I slept in until nearly 9am this morning so I had a late breakfast / early lunch. That reminded me of the Sunday Brunch hat I finished in June that hasn’t made it here yet.
Pattern: own — Garter stitch strip with built-in i-cord for brim, grafted together; picked up stitches for body and knit up Yarn: Fearless Fibers Mohair and Wool Worsted Yarn, color Sunday Brunch Needles: US size 6 Size: adult large
Despite hearing other knitters’ opinions that this is fine, I don’t think the stripes on the band work well with the color blocking on the body. However, I know that there’s someone out there who will think this is the greatest thing ever so off it goes into the craft fair box for this November.
I had never heard of Urban Fauna Studio until last week, when I saw a gentleman in Golden Gate Park sitting with his drum carder and a bag filled with an entire llama fleece. Of course I had to talk to him and in the conversation, he told me about this place. I figured I’d go there someday.
Today happens to be their 2-year anniversary sale. I gave in to temptation.
The fiber is handpainted by The Spun Monkey. It’s Falklands wool, a breed I’m unfamiliar with but which from what I’ve read fits the bill for Urban Fauna Studio’s focus on “ecologically and socially considerate manufacturing processes” (to quote their website). Plus it’s pretty.
The yarn is dyed by Girl on the Rocks and is a merino and tencel blend in the Pewter colorway. It looks purple in the photo but is actually a silvery gray with purple and changes color as you rotate it in your hand. Very lovely stuff.
I think I may have broken my July curse and it’s safe to write a blog post. We’ll see if I make it to the end of today’s entry without messing it up somehow. Just to be safe, today’s finished items are going to be a foray back into June.
First up, the great. I really, really like this little cardigan. It’s official name is Tain’s Welcome Cardigan, for my friend’s new little baby boy; however, it could also be called the I-had-lots-of-red-Baby-Ull-and-not-so-much-of-the-other-colors cardigan.
I based it on a cardigan I saw on a little girl in Trader Joe’s. Hers was pink with multi-color striped sleeves, some sort of fluffy polyester or nylon affair, the kind of yarn that makes it look like you’re wearing a bathmat. I filed that away in my brain and came up with this when the time was right. I knitted the sleeves first, then the red body from the bottom up, then joined it all together for the raglan decreases. I added the bottom ribbing and bands at the end and used a suspended bind-off. This is my first time using it and it was a rousing success: the bands are elastic yet hold their shape. I’ll have to remember it the next time I make a top-down hat.
Mostly-matching buttons finish the look:
Pattern: own Yarn: Dale of Norway Baby Ull, 100% superwash wool, colors 4227 (red), 5755 (blue), 2908 (orange), 5135 (purple), 2317 (yellow) Needles: US size 2 for the body and 1 for the ribbing Size: about 9 months
Started 4/26 and finished 6/14/2010
Next on the list, the bad. This is a very bad bad bag. It has been a WIP for more than a year and I decided to concede victory to it. Don’t let this picture fool you; it’s basted within an inch of its life with black thread, mightily distorted from its actual shape so it only looks good on this exposed side, and arranged very strategically for its photo shoot:
Pattern: Small Origami Bag by Vicki Square, as published in Folk Bags Yarn: Artfibers Sherlock, 75% merino and 25% silk, color I (black); Artfibers Minstrel, 63% mohair, 17% wool, 20% nylon, color 4 (brown/black/gray) Needles: US size 3
Started 12/31/2009 (actually, August 2008 but I unraveled it then) and gave up in despair 6/26/2010
The square and i-cord were easy. Then came the two little tiny seams. I sewed those over and over until the yarn was shredded, and still the shape wouldn’t come together. Forget frogging it, this one went in the trash! The guilt over throwing away Artfibers yarn went away once the lid was shut. Take that, you bad bad bag!
