And There They Go

Whew! I almost blew the Red Scarf Project. Very important to remember knitting isn't enough. You have to ship the scarves. They will not magically find their way to the OFA. Nor are they like carrier pigeons who will get themselves where they need to be as long as you set them free. No. For scarves, further human intervention is required. But they're off. They'll be on the UPS truck this evening and reach their destination Friday. Technically not January I know, but Norma said it was okay, right here.

So today I printed off my tags and wrote a little note on the back of each one. Words failed me (I know, hard to believe, but they did) so all it says is "Hand knit for you in Chicago, February 2007." I'll be more eloquent next time.

On the theory that chocolate and goofy toys improve anything, I included a Valentine treat bag filled with Dove hearts and a pinwheel with each scarf.

It's very strange to send something you've made off into the great unknown. Generous- spirited isn't a way I think of myself. Nice, sure. Pleasant, yeah, mostly. Reasonably courteous, as long as you're not a complete idiot. But then there's that possessive part of me. The part that almost can't process the idea I'll never see these again.

Still, I don't know that anything else I've knit this past year has been as satisfying as these four scarves. So, there you go Rosie. Who knew back when I was 11 and you were maybe 3 that decades later I'd be knitting for you.

solitude. n., from Latin - solus, alone, +udo

No one's home but me.

Everybody's better.

Nobody needs me for anything.

I'm going to make a fresh cup of coffee and write Clare. I owe her for about 4 emails. But I wouldn't want it to seem that I've forsaken knitting for the joys of playing with Blogger templates.

Here is progress on the Perfect Sweater. February 13 begins to feel like a not absolutely impossible thing to think of, before breakfast or any other time.


Then there's my latest knitting puzzle. It was inspired by this, the Dragon Scales dishcloth from Knitter's Stash (the one on the far right).

This is what I started with. It's not what I want.


What I want is, the same gauge, same stitch count, but no holes and more "scales." I want Dragon Scales for boys. It's not working.


Nope, I have no idea how I'm going to pull this off, but once I do, I know what I want to knit it with:

Mountain Colors Weaver's Wool in Wilderness. Would this not make the perfect Dragon Scarf?

Time to Take the Plunge

I'm giving fair warning here. I'm finally finishing the switch to "New Blogger." Gutless wonder that I am, I don't think I'll go as drastic as Lene. In fact the first change will simply be the new version of the template I've got, but I'll be playing around for the next bit.

Let's see if it's as much fun as Blogger claims it will be...

Edited to add:

1) Aw dang, they took away my buttons.

2) Never mind.

Edited Sunday to Add:

Kathleen asked about buttons. Okay, let me see if I can recreate what I did so it makes sense. It's kind of long, Sorry.

On the new Blogger Dashboard, click "Layout". (If your Dashboard still says "Template," you'll need to choose your new template first.) "Layout" will bring you to the new Template tab.

Under Template, go to "Edit HTML." At the very bottom click the link that says "View Classic Template." This opens a new window with all your old code. Scroll down till you see the HTML for the button/s you want. Hit "Control and "C", select the code you want, right click, choose "Copy."

Go to Page Elements. Click "Add a Page Element." In the new window, click "Add to Blog" under HTML/Java Script. In that new window, right click, and choose paste. Save.

If you want the little dividers/borders between say, buttons and rings, add all the buttons as one page element and all the rings as a separate one.

Drag and Drop the element to where you want it.

Click "Save Changes."

It's a little tricky, because sometimes the preview would show the changes in the wrong place, but it all worked out in the end.

Admittedly, I did this last night, and took a number of wrong turns to get what I wanted, but I'm pretty sure these are the steps that finally worked. Did that make sense?

I'm wondering if, under the rich text option, you could just copy and paste the buttons right off the old blog, assuming you'd had the good sense to open a window with the old blog before you chose your new template? I didn't think of it until now, but I wonder.

Now if I can just figure out to add and link a completely new button. Or even create a button, for that matter.

There's Always Room

It's been a little stressful here these past few weeks, even discounting my poor sick family. The next six weeks promise no relief. When stressed, I do wonderful things for the economy.

I live in the same neighborhood as the Oriental Institute. Inside the OI is The Suq. The Suq is where I I found the carpet bag.















