Prime Time Knitter

June Bugged and July Baked

For the last five or six weeks, I’ve had nothing to show for my hours of knitting.  I switched to shawl knitting as an antidote to the hot weather, which had not yet arrived in June, by starting the Tendrils crescent shawl in the latest Twist Collective.  This was intended to get me acclimated not only to the weather but to knitting with beads.

Well, the bead knitting was easy enough.  What was not easy enough was every other aspect of this shawl.  Let’s just say I crawled up my learning curve by taking one step forward and two steps back.  I’d like to say that I made every mistake possible, but new possibilities keep cropping up.  This is not the shawl that is warming me up for Evenstar, but a formidable challenge of its own.

The first hurdle was casting on the 507 stitches to start the shawl.  This is my first bottom-up shawl, and just that task alone gave me some pause.  I counted the stitches a zillion times before purling back and getting ready for the lace border.  I did manage to get the 507 stitches cast on.  Don’t rush to congratulate me yet.

On my first pass, I learned that dropping a purl stitch sends you back to square one.  This is 100% silk lace and very slippery, so what might be forgiven on wool (a stitch “stuck there” waiting to be picked up) is a disaster on silk. The stitch falls into the cast-on row.

So back to square one.  I cast on again, purled back, and was ready for the first lace row.  No drumrolls yet though.  I read the chart incorrectly and didn’t knit the edge stitch.  So when I managed the 506 lace stitches, without a flaw, I had two stitches at the end of my needle when I should have had one. 

I thought I’d tink back, despite the annoyance of doing so, but that was an exercise in futility.  The beads flew everywhere and the knit 3 tog’s disappeared into oblivion.  I ripped out everything and started again.

Hah.  I’m not going to make these mistakes again.  And I didn’t.  But, lest you not be aware of it, silk lace spins around on the circular cable.  After knitting up to about row 15, I realized that I had twisted the yarn in Mobius-like fashion—something I have never done before. And never hope to do again.

Back to square one.  This time, despite one minor hitch, I appear to have done it:

 

 The flaw is here:

 

I’m actually not sure what I did.  The yarnovers flop over the knit stitches next to them (or the purls on the wrong side), and it is easy to knit or purl the stitches out of order.  I think I did that, and then tried to put the stitches back on the needle.  In any case, this better block out because I’m not ripping again. 

Despite the aggravation, I love this project.  It would have been in the trash had I not been so captivated.  And I’m now happy to be working on it after nearly three weeks of unrelenting heat (we’re headed for two 100˚ days before the latest heat wave ends—and not even for that long).

Until this week, when the temperatures because stifling, my garden had done pretty well.  This is what it looked like at the start of July.

 

My new "capital improvement" for this year was the purchase of a large roll of shade cloth (the green stuff), which is saving my beets and chard.  The broccoli in the back two rows didn't make it.

I’m particularly pleased with my garlic harvest (nearly 7 lb!).

And even more pleasing, with a face only its mother and a gardener could love, is a praying mantis (actually, I have spotted two).  I’m thankful to my knitting friend Sara for giving me an egg case last fall. 

The garden doesn’t look quite so orderly now because the rule around here is not to weed when the temperatures soar into the 90s and the air quality is unhealthy.  Also the plants are very stressed.  But I had a great salad year, and it looks like a wonderful pepper and green bean year as well.  My fingers are crossed for the tomatoes.

Decapitation

Knitting in public poses a dilemma for me. I feel incredibly lucky to be a member of a group of interesting and passionate knitters who meet weekly and a group of library knitters who meet once a month. I enjoy sharing advice and tips and the general conversation about all sorts of topics. But these sessions require a particular kind of project. It has to be easy enough for me to knit it while not paying complete attention, and I have to know what I want to do. Therein lies the complication. 

I designed my no-name jacket specifically as a knitting-in-public project, and it worked for a while. The stitch motif is ridiculously easy (two rows of ribbing punctuated by two rows of reverse stockinette), and I did not want to attempt to shape a sweater using yarn as heavy as this. I wanted a roomy jacket to wear over a shirt or blouse, so the body is just rectangular. But there have been instances in which I did have to pause and work things out. The pockets were one such diversion.

