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.

​​

 Pattern: Irish Moss Toque by Alexandra Charlotte Defoe

Yarn: Gale Woods Farm 100% Finn Wool

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.

​SLXL

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.

Stash Confessional: Minnesota Yarns

This week’s (month’s???) stash confessional is very different than most. Not that it doesn’t mean I didn’t acquire some stash, because I definitely did. Just that I lost significantly more stash than I acquired. Which, you know, is the goal. Still, it puts me decidedly ahead in the plan to be 24,000m lighter by the end of the year. That said, I’m pretty sure I’ll never again get rid of this much yarn at one time, so I suppose I should preface this with a “results not typical” sort of statement.

A bit of background for anyone who might be a new reader. As part of my “own less in 2015” goals, I made a commitment to knit or otherwise rid myself of 2000m of yarn per month. Which . . . considering a worsted weight sweater takes ~900m of yarn is pretty lofty if I were just knitting it all, but it includes knit AND destash. That said, I don’t have THAT MUCH yarn I’m willing to part with as destash, and after Sunday I have even less.

Sunday. I took a birthday trip north (halfway to Canada, as I like to phrase it) and made it a point to stop in to the LYS in town (home of Three Irish Girls) both because I had heard good things about the store (all correct) and because I wanted to get myself some TIG from the source, as it were. While investigating the store, I found out they’re a drop-off location for the charity knitting group F.L.O.C.K. (For Love of Charity Knitting). F.L.O.C.K. will basically take whatever yarn you want to give them and distribute it to various group members who want to charity knit for someone, which I think is great. I would love to do more charity knitting myself, but I also like knitting things FOR myself, so I don’t get around to charity knitting as much as I do in my dreams. I figured this was a good way to go through my stash, figure out what I would have probably designated into charity knitting projects once I got to it anyway, put it all in two giant plastic bags, drive it 2.5 hours north, and drop it off for other people to play with.

All told, I dropped off 4457.65m (2580g) of yarn from my stash. That puts me TWO MONTHS ahead on my stashdown goals, provided I don’t actually purchase more yarn. But you know where this is going, right?

As I said, my primary goal in hitting up the LYS was to PURCHASE yarn, and purchase yarn I did, though I’m incredibly proud of my ability to make decisions, especially in the face of a wall of Kauni and a front-and-centre display of ALL THE THREE IRISH GIRLS with the best colourway names and things I had never seen before. So I came home with 5 new skeins of yarn, all of them local to my area, some of them handspun by lovely people I would like to meet someday so I can praise them for providing me with handspun Border Leicester, for a total of 1453.6m (581g) of new yarn, which evens my destash to acquisition total for this trip to 30004.5m (1999g). Not bad. I count that a mega win! I’m still well ahead for the month of January and still knitting away on a project and swatching for the next.

This probably won’t be the final acquisition post for the month since my mother gave me a $50 US gift card to my LYS with the instruction to “Knit something beautiful” for myself, so I’m betting I’ll be back again next week with more stash confessions.

Which brings us to the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Stash confessional #1 for the year:

1 skein of Three Irish Girls Adorn sock in the “Cooler Bythe Lake” colourway. I actually had this and a “Land of the Loon” colourway that were SUPER similar, but Jonas and I rationalised that although both were awesome, the blue makes this one better. Plus, “Cooler By the Lake” was the tagline of my childhood hometown for a while in the 80’s/90;s so even though I know this meant a different lake, I still felt like it was made just for my home.

 

1 skein of Three Irish Girls Adorn sock in the “Cair Paravel”colourway. And okay . . . it’s named after the castle in Narnia. Do I need to rationalise it beyond that?

1 skein of Three Irish Girls Glenhaven Cashmerino Worsted inthe “Observation Hill” colourway. Which is pretty. And is named after a place in the city we were visiting (which is where TIG dye out of). But also there was a place in the city I went to University in (my second home) called Observatory Hill and I spent a LOT of time on that hill and I felt like this colour could also represent that place. Plus did I mention it’s pretty?

1 skein of super awesome amazing hand spun Border Leicesteryarn in the “Natural Dark” colourway from a local spinner. It’s 225m in a beautiful chocolate brown and I’m SO EXCITED to work with Border Leicester. No idea what it will become, but whatever it is will almost certainly be warm and happy and made with love from start to finish.

1 skein of super awesome amazing hand spun BLF/Silk in the “LanikaiHike” colourway (presumably inspired by Hawai’i) from a spinner that’s evenmore local to me. It’s beautiful barberpoled brown and blue (you know how much I love brown and blue together!) and is 240m of DK weight. Again, no idea what it will become, but it is sure to be made with love.

Note that despite a WALL OF KAUNI I did not purchase any. This doesn’t mean I didn’t have three different colourways in my hand at one time, it does mean that I decided that Kauni skeins have a LOT of yardage and I still haven’t decided what the three skeins of Kauni I purchased back in May are going to be, so I reluctantly returned them from whence they came because although I love Denmark and Danish yarns/knitting something fierce, 2015 is all about making good decisions with stash and I could walk away feeling comfortable with what I purchased.