WIP Wednesday: Mitten Ho and some yarn Déjà vu

Hi there. Not much to say on today's topic, honestly.

If you'll remember back a few weeks ago, I talked about the Irish Moss Toque I completed using Gale Woods Farm Finn yarn. Although I loved it and it was a lovely hat, I couldn't quite get it to fit right (it ended up slightly too short). That, combined with having another 110 yard ball of yarn left over and not being sure what to do with it, led me to thinking about possibly trying to make something else with it, a cowl or else a hat/mitten set.

Since my shawl was getting really big and I wanted to have something more portable to knit in airports for my trip last week (I ended up not actually knitting since the knitting didn't fit in my carry on bag anyway, so the point is moot, but whatever), I decided to try to find a hat/mitten set that I could use to knit this yarn. I finally settled on the High Peaks Mittens and Hat by Anne Hanson. It was published as part of Knitspot. It looked like it would work well with this thicker, more roughspun yarn and I figured I could make the yardage work out.

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I didn't swatch since the gauge was the same as the one I ended up with for the previous hat. That said, it turns out that either I should have or else the pattern is written for someone with hands bigger than mine since this one mitten is slightly too big for me. The reason the picture doesn't look the best is that (a) it's MN fall so it's basically always kind of dark outside and (b) the mitten is wet because I wanted to see how big it would be after blocking. I think I either need to take out stitches and cast back on or I need to use smaller needles. The idea of knitting what is essentially aran weight yarn on 3.5mm needles is laughable, but I actually do think the fabric on the 3.75mm needles is too open (at least pre-washing.) I'm trying to decide if I want to just go ahead and cast on the second mitten on the 3.5mm needles or cast on the hat or move on to the next project and decide what to do about the mittens once the first mitten dries.

I'm also trying to decide if I actually like these mittens. The pattern is easy and is made with all purl and knit stitches and no cables or anything, but it's really puffy and it seems to look okay in all the project photos I looked at, but I don't know if I actually like it in my yarn. Fortunately, as with the hat project in this yarn, I managed to knit one mitten in like 3 hours, so if I want to keep changing my mind at least I'm not ripping out days of knitting.

Thoughts? Do you like it? Try to find something else and find another yarn for this? The pattern was, in my opinion, rather expensive for what you actually get. It's very much a beginner pattern and while it's well written, it's bare bones and definitely something I feel like I could have just made up on my own instead of paying $8 for. I'm not against paying designers, of course, but I don't at all believe this was an $8 pattern so now I feel like I'm obligated to try to knit this with SOMETHING for SOME reason. I just...don't love it in this yarn at all.

Crafting Firsts: I Published A Pattern!!!

I debated whether to consider this post a crafting first or a finished object, as it's technically both, but since technology prevented me from actually publishing on Friday (and since I have work travel next week so I don't know if I'll get to writing my Monday post where I'd ordinarily cover the crafting firsts segment) I thought I'd just publish today and sort of consider it both? That's unimportant, really.

What is important is what crafting first I've completed.

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Just now (like, 15 minutes ago) I published my first ever knitting pattern on Ravelry. Now, I never really thought I'd be the sort of person who would be a pattern designer of any sort. Too much to think about with fitting and moving parts. Plus I'm not one to think "I have this stitch pattern in my brain," it's just not how my brain works. But yet...

Here's how these mitts came about. I've spent the past four months listening to (and LOVING) Maggie Stiefvater's book series "The Raven Cycle." As part of that I dyed some colourways to honour some of the characters of the book, and one of them "Blue Lily" has rapidly turned into one of my absolute favourite colourways. Inspired by this, I wanted to dye the Knit Picks Capra that Jonas bought me for Christmas a few years back that I'd been saving until I found exactly the right colour for it to be. This was that colour. It needed to be this. So I dyed the yarn and found myself with 100g of DK weight merino/cashmere that needed to be knit into something Blue Sargent would approve of. As a short aside, I'm not one for fingerless mitts. Where I live, if it's cold enough to need something on your wrists/hands, it's cold enough to need your fingers covered. That said, I did think a few times last winter while I was working from home and my house was frigid that I could perhaps see the utility of the fingerless mitts. Plus, fingerless mitts are TOTALLY something Blue would wear regularly, probably even in the heat of the Virginia summer. 

