Change of Heart

I haven't said much about the Afghan for Afghans shawl lately. It is deserving of more. When even my brain feels cross-eyed with cables and graph paper, it's a refuge of sanity and simplicity. Not only that, and even better, it has ceased to be the Red Shoes Project. I admit I was still a bit queasy over the color scheme, even after adding the red stripe. Once the wide (ish) green swath was in place, I was much happier with it.

So happy that I'm willing to share the recipe.

Directions for the "I Did It My Way (and I'm not a Frank Sinatra Fan)" Shawl.

Choose your yarn and circular needles. I'm using Unique Sheep Super Wool in Evergreen for the base and an assortment of Dale of Norway Tiur (the pink) and Baby Ull (the rest of the colors) for the stripes.

Swatch (sorry, but it's necessary).

Do the math (sorry, sorry). Stitches per inch from the swatch times the length or width of your shawl (depending on how you want the stripes to run).

Choose the kind of border you want and cast on. I used the crochet cast-on -- because I like the way it makes the cast on edge match the bind-off -- and an odd number of stitches -- because I wanted a seed stitch border (or is it moss stitch over an odd number and seed over an even?) that began and ended with a knit stitch -- and cast on 301 stitches for the length of the shawl so my stripes would run horizontally.

Knit your border - garter, rib or moss/seed stitch. I did 5 rows of moss stitch.

Knit in stockinette, maintaining a 5 stitch border at each side until you can't stand using the same yarn anymore. Add a stripe. I made it for about 3 inches. Here's the part where you see why you needed to use circular needles. It wasn't just for the huge stitch count. Slide back to the base color. Knit a row. Add another stripe. Slide to the other end. Knit a row. Continue for as many stripes as you want. Make the stripes farther apart by knitting more rows of the base color and carrying the contrast yarn up the side. Make wider stripes by knitting more than one row of the contrast.

Make up the pattern as you go along, repeat in it reverse once you've reached the half-way point.

One word of warning. If you go for the single row of contrast color, when you slide your yarn over, if you keep doing K1, P1, K1, P1, K1 for your border, it's going to get out of whack. Sometimes you're going to have to do P1, K1, P1, K1, P1, so look at your stitches. Remember that, for mos stitch to work, you need to knit into the purl stitches and purl into the knit stitches. I don't want to discuss how many stripes I went through and how many times I dropped down to fix the border before I figured that out.

It's knit. The ends are woven in. It's blocking. I'll send it off to San Francisco as soon as it's dry.

Wonder what I'll find next to help me avoid The Cable Project.

Friday's Inspired Silliness on Saturday

Mason Dixon-have a lot to answer for. Kay introduced Matt (it's the July 9 post). I've spent way too much time watching him dance across the world. Then I spent way too much time playing on Youtube. We haven't had overt, pointless goofiness here for a while. I found this classic.



Why? Because!

S(p)inning

Oooh! Presents.



If one is participating in a bi-monthly yarn club that has 7 mailings, one of the mailings is going to arrive earlier than every two months. The s(p)in that arrived early? Sloth. This amuses me.

It's a rather - interesting- collection this month. I like each yarn. The one on top is a little bit of black angora for lining (one of the patterns has ear-flaps). The other two are Footprints yarn in Siesta Fiesta (the multicolor) and Studmuffin (the brown) by Unique Sheep.

I quite like the slouchy, sloppy, slothful hat pattern (not the one on the front so much, there's one inside called "Path to Purgatory" for those of us disinclined to do the "work of atonement" the featured hat requires). I'm just not sure I like them all together.

The little extra treats are always fun. The tin that will someday house part of my stitch marker collection has "Slothful" tea (green tea, chamomile, peppermint, and catnip). The logo pin is for my knitting bag, but will probably come to live on my kitchen bulletin board. My favorite is the little post-it pad. When I lined up the shot above, I hadn't given the package as thorough an investigation as I should have (evidence of more sloth?). While I was playing with it all over coffee this morning I found this.

A rainbow sloth.

