Sweaters

This is always a good sign:

Terrible picture, but exciting that it’s all blocking.

Reading various knitting blogs today, I came across this little gem. It’s crocheted, not knitted, but still astounding. Go on, take a look.

My caption, of course, would be: You can stand there finding fault, or you could knit me some ketchup! There are some very creative folks out there.

I am working away at the Sweater Girl Pullover:

That’s a finished back and sleeves, and about 1/3 of the front. Note the safety pins in the front: I did not, indeed, forget waist shaping.

Waiting is a big theme in the MmmYarn household these days. It’s not all bad. It turns out time spent waiting translates into quite a bit of knitting time. I took advantage of the brief period of sunshine through heavy rain clouds this morning and took photos to share.

The baby sweater nears completion:

I did finish knitting the lower band today and the sweater is officially off the needles as of early this afternoon. Now comes the sewing up of the sleeve seams, the weaving in of ends, and the creation of an i-cord edge with buttonholes along the two fronts. Ugh. Most likely followed by button shopping (much more fun than creating the holes); I haven’t checked the button stash but if memory serves I have nothing that will work with this coloring. This means I might need to go to the yarn shop because I don’t want to wait until Stitches West to send this sweater off to its continually growing recipient. Oh, the torture. Because I can’t buy anything but buttons at the yarn shop because I am still on a self-imposed knit-from-the-stash diet, with an exception for Stitches West, where I typically end up buying from the local shops’ booths anyway. It’s a strange logic.

Time flies when you’re knitting, and the Sweater Girl Pullover is well beyond the swatching stage:

Those safety pins up the right side of the back are marking where I added waist shaping that’s not in the pattern. Perhaps leaving those pins there will help me to remember to add the same shaping to the front. Perhaps if I write about the plan here that will reinforce it in my Swiss-cheese brain. You think? And yes, I nearly always knit sleeves two at a time when they are worked flat. It’s the only way I can be sure I’m duplicating the shaping.

Oh, and I may have done a little plying this week. Yarn, however, is still on the bobbin and not yet skeined:

Waiting took on another form a few months ago when I ordered a book I was sure would be fabulous. I got impatient, checking to see when it would be released and when it would be shipped on a regular basis. But you can’t rush these things and it finally surprised me by arriving last week. I wasn’t wrong about its fabulous-ness, and this sure is some great retail therapy, courtesy of the talented Nancy Bush:

Mmm… nupps. I do like the look of nupps and even enjoyed their execution when I made the Lily of the Valley shawl. I am looking forward to eventually working some patterns out of this one. First I have to read it, though; haven’t had time to really peruse it yet.

I indulged in a little more this week. The reward, me mateys, is my very own pirate-ish YARRRN t-shirt:

Mr. MmmYarn and I decided to stay in for Valentine’s Day this year. Lots of the knitting blogs I read posted something heart-shaped or red today. I give you, instead, Beef Braised in Ale on noodles alongside red cabbage with cranberries:

Hey, at least the side dish is in the pink/purple/red color family. We also indulged in red wine. Yum. Happy Valentine’s Day, all! I hope you are as lucky as I am and can spend it with someone special.

I have a finished hoodie, and I also have finished hoodie photos to share:

Pattern: Apres Surf Hoodie by Connie Chang Chinchio, as published in Interweave Knits, Summer 2008
Yarn: 8 skeins Baruffa Aerobic, 100% wool, color 985
Needles: US sizes 2 and 3
Size: medium for the body, small for the sleeves
Started 7/6 and finished 12/29/2008

I remember back in July that I serendipitously came across this yarn listed in my stash spreadsheet, and realized it was pretty thin, and wasn’t there a sweater I saw recently that required a pretty thin yarn? Found the magazine and dug out the Aerobic so I could double-check the yarn label: yep, it matched the desired gauge for this sweater. What luck! When I washed and blocked the first 4.5 inches of sleeves that I was using as my gauge swatch, the knitting gods were on my side and the gauge was spot on, allowing me to forge right ahead.

It looks pretty good from the back, too:

After reviewing the schematics and checking a few sweaters I own and measuring my arms, I decided to make the small sleeves and medium body. This was no problem at all when it came time to sew it all together. I had a moment of panic, though, after I had sewn only the shoulders as the front and back hung down nearly to my knees. Funny how a nice, sturdy, side seam will pull in all that length and translate it into width.

This is the only hooded sweater I have made and I had some doubts when I was shaping it, how the shape I was making could possibly turn into a hood. I followed the instructions blindly and got a nice hood. I made it only 10.25″ long rather than 12.25″ before beginning the shaping, having read a few notes from folks (blogs or Ravelry) saying the hood was too big otherwise. Mr. MmmYarn finds the hood comical, how it’s pointy at the top. Rather like an elf hat:

One minor quibble is that the hood, when up, is rather gaping in the middle of the neck area. When I look back at the photo in the magazine, the model is holding the sides of the hood in a saucy way. She may have been posed that way to try to hide the gaping, or perhaps the maker of the magazine sweater picked up a better lacy-section-to-stockinette-border ratio than I did and the sides of her hood do not gape and the model is posed that way for artistry’s sake. My neckline is definitely wide with the hood up:

The sweater looks lovely and fits me well and I have worn it several times already. It’s a little too cold most days to wear it in the house; even though it’s wool, all those lacy holes let in a lot of air. But come spring, it will be out and about reguarly.

Those 2 little ends are all I have left to weave in, thanks to a night of not knitting at knitting group:

Why, yes, that is the base of a wine glass next to the Ott light. I have to summon up the fortitude to finish this puppy and block the hood tonight. It’s relatively warm in here tonight, you see, so I have to grab the opportunity while I have it or else the hood won’t dry for a week.

I visited my parents briefly over the weekend and my mom mentioned that the socks I made for her back in March worked out great for her Grand Canyon hiking trip at the end of October. Nary a blister, thanks to hand-made, seamless socks!

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!