Sewing: Legend of Zelda Fabric Source

Regarding the fabric used in the project bag tutorial I posted yesterday (since I got some comments on its awesomeness):

It is Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past fabric that I ordered from Spoonflower (which is the best place in the world to find geeky fabric, though it is a bit pricey).

Exterior: Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Hyrule map
Interior: Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Sewing: Project Bag Tutorial (at long last)

Since I had to make another project bag over the weekend, I told myself that I needed to actually post the "how I make my project bags" tutorial that I've been meaning to post since sometime in October. It's past time, and I hope it may be helpful to some people.
I will say that I offer multiple bag sizes, so the actual sizes/dimensions are more formulas than numbers. I hope that's fine. I can do it, so that probably means it's really easy math!

That said, let's dive in!


A note: Although I don't mention it all the time, please know that I press my seams open after every sewing step and that I trim my seam allowances down to 1/4" to make it easier to turn the bags and put them together without too much seam bulk. When trimming your seams, be especially sure not to accidentally clip any of your stitching. If you do not want to trim the seams, at the very least you will find it helpful to notch your corners to make the bags easier to turn.

Step 1: Cut the fabric. I use a different fabric for interior and exterior, so it's basically two of the exterior fabric and two of the interior fabric, not on the fold. I also cut a pocket out of the main fabric.

The bag sizes I offer are 9"x9", 12"x12", 15"x15", and 18"x18". I just really like to have square bags. You can basically use whatever dimensions you want. I use a 1/2" seam allowance all the way through, so whatever I do, I just add 1" to the finished dimensions when I cut, so...10"x10", 13"x13", 15"x15", or 19"x19".

For the pocket, I cut the main fabric to 12" x whatever the bag width dimension is. You will fold it in half to make a 5.5" tall pocket.


Step 2: Pin the outer fabric, right sides together, being sure to line up the corners.




Step 3: Starting about an inch and a half down from the top of the fabric, sew around three sides of the project bag, pivoting when you get to within a half inch from each corner. Stop an inch and a half from the top of the other side of the bag. In mine, you'll see that I then left a small half inch opening and stitched the last inch to the top. I've since stopped doing it this way, as I find it means you have to rip that out when you sew the inside to the outside.




Step 4: Fold the pocket fabric in half lengthwise, putting right sides together. Make sure to keep the pattern upright if you have one. Fold along the 12" side so you end up with a 6" tall piece of fabric.




Step 5: Starting at the fold, sew around the three open sides of the fabric, pivoting a half inch from each corner. Be sure to leave a 2" opening before you reach the next fold, so you can invert the pocket to be right side out.




Step 6: Trim your seams to a 1/4" seam allowance, being sure not to cut the stitching. Using a tool or a wooden chopstick, pull the fabric through the opening you left until the pocket is right side out. Be sure to use your tool or your chopstick to push out the corners so that they are square. Press the pocket flat.

(Half turned pocket. Sorry the photo isn't the best.)




Step 7: Pin the pocket to one of the pieces of lining fabric, making sure to centre the pocket on the fabric so that the edges of the pocket fall just inside the seam allowance. Don't worry about sewing up the opening you left for turning the pocket, since it will be incorporated into the seam of the lining. I like to pin the pocket a comfortable distance up from the bottom. I eyeball it, depending on what size the bag I'm making is.




Step 8: Using a zigzag stitch and sewing along the edge of the pocket, sew around three sides, leaving an opening on the top (because it's a pocket!)




Step 9 (optional): You may want to sew a line or two down the middle of the pocket to bisect it and create several smaller pockets. Do this now, as it's basically impossible to do it later.




Step 10: Pin the lining pieces right sides together, making sure the pocket is in the right location and making sure the corners are square.




Step 11: Starting an inch and a half down from the top, sew around three sides of the bag and stop an inch and a half from the top, just as you did for the exterior of the bag, only this time, leave a 2" opening in the middle of the bottom side so you can assemble the bags easier later.




Step 12: Box the corners of both your bags (inner and outer). The process should be done as follows:

1. For each of the four bottom corners on your two bags, fold the corner with the side and bottom seam touching to create a point and iron it flat.
   



2. Measure 1.5” from the point and draw a straight line. Stitch across this line and then cut the fabric ¼” away from the stitch line. Seal the edge with a zig-zag stitch or trim with a pinking shears.
   
   

Step 13: Assemble the bag. Turn the lining bag inside out and make sure the exterior bag is right side out and then slip the exterior bag inside the lining bag. Pin the bags together around the opening. If you want to have a strap fold it in half and put it between the bags, looped end down inside the bag, with the two ends protruding slightly out of the top.



 
Step 14: Sew around the top edge of the bag using a 1/2” seam allowance. If you've included a strap, go over it a few times to reinforce. 

 
Step 15: Pull the external bag through the hole you left in the bottom of the lining bag, lining up the bottom, flat corners of both bags. Sew up the seam in the bottom of the lining as best you can, then. Iron the bag flat.