Take all these goodies and factor in the current Chicago July weather -- 90's and very, very (did I mention very?) humid -- and I just may have found a deadly sin I can take to heart.

Wild Fiber

Come inside Galena's Main Street Yarn store, Fiber Wild. Right next door to the Quilt Shop (Phat Quarters) and across the street from the Needlework shop (The Timeless Needle, Ltd.). I turned the camera over to Marco. He was very thorough.

Fiber Wild has original patterns and knitted gifts.

Fiber Wild has spinning supplies and their own brand of yarn.

Fiber Wild had kits made up. These came with a skein of Claudia Hand Paints.

I created my own kit. Their pattern (yes, that's a cable) plus their yarn (Wild Sox Handpaint) and a handmade, felted, embroidered, wool pincushion. Perfect.

I know. I only went a little wild. It was fun, though.

Running Away from Home

We've been in Galena. Himself had a conference. It was wonderful and not like being in Illinois at all. For one thing, Galena goes up. The Illinois I know, Eastern Illinois, doesn't.

I've never been in a Midwestern city where the streets were connected by stairs.

We did all the geeky tourist things: Grant's home, lunch in town, the Old Firehouse stairs, the local bookstore. Galena has trolleys, although we never managed to get to the trolley stop at the right time.

The Galena History Museum was my personal favorite. Did you know 9 Union Civil War generals were from Galena? That Galena made it's money from lead and zinc mining? That the original of Thomas Nast's (of Santa Claus fame) painting of Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox is on the second floor of the museum? Well. good for you. I sure didn't. All of that and you can humiliate persuade your kids and take a Civil War picture.

We peered down an actual lead mine shaft that predates the building - when the museum/mansion was built as a private residence, they threw the construction debris down the shaft. One of the docents said it took an act of Congress to get the shaft re-opened.

I can hear you in my mind's ear, jittering with impatience. "This is all well and good, but what about the important stuff? What about yarn?"

Tomorrow. You'll just have to wait until tomorrow.

Breaking Through

Maybe. Sort of. I bet you've all been wondering if any real knitting on the Blessingway Blanket was ever going to happen. The problem, at least the latest one, is this bit. That loop that extends into the tip of the triangle.

That's actually, from a knitting point of view, the conjunction of a closed ring cable with a travelling cable. Once I'd spent way too much time trying to chart a flat oval cable (cable patterns tend to be tall or round), I spent way too much more time trying to convince myself that I could cross the cable and do the increases for the closed ring at the same time. I finally realised I couldn't. Maybe someday, years and years down the road, but not now. Besides, I'm getting kind of tired of it - the swatching and the not knitting.

Which brings us to the sort of, maybe, breakthrough. Novel thought. Why not get the travelling cable in place and then do the increases? So obvious, isn't it? Eh. Sometimes I have to use a big brick.

I can't help noticing that the swatch doesn't pull in and flare out like the blue bit does. I'm wondering, at my level of skill (Minimal. Ambitious, but minimal.), instead of attempting the clever combination of increases and decreases that Hannah Cuviello used to maintain the same stitch count over the whole motif, if I tried the method used by Elsebeth Lavold and Alice Starmore and only did one set of increases at the start and one set of decreases at the end, could the triangle be persuaded to stay more of a triangle?

Here I have to stop a moment and enshrine my new knitting deity, Elsebeth Lavold. She figured out how to do cable increases over 4 stitches. Of course, moving the travelling cable and charting the flat oval loop on a 4 stitch base means my charting is no good anymore. I'm wondering, too, if I can't find a way to tuck the closed ring cable under the travelling cable right there at the start. I see one more chart and one more swatch in my future.

Oh, and one more thing.

I've changed the color.

Incentives

Another diversionary post. Bear with me. I have a number of interconnected ideas that I want to write about. Sort of a Six Degrees of Separation thing, or possibly the result of the intertwined thinking produced by extended contemplation of cable patterns.