The yarn you already know about. Seeing it with the bag gave me Ideas. Seeing the bag and the yarn in conjunction with this book (one of my additional, purchased-several-weeks-ago-and-haven't-told-anybody-about stress responses) just may have solved my "Okay, what do I do with this yarn?" problem.















There's a bag in it. We know I have kind of a thing about bags.















The pattern specs call for 6 skeins of Lamb's Pride worsted, double-stranded. The yardage and weight are a match. I'll need to experiment a bit, though. Do I try to get colors in sync, let the distribution fall where it may, or should I pick out a solid to strand with the Miss Priss? Or do I use the solid only as the contrast as the pattern indicates? Decisions, decisions.

I wonder how much help I'll give the economy by March 7?

Eye Candy

It followed me home. Can I keep it?















Shaefer Miss Priss in "Shirley Chisholm", 840 yards of merino plied worsted weight. No, I have no idea what I'm going to do with it. Which for me, as a product knitter, is a fairly stunning admission. I probably would have bought more, but three skeins was all they had.















You know, I really should not be allowed on eBay.

Who Needs a Philosopher's Stone?

I finished the front! I finished the front! I finished the front!


















You know, I could get to like this. I could develop an addiction to finishing things. Granted, there are two sleeves to be done, then the blocking and the assembly and the finishing touches, but hot damn, this has been awfully rewarding so far.

All this excitement must seem more than a bit daft to the rest of the world. You have to remember, at this point last year I couldn't knit. The only blog I read was the Yarn Harlot, and that was because I'd happened on At Knit's End on the impulse-buy shelf at the Starbucks in Barnes and Noble. I picked it up for my sister. She never got it. I found the blog because the website was on the cover of the book.

At the time, Stephanie was in the throes of responding to and organizing the Knitting Olympics. (Did you know the KO made "The History of Knitting" in Wikipedia? How's that for infiltrating the masses?) I was so on the outside of the sweet shop. I certainly wasn't going to join the Olympics; I saw what those real knitters were doing to challenge themselves. In comparison, "I will learn to knit in 16 days" just didn't seem very Olympian. I almost didn't even try. For all, I still sometimes can't believe I pulled it off.

So yes, now, when I can follow a pattern, when my hands produce what they're supposed to produce, when the whole sticks-and-string transformation happens, I am amazed and delighted. So forgive my excitement and enthusiasm. This is still like alchemy to me - gold out of base metal.

I finished the front. What do you think, 2 sleeves and assembly in time to reach Urbana by Feb. 13 (aka Clare's birthday)?

Problem Children

I have to concede. Bobbi may have a point. Time to set the endpaper mitts aside for a bit. Especially because I ripped back farther than I meant to and now I have to figure out where I am in the pattern. Too complicated now that plague has struck a second member of the household.

John is down. Suspicious and unkind parent that I am, I'd say it's to avoid finishing Martin the Warrior and taking the computerized book report known by the CPS as an "Accelerated Reader" test, but I don't imagine he'd start throwing up just for that. Stick the thermometer in hot water? Possibly. Other symptoms, semi-undetectable ones? Ye-es that could happen. Illness by assertion? Definitely. Throwing up? Nah.

So guess what I did while dodging males tossing their cookies?













I finished the sweater back to Clare's Perfect Sweater. This falls under the rubric of getting-ones-confidence-back knitting. Look at this, huh? Armhole shaping. Waist shaping.













Short-rows with wrap and twists for shoulder shaping.














I am continually amazed at the cleverness of knitters. Not only do they figure out this stuff, they put it together in such a way that other knitters can reproduce it. I'm thinking there's no way those endpaper mitts will keep me down. I may finish the sweater first. No, let's rephrase that, I'm pretty sure I'll be finishing the sweater first, just to get my knitting-mind right. In fact, I think I'll go cast on the sleeves.

And now for this week's non sequitur.












Shortly after dawn this morning.

I Thought Wrong

Well, I thought I was back in the saddle again - despite holidays and half-days for boys, a sick husband and missing-daughter-adjustment, I thought that 4th red scarf had tipped me back into knitting mode.

