March 2008

No knitting or spinning content today, I’m afraid. Yesterday I went out to lunch with a friend and it turned into an all-day outing during which I knit half of one double-pointed needle worth of stitches on my sock and today Mr. MmmYarn and I went for a walk in the far west area of Golden Gate Park. Queen Wilhemina’s Tulip Gardens are in glorious bloom (we’ve been there a few times and have only seen dirt) so you get flower pictures today:

After we got back I had a long nap, then made cookies. So no knitting today, but progress will resume tomorrow when I’m on the bus to work again.

Oh, all right. A tiny bit of knitting content. While visiting the tulips I took a decent photo of the first shawl I ever made:

That’s Fiesta Yarn’s Famous Shawl pattern, made in La Boheme. I photographed it back when I made it but the photo was terrible. My photography skills have improved a little since then so I am re-snapping anything that has a bad photo.  

After much swatching, I gave up and found a pattern I really liked for my Trekking color #158:

The spiral I was trying just didn’t turn out. I really liked the line it made down the cuff but that twisted stitch made the cuff really tight. I experimented with spacing it out more and with putting purl stitches before and after the knit. Neither idea worked. But Jaywalkers… I’ve admired those for a while and these are my first. Come to think of it, of the 60-ish pairs of socks I’ve made I think I have used a pattern only twice: I remember the Chalet Socks by Nancy Bush and Monkey by Cookie A. All the rest are simple rib patterns. Oddly, though, I’ve never been bored. The different colors of yarn apparently entertain me a lot. The colors of Trekking #158 definitely entertain me, and the Jaywalker pattern is so simple but interesting that sock #1 is at the foot already.

Now off to the yarn store to find another set of metal size 1 double-pointed needles.

Friday morning I noticed some action (finally) on the kitchen windowsill. That black strip in the background is the window. Due to the time change it is now pitch dark when I get up in the morning:

That barely visible teeny tiny sprout in the upper right quandrant is the first of I hope several basil plants I’m growing from the seeds of the previous plant. It only took this sprout 6 weeks to show itself (insert sarcasm here; 6 weeks?!? Is that normal?). And the other seeds? Perhaps they’re shy, or perhaps they have heard of my black thumb and have entered some sort of suicide pact, deciding to stay in the dirt rather than face my unique version of plant care. Time will tell.

After work we drove to my parents’ house and Saturday we had a fitting: I am very happy to announce that my mom’s socks fit! Before socks, though, my mom, Mr. MmmYarn, and I went for a walk along the coast. The California poppies are in bloom and are mighty glorious:

What? Not close enough? How about this:

The view on the other side of the path was nothing to sneeze at, either:

For poor Mr. MmmYarn it was all something to sneeze at as the pollen was out in full force. But for me, the luckily allergy-free, it was just so pretty out there that I had to snap a bunch of photos. Both sides of the path seen together, our walk looked something like this:

Nice, huh? But I did promise you socks galore, too, so here they come. We got back from our walk, my mom tried on all three pairs of socks, and I got to work grafting the toes. My stepbrother and his family showed up when I was nearly finished and my stepniece asked me what the socks looked like before I grafted them. I held up a skein of yarn and her eyes went wide with amazement and she gave a big grin. Future knitter? I finished up the last couple of toes, then the socks all went outside for their photo shoot.

Pair #1 with its banded colors reminds me of a snakeskin:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Austermann Step; 75% wool, 25% nylon, contains aloe and jojoba oil; color 01
Needles: size 2

Pair #2 looks like army camouflage to me:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Regia Stretch Color; 70% wool, 3% nylon, 7% polyester; color 88
Needles: size 2

I actually took several photos of each pair, against varying backdrops, but the lawn photos turned out best in each case, so you’ll need to see pair #3 against green, too. Ah, Trekking, with its lovely gradual and blended color changes:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Trekking Pro Natura; 75% superwash wool, 25% bamboo; color 1603
Needles: size 2

I hope you are not tired of socks yet as I have one more to show you. Mr. MmmYarn drove part of the way so I worked on my sock in progress in the car, but I am still working out some kinks in my design, making for slow work. The sock came to knitting group tonight. Now you see it:

Now you don’t:

Sigh.

