Blocking, for the win

While I don’t love the mini-anxiety attack I have when I block a project, I do love what it does to the knitted fabric. It makes your project look like it’s been well pressed with an iron by someone who knew what they were doing.

It was so hot outside today I blocked the mitts  on a towel and took them out to the car to finish drying.  It worked pretty well. If it’s hot enough to do it that way again, I have to remember to use a towel that isn’t damp already from squeezing some of the moisture out of the project, pre-blocking.

The Spatterdash mitt pattern (knitty.com) is awesome! I am going to use it to make Christmas gifts for my sisters-in-law. I think they’ll love them as well, especially the one who gets cold hands at work.

Winding yarn, unsupervised

Arrgghh! I knew I should have waited until I had somebody handy to help me keep a lid on things. Maybe I’ll try it again, but slower. PITA.

Got the rest of the yarn for the Henry the VIII today and it was all I  could do not to look at the 10,000 other things I wanted. That may be the fastest I ever got out of there. There were about 6 people there knitting and I wanted to just sit and knit til closing.

 

On to the edging for the Luiza

*** LUIZA SHAWL

I tried hard to stay up last night and finish the edging on the Luiza. I forced myself to into repeat number 2 of the first row, and even then I was struggling to stay awake. I am so looking forward to this. I am trying to finish my major chores so that when I sit down to knit it, I can do it all at once with no interruptions, except for lunch and dinner.

I hope I have made enough fleur de lis sections that it will go smoothly and I don’t have to redo it. I put a lifeline in row 38, just in case. Some patterns have edging based on multiples of four – most socks for instance. Learned that by experience. Like in K2P2 ribbing, if you increase just 2 stitches, you will mess up the k2p2. It will become k2p2-p2-k2p2. So you increase 4 – K2p2-k2-p2-k2p2. If it was k1p1 ribbing, adding just 2 stitches wouldn’t be a problem.

If Luiza is based on multiples of four, I will have to frog back to 38 and add 2 more fleur de lis sections, 16 per side.

regular pattern:

10 fleur de lis 7-in-3 sections, 11 full leaves from top center to top edge, 9 full leaves down the center before the edging

my larger size:

14 fleur de lis 7-in-3 sections, 13 full leaves down the middle, almost 14 leaves from the top center to the outside edge.

I was going to make it so large it almost reached my knees, but I changed my mind because I don’t want it to be cumbersome when I’m actually wearing it, like the Celtic stole. It was great, but before I accidentally felted it, it hung down to mid calf after I’d wrapped it around my shoulders. I hadn’t quite got the hang of how to wrap it so it looked all cool and stuff, even to me. I was so proud I finished that thing. Still am. Makes me smile just thinking about it.

I spent about half an hour at the spinning meeting yesterday. Just long enough to get me going, but not enough to whet the appetite for more. I plan to do some of that today also, even if it’s just 15 minutes or so. If there’s time, I will put the stitches for the second mitt back on the needles, knit a few rows of that, and maybe knit Mom’s socks.

***FIRST SPATTERDASH MITT

It’s a little large, but I don’t care. It’s so freaking warm, too. I love the end result. I am hoping to find some neat gold buttons to close part of it up. I will sew down the rest.

***ARRGGHHH!!!

This is a note to myself that I am no longer buying knitpicks fixed or interchangeable circular needles unless they actually fix them. I may buy some of the larger size DPNs, like size 4 and up, but that’s it. (I have the 0-3 sock set.)

I was three rows away from starting the Luiza edging, which is at least 200 stitches across, and one of the ends of the purple cable came out of the screw on attachment. The needle tip part was fine. The part it screws into, not so much. About 15 stitches came off.

Borrowed a circ from my roommate to pick them up with, started transferring stitches to it, got even madder, and put the project down. A few days later, picked it back up to finish the transferring of the stitches, and dang if the other end of the purple cable didn’t come out of the screw on attachment. Yay. Lost some more stitches. Picked them all up. Consider myself done with the KP circs. If they haven’t fixed them in all these years, they probably never will.

This happened to me once with some of their fixed circular needles I was using to make a pair of socks, and it was just as frustrating then as it is now. I don’t care about them replacing them free of charge…I just don’t want the breaking part to happen at all, ever. Not to me, not to anyone.

*** IT IS CIRCULAR, NOT CABLE, DANG!

I love my friends, but they’re not right.

I keep asking them for a cable needle when I really mean circular, and they have the nerve to actually hand me a cable needle. And then I look at them quizzically like, “Okay, what are you handing me that for? Do you need me to help you knit cables or something?”

