Try, try again

You'll probably remember the vest I knit that didn't fit me. Fortunately, it fit Earin's husband Dick, but I really did want and need a vest!

I decided to try designing my own.

I dug out some cheap yarn my aunt had found in a thrift store. I measured myself. I drew pictures. I did the math (lots of triangles and geometry). And took a deep breath, and knit. I tried to trust the math. It made me nervous. I couldn't believe it would end up fitting. It just all seemed like a leap of faith.

Trust the math.

It fits! Ok, my husband says it is "okay to wear to work if you don't mind looking somewhat barrel-like". I think that's partly owing to using a heavy aran-weight yarn, thicker than I prefer. But it is comfortable, generally follows my curves (I could have made the waist smaller and I will do so next time), and keeps me warm. Plus I really love what I did with the neckline (growing the trim out of the cable).

Hurrah!

Spurred by success, I decided to tackle my demon — Fair Isle. Dunno why I'm so afraid of it — I guess mostly because I'm not comfortable yet with yarn in my right hand, and yet for the life of me can't manage to knit with both yarns in my left hand. So I picked a simple project (Ysolda's Cotton Reel Mitts) and dug out some scrap sock yarn (leftover bits of a Kaffe Fassett color extravaganza and a plain light green), and cast on. It is actually going all right...

It does seem the floats are a little odd over the needle changes but I have hopes it'll block out okay. Here's the inside, cuz I know how you knitters are...

I can tell you one thing. I'm going to run out of yarn. (Good thing it's just for practice and I don't care if the mitts match...)

I have no idea what I'm doing.

@#$*(@*$(#@*$(@#!!!!

I mean seriously. I think I've had an error on pretty much every row of every lace section in this silly blanket. I started this in July 2009, intending it for one baby; quickly realized I wasn't going to finish it in time, so I thought, okay, it'll be for this other baby... yeah, that didn't happen either. I'm not going to curse it now by determining what baby it'll be for. Maybe it'll be for me, in my dotage, to warm my ancient bones when I turn 99 or so…

The sad thing is how tired and uneven my stitches look when they've been ripped and reknitted 85 jillion times. Hoping it gets a bit better in the blocking:

Anyway, got the dratted thing straightened out again for the umpteenth time and we'll see how it goes.

You know what I love? I love these socks:

Charade by Sandra Park. Utterly fabulous, addictive herringbone pattern (shown here sideways):

Wouldn't it make the handsomest man's scarf, too? I have managed not to make any booboos on these so far (knocking on wood now!), and I have a feeling I'll make several pairs (as I did with the lovely Conwy socks) because they're so mesmerizing and wearable. Plus a nice 64-stitch sock for my loose-knittin' fingers.

Tub saga

Happy New Year all! It's been a while. I didn't knit as much over December as I might have liked. I don't really know why – I even had two weeks off of work — but I seem to have spent the time off differently than by knitting. While I was doing whatever it was I was doing, workman came and removed this:

Ok, I admit that looks pretty reasonable in that picture, but if you looked closely at the surface of the tub, you'd see the whole thing actually looked like this:

and if you stepped in it, you'd find the soft spots, and if you stepped in the wrong spot you were going to go through to the kitchen. I knew where this wrong spot was, and avoided it, but guests didn't, and I really didn't want guests raining into my kitchen over the holidays.

So the postman first delivered this:



I was quite excited, but it turned out to be cast defectively and had to be returned. Sadly, the old tub was already removed by the time we discovered this, so I was tubless for, in the end, three weeks. Fortunately we have a stall shower in our master bathroom. But I missed my baths.

It took a while, and the guests had to use our shower in the end because the tub wasn't done, but now I have this:




I'm pretty happy :-) The bathtub has a lovely, comfy sloping back and I love the little gold tiles I picked out to decorate the otherwise plain white.

I did finish this pair of socks for a friend recently:

They're Cookie's Hedera socks, done in Cookie's leftover yarn (she destashed it and I bought it). For some reason I had a lot of trouble somewhere in the middle of these, so it took me a few YEARS to finish them. Poor Pat was waiting a long time for her socks, but hurrah, they are done and fit!

I do have a couple other knitting triumphs to show you, but I'll wait for another post :-)

Oh, honestly. Sometimes…

Sometimes none of your projects are working. All at the same time.

This one — well, I lost the notes for the first sock, and I didn't follow the pattern at all, so I've had to re-engineer sock #1 (knit 4 years ago) as I go. And I'm lazy.

This one looks done, but actually I knit two different lengths so I could find out which one fit the recipient. Alas, the one with the lifeline is the one that fits. So I just have to thread through some needles and rip back and lengthen the one on top. And I'm lazy.



One project I can't find at the moment.

One (unphotographed) piece is off by one stitch, and I need to figure out why.

So is this one.


One (also unphotographed) needs a whole bunch of math before I start the arms.

There's nothing actually wrong with this one, but you know how lace is -- you just can't work on it during all activities. And frankly, it'll look like a pile of purple vomit until it's done.


So. You know how it is. I cast on this:



Frankly I don't think the color combo's working that well.

One dratted skein...

So as I discussed a while back, my aunt Grace picked up a skein of Filatura Di Crosa Gioiello [Ravelry link] yarn when she was in Italy, and asked me to knit her a scarf from it. There were just two problems:

1. This yarn looks like puke knitted up into anything but stockinette.
2. Knitted into stockinette, there was not enough yarn to make a scarf.