The little bag I started Monday simply wasn’t turning out. I didn’t like how it looked and also didn’t like working it. I think I’ll stick with potholders and edges on knitted items when it comes to crocheting. I gave the yarn away to someone who can use it.

A sock in Trekking XXL color #158 is underway and looking mighty nice, if I may say so. I like the bright colors. This is the best in-progess photo I could get on moving public transit:

That spiral is simply a traveling twisted stitch. I’m not sure it’s going to be enough to hold the sock up on my leg. The cuff fits, I can get it on over my leg, but I’ll need to knit the entire cuff before I can weigh in on stay-up-ability.

We’re visiting my parents this weekend. I hope I hope I hope those 3 pairs of socks I made my mom fit her this time around.

Bwuahahaha! This week’s bus knitting is not knitting, but crocheting:

That little blip of black and white crochet you see in the bottom left of this photo is a bag I made some 8 years ago. I’m really proud of that one as I put in a sewn lining… nearly a year after I crocheted it in a single day, ahem. Hey, I’m a knitter and not a sewer.

Now, does anyone reading this know how to make a jogless jog in single crochet so I can put some neat stripes into this new creation? Google has failed me this time: all I get is knitting references. Mmm… knitting. I think I’ll go work on socks tonight.

I really don’t want to bore my tiny audience of readers by constantly showing the same project rendered in a different color, but the past week dictated small, portable, mindless projects so you will need to suffer through yet another pair of booties. These are the ones I started during jury duty on Monday:

Pattern: own
Yarn: South West Trading Company Tofutsies; 50% superwash wool, 25% Soysilk fibers, 22.5% cotton, 2.5% chitin
Needles: size 2
Size: newborn to 6 months

The colors pooled a little at the tops but I find the way the colors are blended makes interestingly variegated pools.

I got back to working on the green fuzzy sweater I began in late January. I let it languish for a few weeks for two reasons.

(1) I was neurotically obsessed with making baby items when I heard we are going to have two new babies in the family. Now that I’ve come to my senses and realized I have months to go (and have made 3 baby sweaters already), I am back to working on the WIP pile.

(2) I had to do sleeve calculations and for some reason any step requiring calculations causes me to think yick and throw a project aside. It makes no sense. I am not afraid of math; got the Math Award in high school, even. I think it’s more a fear of making something not fit and having it be my fault. If someone else (as in a published pattern) has done the math then I can’t go wrong, right? The calculations took all of 5 minutes one evening and I started my sleeves.

The barely-visible-in-this-photo white threads you see where the sleeves begin are my lifelines, in case I need to rip back:

And I am very glad I put them in, as I have used the right one twice already. I finished the right sleeve a few weeks ago… after knitting and frogging it twice. On the first go I picked up the stitches and knitted away, cursing how hard it was. After at least 90 painfully slow minutes, I noticed the stitches were rather a lot smaller than they were in the sweater body. Yep, I used a smaller needle to pick up the stitches and forgot to switch to larger ones on the next row. Rrrrrip.

Second go, I knitted down to the end of the skein and thought, “wow, that sleeve sure is narrow.” I had calculated that I needed to decrease 20 stitches total, so 2 stitches every 10 rounds. Somehow my brain converted that to “1 stitch every 10 rounds, but I’m decreasing 2 each time so 2 stitches every 5 rounds” even though on the paper in front of me I had it written down correctly. What a doofus. Rrrrrip again. If it weren’t so long ago, those Math Award people might show up on the doorstep and strip me of that honor.

Last night I managed to bring the left sleeve down to the length of the right one without mishap. Whew! Perhaps I do have the minimum amount of intelligence required to knit. Right now the sweater is hanging on a chair so those sleeves can grow all they want before I put in the last couple of inches. Berroco Memoirs is such a light yarn that the swatch did not stretch but past experience with mohair means I don’t trust this yarn not to grow once it’s worked up in sweater size.

