Hi again readers.

I was doing so well on keeping on top of updating you and then I sort of fell off the wagon again. Maybe third (fortieth???) time’s the charm? We shall see.

Today’s post is all about some confessions. Namely . . . I have too much yarn, but tangentially, I have too much stuff overall. It has come to my attention that if all goes according to plan, I will need to move from my current not-all-that-large 2 bedroom flat into a likely even smaller 2-bedroom (I hope) flat within the next year. Since my current flat, I have come to realise, is at (maybe slightly beyond, depending on your definition system) capacity, this means that I absolutely need to have a “no net gain” of possessions, and ideally will have a net loss of possessions before May-June of next year. In an attempt to get organised for this thing, (prompted by the fact that I bought 4 skeins of yarn and then had to basically cram them in the drawers to get them stashed), and because I’d been thinking about my stash recently and how near it was to capacity, and because it’s been bothering me that all my yarn didn’t have accurate weights/lengths and photos catalogued on Ravelry, I took the better part of a day about a month ago and went through my stash. All of it. The bitter truth. And I had SO help me so he could see the actual impact of the amount of yarn I owned and could stop being a terrible enabler at the LYS.

Now, I realise that compared to many, I have next to no stash at all. However, this isn’t about a contest or a comparison. It’s about me feeling like I have acquired at too great a rate and needed to put things into perspective. I remember the early(ish) days of Knitmore Girls Podcast when Jasmin and her friend Tika made an agreement they called “The Social Pressure Experiment”. It was basically about re-evaluating their stash purchasing and becoming smarter consumers. Really thinking about what you were buying and knowing that you had to give up the equivalent amount of that thing puts your purchasing habits into perspective, and I loved listening to how Jasmin’s purchasing philosophy evolved during the 8ish months of the challenge and how they became sort of permanently ingrained afterward. I’ve recently been trying to apply that philosophy to everything in my life . . . do not consume a thing unless you absolutely NEED to have it. If you do consume it, please identify an equivalent thing that can get re-homed. It’s going well so far, but it’s only been a month.

On to the yarn stash. And accountability. This will get long.


Because I don’t have a big enough room and because I don’t have a good place to take a photo of things even if I did have a big enough room, I don’t have one photo of all the yarn together. Instead I have photos of each grouping of yarn I split things into. Doing it this way also REALLY helped me identify problem areas in my stash, which was very helpful. Plus . . . now everything is in Ravelry and is searchable and sortable and I can make plans about knitting. I already have my knitting booked until at least mid-December, I’m pretty sure. I also identified some things that I listed for destash (some of which, if actually requested, will be pretty hard for me to part with because I’m sentimentally attached to them). It’s likely no one will want most of them, as it’s a lot of acrylic, but I have plans to either use it or donate it if I get to its position in the new chronological knitting plan and no one has claimed it yet.

We started with all my fingering weight yarn. I didn’t expect there to be as much of it as there was, because I don’t knit socks or shawls or many of the things that require fingering weight yarn, but gosh was I wrong. Admittedly, much of it is yarn that I acquired from Knit Picks during their annual sale when I got the brilliant idea to use Palette and the Imagination Yarn to make all the Song of Ice and Fire things on Etsy. I still think that was a good idea, although no one has actually purchased one yet, so perhaps I’m being more than a bit naïve. After weighing out the partial skeins and sorting everything, I ended up having ~20,551 yards (18,791 meters) among the 74 skeins of fingering weight yarn in my stash. It surprised me, too.

Here it all is!

 


Next was all my sport weight yarn. Only 12 different kinds of yarn this kind, so this is a bit of a “stash deficiency” as it were. If I really do need to knit something in a sport weight and I cannot make one of these 12 yarns work, I do have permission to acquire what I need. In fact, I already did that to get another skein of Knit Picks Brava to make some hats. It’s not in my stash yet, but SO made it an allowable purchase because he is benefitting from it I will be knitting it right away in a project that’s on a deadline. In total, this ends up being ~ 5205 yards (4760 meters) of yarn among the 20 skeins of sport weight yarn in my stash. (this number is off from the actual stash management day numbers because I’m currently knitting with some of the sport weight so I’m at 2 skeins less than I was then). Manageable and not too shabby, since really this is just 12 different kinds of yarn and at least 5 of the skeins should be out of my stash by the end of the year. Still shouldn’t acquire unless needed, but far less dire than some.

Here’s the sport weight.

 

We move on to DK weight, which is definitely the yarn I have the least of. I don’t know if it’s that DK weight yarn is just rare or if I just happen to never knit with it or never be drawn to it or some combination of all those things, but if a major project came up that needed DK weight yarn, I’m not sure I’d be able to swing it without a purchase. Which is good. That’s where I want to be, mostly. Not that I’m against having a stash, I just like the idea that most of the yarn in my stash is dedicated to a project and has a clear, foreseeable future. I only have 6 “projects” worth of DK weight, and much of that is remnants from other projects and/or is designated for destash. It ends up being ~2350 yards (2148 meters) in 13 skeins (6 of which are designated for destash). This is manageable and somewhat realistic, although if for some reason I start making more projects that call for DK weight, I’ll probably need to think about bulking up this part of the stash. For now, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing and if one comes up, I’ll figure that out.

Here’s the DK weight. It and the sport weight are sharing a drawer right now.

 

Aaaannnnd now we come to the “problem area” also known as my worsted weight yarn stash. Specifically the acrylic bits of my worsted weight yarn stash, but really all of it is problematic. I actually split it into acrylic vs non-acrylic just to make it more manageable. Also, because in most cases involving my stash the distinction between worsted and Aran weight is thin at best, I have combined “worsted” and “aran” into one category. Truly some of what is labeled aran in Ravelry is actually aran weight, but most of it can all be classified the same, imo. So, I think it’s no secret that I like knitting sweaters, which generally means that I buy sweater quantities of worsted weight yarn. In the past, it meant I bought sweater quantities of worsted weight acrylic yarn because I still hadn’t figured out that acrylic sweaters mostly just make you sweat a lot. And also because I got a lot of the worsted weight acrylic I have for free when I was doing some charity knitting and people foisted off their acrylic yarn on me. To be fair, I also rather like a lot of the worsted weight acrylic I have. I’m not trashing on it in the least, I just know better than to think of it as the default anymore.

First . . . non-acrylic 10-ply (worsted or Aran weight). I have ~13, 153 yards (12,027 meters) in my stash, spread among 59 skeins of 30 different yarns. Which isn’t all that bad, actually, when I compare it with the fingering weight. At least I *knew* I had a lot of worsted weight yarn. Much of it is remnant WoTA from Fourth Doctor scarves, really.




