Looking Glass Knits

Stating the obvious

2011-11-15T00:24:00.003-05:00

Hello to any loyal blog-readers who are left! It's pretty obvious that I've kind of run out of steam on the blog recently. I'm sorry not to have posted anything since May -- between the dissertation and my teaching I don't have tons of time for crafting recently, much less for blogging about it.

So for at least the time being, I'm going to be continuing to do what I have been doing for the last 6 months -- i.e., not posting any updates to the blog.

I hope that as I make some progress on the dissertation my energy for Looking Glass Knits will be rekindled, and I do plan in the future to return to regular posts. But I wouldn't look for that to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, if any of you are interested in affect in late medieval English literature of the fin'amors tradition, I'm your woman. I know of someone who's blogging his dissertation, but I suspect if I tried that I'd drive away the last vestiges of you who still come around to visit Looking Glass Knits! I can see it now: "I came looking for a hat pattern, I left with a quotation by Brian Massumi..."

Thanks for your well-wishes and gentle prodding, you readers who have posted comments and questions in the last few months. I wish you lots of joy in your knitting!

more wedding quilt pictures

2011-05-25T16:52:00.003-05:00

I finished my friend's wedding quilt! I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.

I did straight line quilting with the walking foot, spacing the lines about an inch apart from one another and turning corners to emphasize the off-center cross shape. In the above picture you can just barely see what I mean. There are some wrinkles in that picture because the quilt's been folded up since I washed it.

Here it is on my bed to try to get the whole thing in one shot -- it's not that wrinkly in real life, I just put it on top of my down comforter because I was too lazy to take the comforter off (and you can clearly see the lines where I folded it). You can get a good look at the quilting and at the finished color scheme from this angle. It's still more gold and orange than I expected it to be, but I like it fine.

A close-up of the center where the lines come together. I'm mightily pleased with how neat my block intersections are: nary a slightly-off corner to be seen!

I bought this embroidered quilt label from Anne on etsy. This square is part of the pieced back: I did one strip of squares going across the back -- the rest of the back is done with one of the fabrics I used for the front squares. The pieced back looks great, and best of all it meant that I didn't have to stress out so much about perfectly lining up the pattern repeat on the backing fabric.

The specifics:

size: about 70"x 84" (I was aiming for a lap quilt and I think I overshot a bit: this is more like a twin sized quilt. Oh well -- now they can use it when guests sleep over on the couch)
Fabrics: Essex cotton/linen in "putty," various Joel Dewberry prints, mostly from Modern Meadow line with a few prints from Aviary 2; Amy Butler Full Moon Dots in green; Echino helicopters in orange; and a few other fat quarters I picked up at Purl Soho and whose fabric lines and designers I don't know. Batting is Warm and Natural 100% cotton. Gutermann cotton thread.

I've learned a lot about quilting from the three quilt projects I've made so far. My piecing is much straighter now, though not totally perfect; my cutting is a lot more accurate. I've gotten a lot better accustomed to the way my walking foot works, so there are fewer skips and puckers. Indeed, there is only one small tuck and a small slightly bubbled place in the entire quilt top: a real improvement over previous quilts. I learned with this quilt not to be too aggressive in smoothing the top as I quilted, as I found I was stretching it slightly, leading to some wrinkling and bubbling of the backing fabric. I basted this with pins, but I think I would baste future quilts with basting adhesive. It's not something I have wanted to do because I live in a small city apartment and I didn't want to get high on fumes, but I think it would make the puckering/bubbling much less of an issue. For this quilt I used cotton batting and cotton thread: I like the way the thread worked, but I have to say I am not a huge fan of the weight of the cotton batting -- this quilt is really quite heavy. It did wrinkle up beautifully in the wash, though. Maybe next time I'll follow Elizabeth Hartman's suggestion and try prewashed flannel instead of batting. I bet it would be cheaper, too.

I've become a huge quilting blog lurker recently! There are so many gorgeous quilts out there! I think that my next project is going to be a half-square triangle quilt kind of like this.

Wedding quilt

2011-04-23T09:03:00.002-05:00

I've been quilting a lot lately.

This is a quilt in progress for my best friend's wedding present. It's got birds and helicopters -- so, things that fly is the theme?

attaching raglan sleeves in bottom-up sweaters

2011-01-30T14:25:00.008-05:00

I recently helped one of my friends attach the sleeves to her Bellyphant baby sweater, and I admit, it is a little hard to wrap your brain around what you're doing the first time you do this. What you have when you join the sleeves to the sweater body is two small tubes and one large "tube" that is not a tube because it is a cardigan. The difficult thing to imagine beforehand, but what becomes really obvious once you've done it, is that when you're holding a sleeve tube up next to the sweater to attach it, the back side of the sleeve (closest to the armpit) is held with right side facing the right side of body, and the outside of the sleeve is held with right side facing out. So the stitches you are binding off at the armpit are bound off with right sides facing -- using the tail end of the yarn you used to knit the sleeves -- and then you use the working yarn from the body section to knit around the outside of the sleeve all the way to the other side, and then continue working the back of the sweater.

The diagrams in this Vogue Knitting article by Jared Flood help to clarify this all. Jared has you put the armpit sleeves on holders rather than binding them off. If that is easier for you, by all means, do it his way. For me, I like as little finishing as possible, so I like the three-needle bindoff.

So here's the process as I am working that row where the arm stitches are joined:

First I knit the right number of stitches of the body section for the cardigan front. Then I hold my sleeve up to the body section. (I've been working the sleeves magic-loop, so half the sleeve stitches are on one side of the circular needle and half are on the other, and the two needles are both facing with the points to the right.) I use the length of yarn that's hanging off the sleeve stitches to bind off the right number of stitches of the body and the sleeve together with three-needle-bindoff. The sleeve needle that I am binding stitches off of is the back needle of the sleeve (the one that has purl stitches facing me as I am looking at the sleeve tube). After I've finished binding off these stitches, I knot that yarn from the sleeve and drop it. Then I pick up the working yarn from the body section and continue knitting across the sleeve -- but this time I knit across the top needle of the sleeve (the one that has the knit stitches facing me). When I have knit all the sleeve stitches, I go on across the back of the body section until I get to the next sleeve and repeat the process.

Does that help at all? It sounds really hard until you do it. It's hard to visualize ahead of time and to describe in words, but it's very intuitive when you are actually knitting.

Side note: some knitters on Ravelry have wondered why I designed this one bottom-up instead of top-down like the other raglan sweater patterns I've done. The answer is that there's a little bit of variability in people's row gauge, and if you are knitting the sweater top-down, it's hard to be precise about placing the elephants at the bottom and making sure that the sweater is the right length. If you start with the elephants, you can knit the striped part of the body as long as you need it to be before adding the sleeves -- the stripe is only a 4-row repeat but the elephants are something like 18 rows tall.

Snowpocalypse!

2011-01-27T09:40:00.004-05:00

Eighteen inches of snow! Here's what it looked like in my neighborhood at 8:00 this morning.

Sunny Snow Day Knitting

2011-01-21T13:24:00.006-05:00

Snow day! No school -- which made sense at 5 this morning when the snow was pretty bad, but now the sun is shining and this is the view from my window:

So a good day to catch up on some knitting and finally photograph some FOs.

First, I finally finished my Daybreak Shawl, and it is just gorgeous! I've been wearing it nonstop since.

It's a pretty great size -- I knit the large, but then I stopped at 18 stripes of each color and 5 garter ridges at the end. This is an easy pattern to knit, but it did take quite a while, especially when those rows got really long at the end!

When I finished the shawl I made myself a matching beret. This was the Purl Bee beret pattern, which I think I added some stitches to because of a gauge difference. A nice simple pattern. I didn't like the way the decreases made the top pucker on the Purl version, so I spaced mine out a little differently. It came out to a nice size, a tiny bit bigger than I'd like perhaps. Sorry not to have a modeled shot -- I'm still in my pj's with no makeup in lazy snow day mode!

I was wrangling two and sometimes three balls of yarn, because I had two colors of orange that were slightly different and I decided to work them kind of like a gradient. Then at the end I was running out of one of the oranges so I did stripes of the two oranges together. It worked relatively well. I like the brighter orange better, though -- "Smaller Yellow Ant," if you are looking for a really gorgeous, rich, slightly brighter than pumpkin color. Fabulous. The other color is "Ruddy Daggerwing," which looked much darker and redder online, and is in fact only slightly darker and browner than the other orange (still a lovely color, but not as rich and bright). I had originally planned to stripe the two oranges, but they weren't different enough in color, so I ordered some more contrast yarn. The green is "Juniper Hairstreak." Again, a gorgeous color with a lot of depth. I had heard a lot about Sanguine Gryphon colors, and it was all true -- such beautiful, rich, sophisticated colors, with a nice variety of tones, but no pooling -- a truly gorgeous yarn. Bugga! is really soft but seems relatively strong. It did lose a little of its elasticity in blocking. This was fine for the shawl, though if I were to do it again I'd use smaller needles (I knit this on size 4). For the beret, it meant that I had to thread some elastic through the ribbing band. No big deal. Anyway, Bugga! is by far my favorite fingering/sock/light sport yarn now. So far it's wearing quite well, though of course it's a scarf, not socks. I don't think I'd use it for socks -- too soft, maybe not elastic enough, probably would wear out quite quickly. It's a tad on the pricey side, but the yardage is really generous. When I win the Megamillions, I am going to buy a skein of every color.

What I'm working on right now (somewhat furiously) is a super-late Christmas present for my bestest friend. She's the only person I've gifted knitting to who really seems to appreciate it. Non-baby knitting, that is -- I've knit a lot for babies and the moms (and grandmas) are always super appreciative. Anyway, I had ordered some pretty blue DK cashmere from Colourmart before Christmas to make her a cowl, but it still hasn't arrived a month later! This is a real fluke for Colourmart -- I have ordered from them a few times in the past and things always come shockingly quickly, considering that they're coming across the Atlantic. [update: it turns out the delay is due to US heightened security measures that were in effect between November and January. So their shipping should be at normal speed now if you order from them.] So I finally gave up on waiting and bought some Madelinetosh Pashmina to make a Honey cowl -- bandwagon knitting again!

It's a really beautiful fabric and a sophisticated final product, but it's kind of a tedious knit, especially because I decided the larger size really looks much nicer, and because I'm using a finer-gauge yarn than the pattern specifies. I am using Fleegle's garter-in-the-round hack, as suggested by Christina (Bowie on Ravelry) -- a brilliant way to avoid purling! But it does leave you working with two different balls of yarn, which is a little less portable, I find, and it also means that you have to keep peeking behind the slipped rows to make sure you're on track, because the wrong side is facing you when you knit these rows instead of purling them. And I find that I am just absent-minded enough that I mess up whether I am knitting or slipping a given stitch with relative frequency. Luckily the fabric is pretty easy to read so it's not a huge deal. The Pashmina yarn was nice and soft in the store, and really beautiful colors. Knitting it now I'm a little underwhelmed -- it doesn't feel quite as soft knit up, and it looks to me like it's going to pill and halo pretty quickly. For yarn that expensive I was expecting higher quality, I have to say.

Anyway, it's a lovely day to be sitting here in my cozy apartment, with a warm dog sleeping on my feet and a warm piece of knitting in my lap! Happy snow day to you all!

Happy Holidays!

2010-12-27T09:18:00.005-05:00

Hi everyone! How about a late-for-Christmas present?

I cobbled together this cowl as a present for my mom and to use up some really nice fingering cashmere I had from School Products. It's kind of a combination of the shape/button of Knitty Gritty Thoughts' Spiral Cowl (a pattern you know I love) with the stitch pattern in Leila Raabe's Shaelyn, another beautiful pattern I'm dying to try. I have to admit I didn't buy the Shaelyn pattern -- just eyeballed it and assumed that the wavy stripes were done in "Crest of the Wave," an old Shetland lace pattern.

I see that School Products no longer has the yarn I used, but this would be a good project for one skein of Jade Sapphire 2-ply.

The pattern is for a woman's cowl -- if you want to make one for a child, it could easily be done by taking out one or two pattern repeats (the pattern repeat is 12 stitches) and knitting only three stripes of the lace pattern. Or if you want your cowl to be bigger, cast on an extra 12 stitches and work five stripes of the lace pattern.

Christmas Cowl

Size: 21 inches circumference, 9 inches tall
Gauge: 7 stitches and 9 rows = 1 inch
Yarn: 200-300 yards fingering weight yarn in something light and luxurious, like cashmere.
Needles: 16-inch circular needle, size 3 or whatever size will give you gauge
Notions: one stitch marker, tapestry needle, one coordinating button

Glossary
K: knit
P: purl
K2tog: knit two stitches together
Ssk: slip-slip-knit: slip the next two stitches one by one as if to knit. Return both stitches to left needle, then knit them together through the back loop
YO: yarn over

Instructions

Cast on 144 stitches and join to work in the round, being careful not to twist. Place a stitch marker at the beginning of the round (where you just joined yarn).

Work two garter ridges: Knit one round, purl one round, repeat these two rounds once.

Work one repeat of Crest of the Wave pattern:

Round 1: Knit
Round 2: Purl
Round 3: *k2tog twice, (YO, k1) x 3, YO, ssk twice, k1, repeat from * to end of round
Round 4: Knit
Round 5: Repeat round 3
Round 6: Knit
Round 7: Repeat round 3
Round 8: Knit
Round 9: Repeat round 3
Round 10: Knit
Round 11: Knit
Round 12: Purl

Work 12 rounds stockinette (knit all rounds).
Work another repeat of Crest of the Wave pattern.

Continue alternating 12-round stripes of stockinette and stripes of Crest of the Wave pattern until there are four stripes of Crest of the Wave. Then work two more garter ridges (knit one round, purl one round, repeat these two rows once). Bind off loosely (I used Jeny's Surprisingly Stretchy Bindoff).

Weave in ends and block very well -- I recommend wet blocking. You can stretch your cowl slightly in blocking it to open up the lace pattern and to make sure your fabric has some drape. You will find that the lace pattern is more "wavy" on the bottom than the top -- feel free to try to pin it in such a way that you make both the top and bottom as wavy as possible. I did this, and it sort of worked.

To finish your cowl, pick up three stitches at the top edge and knit a length of i-cord about 1.5 inches long. Make this length of 1-cord into a buttonhole loop by tacking down end of i-cord next to where you picked up the stitches and weaving in the end. Try on your cowl with the buttonhole loop at the top and fold over the loop to overlap cowl at the neck as tight as you would like it to be. Mark the place where the buttonhole falls when you do this, then sew your button at this place.

Your cowl is done! You can wear it loose and unbuttoned (like my lovely Mom is wearing it in the picture), or you can tighten it around your neck with the button to keep out the wind.

Not dead.

2010-11-26T09:52:00.006-05:00

Or, as one commenter hopefully speculated, married.

I've just gotten really busy, and also I lost my camera battery charger and was too cheap to buy a new one for $80. I eventually found a cheaper replacement, so now I can photograph these lovelies:

One FO, a Multnomah shawl in Fibre Company Road to China Light. I adore both this yarn and this pattern. The yarn is unbelievably soft and incredibly warm -- alpaca, camel and silk combine to make this like a little heater for my shoulders.

I am calling this my hubris shawl, because I had to rip it out and reknit it like 4 times, because I didn't bother to read the pattern very carefully.

I never thought I was a shawl person, but I love it, so I'm working on another, a Daybreak shawl in Sanguine Gryphon Bugga! Also an unbelievably gorgeous yarn, soft and kettle dyed. I'm not 100% sold on this color combination, but I'm waiting to see once there are more orange stripes.

And it's all orange and green/teal, all the time here, evidently, because I also made myself a pair of Endpaper mitts in two colors of Knitpicks Stroll yarn. They're already pilly after only a few weeks of use, but that's to be expected with this yarn, and it was super cheap.

Okay. I can't promise to blog with much more regularity, but I'll try. And at least now I can post pictures again!

Backstage pass (ish)

2010-09-14T08:32:00.004-05:00

So a commenter has asked me to share how I store all my crafting supplies in a NYC apartment. I think I've posted this picture before, but here's my storage solution:

I have a whole armoire dedicated to yarn and fabric storage. I also have been making a concerted effort lately to keep my stash small and knit only from stash. So far it's worked. It is necessary in a small space not to waste too much of it on storing things you never use. But, I mean, there's a whole piece of storage furniture in my apartment just for craft supplies, so I'm certainly not a model of space-efficiency.