First, there's the "Why hasn't anyone charted a triangle?" issue. On which enough has been said, yes? Once I've got an insurmountable opportunity like that not only renting space in my head, but settling n for a prolonged stay, I realize I need something to look forward to.

Furthermore, when one is convinced that one's knitting is from hunger, one's best friends may turn out to be one's knitting books. Unless, of course, there's a dearth of cable books in your knitting library.

Which leads to the way knitters have of recognizing real desperation and coming out of the woodwork to encourage, suggest, reassure, and point you to a new resource or two.

There are the resources themselves. This time, Alice Starmore and Elsebeth Lavold (thank you, Jess). No, they didn't chart triangle cables ( a piece of knitting I'm realising doesn't exist for a reason), but they, along with Barbara Walker, give you the tools (At least, I think they do. Until I achieve triangle cabledom, the jury is still out.).

If you've been reading for a while, you know that Clare spent the last nine months, with the exception of a little over a week at Christmas, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

Note that Norwich is in Norfolk, which is on the coast of the North Sea, from which fishermen get fish. The same fishermen who wear Arans and ganseys.

Now, go back to Alice Starmore and Fishermen's Sweaters.

You know I'm going to have to find someone to knit this for.

Progress Report

I keep thinking I'm going to have exciting cable news to give you and I keep being wrong. Perhaps not so much wrong as there keeps being more. One thing leading to another. Confusions and convolutions sprouting and intertwining like kudzu. In fact, it's rather like my pantry last week. I keep getting close. It's just that, every time I think I've solved one problem (the elongated cable I need for inside the tip of the triangle, for example),

some new twist smacks me upside the head

(as in, now I have to cross this thing?).

So, instead let me reassure you that the expanding universe (alpineflower's theory and my favorite) known has The Pantry has contracted, but left a gift. Behold, the advantage of having to spread out newspapers to drain the myriad artifacts once the dust of ages has been removed. Have you seen this?

Clever English-style knitter supplies rock bands with custom made guitars. (Not really. I looked it up. It's about a New England senior citizens chorus that covers rock hits. I like my story better. )

Applied Science

The law of the conservation of matter states that, in a closed system, matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Lomonsov and Lavoisier have never visited my pantry. I'm cleaning it out. I have been cleaning it for days (weeks, months, years). I begin to believe I will continue to clean it until the sun falls into the ocean.

I should explain, once upon a time, when this planet was young (that is, before we bought the unit), it was a pantry. Since I've had control over it, it has been storage. We call it the pantry out of courtesy -- rather like one refers to a former admiral as "Admiral" -- but it hasn't held comestibles (unless you count cat food) for, well, a long, long time.

Further, let me state, it has so been cleaned since my children have been born. I know this because among the items on the upper shelves is the pink and white building block planter which screams baby gift (as does the blue with white polka-dots baby-diaper-shaped one that says "BOY" and the blue ceramic vase with white clouds). They would never have made it above my reach if I hadn't cleaned at the point where I couldn't bear to throw them away, but couldn't imagine what else to do with them.

It cannot be denied, however, that this project has taken on aspects of an archaeological dig. How to explain to your 13 year old that what looks like a fishbowl complete with marbles in the bottom was, in its day, that de rigeur accessory, the over-sized flower bowl as featured at the time in Apartment Life (now Metropolitan Home)? When your 21 year old cocks an eyebrow at you, aren't you compelled to explain that no one, no one, throws away Tupperware? That once upon a time, you used those barbecue tools and that that explains the three started bottles of charcoal lighter fluid?

If the law of conservation really works, how did I, the mother of 3 children, come to own 7 sand buckets but only 2 shovels? Five bubble tumblers but only 4 bubble wands? Two squirt guns (did I allow two siblings to gang up on the third)? The pantry can't be more than 4 by 6 feet. Even if you allow for the 10 foot ceilings, I can't see how, emptied, it can fill two rooms.

There was a plan (isn't there always?). The original plan was to haul out anything that hadn't seen the light of day for over a year and send it off to Salvation Army, thus freeing up space for the stuff that, having spilled off the radiator covers, now occupies various corners of the floors.

