tales of hubris punished and patience rewarded

Here is what is on the docket for this weekend:

Hali Meidhad and Seinte Margarete, a few Canterbury Tales, a meditation on the Passion by Nicholas Love, and some NPR knitting.

You may notice that there is a totally new work in progress there on the trusty natural light windowsill. It's true -- I have become an incorrigible starter.

But in this case, there is a tiny bit of an excuse. I made a shocking discovery earlier this week after looking closer at the car intarsia sweater I was making. The process of switching from flat knitting to in-the round knitting I had done in order to do the intarsia part flat had made a significant difference in the shape of the stitches I was making -- and not just a difference in gauge. Witness exhibit A:

In the top half you can see my even in-the round stitches. In the bottom half are a bunch of squiggly, twisted flat stitches. It was at this point that I began to question the arrogance of my claim to be an expert knitter and precocious autodidact. I began to suspect that something was wrong. I flipped open a knitting basics book that had been mouldering on my shelf and made the shocking discovery that for five years I have been purling wrong -- bringing the working yarn around the needles in the opposite direction from the normal one, twisting all my stitches as I did so. It felt akin to being friends with someone for a number of years, only to discover that you have been calling him the wrong name that whole time. So I chucked the offending sweater into a corner for a while in a clear case of killing the messenger, and set myself to knitting a new sweater and purling the right way. Exhibit B:


I have two other excuses. The first is the discovery that another friend is pregnant, thus clearly necessitating a brand new baby sweater. This one is another crack at the top-down baby sheep sweater like the one I made for Andrew. This time I am keeping better track of the process so I can write it up and post the pattern. The yarn is Knitpicks Swish DK, but the blue and green yarns arrived quite a bit more neon than I had wanted -- as is often the case with Knitpicks yarn. So, having been emboldened by my Bristow experience, I popped the two skeins in a bath of water with half a packet of grape kool-aid, and fixed it! I think that the result is quite nice. The mottling of the dye gives the blue yarn a nice homemade look, as opposed to the mediocre acrylic baby boy sweater color it was before, and the green is a more subtle and organic hue too. I'm working out the sheep charts right now: I'm thinking garter stitch for some texture detail.

The second reason to start a new project is a newfound desire to perfect some patterns and post them, because...

My Ravelry invitation finally came!


Ravelry is great! Definitely not a replacement for blogging, and I do rankle at the restrictive nature of the program as it exists now (not sure how to add new patterns, can't register myself as a designer, can only use books already on the site in my library, etc), but it has been fun and exciting to snoop around, and I love the "favorites" feature and the feature that lets me look at what other people are doing with the yarns and patterns I have chosen. If you're on Ravelry too, my ID is lookingglass.

The wine-dark sea

Work has begun on a Bristow sleeve, knit with my Kool-Aid dyed teal yarn. I love the way the color variations and cables combine to ripple like ocean waves -- I think I have changed my mind on variegated yarn (or I guess I'd call this semi-solid color).

I started this project while watching the much-anticipated new episode of Lost last night, and I started with a sleeve, in the hope that I would not get stranded on sleeve island! It was perhaps not a perfect idea -- I had to concentrate a little too hard on the knitting, with the combination of sleeve increases and cable twists. But this is a really nice pattern so far! The cable is easy to remember and pretty intuitive to figure out by looking at. It's not the speediest knitting I've done, so I don't have a lot of progress to show:

Subtlety

I spent the last few days dying yarn -- my first venture into Kool-Aid dying. I am pretty please with the result, though there were definitely some surprises. I ordered a bag of Debbie Bliss Merino DK from Little Knits for cheapy-cheap-cheap, and was a bit disappointed with the color of the yarn. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to try my hand at overdying. I used one packet of orange Kool-Aid for two skeins of yarn, aiming for a richer, more peacock-colored teal. I think that I got it. Here's the before-and-after shot:


The difference is admittedly subtle, but it's significant in my eyes. The yarn went from the color of a muppet to a nice mottled teal. So I did the whole bag. Here's the eye candy shot; it does capture the color relatively well:


What I should have expected but was surprised by was the variegated nature of the color. I suppose that with something as low-tech as Kool-Aid one can't expect perfectly even coverage. I don't really care, though one particular skein is more variegated than the others. In fact, upon knitting a swatch, I discovered that the more forest green sections that appear every once in a while give the knitted fabric some nice depth and almost a silky appearance. I'm not usually a fan of variegated wool (actually dislike, for example, the way that Koigu looks knitted up), but I think that this semi-solid might be nice and tasteful. Of course after dying this whole batch I went to knittyboard and discovered some hints for even Kool-Aid dying. Ah well. Next batch. It certainly was fun to do! And I definitely feel free now to buy whatever yarn is cheap and soft, regardless of the color!