She knits, too

I finished my second pair of springtime socks last weekend, and things warmed up enough around mid-week that I got a chance to wear them. Woohoo! Of course, it's rainy and cold again now, but that's April in Western Oregon (perhaps I should be knitting socks to go with galoshes).

The details:

Pattern: Hedera, by Cookie A.
Yarn: Crystal Palace Panda Silk (50% merino, 25% silk, 25% bamboo) in "Berry Smoothie". Two 204-yard skeins, with maybe a fifth of each skein left over (I could have made these longer, but I like my warm-weather socks no higher than 3-4 inches above the anklebone). One could get a couple more inches of sock length from this yarn, though.
Needles: US 1 (2.5mm). As is my habit for socks I'm going to be hauling around with me, I knit these on two Susan Bates powder-coated circulars instead of DPNs, which I tend to yank out of the stitches when I'm getting them in and out of the Ziplock I use as a portable knitting bag.

I've been knitting a lot of toe-up socks lately, so it was fun to go back to cuff-down construction, and Hedera's a pleasing pattern to knit; the four-row repeat is easy to memorize and to "read," so I was able to catch errors (I tend to drop yarnovers) as I was going and fix them before I'd gone far. The pattern has my preferred gusset shaping and slip-stitch heel, too. And boy, has my Kitchener grafting improved over the past couple of years - the toes are as neat as can be.

Panda Silk is yummy yarn, soft enough for baby items but with enough elasticity from the merino content to hold the shape of the lace. My generally loose tension, combined with the drape of the silk and bamboo content, means these are a little slouchy; next time I knit with this yarn (and I will), I'll try going down a needle size if I want the socks to cling a bit more.( Next up on the needles )

After a good soak-and-block, I declare the Flower Show Socks done.

Pattern: Early Spring Socks by Janice Kang for Crystal Palace. Free pattern here. Toe-up with gusset and slip-stitch heel (my favorites).

Yarn: Crystal Palace Panda Silk (50% wool, 25% silk, 25% bamboo), in Misty Lilac. Much less than 2 skeins. (This shot is true to color; the detail pictures I took under available indoor light aren't. )

Needles: US size 1

Started March 5 on the plane to Philadelphia. I was within a couple of inches of completing them at the end of the return flight. Finished March 12, but I didn't get around to blocking them until yesterday.

Modifications: I used my preferred cast-on for toe-up socks, and knitted the socks on two circulars (I love DPNs, but they can be a little fiddly for traveling, and circs make it easier to keep the work from slipping off the needles when you have to quickly shove them back into your carry-on bag). I didn't like the way the sewn bindoff looked on the first sock, so for the second I substituted a few rows of k3,p3 ribbing and bound off in pattern. That gave a much more finished look, so I undid the other bind-off, frogged back a few rows and reknit it.

This was a nice little traveling project; the lace is just a four-row repeat and easy to memorize. The fingering-weight yarn is as soft as can be (if a little prone to splitting on pointy needles), and the wool content counteracts the tendency of both silk and bamboo to sag a bit. Still, I'm a loose enough knitter that if I made them again I'd probably go down to size 0 needles, at least for the cuff (if you look closely, you can see that it doesn't really cling to the ankle).

With spring in the air and not a lot of time to knit,, I'm all over light-weight, warm-weather socks right now. Currently on the needles: Hedera, from Knitty.com, in a deeper berry color of the same yarn.

I finished Komon last night, steam-pressed it this morning* and am wearing it to work. (-:

Nine days of knitting and two long-ish evenings spent seaming it up and weaving in a bazillion slippery rayon ends. And I wasn't even particularly trying to finish this one quickly.

I credit two things:

• Lots of time on my hands, including two five-hour train rides last weekend.


• The simplicity of what looks like a complicated pattern, but totally isn't. I mean, it's just six rectangles (including the long, skinny neckband one. And the stitch pattern is so simple I had it memorized by the fourth row.

The only down side to whipping through this thing so fast is that I'm left without a project. I've got some Crystal Palace Panda Silk sock yarn waiting to find its pattern, but I'm counting on that for air-travel knitting in a couple of weeks. Maybe I'll dig some worsted wool out of my modest stash and make myself some new felted bedroom slippers - my old ones have worn clear through the soles after three years of wear.

Photos and notes to come, probably this weekend, assuming decent photography weather (I've tried shooting WIP shots of this one indoors, but the flash bounces like crazy off the shiny yarn.)

* Pressing is the equivalent of blocking for this rayon ribbon yarn, and works a similar magic, opening up the lattice lace stitch pattern, flattening the fabric and making it hang beautifully.