It could be because the light of my life is home, recovering from plague. This means a certain need for attention, but he's on the mend, and largely self-sustaining at this point. Okay, so we've seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 12 Monkeys, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Time Bandits and some back segments of Dark Angel. Can this possibly be the man who Phi Beta Kappa'd at U of Chicago? Departmental Honors? Stanford Law School? I think his fever may have fried his brain.

I'm a person who requires silence, and he's obviously not, but I still get dibs on the kitchen. And I've been trying. Really. But first there was this.














Then this.










Now this.














It's a clear case of desire out of sync with skill. The knitting equivalent of having eyes bigger than my stomach. Or something I suppose I can take some comfort in knowing I'm not alone. If you've read the Harlot today, you know something there is that doesn't love fingerless mitts. At least, not today.

Maybe there's a message here. Marco has been piling yarn in front of me, reminding me I still owe him a modelling fee.













Maybe I should take a leaf out of Kay's book and turn into all scarves all the time. Besides, I just got this .





















I'm pretty sure I can find something in here.

Memory Is the Thing We Forget With

I always think I've told all. Sometimes I catch what I've left out. More often I need it pointed out to me. I get kind of caught up in the story part and forget details. No problem seeing the forest here, but if you were wondering whether that tree was an elm or a horse-chestnut, too bad.

So, details and nitty-gritty on Red Scarf #4. Which, I must say, did block out nicely.

Pattern is here. The Multidirectional Diagonal Scarf.
Needles were US size 13 Addi Turbos. Normal knitters could probably go down a size or two.
Knit on a diagonal of 25 stitches.
Final dimensions about 6.5" by 70".
The variegation is due to the cleverness of the yarn, not the knitter.
The yarn is Noro Iro, color 54, dyelot A. Two skeins would be fine -






















- Unless you make some design decisions.

1) I wanted the scarf to be symmetrical, sort of semi-mirror imaged. I had to knit the 2 skeins from opposite ends and didn't use all the yarn at the end of the first skein or at the beginning of the second. (Did that make any sense?)

2) I liked the non-angled garter stitch borders that Norma used, so I added those on.

3) I wanted each color to be represented on each half of the scarf, which made it longer than the 60" minimum the OFA requests.

4) There's this one section of baby blue and pale pink that I really didn't care for and which I thought might kick the scarf out of the unisex pool and into the girls only one. It shows up here, at the back.














The way the yarn played out, it would have repeated in the borders. I decided that would be way too prominent, so I edited the 3rd skein accordingly.

I had to play with the pattern a little bit, too, just near the end. Somehow I missed the part where I should have used an even number of stitches. Kind of necessary if, after a certain point, you're supposed to get the same number of stitches on each needle. Not going to happen if you've got 25 stitches and are decreasing by 2's. The 3rd to last row is based on having 6 stitches left. Instead, I knit in pattern until I had 5 stitches left, skipped the directions for the 3rd to last row, and finished as the pattern describes. It worked. I'm not going to argue with it.

Something else I forgot.

Before she left, not only did Clare clean the cat box, she left chocolate behind.

I Meant To

I always seem to need some time to adjust to an all male world. So that's my excuse. I didn't work on the Endpaper mitts. I haven't taken Clare's sweater through the armhole shaping. It had nothing to do with disliking the tricky bits. It's because of the directionlessness I get the first couple days in my XY world.

Obviously, I needed to knit the multi-directional scarf. I've been contemplating one of these since I saw a couple in the Red Scarf Gallery. Then Norma posted about the 2nd and 3rd ones she'd made. I won't say I was inspired. It was more like, "Eh, Why not?"

Besides, I've been fixated on finishing at least 4 scarves for the Red Scarf Project. I've only completed three. It's January now. The scarves need to get mailed, but I just can't let go with only three ready.

I've tried. I have all the stuff I need to package them up. As additional incentive, I even made up my wash/care/you rock tags.





















(Well. I think they're cool.) Still, the sad truth is that the 4th scarf I'd started back in November (wince)- this one - probably won't get done. It's thinner yarn and smaller needles. A multi-directional scarf fits my knitting needs as well as my mind-frame.

Remember that last girlie trip to Knitche? The one where I completed my mitered square colors? That wasn't all of it. I also came home with three skeins of this. Noro Iro, color 54, dyelot A (remember, we're not cheaping out for charity this year).














