Done with the reposts! I hope. Here's something from String, first appearing on 27 June 2004.

INVESTIGATIONS - FILET KNITTING AND CROCHET

More investigations on filet knitting and filet crochet have convinced me that while filet knitting will be worth doing, provided I use very fine threads and 4/0 (1.25mm) needles or smaller, it's not going to work out for my dragon panel.

I'm having gauge problems working my design into the desired dimensions, even if I eke out the too-narrow dragon motif band with additional borders top and bottom. For the record, my design is something like 43 units tall by 135 units wide. I've got a space to fill that's 19 inches tall by 30 inches wide (although I can go over a bit on this). That means for the width, I've got to hit something like 4.5 rows per inch. Now in filet crochet, looking at a series of filet patterns with gauges found at the Stargazer site, I'm seeing gauges the smallest gauge I see (size 30 crochet cotton) is something like 10 rows = 2.3 inches. That's about 5 rows = 1.15 inches. My 135 rows at this smallest gauge would be something like 31 inches wide. By contrast, the smallest I've been able to do so far in knitting is 3 squares = 1 inch (that's about 14 or so knitting stitches per inch). At 3 squares per inch, my 135 units turns out to be 45 inches wide. I suppose I could hunt down longer size 5/0 or 6/0 needles (or make them) and finer threads, but I'm not inclined to do that right now. Interim verdict: Filet knitting is certainly worth further experimentation, but it's not suitable for this project.

I think I'll have to fall back on filet crochet to do my door curtain. I think I'll take it and my Crazy Raglan with me as my official vacation projects.

Crochet Dragon Panel Pre-Project Calculations

Using these theoretical base calculation points for two thread sizes, I posit these rough dimensions and yarn consumption factors:

• Base for Size 20 cotton - 10 squares x 10 rows = 2.2" x 2.4"; a piece that's 100x50 squares or 21.3 inches x 12 inches will take 519 yards, using old US size 9 steel crochet hook.
• Base for Size 30 cotton - 10 squares x 10 rows = 2.1" x 2.3"; a piece that's 100x50 squares or 20.4 inches x 11.5 inches will take 485 yards using old US size 11 steel crochet hook.

Doing the math for Size 20 cotton (and working across the height instead of across the width to preserve sanity), that means my piece of 43 x 138 squares would be 9.16 inches x 33.12. Since my piece is 5934 squares total (138*43), and the original was 5000 squares, mine is roughly 19% bigger. I'll round up to 20%, and I come up with a new yardage consumption estimate of 519 *1.2 or roughly 623 yards. I'll add 10% to that for a fudge factor and round up - 686 yards. Repeating the operation for Size 30 cotton, I get an estimated finished dimension of 8.8 inches x 31.74 inches, and an estimated yarn consumption forecast of 641 yards. Remember that these yardage estimates are for the base dragon strip alone. I need to make it taller because the window space I need to cover is taller. With height estimates of 9.16 and 8.8 inches respectively I'll need to either find or design complementing border strips that roughly double the project's height. That means I need to double my yardage estimates - 1372 yards or 1282 yards for size 20 and 30 cotton, respectively. These estimates are VERY rough at best, but with luck should be good enough to get me started.

Now on to crochet hook sizes. The circa 1919 instructions on which I've based these calculations specify size 9 and 11 steel crochet hooks for sizes 20 and 30 cotton. According to various authorities (very few of whom agree), an 11 can be as large as 1.1mm, and as small as .75mm; a 9 can be as large as 1.4mm or as small as 1.25mm. My modern Susan Bates set goes from 0 to 10 (2.55 to 1.15mm). I'll have to play and see what I can achieve using those sizes.

I haven't decided which size thread or hook to use yet. Much will depend on what I can find locally, and on what size hook I can dig up without staging a raid on the storage cubby where all my tools and goodies are stashed.

So apologies. This knitting blog is going to take a side trip into crochet. But since I'll be doing it during a forced blogging hiatus, I'll only bore you with a couple large gobs of progress rather than by reporting in inch by inch.

This post originally appeared on 26 June 2004.