And now, the lucky. Remember how I said July was cursed? The month started with a clackety-clack when the DVD drive on my computer failed on Independence Day weekend. I had torte design failure (see previous post) and hit major traffic on the way home from the visit. [The good part of that weekend was re-meeting our niece, who is nearing two years old. She took to me this time. I helped her dip her toes into the ocean, we played with the toys in the toy box and I read to her. I also got to re-meet my very active step-nephew and my brother and I played some Johnny Cash together on our guitars.] Then came so much equipment and software installation failure at work that it felt I had the Technology Death Touch. Kind of like the Vulcan Death Grip, only, you know, it makes hardware sleep.
So I decided to do laundry, something I’ve had lots of practice in and can make me feel successful. Fortunately, this hat, the Bird on a Wire hat that I’m so pleased with and spent so much time on, did not take a ride in the Dryer of Doom.
Brown side!
Blue side!
I am totally charmed by how the bird faces different directions on different sides of the hat.
Brown side!
Blue side!
OK, enough of that although I could go on. Back in January, I double-knitted it only to the top of the design, then worked the two sides separately, only to find my purl side (blue side) gauge completely off. In May I ripped it back and double-knitted it all the way up to the crown shaping and now it looks good. Here are the details:
Pattern: #15 Double Knit Hat, aka the Bird on a Wire Hat, by Elli Stubenrauch, as published in Vogue Knitting, Fall 2009 issue Yarn: Dale of Norway Baby Ull, 100% superwash wool, color 3172 (brown) and 6714 (blue) Needles: US size 1 Size: large adult
Started 1/3 and finished 6/26/2010 (it spent some time in gauge purgatory)
Back to 2 weeks ago: when I folded the laundry I thought the pile of shirts seemed small. It didn’t click until Monday morning that all my work undershirts and camisoles were gone. Someone stopped my running dryer, rifled through my things, fished out the good stuff (never fear: the beaten-up cleaning t-shirts are all still with me) and started the cycle again. How very rude.
So on Monday I was forced to shop, not my favorite activity unless it’s yarn or I am really in the mood. Hardware/software problems continued Monday and Tuesday, and when I went through the mail Tuesday evening I heard little tapping noises in the living room. I went to the kitchen to grab a nectarine and… bees! Live bees in my kitchen! Hundreds of bees hitting the kitchen and living room windows from the outside, hence the tapping noises. Want to see?
The swarm arrived Tuesday afternoon (my downstairs neighbors were in the yard when it came and took the photo shown above out their living room window) and set up shop in a hole in the wall up at my level. That’s my kitchen window in the picture. Stray bees are getting into my kitchen somehow. The only openings I see are tiny cracks around the tightly-closed window so I stuffed those with paper towels and still they get in. This is day 13 of BeeWatch 2010, with anywhere from 5 to 25 individuals in my kitchen during daylight hours. The first couple of hours after they arrive they are angrily buzzing against the window, trying to get out. So I don’t go in there until it’s been quiet for at least 20 minutes and I feel it’s safe to vacuum them up (I know, bad karma), meaning I don’t get to eat dinner until 8:30pm.
On sunny days they’re really active. I made my own Bee Movie from my living room last weekend:
The bee service finally came 2 days ago to remove the hive. They saw through the outer wall, find the queen and stick her in a hive box, then get the rest of the hive in there, and later patch up the wall. You don’t want to exterminate because bees perform a very important role and several pounds of dead bees are very stinky, but you do have to get them out because the honey and wax can do serious building damage. All this activity stirred up the bees and I had a high bee count Friday night. Rather than face the kitchen’s guests yet again, I went out to dinner. I’ve gotten very jumpy whenever a small fly or a piece of lint drifts into my field of vision. The first 10 days I was able to face them but the last two nights my courage failed me completely. My very brave next door neighbor rescued me last night.
It’s just about lunchtime and I don’t hear any buzzing so it’s safe to make a proper meal, I hope. Maybe all the extra duct tape I put around the kitchen window’s seams early this morning is doing the trick. Although when I look out the window, no one’s going in or out of the opening in the side of the house, so maybe it’s too cold or they’ve given up on finding their hive here.
Either way, I am so grateful for a bee-free kitchen that I can hardly stand it and the first pair of socks for my mom is coming along. Perhaps my July curse is broken.