Then we move to . . . acrylic 10-ply (worsted or Aran weight). The numbers are less exact here than they are elsewhere because I have lost ball bands or things are committed in projects that will be frogged and reknit and I haven’t figured all the yardage yet, but it’s close(ish). It ends up being ~1902 yards (1739 meters) among 19 skeins of 14 different yarns. I mean, in the grand scheme of my yarn stash that’s not a ton, but it’s a ton considering it’s a lot of sweaters or large projects worth of acrylic. I’ll use it for things, but it’s something I need to think about. I mean, I haven’t purchased acrylic yarn (save the purchasing of Knit Picks Brava for specific projects or the yarn for my WTNV bag) since June of 2013, so I feel reformed. I also feel weirdly compelled to finish making the sweaters I got this acrylic for. Reality is, some of it will probably end up as hats or bags or some other accessory. I’m not really purchasing this anymore, but I still feel guilty about having it in the first place for some reason. It’s because I use it in inappropriate ways and the reason I still have all of this is because (as previously alluded to on this blog) I try to make garments with acrylic yarn and then they don’t work out and I’m unhappy and frog them. No. More. Acrylic. Sweaters. Not for moral reasons, just because I’ve come to realise they are almost always a bad idea.



In total, all my worsted weight yarn adds up to 15,055 yards (13,766 meters) among 72 skeins of 44 different yarns. Because worsted skeins take up more space than fingering weight skeins, this has become A PROBLEM and will subsequently stop.

Finally . . . bulky and superbulky. It honestly amazed me that I had *any* of this yarn in my stash, as I never use it, but then I remembered I made some bad decisions at a Michael’s sale a few times. It turns out, though, that I actually have identified uses for much of this, despite it all being in destash. Maybe someday I’ll get to it. This is another yarn family that I need to just buy on an as-needed basis. The odds of me needing some around in case something comes up are so very low, at this point. I’ll use, sell, or donate what I have and only purchase if I absolutely see a need. Right now I have ~1449 yards (1325 meters) in 19 skeins of 6 different yarns, most of them in destash.

 

In total, I end up with ~53477 yards (48899 meters) in 202 skeins of 101 different kinds of yarn in my stash. Again, that might not sound like terribly a lot to you, but I’m currently finishing off my most productive knitting year by far (which included THREE Fourth Doctor scarves) and it’s looking like I’m going to hit a knitting total of around 15,500 yards (14, 242 meters) so even if I do manage to sustain this mad knitting pace (which I likely will not), it would take me 3.5 years to knit through all this stash. That’s a lot, and I need to scale back. The great yarn un-purchasing of 2014 starts . . . now. (well . . . actually, it started on August 30, 2014, but I’m telling all of you now. Keep me accountable.

Happy smart stashing!

Stash Enhancement: Doctor Who Yarns!

Shortly after arriving home from my summer of travel, which should probably also be known as the “summer of buy all the yarn while you’re on vacation”, I was browsing around LYS’s website (for some reason…probably they sent me an email) and saw that they had a new yarn in their "Nerd Alert Yarn" series. Many (most) of these are Doctor Who themed (because the staff at my LYS are my kind of people) and this one was no exception. They’d actually added quite a few new Doctor Who/Torchwood themed colourways to the series, but I knew there was only one of them that NEEDED to come home with me.

"A Centurion is Faithful 100%"

Now, since most of you don’t know me in real life and haven’t heard me gush for hours about how much I ADORED the Ponds (basically because that IS my relationship…I’m not making that up), you don’t know how much this yarn needed to come to me and be something amazing in my life, but trust me…there was no option.

One major problem is that I don’t knit socks. I don’t WANT to knit socks. Which means I needed to buy more than one skein so that I could potentially make something substantial that is NOT socks. So, before heading to the store I did a bit of research and queued up a few patterns that I thought I could manage with two skeins. All of them were sweaters, but they were short sleeved and should be feasible with the yardage of two skeins.

Then I went to the store, bent on buying this yarn and only this yarn, and the shop staff, being the terrible enablers they are, showed me ALL of the new Doctor Who yarns they had. Which led to me ALSO purchasing two skeins of Three Irish Girls Adorn Sock in the “Exterminate” colourway. And still feeling proud of myself because I only bought TWO yarns instead of all ten that Jeremy showed me!

Fortunately, I had a groupon, so I only paid about half as much as I would have, but when you keep saying you’re not going to purchase more yarn because you are out of room, buying four more skeins isn’t the way to accomplish things. Especially when you get home and have to literally CRAM these four skeins in your yarn drawers (meaning you’re somewhat damaging the skeins/labels every time you open the drawer). That, combined with the lingering thought that you might be moving soon and the idea that you will soon need a goodly sum of extra money (for various reasons) meant…

It’s time for a yarn intervention…

Stay tuned. There will be photos of my stash. All of it.

Finished Object: Fourth Doctor Scarf the Fourth

Near the beginning of August, just as I was thinking I was going to let the listing expire without getting an order to knit a Fourth Doctor scarf, another order came in. This one was my first overseas Etsy order (Germany!) and came with the (totally valid) request to change the purple colour I traditionally use from a less red purple to a more purple purple. Which is valid. The colour I use isn’t actually the best and I think I might like the purple I used for this scarf better. The buyer was lovely in looking on the Knit Picks site and picking out the colour she wanted and the whole process was very painless and yielded a lovely scarf.

Because I’m not the sort of person who likes having a ton of random scrap yarns around, I dug out all the Knit Picks WoTA worsted (fortunately I keep it all in one bag) from the previous full WoTA worsted scarf, took out my trusty yarn scale, weighed what I had, and then adjusted the ratio of how much to purchase.The one concern I had was that I had no idea how close KP matches colours between dye lots, as I was clearly using yarn I’d purchased a year ago and expected the dye lots to be drastically different. Good news…they weren’t. Even in the sections of the scarf where I *know* I joined a ball of the old colour to a ball of the new colour mid-section, I cannot even tell the slightest colour difference. I wouldn’t put 100% faith on this working all the time, but it worked out this time and I’ll probably take this gamble again.

The only real problem is that even though I made sure that when I ordered, the total amount of each colour I ended up with was greater than what was recommended on the pattern, but I still ran out of red, grey, and tan just before the end of the scarf. This put me a little bit behind schedule because I was on vacation when this happened and even though I ordered more yarn (from Ravelry destash and some from Knit Picks), I had to wait until I got back home to get to finishing the last quarter of the scarf. Fortunately, the buyer is a knitter as well, so they were very understanding about the slight delay and were perfectly lovely about everything, even when the package got stuck in customs in Berlin for a week and they had to call and take care of all of those problems.

Overall, this is the scarf I’m the most happy with since the first WoTA scarf  (which I got to see “in the wild” at the end of August, as I saw the person I made it for and she was wearing it. It’s wearing well and looked great even a year later!) I made, thus reinforcing my new policy of only making scarves in WoTA (or Cascade 220 if a person wants superwash) because it is the best yarn I’ve used for this process. Plus, because I have a new yarn scale and did a better job of monitoring how much yarn I had at the start and end, I have a WAY better estimate of how much of each colour I actually need for the scarf, so maybe the next time I open the listing up (might be a while…I knit this and then immediately knit a stockinette scarf in the round, so I have garter stitch burnout right now), I might not actually have to reorder yarn two times to get to the end.

Here’s a photo of the finished scarf. It’s pretty beautiful. Almost all credit to Knit Picks Wool of the Andes for being such a great yarn for this project.