WORKING REPORT - CRAZY RAGLAN

You know what I like about knitting? Among others, two things in particular:

1. 99.9% of all mistakes can be dealt with without losing anything except time
2. You never stop learning

Knitting is a very forgiving pursuit. Woodworkers can't un-cut a mis-measured plank. Cooks can't get the extra egg back into the shell. Sewers and tailors can't return their fabric to the bolt once it's been snipped. But knitters can grab and end, yank and reduce the most recalcitrant problem back to its larval state, ready to be knitted again. That suits me, as many of my projects proceed one step forward, two steps back.

I'm a slash-and-burn knitter (swidden knitter). By that I mean that I try to expand my mental knitting territory on almost every project. I'm always hungering for new challenges, new techniques, or trying to figure out easier/less error-prone ways of doing things. So far I haven't run out of challenges, as even the simplest thing can end up being a roadblock. I've got knitting pals that always say nice things about the projects I finish, but probably don't realize that like an untrained rat in a maze, I spent considerable time scurrying up and back dead ends. But learning flows from making mistakes, having the patience to figure out what went wrong in the first place, and the fortitude to correct them.

I have a hard time understanding all the people who post that they tried something and gave up, some even tossing the project out in disgust. True, I'll lager the most egregious away for a while or even rip back particularly spectacular failures and re-use the yarn for something else, but I can't imagine getting so disgusted that I would throw away the whole mess.

Case in point - my sorry excuse for what was supposed to be a mindless busy-work project, filling in extra post-exhaustion hours and (perhaps) lasting long enough to take me through a blissfully non-thinking week of vacation. I could make all sorts of excuses for what's happened so far, but why bother. Here are the facts:

1. I mis-measured my gauge - not once, but twice
2. I mis-measured my kid's circumference, and settled on making the wrong size
3. I entered the above bogus data into Sweater Wizard, then mis-read the resulting print-out, and cast on too few stitches.
4. I didn't bother to confirm measurements until I was at least 7 inches into the thing. Twice.

The result? Another opportunity to reclaim and re-use yarn. I should be on target now. I've confirmed my gauge, recalculated The Smallest One's size, and re-drafted the pattern (thank goodness for Sweater Wizard). Given that I was going to have to rip back anyway, I took the opportunity to do what I mentioned yesterday - using two balls of yarn to knit the front and back, doing it with an intarsia-style join at the center front. This makes the stripes even wider, as the span of stitches traveled by each strand is even smaller than before. I'm getting nice, wide sock-type stripes now, with a "seam" up the center front (apologies for the lousy pix, my camera is out of batteries so I had to improvise with another):

At the very least, this continues yesterday's visual lesson on using variegated yarns. The narrower the span of stitches covered, the wider the stripes will end up being. How to know if your yarn will stripe or make that stippled effect? Look at the length of each color section. The longer it is, the more likely it will be to stripe. How to estimate on the fly? In general, a row consumes roughly 3 to 4 times its length in yarn. That's a very rough estimate. If the color sections are at least three times the width of your piece to be knit you'll end up with a one-row stripe. That stripe might not begin at the commencement of each row, and may end up being a wider puddled "bounce-back" section on a side, but it will take at least that much length of any one color to have any hope of visual striping.

More length? Easy. Wider stripes, and the possibility of knitting up larger garments that sport them. (Custom dyers take note - LONG repeats made by looping up double length skeins before applying color may be cumbersome to produce, but I bet they'd sell quite well compared to skeins with shorter color runs.)

Less length? A mottled, speckled or streaked appearance, with the predominant color overwhelming the others when seen from far away. Some yarns with shorter color runs can be a challenge to use. I'm not particularly fond of yarns with color sections that are an inch wide or less. In a fingering weight yarn that's a run of about four to six stitches (depending on needle size). In a worsted, about two stitches. In a bulky/superbulky - that's only one stitch (or fewer!).

One of the things that drove me to play with entrelac for the Tee I'm also working on right now was the short length of the color runs. Colors lasted for about three to five inches before changing. I didn't like the blotchy, streaky effect that gave. Working in entrelac though on tiny 5-stitch squares allows the colors to bounce back and forth forming mini-stripes on each block. It's tedious, but gives a more painterly effect.

