February 2008

I am on a little EZ kick over here and decided to make a February Baby Sweater right after the Baby Surprise Jacket. It went just as quickly with even less need to look at the pattern. You will notice the colors are the same as the BSJ’s. Sorry about that. I realize this may bore my minuscule audience but I am eager to finish up with this yarn already. When I bought it I had no idea I would be able to make 3 sweaters and a few hats with only 4 skeins.

Here’s the finished sweater. I like how the two front panels serendipitously ended up nearly matching in the pooling and that the sleeves look almost deliberately striped:

Yarn: nearly a full skein (about 10 yards left) Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sport, 100% superwash wool, color 62 (Childsplay [sic])
Pattern: Baby Sweater on Two Needles (February) by Elizabeth Zimmermann, in Knitter’s Almanac
Needles: size 4
Size: tiny! Probably newborn to 3 months only

Aren’t the buttons great? You will need to click the photo to get a bigger version of it and see the buttons properly. I like the little colorful dots in the pink that work well with the yellow sewing thread I used.

I made a couple of modifications to the design. The lace pattern simply did not show up in this busy, busy yarn so I went with straight stockinette. I also cast on 6 extra stitches (8%) under the arms when I separated the sleeves onto waste yarn and knitted the body first. Then I picked up the set-aside sleeve stitches plus the 6 extra stitches, working them in the round rather than back and forth and reducing 2 stitches every other round twice to give me a total of 30 sleeve stitches instead of the 28 the pattern calls for. They still seem really narrow when compared to the Baby Surprise Jacket but I am sure they will fit. This is, after all, for a tiny person.

Next time I will work the yoke increases on the wrong side rather than the right side. Those little bloops of color bother me just a little and I noticed the increases are invisible on the inside of the yoke.

And what’s riding the bus with me as of Tuesday morning? Another Baby Surprise, this one in a double strand of Tofutsies sock yarn.

I am back from my weekend at Stitches West, with less money but more yarn and fiber. Yay! I had a great time. When I arrived Friday morning, the convention center looked like this:

The staff closed one of the lanes going in to the parking garage and routed us around through the garage to the outside overflow parking (”why?” still comes to mind, as there were many spaces available in the garage). I despise driving in 1 mph spurts but the reward was this:

This is what two days at the Market will do to you. I came home with the really bright blue flowered bag I’ve had my eye on in years past, a shawl pin, great spinning fiber from A Verb For Keeping Warm (camel/silk, cashmere/silk, and yak) and Chameleon Colorworks‘ Optim (mechanically-stretched 100% merino that will not felt; website is up and coming and will be ready in a few weeks, they told me),  fun new sock yarns that may or may not end up as socks (including my first-ever skein of Socks That Rock), a Strickwear kit, some Handmaiden Sea Silk (yum), and a selection of yarns from Tess’ Designer Yarns (it all smells strongly of fabric softener but still, yum). Mmm… big pile of new yarn.

My friend lives only a 10-minute drive from the convention center so we had two nights of knitting slumber party fun with six knitting ladies and a cat staying in one small apartment. Our hostess knitted us each a fuzzy scarf to wear on Saturday. You can see mine at the top left of the photo.

This was my favorite funny typo this year. I risked taking a photo despite the no cameras rule. My apologies for the blurriness; I kinneared this one:

Only 2.5% cretin? Darn, I like my yarn to have much more cretin than that. Or is that the usual ratio of cretins to non-cretins in the general population? Ah, the joys of spell-check gone wrong. They also had “chetin” and “chretin,” and, finally, “chitin,” the fiber made from shrimp and crab shells.

Ravelers were everywhere, all of us wearing our Ravelry name buttons. I did not recognize anyone since I haven’t been on Ravelry much, nor did anyone recognize me by my Ravelry name (not surprising). I did have my own personal celebrity sighting. Or at least knit-blogger sighting. I saw Yarn-A-Go-Go in the aisle outside Yarn Barn of Kansas. She posts photos of herself relatively frequently so I recognized her on sight. I said hello, although since I’m an avid reader but very infrequent (or possibly non-) commenter I’m sure she has no idea who I am.

Mr. MmmYarn wasn’t too lonely since he busied himself with both work and the laundry. He kindly took and emailed me a photo of the linen washcloths to show me they weathered the trip through washer and dryer:

The weekend was lots of fun. I am off to finish the February Baby Sweater I started Monday. Only 4 rows left on the second sleeve. It’s amazing how much you get done even with all the red wine at a knitting slumber party.

It was not raining when I got home so the finished jacket and I went outdoors:

Pattern: Baby Surprise Jacket by Elizabeth Zimmermann, in Knitting Workshop
Yarn: 3/4 skein Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sport, 100% superwash wool, color 62 (Childsplay [sic])
Buttons: Dill Buttons #1612
Needles: size 4
Size: newborn

Tonight Mr. MmmYarn is preparing for his weekend alone and I am preparing for my trip to Santa Clara in the morning. Someone at work bought this blanket from me today so I have extra cash to take to the Stitches West market, hooray!

