Third Strike

Some of us need a lot of telling.

Let the record state, I have, in the past, failed two Mystery Knit-Alongs. The evidence is right there in my Ravelry record. After the second one, I decided that I just wasn't the Knit-Along type.  Don't like surprises. Never have. Never will.

What made me think it would be different this time?

Well, first of all, it's from String Theory, which I consider one of the best yarn stores out there, even thought it's so far that a visit requires an expedition and I only get out there once every two or three years.

Secondly, the palettes are based on Frida Kahlo's paintings, specifically this still life and this self portrait. I mean really, how cool is that?  Nobody does anything based on Frida Kahlo.

On the third hand, well, let's face it. Sheltering at home is a little dull.  One might think with three sweaters, two blankets, and four shawls all on the needles at once that I could keep myself entertained but no-o-o.  I let myself get sucked into another Mystery Knit-Along.

And, yep, I kind of hate it.

Okay. Back up.

I dithered over this for quite a while, because, really, let's face it, it's a MKA. In fact I dithered so long that all the store kits in the palette of my choice (the still life) were sold out. On the plus side, String Theory has started to offer online shopping.  Not the yarns used in the kits, but in a really nice wool in the appropriate weight and in colors that picked up the colors in the paintings.So I ordered my yarn and the pattern and settled in to anticipate.

Then I got the first clue and sat there and stared at my computer screen.  The sample in the accompanying photo was knit up in colors that were pretty close to what I had bought and I was stunned.  And not in a good way.  Quickly placed an order for colors more suited to the portrait version, hoped for the best.

The first two clues are lace with a weird stripe of reverse stockinette.  I hate knitting lace, but the new set of colors seemed to work so I sucked it up.

Then we got the word that we had to knit it again. 

It's going to be a long Knitalong.

Late to the party.

Good news! New ear-worm.

"Good Old Reliable Nathan" Detroit, in Guys and Dolls, complains that he doesn't order Mindy's cheesecake or strudel because they're so popular.  "It makes me," he observes, "feel like I'm playing the favorite."

Did you know there are over 24,500 Clapotis shawls on Ravelry?  Playing the favorite, indeed. Which explains why it's taken me so long to make one.

Anything can happen, though, with the right inspiration. In this case, the latest Yarnathon at Eat.Sleep.Knit.

Let me back up a bit. It's a sad and sorry truth that this long-neglected blog is my only foray into social media (for some reason, in my head, Ravelry doesn't count).  Which means I've pretty much ignored past E.S.K. Yarnathons.  Things happen on Facebook and Instagram and I don't do either of them.  And Ravelry doesn't count because, while I'm a member of any number of groups, I never participate in any of the discussions, never post to any of the threads and, in point of fact, almost never update my own projects.

But this time, perhaps as an outgrowth of that knitting for myself binge I've been on, I've decided to try to do a little bit to help my team, which tends to languish in last place.  While I may wonder if my attempts to help may only guarantee my team's continued poor standing, not unlike the way I invariably slow any checkout line I choose in the grocery store, I have opted to participate in a knitalong. 

Yep. Me. Knitalong. Really.

The rules for this one are, any project by a Canadian designer published before 2010, with yarn purchased from E.S.K., and cast on no earlier than July 1.

I'm amazed at how fast this knit up.  Truly, like the wind.

It's sock/fingering yarn from that previously mentioned 7 Deadly Spins yarn club. I have absolutely no idea what pattern was sent along with this yarn.  Yes, sent.  This was before download-the-PDF days, so patterns came as hard copy with the yarn shipment.  That's how old this yarn is.

This yarn.  Right.  The also previously mentioned Unique Sheep Luxe (now discontinued) in Pride.  Specifically, going from orange-est to purple-est, Pride 1, Pride 2, Pride 3 and Pride 4.   

Somehow, it feel appropriate to have knit this old, old, Knitty pattern with yarn that is probably almost as old.

It's been a blast.  Like 30,000 Frenchmen, I guess 24,000+ Ravelers can't be wrong.

And I finished before KAL deadline. Whoohoo! Go me.

Made it!

Not that I was worried.

Except I was.

I measured. That last little bit is 74 inches.

Some might call it luck.  I'm going to pretend I planned it so perfectly.

I actually finished this Saturday evening, and I have a post with a picture of it blocking that I promise I'll finish and publish, probably tomorrow. I just didn't want to leave you all in suspense.

Knit Faster

Still catching up to myself.  Pretend I remembered to publish on time this time. That or pretend you're time-traveling and it's really 7/13.

I had a plan for this shawl.  A little flying by the eat of my pants, perhaps, but still a pretty realistic, or at least simple, plan.  I have 4 skeins in what back then (sometime in 2007) was called a gradient set - Unique Sheep Luxe in Pride 1,2,3, and 4 - purchased from Eat.Sleep.Knit. as part of the long defunct 7 Deadly Spins Club.  Starting with the orange-est, the idea is (was) to knit through a skein, magic knotting it to the next skein until I finished. 

