Resolutions Check-In: March

I think the fact that it's currently April 7 and I'm just now getting to this post speaks VOLUMES about how well I did on my resolutions this month. But the current run of Do All The Things is behind me and I'm hoping to make some headway as I gear up for the next round of Do All The Things. Maybe. I hope. I've got some new strategies, at least. But, let's check in anyway. If only because even though I know I'm failing, I have a scientific need to quantify how hard I'm failing. Or something like that.

Downton Abbey Swap 2015: Sent!

So, in my last post I told you all what I received in my AMAZING Downton Abbey swap package from Ravelry user goodstuff via the Subway Knits Downton Abbey swap. Now it's time to tell you all about the package I put together and how much fun I had doing it!

Teaser photo--here's what I sent to my partner moxydawg:

Downton Abbey Swap 2015: Received!

If you've been following over the past month or so, you'll know that I was involved in a Downton Abbey swap via the Subway Knits podcast. I've shown you all some of the items I've made, though not all, but now that I've gotten my swap package and my partner has received their swap package, I thought I'd take you through what I received (I'll talk more about the package I put together in a later post). It was an awesome swap and super fun and I definitely plan on participating if Maria decides to run it in future years.

First--Here's what I received from my swap partner:

Intrigued? You should be! Let's talk about all of this below.

Resolutions Check-In: February (or when I fell hard off the wagon)

I suppose while I’m sitting here thinking about how I should be writing all sorts of blog posts and then not actually writing them (and digging myself into a bigger hole of “I have to write about all these things and I don’t know where to start” while accumulating more things I have to write about) I may as well start with my February resolutions accountability post.

February. I really dislike February. For so many reasons. First, it’s almost always the point at which I just start to get 100% DONE with winter around here. It’s cold, it sometimes snows but not that much, and all the holidays/my birthday are done. Plus, I was raised to think “March = spring” but around here, it doesn’t. So there’s this part where February feels like a neverending Thursday before the weekend starts and then Friday never actually happens. For someone like me who suffers from the whole reduced photoperiod/Seasonal Affective Disorder business this is bad news. It basically means that although I know there are things I want to be accomplishing, my brain just doesn’t have the motivation to actually accomplish them. And then I feel bad about not accomplishing them. Which leads me to more inability to accomplish things. Add to this that I have (for the past eight years) had a major freelance design/layout project I do for a local non-profit and all the work for that happens in February. Which means that in addition to my regular job and my other hobbies (and now my yarn dyeing job) and my real life, I have to put all that together. Ordinarily, I take a week off of work and I knock most of it out in a week, but this year I had to head to an out-of-town work conference the week I’d be doing that, so I quite literally spent all of February trying to work this in to my spare time. Which means that things like blogging and knitting suffered. Oddly enough . . . yarn dyeing didn’t. Hopefully you’ll be hearing about all of that soon.

So. I’m going to make references to some things here that I meant to blog about and didn’t. It’s my sincerest hope that March and I can make a fresh start and I can actually tell you about all these things in the coming days so you can fill in the gaps. I was trying to put off this post until I managed to post about all the things I’m going to reference, but I realised that if I did that, I’d never get anything posted, so I just have to start here and work backward through time.

All that is a long way of saying, sorry I fell off the posting wagon, I’ll try to be better now. Words you’ve heard before. I really do mean them every time.

Yarn Dyeing: Downton Abbey Exploration

As you know, I’ve been part of a Downton Abbey swap via the Subway Knits podcast since the end of January. As such, I knew that I wanted to dye some yarn for my swap partner that was inspired by her favourite character. I happened to have a random undyed skein in one of the yarn weights she likes that I bought at a sale back when I was still just thinking about perhaps getting started in yarn dyeing, so I didn’t even have to acquire anything . . . except dyes.

I’d fairly exhausted my options when it came to the Jacquard acid dyes and while I know now that I can mix many colours to get what I want, I didn’t know that when I started thinking about colourways. Each of the Crawley women has always had their particular colour (or colours in the case of a few) to me and I knew I wanted to represent them as such. So I spent some time on the Dharma Trading Company site, at the recommendation of someone . . . though I couldn’t say who at this point . . . and found that they had the perfect colours for what I wanted to do: A peach, sage green, rose pink, and a lavender purple. I ordered them immediately and began the wait. After shipping issues (caused by my inability to type numbers in the correct order) and a phone call to Dharma by Jonas (in exchange for ice cream, as per our standard agreement) the order was re-placed and sent with newer, more expedited shipping. I received it last Friday and after acquiring new tester yarn last Saturday, I was on my way.

I first used the test yarn to just find out what the colours were when I mixed them straight, then I began building my colourways. I had a vision for all of them and with minimal mixing/effort on my part, I had produced colourways for Lady Edith, Lady Sybil, Countess Cora, Lady Violet, and Lady Rose by the end of Sunday. I had a brilliant time and everything was filled with fun and magic and I wished ever so much that I could just make this my life full time.

