...More like month-of-Saturdays, actually.

Here's the outfit that accompanies the hat I showed off in my last post:

You can't see the watch-type pendant and magnifying glass hanging from the chains at her waist.

The blouse and vest were flea market finds, along with the buttons and broken necklace chains that adorn it. We made the skirt and petticoat, the hat and the woven ribbon bag. The hat is a cut down New Year's Eve party top hat, plus feathers and other adornments. The belt is an 80s-era retread from my closet, and the gear necklace and earrings were holiday presents this year past.

Here's a close-up of the skirt trim. It's a wide strip of brown ribbon, edged with black ribbon, folded and ironed into points:

I don't remember where I first read about doing the points - possibly in an ancient Threads magazine, before they abandoned fine handwork, possibly in a Victorian era ladies magazine or millinery guide. The ribbon folding isn't quite ruching, since no gathers are stitched, and it isn't pleating, because the folds are not perpendicular to the ribbon. I used it once before, to make teeth on a dinosaur costume, when Elder Daughter was a toddler.

Wherever this trick came from was, it's a very useful technique for producing custom, flexible trim that eases nicely around corners. I did mine in inexpensive double sided satin ribbon. A two-tone ribbon with different colors on each side would make points of alternating colors. Here's how:

Fold a triangle, tucking the leading edge underneath. Then do an inverse triangle. Finally, flip the inverse triangle up so that it lies on top of the completed one.

You can see that if you wanted to make rick-rack instead of a row of upward pointing triangles, that second fold step would be done so that the "good side" landed on top, and the third step would be omitted.

Here's the same process in actual ribbon, with firm steam pressing on the silk setting in between manipulations:

and the final product, ready to be pinned and sewn in place. Note the flexibility that can accommodate both inner and outer curves:

Younger daughter wore this to the Waltham Watch City Steampunk Festival, at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation. After planning and accumulating the bits for the better part of the year, she was thrilled to do so, and had a great time.

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We're quite busy these days at String Central. I continue to work on the long green sampler. Here's the latest strip, photographed in early dawn light. This pattern is also in TNCM2, albeit without the gridded voiding. The little complementing border was stolen from a different TNCM2 pair.

TNCM2 as a whole also progresses. And to top it off, Younger Daughter and I are hard at work on an outfit for her to wear to the Waltham Watch City Festival steampunk gala.

Long time readers here may remember that last year at this time, Younger Daughter spent quite a bit of April and May in Children's Hospital, in the throes of an argument with her burst appendix. She had wanted to attend the festival last year, and was very disappointed to have missed it. As a distraction, we planned out the outfit she would have liked to have worn. Being on the young side, what we designed for her was more steampunk than steamy-punk (no exterior corsets, hip high hemlines, or fishnet stockings). As incentive for cooperation with often uncomfortable hospital requests, I promised to make said outfit.

Now a year later, she's totally better and my promise has been called in. We're about halfway through the venture. A blouse/waist has been obtained (an antique barn bargain retread). We're just finishing up a camel wool walking skirt, and will be trimming it next week with black and brown point folded ribbon. She'll be decorating a brown suede bolero with copious brass buttons, plus a watch, a compass and a magnifying glass. The bolero and buttons were also flea market finds. Pix of all of these as they near completion. But I can present her hat:

She started with an costume top hat, and excised about 2 inches of height. She covered the surgical scar with a brown ribbon, complete with a bow and streamers in the back; then added feathers and gears.

Cute, no?

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Laying down the double running outlines for the latest strip, with the intent of going back and filling in the Montenegrin cross stitch spines along them in a second pass:

I'll probably do the long straight runs first, while waiting for the Montenegrin stitch book to arrive. I don't particularly like the way I handled the bent spines and am hoping that Autopsy of the Montenegrin Stitch will help.

In other news, I spent the weekend knitting a hat. An outrageous black earflap cap, encrusted with a lime green crest. Bespoken, of course:

I started with Interweave Knits Army Girl Earflap cap - unisex despite its name (available in the IKE 7 Free Knitted Hats booklet). I added a bit more height just above the forehead, before the crown decreases because the recipient is a tall guy with a slightly longer head than average. I'm using Brown Sheep Lambs' Pride Bulky. If you want to make this hat as published, one skein of it is more than enough for the whole thing. My green crest adds about half of a second skein, in that screaming color.

I've got some more of the ruff to add, then I have to snip it back, barbering it from floppy/sloppy to a uniform and threatening length. But all is on schedule for a hat-ETA of later this week.

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Folk who know me either through String or in person know that I'm generally not prone to enthusiastic gushing. Passionate ranting, perhaps, but prancing around in delight is not part of my idiom.

Until today.

I've been pacing the floors since my last big embroidery project ended, keeping busy by knitting small things:

Two pairs of socks and a pair of Fingerless Whatevers. Socks are headed to Elder Daughter, whose pitiful pleas will now be gratified.

But finally, my Needle Needs Millennium Frame has arrived, all the way from the UK:

I've wanted to get a new flat frame for quite a while. My old one having been bought in the early '70s, using babysitting money when I was still in high school. Frame technology has advanced. I was very impressed by the review of the thing over at Needle 'n Thread. Her pix are better than I could manage, and I agree with her observations wholeheartedly. The frame is well made, and works exactly as presented. It's easy to load with the work (minimal frame dressing), easy to adjust, and a delight to use. All in all a quantum leap over my old one.

The only problem is one faced by all round frame enthusiasts when they "move up" to a flat frame. It's large. You need three or four hands to use it. One or two to hold the frame, and two to stitch. But I've faced this problem before. Behold my ancient Grip-It frame, bought about 20 years ago when I started working on my Forever Coif:

It holds my Millennium nicely in its omnivorous grasp. Just barely, though. I will take the three bolts that make up the fastening mechanism of the jaws to the hardware store this weekend, and look for some that are a bit longer.

And if having this miracle of modern needlework support infrastructure wasn't enough to hyperventilate about, I have more to celebrate!

If you're familiar with 16th and 17th century embroidery - the long red pattern strips that probably bordered domestic linens - you've seen that odd mesh background. Some museums call it "Punto di Milano". Others call it "Point Lace" "Punto Quadro" or "Tela Tirata."

This is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's artifact "Strip." Accession number 79.1.81.c

Stitch attributions range all over, in part because there are several ways that a mesh background can be achieved (withdrawn thread; withdrawn thread to make a grid, then darning; pulled thread, etc.) Some books specify that these patterns used Italian Two-Sided Cross Stitch, others say Four-Sided Stitch in addition (or instead) of using an Italian stitch/style name. At this point, I'll agree with them all because all are feasible. But after long experimentation I've finally found a method that's achievable.

I played with several pulled thread stitches before coming up with this:

It's the same pattern as the museum piece. I'm working the mesh in two passes. The first is an easy to count pass of double sided cross stitch, worked double and pulled very tightly. The second is a pass in which the bars formed between the cross stitch are whipped four times (two times on edges butting up on un-mesh areas). It's totally two-sided, identical front and back. While not exactly speedy, using the initial pass to establish the counted pattern is easy, and the fill-in whipping to create the mesh is far less think-intensive than working the same pattern in hard-to-see-the-count long-armed cross stitch. Is this Punto di Milano or Tela Tirata? I am not sure. But it's darn close!

Requisites for production:

1. Flat frame on a stand. You need two hands to do this.
2. Relatively loosely woven ground cloth. Most modern even weaves are too dense. This nice, airy piece of linen was provided by StitchPal Pam (Hi, Pam!), who found it too gauzy for her needs. But it's perfect for mine.
3. High thread count ground. Although the weave density on this is good, it's a bit coarse for this work. To achieve the compression that leaves nice big holes, stitches need to span 3-4 (or more) threads. I'm using 40 count here, stitching over 4 threads. 60 count would be MUCH better, although I'd have to find finer silk thread. I'll have to investigate this on a future project.
4. Silk thread. Cotton isn't strong enough for all the pulling. Linen would have the strength, but it would be thicker, filling the holes more (and it was also done in linen historically, for white on white stitching).
5. Slightly blunted slender needle with a small eye. This is only one strand of silk floss, and you need to spread rather than pierce the ground cloth threads. Still, a total tapestry blunt is too rounded for this delicate work.

Yaay!

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A brief foray back into knitting. A long-deserving, cephalopod-loving pal of mine bespoke a hat. Not just any hat, a hat in the shape of a squid. How could I turn down a challenge like that? So this weekend past, finishing up last night I made one.

There are several squid hat patterns on the Web, but I didn't want to make any of them. I wanted to make a more hat-shaped hat, but with fully-rounded tentacles. I thought about knitting the tentacles first, then working up from there. While there are glove pattens that start fingertip and work down, I dismissed the idea as being too fiddly. And seaming the tentacles onto a brim-up cap - even with mattress stitch onto a provisional cast-on row wouldn't give the "bodily integrity" I wanted. So I decided to work top down with a double-knit ear band, with tentacles worked in the round.

The following post-mortem can't properly be called a pattern, but the adventurous might be able to work up their own hat from it.

SQUIDLEY - A METHOD DESCRIPTION

Clicking on the image above will reveal more details.

I used approximately 150g of a DK-weight rustic wool, and US #6 (4.0mm) 10-inch long double pointed needles. I also used 12 stitch markers (four of one color, eight of another), plus a double pointed needle of indeterminate size as a large stitch holder later on. I used small scraps of white felt to make the eyes, and sewed them on. Large sparkly buttons or commercial googly-eyes could also be used. Duplicate stitch in a day-glow yarn would be suitably squid-like.

My gauge ended up being a very stretchy 5.25 stitches per inch, with the double knit section being looser.

I violated every rule of knitting, making no gauge swatch, and planning nothing out before hand. I can't speak to quantity or yarn name - this being a coned Classic Elite remnant from their old back room, well aged in my stash.

I started at the top, with a standard figure-8 cast on, the same one I use on all my socks, putting six stitches each onto two needles (12 total). From there I increased standard-sock toe style (at both sides of the toe, every other row) until I had 40 stitches total. Then I decreased at the same points I increased, but upped the rate to every row, until I had 20 stitches total. I worked a couple more rows plain to finish off the little squid-wing nerdle at the top.

After that I designated five evenly spaced increase points and began shaping the top of my hat, working make-one invisible increases at each marker, working them every other round. About 2 inches down from where I began the hat body increases, I added an additional five increase points to broaden out the shape a bit and make it more full. I worked those in the same every other row progression as the other five until I had 88 stitches, and the hat body was wide enough to sit comfortably on my head. From there I continued in stockinette for about 4 inches, until I had reached the top of my ear (more or less). At this point things become interesting.

On the next round, I took a second strand of yarn and holding it with my main strand, knit all the way around with both strands. This was the set-up row for the double knitting section and doubled the number of loops on my needles. From here to the point where the tentacles start, the hat was worked double-knit style. I do this using a strickfingerhut (knitting strand manager thingy), to hold my strands side by side, but some people prefer to work double knitting in two passes. In either case, what you end up with is two layers of knitting, "back to back." Remember - I worked the set-up row using two strands of yarn. As I work the next row I will tease the double loops I just made apart, and treat each one as a stitch. I will also use the two strands of yarn separately (this is where the strickfingerhut comes in handy to manage them).

Using Strand A, I knit one of the two loops that make up the first of my set-up row stitches. Using Strand B I purled the other loop of that first set-up row stitch. Taking care not to cross the strands, I continued this way all the way around, alternating knit-with-A stitches and purled-with-B stitches. I ended up with 88 knits interleaved with 88 purls, for a total of 176 stitches. NOT TO WORRY - the hat will NOT grow twice as wide. My own gauge for double knitting is slightly looser than plain one-strand stockinette I worked this way for about two inches to make a nice, cushy, warm earband (which is not a bad idea on any top down knit hat). At this point the hat-part of Squidley was done and it was time to make tentacles!

Squids are decapods. They have eight shorter tentacles plus two longer ones with little pad-like sucker-bearing ends. The two longer ones are often skinnier than the other eight. This worked out well for me as you will see.

Taking care to begin on the stitch column that aligned with the center of the squid-nerdle at the top of the hat, so that the two long tentacles would be properly lined up with the sides of the hat, I began moving my stitches to my spare circ. As I moved them I placed tentacle defining stitch markers, like this. I used two colors of marker (marker and Xmarker) to make life easier.

8 - Xmarker - 18 - marker - 18 - marker - 18 - marker -18 - Xmarker - 16 -X marker - 18 - marker - 18 - marker - 18 - marker -18 - Xmarker - 8

Then I shuffled the stitches around the circ so that I was at one of the Xmarkers that designate the smaller tentacle. I took two of my DPNs and moved the stitches onto them BUT I held my two receiving needles in one hand and put knit stitches onto one and purls onto the other. I ended up with two needles held parallel, with the stitches assorted around them, ready to knit in the round in stockinette like the finger of a glove. You might like to use more and shorter DPNs, but all I had in this size was a set of 3, so I was stuck.. All of the tentacles begin this way, shuffling stitches from the long circ onto DPNs for working in the round. I worked the two long tentacles first, shuffling stitches around the DPN to get to the second one, so that the memory of working the first one would be fresh (remember, I was working on the fly with no written directions).

To make a long tentacle - Starting with 16 stitches, Work in stockinette for 10 rounds. K2 tog, k6, k2tog, k6. Work in stockinette for 10 rounds. K2 tog, k5, k2tog, k5. Work in stockinette for 10 rounds. K2tog, k4, k2tog, k4. Continue this way until only 6 stitches remain. At this point I moved the stitches to one needle and worked another 2 inches I-cord style, then I divided my stitches back onto two DPNs to make the sucker pad. Make 1 (invisible increase), K3, M1, K3, knit one round. M1, K4, M1, K4. Knit one round. Continue working this way until you have 16 stitches total. On next round K2tog, k4, SSK, K2tog, K4, SSK. Then K2tog, k2, SSK, K2 tog, K2, SSK. Then K1, K2 tog, K2, K2 tog, K1. The final row is S1-k2tog-PSSO, S1-k2tog-PSSO. Break the yarn leaving an ending tail, and thread the tail through the final two stitches to end off.

To make a short tentacle - Starting with 18 stitches. Work in stockinette for 5 rounds. K2tog, k7, k2tog, k7, work in stockinette for 5 rounds. K2tog, k6, k2tog, k6. Work in stockinette for 5 rounds. Continue this way until you reach the row that leaves you a total of six stitches. Knit only one row of stockinette instead of five at this point. Then S1-k2tog-PSSO twice, break the yarn leaving an ending tail and thread the tail through the final two stitches to end off.

Finish off all ends, and sew on eyes of your choosing!

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Back from vacation! A week of Cape Cod sun, sand, salt water and doing as little as possible except enjoying those things.

This year my mom came with us and we had a great time. We spent most of our time on the sands right at our hotel, sitting, swimming, kayaking, even watching Provincetown fireworks from our room's deck. We did our now traditional beach paella, salmon teriyaki on the grill, and flank steak kabobs. I am rested but could be easily persuaded to do a wash-rinse-repeat of the whole week's experience. Seven days is not enough.

Arriving back home, I checked gMail to see if anyone had volunteered a graphed pattern for the crowdsource project. Lo and behold! There was one:

I present Design #1 - Twerp's StarBee. The first design in the series. Red lines indicate straight lines "off the grid" or not at 180/90/45-degree angles. I like this cheeky little fellow. A nice one, Twerp!

If you want to draw up one of your own to be posted here, please feel free to download the JPG at the project's kickoff page, then draw on it by hand or using any graphics program. You can email the resulting file, a photo or a scan of your design to me at kbsalazar (at) gmail (dot) com. Let me know whether or not you want your name or a link posted with your offering. I do reserve the right to do light editorial selection (this is a family-rated website).

Now, what progress have I made on my own stitching?

Some, mostly prior to our departure. I concentrated on two pairs of socks while we were on the beach.

I knit a pair of guy socks, with a simple broken rib ankle and k1p1 ribbing to finish. There is only one in this picture. The other is now at parts unknown. At best guess, I dropped it at dusk on the beach and didn't notice that it was gone. Either seagulls or the sea made off with it. Somewhere there is either a lobster or a tern sporting a new brown habitat. And I need to get another ball of the same yarn and knit a third to make a pair. (Grrrr.) The other pair has a lacy pattern in the ankle. More on that another day.

And here's the latest strip on my sampler:

To which I will return once the socks are done.

One last note - to date (using the click-through count of the fourth part) - over 1,000 people have downloaded the complete Ensamplario Atlantio since I posted it two weeks ago. If you are looking for it, it's here. It's a PDF file - you need a recent version Acrobat Reader to open it. You can get Reader for free, for both Mac and Windows. Although I've gotten some thank-you posts and a couple of questions from people unfamiliar with Acrobat, I've had very little other feedback, and only one bug report - of fonts not displaying properly on an iPad II running the latest version of Safari. I'm looking into that problem and may repost the files later this week.

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Yes, it's been dark here longer than usual at String. My life has not been my own, with raging work-related deadlines consuming every inch of me. But in spite of those, I had a special commission from The Resident Male. He asked me to do some baby knitting for a workpal of his, whose wife is expecting. So I whipped out my needles and made up a pair of standard booties, from the Ann Kreckel pattern I favor, and improvised a matching hat. I've posted about the booties many times before, including an illustrated tutorial.

My matching hat is a simple beanie shape knit in the round, with three welts around the bottom edge to match the three welts that run around the sides of the stay-on bootie. I know that many other people enjoy making these booties, so I share the matching hat pattern here.

Baby Beanie to Match Jane's Stay-On Booties

Materials:

50g fingering weight or sock yarn
1.5 mm (US #000) double pointed knitting needles (can be worked on 1 or two circs if preferred)
4 or 5 stitch markers
Tapestry needle for darning in ends

Gauge

9 stitches = 1 inch on 1.5mm needles

Finished dimensions

Measured across the opening, unstretched = approx. 7 inches

Notes

For the record, my hat is on the small side and should fit a petite newborn. I haven't tried it yet, but using a 1.75mm (US #00) or a 2mm (US #0) at a slightly less extreme gauge should produce a hat for a larger newborn and 3 month size, respectively. If you want to work this at a standard gauge of 7 stitches per inch but end up with the same size hat as I made, cast on 100 stitches, and place your markers every 20 stitches. Follow the instructions as written EXCEPT that instead of following the (K23, K2tog), (K22, K2tog) or (K21,K2tog) directions instead ALWAYS knit until two stitches remain before your marker, then knit those two stitches together. I had plenty of yarn left over from my hat and booties from my one 50 gram skein of sock yarn, you shouldn't run out even if you knit a larger hat or a hat at a less extreme gauge.

Directions

Using a very stretchy cast on (I used half-hitch) cast on 120 stitches and divide among your needles. If you are using one or more circs, mark the beginning of the row with a stitch marker for convenience.

Knit 12 rounds. Purl 4 rounds. Knit 4 rounds. Purl 4 rounds. At the end of this, counting the self-rolling bit of stockinette around the hat's edge, you should have the appearance of three welts at the hat's bottom edge.

Continue knitting until the hat measures 2.5 inches from the bottom. (Measure this with the curling edge curled. Don't flatten it out.) On the next row knit 24 stitches, place a marker, then repeat. If you're using DPNs, you'll have 4 markers in your work, with the division point for the last one being the break between needles that aligns with the dangly cast-on end. If you're using circs, you'll have five markers in your work.

On the next round, (knit 23, K2tog). Do this five times total to complete out the round. Each decrease will occur JUST BEFORE a marker. Knit 4 rounds.

On the next round (knit 22, K2tog). Do this five times total to complete out the round. Knit 3 rounds.

On the next round (knit 21, K2tog). Do this five times total to complete out the round. Again each decrease will occur just before a marker. Knit 2 rounds.

On the next round knit to two stitches before the marker, then knit 2 tog. Do this five times total to complete out the round. Knit 1 round.

From here on in every round is the same - Knit until two stitches before a marker, knit those two stitches together. Repeat to complete out the round. Keep doing this until only five stitches remain on your needles. When only five stitches remain, work them I-Cord style for five rounds, then end off. Darn in both ends.

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Obviously I bored most of the reading audience here totally to tears with the last post. How about something simpler today?

Quite a while ago I tried my hand at submitting patterns to print and on-line magazines. I quickly found out that it's impossible to arrange creativity on a schedule, and that because my career is 100% hard-stop deadline driven, adding deadlines to my hobbies sucked all the fun out of them faster than teenage vampires exsanguinate each other. Be that as it may, I had limited success - some of my designs were published. See Saw Socks in an early edition of KnitNet, a pattern that helped launch the popularity of self-striping yarns:

I had some pieces published by Classic Elite, a few of which remain in their print collections, and one small item - also published by KnitNet - that I thought had disappeared entirely.

But nothing in my house disappears forever. It might become entombed in a box somewhere, but forgotten in this case is not the same as gone. I was doing some spring cleaning and de-cluttering this weekend and found the soft book baby toy that I knit long before the arrival of Younger Daughter (now in middle school).

This piece does not photograph well, and for my limited camera skills poses an additional challenge. It was knit in a long strip, with "pages" each framed by garter stitch. There are three of them, each with a different motif:

After the strip was knit, it was folded accordion style, and the tops and bottoms of each page were seamed together. Finally the leftmost edge of the front page and the rightmost edge of the last were sewn up to make the spine (I'd left the garter stitch edging on those two ends longer to compensate for the bulk of the book).

I used Bernat Handicrafter cotton at about 5 stitches per inch. The pages are each approximately 5 inches square. The two number-bearing squares each sport bobbles, one on the 1 page, two on the 2 page. The whiskers on the cat face are solidly knotted bits of the same yarn. The idea being that nothing on the book should come loose if it was mauled by the target recipient.

I had plans to offer up a whole bunch of additional simple graphed motifs in concert with the knit sample, but KnitNet was only interested in the original six. I have no idea if anyone else ever made this, but the original book was well loved (and chewed) by Younger Daughter when she was in the toy-ingestion phase. As you can see, the Handicrafter held up well, surviving lots of hot washes, although the yellow triangle and pink 2 pages both are no where near as vibrant as they once were.

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Not much progress for this week, but my time has not been my own.

This strip will continue marching on to the right, ending approximately at the green stripe. The horizontal blue stripe shows the approximate length of the graph for the repeat as it appears in my book. More on that below...

First, thank you to those who have left comments or sent notes of support. I know that lots of knitting readers are disappointed that I've been stitching lately. The huge drop off in visitors is a clue, but some of that is due to other factors. Ravelry for instance has just about killed all but the most popular independent knitting sites. So it goes.

Back to stitching. I've got three comments I'd like to address here. The first one is of interest to knitters. Faithful Reader TexAnne points out that long block unit repeats like the one I'm working now would adapt very nicely for double sided double knit scarves. An excellent observation, thank you! I add that anything worked in strips, like a large lap throw, an edging around a circularly knit skirt hem would also show this pattern (and its kin) quite well. I've done double knitting from these before. My oven head hat is knit up from an outtake that didn't make it into TNCM. You can see the negative/positive effect in the flipped up brim:

The chart for this hat appears in a follow-on post to the hat description. And, although not double sided, my Knot A Hat earwarmer band (which appears to have lost its picture link, although the chart link works) uses another historical knotwork strip for knitting:

Charts for both these repeats can be found by following the links above.

The second comment contains questions from Ellen R. She asks if I've ever worked these patterns before, and if they can be done in voided (Assisi) style. Here's an answer to both:

I did "Think" in 1989 and gave it to my husband to hang in his office. At the time he was working for a company that used the Scots lion as its logo. All of these patterns are in TNCM, and you can see the one I'm working on now across the bottom of the piece. It's upside down compared to the strip I'm working now, and is worked voided - with the background instead of the foreground stitched. The effect is a bit different. To my eye, it's more formal done this way. You can also see more of the repeat, although even this strip doesn't capture one full cycle. I've worked quite a few of these many times, although even I haven't done every pattern in TNCM (darn near close, though).

The last comment comes from Anne in Atenveldt, (an SCA region that includes parts of California and Utah). She's got a copy of my book and notes that the chart for the current strip shows the two interlaces and the segment between, but is much shorter than the length of the strip I'm working now (or for that matter, what's in the Think sampler). She wants to know how I do the additional segments.

I attempt to answer. The extra length is a mirror image of the section presented in the book. I work along as shown for the center point interlace and then the area between it and the next interlace as shown. On the far side of the second interlace, enough of the established pattern is shown to keep the stitcher on target, but after that point a bit of mental gymnastics is required. The stitcher has to continue on by inverting the graphed segment, mirror image style until the next mirror reflection point is reached. Again, I do show some of the area on both sides of that second bounce point to assist in navigation (and because in this case the interlaces are eccentric), but space prohibits showing a full cycle of the repeat.

Now this doesn't present a problem for me, but as you can see, I've been flogging myself with this sort of thing for a long time. And it's no shame to say that doing this in-mind reflection is difficult for you. It's a matter of wiring, and not everyone can do this with ease, no more than can everyone use a map or read music.

If chart flipping presents problems, I do know of one easy shortcut. Office supply stores still carry transparency sheets for overhead projectors. They're far less common in these days of Powerpoint and projectors, but many schools still use them so they're kept in stock. They come in several flavors for various types of photocopier or printer, so be sure you've got the right kind for your machine. (Hot process laser printers and photocopiers for example use a melt resistant plastic, and can be fouled by using something not designed for them). Copy your chart onto the transparent sheet. Put it in a page protector sleeve with a piece of plain white paper. Work off it as usual. When time comes to do the flip, turn it over inside the page protector. Instant mirror image. The only caveat is that on pattens with eccentric interlaces as the flip point (like the one I'm working now), you'll need to finish the interlace as charted before flipping to work the "in-between" portion.

In all, thanks to all who continue to read here. I do hope that my prattling on is useful to someone.

Technorati : counted-thread, embroidery, knitting

I'm being eaten alive by work deadlines as usual, limiting my time for knitting and blogging, but I did take off this afternoon to work on the Resident Male's Fathers Day present. Elder and Younger Daughter helped, of course.

Back story: Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai movie is one of this household's all time favorites. On more than one occasion we've pointed out that the Resident Male is vastly outumbered here, surrounded as he is by a sea of females. And on more than one occasion I've threatened to make him a "odd man out" banner inspired by the one raised to rally faltering spirits in our favorite move:

Today we did it. We made a beach flag inspired by the movie. The movie banner says "Farm," but in our case "Sand" is more appropriate, because we intend on flying this on our annual Cape Cod vacation. Calligraphy for "sand" is courtesy of Ted Goodman and family, local Aikido instructor and all around good guy. (Thanks again, Ted!)

Younger Daughter helped with the sewing, learning to use a sewing machine in the process. Elder daughter helped create and ink the circles and triangles.

Resident Male was quite tickled by the gift, which we gave early - there being no effective place to hide a four foot tall banner in this house.

Technorati : knitting

Life took a silly twist here at String this week. Younger daughter and her fifth grade class participated in an Egg Drop. That's the now classic assignment of designing and building some sort of a container that will protect a raw egg when container and egg are tossed from the roof of the school. The kids worked on their designs over the school break week last week. Yesterday was launch day. Acclaim was given for mission accomplishment (the passenger egg remained unbroken after a three-story fall), and originality of design.

Younger daughter's idea was to wrap her egg in a bit of bubble wrap for stability, then to embed the wrapped egg in a mass of balloons. When we went to the party store we found a bag of purple balloons on sale, a post-season discount along with other traditional Mardi Gras colors. She decided to make her balloon mass into a bunch of grapes. A very BIG bunch of grapes.

She made the streamers from tissue paper, three sheets each cut in a spiral for maximum length without the extra weight of additional tape.

Getting the thing to school on a windy morning was a challenge. It filled the back of the van. But as I hear the effort was worth it. "The Grape Escape" had a successful launch, and fell from the third floor rooftop with majestic slowness, bouncing a couple of times on landing but remaining intact. The egg passenger was unharmed. If the school posts a video of the trial I'll share the link. Younger daughter is quite pleased both with her project's success and with its amusement value.

In knitting news, I continue on the entrelac sock and am now about halfway up the ankle. Minor disappointment in the Berroco Sock yarn I used, though. I've found six knots so far in the skein of color 1487 (browns/tans) that I'm using - one or two are a statistical aberration I can live with, but that many knots is a clear indication of quality control problems. By contrast the skein of #1425 (mixed turquoise black, red, orange, purple) was clean.

Technorati : knitting sock

I clearly haven't gotten the latest sock bug out of my system. After playing with the yarn-leftovers entrelac pair last week, I thought that the same technique might be useful for a problematic skein. I recently bought a couple of 100g balls of Berroco Socks. The first was a visual jumble in the ball (color #1425 John Moores). The colors were pleasing, but the appearance of the thing gave no clue as to how it would knit up. It ended up working pretty conventionally, with an interest-maintaining long repeat:

I kept patterning on this pair to a minimum, and introduced the eyelets only because I find miles of stockinette to be exceedingly boring.

The other ball looked nifty in the skein, but presented more of a problem. Those nice, solid sections you see in the photo (color # 1487, Gielgud) are actually quite short. The foot of my toe up sock shows the small tiger-stripy effect of the stuff just knitted up plain in stockinette:

But that's even more boring if continued up the whole leg. That's where the entrelac comes in. I'm using it on the ankle part. The color patches don't align into checkerboard (a mathematical impossibility) but they are interesting in a skewbald sort of way. Note that if I had used a companion contrasting color along with this brown/tan/ecru yarn I could have made the visual weave effect clearer.

I don't know why I'm not more enthused about picking up an in-process project, but until I am I'll stick to working up more of my stashed sock yarn. One thing that whets my interest somewhat is Hanne Falkenberg's Mermaid jacket kit. Unfortunately it's way out of my price range and doesn't come in an XL (the large looks to be a 12-14 US). There's a vaguely similar pattern available from DROPS/Garnstudio that is in my size, but the lines aren't anywhere near as elegant and to me at least, it doesn't have the drape or color placement finesse of the Falkenberg. So I keep dreaming...

Technorati : knitting socks

We had an entertaining weekend here at String, spending most of it cleaning up the debris of a New England winter and waking up the garden for spring. Now I'm not a very good gardener. In fact I stick to plants that in more hospitable geographic areas are rated as borderline invasive, because they are about the only plants I can't kill. I trust in my own lack of skill and the odd deep freeze winter to keep them in check.

This weekend's chores included moving a trillium and a peony to make more room for an aggressive hosta's growing hegemony; shuffling some day lilies out of the way; rescuing some tulips and daffs so courteously relocated mid-lawn by squirrels; planting three ultra hardy five petal rugosa roses in some newly freed up spots; and pulling dead leaves out of the giant grass stubble (aka elephant grass, or maiden grass).

How giant is our giant grass? It gets tall enough for its early September plumes to overtop the roof of our front porch. We cut it down before the seed sets and ripens in order to keep it from colonizing the entire neighborhood. But what to do with canes ranging from 8 to 13 feet? The first year we bagged them with the rest of the yard trimmings, for the town to haul off for composting. This fall though I had an idea.

I also attempt to grow what started out as an antique variety of big scarlet speckled runner beans. While I don't harvest enough of a crop to eat, the kids get a big kick out of our sequential years of Mendelian genetics. We plant our Magic Beans for three springs now - some are still true to their parent's form, some now look more like French flagolets/ Then we watch to see what color flowers appear (originally all red, now a mix of 25% white/75% red), and what color/form of beans result. They grow very fast, and require strings or a trellis to climb. Last year all we could find at the garden shop were puny 4 foot tall bamboo stakes. Not near long enough. So I decided to dry my giant grass stalks and store them through the winter to furnish the scaffolding for this year's bean trellis.

It's not warm enough for bean planting yet (final frost date is the second week of May here), but we did build the trellis and set it up against the sunny southern face of the garage:

On the whole, given the random length, lack of flexibility and fragility of the stalks, I'm amazed we were able to come up with anything at all. Yes, those are cable ties fastening the thing together. We're nerds and proud! The structure is sort of pitiful, as if it were built by drunken orcs in World of Warcraft. I'm pretty sure that if they produced something this sad their players would be dunned a dozen experience points for failing so miserably in the attempt. But I like it. Covered in green with little flowers it will look grand. Provided it survives. Which is why we built it early. Better for it to collapse before beans attack it rather than having to disentangle them after the fact.

On the knitting front, I'm just about done with the entrelac socks. They turned out better than I expected.

Still a bit motley, but the four colors of leftover self stripers ended up complementing each other, mostly because all of them had green and brown in their mix. In person what looks like bright tomato red in the on-needle sock is more muted. Also, I divided the lot of leftovers into two groups - one that was mostly speckled with few or no solid stripes, and one that had firm solid stripes and spotty bits. The finished sock clearly shows the solids in the entrelac bits worked from left to right, and the speckled yarn in the entrelac bits worked right to left. All in all quite a satisfying project for something starting with such an unpromising quantity of leftovers.

Technorati : gardening, knitting, socks

I'm not quite sure why - maybe it's spring doldrums, but I continue to be rather uninspired by knitting. Since I wrote last, I've finished two more pairs of socks and am half-way through the third. One of those pairs has already been given away, so no pix are possible but here's the second rather boring pair:

About the only thing I can say about recent sock production is that I'm trying to use up leftovers and odd skeins. The turquoise in the pair above is old Kroy 4-ply (pre Kroy Sock). The multicolor is a Schachenmayer sock yarn, a ragg blend of spring pastels, mint, turquoise, yellow and pink leftover from a baby project. I had only one 50g skein of each.

The sock on needles below is a more ambitious adventure in leftover exploitation. I save every little bit of sock yarn. You never know when you'll need as little as a row or two to work a contrasting color stripe. Along the way, larger bits get used up to make baby booties in my favorite pattern -Jane's Booties by Ann Krekel. But I tend to use mostly the brighter colors and primary colors for the booties. This means that the tangled mass at the bottom of my sock yarn box is disproportionately a large number of tiny balls in browns, greens, and muddy mixes (the in-between parts of self stripers). Since there's more than enough of those leftovers to do a couple of pairs of socks, and I wanted to reclaim my storage space, I decided to work them up.

Even though I need to use lots of little bits, I don't like lots of darned ends in the foot part of my sock, so I decided to use some of the larger quantities for the feet. The ankle part however is fair game. The foot is rather humdrum, toe and heel in the same brown, and 6x2 stripes of green and brown. Rather than tons of skinny stripes I opted to do my ankles in entrelac:

I've got bits of my brown and speckled green in the ankle, plus odds and ends of three self stripers and a couple of raggs and other prints. Lord knows what yarn labels these were in specific, but likely suspects include Regia Ringel, Schoeller Stahl Fantasia and Opal, all chosen because somewhere in their repeats they included green and/or brown. The second sock will begin similarly with a very plain foot part. Then it will explode into a similar bit of entrelac, although I won't be using the exact same mix of leftovers. I do have just enough of the first set (most notably the orange and brown) to unite the look of both socks so they end up being fraternal twins.

