Franken-Mini Mania Scarf

Knitting socks creates a lot of scrap yarn. I knit a lot of socks. Thus, this:

Mini Mania Scarf (mine ravelled here),

knit in All The Yarn

I've knit one of these before, blogged here. The recipient said it could be a little bit wider, so I tried to make this one closer to 8" than 6". I did the large version, which is a row of 500 stitches. It's not fast, but it's pretty, and I think the intended recipient will love it.

The pattern suggests doing all the rows with the right side facing you. When you get to the end of the row, you cut the yarn--it later becomes fringe--and then slide your knitting so you can start at the opposite end again. I did that this time, and it makes a big difference. It's a linen stitch, and when you're looking at the right side, the stitches group themselves in tidy clumps of two. It's easy to see what should be knit and what should be slipped. It's not nearly as easy to see on the wrong side.

I have to admit, this doesn't make much of a dent in the scrap sock yarn stash. If anyone has some good ideas of projects that use up more scrap yarn, please tell!

Mini Mania and Cashmere

There's been much discussion about the Fire Opal Tee recently. It hasn't been frogged yet. I may try to put sleeves on it and try it on again to see how I feel. I'll let you know. Right now it's folded on a counter at home staring at me whenever I walk into the room.

While I ponder it, I've been knitting a couple other things. One is a Mini Mania Scarf for a friend. As I've noted before, I'm not particularly good at random. I've done several scrap yarn projects though, and I don't mind as long as I know I'm giving it to someone else--someone who doesn't believe all filing systems should also be color coded.

Mini Mania Scarf 2 (mine ravelled here),

knit in All The Yarn

The pattern offers the suggestion of knitting to the end of the row, then cutting the yarn and starting at the opposite end again. This means the right side is always facing you and you're knitting instead of purling. I didn't do that on the first one, but I've been doing it most rows on this scarf, and I like it. The scarf is done in a linen stitch, so it's k1, sl 1 wyib all the way across. For this scarf, all the way across is 500 stitches. It takes awhile. The next row is sl 1 wyib, k1 all the way across. It makes a very pretty, woven-looking fabric.

When I got tired of long rows and random colors, I started a pair of socks.

Conferva villosa socks (mine ravelled here),

knit in Tanis Fiber Arts Purple Label, Deep Sea colorway

As you can see, I'm not far in the sock. I really like the pattern so far though. It's from Hunter Hammersen's new book, Knitter's Curiosity Cabinet, Volume III, and I'm knitting it as part of her KAL on Ravelry. I think I'll like it in this colorway, too. I definitely like the feel of this yarn! Mmmm, cashmere.

Little Suns

I've had the Little Suns scarf in my queue for a long time.

Little Suns (mine ravelled here),

knit in Malabrigo Lace in Fucsia 093 and Knit Picks Gloss Lace in 24849 Black

I'd like to give a shout out to the designer, Emma Vining. I was having trouble with the first pink pattern row. It's all short rows, and I didn't end up with the correct number of stitches at the end of the row. This is knit length-wise, so there are 289 stitches in each row. I sent her a message on Ravelry asking clarification about the instructions, and she very promptly responded, set me right, and said nice, encouraging things. I started again, counted my stitches more carefully, and things went fine the second time. It's amazing to me that we have such a wonderful knitting community. I love that I was able to contact the designer directly and get help when I needed it.

This isn't a hard pattern, but it's not easy either. The short rows require close attention, and I wouldn't dream of stopping partway through the row. Since the rows are long, that required a bit of planning. It was easy to get in a rhythm though, and of the 12 row repeat, only 2 of them are short-row rows. The rest of the rows are very simple.

This didn't take the entire skein of either color. It's a good use of a couple odd skeins of laceweight you might have lying around. This pattern was originally published in The Knitter Issue 47, but it wasn't up on Ravelry for a long time. I wonder if that's why there are only 7 projects listed. Don't let the few projects discourage you; this is a great pattern!

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.

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.

Spectra!

It's finished! I asked a coworker to take these photos. It was highly amusing to me. She said things about "negative space" and told me what to do. Clearly, I should quit my day job and become a model for knitwear.

Spectra (mine ravelled here),

knit in Knitpicks' Gloss Fingering in Black and Chroma Fingering in Roller Skate 

Here is the Dramatic Arm Gesture I promised you, also known as "WALL! It's been so long since I've seen you! You look great!! Hug me now!"

Scarf!

I just finished Tom's Boring Scarf. It started as a Railyard Scarf with the purl row omitted:

But it was deemed that the pattern was too much. He wanted a nice, plain stockinette scarf that he could wear indoors.

Boring Scarf, knit in Premier Yarns Serenity, Charcoal colorway 

It's 40 stitches across, 4 on each edge in garter stitch and the other 32 in stockinette. I knit it on size 6 needles, which gives the fingering weight yarn some nice drape. 

Another Christmas present finished!

Anybody Seen the Bandwagon?

I'm often slow to adopt new things.

I had my first drink at age 22.

I became a vegetarian at 31.

I got my first tattoo at 33.

I often don't start watching TV shows until they're already off the air.

I've come to accept that part of myself that likes to look carefully at other people trying something new and wait to see if it blows up on them. I recognize it takes me a long time to decide that it's actually safe.

In the spirit of this, I have never knit a clapotis. There are over nineteen thousand entries on Ravelry for clapotis projects. I think that's enough to ensure that there's not a horrible mistake in the pattern, no?

Clapotis (mine ravelled here), 

knit in Alpaca with a Twist's Mojito yarn in Hugs and Kisses colorway

I had yarn leftover from my Off-Rib Cardigan, and that's what I used for this. The pattern calls for yarn of this weight, but tons of people have knit it with much, much lighter yarn as well. I think it looks great either way.