Finished Object: Summer Aran Tank

This summer, the host of one of the podcasts I’ve recently started listening to, Subway Knits, was holding a summer “Armchair Knit Along” while she was in Greece for 5 weeks over summer vacation. The premise was that we should knit patterns inspired by Greece or photos of Greece or use yarn inspired by the same. At first, I wasn’t going to participate because I had absolutely no ideas and no yarn that I thought would work and even less time for adding another project to my days, but inspiration struck me and the prizes were SO AMAZING that I just couldn’t say no.

This was my first KAL experience and while I’m glad I got such a great FO out of it, I’m not sure I got anything much out of the actual social aspects of the KAL. I’m new to the group and I admit that I’m not sure exactly how one becomes part of the inner sanctums on Ravelry forums anyway, so maybe that had something to do with it, but in this particular KAL there wasn’t a ton of participation and I feel like the only chatter that was going on was by the moderator of the group and some incidental posting by a few others. On the other hand, I’ve seen groups with 4000 people participating in a KAL and I feel like it’s easy for your posts and what you’re doing to get lost and it’s even more impossible to keep up, so perhaps it’s better to have something smallish to start with.

The tank I knit for the KAL was the Aran Necklace Camisole by Caroline Bautista out of Interweave Knits Spring 2010. About halfway through the KAL, while not at all searching for inspiration but somewhat lusting after all the amazing prizes, I stumbled upon an idea. In my stash I had a few remnant skeins of Knit Picks CotLin from SO’s cardigan that I knit back in May, and one of the colours is a beautiful deep blue colour called Planetarium. This made me think about the night sky and how much reference to Greek mythology is (or used to be) in astronomy/astrology, which then felt to me like a pretty great tie-in to the KAL. I knew I didn’t have enough of the Planetarium colourway to make a full sweater, but when I found this pattern and saw that the yoke part was knit separately from the body, I knew I could supplement with the remaining Cashew colourway (a rich tan) to make sure I had enough yardage. Added bonus, the cashew colour could be reminiscent of the sandy beaches of Greece to fully round out the theme.



I’m really happy with this tank overall, and it was easy to knit and fairly straightforward, My only issue with the pattern is that a portion of the gauge swatch was done over the cable pattern so swatching for the yoke part of the sweater was overly complex and meant a bit of adjusting. It all worked out in the end, although I had to knit the yoke 3-4 times (some of this was my own fault for not counting rows correctly and trying to knit while I was in meetings and other social settings and losing track of where I was.) The only major mod I had to make to the pattern was that I needed to rip back the strap portions because of gauge and because I didn’t want the back to droop as low as it would have if I stayed with the pattern directions.

This was also my first foray into airplane knitting. I had finished the final iteration of the yoke while waiting in the airport (first time taking knitting through security in a carry on. Zero problems, but I was also flying out of the smaller terminal), and since I had a very short flight to get across the border to see my family I thought I’d see about knitting on the plane. For long flights, I don’t think I could do it because I get terrible pressure headaches on planes and I’m sure that hunching up in my seat to knit would cause more damage to me than good. Perhaps not. Perhaps I’ve now become an airplane knitter. Regardless, I managed to pick up for the back and get a significant portion of the back (down to the armhole joins) done on the plane with no problem whatsoever. My Knitters Pride Cubics traveled brilliantly and no one seemed shocked or annoyed by my knitting and all I had to do at that point was miles of stockinette, so I consider my first airplane knitting experience a success.

Stash Enhancement: Buy all the Yarns

Sorry, all. Got WOEFULLY behind on posting again just when I told myself I was going to work even harder to stick to a regular posting schedule. I’ve had so many posts in the drafts that were basically outlines and needed to get posted, but I just never had/made the time to actually get to them.

Many things in the works, so I do promise to be better about making time to write posts!
To start, I want to talk about what I honestly mean this time is THE LAST MAJOR YARN PURCHASING OF 2014 (more on that later).

I took another trip across the border to visit my family, and this time I was there for a week. In that week, I managed to make one trip to a new yarn store (which I am IN LOVE with…they have ALL THE QUINCE & CO.) and also purchased yarn at a festival (not a yarn festival). The festival was the main reason I found myself in town and I knew that they’d had a yarn vendor there previously, so I was fully expecting to purchase some yarn at the festival. I was not expecting to purchase what I did.

For context, the festival in question is a rather large Irish heritage festival (my mother’s mother is from Ireland), and in the past they have had a charming independent vendor from Ireland selling some of the yarn spun from their sheep. I’ve never actually purchased any of this yarn, but this year I told myself that if they were back, I would make the commitment to purchasing a bit of yarn. Well, this particular vendor was not there, but I was not disappointed on the yarn front. This year, the festival had a representative from Studio Donegal, and she had brought several baskets of various colours of their Soft Donegal yarn. Having just purchased two skeins of their Soft Donegal back in July during my trip to California, I knew that I wanted to buy enough to make myself an Aran sweater. So, after much deliberation of colours and much of my mother raising her eyebrows at me about how much I was about to spend on yarn, I purchased 5 skeins of their purple colour. And then, upon getting it home, I realised that in order to make the sweater I wanted I probably needed 6 skeins. But I’ll burn that bridge when I get there.



A few days after the festival, I wanted to take a trip to another one of the few local yarn stores I had discovered the last time I was in town. This one had hours that were rather inconvenient (my mother was going to work during the week and I was working from my parents’ house) as the only day they were open past 6pm was the day I was leaving town at noon. But I managed to convinced my mother to leave work early one day so that we could go, and I’m really glad we did.

The shop was charming on the inside AND the outside, and the two women working there were extremely kind and helpful. On top of that, they wound all my yarn into cakes for me, which I greatly appreciate as I don’t own a swift. But, best of all, they had shelves upon shelves upon shelves of Quince & Co. Even better than that, I was in mighty need of some Quince & Co. to make one of the billions of Cecily Glowik-MacDonald sweaters I had added to my Ravelry queue. Previously, I’d taken some time with SO to sit down and narrow down some of the sweater options and taken notes on which yarn I would need and how much of it I would need and then headed to my LYS (where they used to have a shelf of Quince & Co.), but their shelves were rather bare on the Quince & Co. front and I ended up not purchasing. So, after many frantic text messages to SO to ask him if he happened to be home and could look at the list, then several texts back from him about what yarns I had picked out for which sweater I managed to pick out just what I needed.

The yarn is Quince & Co. Chickadee in the River colourway, and it’s destined to become the Irina sweater by Cecily Glowik MacDonald (hopefully sometime this fall)



While I was there, I also picked up some other yarn that I needed for some gift knitting projects. For a Ravelry swap I’m in, I needed to knit someone a scarf, so I picked up a few skeins of Cascade 220 in forest green and yellow. I can’t yet talk about what the scarf design is since the swap package hasn’t arrived yet, but I will post about it as soon as I can.
I also picked up some Cascade 220 superwash sport (which I’m still bitter about not being 220 yards/skein) in basic black to knit a hat for my father for his birthday at the end of October.

