FOs: House Stark Fingerless Mitts and Fifth Doctor Socks!

It's still not Friday (but it's kinda close) and these have been finished for two weeks now, but better late than never, right.

In my post about my resolutions for March, I alluded to these finished objects, so I should probably show them to you. Plus they're pretty awesome.

First: T.A.R.D.I.Socks by Anna Richardson (round 2)

It's really hard to photograph your own feet.

So... I mentioned above that this is round 2 of these particular socks. I also mentioned in my resolutions post that these socks resulted in a net gain of yarn. Here's the story.

You can first start here with the story of how I decided to knit myself knee-high socks for my Fifth Doctor (Doctor Who) costume even though I had never knit a single sock before in my life and previously had no desire to do so. So I knit myself knee high socks out of a cotton/bamboo/spandex blend yarn (because the costume was originally for summer) following a pattern that's lovely and beautifully charted, but presumes you've actually done some moderate amount of sock knitting and are using wool and know how to adjust socks to fit your feet. Needless to say, I was setting myself up for failure before I even started. So I knit them over the course of 6-weeks desperately trying to finish them in time for the convention I needed my costume for (the only time in my life I've ever knit more than one thing at a time. I will never do it again.), and I was pretty proud of myself. For one thing, I've heard many people who attempted these socks either don't finish or take forever to finish since there's a lot of purling and cabling and charting and they're REALLY LONG, so I was pretty impressed that I not only managed to make socks that look like socks, but that they were also socks that experienced sock knitters don't even finish. So I put them on for the convention and they were HUGE. Four inches too long, too big in the gusset, bunchy in my shoes and didn't stay up if I took more than 10 steps. So...they were socks, but they weren't socks that fit.

Fast forward to now. I needed to re-wear the costume for a Doctor Who panel at a convention in April, and I knew I needed to re-make the socks. I'd been trying to knit my way through the basic sock patterns in Wendy Johnson's Socks from the Toe Up book so that I could have some knowledge of how to make socks fit my feet, and I'd also knit the (still don't fit) butterfly knee-highs to try to figure out the calf sizing. Armed with this knowledge, I ripped out the socks (3.5 balls of RIDICULOUSLY SPLITTY YARN), re-wound, and started again with a modified pattern. I dropped a needle size so I didn't have to modify the width, but I took out a portion of the chart and recalculated the row count so I could shorten the socks and still keep the calf shaping. I managed to use about 55 fewer yards (50 fewer meters)/15 fewer grams of yarn this time, which is where the net gain came in. But the socks are the right height and fit better around my calf (though still not perfect, but I devised a solution with a ribbon that holds them up just fine) and I'm much happier with them. They are a bit of a slog though, so I can definitely see how people who don't need them for a specific purpose on a deadline would get tired of doing it. The only reason I made it through without quitting was that I knew I needed them for the costume.

In addition, this yarn is terrible. I won't mention what it is here (although you can see it if you look on my project page), but I don't think I'll ever knit with it again. I chose it because I wanted lighter weight and hopefully cooler socks to wear with the costume in the summer, but the cotton and bamboo don't have the memory to hold the socks up and the spandex makes the yarn INCREDIBLY splitty, making it very difficult to work with, especially when you're knitting and purling and cabling with yarnovers. I'm not impressed and it definitely wasn't fun to knit it twice.


Second: Game of Thrones House Stark Fingerless Mitts

These are for the Game of Thrones swap package I put together (which I'll tell you about as soon as a package actually arrives for me and I can do a sent/received post like I did for the Downton Abbey swap). These are my own design, modified from a very basic fingerless mitts pattern. I've done the same sigil on a hat and on an eReader case, so it was just a matter of modifying the stitch count and re-charting it. The grey main colour is Knit Picks Palette in Ash and the sigil colour is Knit Picks Imagination Hand-Painted in the Castle Walls colourway, which screamed Winterfell to me from the moment I saw it.

These were super quick and easy to knit up and my recipient loved them. I'm not really into fingerless mitts (I find them hugely impractical) but I'm thinking about modifying the other designs I have (Targaryen, Lannister, and Night's Watch) into the fingerless mitts too. Someday I'll write up the patterns for actual. I started writing up the hat pattern, but I never finished it. These are super fun and a great way to show your support for various houses. If you're interested, I sometimes list the hats (and may eventually list the eReaders and the fingerless mitts) on my Etsy page. Let me know.

I Return (Mostly) Victorious, with Finished Objects!

I feel like I’ve been neglecting you all lately. I promise it’s not intentional, I was just mired in my first true foray into non-monogamous knitting (I hated it) and was waiting until I had anything finished (or even remotely finished) to make an update. Consequently, I have about 5 posts in a row that I’m going to need to make as I’ve been doing ALL THE THINGS. I’ll try to space them out a bit so you don’t get them all at once.