I think if I ever wrote a book on knitting the name might be The Lazy Knitter: How to Avoid Mistakes In The First Place. Either that or Chest of Knitting Horrors^TM: How To Get Out and Stay Out. So it's back to the fertile field of making mistakes, both for my own edification and to provide vicarious amusement for those who read this blog.

Another post from the missing month. This originally appeared on 25 June 2004

Back to knitting.

Having successfully restarted my younger daughter's raglan in Regia 6-ply Crazy Color, I can now report a modicum of progress:

It's interesting to compare this pattern of striping with the one I was getting back when I was working in the round:

Same yarn, different width. If I had the strength I might even begin again, using the same strategy I employed for my Typeset Tee. That would make even wider stripes, but I'm too lazy to begin this no-think fill-in project for a third time.

The Play's the Thing

How did I manage to knit off six inches each of the back and front in one night? I was at an audition.

I've mentioned before that The Resident Male was in a production of King Lear back in March (he played Kent). He has just tried out for a small role in a staging of Macbeth. But I didn't go with him. My older daughter is caught up by the whole thing. At 13, she went to try out for one of the boy's roles - Fleance (2 lines) or even MacDuff's son (about a dozen lines) . She dutifully prepared her audition piece - Quince's prologue to the miniplay in Midsummer Night's Dream in Act 5, and read for the part. I told her that she'd be the youngest person there by a dozen years or more, but she was undaunted. She even made her way through the infamous tongue twister

Whereat with blade,
with bloody, blameful blade,
he bravely broached his boiling bloody breast.

Something I can't see myself managing. I was tickled that she did so well. I have no idea if she got the part. Callbacks are on July 1st, but whether or not she'll be cast she did us all proud.

The Latest Buzz

House nonsense goes apace. Yesterday's big setback was the discovery of a huge colony of bees nesting in the floor below the sleeping porch. They get in through an old drainage pipe that sticks out through the stucco. The electricians working on wiring that part of the house were less than delighted to find the things. I was even less amused.

Under Massachusetts law the only available option besides letting them bee is to hire a licensed beekeeper to relocate the colony (not that I'd want to poison the little buggers). The hive must be removed after the bees are moved, as its contents would decay over time and cause even more problems. We're trying to get a fix on how long the bees have been there. The longer they've been hoarding honey, the larger the removal cost, extent of the demolition required to get at the hive, and subsequent repair costs will be.

The only consolation is that the beekeepers will test the honey for edibility. If it's uncontaminated (highly likely), we get to keep it. If there's any quantity, I intend to have mead brewed from it so we may at the least, drink to both our and the bees' new homes. Needless to say, things like this are not covered by insurance.

This post originally appeared on 24 June 2004

DREAM ON

Just paging through the morning's news, and I stumbled upon this report from a knitting-themed sailing cruise. It sounds like tons of fun. I could spend a week alternately knitting and re-reading O'Brien's Aubrey and Maturin series...

But then reality sets in.

Maybe someday when the kids are older, schedules less hectic, and disposable income more capacious. Still, it's fun to dream, isn't it?

Another entry from long ago. The link provided is no longer good, but the advice still holds. Copies do surface every now and again on eBay and on AbeBooks. Nothing has changed about my royalty situation or the low esteem in which I hold the owners of the publishing firm and their total lack of responsibility. This first appeared on 24 June 2004.

Some people have asked me where to buy my book of charted embroidery patterns. I have to say that there aren't many places that sell it. It's a long, sad story involving publishers who were sloppy and unprofessional at best, and downright unscrupulous at worst. Copies do surface every now and again. I wish I could say that I was selling them, or that I had a prayer of getting royalties from those transactions, but I don't.

However a friend just notified me that some copies have surfaced on eBay. The seller isn't the original publisher, they appear to be an independent bookseller. I also apologize that the books appear to be going for well over the original cover price. I have absolutely no affiliation with this seller, nor will I benefit from these sales. But if you're desperate for a copy, it's the only source I know.

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...

This was the entry that I was hunting for when I discovered my missing month. It describes crocheting onto a needle to start a provisional cast-on instead of just making a crocheted chain and picking up stitches along the back ridge of bumps. This was originally posted on 22 June 2004.

