Where Have All the Bloggers Gone? September 2014

Once upon a time, part of my daily ritual was a cup of coffee at 10-ish and time spent with my favorite on-line knitters.  It made sense to check in every day, because pretty much everyone had something new to say. Someone would write something that reminded me of a story or an event or a project I wanted to make and I would be off to the races,  inspired to make my own contribution, to add to the conversation.  Now?  Now I go weeks without checking my blogging roll.

It's been busy here at Chez WoolGathering.  We had company from Across the Atlantic, which meant summer was pretty much non-stop and the place hasn't looked this good since the last time it looked this good. Every cabinet and drawer in the kitchen got cleared out and lined with new shelf liner.  The linen closet, the credenza, the bookshelves -- all gone through. Fibber McGee's Closet no longer lives up to its name. I think Their Father was on a first -name basis with the people at Salvation Army by the time we finished. (Someday I'll write about the bathroom renovation.  Someday I will, by all that's holy, understand why it took a month to take out the old tub, sink and toilet in the front bath and install the new - a whole month.)

It was an astonishing 10 days in August with Our Company and they got to set foot in two states besides ours (Iowa and Indiana) and saw the Mississippi. They've been gone almost a week now and the apartment stills feel empty without them.

The part you're probably interested in though, is the part where I got yarn.  They brought me yarn.  From England.  Beautiful, beautiful merino-silk handspun from the real Worstead (you know, like worsted yarn?)

I've been playing with patterns and projects.   At first glance the yarn may present as tweedy green, plain and simple, but that merino-silk blend has bits of blue and a yellowish, springy green that pop up when you're not looking. It's soft and elegant feeling and I want to knit something that will show off the yarn, not something with a lot of pattern stitches.  I need something simple but classy.  Something that would showcase the yarn. Which led me to Churchmouse Yarns patterns.

As it happens, neither the Before and After Scarf nor the Beaded Mohair Scarf were willing to adapt to handspun.  I thought that the Shoulder Cozy might work. It didn't.

I'll keep searching. I've never knit a cowl for myself.  Maybe it's time to think about that. 

Maybe I should go read a few blogs and see what they're doing.

Cowl in the Afternoon

It could be said that my knitting tends toward the staid and conservative.  Which may be why the Eldest Niece gifted me (well, actually all of us Stitches types) with this for our party bags last August. 

That's another story, except for the part where it inspired me to try something different.

See this?  

This is Mountain Colors Moguls.  It has been sitting in my stash for longer than I care to remember.  It arrived with my second abortive attempt at an Ab-Fab blanket. It was supposed to fill the slot held by the Colinette Zanziba.  I'm actually attempting another one and was convinced that the Moguls would be perfect.  I was wrong.  While the yarn looked anything but maroon in the skein, context is everything.  Sandwiched between layers of Colinette mohair in Tapis, it presented as red. Not what I thought it would do.

So here I am, stuck with this incredibly active yarn and no place to put it.  It's years and years old and, even if I could convince my over-active conscience to return it, I have no idea where it came from anymore.

What to do? What to do?  It's only 65 yards per skein. And it's busy.  

I went looking at and for cowls. Cowls must be boring to knit, because pretty much everyone introduces some type of stitch pattern or design element.  With everything that's going on with this yarn -- Mountain Colors describes it as lumpy and bumpy; I would like to add that it's also curly, thick and thin and variegated -- the last thing it needs is a cable. Or Kitchener stitch.

I gave up and invented my own.  The most basic, unimaginative, ordinary knitting I could think of.  Ribbing for the top and bottom borders and stockinette for the body.  Anything more and my knitting would cross the border into Art and I hate knitting that is Art.

I have two more skeins of this in Pheasant (very similar colorway, minus the orange and yellow).  Lest its very simplicity renders it un-rememberable, I'm recording what I'm pretty sure I did.

Recipe for a Cowl in the Afternoon:

2 skeins Mountain Colors Moguls ( this is Sunburst).

Needles Addi Turbo 24" circulars. US 15 (a.k.a. big honking needles).

Cast on 56 stitches (or whatever multiple of 4 will get you the diameter you want).

K2P2 for 1 round.

Join to knit in the round and place a marker to mark the beginning of the round. (Careful not to twist, which is much easier when you've done a row of knitting (thank you to Graphica of Inspira Cowl fame.).) (Can one nest parentheses like that?  Must check my Chicago Manual of Style someday.)

K2P2 for 2 more rounds.

Knit (and knit and knit and knit) to the end of the skein

Count your rounds so you'll know when to stop knitting the second skein and start K2P2 ribbing (I think I had 26, counting the 3 rounds of ribbing).

Spit splice skein 2 (unless you really want to weave in those two extra ends).

Knit (and knit and knit and knit).

Count rounds until you have the same number as the first skein, less the three for the ribbing.

K2P2 for 3 rounds

Bind off (I used Jenny's Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-off).

