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 Knitters Guild Yarnover 2015

So...I acquired some yarn this weekend. I was so proud of myself for knitting a whole sweater out of worsted weight and using up yardage this month, and now I've more than negated all of that for another net gain of yarn. Although, admittedly, the bulk of it wasn't really my fault.

Here's the situation:

Looks pretty bad, right? It is, but I can explain.

WIP Wednesday: Continuation of the Giant Orange Stockinette Sweater

This week's WIP is the same as last week's WIP, which is to be expected when you're knitting a size XL men's sweater for someone who's 6'1" tall on 3.75mm needles.

As a reminder, this is Joukahainen by Kristel Nyberg and I'm knitting it out of Berocco Ultra Alpaca in colourway 6268, which is a lovely burnt orange colour with a bit of depth to it.

That said, progress has been made! Noticeable progress! Much thanks to me working a 4-day convention that left me with hour-long chunks of time to sit and knit, the entire sweater being stockinette, and sleeves having SO MANY FEWER STITCHES than the body of the sweater.

So... since you saw it last I finished the main body section, finished one sleeve, and have started the next sleeve. I had to make the slightest of modifications to account for Jonas having dainty wrists compared to the size of the rest of him, so basically I dropped down to 3.5mm needles and cast on 4 fewer stitches (the amount for the size L), did the ribbing, then switched back to the 3.75mm needles and increased until I had the amount of stitches for the XL, then knit to the length of the L. It's based on the Elizabeth Zimmerman percentage formula so it's pretty easy to make changes like this on the fly, especially since the whole sweater is just stockinette in the round.

Still loving this yarn. It's super easy to knit and has a really nice hand even before washing. The biggest thing I have to remember is that when he tries things on they need to be slightly on the small side (fitting, but with slightly less ease than he might like) because it will stretch out when blocked.

I'm hoping to wrap up the sleeves before the weekend and then maybe get the yoke done over the weekend or early next week. I'm currently dyeing some yarn so I can use it for a sock test knit I agreed to do, so hopefully the next time you all see this sweater it will be in an FO photo.

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.

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.

WIP Wednesday: Tauriel by Bonne Marie Burns

So, I'm trying to start a new feature here, we'll say if I can keep up with it.

Every Wednesday, both so I can measure my progress and keep myself accountable (though the latter is less important since I'm mainly a monogamous crafter), I plan to post a photo of my current work in progress. I figure at the very least this will make sure I post once a week and perhaps a nice end result will that I can do a bit of a "year in photos" post once we reach the end of 2015. Plus I thought it would be fun.

Here's my current WIP, Tauriel by Bonne Marie Burns from Chic Knits. I'm at least 95% positive it has nothing to do with the new character in the Hobbit movies, but I won't say I don't think this looks like it could have been inspired by her.

I'm knitting it out of Berocco Ultra Alpaca that I bought back on Small Business Saturday of 2013 because that's the yarn selected by the Random Number Generator. Not that I don't love knitting with that yarn and not that I'm not super happy about all things involving this sweater, just that I asked RNG what yarn I should use and it chose this. I bought another sweater quantity in orange to knit something for Jonas and I most certainly won't regret that decision whenever it comes around to making it. The yarn is soft and fluffy and not at all splitty and very lovely.

I actually had this pattern in my queue (though not for that long) after hearing the Knitmore Girls sing the praises of the Chic Knits patterns and then going through and queuing basically all of them, so once the yarn was selected I used the magic of the Ravelry pattern browser to match it up with a pattern in my queue and it was a match made in heaven.

The pattern is somewhat brilliantly written (especially if you hate seaming) and the cable pattern is incredibly easy to memorise. At most points (until I got to the bottom and actually had to knit ALL THE WAY AROUND the cardigan) this was pretty much flying off the needles. Right now I have about 10 rows of stockinette and then 10 rows of ribbing to knit on the second sleeve and it will be done. I started this on December 27. Now, I've had more knitting time than usual since then, but not bad for a full size sweater.