As for what pattern I'm using - I'm not. These are toe-up socks with Figure-8 toes, worked on 72 stitches around (rather large gauge for me, and quick to knit), with a short-rowed heel. I worked about three rows beyond the heel in the speckled green before blasting out into the entrelac. To keep the ankle a manageable width, I had to do some decreases. Each foundation triangle "eats" 8 stitches of my circumference (k2tog, k1, k2tog, k1, k2tog) to produce patches that are 5 stitches wide. That's 9 five-stitch foundation triangles in total around the ankle. Then I continued in normal entrelac manner until the sock was long enough. On the last row of half-triangles, I reintroduced the stitches I trimmed out before to restore the piece to 72 stitches. I'm now working my standard 20 rows of plain old k2, p2 ribbing at the top.

One more note. To keep from going nuts, I worked the entrelac patches using "backwards knitting." I used my usual yarn in left hand Continental method for what are normally the knit side rows, but instead of flipping the work over to purl back on each 5 stitch patch, still holding the yarn in my left hand I used a throwing variant to knit back from left to right. Much more efficient than flipping back and forth a zillion times.

So I guess the moral of the story is that frugality pays. If you save all those small bits you can look forward to some interesting adventures in sock knitting.

Technorati : knitting socks

As promised, and thanks to the Tofutsies sock recipient, here are pix of that pair. She's a far better photographer than I'll ever be, so for once shots on String have an element of clarity:

Thanks, Merlyn! You can actually make out the diamonds of eyelets. And thanks again to Kathryn for the Tofutsies yarn. (I feel especially enabled today.)

To make life easier for future reference, here's the chart for the ankle pattern. It's repeated four times around the sock, a convenient one panel per needle if you're knitting with four needles holding 18 stitches each, or two circs with 36 each (a sock circumference of 72 stitches, the count for the largest gauge I knit for myself). This can also be worked as side by side panels of 16 stitches by eliminating columns 1 and 18 (a sock circumference of a more usual 64 stitches). The astute will be able to pick out from the excellent photo that I followed the pattern as presented in Duchrow, but my chart below offers up several modifications to the original:

Or if you're adventurous, here's my own riff on the same idea to make an argyle-like diamond studded all-over repeat - this time requiring a fixed multiple of 18 stitches (It can also be worked as a single panel of 18):

This adaptation is so blindingly obvious that it must be presented in other stitch sources. For example, without running to my library I am pretty sure that Walker presents a diamond of double YO eyelets in her second Treasury. Which is another way of saying that there's little new in knitting, and most invention is more of a process of rediscovery than virgin creation.

Technorati : knitting socks

Here I am. Remember me?

As occasional readers here have noted before, extended periods between posts usually mean that my professional life has up and swallowed my personal life, and that I'm hard pressed by work-related deadlines. The past couple of months has been no exception. I will say that even though I get swamped, I do try to grab a little relaxation time, but when I do I usually stick to autopilot rather than challenging knitting.

Which is all a round about excuse for why nothing has been done on my Sempre pullover of late. I haven't had time to sit down and draft out the fulll size mockup. I'll get around to it, but not until after I decompress. In the mean time I've been sticking to nice, boring sock knitting.

Long Time Needlework Pal Kathryn surprised me with a nifty gift - two skeins of lively, variegated pink SWTC Tofutsies, a wool/cottom/soy silk/crab shell chitin fingering weight yarn. I was pleasantly surprised by the Tofutsies. I'm not a fan of cotton sock yarns, and usually stick to all wool or wool/nylon. To me cotton is unstretchy to knit, and both clammy and pebbly underfoot. Not so the Tofutsies. It knits up nice and soft, not pebbly at all. It is however not as stretchy as wool - sort of somewhere in between wool and cotton in total stretch. Because I favor toe-ups with short row heels which rely heavily on total stretch for their ankle to instep fit, I was hesitant to use the Tofutsies for my standard issue sock. Instead I adapted Wendy's toe up gusset heel for my stitch count. It worked perfectly, making a sock with more than enough depth and with for comfortable fit, even with the un-stretchy yarn. For the decorative ankle part, I adapted yet another one of the simplest double yarn over eyelet insertion strips from Duchrow, Vol. 1. This one featured diamonds of eyelets, embedded in an 18 stitch repeat. I wish I had pix, but I gave the pair to a pal who was thirsty for warm socks in a sprightly, spring pink. She has promised to take some snaps though which I will eventually post.

And for those who are dying to ask, no. This yarn does not smell like crab shells. If anything, it smells like cotton yarn, not wool yarn, even though it has twice as much wool in it as it does cotton.

My Tofutsies pair was a super-quick knit, so I started a second pair of socks out of another sock yarn new to my stash. This time it was Berroco Sox, in color #1425 (called John Moores on the B. website, and from the grouping named after the UK entrepreneur or Liverpool-based university, not the US baseball team owner), working my standard toe-up with short-rowed heel. I like this yarn. Although I did find one knot in the skein, the rest of the thing was comparable in feel and gauge to Regia or Fortissima. Very nice, indeed. Especially considering that it was slightly less expensive than those Euro-labels. (The yarn itself is imported.)

The color run repeated roughly twice between toe and heel for me, and with each stripe being very shallow and the color patterning being hard to discern in skein, was fun to watch build. You can't really see it in the standard issue lousy String pix below, but I knit the feet smooth and introduced an ultra simple diagonal lacy detail on the ankle:

It's a simple double yarn over diagonal, done on an 8 stitch repeat (my socks are usually 72 or 80 stitches around). The idea was to leave enough solid to let the color repeat play, but keep me from dying of boredom knitting miles of plain stockinette. Here's left and right hand varinants of the thing, just in case you want to make a pair of complementary socks, too:

Technorati : knitting socks

I'm back from a horrific spate of deadlines prior to a trip to see family in Florida for the holiday, and about to launch into another round of equally horrific deadlines. (I need to embroider a sampler that says "Another Day, Another Deadline.")

But in the mean time, I can present the mindless knitting I did on the plane. I finished the pair of Noro Kureyon Sock slouch socks, and have almost finished another totally boring and featureless sock, this one of Regia 4-Ply, in their Design Line color grouping endorsed by Kaffee Fassett (Color 04455). Interesting play of colors, but like all stripers with no texture, miles of plain old stockinette.

Why knit these boring socks? Because I'm not a good traveler. The motion of the plane coupled with the gentle aroma of blended jet fuel exhaust and unwashed traveler, compounded by the coffin like minimalist seating squash makes me green. I can only work on things I don't have to watch closely. Knitting from written or charted directions is a special challenge to both my personal equilibrium, and ability to contort to hold all in view without elbowing my seatmates. So for the trip, it's plain old socks or some similar non-challenging bit of work.

On the ground in Florida I started a lace scarf. Again, separated from my reference library I relied on a simple printed pattern. In this case, the Estonian Lace Scarf by Nancy Bush, offered up on Knitting Daily for a limited time (it's a reprint from Interweave Knits back in the Fall of 2001, if you still have access to that issue).

I'm using some Malabrigio Baby Merino Laceweight in a garnet-strawberry blend. It is not an optimal yarn for this project. First of all, it's heavier than what I would consider to be a true laceweight, and would look better on a larger size needle than recommended in the pattern (the only one I packed for the trip). It's a highly twisted single, more similar to a 3-ply in bulk. Second, the color variegation is fighting with the lace patterning. In particular the highly-annoying-to-work p7tog nupps (aka mini-bobbles) totally disappear. If I put in that finger twisting effort, I want the result to be seen. And finally, the pattern specifies 504 yards of yarn to complete. One skein of the Malabrigio is 470 or so yards. To save yarn, I planned on shortening the scarf by one repeat and improvising an edging instead of working the one shown. Even so, I am not pleased with the result:

I'm now thinking of carefully ripping it all out and starting over, either working this same pattern on a larger needle, or (now that I'm home) drafting out a different lace pattern that would be better suited to the color combo and available yardage. So it goes.

Technorati : knitting

I was wrong and I freely admit it. Remember the post in which I described a method for estimating the depth of stripes that would be produced by a skein of space dyed or multicolor patch yarn? I applied that method to my skein of Noro Kureyon Sock, and it flat out missed the mark.

Based on skein size and color strand counting, I estimated that each solid color stripe would last 4-6 rows or so before shading into the next. I still stand by that for the yarn on the outside of the skein, but I didn't factor into my estimation how seemingly random Noro yarns can be. Here's the skein:

I see lots of turquoise and magenta, with side trips to royal blue and deep green. The color segments of the yarn on the outside of the skein appear to last for the lengths I indicated.

But here's the resulting slouch sock (a sock with a deliberately wide ankle part), knit from the center of the ball out. It's brother is just a tiny turquoise cast-on speck right now:

Huh? where did that huge lump of royal blue above the heel come from? And the green/orange mix directly above that? And why is the pink/purple section so unexpectedly wide? Counting the strands on the inner layer visible on the un-dissected skein, pink/purple should be equal in width to green. What gives?

I might have been less surprised had there been more than one skein of this color number available on the day I bought the yarn. Looking at several, each starting at a different spot in the color progression might have revealed larger (or different) color segments than I anticipated. In any case, the color repeat has gone through about one and a half cycles in this sock, hitting the toe's hue blend about halfway between orange stripe and densest part of the magenta, although factoring in the wider circumference of the ankle part than the foot, the second appearance of the pink/purple is longer than that combo's debut.

So there's my caveat. I still say my estimation method works. Mostly. Except for Noro, where all bets are off.

Pattern footnote:

How to do a slouch sock? Easy. US #00s. Standard figure-8 cast on toe, worked on a set of five DPNs. Increase to 17 stitches per needle until just before the heel (68 st total). Increase one stitch per needle to 18 (72 st total), work a standard short row heel across two needles (36 stitches), instead of decreasing away the two sneaky stitches used to minimize any top-of-heel-decrease gaps, keep them, and increase one stitch each on the two non-heel needles for a total of 19 stitches per needle (76 st total). Work leg part equal in length to foot (folded along the heel's natural equator), then work about 20 rows of K2, P2 ribbing and end off.

Why do a slouch sock? Between the wild colors, thick/thin spin, and overtwist, any lacy or texture pattern would be lost in this stuff. Also this yarn isn't a good candidate for stranding or striping with another (although two different but closely related skeins in a simple stranding pattern might be interesting). I've had some breakage, and I'm not inclined to use this stuff for a nice, snug sock that takes a lot of stretching to put on. The roomy top will diminish that strain.

Technorati : knitting

My Knitty Op Art blanket is done:

It's about 47 inches across the center. I used about six skeins of green and five of yellow Austermann Record 210. I had begun another round of yellow but I didn't have enough yarn to complete the next progression, so I ripped it back, opting instead to use up all available green for the outer, larger framing section. Obviously, I haven't attempted blocking yet. Cotton yarn as a rule does not deform as well under blocking as does wool, and this dense cotton in particular has a mind of its own. I suspect I'll have to pin this to within an inch of its life, then steam block it rather than just damp blocking. But that's an exercise for another day. Even if I don't get around to it, the odd shape (although unorthodox) isn't unappealing.

In other knitting news, I continue to slog away at the spiderweb section of my growing olive green tablecloth, but pix of the standard indistinct and blurry snood shape object won't reveal much beyond the fact that it still exists. Also I was tempted too long by the skein of Noro Kureyon Sock Yarn that's been sitting atop my monitor since I posted about its acquisition back in July. I had thought about doing something unusual with it rather than just socks, but the lure of those colors proved too strong.

At that time I bought it I posited that each color area would last about three or four rows in a sock. My instinct was more or less correct, but the yarn has more transitions and in-between gradations than I expected. Knit up, the color sections look like they last much longer, but if you examine closely "pure" colors do last for about five or six rows before they begin transforming into the long "tweener" blend areas:

For the record, I'm using 00s, and am working at the relatively large gauge (for me) of 8 stitches per inch. Although I usually prefer my socks knit tighter, this yarn is a bit heavy compared to the sock yarns I usually use. It's also a single, with a fair bit of unevenness - some parts are thinner than others - and a fair bit of overtwist. The overtwist can be a pain because the yarn will kink up on itself if a long section is drawn from the skein. I've also noticed that other knitters have complained about Kureyon Sock's feel, thinking it a bit on the coarse side. It is hard on the fingers as it is being knit, but the resulting sock at my gauge is nice and cushy and feels much softer than palpitating the skein promises.

This pair won't be finished any time soon. Now that the first sock has been kicked off, I've relegated it to "briefcase project" status. That's the small, portable project I keep on hand to knit at doctors' appointments, while waiting on line at the post office, and other stolen oddments of time. My socks will be done. Eventually.

Technorati : knitting

I feel like I've landed on the planet of the domestic divas. Everything I did this weekend involved knitting, sewing or cooking.

First, the Chicken Viking Hat is finished!

It's shown here on a random stuffed toy - no infants of appropriate size being to hand at the moment.

The CVH is quick knit, although getting the legs on and finished were both a bit fiddly. Luckily I had some stuffing left over from a previous project because I violated Knitting Rule #4, and didn't bother to read the whole thing through before I sat down to attempt it.

My only other caution is a minor one - If anyone is going to knit up your own CVH, be advised that on the diagram of how to pick up the stitches that form the leg, there is one 90-degree corner, and three slightly rounded ones. That 90-degree corner indicates the direction that the feetie part of the drumstick will point. I didn't make the mistake of making the two feeties go in different directions, but I can see that doing so might be a very easy and natural error. (Why do I call them feeties? Because that's what we'd call the real thing when as kids we'd haunt the kitchen when my grandmother made chicken soup. Only the best behaved kids got feeties from the stock pot as a pre-dinner special treat.)

My camo valences are also coming along. Everything is proceeding as per the plan and diagram in the last entry. Here's Valence #1, all ironed out and pinned prior to stitching.

And I also managed today to do my community service obligation. I baked for the Election Day bake sale, to be held at (and benefit) Younger Daughter's elementary school. Class for both kids is canceled on Tuesday. Usually voting happens with no interruption of school. My guess is that they're anticipating record turn-out. That means lots of people hungry to express their political will, who might also be hungry for cinnamon hazelnut teacake, or cocoa spritz cookies.

On the teacakes, I used a mini loaf pan that produces four small cakes, sort of like this one.

One recipe of the batter (plus about a half cup of ground hazelnuts in the batter and another half cup in the topping) worked perfectly in it although I did end end up baking the cakes for about 10 minutes longer than the recipe advocates. All four cakes turned out quite nicely.

The cookies also were a success, with one iteration of the recipe making approximately 115 1.5-inch cocoa stars. However I find that most published cookie press cookie recipes are way too stiff for my presses and this one was no exception. I want my batter to be something like refrigerated peanut butter in consistency. It should be so soft that it must be shoveled into the tube - not something that can be taken up and rolled into neat cylinders and inserted. I used an extra tablespoon of cocoa in the spritz cookies, plus considerably more milk than it calls for to achieve my target texture. I used sour whole milk in both the teacakes and the cookies, having some in the fridge this week. It worked nicely, providing both with a tiny bit tangier taste than usual.

Technorati : knitting, recipes, sewing

Elder Daughter is now in the Doc Martins and camo phase of teenage self expression. That expression has spiraled out to her immediate surroundings. As a result, last fall we replaced her pre-teen starry night sheets with a bed-in-a-bag set on this theme:

It came with a top sheet, a fitted bottom sheet, a comforter and a pillowcase. And for some reason - a bed skirt. To those who don't suckle at the breast of Martha Stewart, a bed skirt is a somewhat prissy patterned dust ruffle that lies between the mattress and box spring on most beds, with the fashion fabric curtaining off the under-bed area from general view. Far be it from me to question the wisdom of the marketers who thought that someone favoring camouflage patterns might use and appreciate such a thing.

In any case, her bed is a high platform with built-in drawers underneath and a bed skirt is irrelevant. Still, the skirt came with the set, and I abhor waste, so together Elder Daughter and I decided to remake it into a pair of narrow valences for the windows in her room. It's taken this long to start the project because my ancient Elna sewing machine has been up on blocks awaiting repairs. The machine has now been overhauled and I am no longer able to endure the puppy looks and pleading, so I've begun.

Here's our general plan. My goal is to minimize sewing as much as possible, by re-using existing finished edges and seams:

I'm at the first step (upper left of the diagram), slicing the camo fabric off from the foot of the skirt and picking out the box pleated corners:

We have no ideas on what to do with the excised bit from the former foot. Various pillow and stuffed animal suggestions have been floated. I also considered (then discarded as too fiddly) the idea of using some of it to make curtain tabs rather than a simple rod casing.

I think I'll take this opportunity to introduce Elder Daughter to Ancient Elna. Long straight seams are easy and sewing is a life skill. More on this as we progress.

Technorati : sewing

Just before the fourth of July week, I got some yarn to make baby gifts. One of the items was this cleverly packaged kit from Plymouth:

It contains a ball of Cotton Kisses yarn, three little ducky buttons, and two patterns - one for a three button cardigan (below), and one for a three button placket pullover (shown on the yarn ball). Both patterns are given for three sizes, from newborn through 1 year. The entire thing was $14. at my favorite local yarn store in Lexington, MA. This weekend past I went on a small kid-free vacation, and while away, knit it up while sitting on the beach.

I did the cardigan in the 6 month size. It's finished except for sewing on the buttons. I made buttonholes on both sides of the button band. When I find out the sex of the target baby, I'll sew the buttons onto the appropriate spot, covering up the unneeded set of buttonholes. I had ample yarn left over - probably enough to do matching socklets, so there should be plenty of yarn to make the largest size.

This was a very inexpensive and quick project. The directions are clear and simple. There is minimal shaping, and interest is provided by a double welt garter ridge detail at the bottom of the body and ends of the sleeves. The only vague bit was the direction to make three evenly spaced buttonholes. I substituted two stitch one-row buttonholes for the K2tog/yo ones written up. All in all a new knitter could handle the creation and assembly of this project with ease.

My only caution is a very mild one on the yarn itself. Cotton Kisses is a loosely plied multi-strand cotton blend. One of the strands is fuzzy cotton, slubby and puffy, the other three are thin binder strands of the blend fibers. All are very inelastic, as one would expect from a yarn of this composition. While the resulting texture is extremely soft and pleasingly random, hiding any imperfections in stockinette stitch formation, working with it does take a tiny bit of concentration to avoid splitting the strands. (The variegated color I was using also camouflages any stitch irregularities.) People who don't like the inelasticity of cotton would also probably not like working with this one. Still - for a very economical quick knit baby project that's cute and easy to do, with a yarn that with a tiny bit of patience gives an excellent result even for new knitters struggling for stitch evenness - this one is a go.

Technorati : knitting

Of late my life has been ruled by deadlines. The pressure should abate somewhat soon because we've managed to find another proposal person at work. I am looking forward to evenings and weekends again. Also knitting.

In the mean time more in the manner of keeping sanity rather than making any real progress, I dashed off another pair of socks last week. This one was on huge-as-logs 2mm needles, standard toe-ups with the figure 8 toe and short rowed heel, on only 64 stitches (not my usual 72-80) . No fancy patterning, no nothing. Just mindless stockinette to let the yarn's native colors play. The result looks rather Star Trek - with the standard Trek swoosh - albeit sideways - in crew uniform colors on a dark navy background.

The yarn's official name is Regia Galaxy 4-Fadig Color. I suspect that in Europe it's sold as Regia Jupiter, because of the small blurb about Jupiter inside the label. I worked it on such large needles because the color repeat didn't work very well at my standard smaller gauge. The label recommends 2-3mm needles. As you can see, the swoosh factored in nicely enough at 2mm.

I'm not quite sure what larger project to begin next. I'm still finishing Elder Daughter's Kyoto sleeves. But that's my downstairs project, for when I have time to sit with the family and play video games or watch movies. My upstairs project sits in the library, where the adults of the house take their relaxation after the kids have gone to bed. That's usually the most involved thing I am working on at any one time, and the project for which I now find myself in need of inspiration.

Technorati : knitting

Like most parents, I spend a lot of time rolling my eyes at what passes for homework and school assignments. There are way too many feel-good tasks - making posters and collages, even well into high school. Where are the analytical reading pieces? Where is learning how to write a convincing essay? But every once and a while something engaging and creative is requested.

This month Smaller Daughter (now 9) had to construct a Rube Goldberg device, with a goal of popping a balloon. I sat on my hands and watched her experiment for the better part of a week. She scribbled out her designs and went down several possible paths before settling on her device components. She constructed (and re-constructed) each station scrounged from toys and oddments at hand, testing out each one individually, then assembled them into her final chain reaction. Eventually, after much tinkering she got it just right, and the whole thing worked as intended.

I wish I had a video camera, but you'll have to use your imagination. Especially the part where the balloon makes a satisfying pop, and she leaps up in triumph.

Click on any thumbnail on this website to see detailed pix.

Someday I will loose this proto-engineer on the world. I hope the world will be ready.

In knitting news - not much. I've been working like a demon. All I've had time to do over the past two weeks is one mindless sock. For me to take two weeks to knit one sock says a lot. This one is a standard 72 stitch sock with a figure-8 toe and short rowed heel, worked using five DPNs. That calculates out to 18 stitches per needle. My insertion strip is 18 stitches wide as graphed below, so I do the pattern in its entirety once on each of the four working needles. I've stuffed a piece of white paper inside the sock so you can see the diamond patterning. and provided a chart for the simple design .

I used Meilenweit Mega Boot Stretch, knit at about 9spi. The shaded reds with the touch of orange is color #709. I'm not wild about this yarn. It feels nice and cushy knit up, but I don't enjoy tensioning it. The stretch is throwing my gauge off a bit, especially on my heel's purl rows. It also is rather lofty unstretched, and prone to catch and split on needle tips. I'll post a review of the stuff when the pair is finished.

Technorati : knitting, rube goldberg

For some reason the automatic spell checker kicked in and (without my approval) obfuscated my meaning a bit. I repost, with corrections. Apologies for the confusion.

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I did do a small amount of gift knitting this holiday season - mostly large-gauge hiking or slipper socks, knit from DK or worsted weight yarn, respectively. I give all my socks with a must-fit guarantee. If they're not optimal, I usually make another pair or fix the sub-standard offering.

I had to honor that warranty this year for one pair in particular. The recipient was thrilled, but my foot size estimate was off. I based my estimate on a pair of shoes which turned out to belong to someone other than the target. Since the only defect was foot length, and the yarn is nice and big (and I have a small amount of additional yarn but not enough to do a whole new pair), I decided to lengthen rather than make another pair. Plus a tutorial on doing so might be of use to my one reader out there in blogland. :)

The re-toeing process works in fundamentally the same way, regardless of whether the original sock was knit toe-up or cuff-down. I use this opportunity to present a quick how-to for those looking to add length or replace worn areas on the toe or ball of the foot.

Here's my original pair, knit from the Jaeger Matchmaker DK leftovers from my dropped leaf sweater:

The measurement from the tip of the toe to the back of the heel is about 9 inches. The recipient has requested about an additional half inch of length.

Step one is to unravel the toe area. It's always easier to unravel any area that contains increases, decreases or cable crossings from the top. Knitting can be unraveled from the bottom, but anything other than plain stockinette or garter stitch can be problematic. Because these socks were knit toe-up, I need to start unraveling above the increases that form the toe. If these were cuff-down socks, I'd begin unraveling at my grafted or bound-off seam. In both cases, the process is the same. Identify the stitches that in the toe form the decrease line (in flat feature toes), then boldly snip and get on with it. Here I've put a safety pin between the side stitches a few rows up into the sock foot from my snipping point, and am about to cut. Note that the only one stitch needs to be snipped to start the process:

Having cut, I'm now placing the newly freed stitches of the sock foot on my needles as they are liberated. If I wanted to re-employ the knit part that I'm excising here, I would use two sets of needles, picking up the stitches on both sides of the unraveled row. (I might do this if I were lengthening a sleeve or sweater body above the ribbing, if I intended on grafting the ribbing back on rather than totally re-knitting it). In this case, I'll just rip out the toe and stash the remaining mini-balls in my Box of Future Stripes(tm) - there being few yarn scraps in this world that I find too short to save. The less frugal than I would probably give them the fling.

Why not use the raveled yarn to re-knit the toes? Because I already know that the bit ripped back is too short. Socks benefit from there being as few joins as possible, especially in the sensitive toe and heel areas. If I were to use the ripped back yarn I'm guaranteed to run out, and will need to add on more. That means that instead of three ends to darn in on each reworked toe (the original sock body end, plus the two ends of the re-knit area), I'd have five (original, re-knit section, extra yarn added to eke out raveled bits). More ends = less comfort for the wearer.

While I'm picking up, I don't pay any attention to how many stitches end up on each needle. Because I've marked the exact center of the side, I can assort the stitches appropriately among the needles once they've been rescued. Here you see the result. All stitches reclaimed and on the needles:

Once the stitches are on the needles, it's a simple matter to knit extra length and work a standard toe, ending with Kitchener grafting. As you can see in the after picture below taken after the toe was re-knit, there is no line of demarcation between the body of the foot (knit toe-up) and the new toe (knit in the other direction). My cuff-down grafted toes do turn out to be a bit pointier than my no-sew figure-8 cast-on toes. In any case, here's After Sock and Before Sock. Measured against each other, I've added a bit over a half an inch to the sock's heel to toe length. All I have to do now is fix the other one.

Ripping back and picking up after a garment is finished is a handy technique to have in one's bag of knitting tricks, and one that many people overlook. I've used it to replace worn sock feet, re-knit mitten ends and glove fingers that sprouted holes, lengthen the cuffs and body of sweaters for rapidly growing children, and replace worn elbows or ripped cuffs. So finished doesn't always mean permanently done. Think of it more as "in a resting state that's presently useful" than as absolute finality.

Hope you found this useful!

Technorati : knitting

O.k. I've finished and posted the half-completed blog entry I was working on last month when life so rudely interrupted me. Since then (if anyone is interested) work deadlines have come and gone; our normal holiday-related seasonal bustle has forced its way in and retreated, complete with the annual flood of cookies and New Years cassoulet; and we even managed to grab a couple of days to run away with the kids to visit Washington D.C. The last was the most fun, being a time to revisit the Smithsonian museums and a dear family friend in Maryland - about the only things I miss from the time we lived down in that area.

In terms of knitting, progress has been made as well, both by me and by Elder Daughter. I'm especially proud of her's. She designed and knit herself a pair of fingerless mitten style handwarmers from Cascade Fixation/Elan Esprit. They are K2, P2 ribbed throughout, with a twist-stitch cable running down the back of each hand.

Following up her mitts, she has now embarked upon Her First Sweater ™. She's using Sirdar Denim Ultra, a loosely twisted lofty and soft acrylic/cotton/wool blend. She's getting the recommended gauge of 9 st/ 12 rows = 10 cm, and is working up a simple top-down stockinette stitch pullover from a pattern I calculated for her using Sweater Wizard (About size 40, needle size US #11,13, approximately 720 yards of yarn knitting to Ultra's gauge)

She's up to the first sleeve, and is basking in the delight of mastering the arcane arts of following a written pattern and the SSK decrease, so that the tapering under the arm on her sleeve is symmetrical. Pix of her sweater once it matures from the large blue speckled mass phase and sports a bit more recognizable shaping. Due to the huge gauge it's galloping along, so that should be quite soon.

My own holiday-related knitting was light this year - three pairs of socks and two scarves. In addition, I knit myself another pair of Fingerless Whatevers, quick replacements for the last pair, one of which has now gone AWOL. I'm also now about halfway done with Elder Daughter's Kyoto, and made good progress on my latest lace doodle scarf. Pix of these in the next post.

Resolutions? None. Except for this.

Technorati : knitting

For your holiday themed enjoyment (and because I've been stacked with precious little knitting time of late), I present our very own whistling demon. This candid of Younger Daughter is courtesy of a kids' Halloween trick or treat party hosted by my employer, and the clever camera of Ms. L. Smith:

Elder Daughter however has more elaborate costuming in mind. She loves the black lace doodle scarf, but wants to complement it with black lace fingerless mitts. Never one to back down from a challenge, I've been playing with the concept - flying without a pattern, but as you can see - not without a black lace net.

Left is the thing patted flat, right is the mitt stretched out a bit on a roll of paper. I began at the cuff with a provisional cast-on, then worked a fused picot hem (barely seen here). I continued in pattern, with a mega-eyelet band after I'd done a bit of cuff. I might end up threading a wide ribbon through those eyelets - or not, depending on the bespeaker's preference. The thumb gusset is done entirely in stockinette, and both the thumb and the top are also finished off with a picot hem, although on the cast-off row, I'll need to take a tapestry needle and stitch down the live stitches now stowed on the white cord, cast-off fusing being a bit too fussy for the inside of such small spaces. I don't know if anyone is interested in a stitch by stitch pattern. If so, I'll consider writing one up from my notes.

The white cord itself is a handy tip. It's plastic lanyard string (aka gimp or boondoggle). I've found it to be quite handy for provisional cast-ons, and as a flexible stitch holder for exactly this purpose. It's stiff enough to make threading the stitches onto it easy, can be cut to any length, and it's very inexpensive, especially if you scoop up a spool in an unpopular color from the craft store's discount bin.

Technorati : knitting

Life continues to intrude on my knitting time. Besides the regular flock of work-related obligations last week, I was surprised by Smaller Daughter. Thursday morning, rummaging in her backpack looking for her lunchbox, I found a notice for her elementary school's Colonial Day. It's an interactive festival sort of day, but one that requires all of the kids to dress in some attempt at a historical costume. (To be fair, I had heard about it long ago but forgotten.) So with a costume needed within 7 days, but my being away on a business trip starting Monday, my Memorial day weekend activities now included a close huddle with my ancient Elna sewing machine.

I wanted to make something relatively early - closer to first encounter than the Revolutionary War so that target child had a chance of wearing her outfit again. I pelted over to the fabric store during lunch hour on Friday and picked up a couple of remnants - 2.75 yards of a soft green twill whatever (plus matching thread), and one yard of a linen-look in white, all for about $10.00. The price was right.

Then I came home and thought about what to make. I had already made her a puffy white pirate shirt that could double as a chemise, and I have a small white cap and coif set. A skirt, a bodice of some sort, plus an apron would be enough. Drawstring skirts are easy enough, but the bodice part was tougher. Front lacing (instead of buttons) would do. Thankfully the topography of an 8-year old is easier to accommodate than that of a post-pubescent. I took measurements and drafted out a simple tab-bottom bodice with short sleeves. To make it substantial enough, I cut two of everything, so that the whole thing is self-lined. Here are the resulting pattern pieces, snipped from Red Sox coverage in the Boston Globe, plus all of the pieces sewn and assembled into the final bodice/jacket.

Things went pretty smoothly. I started by sewing the shoulder seams of the outer and inner shells, then uniting them along the neckline by sewing them together up the center front closure and around the neck. Then I sewed the side seams of the inner and outer shell, inverted the inner lining and pressed everything flat. The sleeves went together quickly, too. I sewed the inner and outer sleeve along the bottom edge, then did the underarm seam for the united unit all at once. I inverted the inner linings and pressed my sleeves. Once the sleeves were together, I set them in the bodice. Then I sewed together the inner and outer side of the tabs (that odd shaped piece below the sleeve) - making one for each quadrant of the garment. I turned them inside out and seamed them to the bottom edge of the outer shell. Last, I folded the inner shell's lower edge down to cover the raw edges of the tabs, and hemstitched it down by hand (too may layers for my sewing machine to cope with).

Since I didn't have much time, I didn't go with a zillion buttons or hand-made lacing holes. There's little if any tension on a little girl's bodice, so I didn't bother with reinforcing the lacing edge. I opted for the not very historical but really quick stage option - small rings sewn along the lacing edge to hold the fastening ribbon. Sacrificing a dozen split rings, formerly in use as place markers for lace knitting, I stitched them down by hand.

The apron was also easy. I cut two strips off the top of my yardage and lapping them end to end, pressed the seam lines for the apron's band and strings. Then I sewed the edges of the remaining piece (again doing it double-sided for additional body), gathered the raw edge and encapsulated it in the center of the apron. Time from taking the first measurements to final hemming - approximately 16 hours of work.

Here's the end result: one semi-historical kid-suit, inspiration from the 1620s. And yes, Target Child did help, learning how to use the sewing machine and working it for long, straight seams, tracing the pattern pieces with chalk, and doing a bit of the hand-work.

Knitting? I finished my vintage lace scarf. Blocking was postponed on account of Colonial Day.

Technorati : costumes, knitting, sewing

Self stripers, multi-ply color twist yarns, and hand-dyed yarns are lots of fun. There's a ton of color there to enjoy. But sometimes a vast and unbroken expanse of color play can be boring or can produce some oddly pooled or cluttered results that look nowhere as nice as the yarn did in the skein. That's why I like to fool around with multicolor yarns, trying to find a way that they play best, or are shown to better advantage. Sometimes it's not easy (regular readers here know of at least two of my multicolor yarn experiments have landed in the limbo of my Chest of Knitting Horrors^tm over the past couple years. But sometimes it is easy.

I finished up a pair of socks as a "chaser" after the vest was done. I used a stash-aged 50g ball of Stahl Wolle Socka Color, in a multistrand twist of maroon, pine, blue, and marigold - #9140, plus another well-aged 50g ball of Patons Kroy Socks in hunter green - #409. While the colors aren't exact matches, they are close enough to complement each other. Both of these were found in last-ball sales, but several years and many miles apart. Since I need around 80-90g of most fingering weight sock yarns to make a pair, between the two bargain basement balls I had enough to finish and still have leftovers - provided I used more or less equal amounts of each.

My solution was to work heels, toes, and ribbing, plus about a little under a third of the sock's body in my solid green, plus the remainder in the multicolor. I used very simple seven-row striping repeat, working five rows of multi, and then two rows of solid green (2/7 = about 28% of my sock's body). I like how the multi is visually broken by the bands of solid green. The end result has at once more contrast and more subtlety than working the whole sock from multi alone, even if I still did contrasting color toes, heels and ribbing.

Of course the other advantage of working simple stripes on socks is to idiot-proof achieving two socks of identical size. It's very easy to count five row units and two row units. When I had completed ten muticolored stripes, it was time to start the heel, which is much easier than having to count every row or trust in doing a measured or eyeballed estimation of foot length.

So. If you find yourself with odd lots of sock yarn, don't despair. 100g of fingering weight sock yarn knitting is ample for most socks up to around men's US shoe size 10.5 or so (slightly smaller if yarn-eating textures are used). You can either work color block style, using up one leftover and then another, or you can stripe. But how wide to make the stripes?