I thought I was being a smart knitter.  I noticed that the beginning of the shawl increased and the end of the shawl decreased. So I marked where the transition between the "increase section" and the "knitting even section" and where the first skein actually ended. Turned out, the marking wasn't so helpful. 

Weighing the skein after only one row of working even (which frankly was only a bit of knitting paranoia) was. Or so I thought.

I knit blithely then through the rest of the first skein and the next two.  The knitting was fast and fun.  The color changes were a little more clearly defined than I had hoped, but so it goes.  I started the 4th skein and knit happily through I forget how many repeats and then thought I had, perhaps, better weigh it. It was a little underweight, but that was all right becasue I had only just started a repeat and could tink back a few rows.  No big deal. So I did and then reweighed the skein.  Still a gram or so light, but I didn't want to give up the length I would lose if I frogged a full repeat.

That was then. Now I'm nervous.  I've got at least 20, maybe 25 rows to go.  I know I'm decreasing all the way, but only a single stitch each row and I'm having serious doubts about whether I'm going to make it.

Good thing this shawl is a fast knit.

Shawl Crazy

 I wrote this on the 10th and forgot to publish. Yeesh.  Clearly need to get back in the blogging mindset. Anyway.

Such an annoying ear-worm lately.  "Drum Crazy" from Irving Berlin's Easter Parade.  Don't get me wrong.  I think Fred Astaire is amazing and getting the bunny away from that Little Lord Fauntleroy wannabe was brilliant, but really.  For days?  And days?  Mae West was wrong.  Too much of a good think is just annoying.

I blame it on the title of this post.  I'm hoping that once I write this up, I'll at least get a new ear-worm.

Most of my yarn adventures this past year plus have gone undocumented.  Partly because I've been crocheting huge afghans for the parish Christmas Market raffle and let's face it, there's only so much one can say after the 8th repeat or twelfth square.

Lately though, like from the beginning of summer, I've been feeling this compulsion to knit selfishly.  As in, knit for me.

To that end, I find I have no fewer than 5 shawls in various stages.

Behold.

Each one has a story behind it (of course).

Some are recent projects and some have surfaced from the depths.

Some are still mere concepts. 

One, though.  One has really got me going. We're talking knit like the wind.

More to come.  Really.

Galena

We're back.  With the realization that we didn't have to send the Lord Protector off to college this summer came the further realization that we could take a vacation.  In our typical johnny-come-lately fashion, the epiphany came late in the season, but early enough to get away to Galena for a long Labor Day weekend.

I do love Galena.  It's familiar enough that there's no rush or pressure to see the sights and shops before we have to leave.  We find something new and visit old favorites each time we go.  I hadn't realized how much I've missed it the past few years.

Best of all, there was knitting.

My Sister and I are knitting for the Welcome Blanket project.  

We opted for a variation of Mason-Dixon Kay's Cornerstone Blanket (Ravelry pattern page). The blankets need to be 40" square. We did some rough and ready math and decided we could do 4 10"squares.  Let's pause here and think about this, shall we?  Anyone notice the fundamental arithmetical error in that plan?  Very good. We're talking area, 2-dimensions, not linear measurement.  Four 10" squares will only make up one side of a 40" inch blanket. 


At first I thought we could take the original four squares to make up one corner, then knit two 20" squares and 4 more small squares.  If we set them up diagonally, it might look like we planned it that way all along.

Instead we went more with Kay's original design and made the squares bigger.  Thank heavens for My Sister, who not only assembled the blankets, but remembered to take pictures and send them to me.


I did knit a Cornerstone Blanket several years ago, but completely failed to include any details.  Frustrating when I was trying to remember what I did and how. So, for the record. The yarn is Liberty Wool Print by Classic Elite.  These latest squares are in Ripple and Wave with Bleach for the framing miter.  Knit on US9/5mm Addi Turbo needles.

On a different charitable front. Wait. Hmm. I don't know that I've written about this. We do a Christmas Market.  Okay, so it's in November; handmade markets can't compete with Black Friday and online e-tailers. We have to get our licks in early. For this coming market Earlier this year I knit a mouse.  Well, It started out as a rabbit, but I didn't like the dark charcoal gray yarn and the ears were giving me problems anyway so changed him to a mouse. It was fiddly but fun.

Fun enough that I decided I could knit a rabbit, too.  After all, the mouse needed a friend.

And I promise I will find those pictures. Soon. Right.

A Carousal of Color

It's been so long since I've written anything here that I can't remember if this has ever come up. I am, also, disinclined to go spelunking into the deep recesses of the blog to find out.  In fact, it's been so long since I've posted that I had to write this entry out longhand on paper. (Shut up. I'm old. I know how to write cursive and I'm allowed.)

I should also probably note that, for all this purports to be a knitting blog, this post is not about knitting. It does have lots of yarn though.