Not insurmountable, surely? Well, I tried a few different patterns, and they did, indeed, look awful. Finally I decided to chart a very simple lace pattern that would look chiefly like bands of stockinette separated by some dropped stitches. There are a number of these. What I ended up with was this:



I'm not 100% thrilled — obviously there are still problems with this yarn knitted up (too bad, it looks lovely in the skein!), but I am pretty happy with the end result. And the scarf, using all the yarn save maybe a meter, is a perfect size.




Of course I think this would have been nicer with a different yarn, but even so, I may write up the pattern in case someone else has a single crazy skein of fingering-weight yarn and needs a pattern that will work for it...

Losing track of what I've shown you and what I haven't!

I think that means I've been doing a lot of knitting.

Anywhere, here are a couple of recent triumphs:

Judy Alexander's Bavarian Tulip Mittens from the most recent (Fall 2010) Interweave Knits. I accidentally knit the top in stockinette instead of reverse stockinette, but I think I like it better this way -- the tops match the thumbs -- so there. This is in one hank of Sundara Worsted Merino (Blue-Green over Yellow). It's a perfect application of the Sundara yarn, so if you have a single skein of it in your stash, you might think about these lovely mittens!

These are for my friend Becca. I hope they come close to fitting... I haven't seen her in years!

My friend Sandra has been begging me for a pair of fingerless mitts for several years now. I don't know why, but having someone ask me for something makes me slower about making it. Which is really stupid. I basically improvised this pattern, including charting the simple braided cable, and it took me less than 24 hours to knit from Elsebeth Lavold Chunky AL (leftover from Rob's pullover). Hopefully these will fit — she has tiny hands. These are wet and blocking:

Should dry fast, we have a Santa Ana rolling in. Hot desert wind.

I've got more sinus surgery on Monday, and will be home for a couple of weeks. That'll slow knitting down at first, then probably speed it up, for a while.

Time to cut my losses?

I've been surveying some of my unfinished projects and one of them is this Mariner tunic, which I started way back when I first learned to knit, in 2006:



This sat around for a long, long time because I couldn't remember whether I'd used long-tail cast-on or Twisted German cast-on (which effectively adds a row), and I wanted the front and back to match.

I took it out to look at the other day and realized I have another problem now: this thing is not going to fit. For one thing I'm a slightly different size since I first started knitting it. It is coming out about 46" (well, the front is coming out about 23"). You've seen the vest I recently knit, which was 45" and just doesn't fit me. This is not going to fit either.

I'm rather tempted to frog it and start over. Or leaving the front intact while I knit another one, so I can actually see the difference in sizes before I have a happy little frogging session.

There's the secondary problem that this color is just a little too bright for my tastes. When I first started knitting, as is true for many of us, I was horrified at the cost of yarn, so I was buying yarn on eBay a lot. I was buying the exact same yarn each pattern called for, except that I generally bought whatever color was cheapest. I like magenta, but this is a very bright, crayon magenta.

Still, I think I'd wear it if it fit. But I think I need to knit the next size down.

Hrm.

The biggest problem may be the lack of desire to knit this project at all, right now.

Yeah, baby!

Of course, the cat has to help. Or is she claiming this for her own?

Details:





This is for the two-year-old daughter of a friend. I'm pretty pleased with it, even though either I or the pattern made a mistake and there was an even (rather than odd) # of eyelets, so I had to skip one. I also am hopelessly unable to make pompoms, so I crocheted these bobbles instead. But I like the bobbles.

I finished another thing this weekend — my "Hey, Teach!" cardi. All that was needed was for me to redo the buttonhole band, which had a little too much slack in it. I need to take some new photos of it to show you — the ones on Ravelry are pre-reknit.

Old dog...

…new trick!

I learned a new seaming method this week. A pattern I was knitting called for "flat seams" and I wasn't sure what to do. I knew mattress stitch produces a bulky back seam, and this garment is for a little girl who would not appreciate such abrasion. A little googling produced several links to what is variously called 'flat seaming', 'invisible seaming', 'woven flat seam' and 'Bickford seaming'. Clicking the links here will take you to the three pages I found most useful in learning to do this kind of seaming. It creates a very small ridge on the back side of the garment:



and a near-invisible seam on the right side:



This helped me to put together a Hooded Capelet [Ravelry link] for my friend Fiona's two-year-old. It's not done blocking (pic below is pre-soak), cord isn't done and buttons aren't sewn on, but it is otherwise done:

Little Red Riding Hood here we come!

Not-fitty-ness

As expected, I finished the lovely V-neck vest and blocked it, and it is a color I like, and it is much softer once washed, and drat it, it does not fit me. It doesn't even sort of fit. It just plain doesn't.

I measure myself before I knit things, and I knit with the right size and right ease, and yet often, when I'm done, things don't fit. I might need to rethink the amount of ease I want with my garments. Or maybe bust size isn't the best way to measure, for me. I'm just not sure.

In any event, if you have somewhere in the vicinity of a 45" bust (this measures 45"), like greenish-brown tweed, and would like a nice simple Australian wool vest, please let me know! I'd love to give this to someone who reads my blog. I'm very very sad I can't keep it, but there's no point.



We all know what to do when we experience a disappointment of this type, right?



Catkin Stole from the Baltic Lace kit from KnitPicks.