Heels, toes, and ribbing in my standard short-rowed heel sock consume about 25g (a conservative estimate). I have large and wide feet for a fem, so if you are knitting for yourself chances are that you use roughly what I do or less. Weigh it out and set it aside. Then weigh the rest of your leftovers. If you have (for example) 40g of blue, 20g of yellow and 20g of green, you've got a ratio of 2:1:1. If you worked a stripe repeat conforming to that ratio (let's say two rows of blue, two rows of yellow, two rows of blue, two rows of green), you should have enough of each color to complete the pair.

Obviously, I had enough and did complete my pair. And I did have leftovers. As expected, I had a bit more of the multi left than I did the green, because my heels, toes, and narrow green stripes added up to about 60% of total yarn consumption.

Technorati : knitting

I'm up to finishing the big gray ribbed leaf pullover now. In the best of all worlds, I would have blocked it first. Yes, I know this is heresy, but I'm short on blocking space right now (the aftermath of a minor basement flood in last week's mega-rain), and the texture pattern is relatively well behaved. I have only minor curling, so I thought I'd finish out the collar first. Then if I were to be feeling less lazy and more accepting of playing with moisture, I'd block out the piece before setting the sleeves.

In the mean time, here's one of the shoulders:

I know the pix are blurry, but I'm hoping you can make out that I've managed to match the design elements on either side of the seam. My ribbed leaf texture has a distinct center line for each repeat. Also the front and back ended on the same row of the texture pattern, making direct matching a bit easier. Each piece was bound off at the shoulder. I then butted the two shoulders up against each other and did a stitch-for-stitch-style seam into the stitch immediately under the bound-off edge. The two edges ended up being turned back like selvages. They are however useful, providing seam stability and resistance to stretch. Grafting the two shoulders together as live stitches without the reinforcement of the shoulder seam could lead to distortion of the shoulder region, as the weight of the garment pulled it down. Plus, as a modified dropped shoulder piece, the weight of the sleeve would also tend to distort that area.

Now, why don't I use three-needle bind-off? Bulk. I find that treatment effective, but heavier than my chosen seaming method. The same goes for back stitch.

Tonight I pick up stitches around the neck edge and begin working the collar.

In other knitting news, I finished the rainbow scarf that matches the rainbow hat. Again, quick and easy to knit, but a bit fiddly to finish. As in the hat, the ends are left super long, then crocheted in chain stitch to make tendril-like fringes. Additional lengths of yarn are cut and added to the opposite end of the scarf to make fringes on it, too. I had one skein of Frog Tree in each color, and had ample yarn left over after making both pieces.

All in all a good project for autopilot knitting. Switching colors meant that progress was easy to see, the bright colors made me happy, the yarn was soft and easy to knit quickly, and the recipient is delighted. My next piece of autopilot knitting is another Klein Bottle hat - yet another special request. This one in conservative Navy blue, with a touch of yellow here and there. I am using a yarn that's new to me - Garnstudio Drops Camelia Superwash Sport. It's a very smooth true sport weight, quite soft and with a good hand-feel for a superwash. I'll probably cannibalize my bright yellow Frog Tree leftovers to do the yellow highlights. What they will be, I haven't a clue.

And the "gotta make something" bug here isn't limited to adults. Smaller daughter is in the midst of bead lizard mania right now. I've got more geckos in the house today than can be found on a warm Florida lanai at sunset.

Technorati : knitting

Having successfully beaten back yet another deadline storm, and having survived the annual school year February break, some semblance of normalcy returns to the String household. I spent a dreary but strangely relaxing weekend catching up on house maintenance - one that finally allowed me time to knit.

And what did I knit?

I continued my two dueling projects - the dropped leaf sweater, the two side-by-side knit sleeves of which are now approaching the 60% completed mark. There's no point in showing a blurry picture of yet another pair of indistinct gray objects, larger but still not much differentiated from the last. I am also only four stripes short of finishing the Rainbow Scarf that matches the hat shown off last week. That at least has color and drama, even if the knitting is very mundane:

You can see the long tails at the right hand edge. These will be crocheted into tendrils. Similar strands will be added to the left hand edge after the knitting is done, also to be crocheted into tendrils. I am happy to report that one skein each of seven colors of Frog Tree Alpaca is enough to complete the scarf and hat project. Also that I like the Frog Tree. I've met with some minor knots and a couple of unevenly spun spots, but nothing drastic. I haven't washed the stuff yet so I can't report on whether or not those Crayola-intense colors hold up. I am already looking on to my next mindless project. I've gotten a request for another Klein Bottle Hat. I am thinking of getting more Frog Tree in navy blue to do it.

In other news, I can report a miracle of modern commerce and customer satisfaction.

I have had a small Coach bag for years. I splurged on it when I was gravid with Elder Daughter - so that's something like 16 years ago. So long ago that Coach no longer includes it in their inventory. It's a good size, just big enough to hold a wallet,keys, and a phone, and not so large that stuffing it into a backpack or briefcase is inconvenient. Although I have a larger bag and a dressier bag for occasions that demand them, my little Coach has been the default handbag of choice for over a decade and a half. Needless to say that much daily wear took its toll. The binding around the edges was worn through at several spots, and the clasp had given up all hope of fulfilling its function. My bag was well loved, and looked it.

Now Coach has tried to go a bit more trendy in styling and moved more upscale, expanding beyond the "do you want that in black, brown, or camel" mindset of my bag's day. You'd be hard pressed to find anything similar on their shelves now. But Coach bags are guaranteed for life. So I took my friend to a nearby stand-alone Coach store just after the holidays. My bag was so old that no one in the store recognized the style - not even the manager. I asked if they still repaired bags, and only the manager had an inkling of what I was talking about. But they verified the pedigree of my little guy via the serial number stamped into the inside pocket, and taking a shipping and handling fee (plus issuing a lot of "I don't know if it's fixable" type comments), sent it off for repair.

Lo and behold, my little bag returned to me on Friday. Cleaned and somewhat refinished, with a new clasp, new edge bindings all the way around, and a new shoulder strap. All for the handling fee. My friend is back, and I'm very happy.

Moral of the story: That $80 that was so exorbitant 16 years ago was very well spent, and my expensive bag ended up being a better value than any number of cheaper ones I might have bought and worn to death since. You're always better off buying fewer things of classic style from vendors known for quality and service.

Technorati : knitting

Still tooling to deadlines at work, even over the holiday weekend. Which leaves less time for blogging than I prefer. But I can report some project progress.

First, on the perpetual ribbed leaf sweater. Done with the back and front, I now have two sleeves on the needles. As always, I'm knitting them side by side so that the shaping on both is dead uniform. If you look closely you'll see two things happening with the markers. One is that because this is a wide and easily confused repeat, I've got one small silver jump ring marking off each repeat, even though I've long since memorized the stitch design. Even so, mistakes can creep in. This helps me keep oriented, and allows me to proof my knitting one repeat at a time. The second is that red marker at the beginning of my row. That's a counting marker.

My pattern says "Increase one stitch at both sleeve edges every 4th row, 24 times." I've chosen to make that increase on a reverse side row (all purls) because it's less confusing than trying to do it on the texture pattern side. It really doesn't make a difference in this pattern, so long as the placement is consistent. I've got enough of a headache remembering to do it every fourth row (that's every other purl row), so keeping track of exactly how many times I've done an increase row can become a headache, especially because I only get to knit in short spurts. Pencil and paper would get away from me. Instead, I placed a marker immediately before the last stitch on my purl side row the very first time I did one of the increases. When I began my pattern-side row it was sitting there one stitch in from the edge. On every subsequent increase row I did a make one, one stitch in from the edge. That meant that the new stitch happened between the red counting marker and the edge of the work. After that first row, it's pretty much automatic because the increase point moves further and further away from the static counting marker as the piece grows. I've got six sitting between the red marker and the edge now. That's six increase rows completed. I'll continue until I've got 24 stitches between the red marker and the edge. Problem solved, so long as I don't forget to increase at both ends of each increase row, on both sleeves.

The other project I'm working is a more mindless piece. We like to play PS2 games as a family after homework and dinner - the exploration/quest type rather than straight shoot-em-ups or race games. That's excellent sit and knit time, but because all eyes are needed to spot clues or treasures, not optimal for exacting texture knitting. So that's when I do socks, hats or other easy pieces. This weekend's fit the bill quite nicely - Dovetail Design's Rainbow Hat and Scarf. My LYS kitted the pattern up with Frog Tree Alpaca sport weight - the recommended yarn for the project. I've finished the hat and am on the first orange stripe of the scarf.

Modeled here by a slightly deranged looking Older Daughter, the hat is a very simple project to knit, but a rather fussy one to finish. It's knit sideways. Each color is introduced leaving a very long dangling tail, and ended in the same way. There is no shaping, just welts formed by alternating bands of stockinette and reverse stockinette to make a wide rectangle. After the rectangle is finished, the cast on row is joined to the cast-off row. The dangling strands are knotted two by two, then all are twisted and gathered to make a very big single top-knot, forming the closed end of the hat. Finally, using a crochet hook the dangling ends are dealt with, turning them into the crocheted chains that make up the mass of tentacles tassel at the top.

While the basic idea is ultra simple and very easy to knit, there are a couple of refinements that enhance the hat that aren't covered in the basic pattern. First, the logic of the pattern dictates that some kind of long-tail cast-on be used so that the starting tail is on the same side as end-off tail. but that isn't called out. In spite of that logic, I used a half-hitch cast-on, deliberately leaving a super long tail. I then used that tail (now on the side of the work opposite that of the zillion dangling long ends) to graft the final row of purple live stitches to the cast-on row of the red. When I was done I treated the dangling end of the grafting yarn just like the other tassel strands. The resulting seam is totally invisible, without much bulk. Second, just tying the tails into a very tightly twisted knot doesn't close up the hole adequately. Some of the strips stick out like gaping pockets. Others are pleated back inside the hat. I took another strand of yarn and took some carefully placed tacking stitches across the hat just beneath my dense knot, fastening down the tops of the stripes and making the closed end more uniform in appearance. Third, the pattern directs the user to make a slip knot in each strand close to the origin point of the dangling ends near the hat's closing topknot, and work each one in a crochet chain for as many stitches as possible, ending off the final bit neatly by weaving it back into the crocheted chain. Well and good, but it's very difficult to work that slip knot in closely. I ended up starting in the center, grabbing a strand and drawing it over one of the others close by in order to make that first foundation loop. After that, I sort of scrummed around, catching the first loop of each new strand somewhere in the mounting foundation created by previous squiggles. It worked out well. The tassel is nice and dense at its base and I skipped the "nurse the slip knot into position" annoyance.

My final criticism is one of yarn choice. I really liked working with the Frog Tree. It's soft, without the stabbing guard hairs present on many coarser alpaca yarns. The colors are radiant, especially for alpaca which seems to be offered in bright colors less often than other fibers. So far I've found some knots in my seven 50-gram balls (one of each color), and some bits where the spinning is a bit uneven, tending to two-inch clumps where the yarn is quite noticeably thicker. But not so many of either that cutting them out was a major problem. So the yarn is fine. But in my opinion this hat should not be made from a sport or even a DK. If you click on the picture above and look closer, you'll see that the stitches are very leggy, and the fabric is no where near as tightly made as is optimal for a sport or DK weight yarn. The recommended gauge is 4 stitches per inch. The best I could achieve with the Frog Tree was 4.25 (I added a few stitches to the hat to compensate). But I am disappointed in the open, loopy texture. If I were to do this hat again, I'd use a worsted, or heavy worsted (5-4.75 stitches per inch native gauge). Or possibly even one of the most airy and open of the Aran weight yarns (4.5 stitches per inch). I do think that a true 4 stitch per inch yarn would make a hat that's too heavy.

But sometimes heavy hats are exactly what's warranted. Older Daughter's price for modeling her new hat was to show off her own production - a standard issue rolled brim Gusto 10 42-stitch hat.

Technorati : knitting

A couple bits from my mailbox today, plus a long-lost toy.

Yards, grams, and ounces

A reader wrote to ask how to convert ounces and grams to yards, because she'd found a pattern and wanted to buy enough yarn to knit it. I answered with this:

You can't convert ounces and grams to yards. Yards measures length. Ounces and grams measure weight. One ounce equals 28.35 grams (give or take). One gram equals roughly 0.35 ounces. There are dozens of conversion calculators on the web that can help you flip between the two if you don't have a calculator or pencil and paper to hand.

Let's say you had 1.75 ounces (roughly 50 grams) of a 100% wool. You could have about 250 yards of fine fingering weight yarn, or around 135 yards of sport weight wool, or around 120 yards of DK weight wool, or around 100 yards of worsted, or about 80 yards of bulky. And that's without factoring in stuff like how lofty or dense the yarn is, whether or not it's made up of multiple strands tightly twisted, or one giant fluffy strand. One five stitch per inch worsted for example might be about 110 yards for 50 grams, but another might be only 90, all depending on the denseness of the strand.

This is further complicated by fiber blends. 1.75 ounces of acrylic at 5 stitches per inch (the textbook definition of worsted) might have significantly higher yardage than 1.75 ounces of 5 stitch per inch wool because the acrylic fiber is in and of itself less massy.

All this being said, there are very loose guidelines of roughly how much yardage a pound of yarn might contain. But remember - use these numbers as a rough guideline only, and only for the fiber type and gauge specified. If you're planning a yarn purchase and are going on only this type of info - buy at least 25% more than you think you need. I can guarantee that three times out of four, you'll end up using more yarn than you originally planned. Here's one set of rough yards per pound figures. Remember - it's for hand-spun 100% wool only.

Why post patterns for free?

Another person wrote to ask why I post patterns for free. She specifically asked if I was doing it to undercut the people who charged, and wondered why I didn't write for magazines or other publishers. I wrote back:

I'm flattered that you think my patterns are good enough for professional publication. I think they're borderline. I don't do lots of multiple sizes, they tend to be pretty sketchy. Some are more like method descriptions than hard and fast patterns with set yarn quantities.

I post patterns because I find the process of working out the problems they present to be fascinating. My patterns are posted more as a by-product of that exploration rather than the cumulative product. I want to share the fun of both inquiry and production.

I have dabbled in writing patterns for a yarn maker and an on-line magazine. I'm a proposal writer by trade. I spend my professional life running the gauntlet of multiple concurrent hard-stop deadlines. Knitting is an area where my only deadline is "whenever." I found out that harnessing the creative process to a fixed delivery framework squeezed all the fun (and much of the creativity) out of it. I can't work under a mandate that inspiration will occur between Thursday next and the 30th of the month, will involve one particular technique and one particular yarn in a color not of my choosing; or that the finished object and full proofed pattern in five sizes will be delivered without delay within 15 days of yarn receipt. Even the web-based magazines brook no delay. So I retreat to my own deadline-free tenth-of-never world, doing whatever the heck I want, when I want to do it.

Why not self-publish and sell the result? Because the burden of handling the business end of the thing (payments, refunds, shipments or downloads, record keeping for taxes) is not commensurate with the pocket change income the effort would bring. I'm re-thinking this in reference to my embroidery book, but to do it for lots of little knitting patterns would be a big pain. Also because patterns people pay for are held to a higher standard than are give-aways. To be competitive, I'd have to knit the trial in a color that photographs well (opposed to the color I want to use), figure out that range of sizes, and use a much higher standard of test knitting than I currently do. While I don't put out junk as a rule, errors are there. I get to them when I can. But I don't want to knit everything twice or more - once to create it and at least once more to test the directions, possibly trying out every size offered.

Long Lost Toy

Well, not lost. It's been sitting in a corner for a while. I made it for Larger Daughter when she was four. Now that Smaller Daughter is out of the hobby horse years, poor Hero isn't seeing much action. But he's one of my favorite projects, out of all the things I have ever made.

I had no pattern, some black and green Melton wool scraps left over from some SCA outfits, stuffing, a stick, two brass rings, plus a bit of trim, glue-on jewels, a couple of and bells left over from making holiday ornaments. I improvised and here's the result.

A stick horse menacing enough for a Nazgul's child. Needless to say Hero will be spending his retirement here, and not getting passed down to anyone else.

Technorati : knitting

A couple items from my inbox.

Question on Justin's Counterpane

Cindy wrote to say she was having problems conceptualizing how the pieces to make my Justin's Counterpane pieced blanket fit together. This particular blanket is a large scale intro to white cotton/lacy knitting. Only twelve main units are needed to complete it - six keyhole shaped motifs, and six whole octagons. Ten triangles are used to eke out the sides and make them straight. An optional edging finishes the thing. They're put together like this:

I did not use additional triangles at the corners to make a true rectangle because it's easier to go around a more gentle angle without mitering than it is to go around a 90-degree turn. And I didn't want to go through the bother of mitering my corners.

Because of the relatively few units used and the simplicity of the classic pinwheel motif, I think that people wanting to make a first item in this style might find the pattern useful. Being a blanket, it doesn't have to fit anybody so gauge is a guideline, not a mandate. It can be worked in any cotton or cotton blend yarn you like. The yarn I chose was a very inexpensive DK weight, but by using the appropriate size needles, a piece of usable dimensions could be made in anything from sport to worsted. Much heavier than that though and you'll get into weight issues, cotton being quite a bit massive than its equivalent thickness in acrylic or wool. (You could even work this in standard wool or acrylic, but I think the design will be crisper in cotton.)

In any case, some basic guidelines for knitting and seaming together pieced counterpanes include binding the motifs off especially loosely; blocking the units before assembly, by wetting them down and pinning them out while stretching them to their maximum extent; and using whip stitch or when possible, mattress stitch done in half of the edge most stitch to sew them together. Back stitch or mattress stitch done further into the motifs will make the seams too dense and rigid, and may introduce cupping.

Bargain Hunters' Blocking Boards

Rachel and I had an eMail chat recently. I think it was over on one of the knitting-related boards at Live Journal. She was looking for advice on blocking. In specific, she was looking for low-cost alternatives for blocking. We went through the standards - pinning out on carpet covered with towels or on a padded table or bed, but she wanted a rigid surface that was easy to stow in addition to being inexpensive.

I recommended getting a half-sheet of drywall from the hardware store, taped around the edges to reduce crumble, and topped with a flat sheet through which the pinning happens. I also suggested scouring yard sales or opportunity shops for the squishy/spongy foam pattern/alphabet block floor tiles or play mats favored by the parents of toddlers. They're indestructible and often outlast the toddler years, landing at second-hand venues. Top those with a sheet and pin away, happy that you've found a modular, easy to store solution that as a creative recycle, nibbles away at the waste stream.

Rachel decided to go with the play mat idea. She sent me a note of thanks, and included this shot of her shawl blocking:

(Photo is hers, used with permission). She also notes that she got her mat at WalMart, and it was less than $20. Love the shawl, Rachel, and as ever - I'm delighted to have been useful.

Not much knitting here beyond finishing up the gift socks mentioned yesterday, which later today will be given to the target recipient. I also posted a yarn review for the Schoeller/Stahl sock yarn I used.

(Please consider leaving reviews of your current yarn yourself, as a holiday present to fellow knitters worldwide).

I can in the spirit of ecumenicism born of our happy, culturally jumbled household recommend two non-knitting related holiday hacks.

First for Hanukkah (and Kwanzaa): Every kid is fascinated by the candles used in menorahs and other holiday candle holders. They burn quickly, and often being close together, act on each other to make strange melting patterns and drips - especially when "encouraged" by the viewer. And every kid who grew up with a menorah in the house will either admit to performing said encouragements, or by virtue of being watched constantly, not having the chance to do what he or she really wanted to do. But not every parent can hover over the candles for the entire time they are lit for eight nights straight.

Now devices are no substitute for parental supervision, but accidents happen in even the most careful household. Place your menorah on a shallow lipped pan (like an inexpensive jellyroll pan or in my case - the liner pan that came with a now defunct toaster oven) and fill the pan with about a quarter inch of water. Drips will fall into the water, and won't weld the menorah to the table or counter top. Should your offspring be too helpful and a candle come loose from its moorings - it will fall harmlessly into your mini-reflecting pool and be extinguished.

Second for Christmas trees: Fighting one's way underneath the lower branches to water the thing is a major pain. I cheat. I float some packing peanuts or crumpled aluminum foil on top of the water so I can see the level while still standing. I also take a tube or pipe (in this house, the unobtrusive brown extension tubes from our upright vacuum cleaner) and wedge them into the tree holder's bucket area. I use some twist-ties to anchor the tube against a branch. The tube remains there as long as the tree is in the house. Then when watering time comes, I take a watering can and pour into the tube until I see my floating markers rise. No bending, no needles in my hair, no overflows.

Technorati : Hanukkah, holidays, knitting

We celebrated Hanukkah this weekend past in our own style. Fried foods are traditional. We did crab cakes. Not traditional by a long shot, but tasty none the less.

The Resident Male, finding himself at the fish shop buying the crab was tempted by some beautiful Bluepoint oysters. So he brought home four as a special grownups-only treat.

So there we were, happily slurping down our excellent oysters, when I thought I found a bit of shell. Not uncommon in oysters opened by amateurs*. But it wasn't shell.

It was a pearl.

A natural pearl. Far from gem grade, but round and pearly enough to qualify, even though you can see a bit of the gravel that inspired it sticking out from one end.

I've put my tiny pearl next to a strand of cultured pearls for size comparison. I've joked about finding a pearl, and have known it was remotely possible. But I'd never heard of anyone actually finding one. So what to do with my inferior but extremely lucky pearl? Wear it for luck, of course. I'm thinking of getting a tiny silver charm in the shape of a cage to keep it in.

And I'll probably make the traditional latkes tonight.

As far as knitting goes, I'm trying to zip through the remainder of a pair of socks, plus get a start on the foraging cap (in the style of a Liberty or voyageur's cap) for my re-enactor friend. I've got a nice hand-spun wool fingering weight single, in a color sort of between forest and teal, with a touch of black. I would have preferred a barn red, but the red I had was heathered with too much white and from a distance read "pink." Shown here are my larval beginnings (I'm working on the area that when finished will be the facing in the earband, plus the too-pink yarn. Gauge here is between 5.75 and 6 stitches per inch. I've got 130 on the needles, and am getting a band big enough to fit a 23" circumference head. There's some allowance for stretch and the hat will be double thick at the earband, but I don't want to make it so tight that the wearer will get a headache. You can see just a bit of provisional cast-on peeking out at the bottom of that dark green wiggle:

Other than that, I am finishing up yet another pair of gift socks. This one from Schoeller+Stahl Fortissma Colori/Socka Color, color #5.

* We follow the safer Julia Child oyster method (learned while watching her on TV). It involves identifying the hinge and using the pointy end of a bottle opener to dislocate it. Then using a thin, sharp knife - winkling it into the opening made by the unhinging and running it around the oyster inside to scrape it top and bottom from its shell.

Technorati : knitting

As promised, here's my knitting progress. First, the leaf pullover:

As you can barely see, I'm now well past the underarm narrowing, about half-way from that point to the beginning of the neckline. It's still very slow going because of all the 1x1 twists, but I'm very pleased with the effect, in spite of the thing being a bit off gauge and an inch too wide (I like loose fitting sweaters in mid-winter). Although I'm mired in holiday gift knitting right now I'm making a point of NOT putting this down in its entirety. I want to avoid what I now (thanks to blogging) see as a familiar pattern - the sidelining of my October/November project due to gifts leading to its eventual consignment to my Chest of Knitting Horrors (tm).

And in gift knitting, here is a mostly done sock worked in a combo of black Cascade Fixation and raspberry Elann Sock it To Me Collection Esprit. Both yarns are 98.3% cotton, 1.7% elastic. Both are marked with the same yardage (186 yards stretched or 100 yards relaxed), and same gauge 25st and 40 rows = 4 inches or 10 cm. Fixation also carries a crochet gauge of 29 double crochets and 12 rows = 4 inches or 10 cm. As far as I can tell, they look like exactly the same yarn. While the yarn review collection reports Fixation as a worsted based on its initially reported gauge, current labeling moves it down to the sport yarn realm in line with Esprit's labeling. I say neither is spot on, and would call both yarns DKs.

My own gauge using 3mm needles at a reasonable sock gauge is 6.5 stitches and 12 rows = 1 inch. The fabric is markedly stretchy, even more so than a comparable weight wool yarn knit at the same tight gauge. Now I know many people who have reason to avoid wool socks swear by this stuff, but I'm less enchanted. I selected it because I am knitting socks for someone who is both wool sensitive and diabetic, who requested very stretchy cotton socks with a specific wide ankle measurement in comparison to the foot area. I am working my standard toe-up sock on a foot circumference of 48 stitches, moving up to 52 stitches just prior to the short rowed heel, and then 54 stitches immediately after. I add another four stitches at the uppermost black stripe for an ankle part stitch count of 60 stitches. Based on progress so far I predict I'll use one ball of raspberry on each sock, plus most of one ball of black between the two. I bought 4 raspberry and two black, so I'll have enough left over to make another pair, should I so desire.

But I'm not sure I so desire. Although this sock is suitably uber-stretchy, and the cotton yarn is relatively lofty, I don't like the feel of cotton socks for myself. I find them cold and hard compared to wool, and walking in them feels like walking in a massage sandal studded with thousands of little pebbles. But I don't have problems with wool. If you do, this yarn is an acceptable substitute, although at its weight you're going to end up with nice, thick hiking socks, not fingering weight socks that are wearable in a wider range of shoes.

I was also disappointed in the color of the raspberry bought via the Web from Elann. Standard cautions on buying based on color displayed on a computer monitor apply. Remember - no color monitor displays true color fidelity, and lighting conditions at the photographer's end can add complications (to demonstrate this, call up different photos of the same color card at multiple retailers' websites, and/or view the exact same color card photo on different monitors). On line the stuff looked much deeper, almost wine in hue (which was the color requested by the recipient). In person the raspberry is closer to an unexciting mauve. Color fidelity is another reason I vastly prefer to buy yarn in person rather than by mail order. Color cards help, but since I have so many excellent local yarn source options, and am always looking for new yarns rather than repeaters, I do not buy by mail often enough to invest in them.

My next bit of gift knitting will be a wool foraging cap for a historical re-enactor friend. It's mid to late 1700s or so in target, and will be based on Voyageur's Caps and Liberty Caps. I'll take notes as I create that hat in case the thing catches on with his re-enactor regiment. Second cotton sock will probably take me through Thursday or Friday, so I won't be beginning his hat until later this week.

Technorati : knitting

If you've been reading along here for a while, you might remember I've mentioned this family's holiday cookie fixation before. Ten kinds. Every year. (I do give most away to co-workers and friends rather than let us eat them all ourselves). This year's list is a mix of first time experiments and family favorites. It includes:

• Chocolate chip cookies - the classic, but made with mini chips and pecans instead of walnuts, slightly smaller than their non-holiday brothers. Mostly from the official Toll House recipe printed each year on the bag of chips (although I do cheat and use non-official chocolate).
• Peanut butter cookies - my kids would shudder in horror if I left these off the list. Done with crunchy peanut butter, just for fun. Otherwise it's the standard from Joy of Cooking
• Buffalo rum balls - a version of the classic crushed cookie bourbon ball, but done with rum and cocoa, rolled in cocoa. Our variation comes from a recipe published in the Buffalo, NY evening newspaper some time in the 1960s
• Sugar cut-outs - the iconic holiday cookie. This year we get to use the Hannukah cookie cutters. Also I put lemon zest in the batter, and mix the icing with lemon juice instead of milk or water
• Oysters - a family invention. A hazelnut spritz sandwich cookie, filled with dark chocolate ganache
• Linzer cookies - New this year, from the King Arthur website recipe collection. Mine have little leaf shaped holes, that being the smallest cookie cutter I had on hand to do the center hole.
• Chocolate crinkles - Also from the King Arthur website. Killer chocolate flavor, fantastic texture. We use extra cocoa instead of espresso powder. My kids call these "Earthquakes" because the white sugar outside flaws and cracks in baking to reveal chocolate fault lines. I made these the first time two years ago from a very similar recipe sent by a friend and they've become favorites. (Hi, Kathryn!)
• Almond/cherry biscotti - Another new one. I'm cribbing this recipe together from several sources, including a basic biscotti recipe in the always wonderful Baking with Julia book. This is instead of the Panforte which although excellent deserves a break after a two years running appearance
• Lime cookies - Again a new experiment. This one depends on my finding sour salt (citric acid) locally. My grandmother used it to make her stuffed cabbage and to restore the shine to aluminum pots and pans (boiling them in a bath of water and sour salt). Another King Arthur website find.
• Pecan sandies - A family recipe, basically a nut-rich shortbread, rolled in granulated sugar and topped with a pecan half. These tend to alternate appearances with Mexican Wedding Cakes in our roster, as both are pecan shortbread type cookies.

I made a lot of progress this weekend past. I've got two cookies left to bake - the biscotti and the lime cookies. Plus I have to fill the oysters and Linzer cookies, and the kids get to ice the cut outs.

In other news, knitting did get done. Here you see the second of my two emergency baby shower gifts blocking on a balloon. The Regia 6-ply Crazy Colors has a relatively long repeat, so it makes wide stripes on both booties and hat. The white sections and broad yellow welting (including the tips of the I-cord bootie laces and hat bow) however are done in another well-aged leftover.

I also managed to get another couple of inches done on my ribbed leaf pullover, and complete about half a sock of other holiday gift knitting. But more on those tomorrow.

Technorati : cooking, knitting

I'm with Franklin all the way on this. I've been visited by his Ghost of Christmas Knitting, but that specter couldn't force his way into the room, crowded as it already was by the Ghost of Hastily Announced Baby Shower Knitting, the Ghost of Birthdays Come and Gone Knitting, and the amorphous yet omnipresent-in-December Ghost of Holiday Preparations. The whole spooky committee then voted and consigned me to wherever procrastinators end up, when they remember that they have to be somewhere.

But tamales, cookies (cocoa rum balls and peanut butters both done and lagered away), work, and routine family support tasks aside, I did manage to whack into the baby shower backlog. Which is a good thing because today is the first of several.

The white with speckles hat and white booties are knit in Sirdar Snuggly Snowflake DK. I believe it's now discontinued, but these are leftovers from a Oat Couture Curlique Coverlet done about six years ago for a niece. It's a spectacular pattern and I had a great time with the blanket, although (like everything else) I did play with it a bit. It's difficult to see in the official cover photo, but the thing is a round blanket, knit in garter stitch paisley-type slices, with the shaping formed by short rows and picking up along an edge. I wouldn't quite call it modular knitting, but if you're familiar with that style, this blanket will be easier for you than for someone who has never done short-rowing before. What I did was notice that the pattern had a logic that would enable the use of two colors. I knit all of the segments radiating from the center in a white-with-speckles Snowflake, and all of the other segments in plain white Snowflake. What I ended up with was subtle, but effective - a center swirled star with speckles surrounded by a plain white field.

One caveat - because I used the loopy Snowflake, my final texture was sort of reminiscent of a supple light terry cloth towel, with less distinct garter ridges than the pattern's own photo. I wish I had pictures of that blanket to share, but I made it BS (Before String), and never got a snap back of the target baby with her present. I'd do the blanket again but not in this yarn. In any case, Snowflake worked just fine for my no-pattern hat and standard issue booties, although again, I've played with the pattern. I did the Ann Kreckel baby bootie, but because this is DK weight, I worked it on a sole of 8 stitches x 16 rows, and adjusted the rest of the pattern accordingly.

The multicolor hat is knit in other stash-dwelling odds and ends. The multi part is clearly Regia Crazy Color, left over from the Crazy Raglan I made for Smallest Daughter. The solid white and yellow used on the welting and stockinette edge are ancient bits of Baruffa/Lane Borgosesia 7 Settembre DK, shamelessly stolen from my mother's stash. Both colors are remnants of a project she did around 1993 or so. 7 Settembre was a particularly nice machine wash textbook-standard DK weight 100% wool that came in a wide range of colors, including brights; now long since discontinued. There will be booties to accompany this no-pattern hat, too.

Moral of today's post - Those half-ball or less odds and ends left over after a project come in handy if you need to do up a quick, small gift; don't throw them away! Think of it as bonus investment in future gifts. Oh, and that holiday knitting thing? Boo, humbug! There are still 9 knitting days to Hanukkah (which thankfully lasts until the 23rd), and 18 knitting days until Christmas.

Technorati : knitting

Today I document a Good Deed.

A co-worker, all puppy eyes and pleading, brought his favorite sweater to me yesterday. He bought it in Ireland, and practically lives in it all winter. He'd caught the elbow on something sharp, and cut a strand. And then the snag started to run. He asked me if I could fix it.

The sweater is of good quality, rustic finish wool. It looks like it was knit from two strands of sport or guernsey weight. The seams are machine-sewn, and there's a nice "commando collar" - double thick ribbing, inset in a V, with a low turtleneck finish and center zipper. I'm not a machine knitter, so I'm not really up on what can and cannot be done using one, but the cables are not deeply embossed. They're all formed by traveling stitches rather than multiple-stitch cable crossings.

Still, it's a particularly nice and obviously beloved item. So I brought it home to fix.

Fixing hand knits with runs in them should be second nature to most knitters. First, you want to identify the break. Then if a run or ladder has developed, you want to spot the bottom-most good stitch that sits below the run. That's the one that needs to be secured, and the one that you'll use later in the repair. In this case, I secured it temporarily with a safety pin so it wouldn't ladder down any farther.

If the yarn has broken, the ends need to be secured. Since this is a nice, sticky, traditional finish wool, the stitches left and right of the broken one hadn't raveled side to side. (A plus for working with real wool). I reinforced them gently on the wrong side with some darning yarn of the same color, taking care not to let my repair show through to the front. Then I smoothed out the lumpy ladder, separating the rungs. Obviously there was one rung missing - the one that would have been formed by the broken strand. I laid some long stitches across that spot with my matching darning yarn until I had approximately the thickness of the original yarn built up.

Then I took a crochet hook and starting with that stitch at the base of the run, I re-formed the knitting stitches. I did this by pulling each rung through the stitch below it. Luckily this particular repair occurred in a plain stockinette area. I didn't have to deal with crossed stitches or purls.

Once I had re-built all of the stitches, I had one top stitch that needed to be secured. Again I was lucky. This particular column of stitches "dead ended" at a traveling stitch cable. I used my darning yarn to take a tiny stitch, securing the loose loop to the side of the cable at the point where it would have been eaten by the decrease that formed the cable's movement.

Here's the result (not that my lousy photography skills and a charcoal gray subject make it any easier to see):

The formerly broken bit is in the top center of the sleeve that lies across the body, roughly below the zipper slider. You can't see it, but take my word for it - the repair is totally invisible.

