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

WIP Wednesday: After a Brief Pseudo-Patriotic Diversion...

Apologies for one more week of showing you all the same thing, but at least this week it comes with some additional content that serves as my excuse for one more week of the same thing.

That's right, the Berocco sweater is still on the needles, although if I can put in some quality time over the next few days you might not see it again until next Friday (possibly this Friday if for some reason I manage to get ahead of myself). The below (admittedly poor quality) photo is of the back, the front, and one sleeve done and another sleeve just about to start the shaping for the sleeve cap. Following that, I have to seam the shoulders then pick up and knit the collar, then finish seaming, then wash and block.

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Regarding sleeve caps--I hope they fit. The fact that my stitch gauge was DRASTICALLY different than the pattern stitch gauge was never a problem at all until it came time to shaping the sleeve caps. The pattern, as it should, calls for some gradual shaping for 36 rows and then more rapid shaping for the rest of the shoulder. However, because I had fewer stitches, I ended up just decreasing 1 stitch on each side of each right side row to end up with the requisite number of stitches after knitting the requisite number of rows. I'm really worried that the shoulders won't fit into the openings right and are going to fit oddly, but there's not much I can do about it right now (well, there is, I can pull it back and try to do even more complicated math, but since math and I are sworn enemies, I'm not sure that's the best strategy). For now, I plan to seam the whole thing together, block, see how it goes, and rip back the sleeves from there if I need to. Might not be the plan with the least knitting, but also it might be, so I'm willing to risk it.

And now for something completely different!

Two years ago I dyed some yarn to match the US Men's National Soccer Team's super cool jerseys, affectionately known as the "Bomb Pop" kit after the novelty Popsicle treats that used to be popular in the 1990s (maybe they still are, I don't know). Fast forward to last summer when I started actually knitting it into socks (which, it turns out were too big). I managed to finish one, but then the magic of the World Cup and the Gold Cup (the big international soccer tournaments the US was in) ended and I put it down, saying I'd re-measure and make the next sock later. So...that brings us to now when the USA was hosting the Copa America Centenario and I decided to cast on the correct number of stitches and knit sock 2 whenever I was watching the tournament. I took measurements (spoiler alert, incorrectly) and used Lara Neel's book "Sock Architecture" to cast on toe up and get working.

Which is where adventures and shenanigans begin.

As we began this weekend (since it was a patriotic holiday here in the US I figured I'd just knit the sock all weekend and see about getting it done since I was already past the heel turn), I got about 13cm into the leg (they're tall socks because (a) I like tall socks, (b) that's how the yarn dyeing worked out the easiest, and (c) that's soccer style socks) and then held it up and thought "the foot looks really short". I'd tried it on before and convinced myself that it fit, but I compared it to the too big sock (which actually fits fairly well in the foot, it's just too wide) and it was about 4cm too short for my foot (because for some reason I'd measured the length of my foot as 20cm instead of 24cm. So, I ripped it all the way back to where I'd started the gusset, re-did the math and blissfully began the foot. Where, instead of remembering that I needed to knit to 78 rows (I was already at 66), I had in my head that I needed to knit to 98 rows and then start the gusset. I realised this at around row 102, counted back to 78, ripped out again, and finished the weekend merrily at 19cm of cuff.

 

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Which is where it will stay until the US Women's National Team's Olympic matches. Maybe I'll get this one done. And then I'll be right back where I started the year with one sock completed.

WIP Wednesday: Knitting Polygamy

You read that right, everyone...I have more than one thing in progress! It doesn't happen that often (and honestly I wish it weren't happening right now), so you might want to take a moment to commemorate this day with me. I want to tell you that I hope I won't still have two things in progress next week, but unless something changes with my schedule and I get an unexpected run on knitting time, I'm pretty sure you'll be seeing these both again next week. That's the problem with knitting two things at once...it takes so much longer to finish anything.

Okay. So. First up is the Queen of the Waves shawl I had started two weeks ago out of some Kauni I had. I took photos last week with the intention of updating you on where things stood, but school/work won out and the post never got written. As of now I'm probably slightly less than a quarter of the way into ball 2 (finished ball 1 last Thursday) and am in the part of the shawl that is mostly garter stitch with only a few pattern rows, so hopefully that plus the rapid decreasing will help it go faster than it looks like it's going to go on paper when you think to yourself that you have more than 100 rows to go and you've only completed 70 rows in two weeks WITHOUT working on a second project. (Trying to get these both done by the end of February. I might be killing my chances of even finishing one by undertaking both. The tragic irony of me trying to become a polygamous knitter when faced with deadlines. It's the real reason I only knit one thing at a time.)