Then that dangerous word, "just," started being bandied about. In scary sentences like, "Well, let's just empty the top shelves and strip the old shelf paper." "You know, if we just moved this rolling shelf, we could wash that wall." "If we just empty the big, free-standing shelf, we could patch those cracks." "I'm thinking, we could stop at the Ace and just pick up a bucket of paint."

If navigating the unit wasn't unlike attempting to thread a maze, I might think this an elaborate ruse to duck my knitting, all of which I despise at the moment. To protect my credibility as a knitting blogger, here's the obligatory picture.

This is where it sits at the moment. It will continue to sit here for a while.

The pantry is emptied, spackled, sanded, primed and, as God is my witness, the final coat of paint goes on this morning. Just in time for me to try to organize tomorrow's parade. Then maybe I'll be able to knit again.

Of course, there's always the possibility that my pantry isn't a closed system at all. That it is, in fact, a portal to another system. Obviously, one that manufactures plastic children's toys.

Just Walk Away

Do you know the fairy tale, The Red Shoes? It's the one where the little girl buys red shoes that compel her to dance, will she, nil she. No matter what, once the red shoes are on her feet, it seems her feet have a mind of their own. Rather grim, really.

It's been like that with the green shawl. It's not working. I know it's not working, Yet I keep adding to it. The rose turned it into the Baby Bop shawl? I'll add a set of blue stripes. The green fought with the blue, bruised it, and brought out purple overtones (don't anyone dare say "Barney," here)? I'll add a set of yellow stripes. No matter how many times a seeming inspiration strikes and then falls over gasping pathetically, I keep knitting.

It's undeniable. The green yarn doesn't play well with others. It's a prima donna. A soloist, not an ensemble member. An isolationist, not an ally.

Then again, maybe if I add some red.

Why do I feel that, like a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, this isn't going to end well?

The Object is to Go Home"

"And be safe."



I hope you're safe at home, too. Thank you Mr. Carlin.

Subject Change.

No, it's not going well and no, I don't want to talk about it (the sooner one of you charts a triangle the better). Diane sent me an email about the latest Afghan for Afghans initiative. Mason-Dixon blogged about it. I need to escape from Cableland. That's what I call a fortuitous concatenation of events (I've been doing my "Free Rice." Can you tell?).

You can get the details from Afghans for Afghans, but the short version is, they want rectangular shawls, 20 to 24 inches wide, 60 to 80 inches long, not open-work, and they want them (probably) by mid to late July. Somewhere along the way, I read that green is a good color in Afghanistan. I ordered my yarn from Eat. Sleep. Knit. (More points for my Yarn Marathon. I'm in 38th place.)

It's Unique Sheep Super Wool in Evergreen.

I thought I was all set. A nice rectangular stockinette shawl, I thought. One with a nice seed stitch border (I'm quite liking the look of the border on the cable project that we're not mentioning today). It will be prime movie-night knitting, I thought. I could watch any number of High Adventure Boy Movies and not miss a yarn over.

Except then there's me and green. This has never been a good combination. I got bored. I decided that colorful would be better, or at least more endurable. Clare recommended rose. When none of the five shades of pink yarn that turned up when I tossed the stash was deemed acceptable, I took advantage of Tricia's Yarn Harlot sale and went down (through road repair on Cicero Avenue, I might add) in search of rose. If you were me, wouldn't you have been happy with this?

Dale of Norway Tiur in 4425.

Yes, the shawl is still a little dull. Nevertheless, I fully intended to persevere until Clare commented that it was a good thing it was going to Afghanistan.

"Why?" I wondered. She responded, "Baby Bop."

Subject change.

Experiential Learning

Experience 1.

Barbara Walker's closed ring cables require an odd number of stitches between cables. Had I been paying closer attention when I knit the first blue bit, I might have noticed this. As it was I didn't, so I charted mine out with an even number, 4 to be precise. This brought actual knitting to a screeching halt when I tried to knit the first row of stitches in the cable. Let me introduce chart 2.