The problem is color. I'm not good at it.  I love it, but I am not good at it.  In my head it's one thing. Then I am confronted by reality and it's something else again (the Barney shawl comes to mind).   For reasons of it's own, reality never conforms to my imagination so I usually play it safe:  reds, blues, neutrals, maybe a quiet or dark green. Yet here I've gone and committed to a Circle of Friends Afghan, inspired by the exuberantly colored ones I've found on Ravelry and Pinterest.

I should probably note here (full disclosure and all that) that I have a lot of yarn.  When I start on something as big as an afghan, I feel compelled to at least try and shop the stash.  That way I can feel all virtuous and economical about what I'm making.  Factor in that an afghan made for someone other than me has to be washable.  Given my aversion to acrylic yarn, that means super wash wool.

My choices for non-variegated, non-indie-dyed, or non-self-striping superwash were surprisingly limited.  I didn't have any; the Princess only had some. Dumping out her collection yielded lots of grey and light blue, a fair bit of dark blue, a couple skeins each of green and orangish-brown and one of bright yellow. Not what I would call a happy combination.  Also, not enough yarn. 

Back to our story.  I went shopping.  Looking at what I had in the context of what I needed, I decided on the grey, as the most neutral, for the background. That left me with five colors for the squares - an awfully limited palette. I further decided I needed eight colors (mostly based on the advice from this blogger's post).  I then decided (so much decision here!) I needed contrast and balance.  I had three cool colors and two warm ones.  I went looking for one additional blue-to-green and two reds (since I had a yellow and an orange).  So far so good.  In theory, it all should work out. When the new yarn came and I piled the all the skeins up, I thought they played well together.  

Then came the hard part.  Individually, I'm not sure that some of the skeins play together at all.  In fact, I'm pretty sure they fight.  I begin to fear that the best I can hope for is detente but that what I am most likely to get is a sort of grudging surliness.  

Determined not to let my yarn defeat me, I decided to make a truly unappealing square.  Behold. 

The yellow turns the fresh green nasty.  The dark blue is too strong a contrast to the yellow.  The light blue looks wishy-washy and words fail me when I consider the juxtaposition of the orangish-brown and the purple. Yet, if this is the ugliest I can achieve -- and I confess I find a certain appeal in its very lack of appeal -- I begin to think I might pull this off after all. 

I've lived with the square for a few days now. I will be unraveling it in due course, not because of the infelicitous color combination, but because I've since made a design decision.  The navy and orange sections are actually made up of two rounds each.  The first is single crochet with chain stitch spaces, then double crochet worked into the spaces on the following round.  I'm going to change that foundation row (the single crochet and chain one) to a contrast color, picking up the yarn from one remove.  So, the green repeated after the yellow and the dark blue after the light blue.

I did have the good sense to make up a sample using this scheme before I undid the original square.  I think I'm on to something here. 

For the record, and lest I forget:

Pattern - Circle of Friends Square by Priscilla's Crochet, designer Priscilla Hewitt.

Yarn - Cascade 220 Superwash in 874 Ridge Rock (the grey), 1910Summer Sky Heather, 856 Aporto (the darkest blue), 882 Plum Crazy, 821 Daffodil, 208 Treetop (the green),  212 Picante (the orangish brown), 210 Deep Ocean (the mid blue),  and 879 Very Berry.

Hook - I/9-5.50 mm.

And Now for Something Completely Different

2016. Not knitting, but still pretty cool, right? And a sort of fiber art. I mean, after all, fabric is made from fiber.

A Santa for the Christmas Market.

The Prototype.

The one I meant to keep, but sold to the art teacher anyway.  At least she sent me pictures.

Because Knitting With US 11 DPNs is Such Fun

No, I haven't figured out what to do about the thumb yet. I've decided I deserve a break instead. Any sane person would opt for something the polar opposite of stockinette in the round (aka knit every stitch) with big yarn on big needles. A nice fingering weight shawl perhaps. Or a sweater.

But, you say, it's been so much fun knitting with bulky yarn or its equivalent on big fat needles.

Well. I never claimed to be a sane knitter. As a break from Lamb's Pride Bulky stockinette (aka knit every stitch) in the round on big fat needles, I have -

Kitty Pi. The second one actually. Knitting stockinette (aka knit every stitch) in the round with Cascade 220 doubled on - yes ma'am - big fat needles. Truly deeply boring. More boring than repeatedly knitting thumbs on Sasquatch mitts and ripping them out.

Just in case the monotony of that starts me fantasizing about using big fat DPNs for kindling, I also have a Garter Squish Blanket going (have I mentioned this one, I think I may have). 

It is garter stitch (hence the name, yes?) knit flat (again, aka knit every stitch) with Cascade 220 doubled on big fat needles. Addi turbo circulars here rather than dpns, but you say tomato, I say big red fruit that grows on a vine.

I may need to rethink my idea of alternate knitting.

