WIP Wednesday: The Fifth Fourth Doctor Scarf (now with extra scarf!)

Hi all,

A person might think that since I've been on break from school for most of August, I would have found time to post. Not so! 9 hour work days so I can make some money and because I have no vacation and myriad weekend events sort of pre-empted all that. I still had time to buy yarn though...no worries there. Someday I'll round it all up from the two cities it's split between and take photographs of it and actually put it in Ravelry so that it officially exists. But today is not that day.

Today we're here to talk about the fifth scarf.

There are no blog entries about scarves 1 or 2 (although I did get to visit with scarf 2 in the wilds while working on scarf 5), but if you've been reading for a while you may remember the saga that was knitting both scarves 3 and 4 in a 2 month period and the colour issues that came up with scarf 4.
Well...this scarf is for the same recipient of 4, only with new and improved colours, more Shetland, and 1.75 times more scarf!!!!

The buyer is super great to work with and has commissioned me to make him another scarf even though I completely underdelivered on the first one I made him, and generally seems to think I'm pretty great to work with. So IDK, but I'll take it. Glad I'm doing something right despite feeling like I've screwed this up at every available opportunity. He bought all the yarn so he could make sure he was getting the colours he wanted (I don't fault him this at all), and he still wants a sport weight scarf so my good friends at Knit Picks aren't coming through with the colours I need in Wool of the Andes, so it's mostly not my beloved WoTA (although I still coo a bit at how much the green yarn sings off my needles when I get to it). It still has the mixed yarn source challenges of scarf 4, which I don't love since the edges aren't even, but will hopefully work themselves out in blocking at least a little bit. The biggest issue is that the Jamieson's Shetland is a DK and the rest of the yarn (Brown Sheep Nature Spun, Dalegarn Falk, and Knit Picks Wool of the Andes) are all sport weight, so the Jamieson's stitches are a lot tighter on the needles and the edges are a bit wider than the other yarns. Plus that yarn is still scratchy and grabby, which is ok if you drop a stitch, but doesn't let the stitches slide very well. Since I have the most of that yarn I'm knitting on metal needles instead of wood, which means the Brown Sheep slips a bit more. But I'm working it out. I just kind of still dread the Shetland sections. I know I should be one of those people that's like "oh, yay, super authentic Shetland wool!!", but I just don't like that yarn. The colours are right though, and it's not the most terrible thing, but if I had to choose yarn to knit with I don't think I would pick that.

The scarf is half done, in 3 pieces. I learned this AM that I cannot seam it together until I block it because otherwise it will block weird, so I spent 20 minutes whip stitching and then un-whip stitching this morning, but, you know, lessons learned. I've decided to weave in ends every time I finish a part (in the case of the duplicate part I'll just do it at the halfway point) and it's far less frustrating than doing it all together.

Scarf piece 1

Scarf piece 2

Scarf piece 3

The scarf so far (not seamed)

So...I have half a scarf. And I still don't mind doing it, but I'll admit that I'm ready to be done. I have so much lovely yarn in my stash waiting for me and I feel bad that I keep acquiring and not actually reducing...plus I've learned that there really are only so many hours a day you can knit this thing. So for the first time I'm not JUST working on the scarf. Instead I'm in never-ending swatch land with some delightful single-ply silk merino that I've had around forever, but that's not worth talking about now. For now, scarf is priority, I have a number of colours/rows to knit per day goal, and when I accomplish that I can do other things. It seems to be working alright.

WIP Wednesday: I meant to have this sweater done a month ago

Granted, in order to have this sweater done a month ago I would have had to start it a month ago. Instead I was working through more (hopefully) lucrative ventures and knitting up samples in yarns I've dyed. So I suppose that's worth doing. Then there were those yarn swap things...

Though, TBH, even if I had started this in time, I'm still not sure it would be done. It's only recently that I've come into some knitting time.

Enough of that! On to the talking about knitting.

This week's (and last week's and probably next week's and maybe even the week after that's) WIP is a summer sweater, "Louise" by Amy Christoffers from the Berocco Fiora book. All of this came to me as a door prize from Minnesota Knitters' Guild Yarnover. I have nine skeins of this yarn and a book full of patterns and the fibre content is 40% cotton, 30% viscose, 15% alpaca, 10% nylon, and 5% wool in a DK weight, so I thought this would make a good sweater for air-conditioned classrooms. (It turns out, however, that these classrooms are not so much air-conditioned as set to "freezer" and "Siberia", so I'm pretty sure I could roll in in a full wool/alpaca worsted weight sweater and be perfectly comfortable even though it is July.) Regardless, I think I'll still get some wear out of this sweater in the early fall and, of course, next summer. And if I happen to get this done before August 7 (I'm on track for now, but you never know these days) then I'll have it for summer classes, too.

Here's where I am for now:

The back is done, the pocket lining is done, and the left front is started. I've had more time recently, but I'm also going weirdly polygamous in my knitting (thanks to podcast KALs) so...we'll see.

Thoughts on this yarn: It's nice. It's soft because of all the fibre contents, but sturdy. It's a tiny bit splitty, but not that bad. Although I've never found cotton to be particularly hard on my hands, this one definitely isn't. I didn't get gauge for the sweater on the needle size suggested (well, I got row gauge but not stitch gauge...which like...it's written for this yarn, so IDK what that's about), so I went down a size (so now my row gauge is wrong AND my stitch gauge is still wrong) and then I just did the math that allows me to knit the size XS wide to get the size S I need and I just have to keep track of my row gauge. It's working out.

About this pattern: I get that it's in a pattern book for the yarn and there's limited space, but holy wow is this hard to follow. There's one chart. It's 15 stitches by 42 rows. For the whole sweater. Which is fine, because as you see above the pattern repeats, but the chart makes you read R-L on RS rows and L-R on WS rows which I know some people find confusing. Worse than that, the sweater is shaped with increases and decreases which mean you have to re-think the chart and how it all lines up on your own. Then, now that I've moved to the front...you don't have the right number of stitches. The chart has 2 stitches border on the RS, then a repeat of 8, then 5 border stitches on WS. This works for the back, but on the front I had to cast on 44 stitches and turn 5 of them into a button band, which left me with 39 stitches...which isn't a multiple of 8 if you take off the 2 stitches on RS or the 5 stitches on the WS, so I guess it's now 44-5 button band stitches and then including the 7 border stitches to get 32, but the pattern is VERY NOT CLEAR about that and I wish it would be.

Also, I read the part about how to attach the pocket lining and I'm super confused. So, we'll see about that when I get there.

I'm smart and can logic this out, but it's somewhat annoying and means I *really* have to think about knitting this, which is not always what I want to do.

Stash Confessional: Minnesota Yarns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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