Stripy, Stripy, Stripy

I don't even quite remember how it happened. I think I saw this cowl somewhere (ravelry? pinterest?) and fell in love. Then Knit Picks was having a sale on some of their Chroma. Then I was talking with a friend and we were discussing possible colorways.

Anyhow, this happened.

Bad Blood Cowl (mine ravelled here),

knit in Artist's Palette Smoothie Sock in 1079SS

and Knit Picks Chroma Fingering in Dear Diary

I used just over one skein of the Smoothie Sock and not quite two balls of the Chroma. The pattern suggests just knitting until you run out of the 100 gram skein of each, but I knit a bit more than that to get it the length I wanted.

It's an easy pattern. It starts with a provisional cast on of 107 stitches (which I can do only if I watch this video every single time I need to do the cast on), then has 2 rows of the first color and 2 rows of the second color for 10 repeats, then 3 rows of the first color and 3 rows of the second color for 10 repeats, then 4 rows and so on until you have 8 stripe rows.  Then you graft the two ends together to make a cowl.

If you are ready for this step at your lunch hour and realize you don't have another circular needle, you may be tempted to try various other bits from your knitting bag, such as stitch holders and shawl pins. These will not work. You should then remind yourself that it is July, and you do not need to be in a rush to finish a cowl on your lunch hour. Furthermore, remind yourself that you can't kitchner 107 stitches together in a lunch hour anyway.

I like the cowl a lot. It's long enough to loop twice around my neck.

I have the yarn picked out to make another one for a friend. This time, I'm going to avoid the tedium of progressively wider and wider stripes and start with the 8 stripe sequence and decrease down to 2. I know that it's exactly the same amount of knitting, but I'm betting it won't feel like it. Score one for brain trickery!

Rainbows all around!

Holly, mom to the adorable kid, and I have been friends since the third grade. (Second grade was rough for us. I was super jealous of her.) She lives in Germany and is in Indiana for a visit, so we pretended yesterday was her birthday even though it's not for another six weeks.

She's asked for a hat:

Ann Budd's Basic Hat Pattern with picot edge, 

using polka dot chart from Hilary Smith Callis' Dots Cowl

(mine ravelled here)

a cowl:

roughly based on "My Favourite Things" Infinity scarf

(mine ravelled here)

and Totoro mittens:

Norwegian Totoro Mittens (mine ravelled here)

 All were knit in Cascade 220 Superwash in 854 Navy and Knit Picks Chroma Worsted in Carnival.

I don't know Totoro, so those didn't strike a cord with me, but I love the hat and cowl A LOT. I'd wear them myself in a heartbeat.

Happy birthday, Holly!

Tractor Repair

In my neverending quest to use up scrap yarn, I made a "My Favourite Things" scarf in 2013. I've never been happy with the way the tractor turned out. Back in 2013 I wrote, "The tractor turned out a bit wonky, but intarsia is of the devil. I was lucky to emerge as unscathed as I did."

After nearly two years of the puckering bothering me, I decided to bite the bullet and do something about it. I threaded a cable into each stitch of the section above the tractor.

Then I pulled out the last/top row of the tractor section.

Then I started to unravel.

It took about an hour just to get the section undone, and then another several hours to get it reknit. I tried to strand as much as I could, and I ended with duplicate stitch.

Then I kitchnered the top row to the row I had on a cable. It was 240 stitches. The only way out is through.

It's better. Not perfect, but better. I can definitely live with it, and I'm happy I redid it. I wear this scarf a lot, and I want to be happy with how it looks.

Own the crazy, my friends. Own the crazy.

Arbutus

After the Farmer's Market cardigan (a post on that soon) and Andrew's boring socks, I wanted to knit something that was pretty fast and didn't come in pairs. Enter Arbutus.