Before a session at the library when I was up to the sleeves, I wrote down what I thought would be the decreases for a fitted sleeve. This did not seem particularly complicated because I have another sweater with approximately the same measurements, and I could just (or so I thought) “wing it.” Somehow while winging it at the library, I lost count on Sleeve #1 (you could see that coming—right?).  But rather than work out what I had done, I just plunged ahead.  I should get someone to stitch me a sampler that says, “plunge blindly ahead now, frog later.” 

The sleeve turned out to be a bit trapezoidal, and close to raglan shaping. 

I wasn’t happy about this, but I thought, “Hey, I can ease this into the armhole, and everything will be ok.” Well, that bit of logic didn’t exactly work out either. I didn’t try to get it to fit in the armhole because another problem arose when I tried to get Sleeve #2 to match it. I knit what I thought I had written down, and Sleeve #2 didn’t match Sleeve #1. I ripped it and knit what I thought I ought to have written down. Still no good.

So true to my fashion, I ripped out everything (Sleeve #2’s cap and Sleeve #1’s cap) and started over.

While I was on my unintended blog hiatus, on one of those rare instances when my old Mac cooperated enough for me to do some web surfing, I came across this book. 

It was described in a blog post (now lost from my computer forever) showing elegant shoulder decreasing—like that on an expensive cashmere sweater. And I thought, "Ooh, I've got to learn to do that."

The book is out of print, but available from used booksellers, and I borrowed a copy as an interlibrary loan just to be sure the $30 would be worth it.  And oh is it.  This book describes mathematically every bit of flat sweater designing anyone is likely to want to do. If you are as much of designing nerd as I am, you’ll find it irresistible. It complements all my other sweater design books and is a huge star in my personal knitting library.  I’ll continue to sing the praises of this book in future posts, but for now, I just checked the fitted sleeve shaping discussion and used it to respace the decreases. 

Sleeve #2 now looks like this.

 

This is much closer to the shape I really want in a fitted sleeve. And after last night’s session at the library, Sleeve #1 now matches it. So I’m on to the fronts to complete the neck shaping.

Lady in Waiting

I feel as if I’ve spent this past week waiting around.  A week ago on Friday, when I came home from my annual mammogram (and spent this week waiting for the results—all is ok), I discovered I had no phone or Internet.  So I waited around all day on Saturday for the FIOS tech to fix my connection.  I had fond hopes of spending that rainy Saturday on either restoring my iTunes library or improving the look of this blog, but I passed the time instead by filing papers in my office without, alas, the distraction of Ravelry.  

When I got back online, I ordered the beads for Evenstar.  I have found two excellent Internet sources for beads: Auntie’s Beads, where I got the gold beads for Tendrils, and Aura Crystals, where I bought beads for Evenstar.  I’m pleased with the match:

These are Miyuki seed beads, Duracoat galvanized, size 8/0, in light cranberry.

Then I ordered wooden buttons from Pymatuning Crafts, an etsy shop, for my no-name jacket. 

The buttons are departure from my usual choice.  Typically, I match the fabric closely so as not to detract from the knitting.  But the color of this yarn is elusive, not only for my photos (this one is accurate), but for matching other colors.  Purple doesn’t work—the yarn is not really purple, but a mix of maroon and deep blue, with flecks of white.  Black disappears.  And I wanted to capture the rustic feel of the yarn.  So I selected a button that would complement the mule-spun yarn.  I still feel as if this isn’t “me,” but I’ll wait to pass judgment when the sweater is assembled.  I do love the buttons.

I couldn't wait for the beads and buttons to come, and to thwart my enthusiasm our regular mail carrier went on vacation.  My mail service is pitiful because I am the fifth house from the end of the route (which based on the time it takes to get here must start in Biloxi, or maybe even Nome), and even under the best circumstances, I don’t get mail until late afternoon (on very snowy days, not at all).  I thought the packages would show up on Wednesday, and I must have checked my mailbox twenty times waiting for the substitute mail carrier to show up.  Shortly after 5 PM the packages arrived.

On the garden front, we have been waiting for veggies to eat.  The garden is off to a very slow start because this has been a very strange spring.  April and May have been cold, and a few night’s ago there was even a frost warning.  April was so dry that I thought we’d have water restrictions again, but rain finally did come in the form of a 2-inch deluge in a single day.  Now it is dry and still cold, although punctuated by some warm days.  But here the waiting has been rewarded:

 

My salad greens (8 varieties, some shown in the picture) and lettuce (10 varieties) are about the best I recall, and we’re now having salad every night. 