Tomorrow is Stitch & Pitch (go Giants!). I always wonder what it would be called for other hobbies. For weavers: Weave & Heave, kayakers: Row & Throw, tatters: Tat & Bat, bicyclists: Ride & Slide. Ha!
What is the point of carefully arranging the fruit on an almond torte
when it sinks as though into quicksand while baking?
It was still very tasty.
I brought the torte along with me when I visited my parents over Independence Day. My mom and I went to the new NordicMart yarn shop in San Luis Obispo where I got this with the intent of making hat and bootie sets:
And she also gave me the yarn she bought on her recent trip to Germany so I could make her more socks:
She called me when she was on her trip telling me she got yarn and that it was more interesting than the socks I’ve given her so far, not so much brown. She had a cheery tone but was completely serious. Um, yeah. She went with me to ImagiKnit to pick out the yarn for the other socks I made her!
The socks will all have plain stockinette feet. I’m thinking Jaywalker tops for one of the Weekend Color skeins and something textured for the pink. I’ll see what inspiration hits when I get to the second Weekend Color.
Yes, I am still here. Mmm… Yarn still is, too, although I have been looking into migrating it elsewhere. Part of that process is getting into our virtual dedicated server and I got stuck on step 1 (how ridiculous) today. Now I’m waiting for an answer to my plea for help in that vendor’s forums. While I could say I am technologically competent, I work an internal help desk, meaning I answer staff members’ questions about or solve their problems with the software titles we use. And I sometimes help relatives. I am comfortable saying I am good at what I do, but I do not set up virtual dedicated servers nor do I know how to manage an existing one (any friend or family member reading this, if you know how to use a VDS, Plesk 7.5, and Linux, and have some spare time, I’d love to hear from you). The biggest part of the problem is that Mr. MmmYarn set up most of (= 95%) of our computer stuff and left behind no notes. So I slog through what I can find on the vendors’ websites or in general on the Internet and sometimes I get somewhere and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I get pretty upset over it all, with being stuck trying to figure out all the stuff Mr. MmmYarn set up, and when I get upset I go for the dark chocolate or an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or some knitting or all three, not for reading complicated and usually outdated documentation (part of my job is keeping our documentation up to date, and I’m good at that, too; hear that, vendors?) that makes it just that much harder to figure out what’s going on. Simply guessing the various user names and passwords and associated email addresses has been an adventure, although vendors who are unwilling to talk to me because I don’t have the magic combination of all three are certainly very happy to accept my credit card to keep the service going while I try to figure out what it’s for. Not that I’m bitter. But I digress.
On the knitting front, apparently I came over all stripe-y one morning a couple of months ago and kept it up since then. I didn’t even notice this pattern of behavior until I viewed my projects page on Ravelry and saw them all lined up in a technicolor row. So, let’s dive right in, shall we? Do not adjust your screen; everything here is indeed striped.
First up, a use-up-random-scraps-of-yarn scarf. I sorted my scraps into color groups:
Then I bought a skein each of bright, solid wool in rainbow colors:
And whipped up what I consider the Screaming Rainbow Scarf. This weekend is Pride; I wonder if I could have sold it on the street.
Some of the scrap yarns were fragile novelty types so I had to make twisted fringe to keep them contained. Well, I suppose I could have woven in all those ends instead of making a fringe but you know that just isn’t going to happen here at Mmm… Yarn. I like that I found one fluffy skein each in purple, red, and blue as it makes for a balanced effect. This sucker is bright!