Weave in the two ends (start and finish).

Here's the kicker. Turn it inside out, which emphasizes the funky element, but avoids Art.

Call it done.

You Say It's Your Birthday

It was. And it was just delightful.  For one thing - it went on for days. The Lord Protector came home for the weekend so we celebrated Saturday and Sunday. Homemade cake courtesy of the Princess (vanilla cake with strawberry frosting, although we told the Pirate it was only pink,: it seems Pirates don't believe in strawberry anything) and presents on Sunday evening.  Very cool stuff, but for the purposes of a knitting blog, just this.

Hand Painted Knitting Yarns Rome Bias Shawl  kit in the red/black colorway (birthdays are a tried and true excuse reason to not have to augment the stash).  I can never get red to come out right.  You'll have to take my word that there are actually two shades there - one a deeper red, shading toward burgundy and the other a brighter, more stop-sign red.

Then, as if that wasn't enough, 

exquisite tiny little cupcakes from Sugar Bliss on the Day itself.  There were more. They just didn't last long enough to get in the picture.

St. Patrick's Day Manque

Which is why I didn't have a green sweater to wear on March 17.

Hot. Cool. Yours.

Let's get this out of the way first. The problem with the FYA shawl was that I miscounted/added an extra stitch/forgot a stitch/whatever in the first few stitches on the first row of Clue 3. The way the pattern is written, you start the chart over at each stitch marker, and I managed to read it/knit it/whatever it correctly the next two times. Which is how it was wrong in one place and right in another.  Since, however, I messed up within the first few stitches of the very first row, I had to frog all the way back to the beginning of the clue. I was not happy about this. In fact, I ragged on it so long and so hard to The Princess that, once I had made the correction, I managed to knit back on the wrong side row instead of purl back. We will draw a curtain here, now that I've successfully knit Clue 3. 

One could argue that, until Clue 5 is actually released, I am now on schedule. I have a chance to finish Clue 4 before Clue 5 (the final clue) is released on Monday.

I have other plans.

I'm not joining the Ravellenics. Technically. I'm not on any team. I haven't tagged any project. I missed the cast-on moment by hours and hours. However. The Lord Protector is still waiting for his college blanket. We have gone back and forth on patterns for a while. I was going to try to knit intarsia cables on a Knitspot pattern until I counted the number of bobbins of yarn I would have to juggle to achieve the width he wanted. Thirteen. I pondered knitting it in panels, and then remembered how good I am about assembling blankets that are knit in pieces. Over break, we found another pattern: the Walt Painted Chevron Baby Blanket. Okay, so it's written as a baby blanket and there was MATH, but it was pretty straightforward MATH and I did it.

Then we looked at the yarn and compared it with THE MATH and concluded it wasn't going to make it.  The yarn we'd planned is from the stash.  Very old Sweet Georgia Yarns Superwash in Nightshade and Silver. Sweet Georgia Yarns is not always consistent within dye-lots (it is hand-dyed after all).  At this late date we figured there was no way we could match what I already had.  We are clever and creative people, however, and when scanning Ravelry projects, we noted that the blankets, by and large, use three colors. I tried, really I did, to persuade the Lord Protector to add some color to this blanket.  A nice, deep, wine, red perhaps.  Maybe an old, antique gold.  Or a profound forest green. He chose another, darker gray.

Those who live in most of the Lower 48, have you looked out the window?  Do you know what is heading our way?  Do you realize what it will be like to knit navy, gray and darker gray in February in Chicago? I'll tell you what it will be like.  It will be like knitting a perpetual winter twilight, that's what it will be like.

I call that a challenge of truly Olympic proportions.

I have, therefore, built in a respite.  Sort of like those moments between events when the commentators drone on and on and the only purpose for them is to break up the main action.  In a flattering turn of events, someone admired my Color Affection Shawl so much, she asked, if she bought the yarn, if I would make her one, "just like mine."  I knit mine in Miss Babs Yummy 2-ply.  Miss Babs has been out of stock on the Flaxen and the Navy for a while, but since mine included a one-of-a-kind colorway, I wouldn't be able to duplicate it anyway. Besides, that would be boring. I think this will get close enough.

It's Shalimar Yarns Breathless in Oyster, Cephalopod Yarns Bugga in Frog Legged Leaf Beetle and Fleece Artist Merino 2/6  in Polar Sea.  I do believe that when the dim and dark of the Lord Protector's blanket begins to overwhelm, this project should restore me.

Citius-Altius-Fortius.

Oh, Just Arrgh!

And I'm not talking like a pirate; I'm frustrated.  I'm a better knitter than this. I really am.  I just can't seem to keep my mind on this Follow Your Arrow thing. 

Case in point.See this?

It's supposed to look like this.

