Doilies Are Stylish

Mismatched

2012-01-20T12:19:00.000-08:00

I knitted a prototype of these months ago, glowered at their saggy cuffs, and put them away. This month I finally gathered the resolve to unravel and try again.

Their original problem was that I had operated under the assumption that my colourwork tension would make the mittens too snug around the wrist unless I took some measures, so I cast on extra stitches and decreased them away after finishing the stranded section breaking off the contrast colour. MISTAKE! The fabric the yarn produces at this gauge is soft and pliable, so instead of not-too-snug cuffs I had saggy, baggy, can't-do-anything-with-'em cuffs attached to otherwise perfectly fine mittens. They annoyed me too much to countenance wearing or looking at them, so I shoved them in a drawer and resolved not to think about them until the annoyance had subsided.

Their time came when I was slogging through these other endless mittens and I wanted a small treat to work on in between sessions of black cotton blend stockinette at a dense gauge (my hands ache thinking about it). The yarn (Jo Sharp Silkroad DK) stood up well to being unravelled, no undue fluffiness or breakage. I skeined it and washed it and hung it to dry to bring some life back into it since it was feeling flatter than it had before, and it revived nicely. (Since we're talking like 200m of yarn, the unravelling-skeining-rewinding took very little time.)

The knitting itself took about two days, because puffy, tweedy, heathery, soft DK yarn on 2.75mm needles in the round is my happy place.

I solved the saggy cuffs problem by doing exactly nothing about it. There's the same number of stitches in the hand as in the cuff; the double-thickness of the colourwork section and the slightly tighter tension draws it in comfortably, though it's elastic enough to slide over the hand with no problem. It was a good reminder that while it is a good idea to put thought into a project, it is not always necessary to overthink.

The tips spiral in opposite directions because I cannot stand to knit the same thing twice. Four stitches get decreased every alternate round, with the decreases spaced evenly around and the total stitches decreased to four to make a pointed tip. (I like wearing pointy-tipped mittens as an adult woman though I have never seen any others worn out in the wild except by small children. Screw you, world, I wear what I want!)

Since it is my birthday today I am going to admit something nerdy: the colourwork part is loosely adapted from what I remember of a carpet that appears in an 18-year-old video game. It turns out that my recollection: not so accurate! But the knitting is an accurate reflection of the memory, at least.

wordless Wednesday: small hands and big

2012-01-18T11:44:00.000-08:00

Warm fuzzies

2012-01-14T21:47:00.000-08:00

I have been knitting a bit that I can show off, but it's not terribly interesting: new mittens for the aforementioned partner, to replace the pair that vanished at the end of last winter. The shells are the dullest fabric you've ever imagined—vast expanses of black stockinette—but the linings are a brightly-coloured secret.

The yarn is Blue Sky Alpacas Brushed Suri, and it's soft like fuzzy kitten tummies. I don't think I'd want to wear it on its own as the outside of a hand covering, but mittens lined with it will be absurdly warm.

It might be a little idiosyncratic to knit mitten liners separately from the mittens they will line (actually, I knitted them first!), but I am doing it this way for a couple of reasons. First, the liner alone is much lighter than a liner being knit from stitches picked up from its mitten shell, and the lighter the better so far as my wrists are concerned. Second, since my partner is quite fussy about how things fit, I wanted him to be able to try on a mitten shell with liner already inside while the shell was still in progress, to ensure that they had the right amount of ease and to minimize the number of corrections I'll have to make after they're finished. I think this would be less of an issue with a finer liner (heh) or a stretchier shell, but these liners are thick and the shells are a wool/cotton blend knitted up at a bulletproof gauge.

Little to report

2012-01-12T13:19:00.001-08:00

Here's how it looks outside:

That's about how I've been feeling for the last couple of months, too (gloomy and weatherbeaten and disappearing into the fog) as my partner limps through the last pages of his PhD. It has been an all-hands-on-deck situation in my house since about October. My job is to cheerlead and proofread and write "tell me more" in the margins and be the first source of resistance or enthusiasm to new lines of thought, and to ask to hear the rundown of the whole project a few times a week. This consumes most of both of our waking time and energy. It is too bad that departments don't award PhDs to partners of PhD candidates, because now that I have seen some of the abusive ugliness that academia enables and encourages, I am never signing up for one myself!

The last chapter got sent out to the committee in the wee hours of the morning, though, and now the end is in sight. I have been knitting a thousand swatches and imagining the beginnings of new things. And I am putting the finishing touches on an appropriate sampler. (Pardon the wrinkles.)

Tuesdays are for embroidery

2011-11-15T15:20:00.000-08:00

I've been cross-stitching a lot recently but not documenting it much. I hereby vow to share an embroidered snippet once a week. The image below contains foul language, so consider yourselves warned.

It's incomplete but not by much—I'm thinking about what small elements to add above and below what's there already, and I'll also want to line it with some matte black fabric to keep the silver on the back of the phone from showing through (as it does in the image). But it's getting close to done.

There were also hundreds of fluffy bunnies

2011-11-14T17:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was the last day of the Royal Winter Fair, so we made the trip down to Toronto to witness the spectacle. I'd never been to an agricultural fair that didn't involve warehouse-sized rooms full of combines and wheat-braiding competitions, so this big-city Ontario version was novel for me.

We saw prize-winning apples!

And inspected many fleeces (more on this subject anon)!

We swooned over sweet sheepy faces!

And marvelled at a row of giant butts!

At the end of the day we were rewarded with a lovely cow with silky ears! Her handlers had a fan set up next to her enclosure so her ear furnishings waved in the breeze.

The fleece auction was surprisingly exhilarating; Mel and I had a lot of (quiet, intense) fun making a slow circuit through the auction room examining each one and making notes on our cheat sheet. We didn't get our best beloved but did get our second-favourite, a massive handsome grey Romney-looking fleece from Gillian Mullins in Stirling. Today I washed a few locks to see what the deal was, and they are sturdy and glossy and long. Also bought were a shiny longwool fleece¹ and a creamy white Icelandic fleece I want to knit about twenty mittens out of.² It should be enough to last me until next November.

¹ What, we were curious. It placed sixth in its category and I felt sorry for the poor darling because it's lovely really; I promised it I'd make it into something pretty.

² Another One That Got Away was a beautiful moorit Icelandic lamb fleece. Sigh.

Suddenly, autumn!

2011-10-29T21:13:00.000-07:00

I've been in kind of a knitting slump for the last couple of weeks, due to a terrible cold and some disruptive apartment renovations and a whirlwind trip with visiting parents. (I think I am emerging from the slump though, on which more soon.)

The bright side is that now our apartment has beautiful new windows. And I got to eat some delicious food in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

We had tea that was very nice.

I was terribly decadent and ate like a fist-sized gob of clotted cream.

I guess we ate some tiny sandwiches? I don't remember them because I was distracted by this tier of dessert.

I could probably only handle such a meal about once every six months—it was delicious but so rich that it took us about two hours to work through at a slow and steady pace. It was a great antidote to the dreary weather, though.

It's finally a wool-sock-wearing time of year, which is what's pulling me out of my knitting slump: I got some amazing glittery yarn in the mail thanks to Dale's October giveaway. My new colourway suggestion was yarn that was all the colours of this photograph of a pomegranate (plus glitter of course), and the resultant yarn is so beautiful that I needed to knit it immediately. I only have about twelve pairs of handknit socks, after all, and clearly that is nowhere near enough.

Saturday softie

2011-09-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

There's an adorable MMO that I love and play constantly when it's available. (It is called Glitch, and you should sign up and be my friend: over there I am Aspasia Tuffet.) It's still in testing; sometimes (as now) the game is closed. What better time to make some fan art.

This is a version of the game's piggies, though I took some artistic license with fabric choice (the ones in the game aren't adorned with flowers). I followed this very empowering tutorial by Abby Glassenberg for pattern drafting and sewing up directions. The main fabric I used was the bonus Lecien linen I got in this month's Pressed Seam shipment:

I also used tiny scraps of the narrowly striped fabric from the same group to line the piggy's ears.

Anyway, now I am looking at my quilting fabrics with fresh eyes, and all I see is animals. The Anna Maria Horner Stockings fabric (above, bottom centre) would make an excellent zebra!

Puzzle Stripe Mittens

2011-09-19T11:48:00.000-07:00

The last week has been the first properly autumny week there's been in my city so far, and I am totally thrilled. It's jacket weather! wool sock weather! scarf weather! bread-baking weather! impending glove and mitten weather! knitting with wool without intolerable sweatiness weather!

To celebrate I made a pair of mittens, and they're for you, internet.

I watched Lynne and Gayle's Hexalong all summer with a lot of interest, because I love hexagons! love them! I haven't been able to muster the dedication necessary for making an entire hexagon anything, but I did come up with a little stranded colourwork pattern with hexagons in it, and turned it into mittens. I have christened these Puzzle Stripe Mittens because the hexagons are made out of wiggling lines that look a bit interlocking/confusing/puzzle-like at first. Once the pattern is established, though, it's pretty easy to follow, and there are no areas where you'll need to make a long float behind the work that will catch your fingers when you try to put a mitten on. The palms and thumbs are patterns with narrow stripes for quickness of knitting and fun-ness of contrast with the backs of the hands.

The yarn I used was Jamieson's Heather Aran in Burnt Umber (CC) and Grouse (MC). The skeins were 100 yards and one of each colour produced a pair of mittens, but there wasn't a lot left over. To substitute a comparable yarn, be on the lookout for a heavy worsted weight that is lofty and crisp.

As written this pattern will produce a pair of mittens that measure 7.5" in circumference above the thumb. (The wrists are slightly smaller around for a closer fit despite the lack of ribbing.) This is smallish, but if you choose a puffy-sproingy-squishy yarn like I did and keep a loose tension when stranding the unused colour behind the work, this size is reasonably accommodating. (My hands are 7.5" around above the thumb, and the mittens feel nice with no ease.) Slightly smaller yarn and needles (like a regular worsted weight with 3.5mm needles) would size them down handily; try slightly bigger yarn and needles (Knit Picks City Tweed HW and 4.5mm needles would be excellent). The lengths of the cuff, hand, and thumb are easily adjusted on the fly; try the mitten on periodically to make sure you're on the right track.

Onward!

Materials

100 yards aran-weight yarn in each of two contrasting colours (shown in Jamieson's Heather Aran in Grouse and Burnt Umber, 1 skein each)
4mm and 4.5mm double-pointed needles
4 stitch markers
scrap yarn
tapestry needle

Gauge

20 sts and 22 rnds = 4" in Palm patt

Finished size

7.5" hand circumference, measured above the thumb. Hand and thumb lengths are adjustable.

Notes

The mittens begin with a length of I-cord that forms the edge of the cuff. Work 4-st I-cord over 4 sts on double-pointed needles as follows:
Row 1: K4, do not turn. Slide sts to opposite end of double-pointed needle.
Repeat this row to make 4-st I-cord.
(For a video of this technique, see this page on knittinghelp.com.)

Required skills

Knitting in the round
Stranded colourwork with two colours
Reading a stranded colourwork chart
Casting on provisionally
Casting on with the backwards loop method
Picking up stitches
Decreasing with k2tog, ssk, and sk2p
Grafting
Increasing with m1

Abbreviations

k: knit
rnd: round
st: stitch
ssk: slip two stitches separately and knitwise, insert the left needle through both of them, and knit them together (1 stitch decreased)
k2tog: knit two together (1 stitch decreased)
sk2p: slip 1 stitch purlwise, k2tog, and pass the slipped stitch over (2 stitches decreased)
MC: main colour
CC: contrasting colour
CO: cast on
beg: beginning
foll: following
pm: place marker
rem: remaining

Charts

Key

Cuff

Hand

Palm

Gusset

Thumb

Right mitten

Cuff
With larger needles and MC, provisionally CO 4 sts. Work 4-st I-cord for 40 rows. Do not break yarn. Place 4 live sts on hold.
Switch to smaller needles. With working yarn still attached, pick up and k 1 st in each row of I-cord along its length, taking care not to twist the cord. 40 sts picked up. Divide sts between needles for working in the rnd and join. Mark or note beg of rnd.
Beg foll Cuff chart, working the 8-st repeat 5 times each rnd. Continue until 19 rnds of patt have been worked.

Gusset
Next rnd: Work Hand chart over first 21 sts in rnd, pm, work Palm chart over rem 19 sts.
Continue as established for 2 more rnds.
Next rnd: Work in established Hand patt to first marker, work next 2 sts in established Palm patt, place first gusset marker, work rnd 1 of Gusset chart, place second gusset marker, work to end of rnd in established Palm patt.
Continue to work patts as established until all rnds of Gusset chart have been completed.
Next rnd: Work in established patts to first gusset marker, remove marker, sl next 13 sts to scrap yarn, remove next marker, CO 3 sts using the backwards loop method, work to end of rnd in established patt. 42 sts.

Hand
Next rnd: Work in Hand patt to marker, work in Palm patt to end of rnd.
Continue as established until work measures 3.75" from the CO edge above the thumbhole, or until the mitten just covers the tip of the little finger when tried on.
Next rnd: With MC, ssk; work in established patt to 2 sts before marker; with MC, k2tog; with CC, k1; with MC, ssk; work in established patt to last 3 sts in rnd; with MC, k2tog; with CC, k1. 4 sts decreased.
Repeat last rnd until 10 sts rem.
Next rnd: With MC, ssk; work in established patt for 1 st; with MC, k2tog; with CC, k1; with MC, sk2p; with CC, k1.
Next rnd: With MC, sk2p. Break off both colours. Thread MC through rem sts, pull tight, and fasten off.

Thumb
Transfer 13 thumb gusset sts on hold to needles. Join both colours. Work across 13 sts in Palm patt. With MC, pick up and k 3 sts from CO edge of hand. Mark or note beg of rnd. 16 sts.
Next rnd: Work in Thumb patt.
Continue until thumb measures 2", or desired finished length. Break off CC.
Next rnd: With MC, k2tog around. 8 sts rem.
Break yarn, thread it through rem sts, and fasten off.

Left mitten

Work cuff as for right mitten.

Gusset
Next rnd: Work Hand chart over first 21 sts in rnd, pm, work Palm chart over rem 19 sts.
Continue as established for 2 more rnds.
Next rnd: Work in established Hand patt to first marker, work to last 3 sts of rnd in established Palm patt, place first gusset marker, work rnd 1 of Gusset chart, place second gusset marker, work to end of rnd in established Palm patt.
Continue to work patts as established until all rnds of Gusset chart have been completed.
Next rnd: Work in established patts to first gusset marker, remove marker, sl next 13 sts to scrap yarn, remove next marker, CO 3 sts using the backwards loop method, work to end of rnd in established patt. 42 sts.

Work hand and thumb as for right mitten.

Finishing

Carefully undo the provisional CO from each cuff, transferring sts to a needle as they become live. Transfer 4 sts on hold to another needle. Graft the two sets of 4 sts together, taking care to match tension as closely as possible. Weave in all ends, but don't cut them off yet. Use the ends at the base of the thumb to mend any holes in the area if necessary. Block mittens by soaking in lukewarm water, squeezing out excess water in a towel, and laying flat to dry. When mittens are completely dry, cut off the woven-in ends.

Elsewhere

2011-09-13T12:11:00.000-07:00

Hélène of The Icelandic Knitter and Theodóra took the striped shawl I made for them on a hike through some excellent mountains, and sent pictures to prove it.

MOUNTAINS. The city where I live is a smear across a modest rise that everyone calls "The Mountain" (it's really an escarpment, the same one that Niagara Falls plunges off of). While I have cultivated a fondness for The Mountain, thinking about it too hard makes me miss the rocky and jagged kind with glaciers and forests.

More interest elsewhere: Tracy of Tangled Online Magazine took the crocheted cuff edge from the socks I made for her, blew up the gauge, and turned it into a fantastic cowl. I love how the lace changes when it's worked at a chunky gauge—still pretty, but bold and substantial, though not indelicate. Her project has gotten me curious about what other delicate crocheted edgings would look like in worsted-or-heavier yarn, so there's going to be some experimenting in my future.

And Eileen posted this exciting seasoning idea last month, which I got around to making this week. Let me tell you: gomasio should go on everything forever. Except possibly the things that already have homemade celery salt on them.

Today I am engaged in a pitched battle with the weather: it's threatening rain and the humidity is hovering around 80%, but I want to block some mittens. Oven on low heat to the rescue!

Since last we spoke

2011-08-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

I have been making some progress in my quest to use up the City Tweed box.

These are both sort of quilty, because I have been pretty fixated on patchwork recently. Adapting my patchwork doodles on quad paper to knitting was an interesting challenge. The first problem is trying to make them recognizable (at least with some squinting and concentration, or once someone's pointed out the source) despite not being able to have clean diagonal lines or half- and quarter-square triangle units in which all the pieces are the same size. This shortcoming ("design feature") is clearest in the pinwheel mitten on the right, I think. You can see that the light triangles and dark triangles aren't the same size, and that the dark triangles aren't really triangles at all, they're sort of half-butterfly shapes. It still works, though.

The Ohio Star mitten on the left looks like an optical illusion to me. Each star has concentric squares in the middle, surrounded by eight light-coloured triangles; the rest is just filler so it's not necessary to strand the unused colour behind more than three stitches. I think it ends up looking like an optical illusion (focus on the stars and the checkerboard is less obvious… focus on the checkerboard and you can't see the stars).

I liked the concentric squares that make the centre of each star so much that I put a smaller, checkerboard version of them on the palm. (This also appears on the cuff of the pinwheel mitten: I am nothing if not willing to recycle my own work.)

Then I was thinking about how concentric squares change character when turned on point, and how good a mitten that would make, and before I knew it there was a pair of them.

These ones are not City Tweed—they're made out of Jamieson Soft Shetland (RIP). One pair took just a hair under two skeins, so I'm pretty pleased. The finished fabric is thick and spongy and assertively woolly.

My left thumb is pretty upset with me for knitting this many mittens in a short timeframe, so no knitting for me today—instead I have designs on this stuff.

Terse Tuesday

2011-08-16T13:01:00.000-07:00

It's coming up on cold weather accessory season, and today I got a box in the mail full of yarn to play with:

Knit Picks is very generous and I am pleased to know them! These yarns are mostly blues, greens, and greys, plus a few others for contrast (the blackberry-coloured yarn is my favourite, but so is the toffee-coloured one and the bright pink—so basically, everything). I foresee all kinds of mittens in my future.

Unrelatedly, Karen Tusinski's Gallery Fiori collection is out today, and I want a bolt of everything.

Can and must

2011-08-10T15:53:00.000-07:00

I am hopelessly distracted by the immense amount of beautiful fruit that is suddenly available in the grocery store near my house. No knitting to show you, just jam.

I have been wanting to try more interesting jams this year, but also wanted to start small and ease into the swing of it, so jam #1 is the very plainest apricot jam. I chopped five apricots and measured the volume of the fruit, added ¾ of that volume in sugar, juiced a lemon into it, brought it to a simmer, and then left it in the fridge overnight. The next day I strained out the apricots and brought the syrup to 220F before adding them back, jarring, and processing. The result is awesome big cohesive chunks of fruit that are very soft, and an intense apricot flavour. I think the jam tastes more like apricots than my apricots did.

#2 is plum and cardamom jam, made from an assortment of plums (I couldn't decide which variety to buy so got some of each). The plums got chopped and macerated too:

But this time I stirred in about ½ tsp of cardamom before putting it to bed in the fridge, just enough so that I could smell it underneath the plums. The syrup deepened from scarlet to ruby red as it thickened, and when I stirred in the plums it turned downright burgundy, and stayed that way.

I may need more jars despite my resolution to can only in small batches. I still have peaches in the kitchen (five of them, to which I will add ginger!) and have been eyeing up blackberries (maybe ginger also?) and strawberries (basil!).

This is my high-tech canning setup:

That's seven rings from the tops of jars tied together with silk thread, in the bottom of my biggest (only) stock pot. It was a little startling how well it worked: the bottom of a jar just fits in the top of each ring, and it looks slightly precarious to me but none of them have fallen over in the boiling water yet. If a bigger kitchen falls into my lap and I suddenly have room for a canner + rack, it's easy enough to cut the rings apart and stick them back in their box. Excellent.

Fit to print

2011-07-27T12:50:00.000-07:00

I have three items to report!

First, two pairs of lace stockings that I made in the spring are finally in a state that I can show you:

© Interweave Knits

They're Hex Mesh Stockings from the Fall 2011 issue of Interweave Knits. The knee-highs take around 400m of laceweight yarn if you knit the smaller size, and the mesh is very quick to knit once you get started. (The pattern will be uncomfortably familiar to Niebling aficionados—the thigh-high version in particular is a lot of hex mesh.)

The yarn they sent me to knit the stockings was Malabrigo Lace, which definitely makes a luxuriant fabric but definitely doesn't make a durable one. I'm not sure what laceweight yarn would be a better fit for these socks; maybe something like Mithril, or fine tightly-twisted handspun if you can produce it. I have a fairly extensive lace yarn shelf and don't see anything in it that would be ideal, other than maybe one of the pure silks. In any case, the magazine will be on newsstands on August 9, and I am pretty excited to see it.

Second and third: I'm not going to be at Sock Summit this year, but I'm already feeling well-represented there. You can go to Miss Babs's booth and say hi to the Windsor Mitts:

Mittens with flip-tops and half-fingers concealed inside! They took a little under 200 yards each of Miss Babs's delectable 3-ply superwash sock yarn in Roasted Pumpkin and Cadet. I used to be wary about stranded colourwork with superwash yarn, but this stuff is so springy that it works beautifully for this purpose, and I am wary no longer! The fabric is thick and heavy and utterly perfect for mittens. The ribbing it makes is admirably springy, too. If I were only allowed one yarn to ever knit with again, it would be a contender for top spot.