Here's where the shawl was last week (for reference and since I have the photos):

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And here's where it is this week:

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So, yeah. Some progress, but not a lot considering how far I managed to get between week 1 and week 2. The Kauni is really growing on me (I thought it might be slightly too scratchy, but it's not at all). It does have a lot of random veg matter in it though, so if that's a thing that bothers you, steer clear. I'm a bit surprised at the way the colours are striping in it since I honestly thought this was going to be a true gradient from dark to light. It's a bit of a pleasant surprise.

Before I leave this WIP, here's a closeup of the pattern stitches so you can perhaps get a better idea of what's going on with it. It's slightly bothersome to actually create because you have uneven stitch counts and lots of yarnovers that you need to drop which get hung up on the needles, but really it's only a few rows and it's not that bad. The pattern is easy to memorize/follow. I keep ending up with the wrong stitch counts, but it's a shawl so I'm rolling with it.

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Okay. Wow. Posts get long when you haven't updated for two weeks AND you have a second WIP. Yikes. I'll try to make this quick.

Also for the Knerd Girl Knits 2016 Bad-ass Women Craft Along round 1, one of the challenges is to knit from an historic knitting pattern. I desperately tried to find something that would be roughly the era of Outlander so I could double-dip into the Subway Knits Outlander KAL, but the earliest patterns I could find were Victorian era. One of the sites we were directed to was the Knitting Reference Library at University of Southampton, and I have a soft spot for Southampton, so I basically didn't consider looking anywhere else once I couldn't find pre-Victorian patterns. So, after going through a lot of books of doilies and all manner of impractical things I had no desire to knit, I came across "Weldon's Practical Needlework" which has patterns for all sort of things, but most specifically for my needs, a pattern for fold-over "Club Stockings" with a Union Jack, which basically means a regular sock with a fold-over section that has a Union Jack intarsia on it. And if you've been around the blog for a while you know how I can't resist putting a good logo on something.

Problem was, I didn't have the yarn I needed. I could have produced all the colours I needed (save white) in Knit Picks Palette, which does very well with colourwork, but because it's for socks, it needs to have nylon in it, which Palette does not. I had the grey and the red in Imagination, but not white or blue. And since I'm on a limited purchases plan, I was a bit stuck as to what I should do. And then it came to me. I pulled three balls of the heavier weight superwash wool sock yarn from my undyed yarn stash (yeah, I'm using business yarn for personal purposes. People do that all the time and it's not like anyone was buying it in a hurry lately) and dyed some up. 2 balls grey (which has now become the Lonely Mountain colourway thanks to fortuitous circumstances) and one ball half blue, a quarter red, and a quarter undyed. I was trying to estimate based on weights needed in the pattern, but the pattern is truly for knee-highs for men, so the stitch counts are very different than mine. I'll probaby have yarn left over, but there was no real sense in not just using the full skein.

So here's where it is now:

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(and here is the intarsia disaster mess I need to weave in at some point but have been putting off):

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The knitting is going fast, but I'm still skeptical that I'll be able to finish this sock and knit another sock by the end of February, even if it were the only thing I was working on. Also I pulled the floats too tight so it's puckering weird in the straight red column. It looks a bit too "homemade" for me. Odds are good I'll end up redoing this or doing it in a different way. But I do love the idea of the foldover sock! I think I'll make them for all my footy clubs someday.

So that brings us to the end of this very long post. I can almost guarantee you that I won't have a finished object for FO Friday, so I will hopefully see you back here next Wednesday with progress updates.

FO "Friday": It's Bigger Than I Am

First things first, I'm aware it's not Friday. I meant to do this yesterday, but I have a 20-point 3-page paper due tomorrow and a 30-point 2-page paper due Monday so priorities sort of necessitated a re-sort. I'm actually only posting now because I've turned in the former paper and I thought I owed myself 30 minutes of not doing schoolwork for a change. Plus I'm super happy with my FO and needed to tell everyone about it.

Second. It's true. This thing is bigger than me. Granted, I'm not that big, but still. I knit a thing for myself to wear that is both longer and wider than my actual self. Yikes.

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See. Bigger than I am. It's 90" long by 20" wide. I am probably 20-ish" wide at the widest point and 63" long.