 

This is the third time I've done something that has to be ripped out.  Admittedly, the first two weren't documented, but I didn't know then that they were part of a trend.  For the record, the first mistake was at the garter stitch band near the top.  I knit it in stockinette instead and didn't notice until I was ready to start the garter stitch/lace section. I was not happy, but it was early in the project and not a lot of stitches were involved.  I debated calling it a design element, but decided against it.  Riiiiiip.

The second one was minor.  On the last right side row of the weird asymmetrical part, I apparently slept and skipped the last two yo increases. I didn't find the mistake until I knit the first row of Clue 3A.  By then I had over 200 stitches on my needle, but still, that was pretty quick and while the yarn had re-arranged itself so I couldn't fake the yarn overs by just pulling up the bar between the stitches, it wasn't all that much.  Riiiiiip.

This one, though.  This one really anoys me.  I had hopes of being at least close to on track before Clue 4 came out. Note that I have a flexible notion of what it means to be on track.  Halfway through the previous week's clue would have counted. Now it's Wednesday of Clue 4 Week and I'm back at the end of Clue 2.  Now? 

Well, now?  Oh, just arrrgh!

More Mystery

I've made some progress on the shawl and I'm not so mad at Blogger anymore, so let me write a bit more about this whole mystery knit-along thing. It's a little tricky and perhaps annoying, since there are a lot of references to the knit-along which might seem to require spending significant time on the group spoiler threads. Tough. Sorry. 

First, some technical elements, lest I forget. The yarn is Fiberphile Super Squish Sock, a merino fingering yarn, in Rose Gold. (It breaks my heart a little bit that Fiberphile is no longer in existence. I got this during their brief stay at Eat.Sleep.Knit. and was waiting, wishing and hoping for a restock in worsted weight).

The needles are Addi Turbos in Us6/4 mm.

The MKAL is Ysolda Teague's Follow Your Arrow Mystery Shawl Knit-along.

I chose the B version of Clue one.

I have some serious catching up to do.  Clue Three was released on Monday.  Clue Four is due out in four days.  I haven't even finished 1B.

Keeping in mind the confession in yesterday's post about cheating on mazes and mystery novels, I'm sure it's not a surprise that I've been haunting the spoiler threads on Ravelry. I can't afford to make a wrong choice here. 

I was all set to go right into 2A, which is fairly conventional lace construction, except I don't like the way the two patterns meet - it's disharmonious. Which leaves me with the odd, asymmetric, unconventional garter-stitch wedge option. I think I'm feeling odd and asymmetrical. Also, with yet another Winter Storm Watch in effect, possibly a little cranky, cabin-fevered and judgement-impaired. 

In 2B there's a little stockinette detailing. Maybe I'll get really bold and daring and, even though my intent was to knit a solid color shawl, throw in a little contrast yarn. I still have some Miss Babs Deep Sea Jellyfish left over from the Color Affection Shawl.

Let's see what happens.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

I had such a nice post written.  

It had self-revelation (I don't like surprises. I have control issues).

It had humor (I read the end of the mystery half-way through, and sometimes sooner. I work the mazes in the Sunday papers from the inside out). (That's humor in support of the aforesaid self-revelation)

It had personal growth (I signed up for a mystery knit-along anyway). 

It had rationalization (The knit-along let's you choose your clues, so not all the shawls will be the same; the designer is Ysolda Teague; one of the bloggers I read had already started one).

It had pictures (here's one).

Hmm. I don't remember it looking quite that harsh a red when I took the picture.  Too much Photoshop?

And then I typed the last two words of a really clever closing aphorism, which I can no longer remember but was probably tied to all the preceding clever prose, and Blogger ate it all except for the last word and a half.

Definitely not as easy as Abel Baker Charlie.

Didja Miss Me?

Well. Here I am, back from my self-imposed exile.  You see, there was this article.  Technically it was due mid-October.  I told myself I could finish it and then feed The Blog as a reward.  I just sent the final draft off to the editors last night.  Can I even begin to tell you how much I did not want to write that article? But it's done and gone.  At last reading it sounded to me like I didn't want to write it, but the Princess looked it over and assured me that, as long as it's read by an audience that has never met me, they'll never be able to tell. Not, let me state, the way I wanted to start the New Year.

But. It's done and I'm back and I have been knitting.  Sometimes as an avoidance technique.  Sometimes as therapy. Sometimes in a grimly determined effort to reduce the stash.  The total was impressive.  5 Garter Squish Blankets (free on Ravelry) for Christmas gifts at roughly 12 skeins of worsted per blanket.  4 cowls of the Inspira variety (also free on Ravelry), also for Christmas gifts, at 4 skeins each.  20 little knitted Christmas trees for gifts and the Christmas Market (Not much help reducing the stash; three inch cones on US3 needles pretty much are only good for using up bits and bobs of yarn).  4 Minikins, also for the Christmas Market (Again, not much stash busting; see note on Christmas trees above).  [I mention here a blanket knit by The Princess, as an additional 12 skein stash-bust and because it was my idea (I think).]