So, today's morals are:

1. Don't toss damaged hand-knits in a corner in despair. You can use your knitting-developed skills to rescue some of them. and

2. Ease of repair down the road is yet another reason to use the best quality materials you can afford.

Technorati : knitting

More from the missing month of June. This originally appeared on 23 June 2004.

PROJECT - STRAKER GANSEY IN SHRINKING COTTON

The summer has finally arrived and it's cotton knitting season, so I thought I'd show off my project from early last winter (I'm seasonally dyslexic). I've always had a yen to knit up Penny Straker's Inverness Gansey, but had never found the right wool to use:

In a fit of serendipity, I ran across one of the naturally dyed, guaranteed to shrink cotton yarns at a recent clearance sale at my local yarn store: Marks & Kattens Indigo Jeansgarn. Although the yarn was cotton and not wool, the two meshed in my mind. So I went about messing with the pattern, taking into consideration:

1. It wasn't intended for cotton
2. It wasn't intended for a shrink-to-fit cotton
3. The sizing is for men
4. My gauge both before and after shrinkage wasn't a match to the pattern

But challenge is the frosting on my cake, and I loved the thought of the indigo yarn slowly fading along the crisp cable and King Charles Brocade pattern edges like jeans seams do. I plunged ahead, knitting up the required swatch.

The length of my test swatch shrank about 5% the first wash, but continued to shrink in each of two successive washes/volcano drys. Total shrinkage after three washes was on the order of 8-9%, so I figured that the 10% shrinkage listed on the label was close enough. Width shrinkage was on the order of 1-2%. Minimal.

I'm a little handicapped in writing this up because my copy of Inverness is tucked away in the storage cubby along with all of my yarn and pattern stash. I recall the pattern was written for worsted weight, with a recommended gauge (in stockinette) of 5 stitches per inch. My yarn was listed as a DK, but it was a rather robust DK, closer to worsted than to sport weight. Also, because I planned for shrinkage, I figured that knitting it a bit loosely wouldn't matter. My gauge swatch results bore this out.

So I went ahead. I recall that there was quite a bit of ease in the largest size (a men's 42). I did add a little over an inch of width to the body. That wasn't hard because the sleeves are dropped sleeves and aren't set in. I made the seed stitch panels on the side under the arm each 3 stitches wider. No fuss.

Now, the sweater was long to begin with, but I'm tall. I decided I wanted to keep it long, so I added 10% to the length measurements. That means that I knit around 30 inches of body. I also added to the sleeves (more on this below). Having done my adjustments, I cast on and knit away merrily.

This was one of the most enjoyable, fun sweater patterns I've done in quite a while. The texture patterns, while visually complex were quick and easy to memorize. The yarn was a dream. Yes, as a naturally dyed guaranteed-to-fade indigo, the dye crocks and comes off on one's hands, needles, stitch markers, but cleanup was quick. I avoided sitting on the chair with the light upholstery and washed my hands after each session. And yes, it's a cotton and relatively un-stretchy, and working cables in it is more of a pain than working cables in a nice, elastic wool - but the thing really flew. Here's the result:

I especially liked the small details that don't show up in the photo. The ribbing bears a nifty little cable. There's a row of eyelet welting above it, and just below the seed stitch mock saddle shoulders, and at the top of the sleeves. The sleeves are joined to the body by working a row of picked-up stitches along the shoulder line, then doing three needle bind-off to join those stitches to the live sleeve top stitches. All in all, tons of fun.

Apologies for the color in this detail shot. It's tough to take a snap of something that's dark blue without using studio type floodlights, even with a flash. The actual color is closer to the full view, above.

After my knitting was finished I washed my giant sweater as I had my swatch: hot water, cold rinse, followed by volcano heat in the dryer in the company of my navy blue sheets (so I wouldn't have to worry about the sweater's blue migrating to other things). Three trips through and I had achieved around the same percentage shrinkage as my test swatch.

I adore my finished sweater. It's soft and supple, and the comfortable kind of baggy that only the most beloved an worn-out sweatshirts ever achieve. I can wear it indoors without something underneath in spring and summer, and layered over another shirt in the winter. (Were it wool, it would be too warm for all but winter wear indoors.) Even though it's cotton and weighty compared to wool, the thing isn't heavy and saggy. The color is fading as I anticipated. The exposed edges of the twist stitch cables and purls in the brocade are becoming lighter than the surrounding background. I'm looking forward to seeing this effect intensify over time. Plus I love being able to fling the thing into the washer and dryer instead of pampering it like I do most of my other sweaters.

I do have one miscalculation to report. Remember I said I added 10% to the sleeve length? That wasn't a good idea. I had forgotten that I was starting with a man's pattern. My sleeves are too long, even after shrinking. Eventually I'll find the strength to pick out the seam, ravel back the excess and re-knit the cuffs. Someday...

[Repost of material originally appearing on 27 July 2006]

After yesterday's post about the Baby Surprise, Alyse asked if I had any comments or tips on using the pattern as published in Knitters, and whether I'd knit it up before.

I reply that this was my first attempt at a Surprise. I can say that it worked up extremely quickly, and that while how it will all come together was not intuitively obvious at the time of production, once the body was done and I figured out that the single seam on the garment goes across the top of the sleeves and across the back - all doubts were settled.

I think that the proportions of the thing look a little off. If I do another, I'd make it wider across the body. The sleeve width and depth looks o.k., but the body diameter seems a bit skimpy, especially when buttoned. I'd probably do this by adding a few stitches to the center back and to each side prior to starting the sleeve increases.



Uberknits wants to know if I used the white because I ran out of leftover purple and pink, and if the white was Encore, too.

No. I have over 3/4 of a skein of pink left, and about 10% of the purple remaining. I decided to tame the pink/purple with the white and went stash diving to see what I had on hand that was washable and of the same weight. I ended up using some orphaned Canadiana. (There is no such thing as surplus yarn, there is just yarn that is waiting to make it into the next garment). It's not as soft as the Encore, and it's just a tiny bit heavier, but not enough to have a major impact on gauge.
As to the proportions of the colors used - since I didn't have a clear idea of how the thing was going to come together up until after I was half-way through the white, what you see is more serendipity than planning. Still, you can't go far wrong if you stick to proportions. The pink stripe is half as wide as the buttonhole area of the purple. The mechanics of the pattern itself made the lower purple area come out three times the width of the buttonhole band. The white area to the underarm increases is approximately twice the width of the pink stripe. And when I was nearing the end, I made sure that the final pink and purple stripes (on the cuff) were the same width as the first pink stripe. Overall, in spite of some floppiness of the collar, I'm pleased.

Technorati : knitting

[Repost of material originally appearing on 26 July 2006]

So. Where have I been? Between work deadlines; preparing for a family vacation; coming back and having the smallest one hit by a sticky mystery illness (she's better now); and getting the kids packed off to summer camp, life has been getting in the way.

I can report that we all had a fabulous time doing absolutely nothing on Cape Cod. We mostly enjoyed the beach right at the hotel, took strolls around Provincetown and Wellfleet, kayaked a bit, golfed, read a lot of beach books, saw an unusual production of As You Like It. ate great food, and some of us knit.

I can report that I finished the two quickie sweaters previously reported - one in the fuschia shown, and one in screaming purple. I also did a couple pairs of socks, and started in again on my perennial summer project - my North Truro Counterpane. I've got no pix of the sweaters or socks as they all made their way to the intended recipients before I could find time to take snapshots, but I will show progress on the counterpane later this week.

On the two small kidsweaters from the 1,2, Top Down #609 pattern from Cabin Fever - it knit up quickly with no problems in both sizes, and final finishing was a breeze. My only criticism is that the thing comes in just two sizes - 2/4 and 6/8, with the difference between the 2 and 4, and the 6 and 8 being length, not width (2 and 4 share widths, with the sleeves/body of 4 being slightly longer; 6 and 8 work similarly). I knit a 4 and a 6. The 4 looks about right in terms of size, but the 6 will probably be ragamuffin large on the target kid. That's not a major problem as kids are not known to shrink, and baggy/huge is a cute look on little ones. I'd also note that in both sizes I had more than ample leftovers from my skeins of Encore. Especially in the 6. I did need to crack into that last skein, but just barely so.

Oh. I've got one more knit thing to report. Since the two sister sweaters were for two little girls who are about to become bigger sisters to a third daughter, I took the leftovers from their pullovers and knit up a quick Zimmerman Baby Surprise, as described in Knitter's Magazine's Fall 1999 issue (#56). I added my own collar to the thing. Please don't ask me how I did it. All I can say is that far too much local Chardonnay and beach air intervened, so no notes were taken and memory is hazy.

Technorati : knitting

Some questions fell out of yesterday's post:

Which dye kit did you buy?
 
This one.  It's by Jacquard (aka Rupert, Gibbon and Spider).  It retails for around $19.00 and is widely available on the Web and in crafts stores.  There are probably more cost effective ways to get the materials it contained, but I was paying for convenience and (being an idiot working with kids) idiot-proofed directions.  Remember, I bought the thing primarily to dye shirts as a birthday party activity for 8-year olds.  Dyeing my yarn was a lagniappe.



What kind of dyes did you use?

The kit comes stocked with pre-measured Procion MX dyes in squeeze bottles.  They're cold water dyes, and quite vivid.  I know very little about dyes and dyeing, but it appears from a cursory web search that these are ideal for cotton.

Why did you use cotton and not wool?

See above.  Also, I have to admit that the sacrificial aspect of experimentation played a key part.  The cotton yarn I used was very inexpensive and has been stash-aging long enough to qualifty as being "almost free." 

At present, my stash includes two sweater sized lots of undyed wool.  One is a very special thing - hand-spun Churro wool, a gift from a friend in New Mexico.  It's waiting for the **perfect** thing to do with it, and is not to be wasted on an experiment that might go wrong.  The other is a more modest yarn, but is a small producer local product, blooming with lanolin.  I was unsure of  whether or not the dyes would be as suitable for a protein fiber as they are for cellulose fiber, and I didn't know how the presence of lanolin would affect the process.  The kit was designed for cotton garments, so cotton yarn was my chosen target.

Did you measure out your skein diameter for optimal flashing?

No.  I thought about doing that, but doing so would require that I knit up some swatches and do gauge calculations, then do some test-knitting to determine the final flash diameter.  (Yes, I'm still progressing with my flash camo tee).  Instead I decided to wing it.  I extended my swift to its maximum diameter and just used that.  My skein is about 1.5 yards in circumference.  Give or take.

Have you rinsed the yarn yet?

No.  Not yet.  The kit specifies letting the dyes sit for a while, preferably overnight, to make sure they are firmly fixed.  The picture I showed yesterday is of dye-damp unrinsed yarn.

What the heck is soda ash?

I didn't know, so I looked it up.  Google is my friend.

Yes, I am still swamped at work, by the same project that has eaten my time and sanity since last November.  The end though is in sight.  Thank goodness.  In the mean time everything else suffers.  Especially blogging.

I was able to steal an evening this weekend past because Younger Daughter was celebrating her birthday.  We had a house full of 8-year old girls, lots of cake, giggling, glow in the dark sticks, and other modest entertainments suitable to a sleep-over party.  Along the way we did t-shirt tie dyeing.  I got a bunch of inexpensive plain white t-shirts from Walgrens, and a tie dye kit from the local arts and crafts store (more chaotic but much more fun than those big box crafts palaces).   The kit came with almost everything other than the shirts - instructions, three squeeze bottles pre-loaded with dye powder in screaming primary colors, one empty squeeze bottle with marks on it for using two of the other colors to make a fourth, soda ash, rubber gloves,  and rubber bands.  All I needed to add were the shirts and a bucket.  The kids had lots of fun making their own creations, but when they were finished, I had about half of the dye left. 

What to do with it?  Well - what would you do?

What I did was experiment after the kids had wiggled themselves into their sleeping bags and (mostly) gone to sleep. 

I had some old Southmaid Cotton 8 unmercerized white cotton left over from blankets past.  It was very inexpensive, around $1.75 per skein, and it's been kicking around my stash forever.   Using my swift, I wound out about six skeins worth (2.5 oz each, no yardage provided), knotting them end to end as I went along.  I secured my mega skein in three places with a loose figure 8 tie, just like all the countless skeins of yarn I've bought over the years.  Then following the dye kit directions, I soaked the yarn in the soda ash bath.  It sat there for a couple hours.  Then I squeezed as much of the ash water out as I could and laid my yarn out on plastic.  Then I took my squeeze bottles and had at it. 



This is much harder than it seems.  First, keeping the colors in neat segmets is a challenge that must get easier with practice.  Second, making sure that the full depth of the skein is penetrated by color is also difficult.  Again practice must be key.  Perhaps I was overly ambitious with the amount of yarn I was trying to color, but you can see in the blue that I didn't get the core of the skein as evenly colored as the outside. 

Still, garish colors and imperfect execution as it is, it was a noble experiment.  Without measuring, my guess is that I have enough yarn here to (eventually)  make a sweater for Younger Daughter.  At worst case, possibly a tee-shirt for her.  Which would be congruent given the origin of my inspiration.

Will I try this again?  Possibly.  Messy is always fun.

This post comes under the heading of "Bragging Parent."

Elder Daughter's school hosts a math fair every spring.  Much as in a science fair, students are encouraged to create exhibits detailing concepts, or offering up research or practicum results.  The only stipulation is that they have to involve math.  One of the suggested topics this year was "Math in Everyday Life."  Suggestions for this topic included documenting the math inherent in a cooking or hobby project.  Elder Daughter chose to do hers on the math required to create a mini-sweater.  Evil OverMom made sure she got lots of pencil time in doing so. [insert bwaa-haaa-haa sound effect here.]

She decided to take Mr Bunn (her first toy), and outfit him with a pirate motif sweater.  She did some fashion sketches, and searched the web for a pirate motif.  She found one on a wristband offered up by MagKnits. 



To start, I gave her a tangled pile of yarn, of undetermined yardage and gauge.  She rolled it up, weighed it and used a McMorran Balance to figure out her yards per pound.  Lots of conversions between grams and pounds ensued. 

I then had her measure Mr Bunn and draft out a proportionally designed pattern.  There were percentage adjustments for ease, plus determining the length of the T-slit for the neck hole using Pythagorean geometry. 

Then she did a gauge swatch, weighed it and figured out her yarn consumption per unit area, and based on that - whether or not she'd have enough yarn to do her project.  (Obviously I made sure that she would, but let her figure it out on her own).  More ounces, grams, pounds conversions!
After that she used that same swatch to determine row and stitch gauge.  Averaging here, as she took several measurements at different spots on the swatch to get more accurate figures.

She used multiplication and ratios to translate her pattern and her gauges into actual stitch count directions.  Then she drafted up a to-scale final pattern schematic.  Finally, she mathematically determined placement for the motif.

And then she knitted the sweater and did up her poster, documenting all of the equations and methods she used.  (The poster is still at school).  On the day of the fair she manned her mini-booth and explained all of this to the judges.

I regret that in spite of effort and originality, Elder Daughter didn't win one of the coveted few prizes.  But that's a mom talking.  She did get an excellent grade on the project from her  teacher.  Also she learned quite a bit about design, data conversion, and drafting, had fun with applied math, and is now talking about designing up a person-sized sweater.  All of which make her a winner in my book.

As you can tell from my absence from these pages, life again overtakes my leisure pursuits.  Still, even though I haven't had much time to write, I have been able to fit little scraps of knitting into my not-so-copious free time.

First, I knit a pair of replacement socks for Friend Alexx.  They're replacements because I had made a pair for him over the holidays that failed to fit.  Since my socks come with an unlimited warranty, I was honor bound to replace them.  Friend Alexx requested a pair of heavy hiking/slipper socks - preferably purple variegated.  It took a bit of searching to find a purple mix in DK weight washable wool that didn't trail off into prissy pink or boudoir lilac.  But I did.  Cleckheaton Tapestry 8 Ply, in Color #4.  The pair is now done and waiting for me to darn in the ends and send them to the recipient.  No pix - they're pretty standard stockinette in screaming purple, but they're dense and cushy. 

In a coincidence, I stumbled across a briefcase I had been using three years ago.  In it I found a pair of socks I had started for Alexx's wife, Friend Kestrell.  At that point, Kes was learning to knit and wanted to make socks.  So I decided to make a pattern just for her.  This presented a couple of challeges because Kes is blind.  I wanted to use a simple knit/purl brocade that made a deeply embossed texture, and that would be relatively easy for a new sock knitter to memorize.  Having worked with Friend Rosie (another non-sighted knitter) I also wanted to make a pattern in which one could use feel to determine one's location.

My best intentions at that time led me to finish out one sock, and make my way through the heel of the second.  Then for whatever reason something happened and I stopped working on the project.  Around that time my job world changed, and the briefcase holding the socks was "retired." The socks were forgotten in the ensuing turmoil. 

In any case when the pair resurfaced,  I had a finished sock but no pattern written down.  I know I had drafted out the textured brocade, but I couldn't find it on my archives.  Another friend came to the rescue.  My stitchpal Kathryn saves everyhing.  I had shared the original chart with her way back when, and she was kind enough to send me a copy.

But there was a complication.  The chart I sent Kathryn was for a 14-stitch repeat.  My done-sock was worked on 72 stitches - an 18-stitch repeat.  Yes, I had the finished sock, but it can be surprisingly difficult to graph up a piece from as-knitted, especially when the knitted object is done at tiny gauges with a variegated yarn.  But between the sock and the logic of the pattern I was able to noodle it out and continue.  I present both the 14 stitch and 18 stitch repeat.  The 14 fits neatly on any sock worked on 56 stitches.  If you are partial to working with a set of five rather than four needles, you will find that one full repeat will fit on each needle, and each needle will be worked in the same way.  Also, being top-down symmetrical, this pattern wil look pretty much the same for toe up and cuff down socks.

Here's a set of quick and dirty charts.  Yes, I know that Kes and Rosie would have problems reading a *.jpg chart.  See below for full prose instructions.


Kes' Brocade - 14 stitch version, transcribed for knitting in the round only

Row 1: (Right Side) P2, K3, (P1, K1)3 times, K2, P1
Row 2: (Wrong Side) P3, K3, P1, K1, P1, K3, P2
Row 3: K1, P3, K3, P1, K3, P3
Row 4: K2, P3, K5, P3, K1
Row 5: K3, P3, K3, P3, K2
Row 6: P1, K3, P3, K1, P3, K3
Row 7: K1, P1, K3, P5, K3, P1
Row 8: (P1, K1)2 times, K2, P3, K3, P1, K1
Row 9: K1, P1, K3, P5, K3, P1
Row 10: P1, K3, P3, K1, P3, K3
Row 11: K3, P3, K3, P3, K2
Row 12: K2, P3, K5, P3, K1
Row 13: K1, P3, K3, P1, K3, P3
Row 14: P3, K3, P1, K1, P1, K3, P2

Kes' Brocade - 18 stitch version, transcribed for knitting in the round only

Row 1: (Right Side) K3, P4, (K1, P1)2x, K3, P3, K1
Row 2: (Wrong Side) K1, P3, K4, P1, K4, P3, K2
Row 3: K2, P3, K7, P3, K3
Row 4: K3, P3, K5, P3, K4
Row 5: K4, P3, K3, P3, K4, P1
Row 6: P1, K4, P3, K1, P3, K4, P1, K1
Row 7: K1, P1, K4, P5, K4, P1, K1, P1
Row 8: P1, K4, P3, K1, P3, K4, P1, K1
Row 9: K4, P3, K3, P3, K4, P1
Row 10: K3, P3, K5, P3, K4
Row 11: K2, P3, K7, P3, K3
Row 12: K1, P3, K4, P1, K4, P3, K2
Row 13: P3, K4, P1, K1, P1, K4, P3, K1
Row 14: P2, K4, (P1, K1) 3 times, K3, P3

The astute will notice that the thing is symmetrical on two axes.  The 14 stitch repeat mirrors around central stitch #8, and row #7.  The 18 stitch repeat mirrors around stitch #9 and row #7.

And for good measure here's a close-up showing the final texture.  Or as good a photo as I could manage given my limited photography skills, the dark color and speckled nature of the yarn I used.  Which yarn is it?  I believe it's Ancient Fortissima from the pre-merger days.  The 100g ball (now long since separated from the ball band) is sort of ragg-style tweedy, with haphazard stripes being produced when one or more of the constituent plies shades off to a new tone.  In real life it's more deep burgundy/blood red than it is magenta/blue.  The striping effect though isn't uniform.  Sock #1 has a far more demonstrative striping pattern than does on-the-needles sock #2.



I'm about half-way through the brocaded cuff of sock #2 right now (not shown).  As soon as I'm done, I'll pack up both pairs along with the finished pattern and send them to my friends.

Once again life overtakes blogging.  But this time it didn't intrude so completely that all knitting ceased.  As a result I can report on progress and make some promises.

First, progress on my Trekking XL socks.  With the exception of binding off, they're done.



Yes, both of the socks are the same size.  There's a slight distortion because the photo was taken on a futon sofa with a canted seat area, then flipped 90 degrees.  The sock on the left was further from the camera, and just looks smaller.  As you can see though, just as I predicted, the tweedy type of striping is wildly unpredictable.  Both were knit toe-up from the same ball of yarn.  The sock on the left was done first.  You can see the color match between the cuff cast-off row and the toe of the sock on the right.  I did have a small quantity of yarn left over.  Probably enough to have been more generous in my K2P2 rib (it's only 20 rows deep).

Before anyone asks - there is no way to make a pair of identical socks knit from tweeds made up of several plies that cycle independently through a set of colors.  If you're dead set on identical rather than fraternal pairs, stick to printed yarns.  Like the one in the next photo:



I still need to spell my camo tee knitting with something else, so I grabbed the next ball of yarn off the top of my sock yarn stash.  This one is Lana Grossa Meilenweit Fantasy.  The Fantasy color variant has the longest true repeat I've found in a fingering weight sock yarn.    This one is in nice spring colors.  Again, more autopilot knitting on my standard toe up, short row heel sock.  I feel like using large needles this time, so I'm working this pair on #00s, about 9 spi and only 72 stitches around. 

Lydia asks how I avoid little holes at the points of my short-rowed heels, at the spot where the heel ends and all the formerly dormant stitches have been re-activated, and the first post-heel full round starts.  She also wants to know if I put my non-heel stitches on a holder when the heel itself is being worked. 

I don't bother off-loading my non-heel stitches.  I just leave them on the two DPNs on which they ride for the entire sock and let them dangle.  I never have a problem losing them off the ends (I prefer relatively long DPNs for other reasons, but not losing stitches off the end is another good reason not to switch to shrimpy needles.)  On the gusset top hole problem - I pick up a stitch on each side during that first post-heel round.  There's a little trick to it, so I promise to take pix of that point when I get up to it on this pair.

On my camo tee - I'm still going...



I'm finding that the repeat becomes less and less stable the further I get into the piece, even though my stitch count remains the same.  Better pix soon, I promise that too.

Working away at the camo tee.  The striping has settled down somewhat:


Unfortunately, the need to keep precise tension in unstretchy cotton is tiring on my hands, and when my hands get tired the gauge (and in this case the flash ratio) wanders.  I find flash pieces and self-stripers to be easier in forgiving and somewhat self-correcting wool.  So to ward off fatigue, I've been alternating projects, working a pair of socks at the same time. 

Now the socks themselves are nothing special at all, being plain old stockinette with my standard figure-8 cast on toe and short rowed heel, but the colors of the sock yarn I'm using are particularly pleasing, and given the appearance of the skein - quite a surprise:



For the record this is Zitron's Trekking XXL, color number 100.  It's marked as 75% superwash wool, 25% polyamide nylon, at 420m for 100g (2.5 oz, 459 yards).  It's very similar to the Skacel yarn of the same name, and to an older Socka yarn I remember using yearsandyears ago.  The striping effect here is serendipity, caused by a confluence of color change among the yarn's four constituent, individually shading plies. 

I've used yarns that look like this before and had mixed results.  The Socka pair was a minor disappointment.  I bought two identical looking skiens of the same color number, in vivid fall reds, oranges, greens, and browns.  One striped like the pair above.  The other remained somewhat muddy, with no clear color sectioning because the tweedy bits never quite aligned.  I note that since just before the heel this skein has calmed down somewhat.  I'm hoping that it gets more demonstrative again on the ankle, and that the second sock (it's a two-sock size ball) while not an identical match to the first, will display a similarly cheerful stripe effect.  From the size of yellow-red blob that's peeking out just over the "TR" on the label, I supect it will.

It's true I've had precious little time for much of anything lately.  Including knitting.  And the last thing I wanted was something challenging.  Since small, soothing, quick to finish, and materials-on-hand were the orders of the day, I did several miniprojects. Most have already ended up as gifts - more booties, a baby hat, and several scarves. 

The scarves were all done from my Kureopatora Snake pattern, some in various variegateds, and one in a solid color.  I even bowed to the begging of Younger Daughter, and finished out the hideous short-repeat white, pink and grey Red Heart scarf for her to wear.  (I may think it's detestable, but she likes it).

I also went stash diving and came up with the remnant from this vest.

The vest was knit in 1987 or so, and at the time was a Major Investment for which I skimped on lunches, saving up for the purchase.  The yarn is an old Silk City yarn I bought at Washington D.C.'s late, lamented Woolgatherer shop in Dupont Circle.  It is worsted weight, mostly raw silk, with a touch of wool.  The label departed company with the stashed remains years ago so I'm not quite sure which yarn it was.  The stuff itself is soft and spongy, and over time becomes even nicer.  Down sides include an abundance of very sharp chaff - almost thorns; plus the general non-stretchy nature of silk.  The vest was adapted from a commercial pattern, now lost.  I do know that I substituted yarns, messed with a new gauge, introduced the cables and removed some pockets. 

Now for the hat.

 I've had a haphazardly wound ball of leftover yarn sitting in my stash, too expensive to fritter away, but not enough with which to do something major.  I grabbed it to work on in my small project frenzy. 



Still riffing on the Snake scarf idea and no particular pattern, I started with a strip of bias-knit ribbing.  I made it large enough to go around my head, earwarmer style and seamed it up.  Then I picked up stitches along one side at a ratio of about three stitches picked up for every four rows of the strip.  I ended up with 84 stitches, divided among four DPNs.  Then I did a couple rows of purl welting and broke back into K1 P1 ribbing.  When the hat was about 5 inches deep, measured from the bottom edge of the earwarmer band, I began my decreases.  Since the thing was on four needles and I was lazy, I settled on four decrease points, and knit the last two stitches on each needle together, doing so every other row.

When I had onl y four stitches left on each needle, I decided to be silly.  I worked about 16 rows of I-Cord using the four stitches on the first needle.  Then I folded it in half, and without breaking the yarn, knit I-Cord from the four stitches on the second needle.  I continued until I'd made four I-Cord loops, then did one row of plain knit to unite them, and one more decrease row.  I drew my end through the remaining 12 stitches to end off the piece.  I also did a little stealth fudging with the dangling end and a tapestry needle to snick up some looseness at the base of the I-Cord loops before darning the remainder in to finish the piece.

The result is a slightly goofy hat, with a finial on the top that looks like a Chuck Jones Instant Martian.  I think I'll take that tiny bit still left and add a row of knit-on I-Cord around the bottom edge.  That will echo the look of the welts and the deely-bob at the top, plus it will give a nice, strong bit of definition around the bottom.  As usual apologies for the lousy photos.  The tweedy yarn is hard to capture well enough to see details,

One final note - The abalone shell buttons you see here are the third set that's been on this vest.  Previous sets included embossed black leather, and shiny black plastic.  I've updated them several times over the years as styles have changed.  Changing buttons can be an inexpensive way to freshen the look of classic knits, opportunity shop finds, or hand-me-downs.

Turtlegirl asks what patterns I use for fingering weight socks.  I shamelessly answer - my own.  New readers here (and there appear to be many of them) may not know that I also am the keeper of wiseNeedle.  wiseNeedle is the original yarn review site, active on the web as an all volunteer consumer to consumer, unsponsored service since 1995.  In addition to the yarn review collection and a searchable glossary of knitting terms in 14 languages, I keep some patterns there, too.  Among them is a slew of toe-up, short row heel socks in several yarn weights.  There are three patterns there for fingering weight, and any of them can be used as-is, or by elimination (or substitution) of patterning on the ankle parts, made as simple or as complex as the knitter desires.

And in response to other requests, here's a close-up of the short row sock heel, showing the mitering you can achieve with a little advance planning and a modicum of luck:



Why do they not match exactly?  Because I didn't take the time to make my socks identical twins.  I started each sock off its own ball of yarn at the exact start of the ball.  The repeats were slightly skew.  I don't have a problem with making these self stripers into fraternal rather than identical pairs.

Now, how to finagle this effect using a self striper?  Lots depends on the width of the striped section.  The narrower the stripe, the easier this is to do.  You can better see what I did in the top sock, above.  I knit the foot (on the left, heading up towards the top of the photo), ending it in synch with the completion of a red stripe.  Then I began the back and forth short rowed section with the following section of black.  I ended the decrease section of my short rows roughly half way through the black bit that followed the red, finishing up the black on the part of the short row section that re-awakens dormant stitches.  Then I finished out my heel.  This synch of the pattern to the printed repeat required that I fudge a bit on foot length.  In a sock of this type, a row or two extra in the foot, combined with a heel a row shorter than normal isn't going to make a major difference in fit.  Since the repeat pattern is so narrow, I can get pretty close to perfect miters.  On wider patterns it's harder.  In a wider pattern I do still try to end the foot at the completion of a stripe (or if it's a VERY wide stripe, half way through a repeat).  I let the short rowed section fall out as it may, hoping more for serendipity rather than planned perfection.  Most of the time things work out well enough.

The work crisis has not yet abated (in fact, it's just settling in for the long haul).  Even if I'm not writing about it, I AM knitting.  Plain, boring, unadventurous, run of the mill, miles of stockinette, unchallenging (but comforting) knitting.

In my case, that usually means socks, and reverting back to the sock style I can do in my sleep - toe up with a figure-8 cast on, and short-rowed heel.   I've been averaging completion of a pair every six days or so.  I only knit for an hour or so each evening, so each sock is taking me three evenings to complete.



At the left what we've got is a pair of fingering weight socks composed from various leftovers.  The vile mustard is a 100% wool yarn I've had forever.  The label still lists the distributor with a pre-zip code address format.  The tweedy green/blue is a partial ball of something (I know not what) I got in trade swapping leftovers with a friend, and the red is some Dale Baby Ull, left over from a sweater knit for the smaller daughter.  This is the pair I was referring to when I wrote that in January my color taste departs, and I feel compelled to mismatch in the most garish ways possible.  Perhaps it's a seasonal longing for light and color that happens just after the holidays, when the world returns to winter-drab.  In any case, the moire-like patterning of the red tweedy parts isn't a camera artifact, it actually exists.  For some reason the tweedy red bits worked themselves into swirls on the foot of one sock and the ankle of the other.  I think they moved in and out of synchronicity this way because in this multi-ply yarn (a true 4-ply four ply), each ply was carrying the same set of colors.  While the plies never aligned so that a blob of red hit across all four at the same time, it does appear that if two aligned **just right** I got my swirls.  An unexpected effect to be sure, and one I would have preferred either lasted for the entire duration of both socks, or didn't appear at all.  Still, the things are garish enough to begin with, so the red striping is just another element of eye offense.

In the center is half a pair of light worsted weight socks.  The other is still on the needles.  In this case I had a skein of Little Lola, a variegated yarn.  I've used it twice before to make Kombu scarves, but the colors for those were tamer.  This particular skein presented a problem.  The colors in it are less of a set, and more of a street fight, with fuschia, teal, olive, mustard and navy all scuffling for attention.  I had set the skein aside when I used its two brothers because I didn't know how exactly to use it.   When I was rummaging through my stash to fuel my holiday knitting I came across two skeins of a yarn I got in a discontinued inventory sale back in 1994 or so, at the late lamented Yarn Shop in College Park Maryland.  It's Classic Elite Paisley Light, a mix of wool and rayon, and matches the all superwash wool Little Lola exactly in gauge and structure.  In my case the Paisley Light also matched the fuschia in the Little Lola spot on.  By working the toes, heels, and ribbing in Paisley, plus alternating stripes of three rows of Paisley and six of Little Lola, I've managed to tone down the discord of the variegated skein a bit.  It's still a riot, but more of a quiet one.  (Review of Paisley Light coming soon to wiseNeedle).

Finally the pair on the right is standard issue Regia Mini Ringel.  Nothing special here whatsoever.  Due to my bad photography you can't even see the nifty way the stripes miter on the short-rowed heel.

One last bit of blather, the old fashioned way of doing stripes (actually using two skeins of yarn, alternating between them on some sort of fixed count) is a wonderful way to make socks match in length.  It's relatively easy to count four or six rows of color A, then some number of color B.  Then when time comes to make sure that the second sock is the same length as the first, all that need be done is count the stripes.  Much more accurate than eyeballing or measuring, and far less tedious than counting rows.  A final hint, sometimes counting even a small number of rows in stockinette can be difficult if you're using a dark color yarn, or one that's highly variegated.  Instead of counting on the front side, I take a needle tip and insert it into a column of purl bumps on the reverse side of my stockinette.  It's easy to count off my rows by counting the purl bumps.

My convertible mittens are done.  I have to admit, the joy of ending off ten fingers wasn't a pleasure of the ages - but they're finished.



The rustic wool I used for these isn't as soft and non-itchy as I would have preferred, but in this case the intended use trumps that problem.  It's my understanding that the recipient would be wearing ultrathin silk gloves inside these.  Liners do away with itch.

If I were to make another pair of these mittens, I'd probably use a shaped thumb gusset instead of the afterthought thumb.  While these do fit nicely, I find a shaped thumb area to be more comfortable.  Award to recipient is this afternoon.  I'm sure he'll be pleased.

Next up in the gift parade is problematic.  I had a Very Strong Hint shared with me yesterday.  I don't have the special materials on hand, so compliance will entail a lunch-time raid on my LYS.  Now not everyone around me can get goodies just by idle hint.  Hints must be 1) shared innocently, with little expectation that they will lead to the desired object; and 2) must be given by the deserving, and I get to decide who's deserving.  If I didn't impose limits, I'd be chest deep in special requests.

Other items on parade include another pair of socks (probably not going to happen), and some ear warmers and hats.  Plus some additional crocheted snowflakes for the tree.  We'll see what further stash excavation expeditions unearth.

Cookie report: 
Rum balls this year turned into Scotch balls, as a last minute dearth of rum foiled my original plans.  I've used bourbon before, but found the result too strong, so we'll see how this year's crop mellows.  Peanut butter cookies are also finished.  I'm happy to say that the spice cookies turned out exceptionally well.  Thin, light, and gently spiced.  A delicate cookie compared to many heavier riffs on the spice cookie theme. 