For those who haven't been following along, this item is the Cocoon wrap by Anne Kuo Lukito. I knit it out of local Minnesota yarn that I'm very sure is not being made/sold anymore by a company called After the Sheep. It's 100% sport weight alpaca and it's soft and warm and cuddly as a wrap (it was formerly all these things as a sweater, but it's much happier being a wrap). Even though it wasn't cold in my house in the least after I finished weaving in the ends, I wrapped it around myself and then promptly declared I was never going to come out of it. Cocoon indeed.

Here are some photos of it so you can (hopefully) get a better idea of the stitch pattern. Sorry there aren't any photos of me wearing it, but by the time we got this all done it was dark outside and the inside lighting was horrible. I could model it now in the few hours of daylight we get up here during deep winter in the frozen north, but I'm not in the least presentable right now. I'll try to get a few on my project page and/or twitter and instagram in the next few weeks.

It's done and it's warm and it's snuggly and it's pretty and the lace blocked out wonderfully. Now if only I'd finished this while it was -10000 outside and not a perfectly reasonable 30F.

(Mo)FO Friday: Giant Orange Stockinette Sweater for Jonas

It's not DONE, done, but the giant orange stockinette sweater is blocking and awaiting seaming (and then re-knitting).

Sorry for the terrible photo. It's still blocking and it's too huge for me to take a proper photo of it yet.

To recap: The pattern is Joukahainen by Krystel Nyberg. The yarn is Berocco Ultra Alpaca in colourway 6268.

I started this sweater for Jonas on March 23 and wrapped it up on Tuesday (April 14), so it took me just over 3 weeks start to finish. It's an easy pattern, being predominantly stockinette, so even though Jonas is huge and has a giant long torso and huge arms, this still knit up really quickly. That said, the bit just after joining the sleeves and before you get a good way in to the raglan decreases is probably best described as a slog. I had 300+ stitches on the needles and was working to reduce (every other row) to 92 stitches. It took me 15 minutes to knit a rest row and 20 minutes to knit a decrease row. The good thing about working it in decreases is that it got better from there, but gosh was I ready to just throw the sweater down and walk away once I realised what I was in for while knitting the full chest measurement. But I got through it and it's over.

And it needs re-knitting.

Don't panic...it doesn't all need to be re-knit (I hope), I just need to re-shape the neckline. It came out way more like a mock turtleneck than the crew neck it looks to be in the photo (plus it's way too wide for Jonas to wear as a mock turtleneck even if he wanted to). It seems like this is a common problem with the pattern and I've looked up people's fixes and have pulled out my sweater design books, so I'll devise a solution for re-knitting just the very top and the collar as soon as it's dry (it's been blocking since Wednesday and is still pretty soggy). The bigger problem might come if Jonas thinks it's not long enough. When he first tried it on, he definitely didn't think it was, but based on how much the yarn stretched when I knit my Tauriel, I'm hoping it will block out long enough for him. If not... well, I told him to expect the sweater in a few years when I can muster up the Can to rip it back to the sleeve joins and knit more onto it before doing all those raglan decrease rows again. I'm not even sure I'm going to get to re-doing the collar for a while, since I've got other projects I need to commit to now.

Good news is, he had it on in the house on Tuesday night for less than five minutes and was already too hot in a wool/alpaca sweater, so I'm betting he won't be clamoring for it until September at the earliest. So I have some time. Which is good, because this sweater and I need a break.

It's not even that I mind that much stockinette, really. It's easy knitting and I can do it while doing pretty much everything else, so it was actually good... it was just A LOT of sweater and I'd like to knit something else now.

The yarn was lovely to knit with as always. It's got a great hand and it's not at all splitty or difficult to work with, even when I had to cable it to do the raglan decreases. Lovely all around. The only complaint I had is that a lot of dye leaked out into the water when I was soaking it. The basin was a delightful tangerine colour when I pulled the sweater out and it still wasn't rinsing clean. If I remember correctly, the green yarn for Tauriel did the same thing. So... a bit of caution if you're using this yarn and want to wash the item with other things. It looks like there will be a significant amount of excess dye for the first few washes.

Jonas is weirdly allergic to Eucalan, so I had to use regular laundry soap, but I don't think that will affect the blocking process too much. I just really hope it's long enough after blocking because as lovely as it was to knit, the only challenging part is at the top, and that's the bit I'd have to do again. No thank you, please.

It's a good, basic stockinette sweater. Nothing fancy, but certainly a blank canvas for colourwork or easy design changes and a good place to start if you need to just knit a sweater with no frills. I *might* knit it again. In a smaller size. In a few years. With a different neckline.