 
Step 16: Sew a line of stitching all the way around the bag above the opening for the cord (about an inch down from the top), and then sew another line of stitching parallel to this just below the opening for the cord (about an inch and a half from the top) to create a channel for the cord to live in. Thread the cord into the channel by attaching it to a safety pin and running it in between the lining and the exterior fabric. Thread a toggle onto the cord and tie off the ends. I also like to put a snap in the centre to allow for threading yarn through the bag without needing the bag to be fully opened.



 

Congratulations! Your reversible draw-string project bag with pockets is complete!

New Year: A Look Backward and A Plan for the Future

Hi there. First of all, wherever you are in the world, happy 2015. I wish you and yours a safe, happy, healthy year.

Now...down to business. First, a little look back at 2104.

I know I've been pretty bad about blogging regularly, and there were a lot of things I wanted to share with you that I simply didn't make the time for. I hope to get better at that in the future (see the plan for the future section), but for now, let's do a little recap of the year and then talk about what I have planned for crafting and blogging in 2015.

FO: Trilobita OR Accidental NaKniSweMo

As always, apologies for not posting. I’ve been doing a LOT of crafty things and not allocating myself a lot of time for blogging about them. I have designs on changing that in the new year, but we shall see, I suppose.

I know I promised a photo tutorial of how I made a project bag for my swap partner back in September, and honestly, putting together the photo tutorial is what’s been hanging up my blogging, since I never seem to have time to sit down and actually put that together. I still have plans of doing it someday, but I’m going to try to move forward without it and get it in when I can get it in. Hopefully that’s okay.

I’m going to skip forward in time a bit and then try to remember to backfill you with all the things that went on since September until now as I’m able. I feel like this is slightly more time relevant (although it should have been posted last week) so I’m moving on.
Okay. Now that the administrative work is out of the way, let’s jump in with a story about my first ever participation in NaKniSweMo. It was accidental. It wasn’t challenging. I have knitted myself my FOURTH properly fitting sweater.

Here’s the story:


If you were reading back in May, you might remember that I attended a local fibre festival. While there, I bought some yarn (okay, I bought a lot of yarn), specifically I bought what I referred to then as “beautiful variegated organic wool yarn in just the right colours to finally make myself the Hobbit dress before the third movie premieres in December”. So, round about the end of October I’d finished all the hats I’d committed to (you didn’t hear about those, but hopefully you will later) and I thought . . . if I’m going to get this done by the time I see the Hobbit movie, I’d better start now.

So I wound the yarn and I swatched and the yarn was lovely and all was well. I did the math and cast on for the sweater and was happily knitting my very long rows of reverse stockinette stitch in the flat with zero trouble at all. I knit on it all day during a local podcast retreat I attended on November first and had made about 20 cm of progress on it and all was well. Except that I was nearly out of the first ball of yarn. I had three total balls of yarn. This is supposed to be a knee length cardigan with a hood. And I hadn’t even made it to my hip yet and I was nearly through a third of my yarn. The pattern claims that at the largest I will need 895 yards (818 m of yarn). I had 990 yds (905.3m). Before I even got close to an eighth of the way through the pattern I was out of a third of my yarn. At this point, it became immensely obvious to me  that I did not have enough yarn for this project.

It saddened me, because I’d bought this yarn specifically for this project because the colours reminded me of the Shire and everything was very hobbit and lovely and I was really looking forward to having a new sweater for the movie (I’ve never made myself an item specifically to go see a film before so I wanted to get in on the hype). But! I had this lovely yarn and I didn’t want it to go to waste, so I took to Ravelry. I have many Hobbit and Lord of the Rings inspired patterns in my queue and I tried to match up what I had with one of them, but nothing worked out. So I decided that I could still make myself a sweater out of this yarn and wear it to the film even if it’s not specifically Hobbit themed because the yarn still reminds me of the Shire and it’s lovely and it will still make me happy.

So . . . on November 1, I ripped out all of the knitting I’d done on the Hobbit dress, rewound the yarn, and picked a new pattern. And I felt good about it.

On November 2, I cast on Trilobita by Annamária Ötvös. It’s a beautiful yoked sweater pattern with raglan sleeve increases knit from the top down and it has these cute little details on the neckline and the cuff that look like little trilobite fossils if you look at them close enough and know what to look for. Most of it’s just stockinette in the round with short row shaping for the yoke and decreases and increases for the waistline. The pattern is incredibly well written and comes in a good range of sizes. It was easy to knit yet still interesting. I’m not incredibly proficient at short rows yet, so I had to rip out the short row shaping once because I wasn’t doing the wrap and turns correctly, but I worked it out and continued on.

The yarn is a sport weight Falkland dyed by Dyenamic Duo (who are so indie they don’t have a website I could find). I’ve never knit with Falkland before but I enjoyed it. It’s not a super fine micron like Merino, but it’s also not as scratchy as Shetland. I found it to be just a good, warm, somewhat rustic wool that I loved knitting and I loved wearing. I hope to find myself some more Falkland someday soon and highly recommend it.