And you can see my cute bright orange knee socks with bold crocheted lace cuffs at the Tangled booth:

© Brittany Tyler, Tangled Magazine

These are made from 2 skeins of Spud & Chloë Fine. The crocheted cuff is worked flat, one medallion at a time, then joined into a ring; the knitted part begins immediately after the eyelet round through which the ribbons are threaded. I had a hard time sending them away because I didn't want to take them off. I am also now having irrepressible urges to crochet edge treatments for everything.

Tangled gave me a coupon code to distribute: use SOCKSUMMIT11 at checkout to get $1 off any pattern from their Sock Summit issue, which is right over here.

Yo

2011-07-21T19:14:00.001-07:00

I signed up for the new fat quarter club from Verb, which had its first shipment at the beginning of July; then I went away to the beautiful distracting coast for two weeks and totally forgot what month it was. When I got home, this was waiting for me.

They are all so good. The mushroom fabric! The blue Lecien one with the delicate pink flowers! The exuberant Brandon Mably clover!! I cannot pick a favourite and am really gleefully excited about how the rest of the shipments will look. What an auspicious beginning!

Kristine issued a challenge to us over in the club's Flickr group, which was to use five of the six fabrics in the same object. I have been having really elaborate daydreams about tiles and penny round tile patterns in particular, so I decided to commit one that I liked to yo-yos.

I made all of these in the sweltering heat this week. Sewing yo-yos is very soothing and soporific, and doesn't require you to heat up the iron or stay in the sewing room where the air conditioner doesn't reach.

Here is the assemblage:

The central few rounds are sewn together, but I am still undecided about the outer ring—I could sew it together as pictured, or add some plain off-white ones to make the whole thing a bit less busy. (I have a Mason jar of white yo-yos in case I decide on the latter course.)

What I'll do with it remains to be seen. I'm thinking about making a quilted background hexagon and sewing the yo-yo one to its front, to make a sturdy trivet or wallhanging. I have enough fabric left in these fat quarters to make a couple more small hex tile-inspired pieces, and could turn them into a little set of trivets or wallhangings. The future is wide open!

Blech

2011-07-21T11:32:00.001-07:00

I came home from the marvellously cool coast to the worst weather ever.

It's pretty much too hot to do anything other than lie motionless directly in front of the air conditioner. Even then it's pretty miserable. The Starbucks near my house is kept blessedly, bracingly cold, and I have been setting up camp there in the afternoons to enjoy the sensation of shivering before I step out onto the sidewalk and get blasted by the soupy heat again.

I have been having a lot of trouble knitting, partly because the humidity makes everything sticky and partly because the heat makes my hands swell up just enough to be clumsy. I started a tiny nearly-weightless project on steel needles so that I'd have something to knit at least some of the time, when nothing else seems to be working.

It will be a veil (because apparently when I don't know what to knit, I can't help but decide on something supremely impractical). I am fondly remembering this beach, which is a tiny bay surrounded by rocks and a forest, so the veil will be a sort of stylized map. Pictured above are the "trees" and the "rocks" which border the innermost "wave" pattern, which is row after row of horizontal zigzags. Once it's the right size I will figure out some kind of knitted-on edging solution.

The yarn is Filatura di Crosa Nirvana, which I cannot recommend highly enough. I'd want to knit with it even if I could knit other things!

Six by six

2011-07-14T15:59:00.000-07:00

This is how I've been spending my last day at the coast:

It's small (42" a side) and I am considering getting more fabric and giving it a couple of borders made from half-square triangles of different sizes. When I was cutting out pieces and working on one block at a time, it seemed like the colours were a lot more varied than they are—all together it has a kind of beachy weathered look, thanks to all the taupes and browns. As noted before the fabrics are all from Barbara Brackman's collection "A Morris Tapestry".

I am also in desperate need of a new bag, because my old grey messenger bag is about to fall apart after three years of faithful service. The fabric where the strap is attached at both sides is falling apart from the stress of e.g. lugging home eight litres of milk (hey, it fits in the bag!). I decided that the replacement should be smaller so that I am not encouraged to ruin it in the same way. A bag that I'll actually use also needs to have no Velcro and few or no zippers, because it's too easy to snag knitting or yarn in them.

There weren't any bags that fit the bill in the stores I wandered through, but then I was looking at Susan Briscoe's Japanese Taupe Quilts, and there's an excellent bag idea toward the back. It's a small bag with a messenger-style flap made out of three quilted panels, a gusset with box pleats at the top of either side for shaping, and a lining. Excellent.

Leanne had some Kaffe Fassett striped and shot cottons sitting around, so I made use of three fat quarters. Here's the front flap:

It opens to reveal this panel:

And this is what's on the back:

I used a remnant of black linen (? it certainly felt like linen) to line it. Finished dimensions are 12" wide by 10" tall by 3" deep. The strap is 40" long, which is a comfortable length for slinging across my body. Probably later this afternoon I'll make a couple 4" or 5" blocks and line them and sew them in as patch pockets. The bag is probably not big enough to actually lose anything in, but pockets can't hurt.

This is how it looks outside:

And how it's looked for most of the last week and a half. It was pretty great to have a break from Ontario's sweltering heat.

Vacation

2011-07-08T14:52:00.000-07:00

I am hanging out on the west coast this week and next, and it is pretty awesome here. There are rocks to scramble around on:

and mountains and rain and the sea:

and a poodle to snuggle:

and seals hoping to be given delicious fish heads:

and a Morris Tapestry by Barbara Brackman layer cake that I am cutting into triangles:

(Pardon the blurriness. At least the colours are accurate.)

Sock anatomy

2011-06-29T15:49:00.001-07:00

I've been playing around a bit with shaping in pattern for socks—not incorporating shaping into the areas around a pattern, not shaping encroaching into a patterned field, but drawing a chart in the right shape and filling it in with a pattern devised to fit. These plainish socks are the first result of the experiment:

The "shaping in pattern" part is a twisted stitch cabled panel on the back of the leg that grows out of the ribbed cuff and narrows to a sliver:

The purled column on the back of the leg beneath the cabled panel continues to the bottom of the heel flap, where it's swallowed up by the heel turn. Like a seam only seamless.

Like most very tiny ribbing-like cables, the pattern looks best when it's stretched sideways, as for example when you put it on your leg and it stretches to accommodate your shapely calf.

The socks also have their gusset decreases on the soles instead of placed at either side of the instep stitches, which I am counting as "shaping in pattern" because of its effect on how the handpainted yarn knits up. (It's okay to cheat if you are the one who invented the rules.)

Gusset decreases make little angled lines across the knitting, which interrupts the flow of whatever pooling or striping the yarn is doing. Putting them on the bottom of the foot leaves the instep undisrupted. This might not always be an advantage, but it is definitely a good trick to have up one's sleeve. (I am also operating under the assumption that the top of the foot is more 'public' and visible than the sole—your mileage may vary!) It definitely worked well with this yarn, which has only shortish runs of each colour. I'm pleased with how the columns of picked-up stitches from the sides of the heel flap continue uninterrupted to the spiral toe.

For fun, the toes spiral in different directions.

The yarn I used is pretty interesting; it's an 8-ply fingering-weight superwash merino that Dale of Light Brown Hare dyed in the most outstanding browns. I can attest that it is very round, which makes even these tiny cables look full, and the stockinette fabric is smooth and has a springy texture that feels wonderful on the foot. I wish it weren't almost July so I could actually wear them for more than five minutes!

Frills and flowers

2011-06-28T12:53:00.000-07:00

Internet! If you go find the July/August 2011 issue of PieceWork magazine and flip nearly all the way to the back, you'll find a short article I wrote and a pattern for a frilly Victorian accessory.

The article is a quick walk through Home work: a choice collection of useful designs for the crochet and knitting needle. Also, valuable recipes for the toilet, which is as it sounds. It was published in Toronto in 1891 and contains many, many knitted and crocheted edgings, a number of small garment patterns, and a modest collection of horrifying recipes for unguents to rub on your face. (The full text of the book is available online here, though the quality of the scan leaves something to be desired and most of the images are difficult to make out.)

The frilly accessory is a collar (No. 110 – Vandyke Collar), instructions for which begin on p. 335 of Home Work. I made a few minor adaptations, including changing the central motif to make it symmetrical, knitting it at a different gauge (no gauge is specified, but the pattern text implies that it should be tiny!), and charting the whole thing for concision's sake. There are a lot of short rows involved in its construction, which was a lovely surprise. If you knit it out of cashmere and add a row of pretty buttons up the front like I did, it turns into an elegant little wintry piece to wear underneath your coat.

An update on the last thing I posted: after knitting about a thousand rows of edging, picking up five hundred stitches along its straight edge, and knitting about 40 rows, I concluded that the centre line of the triangle was really an ugly disruption to the elaborateness happening on either side of it, so I unknitted it all. I am recycling the pattern thus far into a rectangle, which is probably better suited to it anyway. It includes these very stylized flowers:

I learned about them from this picture that edithcone posted in the Heirloom Knitting group on ravelry. The shawl in the picture was knitted by Joan Thomasina Williamson in Shetland, and edithcone did a great service to humanity by visiting it and taking a picture. I think the flowers are too amazing not to borrow, so I have charted them (and a couple of variations with different motifs up top—different species? should they have different leaves, too?) and will fit them into a zigzagging background of smaller stylized plant motifs. Not the zigzags pictured above; different ones, with more plain garter stitch "white space" separating things.

You can tell that the flowers are awesome because I am not disappointed about tearing out this much knitting: it just means that I get to knit them all over again!

wordless Wednesday

2011-06-01T13:41:00.001-07:00

Pictured: 50" of green Shetland lace edging, coffee, distracting book, and lemon-cognac pound cake.

Pragueress

2011-05-25T17:41:00.001-07:00

My partner left for Prague on the weekend on very short notice, and I have been slightly out of sorts. (The trip is for an interesting and cool reason, not a sad one, but still! Prague is very far away! It was a strange few days of planning and scrambling around.) To console myself, and without anyone else's television-watching preferences or sleep schedule to take into consideration, I have been sewing noisily at all hours.

The weekend's project was getting started on a collection of plain black shirts to give as a welcome-back-from-Prague gift. I found a nice lightweight linen blend on sale at Fabricland, of all places, and went to town. J. prefers loose-fitting shirts with slashed neck openings and long, wide sleeves and no buttons, which are terribly difficult to find in a store; Folkwear #104 is basically his Platonic ideal of a shirt, though, so I cut out pieces to make three of them. (I did make another a couple of months ago from IL019, a slightly heavier linen. No pictures are forthcoming because he has barely taken it off since I finished it, and right now it too is in Prague.)

Cutting out the pieces seems to take only a little less time than sewing them together. Assembly is basically sewing in straight lines—those excellent square armholes!—so most of the seams are flat felled seams, which makes me feel good about their longevity. (However, the sewing-in-the-bottom-of-a-bucket effect when you try to flat fell a sleeve seam so stresses me out that I didn't bother; the sleeves have French seams instead.)

Plain black shirts in the evening half-light are so impossibly boring to look at that I almost didn't bother with a picture, but here is one neck:

I was timid about notches at first, but now they are my favourite part, because they really reward bravery. It is a joy to carefully clip perilously close to the stitching line and end up with a slash that doesn't pucker.

Interim

2011-05-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

My blogging ambitions have been a bit confounded by relentlessly gloomy weather, knitting I cannot show you, and a bunch of slightly longer-term projects that are taking me a while. Here's what's on my mind and coffee table this weekend:

Topstitching around a scalloped hem;

and cross-stitching some fan art.

(I'm not kidding about the gloom—it's twenty to one in the afternoon, the table is next to a huge west-facing window with the drapes thrown open, and it's distinctly shadowy in here.)

Sprung

2011-05-05T13:41:00.000-07:00

Now that we've had a full week of dreary rain-and-not-snow, and now that it is almost the middle of May, I am comfortable acknowledging that it might finally be spring.

And I can show you a springy thing I worked on in the fall for Hélène Magnusson's new webzine The Icelandic Knitter:

A top-down triangular shawl worked in garter stitch is the quickest thing to knit, if you want a cheery accessory in a hurry. This one is reversible even though it's striped because the colour changes are disguised in the eyelet rows (no rows with 'blips' of the new colour mixed with the old). The edging can be added on after any stripe, so you can keep knitting until you run out of yarn or patience to have a shawl of any size.

The yarn Hélène sent me to knit the shawl with is very special, and I'm excited that the pattern is also offered as part of a kit. It's Icelandic wool dyed with plants to yield colours that are rich and earthy and slightly mottled, and it was a joy to knit with. The pattern PDF by itself is €6, or the kit is €47 inclusive of shipping; you can order either from this page.

15-17

2011-04-26T15:20:00.001-07:00

Here are my Civil War Quiltalong blocks from the last few weeks. #16:

The instructions for this one called for the striped fabric (here, fabric with a grid on it) to be cut into eight pieces (four triangles and four squares), lining up the edge of a stripe with the edge of the ruler so that the stripes would match up when the pieces were sewn together. A few clever quilters decided to cut the square-and-a-triangle in one piece instead, and I followed their lead, saving myself a few seams and preserving the integrity of my grid.

#15:

I initially wasn't sold on the colour choices I made for this block (such doubts are a consequence of picking out fabrics in the semidark while watching a movie in the evening—not interrupting the ambience by turning on a light seemed like a very good idea at the time!). I felt apprehensive when I was sewing on the corner triangles, apprehensive when I was pressing the seam allowances into place from the back, apprehensive as I turned it over to inspect the front. Then I put it beside the other blocks and it was completely fine. All that anxious energy expended for nothing!

The muslin I'm using as the light fabric common to all the blocks that need a light fabric is doing a lot to pull the blocks together, I feel. Even when there's only tiny flashes of it, like the whole four square inches in the block I was worried about.

Last, #17:

This one was very quick to put together (no triangles!). I used nine different blue fabrics from my little collection of blue fabrics and am very pleased with the result.

Long weekend

2011-04-23T10:37:00.001-07:00

I've been paper piecing:

And quilting:

And finishing knitting:

The rest of the weekend is earmarked for more of the same.

Blue and orange

2011-04-14T10:08:00.001-07:00

The third block in the Civil War Quiltalong has seven little stars appliqued to it. Applique is totally new to me so I wanted to try something easier.

This might be a little anachronistic, but I like it. (Although I could have made the flower a bit smaller.) And now I want to applique more things!

I also have some knitting-in-progress to share, with yarn that Miss Babs was generous enough to send me. One little stranded colourwork number in two colours:

This colour combination has been rattling around in my head for months, and I only recently figured out why. Pictured below is the tiny shelf above my stove that I look at every day.

Ah.

Both of these colours are from her collection of monochromes, which are solid enough for detailed colourwork or lace but have a wonderful richness and depth to them. Since I have been looking at fabric for quilts so much, they are reminding me of Cherrywood solids.

I think knitting thoughts have been bleeding into my quilting thoughts, because the blue and orange thing looks a lot like simple square-in-a-square blocks set on point, and I want nothing so much as to make a couch-sized quilt in that pattern in #225 Peacock Blue and #230 Pumpkin.

Bigger yet

2011-04-12T09:12:00.001-07:00

Those 8" quilt blocks I have been making seem big enough when I'm making them, but they're nothing compared to these behemoths:

These enormous dresden plates are part of the quiltalong hosted by Lynne at Lily's Quilts, and the blocks will finish to 30". I took a long time figuring out which fabric to use and finally settled on these oranges from Lonni Rossi. I pulled out the palest fabric of the bunch to use for the centre circles, and pulled out the darkest ones to cut into strips for the borders (not pictured).

I have to confess that I'm setting in the centre circles in by hand—this is partly because I didn't feel like dragging out the sewing machine when I was getting started on them and now my fate is sealed, and partly because the Civil War quiltalong blocks have given me a fondness for hand-piecing. I doubt that I'll piece the dresden plates into their backgrounds by hand, though; they're 78" around!

My partner thinks the dresden plates look like a child's drawing of the sun, and they do. But I think the blocks resemble huge cross-sections of citrus fruits, which means that they tie in nicely to my current fixation, which is making marmalade out of the last beautiful fruits of winter.

So far I have Meyer lemon, Minneola tangelo, blood orange, and key lime marmalades. (There were satsumas earmarked for marmalade, but I ate them.) And I'm already planning slightly more adventurous ones for next year. A variety of tangerines! Lemon-vanilla! Jalapeño-lime! Grapefruit! Kumquat! I am convinced that lemon-orange-bergamot marmalade is the only thing missing from my life! Clearly I need to move to California or the Mediterranean where these things actually grow, instead of just sighing wistfully over them from afar.

Moreover

2011-04-04T10:14:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the mighty Shannon Okey, I can show off two projects I worked on last year! One is a mostly-Shetland lace shawl ("mostly" because of how it's constructed) knitted out of the most glorious indigo-dyed alpaca from A Verb for Keeping Warm.

(Yeah, I'd wear it with nothing underneath, too; that yarn is soft.)

The other is a pair of gloves that would be very plain if they weren't cashmere and silk.

The red is the reddest red, and they are the most decadent things I have ever felt. You can get the yarn from Lisa Souza and I recommend that you do.

Both of these are going to appear in Shannon's upcoming Fresh Designs books, which are the subject of a Kickstarter fundraising campaign over here. It makes my heart swell a little to see that as of this post, 88 knitters and lovers of knitting (and lovers of knitters?) have pledged $4401 out of the $5000 goal—and the month is only four days old. If you can spare a few dollars and want books or patterns or other cool things in exchange, go take a look!

Quilt blocks little and big

2011-04-04T09:58:00.001-07:00

Four more Civil War QAL blocks finished since last we spoke, and now I am much closer to being caught up. First I made #10:

I regret that I couldn't find a good flower that was the right size for that centre square, and might eventually be moved to embroider one there.

Then I made #11:

Barbara Brackman says that this pattern is sometimes called Ocean Waves, so I had to make it in blue and yellow (sea and sand, you know).

On Friday evening while we were watching TV, I made #12:

And on Sunday night I made this week's block, #14:

A trend I am noticing is that I keep gravitating toward the less fiddly blocks to make immediately, and leaving the ones with more pieces for later. Now that I've noticed, though, I hereby resolve not to be avoidant about these little challenges. Next up is block #5, which has a million 1-inch half square triangles in it.

I felt quite pleased with the delicate smallness of these blocks until I saw these miniature versions that one quilter has been making, with a thimble for scale. Man. These are the greatest things I have ever seen.

Palais

2011-03-29T11:50:00.000-07:00

Hey, today I can show you something neat that I finished a little while ago:

This is a hat with stranded colourwork on every round and cable crossings on every alternate round. When I was working out a cable pattern I was thinking about the zigzagging reinforcements on these ironwork supports, but in the yarn that Gryphon chose it looks more like a stained glass lamp than an ironwork dome (and just as well, I think). I am delighted by how the black dividing lines make the variegated contrast yarn pop—there are a lot of colours in it (rust, teal, green…) but they don't look muddy at all. Love, love, love. The yarn, Eidos, is a springy fingering-weight superwash wool that is outstanding for cables.

The pattern is available for purchase from The Sanguine Gryphon, for $5 USD. (And go look at the rest of the swirly decadent knitted things in the collection, too!)

Motoring

2011-03-28T14:24:00.000-07:00

Block #4 is finished:

After the first three I wanted a relatively quick and easy reprieve, so I skipped ahead to #8 (I kind of want a whole quilt of this block):

Then #7 (I love these wide log cabin stripes):

And #9:

This many blocks a day probably isn't a pace I can keep up any time other than the weekend, but I am satisfied with my catching-up efforts.

I am gradually figuring out this hand piecing thing. The triangles sewn on the bias are still a bit tricky, but I have figured out that the blocks end up less ripply if I finger-press the seams with some vigour before pressing them with the iron. I am plotting a simplified #3 block—I think I will make 72 degree diamond templates and piece a five-pointed star out of those shapes, and then appliqué it to a background square. That way I can have The Appliqué Experience without needing to do it seven times and without having to cut out a non-lopsided five-pointed star. (I cannot cut out a shape to save my life.)

Tentatively setting a goal: I want to be all caught up by the end of April so that I can finish out the year at the pace of one block a week.

Better late than never

2011-03-26T08:46:00.000-07:00

I am jumping in to Barbara Brackman's 2011 Civil War Quiltalong, two and a half months late. I am armed with a rainbow of excellent reproduction fabrics (red yellow olive greyblue indigo violet lavender) and some exceptionally substantial muslin. There are many small pieces involved in this endeavour—each block is just 8"—so I am anticipating a certain amount of difficulty and frustration (and learning and growth and the triumph of achievement).

An extra-special bonus challenge I am setting for myself is to piece every block by hand. This is partly because I want to learn to do it and I want a lot of practice, and partly because I want at least one quilting project that is portable and quiet. The pace of the quiltalong is one block each week, so I'm hoping not to be too terribly overwhelmed, at least not once I've caught up.

Here is block #1:

(I told you I was late; the post with the block instructions is dated January 1!)

This block is sort of dynamic—a pinwheel inside a pinwheel!—so I picked a medium blue with lots of movement in it for the medium fabric. I think those tiny things in the dark fabric are supposed to be flower buds (though they look a bit like apples halved pole to pole).

And here is block #2:

I thought that this combination of fabrics looks a bit like a sunflower. The one in the centre is the lightest of my olives.

So far I am liking this muslin as an all-purpose generic background lightness. I was a bit worried that the rainbow would be too bright, or too busy; having a single solid thing common to all or most of the blocks is my emulsification strategy. We'll see if it works (and I hope that it does). My beginner's thoughts on hand piecing are that it is not as slow as I'd worried, and that it is actually pretty fun to draw lines on the backs of all my pieces before the sewing begins, and that it is a pretty great way to get very pointy points on the triangles.

Block #3 is seven tiny appliquéd stars, and I am not feeling up to that task this morning, though otherwise I intend to do a lot of making up for lost time this weekend. Onward to #4!

Aloft at last

2011-03-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

We got something like eight inches of snow this week, and the wind has been howling late into the night. I decided that this was a good time to start knitting something cozy.