On that note, I really, really, really hope that my washed swatch didn't lie to me and that the characteristic alpaca drape and stretchiness isn't going to let me down. Otherwise I better add some length to the sleeves at the very least...they're, well, noticeably short. If they were pants people would ask me if I were expecting a flood. We shall see after blocking.

I'm betting you'll meet up with this sweater again in all it's finished and blocked glory on FO Friday. I have a mind to finish these sleeves as soon as I sign off here. Which is now.

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.

New Project: Falling in Love With Yarn

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Finished Object: VERY EXCITING FINISHED OBJECTS!!!

I just finished the second in a series (currently there are only 3 designs, but that’s just because I haven’t created the 4th one I have planned) of Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire inspired sigil hats!

They look like this!





I completed the Stark hat on Monday (this is the aforementioned hat that I knit on a US5 instead of a US3…it’s comically large and was almost a bit tragic, but I think it's all going to work out) and yesterday I did the final seaming on the Lannister hat. Next up (the yarn came this morning as I was on my way out the door and I didn’t have time to snuggle it) will be a Targaryen hat and then Night’s Watch. Potentially I will also create a Greyjoy hat and maybe Tully or Martell (probably Martell, given the content of the upcoming season of the show). All the hats are created with a base of Knit Picks Palette and the sigils are done in this AMAZING yarn that Knit Picks stopped making (but I snapped up all of it that I could and still look for the sales on Ravelry) called Imagination Hand Painted. It’s a fingering weight and has the most amazing tonality. It’s this yarn that inspired the sigil projects in the first place. I saw what they referred to as the “Castle Walls” colourway and thought to myself that I needed to find a fantasy theme to use it for. The more I thought about it and the “Treasure” colourway, the more I realised they needed to turn into Game of Thrones somethings. This yarn is BEAUTIFUL and the variegations are coming through wonderfully and I am in absolute love and I hope you all like them, too!

I have hopes that they can turn into things besides hats, but for now I want to make a bunch of hats before the premiere of season 4.

I’ll keep you updated on how things are going, and I’ll get them listed on my commissions page as soon as I’m ready to say these are good to go.

WIP: Exciting New Projects

If you read a few of my posts a few weeks ago while I was on hiatus from the sport weight 4th Doctor scarf, you may have heard me allude to a new exciting project.

Well, it’s done enough that I can share it with you!

Inspired by my recent Frostfangs hat, the AMAZING Knit Picks Imagination Hand Painted Fingering Yarn in all manner of colourways with exciting fantasy names (Castle Walls, Ruby Slippers, Treasure), and my supreme love of all things A Song of Ice And Fire, I have created…..

Game of Thrones House Sigil Hats!

I got the pattern drafting done a few weeks ago for the Stark, Lannister, and Targaryen sigils (I plan on making the set of patterns available for purchase as soon as I’ve knitted up a hat for each of them just to make sure the pattern is right), and I was waiting to finish both the Frostfangs Hat and the 4th Doctor scarf before I got started. The background yarn (MC) is Knit Picks Palette since I had such fun working with it in the Frostfangs hat and since I knew the weights and gauge would match up well. Plus, it’s great for colourwork, and even though these are knit in intarsia and not stranded, I thought the Palette would be the best choice just because of colours and yarn weight matching. Plus, you all should know by now how much I love Knit Picks. I began with the Stark hat (since I always begin with the Starks, and since it’s winter, and since I had a skein of Palette in Ash that was just sitting around). The ribbing takes forever, as it did with the Frostfangs hat, but at least I opted not to do the extra 40 rows of stockinette as a liner on this hat. I may need to line it with fleece or something just to keep them warm enough, though for anyone who doesn’t live in the frigid north like myself, these will probably be okay, as the Palette is a 100% wool yarn and the Imagination is mostly wool with a bit of nylon, just like the Chroma. I will evaluate that later. I learned the hard way that I have to work the piece flat and then seam it, since I hear rumours that there are ways to work intarsia in the round, but I am unable to captivate the mystical energies that allow this to work out. I’m working on size 3 circulars with a CO of 180 stitches. I marked of 61 on each side and have the pattern centered with the remaining 58 stitches. The Imagination yarn (that statement never stops being funny to me) I chose for the Stark sigil is the “Castle Walls” colourway. Unfortunately, Knit Picks is clearing out this yarn and all you can get is the "Treasure" colourway at this time. It’s absolutely beautiful and from the moment I saw it I knew it needed to become the direwolf symbol of House Stark.