Oblique passed its first road test with flying colors. I wore it in lieu of a jacket on the train up to Seattle and back last weekend, and it was perfect - not too warm to wear on the train, but warm enough to keep me cozy in the relatively mild late-winter weather. No sagging, no bagging, no pilling. Click through the image to see more photos.

The only adaptations I made to the pattern were to knit the torso about three inches longer, and add an inch of depth to the raglan sleeve opening, because I wanted a loose sweater I could layer on top of other garments without binding or bunching. It hits me about mid-thigh, which is perfect for me.

Others have noted that the sleeves run a bit long, even with the cuffs folded back (and yay to the designer for detailing that lets them *stay* folded back). I don't mind pushing the sleeves up a bit, but if you want to make this and dont like sleeves that brush your knuckles, I'd recommend attaching the front panels to the back, pinning it on your body and taking an arm-length measurement from the bottom of the raglan to where you'd like the folded cuff to end, and adjusting the length you knit accordingly.

(Thanks to karenkay for nudging me to get this thing photographed. I'd tried some indoor shots, but they were full of fail, and I haven't been home much during the day. This afternoon I'm working from home, so I took it out on the front porch and got some decent shots, although they took a bit of tweaking in Photoshop to get the color right).

I would have finished the Oblique cardigan on the train back from Seattle Sunday night - had I not run out of yarn.

It's my own fault. I'd ordered two more skeins than I thought I'd need - but then I decided to add two inches to the sweater's length. Duh.

( Snippety-snip to spare your friends page )

I cast on for Veronik Avery's Oblique cardigan last weekend, and after a bit of a false start, have been knitting at it every time I have a spare moment since.

The false start resulted from trying to follow the pattern - which requires you to work several different lace patterns, some in eight-row repeats and some in four, at the same time. Even using my handy "kachga-kacha"-style row counter, I managed to get off-count to the point where I had to frog back to the twisted rib border, not once but twice.

So I sat down with Open Office Calc (a freeware Excel-type spreadsheet program) and the knitting symbol font from Aire River Design, and charted the damned thing, which I should have done in the first place.

Some people prefer their knitting instructions written; I'm in the camp that finds charts much easier to follow, not so much because they provide a graphic representation of what the stitch pattern will look like (they do, but I can't always see it), but because I can slide a wide Post-It up the page as I go, row by row, and see right where I am. That, and stitch markers to demark the change from one stitch pattern to the next, and I'm set.

Things have gone much better since, and the sweater back is knitting up fast. I've adjusted the pattern slightly to account for my short-waisted body and the fact that I like my sweaters even longer than the pattern suggests, delaying the start of the waist shaping by several rows and reducing the number of rows between the above-the-waist decreases by two.

I'm loving the way the yarn (Elann.com's very affordable Incense wool-silk-bamboo blend) works up in this pattern; it's soft and smooth and less elastic than pure wool, and it really shows off the stitch patterns; the diagonal lace in particular is sharp and crisp. This stuff would be terrific for cabling, and it's relative light weight suggests that even a long cardigan will keep its shape without sagging or stretching.

The pattern itself is fun to knit - regular enough to memorize, if you're more disciplined than I am, but with enough changes in each row to keep me on my toes. And I love the textures that result. If I continue knitting at the pace I've set, I should finish the sweater by the end of the month, while there's still plenty of cardigan weather left in the season.

Lessons learned: Even with the charts, I managed to get distracted enough (I knit while watching all of Babylon 5, in great marathon sittings) to screw up one of the diagonal panels and not notice it till I was six rows past the error. Rather than frog the whole thing, I gritted my teeth, took a deep breath and dropped the stitches for that section back to where I'd made the error; then I slipped the live stitches onto DPNs and worked them back and forth on the long loops of loose yarn until I made it back to the top. It looked hopelessly sloppy and loose at first, but once I got back to the top row and slid the stitches back onto the circs, everything tightened up and smoothed out nicely. Looking at it now, I can't even see where the error occurred. And it's always good to have a new repair technique in my bag of knitting tricks.

The yarn for my impending Oblique arrived in the mail this week, and I think I'm in love.

It's Elann's Incense, and it is yummy: 50 percent wool, 25 percent silk, 25 percent bamboo (edited to fix fiber percentages, with a soft, smooth, luxurious hand. Like a lot of elann's house-brand worsteds, it seems to be a slightly finer gauge than most worsteds, but I also knit loosely, so I should get gauge.