I have five skeins of Knit Picks' new silk/mohair blend, Aloft. It seems pretty much identical with Kid Silk Haze for a little under half the price, and comes in some of my favourite rich jewel colours. I've been having such a hard time putting it down that I am a bit over a third of the way through knitting a big stole, and the yarn only got here on Monday.

Nothing in the picture reveals the size of the thing: after blocking it'll be three feet wide, and its finished length will be six feet or slightly longer.

This project is not especially Russian, in design or material or inspiration—I was thinking about walled gardens, labyrinths and enclosed things—but when I was figuring out how big it should be, I had in mind the grey shawl that has been my near-constant companion since the fall. Aloft is unlike that Orenburg lace yarn in many respects, but it does come with a fabulous halo, and I imagine that someone could wear it wrapped around their torso underneath a wool coat to stay warm even in January.

I like this very simple allover pattern. The repeat is rather big (18 sts by 34 rows), but it is easy to memorize and fast to knit, as most of the wrong-side rows are knitted plain with no patterning at all. The big eyelets are "peas" (borrowed from Gossamer Webs) and the circular things are the same motifs as in Mrs. Montague's pattern, arranged very close together. I think the alternating diamonds set into a diamond grid will end up being pretty striking, although it's all very undefined and soft-looking right now, before blocking.

Things to do when you have too many buttons, part one

2011-03-13T14:20:00.000-07:00

Attach a whole bunch of them to everything you sew.

I am getting a big kick out of having a scrap basket with bits in it that I can use for small items. On Monday night I made a couple of pincushions from scraps to take to a friend (not pictured because it was nighttime when I made them, and because they are already given away; picture one made out of quarter square triangles made into a square, and one slightly bigger one made from half square triangles); then made another four, and have one more cut out and partly pieced. (Total buttons used so far: 32.)

I think the buttons and their indentations give them a satisfyingly full feeling, like cushy upholstery.

(14/16 pinwheel lawn blocks are finished, but the new ones are not interestingly different from the old ones.)

I have a small and easy free pattern in the current edition of Tangled, right over here. It's for a little lace scalloped-edge cuff to encircle your neck, and it is a good way to use up a bit of DK or worsted-weight angora and an afternoon. It's still wintry enough outside here to justify new scarves.

Marching onward

2011-03-07T13:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's project was sewing together a million half-square triangle units, and today's is pressing them.

I am about one-quarter of the way through my unruly pile.

8 blocks for the lawn quilt are finished, and all of these bits are for the remaining 8. (I thought I might be able to eke out an extra four blocks from the fabric I had remaining, but no: there are just little bits left.)

Also, I made the mistake of signing up for the Fat Quarter Shop newsletter, so now I get notifications of beautiful new things every Monday. I think I understand now why building up a stash of quilting supplies is so dangerously easy. Who can resist these purple birds? these tiny flowers? these wobbly concentric circles?

Fortunately for knitting content, I'll be able to show you several secret projects soon. I also have one glove of a new pair to brag about:

Its mate will be a mirror image of this one, with all the pattern motifs pointing the opposite direction. The yarn is Knit Picks Gloss again, and I love the stitch definition it provides in these sorts of patterns. The yarn blooms a bit with washing, which is great for the plain stockinette sections, but it doesn't interfere with the crispness of those diagonal purled lines in the cuff. Excellent.

Interdisciplinary

2011-02-23T14:39:00.000-08:00

Hey, it was a long weekend! I used part of it to take a break from knitting—secret knitting, public knitting, planning knitting, writing about knitting—and indulge my patchwork fascination.

These are 13" blocks made out of reproductions of old Liberty prints (the fabric is Regent Street Lawn from Moda). I really like the look of plain old nine patches, but also wanted to play with pinwheels, so here we are.

Since the objective is to improve the pointiness of my points, I am cutting out all the triangles before piecing them together, no shortcuts allowed. Fortunately the fabrics are all busy enough that you really can't tell where the points don't line up nicely.

These ones will be alternated with corresponding blocks in the other nine patch configuration, except the alternate blocks will have some other pieced components. I'm leaning toward Broken Dishes.

And this is a movie-watching project:

Tumbling blocks are like slightly more elaborate hexagons! I printed off 1.75" diamonds from this generator, and here I am, going to town. The three fabrics in there are all from the same collection as the kitchen stuff, but these are going to end up in the living room. I have two throw pillows with sad polyester shells that need recovering with something attractive.

Through the Looking-Glass

2011-02-18T11:04:00.000-08:00

I had big plans for Valentine's Day and a fragment of a mitten with hearts on it, but they were totally derailed by this fabric.

My kitchen is full of motley and boring accessories: one burned oven mitt, two ugly matching potholders, black-and-white tea towels from Fortino's that don't absorb water so much as spread it around in a thin, even layer. I had aspired to replace them someday with colourful quilted items, maybe green ones or blue or orange, something cheerful. Then last week we went to a quilting store and I saw the William Morris fabrics and all was lost.

This is the damage so far:

Five potholders! Three tea towels with birds on them! The potholders are assembled from four-patch units made out of charm squares. I used the whole package (of 40); the potholders are pieced on both sides, so they don't really have fronts and backs. The tea towels are just rectangles with hems.

One oven mitt and one coordinating half-apron with a big contrasting ruffle at the front and big vintage buttons at either side! The oven mitt is from the template on this page; the half-apron is from 101 One Yard Wonders.

One knee-length apron with fun gathered detailing over the bust and rows of birds adorning top and bottom! The tutorial I used is here.

Not pictured: One tiny quilted cozy for my tiny French press, awaiting binding; six more tea-towel-sized rectangles cut out, pressed, awaiting hemming.

Guys, I have had to make myself knit this week. All I want to do is make another cup of coffee and hem more rectangles and sew more ruffled aprons. The palette is rather subdued and sedate compared to the cheery colours I had wanted, but somehow I don't care anymore. My priorities have clearly changed because look at the birds:

I wasn't a person who was terrifically interested in quilting before, though my grandmother's quilts were plenty inspiring and as a child I was sometimes deputized to press bits of fabric for her, or make yo-yos out of scraps. This, though, this is a lot of fun. I am having an inappropriate amount of fun.

Edgewood

2011-01-27T14:14:00.000-08:00

Yikes, socks on 2.75mm needles go a little too fast. I had barely started knitting these when all of a sudden they were finished.

The pattern looks like it might be a little complicated, but it isn't particularly; the pattern on the leg and instep has twelve rounds in it, of which six are just knitted, and the others are the same three rows staggered by half a repeat. There aren't even any double decreases in there, which might have something to do with how fast they are to knit.

They've got nice ripply cuffs with garter stitch welts that prevent rolling. The lace pattern on the cuff pulls in quite a bit, but also has some widthwise stretch to it; I have been wearing these all morning and they haven't sagged down around my ankles yet, which bodes well for their future.

One of these is a lot chunkier than the other, but it's what I was thinking about.

The pattern is $4.50 on ravelry, right over here.

Bluestocking

2011-01-25T11:59:00.000-08:00

I am a pretty big fan of sportweight socks.

I feel like these are a little too clunky to be delicate, really; they look pretty lacy, but the zigzags made by the decreases stand out more than their corresponding yarnovers do, in the final analysis.

Compare with a swatch of the same pattern in much finer yarn at a much looser gauge:

where the yarnovers and the way they shape the fabric into ripples are what's most obvious. It's hard to notice, in the sock, the way the single stitch in between the paired yarn overs gets stretched out at the base of each leaf; that distortion is front and centre in the swatch. None of this is to say that lace patterns knitted at tight gauges for socks are bad or lesser. They're just pretty in different ways. It's interesting to see what changes about the character of a pattern when you adjust the gauge.

(This pattern is adapted from one in the leafy section of The Haapsalu Shawl, which is the most inspiring book if you like lace patterns where the yarnovers tend to be placed a few stitches away from their decreases. My adaptation was to replace some purled stitches with knitted ones in order to emphasize those zigzags.)

This sock has a mate on the needles, almost half-finished, and its pattern is nearly finished too. (I actually wrote it months ago and just didn't get around to actually knitting it until now.) They'll only come up to the mid-calf, but they have a bit of a stocking feel to them, or at least I think so. There's some secret calf shaping that's barely noticeable in the finished sock when it's laid out flat, but very noticeable when you put it on and it flares out to fit your calf. All of the decreases are lumped together into a single round in the narrow garter welt that divides the cuff from the leg, so no pattern element is interrupted; the cuff pattern tends to draw in enough that the decreases don't make too dramatic a change to the width even though they all happen at the same time. It's a nice balance.

I am pleased with how the pattern on the back of the leg flows into the heel flap.

Also with how the lace pattern on the instep goes nearly all the way to the tip of the toe. I think there are about four rounds that escape being patterned before the toe gets grafted closed. Toe cleavage is the new hotness, right?

Also also, is it dorky to kind of want a lace scarf that matches my lace socks? Because I am seriously considering it.

Warm hands, warm heart

2011-01-21T11:52:00.000-08:00

This was my response to a sudden onslaught of cold, wet weather.

Hey, do you want to make shaggy, woolly fingerless mittens, too? Do you have a cake of plötulopi hanging around, and 2.75mm double-pointed needles (or circulars for magic looping or 2-circ methods), and some sort of scrubbing or brushing implement? I don't recommend substituting a different yarn because the finishing stage of this project sort of relies on the qualities of unspun Icelandic wool—the fabric gets fulled a little bit, then brushed vigorously with a flick carder, wire brush, or plastic scrub brush. Icelandic wool is great for this purpose because the sheep are double-coated: there's a very soft, very fine undercoat (thel), then progressively coarser, longer hairs (tog). They're blended together in this yarn. It's pretty easy to raise the nap; the yarn is so loosely structured that it doesn't offer much resistance.

Mohair or a mohair blend would work, too. Look for long, hair-like fibres in the yarn that want to work loose. Not merino, not superwash.

Bonus: close-fitting fingerless gloves make a great base layer for wearing underneath bulkier mittens, like long underwear for your hands! Double bonus: oh man, do my sore wrists feel better when they're swathed in warm, fuzzy wool.

This barely qualifies as a pattern, it's so simple, but I've named it Poilu.

Materials

Istex plötulopi (100% Icelandic wool; approx. 300m/100g cake); 1 cake (you'll use about a third of it)
set of 5 US #2/2.75mm double-pointed needles, or a long circular needle for magic looping
scrap yarn
tapestry needle
flick carder, wire dog/cat brush, or plastic scrub brush

Gauge

… is actually not that important for this project, since the finished mitts can be fulled down to size and can be tried on during the process. Pre-fulling gauge for the sample pair was 26 sts and 36 rnds = 4" in stockinette.

Finished size

Sample mitts measure 7.5" around. Since there's no pattern to interrupt, these are the easiest thing to resize; cast on more stitches for bigger mitts and fewer for smaller mitts, and work as many thumb gusset increases as you need to fit your hand.

Bear in mind two factors when resizing: fulling will shrink them a bit, and you'll be brushing the insides, too. Too-large mitts are easier to fix at the finishing stage than too-small ones.

Abbreviations

k: knit
p: purl
rnd: round
st: stitch
m1: make one
p3tog: purl 3 together
CO: cast on
BO: bind off

Stitch guide

Garter stitch (worked in the round):
Rnd 1: K.
Rnd 2: P.
Repeat rnds 1-2 for garter stitch.

Mitt (make 2 alike)

Cuff

With a single strand of plötulopi, cast on 52 sts, being careful not to break the yarn (it's fragile!). Divide sts between needles and join for working in the round. Mark or note beginning of rnd.

Work garter stitch for 20 rnds.

K 20 rnds.

Thumb gusset and hand

Next rnd: K25, place marker, m1, k1, m1, place marker, k to end.
K 2 rnds.
Next rnd: K to first marker, slip marker, m1, k to next marker, m1, slip marker, k to end of rnd.
Repeat previous 3 rnds until there are 15 sts between markers. K 2 more rnds.
Next rnd: K to first marker, remove marker, slip next 15 sts to scrap yarn, remove next marker, CO 1 st using the backwards loop method, k to end of rnd.
K 5 rnds.
Work garter stitch for 10 rnds.
BO loosely.

Thumb

Transfer held thumb sts to needles, dividing for working in the round as you go. Join yarn and k across these sts, then pick up and k 3 sts from CO edge of hand.
Next rnd: P to last 3 sts, p3tog.
Work garter stitch for 8 rnds.
BO loosely.

Finishing

Weave in and cut off all ends. Full the gloves by agitating them first in hot water, then in cold water, until the stitches are slightly obscured and the mitts are a little smaller. (Squeeze out excess water and try them on to make sure they’re the right size for you before calling it quits.) Pat mitts into shape, then lay flat to dry. When the mitts are completely dry, brush their surface with a scrub brush or flick carder until a furry, shaggy nap appears. Brush more for a shaggier appearance. When the outside of each glove is sufficiently shaggy, turn them inside-out and brush the wrong sides, too.

If at some point in the future you decide they aren't shaggy enough after all, brush some more!

Eyes on the prize

2011-01-17T12:05:00.001-08:00

The red thing proceeds apace:

The project is a stole made out of Yubina laceweight cashmere on 2.75mm needles. This is a little more than the first 1/9, so I am on track to finish by my self-imposed deadline of the end of March. The finished shawl will have 18 repeats of the central pattern, and this here has two. It looks blocked because it is: I can't stand not knowing what something will look like when it's finished, so I frequently block things in progress.

I'm pretty happy with the edging:

I like the reinforced look of double yarnover zigzags, especially when they're surrounded by zigzagging rows of single yarnovers worked on every row. The very edge is my beloved lacy edge stitch, a yo-k2tog worked at the beginning of every even-numbered row.

For some reason I thought the central would not be this densely lacy, looking at the chart I made, even after swatching. Looking too hard at the knitting while I'm knitting it makes me go a bit cross-eyed.

The bigger motifs are supposed to look like eyes! I think they mostly do.

Boldness

2011-01-04T11:29:00.000-08:00

I got Margaret Stove's new book Wrapped in Lace last week, while my partner and I were killing time before a movie. The movie (True Grit) was excellent, but I kind of wished that I didn't have to wait three hours before I got to bring the book home and read it.

There are beautiful patterns, but I don't get the impression that it's intended to be a book of patterns. There is a lot of discussion about why Stove made this or that decision about a particular design, and then the pattern itself is the proof of concept or one example of knitting ideas put to work. I think this is an interesting vibe for a knitting book to have, not least because I am usually more interested in process stories than in finished objects. The result is that it's a very encouraging and emboldening book.

In that spirit of boldness:

This is one end of THE THING that I was chattering about a few months ago. (Also, this is what lace knitting looks like if you block it, then crumple it up and shove it in the bottom of your purse and leave it there for a month.) I had felt a bit strange about deploying Shetland lace motifs in vertical stripes of different widths, but one of the lessons I took away from Margaret Stove's book is that I should get over myself and just implement the knitting ideas I have, so here we are.

I like the wickedly pointed edging I came up with.

This is what happens when you increase with kfb and decrease with k2tog at the very edge of the scallop on every row. It comes to a very sharp point and the scallops seem deeper than ones accomplished with yarn overs a few stitches in from the edge. The kfb edge looks dangerously fragile while knitting compared to the k2tog part, but it all seems to come out in the wash.

I also swatched another thing:

I noticed that most of the lace knitting I've been doing has resembled fields of blank, staring eyes. The new year is for knitting boldly, so I'm going to knit a thing that is self-consciously and evidently a field of eyes. I like how the diamond outlining the spider motif in the centre of the swatch looks like lashes. (The motif will be tiled in the border of a rectangular something. Not sure what the centre will look like just yet.)

Third time lucky

2010-12-03T11:10:00.001-08:00

I've been having a bear of a time with a particular purple shawl. The first time (reported here) I cast on, oh, two hundred too many stitches for a bottom-up triangle, and had to unravel it. The second time (undocumented) I had made too wide a rectangle, and it would've ended up too short to be useful. So I unravelled it too.

But now at long last I am on to something.

This is half of a thing; it has a little scalloped edge and then a polka-dots-in-a-diamond-grid pattern that becomes just polka dots toward the centre. Each dot has a nupp in its centre, so it is like dots nestled comfortably inside bigger dots, and I am altogether pretty pleased. I am coming to like lace knitting that's not particularly lacy.

I think that when I block it for real (rather than haphazardly on the couch just to see what it looks like, as pictured above), I'll do it gently; it's okay for the fabric to have some stretch and give and squish left in it. It's easier to get the straight edges straight when you're not blocking an item to within an inch of its life, too.

Juliet is some of the most well-behaved yarn I have ever had the pleasure of knitting. Looking at it, you'd have no idea that I had been knitting and unravelling and reknitting and unravelling; it looks just the same as the first time I knitted it up, with no undue fuzziness or pilling. The stockinette-based pattern is edged with only three stitches in garter on either edge, but in the few days of being shoved in my purse since I blocked it, the fabric has lain as obediently flat as it was immediately after unpinning.

It's a somewhat hefty fingering-weight yarn knitted at a moderately tight gauge, so the shawl will have a satisfying and comfortable weight to it. I think it would make the best sweater in the world, or the coziest, sturdiest socks.

Polaris

2010-12-03T08:55:00.000-08:00

So! I am pretty pumped up about this little project:

I wanted to knit a stranded colourwork something that was more relaxing than the monstrously fiddly things I had been knitting, and starry Norwegian-inspired mittens fit the bill nicely. This project was like a palate-cleanser; now I can return to other knitting without trying to make it more difficult than it is.

Mittens with diamonds and squares and stars and fleurs-de-lis! And patterned thumb gussets that give way to thumbs in the same pattern as the palms, and invisible wide folded hems for embroidering secret messages onto. (I am actually pretty terrible at embroidering on knitting—cross stitch is more my speed—so I declined to add a message to my mittens, but you need not decline.)

These were interesting to knit because they didn't feel repetitive; there's a lot of mirror-imaging going on, but the motif is long and wide enough that I usually forgot what was supposed to happen next. The palm, though, has a tiny repeating pattern (a field of fleurs-de-lis or stars?), which offers a small break from chart-reading every round.

Having recently discovered this awesome old space news item, I had to name the triple-star mittens after a triple-star system. Polaris it is!

To knit them, you'll need two 50g skeins of Knit Picks Palette or some other sticky fingering-weight wool yarn, in two contrasting colours (shown in Jay and Cream). I used a set of 5 US #1/2.25mm double-pointed needles to achieve a gauge of 38 sts and 44 rounds = 4" in the stranded pattern; choose whatever needle size gets you gauge. The finished mittens measure 7.5" around above the thumb, and 11" from the edge of the cuff to the pointed tip.

As the pattern is written, the hand measures 4.5" from where the thumb splits off from the hand to the tip of the hand. The thumb can be moved up or down by beginning it a few rounds earlier or later than is marked on the charts; this lengthens the hand and shortens the cuff, or vice versa. More dramatic resizing is best accomplished by going up or down a needle size (for bigger or smaller mittens, respectively).

My favourite part is the sort of abstracted snowflake motif on the cuff. (And the hem! I like wide folded hems instead of ribbing; you get all the cozy fit of a ribbed cuff with none of the pulling in, and then there's this excellent extra space where you can put more patterns.) There hasn't been an actual proper snowfall where I live yet, and even though it's December it doesn't feel like winter. Snow already!

Get the pattern for $5.50 CAD by clicking this link, or from the pattern page on Ravelry here.

(The mittens I've actually been wearing out and about, though? Maplewood mittens. They are so cutely rustic, and their yarn is so assertively wooly, that I just can't not take them with me everywhere. I am a huge sucker for wooliness.)

Maplewood

2010-11-28T13:22:00.000-08:00

I knew that if I waited long enough, it would be mitten season again.

These mittens are the first cousins of these ones; I even used the same yarn, Cotswold wool from Lange's Rock Farm in Nova Scotia. Their namesake is the community where the quarry is.

They have wide and cozy garter stitch cuffs and a chevron pattern over the back of the hand, with a single garter stitch at each side. The palms and thumbs are kept in stockinette for fast and easy knitting. For best effect, choose a crisp worsted-weight wool yarn.

I think the exaggerated picots that edge the cuff give these mittens a very faintly feminine air. (I also think that using "delicate" techniques with hearty, sturdy yarn is hilarious, like an elephant in a tutu. Anyway.) They could just as easily be omitted; if you don't want picot edging, just CO 40 sts using whatever method you prefer.

Gauge

20 stitches and 30 rounds = 4" in stockinette

Finished size

8" in diameter, and 11" from cuff to tip

Skills required

casting on with the cable and backwards loop methods
knitting and purling
increasing with m1
decreasing with k2tog, ssk, and sk2p
knitting in the round
picking up and knitting stitches
binding off

Yarn and notions

Lange's Rock Farm Cotswold Wool (100% Cotswold wool; 200m per 4oz skein); 1 skein in cream
set of 5 US #6/4mm double-pointed needles
scrap of yarn or stitch holder
stitch markers
tapestry needle

Charts and written directions

A key to the charts:

Hand

Round 1: P1, k3, p1, k1, p1, k3, p1, k3, p1, k1, p1, k3, p1.
Round 2: K3, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k5, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k3.
Round 3: P1, k1, p1, k5, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k5, p1, k1, p1.
Round 4: K1, p1, k3, p1, k3, p1, k1, p1, k3, p1, k3, p1, k1.
Repeat rounds 1-4 for patt.

Tip

Round 1: P1, ssk, k1, p1, k1, p1, k3, p1, k3, p1, k1, p1, k1, k2tog, p1.
Round 2: K2, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k5, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k2.
Round 3: P1, ssk, k4, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k4, k2tog, p1.
Round 4: K3, p1, k3, p1, k1, p1, k3, p1, k3.
Round 5: P1, ssk, k1, p1, k3, p1, k3, p1, k1, k2tog, p1.
Round 6: K2, p1, k1, p1, k5, p1, k1, p1, k2.
Round 7: P1, ssk, k2, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k2, k2tog, p1.
Round 8: K5, p1, k1, p1, k3, p1, k1.
Round 9: P1, ssk, k3, p1, k3, k2tog, p1.
Round 10: K2, p1, k5, p1, k2.
Round 11: P1, ssk, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k2tog, p1.
Round 12: K3, p1, k1, p1, k3.
Round 13: P1, ssk, k1, p1, k1, k2tog, p1.
Round 14: K7.
Round 15: P1, ssk, p1, k2tog, p1.
Round 16: K5.
Round 17: P1, sk2p, p1.