But I think the real reason I can do it is because I'm single. I have space for an armoire full of yarn because I don't need two dressers in my bedroom. That's also why I have been able to sew so much this summer. Normally, when my apartment is clean, my dining area looks like this:

But for much of the summer, that whole table was covered with piles of fabric, a sewing machine, a cutting station, and a blocking/ironing board. I could never do that if there were someone else living here -- let alone kids around.

Lemons, lemonade. Frankly I'd rather be married with kids, but in the meantime, I can knit and sew a lot.

Fall FO's!

2010-09-10T13:46:00.005-05:00

My glorious, super-bright picnic blanket is done!

It's about 5' x 7', uses lots and lots of scraps, and is pleasingly puckered just like a well-loved heirloom. It has snaps to roll it up for toting to picnic locations and rock pockets to weight it down:

I've already used it once and am mightily pleased with myself. And what's this little lump sitting atop my picnic blanket?

Ah, yes, knitting. I've missed you, old friend.

Oh, and in other news, here's a lovely photo of the recipient of the "Sock Yarn Stranded" prototype, looking all cute and cuddly in her sweater:

I see lots of pills on those elbows. Hope that's from hard use!

a string quilt and and a nerd-out

2010-08-22T10:48:00.005-05:00

It's late August, and I'm still on a knitting-hiatus quilting jag. I think it's the novelty, the fact that it's not a lapful of hot wool, and the fact that I'm not inspired by any particular knitting projects that have combined to make this the summer of quilting. I'm working on a string quilt right now. It's a really cool technique that involves paper piecing and lots of scraps. In a typical move for me, I am fanatically working on a project that will be finished just as the season for using it has passed: in this case, a picnic blanket. But I don't care -- the colors are just so beautiful together! I love how improvisational it is, too -- the color combinations and the width of the stripes are all pretty much random. I had a lot of scraps of Heather Ross Mendocino and Lightning Bugs fabric left over from various projects, plus quite a bit of Amy Butler fabric left over from sewing my sister a bunch of scrub caps and a little bit of Joel Dewberry Deer Valley left over from that recent wedding present project, but I did have to supplement with some fat quarters I bought, so it's not totally comprised of scraps. But I'd say it's about 60% scraps -- so not exactly free, but significantly cheaper than a quilt you bought all the materials for new.

My other obsession of late has been watching "The Pillars of the Earth," the miniseries of a Ken Follett book about the Middle Ages. I had to watch this one -- not only is it about the period I study (well, actually I'm a late medievalist, but let's not split hairs), but it also stars Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen)!

(Starz publicity photo)

It's really more of a "Medieval Times"-ish soap opera treatment than a historical movie, but it's pretty fun to watch. But it reminded me of a beef I have with "historical" movies: why do these movies always include someone inventing something modern? In this miniseries so far, they have invented Gothic ribbed vaults and the concept of buying on credit. In the recent "Robin Hood" movie, Robin invented the Magna Carta, for pete's sake!

Another thing that irritates me about "medieval" fictions: why does everything set in medieval England have to include some sort of goddess-worshipping witch woman?

(Starz publicity photo)

The one in this movie actually has dreadlocks, and in one memorable bit of dialogue, when the prior asks her why she doesn't worship god, she says, "I just worship her a different way." Ugh.*

Anyway, if you're a nerd like me, you should watch it! It's all on Netflix, if you subscribe.

The next time I post, perhaps there will be some actual knitting to talk about!

*by which I mean, not, "ugh, she thinks god is a woman," but, "ugh, why does every empowered woman have to be a witch?"

lest you think that I've been abducted by aliens,

2010-07-24T16:50:00.004-05:00

I haven't. I've been lazy. It's summer, and I can't seem to motivate to do anything. Except sew. I've become obsessed. I decided to try quilting, and it's totally addictive. Not needing or wanting any quilts for my own apartment has not stopped me from making them. I've finished a baby quilt and then started my current project, which is a set of placemats, towels, potholders, and napkins for a friend of mine who's getting married.

Unlike knitting, where you can basically do whatever you need to do with a starter kit and the equipment is not particularly varied, quilting really can't be done perfectly without an investment in some special stuff -- namely, a rotary cutter, a quarter-inch foot, and a walking foot (I haven't gotten brave enough to try freehand quilting with an embroidery/darning foot). I've been tediously machine-quilting these placemats with parallel lines about 1/4 inch apart. It is pretty boring, but it looks great! And it's less boring than hand-quilting probably would be.

I have discovered that really beautiful fabric is expensive. This Joel Dewberry fabric for the placemats, for example. And rotary cutter blades are expensive. In fact, the crazy cost of quilting supplies has made me feel a little less guilty about knitting supplies: a quilt is much more expensive than a sweater to make (unless you're making a tiny quilt or you're using only quiviut yarn or something).

Oh, and quilting is much messier than knitting. My apartment is a gigantic mess right now. There are little scraps of thread and fabric everywhere. It's nice that even when you're knitting a big afghan or something you can still pack it up and put it neatly away if you need to.

Okay, off to sew some more!

Sweetness

2010-06-01T08:43:00.004-05:00

Finishing the Orals and the school year has made me want to do nothing but fall back on sheer relaxing pleasure knitting, which for me, unsurprisingly, is making top-down baby sweaters. I bought this yarn back in April to help sweeten a sort of miserable birthday spent alone and under the crushing stress of last-minute studying, and it actually did help.

The yarn is Sweet Georgia Tough Love Sock in "Cedar" with Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in "Andersonville" as a contrast. They looked great together in the skein because there was a little touch of the cedar color in the Lorna's Laces. I bought them intending to make the mosaic-yoke "Cardigan B" from my "Steps to Stranded" patterns, but when I came to knitting the mosaic part, that stripe of cedar color turned out to muddy the crispness of the pattern, and my pretty squares looked more like smudges. So I improvised something that would work with this yarn.

Instead of six rows of mosaic pattern in alternating sequence, I worked four rows of garter stitch in the Lorna's Laces separated by two rows of stockinette in the Sweet Georgia. The beginning of each garter stitch section is where I worked my yoke increases.

I think it looks very nice, and it's a sweet little variation on the pattern. So if you're looking for a variation on the "Steps to Stranded" pattern, I'd recommend it, especially with yarns that are just a little too close in color to make the most of a stranded or mosaic pattern.

A note on the yarn: in my previous post I had expressed some doubt about the Sweet Georgia yarn, but I rescind that comment: after wet-blocking this yarn is heavenly -- soft and sort of silky feeling with no scratchiness, and it seems to have lost the fuzziness that was making me worry about how well it will hold up. I think if I were knitting socks with it I would still knit them at a pretty tight gauge just to be sure -- and this yarn is a relatively fat sockweight, so knitting on one's normal sock needles would already be knitting it pretty tightly. But at the looser gauge of this baby garment, it drapes beautifully.

adorbs

2010-05-24T06:47:00.002-05:00

Just whipped up a few matching accessories for two of the "Steps to Stranded" prototypes I knit last year. My mom wants to give a present to the baby granddaughter of one of her friends and asked if I had any baby sweaters hanging around the apartment. What a silly question!

In fact I have four unclaimed baby sweaters hanging around the apartment. I'm kind of glad to be getting rid of these because I feel like holding onto that many baby items is probably jinxing my ability ever actually to have a baby myself.

Once again, Saartje's Booties come through! I adjusted this pattern to use sock-weight yarn and size 1 needles at a gauge of 8 stitches/inch, because Lorna's Laces is really quite thin. My adjustments: cast on 39 stitches, which makes 19 stitches on either side of the center stitch, increase to 63 stitches, then knit straight to 12 garter ridges. On decrease row k19, ssk 6 times, k1, k2tog 6 times, k19. BO center 27 stitches. For the straps CO 15 extra stitches to make straps 27 stitches altogether. Those notes make sense if you look at the original pattern. I knit them flat because I don't mind seaming and I hate purling, but in retrospect I'd probably use Fleegle's in-the-round variation.

Phew!

2010-05-13T16:39:00.003-05:00

I passed my Orals, and I am celebrating by knitting another yoked baby sweater. I feel no shame about knitting a baby sweater with no intended recipient -- and I'm not alone; Grumperina just spoke on the subject herself.

This is made with some splurge yarn -- Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in "Andersonville" and Sweet Georgia Tough Love Sock in "Cedar." Both are just gorgeous, sophisticated colors, and they work really well together. I have some questions about how well the Sweet Georgia will hold up as it seems a little fuzzy from the get-go, but I don't care. Who could resist that glorious, complex shade of blue-green?

As summer approaches I am lining up some more knitting projects and taking a vow that I will actually finish at least two sweaters I've been sitting on. And of course, I've also got to start writing the dissertation!!

Bellyphant!

2010-04-28T13:05:00.005-05:00

Sorry about the gap in posting there, gentle readers! I have been studying for the Orals like a madwoman. I hope I can make up for my e-silence by offering at long last the pattern for my baby sweater with elephants on the belly -- or as I've dubbed it, the Bellyphant Cardigan!

Click here to download the 9-page pattern pdf for $4.99 (Ravelry dowload):

This one is a first for me, because it's a bottom-up raglan instead of a top-down. The difference was necessitated by the design's having the elephants at the bottom of the sweater -- unless you want to do some math, it's much easier to start with the stranded portion and then knit in stripes until it's the right length, rather than starting at the top with the stripes and then beginning the stranded portion at the appropriate number of inches from the bottom of the sweater.

The details:

Size 3-6 (6-9, 12-18) months
Finished Measurements 21” (22”, 25”) chest, 10.5” (11”, 12.5”) long
Gauge 6 stitches and 8 rows = 1 inch

Requirements
Size US 3 (3.25 mm) straight or circular needles. I would recommend a long circular needle
Size 3 (3.25 mm) double-pointed needles or long circular needle for magic loop
300-400 yards sport weight yarn in main color (MC) (I used Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino in brown #11); about 200-300 yards sport weight yarn in contrast color (CC) (I used Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino in pink #15 or teal #203)
8 stitch markers
2 Stitch holders or scrap yarn
Tapestry needle
7-10 Coordinating buttons

Skills required: knitting flat and in the round, stranded knitting done flat, 2x2 ribbing, paired decreases, three-needle bindoff, picking up stitches

The pattern includes a glossary of all abbreviations as well as illustrated instructions for ssk (slip-slip-knit decreases), picking up stitches, and working three-needle bindoff.

This pattern does require flat colorwork (not knit in the round), and there are some pretty large stretches of one color only in some rows. If you’d like, you may prefer to knit it in intarsia rather than stranded knitting. The colorwork section is only 11 rows, though, so I think it's reasonable.

Click here to download the 9-page pattern pdf for $4.99 (Ravelry dowload):

The original recipient of this sweater adores it, and I've worked up two more of them to sell for my choir's silent auction. So the pattern has been test-knit by me in two different sizes and knit a total of 3 times over the last 6 months or so.

That's it, my friends! As soon as I'm done with the Orals I promise I will post again. I'm so looking forward to knitting again, and indeed to doing anything with my spare time other than read about medieval lay devotion!

C'est chouette!

2010-04-08T22:27:00.002-05:00

Louise Robert, aka Biscotte from Biscotte et Cie has graciously translated my Sheep Yoke Baby cardigan into French! Cliquez ici if you'd like to download it!

Snow day update

2010-02-26T12:53:00.003-05:00

The snow is falling into the trees outside my window; school is canceled; I'm sitting here in my nightgown and grandfather's old sweater knitting a sock heel and reading Judith Butler for orals. It's just a lovely day.

A few quick updates:

1. Thanks so much for buying my patterns this past month! I was able to donate $125 to the American Red Cross for Haiti relief because of pattern sales during my pledge period.

2. The giant doily blanket is coming along well. I don't know how to crochet so I am finishing the edges with an easy knitted-on lace; picture above. It's an eight-row repeat that goes on sideways and eats up 1 doily stitch every other row (so four rows total each pattern repeat). It's slow going, but I like the way it looks. I've done about 1/4 of the blanket edge so far.

3. The elephant sweater is all finished and awaiting buttons. It's heart-squeezingly cute. Still working on the pattern. The elephants are an 18-stitch repeat, so it's kind of hard to figure out whether it's even possible to write it for different sizes than the one I made it in.

Wins of the Week

2010-02-06T14:43:00.006-05:00

I am pleased to report of a number of wins, both epic and not. It has been a big week for:

1) Haiti Relief. Thanks to readers like you, I have been able to donate more than $100 to the American Red Cross, and I am only halfway through my pledge period.

2) Elephants. The new baby sweater is almost finished, and it is pretty freakin' cute. Question, though: I've been holding off on the button band because I am wondering if the body of this looks too long. Thoughts, gentle readers?

3) Snow. There was a minor snowstorm last week and apparently a biggie in the making. Which also makes this a good week for...

4) Delivery. I have just discovered the joys of Fresh Direct and PJ Wines deliveries. It's surprisingly exciting to get a pile of boxes from Fresh Direct delivered up to one's door -- kind of like getting a present, even though you know what is in it!

5) Cleaning tips from Ravelry: I pulled my beautiful cashmere spiral mitts out of my bag on Thursday and discovered that a red liquid ink pen had exploded all over the cuff of one of them. It looked like a bloodbath! But Ravelry forum posts came to the rescue: turns out hair spray and rubbing alcohol remove ink (in fact, I bet the hair spray works because it contains alcohol). So after some liberal hair-spraying and rubbing with alcohol prep pads (all I had in the medicine cabinet) and a good wash with shampoo and conditioner, this is what remains of the ink. The two little spots you see were quarter-sized deep red blotches. Pretty sweet! Plus, the mitts are now softer and fluffier than ever!

6) Fingerless mitts: the possibility of my spiral mitts' being destroyed led me to reconsider the fondness I have developed for them. They are surprisingly useful both indoors and out -- especially indoors, as my living room is quite cold and having just that little bit of cashmere around my wrists is surprisingly helpful in keeping my warm. So I cast on for a pair of October Leaves fingerless mitts with some Dream in Color Smooshy in "Gothic Rose" that's been languishing in my sock yarn drawer for more than a year. What a lovely pattern, and what a beautiful yarn! And fingerless mitts take up a surprisingly small amount of yarn. Which led to this being a good week for...

7) Cable earwarmers. This is a Bamboozled in the same yarn, held doubled this time. This is also a great pattern, and the only mod I made was to add a cable repeat (my row gauge was off from the pattern's) and to switch out the ties for buttonhole tabs.

Also wins, but not documentable in photo form:

8) Belated resolutions. I've been on a weight loss kick and have lost between 3 and 5 pounds, depending, oddly, on where I place the scale in my apartment. Magnetic anomalies? Ah, that reminds me...

9) Lost. It's back on, and it seems great so far. Much better than last season.

10) Emma. The Masterpiece Theater series has been adorable! Which leads to...

11) Cable TV. I finally caved and got cable for my apartment. I realize that both ABC and PBS are not cable channels, but my old antenna only picked up 2 channels.

12) Productivity. Shockingly, considering that the previous three entries on this list were television-related, I have been able to get a lot done in the last week and am now sitting smugly at the cafe blogging with hardly anything hanging over my head for the upcoming week. Indeed, the two pieces of reading I have stacked in front of me at the moment are not even things I have been assigned to read! (They are, however, medieval).

That's it! Anyone want another earwarmer picture?

Thanks!

2010-01-24T10:50:00.007-05:00

A big thank you to everyone who's bought my patterns since I pledged to donate to Haiti relief -- already I've been able to donate more than I otherwise would have, thanks to you, and I will continue to do so until 2/14. If you're still looking to help, please do check out the "Help for Haiti" pattern sales on Ravelry. Knitters have been making a big difference: Yarn Harlot reports that her readers have donated an astounding amount so far!

Meanwhile, some knitting pictures.

The Stor Lysedug is making good progress, but unfortunately it's impossible to photograph in any way that doesn't look like a giant gray blob.