Let it also be noted that I finished the original Garter Squish Blanket and the Original Color Affection Shawl.

Most of the pictures, however, are on The Princess' new camera and I am not going to attempt to retrieve them without her around. You'll just have to wait.

Instead, and to keep this post from being a rant, let's go back to that adjective modifying the Color Affection Shawl,  "Original"  implies more than one. If you go to this post, and scroll down, you'll find a photo of the yarn I planned for the Next Color Affection Shawl.  The yarns are Tosh Sock in Byzantine, Jade Sapphire Silk Cashmere 4-ply in 68/Burnished Gold and Malabrigo Sock in 811/Eggplant.

Alas, plans were made to go awry.  That gold yarn?  The soft and silky cashmere blend by Jade Sapphire?  Too thin.  Very light fingering weight.  Too light to be compatible with the other yarns. I was sure I had the colors right, so went searching for a sock weight, true fingering yarn in the same greenish-gold family.  You'd be surprised how many golds there are out there that shade to orange. 

I thought I had found it in Dream in Color's Smooshy with Cashmere in Medieval until I wound it up and looked at it next to the Tosh Sock in Byzantine. 

Too close in value, I thought.  Not a problem; I could use the Malabrigo Sock in 800/Tizano Red that I intended to use for wristlets (a less successful past Christmas gift knitting plan, best left buried in oblivion).  Except now that I've finished the first, solid color section of the shawl and am looking at starting the first set of stripes, I'm having second thoughts.  

Red, gold and purplish grey.  Isn't that maybe too mundane a color combination?  What if I end up with an (*gasp*) ordinary shawl? 

I went looking for sock yarn in the stash.  I have more than I realized. Way more. 

Decisions, decisions.  I will keep you posted.

Chance Favors the Prepared

Thirty degrees is a lot.

It's strange, but no matter how many times I hear it, no matter how much I look forward to it (at least when the drop starts from the mid-90's), no matter that except for that brief stint in California, I have spent my whole life in the Midwest, I am never prepared for just how big a temperature change thirty degrees is until it happens. Tuesday we were sweltering. Today I've thrown open my windows and am sitting here in a sweatshirt. It's Fall in Chicago.

You know what this means, don't you? This means I can confess. This means I can go public. This means I don't have to hide any more. No more pretending all I'm working on is easy warm weather knitting like cowls and fingering-weight shawls. This means I can announce that I am (wait for it) knitting another blanket!

I've written a couple times that the Princess and I are valiantly working our way through reducing the stash. When you work on cowls, mittens, socks, hats and children's sweaters, though (well, socks and mittens not me, but she does) the stash fades away gradually. I want some major disappearing here. I want my stash to fit in its baskets. I want Their Father to not walk from room to room and wonder if we're single-handedly supporting a sheep farm somewhere in Montana. Dang it, I want to buy more yarn with a clear conscience.

Which is why I am saying thank-you to Stephen West for the Garter Squish Blanket (it's free on Ravelry).

Worsted Weight. Double-stranded. Big needles. Full-size blanket. We're talking about ridding the Stash of 16 skeins in one fell swoop. And easy. It's garter stitch. Knit until the skeins run out and then start the next two. This thing eats yarn. Even better, I'm using up some of those lost, lone and left-over skeins. Those eight skeins of Rainier Heather Cascade 220 that I bought online when I thought they were blue and they turned out to be purple? They have found their project.

Okay, so this is me and I had to change it. That would be because two of those lost lone skeins are a really awful orange-and-green-heather-makes-for-one-muddy-brown.

I worried about knitting a large block with it. Even double-stranded with the Rainier Heather (purple) it looks brown. Keeping in mind that if you only choose pretty colors for a project you'll end up with a pretty boring project, I took the advice of Lady Macbeth and "screwed [my] courage to the sticking place" (that and I may have knit with one eye closed at the start). Somehow, though, juxtaposed in narrower bands between navy/purple and charcoal heather/purple, I like it. I'm curious to see what it looks like between the charcoal heather/purple and the more bluish/greenish-grey of the Smoke Heather/purple combination.

I find the knit-as-you-go I-cord edging particularly fetching. I may do this for all my garter stitch blankets from now on.

Not to mention that now that it's getting chilly here, instead of shivering in this robust northeasterly breeze, I get to sit with a lapful of wool.

Stitches 2013

This is partly about Inspira Cowls, but mostly about what they drove me to learn at Stitches.

If you page through the over 1700 Inspira Cowls on Ravelry, you may notice that every now and then one pops out with a flared top edge.  This does not appear to bother the knitters.  When Mesa Rock I turned out that way, it bothered me.  Graphica says to "BO just loose enough in rib." "Just loose enough." Right. I bound off with a larger needle. Flared. I bound off using the lace bind-off. Flared.  I bound off using Judy's Surprisingly Stretchy Bind Off. Flared. 

I was not happy. I ripped out the bind off, put the whole thing back on the needles and proceeded to ignore it. 