All Thumbs

Way back when, in my first Stitches Midwest class, I made an oven mitt. Once I got home, I made a second one. Made of Lamb's Pride Bulky and knit on huge needles, they started out looking like something for the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, but after a couple of hot water washes zipped in pillow protectors, they felted down to a reasonable size.  They have been in constant use since then, the best oven mitts I have ever had. I am so enamored of them, that when a dear niece got married last spring, I made a pair for her.  It is time and past time to replace the original pair.  That, and I want  a pair in red and one in green for Christmas baking, since that store-bought (hey, I wasn't knitting back then) pair, the ones that only come out for a couple weeks each year, are also dying.

Just one problem.  I've lost the pattern. Twice. We got the original as a handout for the class. I lost it.  Early in 2013 I contacted the designer and bought a second copy.  Lost that one too (apparently the pattern never made it to a downloadable version, otherwise I would have the pattern on my computer).  When it came time to make the pair for the niece, I fudged from three other patterns I found on Ravelry (this one, this one, and this one) and the photos I had posted on the blog of the original pair.  They didn't any of them quite sync, but I took notes.

Just not, apparently, very good ones. So here I am, trying to recreate the pattern, because when I consider that I paid for it once as part of the cost of the class, and again (the designer charged $10) for the replacement hard copy, I feel I've paid enough.  Besides, somewhere along the line, I acquired a hard-copy of the same designer's pattern for felted mittens. I'd feel like an idiot contacting her again. 

I've got a picture of the cast-on, it's clearly 36 stitches. I've got pictures of the mitts before they were felted. I'm pretty sure I've got the right number of rows for the body of the mitt.  It's the thumb that I can't seem to get right.  It looks like I might have 13 stitches held from the thumb gusset.  But it might be 11. The mitten pattern says to pick up 7 stitches and then decrease by 4 until 4 stitches remain.  11 = 7 =18, not a multiple of 4.  I tried decreasing 2 and then by 4 until 4 remained. The thumb looked like a flattened ping-pong ball -  too short and too round.

You'll have to take my word.  I'm so out of touch with blogging that I forgot to document that screw-up. Just the carnage after.  

So I figured I'd try 13, since 13 + 7 = 20. That's divisible by 4.  Ripped back. Re-knit. Closer, but the thumb still  looks a little short and too wide, at least when I compare it to the original photo. 

See?

I figure the next step is to pick up just from the 3 stitches I cast on to bridge the gap over the thumb gusset and hope that I don't end up with huge gaps between the saved stitches and the picked up ones.  Or maybe I need to cast on the 7 stitches and then K2tog at the joins.  Or I could split the baby and cast on 5 stitches and see what happens. No matter what, I think I have to knit even for more than 6 rows (another direction grabbed from the plain mitten pattern).

I am keeping better notes and by the time I've knit six of these I hope I'll have worked out the kinks. Until then, I guess I'll go back and rip out the thumb again.

Prognosticating

I can see the future.

 

I foresee a Kitty Pi Bed in mine.

Something for Me

NB - Change date to 12/28/2015 if I ever publish this.

A few notes to the failure stories from last post. Then on to new adventures.

The gray scarf is almost done. I may not be able to hold onto it until next Christmas. It seemed like a reasonable plan in the midst of our El Nino December, but it's turned really unpleasant out there. The sleety, windy, icy, windy, snowy, windy variety of nasty. And did I mention windy?

Today's not-fun project is to frog the Raglan Sweater and reclaim the yarn. The debate is whether to frog the whole thing or try changing the yoke. This may be an intense debate. It could be that frogging will wait.

The tree skirt was at least a functional tree skirt, just not an embellished one. The giftee has instructions to return it when the season is over, but for the moment, I'm off the hook.

All of which means I'm going back to knitting for me. I got some fabulous yarn from My Sister. It's Verdant Gryphon Zaftig, a worsted weight blend of merino, cashmere and nylon. I have two skeins of it in Jade Eyed Bengal. I Googled Jade Eyed Bengal. It's a strange mix, but mostly tigers and Bengal kittens. None of which seem to have anything to do with the colors on the skeins I've got.

No matter. I have a pattern. I've had Leethal Knits' Betiko Shawl in my knitting patterns folder for over three years. Back then I was too intimidated by the casual instructions; it's more of a recipe for infinite variations than a cut-and-dried kind of pattern. Trolling through Ravelry's pattern search felt unusually uninspiring until Betiko came up. Not a lot of people have made it, but the ones who have write good things about it. It's enough for me.

I'm giving the "Wavy" version a try. The shawl starts with a sort of garter tab. One might say, an eXtreme garter tab. It's three inches wide, patterned, goes on for 24 to 32 inches and, by way of the clever use of a KFB increase followed by a short row gives you all the stitches you need for the main body of the shawl without having to pick any of them up.

I'm intrigued. It was tedious at the start, but as the pattern emerges (and as I internalize the repeats), it's getting fun. Well, fun-ish? Less tedious? Interesting, but in a good way? Most of all, it's for me. At last, some no-pressure knitting.