It took me a bit longer to get the yarns finally listed on Etsy (they still need better photos and not all of them have example swatches), because I do actually have a real job and a real life that needed handling, but those five (plus another that I’ll write about later) are now available for sale in my new Etsy shop that will be dedicated to my hand-dyed yarns from here on out.

Here’s a few teaser photos to entice you to purchase!

Yarn Dyeing: Buy All the Undyed Yarns!!!

After my morning in the textile centre dye lab on Friday, I convinced the lovely Jonas to take me back there on Saturday morning. Not for dyeing this time . . . but for a related cause.

I’d gotten an email, I remembered after getting a verbal reminder, that the textile centre was doing a fundraiser on Saturday morning/afternoon. Apparently they’d gotten an incredibly large donation of yarn and fibre from an estate and they were selling it en mass to raise some money for the centre. I had thought about going, but then immediately forgotten that it was happening until the instructor in my dyeing class mentioned it. She went to scout what was available and let us know that there was quite a lot of undyed/white/light coloured yarn on offer. This, of course, piqued my interest, and I asked Jonas if he would mind driving me back over there the next morning so I could see if I could replenish my stock of tester yarns. I’d previously (when I first started dyeing) bought a bunch of yarn on super sale from my LYS that I used as colour testers and practice skeins, but I’d run out and now if I wanted to test a colourway I needed to dye a full skein or else sacrifice a skein that I could be selling as a tester, and neither of those things tends to gain me any money back for a skein. I get that this is part of business, but if I can get non-marketable skeins and use them to experiment then more’s the better, right?

Jonas agreed, because he’s amazingly supportive of my somewhat ridiculous hobby that I pretend is a business, and drove me to the textile centre at 10:30am on a Saturday morning. We got our number and waited for the sale to start, then immediately rushed to the table labeled “wool” in the yarn section. There was far less there than in the “cotton” or “other” sections and far less yarn than fleece and of course far less undyed yarn than already dyed yarn, but! What I found were two LARGE bags of undyed or very light coloured wool for $3US per bag, a box of various skeins of silk for $5US per skein, and a FULL BAG OF 100% SILK SKEINS for $50. There are probably 10 skeins of pure silk in there. Since I’m working on a bunch of Downton Abbey yarns and I figure the Downton ladies would love to be represented in silk, I decided to buy the bag and another tester skein that I can split into 5 parts and try to create the Downton colourways in a bit of luxurious 100% silk. 

The process was quick, painless, fun, and $65US later I came home with this:

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FO(s): High Tea Cuffs and Jabot

Hi all,

I have one totally finished object today (blocked and the ends woven in) and one that is completed, but hasn't been blocked or had the ends woven in, so I figured I'd talk about them together. They are a set, after all.

If you've been following along, you know I've been working on the High Tea Cuffs and Jabot by Andrea Jurgrau from the Unofficial Downton Abbey Knits 2013 for my swap partner for the Subway Knits Downton Abbey swap. Well...they are done. 

The jabot was easy and basically took the lace motif from the knits, applied a second panel of the lace motif that you attached over the top, then knit the scarf in the twisted ribbing for a desired length, then repeated the lace motif. It's a nice construction and very straightforward. Again, I was using the Knit Picks Imagination Hand-Painted Sock Yarn in the Ruby Slippers colourway, and I am no less enamoured with it than I was at the start. It's beautiful yarn and has a really nice hand and just the littlest bit of the alpaca halo. The hand-painting is gorgeous and I think it made a really beautiful end product.

The cuffs were also easy, but because the Imagination yarn (never stops being funny) is fingering weight instead of lace weight, it did require me to do a bit of math and chart fudging. I knit both the mitts and the scarf on a size 3 needle instead of the size 1 called for by the pattern, which meant I got the row gauge right, but not the stitch gauge. I thought I'd calculated my gauge right, but apparently I hadn't because the first time I made the mitts they were far too small to fit any adult-sized hand, so I re-knit them. Thankfully they're a very quick knit and once you're out of the lace section it's just 20 or so rows of the twisted stitch ribbing with a few decrease rows and check points and they go pretty fast. So I re-knit them with 3 pattern repeats instead of the 2 I started with and the 4 called for by the pattern, and they are slightly large on my very tiny hands pre-blocking, so I think they will fit just fine. Here's hoping. The scarf is probably skinnier than it's supposed to be because of the gauge things, but it's working out okay for me so I'm going to leave it. It's a scarf, it doesn't exactly have to "fit" a particular size as long as it's long enough.