Then I got my email reminder about homework for my Stitches classes.  Yes, I signed up for more than one. No, I don't know what I was thinking. Yes there was homework for one of them. No I don't know how I missed that one of them was for 8 AM Saturday morning. Yes, it was the one I had to knit seven swatches for.  It was worth it.  The class was a bind-off class with Sarah Peasley. 

Any class with Sarah Peasley is worth it.  This one was exactly what I needed. In the course of the morning, I mastered seven different bind-offs. 

Okay, six out of seven. That one on the bottom was supposed to be the bind-off based on Kitchener stitch (I think), but the field marshal and I had a disagreement and I ripped it out and put the swatch back on the needles. I will prevail over that one, just - later. Anyway. I also acquired the piece of wisdom that saved Mesa Rock and all future Inspira Cowls.  When you do stretchy bind-offs that involve yarn overs?  You don't need to yarn-over for every stitch.  Let me repeat that.

When you do stretchy bind-offs that involve yarn overs?  You don't need to yarn-over for every stitch.

Honestly, you would have thought I had discovered the wheel. 

Binding off with yarn-overs, as for the lace bind-off or Judy's Surprisingly Stretchy one, means you increase a stitch at the point before you close the stitch. That extra yarn is what makes the bind-off stretchy.  It's also what made my bind-off flare out. By spacing out the yarn-overs, you can control the amount of stretch in the bind-off.  I reduced my yarn-overs by half, doing one for every pair of stitches. And it worked.

Stretch without the flare.  If I didn't tell you that the edge on the top is the bottom and the edge below is the top of the cowl, would you know?

Good thing, given that I have all that new self-striping yarn, no?

Late to the Party, Again

Believe it or not, I am knitting something other than corrugated ribbing. But you have to get the story before you get the pictures.

It's not that I go looking for excuses to cheat on my resolution to knit from stash.  It's that there are always extenuating circumstances. The Market at Stitches Midwest has always qualified as the ultimate extenuating circumstance. As if all the yarn I bought there for Inspira Cowls had never happened (which technically, I can argue didn't, because yarn bought to make gifts doesn't count, right?), I went searching for my Stitches yarn.

True confessions time.  I have, in the past, bought some truly delicious yarn at Stitches.  There are the two hanks of Brooks Farm Mas Acero in a cornflower/porcelain kind of blue.  A couple years ago I succumbed to the lure of Silk/Merino Worsted from Ellen's Half-pint Farm and bought yarn that makes me think of poppies thinly scattered in wheat fields. Then there was the year I bought vast quantities of Jojoland Melody Superwash. I have never found the right pattern for any of these yarns, and so they languish. 

This time, I determined, would be different. This time I would restrain myself.  This time I went with a pattern in mind.  This time, when I returned from Stitches, it would be with something I wanted to make immediately.  I chose my pattern and downloaded my knitting folder onto my Nook, to make sure I had all the information I needed to make Carina Spencer's Catkin Shawl, and made a beeline for the Miss Babs booth.

I did not come away with yarn for the Catkin Shawl. Instead I was seduced by Color Affection.

I should mention that I had never been excited by CA.  I admit I looked at it pretty closely when the Yarn Harlot extolled it. Despite one of my favorite knit blogger's praise, despite the inspiration of nearly 10,000 knitters on Ravelry alone, I was unmoved. Just couldn't see the appeal.  

Back to the present. Miss Bab's has put together color sets called Trios designed specifically for Color Affection (or other three color objects).  She had a sample knit up in colors that, for me, recalled nothing so much as the Wicked Witch of the West - black, green, and purple. So not my colors, and yet I was completely won over. I liked the way the colors moved through the pattern.  I was intrigued by the cleverness of the construction.  And then there's that part of me that is something of a sucker for a curving shawl. 

As it turned out, none of the color sets called my name, but that didn't stop me. By the time Stitches was over, I had a Trio of my  own - Denim, Deep Sea Jellyfish, and Wheaten.

I am loving this shawl.

I've already started sneaking onto the Miss Babs website looking for new combinations. Although, now that I think about it, I do have some pretty amazing fingering yarn that hasn't been set aside for anything yet.

There's Always Room for More

When one is most determinedly not yarn-buying, one needs to get one's fix somehow.  Ravelry helps.  One can locate patterns to knit some of that beautiful yarn one has accummulated almost obsessively over the years (which is why one is not yarn-buying, after all).  Marketing emails from semi-local yarn stores are even better, although more insidious. I know whereof I speak.  One of my favorite shops knocked me right off the wagon.

String Theory sent an email about perfect July 4 knitting.  She described it as "portable, mindless and impressive since I'll be knitting in public." Yes!  Exactly. The project she chose was the Inspira Cowl.  I bought the pattern last August, almost a year ago.  What I don't have is a huge stash of self-striping worsted weight yarn. You do see where this is going?