Add to all of this that the Knerd Girl Knits podcasts's ongoing bad-ass women KAL was focusing on women in books during July and August and one of the challenges was to knit something inspired by a women in a poem or a poem by a woman. Since I'm not usually one for poetry, I didn't have any ideas...until I remembered that book three had a song (about Blue) running through it, thus making that bit a poem both about a woman and written by a woman. So it qualified. The problem was, there wasn't anything at all inspired by Blue that I could find on Ravelry. Or, at least nothing that would work with my yarn or would match up well with the poem. It was then that I pulled out my big book of cables, started browsing Ravelry to see what some other people were doing with fingerless mitts, and started thinking.

The ideas actually all came together really quickly. I browsed the books, found two cable patterns that matched up with the images that I wanted, drew a sword/knife pattern onto some graph paper and made a chart. I still didn't know how to put it together, but I did a bunch of swatching and then a bit of math and then started trying to do it.

I made myself the goal of designing the whole thing during the course of the summer Olympics as part of the Ravellenic Games. I thought that was appropriately ambitious, as the mitts knit up really quickly, but also I would have to push myself to do the calculations and math needed to put it all together. There were, as with all pattern designs, a few stumbles as I changed my mind, ripped back, and once ripped out an entire mitten because I needed to change the position of the thumb, but they knit so quickly that I accomplished it easily within the timeframe. Honestly, I think actually writing the charts and doing the layout took me more time than actually designing the mitts!

So, at long last, after much ado and explanation. I present to you, my first (and quite possibly only) knitting pattern, Lily Blue Mitts.

 

WIP Wednesday: Daenerys (Round 2)

Let me preface this post by saying that very little of what you're about to read below is typical for my crafting life.

So I've started knitting another Daenerys. It's not that I'm not a re-knitter, I've knit several things more than once, it's that I'm not usually one for essentially chain knitting the same pattern. Especially when that pattern happens to be a rather large shawl. However, I've been wearing the other one around and gotten many, many compliments on it. During one of those wearing/compliment sessions, a long-time friend of mine who's really helped me out and who is also crafty (so understands that crafting takes time and energy) and is a freelancer (so understands that people need to be paid for their crafts) asked me if I would be willing to make her one. Because she is who she is (knitworthy, a good friend, someone who will appreciate it, someone who has done a lot for me, etc.) I said yes. We settled on a price (much lower than if just about anyone else asked me, but I'm the one who set it so I'm obviously fine with it) and she picked some yarn.

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Pattern: Daenerys by Valerie Johnson

Yarn: Knit Picks Chroma fingering in the Drawing Room colourway

She wanted a gradient like mine, but didn't think she was going to like the feel of Kauni, so we settled on knitting it in Knit Picks , which was the first reasonably inexpensive gradient yarn that wasn't Kauni that I could think of off the top of my head. Because she tends to wear a lot of greys and blacks and neutrals, she knew she wanted something that would complement, so she decided on the Drawing Room colourway, which is described on the Knit Picks site as "an elegant group of pastels". I don't disagree with that statement. I will say that this is 110% NOT my colourway, but I do think it will look lovely on her and I admit that it is knitting up rather pretty.

I've worked with Chroma before on my Frostfangs hat and mittens, but they seem to be sourcing it from somewhere new, since it has a different feel to it. It's a bit more slippery feeling, as though it had acrylic or more nylon in it, but according to the label the fibre blend is the same. I definitely like it less than it's predecessor, which, sadly, seems to be the way of many things with Knit Picks these days. It's also different in that the colour repeats mirror one another instead of simply repeating in sequence, so that's an added bit of fun. My biggest concern is that the colour repeats aren't that long, so as the rows get longer there are fewer rows of each colour (which is logical), and I fear I may get to a point where a colour only takes up one row or, worse, part of a row. I bought 2 balls of yarn since she said she'd like hers bigger than mine (and it's fingering weight instead of sport), and I'm nearly through one and the colours are really only taking about 2 - 2.5 rows, so we'll see how things go. I'd like to not have extra yarn since I will never do anything with this colour, but I also know I need to stop before I get to a point where the colours get muddy.