The first thing I want to talk about is something I think I mentioned once before, the Men’s Striped Cardigan that I made for my SO for our anniversary. It’s out of Knit Picks CotLin (because I really wanted to knit with Knit Picks CotLin) and it turned out pretty well, despite me having a lot of struggles with the pattern (part my fault, part the pattern’s fault) and having to rip out the sleeve THREE TIMES (though it turns out that the third time I ripped it out, I didn’t actually have to rip it out, the pattern was just confusing). I also learned that although I don’t usually mind finishing/seaming, I DO hate seaming things with stripes because making the sleeve stripes line up with the yoke stripes was an exercise in madness. Because of the sleeve setbacks, I was worried I wouldn’t finish it by our anniversary, so I dropped all the other projects I had in progress (monogamy ftw) and basically did nothing with my free time but knit that sweater for about a week and a half. I finished weaving in all the ends at around 10:30pm on May 14 (the day before our anniversary). So, technically it was finished on time, but the seams were so horridly bunched up that I knew I needed to block it, so he couldn’t wear it right away. He did wear it to the fibre festival we attended this Sunday (more on that in a later post) and it fits him well and he likes it well enough that I think he’ll actually wear it, so I’m counting it a win. That means that I have successfully knit him THREE sweaters now and I have successfully knit myself two. Yep.

Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of him wearing the cardigan (despite the fact that I was with him all day yesterday when he had it on), so here’s a photo of it blocking.



I was really excited to use the CotLin yarn after listening to the Knit Picks podcast where they were talking about the yarn. I’d never knit with cotton yarn at all before, so it was a new experience for me to knit with yarn that didn’t have much elasticity to it and had a lot of stretch. I think I already mentioned that I had to switch to bamboo needles because the cotton yarn and the aluminum needles were not agreeing with one another. Once I switched to the bamboo, all went well. I didn’t LOVE the CotLin as much as I hoped I would, but I think it’s a pretty great yarn to knit with. It helps that the pattern I chose was designed with a cotton yarn, so I didn’t have to worry too much about how it would stretch with gravity (although I don’t know yet since SO has only worn it once), but the linen seems to help it keep a bit of integrity. The stitch definition is nice and it definitely wasn’t hard on my hands while I was knitting (something else I’ve heard about cotton yarns). I LOVE the colours that SO picked (Cashew – a lovely toasty tan colour, and Planetarium – a rich navy blue with the slightest bit of a greenish hue and almost a little sheen that’s basically the colour of the midnight sky) and I have quite a bit of yarn leftover (especially in the blue) so I’m thinking about other things I can make (perhaps for ME) in the yarn. I wish I had more of the tan left because I think it would be a great neutral for me to make another short-sleeved layering cardigan with, but I definitely don’t have enough of the tan for a sweater. The blue however …

The only thing I’d caution about when knitting this is that when I made it (in XL, not sure if smaller sizes also have this problem) according to the pattern dimensions, the armpit shaping starts a bit low, unless you’re planning on wearing a dress shirt or bigger shirt underneath it, and the sleeve lengths (at least on my SO) were about 3” too long if you made the sweater as written (see: why I had to rip back the sleeve the second time), so you might want to measure and adjust as needed.

I might knit this again, but not for a while and definitely not in stripes. Also, I forgot how much longer it takes me to make sweaters for SO because he is so much bigger than me! Yet somehow, he is the one that has all the sweaters that fit and I am the one with a bunch of sweaters in the “things that need to be re-knit” pile. Whatever.

Yarn Review: Knit Picks CotLin

PSA: This also gets into a bit of a “needle review”, which is to say I might say some unpopular things about knitting needle brands and people who feel like if I’m not knitting with $400 needles I’m not doing it right. You have been warned.

Start Post

SO has been really into cardigans lately and since it is allegedly going to be summer soon, I thought that making wool cardigans for someone seemed a bit silly. Thanks to my binge listening to the KnitPicks podcast, I’d been seriously itching to knit with their cotton/linen yarn blend “CotLin”. I don’t really know why, but the podcast made it sound like such an amazing and exciting yarn and since I was thinking about summer knitting (who are we kidding here, I made a worsted weight, all wool, 4th Doctor scarf during the duration of last July/August…summer knitting isn’t a thing I think about) and I was thinking I should make some things out of cotton yarn (which I’ve never used before) and CotLin seemed fun.
I had to wait for the backordered black Palette to come in (Night’s Watch hat!), but as soon as it was ready I pulled SO in and we sat down and picked out colours for the cardigan. There was no question that a navy blue was going to be involved, but we spent a fair bit of time going over the various greys and brown colours and finally settled on “Cashew” and “Planetarium” (the cardigan is done with wide stripes—12 rows high with a gauge of 6 rows per inch). I waited for the yarn to come and then I got swatching.