Jury duty ran pretty much all day yesterday. Oddly, they called in the bulk of the potential jurors rather early on, but for the remaining 7 of us it was just sitting around and listening to the nice folks say “we don’t need you yet” every couple of hours. By lunchtime I finished a quarter of my book and had this:

By the time my group was finally excused at 3:20pm I had finished more than half my book, finished the dark teal booties, and had another bootie more than half done. The finished ones look like this:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Lang Yarns JaWoll Superwash; 75% superwash wool, 18% nylon, 7% acrylic; color 83.0088
Needles: size 2
Size: newborn to 6 months

I had hoped to make another lace scarf yesterday but swatching late Sunday night just didn’t work out, so booties it was. I still don’t know what to do with the yarn I intended for the scarf. It is a single 250-yard skein of Louet Sales Kidlin Pixie and because of the linen content it’s stiff so I’m having a hard time deciding what to do with it. I have a feeling nothing is going to look too nice until it is washed and blocked. It’s going to go back in the stash for now.

As far as the blog is concerned, the time change is great. It means I can take photos of finished and in progress items after work and not only on weekends.

The Baby Surprise I started last week went for a walk in the park today:

Pattern: Baby Surprise Jacket by Elizabeth Zimmermann, in Knitting Workshop
Yarn: about 1.25 skeins (I have 75g left of 200g, weighed by my not-so-accurate scale) South West Trading Company Tofutsies; 50% superwash wool, 25% Soysilk fibers, 22.5% cotton, 2.5% chitin
Needles: size 5
Size: newborn

I couldn’t get 6 matching buttons so made do with 3 of each color. I held two skeins of Tofutsies together throughout, both to help avoid pooling and to make the yarn thick enough to work with this pattern. When I first touched this yarn in the skein I thought it was a little rough and I hesitated to use this for a baby sweater, but it turns out it’s skeined very tightly. Once I had worked two or three rows the skein loosened and felt soft. The sweater feels great, too. I hope the coloring meets my stepsister-in-law’s criteria of soft greens and tans for her baby boy due later this year.

This brings me down to only 43.157 miles of yarn in my stash.

Now I have to go come up with a project that meets jury duty criteria for tomorrow: small, mindless yet interesting enough for me, and on wood or plastic short needles so security doesn’t take away my knitting. I will bring a book, too, just in case.

I am cleaning up my yarn stash spreadsheet to remove recently finished projects and have also added totals to the bottom. The spreadsheet does not contain all my yarn: I have some super-thin mercerized cotton I got from my great-grandmother that is not in my spreadsheet, 45 balls or so, and I’m sure I missed a few skeins here and there. But just thinking that I have hard proof that I have 43.4588 miles (=76,487.5 yards) of accounted-for stash to knit from is rather daunting. It’s actually slightly more, since I put all lengths in the yards column, even meter measurements. Hmmm. I’d best go knit now.

I made these washcloths on the fly while riding the bus during February:

Patterns: own
Yarn: Louet Sales Euroflax Originals, 100% linen, black is color 18-2223-17, pink is 18-1234-1
Needles: size 4

The patterns are one of each color in knit-purl 4×4 basketweave, one black in garter stitch with a yarn over edging (that doesn’t show at all in the photo), and one pink in garter stitch with knit 4, yarn over, knit 2 together every other row.

I had mentioned before how the linen is tough on my hands. It’s amazing how much softer and pliable these washcloths got after running through the washer and dryer. I sent the striped scarf through, too, to make it more attractive to a recipient/buyer. All of these items needed a steam blocking afterward as they were a bit rumpled.

It makes me wonder whether in future I should send the linen hanks through the washer and dryer before trying to knit with them. That would be easier on my hands, I should think. I frequently send hanks of cotton through both cycles (after securely tying them in 8 places and putting them in a lingerie bag) before knitting with them. Linen can’t be any different, but please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Also done this week – purple baby booties:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Brown Sheep Wildfoote, 75% washable wool, 25% nylon, color Sy-17 Purple Splendor
Needles: size 2
Size: newborn to 9 months

We had cold rains again just a week ago (I got soaked walking to the car at Stitches West) but this week the magnolia (?) tree in the park seems to think it is finally spring:

Spring means maybe getting a new short-sleeved shirt. Neither of these is appropriate for work, but I really want a YARRRN t-shirt and I need to restrain myself as I just bought a spinning wheel t-shirt. Not to mention buying all the Stitches West goodies last week. Fortunately, the YARRRN folks are out of my size, making it easier to resist.