Lesson learned: No battle plan survives the first encounter with the enemy.

Experience 2.

Just because the small closed ring cable (that's the one made with a 2-stitch cable from the Third Treasury) calls for 13 stitches, that doesn't mean you can start the cable once you've got 13 working stitches. If your triangle is going to travel across your knitting at a rate of roughly 3 stitches per row, and your knitting is only increasing 1 stitch per row, you're going to run out of stitches.

Lesson learned: It may not survive the second encounter, either. Note that I did not, however, need to be told a second time to swatch in wool.

Are you sure none of you have done this already? I'm perfectly willing to indulge in a more didactic learning experience.

Off the Deep End

I don't own either of the books Jess recommended. My local bookstore didn't have them in stock. So.

I guess now I have to try to knit from this.

I'm a little nervous. Make that absolutely wild-eyed. Very nearly spitless. I have no idea if I've been consistent in my notation. I'm clueless about that elongated bit (the part where the notation descends into question marks). I take some reassurance from the fact that Barbara Walker has a symbol for taking a two stitch cable across 3 stitches, but I wonder if it will actually work. I'm not even sure I will remember what I was trying to do when I get there, wherever "there" ends up being. Vertigo at apogee.

Clare suggests a nice, sturdy wool.

Ambitious Knitters Want to Know

No, really. No one has charted a cable that looks like this? Or rather, one quarter of this. I especially want the pattern for the sideways parts. Wouldn't they be perfect for the blue bits?

Okay, what about this one? Of course, you'd have to tip it.

No? Not one?

Anyone want to?

Separated by a Common Language

For the past nine months I've been taking English Lessons.

Gas is petrol.
The exit sign says "Way Out."
A trunk is a boot.
A truck is a lorry.
Tea is not just to drink.
A cookie is a biscuit.
A muffin is a teacake (I think).
A camper is a caravan.
"Watch your step" is "mind the gap."
A bake sale is a cake stall.
The mail is the post.
Cots are camp beds.
The railroad is the railway.
Fries are chips and chips are crisps.
Dessert is pudding, unless dessert is fruit(?).
Lunch is dinner and dinner is supper.
Moms with strollers are mums with pushchairs.
A drug store is a chemist.
Then there's pyjama, honour, colour, sympathise, realise.
Worsted originated in Worstead, Norfolk.

Clare comes home tomorrow.

Here I thought labo(u)r was finite.

The Blue Bit

I'm having reservations. It's the blue triangle that's not a triangle. I knew, in the higher level, intellectual sense, that the triangles were knit at a 90 degree angle to the rest of the blanket. I told myself this was okay. Sleeves are knit at 90 degree angles to the body of a sweater and they work. Looking at the photos, I could see there was some distortion, but I thought I would be okay with it, that it would add to the charm and uniqueness of the whole project.

Now? I'm not so sure.

I'm thinking, if I could find a triangle-shaped cable, I could just use the instructions for the increases from the white parts, carry them up to the apex of the triangle and then follow the decrease instructions down the other side. Then all the knitting would line up and maybe, perhaps, the overall silhouette wouldn't look so - distorted. Maybe, perhaps, the piece would be triangular instead of trumpet-shaped.

Then there's the recurring memory I have of Clare telling me to avoid any plans that include the words, "I'll just." Still, maybe I'll swing by Chix With Stix for an extra skein of Blue Sky Dyed Organic Cotton in Sky. Just, you know, for practice (note how the two words don't occur in the same sentence).

Anyone have a source for a triangular cable?

Not Rational at All. Really.

You may have noticed that posts were a bit thin on the ground last week. That would be because I couldn't knit anything right.

My latest Barn Raising Quilt square? No matter how many times or how far back I ripped and re-knit and ripped and re-knit, I ended up two stitches over on one side. I'm still not sure if I kept making the same mistake at the same place over and over or kept failing to rip back far enough. Final score? Down by 12. I'm left with 25 stitches per side from 37 out of 43, so I thought I was close (just to add to the indignity).

