Sweaters

I spent a good chunk of time Thursday evening and yesterday setting in the sleeves and sewing the seams of the Apres Surf Hoodie. This is what I had yesterday afternoon:

It’s a little tight on the arms and a little baggy on the chest. And a little longer than I’d like, too. After I sewed the shoulder seams, I tried it on and found the front and back to hang halfway down my thighs. Whoa, that wasn’t right! But The Kneedler was right that sewing the seams takes up some length and now it’s only an inch or two longer than I’d like. I will either fold under the stockinette part and make a hem or shorten it. I haven’t decided. In the meantime, I’m knitting away on the hood.

That sad little pile of unraveled chocolate pink cherry yarn you saw 10 days ago is now a complete hat:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Fearless Fibers (on Etsy) 100% superwash merino wool, Chocolate Pink Cherry, held doubled throughout
Needles: size 3
Size: child
Started 8/26 and finished 8/31/2008

Mr. MmmYarn and I are going on vacation in less than 2 weeks and I still need some sort of flat purse that’s easy to stuff in a suitcase. I found a pattern in my pattern binder that I think will work and some possibly suitable yarn in the stash but I’ll have to hustle to get it done in time. Plus I have to think about travel knitting. A knitter’s work is never done.

…but oh, my aching knees (we have wood floors). Kneeling around the bulletin board brandishing a yardstick is a little rough, but I am very pleased with the result:

The weather is supposed to be warm tomorrow, even in our neighborhood, so perhaps this will dry by Thursday night. That would indeed be nice.

Because this is a hoodie, the back neck is left completely straight. You start knitting the hood from the live stitches. Well, part of the live stitches. The rest of them are for the shoulders. You can see I did not cut the yarn balls off the two parts yet. I am waiting to see if I like the hood before I cut (anything to avoid weaving in more ends than absolutely necessary).

I have surprised even myself this time around. The front of Apres Surf, that I started on August 19, is at the beginning of the v-neckline already. In the photo here it’s all curled up at the bottom and sides, but when I flatten it out, it’s long enough:

It would have been up halfway into the armhole by now if I had remained oblivious to a point where I started a pattern repeat only halfway through the previous repeat. I spent this morning’s knitting time undoing everything I did last night.

This looks an awful lot like something I was working on just 2 weeks ago:

It is, however, something different. This is the front of the Apres Surf Hoodie that I cast on last night. The back is done but not yet blocked. The front is coming along quickly; again, memorizing the stitch pattern is a great help in picking up the pace. I can knit up to the neckline on the bus, adding more than an hour of knitting time to this project each day than I’d have just working on it at home in the evenings.

Alas, the hat now looks like this:

I ran short of yarn for finishing the top, so I’ll need to cast on with fewer stitches and give it another run.

I wish I could say the big space between my last post and this one was caused by my leading such an exciting life that blogging went by the wayside. Actually, I’ve been watching others lead exciting lives by being Olympians. We pre-record the Olympics so we can breeze through sports and long sections of talk that don’t interest us, but all that extra TV still cuts into blogging time. And knitting time, too, since I can look down and focus on yarn overs and corresponding decreases during the pre- and post-event chatter, but have to look up for the 30 seconds or so it takes a swimmer or gymnast or runner to complete a swim or routine or lap.

Not to say life hasn’t been fun.  Mr. MmmYarn took me out for my birthday last night, to a restaurant at the top of a fancy hotel downtown. We got all dressed up for it (I was in heels), had a tasty dinner, and did a bit of dancing. I find the dressing up part fun, as long as I don’t do it too often. It’s too bad it was so foggy that all we could see was the lit-up sign at the top of a nearby hotel. The rest of the world outside those windows was a wall of solid white.

I am not participating in the Ravelympics. I set myself plenty of self-imposed deadlines and I did not want to add a real one to the mix. I will do some deadline knitting shortly, though, as I have signed up for Mystery Stole 4. Want to see the materials I picked out? The yarn is from the stash (I swatched last night) and I went bead shopping earlier today:

The Mystery Stole may be madness for me, as Mr. MmmYarn and I are going on vacation the Friday after clue #1 is out, meaning I may not even get clue #2 before we leave depending on what time of the day it’s released. So it may be out for travel knitting and I’ll have a ton of catch-up work to do on three stole clues when we get back.

Oddly, though, even doing vacation planning and watching that much TV the week has been productive fiber-wise and I have progress photos to share today.