Arbutus (mine ravelled here),

knit in Juniper Moon Farm's Zooey, color #11 Mainsail

It's an interesting construction. It's one piece with three "rings" in the front made by a combination of short rows and partial bind off/cast ons. The back is solid. It was a very fast knit. It required a tiny bit of attention, but not much. I did have to start it twice because I twisted the join the first time. That's a rookie mistake I make more often than I care to admit.

It took less than a ball of Zooey, which I had left from a test knit I did for Juniper Moon. Zooey is a cotton/linen blend, so this is something I'll wear to work rather than wearing to walk the dog in cold weather.

Andrew assures me that I can wear navy with black pants, and he's much more clothing-aware than I am. I choose to believe he's correct, and that's what I'm wearing at work today.

This was a nice palette cleanser. I'm now working on another pair of socks for Andrew!

Back!

I've been on vacation! We had a great trip, and I'm slowly figuring out how to do normal things like working, paying bills, and finding food for myself.

Knitting went with me.

This is the Starshower cowl by Hilary Smith Callis. I started it before we left and worked on it diligently for about 10 seconds while on vacation. Then I abandoned it in favor of sunshine, reading, and the ocean. I cast off last night and plan to block it this evening. I'll have pictures soon!

And we'll discuss a few NYC yarn shops I visited. Opinions? I have them.

Christmas Progress

I'm doing pretty well on my Christmas knitting. I just received the self-striping yarn I needed to make socks for my oldest sister, and they'll go quickly. I was feeling pretty smug about my progress when I went to a friend's house on Saturday.

Her son asked if I'd make him a Packers hat. I have some Berocco Vintage in green and gold in my stash already. Months ago, I was looking for fingering weight yarn in the right green and gold for socks he wanted, and I couldn't find it. I stupidly and desperately bought the Vintage thinking I could make him thick socks. That's nutty--it's not that hard to find the right colors online--but it means I already have the yarn to make the hat.

Another friend asked if I'd knit her another cowl. She loves the one I gave her for her birthday, but it clashes with her winter coat.

GAP-tastic and Fluted Cowl (mine ravelled here),

knit in Knitpicks' Biggo, Calypso Heather colorway

The pattern is a mashup of two patterns: the Fluted Cowl and the GAP-tastic Cowl. (Notes are on my ravelry page.) It really does make a lovely cowl, and I would have been tempted to keep it if it was in another color. Now that I need to order yarn to make her a second one... well, there may be one of these for me in my future as well. I keep telling myself I need to wear the Clara Cowl and see if I like it, but the temptation to buy three more skeins of this yarn in gray is great. A girl only needs so many fluffy cowls, right? Right?

Some of My Favorite Things

I ran out of scarf before I ran out of favorite things.



 

That's probably a good thing.

Lots of things make me happy,

 

like cool buildings

and dogs and cats and scribbles

and pixel-y patterns

and red tractors

and hearts and Celtic knots and flowers and skyscrapers and other stuff.

I blocked it while still on the needles in case I needed to go inside the tube to fix something. The tractor turned out a bit wonky, but intarsia is of the devil. I was lucky to emerge as unscathed as I did.

Kitchnering 240 stitches together is an exercise in patience. I can always use exercises in patience. GLASS HALF FULL.

This is the biggest kitchner project I've done, and I learned something important: I should stop every 10 stitches or so and make sure I'm not pulling too tightly. I did pull too tightly, and it took a long time to try to work some ease back into it. Again with the patience.

Also, the provisional cast on was a little loose. You can see in the picture below the heart section connected to the square section (above the buildings). The heart section was the cast on, and it's a bit flared compared to the other end, even after blocking. It's not a big deal, but it's something to be aware of the next time I try that cast on.

"My Favorite Things" Infinity Scarf

(mine raveled here)

I linked to the patterns I used for each section on my Ravelry page, so feel free to go there if you want information about a certain section.

I really like this project. It did very little to lessen the scrap sock yarn though. I'm going to need to think bigger, like a blanket... or a car cozy. I'll keep you posted.