Knitting Inspira in the Classic Elite Liberty Print at the Fourth on 53rd Picnic fulfilled all my expectations about knitting in public.  It does indeed look impressive in progress:  yarn in both hands, stranding, colors emerging as if by magic from single skeins.  The reactions of the nieces attendant were particularly gratifying. They want one. All of them.  So does the Princess.  In fact, the Youngest Niece Present was all set to lay claim to the cowl in progress, based on the barely one-third I had knitted. (Sorry, YNP, the Princess tried it on when I resolved my bind-off issues - another post - and I don't think she's planning on releasing it.)

Except, poor me, I have very little love for self-striping yarns and so have very little in my stash.  I bought the Liberty Print especially to make the Mesa Rock Inspira.  Those two skeins or Noro Kureyon I'm using in the second, numerically-challenged cowl, which, unless claimed by one of said nieces, is intended for the local Christmas Bazaar, represented over half of my remaining self-striping yarn.  

That was then.  This is now.

In my defense, the Princess wanted a cowl big enough to pull over her head and still come down to her shoulders in the back.  That calls for extra yarn.
 

She chose Stained Glass for her main color with Cascade 220 Heather "Summer Sky" for her contrast.

The Eldest Niece chose Caribbean Tide with Malabrigo Twist in Teal Feather. 

I didn't have any Teal Feather Twist in my stash, either, so I had to buy a skein of that.

Well, what would you have done?
 
Special thanks to Wool and Company in St. Charles for coming to Stitches Midwest this year.  And to FiberWild for putting the Liberty Wool Print on sale this week. 

Oh. That Noro and the Liberty Wool Print in Cupcake, Cloudy Day and Tropical Sea?  I'm still working on those excuses.

Numbers

or, "Is it a mistake or is it a design element?"

Under the influence of String Theory's e-newsletter, over the fourth of July weekend I started and (almost) finished this.

This is the Inspira Cowl.  The pattern has three variations: Mesa Rock for aran weight yarns, Steampunk for sock or fingering weight and Afrique for bulky.  I used Classic Elite Liberty Prints -- a worsted to light worsted weight --  in Brick Road and Cloudy Day and obediently went with the Mesa Rock variation, but cast on 160 stitches to compensate for my slightly thinner yarn. It was fun. Fast. Easy but engaging.  Until I got to the bind-off, but that's another story.

I decided to  make another one.

This one is Noro Kureyon in a mystery color (I have had this forever, I don't remember for what and the ball-bands have gone the way of stitch markers, tape dispensers at wrapping time, my good scissors and single socks).  The cream yarn is Jaeger Matchmaker that I bought as a bag lot lo, these many ages ago, when Flying Colors closed and was clearing out their stock.

Since yarn for this one is DK I decided to try the Steampunk version. Except I decided I had to compensate for the fact the DK is heavier than fingering yarn. 

This is where I demonstrate that a little learning is the road to good intentions. 

The Mesa Rock version is 2 x 2 rib, so you need to cast on a multiple of 4.  The Steampunk cowl is supposed to be 3 x 3 rib (more gear-like in the designer's mind?), so between that and the thinner yarn, I cast on 180 stitches.  Except 180 is also divisible by 4 and that's when it all went sliding down the razor blade of Math.  I merrily knit my corrugated rib in 2 x 2, not 3 x 3. The Mesa Rock version has you work a progression of repeats. Three sets of 9, followed by three sets of 7 and then three sets of 5.  Steampunk repeats 3 times too, but repeats sets of 12,6, 3, that is, 12,6,3 - 12,6,3 - 12,6,3 - 12.  I left my instructions stashed in my knitting bag and mindlessly knit two sets of 12, then pulled out the pattern and, while maintaining my original delusion, misread it further and did a set of 6 and a set of 3.

Now I had choices. Do a second set of 6, 3 and then go back into pattern for the final 12,6,3,12? Go for a mirror image thing, and do another 3 rows making the pattern 12,12, 6, 3,3, 6, 12, 12? Except then I'm short 9 rounds, so maybe I need 12, 12, 6,6, 3,3, 6, 6, 12, 12?  Which would leave me three rows over the pattern total and while I want to use up all this yarn that might be calling it dangerously close?

The designer says, "The most valuable lesson by far is to make your Inspira all your own. Modify it to your heart's content, & you will be better for it, Gentle Knitter." Which, it cannot be denied, I had done. I just wish I had taken her advice on purpose instead of as a math failure.

Is it a surprise that before the Princess and I left for Stitches Midwest, I frogged back to the middle of the second set of 12 rows?

Turn Around, Turn Around

I remember watching Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color when I was a little girl.  Kodak ran a commercial -- and let's tip our hats to Madison Avenue -- that I remember better than any of the actual shows.  It featured the Malvina Reynolds/Harry Belafonte song about "Where are you going my little one, little one..."  The point, of course, was to make sure we used Kodak film and cameras to capture those Kodak moments.

