WIP Wednesday: Daenerys (Round 2)

Let me preface this post by saying that very little of what you're about to read below is typical for my crafting life.

So I've started knitting another Daenerys. It's not that I'm not a re-knitter, I've knit several things more than once, it's that I'm not usually one for essentially chain knitting the same pattern. Especially when that pattern happens to be a rather large shawl. However, I've been wearing the other one around and gotten many, many compliments on it. During one of those wearing/compliment sessions, a long-time friend of mine who's really helped me out and who is also crafty (so understands that crafting takes time and energy) and is a freelancer (so understands that people need to be paid for their crafts) asked me if I would be willing to make her one. Because she is who she is (knitworthy, a good friend, someone who will appreciate it, someone who has done a lot for me, etc.) I said yes. We settled on a price (much lower than if just about anyone else asked me, but I'm the one who set it so I'm obviously fine with it) and she picked some yarn.

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Pattern: Daenerys by Valerie Johnson

Yarn: Knit Picks Chroma fingering in the Drawing Room colourway

She wanted a gradient like mine, but didn't think she was going to like the feel of Kauni, so we settled on knitting it in Knit Picks , which was the first reasonably inexpensive gradient yarn that wasn't Kauni that I could think of off the top of my head. Because she tends to wear a lot of greys and blacks and neutrals, she knew she wanted something that would complement, so she decided on the Drawing Room colourway, which is described on the Knit Picks site as "an elegant group of pastels". I don't disagree with that statement. I will say that this is 110% NOT my colourway, but I do think it will look lovely on her and I admit that it is knitting up rather pretty.

I've worked with Chroma before on my Frostfangs hat and mittens, but they seem to be sourcing it from somewhere new, since it has a different feel to it. It's a bit more slippery feeling, as though it had acrylic or more nylon in it, but according to the label the fibre blend is the same. I definitely like it less than it's predecessor, which, sadly, seems to be the way of many things with Knit Picks these days. It's also different in that the colour repeats mirror one another instead of simply repeating in sequence, so that's an added bit of fun. My biggest concern is that the colour repeats aren't that long, so as the rows get longer there are fewer rows of each colour (which is logical), and I fear I may get to a point where a colour only takes up one row or, worse, part of a row. I bought 2 balls of yarn since she said she'd like hers bigger than mine (and it's fingering weight instead of sport), and I'm nearly through one and the colours are really only taking about 2 - 2.5 rows, so we'll see how things go. I'd like to not have extra yarn since I will never do anything with this colour, but I also know I need to stop before I get to a point where the colours get muddy.

The pattern is easy now that I've done it one and a half times, and I've memorised the main chart. It's still a lovely shawl pattern, really. Not much more I can say about it that I haven't already said.

WIP Wednesday: Losing at Yarn Chicken

Had all gone well, tonight's post wouldn't be about WIPs because I would have a finished object by now. But...

The Daenerys shawl is still on the needles (and looks like it will be for a little while longer). I followed the suggested number of pattern repeats, trying to judge how much I needed for the end, and I guessed incorrectly so now I'm in what feels like a seemingly endless cycle of tinking back about 32 super long rows of lace knitting. I hear you all telling me to just put in a lifeline and rip it back, and I will answer your cries with a resounding I attempted to do this, but I'm not good enough at reading lace knitting so I can't figure out exactly which stitches/row to get the lifeline worked in. So. Instead of risking dropping stitches or putting the lifeline in crooked, I have resigned myself to a lifetime of tinking back.

Here is the shawl at the point I realised I was going to run out of yarn.

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Because the edging requires you to be at the end of a pattern repeat, I actually have to rip out the 12 rows of edging and then the 21 rows of my final pattern repeat, which means in this photo I have to essentially rip back to just before I start the dark purple stripe on this Kauni. It's a lot of rows (and stitches), but hopefully it will go quickly and knitting the edging won't take too long. I remain optimistic that you all at least won't see it in the WIPs post next Wednesday.

In an added bonus, I STILL love this colourway. This shawl is going to make me really happy when it's done, so all the tinking is TOTALLY worth it!

Pattern: Daenerys by Valerie Johnson

Yarn: Kauni wool 8/2 Effektgarn in the colourway EI

WIP Wednesday: More Kauni, More Shawl

I joked about it earlier in the year, but it really is starting to look like 2016 is the year of the shawl. Better yet, it's looking like the year of the Kauni shawl. I'm very okay with this.