The pattern is easy now that I've done it one and a half times, and I've memorised the main chart. It's still a lovely shawl pattern, really. Not much more I can say about it that I haven't already said.

Crafting Firsts: PODCAST!!!!!

A bit of old news, but since I'm still excited and it's technically still relevant, I'll happily bring it to you all here!

Back in June, I attended Zombie Knitpocalypse just a 90 minute drive down the road in Rochester, MN. While I was there, I had the opportunity to meet some lovely people, as usual, but I spent much of my time getting to know some of my favourite podcasters (and now favourite people), Susie and Danie from the Prairie Girls Knit and Spin podcast and Sarah from the Cultivate and Create podcast.

Over dinner the first night of the event, Jonas was relaying to the table how I had asked (demanded) that he go to the hardware store down the street (where we shop a lot, so it wasn't like this isn't a place he ever has to go again) and get me one of each of the colour cards from their (admittedly small) paint colours section. This is because when I dye yarn I get the picture of what colour I want in my head and then I translate that into a visual cue based on the colours on the paint cards. Sarah loved this idea, and since part of what she is trying to do with her podcast is really get at the various ways that people express creativity, she asked if we could do an interview about my creative process. So we did!

I've thought at several times about starting a podcast of my own, but since you all can see how reliable I am at updating a blog regularly, I figured it might not be the best idea. Plus I'm not sure that me (and my monogamous knitting self) doing a solo podcast would actually generate any interesting content, especially when I'm working on big projects. So I've never done it, and Sarah's podcast was the first time I've gotten to appear in that medium. I had a lot of fun, and it sort of made me wish that I had a crafty friend locally who would be able to come up with more content than I could and also hold me accountable to actually doing things on time (and that I even had said time in the first place) so I could podcast. Of course, as soon as I got back to my room after recording I thought of six million things I didn't say or should have said differently, but listening back to it after it was released, I think it sounds better than I thought it would after my original critical remembering...which is normal.

Here's a link to the episode with my interview.

After you listen to that, be sure to check out Sarah's most recent episode where she announces a coupon code for my shop and a way you can enter to win a skein of my new favourite of my hand-dyed yarns, "Blue Lily" (more on that in a week or two!). I love the format she's chosen for the contest, and hope that I can take some of the great info that's coming to me and make even more exciting things happen in the shop, so check out Sarah's podcast, contribute to the discussion for a chance to win some yarn, and stay tuned for even more awesome!

Thanks to Sarah for letting me hijack her podcast. I had a blast, and I'm so glad we had a chance to meet at ZK!

FO Friday: In Which It's Actually Sunday

I honestly meant to write this post on Friday, but all of a sudden it was 10pm and I really didn't feel like getting off the couch.

Besides, this thing took FOREVER to dry. As far as I know it's *still* not dry, I haven't looked at it recently. Apparently "real wool" as I called it when Jonas commented that it was taking forever to dry (don't ask me, I hadn't been caffeinated yet) takes about eight years to dry out once thoroughly saturated. More likely it's that I had two layers of cabled worsted weight knitting laying flat on top of itself on a rubberised surface, but we'll pretend that it's just because the rusticness of handspun heritage sheep means it retains water better.

As you may have guessed by now, I have finished my Irish Moss Toque. I actually finished it Wednesday night after writing the WIP post (and then finishing up some casings on a project bag). The top decreases look way better this time, and although it doesn't fold over on the bottom like the pattern calls for, I think it fits me remarkably well. I think it not folding over will ultimately be okay as it's super heavy pure wool knit on needles that are a few sizes down than I would usually use in order to maintain a denser fabric. I also don't think the fact that there are only two repeats instead of three makes it look weird, but I can't see all the sides of my head at the same time so I may not be the best judge.

In just a few minutes when I put these pictures I'm including below into my Ravelry page this will be finished, finished, finished. It's a super quick knit, and like I said on Wednesday the cable pattern is, to me at least, really intuitive. I do have some of the yarn the pattern actually calls for, so I may give this a go and knit it in that yarn to see how it does with a thinner yarn and possibly all the pattern repeats. As it stands now I only used 1 skein of just under 100 grams (116 yds/106 metres) for this one, which means I have another skein to make myself some other fantabulous winter accessories. I highly recommend this yarn if you can get your hands on it as it's lovely to knit and washes up lovely and soft and plump, but retains its rusticness. I think this is the perfect yarn for some rustic but stylish winter outerwear.