Having never knit a giant doily with aran-weight yarn, I have found this quite a pleasing project so far. It's a pretty quick knit, despite the fact that as I near the end the rounds are taking longer and longer to finish. I'm not sure how big this will be by the time I finish. I was hoping for something like 6' in diameter, but I think it will more likely be 5' -- still big enough for a lap blanket, but just barely.

I am usually a fan of knitting from charts, but that's kind of impossible to do with a circular pattern like this, and there's something cool about the element of surprise in reading written-out directions. This pattern uses all k2tog's and directional double decreases; I've been knitting it as written, but I'd like to try it again with ssk's for symmetry and symmetrical double decreases.

Meanwhile, I'm working on a new pattern, for a friend's baby boy to be born soon. There was a request for elephants:

A little help

2010-01-17T09:25:00.002-05:00

On Ravelry, lots of pattern designers have pledged to donate a percentage of their pattern sales to Haitian relief efforts of their choice. I'm joining the effort: I'll donate 50% of proceeds from my pattern sales from now until 2/14 to the American Red Cross for their Haitian relief efforts.

My patterns for sale, just to recap, are Radcliffe Cardigan, Steps to Stranded (sweaters A, B, C, and the set), and Sock Yarn Stranded.

Ravelry now includes a "Help for Haiti" tag search that lets you see all the designers who are donating to Haiti relief -- there are tons of great patterns on there, and some designers report being able to donate pretty large amounts of money after just a day of listing their Help for Haiti patterns. So if you were thinking of buying a pattern but were waiting, or felt like it was too decadent to buy a pattern, now you can buy all the stuff you've been waiting around on, while feeling good about helping out in the process!

2010: A (Storage) Space Odyssey

2010-01-10T14:03:00.009-05:00

Because the new place has less closet space and I am using some of my furniture differently, I've been experiencing a bit of a storage crunch. Combine that with the fact that my mom shouted, "Stop the insanity!" as we were unpacking my yarn stash at the new place, and it seemed like a good time for a little destashing. SO! Here's your opportunity to help me out: anyone want any of this stuff? Write me at the e-mail address listed in the sidebar and let me know if you'd like to buy any of the following (paypal only, please; prices include US shipping; international shipping would be extra):

6 balls Lana Grossa "Merino 2000" in a nice slate/cadet blue (413). Sportweight 100% merino, 176 yards/ball for a total of +1000 yards. $40.

3 skeins hand-dyed laceweight silk (originally from School Products). Can't remember the yardage on this; one skein is untouched and two have been wound into balls. This was definitely enough to make a lace shawl, which was the reason I bought it in the first place. It is quite thin. $12. SOLD.

Two skeins each of Knitpicks Imagination hand-dyed alpaca/merino blend in "Wicked Stepmother" (purple blend on left) and "Frog Prince" (the green blend on bottom right). Fingering weight 50% superwash merino, 25% superfine alpaca, 25% nylon, 219 yards/skein for a total of +400 yards in each color. One skein of each has been balled but has not been knit. $8 each color or $15 for both colors. WICKED STEPMOTHER SOLD.

7 skeins Ella Rae Classic wool in periwinkle blue (46). Worsted weight 100% wool, 219 yards/skein for a total of +1500 yards. $30.

1 skein Cascade Heritage sock yarn in tan (5610). Fingering weight 75% superwash merino, 25% nylon, 437 yards/skein. This has been balled, and about 75 yards of it have been knit and frogged. $10.

12 skeins Jo Sharp Classic DK wool in forest green ("venice"). DK weight 100% wool, 107 yards/skein for a total of +1200 yards. I knit one small swatch with it, so one skein is slightly smaller than the others. $40.

And one hand-knit for sale (this one I am sad to part with, but I don't have a baby to give it to, and it's depressing to have beautiful baby sweaters sitting around one's apartment, not to mention the fact that it seems like it will jinx one's ability ever to produce such babies on one's own):

One size 3-6 months baby sweater, brown prototype for my "Chronicles of Narnia" pattern. This was knit in Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino. $125.

And, so that this post is not entirely capitalist whoredom, here's a shot of my most recent knitting project: a blanket-sized doily knit with aran-weight Reynolds Candide on size 9 needles. The pattern I'm using is "Stor Lysedug" from Yarn Over free patterns. I decided I needed a TV-watching afghan because my living room is cold, and it's fun to knit a big beautiful lace thing with big yarn. This has been so much fun that I might take a crack at a Hemlock Ring next, perhaps in softer, slightly lighter wool, for a friend's baby (one that really does exist).

Lots New December

2009-12-31T11:57:00.006-05:00

Here's the reason why I haven't posted in almost two months:

I bought an apartment. It's been a lot of work, but it's mine!

I acknowledge that it looks very similar to my old apartment. It's a little smaller but otherwise almost the same.

The best feature may be the views:

Pretty good for NYC, huh?

Hardly any knitting to speak of recently, but here's my new yarn storage solution:

Nothing New November

2009-11-08T14:57:00.006-05:00

I'm in the process of moving apartments, and when I started to pack the knitting area I was appalled at the size of my stash, and at the pile of unfinished pieces in my work basket. Whence my new motto: Nothing New in November! No new yarn, no starting new projects!

Here are just a few of the pieces yet to be finished:

Selbu Modern. I have some doubts about this: it's looking very small, and I know that I can stretch it to block, but perhaps not as much as I originally thought. I have to say that I am a fan of colorwork but this has not been super fun to knit, so the thought of ripping it out and adding a pattern repeat to make it the right size is not particularly appealing. So this might be a back-burner project.

Ripping and re-knitting the sleeves of my Shalom cardigan. These just never fit right, and I had been thinking that the whole cardigan was too big to wear when in fact I think it was just the sleeves that were too big. This should be about a two-night project in front of TV, I think; I've already pretty much finished one of the sleeves. I'm also going to thread some elastic into the collar to make it stay tight -- Karabella Aurora 8 is a stretchy, heavy yarn, and the neckline gets pulled way big by the end of a day of wearing it. Re-knitting with it reminds me of what a nice yarn it is, though -- super soft, super bouncy, and not particularly pilly, yet.

Remember this guy? This sweater has been on my needles for more than two years! It's been languishing almost finished because I now hate wrapping my purls the wrong way, as I was doing when I started this. It seems to take twice as long to knit a row this way! One sleeve is about 3 inches from completion, and the other one is still unworked from the armpit join. This project could take me more than just this month to complete. In trying it on to gauge sleeve length, though, I am reminded of how adorable it will be when I finish it!

One new spiral mitt, waiting for thumb ribbing, and then for its partner to be knit. I tried a different design for these and have decided I like the original spiral mitt much better. This pair might be gifted for Christmas.

Then a couple of cheats:

I cast on a few days ago for a featherweight cardigan. I'm counting this as a "nothing new" sweater, though, because I ordered the yarn (Colourmart cashmere 4-ply) more than a year ago. Knitting my mitts and cowl with the gray cashmere made me absolutely burn to work with more cashmere, so I pulled this out of the stash.

This one is really a cheat: This is the ribbing for the left front of a new cardigan design I started only a few days ago. It doesn't really count as "nothing new," if I were being a stickler, but I've got to have something besides sleeves to knit, don't I?

This is only the tip of the iceberg, peeps. Among the other unfinished items I dug out of the knitting cupboard are not one but two baby sweaters awaiting a second arm, the left front and two inches of the back of my birthday BFL sweater, about half of a chevron scarf to match my chevron beret, another patterned-yoke sweater left off about an inch from the armpit division, an adult surprise jacket for my mom, and a cable sweater I've had on the to-finish list since I first learned how to knit five years ago. Oy!

Will it all be finished in November? Definitely not. But will anything new be cast on between now and December 1? Absolutely not!!

You hear that, Jennifer Little? Absolutely not!!

Fall freebie: spiral mitts

2009-10-29T08:53:00.007-05:00

I was so enamored of Knitty Gritty Thoughts' spiral cowl that I knit myself some matching mitts. I had exactly the same experience with the mitts that I had with the cowl: I thought I'd never wear fingerless gloves, that they would be impractical or not warm enough, and it turns out that I adore them and wear them and the cowl all the time!

I'm passing on the pattern to you. It's super easy and quick to knit. I had been knitting my cowl with two plies of Colourmart 4-ply weight cashmere (so a little lighter than fingering) held together, so I used them singly to knit these mitts. If you want to do something similar, you could use any luxurious fingering weight yarn to make the mitts, then hold it double to make a matching spiral cowl! I imagine that these would be lovely knit out of Malabrigo sock yarn, for example.

Spiral Mitts

Size: Ladies' small/medium ( 7" hand circumference) with 8 stitch/inch gauge; Ladies' large (8" hand circumference) with 7 stitch/inch gauge

Gauge: 8 stitches and 10 rows = 1 inch (small/medium); 7 stitches and 9 rows = 1 inch (large)

Yarn: 150-200 yards fingering-weight yarn (the more luxurious the better!)

Requirements: US 1 (2.25 mm) double-pointed needles or long circular for magic loop, two or three stitch markers, tapestry needle, waste yarn to use as stitch holder

Note: these mitts are knit top-down (from the fingers to the cuff). This means that you start by knitting the thumb and hand parts separately. It also means that you can tailor it to the amount of yarn you have by knitting the cuff longer or shorter as needed.

Directions:

First, make your thumb tube: CO 28 stitches and join to work in round, being careful not to twist. You can place a marker at the beginning of the round if you’d like. Work 4 rounds k1, p1, rib. Work in stockinette (all knit) until piece measures 1". Break yarn, leaving about a 2” tail, and place stitches on a piece of scrap yarn.

CO 56 stitches. Join to work in round, being careful not to twist. Work 5 rounds stockinette (knit). In next round, *k2tog, YO, rep. from * to end of round. Work 5 more rows stockinette. In next row, knit each stitch together with one loop from your cast-on to make a folded picot hem.

In next row, make one stitch (or increase by one stitch), then begin spiral eyelet pattern as follows: *k6, k2tog, YO, rep. from * to end of round. You should be able now just to spiral your way around the mitt ad infinitum. Work three full repeats of the spiral pattern (24 rounds), or until work measures 2” from folded-down hem.

In the next round, join your “thumb tube” to the mitts as follows: work 28 stitches in spiral eyelet pattern. Place a marker. Knit across all your live “thumb tube” stitches, working the first few stitches with working yarn and tail end of thumb stitches held together, and place another marker. Work remaining 29 stitches in spiral eyelet pattern.

In the next round, work to first marker in spiral eyelet pattern and slip marker. Slip-slip-knit (ssk) or work your favorite left-leaning decrease, knit to last 2 stitches before marker, k2tog, slip marker, and continue round in spiral eyelet pattern.

In the next round, work to first marker in spiral eyelet pattern, slip marker, knit to second marker, then finish round in spiral eyelet pattern.

Repeat the previous two rounds until there are two stitches between the markers. In the next round, work spiral eyelet pattern until one stitch before the first marker. Drop marker and k3tog, drop second marker and continue in spiral eyelet pattern.

Continue working in spiral eyelet pattern for 4 more full pattern repeats or until work measures 3” from bottom of thumb gore or 7” from folded-down hem. Work 6 rounds stockinette, decreasing by one stitch in the first row of stockinette. In the next round, *k2tog, YO, rep. from * to end of round. Work 5 more rounds stockinette. Break yarn, leaving a long tail. Fold hem and tack down live stitches with a tapestry needle to make picot cuff.

Weave in ends, block as you prefer and repeat with second mitt!

What I'm doing this weekend instead of going to Rhinebeck

2009-10-17T10:00:00.006-05:00

Eating brussels sprouts.

(Isn't this thing cool? I got it at the farmer's market today. Who knew that they grew like this? It's heavy, too -- like a big caveman-club of healthiness.)

Knitting cashmere spiral mitts and listening to NPR.

Grading papers.

Reading for orals.

I'm sure that Rhinebeck will be more fun, but I just can't stomach it with both the work pileup and the upcoming move -- don't need more stash to pack!

Want another shot of those mitts? I thought so.

They're ribbed for her pleasure! I laboriously un-plied the double strand of 1/14 I had used for the spiral cowl (which I had originally twisted like that by colourmart), so these are exactly half the scale of the cowl. I love them! It was my first crack at top-down mittens -- I like it, and it does let you modify to fit the amount of yarn you have, but I'm not a huge fan of the thumb join part. These guys are so warm! Just trying them on for size or to snap a photo made my hands feel so warm and cuddly. I think they're going to get a lot of use.

NB: I cast on 56 stitches to make these, following the 8-stitch repeat of the spiral cowl's eyelet pattern after a picot edge. I added a 30-stitch-around thumb tube after 4 repeats, then decreased the thumb gore every other round until it was gone, then worked 5 more repeats of the spiral and cast off with a picot edge. I also tried picking up stitches and working a 3-needle BO instead of sewing down the final hem -- kind of a cool idea, and definitely a lot neater, but less stretchy, despite the fact that I used a needle 4 sizes larger for the bindoff.

How do I love thee? Let me cowl-nt the ways.

2009-10-13T07:17:00.003-05:00

Finally put the button on the cowl, and, as the Harlot would say,

Dudes, I love it.

It's soft and fluffy and not heavy, and it tucks just perfectly into my coat. It looks good buttoned and unbuttoned -- I'm currently sitting at my desk at work wearing it unbuttoned around my neck, and it may stay that way all day.

I love it so much that I immediately cast on for another one and a matching pair of mitts!

gorgeousness

2009-09-19T17:07:00.007-05:00

The cashmere spiral cowl is finished and blocked, and man, is it beautiful! The yarn bloomed and softened even more with the final soaking I gave the finished piece, and it's just a pleasure to hold up to my neck.

Now the dilemma is the perfect vintage button to use. I've narrowed down my selection to this (admittedly still large) array of options:

Clockwise from the top they are:

1) creamy mother-of-pearl with sort of feather detail around the edge, a family heirloom
2) dark gray faux mother-of-pearl shank
3) black plastic faux braided leather
4) heavy cream mother-of-pearl or bone (this one seems really old to me)
5) dark gray abalone or mother-of-pearl shank
6) dark gray mother-of-pearl with fancy etchings
7) dark gray mother-of-pearl with four holes
8) dark gray bone or something
9) black plastic with sort of art-deco detailing
10) brown plastic with flower-shaped indents
11) dark gray mother-of-pearl shank
12) dark gray mother-of-pearl shank
13) black plastic with sort of art-deco detailing

Thoughts? Personally I am leaning toward #11, I think. It will blend in nicely and I like its style and size. Were I to go for personal meaning, I would pick #1. If I wanted something that would pop, I think I'd go for #9 or #10. On the off chance that you care as obsessively about this choice as I do, you can click on the picture for a close-up that shows the detail better.

I thought I was going to give this away as a present, but it's just sooo lovely...

Ful semyly hir wympul pynched was

2009-09-12T11:07:00.004-05:00

Whoa. The first few days of the school year hit me like a steamroller this year! Between not being prepared either for the classes I was teaching or for my own reading, dealing with multiple technological issues in the office, assisting with a big medieval conference (at which I discovered that one of my personal medievalist heroes is also a knitter on Ravelry!), putting together loan documentation and board package materials for an apartment I'm buying, and triangulating multiple times a day between the lawyer and the broker, not to mention dealing with a mouse infestation in my current apartment, I am exhausted! And that's after only a two-day week of school!

It's a good thing that this also arrived this week: lovely, unbelievably soft cashmere yarn from Colourmart.

Now I know what everyone's gushing about! This yarn arrived quite quickly considering that it was sent from England. It came on a cone, oiled for spinning, and I skeined it and gave it a hot bath with dish detergent (twice with the detergent, followed each time by about five rinses). It still hasn't bloomed as much as it could, and it also smells really strongly now of Mrs. Meyers' Lemon Verbena dish soap. Even so it is heavenly to knit with -- sooooo soooooft, with a gorgeous fluffiness that is also somehow satiny, just like the most luxurious cashmere sweater you could imagine.