Right mitten

Cuff

(CO 5 sts using the cable cast-on method, BO 2 sts, transfer stitch on right needle back to left needle) 13 times, CO 1 st. 40 sts cast on.
Turn work so that wrong side of CO is facing—this will become the right side of the work. Divide sts between needles for working in the round, and join. Mark or note beginning of round.
Next round: K.
Next round: P.
Repeat previous two rounds 12 more times, then knit one additional round.
Next round: Work Hand patt over first 21 sts of round; k remaining 19 sts.
Continue as established until one 4-round repeat of Hand patt has been worked.

Thumb Gusset

Next round: Work across back of hand in established patt, k1, place marker, m1, k1, m1, place marker, k to end of round.
Next round: Work across back of hand in patt, k to end of round.
Next round: Work across back of hand in patt, k to end of round.
Next round: Work across back of hand in patt, k1, slip marker, m1, k to next marker, m1, slip marker, k to end of round. 2 sts increased.

Repeat previous 3 rounds until there are 13 sts between the gusset markers. Work two more rounds even, without increases.
Next round: Work across first 21 sts in patt, k1, remove marker, slip next 13 sts to a holder or scrap of yarn, remove second marker, CO 1 st using the backwards loop method, k to end of round.

Hand

Next round: Work across first 21 sts in established patt, k to end of round.
Continue as established until the mitten is just long enough to cover the tip of the recipient's little finger. End on round 4 of patt.
Next round: Work Tip patt over the back of the hand; ssk, k to last 2 sts of round, k2tog.
Next round: Work Tip patt over the back of the hand; k to end of round.
Repeat the previous 2 rounds until every round but the last of Tip patt are completed, and 8 sts remain.
Next round: Work round 17 of Tip patt, sk2p. 4 sts remain.
Break yarn, thread it through the remaining sts, pull it tight, and fasten off.

Thumb

Transfer held thumb sts to needles. Attach yarn and k across these 13 sts, then pick up and k 3 sts across the edge of the hand—16 sts.
Next round: K to last 3 sts, sk2p. 14 sts remain.
K every round until the thumb is the desired finished length.
Next round: (K1, k2tog) to last 2 sts, k2.
Next round: K2tog around.
Break yarn, thread it through the remaining sts, pull it tight, and fasten off.

Left mitten

Work Cuff section as for right mitten.

Thumb Gusset

Next round: Work across first 21 sts in established patt, k to last 2 sts of round, place marker, m1, k1, m1, place marker, k1.
Next round: Work across first 21 sts in patt, k to end of round.
Next round: Work across first 21 sts in patt, k to end of round.
Work across first 21 sts in patt, k to first marker, slip marker, m1, k to next marker, m1, slip marker, k1. 2 sts increased.

Repeat previous three rounds until there are 13 sts between the gusset markers. Work two more rounds even, without increases.
Next round: Work across first 21 sts in patt, k to first gusset marker, remove marker, slip next 13 sts to a holder or scrap of yarn, remove second marker, CO 1 st using the backwards loop method, k1.

Complete as for right mitten.

Finishing

Weave in all ends, but don't cut them off yet. Use the end at the base of each thumb to mend any holes in this area if necessary. Block mittens by soaking them in lukewarm water, squeezing out excess water in a towel, and laying flat to dry. When mittens are completely dry, cut off the woven-in ends.

Newness

2010-11-25T11:52:00.000-08:00

A new pattern:

Yellow isn't my colour. Or wasn't. The swirly greeny gold yarn that Sharon from Three Irish Girls sent me for knitting a sample was a revelation and a game-changer; it makes me think of old jewellery or battered ornaments inside weathered churches. I want to knit everything out of it.

(And I just might: wouldn't it be awesome to have, like, elbow-length gloves in that colour, knitted at a tight gauge, with travelling twisted stitches and cables? Like embossed patterns decorating something golden? I suppose not everyone wants to look like they're made of metal, but I have a thing for robots. Gold robots.)

The result was this scarf, which you can get exclusively from Three Irish Girls. It's a $3.95 download.

The yarn, McClellan Fingering, is a soft and silky merino/nylon/bamboo rayon blend that drapes and drapes. When I was knitting the scarf I kicked myself a lot for having come up with a little project idea, instead of one that involved oceans of that fabric to drape around my body, like a swingy wrap cardigan or a giant shawl, i.e. excuse to knit a sheet of lace. I also didn't like rayon much until laying hands on this yarn, so thanks, Sharon, for broadening my interests. Now there's even more yarn out in the world that I Must Have.

I also recommend that you look through the entire catalogue, because there are some delectable colours in there. They did a great job of purples in particular.

Small treasures

2010-11-20T18:02:00.000-08:00

Thanks for your kind words; internet; the funeral was very sad but it was good to see my far-flung family gathered together in one place again, and it was nice to remember all the excellent things about my late grandfather.

While I was home I stayed at my grandmother's house, which is full of interesting old treasures. My aunt sent me home with these:

It is three and a half pairs of white stockings from 1873 or thereabouts. They all bear the names or initials of their owners at the top of the calf immediately underneath the lace or cabled cuff. Some are elaborately beaded words:

While others are garter-stitched initials that all but disappear against their stockinette background:

I'm certain that some of them were knitted by machine, but these ones, at least, appear to have been reknitted by hand from the ankle at some point in their lives:

And this pair, marked 1873, bears the telltale minor unevenness of having been handknitted with a mixed bag of needles in different sizes:

The garter-initialled one, a single sock, is worked at a much looser gauge than the others, so I suspect that it was also knitted by hand.

There's really very little to reverse-engineer here. All of the patterns are very straightforward. The stockings are more or less identical to one another except for their band at the top; they all have one stitch kept in garter at the back of the leg around which the decreases are oriented; they all have spiralling decreases for the toe. They also all have a tiny ribbon stitched into the inside, so that the pairs can be tied up together and no stocking gets separated from its mate, except for the poor garter-initialled singleton.

My favourite thing about them is that they all fit me, which came as a bit of a surprise; the cotton fabric is not stretchy and they look very narrow when they're laid out flat. But they fit me like I had knitted them for myself.

Triumph

2010-11-11T12:32:00.000-08:00

I am finally victorious over all of my gloves.

1:

Guardian Gloves have an elaborate stranded colourwork pattern that is a bit fiddly to work—three colours at once, you know. The remaining two colours are added with duplicate stitch after the knitting is finished. These take a long time to knit, as gloves go, but I think you'll find them worthwhile as soon as you put them on. I was moved to cackle madly with glee. It's great to have brightly-coloured hands!

The pattern is available on ravelry for $5.50 CAD, and eventually will be available from Knit Picks, where you could get it together with its yarn. I used Palette in five colours: Jay, Safflower, Sweet Potato, Pimento, and Clover. Most of a skein of Jay, about half a skein of Sweet Potato, a third of a skein of Safflower, and only oddments of the last two.

2:

Lily is a more subdued glove for occasions where bright colours would be out of place, perhaps. I think they look like something out of the 1920s, long and lean. The cuffs are worked side-to-side in garter stitch, though, so there's a lot of stretch concealed in there—this is the glove analogue of the automatic calf shaping I was so excited about in the Solstice Stockings.

Any light fingering-weight yarn will work, I think, but I used laceweight held double to make a thinner fabric. Two skeins of Alpaca Cloud will do it, or around 800m/100g of something else. This pattern is also $5.50 CAD on ravelry and also is eventually bound for Knit Picks.

I've had a pretty sad week; my grandfather had a stroke and passed away a couple of days later, which was yesterday morning, and so I've been planning a visit home for the funeral. Too scatterbrained to knit anything complicated or thoughtful, too tired to sit upright and spin, too bleary-eyed to squint at a pattern.

So I started a pair of plain toe-up socks for the trip. I have two skeins of Louet sportweight superwash merino in a sort of blueish red, and am going to knit them until I run out of yarn (this is the "mindless" part of my scheme), which means probably knee socks or taller. Endless stockinette has near-magical soothing powers.

A love letter to Palette

2010-10-25T10:39:00.001-07:00

These gloves are the anti-Ringwoods. They are neither easy nor fast. (The ring/middle/index fingers are twenty-six stitches around. Those suckers are time-consuming!) But I'm madly in love with how they're turning out:

(Don't mind the unevenness; this is a pre-blocking picture!)

That's not to say that I didn't have to deviate a lot from my original idea! Three main changes:

I decided that corrugated ribbing actually interfered with the pattern a little; the flow of the transition section between cuff and hand was thrown off by adding purl columns. So instead the cuff is just pinstriped, and I am much happier.

The pattern is written for five colours. I'd originally planned to knit four of them and add the last one in duplicate stitch after the knitting was done. It turns out that it's a huge hassle to strand four colours at the same time, especially when two of the colours have long floats. So now the whole thing is worked with three colours (blue, yellow, orange), and the last two (green and red) are duplicate-stitched on. You can see the embroidery in progress in the unglamorous picture above. This is much faster and pleasanter in the scheme of things!

Another deviation I made from the original plan was to scrap the peasant thumb, and make a gored thumb instead. The extra stranding going on makes the fabric awfully inflexible, and the peasant thumb ended up being uncomfortable for that reason. I was also worried about the distortion in the corners where the thumb emerged from the palm, and what that would do to the gloves' durability. (Yes, I knitted most of a glove, sighed heavily at the result, and then ripped it out!)

I reiterate that it's a pain to strand three colours at once, but the thick cushiness of the resulting fabric is really, really worth the trouble. These aren't gloves you'll be able to wear in the late fall but have to switch out for something warmer in December; they're dead-of-winter gloves that will keep you (and me!) toasty warm.

I adore this unassuming yarn. There's nothing fancy or ostentatious about Knit Picks Palette; it just comes in a lot of marvellous colours and does exactly what you tell it to do. It's a little grabby but not toothy; it is soft around the edges. Look at this face; what's not to love?

A bonus outstanding thing I discovered is that SpillyJane the Bold has already designed a pair of mittens inspired by the very same building in Detroit! You can buy the pattern on ravelry right here, or admire them in her blog post here. She borrowed a tile and ironwork pattern from the building's exterior. How awesome is that!

Shawlitis

2010-10-18T11:58:00.001-07:00

I signed up for an international shawl swap on a whim at the very last minute. The arrangement is not complicated: each participant filled out a survey about their favourite things to knit and favourite things to wear, and the swap coordinators matched each knitter with a recipient according to those preferences. The pace is relaxed—finished shawls get sent out in January, so everyone gets a nice little pick-me-up in the mail right when it seems like winter has gone on for too long. February is grey and interminable here, and thinking about getting an awesome present—and getting to prepare an awesome present for someone else—is already making me excited.

It's taken a couple of weeks of thinking, swatching, and thinking some more, but I think I've finally got the right idea. Here's the first stage:

I was inspired by Jared Flood's beautiful Terra shawl. The main area inside the lace border he used is quite plain, but it's very elegant because of the yarn he chose and the slightly loose gauge it's knitted at. I'll use a different edging pattern than Jared did, and my shawl will be a rectangle rather than a triangle, but I want it to have the same vibe—the centre of this shawl will also involve stripes of garter stitch. I love plain knits that are elevated by the yarn they're made from.

The plan is to knit one border-and-centre unit and another border piece, and then graft them together. I value symmetry and can't stand it when edges are differently scalloped, so I am not allowed to complain about having to graft a hundred stitches. To use up as much yarn as possible, I'll knit the border by itself first, followed by the border and centre together; then I'll only need to reserve a few feet of yarn to graft with.

Speaking of the yarn, dear swap partner, I think you'll really like it! It's 80% ultrafine alpaca, 20% silk, from a farm that was local to me until recently. It's cashmere-soft—when I touched it in the store I had a hard time believing it wasn't cashmere. It has a slight halo and a very subtle sheen from the silk content, and it drapes like you wouldn't believe.

I'm going to block it lightly—I want the garter stripes in the border to really pop, and the lace portion to recede behind them a little. The lace is really there to shape the fabric into scallops, not to be delicate in its own right.

Heart of a blossom (a tiny tutorial)

2010-10-06T10:49:00.000-07:00

So I've been instructing that glove fingers and mitten tips be finished by decreasing to a small number of stitches, breaking the yarn, threading it through the stitches, and fastening off the end. I wanted to show you a tidy way to do this that allows you to tighten each stitch around the yarn as you thread it through. Threading through and fastening off is how I've been finishing glove fingers since I read Nancy Bush's Folk Knitting in Estonia and learned her name for the technique—"heart of a blossom". I figured out this painless way to tighten the stitches up after a lot of hours spent laboriously pulling on each stitch with a darning needle, trying to make them smaller.

A bonus feature of the tighten-as-you-go approach is that it doesn't require that you unearth a darning needle to thread the yarn through the stitches. You'll still need one to weave in the ends, but if you're like me, you leave all the ends hanging to weave in at the very end of the project anyway. Gloves generate a lot of ends to weave in.

This is the thumb from that cream alpaca glove I showed you at the end of last week. Here I've decreased down to 5 stitches, which was the final decrease round before the break yarn etc. step.

Break the yarn, then arrange the needles as if you were going to keep knitting. Knit the first stitch of the round with the dangling end of yarn, pull the end all the way through the knitted stitch, and drop it off the needle. It won't unravel because it will be caught by the yarn now threaded through.

Knit the next stitch, again pulling the yarn all the way through. Before you drop this stitch, tug on it a little. The previous stitch, already dropped, will tighten up around the yarn threaded through it. The stitch you are currently working on will get bigger. But don't worry about it, because….

… now it's time to drop it, and knit the next stitch. Pull the yarn all the way through it, tug on it to tighten up the previous stitch, and let it go.

Carry on until all the stitches have been knitted, threaded through, and dropped. You'll have no live stitches remaining, a number of very neat tightened stitches, and one enormous ugly loop….

… which vanishes when you tug gently on the tail.

Take a moment to sing a triumphant song to yourself, then move on to the next finger.

I meant to post this on Monday, and then I meant to post it on Tuesday, but it's a rainy week here and there hasn't been enough light to take adequate pictures. (Or really even to knit by!) I hope you can tell what's going on in the ones above!

May you never run out of buttons

2010-09-29T12:32:00.000-07:00

I think this is a good all-purpose blessing for knitters. (Another might be, "May you never be too bleary-eyed with a cold to count to three." That was my fate last week.)

This etsy seller has various quantities of mother of pearl buttons for sale. Since mother of pearl buttons are my very favourite, and since I don't foresee myself ever running out of things to knit that require buttons… I bought some.

Maybe a few too many: I have half a pound of these cream-coloured ones, plus 100 little grey ones with shanks. Here's to not needing buttons for a while!

Another thing is that the excellent Dale of Light Brown Hare got a new base yarn recently, a soft and luscious laceweight wool/mohair blend. I couldn't stand how lovely it was and snapped up the first skein, and here it is:

I'm chronicling these two news items in the same post, buttons and yarn, because look how well they go together!

I'm not sure what kind of soft and wispy thing needs buttons on it, but I'll come up with something, because this is too beautiful a coincidence to ignore. A wide scarf with closures like this one, a floaty cardigan, a shrug perhaps with buttoned cuffs.

Glove Fever

2010-09-28T10:22:00.000-07:00

I have a pattern in the Deep Fall 2010 issue of Knitty, right over here. It's for a pair of gloves that resemble the Ringwood gloves that Nancy Bush based her Ringwood Half-Hose on, and that Richard Rutt describes in his monstrosity of a book. Instead of a ribbed cuff, though, there's a tidy seed-stitch cuff that buttons closed. The pattern is for worsted yarn on 4mm needles and it is basically the fastest thing to knit; I think they'd be great emergency last-minute presents.

Relatedly, you know you have picked a good romantic partner when you say something like "Hey, do you want to come outside into the alley with me and take a few dozen pictures of my hands"; and they reply, "Sure, let's go!"

The Thing of last week is currently on hiatus, its calculations finished and its yarn neatly wound, while I work through two new things that came in the mail on Friday. These are more pattern ideas for Knit Picks, both gloves worked at relatively small gauges, and I want to get them out the door as quick as I can, so that the patterns are ready for high glove season.

Thing One is gloves with wide lace cuffs, knitted sideways. The yarn is Alpaca Cloud worked double-stranded. I chose a lace yarn instead of a fingering-weight offering for a couple of reasons. First is that the fabric double-stranding lightweight yarn makes is different from the fabric that a single strand of a heavier yarn makes, even where the gauge is identical. The double-stranded one will be a little thinner and a little drapier, which I think is ideal for something intended to be soft and pretty. Since the yarn is alpaca, they'll be warm as anything in spite of their relative thinness.

This is the cuff so far:

Ugh, right? This was my swatch, in a different yarn of around the same weight as the double-stranded Alpaca Cloud:

I think it blocks out pretty nicely! The swatch yarn is something of a novelty: Winter's Tale from Taiga Yarns, previously known as Unusual #15. I knitted a Faux Russian Stole out of it a couple of years ago and it turned out to be too warm for even an Edmonton winter. It's 100% goat down plus many coarse and wiry guard hairs, some of which fall out during the knitting while the rest stay put. The down beneath is very soft and vaguely silky-feeling, with some subtle glossiness. I might turn the swatch into its own pair of gloves, because I have a feeling that they would be great for October weather.

(I'm not allowed to make doubles of things before I even finish the first sample, though!)

Thing Two is a pair of elaborate stranded colourwork gloves that are not for the faint-hearted. Most rounds require stranding three colours at once, some rounds require four. I'll add a fifth colour with duplicate stitches after the knitting is finished.

And let me tell you: stranding three colours is a pain. The knitting doesn't have much of a rhythm; I keep dropping a strand of yarn off the tip of my right index finger and having to fish around for it behind the work. When I try to knit while something is happening on TV or I'm listening to music that is distracting or unfamiliar, I lose my place.

But the results are enormously rewarding.

I hesitate to praise this snippet of knitting—it's destined to be unknit and reworked on needles a size smaller (2mm, not 2.25mm). The fabric is a strange combination of too stretchy because of the loose gauge, and rigid and unyielding because of the extra stranding going on behind the scenes. But I think adding a third colour to the mix after the corrugated ribbed cuff makes the work look elegant in a way that leaving it at two colours would not have been. And it's surprisingly thick, and will be a useful warm thing in a couple of months. (And I need to psych myself up for knitting it again.)

I'm trying to evoke this mosaic ceiling, which is in the lobby of a magnificent art deco office building in Detroit. My knitted rendition is substantially simplified (for example, it's missing the little green diamonds between the blue diamonds that divide the columns of yellow and orange!), but it's fun to look at, too. It had better be fun to look at because I'll be knitting it for a while!

Horror vacui

2010-09-22T15:12:00.000-07:00

Or, now for something completely different

This is a post about bending your knitting to your will using the power of mathematics.

So. If you're like me, you like to knit rectangular shawls in one piece from end to end, with scalloped edging all around that's knitted more or less simultaneously with the body of the shawl. This means starting with a provisional cast-on and a strip of edging, turning the corner somehow, picking up stitches from the straight edge of the strip and from the cast-on, and knitting perpendicular to the original direction for the length of the piece. The live stitches are dealt with by knitting on edging at the end, growing out of the edging from one long side and ending by grafting it to the remaining edging stitches. (This construction method might sound familiar—it's the one that Galina Khmeleva describes in Gossamer Webs.)

The problem with this method is that there's not a whole lot of room for fudging if the total edging row count and the total row count of whatever central pattern you've chosen don't have a common denominator. It's obvious (and unattractive!) to have corners that don't match because you were on a different edging row when you turned the second pair than when you turned the first. And it's not necessarily going to be clear how or if things will match up at the end, when you're just starting the project. When you're knitting on an edging after the centre is finished, you can count rows and ease in the corners by knitting the last edging stitch together with two live shawl stitches, say, or by working some returning rows without attaching them.

My preference is to calculate how everything will fit together before beginning the project. I don't like to have much space between the edge of the edging and the beginning of whatever pattern is in the centre—this is a personal preference (i.e. a personal problem) and you can add "frame" stitches to your calculations without much trouble if you wish.

When I was knitting a stole a while ago that I managed to give away before documenting, I wanted to use a border pattern that had a 17-row repeat, and a central pattern with a 12-row repeat. There was a 16-row buffer section between the border and centre on each side, and there should be one extra plain row at each end of the stole. The edging I wanted to use had a 20-row repeat, and I wanted it to fit perfectly with no easing at the corners.

You can make an equation out of those requirements.

17x + 12y + 16 + 16 + 2 = 20z
or
17x + 12y + 34 = 20z

There's more than one solution here, actually an infinite number, but most will not be realistic for knitting—they might require you to knit thousands of rows, for example, and while I think that a hundred-foot-long stole would be totally cool it's really not for me and my 1200m skein of yarn right now.

If you're a math person: come up with an integer solution! If you're not a math person: go to Wolfram Alpha and plug in your equation, and copy down the integer solution it gives you.

x = 2(2a + 1)
y = a + 5b + 1
z = 4a + 3b + 4

Now each variable is neatly isolated—number of repeats in the border, number of repeats of the centre, and number of edging repeats along the length of the stole—and you can start plugging in integers for a and b until you come up with a reasonable-sounding answer. Seriously just pick your favourite integers.

When a = 6 and b = 4,

x = 50
y = 27
z = 40

Since x is both of the border sections put together, that number of repeats will eventually be divided in half: 25 17-row repeats on each side of the centre, which has 27 12-row repeats, and there are 40 edging scallops along the length. That's a total of 800 rows. If the gauge is around 32 rows = 4" after blocking, not an implausible gauge, that's a stole 100" long.