So…overall I managed to come home with 18 new skeins of yarn to put in an already full yarn drawer, but I told myself that 6 of them are getting used nearly immediately and if all goes well the Quince & Co will be getting knit up soon too. Still…I knew it meant that I was about to need a yarn intervention. It was a few more weeks before that happened, but it has happened and I’ll be sure to tell you all about it as soon as we get through the pile of other things that happened in the interim.

It’s been an exciting summer/end of summer on the crafting front, and has no promises of slowing down. Thanks for making the journey with me.

Knitting Firsts: Part 5 - Bamboo Yarn and proper needles

The Fifth (Seventh) First: Bamboo Yarn

Both for the T.A.R.D.I.Socks and the lace sweater I’m using a bamboo blend yarn. It’s my first time knitting with any level of bamboo fibre, though it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I’ll do proper yarn reviews when I talk about the WIPs or FOs (whenever I get to them), but suffice to say that I love one of them, I’m frustrated as hell at the other one, I bought my first set of big girl circular needles, and I will forever insist on knitting bamboo WITH bamboo (or at least wood … but preferably bamboo).

And that wraps up my series of post about knitting firsts. Thanks for reading. Happy knitting. Feel free to share your knitting firsts or any tips/tricks/experiences with any of my firsts either in the comments or by sending me an email, Google+, or Twitter message.

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.

Knitting Firsts: Part 3 - Yarn Swap

Third First: Yarn Swap

Since I’ve only recently gotten into knitting podcasts and the more social aspects of Ravelry (even then I’m just dipping my toe in the water) it’s only within the last year that I learned that yarn swaps are a thing people do. So, when my first knitting podcast foray rolled around to their second anniversary in May and they decided to do a swap, I knew I wanted to participate. It’s a video podcast so I’d gotten to see them showing the spoils of yarn swaps past and it just seemed like a really great way to potentially experience a new yarn or local goods from places I’d never been and to just connect with some of the people you only communicate with via the internet. I was excited to try to share my local flavour with someone else and have someone share theirs with me.

Interestingly enough, I ended up with one of the hosts of the podcast as the person I was buying for (it was a round robin swap so you weren’t getting the same person who got you), which I thought was pretty great. I’d been watching her progress in knitting and life over the past two years and I felt like I had a good handle on what she liked, so I hoped I could put together the best possible package. I knew also that whenever possible I wanted to give her something uniquely me or uniquely Minneapolis. I got two kinds of tea from my LYS (because they have special tea blends and they are both phenomenal and I enjoy them whenever I’m there knitting or shopping or winding 50 skeins of yarn on their swift/ball winder because I don’t have one), yarn that was the exact colour of green she’s always showing off on the podcast (I conquested hard for it) that I picked up from a local independent dyer at the fibre festival, a pattern I also picked up at the festival, a stitch holder that she had requested, and a reversible project bag I made myself. Which I guess isn’t a knitting first per se, but is a first. I’d never sewn a project bag before (or really a bag of any type … I’m a garment sewer almost exclusively), but it was a quick and mostly painless process and I hope to make many more of them for friends or for myself (though I don’t really use project bags) or to sell on Etsy or anywhere else I might find myself selling things. The best part, I think, was that since mine went to one of the hosts of the podcast I got to watch her open it on the show and see her reactions to everything. It was really special and it’s a bit tense and also a bit exhilarating to wait with anticipation to see if someone halfway across the country likes the things you sent them.

Also amazing was receiving a package in return. We had to fill out a short questionnaire to tell our potential swap partners more about us, and my partner really seemed to have a knack for taking the short info I provided and really putting together something truly special. She sent me two kinds of tea (divine vanilla black tea and the most bergamot-y smelling Earl Grey I’ve ever had) from a local-to-her tea shop, two sachets of lavender (one of my favourite smells) from her bushes in her back yard that made the whole box smell lovely and are now residing in my yarn trunks and hopefully making my yarn smell lovely as well, my first ever real, actual stitch markers (so I guess that’s the Fourth First – up until now I always just tied scrap yarn around the needle to mark the stitches) which are jeweled and beautiful and I can’t wait to get back to a point in a project that needs the stitches marked so I can use them and smile because I feel like a real knitter, a needle size/gauge checker (a really awesome one) because I mentioned that I lost my other one somewhere in my flat and I’m banking on it never returning until I move) and a skein of yarn from an indie dyer that I stalk on Etsy but have never purchased anything from. This yarn is SO VERY EXCITING to me, both because it’s inspired by one of my favourite fandoms (Welcome to Night Vale) but also because it’s even more beautiful in person and it’s not very expensive so it’s telling me I should just buy yarn from this dyer instead of just favouriting all of it and then being moderately sad when it sells out. I’ve found a new dyer and that’s amazing. So I suppose this is my Fifth First—it’s my first fandom-inspired indie yarn. It’s also my Sixth First because it’s 100% Blue-faced Leicester and I’ve never owned any BFL before.

Yarn swap … stressful, but INCREDIBLY FUN. Let’s do more of them!

Knitting Firsts: Part 2 - Fibre Festival

The Second First: Fibre Festival

The weekend after my two weekends of knitting classes, I ventured out of the confines of the city to my first ever fibre festival. It was a small one held out in one of the very rural suburbs at the county fair grounds, but I think that was just what I needed for my first time. I hear many horror stories from podcasters about the rush of people waiting to get in to the big festivals and the hordes of people all grabbing at the same yarn from a certain dyer and how people are carrying around armfuls just to make sure no one takes the one they want, and I’m just pretty sure that scene’s not for me. Instead, I went to this small one on the lookout for a select few things for a select few projects and I had a really great time. There were sheepdog trials and spinning demonstrations and many very nice vendors who I still feel bad about not giving money to. In the end I got just what I wanted (yarn to make the aforementioned sweater that I’m laughingly trying to accomplish by July 9, beautiful variegated organic wool yarn in just the right colours to finally make myself the Hobbit dress before the third movie premieres in December, and the perfect colour green yarn for my yarn swap partner (see the Third First)) and I also got some things I’ve been dreaming of for a long time (two skeins of Alisha Goes Around –and let me tell you that (1) Alisha is an AMAZING and LOVELY individual and  (2) I wanted to buy the whole damn table, and two skeins of Dansk garn called Kauni that I’ve been loving and wanting and dreaming of for a long time and have never seen in person anywhere in the US). Originally I thought I would make my sweater with Kauni, but then the other yarn turned up and I somehow knew that it had to be the sweater yarn and the Kauni will be turned into something perfect and wonderful. It may linger in my stash for years to come until it meets exactly the right pattern and circumstance and that is okay because I wish nothing but the best for it.

I also got an adorable pattern that SO picked out and a charming skein of wool/bison blend handspun from reasonably local bison (Dakotas) that still has the beautiful smell of lanolin and bison wool. Aside from yarn there was a booth selling all manner of sheep cheese and since I’m intolerant to all cow milk I have to get my cheese fix exclusively from sheep or goat cheese. So … I bought a lot of cheese. My drawers are full of yarn and my freezer is full of cheese and that’s the best possible way I can think of to exist.

In short, I had a blast at the festival and look forward to the next one. Maybe I’ll work my way up to something bigger. Here’s a photo of my yarny take homes (minus one skein because it got pretty much instantly converted to sweater) that caused me to text my best friend and say “I’m yarn envying myself because of all the awesome things I got”. 