WORKING REPORT - CRAZY RAGLAN

Enough boring everyone with rehab junk. You came here to read about knitting, and not to visit This Old House.

I've ripped out the entire mindless knitting raglan and started again. This time I'm doing it in the flat, and working both pieces side by side. Because I hate seaming ribbing I've decided to add it later in the round, after I've sewn the sweater body, so I've started out with a provisional cast-on. I favor the crochet chain method of provisional cast-on, but I detest fiddling with the crocheted chain, picking up the bumps along the chain's back. Instead I crochet my chain directly onto my knitting needle. Here's how:

First I pick a nice smooth cotton string-type yarn, and a crochet needle a size or two larger than I'd use with it for a crochet project. In this case, I raided the Baby Georgia I was using for the filet knitting project, and grabbed a Bates F size crochet hook (more on hook sizing another day).

To start, I chain up about five stitches, just to have a stable spot to begin and an end to hold as I do so. Then I take my knitting needle and hold it like this:

Holding the yarn in the back of the knitting needle, I reach up across the front of the knitting needle to grab the strand and form my crochet stitch. This lays a loop around the knitting needle itself, with the leading leg of the loop correctly oriented. After the stitch is formed, I use my left forefinger to flick the yarn around to the back of the knitting needle again:

Once the yarn is in the back of the needle, I'm ready to crochet on my next stitch.

I usually crochet on several more stitches than I need, just to be sure I have enough, and end off with five or six plain chains as insurance. Once the stitches are on the needle, I can switch to my knitting yarn and begin my first row of knitting. If I have more stitches cast on the needle than I need, I just slip off the excess. They become normal crochet chain stitches and sit quietly until the end of the project. No worries.

When it's time to awaken the provisional stitches and begin knitting in the other direction, I find the last chain stitch I did (tie a knot in the dangling end if you think you might not remember which is which), carefully unpick that last stitch, then pull the strand to zip out the crochet stitch by stitch. As each knit loop is freed, I slip it onto a waiting needle.

Here's my newly re-started raglan. Note that I'm knitting the back and the front at the same time. That way I am guaranteed that they match row for row and decrease placement for decrease placement.

I've done something here with the crocheted provisional cast-on that helps me keep life straight when working two pieces side by side. I've crocheted all of the stitches I need for both back and front in one long strand. First, following the procedure above, I made enough stitches for the back. Then I crocheted about ten free stitches without making loops on the needle. After that I made the stitches for the front, ending with a few extra chains. Using a different ball of yarn for each piece, I knit across first the front and then the back. The little bar of crochet anchors my two pieces together in the center and helps me remember which direction I'm going so that I don't get to the half-way mark, then head back across the same piece instead of working the other one. (As the work gets longer I'll safety pin the two pieces together closer to the top for the same reason.)

How did I manage to take the photos above? Not by growing extra arms, that's for sure. So far all of the "hands working" shots on this blog have been taken by Alex, my 8th grade daughter. She may not knit, but she handles a mean digital camera.

Technorati : knitting

Another lost entry that didn't transfer correctly from the old site. This one originally appeared on 21 June 2004.

Well, my mindless knitting has suffered the intrusion of some thinking. Looking at my 9-inch deep yoke I've decided to pull it all out and start again:

(That's my toe holding down the edge, clad in a Regia 6-Ply Crazy Color sock.) Why rip back? Two reasons. First, I don't like the one-row color stripe widths that the larger circumference piece sports. While I realize that stripes won't be as deep as the ones on my socks, I like the upper part of the yoke better, where the shorter rows and bounce reflections off the neck hole made the stripes wider. Second, I don't like the way the mini-cable on the raglan "seam" is coming out. I had started this piece on one circ, then moved to two. For some reason, when I moved to two the width of the framing purl stitches decreased considerably. While this tighter look is better, it does leave the upper part looking sloppy by comparison. So having knit up around 2.25 skeins, it's back to ripping for me.

I think I'll begin again, also doing a raglan, but I won't get caught up in the idea of matching stripes across the raglan seam (near impossible with this yarn unless you knit in the round). It will be boring as heck, and seamed to boot, but I think the stripes will work out better on shorter width pieces of knitting.