Holiday shopping is now complete.  My cookie list is done and supplies have been purchased.  I turn again to knitting (in between the batches).

My hunter's mittens (or shooting mittens, or flip top mittens, or convertible mittens) are more than three quarters done.  I've finished the first one, and am up to the fingerettes of the second.  I read through the list of patterns that I posted last week, and absorbed some general principles. In specific, I adopted the afterthought thumb and line of purls along the knuckles to make flap attachment easier from this one but mostly I just went along on instinct. 

I'm using a rustic-type worsted weight wool.  This particular bit is left over from a sweater I knit for myself from yarn I bought at a Gore Place Sheepshearing Festival, held annually in Waltham, Massachusetts. I've written about my No Math Pullover before.  My normal gauge for this stuff is about 5 stitches per inch over stockinette on US #7s.  For this project I wanted something tighter and more wind-proof, so I ratcheted down to a mix of 2s for the ribbing and #4s.

I worked about five inches of wrist ribbing in K2, P2, switched to stockinette, knit to the thumb point and introduced some waste yarn for the thumb opening.  Then I knit to the knuckle ridge and purled the stitches on the back of the hand.  After about four rows of spacer after the knuckle ridge, I worked some evenly spaced mini-fingers.  Once they were complete, I picked up stitches along the knuckle ridge, cast on extras to go across the palm (I used cable cast-on for that to make a firm edge).   Once I had my stitches for the mitten end established, I did several more rows of ribbing across the palm side to keep the edge from curling and stretching, then finished off the mitten end with a standard sock toe, ending it off with Kitchener grafting.  Then I went back and worked a standard thumb.

The palm side is shown on the left.  You can see the thumb and ribbed edge of the mitten end flap.  The back of the hand is shown on the right, with the mitten flap end folded back to expose the fingers.  I'm pretty happy with the result.

Now, some people have asked how I figure out the sizes for gift knits.  I try to do it by nefarious means most of the time, but for this gift I admit I showed a partially done (and woefully oversized) mitten to the recipient.  I knew I was so far off that the result would be laughable, so I spoiled my own surprise.  

Nefarious means:  For socks, I eyeball the target feet.  I've been known to measure footprints in the snow, sneak looks at spare shoes when visiting, or note where the toe and heel line up when their owner is standing on a patterned rug,then return later and measure the interval.  Hats are harder, but since knitting stretches, planning on a 21-inch head circumference to start with, then doing a plus or minus based on whether I think the person has a larger or smaller head than usual has always worked for me.   For mittens, I usually contrive some sort of conversation that leads to a hand to hand comparison between the target and me.   For example, I'll ask about how comfortable the target finds his/her particular model of keyboard, note that my experiences vary, and posit a hand-size difference.  That usually leads to a palm-to-palm comparison, which gives me a rough idea of size.  I'm sure others have similar sneaky ways to evoke the needed data.  I'd love to hear about them, too.

Side trip - I've had a request for the recipe for Oysters.  I posted it last year around this time.  Enjoy!

Sometimes having lots of dribs and drabs in one's stash can lead to some strange picks as projects and available yarns are aligned.  This week's projects are case in point proof. 

Knitterguy asks why on earth one would want to knit an acrylic/cotton blend scarf.  I agree with him.  Those fibers are far from warm and cozy, and there are lots of better choices for a warm neck wrap.  In this case i plead a confluence of several factors:

• The screaming yellow color.  The crossing guard in question will appreciate it.
• Having the yarn on hand
• The target recipient's frequently repeated statements that she can't wear wool

Now I don't want to start the whole, "but of course she can" or the old warhorse perceived allergies vs. real allergies debates.  I take her words at face value.  She doesn't want anything made of wool.  She gets a nice, bright scarf in a color she favors and fiber type she believes is best for her, and I find an appreciative home for yarn I've held on to for upwards of ten years.  But if I were knitting this for me, I'd be looking into a supersoft merino, or cashmere/merino blend for sure.

Next up appears to be a pair of flip-top mittens.  I'd like to make something for a friend who has a predeliction for outdoor activities in the winter that occasionally require the use of bare fingers.  A pair of these should be perfect.  I note the presence of lots of free patterns on the web (convertible mittens, work mittens, two-way mittens, urban coping mechanism mittens I and urban coping mechanism II) plus several well regarded for-pay patterns (Pop-Up Paws, and Patons.)  But in true String-or-Nothing tradition, I plan to leap off the cliff and improvise something on my own.  I'll probably start by looking over what's out there, then messing about with the concept.  Not sure if I'll do a fingerless glove surmounted by removable finger end cap, or if I'll do a fingerless mitten.  I suspect the former will stay in place better, while the latter will be quicker to make. 

As to what yarn to use - I'm not sure yet.  This particular target recipient has an interest in historical things, so I may look at some of the more rustic looking 100% wools I have.  For example, I've got some leftovers of Cestari light fingering weight 100% wool singles in both white and heathered barn red.  I could combine the two into a Ragg-style looking DK equivalent.  Hmm....

My stash diving and holiday knitting continue.  Unfortunately, my camera and camera skills are far from the best (plus I'm still having some platform issues left over from my system upgrade), so you'll have to use some imagination on this one.



Believe it or not, there are three strange and blurry objects above.  At the top is a long scarf knit in the loopy mohair previously described.  It's in plain old garter stitch, but the resulting fabric looks a lot like the curly lamb stoles my great aunts wore four decades ago.  It's plush and lush.  It also left precious little left over, but I contrived a simple beanie cap from the leftovers.  That's the shapeless black lump at the bottom of the photo.

In between is a simple knit/purl patterned scarf in screaming yellow.  In this case, yellow is appropriate because the thing is a gift for a crossing guard.  The pattern is a basketweave variant from B. Walker's Fourth Treasury.  The yarn is a well-aged stash resident - Brunswick Bermuda II.  Bermuda is a cotton/acrylic blend, with a maker's gauge of 5 stitches per inch on US #6 needles.  I am not quite sure where I came by the five skeins of screaming taxicab yellow, but I suspect that this is a leftover from a project my mother made years ago.  I can say that I am not fond of working with the stuff.  It combines many of the worst features of both cottons and acrylics.

To start, Bermuda has a loosely twisted multi-strand construction, with about eight constuent plies.  Eight point-trapping nuisances that make this yarn a nominee for "Worst Splitting Yarn I've Ever Used."  The stuff is unstretchy as one would expect, but so much so that knitting evenly with it is a huge challenge.  To keep my stitches uniform, I'm having to knit as tightly as possible, especially on the transitions between knits and purls.  Even so, a knit/purl combo pattern is better than all stockinette for this yarn, as the texture doesn't betray those "I'm knititng with an uncooperative cotton" occasional leggy bits.  But I can go on...  The texture of this stuff is string-like and hard in the fingers, very uncomfortable to use especially given the tightness I'm trying to achieve.   I've knit up three skeins of Bermuda so far.  One more should make the scarf a useable length, and any leftovers will become fringes.  Ending this one off can't come soon enough for me.

I'm not quite sure what stash diving I'll do next, or what the next bit of knitting will be, but I suspect that there will be at least one more pair of socks between now and the holiday, plus some more snowflakes for the tree.

The socks are done, and I'm looking over all the possibilities for gift knitting that can actually be accomplished between now and when needed.  So far I've stockpiled two pairs of socks, two scarves, and a pair of halfie mittens.  This is an excellent opportunity to go through my small quantity stash box and identify things that can be pressed into service.  So far I've found:

• A large ball of heavy loop mohair/wool blend in black, probably bought at a Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival from Tess Yarns.  If I recall correctly the year I went Saturday night and Sunday morning were quite rainy.  The Tess booth had the misfortune of experiencing tarp failure, and the stock got quite wet.  Those of us who chanced by when the inventory was being packed up at the end of the day were treated to sizable discounts on sopping skeins.  When knit up in garter stitch this stuff is a dead ringer for curly lamb or mouton.  Perhaps a scarf and (if there's enough) trim on a matching hat.  Or perhaps if I feel adventurous (and there's enough), a shaped shoulder shrug in imitation of a curly lamb stole of the 1950s.  One drawback - mohair and I don't get along very well.  I'll probably have to knit this wearing gloves, or put up with itchy, red hands for the duration. (I didn't realize how poorly we got along until long after I had bought the stuff.)
  
• Some leftovers of cotton blend and cotton velor yarns - the dribs and drabs of kid sweaters long since completed and outgrown.  Since I often buy yarn in bag quantity I almost always have extra.  This stuff would be good for small seaman style inside the coat type scarves. 
  
• Some sport weight Shetland two-ply yarn in cranberry, olive and muted blue, left over from a linen stitch sweater-suit my mother knit sometime in the mid 1960s and shamelessly stolen from her stash.  The colors look quite good together and are not as out of favor as they have been in the past.  Hats?  Ear warmers?  More halfie mitts, but with stranded patterns?  No decisions yet, but the stuff is still in excellent condition and should be used
• Some fingering weight cotton blend sock yarn.  I am not a fan of cotton socks, I find them cold, clammy and hard textured compared to wool or wool blend socks.  But I have some sock weight cottons.  These should make nice wrist warmers or ear bands.  Or perhaps cell phone or iPod socks for the gadget-blessed who have requested such things.  (Someone please tell me why anyone would want an cozy for a device upon which engineers have lavished man-years of effort to mitigate the problem of heat dissipation inherent in small scale electronics.)
  

And that's just in the top layer of the box.  Stay tuned!

First, an aside.  I finally darned in the ends of my Alcazar shawl.  I only end off ends when the final disposition of a piece has been decided.  In this case it means I've decided that as much as I love my Alcazar, there's someone who deserves it more.  My shawl has now found its way to its new (and very appreciative) owner, and I beam with my own pleasure at  joy with which it was received.. 

My socks continue.  I've finished the first and am only a single evening away from finishing the second.  I've placed the motif on the ankle.  Because I chose to work it as a knit image on a purl ground, and the motif is made up of solid blocks and strips, unstretched the sock looks rather strange.  The motif draws in like ribbing and the purl background puffs out compared to the rest of the stockinette sock.  But when worn, it looks fine.  The purl ground recedes, the proportions of the knit motif correct, and the draw-in so evident in the unstretched item goes away.



The motif on the ankle isn't very visible in this photo, so here is the graph:



Yes, it has a specific meaning.  A work-related meaning that a very small minority of the viewers here will recognize.  And no - I didn't stick to the graph in the absolute.  My final version has the same height to width ratios as this visual, but because there is very little variation row to row, I repeated the center area rows and the upper end rows more times than they are shown here. I did that because my graph was done on square units, but my knit stitches are not 1:1 ratio.   I needed extra rows to achieve these proportions.

In terms of placement, I centered the unit on the ankle bone, and repeated it on both sides of the sock.  The red line marks the centermost point and the whole graph represents half the sock's stitches.  Because I work with four DPNs in the work and one in hand with an equal number of stitches on each of the four DPNs, finding that center point was very easy.  I do admit that once I began the pattern panels I rearranged the stitches so that I held the motif and field stitches (the green ones) on a single DPN, eight stockinette stitches on a second, the other side's motif on a third, and the final eight stitches on the fourth DPN.  I did the reassortment to avoid the possiblity of a loose stitch marring the center of the motif.  While I don't have ladder-itis between DPNs in stockinette, I am less sure of myself in reverse stockinette, so I avoided the issue entirely.   I planned my vertical placement so that the motif would occupy the center third of the sock measured from the bottom of the foot to the bottom of the ribbing.  That means I worked a few rows after completing the heel and before starting the motif, and working my post-motif stockinette to the same depth as the patterned part.

Finally, I finished the sock off with plain old 2x2 ribbing, whick I did until I ran out of yarn in my standard issue Regia 4-ply 50g/210 meter ball.  I'd say the resulting sock should fit from man's shoe size 9.5 wide through 11 (possibly 12) medium width or so. With luck the target recipient has feet in that size range.  If not, I've got an alternative recipient planned, and I'll knit another smaller pair for target #1.

?Thanks to everyone who left recommendations on inverting heel flap heels for toe-up socks. There probably are lots of "official" ways to do it. Leah mentioned one in Gibson-Roberts Ethnic Socks and Stockings. Kathryn says there's one in Church's Sensational Socks. Brigid sends us to the KnitSocks Blog. Emily says just to do a plain old flap heel, as written for cuff-downs, and Rob points out a totally different approach adapted from Rehfeldt's Toe Up Techniques for HandKnit Socks.

You know sometimes there's a reason to bow to the giants who have gone before. And sometimes for no reason other than personal perversity and the joy of fiddling with something on one's own, there's a reason to keep on plugging away despite all the world's advice to the contrary. I've been feeling contrary.

I worked my heel as described in yesterday's post. Here's the result:



I tried it on. It fit, but the sock ended up being too long. Plus I wasn't entirely satisfied with the location of the gusset. it was centered too low on the foot, with too much above. Fabric sort of lumped up on top of the ankle. So in this aspect at least taking a recommendation from Emily, I ripped my sock back to about a half-inch below the heel and reknit the thing on 50% of the total stitches. I ended up picking up 15 stitches on either side of my heel flap.



I like this better. I had thought that not having a heel cup (the turning the heel bit) that I'd end up with little wings at the corners of the heel flap. The sock unworn kind of looks that way, but when worn, everything fills out and no little corners protrude. Perhaps that's because my feet are so wide. This particular pair is a gift, so I'll have to knit another pair using this heel and give them a thorough wear testing. I am keeping this heel. (The color on this second photo is closer to Real Life.)

In any case, I'm now up to the ankle part and am about to place the knit/purl motif I've drafted up. It's a very simple geometric design based on some rectangles. Thinking on the way knit/purl patterning looks, I'll work the foreground in knits, and the background in purls. I'll either place it in a stripe of purl that goes completely around, or box the motif in a purl field. More on this tomorrow...

A couple of people wrote to me yesterday to report on faux chain mail sightings - mostly in movies. With the exception of a couple of very recent mega-budget fantasy and historical pictures, the majority of movie mail is the fake stuff. For example, in Branagh's Henry V, a couple of the leads wear real chain (laughably without the padding that actual use would require), but the majority of the cast including some characters with significant screen time wear knit yarn mail.

On the knitting front, I am finally tinkering with the reverse Dutch heel flap for toe ups thought experiment I wrote about back in March. I'm working a fingering weight sock on US #0s, on 68 stitches around (17 stitches each on four DPNs). The method I wrote about then looks confusing to me, even in retrospect, but trying it out all became (sort of) clear.

I knit my foot until I achieved the length I thought I'd need from toe to hard up on the ankle. Then, taking care to center the pre-heel bottom of the foot stitches on the bottom of the foot - I worked a protruding flap on about 20% of the heel's stitches (more on the figure later). I slipped the first and last stitch of the flap to make picking up along it easier, and knit it about 1.5 inches long. When the flap was that length, and finishing with a knit row, I picked up the stitches along the flap's left side, then knit across the top of the foot, and picked up the stitches on the flap's right side. I then was ready to begin my gusset decreases. I worked along for a while, decreasing at either side of the picked up stitches every other row.

It quickly became clear that this heel - although structurally correct, was flawed. I had a narrow band of stitches along the center bottom of the foot, with two prominent ridges made by picking up on either side of the heel. I had extra depth in the ankle, but the heel itself was too shallow for a comfortable fit. So I ripped back and began the heel again.

Right now I'm inspired by Emily Cartier's suggestion from the blog comment she left on the entry cited above. She suggests working a reverse flap heel on 50% of the available stitches rather than 20%. Bigger is most certainly warranted here, but 50% looked a bit big to me. So (apologies, Emily) I'm going to try a figure closer to 30%. Now I'm at the large rumply yarn clot formed by ripping back, and naked foot stitches just before the heel begins stage, but this is what I'll do, and how I'll go about working the heel on 4 DPNs.

1. I'll look at my toe and identify the center of the bottom of the foot (no point in working a heel akimbo). That point will lie between two of my DPNs, as I work my socks using a set of five.
2. I'll arbitrarily set my bottom of the foot flap at 22 stitches total. Since I'm working with 17 stitches on each needle, I'll slide six stitches from the leftmost bottom of the foot needle left to the one that normally holds only the top of the foot; and I'll slide six stitches from the rightmost bottom of the foot needle right onto the other top of the foot needle. Finally, just to make things a little clearer, I'll consolidate all the heel flap needle onto one needle. I now have three needles in my work: one holding 22 flap stitches, and two I'll ignore for a while, each holding 23 stitches.
   
3. I'll knit back and forth in stockinette on the 22 heel flap stitches, slipping the first and knitting the last stitch on all rows (making chain selvedges on both sides of the flap), until the flap is about 2 inches long. I'm not sure how many rows this will be - I could do the row gauge computation, but the exact number of rows is pretty much immaterial.
4. Once I've decided my flap is long enough (some trying on may be required), I'll make sure I finish at the end of a knit row. Then I'll pick up stitches along the left hand edge of the flap, taking advantage of the chain selvedge to do so. I'll remember this number. Then I'll knit across the top of the foot, back to the base of the flap, and pick up the same number of stitches I picked up before, this time heading up the right side of the flap.
5. While I'm working the pick-up row I'll reallocate my stitches onto four needles. The two needles that hold the top of foot stitches each have six extras. When I finish the pick up row, I should return to having the 17 original stitches on each of the two top of foot needles. The other two needles will each hold half of the remaining stitches. They'll be a bit crowded, but the goal will be to work the gusset decreases until they too have 17 stitches each.
6. I'll begin the gusset decreases by looking at my left-most heel stitch needle, and noting which stitch is the last of the ones I picked up along the heel flap. The stitch after that one - the first stitch of the actual foot is the one that will be the top stitch of the SSK decrease column on this side of the ankle. Likewise, the last stitch of the actual foot will form the top stitch of the K2tog decrease column on the other side of the ankle.
7. I'll work in plain old stockinette until I get to the last picked up stitch, identified above. I'll do my SSK, then work across the top of the foot. I'll continue in stockinette until the last actual foot stitch before the picked up stitches on the other side of the heel flap. I'll do a K2tog with this stitch and the first picked up stitch, then finish out my round by knitting to the center of the heel.
8. I'll work a complete round in plain stockinette with no decreases.
9. I'll repeat the last two steps above until I have 17 stitches on each needle again. At that point the heel should be done.

Now, there's no guarantee that things will actually work out as planned. This is theory only. I have to try it out and see if the heel flap is too narrow (solution - try again with more stitches allocated to it); if the gussets are too shallow (fix - knit the initial flap to be longer); or if the total heel is too deep (fix - rip back a bit of the foot before starting the heel again).

Now - why is there no picture to accompany this grand experiment? Because all I've got is a sock foot knit in solid gray Regia on four needles, sitting next to a rat's nest of rippled yarn. Not exciting in the least. That and I'm still relegated to posting away from my base station because my computer is still in the throes of reassembly.

I'm doing fine, but my base station computer is lying on the dining room table, completely gutted. A new motherboard, new power supply, and a new video card are arrayed nearby. But you didn't come here to read about my digital woes.

I'm working up a follow-on to the charting articles - a set of thumbnail reviews of the knitting pattern books on my shelves. I've got most of the standards, plus a couple of the harder to find items. But that's much easier to do when I'm working in the same room the books are.

In the mean time, I've been working on various small projects - mostly holiday related. I've finished off several more pairs of booties (there must be something in the water, as there appears to be spike up in the local numbers of the gravid). Socks march on, with the latest pair being toe-ups in a very conservative gray, possibly with an inverted flap heel and the placement of a spot motif on the ankle. Those bits may yield something of interest to write about. Plus a quick stitched piece that is destined to be given to an unsung hero at work. More on that tomorrow.

In the mean time, I present with a bit of sadness, the knit fake chain mail coif and hauberk I made for Older Daughter when she was five:



Apologies for the even lousier than normal picture quality. I don't have access to the photo editing tools I normally use.

This is the knight costume that was featured in the note I wrote that ended up in the first volume of KnitLit. I made it for Elder Daughter in 1996, when she was in Kindergarten. The sadness creeps in because Younger Daughter just wore it for Halloween, and it was clear that this is the last year that she will be able to do so. The coif will still figure in fantasy play for or a while, but the mail shirt is ready for The Box of Knitting That No Longer Fits.

In the mean time, if you want to knit up some play armor for your own miniature warrior, the method description is on wiseNeedle.

A person left a comment on one of the counterpane pages here, asking for help identifying the technique or stitches used in blanket she owns. She neglected to leave an eMail address. I'd be interested in seeing a photo and possibly posting it here for discussion, but without contact info not much can be done.

Yes, in the midst of all the charting stuff I was knitting. I finished up the Harvey Kombu, and I did a pair of plain toe-up socks from Lana Gross Meilenweit. I'm not sure which color variety it is, as I lost the label in an airport. It's not Fantasy, the repeat is too short. It' s not Multieffect, or any of the MultiRingel colors, either. It's possible it was part of last winter's Jacquard color crop.



You'll notice ends dangling off both pieces. I really can't say why I do this (perhaps it's a personal superstition, perhaps it's a reminder not to use the item myself), but when I make gifts in advance, I don't darn in the final ends until I have decided whom the recipient will be. I'm not quite sure who will be receiving these, so the ends are still there. Go figure.

The socks were done on US #0s (2mm) needles - 72 stitches around. That makes them rather large in gauge for me. I used the standard figure-8 toe and short-row heel I use in all the sock patterns on the wiseNeedle pattern page. Nothing fancy here, just miles and miles of plain old stockinette, finished off with a K2P2 ribbing at the top. The pattern for the Kombu scarf is also there. In this case, I used a US #6 (4mm), and used just under two full balls of my ancient stash-aged Lang Harvey yarn.

Finally, one other person asked about how I construct my charts. As I've described at length before, I use Microsoft Visio. I'm sharing my Visio stencils. If you've tried graphing knitting or stitching patterns using them and have feedback or questions, please let me know.

Some random questions popped into my inbox this week. I try to answer:

You said you knit a lot of socks, and the colorful bits on the booties are leftovers. Leftovers from what? What are your favorite sock yarns?

I like the Euro-style classic finish hard twist wool/nylon blend sock yarns best (I don't care for either wearing or knitting cotton socks). My short list includes Socka/Fortissima, Regia, Meilenweit, and the like. I'm slightly less fond of Reynold's sock yarns, finding them a bit coarser than I like. I knit with Opal once, the yarn's texture was nice and the colors were interesting, but not so much that I'd pay a premium to find more. I've also tried Kroy 4 ply (aka Kroy Sock), Special Blauband, and Brown Sheep Wildfoote. I'm not as fond of those. Brown Sheep is too thin, splitty and flabby. Special Blauband is also thin compared to my usual (their Blauband Ringel yarns though are more comparable to the Socka type). Kroy is a bit less densely spun than the Euro yarns, but it's economical and is stocked in solid colors. Once it was difficult to find multicolor sock yarn, now it's tough to find solids. I use solids for contrast, so I was very happy to find Kroy.

I've also tried some of the higher priced yarns, like Koigu and Lorna's Laces. In truth, though the Koigu colors were fantastic, I was less pleased with its performance in a sock than most. I found it too thick to make socks I can wear in most of my shoes, plus even under careful hand-wash, I found it fuzzed and lost that surface sheen that makes the colors pop. The socks are wearing well, but they've lost that special something that the yarn had in the skein. I'd use Koigu again in a heartbeat - but not for socks. The Lorna's Laces yarn was a bit loftier than my usual hard twist stuff, but worked up nicely. It's wearing quite well.

I've also tried a salad of other sock yarns - Alpine, Marathon, Happy Strumpf, Trekking - whatever wandered into my local yarn store that looked interesting. While all made suitable socks, none stood out as things I'd want to seek out for repeat use. Alpine was a Euro style yarn - good texture, boring colors; the others were heavier than I prefer.

I haven't tried the less expensive sock yarns from KnitPicks or Elann. I tend not to buy yarn via the Web if I can get the equivalent locally, and I live in a very sock yarn rich region. (Actually touching yarn before I buy it is a requirement.)

The links above just go to one representative of larger, similarly named sock lines. If you need more info on sock yarns, try wiseNeedle. Go to the search page and look up a sock yarn by name, or select "sock" from the drop down list of yarn types. About 135 are currently listed - 85% with at least one review. You can also find a chart showing some repeat lengths of common sock yarn self stripers here.

Still working on the scarf?



I like it better when you write about little stuff. The big projects are boring. What little stuff are you planning?

Unfortunately, I don't plan my knitting to fuel this blog. I knit wherever I want to wander, and the blog gets pulled along behind. That being said, I have to finish this latest crop of booties plus the Harvey Kombu, then rescue Elder Daughter's Rogue before returning to my large blanket. Plus the holidays are coming. I've promised a ton of socks, plus there are some other special gifts that I really should make. You'll see quite a few quickies over the coming two months, I guarantee.

Late breaking addition:? Ooooh. Mittens!? Haven't done full patterend mittens yet. Thank you , Wendy!

There must be something in the water (please excuse me for not drinking).

I find myself knitting booties for a flood of the newly expecting. So many in fact that over the past two weeks, for the sake of fun I've taken to playing with ankle part after the eyelet holes for the drawstring style bow.



This bootie is a combo of Dale Baby Ull and tiny leftovers from three candy color different self-striping sock yarns. Like I wrote before, just a yard is enough to do a stripe, so I save every scrap.

You could argue that my petaled bootie isn't entirely successful, that the top round of contrasting welting should be deeper, and that I should have worked a round in white before launching into the crown-like points at the top. But hey - these booties are the knitting equivalent of potato chips - quick snacks tossed off in between more substantial meals. However they are excellent for playing with some basic concepts before risking those ideas on a larger piece.

In this case, I looked at the thing (shown above before the bow tie is inserted), and thought that I'd like a pointy finish. I didn't want it elaborate or deep, and was too lazy to haul myself over to my bookshelf and dig through my collection of stitch pattern books. It being a no-brain night, I decided to improvise on the fly and do a no-brain edging knit onto the live stitches of my bootie ankle to eliminate seaming (a pain on something so small.)

These booties finish out with 40 stitches - 10 on each of four needles. 40 is a good number, it's an even multiple of 4 or 5, so an edging worked on 40 live stitches can have a 4 or 5 stitch repeat. For no reason whatsoever, I picked 5.

I cast two stitches onto a DPN, and knit one, then did a yarn over and worked the second together with the first stitch of my bootie ankle using a SSK. On the second bootie-out and all subsequent bootie-out rows, I flipped the thing over and knit back to the outer edge. On the next and edge-in subsequent rows, I knit until just before the last stitch, finishing out the row with a YO, SSK incorporating one stitch from the bootie ankle. After I'd "eaten" up four stitches of the bootie ankle and was ready for the fifth edge in row, I bound off until I had one stitch on the right hand needle and one stitch on the left. This last stitch I worked together with the fifth bootie ankle stitch. Voila!? A very simple 10-row petal edging custom-matched to the stitch count of the piece being trimmed. I did seven more points (eight in all - two per bootie ankle needle) and grafted the last two stitches to the cast on row. Bootie done, and neither seaming nor casting off was required.

Neither knitting an edging onto live stitches nor creating a very simple edging in this manner are new ideas, but both evoke a bit of "How did you do that" when seen outside of lace knitting circles.

I would improve this a bit were I to do it again. Instead of each point "eating" five ankle stitches and taking 10 rows to complete, I'd cheat a bit. I'd do an 8-row repeat, working my bind off on the fourth edge in row instead of the fifth, BUT instead of working a SSK with one edging stitch and one bootie stitch to conclude the bind-off row, I'd work a SSSK, fusing together one edging stitch and TWO bootie ankle stitches. In effect, I'd be working an 8-row repeat attached to five ankle stitches. This will draw in just a bit and counter the tendency for the edging to stretch the live stitches, and be wider than the tube of the item it completes. Most lace projects that? are ended off with an edging knit perpendicular to the body and don't exploit this natural tendency to ruffle do vary the stitch attachment count in a ratio closer to 3:2 than 1:1.

So, the next time you do a top-down hat, a tubular iPod case, or even a toe-up sock, think of finishing it off with a bunch of slightly silly, fluttery petals instead of the standard bind-off row. Or if you feel really ambitious - thumb through the lace edging section of your stitch dictionary, pick one with an appropriate row count and try it out out to put a crowning touch on your piece.

I'm still sweeping out mental cobwebs, occupying my fingers with interim quickie projects. Saturday's was another pair of booties, in the bootie pattern I've blogged about before:



This pair is in lime green Dale Baby Ull, and the leftover of some tweed sock yarn long since separated from its label of origin. It just takes a couple of yards to do one of the purl welts. I've worked them in contrast (as shown here), even working each welt in a different color yarn. Sometimes I do the ties in the same color as the contrast, sometimes not. It all depends on how much I've got. This is why I never throw away sock yarn leftovers. The smallest bit is enough to accent a pair of these booties.

I'm still repacking my stash after our near escape from a basement flood. In doing so I'm running across all sorts of goodies I had forgotten about. In the same box as my Kureopatora leftovers, I found about seven or eight balls of Harvey. Lang Harvey was a wool blend salad with a boucl? finish - 40% wool, 32% acrylic, 15% polyamide nylon, 10% alpaca, and 3% viscose. I'm pretty sure I scavenged it from a bargain bin at a (long gone) yarn shop I used to frequent in College Park, Maryland. And I'm also pretty sure that I bought it circa 1990 or so. Possibly earlier, so the chance of anyone finding more outside their own stash is slim to none. The original intent was to make a vest, but although I liked the yarn I didn't like the way it worked with my chosen pattern, so I stashed it.

What's boucl? you ask? It's a style of yarn that has fallen out of favor. You don't see that many of them around any more, the textured yarn niche having been consumed entirely by the fluttery fur monster.

Boucl?s have an airy hand. If you think of classic finish multi-strand yarns (like Cascade 220) as dense cream cheese, boucl?s would be the whipped variety. Unlike chenille where the fluffiness is made by little strands that are bound by some kind of "keeper thread," boucl?s have no fuzz to come unbound. The yarn's structure is of one or more two-ply strands. One ply is relatively taught, usually a very fine nylon thread. The other ply is looser spun, almost slubby, and is under far less tension. The looser strand is sort of gathered and lumped around the nylon base thread, resulting in something that has more loft and that has higher yardage per unit weight.

Here's Harvey:



Harvey has two two-ply strands. You can see how nubbly and slubby it looks. While it reminds me in color and visual appearance of the iron-upholstered sofa in my grandmother's apartment (the one that would sand your thighs off if you sat on it while wearing a skirt in the summer), it is in fact an exceptionally luxurious feeling, soft and easy to wear yarn.

Some boucl?s are even more fluffy or bumpy than this. Some have a loopy construction (I'm not sure at what exact point something stops being a boucl? and becomes - for example - a mohair loop, but I'm sure one of the spinning folk who read here will enlighten us.)?? My Harvey is marked at worsted gauge (20 st x 34 rows = 4 inches or 10cm) . It's about 126 meters or about 138 yards. A classic worsted like Cascade 220 is about 110 yards for 50 grams. Even taking the fiber salad composition of Harvey into consideration, 28 yards in 50 grams is a major difference in yardage.

Now. How does Harvey knit up??

The first time I tried it out I was disappointed, but I had picked a pattern for which it wasn't suited at all. I tried it out using a knit/purl texture pattern that was totally eaten by the yarn's texture and dark color. While it isn't optimal for showing detail on something like my Kombu, I thought it might be fun to try out in that pattern:



Again, the ribbed detail is partially obscured, although it shows up better in person than it does in a photo. But the softness and drape can't be topped. I'll be finishing out my Harvey Kombu and stowing it for the upcoming gift season. I'll probably have enough to do a matching hat, too.

Oh, and for an exceptional Kombu that really shows off the pattern's texture better than my own attempts at both knitting and photography (and not to mention her superior execution of the idea) check out Kerstin's Strickforum. Beautiful!

In answer to so many questions - yes, I did finish the halfie mittens I showed last week:



Except for darning in the ends, that is. You'll note that the thumbs are on the same side in the picture above. That's because I'm trying to show the palm (stockinette) and the back of the hand (textured) of the pair. A little ending off, and they're ready to go into my hamper of potential holiday gifts. Or if it gets cold here before I get around to distribution, being pressed into immediate service.

My snake scarf continues to grow:



It's just at the point of Scarf Length Viability, but not really long enough yet As you can see I'm just about done with my first full ball of yarn. That leaves just one. I don't think I'll be able to save out my second for edging. It's going to get consumed just doing scarf body. Some have pointed out that I really don't need edging, but I haven't abandoned the idea. Getting more of this yarn is of course impossible, but perhaps something in black.

As soon as I end off the top end, I'll write up a how-to on this one.

Thank you to all who saw something redeemable in yesterday's blanket. I think the most telling thing of all is that the entire time I was working on it, my parents smiled sweetly and offered up yarn leftovers and encouragement. At no time did they grimace, giggle, or point. That sort of unconditional support must be something one learns in Secret Parent School, because I find myself smiling sweetly at earnest yet flawed first attempts made by my own kids.

On the knitting front, I'm still blowing the cobwebs out of my brain. This weekend past we narrowly averted a minor flood, and in doing so learned yet another advantage of keeping a large yarn stash stored in plastic boxes. What we see here is several tubs of yarn, dumped out on the projects table in the basement, and an "after" shot of the flood site, with the now empty and drying tubs perched on top of the sump they helped drain.


Had I not had a bunch of tubs lying around the house I would not have been able to stem my mini-tide.

In the course of the whole thing, I ran across two and a half balls of Noro's Kureopatora Plus. This is a multicolor wool/cotton blend yarn that's about six years old. The label calls it out at 23 st = 4 inches, but it knits up more like a heavy DK or even a worsted. It's long since discontinued which is unfortunate.

Although it won't full like the Noro multis popular right now, Kureopatra's cotton content makes it softer than they are. The colors are distributed not through dying but through spinning. It's double ply in construction. It looks like the spinner did a thick/thin thing on each ply, starting with one color and introducing fiber of the second in the thinner sections. Change is gradual (with occasional slubs) from color to color. Then two strands were plied, with the thin strand of one matching up with the thicker section of the other, so that the contrast color of the thinner strand is very evident against the puffy part of the other strand.

I started my latest bit of gratification by working up another of my Kombu scarves. Hey - it worked with a multicolor before, right? But I didn't like the look. The rainbow of this yarn is too strident for the textured Kombu:


So I ripped it out (hard going with this loosely plied fuzzy stuff); and began again. This time with my own off the top of my head variant on the single repeat entrelac rooted multidirectional idea. Mine is done in ribbing on 30 stitches. Provided I have enough yarn, I intend on finishing it with some sort of edging knit on after the main body is done:



I like this much better. Thank goodness my color sense has matured since 14.