Since yesterday I keep singing in my head, "turn around and you're two, turn around and you're four, turn around and your a young man going out of my door."

The Lord Protector left for college this morning. Wasn't he just hip-high yesterday?
 

And then I turned around.

It Worked

It's amazing what a difference the details make. 

From this (very generic, almost boy-like run of the mill dark red sweater)

to this.

Pattern: Arrowhead lace pattern from Nicki Epstein's Knitting Over the Edge (or Beyond the Edge) added to Knitting Pure and Simple's basic Children's Neckdown Pullover.
Yarn: Cascade 220 in Red Wine Heather.
Needles: Addi Turbo's, US 9 for body, US 7 for the edging and neckline.

Things I want to remember.
- I did fewer repeats for the sleeves than I did for the bottom, making a narrower edge.

- The pattern called for a multiple of 10 plus 1.  Since I knit it in the round, I could have skipped the plus 1. Since I didn't, one of the repeats has a two-row vertical bar instead of one-row.  It's at the side seam, so it's not that noticeable, but I wish I had paid attention sooner than I did (which was after I bound off).  

- The sweater ended with 138 stitches, so I knit a transition row on the smaller needles and increased 3 stitches evenly across the bottom edge. I decreased a couple stitches at the sleeves (and forgot to write down how many) on the theory that a closer cuff would be warmer than a looser one, and that the additional give in the lace pattern would still accommodate the widest part of the hand.  Since I could get my hand through, I figure it worked.

Don't get me wrong. I love the basic neckdown raglan sleeve child's sweater.  It's in the round, so it's mindless.  It's worsted weight yarn, so it's fast without looking clunky (an attribute of bulky wools, at least the way I knit them). The call, however, was for a pretty sweater. Basic just wasn't going to cut it.

The sweater is on its way, packed up with the last two pairs of socks The Princess knit.  The deadline is the end of the month, so it should get to a4A headquarters in plenty of time. 
 

Don't you just love details?

Housekeeping

Or, What to Do When You're at Loose Ends.

Turns out I've been knitting all this time.  

When one is actually knitting (as opposed to surfing, scrolling, reading, flipping through books and magazines looking at pretty pictures and knitting accoutrements), once accumulates finished objects.

Sadly, once the knitting is done, there's all that other stuff (washing, blocking and sewing in the ends).
 

I had a very busy weekend.

Waking the Sleeping Giant

Speaking of unearthing. 

This all started over two years ago.  I had been wildly irresponsible, in a yarn-ish  sort of way, and bought an entire dyelot of Briar Rose Fibers Wistful and needed to justify it. I saw Spud Says Hi's  "Last Gasp of Winter" blanket, a.k.a. "Embellished Squares" (pattern is still here). It seemed ideal.  So what if hers was based on self-striping yarn and my yarn was merely variegated? It was beautifully variegated, so I told myself.  Besides, a pattern that increased every other row was guaranteed to ward off the bane of almost all varicolored yarn - pooling.

Well, we all know what happens to projects that start out with an excess of optimism and justification, and my blanket was not immune.  First, and very early on, came the part where I decided Spud knew something I didn't and I would need to find a way to break up the yarn into stripes.  I'm sure coming across Carol Sunday's yarn at Knitche had nothing to do with the decision.

All went swimmingly through the first 500 yard skein of Wistful.  And seemingly through almost all of the second, for that matter.  Which is when I took a good look at it and relearned the lesson of hand-dyed artisan yarn most emphatically.  The second skein, though equally beautiful, did not match the first and no amount of arguing would change that fact.

Disheartened, I set the blanket aside.  Every now and then, when tossing the stash or scrounging for a simple half-finished project, I would disturb the mammoth, sigh despondently, and move on.  I knew it would eventually need to be frogged, but it was a pretty good size.  Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it was huge. Massive. Gargantuan, even. We're talking 1000 yards of the Wistful and several hundred yards of various Sunday Knits solids.  Going forward seemed pointless, but going back was overwhelming, so it would sink back into the depths.

Periodically, I would try to devise clever and creative schemes for finishing it.  I could rip back the second skein, buy more Sunday knits fingering yarns in the solids that I used and double-strand to camouflage the visual discord.  I could rip it back and use the second skein for the border, trusting that the change from stockinette to garter-stitch would disguise the color change.  I would tell myself I could bind it off and give it away and whoever got it would just be stuck with the mismatched dyelots, too intimidated by the vast amount of knitting to do anything but drape it over a chair whenever I came visiting; it would at least be out of the house.

Imagine my surprise then, this past winter, when it broke surface again. I noticed what I had never noticed before.  By introducing the solid color contrasting stripes, I had separated the two skeins.  I had, in fact, already performed that sleight of hand that turned the not-quite-the same skeins into a design element. 

So I wound up the final 500 yard skein and I've been knitting away at that garter-stitch border (because I am not entirely confident that I will forgive this blanket for a third variation) ever since.