And, with my trusty US size 13 Addi circulars, I turned it into this. As proof that I' am not avoiding, I would like to note it has as many tricky bits as the projects I'd put aside. I've been knitting into the front and back and short rowing my merry way along.






















I hope Norma is right and a good blocking will work wonders, though. Even allowing for the fun Noro has with incorporating texture into the yarn itself, this is a little too lumpy and bumpy for me. It's having a nice bath right now and we'll see if the ridges from the SSK settle down.

Gad my prescience sometimes astounds even me. Four scarves it is.

I Missed It?!?!?

I can't believe I had to go all the way to the UK to find this out. There was a National De-lurking Week and I missed it?






Oh great, now I have guilt.

In Which To Give Good Advice Is Not Necessarily Fatal

The Plan was to do a post on the amazement of having a knitterly daughter. There were supposed to be pictures. There was supposed to be commentary on the pictures. Unfortunately, said daughter is back at college. With her knitting. Of which I have taken no pictures. Sorry.

You'd think I'd learn by now. Forget Machiavelli's advice to "make no small plans." Just don't make any. No plans. None. Zero. As soon as I think I've made one, it all goes down the tubes.

I do, however, have a mother-daughter knitting expedition I can relate.

It really was only because I needed to spend my gift certificate from Knitche. The fact that we got an extra day with Clare because her dorm was having plumbing problems was just serendipitous. The chance to take off for one last trip to the yarn store before I become mired in boys had nothing to do with it. I needed to spend my gift certificate. Clare needed some lime green or hot pink or electric blue sock yarn for the heels and toes of her, and I quote, "stripy, shiny socks". Sadly, Knitche had a dearth of bright-colored solid wool sock yarn. This was a blow. She had to settle for some vivid Baby Ull and the last set of Crystal Palace US0 DPN's.

This is where her knitting philosophy differs from mine. She will try it, whatever it is. I would have gotten all hung up on how the gauge probably won't be the same and the toes and heels won't fit the socks. I would have hamstrung myself with "and". She pretty much knows that, but figures she'll give it a shot. It could work. It's humbling to live with an adventurous knitter, even if it's only for a month or two at a time.

I was still on my quest for the last color in Cascade Heathers that I need for the new, improved Mitered Square Blanket. I intended to get something neutral. A grayish something. Or foggy green, maybe. Or something brownish. Never mind that previous attempts had landed me with these. Which are, in clockwise order from top left, too strong, too dull, too muddy, too orange and too dark. I seem to have a knack for making the same mistake in infinite variety.














This is the color I was considering while Clare hunted psychedelic sock yarn.

She, shall we say, dissuaded me. Instead, I came home with three skeins of this.












And you know what? She might be right.












Now I have to figure out what to to with all those errors in judgement. I suppose I could pretend I'm headed toward Mitered-Squares V.2. Of course, I could just admit my obvious addiction, but where would be the fun inthat?

Better than Juggling

Oh, this is fun.














I admit I was a little nervous, after my experiences with feather-and-fanning. (Which remain, alone together but abandoned, in the bottom of one of the little Lantern Moon bags. I keep telling myself I'll pick them up again. Later.) Then all the fun went out of Branching Out at about the seventh repeat. I began to have intimations that I would never become a Real Knitter. I would be relegated forever to the rectangular, the one color per row. Doomed to be the knitterly equivalent of a dilettante. This two-colors at a time stuff, though, is like Cirque du Soleil for knitting. I almost expect flashing lights to accompany my astonishing feats of skill and daring. If there were a Flying Karamazov Brothers of knitting, this is the kind of stuff they would be doing. (If you have Quicktime, you can see them in action here.)

Look at this. It looks like it's supposed to look. The little center motifs delineated by the diagonals. This is heady stuff. Even the pseudo-seams the purl stitches create look like they're supposed to. Admittedly, probably because all the purl stitches are created with the main color, which I am now carrying in my right hand. In other words, I haven't figured out what I was doing when I thought I was purling while carrying the main color in my left hand. One new skill at a time, people.





















While in the throes of all this excitement, I realize I still have to acknowledge a debt to Branching Out. It made me learn how to read a chart. I cannot imagine trying to do stranded colorwork using written directions. K2 in MC, k1 in CC, K1 in MC, K1 in CC, K1 in MC, K3 in CC. I believe the phrase we're looking for here is "just kill me now." Accompanied my banging one's head against the table top while deciding that reading is a perfectly acceptable habit. And so is bungee jumping. Or taking naps.