So, this part of the swap package is done. Still much to do, but it feels good to have the knitting over with. The added bonus of this project is that I can count it toward the Stitch Red KAL that Geknitics and Knotty Knerd at Knerd Girl Knits are running! Hooray for one project serving two purposes! I love it when things come together like that.

WIP(again): High Tea Cuffs

As anticipated, even after blocking the High Tea Cuffs by Andrea Jurgrau that I recently finished are FAR too small, even for my delicate little wrists, which means they 100% will not fit an adult human being, so I am re-knitting them.

I'm still using the Knit Picks Imagination Hand Painted yarn in the Ruby Slippers colourway and still using the 3.25mm DPNs, I just decided to cast on more stitches. The pattern repeat is 18 stitches and the last time I'd cast on 36. This time, I decided to cast on 54 stitches, although I worry this will make them too big this time around. My swap partner has gotten back to me with their wrist size (which is bigger than mine, but not a LOT bigger than mine), so I 'm going to just knit one of these (they go fast) and see how big it ends up. If it's more than 3cm too big for me then I'm either going to have to scrap the idea of making the matching cuffs and scarf set or I'm going to have to hope that if I knit this on a 2.75mm needle, I can just make up the difference in row gauge by adding rows to the ribbing and that it will still work out okay.

The cuff on the left is the original one I knit with 2 pattern repeats and the one on the right is the new one, just for comparison.

I'm hoping to have these done by the end of the weekend, so here's hoping you'll get a good FO post by next week. Unless it's all too large and has to be re-done yet again and then I finally decide to scrap the project.

FO(ish): Downton Abbey High Tea Cuffs

So, once again, it becomes clear to me that although I keep saying FO Friday, it's really more like FO Saturday or Sunday, or even Monday. We do what we can around here. Anyway, here are the High Tea Cuffs from the Unofficial Downton Abbey Knits 2013 out of Knit Picks Imagination Hand-Painted in Ruby Slippers in their more finished form.

These are only finished in the sense that they're done being knitted the first time. By which I mean these are waaaaaaay too small for my tiny little wrists so there is no way they will fit an actual human being and I'll have to reknit them. I'm unsure if I have to go up another needle size and re-knit the whole thing, or if it's just the part of the ribbing where I listened to the pattern and went down a needle size that screwed it all up. These are the perils of knitting something designed for laceweight yarn on fingering weight yarn and thinking you're good enough to figure out this math.

It doesn't help that the bind off the pattern tells me to use has absolutely no give whatsoever. I mean, right now I can't tell which one I bound off in pattern and which one I used my regular bind off on, so that's hardly the only thing I've got going on here, but it certainly isn't helping.

So...these are done and they're a quick knit and I love them and probably if you're the sort of person who knits with laceweight yarn they're even easier. The pattern is clear and easy to understand. It only gives you charted instructions for the lace pattern though, so if you're the sort of person who prefers to have things written out rather than reading them from a chart, know that you might have to create the written instructions yourself. That and the fact that I'm skeptical about the bindoff are the only issues I have with this.

You'll probably be seeing these again soon when I re-knit them. I'll let you all know if it was the full pattern that I needed to fix or just not dropping a needle size on the ribbing.

WIP Wednesday: High Tea Cuffs

Let me start out here by saying...these are so close to done it hurts! I can almost promise you that pending epic disasters you'll be seeing these again for FO Friday. I know I said that with the sweater and then it didn't happen, but if I can get the few internet things done that I need to do relatively quickly, I may even be able to finish knitting these tonight and get them blocking. Plus they should block much faster than a full worsted weight sweater.

I'm knitting the High Tea Cuffs (and eventually the matching Jabot) for my swap partner in the Subway Knits Downton Abbey swap (shh...don't tell!). The pattern is from the Unofficial Downton Abbey Knits 2013 and actually calls for laceweight (which I do not have and will never have), but I spent the better part of a week and a half swatching and am confident that my new adjusted gauge math works out just fine. I chose to knit them out of the Knit Picks Imagination Hand-Paints in the Ruby Slippers colourway that I had in my stash for a number of reasons. First...I thought the hand-painted nature of the yarn would add interest while still showing off the lace pattern. Second, my swap partner said they like royal colours and I figured Ruby was pretty royal! Third, it's fingering weight, which is a reasonable substitute for a laceweight. Plus the little bit of alpaca in the yarn makes them soft and gives them just a little of the halo. I really like how they're turning out and I hope my swap partner will too.

The only complaint/problem I have so far is that I did the bind-off as instructed in the pattern and it's WAY too tight. If it doesn't fix itself after blocking I'm going to rip it out and re-do the bind off with a stretchier one. I don't want it too stretchy because it should grip the wrist a little bit, but at the same time I can barely get it over my hand and I have tiny little hands/wrists so I figure that's a good sign I should make it bigger.

Stay tuned for more on Friday, I imagine.