I'm using it to knit a spiral cowl. I am not usually a cowl kind of girl, preferring not even hand-knit scarves but big thin pashmina-type wraps, but when I saw all the cute pictures on Ravelry of this, I was convinced to try it. I certainly now appreciate the pleasures of knitting a cowl -- just round and round and round, no shaping, a nice size for subway lap knitting. I tried out a prototype with some leftover Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino, and I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly it knit up. It's been a while since I knit anything in a gauge larger than 7 stitches per inch, I guess. Off the neck, it's pretty, but rather unimpressive:

But on and buttoned, I think it's really quite nice, sort of floppily structural. Pardon both the double chin and the visible bra straps:

There are many nice things about this pattern. The picot hems give it a polished, feminine look and maximum stretchiness; the eyelet spiral keeps it interesting and looks much more complicated than it actually is; it uses only about 200 yards of yarn, so you can buy something luxurious; and it's a great way to showcase one awesome button. For this red one, I used a metal "pelican in her piety" button that was a present from the ex-boyfriend -- it's a long and nerdy medieval/choir inside joke.

Baby Cashmerino was not really the best yarn for this pattern, and I'd warn people against using any bouncy, multi-ply superwash yarn like it for their cowls: it's just too stretchy and heavy and floppy really to hold the great structure that makes this pattern so cool. You definitely want something luxuriously soft and with some drape, but not perhaps stretchy -- lots of these cowls on Ravelry are knit with Malabrigo merino silk dk or Manos Silk Blend, and those both seem like a perfect choice. I have high hopes for this cashmere. I've also picked out the perfect button from my collection of antique buttons -- I have so many singleton beauties I've been dying to use!

Now for a nice, slow afternoon of luxurious knitting therapy!

Happy Beatrice Day!

2009-09-09T22:23:00.008-05:00

With only a few minutes left in 9/9/09, here's wishing you all a happy Beatrice Day. Bea is all about the number nine in the Vita Nuova. She's nine when he first meets her, 18 when he sees her again, and the day of her death is the ninth day of the ninth month -- today -- with a bunch of other nines thrown in for good measure.

Ah, Bea. Light of Dante's life, fire of his... fervor for God.

At long last... Steps to Stranded!

2009-08-31T14:36:00.009-05:00

Special note: from now until 2/14/10, I will donate 50% of the proceeds from all my pattern sales to the American Red Cross for Haiti relief efforts.

Cardigan A ($1.99): buy now

Cardigan B ($2.99): buy now

Cardigan C ($2.99): buy now

Or the packet of all three ($5.99): buy now

I'm pleased finally to present a pattern I'm really excited about: Steps to Stranded Baby Cardigans!

This package of three top-down baby cardigan patterns is intended for all ranges of knitters, from beginners who only know knit and purl to intermediate or advanced knitters who have been wanting to try stranded knitting but are a little afraid to try.

Cardigan A has a circular yoke worked in contrasting self-striping yarn for a big effect with very little effort. Cardigan B uses Barbara Walker's "mosaic knitting" to achieve a two-color yoke while only working with one yarn at a time. And Cardigan C... is the one I'm really stoked about: it uses a modified mosaic technique worked over one row at a time to achieve what looks like fair isle... but without ever having to use more than one yarn at a time, and without steeking!

Cardigan A

Cardigan B

Cardigan C

The 16-page pattern includes detailed, illustrated instructions for every technique included in the pattern except knitting and purling, as well as lots of other photos, hints, and charts to make everything totally clear. It's written for thee sizes, from 3 months to 12 months.

Best of all, these three sweaters use up extra sock yarn and are also the same gauge and measurements as my Sock Yarn Stranded Sweater, so you can graduate from these to that! And in fact, the Sock Yarn Stranded fair isle yoke never has more than 3 stitches at a time of one color, so you could use the same modified mosaic technique from Cardigan C to knit it!

There are two ways to buy: you can buy the individual sweater patterns, or you can buy the packet of three patterns at a discount ($1.98 less than buying all three individually).

Cardigan A ($1.99): buy now

Cardigan B ($2.99): buy now

Cardigan C ($2.99): buy now

Or the packet of all three ($5.99): buy now

Finito!

2009-08-31T12:46:00.006-05:00

Phew, that was a lot of knitting for no particular recipient!

The second and third of my trio of circular-yoke baby sweaters are finally finished, and I'll be posting the pattern pronto! But first, a moment for boasting.

I am so excited about the technique I hit upon for working the yoke of this seemingly "fair isle" sweater. It achieves quite complicated, one-row color changes (whereas mosaic knitting requires pairs of two rows each), but without ever having to knit with two colors at once!

I am sure I am not the first person to have thought of this, but I did some poking around the internet and couldn't find any other examples. It's so simple, and yet so cool! If you're wondering how it works, check out the Purl Bee's Treeline Cardigan, which exploits the fact that circular needles have two working ends all the time to achieve one-row stripes in flat knitting. That's what got me thinking about how one could work one-row fair isle patterns, slipping stitches as if to work mosaic knitting, but instead of turning the work and purling back and slipping the same stitches, pushing the work to the right and knitting over the same row with the second color! It only works for patterns that have no more than three stitches in a row of one color, but it's an awesome trick! Now I want to use it as often as I can.

Anyway, be on the lookout for the pattern later this afternoon. Yay!

Actually, first a question, though: I am bundling them and selling them as one unit, with a price significantly cheaper than if I sold each individually. But would you want them also sold individually?

Mental knitting = dealbreaker

2009-08-10T21:23:00.006-05:00

Once again, knitting proves to be my litmus test, I think.

So I broke up with the boyfriend -- the one for whom I knit the OXO cable scarf for Christmas. That was actually good, as good as it could possibly be: the first real, mature adult breakup I've ever had, and we're on really good terms.

But that means I'm back to the internet dating. And it happened AGAIN: I was out on a (second) date with this guy who is in fact really quite sweet. And I started daydreaming about knitting. I mean, I was calculating sizing and gauge for patterns in my head. I was mentally assessing the virtues of a few different yarns for my next project.

Clearly a sign, n'est-ce pas?

Some possible ways of reading it: a) I'm clearly not into this guy. b) I am obsessed with knitting. c) Both of the above.

Or, I suppose: d) I'm not as ready to be dating again as I thought I was. e) I'm sublimating with fiber arts. f) Both of the above.

The poor guy. Thank god he didn't know the real reason I was dreamily smiling while he was talking.

A lot of circles

2009-08-06T13:17:00.007-05:00

Finally got a chance to photograph a few of the projects in the works. Everything on the needles at the moment is circular! I've got now two baby yoke sweaters in the works and one finished:

I'm quite pleased with how this one came out, though there's some noticeable difference in the dye lots of the two skeins of "Grasshopper" -- most noticeably where the button band meets the collar.

Then there's a really simple garter yoke cardigan, using some leftover Knitpicks Felici self-striping yarn and Knitpicks "Bare":

And then there's the one that caused me the most consternation: a "fair-isle" yoke sweater using a super-secret trick to make it look much more complicated than it is to knit (which is why it's "fair isle" instead of fair isle). I had to rip and redo this yoke a number of times until I was satisfied with the way it looked.

And even when I was satisfied, I went back in and duplicate-stitched one row with the MC yarn (Knitpicks Stroll in "Tidepool Heather") because I was afraid there wasn't enough similarity between the yoke section and the body section (which is the old standby Knitpicks Essential/Stroll Kettle in "Grasshopper" and Lorna's Laces in "Gold Hill" -- the same two colors, in other words, that I used in the mosaic yoke cardigan pictured above). That combo looks quite different in single-row stranding rather than mosaic knitting, huh?

But it looks quite nice now! I'm busily knitting these as I write up the patterns, hoping to publish all three in one packet (they all have the same gauge and measurements). It's my hope that knitters could work from the garter-yoke one through to the "fair isle" one, gradually becoming more comfortable with stranded knitting. Then they could graduate to my Sock Yarn Stranded (which also has the same gauge and measurements) or to any other fair isle pattern! I'm a little frantic to get the pattern finished by the time Sock Summit is over, because even though I'm not going to Sock Summit, I figured that people would come home loaded up with beautiful sock yarn and be looking for projects to knit with it!

Then lastly, to continue the stranded knitting fiesta, there's one of these:

Which I am sure you all recognize as a Selbu Modern in the works, using a popular color combination. It took me a while to hit on the right color of blue, and I'm still not satisfied with it -- I was looking for "Tiffany Blue" or robin's-egg blue, but this is a little greener than either of those colors. I was inspired by haveyouanywool's version on Ravelry. She used Louet Gems fingering, but that was a little out of my price range and I don't like working with it -- too heavy and not springy enough for my taste. This is Knitpicks Essential/Stroll in "Glacial," a discontinued color, and the red is Valley Yarns Huntington (color 4150). I think in combination the two yarns look better than separately, and the Glacial looks sufficiently Tiffany-esque to cut it. Last year I had so much fun knitting and then wearing my Chevron Beret that I figured another pretty beret was just the ticket for getting ready for hat season!

More knitting is afoot.

2009-07-29T10:54:00.005-05:00

It's baby sweaters all the time here! (It's turtles all the way down.) As soon as I finished that uber-cute sock yarn stranded sweater, I started in on another. I had ordered three skeins of that Essential Kettle "Grasshopper" yarn but only used two, so clearly the answer was to order another skein and try out a different patterned yoke sweater! Then I had a couple more brainstorms while knitting it, and all the sudden percolating in my mind is a genius idea for a step-by-step pattern that lets knitters work their way up to stranded knitting, and not one but three sweaters in the works. So if "Sock Yarn Stranded" is Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, these three sweater pattterns are Episodes I-III. Only without Jarjar Binks. And with better dialogue. Uh, and in sweater pattern form.

Anyway, lots of unnecessary baby sweater knitting going on here. I don't even know anybody who's pregnant this time! I suppose it's always nice to have a few presents sitting around waiting to be given, right?

Sock Yarn Stranded -- now with pattern!

2009-07-25T23:52:00.010-05:00

Special note: from now until 2/14/10, I will donate 50% of the proceeds from all my pattern sales to the American Red Cross for Haiti relief efforts.

Here it finally is! I'm really pleased with this one. Not only is the finished sweater way cute, but I worked really hard and carefully on the pattern to make it easy to follow.

On Ravelry, I noticed that a lot of people who were using my baby sweater patterns seemed to be people who were using some of the techniques in them for the first time. Some of them expressed frustration, therefore, in trying to decode abbreviations or use techniques that I assumed they already knew. So I decided to write a pattern that would also teach people all the techniques involved in the pattern (within reason -- I don't give instructions for how to cast on or anything!). Indeed, this pattern will also teach knitters how to do all of the techniques involved in my other patterns.

So this pattern includes an extensive appendix, with photo-illustrated instructions for how to do my favorite M1 increase, how to ssk, how to work stranded knitting, how to pick up stitches for a buttonband, and how to seam with mattress stitch. It also includes a glossary of all abbreviations.

As for the pattern itself? It's also clearly and simply written, with lots of added instructions to walk people through stranded knitting and steeking (remember my fascination with this cool kind of steek!). It also uses sock yarn -- about a pair of socks' worth of the MC, and leftover scraps of self-striping yarn for the fair isle patterning. Sock yarn is great for baby clothes -- soft, machine-washable, a great gauge for making not-too-bulky garments, and made in a huge variety of colors and patterns. I ogled sock yarn for a long time before I ever made my first sock. I don't wear hand-knitted socks, but I am addicted to the yarn and love to find ways to use it!

Specs:
Size: 3-6 (6-9, 9-12) months
Finished Measurements: 20” (21”, 22”) chest, 10.5” (11.5”, 12”) long
Gauge: 7 st and 9 rows = 1 inch
Requirements: size 2 (3 mm) circular needles, 400-600 yards fingering weight sock yarn in main color (MC), plus leftovers (about 75 yards each) self-striping yarn in two colorways

I am charging for this one -- not a lot, $2.99 -- because I really did put a lot of work into it. I think it's well worth the cost. It's a Ravelry download -- I'm assuming that's an okay way of offering it, but comment if you can't access it. Click the "buy now" link at the top of this post if you want it!

But I am also offering just the appendix for free. Not only is it a useful tool for sort of intermediate-novice knitters, but it's also a way for me to preview the kind of instructions and care that are in the for-sale pattern. Here's the link:

download now

Yay for adorable baby-sweaterishness!

entrepreneurialishness

2009-07-24T21:27:00.003-05:00

So anyone who's been following the blog the last month or so (and I know it has not been a particularly scintillating month of posts!) knows that I've been obsessively sewing zipper pouches of various sizes.

Not needing a gajillion zipper pouches just for myself, I've decided to open up a little etsy store. The bags I've made are all finished carefully and are perfect sizes for knitting on the go -- sock-size WIP bags and smaller notions pouches. Feel free to check it out!

It's hip to be square!

2009-07-03T09:18:00.005-05:00

Here's how I made my zipper pouch corners much squarer.

I ironed a hem on a little tiny piece of scrap fabric, then sewed this to both ends of my zipper. I used an iron-set glue stick to get the placement exactly right.

Here's a close-up, to show the seam and how close it is to the zipper stop. I used the zipper foot for this. I did a double seam for reinforcement -- just ran it in reverse along the same seam.

Here's what it looks like on the back side.

Now trim the zipper ends way back. This is about 1/8" away from the seam. Get them back to beyond where you know your seam will be when you're sewing the sides of the pouch.

Now you are only dealing with a piece of fabric when you turn your bag inside out and poke out the corners. A piece of fabric is, of course, much less stiff and much more flexible than the end of a zipper.

An added benefit: It sort of disguises slightly misaligned sides, because the little metal end pieces of the zipper are not right next to the corner to get pulled out of alignment, and because the added piece of fabric kind of blends out the colors of the two side panel pieces.

I am sure I'm not the first one to have thought of this. But it is cool!

Square corners!

2009-07-02T15:37:00.004-05:00

It totally worked!

The trick was to sew a little piece of fabric to the zipper, running perpendicular to it, then to trim the zipper back to at least the middle of this piece of fabric, so that when sewing the seams of the bag the thread didn't actually run across zipper material at all. That meant that it was much easier to turn the corner, without that stiff plasticky zipper material in it.

I'll take some more process pictures tomorrow. It's way easy, but I mucked it up a little this time around. But the NEXT pouches...!

Yes, Jennifer K., you are a goddess among women.

2009-06-30T16:46:00.004-05:00

I made an awesome laptop sleeve.

Ok, it probably doesn't look any different from the other things I've been making recently with this Heather Ross Mendocino fabric, but it is, my friends.

For one thing, I made it with super-heavyweight interfacing, so I had to figure out how to cut my fabric 3/8" larger and do all the seams with the zipper foot so I could sew right up next to the edge of the interfacing.

For another thing, I cut the zipper to be exactly the right length to fit my laptop, and no bigger. Actually, I wish I had made it just a touch bigger, because it's a pretty tight squeeze!

But the thing is exactly, exactly the right size. Not a fraction of an inch too big! Just look at that zipper closing. Uh, but don't look too close, because you'll notice that things aren't totally aligned there.

Yes, Jennifer K., you are becoming the mistress of your sewing machine.

(oh, also, I had a good idea about how to fix the problem of the not-quite-square zipper corners. More on that when I have a chance to try it out.)

Sock Yarn Stranded

2009-06-26T11:53:00.005-05:00

The sock yarn baby sweater is finished! I'm quite pleased with it.

The stranded yoke looks just darling.

The wrong side is the neatest of any fair isle work I've done -- I think knitting in the round is the key here (the first time I've done this with a stranded sweater!).

The steek threads are all snipped down and hidden underneath button band ribbons. I had to put the ribbon kind of halfway into the button band, but in fact, I think that it looks fine, and it makes it much easier with the buttoholes. Other sweaters with ribbon-faced button bands I've made, I've used my sewing machine to make buttonholes on the ribbon to match the eyelet holes on the button band, and they are a pain to do, plus the shapes of machine-made holes and eyelet holes are not the same and it's just an awkward business.

Here's the other side. I have to say, I may be a pretty neat knitter and finisher, but I am a total moron at sewing on buttons! My knots are never neat, you don't know how many times I threaded the needle through the wrong side of the button or the wrong side of the band and had to cut the thread, and then I had to rip out and reposition almost all the buttons at least once in order to get the bands to lie flat. Ugh!