That's not all that's been going on here. We have serious progress on Clare's Sweater. I wish I were a better photographer. This yarn is so lovely, and it keep coming out looking like the navy version of plain vanilla. Front and Back are almost ready for the the arm-hole shaping.














The Endpaper Mitts are ready for the thumb-gusset.














It's going to be an all-shaping-all-the-time weekend here. Binding off at the end of rows. Raised bar increases.

Who needs flaming torches?

Erudite. Yup.

Yes, I know using Blogthings is the blog equivalent of cheating. Not a real post and all that. No pictures. No original thought. No knitting, for the love of Mike.

I'm all wore out fixing my Endpaper Mitt. Sorry Diane, version 1 is history.

Your Vocabulary Score: A

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary! You must be quite an erudite person.

How's Your Vocabulary?

Excuse me now. I have to go look up "multifarious."

Listening to my hands

First off, ta-da. Sort of. This will be swimming in the lily pond soon.














A complete non sequitur here, inspired by trying to photograph this thing. Do people realize this is extremely pointy knitting? Do sock knitters do this all the time? It's like knitting a spider shooting out two strands of webbing. Greek Mythology got it wrong. Arachne wasn't a spinner. She was a knitter. A circular knitter on DPN's in point of fact. A stranded-colorworking-circular-knitter to be most precise.

To return, I have attempted stranded colorwork. The key word is "attempted." It wasn't pretty or pleasant. But then, my learning experiences so seldom are. Some people you have to hit over the head with a brick and all that. It has, however, been fraught with new neural connections. I do love the figuring things out part.

I am a two-handed stranded-colorworker. Trying to carry both colors in one hand was so cognitively dissonant, I almost had a breakdown right there at the kitchen table.

I may have figured out my problem with continental knitting- I twisted my stitches. When I picked up the yarn from my left hand, my stitches ended up with the leading leg at the back instead of the front, which made them harder to knit. If it's harder to get at and through the stitch, I figure I'm doing something wrong. It was true for learning to cast on. It was true for learning yarn-overs and ssks and k2togs. If I'm trying to remember the past, that I not be condemned to repeat it, I think I'll allow that it was true for the way I was catching the yarn from my left hand. After spending an embarrassing amount of time staring at my hands, wondering what they thought they were doing, I realized there was more than one way to pick up the yarn. I get so smug when I'm right.

I don't seem to have tension issues. It's nice and stretchy. The strands all seem pretty uniform - not the length, which is pattern dependent, but the way the yarn lays. An unexpected and pleasant surprise, given what I've been learning about my gauge lately.














That's the good part. It's still destined to be tadpole fodder. Because of this.














While I have figured out how to knit Continental-ly, I still need to figure out how to purl. That or switch the yarns, MC to my right and CC to my left.

And then there's this.














Must listen to my hands. I will repeat this until I get it: I can trust my muscle memory. If it feels wrong when I knit it, it probably is wrong.

So, why did it take me 3 1/2 rows to figure out why this was so hard? And why did I persist in knitting, albeit correctly, the remaining seven rows of the repeat once I knew the first 3 were wrong?

Some people you have to hit over the head with a brick. Some of us you have to hit with a BIG brick.

Post Script.

2) Snow Cat mined my archives and left a comment there asking about the Tree of Life pattern I used on one of my Mason-Dixon towels. His/her Blogger profile doesn't have an email address, and Blogger doesn't allow direct replies to comment emails, but I don't believe in not answering questions. It's from Debbie Bliss' How to Knit book. I find her didactic attitude to the right and wrong way to knit annoying, so I only use it for the stitch dictionary she includes. The pattern is, however, apparently a common motif for Aran and fisherman's ganseys/sweaters, so you might be able to find it in a pattern book.

Patience Rewarded

I knew there was a good reason for holding off on the colorwork. Look what I got in the mail today. I found it through the Stranded: The Colorwork Challenge KAL that's going along now. Scroll down. They have a little drop down menu for resources in the sidebar.





