If you’re going to Santa Clara, too, be sure to stop by A Verb For Keeping Warm; they have great naturally-dyed colors.

My sister-in-law and stepsister-in-law are both expecting little ones in late summer and early fall so I decided to get a jump start on small gifts.

First, I’m using up my leftover black and pink linen to make washcloths for the moms-to-be, my reasoning that they get tons of gifts for the babies but none for themselves. However, the finished squares are more diamonds than the intended squares:

Trust me, that pink one is as tall as it is wide (twice as many rows as stitches) but it really looks short of the mark here. They’re both garter stitch and apparently this linen does not like that. I am going to run both through the washer and dryer to see what happens. Most likely they will stay biased and I will need to wet them down again and block them forcefully into shape. I don’t mind if they’re skewed after they have been used but for presentation purposes I want them to look good. I made another black one in 4×4 knit-purl basketweave and that one did end up being a square.

A quick search through my box of finished items reveals a decided lack of baby things. My sister-in-law is too early along to tell which gender she will have; the stepsister-in-law’s first ultrasound showed boy parts but now they’re thinking girl. Perhaps the ultrasound technician was inexperienced and saw “amazing” boy parts, perhaps the umbilical cord? Who knows. It means I will need to make at least two boy items and two girl items to cover all the bases.

The first of the girl items is the Baby Surprise cardigan you saw a few days ago, started last Monday night and finished Friday on the bus:

It’s always amazing to me how that amorphous mess turns into such a cute little sweater with a few flips of the wrist. I took it to Monday night knitting to let the ladies marvel at Elizabeth Zimmermann’s brilliant origami puzzle so I hadn’t sewn the seams yet in this photo. Here’s the preview:

Buttons are on it now, too, and a good photo is coming once there is a break in the rain.

In the meantime, my little EZ kick is continuing and I am working on a February Baby Sweater in the same yarn as above.  Therefore also girly. Hmm, where is that Stitches West list? I need to add boy yarns to it.

The Kneedler brings up an interesting topic this week: signs that one may be overly obsessed with knitting.

Mounds of yarn and piles of knitting and fiber-related books about our apartment, an obvious sign of some sort of knitting obsession, notwithstanding, three of her observations really ring true for me.

1. I have often spotted someone on the bus or on the sidewalk untangling yarn and felt that momentary spark of excitement at finding a kindred spirit, only to be crushed by the realization the “yarn” is headphone cabling. Once it was a teenager stretching her gum that caused that feeling.

2. For a while (read “several years”) I stored my sleeping bag in the trunk of my car because there was not enough space in the closet to store it there. Why so little closet space? Why, yarn, of course. I’d rather have my yarn, the thing I use daily, in the house. I only used the sleeping bag a couple of times a year, plus its location had a safety benefit: if the car broke down, I had something warm to wrap up in. Of course, the car never broke down. And, of course, without yarn in the trunk I would have been really bored in my broken-down car. I have never stored an ongoing travel knitting project in the car, preferring instead to choose one for each outing.

3. And I, too, do not count my handspun yarn as stash. It sits in its own zippered bags on top of the store-bought stuff, so I see it every single time I root around for something to knit (= at least twice a week), but my brain just overlooks it. I also don’t inventory it in my stash spreadsheet. It’s somehow too special to knit with just yet.

Back to preparing for Stitches West, which is next week. Yay! I am still working on my list of things to look for in the Market.

As it’s Valentine’s Day, I wanted to show you something red. I realize you saw this item just a few days ago, but the red Squiggle hat has a happy owner, so today’s blog post is brought to you by our super-cute niece (yes, we here at MmmYarn are biased).  

When Mr. MmmYarn and I visited his parents over the weekend, his sister, brother-in-law, and their daughter were there, too. Our little niece spotted the hat crumpled in my hand as I was taking it outside to photograph it again and pointed it out to her mother, saying “hat.” How on earth she knew it was a hat in that state I’ll never know. Once I came in she wanted to try it on. And it looks great on her:

She also flipped it inside out and wore it with the red side out and the ribbing turned up so some of the Squiggle stuck out the bottom. I never knew it was so versatile.

She decided to keep it. Her mom says she talks a lot about her aunt and the hat.

On the way home we briefly stopped by my mom’s. The socks? All too short. Rats. I will need to re-do the toes on all six of them.

At Monday night knitting group I started something new. This is this week’s bus knitting in progress:

Any guesses as to what it is? And no cheating by looking it up on Flickr!

The purple sweater, blocked way back in November and sewn together by early December, is finally wearable. And wear it I do. Funny how long it takes me to go button shopping when two shops carrying buttons are less than a 10-minute walk from home:  

This photo makes it look more blue than purple; trust me, it’s very purple:

In this photo I like the sweater less but myself more than the previous one, so you get this one, too:

Pattern: Tangerine Twist by Susan Todhunter, as published on knitty.com
Yarn: 4 skeins Classic Elite Yarns Provence, 100% mercerized Egyptian cotton, color 2617
Buttons: Dill-buttons #809
Needles: size 6 for most of it, used sizes 5 and 4 for shaping
Size: own (I could not use any of the published sizes)

I made several alterations to this pattern.