Pattern: own: 1 to 3 strands of scrap yarn held together with the Nature Spun, cast on 260 and go Yarn: scraps held together with Brown Sheep Nature Spun Sport, 100% wool; .14sk color N46S Red Fox; .43sk each color N54S Orange You Glad, color 305S Impasse Yellow, color 112S Elf Green, color N36S China Blue, color N62S Amethyst Needles: US 8 Size: 6.75″ wide, 64″ long without fringe and 72″ long with fringe
Started 4/11 and finished 4/15/2010 (makes for a happy Tax Day)
After that came a parade of hats, starting with two opi. I like “opi” better than “opuses,” so that’s what you get: two opi. The first one is a basic hat with my usual 8-point decrease at the crown:
The second has a brim and a 4-point double decrease:
Pattern: own Yarn: 1.75 skeins Zitron Opus 1, 100% wool with aloe and jojoba, color 100 Needles: US 5 Size: adult
Started 3/24 and finished 4/14/2010
I made a couple of spiral rib hats. This one has a textured stripe only:
Pattern: own Yarn: Karabella Yarns Aurora 8, 100% superwash merino wool, color 1530 Needles: US 5
Size: adult
Started 4/16 and finished 4/18/2010
And one using up some yarns I’ve had for quite some time. Two colors always gives me good practice in holding one color in each hand. I usually hold my yarn in my left hand. In this case, I purled left and knitted right:
Pattern: own (3×3 spiral rib) Yarn: Cascade 220, 100% wool, color 7830 (salmon-y red) and 4147B (light yellow) Needles: US 5 Size: adult
Started 5/9 and finished 5/26/2010
I made a spiral stripe hat using the same technique I learned in my Rovaniemi mittens class. Each yellow-green stripe is one strand of yarn so there are no floats inside although I did end up with 24 ends to weave in:
I wove in the ends very neatly so the wearer has the option of wearing it either way out. Here’s the inside:
Pattern: own Yarn: Brown Sheep Lamb’s Pride Worsted, 85% wool, 15% mohair, color M-52 Spruce and M-135 April Green Needles: US 6 Size: adult
Started 4/19 and finished 4/25/2010
And, finally, the comparatively plain gold and orange hat:
Pattern: own Yarn: Brown Sheep Lamb’s Pride Worsted, 85% wool, 15% mohair, color M-14 Sunburst Gold and M-110 Orange You Glad Needles: US 6 Size: adult
Started 5/5 and finished 5/8/2010
“Why, yes, I am very happy with my hat wardrobe,” says Sancho Panza, “although the light purple one did make me feel a little less manly.” Fortunately for me, he never complains and he always holds still.
I’ll stray from hats as I expect you’re tired of them and show you the last thing I’m showing today, my Sharks socks in a self-striping yarn. This yarn traveled with me on our vacation in 2008 and came back home unknitted. It finally gets to fulfill its potential:
Pattern: own Yarn: 2sk Claudia Hand Painted Yarns fingering weight, 100% merino wool, color: Sharks (as in San Jose Sharks, the hockey team) Needles: size 1 Size: my feet
Started 5/26 and finished 6/17/2010
This is my first time using Claudia yarn and I am happy to report I really liked it. It’s easy to work with (no splitting or weirdness) and feels soft and spongy. The label doesn’t say what her base is but my guess is Louet Gems.
There’s actually more, even non-hat items, but I think this is enough for one day. I do need to leave *something* for my next post, whenever I decide I have time to write it. I don’t have too much of an excuse for my long silence, although about 4 weeks ago, I picked up my guitar again after a nearly 2-year hiatus and I end up playing that in the evenings instead of playing on the computer.
Oh, and I have nothing to knit for the bus tomorrow, having spent yesterday and today actually finishing stuff. Le sigh.