Over the weekend, I completed the sigil portion of the hat and I wanted to share the photo with you. I think it turned out well, especially for something I drafted myself, and I hope to make some gloves and possibly scarves (though, scarves in Palette will take me about 40 years, so I’ll either have to find some comparable yarns in worsted or sport/DK weight to work with or just not make scarves). I also plan to make these hats for some of the other houses. It’s my hope that I can have several completed in time for the Game of Thrones season 4 premiere coming up at the end of April, but 5 rows of the sigil (10 rows of the straight stockinette) take me about an hour. I’ve completed the ribbing and 51 rows (up to the decrease) thus far, and I’m 15 hours in. It’s not quite shaking out to be the almost 40 hour investment that the Frostfangs hat was, but my confidence that I’ll be able to just knock out 15 - 20 hats in the next month and a half (especially with a lot of RL business going on) is starting to dwindle.

For now, I leave you with some photos of the sigil. I hope you can get a sense of the gorgeousness of the Imagination yarn (still laughing) from these.




Remember, if you want one, or if you think you want to purchase the pattern at a later date, please check my Etsy store, my commissions page, and my Ravelry page in a few months and you should be able to place an order.

4th Doctor Scarf 4 - Sport Weight Wool and the Glaring Imperfection

First…sorry this post is long overdue. Life, you know?

If you’ve been keeping up, you know about the great yarn saga of 2014 and all that went into the second of my “Two 4th Doctor scarves in two months” plan, so I won’t get into it too much. I will say that this was my first time using multiple yarn sources to make a scarf, and I don’t much like it.

Some thoughts:

• I still adore Knit Picks Wool of the Andes above all other yarns for this scarf. In the future (after this next custom order…I’ll get into that later) I think that I will explicitly state that all scarves will be made in Knit Picks Wool of the Andes worsted, Cascade 220 Superwash (yes, I’ll use it. I don’t like it as much, but I’ll use it since I know people want washable items), or Lion Brand Wool Ease (my favorite of all acrylics…though I just knitted up a swatch of Knit Picks Brava Sport and it’s certainly giving the Wool Ease a run for its money). I realize that some people have wool allergies and that Wool Ease won’t work for them and that I’m always harping on the need for people to be accommodating of allergies, but until I find a colour combo and a yarn combo that doesn’t make me want to never knit the scarf again, those people will just have to make do with those out there offering the scarf in acrylic (at frankly atrocious prices, if you ask me).


• Jamieson and Smith Shetland Double Knitting is the worst non Lion Brand Homespun yarn I’ve ever worked with. It’s scratchy and awful. I like to think that I can tolerate a fair amount of rustic scratchiness in my wool, and maybe it was just that it was VERY rough compared to all the other yarn sources, but every time I came to the brown colour I sort of cringed at the idea of having to knit with the Shetland. I didn’t like the feel of it in my hand while I was knitting it at all. I definitely don't think I'd knit something like a hat or a garment out of it. It knits up alright, but it was truly horrible to run my hand along.