No, thanks.

When a = 5 and b = 1:

x = 22
y = 11
z = 27

That's a lot more realistic; 540 total rows at my gauge is 67.5". There will be edging on the short ends of the stole, too, which will add about four inches to that number—two inches at each end—for a grand total of just a hair under six feet. Now you can knit in peace, knowing that the pattern will fit perfectly and that you are not in for any nasty surprises.

Obviously you need to calculate for width, too, but that's much less fussy. My pattern repeats were all a multiple of 16 sts + 1 wide. With a stitch gauge of 24 sts = 4", and a desire for a stole 24" wide including the edging… 24" - 4" for edging width = 20", or somewhere in the neighbourhood of 120 stitches. 7 repeats would require 113 stitches, close enough to 120.

It is easy to fudge the number of stitches picked up from a strip of edging, and in fact I prefer to. 9 edging repeats yielded a straight edge from which I could pick up 90 stitches, and increase to 113 on the following row. (That's one of the +2 that figured into the row calculations; the other is decreasing those extra stitches away before knitting on the final edging.)

I'm codifying this here now because I am working on a thing! More later, when it's more than a crumpled strip of edging.

Keener

2010-09-15T12:22:00.000-07:00

Do you guys remember the Queen Susan? I don't think I've mentioned it here before, but it was an outstanding reverse-engineering project that some amazing knitters took on. The original shawl is a piece in a museum that has some interesting features to it—in particular, there were very elegant, curvaceous garlands on the border. It was interesting enough that some members of the Heirloom Knitting group on ravelry charted each section from photographs, swatched the pieces and tweaked the charts until they were right, and then assembled them into an entire pattern. It's a 73-page .pdf and represents hundreds of hours of effort. Links to download it are here.

Thanks to some lovely knitters who attended a conference held in Shetland recently, there are new and detailed pictures of old lace objects, and the group is currently working on this piece from the Shetland Museum. I might write some more later about why I am so moved by these projects—not just the finished knitted objects, but the reverse-engineering efforts—I suppose it drives home how enormously complicated the designing and knitting was, and what a brilliant mind you'd need to be able to knit these things without the benefit of charting software and a dozen other knitters double-checking your math.

Clearly this means that it's the right time for me to become fascinated by a completely different reverse-engineering project.

The Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Service has a website with dozens of pictures of ganseys on it. Some of the images are actual sweaters in the museum's collection, and others are scanned photographs and postcards. I think ganseys are great, as you know—I don't really care for all-over cabled designs but a little cable highlighting something else is fine, and brocade-like designs made of knits and purls knitted with sturdy yarn at a tight gauge? I love those. I think it's some desire to compensate for all the wispy impractical lace items I make.

The pictures of the fishermen are arresting.

(Black and white photographic postcard image printed in negative of Walter 'Primo' Allen at the wheel of the lifeboat.)

His sweater is just great—I love the horizontal ridges that set off the areas with different patterns, and I love the embossed look of those narrow zigzagging cables, and I love how it's plain past the elbows and at the bottom, where it would be prone to wearing out. Much easier to darn or reknit stockinette than a cable pattern. It's very handy that this practical feature also makes a handsome design element.

I'm playing with a sock pattern based on a different gansey from the collection, which belonged to a Henry Little.

(Henry Little's gansey; hand-knitted woollen blue pullover with typical Sheringham coil o' rope and bar pattern; worn very thin and repaired at the neck and cuff; probably knitted by Edie Middleton; two buttons at the collar.)

My modifications are to tighten up the cable a little by working fewer resting rows between patterned rows, and to add a couple extra purl stitches to the columns that separate the patterned sections. This is partly to add elasticity to the pattern and partly to facilitate hidden calf shaping (p2togs in that gutter are a very easy way to narrow the leg without interfering with the rest of the pattern at all). The foot will be plain, of course.

Here's my progress so far; it's most of one sock. I think gansey socks worked from old postcards and photographs would make a fun series of patterns or an interesting informal ebook project. I definitely need a new influx of wool socks, anyway.

Confessions

2010-09-06T13:41:00.000-07:00

I am really terrible at counting! I don't use stitch markers to separate out repeating patterns in lace or cables or whatever, but I do need them when I'm working on a very long cast-on edge to mark every 50th or 100th stitch.

I really hate casting on. Knitting very long rows isn't a problem—if I knit 800 rows of edging and pick up 400 stitches from the straight edge, I'm happy. But casting on 400 stitches seems like it takes too much time and causes me a lot of anxiety!

I have had ample opportunity to think about these two hang-ups over the weekend, during which I failed to cast on 513 stitches twice. It took two episodes of The X-Files and ten minutes of frenzied recounting to do it right, but now I've finally got it and am off to the races.

This will be an enormous triangular shawl with a small repeating pattern that I'm quite proud of. The lovely yarn is Juliet from Yarn Love, in a pretty new fall semisolid colour called Frosted Mulberry. I had had a stole idea for this yarn, but then it came and I swatched and it begged to be something different, and so it shall be.

(What clinched it was the way it's dyed—it has very short runs of colours that are very subtly different from one another, which means that I can put it in a triangle and it will neither resolve into stripes nor pool into blotches. Amazing! Katie is amazing.)

Because I am not a very responsible knitter, I unravelled the swatch immediately after finishing it and deciding it was worth pursuing. (It is now part of that enormously long cast-on edge.) But it's an allover pattern, which means that as soon as the knitting isn't so squished on the needles, I can show you. It me think of an enormous raspberry—or, I suppose, a mulberry—all plump circles adjacent to one another. The yarn is very round and slightly springy, and that only makes it look juicier.

I also have an exciting news item to share: the pink and yellow things from a few weeks ago are now a pattern for sale at Knit Picks! I'm happy with how that pattern idea turned out. The patterns are the same, but are differently proportioned: the stole is divided roughly into thirds, while the scarf is mostly one pattern with just a few repeats of the second pattern at either end. The stole is remarkable because of its enormity, but the scarf ended up being my favourite.

A tiny present

2010-08-30T11:28:00.000-07:00

I adore these booties! I made them very far in advance, anticipating an upcoming baby (not mine). But it is a special baby and I want him or her to have all the soft and warm knitted things that the world has to offer. It's a little early to start handing off baby presents to the parents-to-be, so I am going to set up a little stockpile over here over the next few months. Just a bit at a time.

Cute, eh?

The pattern is named Baby Booties to Match Berry Sweater (ravelry link), and I made the large size with smaller needles and yarn. The foot is about 3" long, which is, god, I don't know what size of baby. It will fit eventually.

The aforementioned different yarn was Jo Sharp Alpaca Kid Lustre (40% mohair, 30% merino, 30% alpaca) in a pretty light yellow-green called Elderberry. The yarn is 121 yards/111m per 50g ball and I used about half of one.

The large size had a couple of wrong numbers in the toe-shaping section. I also wanted the toe shaping to be a little sharper than in the booties pictured in the pattern, so I knitted it like this:

Rows 1-2: K.
Row 3: K13, kfb, k1, kfb, k13.
Row 4: K1, kfb, k to last 2 sts, kfb, k1.
Row 5: K14, kfb, k3, kfb, k14.
Row 6: K1, kfb, k to last 2 sts, kfb, k1.
Row 7: K15, kfb, k5, kfb, k15.
Row 8: K1, kfb, k to last 2 sts, kfb, k1.
Row 9: K16, kfb, k7, kfb, k to end.
Rows 10-16: K.

I followed the instep and lace top instructions as written, but left off the last purled row of the final repeat, and knitted three rows to make an anti-curling garter stitch edge that matched the garter stitch foot.

There's no ribbon on them, but that isn't an artistic decision; it's because I don't have any good ribbons handy.

Magnified

2010-08-21T10:31:00.001-07:00

This was an experiment that I am especially happy with. Remember the teal thing from a while ago? This little triangular shawl is that pattern blown up with bigger yarn, bigger needles, and a plain purled row worked between the patterned rows. (Also directional decreases: I will admit to laziness and defaulting to only k2togs when knitting lace that's garter-stitch based and patterned on every row. Such laziness has consequences in a piece like this, though, so I made the extra effort.) With the plain rows included, it fit very neatly into a triangle.

What I like most is how the straight lines of decreases suggest curves when there are some rows between them:

When I was a kid I had a dress with ribbon roses on it, and wearing it was a joy because it had dozens of shapes to trace with my fingertips. Wearing this shawl is sort of like that! I think it probably looks weird, absentmindedly running my fingers down my arms, but who cares: there are curves.

It's mostly not very lacy at all, and I think it's quite striking! If you are interested in knitting it too, its name is Victoria (after the Queen, clearly!) and it's a $4 download on Ravelry. The pattern is only charted (and the charts are many, and sort of big), but it's very easy to follow. I used one skein of Abuelita Yarns Baby Merino Lace (420 yards/385m per 100g skein) in Jasper, which is the most excellent red. Knitted on US #4/3.5mm needles, it ended up being 46" across the hypotenuse and 23" down the centre.

I like the yarn. I'm not sure how well it would stand up to abrasion, as on elbows or underarms or between fingers on gloves, but it's great for a shawl or scarf. I've been stuffing it in my bag and taking it on field trips to heavily air-conditioned coffee places for about a month now, and it still looks fine.

Ever since I finished knitting it, though, I have wanted to knit a little shrug or cropped cardigan with the same set of patterns. From the top down, worked in one piece, with raglan sleeves so that the increases can be yarn overs, starting out with the less-dense pattern just like the shawl, and ending with the scallops. Garter stitch neckband and button bands, sleeves just to the elbows….

dreamy sigh

In other news, if you are in the market for a sleeve for your laptop and don't want one that looks like a windbreaker or nylon track suit, I direct you to Rib & Hull! The leather-and-felt sleeve I got is exactly right—just simple enough to be perfectly elegant.

More pea coat than windbreaker, right? And it feels nice, too. The felt is sturdy and a little coarse; the leather is supple and soft. It is a treat to carry around.

Throwing my hat in the ring

2010-08-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

Here is a cool thing! The 4 oz challenge requires participants to spin 4oz of handpainted fibre, knit a sample, and publish a pattern, between now and the end of September. The fibre has to be from Southern Cross, Hello Yarn, or Spunky Eclectic (like I need an excuse to order from any of them!), and the idea is to produce a set of patterns intended for handspun that will take advantage of the interesting texture and colour properties available to spinners, and get specific about the yarn they're written for. There are not enough patterns that do this!

I ordered four ounces of BFL from Spunky Eclectic, in this colour. It showed up in the mail today. Behold:

DELICIOUS.

My pattern idea involves spinning it into a smooth fingering- or sport-weight yarn and knitting it into gloves with dense lacy scallops—sort of like oyster mittens but finer and more detailed and with fingers. There will be spaces between the yarn overs and their decreases to make zigzags out of any variegation in the yarn, and some purled rounds interspersed to make the colours mingle a little more. I think this would work well for subdued variegation like my yarn will have, or for wilder stripes. It would also be perfectly lovely and not too boring in a solid or relatively solid colour. Or so I hope.

A thing I did not knit

2010-08-09T11:16:00.000-07:00

I did something.

A few weeks ago, a ravelry user was selling a silver Orenburg shawl from her collection. I managed to pounce on it before anyone else, Paypalled some cash, and waited anxiously, refreshing the tracking number page every few hours and sweating through two weekends.

I got it today, and I just—

I can't even—

I am very moved by its loveliness, that's all.

It is enormous and very fine. (I have no wedding ring nor indeed any ring to try it out, but the seller posted a picture of it being drawn through one of those.) The enormity hasn't really sunk in yet because I am too fascinated by the details. It is very soft and it weighs next to nothing. The yarn has bloomed a little and developed a floaty fuzzy halo that doesn't obscure the stitches at all and seems instead to highlight the lace.

The other effect of the halo is that the shawl seems not to touch the surface it's sitting on, like a hovercraft made of goat down. It is very shiny, too—the yarn looks like down very loosely plied with silk, and it glows a little in the light. I feel mysterious and invisible wearing it, like I am shrouded in fog.

In terms of stitches and rows per inch, it's about the same fineness as the things I have been knitting recently, so there is hope for me yet. This is not an impossible beauty. It's so enormous though!

It's really interesting to see how the patterns are put together. There are a lot of different things going on in this shawl, and it is all very carefully laid out and symmetrical. For some reason it hadn't occurred to me that you could arrange a whole bunch of different pattern elements and have it come out looking harmonious. I like the fill-in pattern that makes triangles around the central diamonds and I like the zigzags in the inner frame and I like the outer frame pattern most of all; it looks like something cascading, I like everything about it. I like everything about the entire thing.

(I have been excitedly pointing out all of its excellent features to my long-suffering partner, who is listening patiently even though these details mean nothing to him. Ah, non-knitters.)

My excellent friend A. made gentle fun of me for buying a shawl that someone else knit, when I can knit perfectly adequate shawls myself. All of that is why: a treasure like this is an inspiration and a call to action. I have some Gossamer Web yarn neatly balled up and waiting to be knitted into something lovely; it might be time to break it out. I am so tempted to get some mohair yarn and knit a wispy nothing out of it instead, though.

In other, more inane news, I made a twitter account for knitting-related chatter. My name is rebeccabeast.

Today in statements of the obvious

2010-08-05T11:01:00.000-07:00

Freshly-knitted unblocked lace looks like boiled ass.

And blocking will always reward you.

I don't want to say that blocking is magic because nothing in knitting is; but blocking as close as it gets.

This was another $5-on-sale skein of Exquisite, and another little Orenburg lace experiment. This time I was thinking about something I read in a book (The Art of Shetland Lace maybe) about triangular veils that could be folded up to fit inside matchboxes, so it turned into something like that. The central area has closely-spaced eyelets in clusters of four ("mouse prints"!) to make a more transparent fabric; it's bordered by pine cones? trees? flowers? in a field of garter stitch, and then outlined again by edging that echoes the centre.

I knitted the edging on afterward, which was cheating a little, but I didn't want to deal with it at the very outset of the project.

This thing I have been doing to the very edges of my edgings is not Russian; it's the "lacy edge stitch" that Sharon Miller talks about in Heirloom Knitting. On returning rows, you yo-k2tog at the beginning, and it makes a tiny prettiness. I like it because it makes the very edge look denser, like someone drew a line the shawl with a marker. It also makes the edges a tiny bit stretchier than they would otherwise have been, which is excellent when you are worried about easing in corners.

There is a new group on Ravelry about Orenburg down shawls, which I don't really post in but I read it a lot. They've been talking about knitting without charts, making up patterns as you go along but keeping them symmetrical and balanced. I tried out that approach for this piece -- a bottom-up triangular shawl is a good venue for making it up as you go along because you only have to worry about symmetry from side to side. I found it very peaceful not to be tied to a chart, although I admit to making one afterward so that I could duplicate my results if they were good.

The secret reason I am so, so, so pumped up about Orenburg shawls is that I bought one recently. It is in the mail! When it arrives, sweet internet, you'll be the first to know.

I am going to read every novel ever written that is now in the public domain

2010-07-31T16:48:00.000-07:00

A huge pile of yarn is coming in the mail but hasn't arrived yet, so not too much knitting is going on around here—I don't want to get started on much of anything because soon I'll be swamped with secret projects.

However! There was some non-yarn exciting mail, too: a tiny new iPod. I knew these were cool, but didn't know. Guys, it is like an internet jukebox that fits in your pocket and you can put books on it.

I knitted a little case for it, my third act of iPod parenthood. (First was introducing it to my computer and assigning it an unwieldy name—C.G.B. Spender—and second was teaching it shortcuts to visit gmail and ravelry.)

This pattern makes a very thick fabric, which is optimal for gadget cases. I'm not going to experiment by hurling it down the stairs or anything, but it appears to be cushioned adequately in case I drop it. There is a tiny bit of shaping at the bottom to prevent dog-ear corners. The yarn I used was some leftover Belfast Mini-Mills merino, which is so squishy and soft I can't even tell you.

Anyway,

Minimalist Gadget Cozy

Materials

some leftover worsted-weight yarn; you'll need very little of it, maybe 30m at most
a set of 5 US #6/4mm double-pointed needles
a darning needle
one button
4mm crochet hook
a homeless gadget

Gauge

27 sts = 4" in linen stitch. Row gauge is not terribly important.

Finished size

4.5" x 2.5", sized to fit a 3rd gen. iPod Touch. For bigger or smaller, cast on more or fewer stitches in multiples of 2, and amend the shaping instructions to suit the new stitch count.

Pattern

CO 34 sts, divide as evenly as possible between 4 double-pointed needles, and join for knitting in the round, being careful not to twist. P 1 row.

Begin working in linen stitch as follows.

Round 1: K.
Round 2: (sl 1 purlwise with yarn in front, k1) around.
Round 3: K.
Round 4: (k1, sl 1 purlwise with yarn in front) around.

Repeat 10 more times or until the knitted piece just covers the gadget—slip it inside to check.

Next round: (ssk, k13, k2tog) twice. 30 sts remain.

Turn the piece inside out and arrange the stitches so that the first 15 in the round are on one double-pointed needle, and the remaining 15 are on another. Work a three-needle bind-off over these sts.

Finishing

Weave in ends and block.

Sew on a button near the open end of the case, in the centre of one side. (Clearly I have not gotten to this part yet, because there is a button shortage in my house.) Crochet a short chain, slightly longer than necessary to fit over the button. Break yarn and sew the ends of the chain opposite the button to form a loop.

Paired yarn overs and the double decreases that offset them: a love story

2010-07-29T07:42:00.001-07:00

I wrote up another pattern, this time for a top-down triangular scarf that uses around 400m of fingering weight yarn. The yarn I used—Viola Fancy Sock—is exquisitely soft, and the finished fabric has a subtle downy halo. The three main pattern sections are related feathery motifs that use a number of knit stitches between the yarn overs and their accompanying decreases to shape the fabric into peaks and valleys, including the wide shallow scallops that edge the piece:

They look a little Art Deco, I think!

I decided to name the pattern Fledgling, for a few reasons:

I am a fledging designer of things-larger-than-mittens—I have to say that making charts for this pattern was daunting, because they're awfully big. It starts small, though, for confidence-boosting. The smallest patterned section involves a four-stitch, four-row repeat.

This is a pattern for fledgling lace knitters—every alternate row is purled, giving you time to breathe and collect your thoughts and count your stitches in peace. The patterns are both charted and written, in case you are a fledgling chart reader, too.

Finally I feel like a triangular scarf knitted from a pair of socks' worth of yarn isn't a fully-fledged shawl yet. But it has aspirations.

And I wasn't sure how I felt about it during the knitting, but now I really like the relative solidity of the border. It anchors the shawl a little -- you know that I am happy to knit outrageously lacy edges on things, but some weight there is nice too. It is particularly pleasing when worn:

This colour is called "Robin's Egg", and is a beautiful subtle semi-solid. It is worth getting, because it's exquisite yarn! But any drapey fingering-weight yarn would do just as well for this pattern. I think it would be beautiful in Schaefer Anne, for instance, or Abuelita Yarns Baby Merino Lace, or Knit Picks Gloss Lace, or....

It takes 400m of yarn, and this sample was knitted on 3.5mm needles. The gauge is 26 stitches and 40 rows in stockinette (after blocking), and the finished dimensions of the scarf are 48" wide and 24" deep. I find that this is an excellent width to pin closed at the front.

The pattern is $4 CDN and can be got from Ravelry, or by clicking this link.

The real reason for all of this shawl madness is that I am auditioning things to wear to a wedding. Too fickle to just pick one already without seeing all the options. All the options are in my head and they don't seem to be exhausted yet. I have six weeks to go before it actually must be time to decide.

Prolific

2010-07-24T15:02:00.000-07:00

I'm THRILLED with how this turned out:

It is inspired by Orenburg lace shawls and is constructed the way that they are, beginning with a strip of edging and picking up stitches from there. The background pattern is also borrowed from there, and the main pattern motif is my own effort. I named the scarf "First Frost".

I wish lace knitting was better suited to making six-sided figures; then it would be an actual anatomically correct snowflake. This was the closest approximation I could make.

It is a weightless and airy little nothing! But it looks a little like someone drew a thick line all the way around it, outlining the scallops of the edging:

Yesssss.

I got this yarn—Fiddlesticks Exquisite wool/silk—without ever having heard of it before because of a deal at the Needle Arts Book Shop. It was $5/skein with the purchase of the Haapsalu Shawl book. I wanted the book, and the yarn was cheap, so I picked three colours because I liked the sound of them (Ivory, Peony, Damson).

This scarf took one 500m skein—one!—of Ivory. The knitting flew by because many of the wrong-side rows are knitted plain, and the ones that aren't have long sections of straight knitting without yarn overs or decreases. The pattern is straightforward and symmetrical, and the "peas" sections (the triangle bits outlining the diamond areas with snowflakes in them) are rhythmic and easy to work. The edging is a little patterned treat at the end of each row.

People thought it might be a table runner when I was knitting it, which is I guess an occupational hazard of knitting anything white and lacy. It is decidedly a scarf, though. The yarn is fabulously soft and the finished fabric doesn't feel too insubstantial even though it is close to weightless.

Anyway, you can knit one too if you'd like! You'll need one 50g/500m skein of Exquisite in Ivory and US #3/3mm needles to knit a scarf just like this one, which is 48" long and 15" wide. The pattern, which is charted in the interest of saving space, is $6 CDN and can be purchased right here.

A fulfilling kind of day

2010-07-22T13:42:00.000-07:00

FINISHED.

Transitions

2010-07-06T14:59:00.000-07:00

Here's a pretty good scarf from a few weeks ago that I am only now getting around to documenting!

This required one skein of Tribble, in Peacock, knitted on 2.75mm needles. The finished dimensions are 16x66", but the fabric has a lot of give and stretch and it could probably be blocked bigger. Forgive me for the ton of detail pictures: I am very pleased with how this idea turned out.