But all in all, a totally fun knit and a great finished product! I've written up pretty detailed instructions and will post them soon.

tutorial: picking up stitches

2009-06-20T10:24:00.007-05:00

The body of the new baby sweater is finished, and I'm picking up stitches along the fronts for the button bands. I thought I'd stop and take some pictures and do a little tutorial for any of you readers who have never picked up stitches for button bands (or other things, for that matter) before. You can click on any of these pictures to see a much larger image.

If you look carefully at your cardigan fronts, you'll see that between each column of stitches is a little ladder of yarn that makes a column of little holes. The column of holes you want to work with is the one between the very first column of stitches of your cardigan front and the column of stitches next to it.

Hold your work so that the right side is facing up and the button band is closest to your chest (your columns of stitches will be running sideways). Tie your working yarn to the back side of the work at the very right edge of the front. Poke the tip of your needle into the first hole (the one farthest to the right) in the column you were just looking at, from the front side into the back side. In the photo below, I've already picked up some stitches, but the process is exactly the same:

Here is what it looks like from the back side of the work:

Wrap your working yarn around your needle the way you would wrap the yarn if you were making a stitch.

Pull the loop of yarn you just wrapped around the needle from the back side into the front side of the work.

As you are picking up stitches, you are going to need to skip a hole every once in a while, because rows are shorter than stitches are wide. (Recall that gauge is sometimes given for stitches and rows, and it will say things like "5 stitches and 7 rows = 1 inch.") In this case, I need to skip every fourth hole.

When you get to the end of your cardigan front, you will have a whole bunch of loops of yarn on your needle, ready to turn and work just like regular knitting!

Adorability

2009-06-11T13:33:00.006-05:00

Progress on the new baby sweater continues. I'm quite pleased both with how nice it looks (with the ends all tucked in on the front) and with how little yarn it seems to be taking up -- I had planned for three balls of Knitpicks Essential Kettle-dyed (the old 50g balls), but I think it will squeak in with just two. Sweet! And the yoke is all done with scraps, so for the price of a pair of socks, I get a baby sweater!

Meanwhile, I have discovered the joys and dangers of Etsy. It's an awesome, awesome site. The problem for me is not that I go on Etsy and order tons of handmade things, but that I go on Etsy and look at beautiful handmade things, and think, "I could make that!" Hence, the huge pile of designer fabric scraps and lots of zippers:

None of which I really need. But I did make some cute things today! Here are two little coin pouches.

I learned how to make a fully lined zippered pouch. I have not yet learned how to make it perfectly straight, but I'm getting better. I made the orange one first, and then the pink one, and I think the pink one is straighter. I also don't know how to make square top corners, and though I don't dislike these sort of "mitered" ones, I'd love to know if there is indeed a trick to squaring them.

Do I need these things? No. But they are cute. Did I spend $25 on zippers alone? Yes.

Then there's this little buttoned metrocard holder. This one I actually kind of do need, because I am constantly losing metrocards with like $40 on them. The plan is that a slightly bigger holder (that's super cute) will keep me from dropping the card in my pocket where it will slide out again. It's adorably reversible (and also definitely not square):

Also adorably reversible is this little purse for the two-year-old older sister of the baby who's getting the sock yarn sweater:

I'm a little disappointed with the strap -- it just looks kind of clunky. I also didn't really measure the buttonhole tab, and it's a little too long. But the combination of fabrics is really sweet. And the best part is this:

She loves playing with wallets and taking credit cards out of them, so I made her her own little wallet, with a few old cards of mine. So sweet!

Yes, I may have lost my mind. Adorable fish-print-induced mania!

Cheaters never -- or in this case always -- win

2009-06-07T19:05:00.006-05:00

The birth of another friend's baby gives me another opportunity to design baby knitwear! I am super excited about this design, because it makes use of a lot of cool "cheats" to make something pretty simple look pretty complex. One of those cheats is a kind of steek that I learned about in Robson/Gibson-Roberts' Knitting in the Old Way. Like many people, I've been a little nervous about trying out steeking, despite the fact that so many people do it every day with total success. Plus, I was using a superwash yarn, which is not "sticky" enough for many kinds of steeks. But the kind of steek I used here works really well without any sewn reinforcement!

After I knit the neckhole ribbing just like a regular cardigan, I cast on eight extra stitches and started knitting in the round. Whenever I came to the eight added "steek" stitches, I knit with both yarns held together (if I was on a row with two colors). After I was done with the yoke pattern, I unraveled the eight steek stitches all the way up to the cast-on.

Then I cut four "rungs" of the ladder formed at a time and knotted them together on each side of the steek:

The advantage of this kind of steek is that it is totally controllable. You are guaranteed that you'll only be working with the steek stitches, and you can cut and tie them as slowly as you want to. No scary sewing and cutting knit fabric!

Of course the disadvantage is this:

Every single row means two ends to weave in on each side of the cardigan front. Pretty messy! I am still deciding what to do about this fact: I am inclined either to "french braid" them down the front or to trim them down and sew a ribbon on the inside of the button bands to cover them up.

The rest of the pattern is forthcoming, as soon as I've finished knitting the sweater!

Beautiful yarn + windfall free time = a cardigan front!

2009-05-25T16:09:00.004-05:00

I've had a lovely Swinecation. I knit in the DMV waiting for my license renewal; I knit in the car on the way to Syracuse to pick up Raymond; I knit on the couch watching old episodes of TV shows on Hulu. It's been lovely.

After some other knitters weighed in, I went with my gut and knit a plain cardigan front. I'm pleased with the way it came out -- especially with the fact that it is EXACTLY the size I wanted it to be. My swatch, for once, did not lie. On to the back! Without a pretty lace panel, the back will be easier to knit but much more boring. Undaunted, I forge ahead! This is such beautiful yarn it just begs to be knit!

Oink.

2009-05-20T12:25:00.006-05:00

Guess whose school is canceled because of possible swine flu?

We're supposed to be continuing to "teach" our classes over the internet, but who are we kidding? I'm taking full advantage of the serendipitous free time to knit a swatch with the lovely birthday BFL. Even winding it on my new ball winder has been a treat!

This stuff is even prettier knitted up than in the skein! The color's called "harvest," and it really does remind me of beautiful, warm wheatfields.

I've got an idea in mind for a cardigan with a stripe of Barbara Walker's "Swiss Fan" lace down either side of the button band. I'm trying to decide whether to make it empire-ish waisted with a peplum, or just straight.

Opinions, anyone? I was all for the peplum, but now when I look at these sketches, I wonder if simplicity is better and will show off the lace pattern better.

Other recent activities have included tearing up my windowsill planters and laboriously spraying and washing each plant; I've been dealing with an infestation of mealybugs.

Now each plant is quarantined in its own little pot while I wait and see if the mealybugs come back. So far I've had to throw out about half of them. Poor plants! Stupid mealybugs!

Anyone have any suggestions? Everything I read online makes it sound like this is a really futile effort, but I am loath to throw these guys out because they've been my chance to prove that I'm not a total black thumb. I was seriously considering getting a box of ladybugs to eat the mealybugs, but then my plants are covered with ladybugs, and is that really any better?

Birthday treats

2009-05-02T12:09:00.008-05:00

What a lovely boyfriend I have. Witness the delectable birthday fiber present.

By "lovely," I also mean "learning." He's been quite curious about the knitting obsession recently, asking a lot of questions. Though I am of course aware of the fascination knitting should hold for every human, I suspect that some of the curiosity was reconnaissance work for a birthday present. But, as he related a few days before the event, he walked into a yarn store to buy me a present and was totally intimidated and overwhelmed by the array of choices. Apparently he had no idea that both yarn and needles come in so many varieties. So after making a foolhardy attempt to appear suavely as if he belonged there, he made an embarrassed exit.

So, attempting to help him out, I said, "Well, if you are ever in that position again, I think that a few skeins of some really luxurious or unusual yarn that I wouldn't buy myself would be a nice gift. For example, I have been wanting to try some Bluefaced Leicester yarn for a while." Ah, he said, this was very helpful. He would have to remember that name.

Later, we were walking by a yarn shop, and he said, "what was that breed of sheep again? Blue something?"

So that night I decided I'd help him out again. I sent him a link to an online yarn store and wrote, "Here's an example of that kind of yarn I was talking about today. Isn't it pretty? I particularly like that amber color."

Obvious, right?

Later he told me that he read the email and thought, "hm." Then, later the next day, he thought, "Oh! Maybe I could buy her some of THAT yarn!" Then a few hours later, he realized, "Oh! She WANTS me to buy her that yarn!" What a cutie. Just goes to show that hinting around to dudes about what you want or what you are thinking is bootless. You gotta just tell 'em. But it's okay, because they'll probably think it was their idea.

The present arrived today, and it is glorious. Three skeins of Fleece Artist BFL 2/8 in "Harvest," "Twilight," and "Victoria" from coloursong. Each 250 grams and 1000 meters, so easily enough to make three sweaters in my size (though possibly with 3/4 sleeves). And sooo lovely and soft and saturated with jewel-like color! They came with this cute project bag:

Happy Birthday to me! And thanks, sweetie!

long weekend knitting and Easter bread

2009-04-11T16:46:00.007-05:00

It may be April, and the weather may be getting warmer, but it's still winter here Chez Looking Glass -- at least as far as the knitting's concerned. It seems always to be my M.O. to get the knitting bug and finally have time time to make something substantial just as the weather is getting too warm to wear it. Hence my lovely Shalom, which I have been able to wear thrice since knitting it. Now I'm deep into another totally unseasonal and impractical knit -- an Adult Surprise Jacket for my mom in Dream in Color Classy ("Dusky Aurora") and some stripes of leftover black Karabella Aurora 8.

It's been a hoot to knit. Originally, I had thought that the color variation in the Classy would be enough to accentuate the mitered corners and cool construction of this sweater, but you can see that the variegation was just too subtle -- a fact which really is a strong point of this yarn, because, really, who wants really noticeable striping and pooling? So I had to build in some stripes with a contrast color. I'm keeping it subtle with this one -- Paula is a pretty conservative dresser, and I'm planning to keep the striping to a minimum and to finish this short and boxy, like a little jacket.

Next up in the wintry yarn/knitting docket: an order of Jo Sharp DK wool in "Venice" that I got on the cheap in a supersale at Webs. This is probably also going to be a sweater for my mom, with a more conservative projected finishing time of this fall. I'm thinking simple, stockinette body with a cable at the button band and cables on the yoke -- kind of like a variation on the Radcliffe Cardigan. Of which, I realize, I still have two on the needles -- one for my mom and one for me. The one for my mom turned out dishearteningly small, and I just don't have the heart to rip it out and reknit the body bigger. So of course the solution is just to knit something else and let it keep languishing...

But all of those projects are temporarily on hold while I knit something for myself.

This is the beginnings of a hybrid circular shrug and shawl-collared vest for me, to wear over this dress at a May wedding:

I'm hoping the vintage-style look of that dramatic shrug shape (with added 3/4 sleeves) will both keep me warm and match the look of the dress. I'm making this out of Knitpicks Gloss held doubled. Definitely not my ideal choice for yarn -- Knitpicks yarns have always disappointed me with their tendency to pill immediately, and this yarn is a little scratchier and cheaper looking than I had hoped (the name "gloss" led me to imagine smooth, glossy yarn and not wooly, acrylic-shiny yarn) but I didn't want to break the bank on something I expect I will only wear a few times at most. I do have an awesome shiny faceted antique button I plan to use for the closing. More on that when I finish -- it has to be done by May 16th, at least!

Other crafty doings of late include baking a pair of perfect loaves of nisu, a Finnish bread my grandmother always made. This sweet, eggy, cardamom-flavored bread is sometimes spelled "nissu" and is more often called "pulla," which I believe is also the Swedish word for coffeebread. I got the itch to make it as Easter approached -- it's not necessarily an Easter bread or even a special-occasion bread, but I only got to eat it on holidays and special occasions when I was a kid, because that's when we tended to see my grandma.

Why, you ask, did I speak of loaves of nisu but only show you a paltry butt end and slice? Uh, because I've already eaten the rest of that loaf and shoved the other in the freezer to avoid further temptation.

I thought I'd share the recipe with you. In my opinion, I've gotten it totally perfected -- my mom attests that it is better than my grandmother's, which is saying a lot. So bake this and feel like a true Finn. Or at least a true Finno-American.

Nisu: Finnish coffee bread
Recipe adapted from Carmel Mackey's family recipe

Ingredients (makes two loaves):

1 cup 2% milk
1/4 pound (1 stick) butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 heaping teaspoon ground cardamom (grinding whole seeds in a coffee or spice mill recommended)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 package rapid-rise yeast
1/8 cup lukewarm water
2 eggs, beaten
3-4 cups flour
1 tablespoon 2% milk and 1 beaten egg to brush tops of loaves
fancy Swedish pearl sugar or fancy casting sugar to sprinkle on loaves

Equipment that might come in handy but is not necessary:

cooking thermometer
stand mixer
pastry brush
bread loaf pans

Scald the milk. I don't really remember what scalding actually involves, but I heated the milk on medium-high until bubbles started to form around the edges. Remove from heat and add butter, sugar, cardamom and salt. Don't stir at all. Just after you add these ingredients, dissolve the yeast in the water and let sit while the milk mixture cools.

When milk mixture cools to between 105 and 115 degrees, scoop 2 cups of the flour into a large bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer. Make a well in the flour and add eggs, milk mixture and yeast mixture to this. Beat with a wooden spoon until smooth. Then begin adding the remaining flour 1/4 cup at a time until dough holds together and doesn't stick to the sides of the bowl, but is not too dry. If you are mixing this with the dough hook in your stand mixer, you might find that it's easiest to gauge the dough's consistency by stopping when it is still a little wet and kneading the remaining flour in during the kneading stage. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let rest for 15 minutes.

Turn dough out onto floured surface and knead until smooth and satiny, about 10 minutes. It's okay if you find you have to add some more flour as you knead to keep dough from sticking to your hands. Shape dough into a ball and place in a clean, lightly oiled bowl. Turn dough around a few times in the bowl to grease the top of dough. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled in size, about 2 hours.

Turn dough out onto a clean, oiled surface (no flour) and knead lightly and briefly to release air. Divide in half, and divide each half into three equal balls. Roll each ball into a snake about a foot long. Arrange 3 snakes vertically on the counter. Pinch together at the top and braid (as you would braid hair), stretching snakes ever so slightly as you braid them. Pinch together bottom and turn top and bottom pinched areas under to make braid look neat. Place braid into a lightly oiled bread pan or onto an oiled cookie sheet (making it in a bread pan will make the loaf rise taller, but it has to be a pretty long bread pan, not a little banana bread pan). Repeat with second loaf. Cover loaves with clean dishtowels and let rise until doubled, as long as 4 hours depending on how warm your kitchen is.

When loaves are the right size, heat oven to 375 degrees. Beat together egg and milk for brushing. Brush tops of loaves with this mixture, then sprinkle liberally with sugar. Bake 15-25 minutes, until tops of loaves are lightly browned. Let cool.

Even tastier the second day. Also good toasted and spread with butter when it starts to get a little stale.

Squee!

2009-03-31T11:51:00.005-05:00

A last-minute socktopus for my friend's baby's birthday. They invited me to dinner on Monday night, and I knit the whole thing on Sunday (it did take longer than I thought; I was up pretty late Sunday night).

Were I to knit it again, I think I'd do paired right- and left-leaning increases and decreases for some symmetry. I'm not super fond of the way those increases swirl across the top of the head.

The thing is even cuter than I thought it would be! Those tentacles were a little fiddly to knit, but so worth it! Just look at those adorable socks.

FO: Shalom

2009-03-25T11:12:00.006-05:00

Here are some more composed pictures of the Shalom cardigan, taken in the sober morning after my wearing it out immediately upon being (almost) dry yesterday. You may notice that the sleeve is a little wrinkled, from my bending my elbow last night at choir rehearsal.

A little difficult to catch the color in this light (barn-red-rust-brown-orange is almost as hard to photograph as red, it turns out). This striped-with-window-sash pic comes closest to getting it. Looking at that length laid vertically, the thing looks really cropped and boxy, right? Hard to believe that it gets weighed down enough by its own weight to be pretty much the same length as all my other sweaters.

