Close enough to taste...

Not that I recommend licking a wool sweater.

I've mattress-seamed the sides and three-needle-bound-off the shoulders. So what's left (besides, obviously, finishing the sleeve), is button bands, collar, end-weaving and washing/blocking. It should be done by the weekend. I'm stoked! A two-week sweater! I love you, Leland. And so far, it even fits. Which is sort of shocking.

Cruising past the half-way point...

At least, that's my assessment. Back done, front right done, cruising up the front left; still have sleeves and button bands and collar to do.


I'm officially renaming this the "Leland" sweater since (1) it doesn't really look like Sienna and (2) it matches April's goat. The purple yarn up top is some waste yarn; I decided to keep the shoulders not-bound-off so that I could join them with a three-needle bindoff, much nicer than that bulky seam I did on the Pea Pod. Though the color is a nice enough contrast I may be tempted to look for buttons in that color when I'm done!

On the personal front, things are less wonderful; I just got a phonecall that my remaining grandma is likely not going to make it too much longer. There's no real way to feel good about a year that has seen so many losses (five so far and this will be six, when it happens), but I do feel that knitting helps me hang in on the sane side of the seam. Sometimes just barely on the sane side, admittedly. :-) Plus, both grandmothers encouraged my knitting, and that makes me feel it is important. So that's something.

On the theme of Frogtober.

Crankygrrrrrl has named this month "Frogtober" in respect to the severe amount of frogging that she, among others, has had to do this month. As I'm having a Frogtober too, and because Fuzzarelly asked about my frogging technique, I thought I'd attempt to spill the beans. Keep in mind that I learned this from countless good learn-to-knit sources and my explanation, being that of a new knitter, won't be as clear as the originals.

If you have inserted a lifeline, you can always rip back to the lifeline. Sometimes, though, you haven't bothered with the lifeline, because you're not knitting lace and it's just plain old stockinette and what could go wrong?

Yeah. So... here's what I do. I basically insert a lifeline after the fact.



What you do is to take a long circular needle, ideally a couple sizes smaller than the one you've been using, and weave it through just the right-hand leg of the V on each knit stitch on the row you want to frog back to.


Then you can just pull the main needle out and rip back with gusto! You can then knit onto your usual needle from the smaller one and things go on just fine from there.

Sometimes you will miss alignment, and go up a row at some point during the weaving-through process. Then when you frog back, you'll end up with some stitches sitting nicely on the needle, next to a bunch of little loops hopped-up (like frogs!) above the loops that are on the needle. You can either pick these up (it'll be easy, because they are firmly held in place by the needle below them), ending up with a row higher, or add a needle to the stitches just below the part that are sitting nicely, and rip back one more row.

What if it's not stockinette? As long as it's not lace, it's still reasonably possible to use this technique.

The problem is that on purl stitches, it can be a little tricky to find the appropriate next V. Here you can see me working my needle under the left-hand leg of the knit stitch V and tugging on it a little, just to see which loop is the appropriate one to pick up on the purl to the left of it. (This is 2x2 ribbing.)

If you succeed at this, it'll look something like this:



Oh, and I have reknit the poor back of my Sienna. She's just about ready for the neck split, then it's up the left front!

Ahh, blocking.

Pea Pod before:


Pea Pod after:


See? Blocking is amazing. It can cause the seasons to change.

(P.S. This came out HUGE. I used 3.5 skeins of Cleckheaton Country 8-ply and a US #4 Inox Circular. It's definitely larger than a 3-month size. My gauge is, despite the smaller needle, still way off, which explains it. I bet if I'd gotten gauge this would have taken only 3 skeins.)
(P.P.S. I know it's missing buttons. I'm waiting until I finish both sweaters (these are for twins) so I can get coordinating buttons.)

Pride goeth before a rip

I was really pleased that I reached the armholes on the back of my Sienna last night. Pleased until I started binding off and decreasing for the armholes, and had the wrong number of stitches left. I tinked back about ten rows, until before the bindoff, and still the count was wrong.

Yep. You guessed it. I had dropped a stitch (on the edge). THIS far back:


At least this thing goes so fast it won't take that long to knit it back again.