The color is great, too. They call it Persian Violet, but it's more subtle than their Web site (and my own photo) show it - in some lights, it looks soft grey with just a hint of purple

I've got one last pair of socks to finish before I start the sweater, and I will finish them, but I may have to break long enough to knit up a good-sized swatch and see if this stuff drapes as nicely as I think it's going to.
( Wanna see? )

I do love elann, and their prices are hard to beat. At $3.98 a ball, I'm going to wind up with a great sweater for just over $50. And a lot of hours of knitting fun.

As noted in my last post, I've been pondering my next big project while growing increasingly bored with the socks I have on the needles right now*. Kumon, the hip-length cover piece from Knit Kimono, is running neck and neck with Oblique, but I was puzzled by trhe recommended yarn, Berroco Glacé. I had a skein of what was sold to me as Glacéin my stash, and it didn't look anything like the fiber used in that kimono. I even hauled it out and made a swatch, and nope, nope, nope - instead of a sleek, shiny fabric, my swatch was shiny, yes, but downright hairy. And far more slippery than I'd have expected rayon to be.

I surfed over to Berroco's Web site to get a closer look at the yarn. Their illustrations kind of suck, but no, other than the color, that really didn't look much like the yarn in my hand. So I dug around in the site a bit until I found Berroco's listing of discontinued yarns and started clicking on pictures. Finally, near the bottom of the list, success: The yarn I have isn't Glace it all, it's Quest, a shiny, hairy nylon novelty yarn. Which explains a lot - except for why my yarn was wearing a Glacé label.

My surmise: ISTR buying the stuff from a deeply discounted sale basket back in my early "ooh, shiny!" phase of yarn discovery. I know the skein appeared to have been rewound. I'm betting it either fell apart in the yarn store, or was returned by a buyer and got mislabeled somewhere in the process of returning it to stock.

At any rate: Whew. Glacé, by contrast, is a nice-looking ribbon yarn, and the Yarnmarket has it for a decent price, so I've ordered what I need for the kimono.

And while I was at it, I surfed over to Elann ordered enough of their new Incense wool/silk/bamboo blend for oblique. I know I want something less toasty (and fuzzy) than the wool/alpaca/mohair blend the pattern calls for; the Incense is a slightly smaller gauge, but given how loosely I knit, I should be able to make it work.

That's a fairly hefty yarn investment, but I'll get good entertainment value from the knitting for weeks and weeks, and should wind up with two garments I'll actually be able to wear, as opposed to the pretty-but-too-damned-warm sweaters I've knit so far. Whichever yarn shows up on my doorstep first is the one I'll knit first.

And you know, if the socks languish in the work basket for a while, that's OK with me.


* Bored, and irritated. I'm knitting the socks with a ball of Paton's Kroy that's been in my stash for a couple of years, and I keep running into breaks in the yarn. If I didn't know better, I'd swear moths had been at it (and perhaps they had before I acquired it, but it's been stored in a lidded plastic bin and I've never had a sign of a single moth in my knitting or my house).

Now that the holiday sock binge is out of the way, I'm looking at things I want to knit for me, and experiencing a bit of choice paralysis. There are at least four great patterns I'm eager to knit - and wear - and I've been wandering all over the Web testing potential yarn choices against my budget, which will be a little tight until I get done with all the dental work I've got scheduled in the New Year.

The decision isn't made easier by the gift I got from my sister Martha, another budding knitter: Vicki Square's Knit Kimono from Interweave Press. Oh, my, but I love these designs, both for their aesthetics and because they're exactly the sort of thing I love to wear - loose, flowing kimono-styled jackets that look great over simple, solid-colored slacks and tops or dresses. Lovely, lovely stuff, and I've thoroughly enjoyed knitting from Square's other books, Folk Bags and Folk Hats.

I'm most taken by the cover piece, a thigh-length jacket called Kumon, done in an open-work pattern that looks like it would be a blast to knit. But the recommended yarn gives me pause: Berroco's Glacé is a lovely, shimmery tubular rayon ribbon yarn that's just as slippery as can be; I've knitted with it, and it's a challenge to keep it balled while you're trying to work with it - it shimmies and slides and loops itself into a tangle at the slightest motion. So I've been Googling around for substitutes that have similar quanlities of sheen and drape, and everything that's appealing to me is OMG expensive...

Maybe I'll put that one off until I get my tax refund and can afford to splurge. Meantime, I'm looking at Veronik Avery's Oblique, from the fall Knitty, which is just my kind of comfy cardigan, the Juno Regina wrap from that same issue, and just about anything I haven't made yet from Victorian Lace Today (and I still have some yummy cashmere-silk laceweight in my stash for those...)

