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Wingspan

I seem to be off knitting at the moment. I think we all go through these periods where we're just not feeling it, right? It's been so hot, and I've been on a reading kick instead (I read seven books during July!). I know the knitting mojo will come back, but for now, I've not knitted a stitch in at least a couple of weeks.

But since I photograph, and blog about, my knitting so sporadically these days (even when I AM knitting actively!), I still have something to show you!

Pattern: Wingspan
Yarn: Lang Yarns Jawoll Magic Dégradé
Needles: US4/3.55mm
Time: April 16 - May 6, 2012
Ravelry project page

This was such a fun knit...quick and easy, so perfect for knit night! I followed the pattern as written; I didn't wrap the stitches for the short rows (there are little holes, which I rather like the look of). I just knitted till I ran out of yarn, pretty much. And I liked it so much, I immediately started a second one in a more subdued yarn (which I will finish someday).

While this yarn is really vibrant and pretty, and it feels nice, I don't know as I would knit with it again. There were a lot of knots in the yarn, and they didn't even try to match the colors when they knotted it. You can see how the striping pattern is regular and predictable...except for where it isn't. I don't think anyone would ever notice if I didn't point it out, but it bothers me!

This ended up being sort of a strange size. It's not really long enough to be a scarf (for my tastes, anyway) but it's also not big enough to really be a shawl. It'll certainly work as a neck-wrap, but I'm not sure what, exactly, to call it. I hereby coin the word "sharf." Or should it be "scawl"?

PS. Kim is starting up Knitters' Hunk again! Come play with us!

Stormy

Before Hurricane Irene hit, I figured I'd better find some Storm Knitting to do -- something that would lend itself to knitting in low-light conditions if we lost power (since everything else I'm knitting at the moment requires actual light).  It took me a while to find something, but I finally settled on a pattern in my queue: the Storm Cloud Shawlette.  Appropriate, no?  As it turned out, it's a good thing I did this - we made it through the entire storm just fine, only to lose power at 10pm on Sunday night, long after the rain and winds had stopped.  Go figure.  We had 48 hours without electricity.  My mother-in-law, who lives nearby, DID have power, so we showered there in the mornings and had dinner there after work, but then went home for bedtime.  Jim read with his favorite booklight, I knitted by candlelight.  And over the course of the outage, I knitted most of this shawl, finishing it in the next week.

That's a really horrid picture, but honestly, it's not a particularly photogenic project!  The yarn I used is my own handspun -- believe it or not, although I've been spinning for several years now, this is the first time I've knitted with my own yarn!  The fiber is a wool/bamboo blend from Creatively Dyed, and I purchased it at Rhinebeck 2008.  It went from this braid...

...to this singles...

...to this two-ply yarn...

...to this shawl.  It was really a good choice for this pattern; it's very light and drapey, but warm, and it striped ever so subtly, which works well with the semi-circular shape.  And I'm very pleased with how consistent the yarn was -- the plying was mostly very even, and the thickness pretty uniform too.  

The yarn was heavier than the yarn called for in the pattern, so I knitted this on pretty big needles - 10s, I think.  And truthully, I didn't have quite enough yarn -- I only managed to do a couple of rows of the ruffle after the final increase (rather than the 12, I think, that was called for) before needing to bind off -- and I literally had about two inches of yarn remaining after binding off my final stitch. So it's more of just a little flourish than a full-on ruffle, but this is a forgiving pattern so it doesn't matter.

This is on the small side -- I've not blocked it yet (and am not sure if I'll bother).  It's just large enough to drape over my shoulders.  I don't know how much use it'll really get, but it's pretty to look at -- far more than these poor pictures would suggest -- and I'll admit that I keep fondling it just to admire the yarn.  ;-)

 

Non-Traveling Woman

It's hard to scrape together the time and the money for travel these days.  So while I have been daydreaming about all the fabulous places we will go someday when we're not spending a gajillion dollars on daycare, I've been knitting this.

Pattern: Traveling Woman
Yarn: Ella Rae Lace Merino, color 115 (purchased from the back room at Webs!)
Needles: US6/4.0mm
Time: January 16, 2011 - July 1, 2011

LOVE this pattern!  It had been in my queue for some time, and I'm pretty sure that it's what I had in mind when I bought this yarn (for VERY cheap) some months ago.  It was a quick knit; as with so many of my projects, it only took as long as it did because I put it down for a while midway.  The lace part went very quickly, though -- it was very intuitive to me.

I just love the colors -- they remind me of the Caribbean on our honeymoon all those years ago.

