Knitting and spinning update

There is nothing like having a wealth of patterns to choose from, free and paid. If you get bored or if what you’re doing isn’t working right, you can go to something else  you like better.

Working on the birthday pi shawl  (gone missing) made me want to knit even more lace, so I started the echo flower shawl in Cherry Tree Hill lace (Old Rose colorway).

The color repeats are too short for me to enjoy how it worked up, so I decided to save the Old Rose for a plainer pattern, maybe with the solid colored burgundy (the half of the birthday shawl yarn that was left from splitting up a giant hank of yarn) to break it up a little.

I plan to use my time this Saturday for a personal knitting/movie/podcast marathon. I think I am going to be switching between a few different projects and see how far I can get with them. It’ll be fun.

The list of current projects, active and inactive, includes musica mitts (which  I love!); Fred’s scarf, which is going to be River Rapids by Kieran Foley; the Luiza; and the bathroom set.

Spinning

On the spinning front, I have about 5 braids and a pound of multicolor turquoise fiber to spin. I think I may actually have 400 yards are more once the turquoise is spun up. It’s going to be pretty; I plan to make a two-ply yarn with it.

Not a lot of knitting happening here

I get a few minutes here and there, but the days have been packed with school, work and family get-togethers.

I have two more rows before I can attempt the Holden shawlette edging again. I have been sneaking in a few rows here and there, working on them without counting to alleviate stress, and coming to the brink of frogging the whole thing into oblivion when it wasn’t moving along fast enough one tired Friday. My knitting group eased me into giving it a time out instead of setting it on fire. (Wool might be flame retardant, but that’s what lighter fluid is for.) Can hardly wait to be done with it.

I am redoing the heel for the sock; I am going to finish the rest of it according to a pattern I saw in a sock knitting book. The heel is interesting and the pattern I’m going to use for the top is beautiful. I am excited about what it will look like in that colorway when it’s done. Naturally, I wish I could come up with some fantastic pattern all on my own that people will be clamoring for, but I just don’t have the temperament or the necessary ideas to settle down to something like that right now.

Also, where do camera cords go to die? Are they really dead, or are they just out partying with their friends, the phone charger cord, almost dead batteries, and half-working, half-broken headphones?

Knitgirllls hosting Stash Dash 2011

udontcallmeles and lala of the Knitgirllls video podcast are hosting a knitalong over the next few months (May 27 to August 15), putting their accumulated stash to use, with the goal of knitting 5,000 yards. Here’s a few more of the Stash Dash guidelines:

• Crochet, weave, spin or knit from stash! Every yard of yarn used from 5/27 to 8/15 counts toward your goal of knitting through 5K of yarn (5,468 yards)
• If you spin, you can count the yardage of the plied yarn towards the goal, and if you knit with that handspun, you get to count the yardage twice (because you took the time to create/spin it and to knit with it).
• Pictures are necessary.

I think I will be companionably knitting along with them. I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of making 5000 yards by July, but I consider any knitting that doesn’t get frogged into oblivion as good. Even if I had to frog it more than 5 times to get there. I’m thinking 300 yards if I’m lucky.

I have been knitting on the socks, and I finished spinning a fingering (?) weight yarn from the juliespins merino. Doing my Renee’s-late-night-no-good math, I think all that hard work has come out to 210 yards of yarn. That pisses me off. As finely as I spun it in most sections, if there’s any justice in this world, it will be at least 350 yards once I soak and block it. Like I’ve said elsewhere, good thing it’s pretty. Pictures later.

I’m starting to think it’s me

Personal note to self: NO, NO, NO!!!! You do not need new yarn. You haven’t even knitted up your old yarn. You still have yarn and cotton crochet projects from the 80′s, before you even learned to knit. NO, you do not need new fiber either. Finish up your Juliespins Jungle colorway fingering weight, that big pretty bundle of turquoise black and white fiber, and knit up a few more projects, then we’ll talk. I don’t care how pretty it is, you have storage issues and there are other knitters in the world who might want some Juliespins as well. Give them a chance to get some under their belt, whydoncha?