The scarf is based on Mrs. Montague's pattern, and starts there with no modifications:

But I wanted to experiment with the density of the pattern, removing motifs to thin it out. When you pick out a diamond-shaped group of 9 motifs and remove the one in the centre, the pattern suddenly suggests a grid, like a chain-link fence:

I think the suggestion-of-a-grid is still in place at the opposite end, when only the apices of the diamonds remain as isolated motifs in a field of garter stitch:

It is startingly delicate for all that the yarn bloomed on blocking and I knit it on 2.75mm needles. Not delicate in the scheme of things. But when you lay it flat on a surface it seems to float a little.

My favourite part is the thinned-out pattern section. This yarn makes fabric that is exquisitely soft, and garter stitch is squishy anyway, and the combination is to die for. I almost want to double the yarn and knit a plain old garter stitch scarf on 3.5s or so—it would be time-consuming but ultimately worth the boredom, I think.

And I am happy with how the edging came out:

The triangles between the faggoting and the outer lace pattern are arranged in pairs because I wanted the edging to be narrow enough at its narrowest point that I wouldn't have to do anything to the corners to make them lie flat. It worked: the only trick is making sure that a corner stitch lines up with a row 1 of the edging, as usual.

Now I need it to be winter already so that I can wear it instead of just admiring it from across the room....

Jonesing

2010-07-02T13:18:00.000-07:00

I really really want to knit some very fine lace. This is because I can't right now—I'm working on a big project in Shadow, related to the green swatch from before, and want to have it finished before I start anything else.

Instead I am longingly looking at some other finished projects and dreaming of what gossamer item I will make when I am able. I put some of them side by side to remember my fineness priorities, and here it is for your consideration:

From left to right, they are Abuelita Yarns Merino Lace (don't be fooled by the name, it's fingering weight) in the most perfect red; Knit Picks Shadow Tonal in Golden Glow, which is a very warm collection of yellows; Gossamer Web Tribble, in Peacock; and 32/2 yak/silk that's a strange shimmery greybrown.

Three of the patterns are closely related (the leftmost three)—they're all variations or developments or uses of Mrs Montague's Pattern, which is my current favourite thing. I have sort of adopted Mrs. Montague as my knitting fairy godmother! She is purported to have given Elizabeth I a pair of silk stockings as a present, and they were great enough that Elizabeth only ever wanted to wear silk stockings from then on. In Heirloom Knitting Sharon Miller attributes this diamondy pattern to her, and I have been imagining that it was the pattern on the stockings.

Clearly this means that I must knit stockings in that pattern! But first the Shadow project and after that a cobwebby veil.

These should be the last mittens for a while

2010-06-20T15:15:00.000-07:00

I am pretty thoroughly mittened out now that it's 26C outside, but I have one last mitten news:

A pattern for these mittens (ravelry link) is for sale at Knit Picks, for dirt cheap. It's written for their City Tweed HW yarn, which is mostly wool and alpaca, and is sort of heavy and a little glossy. I also test-drove it in Takhi Donegal Tweed, and it came out looking like this:

I can't even bring myself to put them on my hands, though, or think about them for long enough to write about them. Good god, I want it to be winter already.

Citadel mittens

2010-06-16T17:54:00.000-07:00

Hooray for mittens!

These mittens were basically an extended swatching exercise for a future sweater, so I am releasing the pattern into the wild.

Because of the sweater idea I have in mind, they have some features that I think of as associated with a gansey—split hems, patterned gussets, and areas with different patterns set off by horizontal welts. (My impressions of what a gansey is like are not extensively researched—basically I am remembering thumbing through Alice Starmore's Fisherman's Sweaters.)

The yarn I chose is a very lanolin-rich worsted weight Cotswold wool that I got from The Loop, so these are probably the most practical mittens I will ever make. It's a little on the coarse side, so I don't think they'll wear out any time soon. I'd recommend choosing a crisp worsted weight wool if you want to substitute a comparable yarn; something like Briggs & Little Heritage would be great, or Debbie Bliss Donegal Aran Tweed.

I love how the purl stitches stand out against their stockinette background:

(I committed a terrible indiscretion, though—for swatching purposes I was curious about what the knitted fabric would be like if it were scoured, so I scoured the finished mittens like you'd scour a fleece. Answer: it's totally awesome, but in a different way than the greasy fabric was awesome. It is a little bit softer now, and glossier, and the stitches are more even now than before. This is all very useful to know!)

These mittens are named what they are because of the circumstances under which I decided that it was important to have more mittens immediately. My partner and I recently visited Halifax (home of The Loop) for a weekend. I used to live there, but have apparently been away for long enough that I forgot how cold it gets when it rains. On the Saturday we were there I went yarn-shopping and then started walking up the hill to visit a friend... but it was pouring rain, and poor bedraggled me with no umbrella, and every time I reached up to brush water out of my eyes, water from my hands would run up the sleeves of my jacket, and it was a freezing cold disaster. I was waiting for a light to change beside the Citadel when I stopped thinking about how awesome it would be to knit something out of this yarn, and started wishing fervently that someone had already made it into mittens for me.

Anyway! All of the pattern elements are charted, with written directions following each chart. It looks like a lot of pattern to keep track of, but it's all very easy to follow once you get going. I hope you like knitting mittens as much as I do!

Gauge

20 stitches and 30 rounds to 4", in stocking stitch.

Finished size

8" in diameter, and 11.5" from cuff to tip.

Skills required

casting on with the long-tail and backwards loop methods
knitting and purling
M1 increase
decreases: knitting two together (k2tog), ssk, and slip 1, k2tog, pass slipped stitch over (sk2p)
knitting in the round
picking up and knitting stitches

Yarn and notions

1 skein Lange's Rock Farm Cotswold (100% wool; 200m per 4oz skein)
4mm double-pointed needles, set of 5
one stitch holder or oddment of yarn to hold the thumb stitches
stitch markers
a darning needle

Charts and written directions

First things first, a key to the charts:

Cuff:

Round 1: K4, p1, k3.
Round 2: K3, p1, k1, p1, k2.
Round 3: K2, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k1.
Round 4: (K1, p1) four times.
Round 5: K2, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k1.
Round 6: K3, p1, k1, p1, k2.
Round 7: K4, p1, k3.

Hand:

Round 1: K1, p1, k1, p1, k13, p1, k1, p1.
Round 2: K2, p1, k1, p1, k11, p1, k1, p1, k1.
Round 3: K3, p1, k1, p1, k9, p1, k1, p1, k2.
Round 4: K4, p1, k1, p1, k7, p1, k1, p1, k3.
Round 5: K5, p1, k1, p1, k5, p1, k1, p1, k4.
Round 6: K6, p1, k1, p1, k3, p1, k1, p1, k5.
Round 7: K7, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k6.
Round 8: K8, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k7.
Round 9: K7, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k6.
Round 10: K6, p1, k1, p1, k3, p1, k1, p1, k5.
Round 11: K5, p1, k1, p1, k5, p1, k1, p1, k4.
Round 12: K4, p1, k1, p1, k7, p1, k1, p1, k3.
Round 13: K3, p1, k1, p1, k9, p1, k1, p1, k2.
Round 14: K2, p1, k1, p1, k11, p1, k1, p1, k1.

Gusset:

Round 1: M1, k1, m1.
Round 2: K.
Round 3: K.
Round 4: M1, k3, m1.
Round 5: K.
Round 6: K.
Round 7: M1, k2, p1, k2, m1.
Round 8: K2, p1, k1, p1, k2.
Round 9: K3, p1, k3.
Round 10: M1, k2, p1, k1, p1, k2, m1.
Round 11: K2, p1, k3, p1, k2.
Round 12: K3, p1, k1, p1, k3.
Round 13: M1, k4, p1, k4, m1.
Round 14: K4, p1, k1, p1, k4.
Round 15: K3, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k3.
Round 16: M1, k2, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k2, m1.
Round 17: K2, p1, k2, p1, k3, p1, k1, p1, k2.
Round 18: K1, p1, k1, p1, k5, p1, k1, p1, k1.

Tip:

Round 1: K1, p1, k1, p1, k13, p1, k1, p1.
Round 2: K2, p1, k1, p1, k11, p1, k1, p1, k1.
Round 3: K3, p1, k1, p1, k9, p1, k1, p1, k2.
Round 4: K1, ssk, k1, p1, k1, p1, k7, p1, k1, p1, k1, k2tog.
Round 5: K4, p1, k1, p1, k5, p1, k1, p1, k3.
Round 6: K1, ssk, k2, p1, k1, p1, k3, p1, k1, p1, k2, k2tog.
Round 7: K5, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k4.
Round 8: K1, ssk, k3, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k3, k2tog.
Round 9: K6, p1, k1, p1, k5.
Round 10: K1, ssk, k4, p1, k4, k2tog.

Thumb:

Round 1: K2, p1, k1, p1, k3, p1, k1, p1, k2.
Round 2: K3, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k3.
Round 3: K4, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1, k4.
Round 4: K5, p1, k1, p1, k5.
Round 5: K6, p1, k6.

Right mitten

Cuff edge (work 2 alike, knitting back and forth)

Cast on 20 sts using the long-tail method. Purl 2 rows. Knit 2 rows. Purl 2 rows. Knit 2 rows. Purl 1 row. (This creates horizontal welts of stockinette and reverse stockinette that are 2 rows wide.) Set this piece aside while you work another one.

Cuff

Knit across one cuff piece and then the other, dividing the stitches evenly among 4 double-pointed needles as you go. (You'll have 40 sts altogether.) Join for working in the round, being careful not to twist, and place a marker to indicate the beginning of the round. Then begin working the diamond pattern—follow the Cuff pattern through to the end, working each charted round 5 times around. Then work another set of welts as follows:

Knit 1 round. Purl 2 rounds. Knit 2 rounds. Purl 2 rounds. Knit 2 rounds. Purl 2 rounds. Knit 1 round.

Setting up the hand

Establish the pattern by working round 1 of the Hand pattern across the first 20 stitches of the round, then knit the remaining 20 stitches. Continue working the pattern on the back of the hand and knitting the palm stitches plain until you have completed round 7 of the pattern.

Thumb gusset

Work across the back of the hand in the established pattern. On the palm side, knit 1, place a marker, work round 1 of the Gusset pattern, place another marker, and knit to the end of the round.

Continue as established, working Hand pattern on the back of the hand and Gusset pattern on the palm side between the markers, until you have completed the Gusset pattern. On the following round, work across the back of the hand, k1, and place the gusset stitches on a holder, removing the markers on either side. Cast on 1 st over the gap using the backwards loop method. Knit to the end of the round.

Hand

Continue as established, working the Hand pattern over the back of the hand and knitting the palm stitches plain, until four full repeats of the Hand pattern have been worked.

Shaping the tip

Round 1: Work Tip pattern across back of hand, k1, ssk, knit to last 2 sts of round, k2tog.
Round 2: Work Tip pattern across back of hand, k to end.

Repeat these two rounds until round 10 of the Tip pattern has been completed. Then begin decreasing on every round, as follows: K1, ssk, k to last 2 sts from the back of the hand, k2tog; k1, ssk, k to last 2 sts of round, k2tog.

Repeat this decrease round until 8 sts remain, then work one final decrease round as follows: K1, sk2p, k1, sk2p.

Break the yarn and thread the end through the remaining stitches, then fasten it off.

Thumb

Transfer the held thumb stitches to double-pointed needles. Join yarn and work round 1 of Thumb pattern across the thumb sts. Pick up and knit 3 sts across the gap and join into the round. Place a marker here to indicate the beginning of the round. (You will have 16 sts altogether.)

Next round: Work the next round of the Thumb pattern, then knit to the end of the round.

Continue as established until Thumb pattern has been completed, then knit all sts until the thumb measures approximately 1/4" less than desired finished length.

Next round: (k2, k2tog) four times.
Next round: (k1, k2tog) four times.
Next round: k2tog four times.

Break the yarn and thread the end through the remaining stitches, then fasten it off.

Left mitten

The left mitten differs from the right only in the placement of the thumb gusset. Work Cuff edge, Cuff, and Setting up the hand as for the right mitten.

Thumb gusset

Work across the back of the hand in the established pattern. On the palm side, knit to last st in the round, place a marker, and work round 1 of the Gusset pattern.

Continue as established, working Hand pattern on the back of the hand and Gusset pattern on the palm side between the markers, until you have completed the Gusset pattern. On the following round, work across the back of the hand, k to the marker indicating the beginning of the gusset, and place the gusset stitches on a holder, removing the marker. Cast on 1 st over the gap using the backwards loop method.

The remainder of the left mitten is worked the same as the right mitten.

Finishing

Weave in all ends and block, by washing the mittens in warm water, patting them into shape, and leaving them to dry flat.

Ponderous

2010-05-25T20:47:00.000-07:00

I have been knitting a lot of swatches and thinking a lot about what to do with them. Here's one that has a plan:

What I have in mind is a stole assembled from traditional Shetland lace patterns collected by Sharon Miller in her book Heirloom Knitting, and put together in the "borders-outward" style she suggests. You start by casting on some stitches provisionally and knitting the central section followed by a border. Then you put those stitches on hold, pick up the stitches from the cast-on edge, and work a second border in the opposite direction. The piece is finished off with a knitted-on edging worked all the way around—cast on a few stitches provisionally and join every other row of edging to a stitch picked up from the body. Once the edging is completed, you graft the end to the beginning (that's like ten stitches to graft, it's barely even a thing).

For my purposes, the central section and the border sections will be squares, 20" per side; the three sections in a row with a narrow edging all the way around will yield a generously-sized stole 24" x 64". I'm not sure yet how I feel about carting around that amount of knitting in the summer. The pattern is modular, though; a knitter can choose to cast on more or fewer stitches in multiples of ten, to make a stole that's wider or narrower, and knit more or fewer lengthwise repeats to lengthen or shorten the finished piece. I think a scarf would need different proportions, though—I'm thinking about more centre and less border, but I'd have to play around with it to see.

The swatch shows the pattern for each section—the densely-patterned diamond area is the centre and the little floral pattern it flows into is the border. The edging is narrow enough to lie flat at the corners without any special treatment. I decreased a few stitches on the last border row to see whether it would keep the edging from puckering on the short end, and it did! So that's a trick that will end up in the pattern.

I intend this to be a pattern for adventurous intermediate or newly advanced knitters. There is lace patterning on nearly every row (i.e. no resting rows!), but the patterns are easy to read and the repeats are easy to separate with stitch markers. There is no arduous counting because the motifs are small and closely-spaced. The knitting is not technically challenging; it has a garter stitch ground and only requires that the knitter know how to execute a yarn over, k2tog, and sk2p.

Those are my thoughts! I'm waiting on some yarn from Knit Picks to make samples of both stole and scarf—this is a pattern for their catalogue.

Solstice stockings

2010-05-19T19:09:00.000-07:00

Elinor from Exercise Before Knitting is hosting a sock-knitting contest, which I couldn't resist. My contribution is this:

I made these out of Socks That Rock Mediumweight in "Winter Solstice", which was a lovely experience. Sportweight socks go shockingly fast! I made an entire sock in an evening of watching Alias.

I am especially pleased with the cuff, which is sort of chunky and tightly-knit lace edging:

It fans out into pretty scallops when you put on the sock, and it is stretchy like you wouldn't believe. My anguish about knitting socks is that the cuff edge always feels too tight, no matter how I cast on, and I end up adding calf shaping that sometimes interrupts or destroys the pattern.... but a sideways garter stitch edging is automatic calf shaping, and makes a very comfortable cuff. I would be wearing these socks now if it weren't 29C outside.

If you want to knit them too, the pattern is available on ravelry for four of your finest Canadian dollars.

Monster

2010-05-01T15:21:00.001-07:00

I got so excited by the little hexagon pincushion that I made a bigger one to go with it:

Yes. The reason I invented when I was finishing it was, it is good to have one pincushion for pins and one for needles, so that nothing gets misplaced. (I have spent a lot of time looking for needles in a collection of pins.) It's a good reason!

The other excitement is a set of charm squares from a couple of years ago. (The collection is Shangri-La from Moda, I think). I noticed that each one can become two hexagons and leave a couple of scraps to maybe turn into coordinating diamonds, and I started something:

I'm not sure what this will be! (A sort of silly kitschy sleeve for my laptop, maybe.) So far it's a mass of hexagons, assembled more or less at random. The only assembly criterion I have is that two hexagons that are from the same colour group shouldn't abut.

Cutting out dozens of hexagons and basting them and sewing them together is slow and painstaking and repetitive and meditative work, which is exactly what I am interested in doing right now. The process goes something like this:

Cut out some paper hexagons.
Look at all the fabrics and pick out two or three from each colour group. Cut out some fabric hexagons.
Fold one fabric hexagon of each colour around a paper hexagon and baste them at the corners.
Pick three of them and assemble them into a three-hexagon unit.
Put the new unit next to the already-assembled hexagons and admire everything.
Attach the new unit to the old assemblage.

As you can see, I am grotesquely inefficient and spend a lot of time looking with admiration at my own work. The colours are so pretty.

My fingertips are sore today though

2010-04-27T16:13:00.000-07:00

The Barefoot Shepherdess made a really excellent little pincushion recently. It reminded me a little of tomato pincushions—I think it's partly the colours she chose and partly that I associate all pincushions with tomatoes. I dug out some brightly-coloured Kaffe Fassett fabrics I have, and made one for myself:

The light is pretty gloomy today, but bright ungloomy colours are a good antidote. I love hexagons so much, and the result with these fabrics is very cheerful and a little ridiculous. I am happy with the way the circles on the fabric make the hexagons look slightly off-kilter; it is fitting because the circles are also slightly off-kilter. I am very slow at basting the corners around the little paper hexagons and also at sewing in general, so it took me around half an afternoon to put together.

It was a really excellent afternoon, though! I lounged around and assembled hexagons and watched Fringe and drank coffee. I am now all caught up on the television I have been shirking, and I have a pincushion. This is why vacations were invented.

Selfish

2010-04-04T10:51:00.000-07:00

My excellent friend Mel is getting married in September, and is knitting herself a stole from a pattern in Knitted Lace of Estonia. I can't stand the idea of someone else having a new shawl and not me! So I dug up some llama lace yarn from a visit to Americo a couple of years ago, and set to work.

My favourite part is the tiny ripply garter stitch welt that divides the edging from the body.

This is the body pattern from the peacock scarf in the same book, attached to an edging from the little dictionary section at the end. It smooths out and develops a lovely halo after blocking, and also grows to about twice its previous size. However! I only have one 700m skein of this yarn, and it just isn't enough. Half the yarn knitted up into a piece that measures 27" from the points on the edging to the knitting in progress. Twice that length is just not long enough for me, and I don't want it to be any narrower.

I knitted a matching piece and will set both of them aside until the next time I visit Toronto and can get more yarn, in the same colour if they've got it and in something coordinating if they don't. (My action plan for dealing with different dye lots is to unknit a chunk of the finished work and reknit it alternating skeins, on both pieces: labour-intensive, but the best way to blend in a new dye lot.) My completion idea involves a central section in some other pattern growing out of one of these two sections and grafted to the other, maybe about two more feet of knitting, to make a stole that's a little over six feet long. I really like the Shetland stole format of two big matching border sections flanking a centre with a different pattern, and then a narrower edging all the way around—I want this stole to remind me of that, although the narrower edging will only be on the two short ends. I might pin out the selvedges into scallops, or maybe not.

In any case! I think having 2/3 of it knitted already will encourage me to finish it off when I have the opportunity, whatever that entails.

Two Lace Edgings of Mlle. R. de B.

2010-03-24T15:44:00.000-07:00

I was having trouble seeing what was going on in a couple of these edgings from the spring/summer Knitty, so I made swatches (and had some fairly extensive nerdy thoughts, which I will share with you shortly). The yarn is a slightly hairy and not particularly glossy 2/30 silk/wool that obediently stays put once you block it; I used 2.25mm needles to make the fabric solid enough that I could see the motifs outlined clearly. I picked dark grey to make outlines that are maximally obvious against a white background (wrinkly linen handkerchief).

The treble diamond edging (top) is totally charming, now that I can see that there really are three tiny diamonds in there. It's a bit strange to knit; I was starting to get the hang of it here, but I think it would take a few more repeats before I wouldn't have to look at the chart all the time anymore.

I only made one small change, which was to add a yo-k2tog at the beginning of every even-numbered row on the scallop edging (bottom). It was the only one out of the three that didn't have that lacy edge written into the pattern. I did this for two reasons: first because the poor edging looked a little bare without it beside the other swatch, and second because I find this makes a stretchier edge that's easier to block into big swoopy scallops than a plain garter edge. I'm sort of enamoured of this edging, actually! I like the contrast between the faggoting along the straight edge and the eyelets in the scallop. The yarnovers in the straight edge make little diamond or house shapes and the others are quite round, and I like seeing that difference close together in the same piece.

Speaking of lacy edges! I tend not to pin out each yarnover loop, even though I think it might be The Done Thing. This is partly because I just don't own that many T-pins. (I have about 600, but there are more loops than that in most shawls I knit.) It is also partly because I am worried about breaking the yarn when I'm stretching a shawl out during blocking; I would rather pin through yarnovers a little way away from the edge of the knitting (or thread wires through there), because I tend to stretch the living daylights out of my knitting when I block it. It's also partly because I conceive of the lacy edge as a way of adding some give to the fabric and not as a decorative element; in my head it's more like lengthening the edge than it is like a tiny extra pattern. Really it just doesn't occur to me while I'm blocking a piece that I could pin out each loop.

Back to edgings: the scallopy one does have one unevenness that bothers me, and that's the extra stitch near the scalloped edge on the decreasing slope. (Look at the chart; rows 2-14 have two stitches between the yarnover closest to the left edge and the edge itself, and rows 16-26 have three.) That means that the decreasing slope is slightly thicker than the increasing slope, so the edging looks vaguely off-kilter. If I used this pattern to edge a project, that's something I would change, probably by shoving all the patterning beyond the faggoted edge beginning with row 16 over one stitch to the left (as charted).