• Absolutely no one in the world other than Knit Picks holds true to yardage in this scarf. I was using three yarns from Knit Picks WotA Sport (Thyme, Turmeric, and Currant). According to Knit Picks, there are 137 yards on a skein. I needed 195, 113, and 137 respectively, according to the pattern estimates. What I ended up using was a skein and roughly a half of the Thyme, slightly less than a skein in the Turmeric, and slightly more than a skein in the Currant. This, to me, is accurate, as the yardage is approximate and I’m not sure it includes tassels, plus my gauge didn’t exactly match the pattern gauge. In the other yarns…well…in the Dalegarn Falk, which I used for the grey, the pattern noted I would need 184 yards. I had 2 skeins, which totaled 232 yards and I had to cut the pattern short to ensure I had enough yarn for tassels. I know this is because Falk is measured in weight, not yards, but the pattern was in yards and matching this up was a challenge. To me, 48+ yards over what I was expecting to use is a little unacceptable, and I did have to leave rows off. That said, had I ordered a third skein, I would have had too much yarn left over. For the Jamieson Shetland DK, I also had to cut rows in order to make sure i had enough yarn for the tassels. The pattern called for 153 yards and I used 2 skeins, for a total of 164 yards. I ended up having to cut 8 total rows, and I was still a bit short on tasseling. This isn’t terrible and, again, if I had to order a third skein, I would have had way too much yarn, but it is disappointing to me. The worst offender, however, is the Rowan Pure Wool DK, which I used for the tan colour. According to the pattern, I needed 263 yards. I ordered 2 balls of this, which should have given me 274 yards. Cutting it close, but should have been ultimately fine. With 40 rows of tan still left in the scarf, I ran out of yarn. With my very rough estimate of 1.4 yards of yarn per row (that’s on the high end by a lot, I rounded significantly), this meant that I would need around 55 more yards of yarn. This meant that I used a rough total of 330 yards in a pattern that called for 263. I’m not sure if this is something with the pattern or something with Rowan really not getting their yardages correct on the labels, but it’s something to note if you’re going to undertake this project with this yarn in the future. I’ve been estimating total yardage needs for this scarf at between 1400 and 1500 total yards, whereas the pattern recommends a total of 1222 yards. My advice is to overestimate how much you need and figure on using about 1.4 - 1.5 yards of yarn per row of knitting.


• Mixed sources don’t knit up the same width. This should be obvious, and I was able to fix it with very careful blocking, but it’s not really something I’d like to have to do again. I’d rather I just use all one yarn source and have nice, crisp edges in the first place.


• I’m not going to talk any more about the orange/red problem and the Cascade 220, but it basically ruined what was an otherwise flawless scarf and I regret not holding out until I could get the yarn I actually wanted. The customer was disappointed (but understanding) and I was disappointed in myself. I will never again make this mistake.

Here are photos of the finished product, if you are interested.



 
I’m pretty much done doing these scarves for a while. I did promise this customer (because basically my executive decision to use this orange completely ruined a scarf that they ultimately otherwise loved), that after I get a break to recover and not hate these scarves and get some other projects done (and after the Knit Picks Saffron is back in stock at the end of April) that I would make them another one. I will let them custom it and they will order all the yarn to make sure it is what they want. And that will be the last mixed-source scarf I make. It may, in fact, be the last scarf I make for anyone who is not a close friend, and it will more than likely be the last scarf I make in 2014. I have a lot of projects I’d like to get done and if I keep making these scarves, I will never achieve even half of them. I don’t hate doing them, they’re easy, but they take time, and time is a thing that I don’t possess in great excess.

Finished Object: Frostfangs Hat in Knit Picks Chroma (Midwinter)

As my birthday gift to myself, I wrapped up the Frostfangs hat on Monday morning. The entire hat took me ~30 hours to knit total, which is, in my opinion, a rather long time for a hat. However, the Knit Picks Chroma remained a delight to work with and the Palette did it’s job as a phenomenal yarn for stranding (as advertised).

I did cut the pattern a bit short (though not much), as I thought the hat was getting a bit long. Turned out to be just the right length. Also, with the addition of my 40 extra rows of Palette to add an extra layer of warmth, I did *almost* run out of the contrast colour yarn (I made it though). I definitely have enough Chroma left over to make at least one, if not two, if not possibly three hats, so it’s a pretty good deal if you can buy 1 ball of $10 yarn and get 3 hats out of it.

The best part, I think, is that while the pattern wasn’t written with Chroma in mind, it might as well have been. It was the perfect length to go through exactly one cycle of the colour gradation in the Chroma yarn and I think it looks absolutely stunning. A bit like the northern lights.



I took it for a test drive the past few days here in the -10F (-23C) Minnesota windchill, and with the double layer of Palette plus the stranding across the back, it kept me pretty warm (at least in combination with my hood). I’m not sure I’d trust it at much colder temps than that, but there comes a point where pretty much no hat is going to help you out. If you live in less extreme conditions, this is probably a really great hat all winter long. My only gripe with my decision to use Palette as the foldover colour is that because it is 100% wool, it’s very itchy against my forehead. I have hope that with time and a little wool wash (I didn’t block it because I couldn’t wait to just get it on my head and out into the world) it may soften up and my itching will be minimized.