On another note, I tried Kool-Aid dyeing for the first time yesterday on some Knit Picks Dye Your Own. I had this clever idea of using only a couple of colors of Kool-Aid, but I quickly ran out and had to use other colors (including some soap dye) too. Result? It looks pretty much like the everyone's first Kool-Aid dye.

Wet:


Dry:

In the cake:

Might be okay for kid's socks. It was fun to make, but I'm not going to be the next Sundara ;-)

Whoosh!

It seems to be fast-knits week here at Chez V, perhaps to make up for last week's froggin' misery.

Pea Pod is seaming — pictures later. Last night I was too tired to seam, so — bad me. I started a new sweater. Look how far I got in one night!



Those big cones of Webs closeout yarn seemed to bring a lot of you lurkers out... right when I was off-blog for almost a week. This was because I kept forgetting to bring my CD card home. (And then I did write a long post and my browser crashed, and I didn't rewrite it.) Anyway, this is the start of Sienna from Interweave Knits:



with the Webs yarn.

Sienna really wants a cushy merino with lots of squash and body — Sundara's worsted merino would be fab for it, for example. But I can't afford to spend $180 on just one sweater right now, and also I thought it would be interesting to see what a rougher, less even-stitch yarn would do in this style. Plus, I need a brown cardi!

So this yarn isn't suited to this project, but it's not as bad as it looks. The raw yarn has a weird feel — almost waxy, very stiff. But wash it and it fluffs up, fulls out, gets soft. Here's an overlay of my washed swatch on last night's stockinette:


Color is all wrong, it's a very warm golden brown.
Interesting, no? Surely worth $20 for a sweater!

Ingmar Bergman knits a sweater...

Rob's been Netflixing Ingmar Bergman movies recently, and, somewhat to my chagrin, I've found that I actually appreciate them. ("Like" is probably the wrong word as they are fairly depressing, but they're good.) So last night we got "Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie," a documentary done about the filming of Winter Light.

It was very technical and detailed, and would probably be fascinating to a student of film: they talked about how they figured out lighting, how they worked out every detail of costume, how they moved from a written script to a shooting (camera) script. But it was also more than two hours long.

We didn't make it through the whole thing, but I did get a lot of the Pea Pod done. It really is a very fast knit!


I realize my stitches are pretty uneven on the Pea Pod. This is because I kept having panic attacks about running out of yarn, then calming down and thinking no, I was totally fine, then having panic attacks again. So my gauge was all over the place. I really knit loosely, because using size US #4 needles, I was getting 4.5 spi whenever I relaxed (I wanted 5.5). Oh well, a lot of the unevenness will come out in the blocking. And I'm definitely not running out of yarn.

I should have taken this yarn out front and photographed it in the sun. It just looks grey here, but this is some of Cabin Cove Dave's fabulous merino-tencel. Tencel has a slick, slightly shiny quality that really takes to Dave's dyeing methods and I keep falling in love with his colors.

It's fated to be the Forest Canopy Shoulder Shawl, which I purchased about a month back, and hopefully (if I knit fast) a Christmas present (for a friend who doesn't read this blog). The color is really a gleaming silver, nearly metallic, and just glitters in sunlight. It's amazing, as is all of Dave's yarn.

Go buy some. You have been advised!




A week ago, I couldn't resist ordering a little more of that marvellous "wool-sweater-for-$20" cone closeout yarn from Webs. This is another cone in the golden brown I already had, and one in the other available brown (which is a bit redder) — two more sweaters' worth. I know, I'm out of hand.

Sometimes you need a change of scene...

I finally did get the chart under control for the Pea Pod sweater (PDF is here if you want the pattern). It is a fast knit; just on Sunday and not knitting all day, I got quite a bit done. I'm up to the split for the underarm and zooming quickly up the front right.

Coincidentally (I ordered this yarn for this sweater weeks ago), Wendy just finished a Pea Pod in a similar color. I'm not using the indicated yarn, though; I'm using Cleckheaton Country 8-ply, a cushy superwash wool. I have two of these sweaters to make — the other will either be yellow or green, I think. I'm really enjoying this pattern, now that I get it {insert wry smile here}...

