Knitting

I saw the pile of knitting on my side of the sofa over the weekend and realized last week’s finished projects represent a basic kindergarten primary color assortment.

First up, a bright blue hat:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Wolle Roedel Universal Superwash, 100% superwash merino wool, color 835
Needles: size 3 and 4
Size: adult average
Started 11/5 and finished 11/13/2008

I designed this one for Mr. MmmYarn and he found it to be fine in the house, but outdoors his ears were cold so he requested a long, folded brim. I have re-made the hat in the same yarn, this time with a big brim. He’ll get to try it on tomorrow. I’m going to try to write a pattern for it in a couple of sizes but that won’t be ready for a few weeks, I’m sure.

Next up, a long, skinny, yellow scarf:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Schoenbuch Garne Superba 100 4-Fach; 37.5% cotton, 37.5% superwash wool, 25% nylon; color 214
Needles: size 4
Size: 4.5″ x 78″
Started 11/10 and finished 11/28/2008

Even though to my eyes the yarn reads as a yellow, it is composed of two plies of yellow and two plies of white. I didn’t do a burn test, but the yellow looks and feels like the wool and the white looks and feels like the cotton. The chevron pattern is a simple k3 p3 rib on 31 stitches that I shifted one stitch to either side on each row.

And to complete our collection of primary colors, a flash of red:

Sunday was warm so the Mystery Stole dried the same day. Does crawling around on the floor around your blocking bulletin board for an hour count as exercise? Non-aerobic, of course, but definitely a lot of bending and stretching, crouching and reaching. It must count as something as I was incredibly sore Monday morning and am still feeling the effects today.

And where’s the green? I know it’s not primary, but it’s usually included in the grouping of primary colors when a fourth color is called for. Well, the green Apres Surf Hoodie is up next after the re-worked hat. I’m about less than halfway through the hood, having ripped out a good 4.5″ tonight after finding a mistake (!) that I thought I spotted a few weeks ago but must have buried in the back of my in-denial brain. Tonight I decided I couldn’t live with that wonky row in the middle of the lace pattern and out it went!

The craft fair I mentioned a couple of posts ago was a bust this year. I sold one hat. This will in no way finance a yarn crawl at Stitches West, especially not an Mmm… Yarn- sized crawl. That’s OK, though, as work is going to try to hold a second one just before Valentine’s Day, which falls conveniently before Stitches West. I hope the day they hold it is cold enough to freeze one’s ears; I sell much more stuff on cold days than on warm ones.

It has been a rough two months here chez Mmm… Yarn, with more rough months to follow, but the knitting must go on. Blogging will continue to be sporadic.

I had a well-planned mini yarn crawl on our vacation in September, hitting two specific yarn shops in Saarbruecken, Germany. The first stop was Wolle Roedel, definitely one of my favorite brands for workhorse superwash wool yarn. I shop there every time I go to Germany. The empty space in the upper left corner represents the Opal yarn I already knit up into the scarf you saw in my last post:

Even with the poor exchange rate, I got great deals at Wolle Roedel. The Opal sock yarns, for example, are $21.95 and $22.95 in the U.S. and I got them for $12.52 and $14.66 (woohoo!).  The Wolle Roedel Universal superwash single-color yarns (at 50 grams and 125 meters) are under $3.00 a skein. They used to be closer to $2.25 but with the exchange rate this time they were more. Either way, I can bang out infant and toddler sweaters and hats for under $15 so they were well worth having to buy a duffle bag to haul them home.

The second stop was Tausendschoen. The tiny skein of Opal Tiger in the above photo, left front, was a gift from that shop. The owner does her own dyeing so I ignored the recognizable brands and picked up some Tausendschoen sock yarns and spinning fiber.

The sock yarns remind me of Socks That Rock. There are colors that are considered standards, colorways that are dyed regularly although each individual skein is still one-of-a-kind, of which I bought two. Here Goldener Oktober (golden October):

and Seegras (sea grass):,

and there are one-of-a-kind skeins made with leftover dyes. This is the one I settled on out of a pile of very worthy colorways:

I also picked up about 2 ounces each of three merino fiber bundles, one a blue/green mix, one of reds streaked with maroons, and one that reminded me of a chicken’s feathers:

Don’t ask me what breed of chicken, but I’ll know it when I see it. I have no specific plans for any of this yet except the bright blue Universal yarn is mostly knit up into a hat for Mr. MmmYarn and the yellow and orange are for a baby sweater that I really should be working on now and am not. Fortunately the intended recipient was a preemie so she has given me a few extra weeks to come up with something.