Fibre festival: A+ would do again.

Knitting Firsts: Part 1 - Knitting Class

The past month (or so, I’ve been lax in posting all the things) has been a month of a lot of knitting firsts for me and I thought I’d share them with you. Because I got long winded, I’m going to do these as a series of posts.

So…we shall begin with…

The First First: Knitting Class (and tangentially … sock)

Because I’m the sort of person who thinks to herself “but why shouldn’t I do it the most awesome and hard way possible on the first try instead of easing into a thing”, I decided that for the femme Fifth Doctor costume I’m working on for a con upcoming in July (and then another one in August and then office Halloween in October) I should not only knit a vest (which is done and I really need to post photos of it but haven’t) which is easy and I KNOW how to do and will be nbd, and sew a skirt which is using a pattern I’ve already sewn and love and is also nbd, I should also knit myself socks. Knee high socks. Knee high T.A.R.D.I.Socks. I made this decision at the end of April and then told myself that before I could cast on said knee high socks I had to finish the mittens of repeated epic fail (more to come once that situation sorts itself out) and also my SO’s cardigan. Which, as previously discussed, took me until the middle of May. So I somehow decided that between May 15 and July 3 I would finish the half completed vest, sew a skirt, also knit another sweater that I wanted to make for a trip I have on July 9, and knit knee high socks that by all reports take experienced sock knitters months to years to do because they are SO DAMN ENORMOUS. Oh, and did I mention I’ve never knit a sock before in my life and while I conceptually understand that socks have heels and toes and legs and feet I don’t have a clue about how to adjust that to fit my actual heel or toe or leg or foot? Did I also mention that these socks are toe up and leave most of the adjusting to the knitter? They are.

Which brings me to my first first … my first knitting class. In a timely fashion, my LYS sent me an email that they were having a “knit a sock” class for the first two weeks of May. I’d never taken a class there before, but I learned to sew by taking classes so I figured what harm could it do. Granted this was a cuff down sock on two circular needles using worsted weight yarn and not a toe up sock with patterning and self-adjusting on 4 dpns, but at least I could understand the basics of sock mechanics. Hopefully. The short answer was, I found the people in the class not that awesome (much discussion that made me cringe at the levels of fail on various levels) and the teacher was distracted at best and almost no one but me actually made any progress or seemed to understand knitting in the round, but the materials I received and the comprehensive instructions on how to figure out what size your feet were and how the parts of the sock went together accordingly were hugely helpful. And at the end of it all I had a sock. Just one, but a sock no less. I want the cuff to be longer, but I ran out of time, so I’ll probably end up ripping it out and making it taller ( which can wait until closer to winter because worsted weight wool socks in the summer are just … no), but I have a sock.



So there you have it. My first class and my first very plain, very boring, ultimately well fitting sock.

I Return (Mostly) Victorious, with Finished Objects!

I feel like I’ve been neglecting you all lately. I promise it’s not intentional, I was just mired in my first true foray into non-monogamous knitting (I hated it) and was waiting until I had anything finished (or even remotely finished) to make an update. Consequently, I have about 5 posts in a row that I’m going to need to make as I’ve been doing ALL THE THINGS. I’ll try to space them out a bit so you don’t get them all at once.

The first thing I want to talk about is something I think I mentioned once before, the Men’s Striped Cardigan that I made for my SO for our anniversary. It’s out of Knit Picks CotLin (because I really wanted to knit with Knit Picks CotLin) and it turned out pretty well, despite me having a lot of struggles with the pattern (part my fault, part the pattern’s fault) and having to rip out the sleeve THREE TIMES (though it turns out that the third time I ripped it out, I didn’t actually have to rip it out, the pattern was just confusing). I also learned that although I don’t usually mind finishing/seaming, I DO hate seaming things with stripes because making the sleeve stripes line up with the yoke stripes was an exercise in madness. Because of the sleeve setbacks, I was worried I wouldn’t finish it by our anniversary, so I dropped all the other projects I had in progress (monogamy ftw) and basically did nothing with my free time but knit that sweater for about a week and a half. I finished weaving in all the ends at around 10:30pm on May 14 (the day before our anniversary). So, technically it was finished on time, but the seams were so horridly bunched up that I knew I needed to block it, so he couldn’t wear it right away. He did wear it to the fibre festival we attended this Sunday (more on that in a later post) and it fits him well and he likes it well enough that I think he’ll actually wear it, so I’m counting it a win. That means that I have successfully knit him THREE sweaters now and I have successfully knit myself two. Yep.

Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of him wearing the cardigan (despite the fact that I was with him all day yesterday when he had it on), so here’s a photo of it blocking.



I was really excited to use the CotLin yarn after listening to the Knit Picks podcast where they were talking about the yarn. I’d never knit with cotton yarn at all before, so it was a new experience for me to knit with yarn that didn’t have much elasticity to it and had a lot of stretch. I think I already mentioned that I had to switch to bamboo needles because the cotton yarn and the aluminum needles were not agreeing with one another. Once I switched to the bamboo, all went well. I didn’t LOVE the CotLin as much as I hoped I would, but I think it’s a pretty great yarn to knit with. It helps that the pattern I chose was designed with a cotton yarn, so I didn’t have to worry too much about how it would stretch with gravity (although I don’t know yet since SO has only worn it once), but the linen seems to help it keep a bit of integrity. The stitch definition is nice and it definitely wasn’t hard on my hands while I was knitting (something else I’ve heard about cotton yarns). I LOVE the colours that SO picked (Cashew – a lovely toasty tan colour, and Planetarium – a rich navy blue with the slightest bit of a greenish hue and almost a little sheen that’s basically the colour of the midnight sky) and I have quite a bit of yarn leftover (especially in the blue) so I’m thinking about other things I can make (perhaps for ME) in the yarn. I wish I had more of the tan left because I think it would be a great neutral for me to make another short-sleeved layering cardigan with, but I definitely don’t have enough of the tan for a sweater. The blue however …

The only thing I’d caution about when knitting this is that when I made it (in XL, not sure if smaller sizes also have this problem) according to the pattern dimensions, the armpit shaping starts a bit low, unless you’re planning on wearing a dress shirt or bigger shirt underneath it, and the sleeve lengths (at least on my SO) were about 3” too long if you made the sweater as written (see: why I had to rip back the sleeve the second time), so you might want to measure and adjust as needed.

I might knit this again, but not for a while and definitely not in stripes. Also, I forgot how much longer it takes me to make sweaters for SO because he is so much bigger than me! Yet somehow, he is the one that has all the sweaters that fit and I am the one with a bunch of sweaters in the “things that need to be re-knit” pile. Whatever.

Recommendation: Designer Cecily Glowik MacDonald

For some dumb reason I’ve all of a sudden decided that I absolutely *need* a cowl-neck sweater. Right now. Never mind that I have five projects in progress on my needles, some of them with timelines. Never mind that I don’t have the yarn for these projects and I was going through my stash today and told myself no more yarn until I use up a significant amount.