The really funny part is that this has happened to me more than once. So they should know by now that I mean CIRCULAR when I say CABLE. One time, I actually asked Kristen for a circular needle using the actual word CIRCULAR, and she deliberately handed me cable needle and cracked up laughing. That was just mean! lol

Guess I was kidding

I haven’t started the spin everyday thing yet…been a week. Maybe I need to move the wheel back into the walkway where I can trip all over it, and put one of my favorite fibers on top of it too. lol

I have knitted a couple of inches back up on my mom’s socks… a little ways to go before I have reknit the parts I have frogged, and then I’m going to add about four more inches to it to make sure it’s long enough, adding 4 stitches to each sock every couple of inches or so. They do look better since I redid the increase parts.

These are the socks right now. The orange stitchmarker is where I started knitting yesterday morning before work.

This is another project I’m working on, the Spatterdash mitts from the Knitty website. I’m using the handdyed yarn I got from another Raveler…traded for some green Juliespins sock yarn. I love all the colors.

These are going to be some cute mitts. This is like the 3rd or 4th retry. There will be no more of those! lol

Everybody in the group who is making the pattern is excited about how they’re going. I think I will take a picture of them all and post them in here.

Right now I am making the small size on US size 2′s. I started out making the medium size on size 3s, which gave a loose fabric I didn’t like. Then I went down to a medium on size 2′s, which Melissa said was going to be too big in the yarn I’m using and made me try hers on. Damn. So much for going by the instructions. I frogged again and started the smaller on size 2′s and that’s the last time I’m starting this one over.

I swear, some day I will be able to use size 3′s on skinny sock yarn and it will come out perfect, exactly how I planned it!

Melissa thinks I’m crazy, because I try that with every pattern calling for a size 2. Excuse me if I have a mental block about it, a throwback to the days when I first started knitting and swore I’d never knit on any needle smaller than a size 5. The socks I was making when I said that, I had to go down to a 003 or 0003 just to get gauge. I think I was traumatized or something. Then I started doing lacework using skinny yarn on bigger needles. But I still balk about smaller diameter sock weight yarn on small needles.

To do list later:

Post a list of Henry VIII knitting reference points I went to for the sweater, post my notes and pics of one of the  yarns I’m using.

Figure out why I’m looking at mine as a red-headed stepchild for using 2 yarns, when I love the one somebody on rav did using 2 colors.

No hat, no spinning, just socks

Plans for yesterday fell through. Worked on the spatterdash mitts, had to frog them, twice, because the way I did the increases made holes. Then I saw where I’d split the yarn as I was knitting and it didn’t quite work out. When I restarted them, the section was much wider than necessary. Frogged it again. Now it’s on hold while I decide if I want to switch yarns.

Went to the yarn store and picked out half the yarn for the Henry VIII sweater. The other 1/2 is on order. Instead of solids, went with a long repeat yarn from Jojoland. It’s a medium to bright blue mix of color, to be combined with a skein of Cascade in white, beige  and tan. I am hoping I will get the same effect as I would in solid color fair isle, since there’s variation going on in both skeins. I wish I was swatching for it right now.

Didn’t spin yesterday. Todays’ the charm I ‘m hoping.

On the to do list I did knit/frog through Harry Potter 1. Picked my mom’s socks back up so I could finish them off sometime this week. Had to frog several inches and fix some increases. I just got the one back to the point where it was the same height as the other, and  hopefully I will be able to knit everything I frogged today and then some. Will be watching Harry Potter too while working through it. I also plan to start the spin everyday challenge with a grab bag fiber I bought from Silver Sun alpacas. It’s a small enough size that it should take a day and a half for me to spin it and finish it.

What I want to do today

- Work on the hurricane hat

- and start day one of spinning everyday.

Since I am up ridiculously early today (7 a.m. – thought I’d be asleep until at least 10 a.m.), it shouldn’t be that hard.

I had to take the hurricane hat back down to the ribbing at lunch Friday. The purl increases in the pattern form a neat spiral when done correctly. My previous version had purls all over the place, in no spiral whatsoever! lol. I’m using a finer yarn, which called for more increases to make sure it was big enough, and so my spirals were all over the place.

I’m sorely tempted to make it plain ribbing all the way to the top, lol, but the spirals add a dash of awesome to it. See?

That was my first hurricane hat. Blocking it over the vase jacked up the ribbing some. I’m going to block this next one over an inflated balloon, like my friend Melissa did. Her hats blocked great that way!

Back to the spinning part.

The idea of starting with a fresh braid appeals to me, since I have been working on this bag of fiber for a while. It’s probably 2 or 3 pounds worth of a merino/mohair blend. It’s beautiful, but I don’t have quite as much control over it as I’d like. The goal was to spin it finely and make a 2 ply yarn for a sweater, but I have had a hard time with the draft and separating the colors.

If I try to separate the colors into all turquoise or all black, a miniscule amount of the unwanted color will splinter into what I’m working with, no matter which color I’m on. So the plans to make big blocks of turquoise with thin black or white stripes isn’t working out. All the colors get mixed throughout.