The little hat grows very slowly as I’m only knitting on it in short bursts, such as waiting in line for my turn with the surprisingly and unusually efficient postal clerk yesterday:

Why no marathon hat knitting? Because I’m working on the Apres Surf Hoodie almost exclusively on bus rides and at home. The sleeves are done, as you know, and this is the back at the beginning of armhole shaping:

Why, oh why, the color must be so washed out every time I snap a photo is a mystery to me. Imagine the green more the shade of a spearmint Tic Tac candy and you’ve just about got it.

Under the Ott-Lite, the 2 ounces of thin orange singles I managed to whack out photographs bright and bold. This is for the orange and purple 4 ply. Here it is, 25% done, atop a background of one of Mr. MmmYarn’s early weaving projects:

All in all, I can’t complain. Except that the baby sweater’s neckline continues to be uncooperative. It’s entirely my fault for not writing down any part of my thought process.

I’ll go put another inch on Apres Surf before it’s time to go chop okra and onions for bhindi do pyaaza for dinner tonight. Yum!

Mr. MmmYarn and I went out of town again this weekend, to nearly the same place we went last weekend. It’s a 4-hour drive each direction. I finally have the stitch pattern for the Apres Surf Hoodie memorized (sheesh, that sure took long enough) and Mr. MmmYarn kindly drove a 2-hour leg each direction of our trip, so the back of the hoodie is coming along nicely. Here it is on the road Friday:

I am working a larger size for the lower half and a smaller size for the top half. The back looked like this today when it was time for me to take over driving:

This is all just car knitting this weekend, I got no other knitting done. We got home tonight and I spun some more of the electric orange singles and now I’ll go work on the hoodie while we watch the recorded Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics in Beijing. 4 1/2 hours recorded? Gads. I bet with fast forwarding the presumably abundant commercials we can cram it in in less than half that. I like the parade of nations. It’s a great refresher of 9th grade geography.

This little hat came and went so fast I didn’t even get a chance to post it as an in-progress project:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Schoeller Esslinger Fortissima, 75% wool, 25% nylon, color 085 (navy blue) held together with Froehlich Wolle Blauband Maxi Ringel, 80% wool, 20% nylon, color 7705 (blue stripes plus a green one)
Needles: size 2
Finished size: Toddler
Started 7/25 and finished 7/26/2008

On Thursday I soaked and blocked the finished sleeves of the Apres Surf Hoodie. I had some tense moments while the yarn was wet, pinning out the suddenly and suprisingly gargantuan sleeves. My gauge swatch, that I actually soaked and blocked (an unusual move for me), apparently lied! The sleeves were supposed to be 23″ long total and mine were nearly 31″ when I pinned them down. I actually pinned the sleeves very loosely, stretching them widthwise very minimally and lengthwise not at all.  Dry, my gauge is off by 1/4 stitch and 1/4 row per inch. I can easily adjust for that and need not worry that my sweater’s sleeves are better suited to an orangutan than to me. I have forgiven the gauge swatch.

Now it’s Sunday night, the little hat is finished, Apres Surf is at a non-portable stage, and I have nothing for the bus ride tomorrow. Back I go to the giant pile of yarn I strewed across the bed this afternoon, to see if I can find something that jumps out at me.

Oh, one more thing! The recipient of the 4 chemo hats I wrote about last month finally got them, and while the Swirl Cap is indeed too small (as I expected), she likes and wears the other three. I am glad I was able to do one little thing to help out.

Last night was the annual S.F. Giants Stitch & Pitch baseball game. I joined two ladies from my knitting group in the stands and cheered along while working on the hat I started Monday night (emergency bus project for Tuesday):

This next photo is a gratuitous one I took at my friend’s request. The player at bat had rather an impressive rear end; unfortunately, my phone’s camera doesn’t zoom or even have a lot of power to begin with, so you’ll have to use your imagination. Or look up player #33 and hope to find something other than a head shot:

The game was pretty good. I found it to have a little less action than the 3 other games I’ve been to, so I spent some time admiring the WIPs and many hand-knitted garments in the stands around me. Some of the babies had exquisite little sweaters on, clearly the children of or closely related to some great knitters. With the bus ride to and from work, then back out to the ballpark and watching the game, I finished the hat, another of the rebel-baby color choices:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Zitron Trekking Pro Natura, 75% superwash wool, 25% bamboo, color 1603, held doubled throughout
Needles: 2
Finished size: Toddler
Started 7/21 and finished 7/22/2008

Fortunately, I come prepared for just such a calamity, so the back of the Apres Surf Hoodie saw some baseball action too:

I know, not much to see there yet.