It is still far too cold to put my tomatoes out (I’m waiting for mid-June to be on the safe side).  But waiting for the warm weather should give me a chance to finish that jacket, which is going in fits and starts.  More precisely, the sleeve caps are giving me fits and will need to be restarted—but more on that next time.

A Half-Century of Knitting

One thing about not posting for a while is that there’s a backlog of things to write about, so for this post I’ll travel back in time a bit to the end of February when I passed another birthday.  This was hardly a unique experience—I’ve had so many birthdays that yet another is not noteworthy. (What I suppose would be noteworthy is if I stopped having birthdays, although I wouldn’t be around to contemplate that state of affairs.) But what I did realize and found very jarring is that it was the 50^th anniversary of my birth as a knitter. 

If we travel back farther in time to my 16^th birthday, we arrive at my initiation as a knitter. It all started quite innocently.  All my friends decided to knit bulky sweaters (the size 10 ½-needle variety), and although I wasn’t necessarily one to slavishly follow trends, I was, like any teenager, easily persuaded by my friends.  After begging and pleading with my mother to let me buy yarn—not that skinny out-of-date 1940s yarn she had stashed—she finally relented and took me to a yarn store.  There I got some fire-engine red yarn and a mimeographed (yes, this was before copiers were invented) pattern.

It is a miracle that I persisted in my knitting career.  That first sweater was an unmitigated disaster.  Oh, the knitting was nice enough, but you could fit two of me in it.  Something stuck, however, and I persisted.  Sweater #2 was better, Sweater #3, a tennis sweater, became a favorite, and by then I was on a roll.  I haven’t kept a lot of my early sweaters, but I do have one that I enjoyed knitting and wearing.

It was hard to find good yarn in the late 60s and early 70s, but this was an exception.  It was a Swiss import of wool and mohair (Spinnerin, I think), and the pattern came from Vogue Knitting before it disbanded publication in the 1970s. I bought the bone buttons for an outrageous $8 (for all 12 of them—there are a couple of extras) at Lord & Taylor in New York City, when it still had a fabric department.  This sweater was completed in 1966, because that is when I had a summer job as a switchboard operator and bought the buttons during my lunch hour. 

I might add that a modeling shot of this sweater is out of the question.  It measures 32 inches across the chest, and that includes a few inches of ease.  My days of having a chest measurement like that have long since been over.

Here’s another early effort that I knit at age 17 for my mother.  This was knit from Bernat baby yarn (wool and nylon) from a Bernat pattern leaflet.

I found this among my mother’s things and was surprised that she kept it all these years.  I was also surprised at how good the knitting was, and how painfully inept the finishing was.  Like Marcel Proust and his madeleine, this one brought back memories.  I recalled how much fun it was to string the sequins onto the yarn and have them twinkle as they formed the shiny bands on the front of the sweater.

I’m not sure I’m attempting to recapture my youth, but twinkly knitting has definitely been on my mind for a while.  I think the attraction arose from seeing finished beaded shawls knit by those in my knitting group—once again influenced by knitting friends.  So as I contemplate switching from wool sweaters to summer lace, I came upon Tendrils, Susanna IC’s beautiful beaded shawl (crescent version), that was in the most recent release of the Twist Collective.  I’ve had this nice silk lace in my stash for a few years (Long Ridge Farm 100% silk), and the shiny beads arrived this week:

 

 Although I don’t expect to be knitting for another 50 years, I’ve got to make the most of the time I have left.  After all there are fewer and fewer years to knit up my stash.

Apples, Lemons, and Lemonade

    If life gives you lemons…

I’m ready for the lemonade part of the old adage after spending a couple of months of dealing with lemons.  Up to now, it has just been sloth and too many commitments that have disrupted my blogging, but starting in midwinter, my Mac began to act strangely.  I noticed that it would not restart (warm boot for you Windows fans), and then it wouldn’t awaken from sleep.  I began my many treks to the Apple Store, where the various Geniuses got it to run again.  But a few weeks to a few days later, after the fixes and replacement in the inner guts, the problems would arise again.  On the next-to-last visit, the techs erased everything and installed the new (Mountain Lion) operating system.  This too did not cure the problem, which had extended from not awakening from sleep to having the screen go black after a few hours of work.  I did not lose any of my work files, but I found that I was very lax in backing up my browser bookmarks, my iTunes library, some emails, and many photos.  Eventually, the folks at Apple honored my service agreement by giving me a new machine:

I’m now the proud owner of the new retina display 27-inch Mac:

It is almost as thin as a credit card:

 

So although this is “dandy,” it left me very far behind in my work. I’m finally caught up and now at the point where I can reinstall my bookmarks (I did have the sense at one point to print them out) and then burn my CDs back to iTunes and rebuild my library. (This is not a total disaster because most of my library is classical music, and iTunes needs to be coaxed to categorize it correctly.  I really don’t want 150 “songs” called allegro moderato.)  And now I’m back to blogging.

During this time, I have been knitting away.  My self-designed jacket, which has no name, lacks the top of one sleeve cap and the completion of the front. 

One reason this has been sitting around is that I couldn’t read my notes, and the cap for Sleeve #2 does not match the cap for Sleeve #1.  At this point, it would be nice to complain about the sloppiness of the designer or the poorly written instructions, but since there’s no one to blame but myself, I’ll just spend the next quiet hour I have counting the decreases on the first sleeve and seeing where things went awry.  I also can no longer procrastinate as to what kind of collar I want or buy the wood buttons I found on etsy that seem as if they’ll do nicely for this project.

Another project that is in the works is the Canyonlands shawl by verybusymonkey.  This was intended as a knit-in-public project, but I’m done with the easy part and on to attaching the border.  This has to be done at home in relative quiet.

And then there’s Mara.  This is definitely not a knitting-in-public project.  Sleeve #1 is a few rows from completion (before the ribbing), and I have to devote some time this weekend to picking up the stitches around the other armhole and getting it started.  Time is fleeting for this project because I know I won’t want all that wool on my lap in a few weeks.  But our spring has been cool, and there is a small window of time to get this rolling again. 

There should be no more excuses for long gaps in blog posts, and I certainly have a lot to say with all these projects on the needles, plans for warm-weather lace, purchases of new books, and my efforts to categorize my stash (the sock yarn is now on Ravelry!). And having been without a reliable computer for so long, I'm now resuming my travels in cyberspace--I especially missed visits to my favorite knit bloggers.

Lining My Pockets

If I believed in conspiracy theories, I’d be certain that there were forces in the universe determined to stop me from writing blog posts. This past week it was my computer—again.  Although I love Macs and I am delighted with my 27-inch iMac, this is the second time it has needed a repair to restore an ominous black screen to vibrant color. The various Mac geniuses are accommodating (and the machine is covered by a service contract), but my machine ends up spending several nights away from home, and I’m cast out of cyberspace.  I’m not sure that everything is 100% better, but it’s working now, so I’ll make the most of the opportunity.

I have been knitting at night, perhaps more so because I could not be distracted by Ravelry, and I got fairly far on my jacket knit from Beaverslide’s McTaggart Tweed in the nightshade colorway.

This self-designed jacket was intended as a project I could knit in public.  Mara is just too demanding with its 14 colors.  Now that I’m up to Mara's sleeves, the decreases need careful attention. The four-row repeat in McTaggart Tweed pattern (2 rows of 1 x 1 ribbing separated by two rows of reverse stockinette) is perfect for knitting while chatting and drinking coffee.

But even easy sweaters need some concentration from time to time, and my jacket was no exception. This stumbling block was self-imposed because I had the brilliant idea to insert slanted pockets—not just slanted pockets, but pockets with a different stitch motif inside than out.  I wanted to make the most of the nubbiness of the yarn by adding texture to the fabric.  Because I don’t have the physique of a runway model (nor am I ever likely to), I did not want the double thickness of the textured fabric over my abdomen. In fact, one reason for the pockets was to give me the illusion of having a smaller waistline than I actually do.  I’m not sure I can disguise my waistline completely, but it is worth a try.

The Principles of Knitting has an excellent description of knitting slanted pockets, and I found one blog post that did a good job of photographing the basics.  So here I’ll show the variations needed to line the pockets in a stitch pattern that differs from the one seen when the jacket is worn.  I had a tough time capturing the color of the yarn because I did this at night—which explains why the colors differ so much from photo to photo.