WIP: "My Favorite Things" Infinity Scarf

I've been doing some gift knitting that I won't post about until way later this year, but I've made some progress on the scarf as well.

 

Yesterday I finished a motif roughly based on a chart from Spindleknitter's Stockings and then did a skyline based on this hat.

 

The scarf is getting pretty long. It's around 45" or so right now, and the designer said hers was 62" and was the correct length to wrap twice around her neck. I don't think it will grow much when it's blocked, so I have room for a few more charts. This is great because once I started looking, I found a lot of charts I loved!

The next motif to go in is Scribble. I liked this pattern so much when I saw it that I tried to convince people they wanted me to knit them that vest. That didn't work, so I'm very excited to use it on the scarf.

Fast vs. Sloooooow

The Inlay Socks are slow. Pretty, but slow. I'll love them once they're done, but slow.

The "My Favorite Things" Infinity Scarf is slow. Fun, but slow. Using up scrap yarn, but slow.

I've been uninterested in knitting for the last several days. I decided it was because I couldn't see the end of either of those projects coupled with the fact that I won't need to wear either of them until fall.

You know how I get when I have more than one project going. I can handle two... except when I can't. Any more than two and I begin to twitch.

However, there was a project that had been hibernating so long that I didn't even count it as a work in progress anymore.

I don't remember the details, but Knitpicks gave away a skein of Biggo sometime in the fall when you made an order. I ordered the Cobblestone Heather colorway, naturally,* and I found the Clara Cowl when I was surfing Ravelry looking for possible projects.

A skein of Biggo has 110 yards.

The Clara Cowl needed 110 yards.

I'm a whore for cables.

DONE.

If by "done," you understand that I buggered it up completely, fixed that, and then ran out of yarn six rows from the end.

And the yarn was backordered.

For months and months.

I became tired of my ravelry projects' page judging me every time I looked at it and saw the Clara Cowl with its never-changing progress percent. I put it in hibernation and hid it at the bottom of my page.

The yarn is back in stock, and I recently received my second skein. I decided that knitting the Clara Cowl in the length specified in the pattern would make the cowl too tight. I would feel a bit like I was being strangled, and being strangled by soft, fluffy yarn is still being strangled. I knit until I nearly finished the second skein and then did the fiddly kitchner join that made this a cowl instead of a scarf.

When November comes, I'll be ready.

Until then, maybe I'm ready to go back to fingering weight yarn for awhile.

*Stop judging me. Gray is beautiful.

Heartgyle

I love stranded knitting. It makes it tricky to fast forward through commercials, but other than that it is delightful. I'm having a great time on the scarf.

This was my progress at the end of my lunch hour yesterday.

* 'My Favorite Things' Infinity Scarf

(mine ravelled here)

Last night I started work on the third section.

When I really started looking, I realized I have a ton of stranded motifs that I love. The argyle pattern is from these mittens, which have been marked as a favorite for a long time. The third motif is from these Knitty mittens.

I found a ton of great charts on Ravelry, and I checked out Mary Jane Mucklestone's book 200 Fair Isle Motifs from the library. I know that it's very, very early in the process and that I will undoubtedly become impatient toward the end, but right now the future seems covered in glorious strips of heart and argyle and birdies. I can't stop myself from thinking about what I would do if I were to make it for other people. (There would be robots and peace signs, depending on the person.)

I love that I'm using scrap sock yarn for this. The background (hopefully) will be done in yarns that I already owned, and all the color (hopefully) will be from scrap yarn.

*Huh. These pictures are rotated on my computer, but when they upload, they are sideways. I've decided I don't care enough to try to figure out why.

"It's Not a Problem. It's a Challenge."*

I've become obsessed with ideas for the scarf. After work, I couldn't come up with a good enough excuse to skip yoga class**, but I found that my mind kept travelling to knitting instead of focusing on the stretch.