I leave you with a final shot of the hat in action as it accompanied me on my adventures:

Head Over Heels in LOVE with Knit Picks Chroma

WIP: The second 4th Doctor Scarf, mixed yarn, Cascade 220, and the great yarn saga of 2014

Since I ended last evening just a few rows over halfway done with the second of the two 4th Doctor scarf commissions I’ve got, I thought I’d give you a WIP update.

This is the scarf I committed to making BEFORE the first one, but then some stuff happened and I didn’t understand how custom ordering and Etsy work and a few other things and someone ended up ordering one before I could take the listing down. Which brings me to where I am today…making TWO 3.5+ metre long scarves between the beginning of December and the middle of January. It’s not a hard pattern, and it’s definitely not work I mind doing, since I can (and have!) literally knit these without looking at them, while watching TV, in the dark while riding in a car, and with my eyes closed as I try not to fall asleep, but I have to admit that I’m getting a bit tired of it. Mostly because I have all these new designs bouncing about in my head and I really want to get to them. But deadlines! And I honour my commitments!

So, this is also the first of these I’ve made in sport weight (though I argue that Cascade 220 Superwash is basically sport weight yarn) and the first one I’ve made with mixed yarn sources. In fact, it’s pretty much the first thing I’ve ever made with mixed yarn sources. I just don’t like the unknown terror of matching gauges across brands and the paralysing thought that one section of this is going to be way bigger than another and it’s going to look weird and be really obvious and… I’d continue, but I think you’re going with this. My OCPD tends to make me a bit of a brand loyalist.
Story behind the mixed media on this scarf goes as follows: I hadn’t advertised that I could do this in sport weight (mostly because knitting things in non-worsted weight yarn never occurs to me, okay?), but when the customer asked if it was possible, I immediately said yes. After all, Knit Picks makes the Wool of the Andes in sport weight too. NBD, right? Wrong. On top of the fact that this was all happening immediately after Knit Picks had their mega-huge sale and were basically out of everything, it turns out that they don’t have *all* the same colours in sport weight as they do in worsted. Whoops. Thankfully, this customer is super amazing and we worked out a deal where I would order the colours I could get from Knit Picks (green, yellow, red, purple) and the customer would hunt down the rest of the colours we’d found (thanks yet again to the awesome resource of doctorwhoscarf.com). I charged less for shipping because the customer had to pay to get yarn shipped from three different places and less overall because my yarn cost was smaller, and then everything was happily worked out.

Except, of course, that it wasn’t.

When it came time to do the Knit Picks order, they were out of the WotA Sport in Saffron. So…I had no red yarn. Being resourceful, and having just learned that Cascade 220 Superwash is the right color, and is basically sport weight yarn, and also happens to actually come in sport weight, I headed to the internet (same place I had ordered all the C220S for the previous scarf). By this time, I was nearly done with previous scarf and ready to ship. I knew that in order to keep my deadlines I’d have to cast on the next one as soon as I started blocking the first one, so I was a bit tight on time, but I was still waiting for the other three colours to arrive from the customer so I figured I was alright. So…instead of just ordering the C220S in worsted (yarn that I knew would work out) I thought to myself, but what if it’s not the right size? I should order sport weight! So I did. And I even used my coupon code for free shipping that I’d earned for spending $95 on my previous order. Very proud of myself, I awaited the yarn’s arrival.

Arrive it did. Except…and I realize this is my fault, really, but seriously the point of calling the yarn 220 is that there are 220 yards on a hank…the sport weight apparently comes in 136.5 yard hanks and not 220 yard hanks. I didn’t even check this because, seriously, 220. Considering I had used pretty much an entire hank of 220S on the last project (despite the pattern saying I would need 175…I blame Cascade. Knit Picks never does this to me.), I knew I didn’t have enough. I thought about re-ordering, but paying the shipping the second time around when I should have just ordered the right amount of yarn in the first place when I got free shipping would have angered me.
So I took to the streets. I searched all the LYS that said they carried Cascade. None of them had it. One store supposedly had 8 balls of it somewhere, but no one could find it. I mean, it’s not that burnt orange is a totally regular colour, but it’s not that weird. I wasn’t asking for the odd yellow colour. Still, not a one to be found.

