and miles and miles, and out of thousands of skeins of yarn, pick something that I could easily get off of the internet. (And theoretically at a LYS, although I've never seen this colorway at any of the ones I've ever gone to.) I overcame that very rational argument with the power of Sweet Holy Moses, This Yarn Is Gorgeous And Mom Said I Could Pick Out A Christmas Present Here. Merry Christmas to me.

I have plans for it - oh, do I have plans - but I cannot reveal them until several other things have been revealed.

Overall, I'm very glad we went. I've never before lived anywhere particularly close to any of the major fiber festivals, so we felt the need to jump at the chance to go when we could. It was cool to be in a place where handknit accessories outnumbered machine-made ones, and it was the perfect time of year to be outside at a fair. It probably won't hurt not to go to another one for awhile, because the allure of spinning is getting harder and harder to ignore.