This wound up being a pretty decent size -- not that I've measured it, but it's large enough to wear as a proper shawl, pretty much, rather than being scarf-sized like my Multnomah "shawl".  I believe the pattern calls for three repeats of the lace chart; I did either four or five (how sad is it that I already don't remember?), and I'm glad I did.  I just have the tiniest bit of yarn left over -- one fewer repeat and I would have thought the finished object too small; one more, and I would have run out of yarn!

Remember this stuff?

Looking at my recent posts, you might forget that this whole thing here started as a knitting blog.  You might not think so based on what I write about lately (fact: I had to go all the way back to BEFORE IAN'S BIRTH to find a knitting post with a finished item), but I do in fact still knit.  :-)  I am not nearly as diligent as I once was, thanks to the small man, but it's still going on.  I knitted a few little things for people at Christmas -- some hats and scarves and cowls which never got blogged -- but since then most of my knitting time has been taken up by a mystery project.  It's done now, but it must remain under wraps for another week or two.  

Back in January, I did finish a shawl. While I wore it frequently through the winter and spring, it's taken me this long to get it photographed.

Pattern: Multnomah Shawl
Yarn: Madeleinetosh Tosh Sock, color "shoreline"
Needles: US4/3.5mm
Time: April 23, 2010 - January 15, 2011

I started this shawl while having a non-stress test just after my due date -- I wanted to have something mindless with me when I went in for Ian's birth, in case I wanted to knit during my hospital stay.  As it turned out I didn't knit at all in the hospital (just during the several non-stress tests I had) but this shawl was my "pick up and knit a few rows" project during the first few months of Ian's life.  It was a quick knit, in terms of how much actual knitting time it took, but I literally worked on it just a couple of rows at a time over a period of months.  I worked on it while holding a sleeping Ian (and sometimes even when nursing him), while riding in the car, when I just needed a couple of rows to unwind in the middle of the night....it'll always remind me of that first year.

I love the colors, and I think the yarn is a perfect match for the pattern.  I think it looks like ripples on a lake.

My only wish is that I'd used a bigger needle - maybe a 6 or 7.  The shawl is denser and a little smaller than I would have liked.  But I love it regardless.

The last eight weeks

This is, already, my last week of maternity leave.  I've been off work for eight weeks (my last day at work was the Friday before Ian was born).  A week from today I go back -- I'll be working half-time for the next eight weeks, and then once that time is up I'll be going back full-time, though with a modified schedule so I can be at home with Ian a couple of days a week.  Part of me is looking forward to having a few hours a week in which I am (mostly) surrounded by adults and don't have to keep an eye on the baby...but then I look down at my little guy, who is just now starting to get interesting and interactive, and wonder how on earth I can possibly be even CONSIDERING leaving him.  Sigh.  I guess motherhood is all about guilt, isn't it?

Anyway, what, besides a baby, do I have to show for the last eight weeks?  I've managed to mostly keep up with the laundry and the dishes (with some help from Jim), which was my primary housekeeping goal.  I've made my goal of taking a shower each and every day, no matter what.  I've eaten an awful lot of popcorn.  I've ordered baby announcements but haven't gotten them in the mail yet (I should really do that, huh?)  I've watched more TV than I have ever watched before, I think.  (I can't bring myself to watch daytime television -- around here it's all Discovery Channel and reruns of CSI on Spike.  I think at this point, I've seen every single episode of Deadliest Catch multiple times.)

And I've managed just a little bit of crafty stuff.  

Some spinning: a 50/50 wool/bamboo blend, dyed by Creatively Dyed and purchased at Rhinebeck in 2008.

I started predrafting this fiber during the first week that Ian was home, and finally did the plying last week.  I LOVE THIS YARN.  It's smooth, shiny, oh so soft, and perfectly balanced -- not bad at all for my first time spinning since, oh, last summer?  It's about 210 yards and is sort of light worsted, as is most of the yarn I spin -- that seems to be my default setting.

And a little bit of knitting: this boring blob is a Multnomah shawl.  I've just started the lace portion, though you can't tell in the picture.

And contrary to popular belief, this isn't a hat.  It's a hippopotamus body, duh.  I got this done during the Worldwide Knit in Public Day event that I ran at my library on Saturday.  I don't think the rest of this project will take very long, in terms of actual knitting time.  Given how infrequently I knit, though, we'll see how many weeks it is before we have a completed project!

In other news, Gandalf is inching closer and closer to Ian.

Someday Ian will notice that the cats exist, and then they'll be in trouble.