And while we’re at it, I know you covet that tigereye lace from Creatively Dyed like nobody’s business, but come on now, when would you actually knit it? Ever? You’re going to stick it on a shelf somewhere and forget you even have it in your stash.

Until you can treat it the way it deserves to be treated, you’re going to have to let it go. I know it is your cold dead hands favorite, but you’re just not ready for that level of commitment. You’d have to find the perfect project for it, which we all know does not exist. So then you’d have to create a pattern for it, and you know and I know (and therefore, we know) you are never going to find that kind of time while you are working and taking classes and chilling to the max with your friends. Accept this and move on.

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Some days, it feels like knitting is against me. Problems keep cropping up where nobody else (but me) seems to have any. I thought at this point I’d have enough knitting experience under my belt that I could see problems developing and head them off at the pass, but apparently that takes more than three years.

JAYWALKERS: I may have to mod these. I have checked some of the most helpful notes for the pattern on Ravelry and no one says anything about having extra stitches when starting the pattern part. I didn’t have the patience to go through them all.

I have 3 stitches left over after the ribbing. So I’m thinking decrease the 3 stitches away, then when starting the pattern part, instead of a 1-stitch increase, K8, double decrease, K8, it should be increase by 2, K8, double decrease, K8 all the way across.

I’ll try it and see how it works out. I want to really put the hurt on these.

Spoke to silverpurl about this issue. She says, forget it and make something that works for you. It is the having of great socks that matters, not the having of Jaywalkers in particular. So, maybe Rivendell or the Selkie socks from the books by Janel Laidman. Or Atlantis. I am really liking the 3-part look of those.

HOLDEN: No complaints on this one. I’m still somewhere in the middle of the stockinette right now. Slow going once I went down to size 5 needles. I do a row here and there. I have found where a yarnover was knitted incorrectly, but at this point I don’t care. It’s about 25 rows down and I’m not about to frog it or try to fix it. It’s not worth that kind of aggro.

APRES SURF: I LOVE THIS THING. It’s on hold (looking for my notes, which have disappeared, so I won’t have to knit another swatch and do all the modding math again), but that chart is a thing of ease and beauty. Nice neat rows of repetitiveness that are interesting enough to not be boring, but easy enough that you can do a row without losing your place. It’s works out to 8 stitches per repeat. That’s a worry-less kind of thing. I kind of want to start the sleeves because those won’t need much modding.

OTHER STUFF: I’d like to knit other stuff along with these, but I’m having enough trouble at this point. Maybe if they start evening themselves out, I will be able to pick up a third project to finish.

Steady work

on the Holden shawl. I do a few rows at a time while I struggle with the other projects and project papers. I have begun reviling the purl rows again. They are like unending irritants between the blaze of the knit rows, even if I do miss them in circular projects. I wonder why that is.

Where rearranging is not fun

I had plans this weekend, and I decided to straighten up the stash a little before I left the house. A secondary goal was to find the fibers I’d pulled from a rug hooking kit so I could get them matched by someone else. I was thinking I would take a “my entire stash” pic that weekend or next weekend, but after I realized just how much yarn it was, I realized I didn’t want to have to put it all up once I was done.

There were bits and wound balls of yarn all over the place, so I decided to get them in one place, or at least congregated. There’s the big trash bag of yarn, two separate shoebox stacks, a stackable bin and a carryall tote.

In addition to these items, there’s a box holding the yarns for the Knitpicks East Meets West tote and a small gnome kit, yarns for a couple of sweaters, and a shawl, yarns I need to dye, and yarns I need to spin together to make “a real yarn”, not a fine sewing thread pretending to be yarn.

The sweater yarn,  gnome kit, and other stray yarns were moved to the stackable bin. There’s more roving I need to find a space for until I can spin the whole bundle.

This bin is an interlocking stack of 3, from smallest to largest size. The lid fits the largest side. I really like these (got them on sale at Wal-Mart), but I prefer Container Store boxes because every container has its own individual lid, and when closed, they stack up without tipping over.