I asked some friends who had been spinning longer than me what they thought the problem was. Judy said it may have felted a little bit, so I would have to draft it more than I would a regular braid. I don’t know if I have enough patience to do the whole bundle that way, so I am going to try spreading the work between other braids in my stash to keep the annoyance to a minimum.

I am kind of tempted to start with this birthday present from Cheryl though (editing the paragraph above is solidifying this decision):

This is where I justify the decision to start with this to myself by saying, if the spin everyday challenge is all about what I want to spin that day, maybe I will spin more at a time. Also, I could switch to the giant project after a while. It’s the biggest amount of fiber I’ve had to spin at one time.

Tomorrow I will count up how many braids of fiber I have to see how far I have to go. I don’t necessarily want to spin all of it up in a year-long challenge. I just want to get down to say, 3-5 unspun braids total. I did really well the first time I joined a Yarn Everyday challenge, getting down to about 7 things left to spin. Even though the yardage wasn’t huge, the end results were pretty, and some were given as presents to awesome people.

I also want to pick out a few braids to possibly use for Ravelympics, which starts in June, and a yarn and project in case I decide to knit instead. (My default for this right now is one of the two sweaters, either the Juliet or the Henry VIII.) This is reminding me that the person who pointed me to the spatterdash pattern was talking about a KAL for June…better go see what project that was. A lace shawl if I remember correctly.

New wordpress….augghhh!!!

Whatever you do, don’t hit the “Insert Photo” button in the top right corner next to the title in the middle of writing a new post, because it will eat whatever your wrote before that and then post the photo all by itself. Geez!!! What I was saying was important to me, and now I’ve lost the train of thought on that one. I’m kinda ticked right now.

OMG it saved it as a draft!!! Good thing I hadn’t figured out how to turn those things off yet. I’m this close to paying somebody to reset this whole damn thing, or even, horror of horrors, go back to blogspot.com.

***************

ALSO, GIANT NOTE TO SELF:

***************

FIND OUT WHERE THE DASHBOARD MOVED

TO BEFORE YOU START POSTING ANYTHING,

since it takes you to the giant typing and formatting window

you’re used to.

Came across a challenge list, part 2

Some other things I want to do with my stash are

• Use the handspun I made to make a blanket or throw, mixing them with white, black and taupe yarns to make the colors work together.
• Hold another spinning everyday challenge for a few months. It’s a relaxing, calming sort of thing, plus I tend to like the yarn I get at the end, even if it’s never as long as I think it should be.
• Go through the yarn and fiber stash separately to see if some items are complementary and can be combined for a larger project.
• Make up a sweater or other large item without a pattern.
• knit one of those random patterns that tell you to “work with this yarn for however many stitches. Add beads every other stitch for one row. Change yarn size and color, stitch type, etc.
• Write and publish a pattern, from beginning to end.
• Take a shawl or doily pattern and morph it into a garment like this lady did: http://www.ravelry.com/projects/jofaliina/evenstar-shawl.

The rest of the fiber challenge list from the previous post. I hope I’ll get to do some TV knitting this weekend.

• Knit Pride & Prejudice (what project can I finish in those 6 hours?)
• Knit The Mummy series (6 hours)
• Knit Dr. Horrible (1 hour)
• Ply the 2 skinny yarns onto themselves.
• Knit the comfort socks.
• Start my sweater.
• Work on crochet.
• Knit the Henry VIII sweater (Alice Starmore).
• Knit other series (can’t remember which one this was).
• Knit Horatio Hornblower.
• Knit through 4 Harry Potter DVDs. (12 hours)
• Reclaim the needles/stitch markers (markers done, needles not so much)
• Spin 6 batts.
• Ply XS merino seacell.
• Assign projects to yarn.
• Untangle silky sock yarn from Melissa.
• Measure yardage of misc. fingering so I’ll know how much I have.
• Knit Stash and Burn.
• Make a knit bag from corduroy fabric.

I have lost some focus over the past couple of weeks. Hence, a current to do list.

Fred’s Scarf – frog to remove horizontal stripes….maybe change colors. Use 4 skeins of burgundy cotton maybe?

Iris shawl

Finish Luiza. Jenn keeps trying to make me throw beads on it. If I did, they’d be navy blue with a gold core. I don’t want anything flashy on this first one, which is rare for me! I like gold flashy everything, with few exceptions.

Mom’s socks. Frog down, switch to a size 6 needle to fix the bad increase sections.

Spatterdashes. Saw snarkyllama’s in Socks That Rock yarn today. Gorgeous yarn for such a cute, cute pattern!

Hurricane hat 2.

Jenn’s dish towel.

Yarn everyday (spinning).

Came across a challenge list

Around Oct. 2011, I wound up looking at a blog post about a “100 things challenge.” Though it’s along the lines of living a minimum lifestyle via “reduce, reuse, reprioritize, unplug from rampant consumerism,” I decided to use the idea to spur me on with my knitting and spinning projects, and organizing my stuff.