Yes, I knew it was coming. But this is through a small printing service that apparently produces individual copies based on an individual order, and I'd had no experience with them. It could have taken weeks. And you can download it for cheaper, and faster, but I'm kind of a Luddite and I like real books. Thank you, Lulu.com.

Stranded Colorwork by Nanette Blanchard. Click the link, there's a nice description, lots of reviews, and a sample of what the book contains. What the web page doesn't show is, in the book there's a picture of a right-handed carry, one yarn across the middle finger (yay!) and one across the index (that part will be tricky). I'd scan the picture and show it, but I'm not sure about the copyright issues.

You may shake your heads in amused disbelief at this compulsion to research before I try something. You should have seen what I compiled for my foray into polymer clay figures. I like the security that comes from documentation and original sources.

Now mind you, I haven't actually attempted any 2-stranded knitting, but at least now I have a net.

Annoyance Avoidance

I admit it. I've had an attack of nerves. Also some internal arguments about frogging the cuff, given the abysmal cast on. The more I look at it, the more annoyed I get with myself. So, do I knit on and ignore my cuff issues, or frog and try to get my first colorwork project right? Or at least presentable. Must ponder.
















Happily, I have other knitting. I've been working on Clare's sweater. She leaves for Urbana in a little over a week, and I would at least like to know it's close to the fit she wants.














Besides, Yarn Country has notified me that it has shipped the yarn for John's Sweater. He wants the Seamless Saddle Shoulder from Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitting Without Tears. I'm kind of excited about this. It will be another step in Knitter's Progress - my first EZ sweater. It will justify my membership in Zimmermania. I'll get to spend time with another Cascade Heather, my most favorite yarn in almost all the colorways. So, the pressure to finish the Perfect Sweater is building here.

Add to this a variation of the fear of Second Sock Syndrome. I 'm convinced once I finish the back, I'll hide from the front. So I'm knitting on them both.














The theory is, the sleeves being smaller will make that part easy and a relief and I won't get sleeve-itis.

I am also hoping to avoid complete knitting idiocy by using different color stitch markers to help me keep straight which is which, purple for the posterior (e.g. back), green for the other part (I couldn't think of a mnemonic). This in hopes to avoid knitting a frack. Or a bont.













Should I mention that the shipment from Yarn Country may contain more Cascade Heathers than that required for John's Sweater? Maybe a few new colors to finally liven up the mitered-square afghan? Maybe later.

Don't Be Fooled

This may seem like a simple, unassuming black ribbed cuff. There's a lot more here than meets the eye.














There's Symbolism: It's the Bridge Between 2006 and 2007.

It's a New Frontier: The First Stranded Colorwork Project, Eunny Jang's Endpaper Mitts (See Diane, I listen. It's circular).

It's a New Technique: Italian Tubular Cast-On.

It's the First Time Using DPN's Smaller Than US 11's: These are US 0's. Just like the big kids.

Now that's a lot of freight for one fancy cast-on and fourteen rows of K1, P1 ribbing to carry. To balance all that, I have another list: New and Not So Creative Mistakes - So Far.















World's wonkiest cast-on. And I practiced. A lot. It looked so tidy all lined up on the one needle, before I actually did anything. And I can hardly blame the yarn this time. It's RYC Cashsoft 4-ply. Given how much more practice is called for, it's a good thing Italian Tubular Cast-On is intriguing once you figure out the logic behind it. A fine Italian hand and all that.

1 dropped stitch recovered. I lost count of how many were almost dropped but saved with the help of creatively shrieking "Don't you dare." There might have been a little, discreet swearing.

Numerous stitches split by and recovered with these toothpick thingies some people apparently consider legitimate needles. (Saved by "Don't even think about it" and some sotto voce cussing.) It's happened enough to establish a love-hate relationship. I am so impressed I managed to knit with these, and so looking forward to moving up to the size 3's for the rest of this project.

(Belated) realisation that I should never knit with black yarn and small needles. Black really does suck up light and I think I may have created a local black hole here. This may confuse the physicists, but I won't be able to help. I have my own problems. It's almost impossible to count rows you can't see. Never mind what happens when you take a photograph.

Now I have to up the ante. It's time to add the "stranded" and "color" part of stranded colorwork. Given that I am not only an English knitter, I'm an idiosyncratic English knitter (I throw from my middle finger), it promises to be an interesting New Year.

Hope yours is, too.