After the overland slog on the Mystery Project, I felt the need for some instant gratification. I did a couple of pairs of booties (already distributed to the deserving, and not available for photographs). Then I took that beautiful hand-dyed sock yarn I mentioned the other day and started in on another pair of halfie mittens. I started (more or less) with the Fingerless Whatever pattern written up here earlier, but went free-form pretty early on.



To start, I'm using a traveling twisted stitch instead of ribbing. It goes all the way around the cuff portion, but when the thing gets to the heel of the hand, the palm side switches to plain stockinette.



After the heel of the hand transition, the twisted traveling stitch pattern drops a half-repeat at each cable crossing, and ends up forming a slave bracelet sort of triangle on the back of the hand. The thumb gusset is worked in the plain stockinette part, and is exactly the same as the one on Fingerless Whatevers. The hand and thumb bit end off with a bit of plain old K2, P2 rib.

Yes, the patterning would be shown to greater advantage were I not using hand-dyed yarn. But I like the seaweed-like effect of the mottled greens and blues, and the way the colors play with the highly embossed texture vs. the flat stockinette part. I'm pleased with my minor diversion, and as this yarn was a gift, thank yous are in order. (Plus I'm sure the giver would be curious to see what her offspring ended up becoming.)

Another postscript

Strange intersections of my professional employment and personal avocation keep cropping up elsewhere. I will soon be forced to knit my own robot.

It was this:



I crocheted this from the American School of Needlework pattern leaflet Original Fisherman Crochet for the Family by Anne Rabun Ough (LA #151):



Well, sort of. Actually I took the poncho pattern in this booklet, expanded it a bit in both length and width, adding extra panels of texture stitches, and edged it with a two-knot macrame fringe. (I tinkered with patterns even before I started knitting).   It ate yarn.  Crochet uses more yardage than knitting to make an equivalent sized piece.  The finished blanket weighs a ton.  Even though crochet is usually faster than knitting, it took a long time to make.  See those fake cables?  Those were done as little semi-detached bits, anchored at the tip several stitches away.  The solid parts were panels of slip stitch or single crochet.   The narrow, wandering cable was applied slip stitch worked after the piece was finished.  The bobble section took forever and a half to finish.  I can safely say that I haven't crocheted a bobble since.

I made this piece as a thank-you gift for my mother, for all that she did in handling our wedding preparations. That was roughly 27 years ago but the thing has aged well, surviving washings and daily sofa or bed-throw use for all these years without pilling, discoloring, shrinking, or snagging.  I'm not quite sure which 100% wool yarn I used, but I do remember it had an Irish-inspired name (possibly Plymouth Galway). In any case, here's yet another example of the lasting power of quality materials.

Why did it inspire me to finally learn to knit? Lots of reasons. For one, bobble exhaustion.  Plus at the time there were (and still are) comparatively few attractive, interesting, wearable crochet patterns compared to the wealth of knitting patterns out there. The crocheted faux Aran imitators were certainly interesting to make, but like the ones on the cover of the leaflet, cursed by that "loving hands at home" look. I wanted to make more than just fine lace, fancy tablecloths, and heavy blankets. I envied the style and wearability of knitting. Yes, I know that crochet can be used for far more, and that it can be wildly attractive, but especially at the time it was pretty much limited to tablecloths, blankets, baby things, odd lumpen pullovers done in yarns far to thick for comfortable wear, and granny square ponchos.

So I was primed for learning how to knit. From a book even. But that's another story.

Not much knitting progress to report on Rogue. Other priorities intrude this week. I have however gotten a fair bit done on my "briefcase sock."? That's the pair of socks in progress that live in my work backpack. I like to keep one going that's done while waiting for appointments, in line at the post office, and in those other bits of time that would otherwise be frittered away.



Briefcase socks are usually not of the most elaborate styling or construction. They have to be able to be picked up and put down without losing one's place in a pattern, and mindless enough to do with only minimal attention. As such, self-patterning yarns are ideal. This pair is in Reynolds Swizzle. It's marked at 7.5 stitches on a US #1 or #2. I'm using 1.25mm needles (US #0000), and getting 10.5 spi. This particular sock is 80 stitches around. As you can see, even at the much smaller gauge, I'm getting accent stripes that are perfectly satisfactory. They're mostly one row wide, with a two row overlap of about 25-29 stitches. This pair is being done in the standard toe-up/short-row heel style that has become my automatic default. I began the sock at the very beginning of a yellow stripe. I've just started the short-row heel section at the blue stripe now just off the needles. I'll probably begin the second sock at the start of either the blue or green accent stripe, just to be playful and have a pair of fraternal rather than identical twins.

Why do I knit my socks at such annoyingly tiny gauges?? I like them better. I find densely knit socks to be more comfortable, with none of that walking on pebbles feeling others report as a reason for not liking hand-knit socks. I have found that densely knit socks wear better and last longer, especially ones that are a bit tight on the foot. Socks that are large enough around to permit shifting can bunch up inside the shoe and either wear themselves thinner over time, or create blisters.

I find that most 4-ply fingering weight sock yarns work just fine for knitting at gauges significantly finer than they are marked. Three ply weight fingering is even thinner. It's tough to find it now that the old Kroy 3-ply is history, but I can get up to 12 stitches per inch out of a good 3-ply. That's fine enough to knit many pre-1900 era sock patterns verbatim. Cast on 96 stitches?? No problem with a 3-ply.

Finally how am I liking the Swizzle compared to other sock yarns?? It's o.k. Not great. I find it a tad harsher than the Regia line and the Fortissima/Socka line. It's also thinner looking un-knit, but denser (less airy) than the other two. The narrow, widely spaced skinny stripe is different, but boring. I may try to liven up the sock ankle a bit by either purling the accent rows, or by playing with a slip stitch or mosaic pattern on them.

Aside:? Welcome to my Japanese visitors!? I have no idea what the referring page says, but you are more than welcome to wander around and rummage through my past entries. Google translation tells me this

???????!

means "Happy knitting!"?? Although automatic translations are usually too literal (and usually produce silly output) I hope it's not too far off.

Questions, questions...

What's lucet cord?

Making lucet cord is a craft that goes waaay, way back. The most common form is sort of a two-stitch I-cord, formed on a very graceful looking lyre-like gadget:



There are other forms of lucet that use frames with more prongs, and their output is even more similar to standard I-cord, or spool knitting (aka corking, knitting Nancy, horsereins). If you don't have access to a talented and obliging woodworker or to a shop that specializes in obscure tools for historical needlework, you can attempt lucet on your fingers, or over the tines of a plastic fork with all but the two outermost prongs broken off.

The image above was shamelessly stolen from Phiala's String Pages - a site dedicated to various forms of historical braiding and weaving. If you've ever lain awake at night wondering how you could distinguish among pieces produced by sprang, naalbinding, and tablet weaving, Phiala has tried them all and provides pictures. Here's her lucet how-to.

Did you actually finish the pair, or just the one bootie shown?



How long did the pair take?

About as long as it took to watch the third Matrix movie on cable TV. It might have taken less time, but I kept jumping up to photograph my progress.

How much yarn did it take?

It's hard to say. Very little, to be sure. I started with a partial skein of the green, and used less than half of that. I suspect around only 50-60 yards. Perhaps a bit more. I used to be able to get a pair of booties (without ties) out of what remained from two balls of Socka after I'd finished knitting socks for me.

Why is Rogue taking so long?

Because I don't have a lot of time each day to knit. I usually only manage an hour or two at most in the evenings, while policing homework or watching TV. Less if other needs press.

I know some of you are writing to me in frustration because you're trying to follow along with my progress, but there's a reason why I neither participate in nor initiate knit-alongs. I knit on my main project when I can knit. Sometimes I choose to do other things - like reading, cooking, earning a living, accomplishing quick side projects, adding 150 yarns to the wiseNeedle database, or shoveling out the driveway instead.

Rogue progress tomorrow. I promise. Now I've got to go back outside and back to shoveling.

A quick side trip. Faced with a need for a last-minute small baby gift, and having at my disposal some orphaned leaf green Dale Baby Wool provided by my pal Kathryn (Thanks, Kathryn!), I do up a quick pair of booties from a time-honored pattern.

Ann Kreckel posted this pattern for Janes Baby Booties to the?KnitList almost ten years ago. Her pattern was collected and preserved at Woolworks, itself (in Internet terms) a venerable Ur-source of knitting info - one of the first generation of knitting sites on the Web.

Ann's booties are a?version of the classic Stay On Baby Bootie. Her pattern, though all text is clear and easy to follow. I can vouch for the fact that these booties do stay on. In fact of all the booties I knit for my spawn in their larval stages, these were the only ones that ended up being at all practical. (Thank you Ann, wherever you are today.)? Other versions of this same basic idea?exist, including ones published in the Taunton Press Knitting Tips &?Trade Secrets?book (1996, reprinting a letter to Threads circa 1991), and the XRX Socks, Socks Socks book (1999). Based on these sources and other hints of similar items, I suspect (but can't document) that the fundamental design of these booties goes back through "knitting for charity and bazaars" leaflets and oral traditions?that probably?reach back to at least sometime between 1900 and 1920.

There used to be several websites around that showed pictures of the finished items. The only other one I can find is here, but it doesn't show the eyelets and ties. I remedy the lack and post some interim progress shots as well.

Knitting the first part - the strip of garter stitch that will become the sole. I used US #0 (2mm) needles to achieve a newborn size. ? I slipped the first stitch of each row purlwise. This made both counting my progress and picking up easier. When I had 18 edge stitches on both sides, it was time to begin the next step, with no need to sit down and count out 36 actual rows:



Here's picking up around the outside edge. As you can see, I used a set of five DPNs. That allowed me to assign one needle to each side of the rectangle. Much easier than fiddling with dividing the stitches among fewer needles:



Here's a photo after the completion of the knit and purl welts that form the sides of the foot box. These can be made a bit wider or narrower. (Hint:? If I'm doing the purl welts in a contrasting color yarn, I switch on the LAST KNIT ROW before the new color welt begins):



Yes, at this stage the bootie looks rather like a cozy for a tiny box of facial tissues. Don't worry. Baby feet are small things with roughly the same proportion as bricks. These WILL fit, in spite of their boxy appearance.

Here's working the top of the foot. Here I chose to do this part in stockinette. I find it easier to knit or purl the last stitch of the top of the foot along with the first stitch on the side needle by transferring the last stitch over to the appropriate side needle, then working the K2 (or P2) from the side needle.



The next step is the transition to working the ankle. This is the only tricky bit in the booties, and Ann provided a very useful tip to get past it. There is a slight tendency for a hole to form at the indicated spot. I fudge this using Ann's method. Just before working the last stitch of the first ankle round, I look at the spot I'm approaching - the first stitch of the round I am completing. I slip the loop of the stitch just below that first stitch onto my needle end, and when I work the last stitch of the round, I do it together with that "rescued" loop. Done this way there's no chance for a little hole to form at the juncture point.




I often part company with Ann's instructions after the eyelet rib section is completed. Here's the spot to get playful. In this case I've opted for expedience instead of playfulness, and finished my bootie with ten plain rows of stockinette to make a simple roll-top. Sometimes I work a very small knit or crocheted edging onto this live stitch edge, working perpendicular to the established rows and attaching the edging as I go along.

Once the booties are done I work my ties on my Strickmuhle I-cord machine. I used to do the I-cord by hand, but the ties often took as long to knit as did the pair of booties, so I switched. I've done braided, crocheted, and lucet style cords as ties, too but I like the clunky look of the I-cord the best. In this case I've used a bit of yellow Baby Ull left over from a previous project (There are no such things as leftovers, just bits of future projects waiting to be hatched.)

And the finished product, just in time for a spring baby:



The yellow is actually paler and less mustardy than my lousy photography skills can show.

Back from a business trip to Tucson, Arizona. No, I wasn't there for the incredibly huge Gem and Mineral Show, but wandered by one of the show's many pavilion complexes in the little bit of free time I had on Saturday.

In the knitting realm here's what I got:



These are little silver mini-earrings - the kind some people line up by the half dozen along the edge of their ears. The dinglebobs (a technical term) hanging down are small faceted semiprecious stones - mostly garnets and pale amethysts, in small silver settings. They were incredibly inexpensive. (I'm sure somewhere in India there's a whole village making these by the barrel full for next to nothing.)

While I was in Tucson, I happened to meet Dr. David Crawford, the Executive Director of the International Dark Sky Association. His group advocates for increased awareness of the problems caused by light pollution, and changes to local zoning/building regulations in favor of more efficient use of outdoor lighting. There are compelling reasons to improve outdoor lighting, including increased energy efficiency, reduced cost, and improved visibility where it is truly needed. There is also a growing body of research documenting how light affects people's health and well-being, and the negative impacts that indiscriminant lighting can have on organisms of all types. When all of the other benefits are taken into consideration, the aesthetic and scientific benefits from preserving the dark night sky almost become secondary concerns.

In any case, Dr. Crawford's impassioned (and sensible) ideas stuck with me on the over-long flight home. I turned out that the sock yarn I brought with me sort of fit the darkness and light theme, so I present Night and Day socks (still in process):



This particular yarn is Regia 4-Ply Ringel, Multi Effekt Color #5383. I've done a standard toe-up on US #00s, with 17 stitches on each needle (68 around). After the heel, I increased two stitches to a total count of 70. I did the increases where the corners of the short-rowed heel ends. Those two stitches help fill in the small hole that can form at that point. Normally I add a stitch on each side at that point anyway, then decrease it away on the next row. This time I just left them in.

The ankle pattern is a 10-stitch repeat I doodled up on the plane. I'm sure similar things exist in stitch dictionaries:


I hope that the the organization doesn't mind having something as silly as a pair of socks dedicated to it. I'll be writing up the pattern at greater length as I do Sock #2. If you decide to knit them, consider investigating (and making a donation to) Dark Skies.

Oh. The red jelly-bean looking things in the sock photo are lampwork glass ladybug beads, about to become a necklace for The Smallest Daughter. The other received earrings made from slices of a very small fossil ammonite, set in silver. My gift for myself was an unusual silver wire necklace thingy, meant to display large dinglebobs (see above). The ones I chose were rectangles of cobalt blue dichroic glass set in silver. (Dichroic glass is that iridescent stuff that looks like someone vitrified a peacock.) The Resident Male got an entire backpack full of various types of dried chili peppers - things that are hard to lay hands on here in this small corner of Massachusetts. He's much happier with something edible.

Posted in absentia. I'm off on a business trip, but left this behind.

A couple of people did write to say they would be interested in reading more about the symbols on the Lillehammer. Please bear in mind that this is just one person's interpretation. I may be reading more into the little bits than the designers intended. And I am not someone schooled in this stuff. This is just one Avid Reader's observations. Apologies if I've forgotten my Eddas and sagas, or have messed up the spellings.

Here's my Lillehammer:



Starting with Lozenge C, just because I like to skip around, we see Odin chief and father of the gods, and god of battle and honorable death. He is riding on his ultra-speedy, eight-legged horse Slepnir (the extra legs are implied by the zig-zags). He carries his customary spear Gungnir (hard to see, but I think it's here because he's holding something long and thin in his hand) and has a raven following him. (More on Odin's ravens below). I think he's shown in profile because Odin has one eye (more on that below, too). The flower shapes might be an obscure reference to poetry (flowering words), as he was the source of bardic poetry and runic writing; and was the special protector of bards and poets.

Slepnir has a nifty parentage of his own, involving Loki masquerading as a mare to distract the dray stallion of a giant (the adversaries of the gods), to get him to default on a building deadline. The trick worked, the giant was unable to complete his project and received the penalty specified in the bargain, but Loki (a male god) was too tempting to the stallion, and ended up with foal.

Lozenge B carries Yggrdasil or Hoddmimir, the world tree. It's a giant ash tree, most often described as white and covered with flowers. It grows from three roots in springs of knowledge, while its top shades all nine worlds, including Asgard (home of the gods), Midgard (where people live), Jotunheim (where the giants live) and Niflheim (the underworld). One of the roots was in the spring of Mimir. Mimir was an all-knowing god, whose head (some say skull) was thrown in the spring after he was beheaded. His knowledge though wasn't lost, and some of it could be obtained by drinking from his spring. I see Mimir's head in the ovoid object at the tree's base.

On Yggdrasil are flowers that drip a honey-dew of inspiration, and are the ultimate source of all bees' honey (and the exaltation that comes from drinking mead - a fermented honey-wine). Odin's two ravens, Huginn and Munin perch on its branches. These two birds overfly the earth every day, observing everything and whispering that information back to Odin every night.

Odin is also closely associated with Yggdrasil because he sacrificed part of himself to obtain knowledge from the springs that feed the tree. In some tales he allows a raven sitting on the Yggdrasil to peck out one eye in exchange for a sip from Mimir's spring. In others he hangs for nine days on the tree, transfixed to it by his own spear. During this ordeal he learns nine songs of power and the basic runes.

Lozenge A holds Freya, wife of Odin, and foremost female deity of the pantheon. Freya is a fertility goddess and wards agriculture and birth. I'm kind of stumped by the creature she's riding because Freya's mount was Hildesvini - a former lover disguised as a fierce boar. Either that or she got pulled around in a cart drawn by cats. The thing she's riding on is way too long-legged to be a big pig. But the pattern calls out this motif set as being her, so I'll try to find more in it. Freya did have the ability to transform herself into a bird by use of a magic cloak of bird feathers. She does have a large flat thing in her lap (perhaps the cloak); and there are birds around her. Perhaps the strange shapes at her mount's feet are supposed to be cats as well. Her palace of Folkvang is supposed to be flower-strewn, so perhaps that's a big flower below the cats. The royal crown above her is not uncommon on Norwegian embroideries, and so might signify her queenship over the gods.

Lozenge D and the partials up along the neck/shoulder line and sleeve tops all carry the same sort of organic growing thing. To me they look like fruit. The most famous fruit in this cycle of tales would be the apples of Idun. Idun was the goddess of youth, married to the Bragi, whose special charge was poetry. She kept a tree and stock of golden apples, which the gods ate to stay eternally youthful. Idun was once captured by a giant, and without her apples the gods aged quite quickly. There's a whole cycle of stories about the quest mounted to get Idun and her apples back.

That's about all the figural elements I can pick out from the design. The rest is just generally decorative. I do however particularly like the use of the close color banding at the top and edges. It looks reminiscent of tablet weaving, in a geometric that wouldn't be inappropriate for before 1000AD. Likewise with the lozenge framing mechanism and brocade-like voided and filled dots. That's not to say that knitting of this type was done back then (it wasn't); but the style of the ornament on this sweater echoes weavings and textile decorative composition of a time when worship of these deities was widespread.

If you want to read more about Norse mythology, there's always the public library - that wonderful resource in your own back yard. On line there's also the Prose and Poetic Eddas, translations of which are both available on-line.

I'm still noodling on the hoodie project. Target child is waffling about her requirements. I'd rather wait until she settles into firm conviction before casting on. Some questions came in after Friday's post:

Why start with Rogue instead of designing your own from scratch?

First, I really admire this particular pattern, its proportions and the way the cables are so cleverly used. Since it fits so closely with the original set of requirements and/or mods to it would not be difficult, why not start out with it? Cardigan-ization isn't tough, nor would be knitting a smaller size to compensate for gauge differences. As for the rest - the texture pattern and saddle shoulders with a cable down the center of the arms, as Target Child looks over the photos of other people's finished Rogues, she's becoming less attached to those concepts.

You know you can use knitting design software to help.

Yup. I know that. I've got Sweater Wizard and the older Cochenille product. Hated the latter. I didn't mind the non-standard format of the directions, better suited for knitting machines than for hand knitters, but I was totally turned off by the lack of technical insight provided by customer support. The thing wasn't cheap, and I could never get it to run properly. Only one or two of the supplied templates produced any sort of output, and even they were unable to produce more than one or two of the available sizes. "Support" claimed that it was a problem unique to my set-up and there was nothing they or I could do about it aside from waiting for the next upgrade and seeing if that worked any better. Since we've got an average of six or seven working computers in this house at any one time (all with different processor/opsys/video card combos), and I tried the software on all of them and turned up exactly the same bugs, I rather doubted that one unique set-up was the problem.

Rather than throwing good money after bad, I decided not to spend close to $100 to upgrade Cochenille (with no guarantee that the new version would work any better. I switched over to Sweater Wizard. It's got far fewer design templates and isn't a full-size sloper drafting program, but what it has actually works, and is quite easy to use both during the design and knit-from phases. Which is refreshing compared to my previous experience. My only criticisms of the product have to do with personal preference and fit. I find the standard fit a bit tight for my taste, so I always add extra ease (which is verysimple to do).

My real desire though is to be able to produce the full-featured graphs of actual garment pieces, showing color or texture pattern placement like the ones in Rowan magazines. So far no knitting pattern design tools come close to that degree of integrated pattern shaping/motif placement. Yes, there are export features that allow customization of garment shapes for colorwork placement, but no total pattern maker that lets you tinker with all parameters in one interactive console. (If you gotta dream, dream big. [grin])

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Although progress is slowly burbling along on the hoodie, there wasn't enough to keep my fingers happy over the weekend. So I started a pair of quickie socks. Standard Figure-8 toe toe-ups with short-row heels. I'm using Lana Grossa Melienweit Fantasy, on US #00s, at the (for me) relatively large gauge of 9spi (68 stitches around). Ankle pattern is an impromptu feather and fan variant:



Here's the graph for the ultra-simple six-row feather and fan variant used on the ankle. It's 17 stitches wide and six rows long. I'm working my socks on five needles (four in the sock, one to knit with). Because each needle has 17 stitches on it, this graph is worked once per needle:



More info on knitting socks of this type, including basic how-tos for both the Figure-8 toe and short-rowed heel can be found in any of the sock patterns on wiseNeedle.

Sigh. Still no monitor. Perhaps today. At least today I've got Internet connectivity. Yesterday I experienced several hours of intermittent service interruptions (that's why there was no Monday edition of String).

In the mean time, I've managed to get one of the other machines in this house to accept input from my bargain-basement digital camera. It's blurry, but you get the idea:

I finished the Crazy Raglan. Now it's lurid and not my best effort, but it's to the exact specifications of the target Small One, and she loves it. Perhaps this explains why:

She's got one of these. It's been her favorite toy since she was only a couple of months old. Her Squeaky is now much less pristine than this catalog shot, and (mercifully) no longer plays a music box rendition of "Born Free."? She?picked out the self striping yarn because she wanted a "Squeaky Sweater," and now she's got one. But I?think you have to be six to truly appreciate such things.

In terms of technical?performance and lessons learned - there were several. First, going back to mid-summer, there were all sorts of things to be experienced?managing the repeat and?width of the area being knit so as to best manipulate the striping. Second, I used?Sweater Wizard software to devise the basic raglan shape. I really like having that shortcut available to me, but I have to say that for kids sizes at least,?the templates do?run a bit small.I added both copious width/ease and length to make a custom fit on my string-bean kidlet, and it still turned out to be snug.

I'm not entirely pleased with the raglan angle. I should have made the armholes deeper. That would have changed the angles and made the sweater a bit more proportional. I also bowed to kid-preference and made a very shallow V-neck instead of a crew or deeper V, trimming it with a very narrow band of ribbing. She likes it, but I don't - again the proportions are a bit off. Finally, I did a slip stitch selvedge edge on all pieces. I've done that before on raglans and had no problems, but they were solid color raglans, sewn with yarn of the same color. The mattress stitch seaming in the space dyed yarn - especially on the raglan seams - was VERY evident. I ended up taking it out and redoing it as pierced double running stitch to tighten up those shoulder seams and make them gap less. I also selectively cut bits of the darkest green to use for my redone seams. That helped a bit, too.

One thing I did do right was to use provisional cast-ons for the body and sleeves. I also knit both back and front at the same time, and both sleeves at the same time. After I sewed the seams, I went back and picked up the bottom edge stitches at body hem and cuffs, and knit the ribbing in the round. I did the body ribbing first, and liked the contrast between the narrow one-row stripes in it, and the wider stripes in the body. When I did the cuff and neckline ribbing I used two balls of yarn starting at two different points in the color cycle to ensure that they matched the waist ribbing.

So I post an equivocal success. The target audience was pleased, but I'm not enirely so.

Why "By and For?" in the title?? Because those little hand-mitt wristlets The Small One is wearing are a knitting product entirely of her own manufacture. They're lumpen, odd little superbulky yarn paw-warmers but she's very, very proud of them. Here's the pattern. Such as it is:

Morgan's Paw Warmers

Will fit a small child, age 6-10.

Small quantity of?leftover superbulky yarn. I can't say what we used. I bought it years ago for holiday present ties. My guess is that it's 100% acrylic.

US #10.5 straight single pointed needles. Tapestry needle for sewing up.

Gauge - roughly 2 stitches = 1 inch in garter stitch.

Cast on 16 stitches. Knit in garter stitch until piece measures about 6 inches long. Bind off four stitches, and knit across remainder of row. Knit next row, casting on four stitches at the end. On the next row, (K3, K2tog), repeat across the row, ending K1. Knit three more rows on the remaining 13 stitches. Bind off. Sew side seam, taking care to leave the thumb slit open.

Still no monitor, so I'm still photo-challenged here at String. Progress is being made on several fronts, in spite of the joyous accumulation of frozen precipitation that continues unabated.

First, I'm on to the sleeves of Crazy Raglan. I am knitting them flat, both sleeves at the same time, each from a single ball of the Regia Crazy. I had started the sweater body the same way, but being wider, I didn't like the way the self-striper was manifesting itself. Those I did from two balls each, with an Intarsia-style join down the center front and back. I think the sleeves being narrower might look better done straight across. But as with the body, if I don't like the way they look after a couple of inches, I'll rip back and start again.

I've also completed a couple of pairs of socks that were sitting half-done in various small briefcase project bags. One is from a Lana Grossa Melienweit self striper, and is yet another standard toe-up, with a very ordinary ankle based on Old Shale. The other is a pair of kids' toe-ups made from leftovers of several projects. One or both of these pairs will end up being donated to a charity auction.

I'm also finishing up my Cursed Socks. I'm well?past the heel of Sock #2. Unfortunately, I've misplaced my two Strickfingerhuts, and working without one is slowing me down. They're in a knitting bag. Somewhere...

I've still got several UFOs in queue. But while I like to start off the year finishing up some of?the previous?year's stalled efforts, it's also fun to think on some new things. One idea I'm toying with is for a toy. Although I'm not a fan of Muppet-pelt furry novelty yarns, my kids adore them. They've asked if it's possible to work up some patterns for stuffed pillows or floppy bed toys. But they don't want licensed characters or recognizable creatures of any sort. They want fuzzy "Alien Pets" of their own devising. They're scribbling madly away at their sketch pads even as I type this, adding extra limbs and/or tentacles, wings, and multiple eyes. We'll see what develops...

And finally, I'm still working on the write-up for the lacy scarf. Yes, I know it's taking a while, but I want to be sure that it's as error free as I can make it.

Did you crochet those snowflakes on your tree??

Yes. I've done them in several batches. I often invite holiday visitors to take one home with them, so replacement/supplement sets have been made. A couple of?the flakes?are my own invention, one or two are single motifs?intended for bedspreads or tablecloths,?but most are from these books:

Of the two, I like the patterns in the green Leisure Arts booklet better than the red American School of Needlework leaflet. The LA flakes are?smaller, lacier and a bit more delicate. Both books are pretty easy for experienced crocheters to follow, but ?I'd recommend the red one if you're relatively new to thread crochet. Warning - this?IS thread crochet, although it's pretty large scale for that style. These snowflakes all look better done with smaller threads and hooks. You can work them with relatively large threads, size 10 and?bigger, but you won't get?flakes of a pleasing scale for hanging on a tree (they'll look nice as door or window ornaments, though.) ?Mine were done with size 20 crochet cotton, although the next batch I'll make will be with size 30 cotton, comparable to the stuff I used on the dragon curtain.

There are also lots of patterns for snowflakes on line, although I haven't tried any of them yet. Noel Nevins maintains a nice index to them at her thread crochet?website.

How was the cassoulet?

Wonderful. Worth the year's wait. Beyond that, words fail me. And when that happens you know I've been conked royal.

Is cassoulet the most complicated thing you've ever cooked?

No. In what now seems like a previous life, The Resident Male and I were very active in the SCA (East Kingdom, Barony of Carolingia). Among the many things we did was host a Valentine's Day event for the local group.

It was a themed day, and included several activities as well as a sit-down three course dinner for 125 people. The feast?offered up?nine main dishes from historical sources?(of which I can only remember seven), plus three in-between-course sweets. The theme of the day?was Chaucer's Parliament of Fowles poem, in which the birds hold court to debate the nature of love. ?It's more than 25 years ago, but as close as I can remember the "Feast of Fowles" ran something like this:

First course

• Ostrich eggs on salad nests - many chicken eggs cracked and separated, then the yolks poured into round golf ball sized?molds and cooked to set. The whites were poured into huge half egg-shaped molds. When they were mostly cooked, the centers were set inside two half-whites.
• Not Chickens - a chicken skin with legs and wings intact, stuffed with a forcemeat style sausage, sewn back into chicken shape and roasted.
• A barley-thickened chicken soup with leeks (broth made from the bones and scraps from the Not Chickens)
• First sweet - spun sugar nests with tiny marzipan birds

Second course

• Ham dressed in pastry to resemble sleeping swans
• Chicken pies - the meat from the Not Chickens after the soup was made, cooked with onions, leeks and bread,?made into open face pies
• ?
• Second sweet - Feather shaped shortbread cookies (?)

Third course

• Roast duck stuffed with kasha and onions
• Beef birds - rollades of thinly sliced beef, wrapped around garlic and mushrooms, then braised
• ?
• Third sweet - Peacock in its pride - three magnificently shaped and painted gingerbread cakes, each sporting heads, wings, and a fan of real peacock feathers behind.

There were also sallets (vegetable side dishes), brewed mead and ale, and nibbles offered earlier in the day. Before your mind boggles, please note that we didn't offer these dishes in full-serving-per person portions. There was enough of each for everyone to have a fair taste, and to be full at the end of the meal, but not enough to stuff everyone silly (For example, for each table of ten we sent out one pie, one duck, one Not Chicken, etc.)

The Resident Male and I did not do all the cooking ourselves. Lots and lots?of friends helped. They did the marzipan birds, the splendid?peacock cakes, the beef roulades, the mead and ale, and half of the Not Chickens. Most?of the rest we were able to cook together ahead of time and warm at the hall; the remainder we did on-site. RM ran the day-of kitchen, I ran the hall,?the service,?and arranged the entertainments, which included copious dancing (and flirting); a Court of Love adjudicated according to the rules of Capellanus; a poetry competition; and other gentle activities suited to the day and theme.

Needless to say, life has interfered with other pursuits and we don't do this sort of thing much any more.

One last scarf to go. Since (at this point) I'm brain dead and desperate for something quick and easy, it's a great thing that Knitty's latest came with a fast-knitting piece that offers great bang for the time unit investment. Add me to the legion of folks doing up a Wavy Scarf.



I'm using that same sport-weight alpaca I used for the Kombu I finished last week. Because it's of finer gauge than the standard-issue worsted written up in the pattern, I've added an additional six-stitch pattern repeat to make up the width. Mine is done on 48 stitches instead of 42. I'm also visually lazy, so I graphed out the pattern so I don't have to rely on the prose write-up. Note that if you want to use a different weight yarn, modifying the thing is quick and easy - either add or remove multiples of six stitches.

In other knitting-related news, most of my knit presents are winging their way cross country right now, or are about to be distributed to those nearby. Once this scarf is done I'll be done, done, done. (Huzzah!)

Cookie Liberation Front

Today's cookie was an experiment - a coconut/oatmeal drop, based on a standard brown sugar drop cookie recipe, with toasted oatmeal and unsweetened coconut tossed in. Since I had some whole blanched almonds left over, each was topped with a nut. Younger Daughter said the rough-shaped cookies with almonds atop them looked like birds nests, so that is now their name.

Tomorrow's cookies - Chocolate rounds stuffed with marzipan. I haven't decided to do them flat or folded in half like little chocolate/almond gyoza yet. Also another experiment, but this one will be a shortcut cheat. I'll be taking a sheet of frozen puff pastry, painting it with a beaten egg, then spreading it with sugar, cinnamon, and chopped pecans, folding it a bit and cutting it into elephant ears. Pix for sure, as this is something impressive looking even the Cookie Challenged could do.

Genetic Component of Crafting?

Marilyn the Knitting Curmudgeon posted an interesting thought the other day (one of many for her, I might add). She mused about whether or not the urge to do something like knit or make other crafts might have a genetic component to it. That got me thinking...

I'd guess that there would be a large inborn aspect to the desire to do these things. But I think there's more than one influence at work here. To simplify, I'd guess that there are at least two:

• Some set of things governing the process that generates original ideas
• Some set of things that governs the "gotta-do-it" urge

I know people who have a strong concept-generation bent. They fairly sweat ideas, finding new viewpoints or perspectives, synthesizing disparate influences, or distilling previous exposures in innovative ways. The most affected of them sometimes have a hard time sticking to one idea long enough to bring it to full fruition, and may not have even mastered all of the skills necessary for optimal completion, but neither limitation strikes them as a problem. A person like that is off and running, captive to the next idea before the earlier one is completed.

I also know people who have the "gotta-do-it" urge, but the idea generation set in them is less strongly manifested. They are in constant motion, producing endless streams of items verbatim from directions or patterns. They often have extremely accomplished sets of technical skills, but can be stymied by roadblock problems. I have a friend who would seize upon an idea and explore it in hundreds of minute variations. She'd make wonderful little toys or identical baby sweaters by the dozens (in the case of toys - by the hundreds). All were beautifully crafted, yet it often seemed that once she started, "retooling" to make something else was difficult for her. She'd hum along happy to make even more of the item under current exploration rather than switching to a new thing. For her I think that fulfilling the "gotta-do-it" urge to keep busy was the true reward.

And then there are the folks who have both influences working on them in various proportions. Some feel particularly pressured or depressed because they have an inexhaustible source of new ideas and the urge to see each through to completion, but rarely have the time available to accomplish them all. Others are at constant war with themselves, reining in their urge to start something new before the item at hand is completed, and (sometimes) growing to hate the almost-finished item for blocking the beginning of the next.