As my regular readers will know I'm working hard at completing as many challenges as I can in the Knerd Girl Knits Bad-Ass Women Craft-Along. This round is focusing on women in literature, and one of the challenges was to knit something inspired by a woman in literature. The first thought in my head when I read the challenge was "where do I start?!" I have so many amazing, bad-ass female book characters that I've loved throughout my life that I found it hard to pick just one. Admittedly, my current favourite is Blue Sargent from Maggie Stiefvater's A-MAZ-ING series The Raven Cycle, but I don't have a good handle on how I could knit something inspired by her since her style isn't hugely similar to mine. I thought about dyeing her a colourway (that's almost certainly going to happen anyway) and just knitting something with it, but if I was going to do it, I wanted to do it right. I'll still honour Blue some way, but this wasn't the project for it.

The next place my mind went was to Daenerys Targaryen from A Song of Ice and Fire. Although I admit that I've lost my enfranchisement with the TV show, Dany was one of my favourite book characters from the start (and still is at what is currently serving for the end). So I thought, I'll look for dragon-themed patterns to honour her as "Mother of Dragons". I have a whole bunch of red Kauni solid and thought, red could be good for a dragon shawl. Then I got word of Gynx yarns doing a Dye-Along, Knit-Along and briefly entertained the idea of trying to dye red and black yarn and knit it into something. This led me down the Ravelry rabbit hole of Daenerys-inspired patterns and I found one simply called "Daenerys" by Valerie Johnson. It wanted 650yds of fingering weight. So then I was back to the "can I dye the yarn AND knit this in a month?" which didn't seem likely. But then it occurred to me...I had to readjust my thinking! Daenerys is most known for her dragons, BUT!, a year ago I had purchased the perfect Targaryen-coloured skein of Kauni. Which, while it isn't fingering weight, is 650yds and is fairly light for a sport weight. Plus it's a shawl, so there's not really a gauge to it. Now, this yarn isn't what you're thinking. Targaryen house colours are red and black. This yarn is not. No! It transitions from a tan colour to dark purple to light purple to silver grey. If you've read the books you know that a mark of the Targaryen family is that they all have white hair, tan skin, and purple eyes. Daenerys shawl, meet Daenerys yarn! A perfect match made out of perfection and fortuity.

The shawl is a pretty simple (though not yet easy to remember!) dragon scale pattern. I haven't gotten through a full colour repeat of the yarn yet, but I think I might be in love.

It's been going fast, but I'm sure progress will start slowing now that the rows are getting longer.

WIP Wednesday: Knitting Polygamy

You read that right, everyone...I have more than one thing in progress! It doesn't happen that often (and honestly I wish it weren't happening right now), so you might want to take a moment to commemorate this day with me. I want to tell you that I hope I won't still have two things in progress next week, but unless something changes with my schedule and I get an unexpected run on knitting time, I'm pretty sure you'll be seeing these both again next week. That's the problem with knitting two things at once...it takes so much longer to finish anything.

Okay. So. First up is the Queen of the Waves shawl I had started two weeks ago out of some Kauni I had. I took photos last week with the intention of updating you on where things stood, but school/work won out and the post never got written. As of now I'm probably slightly less than a quarter of the way into ball 2 (finished ball 1 last Thursday) and am in the part of the shawl that is mostly garter stitch with only a few pattern rows, so hopefully that plus the rapid decreasing will help it go faster than it looks like it's going to go on paper when you think to yourself that you have more than 100 rows to go and you've only completed 70 rows in two weeks WITHOUT working on a second project. (Trying to get these both done by the end of February. I might be killing my chances of even finishing one by undertaking both. The tragic irony of me trying to become a polygamous knitter when faced with deadlines. It's the real reason I only knit one thing at a time.)

Here's where the shawl was last week (for reference and since I have the photos):

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And here's where it is this week:

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So, yeah. Some progress, but not a lot considering how far I managed to get between week 1 and week 2. The Kauni is really growing on me (I thought it might be slightly too scratchy, but it's not at all). It does have a lot of random veg matter in it though, so if that's a thing that bothers you, steer clear. I'm a bit surprised at the way the colours are striping in it since I honestly thought this was going to be a true gradient from dark to light. It's a bit of a pleasant surprise.

Before I leave this WIP, here's a closeup of the pattern stitches so you can perhaps get a better idea of what's going on with it. It's slightly bothersome to actually create because you have uneven stitch counts and lots of yarnovers that you need to drop which get hung up on the needles, but really it's only a few rows and it's not that bad. The pattern is easy to memorize/follow. I keep ending up with the wrong stitch counts, but it's a shawl so I'm rolling with it.