Just a little knitting

Not much to say, but here's a little glimpse at what I'm working on...

First, the Moderne Baby Blanket.  It's going!  It felt like I was stalled for a long time, but then suddenly it got bigger all of a sudden.  I'm somewhere in the vicinity of two-thirds of the way through it right now, depending on what exactly the final size ends up being.

That beige block on the left blends in quite nicely with the carpet...heh.  This is currently measuring about 23"x29", so I've got about seven inches left to go in either dimension to hit my target size of 30"x36".  I'm not married to that exact size, though -- we'll see how it's looking as I add more blocks.  I've just started another block in that maize/gold color across the bottom (as this picture is oriented) and after that will come another dark blue block on the right side, I think.

I'm debating what I'm going to want to do for an edging -- applied i-cord?  Single crochet?  Just pick up and knit a garter stitch border in one color?  I do like how the garter edge looks on this, honestly, and think that that may be the way to go.  That's a lot of picking up and binding off, though...

I needed something else to work on -- the blanket is monotonous and getting pretty heavy to boot -- so I cast on a Lavalette shawl in this lovely yarn that I got from Kris in her recent destash.  It's Fiesta Yarns Ballet, it's alpaca and tencel, and it's soft and lovely.

This is a pretty basic pattern -- just stockinette sections interspersed with openwork mesh -- but the yarn is so nice that it's really soothing to knit, especially after the nubbly cotton I'm using for the blanket.

I have other things I want to cast on for RIGHT NOW -- another baby sweater (I've gotten it in my head that I want to bring the baby home in something I made for him, so I want to make a teeny-tiny sweater), and the hippo from Itty Bitty Toys!  I've got yarn lined up for both projects -- must get started!

I love the minishawl

I've got a couple more finished objects from 2009 to get through here...I can't even blame an end-of-the-year knitting flurry for the backlog, just laziness at getting things blogged!

Today's topic: Milkweed.

Pattern: Milkweed, by Laura Chau/Cosmicpluto Knits!
Yarn: Fleece Artist Somoko, "Paris" colorway
Needles: US6/4.0mm
Time: November 13 - December 9, 2009

I had kind of a love/hate relationship with this project.  I loved the pattern in theory, but didn't really enjoy knitting it (perhaps because, for some reason, I was NOT able to count while I was working on it.  Baby brain?).  The pattern was, however, VERY well written, and I particularly liked Laura's little touch of putting in numbers for the plain knitting sections, so when following the chart you wouldn't need to count that there were fifteen knit stitches in a row or whatever -- the "15" was right in the chart.  Loved the yarn, but wasn't sure it was right for the pattern.  And I wasn't crazy about how the finished product looked, at ALL -- until I blocked it.  And I'm very happy with how it came out.  So I don't know as I'd knit it again, but I'm glad I did.

I'd had this yarn in the stash for some time -- it's technically sock yarn, I believe, but for me it falls into the category of "sock yarn that is too nice for socks" (I have a lot of this sort of yarn, which I think is behind my recent obsession with the minishawl).  I decided on this particular yarn for this pattern because of the milkweed theme - the colors, in person, make me think of a flowering plant (a hydrangea bush, specifically, but there are others) when it's dried out and beginning to wilt in the fall.  It was a hard color for me to photograph, but it's a beautiful rich reddish brown with teal, magenta, and greenish-yellow streaked throughout.  Love it.

The bits of teal made it a perfect companion to the dress I wore to my sister-in-law's wedding on December 26 --  but it was quite warm in the room where the wedding was and, despite being in a sleeveless dress, I wound up not needing the shawl and so there are no Action Shots of it in use.  I do, however, have a series of photos demonstrating how helpful the cats were while I was blocking it (and also, how much it needed blocking!).

So now I need to decide on another minishawl to use up another skein of too-nice-for-socks sock yarn from the stash.  Maybe Damson? 

Blob no more

A few entries back, I introduced you to the purple blob - Ishbel. Well, Ishbel has been past the blob stage for a while now, but she hasn't gotten her day in the spotlight yet thanks to my poor blogging of late. 

I'm actually not sure when I finished knitting, but according to the EXIF data on the pictures, these photos (both pre-and post-blocking) were all taken on September 7.  I'm pretty sure that I finished the knitting and moved immediately into blocking, so we'll call Sept. 7 her end date, which means that this took me just over a month to knit.  Not bad for not having knitted much at all over the summer.  :-)

First, a couple of pre-blocking shots...