The first thing I noticed while knitting the swatch was that although this yarn claims to be a DK weight, it’s very thin. I think it’s just spun very tightly, but when I put it up next to a strand of Palette, the CotLin strand is just about bigger than the Palette strand. That said, the pattern (which is written for DK weight yarn, although not cotton DK weight yarn…more on that when I talk about the cardigan) called for 4.5sts = 1” and 6 rows = 1” over stockinette stitch using US 7 needle and after washing and blocking the swatch, that’s what I got, so I’m rolling with it.

The second thing I noticed is that cotton yarn is strange. Or, rather, it’s strange compared to anything else I’ve ever knit with (which is basically acrylic and various wools). It feels like knitting with macrame thread (for all I know it basically *is* like knitting with macrame thread) as it slides through my hands. I’ve gotten used to it after knitting about a quarter of a cardigan, but for a while, especially since I’ve been switching between that, Malabrigo Rios (which is ridiculously soft superwash merino), KnitPicks Brava acrylic, and Knit Picks Palette, the CotLin just felt bizarre in my hands. Once it’s knitted, it’s actually rather soft, but it feels very stiff as I knit it and the fact that it has next to no memory (it doesn’t spring around or squish or anything) is still odd for me.

The third thing I noticed is that this yarn is terrible when knitted on aluminum needles. I was dropping stitches all over the place. The cotton yarn is slicker than wool and because it doesn’t have the fibre memory, it doesn’t grip the needles the way I’m used to. I have a Boye interchangeable needle set (this is where my potentially unpopular opinions on needles start…you have been warned) that I use almost exclusively to knit things. If I don’t use those, it’s because the cables disconnect from the needle tips and on certain projects (Palette on size 3) that means the yarn gets stuck in the connectors, so I’ve purchased a stand-alone Boye circular needle for that. In many cases, I also own the straight needles. Problem is, I somehow managed to lose ONE US7 straight needle (which was the reason I was gifted the Boye set in the first place because I was knitting a lot of things on US7 and I had ONE NEEDLE and no circulars). I do own wood DPNs (mainly Clovers) and I own them in a US7, but this cardigan called for me to cast on 150+ stitches and it’s not knit in the round (because it’s a cardigan), so I wasn’t going to use DPNs.

Here are my needle thoughts. Yes. I just admitted to you that I literally knit everything on US$8 aluminum needles from the craft store. Everything. Unless it needs to be on a DPN and then I knit it on US$10 bamboo DPNs unless I have caved to pressures of ergodynamics and bought myself square Knitter’s Pride Cubics rosewood US3 DPNs (which, lbr, were also $10 DPNs) because all the hats I make are finished on US3 DPNs and I own NO US3 DPNs at all (been finishing them on US5s. I’m lazy and cheap, what?). I’ve been using those to knit my Evenstar Gloves, and I like them, but really can’t tell much of a difference between them and the Clovers I usually use. So, okay, let’s discuss this.

Whenever I hear someone saying that one needs to buy only Hiya Hiya or only ChiaoGoo or ABSOLUTELY ONLY Signature needles, I sort of stop listening to them. I admit that the cables on my Boye circular set are pretty stiff, and if I use anything other than the two biggest sizes I basically can’t use them because the cables are too stiff to bend properly. I admit that the junctions routinely come unspun and I have to respin the tips on at the end of rows. But you know what, I’m actually okay with that. A friend gifted me the set for free and it has all the things I need and I’ve knitted some truly amazing things with so-called “worthless needles”. I once heard someone say that if you paid so little for a needle that you feel no remorse giving it away, it wasn’t worth knitting on in the first place. I’m calling bullshit on that. I knit on “worthless” Boye aluminum needles and I knit with a bunch of “horrible” acrylic yarn and I do some really fucking fantastic work. So there.

Anyway, the point of this is that I was dropping stitches all over the place and quickly realized I needed bamboo circulars. I’d been at JoAnn to buy fabric (I needed the Marvel licensed fabric and they routinely carry it), but I didn’t have the swatch done for the CotLin, so I didn’t yet know what size needles I would need, so I didn’t purchase any. Thankfully, the same friend who gifted me the Boye set also has bamboo circs in just about every size. So, I started the ribbing on my US6 Boye aluminums and then moved to the size 7 for the rows and just dealt with it until she came by on Sunday and saved me with the bamboo. You can definitely tell that the first stripe had a lot more fixes done to it if you look at it closely, but SO is okay with it and I’m hoping after a wash/block you won’t even be able to tell.

In summary: It’s too soon for me to tell what exactly I think about the CotLin, but now that I have the proper needles I’m finding it much easier to knit. I’m worried about proper drape on the cardigan once it’s finished, and I’m not convinced it’s going to hold shaping well through the sleeves, but I’ll be certain to keep you all posted through the process.
Sorry this got long. I will leave you with a quick photo of the CotLin cardigan as it currently stands.

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.

Future Project: Swatching Up Some Acrylic

Swatching up a new yarn for a new project. This might be my new favorite of all acrylics. It’s soft and squishy and doesn’t squeak at all. And, of course, it’s from Knit Picks.

More to come on this new project as things progress!

 

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.

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.