If the color wasn't so beautiful. I suspect I would have tossed this, far and violently.

My victory dance over the green cable panel for the Altered Blessingway Blanket? Premature.

Why am I having such difficulty with a lousy 3 stitch seed stitch border? Right now I'm trying to persuade myself it's an opportunity to see if I'm happier adding a new convolution to my already twisted attempt to make the ends match. Instead of leaving the decreases as paired k2tog (the substitution I made for the ssk or p2tog/k2tog pairing the pattern called for), now I can see if I like it better as k2tog/ssk.

Somehow, these demonstrations of my complete lack of knitting virtuosity led me to the corner motifs for the Blessingway Blanket. No I don't know what I was thinking. In fact, I cannot say I was thinking, at all. I question whether applied intelligence, or even sense, was involved.

While hoping for miracles from blocking (those long stretches of cable are decidedly wonky), I have serious doubts about my ability to transform this into a corner, with its implicit 90 degree angle. Still, one down.

Of course, that means one to go, doesn't it.

Not as Fed Up as I Thought I Was

The green panel is done.

I apparently did something wrong at the very beginning, so when I came to the final shaping instructions, the ends didn't match. And they kept on not matching. They didn't match several times last night. They didn't match again this morning. My chart and my book are all marked up with some of what I tried. The rest of what I tried was strictly seat of my pants knitting. Wing and a prayer knitting. Hail Mary pass knitting. Mostly it involved changing pattern p2tog's and ssk's for k2tog's (there must be something very wrong with the way I do ssk, even when I think I'm doing them right).

I'm still not actually happy with it. I'm thinking I should have switched the pattern k2tog's for ssk's but I don't think I can bear to rip it out again. I mentioned the possibility to Himself and he looked at me like I had sprouted a second head. He thinks the ends match. I've decided it's his call. The green panel is done.

Now I have a decision to make. Have I earned a respite and can I go knit the easy panels with a clear conscience? Or should I suck it up, tackle the corner motifs and then allow myself to slide into simplicity?

I'm leaning to get the hard over with and call it done like the Cubs in mid-season, (Don't start. I grew up on the West Side. I'm a Cub's fan. One sunny June afternoon I sat through 17 innings to watch them lose. I am grounded in reality). After all. I am now the proud possessor of Melissa Leapman's Cables Untangled. She has a diagram of a double increase in knit that I should be able to apply to my nemesis, the double increase in purl. Between that and the Knitsmith's photographs (thank you, thank you, thank you), surely I can get it right this time?

Meanwhile, in my head I've been preparing a rant. An anti-cable rant. I thought cables were going the way of two color knitting and lace. You can show me Fair Isle till the cows come home, waft lace in front of me from sunup to sundown. I am unmoved. Bohus knitting? Could care less. Clapotis? Wedding Ring shawl? Nope. The only exceptions are the Bubbly Lace curtain and the Rovaniemi mitts. Otherwise, I wouldn't touch either type with tongs.

So as I cursed and wrestled my way through this panel, it was with the assumption that I would finish this piece, get the remaining panels out of the way (strictly as an exercise in discipline and promises kept; I had no thought of pleasure in the project), and shake the dust of cables from my shoes.

I am, therefore, somewhat discomfited to realise that in looking at the Kaya Aran Shrug (it's free) over at Crystal Palace/Straw.com (and you, oh Kelly Green Rogue, are so to blame for posting it to your Ravelry queue), I'm intrigued. To my further bemusement, on a final art supply project run to Michael's for John, I came home with this.

It has cabled dishcloths, and that's why I bought it.

It turns out the end of my rope is farther away than I thought it was. Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. After all, what's a synonym for rope?

I Can Knit For Miles and Miles

I can knit for miles and miles. (I finished the repeat.)

I can knit for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles. (I don't have to use this chart ANYMORE.)

You can sing along if you want. (Think The Who, or that Honda commercial)