Pattern: Irish Moss Toque by Alexandra Charlotte Defoe

Yarn: Gale Woods Farm 100% Finn Wool

WIP Wednesday: Worsted Weight Hats on Big Needles are So Gratifying

Hi all,

Insert that part where I apologise for falling off the blogosphere for a while. I just needed to get through August. I now have a sudden explosion of free time (which is AMAZING), so the only trick to posting more now will be actually remembering to do it (not as easy as it seems).

Quick update...I finished the Daenerys shawl I had been working on and I've worn it a few times and everyone LOVES it (I'm knitting one for a friend, so you'll get to see the progress on that one coming up starting next week). I also spent the Olympics dyeing some cashmere in one of my favourite new colourways and then designing my first ever actual design project (minus intarsia hats) to go with it. I'm trying to figure out how to chart the pattern now and hopefully it will get published soon. I have no idea how to go about finding test knitters, so it might go up untested, which I don't want to do, but I don't exactly have connections who want to test knit a thing. Jonas would do it, but it's a bit above his level (it's not hard, but he's never done cables before). It's fingerless mitts inspired by my new favourite fandom (The Raven Cycle). Let me know if you think you might want to test knit for me!

I also dyed some yarn for Kaity of the Knerd Girl Knits podcast so she could design some colourwork mittens. I'll be sure to share any updates on that with you here as well.

Finally, if you want to win a skein of my yarn (the new colourway I mentioned above!) or you just want a 10% discount to my shop, visit my good friend Mrs. Shoo at the Cultivate and Create podcast, listen to her episodes (you can just listen to the most recent one if you want, but I recommend a back listen. There are only 20 episodes and they all tend to be about 15-30 minutes, so it's manageable), and enter the contest she's got going on.

Okay.... quick general updates out of the way, let's talk WIP.

Random number generator landed on some Gale Woods Farm Finn Wool (worsted weight, spun from sheep raised at Gale Woods Farm right here in Minnesota) in a sort of natural tan colour with a grey undertone. It's a lovely, sheepy, rustic yarn, so I wanted to knit something lovely and rustic and classic, but also warm. I only had 232 yds (212 metres), so it wasn't going to be a big something. At first I thought cowl, but I ended up finding a lovely cabled hat pattern instead.

It actually took me longer to swatch for the hat than it did to actually knit the hat, I think. I just couldn't get the gauge right (it still isn't) and also make a fabric I liked. The pattern is a 38 or 42 stitch repeat, so it wasn't like I could fudge the stitch count overmuch. Thankfully, I ended up in a situation where I had the right gauge so I could only do 2 pattern repeats instead of 3 (it probably won't look balanced when it's on, but I guess I'll deal with that when I get there). I also knew it was going to take a weird amount of my yarn. Sure enough, I knit most of it (putting in extra ribbing so I could fold it over and still make the hat long enough while being able to start the decreases in the place called for by the pattern) and then ended up switching to the second ball just before the crown decreases, which would have left me with an awkward amount of yarn (which I hate). It only took me about 2 days of knitting to finish the hat, but the decreases aren't charted, so you're sort of left on your own to figure out how to maintain the cable pattern while decreasing, and I definitely did it wrong. That, combined with not wanting an awkward amount of yarn left, made me rip it back. I also dropped down a needle size since (as usual) the hat was too long for my tiny head. 

So I've basically already knit this once, but I'm reknitting it with smaller needles and I've not added any lengthening to the ribbing. Hopefully the crown decreases will go better this time and the hat will fit right. It's still a fun, quick knit; the cable pattern is really intuitive; and the yarn is lovely and rustic and has a delightful hand to it. I can't wait to wear it once winter starts, since I think it will be fantastically warm.

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 Pattern: Irish Moss Toque by Alexandra Charlotte Defoe

Yarn: Gale Woods Farm 100% Finn Wool