The giveaways at this year’s game were a Stitch & Pitch baseball hat and apparently a giant pile of Malabrigo that I missed out on by waiting until the 4th inning to go get my freebie. I found 5 large, empty tables and one table with a small pile of black hats. Here we are, in our hats, enjoying the game:

Sorry for the blurriness; a stranger took the photo and she wasn’t familiar with how my phone worked. I’m on the right.

The Giants won, 6 to 3.

Wow. I do try to post more frequently but every once in a while life gets in the way. I’m glad I ran out and snapped photos yesterday evening just before sunset because today the thick fog and heavy wind would have prevented good picture taking.

Last week’s bus booties are finally done. The nearby cafe has those silver tables you frequently see my knitting posed on, but the fellow there had just packed those up so I made do with an obliging mailbox. I won’t tell you how often the wind skittered those little booties right off the curved edge of the mailbox. Mmm… bright booties in jelly-candy colors:

Pattern: own
Yarn: Zitron Trekking XXL, 75% superwash wool, 25% nylon, color 158
Needles: size 2
Size: newborn - 6 months
Started 7/3 and finished 7/14/2008

This Trekking XXL seems slightly thinner than other Trekking XXL I have used. I usually use size 2 needles, and did for these booties, but for the Jaywalkers I made a few months ago I ended up going down to size 1s. These booties will hit the washer and the dryer tomorrow so they can tighten up a little.

We visted Mr. MmmYarn’s parents over the weekend. They live just outside the same town I lived in until I moved here 6 years ago. That town used to have a yarn shop but that one closed in 1999. By coincidence, I ran into the former shop’s owner at the local farmers’* market on Saturday morning, and as she also ran the knitting group I used to attend and knows how gung-ho I am about knitting in public and with others, she told me about knitting and beer that afternoon in the garden behind a new shop that opened in past year or so. Well, now, I couldn’t pass that up, could I? I couldn’t have any of the wonderful-looking home-brewed beer (driving, you know) on that warm afternoon but did find a consolation prize (Click for big, as usual. This skein is quite pretty):

Plus I got to catch up with 2 people from the old gang. Very nice indeed.

Lest you think I’ve been a lazy knitter, making only a pair of booties since my last post, I did knit an entire scarf out of some of my handspun but it’s too short so I need to frog and re-think the thing, plus I started the Apres Surf Hoodie:

The yarn is Baruffa Aerobic and it’s a very brilliant spearmint green; the dull color here was caused by the sun dipping down below the tops of the buildings a minute too early. That big line on the right sleeve is where I blocked my sleeve/swatch, which turned out to be exactly the gauge I needed so I put it back on the needles and forged ahead.

In family news, the little baby surprise jacket I made of Tofutsies back in March and the matching booties I made in April have a wearer to go with them as of very early Tuesday morning.

* I see this written as “farmers,” “farmer’s,” and “farmers’,” and I never know which one’s right. They all could be, I suppose, depending upon your interpretation of the phrase.

A few weeks ago, I ripped my top-down Memoirs sweater back to the armhole shaping (this included ripping both nearly-finished sleeves) because the armholes were too deep. Then I knitted the body and sleeves again. Last Monday at knitting group, I ripped back because I didn’t start the waist shaping where I was supposed to. I had gotten into a groove and just knitted round and round without paying attention, thus more ripping.

Since then I worked on the body, this time with the waist shaping, and brought the body down to the point at which I need to start the ribbing.  I tried it on and even Mr. MmmYarn agreed it looked rather, uh, bunchy. So I brought the sweater to knitting group again tonight and the ladies agreed the bunchy look was caused by width. Apparently I was under the delusion of having an ample bust when I made my calculations and the too-low armholes hid that fact because the whole thing was weird. This thing has at least 4 inches too much fabric across my chest. I’ll have to try it on once more to see what the back looks like. I was so worked up about the front bunching up that I didn’t bother to look there.

I realize it’s a bulky yarn which will produce a bulky sweater that’s not supposed to be super form-fitting, but I do want it to look nice on me. And I realize this project is meant to be a challenge as it’s my first go at a Barbara Walker set-in sleeve from the top down.

At some point the challenge ceases to be fun. The bunchiness means I’ll be ripping back yet again. All that body, both sleeves once more, and back probably halfway to three-quarters of the way up the armhole shaping so I can figure in the revised width. Once I get the courage to do so. In the meantime, here it is against a different background than last time, just to prove it isn’t the same photo:

The good news is the yarn appears to be holding up well to all this abuse.