No rush. But I feel at loose ends without something on the needles...

I've long since stopped being one of those people who feels compelled to hand-craft every single gift for every occasion. I got over it well before I ever started knitting, after a particularly frenzied project involving way, way too many hand-made books that put me right off bookbinding. Reading various on-line knitting communities and watching people drive themselves nuts trying to knit something for everyone on their giving list - especially when they're novice knitters who don't yet have a good sense of how long it will take them to knit that hat, that scarf, that cozy-for-something-which-does-not-need-cozying.

On the other hand, I'm getting to be good enough at this knitting stuff that I do feel confident knitting specific gifts for specific people. And hand-made socks make my own feet so happy that I want to share the love.

So: Back in October, I sent out feelers to my three siblings and one sister-in-law, asking if they'd like hand-knitted socks this year. They all allowed as how, yes, they would, so I had them take some foot measurements and tell me their favorite colors, did a little yarn shopping and got started.

( Details and photos follow )

The VLT Cap Shawl, she is finished ...

Pattern: Cap Shawl from Jane Sowerby's Victorian Lace Today
Yarn: Unbranded merino-silk 2-ply, purchased from Skaska Designs at the Black Sheep Gathering in June. The shawl took almost 1,000 yards.
Needles: US 5s. Started on bamboo DPNs and eventually switched to 40-inch Addi Turbo Lace circulars. I'm not normally a fan of metal needles, but this yarn was fairly sticky on my usual circs, and I have to admit these things are slick.
Started: Early August, 2007; frogged back to the cast-on in early September because of irreparable errors, and reknit.
Finished: Nov. 11, 2007
( More notes and photos behind the cut )

I had one of those light-bulb moments the other day, and it's causing me to rethink the kinds of things I knit, and want to knit.

It was this: Given my growing collection of delicate lace shawls and sweaters, the one thing I actually wear more often than anything else now that the weather's turned chilly, is ( behind the cut )

I stayed up past bedtime last night to finish the Interminable Border of Doom, but for grafting the end to the beginning; I did that this morning in the dentist's waiting room. If I have time before tonight's rehearsal, I'll give it a good Eucalan wash, blot out the excess water and pin it out.

Right now it looks pretty much the lace always does before blocking: Like something the cat horked up, and a good deal smaller than it's meant to be. I've done this enough times now to know it will grow by at least a third on blocking, maybe more, the yarn (70% merino, 30% silk) will bloom and the sloppy spots should even out.

For the moment, I'm just glad to be done knitting it. don't get me wrong - the body was interesting and fun., even though I had to frog it back to the cast-on a month into it.

But the knitted on border? Took. For. Ever. Seriously. Three weeks of repeating the same little 30 row pattern, on and on around the thing's circumference. I was ready to be done with it after the first week of border knitting.

I'll post an FO photo when this thing is blocked. I think it's going to be very pretty, but to tell the truth, I'm sick of it. I'm seriously considering donating it to the theater to auction off at a fund-raiser, assuming I can get Jane Sowerby's permission.

It would make a lovely wedding or christening shawl, but I'm not planning on having either of those in this lifetime, and I'm not sure I could wear it without launching into the whole tale of tedium any time someone compliments it.

Me, I'm ready to knit socks.

I've just finished the final 738-stitch round of the body portion of Jane Sowerby's Cap Shawl - the one I frogged a few weeks back after making a hash of the first 100-plus rounds. As best I can tell from stretching it out on the circs, it's going to be a lovely thing.

It only got tedious toward the end, when the lace pattern gave way to several rows of plain knitting, but even that was well-suited to spending a couple of days on cold meds that sapped my powers of concentration. I could manage counting to 82 nine times per round, if not much more.

Now all that's left is the knitted on border. Which, by my calculations, winds up being something over 1,400 rows of an almost mindless little 30 row repeat. But those "almost mindless" things bear close attention, because it's much too easy to space out and wind up losing count.

Still, I might be able to finish this thing before I start rehearsals in a little over a week. Which would be good, because once the play begins, I lose most of my knitting time for the next three monts (at least till we get to the point in rehearsals where the actors are becoming more or less autonomous and I can sneak a sock project in to work on under the table.)

... my name finally came up in the Ravelry.com invitation queue, so I've started adding some of my knitting projects to my account there, one by one.

If you've got a Ravelry account, you can find me at:

http://www.ravelry.com/people/kightp

I like their communal database features, and the ease of adding your own projects and notes. The pattern search is nice, too. The interface is ... seductive, although the Web accessbility geek in me frowns at the fact that so much of it requires Flash.