This wasn't all I did, either. I did get back to sock-knitting at last, and finished the first Hedera. Yes, it's for someone with small feet — smaller than mine, anyway — but also, when this is blocked and the heel flattened out, it'll look bigger. It's not blocked and the needle's still in it because I'm not entirely happy with my Kitchenering (as usual!!) and I might redo it. This is a Christmas gift, so I have some motivation to do a nice job.

Ripping yarns...

Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you.

I got to this point on my Clapotis and was knitting merrily along when it occurred to me that I'd used up nearly 2/3 of my yarn and was just hitting the halfway point on the shawl. Er, oops.

Well, it's true that I'd done one more 12-row repeat on the increase rows than specified. Someone else had done Clapotis from Sundara's DK Silky Merino, and they said that they'd made it a bit wider, so I thought I could, too. But I couldn't quite figure out how to do it in less than a 12-row repeat.

I think that was too much. At the rate I'm going, this shawl will be too short to wrap around me. That is pretty much useless. I will need to try to reinsert a needle 12 rows short of the corner, and rip back more than half of what I've knit on this puppy. Poop.

So I was sad, so I got out Picovoli and tried to pin out the excess underarm stitches to see how many there were. If it had been 6 or 7 per underarm, I'd have ripped back and cast on fewer and kept going.



But no. It was HALF of the underarm stitches. Half. Now that is just wrong.

To make this yarn work, I'd have to start over and cast on for the next size down. That seems crazy, because now I'm about 8 inches down from my normal size, but I think that also I'm ending up at a 4.5 spi gauge instead of 5.5.

Since I actually don't really even precisely want Picovoli, but a short-sleeved top, I might just try to take the gauge I have and size I want and make a generic raglan T.

So of course, instead of either of these things, or getting back to another half-done project, I cast on for something new — a baby sweater. Small problem: Valerie has not had much experience with charted patterns, and forgot that on back-and-forth knitting you have to read the even rows left-to-right. (Not only that, my gauge was way off and at this rate I'd run out of yarn.)

Yep, you guessed it: I ripped back the dozen rows I'd knit and cast on again with smaller needles. This time for sure, Bullwinkle!

Not so much. This time I forgot that since the previous row ends mid-chart, the return row has to start mid-chart.

Eye Candy Friday

Since I have no photos of knitting to show you (Clapotis is growing, but you can't have daily progress photos and expect to keep people interested), here are some of the amazements of my lame, potted garden this October.

A gardenia:


Epidendrum (an orchid; my grandmother refers to it as ' the weed' because it grows so well in her garden despite abuse):


Hydrangea (from a potted plant that was a party favor at an award ceremony earlier this year for my other, now-departed grandmother — I'm particularly pleased that it's survived):


And still a few frangipani blossoms!

It's a beard! It's a plane!

Some of you will remember that I scored some fabulous Sundara Yarn in the wacky Caterpillar colorway back in June. I started turning it into Clapotis in July, and then got distracted by Secret Yarnination. I pulled it out again last weekend.

This is as far as I'd gotten at the end of the weekend: finished the increase rows, all ready for the straight rows. I liked the possible usefulness of this as a gaudily colored false beard, especially so close to Halloween.

(I'm sorry it didn't occur to me to photograph this :-( )

However, beard it was not fated to remain. It's looking a bit more planar now, as it moves into its parallelogram shape. Here it is as of this morning (I knit a bit more during a meeting today. I'm bad).

The colors are more accurate in the second photo, I guess, but they're hard to reproduce because in person the silk gives the gold a truly metallic sheen. It looks (to me) like gold jewelry against a beautiful blue pool of water. None of these colors looks good on me, but I really don't care. I love love love this yarn, beyond all reasonableness.

I really like the word parallelogram. I even used it in a song once.

Swatch tales

I did a bunch of swatching this past weekend.

I actually kind of like swatching, but I have to be in the mood. I don't feel guilty swatching even when I'm trying to be faithful to my current, on-the-needles projects, so it lets me get a break from the current yarns. Plus, I had a lot of things I was trying to figure out here, and so far, I like most of the answers I've gotten.