I’ve quelled myself for now and have put about forty bajillion cowl-neck sweaters into my Ravelry queue for a rainy day (or, you know, the next time I buy yarn), but in doing so, I discovered something.

I am in love with all the patterns of Cecily Glowik MacDonald. I’m sure I’m late to the game on this and all you lovely people have been happily knitting her things for ages now, but I’ve only just discovered her and now I would like to purchase every single pattern and do nothing but make and wear her fabulous sweaters every day of my life.

These sweaters are my new fandom. On the off chance you haven’t heard of them yet, please do go check them out. All are beautiful and the photography doesn’t do anything to make me want them less.

Yarn Review: Knit Picks CotLin

PSA: This also gets into a bit of a “needle review”, which is to say I might say some unpopular things about knitting needle brands and people who feel like if I’m not knitting with $400 needles I’m not doing it right. You have been warned.

Start Post

SO has been really into cardigans lately and since it is allegedly going to be summer soon, I thought that making wool cardigans for someone seemed a bit silly. Thanks to my binge listening to the KnitPicks podcast, I’d been seriously itching to knit with their cotton/linen yarn blend “CotLin”. I don’t really know why, but the podcast made it sound like such an amazing and exciting yarn and since I was thinking about summer knitting (who are we kidding here, I made a worsted weight, all wool, 4th Doctor scarf during the duration of last July/August…summer knitting isn’t a thing I think about) and I was thinking I should make some things out of cotton yarn (which I’ve never used before) and CotLin seemed fun.
I had to wait for the backordered black Palette to come in (Night’s Watch hat!), but as soon as it was ready I pulled SO in and we sat down and picked out colours for the cardigan. There was no question that a navy blue was going to be involved, but we spent a fair bit of time going over the various greys and brown colours and finally settled on “Cashew” and “Planetarium” (the cardigan is done with wide stripes—12 rows high with a gauge of 6 rows per inch). I waited for the yarn to come and then I got swatching.

The first thing I noticed while knitting the swatch was that although this yarn claims to be a DK weight, it’s very thin. I think it’s just spun very tightly, but when I put it up next to a strand of Palette, the CotLin strand is just about bigger than the Palette strand. That said, the pattern (which is written for DK weight yarn, although not cotton DK weight yarn…more on that when I talk about the cardigan) called for 4.5sts = 1” and 6 rows = 1” over stockinette stitch using US 7 needle and after washing and blocking the swatch, that’s what I got, so I’m rolling with it.

The second thing I noticed is that cotton yarn is strange. Or, rather, it’s strange compared to anything else I’ve ever knit with (which is basically acrylic and various wools). It feels like knitting with macrame thread (for all I know it basically *is* like knitting with macrame thread) as it slides through my hands. I’ve gotten used to it after knitting about a quarter of a cardigan, but for a while, especially since I’ve been switching between that, Malabrigo Rios (which is ridiculously soft superwash merino), KnitPicks Brava acrylic, and Knit Picks Palette, the CotLin just felt bizarre in my hands. Once it’s knitted, it’s actually rather soft, but it feels very stiff as I knit it and the fact that it has next to no memory (it doesn’t spring around or squish or anything) is still odd for me.

The third thing I noticed is that this yarn is terrible when knitted on aluminum needles. I was dropping stitches all over the place. The cotton yarn is slicker than wool and because it doesn’t have the fibre memory, it doesn’t grip the needles the way I’m used to. I have a Boye interchangeable needle set (this is where my potentially unpopular opinions on needles start…you have been warned) that I use almost exclusively to knit things. If I don’t use those, it’s because the cables disconnect from the needle tips and on certain projects (Palette on size 3) that means the yarn gets stuck in the connectors, so I’ve purchased a stand-alone Boye circular needle for that. In many cases, I also own the straight needles. Problem is, I somehow managed to lose ONE US7 straight needle (which was the reason I was gifted the Boye set in the first place because I was knitting a lot of things on US7 and I had ONE NEEDLE and no circulars). I do own wood DPNs (mainly Clovers) and I own them in a US7, but this cardigan called for me to cast on 150+ stitches and it’s not knit in the round (because it’s a cardigan), so I wasn’t going to use DPNs.

Here are my needle thoughts. Yes. I just admitted to you that I literally knit everything on US$8 aluminum needles from the craft store. Everything. Unless it needs to be on a DPN and then I knit it on US$10 bamboo DPNs unless I have caved to pressures of ergodynamics and bought myself square Knitter’s Pride Cubics rosewood US3 DPNs (which, lbr, were also $10 DPNs) because all the hats I make are finished on US3 DPNs and I own NO US3 DPNs at all (been finishing them on US5s. I’m lazy and cheap, what?). I’ve been using those to knit my Evenstar Gloves, and I like them, but really can’t tell much of a difference between them and the Clovers I usually use. So, okay, let’s discuss this.

Whenever I hear someone saying that one needs to buy only Hiya Hiya or only ChiaoGoo or ABSOLUTELY ONLY Signature needles, I sort of stop listening to them. I admit that the cables on my Boye circular set are pretty stiff, and if I use anything other than the two biggest sizes I basically can’t use them because the cables are too stiff to bend properly. I admit that the junctions routinely come unspun and I have to respin the tips on at the end of rows. But you know what, I’m actually okay with that. A friend gifted me the set for free and it has all the things I need and I’ve knitted some truly amazing things with so-called “worthless needles”. I once heard someone say that if you paid so little for a needle that you feel no remorse giving it away, it wasn’t worth knitting on in the first place. I’m calling bullshit on that. I knit on “worthless” Boye aluminum needles and I knit with a bunch of “horrible” acrylic yarn and I do some really fucking fantastic work. So there.

Anyway, the point of this is that I was dropping stitches all over the place and quickly realized I needed bamboo circulars. I’d been at JoAnn to buy fabric (I needed the Marvel licensed fabric and they routinely carry it), but I didn’t have the swatch done for the CotLin, so I didn’t yet know what size needles I would need, so I didn’t purchase any. Thankfully, the same friend who gifted me the Boye set also has bamboo circs in just about every size. So, I started the ribbing on my US6 Boye aluminums and then moved to the size 7 for the rows and just dealt with it until she came by on Sunday and saved me with the bamboo. You can definitely tell that the first stripe had a lot more fixes done to it if you look at it closely, but SO is okay with it and I’m hoping after a wash/block you won’t even be able to tell.

In summary: It’s too soon for me to tell what exactly I think about the CotLin, but now that I have the proper needles I’m finding it much easier to knit. I’m worried about proper drape on the cardigan once it’s finished, and I’m not convinced it’s going to hold shaping well through the sleeves, but I’ll be certain to keep you all posted through the process.
Sorry this got long. I will leave you with a quick photo of the CotLin cardigan as it currently stands.

Finished Object: Summer Cardigan

Perhaps you remember a few weeks ago when I mentioned I was playing around with the Malabrigo Rios I’ve had laying around for years now. Well, I finished the cardigan I was knitting with it! Which also means that I’ve successfully completed a second sweater for myself, and this one actually fit on the first try!

The pattern is: Katrina Ballerina Lace Layering Cardigan by Nicole Feller Johnson. Photos below, then my thoughts on knitting it.