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Okay. Wow. Posts get long when you haven't updated for two weeks AND you have a second WIP. Yikes. I'll try to make this quick.

Also for the Knerd Girl Knits 2016 Bad-ass Women Craft Along round 1, one of the challenges is to knit from an historic knitting pattern. I desperately tried to find something that would be roughly the era of Outlander so I could double-dip into the Subway Knits Outlander KAL, but the earliest patterns I could find were Victorian era. One of the sites we were directed to was the Knitting Reference Library at University of Southampton, and I have a soft spot for Southampton, so I basically didn't consider looking anywhere else once I couldn't find pre-Victorian patterns. So, after going through a lot of books of doilies and all manner of impractical things I had no desire to knit, I came across "Weldon's Practical Needlework" which has patterns for all sort of things, but most specifically for my needs, a pattern for fold-over "Club Stockings" with a Union Jack, which basically means a regular sock with a fold-over section that has a Union Jack intarsia on it. And if you've been around the blog for a while you know how I can't resist putting a good logo on something.

Problem was, I didn't have the yarn I needed. I could have produced all the colours I needed (save white) in Knit Picks Palette, which does very well with colourwork, but because it's for socks, it needs to have nylon in it, which Palette does not. I had the grey and the red in Imagination, but not white or blue. And since I'm on a limited purchases plan, I was a bit stuck as to what I should do. And then it came to me. I pulled three balls of the heavier weight superwash wool sock yarn from my undyed yarn stash (yeah, I'm using business yarn for personal purposes. People do that all the time and it's not like anyone was buying it in a hurry lately) and dyed some up. 2 balls grey (which has now become the Lonely Mountain colourway thanks to fortuitous circumstances) and one ball half blue, a quarter red, and a quarter undyed. I was trying to estimate based on weights needed in the pattern, but the pattern is truly for knee-highs for men, so the stitch counts are very different than mine. I'll probaby have yarn left over, but there was no real sense in not just using the full skein.

So here's where it is now:

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(and here is the intarsia disaster mess I need to weave in at some point but have been putting off):

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The knitting is going fast, but I'm still skeptical that I'll be able to finish this sock and knit another sock by the end of February, even if it were the only thing I was working on. Also I pulled the floats too tight so it's puckering weird in the straight red column. It looks a bit too "homemade" for me. Odds are good I'll end up redoing this or doing it in a different way. But I do love the idea of the foldover sock! I think I'll make them for all my footy clubs someday.

So that brings us to the end of this very long post. I can almost guarantee you that I won't have a finished object for FO Friday, so I will hopefully see you back here next Wednesday with progress updates.

WIP Wednesday: Apparently 2016 is the year of the blue shawl/wrap

A few months ago (okay, so sometime this summer I started thinking about it, but it wasn't until fall that I started seriously thinking about it) I started thinking I should consider knitting a shawl. I'm still not sure what made me change my mind about not being a shawl knitter. I've gone to several classes about how to style shawls now and I'm still pretty convinced I'm going to look ridiculous, but I guess whatever. I didn't actually think the shawl thing would go anywhere (truthfully I still don't) since I don't even really wear the ready-made scarves/cowls that I've got (aside from winter stuff, though in the true cold I'm still finding myself reaching for a scarf), but many of my classmates in my graduate program would wrap themselves in huge (almost blanket-sized) wraps to keep warm in the overly air-conditioned buildings and I guess I got a little envy. And then I had 1200 yards of sport weight alpaca that had tried and failed at being a sweater, so the ginormous lace/drop-stitch wrap was born. 

And now...a true shawl.

I'd like to say that this came about because I was looking for something to do with the two skeins of blue (gradient) Kauni I bought at Shepherd's Harvest Sheep and Wool Festival back in 2014, but really it came about because I was trying to find a pattern I could knit that was even marginally inspired by a "woman in history" for the Knerd Girl Knits 2016 Badass Women Craft Along and I ran into a Faroese shawl pattern called Queen of the Waves which then made me think about the north coast of Denmark which then made me think about Kauni (which, truth be told., I did hope to use up this year). And the rest is history. Or will be, as soon as it's something besides 5 rows of 380 stitches of garter stitch.

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I have until the end of February to finish this. Others have knit it in a month. Those others were probably not simultaneously working 60% time while in 10 credits of graduate school on the internet and trying to also finish socks from a vintage knitting pattern that they still haven't dyed all the yarn for. No one ever said I didn't do things big.

Wish me luck.