...and some post-blocking (well, to be fair, blocking-in-progress):

(As you can see, especially if you click on the picture to see the larger version over at Flickr, for some reason I had a heck of a time getting the points to scallop out evenly -- the left edge was more than happy to ease into nice points, while the right edge really seemed to want to stay flatter.  Can anyone think of a reason why this would be the case?  It's not like my gauge was different on one side of the row than on the other...)

Blocking really is magic.  I think this is the first time I've really blocked lace, and despite my issues with the scalloping, it was fun!   And not only did it open up the lace, it really made the shawl larger: pre-blocking it measured about 17” deep and 50” across the top, unstretched, and post-blocking it's about 24” deep and 60” wide.  It's a perfect size to wrap around my neck like a scarf (plus it stays on better that way than it does if I wear it like a "proper" shawl).  No action shots, though; sorry.  I'll try to work on that (though first I have to get her back from my MIL -- I accidentally left Ishbel at her house a couple of weeks ago!).

I knitted the "large" size shawl.  The skein of yarn I was using was 550 yards, and I had quite a substantial ball left over -- so my initial fears about running out of yarn were unfounded. 

This was possibly one of my favorite projects ever -- fun to knit, and I LOVE the finished product!  I see more small shawls in my future -- they're a great way to use all that sock yarn that I have deemed "too pretty for feet."  ;-)

I'm working on another blob now, but that's a post for another time...

The Blob

While I was in Washington, I cast on for Ishbel by Ysolda Teague.  I'd had this skein of gorgeous yarn in my stash for -- well, for a long time.  I bought it on eBay, back before Etsy had been invented (though the seller is now an Etsy shop), when I was a brand-new knitter.  In fact, I think it might have been the first yarn I ever bought online, although I'm not entirely certain.  I never had any real idea what I wanted to do with it -- I bought it just because it was pretty, and at 550 yards it was way more than I needed for a pair of socks, so I was holding out for something different -- but as soon as I saw Ishbel I knew that that was what it needed to be.  The yarn is Fearless Fibers sock yarn in "Midnight Passion" and it's a beautiful semi-solid purple, with lovely shades of indigo and violet.

Right now, of course, the project is still in the "blob" stage.  I'm farther along than I was when I took this picture -- I'm into the lace portion now -- but I suspect an updated photo would not look much different.  It may be a blob, but it's a really pretty blob.

Actually, I ran into a snag today.  I was knitting along -- I had completed chart A and was motoring along on chart B -- when suddenly, at the end of a row, I was off by one stitch.  And, sadly, whatever my mistake was, it was NOT on the row I'd been knitting, so there was no tinking back (I can't tink back multiple rows in lace).  Luckily I had been using a lifeline, but unluckily, the lifeline was five rows back (at the beginning of the chart) so I lost almost an entire chart's worth of knitting.  I ripped back and have gotten everything back on the needle (or so I hope -- need to double-check that) but haven't started reknitting yet.  Sigh.  A minor setback to be sure, but still, no one likes backwards progress!

I'm not certain yet what size I'm making.  The pattern calls for 610 yards of yarn, and I have 550.  I'm not sure how much of an approximation the 610 is -- maybe 550 will be enough, and maybe it won't.  I followed the "large" directions for the stockinette portion, but may opt for the "small" size lace.  The only difference is how many repeats of each chart are knitted.  I am planning on knitting through chart A, B, and then A again before deciding what to do.  (At that point, I move onto chart C if I decide to go small, or repeat A and B again if I choose large.) 

Voodoo Triangle

I mentioned in passing, quite some time ago, that one of my projects at the Baskets of Yarn knitting retreat this past March was entrelac.  I've been knitting on it here and there since then.  Want to see?

The pattern is the Autumn Entrelac Shawl by Jojoland, and it's knitted from Jojoland Rhythm, a yarn with very long color repeats (such that each ball of yarn in my bag looks completely different from every other ball -- you'd never know they were the same colorway!).  It's a triangular shawl, knitted from the top down, with a ruffle edging knitted separately and sewn on.  (I'm not sure I'll do the edging as called for in the pattern, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.)

Entrelac may be my new favorite thing.  It looks SO neat when it's done -- I've always admired it, but was afraid to try it myself, so I'm glad I had the opportunity to take Margaret's wonderful class at the retreat.  Had I attempted this on my own, I would have taken one look at the initial row of weird-looking triangles and been convinced that I was doing it incorrectly.  But no, it really DID look that weird at the beginning.  Plus, Margaret taught me how to knit backwards, so I don't have to constantly turn everything around for the purl row.  That was a lifechanging thing to learn, let me tell you!  And I find it fun and easy to knit as well -- just square after square, making it easy to pick up and knit for a short period of time and still have it look (and feel) like I actually accomplished something.