I nearly always have multiple projects on the needles, some easy and some requiring more thought. Things don’t get much simpler than a garter stitch scarf:
Pattern: what pattern? it’s all garter stitch Yarn: 2.5 skeins Trendsetter Yarns Horizon, 70% cotton, 30% nylon, color 8 Needles: US size 10.5 Size: 5.5″ wide x 78″ long
Started 3/25 and finished 4/4/2010
Garter stitch is perfect for knitting on the bus. The coloring reminds me of Neapolitan ice cream, except a little pale for that. The yarn is old, not in Ravelry or Yarndex. I’d guess at least 12 years old: it’s leftovers from an old friend, sent to me in February via a mutual friend at Stitches West. Horizon is an interesting frayed-looking woven ribbon:
My complicated project was a pair of lace socks for me. With all the ripping and re-knitting, these took nearly two months to complete. Fortunately, so much repetition meant I memorized the stitch pattern very quickly so these were good bus knitting whenever I was on a roll on a particular section. They blocked quite nicely:
Pattern: own Stitch Pattern: Little Arrowhead Lace (from Barbara Walker’s first Treasury, page 193, except I added a second purl stitch between motifs Yarn: 2.25 ounces (skein is 4 ounces) Fearless Fibers sock yarn, 100% superwash merino wool, rainbow-dyed colorway Robin’s Egg; white reinforcement thread at heels and toes Needles: US size 1
Started 2/11 and finished 4/9/2010
Fearless Fibers is a dyer I found on Etsy; in fact, my first Etsy purchase. She has terrific customer service. I don’t know what her sock yarn base is. It’s quite a bit thinner than what I’m used to working with. Her skeins are 550 yards to 112g (4oz) and most commercial yarns I’ve used are around 425 yards to 100g. This meant I had to work with size 1s instead of size 2s, not a big deal.
Mmm… pretty blue close-up:
In cooking news, I used the bread machine to make whole wheat pizza dough a few weeks ago. Brilliant! I don’t know why I never thought of it before. Since I was at it, I made enough for two pizzas. Here’s the result, pizza #1 on the left, hot from the oven, and #2 waiting to go in.
Yes, I cannot make a perfect circle unless it’s a shawl or hat crown.
Yeah, nothing finished, but several things in progress.
First up, this week’s opus:
Hat #2 in the same yarn is already in the works.
A very plain scarf is on the horizon:
My robin’s egg socks are making strides although sock #1 is off the needles as punishment for being too small around the foot. Sock #2 forges ahead, now sized correctly, and I’ll catch up with #1 once #2 has its next try-on:
OK, perhaps not a frenzy of WIPs, but after this much Easter chocolate it sure feels that way.
Note for family members: the memorial plaque finally got installed but because the Conservatory is closed today, I was unable to get a photo. I plan to go back Friday and will post a picture to his blog, not mine.
It’s high time I showed you the little wristlets I learned to make at the end of February. These were the product of the “Lapland Hand Garments” class I took at Stitches West, taught by Susanna Hansson. The technique is from the area of Finland around Rovaniemi; we learned there isn’t a big knitting tradition there because there aren’t many sheep, hence not much wool. Traditionally, they stuck with small stuff.
In class, we first made a practice wristlet using worsted weight yarn. This was so we could learn the technique before heading into a small gauge with colors of our choosing. Here again is the practice wristlet in traditional colors that I finished in just under 2 hours and the actual project started right before lunch:
On the practice wristlet, you can see my stitches are looser at the bottom and tightened up toward the top as my technique improved. While I have kind of a super hero-ish feel when I wear it on my wrist, I’m not inspired to make it a mate. I use this as a glass cozy when I get hot tea at Monday Night Knitting.
I was definitely inspired to both finish and make a mate for the fine-gauge wristlet. The actual project is worked on US size 00 needles. It turns out is is far harder to take a picture of my own wrists from the top than I thought it would be. So here they are from the other side:
Pattern: Lapland Hand Garments class project: Wristlets, by Susanna Hansson Yarn: Vuorelma Satakieli, 100% wool Needles: US size 00 Size: adult
Started 2/26 and finished 3/22/2010
Worked three repeats of pattern chart
They are very pretty and work well as warmers. I am wearing them right now while typing because it is chilly with a capital C in the apartment today. Susanna was a good teacher. She is engaging, speaks and demonstrates clearly, and knows her mitten lore. She gave a slideshow of various traditional garments, all with the wearers wearing mittens, in the afternoon. I recommend her as a teacher.