The yoke is just gorgeous, and the short rows I worked in the back do the trick in hiking up the back of the collar just a bit. I would probably work a few more were I to do it again. I used some vintage buttons I bought a few years ago at antique show; they match quite nicely and I think give the sweater a nice old-fashioned look:

In the end, since following my gauge (5 st./in.) mods of Ishi's mods didn't work perfectly for me, here's what I did. I placed markers, rather than dividing, right after the last garter ridge: right front 43 stitches, sleeve 51 stitches, back 72 stitches, sleeve 51 stitches, left front 43 stitches.

Then I knit to the center of the back (36 stitches in) and marked it, and worked short rows as follows: knit to 10 st. past marker, wrap and turn, p to 10 stitches past marker, wrap and turn. Knit to 15 stitches past marker, knitting into wrap with wrapped stitch when I encounter it, wrap and turn. Purl to 15 stitches past marker, purling into wrap with wrapped stitch when I encounter it. Repeat these steps, each time going 5 more stitches out, until I've gone as far as 25 stitches from the marker on both sides of it. Were I to do it again, I think I'd go to 30 stitches past the marker. I did it this way, rather than working my short rows in from the furthest-out point, because I am not super-great at picking up wrapped stitches and I feel like you can always notice them, so I tried to hide them all right underneath the last garter ridge.

Then I went on with the body, dropping that center-back marker. I increased every other knit row inside both sides of just the sleeve markers, the way I would have for a raglan increase, but only in the sleeves. I did this 3 times, for an increase of 6 stitches inside each sleeve. Then I worked regular raglan increases (increasing on both sides of each marker) every other knit row twice. At that point, I was at an armpit length that seemed more reasonable, so I divided for the sleeves. Since I had increased 2 stitches on each side of the armpits, I only had to cast on 11 stitches under each arm as I separated for the sleeves. Were I to do it again, I think I'd have cast on fewer than that, because this sweater is a little too big, and because those cast-on armpits are kind of noticeable when you're wearing the sweater. I think maybe 5 or 7 would have been more reasonable. I also think the sleeves are a bit too wide, so cutting back the cast-on for the sleeves would not be terrible.

I left the body stitches on a holder after a few rows and worked the sleeves; I think this was a great idea, because it helped me avoid second sleeve syndrome. I worked the sleeves in the round using magic loop, and decreased on each side of the center stitch picked up under the arm at the 4th round, the 21st round, and every 14th round after that. I knit them until they were about 11 inches long, then worked a decrease row, decreasing every 8th stitch, then worked 12 rows of garter and bound off. I wanted my sleeves to be a little boxy and not too close-fitting at the elbow.

For the body, I just worked straight to (what I thought was) the right length, working a slipped-stitch "seam" under each armpit all the way down, then decreased every 10th stitch, worked 12 rows of garter and bound off. A proportion of garter to stockinette of 90% seems perfect for not flaring out or pulling in. After blocking, of course, I realized it was much too long and ripped back about 20 rows of stockinette, then reworked the garter hem.

Shalom!

2009-03-24T13:13:00.004-05:00

Shalom turned out quite nicely, I think! I snapped these pictures as I was heading out the door -- they're not very good, but they give a general idea.

Aurora 8 is VERY stretchy -- I ended up having to rip back about 5 inches of the hem after blocking because it grew and grew. Thankfully, the growth seems mainly to be in length, because this is just a tad too big. Perhaps Paula would like it, and I can make myself another. But soft, comfortable, kicky -- I think this will get a lot of wear!

Two FO's and a work in progress

2009-03-23T22:39:00.005-05:00

The Shalom Cardigan is finished and blocking at the moment. It turned out well, with only a slight degree of panicking over growing superwash yarn during the blocking process. Modeled photographs are forthcoming.

In the meantime, here is a picture of a long-finished knitting project: the cashmere OX cable scarf I knit my boyfriend for Christmas. Begrudgingly modeled (but not begrudgingly worn) by the man himself.

I'm partial, but I think he bears a slight resemblance to the sexy Severus Snape. This photo was snapped during a walk this Saturday, a truly glorious day that led me to do a little sightseeing in my neighborhood:

Ah, scraggly weeds and the Henry Hudson Bridge. Gotta love NYC.

Correction.

2009-03-21T13:05:00.004-05:00

Silly me. I forgot that a big change in stitch gauge would entail a similarly big change in row gauge. There was no way this puppy was going to reach under my armpits at the bottom of the yoke ribbing. Luckily, I was planning all along to make it a sweater with sleeves, so it's all good. I incorporated a few raglan increases to cut down on the number of stitches cast on under the armpit, and viola: a Shalom-esque sweater rather than a Shalom.

I think it's still cute, though I liked the nice, neat way that the real Shalom's yoke ended just as the body/sleeves divided. Alas. Next time I won't be such a smart-aleck and will just knit something in the right gauge of yarn.

That said, I love, love, love this yarn (Karabella Aurora 8) -- the color and the feel. I worry, though, both that it will grow out of control and that it will become pilly. Those two problems have plagued me as long as I've been hard-headedly knitting things with soft yarn even though everyone says that soft yarn pills and that superwash grows...

four blobs

2009-03-16T12:48:00.006-05:00

As schoolwork and other obligations piled up over the last few weeks, all I've been able to think about has been knitting. But spring break is here, baby, and I can finally do all that knitting I've been jonesing for!

Today, officially the first day of break, a package arrived from Webs with two lovely blobs in it: Dream in Color Classy in Dusky Aurora and Chinatown Apple. The Dusky Aurora is destined to be an Adult Surprise Jacket for my mom, with some modifications to make it look a little more like a boxy Chanel jacket than a lab coat. The Chinatown Apple, I don't know. Something for myself, I believe. I'd say a February Lady Sweater, but in fact I already have one of those blobs on the needles:

The periwinkle bed jacket for grandma was so successful that I've started my own in Jo Sharp Classic DK -- the gauge is different from the original though (5.5 stitches per inch), which means that I am using the medium measurements to knit an XXS. That's on hold for a bit, though, for two reasons: the first is that I accidentally pulled out the needle from about 30 stitches and am going to have to steel myself before I look at the damage to the lace pattern; the second is that I have to concentrate on the lace, so I am saving it for mindless TV knitting. (I mean, knitting in front of mindless TV, not mindless knitting in front of the TV.)

But spring break also means fun reading, and the book I checked out of the library -- Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex -- is so interesting that I want to read it all the time. So I've cast on a Shalom Cardigan, which has a yoke that needs concentration, but a totally mindless body. Once the yoke is done, I'll have nothing but stockinette in front of me, and I can read and knit to my heart's content. That will be in exactly 3 rows. The fourth blob:

Of course, this is also not the same gauge as the original (5 stitches per inch instead of 3.25), being knit in Karabella Aurora 8, so I've had to make some modifications. In case you're interested, they are to cast on 101 stitches, have 7 stitches in garter for the button band, and to do the increases as written. At the end of the third increase row, it works out to 253 stitches. Doing the math on Ishi's modifications (Ravelry link), I need to add 7 more stitches somewhere in the last garter ridge for a total of 260 stitches, and I'll be able to do the following:

Right front 43 stitches, sleeve 51 stitches, back 72 stitches, sleeve 51 stitches, left front 43 stitches. I'm going to put all but the back stitches on holders and work 8 rows of stockinette along the back to hike up the collar a bit, then I'll cast on 15 stitches for the underarms and work the body (total of 188 body stitches), then for the arms, pick up 15 stitches along the cast-on edge and 6 more along the side edge of those 8 rows, for a total of 72 arm stitches. Here's hoping it works out! Of course, Aurora 8 has a reputation for stretching, so I am hoping that my worries about this sweater's being too small will be resolved in blocking. I am, this time, using a blocked swatch, having been burned with growing, multi-ply superwash yarn in the past.

By the way, I am pleased as punch with both the Jo Sharp Classic DK and the Karabella Aurora 8. I've knit with the Karabella before, but not the Jo Sharp. Both are hardy, well-made yarns, but totally different from one another. The Aurora 8 is heavy, bouncy, super springy, and absolutely not itchy at all. That's why I'm hoping it will knit up into a nice, close-fitting, stretchy sweater that I can wear even in the summer. It would have been a terrible choice, however, for the February Lady Sweater, whose lace pattern would have gotten all stretched out of shape with that much weight pulling it down. The Jo Sharp yarn is much lighter and more rustic, and wooly enough that I don't think this will work up into a seasonless sweater. However, I have high hopes for its being a perfect, mulitpurpose, super-warm and hard-wearing winter sweater, and I know its lighter weight won't pull the lace out of proportion.

Hooray for spring knitting! Even if it does result in sweaters I can't wear for months!

millinery

2009-03-07T16:07:00.006-05:00

Here's a little tidbit I made up to go along with the tulip cardigan. The parents of this baby are supposedly not into frou-frou girly things, so I tried to come up with a hat that had some flexibility. On the one hand, the cardigan seems to call for a 30's-style cloche or helmet, which of course needs an oversized, stylized flower. On the other hand, frou-frou-free parents may object to the flower. Hence the solution:

A removable flower. If they want this baby to sport a pared-down, tailored hat, they can, and if not, they can attach the flower for some frou.

Here are the specs:

Sizes: 3-6 (6-9, 9-12) months
Gauge: 6 stitches and 8 rows/inch
Needles: size 3 16" circular, size 3 double-pointed
Requirements: less than 100 yards sport-weight yarn each in colors MC, A, B, C; tapestry needle; one large-ish button.

With circular needles, cast on 84 (88, 92) stitches in brown (color A). Being careful not to twist, join to knit circularly, and work 4 rounds of k1, p1 rib. Break yarn and join tan (color C). Knit one round. Break yarn and join green (MC). Work 2 inches in seed stitch (*k1, p1 in round one, *p1, k1 in round two), adding one stitch at the end of the first seed stitch round so that you can just mindlessly go around and around over an odd number of stitches. Break yarn and join tan (color C). Knit one round. Break yarn and join brown (color A).

Work in stockinette (all knit) until piece measures 4 (5, 5) inches. In next round, decrease by 1 (increase by 2, decrease by 2) stitches randomly in round to get a multiple of 7 stitches. 84 (91, 91) stitches. In next round, place a marker after every 12th (13th, 13th) stitch. In the next round, begin decreasing as follows:

Round 1: *k to 2 stitches before marker, k2tog, rep from *
Round 2: knit.

Repeat these two rows until there are six stitches between each marker. Switch to double-pointed needles when it gets too tight. Then work decreases every row instead of every other. When there are 2 stitches between each marker, break yarn and thread through all stitches, dropping markers as you do so. Pull tight to draw together stitches.

Weave in ends and block. Sew one pretty large button to center of green band, at a jaunty place on the side of the hat.

Flower:

With double-pointed needles, CO 68 stitches in pink (color B). Join carefully to work in round, being careful to avoid twisting. Work in stockinette (all knit) until work measures 1.5 inches. K2tog across round, break yarn, and thread through all stitches. Pull to draw together, but leave a big enough hole in the middle to fit around your button. Knot yarn to keep from loosening up again, weave in ends and block.

Button flower to hat and enjoy!

Snow day!

2009-03-02T12:45:00.005-05:00

No school today; it's been snowing like a mofo here in NYC. I woke up this morning (at the blissful hour of 10 am) to these views out my fire escape and living room window:

Snow days are so nice! Unfortunately, I can't just laze around the entire day, because I have 36 student papers on Hamlet to read. However, I can take a moment to report on some knitting progress and a new free pattern!

First of all, the red striped socks were finished in time for Paula to wear them home after her visit last weekend. They look great on her, and she reports that they are quite warm.

Then, the tulip yoke cardigan is all finished, and I am pleased to offer it is a free pattern, here on my website and as a Ravelry download (see previous post). Enjoy!

Tulip Yoke Baby Cardigan pattern

2009-03-02T12:32:00.014-05:00

Just in time for in-like-a-lion March weather, here's a free baby cardigan pattern with spring colors of mud and grass and a line of cheerful spring tulips!

This is a top-down, circular yoke cardigan in three sizes (3-6, 6-9, and 9-12 months), with instructions on how to increase for the yoke, separate for the sleeves, and pick up stitches for button bands. It's a great pattern to try if you are a first-time sweater knitter!

Also avaliable as a free Ravelry download here.
Matching hat available here.

Note: There was one row missing from the yoke instructions. All increases should be worked in knit rows. Pattern has been amended 7/3/09.

Tulip Yoke Baby Cardigan Pattern

Sizes: 3-6 (6-9, 9-12) months. Shown in smallest size.
Finished Measurements: 20” (21”, 22”) chest circumference

Gauge: 6 stitches and 8 rows = 1” in stockinette

Requirements:
Circular or straight needles, size 3
Double-pointed needles, size 3 (optional)
Sport weight yarn (I used Knitpicks Shine Sport): MC (300-450 yards), secondary colors A (less than 100 yards), B, and C (less than 50 yards each)
Two stitch holders or pieces of scrap yarn
Tapestry needle for weaving in ends
6-8 matching buttons

MC=green (I used “leapfrog”)
A=brown (I used “fedora”)
B=pink (I used “terracotta”)
C=tan (I used “willow”)

Note: this is a top-down circular yoke sweater; it begins at the neck ribbing. It does make use of flat fair isle knitting for a brief section of the sweater (14 rows total), so be warned if flat fair isle knitting is something you hate!

Special instructions:

Complete abbreviations glossary at end of this document.

m1 (make 1): my favorite way to make a stitch is to lift up and knit the right leg of the stitch one row below the stitch on the left needle. Another option is to pick up the bar between stitches and knit it through the back loop.

Reading the charts: pattern repeat is marked in red. For the tulip chart, one or two extra stitches are included next to left and right button bands to make the pattern symmetrical. The tulips are upside-down because the knitting will be done top-down. The fair isle pattern for both charts begins with a purl row.

Directions:

Yoke
With MC, cast on 79 (79, 85) stitches. Work 7 rows of k1, p1 ribbing. Work one row purl. Switch to A and work two rows stockinette. In next row, increase 16 (16, 20) stitches evenly across row as follows: k2 (2, 4), *m1, k5 (5, 4), rep. from * 14 (14, 18) times, m1, k2 (2, 5). 95 (95, 105) st. Work 1 more row stockinette. In next row, increase 28 (28, 28) stitches evenly across row as follows: k7(7,12), *m1, k3, rep. from * 26 (26, 26) times, m1, k7 (7, 12). 123 (123, 133) st.

In next row (WS), join B and begin working tulip chart. You will work 12 (12, 13) repeats of the tulips. Remember to work the extra stitch or two at the beginning of first repeat and end of last repeat to center the design on yoke. After row 10 of the tulip chart, work one row in color A, then in the next row increase 28 (28, 28) stitches evenly across row as follows: k8 (8, 13), *m1, k4, rep from * 26 (26, 26) times, m1, k7 (7, 12). 151 (151, 161) st. Work 3 rows stockinette (in color A). In next row, increase 17 (17, 19) stitches evenly across row as follows: k3 (3, 4), *m1, k9, rep. from * 15 (15, 17) times, m1, k4 (4, 4). 168 (168, 180) st.

In next row (WS), join C and begin working zigzag chart. You will work 42 (42, 45) repeats of the zigzags. After row 4, work one row stockinette in MC, placing markers as follows: p24 (24, 26), place marker (pm), p36 (36, 38), pm, p48 (48, 52), pm, p36 (36, 38), pm, p24 (24, 26).

In next row and following 5 (7, 7) RS rows, work raglan increases: *k to marker, m1, slip marker, m1, rep. from *, k to end. 216 (232, 244) st.

Body
In next RS row, divide for sleeves as follows: knit to first marker, place stitches between first and second markers on a holder or piece of scrap yarn, knit to third marker, place stitches between third and fourth markers on a holder or piece of scrap yarn, knit to end. You can drop the markers in this row. Continue body in stockinette until it measures 9½ (10½, 11½) inches from cast-on. Then work 12 rows of k1, p1 rib and bind off.