Sigh. At least house stuff is going well. Here's another couple details - the window from the living room, looking out on the porch, and the fireplace from the wall facing it. The same window is also on the dining room wall.

I'm pretty sure that the inside fireboxes of both fireplaces have been rebuilt. To my untrained eye, the plain brickwork surrounds are a bit incongruous, especially with the red tile hearth, but they appear to be original. Also through the window you can see another of my nuisances. The pressboard hutch so generously left by the former owners. The house contains a few pieces of abandoned furniture for which I now have to arrange charitable donation. Grrr.

Technorati : knitting

Another AWOL post. I've got another week or so of these to post, so I'm going to have to finish catching up tomorrow. This one originally appeared on 20 June 2004.

I'm delighted to report that my time crawling through crawl spaces is about at an end. I've finished clearing out the old insulation, and can now turn my attention to ridding the house of picturesque but destructive ivy. (Stucco doesn't like ivy.) Dust masks are still the order of the day, but working standing up and outdoors has a lot to recommend it. Also, the kids can help, at least for the parts of this task that do not require ladders.

I'm afraid I still haven't had much time to knit. I've been busy measuring, then doing dimensioned layouts of the house in Visio. We're using them to help plan where our stuff goes, and for the electrician, so he knows where to place services. Here's the result for the two front rooms and three-season porch.

Going back from this point, beneath the dining room is the kitchen, beneath the living room is the den, followed by a back bedroom we will be using as an office. A long hallway with stairs up extends from the center opening.

Before you ask, there's no particular price break on not running phone, cable and network to all rooms at the same time as we trench the plaster walls to upgrade the regular electrical wiring. Even though we have only one TV and are not planning on having more than one, we'll have the flexibility to move it around should we so desire. Another consideration - should we have to sell, having the house fully wired is a value point. As far as the furniture, painting, and decorating go right now we're concentrating on getting the major infrastructure things done. Cosmetics and aesthetics will have to wait their turn, and our jumbled mix of yard sale finds, first apartment stuff, and one or two decent pieces will have to do for the foreseeable future.

Actual Knitting

With all this crawling around and drafting, I've had very little time or energy for think-work or involved knitting. I've fallen back into the project I had set aside for vacation relaxation. I'm doing a quick raglan pullover in Regia 6-Ply (6-Fadig) Crazy Color for The Smallest One. Nothing fancy - just a top-down stockinette piece with a two-stitch cable detail on the raglan seams. I'm about six inches into the thing so far. I'd take a picture, but all you'd see is a jumble of red, blue, yellow and green stripes jammed onto a circular needle. My only regret is that if I'm using up this project to unwind after a day of house nonsense, I'll have to find something else mindless to knit while I stare off at the sea.

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ANOTHER INNOCENCE LOST

I can truly say that I've had a new experience this week. One that now ranks in my all-time top ten list of nasty things to do.

Removing fiberglass insulation from a crawl space on a hot summer day.

There's a reason why they call it a crawl space. There's nothing like doing physical work in a dimly lit baking hot, confined cubbyhole; wearing a hooded long-sleeve sweatshirt, fogged goggles on top of fogged glasses; with dust in the air so thick you can feel it working its way through the fabric of your clothes, and a respirator mask that would better be called an asphyxiation mask.

I've finished three of eight cubbyholes. That leaves five plus the attic proper to go. It would be faster except the misguided SOB that installed this stuff insisted on tamping all of the roof soffits full in addition to just tacking the batts to the underside of the rafters. That has to be fished out by reaching down as far as one can into filthy, inky blackness, and grabbing whatever can be found. Insulation, mummified dead birds, whatever...

Then there's the joy of schlepping mounds of shredded, moldy, irritating fuzz down two flights of stairs and into the dumpster - one armload at a time because anything larger won't fit through the house's hallways. If only I could have rented a debris chute, too.

All this is to explain why absolutely no knitting went on in my life yesterday, so there is nothing for me to report on the filet lace project.

Did you know that if enough fiberglass gets into one's ears, even they itch?