Leviathan that it is, rather than unearthing perhaps, like humpback whales,  it breached. Both the surface and my defenses.

Posted by Julie McC. at 11:02 AM  

Heart's Ease

We are and have been a cat family for thirty years.  We learned when our first cat died at the ripe old age (for a cat) of 15, that a cat-less household is lacking.  Basil was a purebred British Shorthair and the cat who saw us through our expansion from the birth of our first child to our last. When he died, we knew we wouldn't get another British Shorthair, but we still had small children who needed a stable, calm-demeanored, sweet-tempered cat.  So we went the purebred route again, this time with an American Shorthair and got Liz as a kitten.  When we went (to Kalamazoo) to pick her up, the breeder introduced us to Autumn, a mom-cat who was going to be retired from breeding.  Two weeks later we went back for her and became a two-cat household.

This was a mistake.

They never adjusted to each other.  Eight years of internecine warfare.  I found myself noting how few species of cats live in groups.  I would observe that cats are not pack animals. No one sees herds of cats roaming the prairies and plains alongside the buffalo and caribou, right?  Lizzie was a much happier cat after Autumn died and she was the one-and-only, so much so that I swore I would never again have multiple cats.

When Lizzie died in April, I started scouting British Shorthair breeders again, thinking it was time to go back to the breed of my most favorite cat.  I stalked websites.  I watched for news of new litters or retired cats. I had three cats picked out and was planning that roadtrip to make a final decision. I never, not for a single moment, contemplated a rescued or shelter cat.

Let me digress here and note that my good friend over at Katzundyarner Bits is a multiple cat owner (look at the list on her sidebar). She also works with the local Trap/Neuter/Release program (Hyde Park Cats). Said local TNR program also fosters out cats - rescued cats and cats from shelters.  I have known of her work with this group for a long time.  Somehow, every time I thought I had made a decision on the next pure-bred, I found that I hadn't.  Instead I was spending increasing time at Petfinder and Adopt-A-Pet.  After all, I didn't have little kids that might terrorize or be terrorized by a shelter cat.  Maybe it was time to broaden my horizon.  Eventually I started stalking the Hyde Park Cats blog.  Astra, a sweet looking female calico showed up. Aha! The perfect cat for us, I thought. Okay, so there were also this pair of cute black kittens, a sister and her adopted brother. But there were two of them and the listing said they had to be adopted together. And they weren't calicos. Or even tabbies.  HPC seemed to think I should inquire after a couple choices, though, so I included them in my email. Guess which we chose?

Meet Zoe (formerly Hennessy, but I'm married to a history major and he had just finished a book on Byzantium and really wanted to name a female cat after the 11th century Empress) and Remy.  They joined Chez Wool-Gathering in May. 

They've grown.

Turns out a bonded pair is a whole different kindle of kittens than the two divas we had before.

Can This Sweater be Saved?

It's pretty obvious that I've been terribly neglectful of Afghans for Afghans.  The Princess sends off socks and mittens and hats and I  - watch.  This latest campaign, the one for sweaters for schoolgirls finally got me engaged again.  For one thing, I love sweaters.  A child's sweater, I figured, would be a piece of cake.  The a4A website asked, "Shouldn't all school girls have a new, beautiful wool sweater to wear to class? Yes! Yes! Yes!" and I knew I was in. 

The trick was finding a yarn that would make the sweater pretty.  The Princess and I have absolutely committed to knitting from stash until the yarn we have can be contained in the space we have.  I had no idea I had bought so many variations on dark until I went stash-diving for pretty.  Dream in Color Classy in Black Parade and Gothic Rose. Dream in Color Knitosophy in Superhero.  Fleece Artist Blue Faced Leicester in Raven.  Sunshine Yarns Merino Silk Fine in Black Truffle.  There's Sweet Georgia Superwash in Nightshade. Madelintosh Vintage in Ink.  My collection of sweater quantities of Cascade 220 -- my absolute favorite workhorse yarn for sweaters -- is comprised almost entirely of dark blues and browns.  What isn't is dark red or greyish green or sickly tarnished gold. I have only an odd skein here and there of soft, pretty colors.  So I went with the dark red. I reasoned it was less dismal than the others.  That, and I like red.

I cast on for Knitting Pure and Simple's basic Neck-down Child's pullover, figuring I 'd power through it in no time. I had most of the body knit when I pulled it out to show a fellow knitter.  It was the just-a-little-too-long pause followed by a comment that suggested she thought it would work for a boy that brought me up short and made me take a good look at what I had. She was right.  There was no way this could be called a pretty sweater.  Striping the waistband turned out just ugly. It seems most soft, pretty colors fight with this red.  What to do, what to do?  Something to the bottom hem and cuffs, since any other alternative would involve ripping out the whole sweater.

I hauled out Nicky Epstein's Knitting On the Edge and Knitting Beyond the Edge. I swatched.

Surely one of these will work?