FO Friday: It's Still Not the Thing I Wanted to Have Done

Hi all,

The blue wrap is still not done, but I have good faith that you will not see it again here until it's done. I have finished tinking back all the extra pattern repeats I wrote and hope to start the final edging piece tonight. It should be done soon. Then it has to block, which as I mentioned before has its own set of challenges.

So what is done? A project bag. It doesn't seem like much, and it isn't really, especially when you consider that I did all the cutting, sewing, and putting a drawstring in it last Wednesday and all I had to do was put on a snap and take photos, but it's what I've got. It's my first non-fandom-specific project bag, but it's out of some pretty geeky fabric anyway (which a friend made me a skirt out of!). I made this with the intention of it being the bag I offered up for the Prairie Girls Knit and Spin Legendprairie 2016 contest, and perhaps it will be, but I'm thinking I'll let the recipient choose their own bag at this point. Still, contest drawings were released today so I figured I'd better have something to show for it. It's now available in the shop if anyone loves it enough to buy it.

 

Also done (and really it was supposed to just be a thing I did for me because I needed it to knit socks for the KGK CAL), is a new yarn colourway. I needed a basic grey yarn to knit the body of socks (more explanation on that later), so I pulled a few skeins and dropped them in a dyepot with grey dye, not really intending anything to come of it. And then when I was skeining it yesterday I realised it was basically amazing and I immediately listed it in the shop. It's called "Lonely Mountain" after the dwarven home of Erebor in The Hobbit because the kettle-dyed grey reminded me of all the establishing shots of a lone mountain in the distance that you see in all the Hobbit films. It's not flashy or anything, but if you want a good grey yarn I think this colour is pretty fantastic.

 

FO Friday: Do Not Speak to Me of Dragon Fire Socks

I know I said I was hoping to have these done by last Friday so I could show them off, but (1) it takes a longer time to knit the feet portion of socks than I think it does and (2) I was taking a class at the local fibre festival that specifically said I needed a project to knit and it occurred to me that if I finished the second sock on Friday night then I wouldn't have anything to knit during class, so I stopped working on them and swatched for the hat I posted about on Wednesday instead.

Anyway, they're done now. I wore them the other day and I LOVE them. They fit so incredibly well and were absolutely lovely to have on my feet all day. Fantastic pattern. I highly recommend it.

 

It remains difficult to take a picture of my own feet, but I tried to give you a sense of the chain mail cable pattern on the front, the unique foot detail that's actually a really cool alternative gusset placement, and the leaf detail on the back of the leg. 

They look complicated, but the patterns are all super easy to memorize and they knit up really fast. The yarn does hide the pattern more than I wanted it  to, but it striped up in a fortuitous way and I feel like you can see the pattern well enough.I'll probably knit another pair with a more solid yarn sometime because it's such a great pattern, but I'm happier with these socks than any of the other handful of socks I've knit.

To recap:

Pattern: Do Not Speak to Me of Dragon Fire by KnottyKnerd (I was test knitting, but will link the pattern as soon as it becomes available.)

Yarn: My own custom dye that I made just to knit these socks "Elvenking", but is now available in my Etsy store.

My review... buy this pattern as soon as it's available. These socks are awesome. (And the yarn's not so bad either!)

WIP Wednesday: Sock (and a quarter)

Here's the completed sock as it was on Monday. Since this I've managed to get another 48 rows done on the next one, but I didn't photograph it. Lots going on around here today.

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.