Next step…Ravelry. No one had the right colour in C220S. No one had the right colour in C220S sport. No one had the right colour in C220 sport. Finally, the only ball I was able to track down in the allegedly right colourway (I’ll get to that later) was a Cascade 220 regular worsted weight in non-superwash. Which I had never used before, but I made yet another assumption that if the superwash was basically sport weight, then of course the regular was basically sport weight. It isn’t. TBH it isn’t even light worsted. I don’t know exactly what happens between the regular yarn and the addition of the superwash chemicals, but it sure as hell shrinks that yarn down something fierce. So, now here I am (a week behind schedule) with one obviously larger weight yarn amidst all my sport weights. It gets worse. Despite the fact that the “burnt orange” colourway in C220S is a delightful red with just a hint of orange in it, this C220 I was sent in “burnt orange” is basically just orange yarn.
Here is the end result of my yarn saga:



Now, as I’ve never seen another ball of C220 “burnt orange” in real life, I don’t know for certain whether the yarn I was sent was the wrong colour (the person I ordered it from had lost the tag) or Cascade just uses 4000% different dyes for two yarns with the same colourway name. Suffice to say…I will never use C220 (non-superwash) for this again, at least not until I can get it in my hand and see what colour it is.

But! I was behind schedule and it’s not the *most* wrong I’d ever seen someone get the red bits (despite the fact that people seem to be ordering these from me because I do a bang-up job of getting the colours proper right) and I just wanted to get going.

After I got a quarter of the way into the scarf, I turned to my husband and said…I think I want to rip this out. I hate this orange.

He talked me down. For better or worse. To my customer. I sincerely apologise for this HORRID yarn. I figured on-time shipping was better than another two weeks of setback for something that to people who aren’t me is probably close enough.

So I persevered worked a few 8 hour knitting days that every muscle in my upper back is still screaming at past-me about, and am mostly back on track.



As I feared, the gauges are slightly different so the edges aren’t stick straight (I’m counting on fixing this in blocking). The tan is too saturated for my liking and there’s that damnable orange yarn, but it’s coming along nicely. I’ve learned that I really, truly do love Knit Picks above all else. Whenever I reach a Knit Picks colour I just sort of coo at the delightful way it slides on the needles, the way it feels in my hands, and the perfect amount of tension in the knitting. The other new yarns are okay (Tan is Rowan Pure Wool DK - I would use a lighter colour next time. Plus it’s superwash so it has that weird feel that I’m starting to learn is just a feature of superwash yarn. Brown is Jamieson Shetland Double Knitting and it’s very scratchy wool and I sort of hate it. Grey is Dalegarn. Which I’ve oddly never used before. It’s wool. It’s fine. I don’t find it remarkable for any reason. It does knit up a bit bigger than the other sport weights, though. More often than not it’s the grey sections — more even than the orange bits — that are wider than the others.

I’ll give you another update when I get this done, but it’s going well and I’m making progress and I’ll hopefully not have to push myself so hard that I’m in physical pain for days on end and maybe I’ll learn to accept the orange (doubtful). For now…it is what it is.

Cascade 220 Superwash and the Fourth Doctor

This is going to be a bit of a look-back post, as I’ve completed this project and shipped it out already, but I do want to document my thoughts regarding this new (to me) yarn.

Perhaps someday I will document the story of how I ended up promising to create two Doctor Who Season 12 4th Doctor scarves for two separate customers between the beginning of December and the end of January when I generally budget 4-6 weeks for each scarf, but I think that’s a post unto itself. Suffice to say, I’ve been knitting frantically at any available opportunity, and while I don’t mind making these scarves, as they are largely mindless work I can get done while watching telly or listening to podfic (or in the car, in the case of this superwash scarf), I don’t think I’ll be opening up the posting for a while. Sorry to those of you who may be waiting for one.