Step 1 is to prepare the pocket lining, which hangs a few inches below the slit.  My pocket lining is in stockinette.  On the front (the right front), the stitch holder contains the stitches that will be at the side seam.

Step 2 is to knit the slit.  I determined the length by measuring (with the help of a sweatshirt) the distance I wanted the pocket to end near the center front—about 2 inches.  There will be a 1 or 1 ½ inch buttonband, adding a little more space to the sweater front.

To get the slanted edge, I decreased every other row (on the wrong side because the decreases looked better) from the bottom end of the pocket until I got to the 2-inch part at the top.  The textured pattern turned out to be a benefit because it made it easy to count the rows.

Step 3 is the attachment of the pocket lining to the stitches on the holder that fall near the side seam.  This is simple—just as for a plain stockinette pocket.  I just knit across in stockinette until I came to the pattern, and then I switched to the textured motif.

Step 4 is where the fun begins.  I mirrored the decreases on the pocket slit by shifting one stitch from stockinette to the pattern for every slit decrease.

This is what it looks like when that process is complete.  I actually had to fudge a bit here because there were 5 stockinette stitches on the left front.  To get the pattern, which is an odd number of stitches, to work out visually, I had to end with 6 stockinette stitches.  If you try this at home, just let the pattern dictate (within reason) the number of stitches that you’ll join to the slit piece.

In this photo, the green marker (a bit subtle in the photo) on the left is where the pocket lining started.  I moved the purple marker for every stockinette stitch that was converted to the textured stitch, just to keep track of what I was doing.

And voilà—once those 6 stitches on the pocket were knitted together with 6 stitches on the public textured side, I had two slitted pockets that matched.

As for making me look slimmer, only time will tell.  I’ve finished one sleeve and have the cap to do on the other.  I also have not figured out the collar yet, so another pause for some thought is on the horizon.

 

Shut Out—and In

It is a good thing that I didn’t proclaim as a New Year’s resolution that I’d be writing two or three posts a week because I was shut out of posting again by work on the house.  I had purchased indoor shutters for my bedrooms, which were delayed because Hurricane Sandy damaged the factory that makes them.  So last week some workdays were lost during the shutter installation and the electrical work on the ceiling lights for those rooms.  I made up the work hours on other days and weekends, and blogging and other housekeeping chores were the casualties. (Vacuuming is still on my to-do list, so you can see how I rate that in terms of importance.) 

But I’m absolutely thrilled at the results, particularly in my knitting/sewing room. 

It is now looking less like a bedroom and more like the “woman cave” I intend it to be.  There will be more work on that room eventually, but my decorating dollars are being allocated to the living room and kitchen for the foreseeable future.  With the purchase of those cheap shelves from Target to hold my knitting book collection and some notions, it is now time to get it organized. 

That formidable task will take a long time, and I’m not putting a due date on its eventual completion.  For now, I’ll be starting with my knitting needles—mostly because I can never seem to find the ones I need.  The set of drawers on top of the shelves, purchased from the Container Store, holds my straights, circulars, and dpns, but not my interchangeable sets or the sets of Knit Picks dpns, which come in their own plastic sleeve.  I do like having the interchangeables in one place, so one of the shelves in the Target book case will have to house the miscellaneous needles that aren’t in the drawers.  The needles in the drawers may be misfiled. I’m sure that a burglar has not entered our house and made off with the “missing” ones (leaving my TV and computers untouched), so I’ll be on the hunt to see where I squirreled them away.

I also discovered another box of knitting books.  Those books aren’t shelved.  Although that bookshelf might seem deceptively neat, it is really a jumble. 

Despite the disruption in getting work done last week, I did knit.  DS informed me on the first day of last week’s cold snap that his gloves never showed up when he unpacked his clothing (which was removed from his closet and stored in the garage and basement prior to having the floors finished and room painted).  I volunteered to knit him a pair of the warmest mittens I could imagine, and I used bits of leftover Morehouse Merino (two-ply, in natural, undyed shades). The pattern is from Folk Mittens.  These are the Salish (Cowichan) mittens, and the pattern was very easy to follow.  I wanted something that required no modifications because I needed them in a hurry—and all worked as planned.

I decided to use the weaving-in method for the colorwork to prevent floats from catching on Will's fingers. It was a nice practice piece for the method I'll be using later in the year on my Philosopher's Wool sweater. 