Acknowledge

Let go

Repeat

When I did park myself on the couch to knit last night, I was marveling at how delightful it was to knit little hearts on a gray background. So pretty! What a fun project! The hard cast on was behind me, and glorious stranded knitting stretched out in front of me like a gorgeous field of wildflowers. This project was so great that I thought of it in terms of similes.

As I spread it out to admire my progress on the third row of hearts, I noticed something.

A weird bunching.

A weird bunching that didn't go away as I tried to smooth it out.

I had twisted the stitches when I joined to knit in the round. I had knit the thing into a mobius strip. 

I spent a few minutes trying to think of a way to fix it without doing what I knew I needed to do to fix it. Then I took a deep breath, pulled out the needles and started frogging.

In good news, I did much better with the provisional cast on this time. GLASS HALF FULL.

*That's a line from The Last 5 Years by Jason Robert Brown. The character is talking about staying faithful to his wife, but he could be singing about knitting. The sentiment is the same.

**I certainly tried.

• It's too pretty to go to yoga. (yoga is 75 minutes, not 75 days)
• I need to go home and walk the dog. (Andrew did that)
• I need to knit. (It is a fact that I need to work out more than I need to knit)
• There's a plant in the car and it might get stressed with heat. (It's 60 degrees and the plant is a Japanese anemone. It'll be alive even after the war comes: Japanese anemone, chives, and termites will freely roam the scorched earth. Yes, in my head the plants are able to walk. Just go with it.)

Beginning

When my mom taught me to knit, she didn't teach me to cast on. I mean, she did eventually, but not at first. She said it was the hardest part of knitting, and I needed to have some confidence in the knit stitch before I tackled the cast on.

She was correct.

Mom and I use the longtail cast on, but we don't hold our hands like the rest of the planet. I don't know why this is, but the result is that any cast on that builds off of the longtail is tricky for me.

Enter provisional cast on.

I've done this cast on before. Every time I do it, it involves several Internet videos and lots of cursing. Last night, it also involved trying to get Andrew to help me (a nonknitter) and The Principles of Knitting book. I threw the knitting across the room, but only once.

I'm working on a pair of socks, and they're heavily patterned and moving slowly. (They're Inlays.) In a move that's very unlike me, I decided to cast on a second project that would be easier so I could switch between them depending on my mood.

Well, theoretically easier.

I do have hope that it will be smooth(ish) sailing now that the cast on is finished. 

My Favourite Things Infinity Scarf (mine ravelled here)

I'm really excited about this project. It should be fun, and it will let me use up some random sock yarn. I'm going to use three different grays--light, medium, and dark--for the background and whatever magpie yarn I want for the fair isle motifs. It's random, but not completely random. As we all know, completely random makes me twitchy.

The beginning is always the hardest.

Lessons

I have a post-it on my desk at work that reads, "Every situation is simply a mirror of ourselves. Everything we think or do in a situation tells us exactly what we need to know about ourselves." It's by Geri Larkin, one of my favorite writers.

I decided to start the Clara Cowl last night. It should be a fast knit, and there's only one cowl to be knit (as opposed to socks and mittens and fingerless gloves). I put the skein on the swift and started to wind. I noticed that it seemed that a couple loops doubled back on one another, but I reasoned that it would probably just switch directions when it got to that point and that would be fine.

It became tangled--so tangled that I had to disentangle from both ends as well as the middle. 

Lesson 1: When you think something matters, it does.... even if you don't want it to be so.

It uses a provisional cast-on, which I do not enjoy, but I figured it out after a few tries and some careful viewing of a youtube video. I've used that cast on multiple times, but I can never remember how to do it.

Lesson 2: It's okay to have to work hard at something, and it doesn't matter if you think it's something you should already know. What matters is that you continue to try.

This pattern uses big cables--24 stitches--which means that you have one-third of your stitches being cabled over another one-third. It gets messy. I wasn't sure the first cable was correct, but I figured I'd be better able to tell once I was farther along in the pattern. At the end of the evening, I had this:

Somehow the first cable had knit into a tube. I think it's because I had the yarn in front when it should have been in back or vice versa.