First, the body part is written to start with the smallest needles and work its way up to the largest needles to create waist shaping. The picture shows the finished sweater with an hourglass shape but the schematic is obviously tapered and the instructions made me think it would end up tapered. I like an hourglass shape if I can manage it, so I started with the largest needle and worked my way down to the smallest, then back up again.

Second, the published gauge made for a floppier fabric than I like and my desired chest measurement was between two sizes, so I re-calculated the number of stitches for my tighter gauge and went on my merry way with my own custom size. 

Third, I knew I would not wear a thick-ish cotton sweater with itty bitty sleeves so I made my sleeves long. Many, many thanks to Daryl of KnitU for sending me that partial ball of an odd lot! I came very close to running out of yarn on this after deciding to lengthen those sleeves and that odd lot came to the rescue so I could sew my seams. There is nothing like an Extreme Cast-Off Yarn Challenge (from Stephanie Pearl-McPhee Casts Off) to make for an interesting knitting evening.

How about a good look at those buttons?

I love how sewing on the buttons without creating a shank formed those gentle curves along the buttonband, echoing the curves of the traveling twisted stitch. The buttonband is knitted perfectly straight.  

The really odd thing for me is that this is the first sweater I’ve ever made that is not grossly oversized. For years I wore huge (sometimes men’s) sweaters and couldn’t figure out why I always looked so shapeless. Then about 3 years ago I started watching What Not to Wear and learned about fit. Well, duh, and the little light bulb went on. Strange how I never figured out on my own the correlation between poor fit and poor visual impact. Looking back on past sweaters; nay, trying them on, you could easily put two of me in some of them and one-and-a-half of me in the rest. Since then I’ve learned and my purchased sweaters fit me but I haven’t made finished any sweaters of my own creation since then. This is the first. My Tangerine Twist could stand to be an inch longer, I suppose, but it fits me so well in the torso and shoulders that I love it the way it is. Plus I have no more of this yarn.

The festive knitting of last week is now a finished object that can be shown on the blog. Ta-da! It’s a little hat:

That is the outside of the hat. It looks a little like confetti threw up on it, doesn’t it?

The inside is far more tame:

I like that it’s a potentially reversible item although I did intend for the fluffy side to be the only public side. It may be too tickly on the ears if worn the other way.

Pattern: own. Cast on 84 for ribbing, increase to 88 for body of the hat, 8 point decrease at crown. Red only for the ribbing, then both yarns held together throughout for the rest.
Yarn: Wolle Roedel Universal Superwash, 100% superwash merino wool, color 806 (red) and Crystal Palace Yarns Squiggle, 50% nylon, 50% polyester, color 9297 (multi)
Needles: size 5
Size: toddler

The multi-colored yarn is appropriately named “Squiggle” –  the little strands want to wriggle and squiggle out of your hands and out of the stitches. This ended up being a full week of bus knitting simply because progress was unbelievably slow. I had to keep checking the tension of the two strands (Squiggle is more slippery than the wool) and I had to pay attention to only catch the core of Squiggle with the tips of my needles rather than the core and the three long fluffy strands whenever I came to one of those.

Mr. MmmYarn asked how the squiggly strands ended up mostly on one side. There is a good reason for that, besides my compulsion to pull strays over to the purl side as I worked. Here is what the yarn looks like:

The construction is a chained strand with regularly-spaced bloops of long fluff coming off of it. Bumps, bloops, and fluff naturally want to sit on the purl side because of the way you form your stitches. I tried both knitting and purling with the yarns in my left hand and in my right hand as an experiment and the squiggles went mostly to the purl side each time. Try it sometime.

With a yarn like this, it’s far easier to plan for the fluff to end up on the purl side whether you’re knitting or purling the item. I knit faster than I purl, so I worked this hat inside out with the knit side facing me, letting the squiggles end up on the purl side. Then when I was done, I grabbed a thin sock needle and pulled some of the knit side strays over to the purl side and they are staying put.

Now that I see how very poofy this turned out, working the Squiggle in on every other row may have been a better idea than holding the yarn doubled throughout.

I went button shopping on Sunday, so you get a little preview of a finally finished sweater:

A good photo will need to wait until the weekend.

P.S. Knitty rejected my bag pattern. :(   I still won’t show it here yet as I’m going to try to get it published elsewhere.

This photo shows the beginnings of a fuzzy sweater, at least:

The yarn is Berroco Memoirs, fuzzy and beautifully dyed. It’s a blend of mostly wool and mohair so it will be nice and warm.  

I am trying a simultaneous top-down set-in sleeve as described in Barbara Walker’s Knitting from the Top, hence the calculator and gauge ruler in the photo. So far it is going great. I am almost done with the sleeve cap increases and it both fits me when I try it on and matches the size of the commercially-knitted sweater I am using as my model. Two nights ago I had to unravel back to nearly the point in the photo above as my sleeve decreases were too close together, but am now almost back to the armpits again.

Huh? The Icelandic yoke sweater? What Icelandic yoke sweater?