Why do I think this might be genetic? Because I've seen these urges run through families. Not every person in the family need have the exact same hobby, but the mindsets do replicate through the generations. I know my father was a very compulsive "gotta-do-it" guy. Detail oriented in the extreme, he was a classic definition engineer. He never just sat still, he was always reading something, tinkering with something, or meticulously graphing something (he would have adored PCs and spreadsheets but died before they were sold). I know families where the parents or grandparents are method makers or idea shedders. Their households are sometimes chaotic places, but their kids also scatter innovation behind them and flit from project to project.

Why do I think these things are inborn rather than learned? Because in some cases I see these traits skipping generations; manifested in a household where the older influence was physically absent while the younger example was growing; or emerging later in life. Plus I know from experience it's very hard to teach either creativity or perseverance. These are bents that people are born with. You can encourage these characteristics, but you can't transplant them into someone who doesn't lean that way to begin with.

I've got a very strong "gotta-do-it" bent. Perhaps it's related to the milder forms of ADD, but I find HAVE to be making something, and I've been this way as long as I can remember. Even as a little kid I had all sorts projects underway (and heaven help the adult who put them away before I was done). I even fell into needlework at a very early age, and completed my first clumsy cross-stitch sampler before Kindergarten.

Just sitting has always been extremely difficult for me. Even just sitting and listening/watching something is hard. My hands have to be occupied. When my fingers are distracted, my mind is free and I concentrate better. Conversely, if my fingers are free, my mind is bound by the minutiae around me and zeroing in on some one thing in specific is harder. That fly buzzing around the lecturer's podium; the interesting detail on the curtains behind her; the texture of the cracked wood at the edge of my seat; the air currents around my ankles; an amusing joke the guy sitting across the room told me last week; where I might be meeting with friends after the lecture; the faint sound of sirens outside the lecture hall; what color combo would be best for the thing I'm planning to make the day after tomorrow - all of these at once descend upon me and compete with the content being delivered in the lecture itself. Mindless autopilot knitting has always been my best defense against them.

I have to believe that I was born this way because I certainly didn't learn this behavior from anyone. I can't help this, it's just the way I am and I'm glad to have found the coping mechanism of knitting. So I guess I agree with KC's basic thought. There's an enormous genetic component to many people's affinity for crafts of all types. Why fight it?

Panforte

I promised a post-tasting report. Yesterday I spread melted bittersweet chocolate over the tops of my two cakes, dusted them with cocoa, and stuck some left-over almonds on top as a decoration. Did I mention that for the past week, I've been drizzling rum over one of them - a little bit each day? No? The secret's out now.

Wow.

This is an adult chocolate dessert. It's not soft, gooey, and sweet. To be truthful, it's hard and chewy from all the fruit and nuts. The taste however is out of this world. It's spicy, more bitter than sweet, yet with just enough sweetness from the fruit to round out the flavor. The faint hint of rum was a good addition, and seemed to bring out more of the toasty notes from the nuts. We served our cakes with a selection of white wines. It would also be great with hot coffee or tea.

This one is a make-again keeper, but unless you've got a huge crowd coming or want to freeze or give away cake #2, I'd suggest halving the recipe. I'd also suggest sticking with the hazelnuts and almonds. You can use any dried fruit you wish (I used prunes, dried cherries and apricots because I don't like citron and figs were too expensive), but I think that substituting walnuts or pecans would overwhelm the cocoa's flavor and change the character of the cake.

Socks!

More holiday gift socks.



I knit these Saturday night from Lion Brand Magic Socks, while watching Present #1 below. These socks are worked at 7spi/10rpi on 2.5 mm needles (in between a US #2 and #3). The yarn is serviceable enough - a standard wool/nylon blend sport weight as opposed to fingering weight sock yarn. The color patterning is pretty uninspired compared to most. I get two speckled fake "Fair Isle" sections in this repeat, one in gray and white, the other in red and black. The entire repeat cycles in about 1 inch. Not terribly exciting, but at $7.00 US per 100g ball (enough to make up to about a man's US size 11 shoe) - a very good value.

This pair is for a new neighbor who showed me how our 100-year old hot water heating system works, and helped me figure out the Rube Goldberg device that's our boiler:



Presents and Paeans

The Resident Male and I buy gifts for the two of us together, but don't wrap them or bother to save them for holiday debut. This year's presents were the extended DVD edition of Return of the King (better than the theatrical version, but unsatisfying if you yearn for much of the books lesser themes and characters); the long awaited Lurulu by Jack Vance; and the Vance Integral Edition. The latter most was a major splurge that will count on the present roster for years to come.

Vance is writer whose works are easy to satirize because of his unique style, and who is dismissed all to lightly for it. At the same time, he has a devoted following of readers who appreciate them for what's deeper underneath. His following in is bigger the UK and Europe than in the US.Vance appears to be especially popular in the Netherlands, Germany, and France - all in translation. That surprises me as so much of the texture of his prose is in his precisely worded detail and structured phrasing - things I wouldn't think would move well from English to other languages. Even his old fashioned space opera style stories have a depth of character and sardonic insight into the ironies of human nature that push them beyond the genre.

If you've never read anything whatsoever by Vance, I'd suggest you start with the widely collected short story "The Moon Moth." You can find a list of books containing "The Moon Moth" on this page. If you can't find a copy, you can listen to a dramatization here. After that, pick up anything. His better known works include The Dragon Masters, the Demon Princes series, the Planet of Adventure series, Lyonesse and its sequels; the Alastor cycle; and the Dying Earth books. I'd start with his earlier, shorter works. They're each masterpieces of tightly crafted plot construction, and fit an amazing amount highly evocative storytelling into some truly slim volumes. Enjoy!

I'd mentioned knitting the 42-stitch hats earlier. I've got them, they're cute, but I thought they needed a certain something to make them truly special. I've got six now, two each of red, purple, and blue because each skein of Brown Sheep Burly Spun makes two hats with a tad left over. So I went looking for inspiration in several spots that have trims, embellishments and the like.

Of course I checked out Epstein's Knitted Embellishments and her new Knitting on the Edge. I won't be buying On The Edge, too much duplicates the KE book already on my shelf, plus I have most of the sources she drew upon, so there's very little there new to me. Nice photos, though. Useful if your library isn't as out of control as mine, or if visual inspiration is key to your thought process.

I also looked through Thomas' Knitting Book to check out picot point knitting, and a couple of other books that had tassels or other freeform motifs. I even dipped into my crochet resources, but crochet in finger-wide bulky yarn looks ridiculous to me. I tried out several knit flower and leaf type motifs, but nothing quite hit the spot as being bold enough for the ultra-bulky hat.

Then while taking my daily blogstroll, in a fit of serendipity, I hit on Nanette's Knitting in Color (she of the stranded colorwork book and bunny haven). There she'd posted some directions for knitted stars, worked from the outside edge in. Even in supergiant yarn with a distinctly ruffled look her stars are perfect for my hats!



I played with them a bit, working them up in the round instead of flat to spare myself the joy of a purl side double decrease and a seam, and using a double decrease that leaves the centermost stitch on top. (This first pilot star was done with the decreases as described in the original directions). I had just enough left over from each skein of my Burly Spun to make two stars, plus have a bit extra for sewing and surface embroidery.

More holiday gift socks. Nothing special, nothing exciting (and nothing learned).

I knit these last night from Schoeller+Stahl's 6-ply version of Fortissima Colori/Socka Color. It's a smidge lighter than DK weight. I've added into on the length of its color cycle to the striper repeat chart I posted earlier. All in all a very quick and satisfying pair. A bit heavy for my own sock wearing preferences (I prefer 4-ply regular sock weight yarn knit at tiny gauges), but nice none the less. Another blurry photo:



I find it easier to knit self-stripers when I'm watching TV or a computer game. Otherwise I'm tempted to watch my fingers and micro-adjust my tension to modify the striping effect. That never quite works out right. So I save this type of autopilot knitting for when I'm otherwise distracted.

Cookies

I've gotten some good-natured ribbing back on the cookies. For the record, I'm no domestic diva. Martha Stewart makes me think of those Victorian women's magazines, filled with advice on decorating a status-conscious parlor, complete with directions for crocheted chair leg cozies and decorated cardboard toothpick holders. Then I shudder.

I'm more of a tallish, glasses-wearing, workbooted, aging grrlnerd with a weakness for needlework, history, books and good food. Not necessarily in that order.

My holiday knitting. I'm pleased to say the Hannukah socks were graciously received by someone who both knows and appreciates hand knitting.

The scarves aren't scheduled for distribution until later this month, but as all are to be mailed, should be boxed up as soon as possible. Here they are:

First, the blue one for which I offered up the texture pattern earlier in the week.



Not terribly exciting, but soft and warm. And blue. I'm debating whether or not to fringe this one. Fringes aren't my favorite edge treatment as they often look ratty too quickly, but I have a feeling that this recipient would like them.

Second, the gray alpaca Kombu scarf is finished. Here's another blurry photo to prove it:



And finally, after sitting completed (but never used) since earlier this summer, the Spring Lightning scarf joins its siblings in this year's gift parade:



I love it, but I think the intended target will love it more. Plus, I can always make another. I did however want to take a final good picture of it for use in the pattern I plan on posting on wiseNeedle (which I'm still writing).

Two more hats and two more pairs of socks and I can return to my regularly scheduled knitting.

I can't say I'm going any faster, but I'm in the swim of things with my gift knitting. I have to admit a tinge of guilt this year. In years past, I'd done a fair bit of it far in advance, sometimes using especially mindless gift knitting (like socks or scarves) as bliss-out-on-the-beach pieces during our summer vacation. Or I've doodled up little projects between larger ones, while I was waiting for my ideas to set. By this time I've usually got a basket of goodies ready for holiday giving. Unfortunately, this year nothing got done ahead of time, and I've been forced to do something I detest - knit to deadline.

I hate knitting to deadline because in my professional life, all I do is march to deadlines. I'm a proposal manager, and I've lived my career in 30-day increments. Other people will say things like, "Dear, remember '91 - that was the year little Brunhilde was born," or "Yeah, 91. Cousin Ildefonse was in Desert Storm." I say, "Fall '91. That was that big military IT/hardware support proposal, we had an extension that got eaten up by the sheer bulk of the revised reporting schedule requirements." From this you can well deduce the heart-stopping excitement of my daily life.

Knitting has always been a blissful interlude, a no-deadline finish-it-whenever sort of pursuit. That's one of the reasons why I've shied away from pursuing commercial publication for my patterns. Squeezing my knitting life into a tight deadline sucks all the joy out of it.

So here I am. Doing frantic knitting on a couple of Hannukah presents (it's early this year, adding further complications). The Kombu scarf, four hats, and two pairs of socks are done. That leaves three scarves, two more pairs of socks, and possibly couple of kid's size earwarmer bands to go.

Today I plan on casting on for a very simple scarf done in Sandnes Lime (a mostly cotton, very soft yarn) for a friend who is wool-sensitive. I've used and reviewed the stuff before and not been wildly pleased with it, but for a scarf it should work out fine. Although most of the detail will be obscured by the textured yarn, I'll probably work it in this simple knit/purl pattern - just to give it a bit more interest:


I like this one for scarves because it adds a bit of loft and like all patterns with near equal amounts of knits and purls on each row - it lies nice and flat without curling.

I'll try to get a good shot of this one. It's in a charcoal-grey alpaca, a notoriously difficult color to photograph.



The stuff is sport weight. I mentioned before that I got it at a Maryland Sheep and Wool Show, circa '95 or '96. There was a big rainstorm that year, and many of the vendors in outdoor tents were soaked through and/or blown over. The Tess Designer Yarns booth was particularly hard hit. Sunday afternoon as the owner was packing there was still a large pile of sodden yarns laid out on a tarp that were being sold as-is. I bought this one-skein orphan, took it home and dried it out and wound it, and have been trying to figure out what to do with it ever since. There's a ton of yardage on this 8 oz. ball. I've barely scratched the surface and could probably do another three or four scarves with what's on there.

My gauge over my Kombu is K1, P1 rib is roughly 6spi , on US #4 needles. This gray scarf is about 6 inches wide, measured point to point. I've completed about three feet so far, averaging about eight inches per hour. Both the center pattern and lace edges are quick to memorize and knit. Alternate rows of the center are K1, P1 rib; alternate rows of the edgings are all knit. Because the scarf is based entirely on a combo of ribbing and garter stitch it lies absolutely flat, without curling.

I hate to brag, but I really like this pattern - even though it's one of my own. It's rare I go back and do another of anything I've finished. Even that Dreaded Second Sock can be agony, but this is the fourth Kombu I've done. Two were done in Little Lola (including the same photographed on the pattern website) at a slightly smaller gauge (befitting the slightly thinner yarn). The other was done on US #7s and a 4.5 spi in pink/turquoise/yellow/lime green Red Heart variegated, picked out by a (then) 4 year old. Both my eyes and fingers hurt doing that one, but the kidlet was delighted with the all too bright result after she decided that the yarn wasn't so scratchy that she couldn't wear it as an "outside the coat" type scarf.

Several people wrote to ask about the 42-stitch hats I mentioned yesterday. I attempt to answer.

The pattern (such as it is) is widely available. Cleckheaton has a version that they authorize yarn shops to give away with purchase of Gusto 10 that's written to be specific to the yardage of that product. I've also seen very similar hats in several of the beginners' books so popular now, distributed as shop patterns by LYSs, and posted other places on the Web. Basically, it's a hat boiled down to its barest essentials - a very large gauge stockinette tube with a crown formed by simple decreases. The brim is formed by the natural tendency of stockinette to roll.

1. Find at least 55 yards of yarn that knits up to about 9 or 9.25 stitches = 4 inches. I got 9 with Cleckheaton Gusto, and 9.25 with Brown Sheep Bulky Spun. The Bulky Spun hats measure a bit under 18.5 inches around the lower edge, and stretch for a comfy fit on adults. The Gusto hats are just under 18.7 inches around the lower edge.

2. Cast on 42 stitches, and knit stockinette in the round. I used plain old half-hitch cast on to avoid a tight edge, and to conserve yarn. I did the whole thing on a set of four size US #13 DPNs, but if you hate double points you could do it on two circs, or start on one short circ, then move to DPNs.

3. Knit tube until it's long enough to both cover your ears and reach just under the crest of your head. That's about 7.5 to 8.5 inches, including the rolled brim (which should be flattened out to measure). If you've only got 55 yards of a superbulky, don't make this part deeper than 8 inches.

4. Divide the stitches into 6 groups of 6. If you're on DPNs, that means placing a marker (or remembering the spot) in between the two center most stitches of each DPN. Finish the hat by working six consecutive rows of knit with decreases, always working a decrease just before a marker or (if you're on DPNs), the needle's end - that's six decrease points around the hat. You can work either K2tog or SSK, as you prefer, choose one and work it throughout the piece. If you pick K2tog, the decreases should stack up and spiral in counterclockwise to the center. If you pick SSK, the spiral should end up running clockwise. When you've got only six stitches left, thread break off the yarn and thread them up on the tail, drawing them up purse style. Darn in ends.

Note that you can make this hat larger or smaller by adding multiples of six stitches. A little kid size hat out of the same weight yarn would start out on 36 stitches.

If you pick a lighter-weight yarn, increase the cast on number by units of six, how many will depend on your yarn. For example, if you're using a yarn that's 10 to 10.5 stitches = 4 inches, 42 stitches would probably be a bit small, I'd aim for 48 stitches and hope that the fit wouldn't be too large.

I wouldn't attempt this hat with yarn that's much lighter than 2.75 stitches per inch (11 stitches = 4 inches) for two reasons. First, much of the charm of this rustic-looking funky hat depends on the bulk and body of the yarn used. The silky firmness of dense Gusto is more satisfying than the less-dense Bulky Spun. Lighter weight yarns would be even more floppy. Plus I'd need to do more experimentation to satisfy myself that every-row ratio of crown decreases would work out as nicely as it does on the heavier-yarn hats.



Finally I have to note that I don't like knitting yarns at these huge gauges. I can knit non-stop for hours on sock weight yarn, but this big stuff tires out my fingers. Also this is the first project I've ever worked on DPNs where if you look closely, you can pick out where my DPNS met. Feh.

A break from the monolith of text that this blog has become.

I've been having an on-line chat with a knitter looking for something to do with a pile of small balls/many colors of worsted weight yarn salvaged from a ravelled back Intarsia sweater. I recommended the Ridged Raglan from Knitters Magazine #54,?Spring 1999 issue.

This is my 6-year old's all-time favorite sweater:

Also please excuse the blurry photo. Some days the camera and I get along, others we war. Believe it or not, this is the best of ten shots.

This pattern is by Gerdine Crawford Strong, and in my opinion is the last thing?Knitters published that was a "gotta knit it" project, and the last thing I've made from their pages. But my disappointment in their current direction is food for another day's post.

Ms. Strong's pattern is pretzel-clever. It's knit vertically, with the arm and front (or back) panel knit at the same time - decreases form the raglan lines. The "ribbing" bands at waist and cuff are actually garter stitch worked at the same time as the sweater arms/body. The idea is presented in sizes from little kid through adult XXL, and as both a pullover and as a cardigan. It calls for a worsted weight acrylic, but anything knitted to the same gauge can be used.

I hate to make more than one of anything, but I've done three of these sweaters. One was a two-blues cardigan in Encore (a mostly acrylic/wool blend); the one above is a pullover in three citrus colors of?Record 210, an Aran weight unmercerized cotton; and one was?a pullover in Tahki Cotton Classic, all in tiny balls salvaged from a five-pastel intarsia project abandoned by my mother. For the latter two I had to play a bit with the pattern to accommodate differences in gauge.

As you can see, there are tons of scope for fun with this project. It's a great vehicle for using up bits and drabs. You need one color for the purl welts that?unite the piece as a whole (in my case, navy blue, orange and white respectively), but the individual stockinette stripes can be anything, from scraps leftover from several different projects to one of those hand-dyed yarns that can be so challenging to use effectively.

My only caution is that if you do choose to use cotton take care with the cuffs. Knit an extra garter stitch ridge, and try to work them loosely otherwise they can be too tight for quick dressing. Wool and wool blends however are naturally more elastic than cotton, and don't present this problem.

If you go searching for the Knitters #54, Spring 1999, it looks like this:

A final note to US citizens - go vote or lose your right to complain for the next four years.

Fully fashioned toe-up, short row heel sock with corrugated ribbing, 16 stitches around.  Knit from Froelich Special-Dekatur reinforcement yarn using US #00000 (1.0mm) needles.  Approximately 1 inch (2.5cm) from top of cuff to bottom of heel, and approximately 13spi/20rpi.  I may not be wearing my heart on my sleeve, but I will be wearing a tiny sock on my lapel.

Here's yet another cautionary tale.  This one is about worming. 

I've seen lots of questions about worming - what is it, why does it happen, how to avoid it.  The what question is easy to answer.  Here's a quick little cotton/chenille cardigan I whipped up for The Smallest One this past spring:

It's knit from Stahl Wolle's Harlekin Color, a rather plain generic raglan in stockinette, with a rolled collar and cropped waist.  I did up the pattern (such as it is) using Sweater Wizard.  That part and the knitting went well, although the yarn split like crazy and was a *($# to knit.  The thing is bright and cheerful.  The Smallest One had fun picking out the pansy and bee buttons.   I even went back and got more of this yarn with a navy base color and knit a raglan pullover for the larger daughter.

Things however began to go wrong shortly after completion of both projects.  Both sweaters began to worm.  The little chenille strands separated themselves from the cotton yarn and began poking up here and there.   Hand washing however caused all restraint on worming to break.  In spite of the lousy photo, the result can be seen here:

No I didn't tease these loopies up, nor did I pick a particularly bad part of the piece.  The entire surface is like this now - a ratty, trashy looking mess.  The kidlet still likes her bee sweater because it's soft, but it catches on everything it comes near and I shudder each time I look at it.

Moral of the story.  Chenille isn't worth the effort.  That's four for four projects I've attempted using chenille or chenille mix yarns that have ended up looking like hell within a fortnight of completion.  It's pretty and the colors are great, plus I know some people love the stuff and swear that they can control the worming.  I've tried knitting it more tightly than label gauge.  I've tried knitting it in combo with something else.  I've tried chenilles of different fiber compositions, but I've never had decent results.  Buyer beware.  This buyer will never purchase nor work with chenille in any of its forms ever again.

More Mags to Trade

Courtesy of a very generous pal, I find myself with duplicates of two Interweave Knits back issues:  Fall, 2003 and Winter 2002/2003.  I've got both in my library, and useful info shouldn' sit idle.

If you're looking for these and would like to engineer a trade, please let me know.  Preference will be given to folks outside the USA.  I know that people In Other Countries often don't get a chance to get these mags, and we here in the US often don't get the treat of seeing needlework publications from other countries.  I'd love to trade one or both of these for one or more knitting, embroidery, crochet, or other specialty needlework magazines published elsewhere in the world - language doesn't matter.  If you're interested, please let me know. 

A long, long time ago, I sent in an entry to the Socknitters Museum of Odd Socks.  In it I detailed the tragedy of losing one of the first fingering weight yarn socks I ever knit - an eye-popping mustard yellow thing, with toe, heel, and ankle stripe in a tweedy red left-over.  That must have been back in the summer of '96, just after I moved to my last house, and (coincidentally) just after the sock bug bit me.

In all that time my missing sock never turned up.  Although I was sure it would reappear behind a bureau or under the washing machine, I didn't find it when we moved out, although we left the old house broom clean and bare to the walls.  I came within a hairs' breadth of tossing the mate to my missing sock when I divested myself of others during The Great Sock Exorcism.  At last minute though, I took my mustardy friend out of the toss-me pile and tucked it back into my sock drawer as a reminder of life's eternal mysteries.

Yesterday I got an envelope in the mail.  It contained the missing sock. 

No note.  No return address.  The postmark was local, but not in town.  My guess is that the new owners of my old house found it - where I haven't a clue - and knowing I probably missed it, mailed it to me.  Either that or the colorblind poltergeist finally had enough of the thing and decided to send it home.

No, the kids' Blues Clues videos haven't gotten to me. One of my all-time favorites is a sweater done in screaming magenta wool. I did it ages ago, back when I was a regular customer at Washington, D.C.'s late, lamented Woolgatherer in Dupont Circle.

There was a guy helping there who was fantastic. Back then I had the itch to knit, but a ramen noodle?budget. ?I'd walk in, pull my crumpled dollars and left-over laundry quarters out of my pocket and say "I want to make the most magnificent thing I can afford."? And he'd find it. Sometimes we'd find a luxe pattern and a budget yarn, pairing them against all likelihood of success. Sometimes there'd be an odd lot or strange color at an off price, and he'd spend the time to hunt down a project that could be made from that amount. On top of it all, he had fantastic color/style judgement. Not only were his recommendations fun to knit and in my price range, they were also great wardrobe additions in colors that always suited me. He's gone now - yet another AIDS victim, but I think of him fondly whenever I wear the things he helped me with, or show someone else one of the pointers he shared. Alas, I am truly ashamed to admit that for all the times I visited and all the help I received, I never learned his name.

This item is proof of his expertise. Magenta?? Who can wear something that loud?? It turns out that I can. The yarn is Brown Sheep Lambs Pride. I knit this around '86 or so from an Aarlan pattern appearing in one of their large-format magazines - possibly from that year's fall or winter issue (I haven't found the box with it yet, otherwise I'd be sure).This is?a case where cross-materials substitutions worked well. The original pattern was done in a linen/silk combo. The?yarn?was a very expensive yarn that would have cost me easily five times what the Lambs Pride did. I would never have thought of so drastic a departure back then.The gauges however matched, the wool showcased the texture stitches brilliantly, and the piece just clicked together with no problems whatsoever.

There are several details on it that I'd like to point out. First, note the ribbing. Remember how I said I always liked twisted stitches?? This is the piece that started it. The ribbing is done in P2, K1tbl. That's what makes the nice, crisp, widely spaced verticals. The color on the detail shot below is closer to real life, although it's a bit lighter than the original.

The body is entirely knit in a variant of Wide Waffle (Walker II, p. 152). That's a stitch formed from a zillion twisted stitches (1x1 cables) plus YO eyelets. Although the pattern was fussy, it was quick to memorize and being on large needles (#9s) was fun and quick to knit. I especially like the contrast of the heavily diagonal, textured?body and the wide bits of crisp ribbing.

The neckline was also done in an unusual manner that was very common on Aarlan pattens of the time. The back of the piece is bound off straight across, with no shaping or edging whatsoever. The front is worked leaving a very wide Vee. Two strips of ribbing are worked as separate pieces (with slip stitch selvedges for neatness, since they show), and are then sewn on to the edges of the Vee, overlapping at the bottom point. It's an unconventional treatment, and one I was afraid would pose problems of durability, but as you can see - this sweater is still going strong almost 20 years later.

Again, the moral of the story:? if you want your pieces to last, use the best quality materials you can afford; and you can't go wrong with real wool. That and AIDS has claimed so many of our best and brightest. We miss them all.

All good things must come to an end, and it's nearing that point for the baby blanket I knit 14 years ago for The Larger Child. It was the first piece of lacy knitting I attempted, and?is a combo of the double star keyhole motif from Phillips'?Knitting Counterpanes?(slightly modified); plus a perimiter trim I tinkered up from a standad leaf edging.

Pink?Blanket?wrapped?said child when we brought her home from the hospital, slept with her every night until she was?in Kindergarten,?accompanied us on every family vacation, served as a cape, costume, and tent, survived countless wash/use cycles, and even went off to summer camp with her for the past?four years. Now the nameless cotton it's made from is finally giving up the ghost.

The simple slits between motifs where the stiching has come undone are quick and easy fixes. I've even grafted and re-knit bits of the border before?where it got snagged. The other holes in the ladder lace upper part of the trim, and in the motif in the lower left however are bigger deals. I've still got some of my nameless cotton if I want to try fixing Pink Blanket again. Amazingly, the piece has not faded over the years, so the color match is still good. Still, 14 years of hard wear for an odd-lot yarn bought at a long defunct yarn discount store in Maryland, and a first attempt at a knitting style - that's not a bad return on my investment.

Follow-up - Blauband Blanket

To follow up yesterday's Chest of Knitting Horors^TM post, the fragment you see is about 80% of the finished blanket. I have enough yarn for two more courses of hexes, plus half-hexes to finish out the sides square. I'm looking for a coordinating yarn just to do a trim around the entire edge. But Nancy's "outside the box" idea of edging with satin blanket binding rather than more knitting is well worth considering. Thank you!

Frivolity

A friend sent me a link to this game. If you're into sheep and have time to kill, you can waste hours there.

I was showing something about twisted stitches to a knitting pal the other day, and I thought that other knitters might like to see it too.  I know that  I've discussed them here before as part of the post about knitting backwards, but I'll recap.

Twisted stitches are made when you knit or purl into the back as opposed to the leading leg of an existing stitch.  Sometimes people make them inadvertently when they work a stitch as usual, but that stitch was mounted with the leading leg behind the needle:

The person I was working with does exactly what my mother does - forming stitches so that she routinely ending up with leading legs behind after working a knit row, then untwisting the stitch on the purl row.  If mom is working stockinette in the flat, the final product looks like everyone else's knitting, but if she's working stockinette in the round, they end up with all twisted stitches because there are no purl rows on which to de-twist.  My knitting pal was having the same problem.  We worked on being able to tell the difference between legs in front and legs behind so that she could choose to either compensate or alter her technique.   While learning to recognize and compensate is certainly a good solution, it is a limiting one.  To this day my mom prefers knitting in the flat and working intarsia to knitting in the round or doing texture patterns.  She especially dislikes texture patterns that do not include rows of plain purling in between the rows in which other manipulations occur.  With no plain purl rows to un-discombobulate her stitches, she runs into that same twisting problem.

But twisted stitches aren't entirely bad.  Sometimes there's good reason to make them. They're great decorative accents, and have structural uses as well.  I happen to like using twisted stitches in my work.  In terms of structure, I find them particularly useful for working ribbing on cottons, silks and linens because they are a bit firmer than regular knit stitches, and help the ribbings in those fibers keep their shape between washings.  That firmness and crispness of line is also a great tool to use in surface decoration.  Here's an example from a pattern available on wiseNeedle.

The pattern is for a lacy blouse with a wide vee neck and clingy fit.  The combo of the diagonal lines of openwork and the vertical ribs makes it especially flattering to the zaftig among us.  Here the firmness of the twisted stitches is put to use making the cotton yarn hold its ribbed, body-hugging shape.  Also the verticals formed by the twisted ribbing really stand out.  I chose to do them synchopated, so that the K2, P2 ribs don't line up after they've been intersected by the eyelet diagonal.  That movement of line makes the piece more lively, with a more interesting total surface effect.  (Or so I think.)

Here's another nifty use for twisted stitches.  In this case, I can take credit only for execution.  The pattern is from Reynolds, and was put out around four years ago in a summer book for their Saucy Sport yarn.  Look at the nifty way the twisted stitches are used to make the lobster's outlines, feet, feelers, and to differentiate the textures of the filled-in areas in head, body, tail, and claws.  All in all, a very clever design:

Apologies both for the quality of the photo, and for the wear-and-tear on the lobster.  This is one of my favorite summer sweaters, and he's no longer fresh from the trap. 

What yarn are these two samples knit in?  It so happens that I used the same yarn for both.  It's Silk City Spaghetti, a cotton sport-weight woven tape, now long discontinued.  I love this stuff, and even though it does shrink in the wash (my lobster sleeves are now about an inch too short), I'd buy it in a flash were I to find it still available.  I do have enough left over from my cones of the khaki and paprika that I might be able to do a shell out of each.  Or if I could countenance the resulting color combo, combine them in some sort of a two-tone piece.  The jury is still out on the color combo thing.

Reaching back into time (and into the bottom of a box that surfaced during unpacking yesterday) I come up with my first-ever attempt at both knitting in the round on DPNs, and at stranded colorwork in the round:

I did it a couple of years after I started knitting, about the same time I began becoming rabid about knitting in general.  I used a bunch of Shetland scraps raided from my mother's stash.  Like most samplers I do, I didn't bother planning or charting anything out before hand, I just did it on the fly, experimenting with technique, color, size of floats, number of DPNs (I tried out everything from 3-6 on this piece), and pattern. 

Now.  Have you guessed what this thing is?  It's not a mitten or glove.  It's not a sock.  It's not a piece of gentleman's intimate apparel, either (were it so, the size alone would make it pretty spectacular, athough the itch-factor might be somewhat limiting). 

It's a putter cover I made for The Resident Male.  He took up serious golfing around the same time as I picked up serious knitting.  No connection between the two pursuits other than this item. 

There's a social history lesson connected with this cover, too.  I knit on this mostly at lunch hour at work, and on a couple of business trips because I wanted it to be a surprise gift.  My boss at the time saw me knitting away on the thing in the airport, and upon our return to D.C., called me into his office. 

He gave me a long lecture on why I should **never** let anyone who knew me in a professional capacity **ever** see me doing needlework.  He went on to say that I should **never** wear or display my own products at work, because no one would take me seriously in the world of work if they connected me with domestic pursuits. 

To be fair, even though it was the mid '80s, I was working in a big-time construction/project management firm - in an extremely conservative industry largely devoid of women.  But this particular workplace was backwards-thinking in the extreme.  To illustrate the mindset there - I once got an employee recognition award given to me in public, with the introduction "And here's the little lady who put the lie into the statement that you can't have boobs and brains both."  [shudder]

Back to knitting,  I can report that I

1. blissfully ignored his advice and kept knitting,
2. moved on to another employer after it was explained to me that my promotion track as a fem was nil; and
3. to this day, proudly wear and display my products everywhere I work.

For those of you born after the Carter administration, the attitude displayed by my former boss was common.  Another oft-heard diatribe was that women shouldn't do needlework, because all forms of needlework were artifices that  restricted women's sphere of interest and creativity.  This attitude was more hurtful, as it largely came from other women.  (If you think I'm kidding about this, look into the book The Subversive Stitch by Rozsika Parker. )  For a long time this attitude was in part responsible for the decline in interest in knitting and stitching among younger women.

I am delighted today that things are on the upswing.  I can be an aging grrlnerd, and have interests and accomplishments as diverse as fine embroidery, lace knitting, computer gaming, and SCA heavy list fighting, and no one will think the less of me for doing or having done any of them in particular.  Now if only I could do something about that "aging" part, as it is having a real drag effect on employability...

I was doing some more pre-move packing, and I came upon my Manos del Uruguay coat:

I made it in '96, as a reward for landing a good job after moving from Maryland to Boston.  But the project started ten years earlier when I bought some rosewood buttons at a crafts fair in Virginia.  It took a long time before I found the right yarn/project to sit behind them.   

I started with a pattern in the Manos Book #10, but made quite a few changes along the way:

Aside from the trivial change of color (brick/topaz/black/cherry to canyon/topaz/olive/black), I  did some redrafting.  As you can see from this thumbnail, the original was  a cropped jacket, reaching to the bottom of the beltline.  Being tall and curved rather than linear,  I wanted something longer.  

To add length though posed two problems.  The first was that the body of the piece isn't done in plain old stockinette.  It's worked in a very large non-repeating design of freeform swirls and elongated paisley spots, done in knit/purl texture.  The second was that the proportions of the sleeves and edgings would look out of place on a larger piece.

My solution was to draw up an extension of the pattern's swirly texture.  I did that on graph paper, replicating the last ten or so rows of the chart in the leaflet, then going on to add another 75 or so rows.  I also redrafted the sleeves and armholes, adding a bit more depth.  Finally I extended the slip-stitch motif bands at the button band, lower hem and cuff by adding a few more plain rows of garter stitch between the Greek key design panels, also to help keep the piece in proportion. 

I learned a few lessons along the way, the least of which is that wool in quantity is heavy.  The original cropped jacket isn't anywhere near as massive as my coat.  In spite of my broad shoulders, I needed to add shoulder pads to make my coat hang properly.  The second was about sleeve shape, and it didn't become evident until a few years had passed.  The deep sleeves were more current at the time the piece was knit, and as time goes on are making the fit of the thing look more and more dated.  Had I done narrower sleeves I might have avoided this. 

I also learned about hand-dyed yarns and skein-to-skein variation.  Manos is beautiful stuff.  Each skein is one of a kind.  This is especially true of the multicolors, like the canyon color I used for the bulk of this piece.  The canyon available at that point ranged from paprika through cocoa, with side trips to ecru and run-in-the-rain raccoon.  Some skeins were heavy on the lighter colors, some on the darker ones.  Before I began knitting, I laid out all my skeins and placed them where I thought the colors would balance.  That means I paid the most attention to the right and left cardigan fronts, choosing skeins for each that had roughly equivalent amounts of each color.  Then I picked complementing sleeve skeins.  The remainder became the back.