Lesson 3: If you think something's wrong, it probably is... even if you don't want it to be so. See Lesson 1.

I ripped it all out and trotted upstairs to wind it back up.

It became so entangled on the ball winder that I had to cut it out and then spit splice it back together again.

Lesson 4: Sometimes you should just read a book.

Double Knitting

Finished! Learning to knit Continental style made a huge difference. 

Dots Cowl (mine ravelled here)

knit in Knitpicks Chroma Worsted, Roller Skate colorway, and Patrons Astra in cream

Double knitting is some kind of magic.  You're basically knitting 1-1 ribbing with alternating colors. Because the ribbing is so small, each side looks like stockinette.

I'm really thrilled with the way it turned out, although I admit that I'm not ready to start another double knitting project yet. It took fifteen minutes per round, and, probably because I'm new to holding the yarn Continental style, it made my hands hurt. It was worth it though! I think the recipient will really like it... and if she doesn't, I hope she lies to me.

Foiled

I finished the last surprise gift. Click here if you'd like to see and your name isn't Rachel. I promptly cast on for another gift. It uses double knitting, which I've never done. The first row was pretty fiddly, and it took some work to figure out how to hold both strands of yarn, but after a frog or two I was trucking along.

When I'd done a few rows, I noticed something unexpected.

Double knitting is supposed to give you two thicknesses of fabric. Each side looks like stockinette, and one side is the reverse (in terms of color) of the other. Cool, right?

This doesn't look like stockinette. It looks like reverse stockinette. In non-knitter speak, it's bumpy instead of flat.

Huh.

To the Internet I went, where I saw a video of someone doing double knitting.

It was dramatically unlike what I was doing. The knitter in the video was moving both strands of yarn to the front or back of the work EVERY TIME she made a stitch, even though she was only using one strand at a time. Who would have thought?

I admit to losing my cool at that point. I frogged it, but then it kept getting tangled as I tried to rewrap it around the ball of yarn. I also admit to yelling, "For fuck's sake!" and throwing it across the room. It was at this point that Andrew looked at me with an eyebrow raised and said, "Maybe you should go change the laundry while I rewind this."

Yes, that's an excellent idea.

In related news, I'm knitting Andrew a pair of socks.

3-1 Ribbed Socks knit in Schoppel-Wolle Zauberball Starke 6, colorway 1289 1701

Snidely Incognito

Brandy's birthday was last month, but I never posted a picture of a surprise I knit for her:

Incognito Pattern from Knitty, knit in Lion Brand Vanna's Choice so as to be machine washable

It's a neckwarmer with a 'stache a la Snidely Whiplash stitched on.  Because sometimes you need a disguise in the winter.

Let me tell you the backstory of this project:

I find this project.  It makes me think of Brandy.  I am worried, however, that she won't like how close it fits on the face.  I wouldn't like it.  Granted, I don't wear turtlenecks.  I send the link to Rachel.  Does she think Brandy will like this?

Rachel finds a different, less kitschy neckwarmer on etsy and sends Bran an e-mail saying she is thinking of having me knit her one and what does Brandy think?  Brandy thinks it's delightful and especially likes that you can pull it up over your mouth.

Hooray!  I can surprise her with this fabulous knitwear!  I knit and lie in wait.

Her birthday finally arrives.  I am nervous and excited as she opens the box.  Tissue paper is removed, Brandy smiles and says,

"Oh!  You did knit it for me."


What?

"I asked you to knit this for me.  Don't you remember?"


Wh-huh?

Apparently Brandy and I already had a conversation about this in which she told me she loved it and asked me if I would make it for her.

I don't remember a bit of it, rope friends into doing undercover reconnaissance for me, and knit it for her thinking I'm creating a wonderful surprise.

In related news, I'm probably a good person from whom to borrow money if you don't want to pay it back.

[Note: I survived my first Master Gardening class.  I'll write more about that once I have a bit more time to process.]