What makes it a Voodoo Triangle?  Well, there's the fact that entrelac is kind of voodoo to begin with, if you don't understand how it works -- it looks SO much more complicated and impressive than it actually is.  But really, the voodoo is in the geometry.  As I said, this is a top-down triangular shawl, and each row has one less square than the row before.  And through the magic of math, while it looks like I haven't gotten all that much done, I'm more than halfway through the body of the shawl -- I did out the math, and (not counting the initial row of triangles) there are 300 squares in the shawl, and I've gotten through more than 160 of them.  Amazing!

Incidentally, this thing is going to be huge.  Without any stretching or blocking, the top edge (which is the bottom edge in the photo above) measures over 60" -- my tape measures are all 60" long and it's wider than they are!  I don't think I'll block this severely, but still, it's not a small shawl.  I'm just afraid that before too long, it's going to be too warm to work on, what with all that wool in my lap.

Thwarted again!

Today's post was going to be about my Tour de Fleece progress....but I was thwarted!  My USB cable has disappeared from my computer again so I can't share pictures with you.  Grumble.  I will tell you, though, that I am nearly 2/3 of the way through my goal!  Whoo!  I've spun two of the rovings from my stash (my goal was to spin 3).  One of them is currently wound up on the niddy-noddy waiting to be washed and set; the other needs plying, washing, and setting.  I'll be away for five days between now and the end of the Tour (and I won't be bringing any spinning with me!) so it'll be a mad dash to the end, but I think I can do it!

Since I can't show you pictures of my pretty pretty yarn, I went though my iPhoto library to see if I had any recent things I'd photographed but not written about yet.  And, indeed, there are a few WIPs that haven't made it to the old blog before now.  So how about a brief glance at those?

First up: my first Summer of Socks sock.  Lots of people in the knitalong have already completed multiple pairs.  I've gotten through a sock and a quarter.  Go me.

I worked on this sock while we were on vacation, and finished it in the car on the way home (these pictures were taken in the car somewhere along the Masspike -- Massachusetts Turnpike, for you non-locals :-)).

I bought the yarn at last year's Massachusetts Sheep and Wool festival -- it's Spunky Eclectic "Super Nova" in the "Route 66" colorway. 

Next up: the Swallowtail Shawl.  I'm rather farther along now than I was when this picture was taken, although I really need to get cracking -- my hope is to wear this to a wedding we're going to in August but with my abysmal track record when it comes to deadline knitting, I figure that's probably not going to happen!  The yarn is Handmaiden Sea Silk, and it is gorgeous. 

That's all for now, I guess -- I'm off to ply, and I hope I can share spinning pictures with you soon!

Retreat Project #2: Linen Lace Wrap

The weather has been GORGEOUS lately and so I've been trying to spend time enjoying it, rather than sitting here at my computer in my dark room (the window faces north and it really is a dark room).  That, coupled with the fact that I have been -- gasp! -- EXERCISING REGULARLY, and knitting on some not-bloggable projects, means that I haven't been inspired to write much here.  That seems to happen to a lot of people in spring, though, so I don't feel too guilty.  :-)

Anyway. How about a project peek?  This project is another class I took at the retreat.  It was billed as the Linen Lace Wrap -- it's Macey, a free formerly free but now "subscription" pattern from Louet, knitted in Euroflax Linen.  I'm about one-third done -- more than that, actually, based on the number of repeats the pattern calls for, but I plan to knit until I run out of yarn and I'm not that far into the second of three skeins, so...

This is very VERY easy lace -- it's garter stitch and has a 12-row repeat, only four rows of which are patterned.  And in a first for me, I have the pattern memorized.  I can also knit on this while reading or watching TV -- in the past I've only been able to handle basic ribbing or simpler while doing something else, never an actual pattern.

The eyelet pattern is supposed to look like little flowers.  If I stretch it way out I can sort of see it, but I still think it looks more like cats' paws.  This isn't a terribly good detail picture, but you get the idea.

I'm plugging away at this little by little -- I went all gung-ho on it for a few days but now I'm back to the aforementioned secret knitting.  Still, though, I'd like to have this done before we go on vacation.  It seems like a good casual vacation wrap, no?

My third retreat project -- Jordana Paige's strawberry apron -- is totally on the back burner -- I haven't even touched it since returning from the retreat.  I do intend to finish it because it's such a fun project, but there are just too many things ahead of it in the queue at the moment.  Someday, someday...