Resolutions Check-In: March

I think the fact that it's currently April 7 and I'm just now getting to this post speaks VOLUMES about how well I did on my resolutions this month. But the current run of Do All The Things is behind me and I'm hoping to make some headway as I gear up for the next round of Do All The Things. Maybe. I hope. I've got some new strategies, at least. But, let's check in anyway. If only because even though I know I'm failing, I have a scientific need to quantify how hard I'm failing. Or something like that.

Resolutions Check-In: February (or when I fell hard off the wagon)

I suppose while I’m sitting here thinking about how I should be writing all sorts of blog posts and then not actually writing them (and digging myself into a bigger hole of “I have to write about all these things and I don’t know where to start” while accumulating more things I have to write about) I may as well start with my February resolutions accountability post.

February. I really dislike February. For so many reasons. First, it’s almost always the point at which I just start to get 100% DONE with winter around here. It’s cold, it sometimes snows but not that much, and all the holidays/my birthday are done. Plus, I was raised to think “March = spring” but around here, it doesn’t. So there’s this part where February feels like a neverending Thursday before the weekend starts and then Friday never actually happens. For someone like me who suffers from the whole reduced photoperiod/Seasonal Affective Disorder business this is bad news. It basically means that although I know there are things I want to be accomplishing, my brain just doesn’t have the motivation to actually accomplish them. And then I feel bad about not accomplishing them. Which leads me to more inability to accomplish things. Add to this that I have (for the past eight years) had a major freelance design/layout project I do for a local non-profit and all the work for that happens in February. Which means that in addition to my regular job and my other hobbies (and now my yarn dyeing job) and my real life, I have to put all that together. Ordinarily, I take a week off of work and I knock most of it out in a week, but this year I had to head to an out-of-town work conference the week I’d be doing that, so I quite literally spent all of February trying to work this in to my spare time. Which means that things like blogging and knitting suffered. Oddly enough . . . yarn dyeing didn’t. Hopefully you’ll be hearing about all of that soon.

So. I’m going to make references to some things here that I meant to blog about and didn’t. It’s my sincerest hope that March and I can make a fresh start and I can actually tell you about all these things in the coming days so you can fill in the gaps. I was trying to put off this post until I managed to post about all the things I’m going to reference, but I realised that if I did that, I’d never get anything posted, so I just have to start here and work backward through time.

All that is a long way of saying, sorry I fell off the posting wagon, I’ll try to be better now. Words you’ve heard before. I really do mean them every time.

Knitting Firsts: Part 4 - Ravelry Competition

Fourth First (although I guess we’ve now established it’s my Sixth First): Ravelry Competition

Unrelated to all of the buying of yarn at festivals and receiving of yarn from swaps, I’ve decided that I need to do my part to decrease the amount of yarn I have. Now, compared to many people I don’t actually have that much yarn, but I also don’t have that much yarn space in my flat and it’s already become incredibly cluttered. Aside from the Kauni, everything I brought into my house from the festival was already DFA (designated for assignment) to a project in my queue, so I felt comfortable with it. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Ravelry trying to match up the oldest yarns in my stash with projects so that when I finish the epic deadline knitting of summer (it’s getting wild around here) I will have clear directions for the older yarns in my stash. Problem was that because of the plan (knit the oldest first) conflicting with reality (knit all these things by these dates and also you need to buy yarn for them) I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. Enter the Knit Girllls podcast (which I don’ t listen to yet, but was mentioned on another podcast) and their StashDash 2014. The objective is between May 26 and August 2 (I think) to knit 5km worth of yarn. Which sounds impossible. The catch is … things already on the needles no matter how far they were in progress at the start of the competition, could count their full yardage. So here I was with a sport weight vest, a pair of knee high socks, and an 800yd sweater project already in the works and scheduled to be completed by July 9. So I’m doing it. I don’t think I actually get anything for completing it other than the satisfaction of having FOs and getting yarn used up, but that’s good enough for me. I haven’t really been participating in all the chatter etc.  because while I know other people feed off the social energy of these sorts of things I find it draining. I’d rather compete against my personal goals and not constantly compare my progress to that of everyone else who seems to either have all day long to knit or are the fastest knitters on the planet. I’m making progress, I finished one thing, I’ve established a rhythm for finishing the others, I have plans for the future, and I’m going to make it as far as I can and do my best to not buy yarn in the interim.