And Mystery Stole? In the second pattern row of clue #5 last night I dropped a few stitches off the needle and could not for the life of me fix them. So I’m tinking back, slowly, slowly. Grrr.

I have been knitting on. Not a whole lot, but I managed a pair of booties and a scarf these past few weeks:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Regia 4-Faedig Jubilee Color, 75% wool, 25% nylon, color 5471
Needles: size 2
Size: newborn to about 9 months
Started 10/4 and finished 10/12/ 2008

Pattern: own
Yarn: Opal Hundertwasser, 75% wool, 25% nylon, color 19956 (Hundertwassers Werk 650, “Der Blaue Mond”)
Needles: size 3
Size: 4.5″ x 73″
Started 10/12 and finished 11/1/2008

I have also put in a respectable amount of work on Mystery Stole 2008; I’m halfway through clue #4. I have resisted the temptation to look at any finished pictures so I can enjoy the mystery as I go along.

This coming Friday is the staff craft sale at my work and I am attempting to organize for it today. My computer is being fussy today so it’s slow going. I have participated in this sale every year I have worked at this place and it’s how I fund my annual trips to Stitches West. However, something has come up this Friday that means I won’t be able to man my table, so I’ve asked a co-worker and friend, The Kneedler, to man it in addition to hers. So today I’m trying to pare down the pile to something more manageable to not saddle her with too much stuff, yet I want it to be enough that it generates enough Stitches West income. Decisions, decisions.

We didn’t make a jack o’lantern this year so the pumpkin dressed up for Halloween:

Next week it will be soup! The pumpkin, not the scarf.

Herkules, actually. This tall sculpture atop its octagon-shaped structure stands high above Kassel, Germany. The palace Wilhelmshöhe is way down the hill. Here the sock takes a good look at Herkules’ super-firm behind (lucky guy, but he is made of metal). Scaffolding visible due to restoration and preservation work in progress on the volcanic rock of the octagon and on Herkules, too:

This was Wednesday. Now it is Saturday and Mr. MmmYarn and I are enjoying the wonderful drizzly view outside Terminal 5 at Heathrow. Also enjoying its free wireless connection to check email.

It will be nice to be home again.

Occasionally, it sits out. It is a young sock, after all.

Schneider Weisse is OK, but my favorite beer so far is König Ludwig Hefeweizen. I don’t have a picture of that glass — usually each beer brand is served in its corresponding glass.

Yesterday we saw Amberg with my dad. Right now we’re in the southwest-themed Coyote Cafe (unimpressive but convenient, plus it has wifi) in Fulda for lunch, heading further north afterward.

Just another quick post to give you a preview of the hand-dyed goodies
I picked up at Tausendschön last week:

Proper photo to follow after I get home.

After not finding wifi in a week, we got it here at a restaurant next to the Autobahn on the way to Nürnberg so you get a photo today. We saw Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein castles yesterday. The sock, of course, had to take a closer look at Neuschwanstein:

Since we have wifi, we also checked our email and learned we are aunt and uncle not just once on this trip, but twice. Both are girls. Baby #2 is rather early but doing well. I sense more baby knitting featured here in the near future.

…when the train goes 310 km/h (about 185 mph). We didn’t ride the TGV train after all, but the ICE. It was still satisfactorily fast. So fast that this is the best photo I got. Here’s the sock enjoying a blurry flash of the French countryside: 

We are at my grandmother’s house for two more days. Today I hit the two yarn shops I wanted to go to in Saarbrücken. European brands are a great bargain here so the stash will see some enhancement once this all gets home. We will need to ship it or buy a duffle bag. It will not fit in our suitcases.

It is perhaps a little sacriligious to take a photo inside catacombs
in which rest the bones of a million disinterred Parisians who lived a
few hundred years ago, but this is what Mr. MmmYarn, the sock, and I
did this morning.

Now we are at Notre Dame de Paris which has a wifi hotspot in the
little park in back (modern meets old). Next we will try to get into
Saint Chapelle. Tomorrow we head for Saarbrücken, Germany on the TGV.
This will be the fastest landspeed any sock in progress of mine has
ever achieved.

The sock that saw the Eiffel Tower was a bit too narrow, so here is take 2 at l’Orangerie today, viewing one of Monet’s fabulous waterlilies paintings:

This painting is huge, I’d guess about 20 feet across comprising several connected canvases. Quite amazing.