(Sorry about the poor photo quality on the first two photos. SO just hasn’t yet mastered the art of not mashing your finger down on the shutter button so hard that it makes the camera shake, yet.)





The Malabrigo yarn was absolutely lovely to work with. I chose the short-sleeved cardigan because I thought I’d run out of yarn (I only had three skeins and all the patterns I was seeing called for 4 at a minimum), but I ended up with nearly a full skein leftover, even after adding a few extra rows to make the lace begin where I wanted it to. This means I get to do another project — the Evenstar gloves by Audrey M. It seems perhaps a bit silly to some of you to undertake a summer cardigan and follow it up with a pair of mittens, but as it’s mid-April and where I live there’s snow on the ground and the current temperature is 17F (-8C), I wonder if I shouldn’t perhaps have started with gloves and moved on to making the sweater sometime in May or June. I did wear it the other day though, because I finished it (really it just took me two weeks to buy buttons and then sew them on because I’m a procrastinator about such things) and I was damn well going to wear it. You can see my creative solution to the short sleeve sweater in winter problem in those photos.

The pattern itself is also lovely. It was a breeze to knit, being just several rows of stockinette stitch while you work the raglan increases for the sleeves and then moving in to a simple two row lace repeat over and over until you get the right length. The most difficult part was getting the arrow points in the lace at the bottom, but that could be because I was trying to do it while we had a friend over to watch Frozen and I had to try to count and it just wasn’t happening for me. Once the film ended and everyone was out of the flat, I managed them just fine. It’s not a free pattern, but it’s only $7US, so it’s very manageable. It’s also incredibly well written. The instructions are laid out in sections with adorable ballet terms and they’re clear and easy to follow no matter what size you’re making. I would take the advice of the pattern and size it up one if you’re planning to wear the sweater over anything substantial. I made a size M and, as I think you can see from the photos I’m a rather petite person and it fits me well.

In summary: I adore Malabrigo Rios (while I was wearing the sweater yesterday I kept squishing the end of it in my hand because the yarn was so lovely) and hope I can find some again and create something else lovely, and this pattern is a dream to knit, fits like a charm, and is really the perfect pattern for a summer layering cardigan. I have dreams of making several more in different colours and perhaps seeing what it would do if I moved on to a cotton/linen yarn (more on Knit Picks CotLin in my next post) to make it even lighter for the hot summer months.

Knitting Lessons: Yarn Overs

Halfway through a lace pattern I learned I do yarn overs backwards.

Whatever. It looks awesome.

New Techniques: Spit Splice

Just did my first ever spit splice and it worked beautifully and I feel like some kind of yarn magician.

FO: Sweaters that Fit

Remember how yesterday I said I’d never made myself a sweater that fits? That’s all over with now.

No, I didn’t finish the Rios sweater. I’ve been told I’m a pretty fast knitter, but I’m not superhuman. What I did do, was finish my second attempt at a pattern I found on Ravelry called the $5 in Paris sweater.

(Welcome to my office. My selfie-taking device today was the webcam on my computer. I’m pretty sure I freaked out dude in the cube behind me a lot. Also…sorry about the photo quality. I just didn’t have time to use a real camera this morning)

 


The thing about this sweater (or things, rather) is that it was basically destined to be made by me. Yet somehow I still needed two tries to get it right. The pattern is designed for worsted weight acrylic yarn (which I think you‘ve learned by now basically describes my yarn stash), it’s intended to be knit with multiple colours, so it’s a good way to use up yarn that might not exist in full skeins (or sometimes you have to make this brown vest for someone like 4 times and the original pattern wanted the yarn held doubled (who doubles worsted weight yarn for a vest, IDK) so you have way more yarn than you needed, but not enough to actually make another sweater because it turns out it was a good thing you bought twice as much yarn because the vest was phenomenally longer than you thought it would be), it’s knit in the round (which, like, I don’t care. I’ll purl and seam all day long if I have to), so I basically just had to sit there and mindlessly knit and it’s REALLY fast, and best of all, it’s a raglan that’s knit top down, which means I can try it on as I knit. This last fact makes it even more comical that I managed to make it too big the first time I knit it. I don’t know what to tell you other than sometimes things get weird once I get my hands on them.
This is the first top down sweater I’ve ever made. It’s the first raglan sweater I’ve ever made. It’s the first sweater in the round I’ve ever made. But! I’m glad I learned all the skills because the sweater I’m now making with the Rios is a raglan sleeved cardigan that’s knit top down. So by some good knitting fortune I managed to do things in the correct order. Honestly, I was going to start the Rios project a few weeks ago, but one of the Ravellenic Games challenges during the Olympics this year was to reclaim some yarn, and I knew that if I was going to reclaim yarn from one of the many to-be-reknit project, this was going to be the fastest and the one that made me the least angry, so I frogged it. Then I had all this yarn sitting on my couch, and I thought I should knit it. It has the added benefit of being a good spring/fall sweater (I made it in ¾ sleeve, even though it’s supposed to be short sleeved. LBR about the weather where I live, okay. If it’s cold enough to wear an entirely acrylic sweater, it’s cold enough that you want sleeves.) So I worked it up (it’s fast) making a smaller size and making a point to do all the ribbing on smaller needles so it wasn’t so ginormously boaty around the neck and the sleeves and I tried it on like a billion times and now everything is wonderful and I now know all these great skills to make the nice cardigan out of expensive yarn actually fit me on the first damn try.

Thoughts on Swatching

I know that swatching is a contentious topic with a lot of knitters. When I first started knitting (listen to me, I talk as though I’ve been doing this for 20 years), I didn’t make swatches, but that was because no one told me to do it!

Honestly, when I learned to knit I made a garter stitch scarf and then a basic hat and some mittens and it was all in a class with sufficient hand-holding and it worked out great.
Then, because I’m not the sort of person who sees a utilitarian usage for more than the 5 hats and 15 scarves I already owned BEFORE I started knitting, I realized that if I was going to make things for myself (and dammit, I was going to make things for myself) they were going to be sweaters. Which is cool. I love sweaters. My sweater shelf (and the dresser in which I keep other sweaters) is overflowing. And exactly none of the sweaters on my shelf were knit by me.

That’s right. 3+ years later, I still have never knit myself a wearable sweater.

Now, I don’t say that I haven’t knit myself a sweater, because I have. Three of them, in fact. The problem is, all the sweaters I’ve made myself are in the bin (lbr, cardboard box) of things that don’t fit. Why is that? Well … partially, it’s because I use acrylic yarn in inappropriate ways, but also it’s because of swatching.

Here’s the thing. If you’re going to take the time to knit something gorgeous so you can have a beautiful piece of whatever, you sort of need to make sure that you’re knitting it to the right size, and if you’re following a pattern (or if you’re making up a pattern) you need to know what that size is. So … it’s important in my hat making, for instance, that I know how many stitches to the inch I’m getting so I end up with hats that are the right size for human heads (accidentally knitting on US5s instead of US3s aside). The only way to do that is to figure out how many stitches I knit per inch. Cool? Cool.