The point lace edging—which I didn't knit, because I am sort of planning a project around it, so I'll get to it soon—is familiar to me; Sharon Miller calls the allover pattern it's based on "bird's eye", and it's mostly just a collection of abutted spider motifs. (It's not difficult once you get the hang of it, but it still looks ugly and off-putting in chart form.) The interesting thing about it is that since each spider takes a few rows to execute, the edging has a gentle curve to it instead of the usual pointiness. You could make a similar edging for a piece with bead motifs in it by substituting beads for some or all of the spiders.

The project I'm thinking about is a little bird's eye scarf with that curviness on each long edge, and maybe tiny picots on the cast-on and cast-off edges. I like scarves that you can make out of one 400m/50g skein of laceweight whatever, and I like pretty dainty edges on things, but I feel like narrow scarves are overwhelmed by having edgings affixed to them. This one would grow quite organically out of the allover pattern, and I think the effect would be lovely.

One last item! I have to respectfully disagree with Franklin on the subject of when to weave in ends. If you do it before blocking, any unevenness in your weaving-in will come out in the wash. I am all about solutions that result in neatness without my having to be neat.

Oyster mittens

2010-03-15T14:13:00.000-07:00

I wanted a pair of mittens that were a little fussy but not too much, and a little chunkier than the colorwork mittens I had been knitting before but not too much. Then I found this Silk Garden colour (#269), which reminded me of an oyster shell, and I made some ripply mittens:

The yarn blooms and becomes a little glossier after washing, and I am pretty pleased with the effect. These are more or less standard mittens, with a feather and fan cuff and slightly modified feather and fan on the back of the hand. (The palms are plain.) If you want to make ripply mittens too, you can knock out a pair of them in a weekend with no trouble, and maybe in an evening if you have few distractions and a lot of TV to watch.

Gauge

20 stitches and 32 rounds to 4", in stocking stitch.

Finished size

8" in diameter, and 10.5" from cuff to tip. It's trivial to adjust the length; just make it longer or shorter while you're knitting. Silk Garden blooms enough after washing that I'd recommend sizing them up by switching to bigger needles; I made swatches at 18 stitches/4" that looked just as solid, and would make mittens that were just as warm (and bigger around). For mittens that are a little smaller around, try decreasing a few stitches on the palm side after you've finished the cuff: if you decreased four stitches, your mitten would be a little over 7" around. (Omit four k2togs on the palm side during the first round of decreasing for the mitten tip to accomodate the different stitch count.) Stop increasing for the thumb and put its stitches on hold earlier, too, after 15 or 13 stitches.

Skills required

casting on
knitting and purling
increases: M1L, M1R, and yarn over
decreases: knitting two together (k2tog) and slip 1, k2tog, pass slipped stitch over (sk2p)
knitting in the round
picking up and knitting stitches

Yarn and notions

2 skeins Noro Silk Garden, colour #269 (I used 67 grams of yarn in total)
4mm double-pointed needles, set of 5 (or some other configuration of needles for working in the round: you could also use a set of 4 dpns, two circular needles of the same size, or one long circular needle)
one stitch holder or oddment of yarn to hold thumb stitches
two stitch markers
a darning needle

Cuff pattern

Rounds 1 and 2: Knit.
Round 3: (K2tog twice, (yo, k1) three times, yo, k2tog twice) around.
Round 4: Purl.

Hand pattern

Rounds 1 and 2: Knit.
Round 3: *K2tog twice, (yo, k1) three times, yo, k2tog twice. Repeat from * once more.
Round 4: Knit.

Right mitten

Cuff.

Cast on 44 stitches. Join into the round, being careful not to twist stitches. Purl one round. Begin cuff pattern; work the four-round repeat six times in total. (You'll have seven purl ridges including the one immediately above the cast-on edge.)

Setting up the hand.

Work hand pattern across 22 stitches for the back of the hand, then knit the remaining 22 stitches for the palm. Work one four-round repeat of hand pattern.

Setting up the thumb.

Round 1: Work across the back of the hand as established. Then knit 2, place a marker, M1L, knit 1, M1R, place a second marker, and knit to the end of the round.
Round 2: Work across the back of the hand as established, and knit across all palm stitches.
Round 3: Work across the back of the hand as established, knit to the first marker, slip marker, M1L, knit to the next marker, M1R, slip marker, and knit to the end of the round.

Alternate working rounds 2 and 3 until there are 17 stitches between the markers.

Next round: Work across the back of the hand as established, knit to the first marker and remove it, slip the next 17 stitches onto a stitch holder or a scrap of yarn, cast on 1 stitch, remove the second marker, and knit to the end of the round.

Hand.

Work across the back of the hand as established, and knit all the palm stitches, on every round until the mitten is about an inch shorter than your desired finished length, ending on any plain knit round. (For my mittens, that's 9.5" from the cast-on edge, or 3.25" from where I put the thumb stitches on hold.)

Decreasing for the mitten tip.

Round 1: (K2tog, k2tog, k3, k2tog, k2tog) four times.
Rounds 2-4: Knit.
Round 5: (k2tog, k3tog, k2tog) four times.
Round 6: Knit.
Round 7: k2tog around.

Break yarn, run the end through all remaining stitches, and pull it tight.

Thumb.

Transfer the 17 held stitches to three double-pointed needles. Knit across, then pick up and knit 3 stitches across the gap and join for working in the round. (You'll have 20 stitches.)

Next round: Knit to last 3 stitches, sk2p. (Now you'll have 18 thumb stitches.)

Knit plain until the thumb is about a quarter inch shorter than the finished length you want. (I knitted until it was 2.25", measured from where I picked up stitches.)

Next round: K2tog around.
Next round: Knit.
Next round: K2tog to last stitch, knit 1.

Break yarn, run the end through all remaining stitches, and pull it tight.

Left mitten

Work Cuff and Setting up the hand sections as for right mitten. Set up the thumb as follows:

Round 1: Work across the back of the hand as established. Then knit to the last three stitches of the round, place a marker, M1L, knit 1, M1R, place a second marker, and knit to the end of the round.
Round 2: Work across the back of the hand as established, and knit across all palm stitches.
Round 3: Work across the back of the hand as established, knit to the first marker, slip marker, M1L, knit to the next marker, M1R, slip marker, and knit to the end of the round.

Alternate working rounds 2 and 3 until there are 17 stitches between the markers.

Next round: Work across the back of the hand as established, knit to the first marker and remove it, slip next 17 stitches onto a stitch holder or a scrap of yarn, cast on 1 stitch, remove the second marker, and knit to the end of the round.

Work hand, mitten tip, and thumb as for right mitten.

Finishing

Weave in all the ends and block lightly, by washing the mittens in lukewarm water, squeezing excess water out with a towel, laying them on a flat surface and patting them into a mitten shape, and leaving them to dry. (If you don't, your mittens will have a strange ridge up the middle, where the feather and fan decreases are concentrated.)

Cut off the woven-in ends after the mittens are dry.

Mystery fleece, and more mittens

2009-09-14T09:38:00.000-07:00

We moved recently, and in doing so unearthed a couple of fleeces of unknown provenance in dusty plastic bags. One of them is a lovely reddy brown, greyish-reddy-brown in places, that was already washed. Excellent. I spent a few hours one afternoon pulling it apart into locks:

This is my favourite part, because you get to do some quality control and some colour sorting and really get acquainted with the wool before you put any more effort into it. I feel a lot of love for this one. It is very wooly and a little bit crisp, not soft, and the little sample I spun and plied (from a flicked lock) was very substantial-feeling yarn. I'm not really fussed about not knowing what it is, but if anyone wants to have a shot at identifying it, here's a representative lock:

Delicious.

In other news, I am indeed knitting Liidia's gloves, with some modifications:

There's no way that a 90-stitch mitten at this gauge would fit my hand. The main pattern repeat is 18 stitches, so I'm just taking one out, and working them over 72 stitches instead. The cuff pattern is a 6-stitch repeat so it's not an issue there.
Because mine is smaller around than the pattern says, I'll only reserve 16 stitches for the thumb when I get to that point.
I'll make them mittens instead of gloves! In keeping with the mitten vow.

I present this photograph as part one of a lesson in why you should block all your knitting even things that aren't lace even things that are small even parts nobody will see. It's lumpy and ugly now, but just you wait.

Everywhere is mitten trouble

2009-09-12T17:46:00.000-07:00

So I got a couple of fleeces and that is fabulous and exciting but I will tell you about them a different day because right now all I can think about is

MITTENS. (Smittens?) These are from Folk Knitting in Estonia, which is such an excellent book that my copy is falling apart from overuse. (Weirdly, this is the first actual complete project I've made from a pattern in it; usually I just borrow a motif and stick it on some other project.) The yarn is Knit Picks Palette, in black and white and screaming bright red, and I used 2.25mm needles, one of which was actually 2mm because I was missing one from the set and couldn't find a spare. I knitted them mostly last weekend while I was reading Husserl's Paris lectures. The reading took quite a bit longer than it should have, but I have a pair of mittens to show for it. They only seemed to use an oddment of yarn—from my one ball each of white and black, I have enough left for another pair of the same pattern or one with a similar ratio of black:white.

They're shockingly bright. I think using white instead of cream may have been a mistake. I will try not to wear them when it is sunny outside so nobody gets blinded.

The contrast colour (black) in my pair "pops" a lot more than the contrast colour in the other pairs on Ravelry. I think that is because of how I strand the yarns: the main colour goes on top and the contrast goes underneath, which means the contrast stitches tend to stand out a bit more. (I used to waffle about which should go on top until I read an article somewhere, in Interweave Knits maybe, which described the phenomenon. I don't remember whether or not it took a side.) My opinion is that this is a feature not a bug, but now I am curious about the habits and preferences of other knitters. Any other opinions?

Now I am jonesing for more mittens! I have been staring at this photograph of 4500 pairs of Latvian mittens for the better part of a week. It is not quite mitten season where I am but it will be soon, already at night sometimes I want to be wearing warm woolly things, and I intend to be prepared. In anticipation I ordered some more Palette in twelve different colours. I like their new selection; it is much more sophisticated and usable than the old pukey taupes and crayon brights (of which screaming red is an example).

Did you know that at the beginning of this year, I swore a solemn mitten vow to myself? The vow was, This year I will knit a lot of mittens. I broke it in favour of dilettantism, mostly—I knitted a lot of nothing in particular. But there are a few months left of the year and these mittens only took a few days, so there is still time to make good.

This week I have a big chunk of Heidegger to read; I think I will knit a mitten version of Liidia's gloves, from the same book.

Seasonally inappropriate

2009-07-15T14:10:00.000-07:00

First, some plain knitting: my mother likes to wear a black angora beret in the winter, so I figured I'd make her a new one. I found some luscious angora/silk at Romni and made the plainest hat I could: start in the centre with a 3-stitch icord stem, then increase every other round at eight points until it is a bit bigger than head-sized, knit plain for a couple of inches, decrease sharply (I had increased to 160 stitches, and decreased to 100), knit some kind of hem. This one has a folded-over hem—I was worried that it wouldn't stay on anyone's head since the yarn has no stretch or memory, and you can always stick a piece of elastic in there. I seem to have picked the magic number of decreases and it stays put on my head, but when I send it off I will include a note about threading an elastic through the hem to tighten up the fit.

Fancier knitting: I wanted to make a different thing at the same time as the mystery thing, so I found some stash yarn and went to town with graph paper. (A skein and a bit of Misti Alpaca laceweight in a heathery yellow-green, and 3.5mm needles.) The idea was to make something that looked a bit like a sampler of a few garter-stitch-based patterns with plain returning rows, for maximum mindlessness. It turns out that when you flip a Madeira fern upside down it looks a bit like a flower! So when I got tired of that I made some bigger flowers, and then some flowers underneath half-hexagon roof shapes, and then knitted on an edging.

My love interest is excellent and I adore him, but his apartment (where I am staying) is lightless and full of books (like there are books on every surface). Moreover it is too hot for me to be interested in going outside, least of all clad in alpaca. So this is the best I can do to document this project:

I was worried it would end up looking kind of motley, because by the time I got to the edging I was aching to knit something more complicated with no resting rows and picked something more or less at random. It is 1/2 of the last edging pattern in Heirloom Knitting and I like it a lot. The tiny edging along the hypotenuse is a small variation on something I picked up somewhere else; I remember it being a 4-row repeat but I added in two rows to make the double yarnovers stand out a bit more. I think they look reinforced, like grommets.

The faggoting column down the centre is a kind of homage to this idea. It's flanked by plain yarnover increases, which makes it stand out a bit less, but it's the thought that counts.

It's not too big—the hypotenuse is maybe the same as my wingspan, so 5'5", and the spine is about half that. When I put it on and fold the top edging over like a collar, the bottom points of the big edging hit me at my waist. This is an excellent size for being mostly a scarf worn underneath a coat in winter!

Mojo

2009-06-09T19:34:00.000-07:00

I have STILL been spinning a lot more than I've been knitting! Almost exclusively from flicked locks, which has been fun and instructive. No pictures of anything yet because everything is in a state of disarray and half-completion, but I think I will be done a pair of socks amount of CVM soon, so stay tuned?

In knitting news, the Edmonton Knitters group on Ravelry is hosting a mystery lace-knitting project for the summer, designed by Rebecca Logan—it's a big shawl or a small one, in lace- or fingering weight yarn. I chose the small size, with laceweight Misti Alpaca in an interesting greyish lavender colour, and I'm knitting it on 3.5mm needles. This is my progress so far, at the end of the first clue:

My favourite part is this little spine up the centre, which also happens along the hypotenuse (though you can't see it here because of my quick-and-dirty scallopy pinning-out job):

And these flowers, which are turning up all over the lace-knitting internet but are rendered particularly elegantly here, I think; they look like little buds:

So basically the entire thing! I'm feeling a lot of love for this little project and I'm desperate to knit more, but the next clue isn't out until Saturday. I will sit on my hands until then.

Remiss

2009-03-31T14:53:00.001-07:00

I've been spinning a lot more than knitting lately, because it is a soothing repetitive low-impact relaxing activity (and at the end I get yarn). So I don't have a lot of knitting to show off, but I do have some spinning:

This used to be a 50g merino sliver from Fleece Artist. (Am I the only person who's never even seen a Fleece Artist tag with a colourway name on it?) It's about 350m, so not inadmissably dense or anything, and I'm pleased with it. When it's wound into a cake like this I think it looks like something from a child's drawing, or a satellite weather-map rendering of a storm. I have no idea what to do with yarn in these colours, though.

This started life as Shetland from Spunky Eclectic ("Pluto" colourway). I spun it into a sportweight or so, and it is very crisp and perfect for a pattern full of ribbing like this one ("Porom" by Jared Flood). I modified the pattern by adding an extra few ribs, to compensate for my smaller gauge, and it fits perfectly. I'm thrilled with how the yarn turned out, too; the stripes are just subtle enough for my taste.

This is a bigger project: I have 400g of Shetland roving from a local farm (by way of Wool Revival), and my goal is to spin it into a sweater amount of yarn. So far I've got two 50g skeins of 200m each (well, one is 202m, the other 204), so if I stay consistent that means I should have about 1600m at the end? Which is definitely a sweater amount. I'd never spun proper roving before, and it was a revelation. The yarn is lightweight and squishy and soft, and completely effortless to spin.

What really motivated this post was a box I got from Crown Mountain today, containing these excellent things:

a Shetland rainbow, and

Corriedale pencil roving.

I have a lot of homework still to do before the end of the semester (in eight days!), so I'm going to use this stuff as a reward—I'm not allowed to spin it in earnest until I'm finished school.

Wind chill: -28

2009-01-24T17:34:00.000-08:00

Winter is suddenly COLD. My reaction is to knit things that are warm and soft and bright:

I made this from Ysolda's absurdly pretty Rose Red pattern and Diamond Yarn Angorissima, which is pure angora, and it is so soft and it is bright red. It became my favourite hat as soon as I blocked it; it's big and warm and barely weighs anything (35g total, which is around a ball and a half of the yarn). I knitted the largest size of the pattern with a small modification, which was switching from 4mm to 3.5mm needles for the cabled band around the bottom; angora doesn't really have any memory and the ribbing tends to stretch out without springing back. This way it is tight enough that it doesn't slide right off, but the rest of the hat can still slouch.

I like to make a little loop in the centre of a beret instead of a stem, which maybe makes this into an even sillier hat?

Mandate

2008-12-04T14:39:00.000-08:00

This was originally supposed to be a doily blog! What is the deal with all this sock-knitting nonsense.

Here is a doily from an old Ericas Handarbeiten leaflet that I found. (Only a piece of it though, so alas, I don't know what leaflet exactly or when it was published.) It's Zephyr knitted up on 2.75mm needles, and it ended up being about nine inches across. (My blocking job is not as shoddy as it looks; it was a perfect octagon a few hours ago, really!) I started it with Rosemarie's circular cast-on (but with a lot less ado, I just knitted a scrap of i-cord with the same yarn in a different colour, then increased at the last to accomodate the number of stitches I wanted to begin the pattern with), and ended by crocheting off stitches in clusters of three.

I haven't decided how I feel about doilies made out of wool—I still feel a bit guilty about knitting them because of that little notice at the beginning of that Marianne Kinzel book where she says that non-cotton non-linen doilies are Just Not The Done Thing, So Don't Even. In favour of non-cotton doilies: oh man, the drape, when they stick off the edges of tables and things! The sheen, when there's silk in them! The stretchiness of wool, which takes care of a lot of binding problems in e.g. Niebling doilies without my even having to do anything! Where is the downside!

The real reason I picked this yarn is because I have almost an entire cone of it sitting around, and it is a good doily colour.

Secret knitting

2008-10-10T17:13:00.000-07:00

Not really, although this is a gift. Another shawl:

The pattern is MacGyvered from a border pattern in Heirloom Knitting (repeated forwards and backwards, from the beginning of the chart to the end back to the beginning, for end-to-end symmetry) plus a knitted-on edging invented on the fly—it's like the plainest edgings from Galina Khmeleva's shawls, but with six-hole teeth, so each repeat consumes 10 body stitches (handy, since I cast on 101). Every wrong-side row is knit plain, which means it went very fast and was also very boring. However, garter stitch has a really satisfying sponginess and solidity to it—

It's a very squishable shawl, even though it barely weighs anything. The yarn is Ornaghi Filati Merino Oro in a red I've used before! and I knitted it on 2.5mm needles. Its finished dimensions are about a foot and a half by five.

Everything in its place

2008-09-27T18:52:00.000-07:00

First: Melly sent me this sweet thing:

Thank-you! :D Its rules stipulate that I should pass it on to four people whose blogs I love, but, um, I am about a month behind the curve and I cherish basically all the blogs I follow through Ravelry, so. Keep writing them, please!

Second: Look! I got a shelving unit:

And it's full of yarn! I'm actually pretty excited about the opportunity to organise everything: now laceweight, fingering weight, DK, and worsted-or-heavier have their own little boxes. There's also four (four!) sections of spinning stuff, organised roughly into "sheep-coloured" and "not", and a space for cones of silk and a space for knitting-in-progress and a space for odds and ends of leftovers and and and

a BOOKCASE. I can't tell you how excited I am about this; all of these books have been in teetering piles on the floor for months. I've been gleefully arranging and rearranging them all day. Alphabetically by author! No, by original language! No, by era! No, by subject! (This is a tiny Foucault joke that was hilarious in my head.) That's roughly where things have ended up so far, but it will probably change as I track down more books.

I've also been knitting! Just not talking about knitting, so I have a bit of a project backlog to work through. Here is part 1:

Stephanie van der Linden's Esther socks, from the Socken Kreativ Liste yahoo group. I made the large size (over 70 sts) to fit over my monster heels, and worked cable crossings on the second sock in the opposite direction from the first, so that each is the mirror image of the other.

The yarn is Classic Elite Alpaca Sox, and it's so soft. I can hardly believe it, I keep putting the socks on my hands to feel them, I knitted and unknitted two halves of socks before I settled on a pattern that would do it justice. It would make the most fantastic sweater, I want to make a sweater out of it and I don't like to knit sweaters. That's about the highest praise I can come up with for a yarn.

The only (only!) thing I'm worried about is how it will wear—it's got some nylon in it, but it's still mostly alpaca, and maybe it will get felty and fuzzy faster than I'd like? I'll report back.

Warm and woolly

2008-08-22T14:31:00.000-07:00

August suddenly turned rainy and cold, which kicked my sock-knitting instincts into high gear.

Here is a Susan Lawrence pattern from the Vogue sock book, knitted from Socks that Rock. This is my first time! with this yarn, and I'm torn about it! I was a Socks that Rock holdout for the longest time because I think the colours are garish and I can't stand pooling and flashing because I'm basically a Type A control freak and a conservative bore who only ever wants to wear black and grey. But then! They introduced some colourways that are downright subtle, for the most part, and it was right there in front of me at the store, neatly arranged in racks, and I couldn't resist.

Points in its favour: this colourway ("Thraven") looks like an oil slick, which is rad. The skein weighed 10g more than it said on the label, so I have no fear of running short (and plenty of warm fuzzy thoughts toward Blue Moon). Points against: the colours are still a bit too contrasty for my taste. And it's awfully dense and it feels a bit like knitting with spaghetti, which makes my hands ache. This is also a point in its favour because I imagine the finished socks will last a lot longer than e.g. the socks I've made out of Louet Gems Fingering, which are getting pretty felty around the edges. We'll see!

There's spinning going on, too; it's just in the background.

1:

This is a poplar and beech and elm spindle from Kevin Rhodes. My favourite things about it are that it has a finial like a grandfather clock and that the whorl is a bit translucent. It weighs 23g and spins for a long time with nary a wobble. The browny-grey stuff on it is Louet Gotland top, which is turning into yarn fit for a hair shirt or mittens that will stand up to some abrasion and won't felt right away. We'll see?