Sleeves
Place one sleeve’s stitches back on needles and rejoin MC yarn. Work back-and-forth or in the round. If you work back-and-forth, cast on one selvedge stitch at each side to use for seaming up later. Work 12 rows stockinette. In next row/round (RS), k1, ssk, work to 3 stitches before end, k2tog, k1. Work 11 more rows/rounds. Repeat these 12 rows/rounds 3 more times. Work 0 (4, 8) more rows/rounds stockinette. Sleeve should be 6 (6½, 7) inches from armpit. If it is not, continue in stockinette until it is. In next row/round, *k4, k2tog, repeat from * to end. Work 8 rows k1, p1 rib and bind off. Repeat with other sleeve.

Buttonhole bands
Pick up 3 stitches for every 4 rows along left front cardigan edge for button band. Work 8 rows k1, p1 rib and bind off. Pick up same number of stitches along right front cardigan edge. Work 3 rows k1, p1 rib. In next row, work eyelet buttonholes in the places you would like them (make an eyelet buttonhole by working up to the place you’d like the buttonhole, then YO, k2tog, and continue to the next spot you’d like a buttonhole). Work 4 more rows k1, p1 rib and bind off.

Finishing
Weave in ends, block, and sew on buttons!

Abbreviations used in this pattern:

k: knit
k2tog: knit two stitches together
p: purl
pm: place marker
rep from *: go back in this line of instructions to the *. Repeat the instructions from the * to the end of the line as many times as specified.
RS: right side (usually knit side)
ssk: slip the next two stitches as if to knit, then knit them together through the back loops.
st: stitches
WS: wrong side (usually purl side)
YO: yarn over (move yarn to front of needle as if to purl, but knit the next stitch, making a loop where the yarn went over the needle.

Copyright 2009 by Jennifer Little of Looking Glass Knits. Please do not sell this pattern or sweaters knit for it for your own profit.

Hopeful yoke

2009-02-19T14:03:00.004-05:00

School and work pressure has lifted (however temporarily), and knitting can resume! I've been working away on a new design for that sweater for my friend's granddaughter.

It's really, as all my patterns are, a variation on a theme -- the new element for me this time is the yarn, which, being a cotton blend, seems less well suited to fair isle knitting than my standby superwash wool. Therefore, the yoke pattern I cooked up is decidedly simpler than previous fair isle yokes I've done.

And it's a hopeful yoke -- those coral-colored tulips on a muddy brown ground are a wish for spring from the midst of February doldrums.

I'm working on writing it up as I go, this time in three different sizes. That's a first for me too!

Meanwhile, the red socks are one toe away from completion. My parents are going to be here tomorrow, and I'm hoping I can finish knitting right now and block overnight, so my mom can wear these puppies pronto!

As promised.

2009-02-09T13:39:00.002-05:00

As I posted yesterday, I have a sock completed. As I look at this little number, it seems a little short -- but I am banking on my mom's having smaller feet than mine. She's visiting this weekend and I am hoping to have the pair done by then.

Meanwhile, this tasty treat arrived this morning from Knitpicks: some Shine Sport to make a fair-isle yoke sweater for my colleague's granddaughter, due in April. This seems like a lovely spring bunch of colors, don't you think?

Not a yarn bribe this time -- more of a yarn reward. It feels quite nice to get that Chaucer-paper monkey off my back.

... what's that you say? I have some mittens that I have not finished? You are right. With temperatures in the high 40s, it's hard to conceive of knitting mittens. But not to fear: cold weather will eventually return, as will my knitten-mitting mojo.

This is ynough, Grisilde myn.

2009-02-08T14:16:00.002-05:00

Huzzah! I finished the Chaucer paper and sent it off to my prof. Only 6 weeks late, really not that bad in the scope of things. And, of course, I could not hold off on that reward yarn and have knitted a sock. The partner's on the needles, and I'll post a picture anon. I'm banking on not getting second sock syndrome, having just been through that bout of second draft syndrome.

Actually, a thought on that: the only sock I've really had second sock syndrome with was one of the only pair I've made out of non-self-striping yarn. I think that seeing those stripes stack up really keeps me knitting, and knowing exactly how many I need to knit before turning the heel also seems to make it go quicker -- kind of like the way back from someplace you've driven or walked always seems shorter than the way to it because you know exactly where you're going and how long it will take.

For what it's worth.

Next up: two stacks of short papers to grade (cake!), some medieval mysticism to read (reading! how lovely in comparison to writing!), and a baby sweater for my colleague's granddaughter to knit. More on that anon as well.

conclusions, beginnings, and a yarn bribe.

2009-01-31T15:29:00.003-05:00

Things have been in a shameful state recently here chez Looking Glass. One semester ended, a new one began, and ALL kinds of work did not get done. That Chaucer paper about which I jauntily wrote a few weeks ago is still incomplete, and I've got a big stack of papers to grade that are so late that my students have started joking around about their status as historical documents. I've been whiny and neurotic and just generally a loser, and I'm downright peeved at myself.

Ergo, very little knitting to speak of. I have only knit about 2 more pattern repeats on my mitten, mostly during the episodes of Lost I've taken time out to watch. These will be awesome mittens if I can ever finish them before winter ends! Just trying them on for size, they are very warm.

Only two things are providing hope: my darling, funny boyfriend and a shipment of new Knitpicks Felici I bought myself as a yarn bribe. What gorgeous, jewel-like colors! But I can't knit it until that paper is in.

Now, Jennifer K., get your act together and finish your $@&%ing paper!!

That's right, I'm the queen.

2009-01-22T14:12:00.001-05:00

Of the Middle Ages, that is. I just got a little shout-out from one of the medievalist blogs I frequent. How cool is that?

January morasse

2009-01-18T16:26:00.005-05:00

I was looking forward to turning to projects for myself in January, now that Christmas knitting was all done. But unfortunately, grad school pressures and other daily responsibilities have elbowed out most of my knitting time.

I have just one project I'm working on at the moment: some stranded knitting therapy in the form of another Latvian mitten adaptation. I have some lovely leftover sock yarn from my various socks and berets that was just begging to be combined in gorgeous jewel-toned patterns. It's mostly Dream in Color Smooshy in "Good Luck Jade" and Arucania Ranco in rust, with additional pattern bands of Dream in Color Smooshy in "Gothic Rose" and some scraps of Koigu KPPPM in shades of navy blue and only the yellow stripes from my leftover Knitpicks Felici in "Patina." I'm particularly pleased with the way the Good Luck Jade and rust colors work together; both are semi-solid or mildly variegated, and the combined effect is like an antique piece of fabric.

As with my previous Latvian-style mittens, these have patterns adapted from the mittens on the Riga Summit website. They have a non-traditional thumb gusset, just because I really don't like peasant thumbs; this one is adapted from the Komi mittens in Knitting Marvelous Mittens. Colorwork mittens go so quickly! I had this one knitted up to the thumb, then had to rip it back and make it bigger, and it's still almost finished a week later. Watching those bands of pattern stack up just makes you want to knit one more row... then one more...

It's been freakin' cold here in New York City, so I wish I had more free time to finish these up! Alas, Chaucer and the First Crusade and Literary Theory take priority in the next few weeks...

New Year Update

2009-01-08T08:32:00.004-05:00

All the Christmas knitting did in fact get finished (though I did end up giving my sister only one of the Jaywalker socks and furiously finishing the second on Christmas Day). My cousin seemed a bit ambivalent about her beret, but my grandmother loved her bed jacket. The February Lady Sweater is a great pattern -- quick knit, finishes beautifully. I'd totally recommend it.

Unfortunately, there are no pictures of any of the FOs, because they were all gifted away. The only finished piece I can show you is this beret, a duplicate of my cousin's, which is going to be bestowed upon my friend Suzanne today:

She sang the praises of mine, so I think she deserves one of her own. I think this combination turned out really well: it's Arucanio Ranco in a warm rust color and Jojoland Melody in "Merry."

I'm totally smitten with this pattern and have so far knit five of these berets -- it's La Parisienne Beret by Sockpixie. Quick, satisfying, and totally gorgeous!

Happy New Year, everyone!

16 knitting days left until Christmas!

2008-12-09T14:50:00.006-05:00

I've reached the point where school stress and knitting panic meld together into the perfect cocktail of anxiety. Instead of finishing end-of-term grading or beginning work on my final papers, I am knitting myself into a frenzy here as I finish holiday gifts. Completed this weekend: the partner to the Felici striped sock I made a while ago:

Now only one sock left to go: the partner for the Jaywalker sock I made last month. Here's the progress, such as it is:

The next few projects I can only show snippets of, as I don't know if the recipients will be reading this post:

And there's more: I am still totally stalled on my grandmother's February Bed Jacket, for example, needing to work a few more lace rows and bind off the body before starting on the sleeves. If I can get that all done in time I may try to cram in some mitts for a few relatives and friends. Then after Christmas, it's back to selfish knitting for me, baby! And man, do I have some fun things lined up!

2008-11-14T07:26:00.003-05:00

Thanks to Knitting Knoobie, who gave me a Kreativ Blogger award. She's a pretty new knit blogger and I know she'd love you all to check out her blog. I'm supposed to list six things that make me happy six other Kreativ Bloggers.

So things that make me happy:

1. Singing. No matter how stressful my day has been, singing in my choir every week is a great release and makes me feel so peaceful.

2. Pride and Prejudice. I could read this novel nonstop if I had the time. And the miniseries -- I mean, what more do I need to say?

3. My sister's laugh. It's loud and obnoxious and so contagious!

4. Red licorice of any variety.

5. The fact that when I said, "Let's read some more of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'," today, one of my students said, "Oh yes!! I want to find out what the overwhelming question is!"

As for six other bloggers to award, I think there are too many great ones to single out any, and I kind of feel like web awards are like chain mail, and that I don't want to proliferate them. So I will just direct you to my sidebar of blogs I follow, all of which are great!

New world, new sock

2008-11-08T14:42:00.005-05:00

I'm finally getting over my post-election exhaustion. I'm so happy to live in a country I can feel proud of again! And, heaven knows, excited at the possibility of an end to an environment of anti-intellectualism! As exciting as it is, though, I almost feel sad -- I had so much expectation and anxiety about politics in the last month, that now it's all over I don't know what to do with myself! I'll just have to fill that hole with knitting.

Here's one jaywalker sock for Sarah. I love the way these socks look on the foot, but I can't say I adored the knitting process. And I know that she is going to gripe about how hard they are to pull over her heels. Too bad. If she hates them, I'll be happy to take them, because I love them.

Specs:
Pattern: Jaywalker by Grumperina
Yarn: Knitpicks Felici in colorway patina
Needles: Knitpicks options size 2

Other things to feel contented about: staying on top of my grading, perfecting my scone recipe, coming closer to having an idea what I want to dissertate about, and blissful Sunday afternoons working at the coffee shop in the most delightful company...

Pumpkins we can believe in

2008-10-31T09:10:00.004-05:00

My sister and I carved these a few weeks ago. Happy Halloween!

Be still, my heart

2008-10-29T15:58:00.007-05:00

To those poor souls who actually follow this blog: sorry for the communication blackout there! I've become quite busy of late. Grad school of course is a time-vampire, and teaching is nothing to sneeze at. I've also been spending quite a bit of time with a certain gentleman friend -- about which I will say nothing more at the moment, except that as alternatives to knitting and blogging go, it's been a very pleasant one.

Meanwhile, there has been some knitting afoot. My friend just adopted a baby, and I've been furiously working ever since I found out about it, with these adorable results:

The socks and mittens are my own design; the hat is the "Norwegian Sweet Baby Cap". A simple but ingenious pattern that yields heart-grabbing results. All done on size 2 needles, Rowan Cashsoft 4 ply.

What I've been doing instead of grading papers.

2008-09-30T15:14:00.006-05:00

Exhibit A:

An unblocked sock. The second in my set of socks for Sarah for Christmas. This one is top-down, eye of partridge heel, very standard-issue -- but not for me, because it is only the second pair of socks I've ever made.

Nicely kitchenered toe.

Hello, world. Hello, sock.

Exhibit B:

The sleeve of my long-neglected fair isle yoke cardigan. This one has been long neglected for two very good -- and one medium good -- reasons. The medium good one is that it has a tiny gauge. The two very good ones are first, that I started knitting it before realizing that I was twisting my purl rows, and since learning this I've become a much faster knitter when doing it correctly, and it's irksome to have to keep knitting this the old (wrong) way; and second, that I made the armholes too big when I was knitting the body, and I didn't know what to do to fix this problem. I didn't want just to rapidly decrease as I started knitting them, because that would make them have a funny shape, and in my opinion the most crucial part of a sleeve is the part where it hits your shoulder -- it can make your arm look either fat or skinny. So I came up with this ingenious scheme, which I think worked awesomely. The pit:

(for some reason, this seems like an obscene angle from which to take a picture). I ascertained that there were about 10 stitches too many in the arms as I picked them up to start knitting down, so I kitchenered together four stitches from each side of the arm, leaving the last extra stitch on each side for selvedge when sewing the arms up. Here's a closer detail shot:

That kitchener stitch is executed very poorly, but it's an armpit, for cripe's sake.

Exhibit C:
A gorgeous chevron beret that is, alas, too small, I fear. This is a mid-blocking shot, and I was only able to squeeze it onto a medium-sized dinner plate -- about an inch in diameter smaller than the one on which I blocked the first chevron beret. I have plenty of Imagination yarn left over, so I can just knit a new one if it is too small, but it's a disappointment nonetheless.

Exhibit D:

The beginnings of a February Lady Sweater for my grandmother. Despite my manifold qualms, I am knitting this in Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran. Yes, it is already beginning to pill, but she is very picky about softness. It may not be evident in this picture, but I decided to make the yoke circular as in the original, and to start the lace pattern early instead of knitting garter to an inch before separating for the arms, because I'm knitting this as a bed jacket for her and I think that the circular, shorter yoke looks more like old-fashioned bed jackets.

Exhibit E:

I reorganized my yarn stash. I was beginning to fear moths, so I packaged it all up neatly in Ikea boxes and zipper bags and put it neatly in the bottom of one of my new bookshelves.

Pretty nice, eh? This project renders relatively obsolete my old system of organization:

I may have gotten a little obsessed in the process of putting everything in zipper bags. Here's my basket of UFOs:

All neatly piled in order of what's next to work on.

Yes, I really, really did not want to grade those papers.

Officially Fall...

2008-09-22T06:48:00.004-05:00

... and officially finished! The first pair in my Socks for Sarah project, that is. These are in Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock, colorway Gold Hill. 64 stitches around, toe-up, short row heel, double eyelet rib and double rib leg.

Lookin' good, for a first pair of socks. Things I learned: work more rows plain after the heel before beginning leg patterning. Work tubular bind-off LOOOOOOSELY!

Here they are on my fat, fat feet:

And I've cast on for my second pair. Top-down, this time, still 64 stitches around. These are in Knitpicks Felici in colorway Schooner. I'm going to try a different heel this time too.

Meanwhile, in other knitting news, the body of my mom's Radcliffe Cardigan is finished and blocked, with button bands and everything, and ... it's too small. I've got to rip it out halfway and increase under the armpits. And take out the waist shaping -- it is my style, but not my mom's.

Lessons learned with this project: while aiming on the small side for superwash projects is the way to go, non-superwash yarn does not grow nearly as much in blocking. I measured my swatch ruthlessly, but I should have rounded up instead of down, because a difference of a tenth of an inch a stitch can make a difference of an inch or more in the final product. Oh well -- at least the gauge on this one is big, so it won't take too long.

New and improved!

2008-09-12T13:09:00.006-05:00

I did a little math and resized the Peach Blossom jacket pattern for children sizes 2-10. You can get the pdf file here. Coming soon: babies' sizes from 6-18 months.

new FO gallery!

2008-08-28T11:40:00.006-05:00

I've been having fun with Mosaic Maker. Here are some pictures of my latest work:

Left-right from top left: Knitpicks Imagination chevron beret, front cable of Reynolds Candide Radcliffe Cardigan, two squares from a Noro Kureyon Log Cabin laptop case.

And here are some lovely new pictures of sweaters other people have knit with my patterns!

Left-right from top left: Nonstop Knitter's, Medieval Cactus's, Onoris's, knttygirl's, Koshiba's, Darwin Exception's, redroseknits's, Firstfallen's, and crgilvr's Modified Drops Eyelet Yoke Baby Cardigans (Ravelry names).