The olive-y green in the back is Jo Sharp DK Wool that I'd picked up in Santa Barbara for a cardigan of my own design. It doesn't really matter what gauge I get, just that the gauge make a fabric that I like. I swatched it with US #6s and, not entirely to my surprise, I think that's too large. I am fairly sure I knit on the looser side of average, as I often have to drop down 1-2 needle sizes for patterns. I also tried out some moss stitch, which I'm planning to use as decoration on the sweater. I don't think it stood out prominently enough. So the next swatch will be with size US #5s, and I'll put a border of purl stitches around the moss stitch section. I love this yarn and am really itching to make the cardigan, which I'll doubtless wear to shreds.

On the upper right, the curly, unblocked swatch is the Katia Irina you saw me buy the other day. I will put it in the wash — I still can't quite believe this is machine washable! — and hang dry, then check the gauge. It's for baby things and I don't really need a particular gauge, I just need to KNOW the gauge, and get an idea if there is going to be any shrinkage.

The pink/white swatch is the dusty rose-colored cotton 'thread' I got on those big spools, doubled and knitted with some Jewel Unger I got off DeStash. It is cotton and ?I think rayon, it's at home so I can't check, and it's definitely mislabeled for gauge — I thought it was sport to DK weight, it calls for US #6s and 6spi, but it's definitely around fingering weight and kind of like shiny string. It mixes well with the pink but I don't think there's enough of it to make a sweater. Elinoire, for whom the yarn is intended, is thinking of mixing it with a darker color rather than lighter, anyway.

The brown swatch is making me all bouncy. This is that wool I got in a screaming deal from Webs. I tried swatching it in US #8s and then US #7s, then washed and blocked it as I normally would. I have fallen in love with the Sienna Cardigan (towards bottom of page) from the latest Interweave Knits, and really want to use this wool for it. As I was knitting up the swatch, though, I thought, "this pattern calls for US #9s and it really looks like I'm getting gauge with the 8s and I don't like knitting with the 8s,the yarn feels better with the 7s." To my delight, when I washed and blocked it, it bloomed and softened and got all happy (the yarn was kind of stringy to knit with, though not extremely so), and it turned out I was perfectly on gauge (4 spi) with the 7s and off (3.75) with the 8s. Yay, 7s!

Bogdown and its causes

I finally finished the front of the Mariner tunic on Saturday, and I was musing over why certain projects get set aside for long periods. For example, this one sat with 20 rows to go for a couple of weeks. The answer is in the little white thread lines (click for larger, if you want).

Those aren't lifelines. They're marker lines, letting me know where to count from. When a piece of knitting gets stretched and misshapen during the knitting process, I have trouble aligning the stitches unless it's all-stockinette, alla time.

The problem here was that (as often happens) I apparently lost count of rows. I looked down at my hatchmarks at some point, and the count I had was clearly not as many rows as I had; just as clearly, I had kept on knitting past where a pattern change needed to have happened. I needed to rip back, but how far? No idea. I had to recount the rows. Recounting, for me, takes good light, a needle and thread, and a little focus. I rarely have much focus at all, so I stuffed the thing back in the bag until Saturday.

In the end, it was easy — I drew my line, carefully lining up the stitches and making sure I was all in one row, counted, and I only had to rip back one(!!) row. And then finish the front.

So often, things get stuffed away for months just because I'm momentarily confused and don't want to take five minutes of focus to figure things out. Kind of unfortunate. I need, sometimes, to NOT multitask. Just, ya know, for a few minutes of my life.

Next up: casting on the back. Guess why this isn't going to get started right away? Well... I'm not sure which cast-on I used (it's one of two), and so I have to knit a couple swatches, one with each, and compare to see which one the front looks more like. Guess what project is stuffed back into its bag?

{sigh} I'm sure someday I'll be a Better Person (TM). ;-)

From Friday: tot sweater completed!

Friday night, I finished the "Cozy in Cables" pullover. I think this one will go to Dulaan. I blocked it Friday, and took it outside Sunday to let it finish drying. Sorry I didn't get the photo wide enough to show the sleeve ribbing, which is in the same navy alpaca as the neck and waist.
In the end, I caved, and used Lion Brand Wool-Ease bulky on the arms to make them long enough. It was a little TOO bulky and there's a bit of a bulge right before the wrists, and of course it's mostly acrylic with only a bit of wool, but oh well.