 Strangely, I can't seem to make myself take any pictures of these projects. It is a hard and fast rule that any blog without picture's is simple a rant.

So here are a couple more pictures of what I got at Stitches Midwest this year.  The red is Miss Babs something that is not Vlad.  I don't remember what and I'm not stash diving to find out.

The cream is a fabulous wool silk blend, from who I can't recall and of unknown colorway (see stash-diving comment above).  I can tell you that the pattern is Knitspot's Les Abeilles.

Edited to add.
P.S. You can see pictures of the scarf, sweater and tree-skirt in the previous post. 

P.P.S. If I read my own blog, I would be able to tell you about the Stitches yarn (Miss Babs Shiruku in Scarlet Letter (so, still not Vlad) and Seda Sock from Grinning Gargoyle in Petals).

Almost

I can't believe I did it.  Fell into the over-ambitious knitting for Christmas trap.   

It started out almost reasonably.  Having succeeded in NAtional KNIt a SWEater MOnth - not only participating but actually finishing a sweater (more about that later, to make up for not posting at all in November) - I decided I could make a sizable dent in the stash by knitting the sweater for the brother who asked for one back when I knit the Seamless Yoke Sweater for the Lord Protector. That would be the sweater that started in 2007 and finished in 2008.  

I was so flattered I went looking for yarn right away (the stash was much smaller seven years ago).  Seven years is a long time to hold onto a yarn.  So long that Rowan had discontinued it.  I bought lots of it, though, thinking about what a tall man he is. Scottish Tweed Aran  is (was?) a really heavy worsted, maybe even a heavy aran. Either way, I figured 1) heavy yarn means big needles equals fast knitting; 2) it's commercial yarn, not indie-spun or indie-dyed so no pooling or mis-matched skeins; 3) I knit a big honking sweater in less than a month, and would have done it in two weeks if I hadn't done the indie-dyer thing; 4) I had a month to Christmas, so I wasn't planning unrealistically; 5) the Lord Protecor had strict instructions to bring his sweater home from college, so I would have a template, as long as the new sweater matched the old sweater in size, I was golden.

It all went so wrong.  I may never trust Elizabeth Zimmermann again.  Admitedly, I went for the raglan rather than the shirt-yoke variation, but I still maintain the yoke should have come out the same size.  It didn't.

While I was living in happy delusion, I got an email that Their Father's goddaughter had found a tree-skirt. It's crochet, but I know how to do that. 

"Well," I thought, "crochet is fast and I still have weeks before Christmas." I figured I could finish both projects. It might be tight, but not irrational.  Besides the pattern is free.  Yes, it calls for acrylic yarn, but all the local big-box craft stores carry the product.  Except two of the colors had been discontinued and it turns out you have to get up pretty early - like October - if you want Christmas color yarn around here.  Okay, fine. I didn't really want to knit it in acrylic anyway. No problem. I have Rowan Pure Wool Worsted in almost every color I need and I can get the rest semi-locally.  The pattern calls for 316 yarn skeins.  The Pure Wool Worsted comes in 209 yard skeins. If I got 2 of the Rowan per each skein of acrylic, I'd have a generous plenty.

How then, when I should have had 100 yards left over, did I run out of the dark red three repeats from the end of the third to last row?

I should add.  When one is crocheting a circle, each round gets progressively longer. Ergo, therefore and Q.E.D. each round will take more time.  Factor in having to rip out the third to the last round (which, by the way used the most-yarn- and time- guzzling stitches I have ever some across), because of that yarn shortfall and perhaps you'll understand why the embroidery didn't happen.

You would think that between a sweater and a tree skirt I would have said enough.  Not so.  I decided I had to knit a scarf.  While powering away (as I thought) on the sweater, I realized I had never knit anything for one of my brothers. Admittedly, looking back, I think I got the idea for the scarf before I got the request for the tree skirt, but maybe not.  I do sometimes get chronologically challenged that way.  Anyway, once I had the idea the result was inevitable.  Not just that I would commence knitting a scarf but that I would fail to finish it.  I just didn't know about the inevitable failure bit until two days before Christmas and I still refused to admit it right up to the  point where I had to wrap the unfinished scarf still on the needles with it's ball of yarn still attached because I had no back-up gift.

Well. I certainly have a good start on next year's Christmas crisis presents.

I'm Ready

A couple days ago, Janet Avila of String Theory Yarn Co. sent off an email reminding knitters that November is NAtional KNIt a SWEater in a MOnth month. I've been all about sweaters lately, and I've decided it's time to run with the herd. Since the email came, I have spent ages trying to find the perfect yarn, hoping I could persuade myself into breaking the yarn budget on a really over-the-top sweater. Nothing sang to me. I faced the fact that I'm not really the over-the-top type. Then I realized that I could continue my slide down the Heidi Kirrmaier slope, and that if I did, I already I have the perfect yarn for the perfect pattern.