Knitting purists will note that the swirly pattern I mentioned above isn't visible in the photo because the yarn I chose for those areas is so variegated.  I argue that while it isn't immediately discernable, it is visible, as the patterning  of the purl and knit stitches presents an interesting way to maximize the variations in the yarn.  Yes, it's not immediately evident that what I have there are swirls, but up close and personal, you can see that the piece is textured and the texture accentuates the colors.

While I'm pleased in general with this piece, I'm not 100% satisfied with it.  Manos was not the best choice for a long coat.  In addition to the weight/warmth issue, it does pill.  I planned this cardigan as something to wear indoors at work, but I neglected to think about the abrasion a heavy jacket takes from the rough upholstery of most office chairs.  The back of my coat is a mass of pills.  (You can even see pills on the front and sleeves on the photo).  Very disappointing, but entirely my fault.

I've still got some Manos left over from my jacket.  I'm thinking of using to to make a fulled bag.  But that project will have to wait until we're settled in the new house and I've reclaimed my stash.

Today I'll keep it short.  My mom found this blog and has told me that I go on so long it's too much like work to be enjoyable reading.

I've finished the garter stitch tube destined to be The Small One's pillow.  I intend to full it as-is, then add some sort of buton or trim to fasten the ends.  Although one can never be certain, based on previous experience with this yarn I'm anticipating 40% shrinkage in length and about 10-15% in width.  It's 26 x 14 inches (66 x 36 cm), so I should end up with something in the neighborhood of 15.5 x 12 inches (40 x 30 cm).  That would let me use a 12-inch square pillow form, in a style similar to the Manos pillow. 

Of course, I have to winkle her out of the thing first.  She's taken a liking to it as some sort of kid-specific cocoon:

Which makes me think that knitting up a cuddly tube to use as a nap-sack wouldn't be a bad idea at all.  Hmm....

Having finished the poncho yesterday, I scuff around with what little yarn remains here in the house (my stash being stowed in the storage cubby pending our upcoming move.)

At the Gore Place Sheepshearing Festival last month I bought two skeins of hand-spun fine gauge Merino from Greenwood Hill Farm.  Each is around 200 yards so I have about 400 yards total.  In my opinion it's more like a light fingering weight than a true lace weight.  I bought them with a lacy scarf in mind.  No pattern in particular.  I thought I'd noodle out one on my own.

I've decided to make a piece with two fancy ends, a rather plain but coordinating lacy middle, and trimmed all the way around with a killer edging. 

I swatched on several size needles, and decided I liked the way that lacy stitches felt when knit on a US #6.  (That's an argument that this stuff is truly fingering weight, because I like lace weight knit on #3s.)  Gauge is hard to estimate because I haven't decided on pattern stitches yet, but I'm not worried about making a scarf fit.  The various lacy patterns I played with worked up at between 5.5 and 5 stitches per inch, so I know roughly how wide a pattern I should be looking for to make a scarf of around 5 inches in diameter.

To that end I started paging through some of my knitting books and stitch dictionaries today.  I found several things that had elements I liked.  First, I found a wide diamond band in Lewis' Knitting Lace (pattern #42).  Nice wide diamond frames, filled with a smaller diamond pattern in the center.  It's a 12-stitch repeat, with 2 stitches before and one stitch after the end repeats.  That's 15 total for one repeat.  Narrow, but I'm planning on adding an edging.

To complement the diamond pattern, I'm looking at a couple of simple lace grounds.  Right now the leading candidate is a mini leaf pattern from Walker 1 (p.215, #3 in the set), but I'm not sure it will work out.  I'd like to use a divider to set this pattern off from the diamonds.  I've always liked a plain row of YO, K2tog framed by garter stitch welts.

Finally we get to the killer edging.  I'm looking at Heirloom Knitting by Miller, the Victorian Zigzag Edging on p. 125.  That's a WIDE piece as written - 20 stitches at cast-on, widening to 26.  I might have to eliminate some of the openwork on the attachment side to slim it down some.

The next step is to swatch a bit with each of the given patterns.  Before I do that however, I'm going to redraft them using a uniform symbol set and put all the patterns I intend to try out on one sheet of paper.  It's easy enough to adapt to each book's ideosyncratic style of stitch representation, but it's a pain to switch gears between systems and flop all those heavy volumes around while I'm knitting. 

I give no guarantee that this process will lead to an Actual Design.  I begin two or three of these for every one that ends up as an on-the-needles project. 

In the mean time just to have something mindless on the needles for last night's and tonight's weekend sofa movies, I took my other Sheepshearing Festival acquisition and cast on for another felted pillow similar to the one I did in Manos del Uruguay wool .  This one is also done in the rustic Nick's Meadow Farm yarn I've mentioned before.  The pale blue, light moss green, and light butter yellow skeins together cost less than one skein of Manos. 

The movies that accompany this excercise in autopilot garter stitch?  Last night it was Master and Commander.  Tonight it's John Cleese in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.  If you like either adventure stories or Jane Austin, you'll enjoy the series of books from which the former was adapted.  The movies skipped over the whole drawing-room/social manners side of O'Brian's books, especially the rivalries in love that divide the two lead characters.  As for the Shrew - it's so non-PC it's over the top, but it's also one of my favorite plays.  I'm really looking forward to seeing Cleese as Petruchio, and finding out how the actors cast as Katherine and Grumio stand up to him.

Back to knitting.  Thumbing through my stitch books I lighted again upon Indian Cross Stitch (Walker I, p. 112), a variant on enlongated stitches.  I used it in my Suede T.   It seems that in just the past three months, I've seen elongated stitches, including this one and Seafoam (Walker II, p. 21 ) all over the place, including the latest Interweave Knits and Knitters,  Berroco's patterns, and Lana Grossa's patterns.  Given the long lead time of both magazine and yarn makers' pattern development cycles, it's always interesting to see the same idea hit multiple sources at the same time.  Shadow knitting cropped up in parallel issues of IK and Knitters a while back.  Lacy knitting featuring lily of the valley-inspired textures is another recurring theme (IK led the pack with Forest Path last summer). 

About the only explanations for this parallelism I can come up with are that the designing knitting community is quite small; some things are natural fits (elongated stitches work well with ribbons, ribbons are hot right now); and many designers draw inspiration from the same fashion industry sources (deconstructed/slashed looks were big on the runways two seasons ago, and it takes a season or two for runway ideas to percolate into retail knitting patterns.) 

So far most sources talk about doing the elongated stitches do them with the multiple wrap method.  Can a revival of Condo Knitting be far behind? 

There are lots of stitch patterns that look tempting in the various stitch dictionaries on my shelves.  Some I've been able to place on garments, but others just haven't worked out - mostly because they were too wide or presented composition problems if used over the topography of a person's body. 

About 8 years ago, right after we moved into the house we're on the cusp of leaving, I decided to take some of these difficult-to-place patterns and do up two sofa pillows.   Anticipating severe pillow-abuse that only homes with small children face, I decided not to spend a lot making them.  I got three large skeins of Lion Fisherman Wool from a discount crafts store; and pulled out a pair of US #8 needles and some of my stitch treasuries.  I started right in, not worrying much about absolute size. 

I chose a bunch of patterns from the treasuries, planning out my pillows around an average gauge of 4.5 spi and a target size of around 15 inches, square.  If I was off a bit I didn't worry, knowing my knit pillow tops would stretch to compensate.  Just for kicks, I decided to use different patterns for each side:

If you're a texture pattern junkie like me, in the top picture you'll recognize Rocking Cable (Walker 3, p. 130) and Medallions with Cherries (Walker 2, p. 141) framed by Bulky Double Cable (Walker 1, p. 243).  The simple lacy edging is adapted from #57 in Classic Knitted Cotton Edgings by Hewitt and Daly (p. 44), but I narrowed it a bit by eliminating the openwork along the top edge.

On the other side of these pillows I used Wheat Sheaves (Walker 2, p. 138); and a combo of Patchwork Cable II (Walker 3, p. 93) and Grand Swinging Cable (Walker 3, p. 91).  Note that the Patchwork Cable and Grand Swinging Cable match up exactly in row count.  I was able to tuck them in together side by side in a playful combo I intend on using someday for a kid's pullover.  That pillow is also framed with #89 from Stanfield's New Knitting Stitch Library (p. 59). 

Once I had my four sides knit and blocked, assembly was easy - even considering that I put a zipper in each so I could remove the covers for washing.  In fact, if you've never sewn a zipper into a piece of hand-knitting pillows are excellent practice pieces.  To make life easier, I sewed in my zippers first:

I've posted a general write-up of how to sew in a zipper on wiseNeedle.  In this case, I laid the two squares side by side, and pinned the zipper between them.  Then I hand-stitched the zipper to each square.  Once the zipper was set, I folded the two squares along it, so that the wrong sides were sandwiched between.  Then starting at the foot of the zipper, I worked either I-cord or an edging up along the outer edge of my two matched squares, effectively joining them together at the same time as the edging or I-cord was created and skipping the sew-up-the-pillow step.  I went around the three open ends of the pillow, joining as I went.  When I got to the zippered side, I worked the edging along only ONE of the squares taking care not to foul the path zipper pull with yarn.  My (now camoflaged) zipper nestles along that side at the base of the edging.  "Zip open, shove in store-bought pillow form, zip shut" were the final steps of assembly.

To fasten the pillow sides together I used the second of the two I-cord attachment methods I described yesterday.  The I-cord edged pillow worked exactly the same way, but instead of picking up both legs of the stitches running down the length of the previous round of I-cord, I held the two sides together and picked up the innermost leg of the edge stitch from each one.  This turned the outermost legs inside as a selvedge, and made a nice, neat join without gappy holes. 

The pillow with the lacy edging was done in a similar manner.  Unlike the I-cord however, I had wrong-side rows on the lace.  I did my lace trim, using three plain knits on the straight side as my point of attachment.  I ended every right-side row of the lace with SSK, pick up one stitch, just like the I-cord.  Then I flipped my work over, slipped the first stitch purlwise, knit 1, and continued with rest of my wrong-side row.

Just like in joining the first round of I-cord to my poncho, for both the I-cord and lacy edgings I had to adjust the ratio of stitches picked up to rows or stitches on the piece's body.  I believe I used needles two or three sizes smaller for both the I-cord and lacy edgings.  I also ended up working 4:3 on the sides of the piece and 2:3 along the top and bottom.  Experimentation at the outset and a willingness to rip back a few rows and try again are both always required when you're adding a knit-on edging.

I'm pleased with the way these turn out, and surprised at how well the inexpensive wool I used has held up.  The pieces were a bit stiff and slightly real-wool itchy when first knit, but softened up quite nicely when washed and blocked.  Sure, there's some pilling, but these pillows have survived 8 years of slumber party pillow fights, general abuse and spills of all sorts.  They've resisted stains, and freshen up quite well after a general pill-pluck and washing with Eucalan.  My only cautions on the Lion Fisherman yarn are that even washed it isn't Merino-soft; and that my gauge of 4.5 spi worked but is a bit loose for it in garments.  I think it would look better knit a tad more firmly as a true worsted.

Again apologies to those on the updates mailing list. I did a bit more maintenance, adding categories to all the existing posts so it's easier to page through this ever-growing mound.

A couple of people have asked for the graph I used to knit the interlace shown on my overly warm teal and black alpaca hat.   Here it is. 

This one didn't make the cut for my book because it's one of the designs for which I lost my notes.  A long time ago I had a miserable move between apartments.  Several boxes were stolen off the back of my truck.  Among the things that went missing was a notebook full of source notations for counted embroidery patterns.  I had been researching them casually for more than ten years, and had hundreds compiled.  The sketches for most of them had already been redone on my ancient Macintosh, but all associated notes remained solely on paper. 

When I was composing The New Carolingian Modelbook I had to go back and confirm the exact origins for all the counted patterns I wanted to include.  I managed to find the sources for about 200 of them, but a third as many more have eluded me.  This particular interlace is from my collection of the lost.  It is similar to designs by Matteo Pagano as published in his 1546 book Il Specio di Penfieri Dell Berlle et Virtudoise Donne, but I can't swear that it came from that or one of his other works.  Given the relatively clumsy, heavy spacing and short repeat it might even have been something I doodled up myself after a day of research.

Many of these early Modelbook designs got there by way of Islamic influences (especially patterns cribbed from woven carpets and embroidered texiles).  Over the years the patterns drifted away from work worn by the elite to work worn by middle and then lower social classes, eventually ending up in folk embroidery where they never quite died out.  Counted thread needlework styles were revived big-time among the fashionable in the mid 1800s. Researchers found and reproduced surviving older pattern books, and began collecting motifs from traditional regional costumes and house linen.  Some of the later and folk uses of counted patterns include standard cross-stitch, Hedebo, Assisi-style voided ground stitching, and various types of pattern darning or straight stitch embroidery done on the count. 

This pattern can be interpreted in many crafts.  Historically accurate uses contemporary with first publication include cross stitch panels (the long-armed style of cross stitch is overwhelmingly represented in historical samples compared to the more familiar x-style cross stitch); weaving, or lacis and burato (types of darned needle lace). 

Counted patterns are a natural for knitting.  The first book of general purpose graphed designs that listed knitting as a specific use came out in 1676 in Nurnberg, Germany and was published by a woman:  Rosina Helena Furst's Model-Buchs Dritter Theil.  (the title is actually much longer).   There may be others that predate this book, but I haven't seen mention of them, and I haven't seen the Furst book in person.  It's in the Danske Kuntsindustrimuseum in Copenhagen, a tad far for a day trip from Boston, Massachusetts.  The entire group of graphed designs displayed in the early Modelbooks shows a straight continuity with the geometric strip patterns found in modern northern European stranded knitting. 

The short 14-stitch/17 row repeat of this graph does work well at knitting gauges.   I've always meant to use this one again on socks - either as-is or stretching it a bit by repeating the centermost column so that it better fits my sock repeat, or doing eight full repeats at an absurdly tiny gauge.  As is, you'd need a multiple of 14 stitches around.  A standard 56-stitch sock could accommodate 4 full iterations of the design without adding any columns.

Some people have asked how to get a hold of my book.  The answer is, aside from the used market where it is going for quite a premium, I haven't a clue.  Sadly all I can report is that the publishers absconded shortly after publication.  I have no idea where they went, and have had no replies from them to any queries since 1996.  I received only about a year of royalties on the first 100 or so copies, in spite of the fact that the book went through two printings with an estimated total run of 3,000.  New copies continue to trickle onto the market even today (they're sold as used but mint).  The new-copy seller has rebuffed my attempts to find the ultimate source.  

Moral of the story - don't enter into publication contracts without a literary agent, and if the company has a name like "Outlaw Press" there's probably a reason.

Not every project turns out perfectly.  Some start out well, but end up being a bit shy of the goal.

Some years back my husband requested an ultra-warm hat.  I took him at his word, and settled on a watch cap in alpaca.  Now, alpaca is much warmer than wool to begin with - but I didn't know that at the time.  To make sure the hat was wind-proof I decided to knit it large, then full it to size.  Finally to make sure it was nice and snuggly (and to have an excuse to try out the technique) I decided to do a double-knit hat.  That's not "double knit" as in the yarn weight designation - a yarn that knits up at 22 st=4 inches or 10cm.  That's "double-knit" as in a special technique that produces a fabric of two thicknesses, both of which display their knit-sides to the world (the purl sides are sandwiched back to back inside, between the layers).  Those of us who remember the Leisure Suit '70s, can think polyester double-knit, but done at hand-knitting scale.

Double knitting is a strange beast.  It's related to the famous sock-inside-a-sock trick described in the book War and Peace.  In it the stitches of the two layers alternate on the needle.  The knitter either works each layer from its own ball, or uses one ball of yarn to accomplish each round in two passes - first knitting the odd numbered stitches and slipping the even ones, then going back and slipping the odd numbered stitches and purling the even ones.  The two-ball method if employed carefully can produce the two separate layers of fabric needed to pull off the War and Peace trick.  Using one ball of yarn, or using two colors, swapped back and forth between the layers makes a two-sided fabric that does not separate.

Always being up for a challenge, I decided to use a two color stranded pattern, worked in the round.  My intent was to employ only two strands of yarn, trading them back and forth to meld the two layers together into one unit.  The result would be the same design showing up on both sides of the work, but in a positive/negative value trade.  On one side Color A would be the foreground and Color B the background, but on the other side Color B would be the foreground and Color A would be the background.  You can sort of see the difference between the hat body and its reverse side, shown on the flipped up cuff-style brim:

The knotwork design is an out-take from my book of graphed counted embroidery from pre 1600 sources.  I have this one in the notes I drew upon to compose the book, but my documentation of the exact source wasn't good enough to include in The New Carolingian Modelbook.  I used Indiecita Alpaca Worsted 4-Ply, a worsted weight 100% alpaca yarn imported by Plymouth, and knit a bit tightly at 5.5 spi.  Experienced fullers/felters are beginning to shudder here.

I won't say I truly enjoyed the knitting.  Having to remember that two-stitch groups (one inside and one outside) equalled on box unit while following a complex graph made the project perhaps a bit overly ambitious.  Eventually I muddled through, finished the cap, and with much difficulty - fulled it.

What made the result a disappointment?  Several things. 

Remember how warm I said alpaca is?  Double knitting means that the fabric is two layers thick.  This watch-style cap with a folded brim has FOUR layers of fulled worsted-weight fabric in the ear-band area.  Although I live in an area of the US known for cold, wet winters I will say that in the eight years I've been here there has been only one winter with a solid month of  below -10F (-23C) weather, cold enough to wear this portable little head-oven in comfort.

Fulling alpaca isn't as easy as fulling wool.  Also, I knit this piece much too tightly for something that was to be fulled.  There just wasn't enough room in the already-densely packed piece for the stitches to pull together properly.  It did shrink, but not as much as I expected - especially in width.  The hat ended up being a bit too wide for the target head.  Plus the two colors didn't shrink at the same rate.  It took many, many trips through the washer/dryer, plus a conserable amount of hand-bashing to even out the fast-shriking teal with the slow-shrinking black.  It looks good now, but during the process I think I swore at it enough to provide an entire national navy with suitable vocabularly. 

Fulling/felting something, a pattern with fine colorwork detail can be wasted effort.  Especially if you're using a rather hairy and soft yarn to start with.  It's tough to make out the detail of the knotwork patterning in my finished hat.  In fact, it's tough to make out that the flipped-up brim is displaying the same pattern in negative.

The upshot of all of this is that I learned some valuable lessons:  1.  Save fancy patterns for after I understand the basics of a new technique.  2.  Knit loosely if you expect to full a piece to shrink it.  3.  Alpaca is extremely warm and more difficult than wool to full.  4. Colorwork patterning is muddied in fulling.  5.  My husband really DIDN'T want an ultra-warm hat.  I wear this piece now and he's much happier with his lightweight Ch'ullu, even on a -10F day.

A couple of failed start-ups ago, I was sitting in the cafeteria with the company's resident theoretical mathemetician.  I was penciling out a new knitting project, and he was watching me shape the pieces and place repeats.  I did a few simple calculations, ratios, slopes, division - nothing terribly complex, but he was impressed at the amount of math that was going into the design.  So impressed in fact that he scoffed at the idea of pre-numerate people (meaning people who had no formal math education) coming up with complex patterns. 

Now you and I both know that some pretty involved knitting went on for quite a while before modern math education took hold.  Dr. Math and I got into a discussion on the subject, and the outcome was I bet him that I could come up with a complex knitted pattern that was constructed using only simple counting.  He took the bet.  With a bottle of good single-malt Scotch on the line, I was off and running.

I decided to go further.  I'd make a sweater that required no swatching, or gauge measurement to boot.   I remembered an idea I had seen in a vintage Anna magazine, put out some time in the 1960s.  I decided to give the method a try. 

I fished some rustic Maine style wool out of my stash (Have Ewe Any Wool - I'd bought it at a Gore Place Sheep Festival the previous year).  I knew from prior experience I'd be using a US #9 on this wool.  I happened to have a set of 18-inch European 5.5mm DPNs, but I could have worked this on circs.  Here's the logic of my project:

Apologies that some lines have been lost in the above diagram due to file re-sizing, but they aren't dead-vital. 

First in the round I cast on enough stitches to make the neck ribbing (Step 1).  I worked them for about an inch and a half.  Then counting from the point where I cast on as center front, I determined and marked the center back.  Once that was marked, I counted out the center of each shoulder.  I eyeballed the number of stitches I should use for the shoulder strip and knit out two epaulette-shaped pieces (Step 2), leaving the rest of the stitches on holders.  I kept going, trying on the piece until I had a strip that was as wide as my shoulders.  I now had something that looked like a bell-pull with a hole in the middle. 

I put the live stitches at the ends of the epaulettes onto holders, and began the center front bib area.  Starting around a hand-span's worth of stitches in from the end of the epaulette, I picked up stitches along the sides of my strips until I got to the collar.  There I knit across the stitches I had reserved, and picked up the same number of stitches on the other side of the collar.  I knit down until I had a hanging piece that was about 2 inches below my arm, placing the stitches on a holder instead of binding them off.  I repeated the process for the back (Step 3). 

Once the bib areas were done, I added width so that the upper body was wide enough to fit me shoulder to shoulder.  I picked up the first "wing" along the side of the bib area, then worked across the live shoulder strip stitches, and picking up along the side of the second bib piece.  I put these stitches on holders instead of binding off (Step 4).

After the upper body was done, I folded the piece along the shoulder line.  I picked up stitches along the side of the first wing, worked across the live center bib panel stitches, then picked up along the side of the second wing.  At this point I decided I needed to add more length, so I knit about another three  inches in the flat before joining the front and back and switching over to working in the round.  I continued to knit the body down in the round, working until it was the desired length, ending with a ribbing (Step 5).

I now had a sweater body with two holes for arms.  I picked up along the edge of the arm opening along the little bit of body I just added before joining, then worked across the live wing stitches, finishing by picking up the remaining few stitches along the side of the other bit of late-added body.  I worked the sleeve out to the cuff, doing double decreases at the bottom edge every other row until the sleeve looked narrow enough for comfort.  I continued working it out as a tube until it was long enough (yes, I know the diagram shows decreases evenly to the cuff.  Shoot me.).  I ended off with some cuff ribbing. (Step 6)

Here's the result:

I admit on beyond the method described above, I tarted the thing up a bit with some cables and texture stitches:

I used the Twin Leaf Panel from Walker's Second Treasury (p. 235) for the centermost panel in the bib area.  I framed it with an unusual eccentric chain link cable that featured an openwork detail.  I thought I got that one from Stanfield's New Knitting Stitch Library, but I can't find it in there right now.  I also used the same cable on the epaullete strip, continuing the design down the sleeve to the cuff.  Plain 2x2 cables (mirrored left and right) frames the fancy-work areas on both the bib and sleeves.  I did like the opework detail of the eccentric cable, so I decied to introduce more openwork into the piece by using YO K2tog or SSK YO combos instead of the more traditional purl ground on which most cables float.  That's what makes the curious spines between the patterned panels.  The rest of the piece is done in seed stitch.

So there you have it.  I produced a visually complex piece using only simple counting.  To determine centers, I counted in from the ends rather than divide.  To place cables knowing their stitch count widths, I counted out from my center markers, and placed additional markers to indicate where they went.  I did no other math of any sort, and did no swatching or gauge measurements either.

Did I win my bet?  Of course.  To be fair, it WAS a sucker's bet.  

The Scotch is now long gone and the sweater is now a bit stretched out, but the Bowmore canister lives on as a trophy, happily holding needles here on my desk at wiseNeedle Central.

Private eMails brought three questions yesterday, which I answer in turn.

What's "parrot-color"?

The easiest way to explain the parrot thing is to show you this pullover:

It's a flash sweater knit from Rainbow Mills Matisse.  Their "Navajo Panted Sky" kit included six 4-ounce skeins of Matisse, and produced a one-size-fits-many sweater that's about 48 inches around.  Mine is about as big as the materials provided allow, and I wear a tall 18.  Note that the width of the piece is fixed so that the color repeats flash.  Smaller people can make the body and sleeves shorter, but end up with a baggier fit than I get. 

I found this 10+-year old kit for buried in a stack of other things at my local yarn store three years ago.   Although I've seen Matisse listed on a couple of on-line sources lately, and know some of their other kits are still around, I hadn't seen this particular package for quite a while.  I lusted after the thing because I've got a magpie's taste in color, and because I'd done a couple of flash-type pieces before: the one worn by The Tiny One in yesterday's post (Grandma's Little Darling, a Rainbow Mills kit of unfortunate name), Flash (my own noodling); and my Typeset Tee (a modified flash piece, also original). 

I enjoyed this piece immensely.  At this giant gauge (well, giant for me, anyway) it went very quickly.  I finished it in about a week.   The single-ply construction Aran weight Merino is particularly soft.  Even though I rarely wear even the softest of wools next to my skin I am comfortable with only a cami or tee underneath.  Of course the tradeoff for having such a soft wool spun as a single is a certain amount of pilling, but it's actually quite moderate compared to the pilling I've experienced off of Manos.

What's a WPI Tool?

I know that lots of people - especially spinners and weavers - employ the Wraps Per Inch (WPI) system to describe yarn thickness/weight.  I've had people recommend that I include fields for it in the yarn review collection.  I've held off doing so because of an experiment I conducted a while back. 

Over the course of a week I took several yarns and a ruler into my local yarn store and asked about fifty people to determine the WPI count for each.  I asked most participants to do the test twice.  I used a fingering, a sport, a worsted and a bulky yarn.  The results were quite disappointing.  There was very little consistency among the readings with large variations from person to person, and in some cases from attempt to attempt.  Bad data is worse than no data, so based on this lack of consistency and the limited familiarity of the knitting public with the WPI measurement, I decided not to include it in my standard data set.  I did however continue to play with the system myself, trying to train my bumbling fingers in The Right Way.

I had absolutely no success at consistent WPI measurement until I found the WPI Tool put out by Nancy's Knit Knacks.  I bought mine within this past month.  It's shown in yesterday's post - the little stick thing with the notched end.  It also is marked off in 1-inch increments and comes with a laminated card that lists the WPI count for various yarn types.  It provides a smooth, calibrated surface which is twirled to accumulate the wraps, in contrast to an edged ruler around which the yarn is wound (and apparently, stretched).  Using this tool I can finally get consistent, accurate WPI measurements.  I still don't plan on adding WPI as a permanent field in the yarn review collection, but I'm going to add that figure to all future write-ups as part of what I write about in the yarn review Comments sections. 

So what's with the endorsements?

For the person who wrote to ask if I'd been paid off to post the gadget articles here, please note that I maintain my full independence.  On beyond the "no affiliation" disclaimer, I can say that I've forked over full retail for every item I've described, and have received no compensation or consideration from any pattern writer, yarn or gadget maker, retailer, or wholesaler in connection with anything I have ever said or published about a particular product.  

In the interests of full disclosure, I have written patterns that I have sold to publishers including KnitNet, Schaefer Yarns, and Classic Elite, but I have recused myself from reviewing any yarn connected with those sales, and (with the exception of reminding people not to bug me for the Seesaw Socks) do not provide references or links to retailers selling them. 

First apologies to the few of you who subscribed to receive notification of site updates.  You must have been going nuts since last night because I gave up on Picserver, and ported all of the photos here to a new server.  It wasn't my intent to pepper you with update notes, but I couldn't turn off the notifications from here.  I promise the housecleaning is now over.

Rick-Rack Mesh Scarf in Berroco Zen

If you've ever met me you know I'm absolutely delighted at the prospect of the New Knitter Invasion, but at the same time my eyes are glazing over at all those novelty yarn scarves.  I've done a few on special request, or as gifts for family and friends - but by and large, I find them pretty but intensely boring (hence my Kombu Scarf pattern).

Still, my pal Pat shop manager at Wild & Woolly in Lexington, MA (my local yarn store) asked me to help her come up with something fun to do with Berroco Zen, a ribbon yarn that's been overlooked in favor of flashier novelty yarns. I couldn't say no. (For some reason, Zen is in the yarn review collection twice, so until I get that fixed, there's another set of reviews here). 

Here's what I came up with:

Here's the pattern.  Eventually I'll add it to the free pattern pages at wiseNeedle.

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Rick-Rack Mesh Scarf in Berroco Zen

Materials:
1 Skein Berroco Zen or approx. 110 yards (102m) of a similar ribbon yarn
US #10.5 needles

Gauge:
Gauge is difficult to measure, but finished scarf will be about 5 inches wide by about 56 inches long (exclusive of fringe).

Instructions:
Using half-hitch cast on or other stretchy cast-on, cast on 14 stitches. Knit one row.

Follow Rick-Rack stitch pattern until scarf measures approximately 56 inches long.

Rick Rack Stitch:
Row 1: K1 (YO, slip one stitch as if to knit, K1, pass slipped stitch over)6x, K1
Row 2: K1 (YO, slip one stitch as if to purl, P1, pass slipped stitch over)6x, K1

Bind off VERY LOOSELY.

Cut remaining yarn into 18-inch lengths, and attach to ends of scarf as fringe.

© 2004, Kim Brody Salazar, http://www.wiseneedle.com.  Not to be duplicated on other websites or in print without permission of the author.  Pattern for personal use only.  Please contact the author if you wish to make this item up in quantity, even if it is for charitable sale or donation.

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Still in hurry-up-and-wait mode, I find myself with a bit of extra time so I extend today's entry. 

Here's a past project that was quick, easy, and turned out quite nicely.  It's a pillow inspired by a similar one appearing in Shangold's Design Source book of Home Decor.  This pillow is sitting on my daughter's bed.  As you can see, my tween-ager has got a starry-night/dragons theme thing going in denim blues and raspberry/magenta.

I liked the idea of a tube pillow secured by six buttons as shown, and I happened to have six large mother of pearl buttons on hand.  They looked rather lunar to me, so I thought they'd go nicely with the rest of the celestial/mythical beast stuff already in place.  I stewed around on the idea for a couple of days before mentioning it to the Target Kid.  She was thrilled so I went ahead.  (Major hint:  Never knit anything as a surprise for someone between the ages of 9 and 19).

In truth I only had a glimpse of the book and didn't work my pillow from the directions, so I can't speak to whether or the inspiring object is also knit in the round, but this is how I went about my pillow.  I used two partial skeins of Manos left over from previous projects (the magenta and the pale blue), plus I bought one new skein of the indigo blue.  I wanted to do symmetrical stripes, but I didn't want to weigh my yarn and divide it into equal quantities and/or figure out how big each of the stripes should be, so I took the lazy person's way out.  

I don't have any working notes, but I believe I used either a US #9 or #10 needle, and got somewhere in between 3.5 and 4 spi in garter stitch before fulling the piece.  (A figure of 100 stitches around seems to stick in my mind, but I won't swear to it.)  I started with a provisional cast on, and knit a garter stitch tube using my entire skein of the darker blue.  Then I wound my magenta and light blue into center pull balls.  I "woke up" the stitches at the bottom of the dark blue stripe, placing them on a second circular needle.  then using both the outside and inside ends of the contrasting color yarn, I worked the same number of garter stitch ridges of the light blue on both ends of the center, darker stripe, continuing until I ran out of yarn.  I repeated this with the magenta.  When I was done I had no yarn left over at all, a dark blue stripe in the center, and equal size stripes of light blue and magenta framing it.   Ready to full!

First I tossed the finished pillow in the washing machine and dryer, but my washer is too gentle. Even in a hot wash full of towels not much fulling action happened.  I ended up beating the daylights out of the piece by hand, plus washing it at a friend's house in a washer and dryer that are far more vicious than mine.  That finally worked. 

The finished pillow is nice and dense, cushy even.  It shrank about 40% in length (that's the direction across the stripes), but only about 20% in width (the direction parallel to the stripes themselves).  Final post-fulling measurements are about 20 inches around the pillow's belly, and about 15 inches end to end. 

After my tube was as fulled as it was going to get, I bought a standard baby pillow form.  That's a pillow about the size of the small ones found on airplanes.  Most of the crafting websites list 12"x16" as being the standard, but I think mine was either a tad smaller, or was so squishy that it easily wadded up to fit.  

I sewed on the first three buttons, taking my fastening stitches through both sides of the tube.  This effectively closed off the first end.  Then I sewed three oversized coat snaps to the inside of the pillow's other end, taking care to locate them exactly underneath the spots where I would later sew the buttons.  Once I had the second three buttons placed, I jammed the mini-pillow into the tube and snapped the open end closed.  All done!  One finished pillow; one delighted pre-teen, and something for the stuffed dragon to lean upon.

Well, the easy part is over.  The house is now scrubbed to within an inch of its life.  With so many familiar things stowed it looks oddly sterile, almost hotel-like. 

Amusingly enough the Real Estate Gal asked me if - being a knitter - I might put together a basket of yarn in suitable colors, and pose it invitingly next to the sofa.  She said it was the visual equivalent of boiling a vanilla bean or baking bread before an open house.  So it was off on a trek to the storage cubby to retrieve some yarn in order to tart up the family room.   Today I expect a herd of real estate people to amble through, in preparation for this weekend's official viewing.  Now for the hard part - hurry up and wait for what we hope will be multiple offers.

In knitting, I'm still mid-sleeves on the Suede T - knitting time being at a premium through all of this.  So instead of posting a boring snap of too many stitches of olive nylon squished on a too-small needle, here's an oldie.  I knit this for my older daughter back in '92 or so, and I wish I were a better photographer.  It's in a DK weight cotton from Lane Borgosesia whose label drifted off into infinite space before the advent of the Yarn Review Collection.  It features hearts and OXO cables, both from Walker's treasuries; embellished with clusters of embroidered bullion knots.  The knots were done in scraps of a matte-finish sport weight cotton. 

I was quite amused when two years later Knitters published a similar OXO/heart cardigan on the cover of its Aran issue.  Mine however is unique - if for no other reason than for my inexperienced bumbling around witth the button band when I was noodling it up. 

• Note the odd number of heart-shaped buttons.  There are seven because my spacing was off, and I was too lazy to go back and redo the button band for six. 
• Note the fact that the button band is on the non-traditional side for a girl's garment.  When I was at this point I looked down at what I was wearing and did the same thing, never stopping to think that I was wearing a man's chambray work shirt at the time.
• Note the less-than-effectively centered horizontal buttonholes.  I didn't know back then that during wear buttons "migrate" to the outside edge of the buttonhole slit.  If I were to do this today, I'd not center my buttonholes in the band.  Instead I'd skew them a bit to the inside edge, so that when buttoned, the buttons appear better aligned down the midpoint of the band.

Still for all these defects, this is a much-loved piece.  Daughters #1 and #2 both wore it and enjoyed it.  It lasted well, enduring grass stains, dripped ice cream, and a rather messy day of strawberry picking all followed by rather aggressive laundering.  Now it's at the cusp of being outgrown and is one of the things I intend on packing away rather than handing down to another wearer.