The technique is interesting. You use a separate strand for each zigzag of color and the strands are carried up very neatly on the inside. Always working the main color over the contrasting colors means the main color has floats. The contrasting colors then trap the main color’s floats on the following round so you get a tidy interior:
About all those bundles of yarn in the first photo in this post: that’s the trick to keeping the yarn organized. Make little yarn butterflies for all 11 lengths of contrasting colors, thread them onto a straight knitting needle, and rotate either your project or the straight needle every round to keep everything from tangling. It worked like a charm for preventing tangling; however, my straight needle wasn’t long enough so I had trouble pulling more yarn when needed. It kept wanting to stick to its neighboring color. So I waited to make wristlet #2 until I purchased these cool bobbins that have a hole in the middle, allowing me to organize my colors on a straight needle without all the clinginess:
Sorry, Susanna. I know the whole point was to use the traditional technique.
One drawback to having 11 bundles of yarn plus a main color is you end up with 24 tails to weave in per wristlet. Yep, “48″ was in the running as a post title.
We did have a discussion in class as to whether a full day of class was enough. The general consensus was that a two-day class would be better. I would have wanted a split one-day class: a morning of learning the technique with an afternoon wrap-up the next day to address any questions or problems. I realize this isn’t going to happen at Stitches West, but it’s my opinion. I learned the technique quickly but found my execution to be slow, had less than half a fine-gauge wristlet by the end of the day.
When I went down to visit my parents last weekend, I had my stepdad get a photo of my wrists. Much better here:
And I have to include gratuitous photos of the elephant seals from that trip:
My mom says this isn’t many, this is few. When there are many, you cannot see the sand. Something to think about, isn’t it? Here they are in all their glory. There are seals all the way up in the dunes. If you look at the big version of this photo, you can see the ones in the dunes flipping sand onto themselves.
What’s that? You wanted to see more mittens? OK, I leave you with cell phone photos I snapped in class. Susanna had a table in back covered in absolutely exquisite mittens and mitts. The little ones are no larger than the top joint of my thumb:
The gentleman who knits these wee mittens must have incredible eyesight.
I took today off work to try to regroup a bit mentally and found it’s actually warm outside. So I went for a short walk in the park and it felt so strange to not need a sweater or jacket. While I was out, I noticed a lot of green on the other folks out and about. All the kids in a large school group outside the Conservatory of Flowers were wearing shamrocks. Aha, mystery solved. I had completely forgotten today is St. Patrick’s Day. I did not wear green but last night’s and this morning’s knitting were a swatch for the Colette Cardigan [Ravelry link] with the Brooks Farm Four Play:
Dark and horrible photo despite the sunshine streaming in. Yarn is quite lovely in real life.
See, you don’t need to pinch me, it’s green! It’s also a nice, big swatch. I optimistically cast on the entire width of the back and worked the first 6 inches so I could see what the yarn does. It goes so quickly on size 8 needles; my other current projects are on sizes 1 and 4. Since it’s warm inside, too, (75 degrees!) I washed the swatch and am letting it dry to see what the blocked gauge is. It will probably actually dry today instead of in 4 or 5 days. While I wait for that, I set up my Excel worksheet that will recalculate all the numbers in the pattern. All I have to do once it’s dry is to re-measure, then stick my stitch gauge in cell C12 and my row gauge in cell D12 and I’ll have my calculations all the way through. I just hope I have enough yarn for this one.
Speaking of enough yarn, I most certainly do NOT have enough to magic a baby blanket out of the Creatively Dyed Yarn Fatima. This is what I have:
It’s 36″ wide, about standard width for a baby blanket. But only 5″ tall with the current tier unfinished and I stuck the remaining yarn on the scale and learned I have used over a third of it already. Unless someone near and dear delivers a baby snake (unlikely, right?), this isn’t going to work. I also don’t want to buy 4 more balls of this yarn because I don’t want to make a $200 blanket. Back to the drawing board. The yarn is wonderful, so perhaps a little kimono-style cardigan.
Socks are coming along slowly, with lots of cursing as I re-knit the heel of sock one 3 times trying to get it the right width to fit me:
I stuck my name in an online anagram generator a long time ago and learned my first name rearranges to spell REKNITS. Fitting, isn’t it? I guess I was destined to be a perfectionist knitter.