It's an easy knit, and it's surprisingly satisfying to drop stitches and pop pop pop them down their diagonal row. Purposeful destruction in knitting! No wonder nineteen thousand people are talking about it on Ravelry.

One of my goals is to wear things like this more often. I am very much a utilitarian dresser. My preference would be to wear jeans and a t-shirt every day. (You've heard about this before.)

Maybe I'll now occasionally wear jeans, a t-shirt, and a clapotis.

Baby steps.

Douglas Adams Wanders into Claude Monet's Garden

In the summer of 2010, my mom and I took a class on dyeing yarn. I made this.

I have about 900 yards of Baby Ull wound into 2 balls. I've been admiring the yarn ever since, but then I found a scarf that I thought would work with the myriad of colors.

 Coral Leaves Scarf (mine ravelled here) 

knit in hand-dyed Dall of Norway Baby Ull yarn

The colors I tried to capture were ones that reminded me of a Claude Monet waterlily painting. It's a stretch for me. It has a lot more yellow than I am usually comfortable with, but I love the colors.

I used somewhere in the neighborhood of 550-600 yards, so I still have the majority of a ball left to do something else with. I'm thinking fingerless gloves. The pattern is written to be a scarf approximately 12" wide. I wanted something a bit more shawl-like, so I did a third repeat of the leaf panel and blocked it to 18" wide. I wanted it a bit longer, too. It calls for 35 repeats off the leaf chart, and when I decided to make it longer it seemed that 42 repeats would be perfect. 

After all, 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. That's got to be a good omen.

3KCBWDay1 Colour Lovers

Today marks the beginning of the 3rd Annual Knitting and Crochet Blog Week! Today's topic is Colour Lovers. Here is the description:

Colour is one of our greatest expressions of ourselves when we choose to knit or crochet, so how do you choose what colours you buy and crochet or knit with. Have a look through your stash and see if there is a predominance of one colour. Do the same with your finished projects - do they match? Do you love a rainbow of bright hues, or more subdued tones. How much attention do you pay to the original colour that a garment is knit in when you see a pattern? Tell readers about your love or confusion over colour.

Last night, my mom asked if she could buy some sock yarn for me. She wanted a brightly-colored self-striping yarn. I looked through my stash and realized a couple of things:

1. I am not unselfish enough to give away any Felici yarn whatsoever, not even to the woman who was snowed in at the hospital during a blizzard after giving birth to me. I justify this by saying that Mom is knitting socks for a volunteer in her classroom, and this volunteer may not understand the glory of knit socks. There's no need to waste awesomeness on the uninformed masses.
2. If you take out Felici, I don't have much brightly-colored sock yarn at all. It's all blues, green, purples, and grays.

Despite this, I really do love color. My two most recent sweaters were in bright green and red.

Talamh in Blue Moon Fiber Art's BFL Sport in The New Look of Love colorway

Off-Rib Cardigan in Alpaca with a Twist's Mojito yarn in Hugs 'n' Kisses colorway

Even though I certainly do knit some brightly-colored things, my favorite color is gray. I have to work hard to not buy gray yarn for everything I knit. 

              

As you can tell, this isn't completely successful.

I don't pay attention to what color patterns show at all. I pick colors that I will enjoy spending hours and hours with. Knit what you love!

Random With Purpose

I knit a lot of socks. Since sock yarn typically comes with enough yarn to knit socks for feet bigger than mine, I have leftovers.

Lots of leftovers.

I've done several projects in an effort to try to decrease the alarming amount of leftover soft yarn I have.

I've made clock cozies:

I've made Frankenscrap Jays:

I've made Franken-Knucks:

While great projects, they have done little to decrease the amount of yarn I have. Then I found the Mini Mania Scarf. It's a linen-stitch scarf made entirely of scrap yarn. It's knit lengthwise, which meant each 500 stitch row took around 20 minutes to knit. Surely that would put a dent in the yarn stash.

The scarf is glorious. However, I realized when I was only a few hours into the project that the scarf made me feel uncomfortable.

Sort of itchy and twitchy.

Its gloriousness stems from its randomness and yet I can't handle the randomness. I realized this may be the reason I've knit two clock cozies as gifts and not knit one for myself, despite my deep and profound love for them.  The socks and knucks were also given away.

All these projects are really, really lovely and yet I don't like them.

I felt like a freak for about four seconds. Then I realized that it's okay to be someone who doesn't like randomness. I like a plan. I like a plan even better if it can be color-coded. When I planned the garden for this year--a pretty simple endeavor, really--, I used four different markers and a letter code. As a kid, one of my favorite pasttimes was dumping out my 64 box of crayons and putting them back sorted by color.

This love of order is an excellent trait in nearly all areas of my life. If it means I have to give some of my knitting away--to people who really love the randomness of scrap yarn projects, might I add--then that's fine.

It is a pretty scarf...

...for someone else.

That Was a Quick One

I finished the Noro scarf.  It was absurdly quick--not because it was necessarily a fast knit but rather because any time I had, I was knitting.  I was enamored by it, capitvated by it, couldn't wait to see how the next color would work.

I fear I may be a simpleton, but I'm a happy one and Andrew will stay warm.

Noro Striped Scarf (raveled here) 

knit in Knitpicks Cadena in Coal and Noro Kochoran in 69

This is Andrew's humoring look.  What he might be thinking is, "Really? A picture now?  I'm trying to get this work finished so I can go to bed before midnight." What he did instead of saying that, though, was to wrap the scarf around himself and smile.  He's a good one.

And he knows from whence the knitwear comes.