Left-right from top left: Manoute's, Ummeyysuf's, Nukka's, Knitterbunny's, Pennyg's, Realrellim's, Garnlinda's, Stressknitters', Bluedodo's, Mootthing's, Archangel's, Jandy's, Knickertwisters', Greendillybeans', Thomasinaknits', and Gotham Mom's Sheep Yoke Baby Cardigans (Ravelry names).

Yay for mosaics!

Produstination

2008-08-19T14:04:00.008-05:00

Comprehensive exams are in just a few days, and of course what that means is studying 24/7. And by "studying 24/7," what I mean, clearly, is "watching the Olympics, cooking unnecessarily fancy food, drinking quite a bit more wine than health benefits warrant, listening to Moby Dick on CD, patting myself on the back for listening to such an erudite book, and knitting." It's been productive procrastination city here chez Looking Glass.

The upshot:

Significant progress on both Radcliffe cardigans, especially the one for my mom, whose body is only about 6 inches from completion:

Quite a bit of length on the chevron scarf (man, I'm hoping those wrinkles block out!):

The cuff of a fair isle glove:

And -- steel yourselves -- I've made a sock.

After setting a lot of stock in my being a non-sock-knitter, I have knit a sock. I understand a little better now what the appeal is -- it's pretty quick knitting, despite the tiny gauge, and it's definitely satisfying to try it on every 15 minutes or so and marvel at the perfect fit. This is a trial run at knitting socks for my sister, whose only real luxury as a second-year OB resident is the fancy socks she wears under her clogs. She's picky though, about itchiness and thickness -- I'm hoping that this Lorna's Laces yarn fits the bill, as it's about the softest and thinnest sock yarn I could find.

Not usually a fan of variegated yarn, either, I find myself inordinately pleased at the fabric this yarn creates, though it was a bit tough finding a pattern for the cuff that was both elastic and not marred by the striping. I finally settled on a double eyelet rib.

Now -- merciful heavens -- I can't wait to buy a skein of solid sock yarn and try my hand at something more complicated!

100th post!

2008-07-31T14:33:00.007-05:00

That's right, today's post is a mini-milestone. And to celebrate, here's a lovely rainbow of yarn that just came in the mail. I've had so much fun arranging it all to take photos!

I'm planning to use this Knitpicks Telemark yarn to make Floral Fair Isle Gloves for my... sister? Mom? Aunt? ... unclear... for Christmas. Which purchase puts me in a bit of a gray area as far as my newly pledged membership to Ravelry's Selfish Knitters group is concerned. Because while I am knitting for others, I bought yarn that I know will pill (as Knitpicks yarn always does), because it was cheap, and if I were to knit myself fair isle gloves I'd pick something pricier and better quality.

Man, it sure is pretty, though...

And at least when the gloves are actually given, they will not be pilly. A selfish gift indeed! I will get all the glory of beautiful handmade gloves, then not be around when they stop looking as nice after a few wears.

Meanwhile, here are not one but two Radcliffe Cardigan yokes in progress -- one for my mom and one for me (selfish knitting again!). Both in a color that is impossible to photograph accurately:
I'm glad that I'm knitting them both at the same time, because it's been a real lesson in yarn qualities and gauge. The big one is in Reynolds Candide, a hairy, hard-finished, two-ply (?) woolen-spun wool that's knitting on size 7 needles at a gauge of 4.125 stitches an inch (after a bad sweater-growth episode I have been gauge swatching and measuring assiduously); and the little one is in Lana Grossa Cool Wool 2000, a soft, springy multi-ply merino that's knitting on size 3 needles at a gauge of 5.8 stitches per inch. I am finding myself preferring the way the Candide looks in this particular pattern, though, as I said in the last post, it's been rough on my wrists. This is a kind of vintagey sweater style, and the fuzzy finish and larger gauge of the Candide are a nice compliment. The seed stitch, however, in the Cool Wool is just so crisp and nubbly and neat. I hate working seed stitch, as it takes twice as long as stockinette, but I do so love the look of it. And while my mom doesn't mind itchy wool, I do, and like to wear camisoles under my sweaters instead of turtlenecks, so Cool Wool it is for me. I'm just hoping it holds up better than the last Radcliffe Cardigan I knit for myself!

Lazy Summer Knittin'...

2008-07-28T17:43:00.005-05:00

... loungin' in the sun. It has been ungodly hot in New York City, but not hot enough to keep me from plugging away at knitting ventures. Today was juuuust cool enough to open the windows and turn off the a/c, but man, wool is hot on one's lap. I've been making myself knit a row or two on each project, and it's surprising how much progress can be made that way.

Here we have a lovely pile of summer knitting, a mix of new, old, and very old projects. You probably don't even remember this fair isle project, which languished on the needles for probably 8 months until I could suck it up and do some irrirating intarsia rows:

Then there's the chevron scarf, which chugs along, a few rows at a time, getting quite long and lovely:

Then there's the yoke of my mom's Radcliffe Cardigan; at a gauge of 4.125 stitches per inch, this has been pleasantly quick-knitting; that gauge certainly beats the 7 and 8 stitches per inch I've been working on with other projects!

Reynolds Candide has been interesting to work with: it already seems a little fuzzy, certainly rustic, but it also seems like it will hold up quite well. But it's a little tough on the wrists, I have to say -- no bounce at all.

So there it is, in all its sunset glory. Latin class is over; vacation is coming up pretty soon, and I don't know how much wool I'll be able to stand on the beach. We'll see.

Projects completed and imagined

2008-07-10T13:03:00.003-05:00

After learning that a college friend just had a baby girl, I finally got it together and finished what I'm calling my Faux-bruary Baby Sweater, because I didn't have the pattern and made it up as I went along, therefore not realizing that I was supposed to majorly increase in the armpits for both body and arms. However, I think that the sweater looks pretty much like the original:

Sorry about those dark window sash shadows. I didn't bother putting in buttonholes, and instead used snaps, reinforced on the inside with cheap buttons and concealed on the outside by some vintage buttons I bought last summer at an antique show. To complete the whole vintage-y ensemble, I made a really easy bonnet.

When I say easy, I mean easy. I just did a square of nine repeats of the gull stitch pattern framed by 4 garter stitches on the sides and 4 garter ridges on the bottom, putting an eyelet 2 stitches in from the edges after the first 2 garter ridges and every second lace repeat thereafter. After 4 inches, I did some unnecessarily fancy decreasing in something approximating the lace pattern (but next time I think I'll just switch to garter at that point, then switched to garter and decreased 7 stitches every other row until the thing was like 8 stitches, then ran the yarn through the stitches and knotted it. I wove a ribbon through the eyelets to make a tie. As usual, I have no idea how big a baby's head is, so I eyeballed it -- the kid might be wearing the two parts of this outfit at two totally different times in her life ...

Meanwhile, a shipment from Knitpicks just came in, with four colors of their new "Imagination" sock yarn. I really have enough projects in the hopper already, but I just had to get some of this yarn when I saw that one of the colorways was named Looking Glass! And then, of course, I had to get a few more colorways while I was at it...

From left to right, these are Wicked Stepmother, Seven Dwarves, Frog Prince, and Looking Glass. As usual with Knitpicks, the colors look significantly different in person and on the website. The worst offenders in this instance are Wicked Stepmother and Seven Dwarves, which looked sort of muted and sweet on the computer screen but are in fact quite bright and blaring. The other two look pretty much the same as on the website. In fact, though I was worried that Looking Glass would not actually be a color I'd like, it turns out to be the nicest in the bunch, I think. I'm planning to pair these babies up and make some more chevron berets for Christmas presents, since I so enjoyed making the first one. I'm banking on the mixing of the colors doing wonders for the brightness of the two bright ones -- after my first beret I was surprised how different the yarn looked in the skein and knitted up.

But that will all have to wait until I clear out some of my other unfinished objects...

Not knitting, but neato!

2008-07-04T20:15:00.002-05:00

I made a dress!

This is my very first sewn outfit, and it came out pretty well, if I do say so myself. It was quite an ordeal: there was a lot of ripping and resewing as I figured stuff out. I am particularly proud of the invisible zipper, which looks quite professional. The top is not fitted quite as nicely as I'd like, but with only two darts I think it's the best I can expect. I'd like to get better at sewing and know how to alter patterns to fit me better. It's pretty fun, and definitely quicker than knitting, if messier and less easy to control.

Pooling is a nifty thing!

2008-07-01T12:39:00.007-05:00

So I have never knit a pair of socks and have no real desire to, which means that I have also never worked with hand-dyed sock yarn before. Working on my chevron scarf I've been fascinated by the ways the colors combine. I first cast on for this using five stitches on each side of the chevrons, and after knitting a few inches like that, I could tell that all the pink yarn was going to line up in a vertical column, all the orange, all the green, etc. So I frogged it and tried four stitches on each side (8 stitches fewer in all), and tada! No pooling!

In real life it's not this wobbly on the edges; it just needs to be blocked flat. That's my only news, aside from a visit from this guy:

Raymond. It looks like he's wearing a yellow tiara in this picture, but that's his octopus toy in the background. He loves to shake it really hard and growl. We just went for a walk and he's zonked. It's so nice to look down from your knitting and see this little dude on your foot:

Ooh la la!

2008-06-25T09:44:00.006-05:00

Here's the chevron beret, all blocked and lookin' fine!

Here it is on a fine-lookin' knitter!

Here's some Lady Sweater progress. The bandwagon is a fun place to be!

Swatch Party!

2008-06-22T15:42:00.003-05:00

The chevron beret is finished and blocking on a plate, and I'm quite pleased with how it came out. It is a really great pattern -- I'd recommend it to anyone, but would suggest adding an inch or two before beginning decreases, as a number of knitters on Ravelry recommended (and as I did).

In the meantime, I have swatched for a number of new projects, almost all of which are for me me me -- after all, I've got to make good on my membership in the "Selfish Knitters" Ravelry group. Can you see a trend in my color choices? Clockwise from the upper left, they are Reynolds Candide for a Radcliffe Cardigan for my mom, Lana Grossa Cool Wool 2000 for a new (and hopefully less pilly but just as soft) Radcliffe Cardigan for me, Jo Sharp DK Wool for a February Lady Sweater for me (I know -- Ravelry has turned me into a total copycat), and Karabella Aurora 8 for a totally plain cardigan for me.

That last one is the only one that will involve anything other than following a pattern and recalculating math for gauge; but then there's this:

More Cool Wool 2000 for a cardigan with diagonal lace ladders, design still in the works -- that one is pretty far away, but as long as I was throwing a swatch fiesta I thought I might as well do that swatch too. Now I've just got to label them all so I don't forget.

Now, I realize this looks like a lot of stuff to be starting. And of course I haven't forgotten about the chevron scarf, the February Baby Sweater with an arm and a half still on the needles, the Green Peach Jacket waiting for sleeve cuffs and i-cord, and the fair isle yoke cardigan. But it's the second day of summer, and I felt like starting something(s) new. I'll come up with a plan to finish them all -- after all, in the absence of papers to stress me out, I've got to come up with something to make myself feel guilty about!

ahh... summer reading and knitting

2008-06-19T08:49:00.003-05:00

The papers are all officially finished, graded, and taken care of! And I've dutifully started in on the reward yarn! (actually, to be totally honest, I may have started in on the reward yarn before I finished that last paper...) I'm happilly knitting away, while listening to The Age of Innocence on CD -- the first installment in the summer Comps-prep reading.

Though a chevron scarf is in the offing, I decided to start with a La Parisienne beret first, so that I could just knit until the yarn was through for the scarf. The two have very similar chevron designs. It's been a bit of a humbling experience for me, since I always think I know a better way to do something; I started out by using my go-to increase instead of the kf&b increase the pattern specified, because I thought it would look nicer. It is true that this kind of increase creates a clean, etched-looking line of stitches that matches very nicely the line created by the double decreases. However, all of that knitting into the row below was basically creating a line of EZ-style fake seams of slipped stitches that were much less vertically stretchy than the increases, and I had to rip out and start over again, following the directions as written.

It's also been a lesson in color theory. I chose these two colors because they looked good together in the skeins; they are pretty much the same value. Knitted up, the fact that they are the same value makes for a somewhat bright color combination, just on the edge of what I'd call garish, and not at all what I was expecting:

I think I like it though (and if not I'll gift it). The yarn I'm using -- Claudia handpainted and Koigu (the Gems sportweight was too big) -- doesn't stand up particularly well to frogging, which leads me to suspect that the finished product will not be very hard-wearing. I'm hoping that a scarf and a hat are not particularly hard-worn items.

The next knitting project in the hopper is to pop this baby on the swift:

That's one of a bag of Reynolds Candide, which I am going to use to knit my mom a Radcliffe Cardigan. It will be fun to follow my own directions like any other knitter, and see where they could be clearer. Candide is totally not the yarn I'd choose for my own sweater -- it's pretty darn scratchy -- but it promises to be very hard-wearing, and my mom is not bothered by itch. It is disappointing when your lovely hand-knit item starts to pill and stretch, as in fact happened to my own prototype Radcliffe (Swish DK? Not such a great yarn for adult sweaters). I am hoping that this Candide one lasts longer.

Hurray! Here's to summer knitting, finally here!

Incentive.

2008-06-07T09:27:00.007-05:00

I'm so close to finishing this blasted paper. Yesterday I bought myself this beautiful yarn:

Three skeins of Claudia handpainted merino sock yarn in the colorway "John B." It's going to sit there, eying me flirtatiously, while I finish this last paper (which, by all rights, was supposed to be done yesterday). I am going to use it to make a Chevron scarf by Domesticat -- I know, like everyone else in the knitting world. I was inspired by this gorgeous little number by Debby on Ravelry (here's her Rav profile):

It's a thing of beauty, but also beautifully photographed! Her colors are a little more muted than mine, in a colorway of Socks that Rock that no longer exists, unfortunately. I'm going to use my beautiful jewel-toned yarn with this leftover ball of Louet Gems sport in Sage:

But I can't. start. knitting. until. I. finish. this. paper.

Two saints down...

2008-06-02T12:09:00.004-05:00

... and only one to go. Still feeling the end-of-term doldrums, but I'm slowly, slowly nearing the finish. At least the essay I am allegedly working on right now is a bit more in my field, being only half about a saint and half about a book...

Meanwhile great progress has been made, frogged and made again on the knitting front. I got the front bands done on the green peach blossom jacket, and am on a sleeve hiatus while I decide whether I have enough dark green yarn for both sleeve hems and i-cord closures, or whether I need to rip out the hem facing on the bottom and redo it in lighter green to conserve dark green yarn. That's a project that's destined to be done in front of the TV, I think, and too fiddly to knit on the subway, which is what I've been doing lately.

That barely-discernible fair isle sweater has been frogged (actually the second time I've frogged something partially-knit with this same periwinkle Baby Cashmerino), and I finally cast on something I'm happy with:

A February Baby sweater, a la EZ, only I was too lazy to go out and buy the book with the pattern, so I eyeballed it after briefly consulting a million project pictures on Ravelry and looking at Google Books (which will display only the second page of the Baby Sweater on Two Needles pattern). But, being me, I had to resize the whole thing, going for 26 instead of 20 pattern repeats on the body and casting on 56 stitches instead of 40. As other people have noticed, the yoke does seem to start too small and increase a bit too quickly -- were I to do it again I would start with a few more stitches and increase a little more slowly to keep its angle more in line with that of the rest of the sweater. Meanwhile, since I didn't actually consult the pattern so much as fake it, I did not realize that I should have cast on an extra two (?) pattern repeats under each armpit as I was dividing for the sleeves. I think, in fact, that the body looks perfectly fine the way it is, but I need to jerry-rig something now as I start the first sleeve. I'm thinking of just casting on another pattern repeat's worth of stitches and going with it -- the sleeves will still not be quite as wide as EZ's originals, but I think they will be fine.

I think it's perfectly clear what I have been expending brainpower on this week, as I claim to be working on papers...

However, honestly, this was the quickest-knitting, most fun baby sweater I've ever made. I did the whole yoke and body over the course of, I think, three trips to and from Lower Manhattan or Brooklyn in the last few days. Of course, each time I packed up stuff to entertain myself on these subway rides, I did diligently load like 3 articles and a book into the backpack as well... where they stayed, while I knit...