Stash in the top bin is 3 multicolor skeins of Red Heart Supersaver received from my coworkers this past Christmas; 2 skeins of Dream in Color Baby (something burgundy and Chinatown Apple); a multicolor skein of shibui Knits sock yarn – colorway Jewel, I think). Next to those in the gold-accented plastic is a gnome kit, a pinkish skein of laceweight hand-dyed by me, and wound skeins of Garn Studio cotton viscose to make my Juliet sweater.

In the bottom of the stackable bin are 3 skeins of Palette in the front row; a hand dyed red rainbow multicolor skein from a London Ravelry member; a black-grey-white skein of No Two Snowflakes laceweight; some black worsted weight skeins and a couple of black Cherry Tree Hill yarn balls, and the remainder of the Juliet sweater yarn (in the plastic bag); plus more detail on the Shibui Knits skein mentioned previously.

Projects not being made for me personally are in the tote. The yarns for a sweater were  from a plastic bag to the stackable bin, along with other yarns that hadn’t had a home.

I also decided to clear off the dressers, which is a still ongoing battle. I neatened it up a lot, but the more I’d work on them, the more aggravated I got. I was in “I am not leaving the room until it is done” mode, and got all cranky. I wanted to get it done so badly I skipped other plans I’d made that day until the organizing was done, and at that point I no longer felt like doing anything.

It looks much better in here, but my mind is no longer clear about my stash goals. I’m going to work on my current projects and slowly go through the stash (again) to make a plan. Maybe that will help alleviate some of the stress I’ve been going through lately.

18 thousandth time’s a charm

As much as I hate it when people use 18 thousand instead of 18,000 here I am using it myself.

After another two off-count incidents yesterday, I am for the 18 thousandth time, going to mod the Holden shawl. This makes me feel stupid.

There are 824 of these on ravelry, 536 of them have been finished. The people who knit those must be intuitive or something. I ain’t getting it.

So here’s my new math.

Each swoop is

SKP, K9, K2tog (14 stitches)

I have 205 stitches on the needles right now. 205 minus 1 for the center is 204. Half of 204 is 102 stitches, 102 divided by 14 is 7.28 something.  Not good enough because I’m going to need a whole  number, so I take the number of repeats up from 7 to 8. 14×8=112. 112×2=224 stitches, plus 1 for the center stitch = 225. Plus 6 for the edging = 231 total.

205 +4 (increases on every knit row) = 209

209+4 =213

213+4=217

217+4=221

221+4=225

225 +4=229

229+4=233

That’s 2 more stitches than the 231 total, so I’m going to have to maybe lose the two yarnovers made before the center stitch.

8 swoops on each half, 16 swoops total, maintaining the center spine.

What if I decided to add a stitch between each repeat (I could maybe put some beads there). Also, I don’t know that I’d like to maintain the center spine, so what if I made that a swoop too? I could use up more of the yarn that way as well.

So, that’d be another 14 stitches, plus one stitch between swoops.

* = swoop

| = stitch

* | * | * | * | * | * | * | * |  ( center *  center ) | * | * | * | * | * | * | * | *

That’s 16 extra stitches between swoops, plus 14 for the center swoop.

So, 233 +16+14=263

233+4=237

237+4=241

241+4=245

245+4=249

249+4=253

253+4=257

257+4=261

261+2 (leaving out center double yo’s)=263

That’s another 28 rows of stockinette stitch, including the purl rows. I may have to use all black yarn for the total scallop edging. I don’t know if I have enough wollmeise left to get me to the edging after all the increases. We’ll see.

NOTE: Seems like the wollmeise ends will weave in better if I weave it in using 2 plies at a time.

A few weeks ago

I ordered the one-pound grab bag from Silver Suns Alpaca. The owner asked what colors and fibers I liked. I told her merinos and merino blends, and I liked all kinds of colors, but my favorites were dark colors, burgundy and black. She said, “What about angelina?” I love glitter!

So she sent me 2 glitzy ones and 2 merino (100% merino I think).