The second scarf I knit (back in August/September), I knit in Knit Picks Wool of the Andes in worsted weight and I absolutely fell in love with that yarn. It feels nice both pre- and post-blocking, it slides wonderfully on the needles, and it’s just generally a really fantastic wool to work with, especially for the price. So when it came time to list the scarves on my Etsy page, I thought I’d give people the option of having this knit in washable wool (planning on using Wool of the Andes superwash). Well, when an order came in for the scarf in superwash, I headed to the Knit Picks page and learned that Wool of the Andes superwash doesn’t come in all the colours I needed for the scarf, and I didn’t know the palettes well enough to figure out if I could get close enough. So, I had to ask the customer to pay a bit more for yarn (which I felt bad about, but he was very gracious) and I ordered the full color set in Cascade 220 Superwash (worsted weight).

The yarn came quickly, which is great because I was on a time crunch, and because I spent so much on yarn (the cost was $84), the shipping was free. Both positives, in my book. I was excited to work with the new yarn and see what it would knit up like and what the colour differences would be between the WotA scarf and the C220S (my new abbreviation system) scarf.



Here’s the new yarn. It’s a bit glossier than the WotA, at least on the skein. The green is very dark and the yellow and tan are often indistinguishable in certain lights. The biggest thing to note with this yarn is that while it is technically a worsted weight yarn, it’s a very light worsted weight, almost a DK. In fact, I have since ordered a skein of Cascade 220 superwash sport, and there is virtually no difference in yarn weight between the sport and the worsted, as far as I can tell.

As far as the yarn colorations go between the two brands, I do think the purple-red (marionberry in C220, currant in WotA) was far truer to the original show colors with the C220, but the green, yellow, and tan (Thyme, Turmeric, and Almond, respectively, in WotA) are definitely better in the Wool of the Andes colors.

As far as knitting up, I didn’t much like working with the C220S at first. It was very thin for worsted weight and it took me multiple swatches to get the gauge right (I usually knit very true to gauge). The superwash coating on the yarn makes it a bit slick so I found myself dropping stitches more easily than with the WotA. In addition, where the WotA seems to hold true to the yardages indicated in the pattern (using the pattern found on doctorwhoscarf.com), I either used far more yards than indicated on the pattern, or the balls are far fewer yards than they are supposed to be, as I actually ran out of green yarn before I reached the end of the pattern, and had to cut one of the sections short by a few rows. The pattern indicated that I would need 195 yards and the balls are supposed to be 220 yards. I also had just about enough yarn in grey, red, and purple (each with a 220 yard ball) when I was supposed to need 184, 177, and 137 yards, respectively. So either my gauge was completely off or something else went pretty wrong. I don’t think it would be worth ordering an extra ball of green in the future, as I was only off by 8 rows, but it is something that bothered me.

Blocking: This is my new nemesis when it comes to this yarn. It’s machine washable, so I debated just shoving it in a pillowcase and running it through a wash cycle, but I was worried about the yarn stretching oddly so I handwashed and pinned it instead. Turns out my first instinct would have yielded better results. The yarn opens up A LOT when blocked (it was significantly longer than the WotA scarf I made once it was blocked), which is fine, but my primary problem was that when I pinned my beautifully, consistently straight edges after handwashing the scarf, the rows shrunk up a bit horizontally as they dried and left the edges horribly uneven. I fixed it as best I could, but short of another re-blocking, this time with a run through the washer and a reshaping, nothing would fix the edges. So next time I either need to just let it shape itself and not pin the edges as it dries, or I need to pin it when it is less saturated with water and hope that makes the difference.

I’d definitely work with this yarn again, as it’s pretty much the best washable wool option in the correct colours that I can find, but if I have my choice I’d rather work with Wool of the Andes in worsted, as I think it produces a better product for less cost with less hassle.
Here is a photoset of the finished product in Cascade 220 Superwash. You can see the pulled edges from the blocking and hopefully this gives you a good idea of the colourations. I’m happy overall, except the blocking issue.