I actually first did a swatch when I wanted to substitute a yarn in a pattern. The yarn wasn’t the weight the pattern called for (but was the right fibre, so I thought the drape/shaping would be similar), so I needed to figure out what I needed to do in order to get gauge. Here’s the thing … that sweater STILL doesn’t fit. (That’s a wholly frustrating experience because a LOT of math was involved in that ish, and I’m super annoyed that it’s too SMALL, of all things. But that’s for another time, since I spent way too much on that yarn to *not* rip it out and try again.) For a while I just dumped the sweater in my box of shame and let it languish (not as long as the one I have to fix BEFORE that one because I made it before I knew how to swatch at all. It’s coat length, too. Delightful.), but since I’ve been listening to podcasts, I’ve gotten some insight that seems ever so obvious.

Wash your swatches.

That’s right. Wash your swatches. Wash them the way you would wash whatever you are knitting with that yarn. Because here’s the thing, right. I spend all this time swatching away to try to get the right gauge so that my garment fits, and then I wash it and block it and sometime in my blocking process I either realize that this sweater is either WAY bigger than I thought it was or it’s WAY smaller than it’s supposed to be. Why? Because the yarn is relaxing.

The podcast I got this from (they touch on it in several episodes, and I have no idea which one they really talk about it the most in … sometime in 2008-2009 is the best I can give you) is the Knit Picks podcast. There’s one episode where Kelley really explains what goes on in your fibre from the time it leaves the sheep until you wash it that’s really enlightening. The thing to remember is that even after it’s put on a skein and then wound into a ball and then knit into an object, the fibre is still all tense. It’s been through a lot. Once you get it in the water and let it just hang out and then let it dry on its own, it relaxes into the shape it wants to take … which is rarely the shape it had when it was on your needles. This, in turn, means the gauge you so painstakingly worked to get is now WRONG.

Solution: Wash your swatches, check your gauge again.

I recently did this with the swatch of Malabrigo Rios I showed you a few days ago. I knew I needed to get 18 stitches and 20 rows to 4”. So I knit up a swatch of 24x24 on US7 needles, did a few rows of garter to separate, then did it again on US8. I measured the gauge, and both were close (the 8 was closer), but neither was right. Ordinarily, this would have been super frustrating for me (and probably included swearing followed by me trying to recalculate the pattern math (incorrectly, lbr here) to get the sweater to match my gauge). But! Because of the podcast, I didn’t panic. I put the end caps on my circs, then tossed the swatch in a sink full of cold water with the tiniest bit of soap, let it soak for 5 minutes, rinsed it, and set it down on the blocking board and pulled it out so it was almost flat. That evening, it was fully dry and I measured gauge again. Turned out … size 8 was perfectly on gauge and now I’m happily knitting along on a delightful sweater.

The magic of the properly executed gauge swatch.

New Project: Falling in Love With Yarn

Okay, so I’m not sure it’s “the one” yet, but I am knitting a new thing and I just listened to a podcast that compared making a swatch to a first date and I liked the analogy so I thought I’d run with it.



As a promise to my SO, I said I’d use up some of my stash yarn before I buy new yarn for myself (yarn for Etsy projects doesn’t count) and because I do things systematically, I sorted my Ravelry stash by date stashed and I’m finding projects I can make (in the time I have when I’m not making hats like I work in a factory) starting with the oldest yarns first.
This led me to Malabrigo Yarns Rios. Way back when I was a brand new knitter sometime in 2010, I got it in my mind that I was going to make SO a brown vest (per request). We trekked down to one of our many LYS in town (this is how long ago it was…the store is no longer where it used to be, it has since moved and is, in fact, the place where I bought my emergency ball of Rowan Pure Wool DK tan for 4th Doctor Scarf of Frustration) and started looking for brown yarn. What you should know is that this was literally the first time I had bought yarn anywhere that wasn’t a big box craft store and I had no idea what I was doing. The poor employee had to watch me while I  wandered around for half an hour lamenting the price of yarn, then had to show me how to wind the yarn into cakes because I’d never seen an actual yarn hank before, then asked me if I knew about stranding with that yarn (obviously I didn’t since I didn’t even know WTF that yarn was). I said “yes” though, because I can’t possibly admit to a complete stranger who might be able to help me that I don’t know something. That’s just a particular quirk of me though. I imagine I had at least done something smart like write down what weight of yarn and what length of yarn I needed for the project, but I can’t be sure that ending up with the right amount wasn’t just a happy accident. So…if I bought the yarn for the vest, then what’s going on with it now?
Well. I made the vest a few months ago (after about 5 tries because SO is bigger than the pattern and I don’t can maths), but I ended up making it out of Red Heart Soft. I don’t know why. Don’t ask me why. I imagine it was because I decided that after I spent US$45+ on yarn I was making something for myself out of it, dammit. So it sat in my stash, probably waiting for me to make *myself* a vest.

Then, at some point, I realized that I don’t wear vests.

For a long time, this was *still* my only trip to a non-chain craft store and my non-big brand acrylic yarn purchase. What can I say, no one ever raised me with the stigmas against acrylic yarns. Michael’s/JoAnn/Hancock would sell me yarn on the cheap, so I bough it. I ain’t ashamed. But, since I’m a borderline hoarder, and the Rios was still the most expensive yarn in my stash, I knew I needed to do something important with it and I didn’t have anything important to do.

Fast forward to now-ish. Periodically, I’d pull out the Rios (now not the only nice yarn in my stash) and think “I should make this into a thing”, but not have the time or the energy or the whatever to actually do anything about it. So it would sit there. And I’d buy more yarn (funny thing, I now own like 4 colours of Malabrigo worsted that I *also* don’t know what to do with). I had these plans for what order I was going to knit things in, but then I opened an Etsy store and had to make like a billion hats and forty 4th Doctor scarves, so that threw all my plans out the window.

Since I got hardcore into knitting podcasts over the last month, I’ve been getting all sorts of inspiration and ideas (usually from back in 2009) lately. One particular podcast did a challenge over the course of 2012 (yeah, I’m behind…story of my life) that encouraged people to post their goals for the year in the Ravelry group and then they’d draw prizes once a month for everyone who posted in that month’s thread that they had met a goal. Most of the goals included using up stash. Which, of course, was what gave me the revelation that I should use up stash. It wasn’t possibly the fact that I recently bought a plastic shelving unit to keep my yarn in so it wasn’t just haphazardly piled in paper bags in the corner of the bedroom and all the yarn STILL didn’t fit in there and had to expand into the ottoman and the antique chest that SO’s mom gave us. No. It was people talking about using up stash.
But, it’s gotten me down this road and I’ve finally finished up some other things (I frogged a sweater that I’d made last fall and decided to reknit it…I’m blaming/thanking Ravellenic games for that one), so today I was home and I knit a swatch. Well, I knit two swatches in one, which is why the photo looks a bit wonky. I’m sure that’s not the approved method of swatching, but I’m lazy and I’m sure as hell not cutting any of this yarn (I’m not actually sure I have enough for the project I chose), so it is what it is.

I learned some things about swatching from yet another podcast, but that’s another post. I’ll keep you posted on how the Rios sweater adventure turns out.