I'm still on the fence about bulky wool. It's certainly more fun to knit with than bulky cotton or bulky acrylic, the only other 'bulkies' I've tried before, and it sure does knit up fast. I think my real problem with it is that it does not drape, so unless you are a kid or very tall and thin, it has the potential to make you look like a wooly mammoth (note: I have seen exceptions to this).

A very yarny weekend.

This weekend (which is not even over yet!) has been so yarny for me that I think I have several days' worth of blither. To keep from injuring your brains from sheer boredom, I'll dole it out in small doses, though :-) .

I did completely lose my mind in end of summer bargains at Webs. The subsequent box arrived Friday and I unpacked it with glee and some confusion. I bought a lot of their 'yard sale' and 'closeout' yarn, and sometimes you get an unexpected result.

The entire top layer of my DK stash is new, and all of it's intended for baby things — you see here material for two baby sweaters in Cleckheaton Country 8-Ply, and two baby T-shirts in Katia Irina. The Katia Irina was not at all what I was expecting, but that's okay. A little excitement is good for the soul.

I have a huge number of baby things to make — for at least six babies that I can think of at the moment. So I looked for more baby yarn...

I really thought the image of this yarn on the Webs web site (that sounds weird. Webs web. web web web.) was a pale lavendar. As you can see, it's grey. Just grey. Just absolutely dead even straight-on grey. Not that I don't like grey, but would grey be appropriate for a fine-gauge baby layette, for which this was intended? What do you think?

Maybe if I trim it with something more colorful?

Well, possibly not this, though it's cheerful enough. It was marked as 'mislabeled for gauge', but didn't say what the gauge was, really, nor what it was marked at, exactly. It's marked as 28 st/4 in and I think it's probably about 22. I have no bleepin' idea what to do with it. But you would have bought it too, and you know it, especially on screaming sale.

Then there was this. I thought it was four pounds of flamingo-pink worsted-weight cotton yarn for $6. Well, sort of. They were out of flamingo-pink, so they sent what they called salmon (I call it dusty rose). And it's not worsted-weight, it's worsted-spun. It's approximately laceweight. I'm working on creative combining and you'll see where I got to in an upcoming post about swatching.



Finally, there was a two-pound cone of worsted-weight (really) wool (sorry, didn't photograph it, but you'll see the swatch soon) which was supposed to be taupe. There were two browns on the web site: one taupe, one warm. I picked the taupe. The label says the # of the taupe. But the color looks just like the web-site swatch for the warm brown. Hmm. Though I kind of like it, and spent a lot of yesterday winding it into cakes, it was definitely not my intended purchase. But, heck, two pounds of yarn for $20, can you whine? I cannot.

More garden intrigue....

The mystery started when my lovely Datura was very nearly defoliated in a single day. I searched the leaves for grasshoppers (common in my yard, big as cigarillos), snails, or even smaller insects such as aphids or inchworms.

Yeah, right. I completely missed the real culprit until last night.

This --> not-so-little monster was to blame. He's the size of my entire thumb, base to tip. And he's a hungry little bugger. As far as I can tell, he did all that eating by his own plump self.

And left this evidence under the plant:


Attractive, no? (Actually I think it's kind of interesting.) He is some type of hornworm (Sphinx or Hawkmoth) caterpillar, I am pretty sure.

Onion Patch Defect had a practice last night and I think we are starting to sound good! I am quite pleased. I think we'll try to start doing open mic nights again in November. Still could use a second guitarist/backup vocals and a percussion person, but hey — we're having fun!

What? You wanted to hear about knitting?

Well, here's the current state of the tot pullover. I've stuck in stripes of tiny scraps I had, and have now hit the midpoint of the cream-colored yarn that was left for the sleeves without having quite finished sleeve #1 (about 2" to go). I'm combing the stash for more scraps — I am sure I can make it. It'll just have to be something double or tripled up to approximately match gauge!

An arm begins...

I still can't decide if this is for CIC or Dulaan, but meanwhile the arm proceeds! I found a few more scraps of yarn and will use them to add some stripes to the arms, hopefully stretching the Ecowool enough to finish the sweater. This is a good pattern, and the bulky wool makes it go fast, but I doubt I'm going to use bulky wool frequently enough to be able to turn these out using scraps. Instead, I think I need to purchase wool for the purpose. Next time!