Way back when, in a fit of greed, I ordered a lot of (the now discontinued) Miss Babs Northumbria Aran.  At the time I only admitted to a box full. I'm still not coming clean, but suffice to say, I will have enough to knit a sweater for me and still have more than adequate yarn to complete the shawl (If the spirit should ever so move me. It should be noted that that photograph in that post, taken back in February 2012, is still an accurate depiction of my progress).

My current most favorite cardigan, beating out the fingering weight Vitamin D in the preceding post, is Heidi Kirrmaier's Fine Sand.  I have two finished and another one started.  That's news for another post or two.  I foresee Sweater V2.0 and V2.1 or something along those lines. Anyway. Fine Sand is a sport/DK/22 stitches-per-inch pattern.  Up until yesterday, I thought all my sweaters would be made from fingering to DK yarns.

Yesterday, the boiler failed.  Well, possibly the night before.  Not a quick fix either.  Something was leaking and needed to be replaced.  Even though the temperature here was in the 40's, it was cold enough inside to remind me why heavier sweaters and Chicago winters are like tea and cakes, needle and thread, milk and cookies. Aran weight yarn won't work for Fine Sand.  It will, though, for the companion cardigan - Quick Sand.

Not only that, it will give me a chance to try out my new Indian Lakes Artisans Made in Michigan Right Here in the USA hexagon shaped circulars (They came back to Stitches Midwest this year).

I'm winding and swatching and come Sunday, I'm casting on.

Sweater v1.0

I am trying to be inspired here.  If Kay and Ann can come back to blogging, surely there is hope for the patient, right?  And don't I want to keep said patient alive? Of course I do.  All of which makes the fact that I have knit three sweaters in the past six months and started two more and never mentioned a one of them in the blog, nothing short of reprehensible.

It started when I decided what I needed more than anything else in the world was a silk-blend sweater to wear to a spring wedding.  A careful examination on Ravelry led me to Heidi Kirrmaier and the Vitamin D Cardigan.  As an added benefit, I already had the pattern. I had bought it back in 2012. 

I spent I don't know how many mornings paging through the projects on Ravelry (there are a lot).  I did notice (probably around page 53 and/or Day 4) that the sweaters I liked best were knit with sock yarn, rather than the sport weight the pattern called for.  A thorough examination of the stash turned up nothing suitable. A great sale on Craftsy for Cascade Heritage Silk determined the yarn choice.  Too bad the color I wanted was out of stock.  Still, one must give credit where credit is due, and it was there that I decided the sweater would be knit in Heritage Silk or not at all.  I ended up with Cerulean  from the good folk at The Loopy Ewe (Good heavens. I checked. I ordered the yarn in March. I note that the Blog has absolutely no mention of yarn buying in March. Well, at least now I have a record of when the project started). 

In an astonishing exercise in discipline, I swatched. Even more astonishing, I got gauge (24 stitches and 32 rows/4 inches (US 6's). Most astonishing, I finished in time for the wedding. I knit like the wind, no mean feat for the world's slowest knitter.  The yarn was lovely to work with and the pattern one of the clearest and best written ones I have come across.  It made me a Heidi Kirrmaier fan for life.  And while I didn't wear the sweater to the wedding (too casual for formal wear, even with the beads I added to the cuffs and hem),

and am now regretting the beaded cast-off (too dressy for ordinary wear),  it ranks right up there with the three most favorite sweaters I ever knit. I did at least have it to wear at Stitches.

I will probably, someday,  remove the beads. 

 If only I didn't have to frog the front-and-neck trim so I can get them off the bottom hem.

Pattern: Heidi Kirrmaier's Vitamin D.
Yarn: Cascade Yarns Heritage Silk in Cerulean.
Needles: Addi US 6/ 4.0 mm for body, US 5/3.75 mm for the garter stitch trim at cuffs, hem and front and neck.

Inexplicable

I can't explain why I keep failing to buy anything from Miss Babs in Vlad's, but it happened again this year.  There's history here.

The first year that Miss Babs came to Stitches Midwest I saw a worsted weight Blue-faced Leicester yarn called Northumbria Aran in a color called Vlad's (Yes, as in Vlad Dracula.  It must have been the first of the big vampire-craze years).  It wasn't eye-searing or stop sign-ish, or washed-out or anemic. Put simply, it was, I thought, the best red I had ever seen.  I was determined, before that Market closed on the last day, I was going to get that yarn. Except I didn't. I got cold feet, or pre-emptive assumptive buyer's remorse, or something.

I regretted it for a whole year.  The next time Miss Babs came to Stitches, I went into the Market with the rock-hard determination that I would get me sweater quantities of that yarn. Except I didn't, again. That might have been the year someone got there ahead of me.  Yarn delayed is yarn denied, so I came up with a clever plan. I would order it from the website. I ordered Navy instead.  It's a wonderful yarn and a beautiful shade of blue.  Admittedly I haven't knit anything out of it yet.