Not so pleased with the whole "are you one of the cool kids?" aspect - it looks as if only registered users can access the site contents, and they're still parcelling out invitations at a snail's pace (I signed up something like three months ago). I'm not sure whether they'll open it up once the site is out of Beta.

So I'll very likely use it for its database/inventory featrures, and not for social networking or knitblogging; LJ handles those needs for me just fine. I've disabled the Ravelry IM/chat features, because I don't much care for chat or IM (I'm selectively geeky, thankyouverymuch).

In actual knitting news: My reworking of the cap shawl (the right way) has just passed the point where it was when I unraveled, and so far (knock wood) it's just about perfect. Woo-hoo!

I'm sitting here unraveling 120 rounds of the Cap Shawl from Victorian Lace Today. About a month's worth of knitting, and if I'm lucky I'll be able to salvage, oh, a dozen rounds or so - and the fiddly cast-on, which gave me fits. That's about where I was when I noticed I'd missed an increase a few rows back and, rather digging back to properly fix it, threw in an extra one on the row I was working, thinking it wouldn't be that noticeable.

Hah.
( Edited to add a photo )

The Walker Treasury Project - A blog archive of swatches from Barbara Walker's infinitely useful "Treasury" series of knitting stitch patterns. Participants choose a pattern from one of Walker's books, knit a swatch, photograph it and submit it to the blog in a standard format.

This is great; Walker's books are wonderful, but the photo illustrations, all small and in black and white, fail to do justice to some of the patterns, especially the lacy ones. I'm bookmarking this for future reference, and may just haul out my Walker and knit a few swatches myself.

I love Interlacements' yarns. They have some lovely and fairly hard-to-find fibers - rayon-flax blends, for instance, and 100 percent rayon, as well as yummy, soft, machine-washable merino sock yarn - their colors are gorgeous, and their value-for-price is terrific; the silky "Rick Rack" rayon I'm knitting with now, for instance, is $30/skein, but each skein is a generous 1,400 yards.

But the very generosity of the yardage, combined with a fairly loose put-up, is driving me nuts. A skein is too bulk to fit on my table-top swift, so I'm resorting to the old chair-back method for balling it up, and it's snarling up like a mo-fo; I can barely make one pass around the chair without having to stop and untangle.

(This isn't really a complaint about the company. I bought the yarn at the Black Sheep Gathering, where it had been hanging from a peg and getting petted a lot. I just should have spent more time untangling and winding it all up as soon as I got it home, rather than making up a couple of balls and starting right in knitting. Now I'm running low, eager to get back to the sweater I'm working on, and the heat is making me cranky. I need to set this aside, lock my cat out of the room and leave it until morning, when the temperature should be cooler and my patience less thin.)

Tons of fun at the Black Sheep Gathering yesterday with saoba and johnpalmer, who let us drag him along despite a general lack of fascination by things wooly and seemed to have a good time (at least until a bee flew in the car window on the way home and gave him a scare).

We met up with kathrynt, emmacrew and their babies, who seemed to be handling their first long road trip and first fiber festival with remarkable equanimity, and who (the babies, that is) kept us entertained when we took a break from yarn-fondling under the outdoor shade tents.

I got to show off my new purple shawl to Cynthia Heeren, who dyed and sold me the yarn to make it, and she was most kind and encouraging ... and I wound up buying more of her wonderful yarn, this time the cashmere silk 2-ply in a shimmery steel grey, to knit another VLT pattern.

I also got some yummy merino-silk laceweight, a book of Orenburg lace patterns, and enough nubbly purple rayon to make a this summer tunic (and yes, I know it's an entirely different fiber combination than the pattern calls for, but I've swatched it and I love the way it drapes, so there).

Generally speaking, though, lots less buying and more socializing, both with our friends and with some of the vendors, than the past couple of years. Which was just fine.

Click through the photo for more pictures, including babies!

Pattern: 1840s lace sampler shawl from Victorian Lace Today, by Jane Sowerby, p. 58. This is the "unframed" version, and it's still huge. I think the framed version could be used as a lap blanket if it was worked in a heavier yarn.
Yarn: 100% cashmere 2-ply from Hokulani Farms, Bend, Ore.., in purple. I used four 450-yard skeins and a little bit of one more, or roughly 1800 yards - quite bit more than the 1650 yards the pattern calls for, but I knit loosely, so that's not surprising.
Needles: Size 3 bamboo circulars
Started: Mid-March, 2007. Finished: June 18, 2007
( Notes and more photos follow )