The mittens were also knit as a public service because whenever I finish a heavy wool garment, it becomes unseasonably warm.  So today we’re basking in about 50° weather. Although it is gray and damp, it isn’t in the teens.

One reason I’m back on track with my work hours is that I appear to have some sort of respiratory virus that is keeping me from swimming and the gym in general.  I doubt if this is the flu because I don’t feel that sick (just unpleasantly stuffy), and it is definitely not the Noro virus because I’m eating much more than I should for just sitting around without exercise.  So while I am stuck at home and waiting around for it to go away, I might just take a lunch break and sort those needles.

No Quick Fix

There are mistakes that make you feel like a fool, and there are mistakes that make you feel like a fool but teach you something. 

I’ve now picked out the rows with the wrong yarn dominance on Mara’s sleeve, and I’m back on track with the sleeve knitting. This was a mistake that made me feel like a fool and taught me nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. It should have taught me to read my notes, but I know this kind of error will persist as long as I can hold a pair of knitting needles. I suppose it is the knitting gods way of keeping me from getting too big for my britches.

There was another mistake a while back that did teach me something about fixing errors in stranded knitting. Despite the care I had taken to check my work each night and the following morning, slapping myself on the back for achieving near perfection, I spotted a stitch that was the wrong color:

How could I have made such a mistake and missed it entirely? How could I have knit so many rows before noticing? I suppose everything I know from watching cop shows on TV is right: Eyewitness accounts aren’t reliable.

This error was in the center back, and so I imagined people staring at it behind my back, where it would act as a beacon attracting their attention.  The morning after the discovery, I played the “can-you-find-the-mistake?” game with DH.  He responded with a “no-not-again” look on his face, and he said he couldn’t find it—but he always says that. Or what’s worse, he will point to something that is perfectly fine on my knitting and suggest that I rip, just to keep me in practice. DS was also given this test on Mara’s back and he stared blankly at the knitting, unable to figure out what I was so insistent was a glaring mistake.

I appear to have split the plies on the salmon yarn, and knit it instead of the red.  I’m guessing that when I measured my work, a few stitches fell off the needle, and I didn’t put them back carefully. But I could not leave this as is.

My first response was to do the knitting equivalent of sweeping it under the rug—duplicate stitch.  And this did work to disguise the errant stitch when I tried it. But that didn’t really make me happy because the mistake would always be there. I wondered about dropping down stitches to fix the mistake, just as I would for one color knitting.  But this raised the specter of having to tink back dozens of rows should the operation go awry.

I spent some time searching to see if there were any bloggers who fixed dropped stitches in stranded knitting, and there were a few encouraging bits of advice.  So I decided to practice on my swatch by deliberately dropping a stitch and then picking it up.  If it didn’t work, I’d only have a messed-up swatch.

It turns out that dropping stitches in stranded knitting is not as horrible as it might seem.  The yarn is sticky, and you have to pick out the stitches above the mistake with some force.  This is what a column of intentionally dropped stitches is like.

After practicing, I marked the row I wanted to drop on Mara’s back.

 

Using a crochet hook and some care, I was able to knit the stitch in red and then pick up the stitches over the correction.

When blocked, this fix will be invisible. It is only a bit more difficult than duplicate stitch, and it gives a much better result.

 

WEBS Surfing

I managed to knit out of my stash for most of 2012, but when the fall fiber fairs were held and when my inbox was stuffed with emails announcing incredible end-of-the-year sales, I found myself doing what any serious knitter would do.  In sum, I’m welcoming a lot of new yarns to my stash. 

The most recent foray into the world of yarn vendors was a trip to WEBS on the day after Christmas.  The main reason I wanted to visit the store in person was to see the tweed yarns.  I have been slowly acquiring a lot of tweedy yarns for some future burst of solid-color cabled sweater knitting, and there were some intriguing options that don’t show up well on my computer monitor when I surf online retailers.  When I entered WEBS, I had decided to limit myself to one batch of sweater yarn after I carefully and meticulously compared all the different kinds of tweed.  I really had no intention of buying any sale yarn…that is, until Deborah, expert driver and enabler, showed me WEBS’ sale rooms.