Back to Stitches the following year.  I had given up the plan to buy vast quantities of the Northumbria Aran, but I was sure, sure, I would buy something in Vlad's, probably in Yowza! Whatta Skein!  That was the year almost every booth had a Color Affection Shawl on display.  The designer had used red in one of the pattern samples.  This was going to be easy.  So what did I end up with?  Yummy 3-ply in Denim, Wheaten and Deep Sea Jellyfish. It is my most favorite winter scarf.

This year?  Failed again, despite setting my sights a little lower.  I wasn't looking for sweater or afghan quantities of Vlad's in any weight this year.  This year I decided to finally treat myself to a replacement of the Knitspot  Les Abeilles Shawl I knit with one skein of Handmaiden Sea Silk in Ruby.  The one that it seems I alluded to only once and that briefly, and which came out approximately the size of a folded cowboy bandana. So yes, pretty much unwearable. I came to Stitches with a really unshakable plan to get two skeins of Vlad's in a wool/silk fingering weight so I could make the largest Les Abeilles that Anne Hanson had included in the pattern (800 yards).

I came away with two skeins of red Shiruku, a lovely 50/50 merino/silk fingering weight, just not in Vlad's.  It's called Scarlet Letter (so not my favorite 19th Century American Novel).  

And not for Les Abeilles. For that I bought two skeins of Seda Sock (also merino/silk fingering) in Petals from Grinning Gargoyle.

Maybe next year?

Red Letter Day

Important Day here at Chez WoolGathering. We've been counting down for months (since Christmas, really), then for weeks, finally for days.  Now it's here. The Pirate turned 26 today.

It's always been all about the party with him, hasn't it.

Seems like a long, long time

Remember this? The Barn Raising Quilt from Knitalong?  I decided when the book first came out that it was the perfect summer knitting project. Modular and therefore portable.  Sock yarn (something I hadn't had an excuse to stockpile, not yet having discovered fingering weight shawls) and therefore posing no risk of lap-full of worsted on a hot July afternoon.

It wasn't that big a project.  It still isn't, at the gauge I got. No more than 42 squares. Okay, maybe 48. Or 56. Anyway, given that the squares max out at 43 stitches per side, that once you've got your stitch markers in place (and have remembered to us an odd one to mark the start of the round) the knitting is self-correcting, and that the knitting is simple stockinette in the round, they just don't take that long to knit. A day, a day-an-a-half, tops.

Why then, one might wonder, have I been knitting on this since 2008 and still have only 16 squares finished? That would be because I haven't touched it since 2010, when I jokingly estimated 4 more summers to completion. What happened is, alas, a sad, sad tale of indecision and hand-dyed yarn, not in that order.

The last time I wrote anything about the Barn Raising Quilt, I referred to a serious dyelot issue, but claimed a happy ending.  I was unduly optimistic. Had the yarn at issue been any other than the colorway I had chosen to base the blanket on (on which I had chosen to base the blanket?) (A preposition is a perfectly good word . . .), I could have coped. Had the first two dyelots of Claudia Handpainted Fingering in Walk in the Woods been close, I could have coped. When the third dyelot, which I had bought directly from Claudia at the Fine Points booth at Stitches Midwest, and which (I thought) I had minutley compared to a knitted square in the original dyelot, didn't match, I called it three strikes and hid the project deep-deep in frustrated and rejected project-land until this summer.

This summer I am feeling brave.  This summer I am feeling capable.  This summer I really, really needed something to distract me from the disaster that overtook my home in the name of kitchen renovation.  Chaos everywhere meant I needed to impose order somewhere, so the Princess and I tossed the stash with an eye to String Theory's Stash Sale.  We didn't make it (although we'll be ready for next year), but I found most of the yarn from the original Barn Raising.  I still have some absentees -- the second of the original Walk in the Woods comes to mind, along with the tiny stitch markers I used on the tiny needles -- but by laying out the finished squares and the remaining skeins, I realized that I can make a pretty darn nice looking blanket, even if I can't base it on the Walk in the Woods Dyelot of My Dreams.

I've suffered one slight set-back.  I had planned on three squares per 50g/175 yard skein of Claudia Handpaints fingering (now known as Addiction).  As it happens, I come up about 9 rows and a bind-off short.  That safety pin marks the start of the new skein of yarn.

Make that two slight setbacks - some of the colorways have been discontinued (Claudia Handpainted in Taupe, the Shibui Knits in Pagoda and in Dragonfly), others are lost in the stash (the dark blue, which may be Claudia Handpainted Antique Jeans). Some are both ( the Claudia Handpainted in Jungle).

Poor me.  I had to buy more yarn. Since I've learned my lesson from the Walk in the Woods disaster, I'm  not even going to attempt to match the absent yarns.

Instead I'm trying three completely new colors: Rubies Playing, Honey and Mushroom Hunting.  All Claudia Handpainted Addiction. The plan (I always need a plan, don't I?) is to knit one square of each color, see if any of them work, and go from there.