This will look much cuter when it's finished and blocked, I promise!

THANKS for the info on my new "pet" spider. She's absolutely gorgeous.

Saved by Sock Wars!

Okay, I haven't been killed in Sock Wars yet, nor have I heard confirmation of achieving a kill, but nevertheless, I had some leftover yarn. Turns out that doubled, it comes pretty close to the gauge of the Rosarios Ecowool I was using. It's a little small, but then the doubled Indiecita Alpaca I was using for the rib is a little big, and what the heck — it'll all block out in the end. So I added a tan stripe to the Cozy Cables sweater. You can see here (it's lying on its side, with the neck to the left) that I've finished the front and am rapidly zooming along the back. Soon I'll add sleeves and run out of yarn again :-) But I found a couple of scraps I can stripe with to help with that. So cross your fingers, I'll have a rather.. exciting tot sweater for charity in a couple of days.

Good thing that kids like colorful objects!



Apropos of nothing: is this not the coolest spider? Check out his scary white ZZZZs in the web. I have no idea how he (well, probably she) did that, but it rocks. Such a gorgeous spider. I love spiders. Apologies to all of you who are horrified by them.

I am a process knitter, I am a process knitter, I am...

I have to repeat this to myself every time I make a major visit to the frog pond..!

BTW: All purples in this post are redder in real life. Picovoli is wine-colored, and Mariner is fuchsia. My camera lies :-)

I did get a lot done on Saturday. So that was good... except. I am going to have to frog back to the white lifeline, below.

I realized this last night, but it was late, I was recovering from Yom Kippur and its attendant physical and psychological stresses, and I know better than to frog at night. Plus I really have to do some measurements pre-frogging, and I was in no way up to using a tape measure.



The tale: I had tried on the armholes on Picovoli as soon as I was able, worried (from Grumperina's notes in the pattern and her article on adding sleeves — I do plan to add short sleeves) that they'd be too tight. They weren't, so I whew'd and continued with the bust. Never stopped to think they might be too large!

Following the instructions, I duly moved all my stitches to a piece of string last night and tried on the top when I was about 2/3 way through the bust section. The shoulders fit perfectly — I would not want them any different. The neck opening is beautiful, very flattering. But I added WAY too many stitches under the arms. I followed the size 40 instructions, but I think the problem is caused by a couple of things.

First, even though I checked my gauge, and did the math, and decided to knit this at a size 40, figuring it would be a size 44 in reality, I really need a size 42. Second of all, my gauge does tend to loosen as I knit, and I think I'm getting a smidge — maybe a quarter-stitch over 4 inches — different than I did at gauge swatch time. Those two things would explain maybe 3 inches of the excess. There's more like 5, I think. Dunno what that is, except maybe my weird physiology, or possibly that my row gauge is enough off that the top's just hitting me in a different place than expected.

That's okay. Fortunately I put in a lifeline before adding the underarm stitches, so I just have to frog 24 rows and cast on a different # of underarm stitches, then do the math to retranslate the rest of the pattern instructions to take account of the smaller # of stitches in those places. But before I do that, I need to try it on again and use some clips to figure out exactly how many fewer stitches I want.

But. Just one little sniffle for the frog, folks. I was so happy about how much I'd done.

(I am a process knitter, I am a process knitter, I am a process knitter... if I say it enough, I'll believe it!)

Here, proof that Mariner does progress. I have reached the shoulder on one side, and am getting close on the other. And then I get to start.. the back.
I started Marguerite's Cozy In Cables tot sweater for either Children in Common or Dulaan. I had some small amounts of wool burning a hole in my stash (er, that is some messed up metaphor), but even though it sounded like more than enough, it's clear I'm going to run out of yarn. I'm still figuring out what to do about that. I could make this a vest, but then I'll have too much leftover. What I really need to do is find just a little bit more yarn that matches. Hmm. I don't have that much wool scrap yet, I don't think, but we'll see.

I like the idea of using charity knitting as a way to try out a pattern or a yarn. This is my first experience knitting with bulky wool, and although I still hate the big needles, it's a heck of a lot better than bulky cotton. So I learned something, and a kid will get a sweater, and that's good.