We arrived at WEBS about a half-hour before it was open, and only a few cars were parked waiting for the start of the sale—but we were the first ones in.

 

When you walk into WEBS, there is a huge selling floor with rows and rows of yarn bins and sample garments.  

I was happily wandering in the maze of yarn until Deborah encouraged me to look at the $2 and $5 baskets. 

I could not resist this 100% merino superwash from Pagewood Farms, which was $5.

And I had a similar weakness for the Italian wool-cashmere mix at $2 per ball.  I have enough here (around 650 yards) for a very nice shawlette.

And if you visit WEBS and can’t find what you want in the main part of the store (something I cannot imagine ever happening), the warehouse in the back is also available for browsing.

The yarn I came for, Debbie Bliss Luxury Aran Tweed, was a special order, and there was an email message yesterday saying it is now on its way—and I sure hope my mail carrier takes the “Priority” part of the package label to heart.  So for now, I’m looking forward to a weekend or two or three of swatching cables, as I try to focus on gaining control of the WIPs I’ve vowed to finish.

 

Into the Woulds

Every year at this time, I flirt with the resolutions that afflict so many knitters: 12 sweaters, 52 pairs of socks, 13 whatevers in 2013.  But if growing old has taught me anything, it is that by this time next year I won’t have a fraction of those items.  It is tempting, as I look at my boxes of stash yarn, to think that 12 of them might be empty at this time next year.  That would certainly ease my conscience when I get to fiber festivals or yarn stores, but I know it won’t happen (not the fiber fairs—the FOs).

So rather than resolutions, I’m thinking of things I would like to knit.  In one case, the decision has been made for me.  Our knitting group had a Secret Santa, and my present, which still has me gasping with delight, was this yarn from Chameleon Colorworks:

I have yet to knit a circular shawl, and I have more than 1800 yards of this heavenly stuff. I have looked at Evenstar many times, but the yardage of my stash lace yarn is insufficient. I think that Evenstar will be this summer’s project. 

But less fanciful projects on the “I would like to finish them list” is the Helena baby sweater.  I’m up to the front border, and I did some diving in my button stash and found these vintage buttons. They more than likely belonged to my mother—note the 60¢ price.  The pattern calls for knitted tie closures, but in this soft yarn, I think they would pill and fray, so I’m adding buttons.  The end is near on this one, so it is close to being my first 2013 FO.

I know that knitting top-down, in the round, is the method of choice for most knitters, but after knitting sweaters in the round for most of this year, I found myself longing to do something flat that would require purling and seaming.  I also needed something to knit in my knitting group that I could not possibly screw up. (Fair Isle it turns out is far too challenging for group knitting—at least for me.) So I started my own design using Beaverslide Drygood’s McTaggart Tweed in nightshade and a motif with a 4-row repeat (and two of those rows are stockinette). 

The yarn is surprisingly soft for a tweed and very enjoyable to knit with.  The back is done, as are most of the two sleeves.  The hang-up on this one is that I wanted slanted pockets on the front.  Not only do I want them to slant, but I want the pocket inside to be plain stockinette to avoid extra bulk over my stomach (which has sufficient bulk of its own to require no added help).  So I’m knitting the rest of the sleeves in public for now, and I started wrestling with the pockets during fleeting periods of quiet at home.  I also haven’t quite decided on the collar and whether I want a zipped front or buttons.  It is possible it will have a belt.  This one is evolving as I go along—and it could be my 2013 Rhinebeck sweater.

And then there is Mara.  Mara and I have been on a trial separation for about five weeks, but I think I’m ready to reconcile. I got exasperated with her, and me, when I messed up the yarn dominance on the light blue motif. Despite meticulously writing down on the chart which hand holds which color, for a third time when knitting this motif, I didn’t read my notes.  Some rows after holding the yarn incorrectly, I found myself wondering why the colors just didn’t look right.  I have the last of four incorrect rows to tink out, and then I can resume. 

There is still a lot to do on this one—knitting sleeve #2, steeking and finishing the neck edge, and then weaving in ends and tacking down the insides of the steeks. If I keep at it, I might have it done before the weather warms up.  And I would like to knit another stranded sweater this year.

As far as more things that I would like to knit in 2013, there are more one-color sweaters, socks, a couple of scarves, and one or two hats.  But for now, I’m not looking past my current WIPs.

Happy New Year to all.