Mmm... Yarn

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.

The Rockstar colorway went in my carry-on bag and the sock is having a great time here. I broke one of the needles yesterday; fortunately, they are sold in packs of 5 so I can keep going. Found replacement (more contrasting) beads for Mystery Stole 4 at La Droguerie in the Les Halles neighborhood but they did not carry double-pointed needles in sock sizes.

Well, it is a good thing I braved the wind and went to the library last night. They had my size 2 sock needles and little blue crochet hook in their lost and found! Apparently I turned those in inside KnitKnit the other day. KnitKnit, by the way, I found an interesting read but an impractical choice for my knitting library. I don’t see myself ever donning gloves and a safety mask to cut hundreds of fiberglass strips and knit them into a totally huge, totally unsafe teddy bear. I also don’t see myself knitting a wall covering with a vest in it so a houseguest could fasten herself into the vest and be part of the decor. There was an asymmetrical cardigan that used a stitch pattern I liked but I didn’t like the asymmetry.

It has been a not-so-nice week leading up to my vacation that starts tomorrow after work. Life occasionally likes put us in our places. I mildly sprained that one knuckle that I already mentioned here, injured a calf muscle, and also came down with a cold yesterday. I stayed home from work today so I could try to sleep that off before flying. But looking at my little pile of my freshly-wound yarn cakes makes me smile:

It’s all sock yarn. That’s Fearless Fibers in Robin’s Egg on the left (still waiting to be caked), Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks That Rock in Rockstar at the top, Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in Newtown on the right, and Claudia Hand Painted Yarns in Sharks (as in San Jose Sharks, the hockey team) at the bottom. I plan to bring 2, maybe 3 of these and haven’t decided which ones are making the cut.

Mystery Stole 4 will stay home, I think. I’ll see tomorrow morning. If I can cram it in the suitcase, it can come along. While basic shawls are great travel knitting, this one with all the teensy beads isn’t exactly portable. I need good light, space, and focus to work on this. But I might bring it to show off to my grandmothers.

For our vacation, we will spend one week in Paris on our own,  then travel around Germany visiting relatives of mine for 2 weeks. I haven’t heard anything too spectacular about yarn in Paris craft shops yet so I’ll leave those to chance. If I see one, I’ll go in. I hear buttons and ribbons are fabulous but the knitting bug hasn’t bitten there the same way it has here. Saarbruecken, Germany, has a shop called Tausendschoen that I definitely want to go to. I have read about it in several blogs and seen enough fiber and yarn photos from that shop that it’s become a must-see. The other shop I like in Germany is a chain called Wolle Roedel that can be found in many cities. They have a great basic line of worsted weight superwash wool that I really like for children’s wear plus a lot of sock and novelty yarns. So if I run out of sock yarn, I can rest assured knowing that I will be able to buy more. (For any of you who might be nit-pickers of German orthography, I can’t type umlauts with Wordpress).

We are not taking a computer, so I doubt I’ll be able to blog at any point this trip and if I do it will be short. See you in three weeks, when any completed travel knitting will be revealed.

I decided to knit both halves of Mystery Stole 4 at the same time, so side #1 got held up a bit while I got side #2 going.

You can see the little bit of glistening in the fabric, my tiny beads (the head of the crochet hook I’m using to add beads is nearly invisible in the photo). I mis-remembered the instructions at the bead store and bought blending-in beads rather than contrasting beads, so all you’ll ever see is some glistening in mine. I switched from Addi lace needles to short straight needles the other night which has sped things up a bit again.

I’m just halfway through the chart on clue #1 and clue #2 gets released Friday. I would be going faster, but I re-injured that top knuckle on my ring finger Sunday when a woman ahead of me on an escalator answered her cell phone a few steps from the bottom, then stopped stock-still at the end of the last stair to have her conversation. I managed to scramble backwards two stairs before the escalator ran me into her, nearly knocking her over, and in a chain-reaction effect, she knocked her kid over. Then she had the nerve to ask me what I thought I was doing. Ah, humans. However, it is noteworthy that it was not me being a klutz that caused the problem this time.

The little black purse is not going to make it into the suitcase Thursday night. Seed stitch is by nature slow, but there is also the problem of using an unknown quantity of yarn. Here’s what I had so far in the new size:

You’ll note I used the word “had”: that bit of Sherlock on the tube is all I have left; there’s no way it’s going to make it to square size. I grumbled a little about this at knitting group on Monday night and my friend suggested I look in Chinatown. She was right. I went there on my lunch break yesterday, and found something that will go on vacation with me:

A little cutesy for my taste, but the right size and style for dressing up a little to go out to dinner. Tonight’s pre-trip tasks include plant care, dealing with library books, ironing (ugh), and making wardrobe and knitting project decisions.

The Apres Surf Hoodie will stay home. I’m about a third of the way up the hood. It’s too big for travel knitting now.

The first clue for Mystery Stole 4 was released yesterday mid-morning to the joy of everyone eagerly awaiting the launch of this project. I was at work when it hit the Internet, and had also forgotten my MS4 supplies at home so I couldn’t get going on my lunch break, so I did not begin until last night’s round of travel planning was complete.

This is what I have so far:

That’s the first three rows, including the very slow row of one bead every other stitch. I have not yet searched the Internet to see who’s already done with clue #1 and who’s stuck bemoaning the first row of beads. My progress is going to be somewhat hampered the first week:

Goodness knows what I did to that top knuckle. I asked Mr. MmmYarn if he noticed me cursing after running into something somewhere and he just laughed and asked “which time?”. He knows I am such a klutz that it’s often hard to pinpoint which klutzy event caused the minor injury. This one, however, is not minor in my opinion — it’s cutting into knitting time (!!) and making typing hard.

The flat purse for travel is coming along slowly, too:

This is the Small Origami Bag in Folk Bags. At first I merrily cast on 64 stitches as instructed and knitted for 10″. Then I noticed it’s supposed to be a 14″ square and as I don’t want a chapstick-only bag, I measured my gauge (grrr… should have done that to begin with), ripped out, cast on 90 stitches, and started again. Then injured myself. Ah, well.

The yarn I’m using is Artfibers Sherlock (they don’t have it anymore); it looks like a small knitted tube. Click for the big version of the photo:

It’s hard to photograph but you can see that bit of white background peeking out between the strands of the chained tube. Sherlock likes to split so I have to knit carefully. Since being forced to slow down it’s working better, actually, as I’m not racing along willy-nilly, splitting the yarn every few stitches.

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!