The listing process helped me narrow down what was most important to me right then and helped me prioritize my to do list. There was so much going on with me mentally and emotionally then I could barely make a decision about important things. I was all over the place, and what got done was whatever I needed to do in the next 10 minutes. Anything bigger than that got kicked to the curb. Anything beyond “this week” just didn’t get done if it didn’t have an emergency feel to it. There were a lot of “I don’t care” hours in there too.

When you have that kind of heavy duty agitation going on, it doesn’t feel like much else gets accomplished. Something about it reminded me of those scenes in Harry Potter where Dumbledore used the pensieve to relieve his crowded thoughts.

When it came to the list making, it boiled it down from “I want to do all 8 of these NOW” to “these are the top 3, and I’ll work on this one first.” It kept me from constantly spinning my wheels.

I am very happy to say, I couldn’t come up with 100 things I wanted to do. That made me feel like I was doing better at accomplishing what I wanted than I originally thought. I only had about 40 “must do’s” on my list, and half of them were knitting/fiber related.

Nine of the entire 40 have been accomplished, only one of which was knitting – the musica mitts. Most of the nine were about putting like possessions together, fixing broken things that were irritating me, organizing, or getting rid of items.

The fiber related parts I still want to get done are:

• Knit Pride & Prejudice (what project can I finish in those 6 hours?)
• Knit The Mummy series (6 hours)
• Knit Dr. Horrible (1 hour)
• Ply the 2 skinny yarns onto themselves.
• Knit the comfort socks.
• Start my sweater.
• Work on crochet.
• Knit the Henry VIII sweater (Alice Starmore).
• Knit other series (can’t remember which one this was).
• Knit Horatio Hornblower.
• Knit through 4 Harry Potter DVDs. (12 hours)
• Reclaim the needles/stitch markers (markers done, needles not so much)
• Spin 6 batts.
• Ply XS merino seacell.
• Assign projects to yarn.
• Untangle silky sock yarn from Melissa.
• Measure yardage of misc. fingering so I’ll know how much I have.
• Knit Stash and Burn.
• Make a knit bag from corduroy fabric.

The one thing I really like about the whole “knit this show” list is that it’s not project specific. It’s dedicated time I can use to finish a thing or just get a little further along on any project. Usually when I sit down to watch a movie that’s all I’m doing, so no major interruptions.

These aren’t in any specific order, it’s just for what appeals the most right this second.

Start my sweater: The Juliet sweater has been in my list for years. I have everything I need to make it already. It’s been on the back burner for such a long time.

Henry VIII sweater: I’m glad I revisited this list, because there was some question about which sweater I wanted to work on first from Tudor Roses, so, Henry VIII it is. I had done a lot of thinking to get it to that point on the list. I’m going to do it in two colors at first, and maybe work up to full fledged (all the colors) fair isle further down the road. My dream for this is to save up enough money to make it from the Virtual Yarns kit, without anything else going wanting.

Plying the merino seacell: I bought two matching sparkly batts from Extreme Spinning to make into a tank top, but my spinning was so uneven I am going to ply the two together to make a fuller yarn. Just never got around to the plying part. After they’re plied I will be making a hat or a cowl from it. I am hoping for a burgundy/black marled (?) yarn.

That’s 19 items in that project list. I am going to have a good time doing those, with plenty of nice things to show for it.

Make it 50: There’s some other things I want to accomplish knittingwise as well. More about that next time.

Enjoying my craft

I have been working on the Luiza shawl.

At first I resented the fleur de lis looking things, because I wanted to just do the edging so bad, but now, I am loving them. The only problem is, no way am I going to get a good pic of the lace without taking the needle out, and that is so not happening right now. Maybe I will get my friends to loan me some interchangeable cords (I moved; god only knows where my others are, if I even have more than one), so I can look at it in all its glory (lol) without dropping a stitch.

I think the coolest thing about the fleur/trident things is how they work out to a little diamond pane if you do it right.

If you do it wrong, they get a little out of line from the rest and it’s so obvious to you when you start doing it wrong.

And when I figure out where I got it wrong and start frogging back, I get a little attitude. lol. Especially when I’m on the second half of the right side and the last time it was right was 2 repeats in from the beginning of the first half. No teacher like experience, dude.

I have tentatively begun knitting the Maluka shawl as a thank you gift from someone else. The pattern is chosen, the beads are strung, and I am 2 rows of the edging in.

I still haven’t figured out where the beads will go. I know where I want them to go, but I’m not familiar enough with the pattern right now to figure out how to make them go there. Maybe I can corner somebody on knit night and make them help me.

I have become something of a knit night addict. Several years of meeting with my own group has made me loathe missing them, even for a good reason. Creature of habit for sure.