This is one side of them:

This is the other side of them:

While I’m at it, here’s the current status of the Birthday Pi shawl.

What happened?

I was cruising along on the old Holden shawlette right? Did as much of the stockinette part as I was going to do, thought I’d make it that little bit bigger but my math hasn’t worked out. So I think I am going to go back down to where the instructions said to end the stockinette part and just go from there.

I’m already tired of trying to math work (two attempts…I feel like a spaz), so I’ll see how small it actually is when I’m done with it, lol.

So much for that.

I restarted the Birthday Pi, and I am now halfway done with clue 1.

Longest freaking morning in the history of the world

That would be today. And there’s still 2  hours left before one can decently call it lunch hour. I’m going to be knitting and drankin’ a Coca Cola for lunch today.

One of my coworkers saved everybody’s life today and taped a glittery paper shamrock to my shoulder. So what if I have a stream of bright green glitter from here to the ground? You’re still alive, no one has pinched me and I haven’t been forced to spend some time in jail. Freaking holidays.

I finished the entrelac socks and got them in the mail. The Holden shawl is in progress (about 10 rows to go before I can start the edging rows), I started a Mawelucky Birthday Pi knitalong (my first circular shawl) and I’m going to be starting the Jaywalker socks.

I love the bright red of the Holden shawl. It’s cheery even though it’s not my usual beloved burgundy. I love how it is mostly stockinette and four yarnovers. It’s so easy as long as I don’t drop a stitch at the edge and have to fix it. I’ve done that twice. The first time was a small uphill battle, the second time was a time consuming nightmare! It sucked up one and a half hours to get 3-5 stitches over 9 rows.

The Birthday Pi is going well so far, but I am going to start it over because the circular needle I’m using is giving me fits as I magic-loop the beginning.

The needles start out kind of wide looking and then narrow down sharply so that they are equal to the width of the cord. So when I slide the cord to get to the other half of the shawl, they ease over the narrow part and come to a standstill over the wider part. I keep having to tug on them and it’s weakening the yarn some. A few times I have been afraid I would break the actual stitch. I’m going to go through my needle stash and see if I have a knitpicks size 4 or 5 needle I can use.

Almost finished with the entrelac socks

I have to finish the foldover bind off, weave the ends and fix any problems. They look good, but there is always something with my projects that I feel could have been done better. I wish I had someone with the same type feet at hand who could try them on for me. That’s always an issue when the person you’re knitting for doesn’t live near you.

I had to frog some of the Holden shawlette today and yesterday. I fixed some yarnovers that didn’t look like the majority of yarnovers in my shawl, and today I fixed some knitted stitches that had been knitted through the back loop instead of like a regular knit stitch. I can’t say it looks better due to the reknitted area not being evenly tensioned, but now I know I won’t be looking at that section and saying “It’s wrong!” when I’m finished with it.

I’m making it out of Wollmeise…while it doesn’t really feel like wool yarn to me, I love how it knits up. The fabric it’s making has such a neat texture to it on the stockinette section. I hope to get my hands on the Merlot colorway someday. That’s my favorite color of everything: clothes, accessories, furniture, Y-A-R-N…

I mentioned the shawlette in the Yarn Diet group on the Stash and Burn forum, and a lot of people liked it, so Brownberry and I started a KAL. She’s decided to offer prizes for everyone who posts a picture of their shawl and finish them by a certain day in April. She is so cool; I love that she thought of that! It never even crossed my mind! lol

I have been thinking about my stash quite a bit over the last few months. I have slowed down on yarn purchases and when I get a few more must-have books, I am quitting buying those as well. I’m set for the next 10 years on that stuff.

I keep having the urge to knit up the stash as quickly as possible, just to see how far and fast I get. My main problem though is constant vigilance. I can concentrate really good for 1-2 hours at a time, but after that, things stretch out to days or weeks before I go back to it. sticking to it without getting distracted. Some people have a stick-to-it-iveness that I lack. I wish I knew how they managed to maintain that focus.