That, or I'll scout Fine Points booth at Stitches again this year and come away with a fourth Walk in the Woods dyelot.

The Saga Continues

I bet you thought I'd be done with the kitchen by now. I know I did.

This was such a limited excursion into remodeling. We had to replace the (original, cast-iron, ca. 1920) pipes, but why install the replacements in the same place, the middle of the room?

 As long as we were putting new in, why not put them in in someplace that makes sense? Like an existing perimeter wall. Then just put things back. That's all. No big deal.  I figured 3, maybe 4 weeks, tops. Yet here I am and the carpenters are only just getting here to re-install the last of the cabinets, fit the last of the counters, oh, and fix that 8" by 30" hole in my floor, the one left when the pipes got pulled out.

It's all compromises at this point. Not being a big enough project to demand the full time and attention of any given contractor on any given day -- well, except for the plumbers who got to play with all that brand new copper pipe -- the whole take apart and reassemble bit has been fit in between other, bigger projects from other crankier more demanding, less tolerant clients than I am.  I'm holding hard to the knowledge that once this round is finished, I'll only have to get the drywall people back in to paint and we'll be done, at least as done as I'm willing to take the project for now.

Because there will be more. The floor looks awful.  That's the kindest thing that can be said for it.  It's all going to have to come out, if for no other reason than that it's higher than the rest of the floors. And while we do now know that there is actual hardwood flooring (probably maple, possibly oak) under the ½"+ layers of linoleum tile and sub-flooring, it's damaged and I don't know if it will be salvageable. Even if it is, the floor itself waves like a child's drawing of the ocean, partly due to the steel beam that runs beneath the middle of it.

In order to take the floor out, we have to uninstall the cabinets. The few that we removed amply demonstrated that even heavy duty carpenter's glue does not last forever.  It doesn't even last 30 years.  I'm quite sure that trying to shift the cabinets so we could get all the way down to the original floor would mean I wouldn't have any cabinets left. Since I have no idea what I want to replace them with, this would not be good.

So, all in all, I suppose it's not a bad thing to live with this new floor plan for a while.  I had been thinking we'd shrink the kitchen by a few feet and build in yarn storage a closet.  Their Father, however, has decided he likes the feel of a kitchen this size.

I'll just have to knit faster.

Which reminds me. There has indeed been knitting through all this. In addition to the Grown-up Walt, I have finished a Churchmouse Before and After Scarf in Handmaiden Sea Silk, and a Vitamin D Sweater in Cascade Hertiage Silk and I am two-thirds of the way through the Fine Sand Sweater in Madelintosh Worsted (yes, the original stuff, before it was called Tosh DK), in Tart. The sky has been so uncooperative that I haven't bothered with pictures.That, and I have no idea where the camera is.

Maybe I'll have found it by next time. Maybe next time I'll even talk about knitting.

Phase 2

It's been a week of  peace here at Chez WoolGathering.  Well, I say peace.  No contractors since the stove hook-up. Well, I say no contractors.  Three came in to give estimates to repair the demolition done by water damage and the installation of the new pipes, but their visits were short and didn't involve any noise, dust, or relocation of major portion of our living space.  By my lowered standards, they don't count. Other areas of life burst forth like 5-year-olds denied recess, but most of that has now settled down, too.  Just in time for the next wave of contractors.

They're looking at tearing out between 64 and 100 square feet of my kitchen ceiling. It sounds like a lot, doesn't it?  I've done the math, though. Several times.  That's what an 8' to 10' square area comes out to.  That's a sizable chunk of my ceiling.  The kitchen itself only measures 15' by 19', with a cut out for the small bathroom hall.

It's surprising how disturbing it feels to sit here typing, listening to chunks of my ceiling hit the floor while the workmen mutter things like, "Oh, man." and "Look at that." I begin to wonder if more of my ceiling is coming down than expected, and I expected a lot.

I tell myself that this is the worst part.  Once this is over, we'll move on to putting things back together. Then the noise will, not abate, but at least change. From thunks and crashes to sawing and hammering and sanding.

Any guesses about what I've been doing to soothe my nerves and soften my flinches?

Ta-da! It's Super Walt. Or Walt all grown up. It's big.  Taller than the Lord Protector.  Almost as handsome as he is. 

Cast off.  Not really finished, because of all those ends to weave in - the curse of wide-striped blankets. Not washed/blocked yet either.  Sweet Georgia Superwash is a very round, tight, almost hard yarn to knit with, but experience has taught me that it will soften up considerably once it meets water.

Pattern: The Walt Painted Chevron Baby Blanket (substantially enlarged).
Yarn: Sweet Georgia Superwash Worsted in Nightshade (MC), Silver (CC1), Slate (CC2) and just a touch of Cypress, with a little bit of Madelinetosh Ink filling in where I ran out of yarn for the last of the narrow navy stripes. Fifteen skeins altogether.
Needles: Addi Turbos, US 9/5.5mm.

Maybe I'll start a sweater now, as long as the ceiling is still falling.