It’s a substantial amount of knitting, certainly, and it’s not for beginners, but I had a great time knitting this sweater and completed it within the time frame very easily. Then again, I’m not sure I’m the sort of person for whom an event like this is supposed to be a challenge. You may know by now that I’m a very monogamous knitter. I have a good amount of time to knit and I only work on one thing from start to finish, so even with a few setbacks it’s realistic for me to plan on getting a sweater done in a month.

So, my participation in NaKniSweMo 2014 was EXTREMELY incidental and not challenging in the least, but I did it and I submitted it and I have a sweater I love and the day I wore it three people complimented it and that’s what matters.

Here's a photo taken with the timer feature on my phone in the very terrible lighting of my living room in a grey Minnesota winter.

Video Game Swap Part 1: Yarn Dyeing

So, now that it’s over and the recipient has received all their things, I can talk about the most recent yarn/knitting/crafting swap I got myself into on Ravelry.

There’s a group called the Odd Duck Swaps of Ravelry, and they organize thematic swaps every single month of the year. The way it works is you generally have about a month to sign up, two months to actually craft/shop/mail the swap package, and then you post a thank you when you’ve received your package and the swap is completed. After hearing about how much fun people were having doing this, I decided to scope out the group. On my first visit there, I found out they were just starting sign-ups for a video game swap.

Now, (without getting into the whole ri-fuckin-diculous gamergate situation) I’m not the sort of person who has ever considered myself a “gamer”. I mean, I usually (but not always) enjoy games when I play them, but I didn’t grow up with video games and I don’t keep up with the latest releases and I don’t have a steam account or any of that. It’s just that it so happens that my first “real” fandom, and the fandom that just won’t quit and I never want to, is for a series of video games. So I’m basically SUPER into one video game and have played a few more and have a general knowledge of even more than that. But still, I thought the swap would be fun and I felt like I was comfortable enough with video games to be able to participate. So I signed up. And it was fun. And I will do more of them in the future, because it turns out I really like making things for someone else and the excitement of seeing their virtual excitement over receiving the items I crafted them.

This post is going to be the first of a two-parter on two of the new(ish) undertakings I began with this swap package. I included more than these things (I knitted this Zelda Triforce Scarf that was easy enough to make, but still deserves mention, for one thing), but these are the two things that really stretched into the crafting me of the future, if you will (and I will . . . sorry, that’s a reflexive inside joke that zero of you reading this will understand.)
Without further ado . . . yarn dyeing!

My recipient mentioned that their favourite game was Baten Kaitos, which is a Dreamcast (I think) game that I had never heard of, but my far more knowledgeable gamer husband and his college roommate had spent time playing. Because this game is old and I think it has a pretty small fanbase, there isn’t any merchandise out there for it AT ALL. This is okay, since my recipient also mentioned that they like Zelda and Skylanders and all sorts of things that have way more popularity than Baten Kaitos, but as a person who’s only into video games that have next-to-no crafting fanbase (as in, there aren’t indie dyed yarns or fabrics or patterns or any of that) I sort of knew how excited the recipient would be if something from a fandom you don’t expect to see anything from showed up in the package. So, since I’m newly immersed in a commitment to yarn dyeing, I decided to make my first real yarn dyeing adventure something inspired by my recipient’s favourite charater in Baten Kaitos, Kalas.
 
So, going off the photos I could find online, it seems like the character wears a light blue and darker blue armour set offset with brown leather strappings, so I decided that my yarn was going to be the dark blue transitioning into brighter blue and then the leathery brown. The bare yarn I selected to dye was a fingering weight 75% superwash wool, 25% nylon yarn. I had three 50g skeins, but this was my first time dyeing and I didn’t want to screw up three skeins of yarn in the event that everything went horribly wrong, so I only dyed one of them. I knew this would mean that I was giving the recipient barely enough yarn to do anything with and really it would be better if I could dye two skeins at once and at least give 100g, but I was really afraid of messing it up. Turns out I had no need, because this yarn is one of the best I’ve made to date. That could be because I’m a sucker for the blue/brown variegation, but all reports from those who’ve seen it in person are that it’s pretty badass.

I dyed the whole thing with Wilton’s Icing Gels using a plain stainless steel kitchen pot. Minimal mess, no harsh chemicals, beautiful colour. I highly recommend this method for anyone who might be thinking about dyeing some yarn, but doesn’t have a large kitchen or space for extra equipment or is even just a little nervous about the harsh chemicals in a working kitchen like I was. I’ve since dyed 20 more skeins of yarn in various colourways using this methodology, and the only thing I haven’t been able to get right so far is grey. Not a bad track record, and I hope you’ll all follow along with me on my yarn dyeing journey as I grow into this and figure it out and post all the pictures of my progress here for you to see. If you follow me on Instagram, you'll probably get a quicker peek at what I'm working on, but I'll make sure that everything eventually gets posted here as well!

To start . . . here’s a few photos of the special edition Baten Kaitos – Kalas yarn I did for this swap. Not bad for a first start, if I may say so myself!

 


Stay tuned for part 2 of the swap, where I give you a detailed tutorial on how I made a project bag!

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.