2:

A Greensleeves Vixen in tulipwood, got from Spunky Eclectic a few months ago. I'm working on some Shetland top, Louet again, and it is coming out fine enough for 2-ply laceweight. This is my "commuting" spinning: it lives in my (giant) purse in a Ziploc bag and gets busted out whenever I'm feeling too stupid to knit, which is often.

3:

A little Butterfly Girl Designs spindle that is so so so perfect for silk I can't even believe it. For 2-ply laceweight again, only way finer than the Shetland stuff; I plied a little sample bit and it is actually the sort of yarn I would seek out to knit with. The fibre is tussah silk top from Treenway, which had apparently been in a bin in a closet for quite a while? Anyway, it's unearthed now, and I'm pretty excited about spinning the rest (and finding more silk in more colours to play with).

Hold me accountable, please

2008-08-04T16:44:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about Hazel Carter's square Shetland shawl in A Gathering of Lace for, oh, five years now? But the part about seams has always turned me off, and then I get distracted by something else, and then and then and then.

This time, though, I've started it and am blogging about it so that the Internet will judge me and find me wanting if I don't finish. Also: I'm knitting the central square first, then picking up stitches around it and working the trapezoid borders upside-down, then knitting on the edging. I haven't decided whether I'll do all four borders at once and purl alternate rounds to keep things in garter stitch, or do them one at a time back and forth, joining each to the one previous as I go (like you'd knit on an edging). No seams at all for me, please, is what I'm saying.

Anyway, here's what I've got so far:

This is cashmere/cotton from Colourmart, the same as I used for Lyra and this poor sad Nieblingy doily. The same cone still! I have 105g left, out of 150g to begin with. The cone was $24, I think? Which makes all of these projects so inordinately cheap I can barely believe it. The needles are 2.25mm, which means the solid areas are relatively sturdy and untransparent, so it'll even be pretty warm in the end.

The only issue: it'll look like a tablecloth, on account of the whiteness. Maybe I'll dye it black once it's finished?

I only ever make scarves, you know

2008-07-11T14:29:00.000-07:00

I haven't been neglecting lace, either! A couple of months ago when Knitpicks introduced Gloss Lace, we ordered one hank of each colour to play with. (And one ball of each colour of Palette. The box it all came in is enormous and satisfying in the way that a new box of 64 crayons is satisfying, but more, because it's yarn.) That makes eight: Natural, Cypress, Mermaid, Port, Raisin, Sterling, Aegean, Chipotle. Whew. (They've since added four more colours, but I kind of still like the first eight best.)

The hanks are 440 yards each, which is awesome yardage for the price but not that much for a project, and it's heftier laceweight than I usually choose, so I dithered about them for a long time. Then I looked at Victorian Lace Today again.

Scarves, you guys.

This is the Scarf with Unwieldy Name from p. 100. When I stretch it out a bit to simulate blocking, it's two feet long; I've got 31g of yarn still to knit, out of 50g total. This means that unless I screw something up, I will have five feet of scarf at the end.

And then seven more to make!

The need for tweed

2008-07-10T14:31:00.000-07:00

I've been knitting! Lots and lots! I've just also been distracted by delicious books, is all. Anyway. So I don't like knitting cables, right?

I asked my love interest what seasonally-inappropriate thing I could knit for him, and he suggested a scarf, black.

It took me a while to figure out how to knit a black scarf that was interesting enough to hold my attention without losing the pattern in the dark. After a couple of weeks of knitting a few inches and tearing them out and switching up the pattern and trying again unsuccessfully and casting it aside in frustration lather rinse repeat, I settled on Grumperina's "Shifting Sands" pattern. It has enough cables to be fiddly—ten on every right-side row—but is repetitive enough that I could watch Alias DVDs while knitting. The yarn is Silky Wool that's actually more charcoal than jet black, on 3.5mm needles; it took two and a half skeins to make a scarf six inches by six feet. I am ideologically opposed to fringe so I ignored that part of the pattern, and I'm pleased with the result.

Another thing! This is the "Tilly" scarf from A Fine Fleece, in Grignasco Tango (a.k.a. fake Felted Tweed). It's only three-quarters done, but I think it will be pretty awesome. I can't argue with anything about this pattern. Mirrored cables on either side! Little rolled edges! It's a bit wiggly and uneven because it is as yet unblocked, but I'll probably finish it soon.

Maybe I don't mind cables after all.

Dilettantism

2008-06-08T20:13:00.000-07:00

I've never been able to stick to a project without getting distracted partway through. So what.

Here's a scarf to distract you!

It is the "Twilight" scarf from A Fine Fleece, which is a marvellous and inspiring book. It's mostly full of cables, but there are a couple of simple lacy interludes; this is one. I think it's about perfect for this yarn: laceweight llama from Americo, which is not soft exactly but kind of slippery, and with a bit of a hairy halo, and a bit stringy and not blocking out perfectly evenly (and in reality a bit more green than this). Anything complicated would've been lost in the rustic.

It reminds me of a counterpane, actually. The wavy raised shell-like lines in garter stitch.

To make a 6"x60" scarf it took exactly one-half of a (100g) skein, the other half of which is destined for another ripply lacy scarf. But which one?

Overload

2008-05-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

Hello, internet! I've just gotten back from a series of epic shopping excursions in Toronto. We went to Romni and Americo (halfway by accident; stopped for coffee and there it was across the street) and ended up with a daunting amount of yarn and fibre. And then my friends took me to an enormous number of bookstores where I bought an enormous number of nerd books. And then I came home and there was more fibre waiting for me, and spindles for spinning fine, and and and.

I'm actually still a bit shellshocked from SHOPPING OVERLOAD, too much to make a list of what actually got bought, so instead I'll leave you with a picture of the parts that I am most actually genuinely breathlessly excited about. A hundred thousand books to read only some of which are jokes, and a very light Butterfly Girl spindle, and some Falkland wool top from Hello Yarn that wants to be spun into yarn for a shawl.

There are no yak in the Grand Banks

2008-05-12T15:27:00.000-07:00

It's done!

Structural recap: I knitted a strip of edging and a mitred corner with wrap-and-turn style short rows for neatness, then picked up stitches along the long edge plus the stitches from the cast-on, then mitred another corner. This way I could work the edging on the long sides at the same time as the stole's body, which made me a much happier camper at the end (with no endless knitted-on edging to accomplish). The body is divided into lengthwise thirds: the first section of a pattern with "trees" and hexagons, the second section with only hexagons, and the third section as the first. Then another mitred corner, a strip of knitted-on edging, one last corner, and a lazy graft: I did it the way Galina Khmeleva describes in Gossamer Webs, pulling stitches from the opposite edges to be grafted through each other until there was only one loop left.

All of the patterns are modified versions of things found in Heirloom Knitting. I detached the edging from the elaborate panel it was attached to:

The border trees-and-hexagons I amended so that they'd be symmetrical end-to-end (after being driven completely insane by their asymmetry when I knitted the Unst stole from the same book):

And I made the motif in the centre of each little hexagon into a spider, to more closely match the hexagons in the border (the original pattern has the middle row worked plain, so that it comes out looking more like a bead).

The transition between the pattern sections is not terribly elegant, and next time I knit a stole of this type I'll pay more attention to what happens there. Here I just stopped knitting one pattern and picked up the other (their repeats are the same width: 12 stitches), where I should have done an extra tree or diamond or something to make the transition smoother. Next time for sure.

The yarn is 50% yak and 50% silk, got from Twist of Fate (100g hank, of which I have 38g left—apparently there was more here than I thought?). I knitted it on 2.5mm needles. It came out to 2'x6', which is my favourite size for a stole but was also a stroke of good luck, as I was pessimistic and half-expecting it to be smaller.

I put it away for a month or so because the central section was never going to end. There are around two hundred little hexagons with spider motifs inside them, and I was bored after twenty. Someone thought they look like flowers; I think they look more like scales attached with rivets to some type of mechanical fish. It's also got fins and a wavy edging and it's a shimmery browny silvery stone colour and during the knitting I listened to this beautiful CBC Radio interview about the collapse of the cod fishery, so I've nicknamed it the Grand Banks stole.

This was the first time I'd ever blocked something with wires instead of hundreds of pins; the bits-of-string method as a middle ground has never appealed to me. Reader, my eyes were opened! It was so fast and painless!* I didn't run out of pins and I always run out of pins! (T-pins, at any rate: no matter how many I have on hand, it's always about twenty too few, and I end up sustaining many stab wounds to my fingertips trying to manoeuvre tiny steel dressmaker's pins into position.)

The floor I blocked it on is in a bit of a draft, and the shawl was bone-dry within half an hour. No kidding. I had to mist it with water halfway through stretching it out to keep it damp enough that it would hold its shape once unpinned. Drying speed might be the real reason I love knitting very fine lace.

Speaking of fine lace, I think I'll knit a doily or several out of the leftovers, as part three in my continuing series "Knitting Doilies from Stupid Stuff". Stay tuned.

* Except for the part where I felt cheated out of fun and defiantly pinned out one long side anyway.

All the spinning fibre in the world

2008-04-29T14:07:00.000-07:00

I hit up the moving sale at Twist of Fate and came out with exactly the right amount of fibre.

Left to right: Punta top in "Embers", "Smoke on the Water", and "Midnight Embrace"; superwash wool in #202 and "Aurora Borealis". There's 100g of each.

Also, 100g more superwash in the colourway "Tradition", which is mostly dark blue plus a bit of purpley brown; I was too excited not to spin it right away. There's around 150m here:

I also got 200g of Corriedale awesome in shocking bright blue, which refused to photograph well (my camera wants it to be either neon or grey, and it is neither!—my camera is weirded out by all fibre, actually, and I need to commune with it to figure out why), and a handsome new drop spindle. I'll be busy for a while.

Kalliope

2008-04-19T11:02:00.000-07:00

I haven't knitted anything that's actually germane to this blog in quite a while, and was feeling guilty about it—the idea was to keep topical here at Doilies Are Stylish HQ. So here is something small:

It's "Kalliope" from Kunstricken 2007 knitted out of almost the very last bit of my ecru Colourmart laceweight silk, which ended up yielding one enormous shawl and eight doilies of various sizes. I think there's enough left for another smallish doily and that's it (which is still an outrageous amount of knitting to have come from one cone of yarn). I'd count this doily as "smallish"—it's 11-1/2" across, 61 rounds.

It isn't in the Niebling style of extreme fiddliness, which came as something of a relief after lots of fiddly doilies all in a row. I'm impressed by the fiddly doilies, of course, and I like to knit them, but sometimes you need something easy and intuitive and with no "hex mesh" to knit in between. Like a palate cleanser!

This was the only slightly fiddly part: a round with six three-over-three cable crossings. I wanted to work them without a cable needle because that's how I roll, but slippery silk covered in slippery coning oil doesn't take kindly to that type of manhandling and. Well. I had to reconstruct about six rounds of knitting underneath where one cable was supposed to be. I used an extra DPN to cable the rest of them.

There should be a quiz on the internets where you answer personality-test questions and it responds by telling you which famous doily designer you are most like.

You scored as Christine Duchrow!

Your patterns are heavily stylised and geometric. You like to combine the same small motifs in different ways to make different designs, instead of coming up with something new each time. That's okay—the simplicity you prefer means knitting is relaxing!

You are organised, even though your patterns are quirky sometimes—you like to work from charts and think everyone else should, too. This way all your missteps are easy to find.

You aren't fussed about which way your decreases slant, because with thread this fine it's impossible to tell either way.

Sock blog

2008-04-08T13:37:00.000-07:00

Apparently all you need to escape from a Sock Rut is some interesting new yarn!

These socks are in Schaefer "Heather", which is superwash wool and nylon and silk (I can't stay away from silk), in their Dian Fossey colourway. The pattern is "Firestarter" by Yarnissima. I'm a bit wary of this irony, especially as fire season has just begun and I don't want to tempt fate, so in my head I've christened the socks "Smokey the Bear".

I made a couple of small modifications. I don't like the look of short-row toes, so used a figure-8 cast-on at the tip of the toe and increased with lifted increases to 56 stitches, which is four fewer than the pattern calls for, because a 60-stitch sock in this yarn is too big for me. I increased to 60 at the ankle to accomodate the 1x2 ribbing, then didn't have to switch to bigger needles to shape the calf because it was already big enough around. At the very end I increased three stitches in each side cable so that it would resolve into the same ribbing, like so:

The yarn is really soft, you guys, and really smooth and really round. Knitting with it feels decadent, wearing the finished socks even more so. I'm not completely sold on the colours, however. I never know what to do with variegated yarn; I don't trust it not to pool in flashy splotchy spirals, and I'm never sure how to work with whatever pooling tendencies it has without straying too far away from the thing that I wanted to make. In this case I decided to trust the yarn, and it resolved into camouflage tiger stripes. I don't think I mind, but I wish it came in solid colours—I want to pick this colourway apart into its component greens and knit with them one at a time.

In the spirit of Messy Tuesdays, I was going to offer you a mistake—there's a cable crossing in one sock that goes the wrong way, which happened while I was knitting and carrying on a conversation simultaneously and didn't want to disrupt the flow of either by stopping to fix it. I looked for several minutes just now but couldn't find it, so I suppose it is not too egregious. Hmph.

Have a WIP instead:

These socks may also be a mistake, and are certainly a mess! The yarn is Fleece Artist Woolie Silk (I don't know why it gets an -ie instead of a -y; to differentiate it from Silky Wool maybe?), and the pattern is slightly modified from the Gentlemen's Half-Hose in Ringwood Pattern from Knitting Vintage Socks. I'm appalled but secretly delighted by how garish they are (it's fine, because they'll be hidden underneath boots for the most part and only I will know they're there) and I'm really enjoying the Ringwood pattern—it's plain enough to go very fast but patterned enough that progress is obvious, and you can count repeats to make the second sock match the first.

I also made some yarn:

Gosh, I really am bringing the garish, aren't I? It's about the same colour as the little pegs in a Lite-Brite when the light behind them is turned on. So: like a neon rainbow. There's 2oz here spun into around 100m, with 2oz left to spin, and I think that it will become Lite-Brite mittens.

Nice Weather for Silk

2008-03-31T20:00:00.001-07:00

I made a scarf: Laminaria by Elizabeth Freeman, from the Spring '08 Knitty.

Estonian lace is new to me, so this scarf was interesting to knit (and now I desperately need the book these stitch patterns came from, of course!). The best part is that each chart grows out of the previous one, so that you can work as many repeats as you'd like before moving on, no fudging required. The pattern author has written out numbers for two sizes, and I made one in between. It measures 23" from the centre to the bottom point and 44" across the hypotenuse, which is curvaceous enough that it seems much bigger than that.

It's out of yarn I hadn't seen before: Handmaiden Tussah Sea, which is a variation on Sea Silk—it's a bit thicker, it's not as tightly spun so it's a bit softer, and it's also not quite as shiny. Also the yardage per hank is generous—600m to 100g— and this colourway has stolen my heart, as many not-quite-solids do. It is markedly different colours in different lighting. Direct sunlight: lavender! Indirect inside light: fuchsia almost! Twilight: royal purple! Dude.

I'm insecure about using needles that are too large, and I may have erred on the side of too small in this case (3mm). But the fabric still drapes wonderfully and its texture is fascinating, so I'm not too fussed about it. I am also at peace with the asymmetry of the star section; it could be fixed by working sssk instead of k3tog in the second half, but sssk is uncomfortable enough to work that I like to avoid it whenever possible.

I also appropriated a tiny bit of silk/merino roving and spun it as fine as I could, just to test the water.

The water is fine, I think. I included nothing for scale, so you can use your imaginations! There's a bit less than twenty yards here and it hardly weighs anything and I never want to spin anything out of non-silk ever again (except maybe sock yarn, which is also proceeding apace).

Distraction

2008-03-26T10:58:00.000-07:00

I haven't been knitting as much as I should because of this:

From right to left: 100g each of Blue-Faced Leicester, merino, Wensleydale, merino/silk, and Blue-Faced Leicester again, all of them from Fleece Artist.

I played around a bit with handspinning some years ago, before I became single-mindedly obsessive about fibre, but never in earnest. Now I am spinning like a madwoman.

First goal: to spin yarn for a shawl! Emily is willing to exchange patterns for words; she sent me a shawl pattern in exchange for some stories about birds and my grandmother, for whom I would have made such an item. It doesn't require a truly immense amount of yarn, and I figure that just over 1000m of even laceweight is an excellent lofty goal to bear in mind.

Second goal: to spin yarn for socks! This one is actually within the realm of possibility, and is important. For the last few months I've been in a Sock Rut. I need new socks because my old ones are beginning to wear out, but I can't muster the enthusiasm to knit any, even though there is all kinds of tempting sock yarn sitting around taunting me. Maybe if I spin the yarn myself it will be exciting enough to knit.

This is the beach-coloured Blue-Faced Leicester roving from the far left. There's 25g of it spun up here into around 100m, Navajo-plied to make longer colour runs because I was worried (rightly!) that baby blue plied together with rust or greeny bronze would look like mud. There's 75g more where that came from so there is a lot more distraction in my immediate future, but my cold feet will thank me for it in the end.

Proportions, at length

2008-03-13T12:06:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite things is mixing up sources and seeing what happens. In "real life" that means that I always want to talk about tracking paths of influence and genealogies of items and ideas; in knitting it means I've been thinking a lot about different lace-knitting styles and how to combine them, or at least how to arrange pattern elements from one in the style of another.

Last year I knitted some Orenburg shawls all in a row, so now I feel comfortable assembling shawls in that style: knit a strip of edging long enough to accomodate the main body pattern, then mitre a corner, pick up stitches along the long edge, pick up the cast-on stitches, mitre another corner, and work the body of the shawl and two sides of edging at the same time; then mitre the third corner, knit another strip of edging attaching it to the shawl body as you go, mitre the last corner, and graft the corner stitches together with the leftover edging stitches left in reserve.

There are some advantages to this method. My favourite part is that you don't have to estimate how much yarn you'll need to knit the edging, because all that's left at the end is one side to finish. (If you're keen you can even weigh the first strip of edging after you knit it, make a note of the weight, and knit the shawl's body and side edgings until you have just over that amount left, then knit the top edge. It doesn't work if the whole thing is extensively patterned in an elaborate and carefully thought-out way, but it's dope for plain shawls or ones with a small allover repeating pattern.) My second-favourite part is that you don't have to spend a jillion hours kniting interminable boring edging all the way around after finishing the fun central area. Third-favourite is that edging looks much tidier to me if it is knitted at the same time as the shawl it's attached to.

How do you knit on an edging? My shawls tend to be garter stitch and I worry about binding edges, so I don't slip the selvage stitches. When I'm picking up stitches I pick them up in the "bar", not the "knot", and work shawl body stitches together with the last edging stitch on incoming rows by knitting them together. This is what it looks like:

Which is awfully insubstantial and uneven to boot! I've gotten a better result by picking up stitches all the way around and knitting them through their back loops to yield a crossed pattern, then knitting the edging onto that, but that's an entire shawl circumference's worth of stitches crammed onto a circular needle. Do you know a better way?

Anyway, what I mean all of this to say is that I started a new thing. It will be a stole, constructed inna Orenburg stylee but to look like a Shetland shawl, out of patterns from Heirloom Knitting. The Unst stole made me contemplate wide borders, so this one will be divided into thirds (exclusive of edging), border-centre-border again; all I really have to do is make sure that each pattern element is symmetrical end-to-end. I thought you might want to see a corner:

The trouble with Orenburg shawl construction is that you have to pick up stitches from the edging's starting point, then proceed in the opposite direction. Gossamer Webs suggests beginning with a backward-loop or long-tail cast-on over two needles and slipping a stitch holder or thread through, to work back the other way when you arrive at that point. I wasn't sure about that, because all the edgings in Gossamer Webs aren't patterned at all on even rows, and maybe this type of beginning only looks decent in edgings of this type?

Maybe. I initially thought about casting on invisibly, but doing that means that the edging (1) has a plain row in it, which is obvious and obtrusive in an edging that's otherwise patterned every row; and (2) is offset by half a stitch at that point, which is an occupational hazard of working a piece in two directions. (It doesn't show at all in e.g. stocking stitch, but it's glaring in rib.) I ended up just following Galina Khmleva's instructions, and it totally worked—there's just an extra thread running through it, but you can't really tell if you're not looking for it, and it takes emphasis away from the offset. Best of all, this method is almost completely hassle-free. I give it my seal of approval.

The yarn is silk and yak, so it is very crisp but with a lovely hairiness that softens the edges of things, so it ends up looking less severe than a silk lace shawl with pointy edging. It's also a funny colour—brown in indirect light but silvery in the sun. All of these are excellent qualities.

Victorious

2008-03-06T10:58:00.000-08:00

It feels excellent to have finished this:

It's "Lyra" by Herbert Niebling, from a twenty-year-old Anna magazine, knit as a circle (blocked to a kind of curvaceous octagon), worked in Colourmart 2/65 cashmere/cotton on 2.5mm needles. It was entertaining to knit even though it was a slog at the end, when each round took the better part of an hour. I'm still partial to Niebling's smaller doilies (<100 rounds) that feature more aggressively floral areas and less background mesh, but finishing this I feel like I have arrived as a lace knitter, or something.

I'm not sure what it's for. It's not quite big enough to be a functional shawl (for me, standing 5'5"; it's about 42" across) and there aren't many things stupider than a cashmere tablecloth, so. Someone suggested making coordinating booties and turning it into an extravagant baby shawl type present, which may well end up happening. It would come with orders to give it back when it got grimy so that I could launder it, because blocking is my favourite part and also I want new parents and babies to be comfortable and warm, not frazzled by demanding washing instructions.

I'll likely end up knitting at least part of this again; the centre flower thing + first tier of leaves would make a fine small doily.

Half the Internet was working on this pattern a while ago, and some of them suggested going up a needle size about halfway through to prevent binding issues (that seem to be somewhat typical of Niebling patterns). Of course I didn't read this advice until twenty rounds too late, so I kept on keeping on. And it doesn't bind as much as I was worried it might! The hex mesh is a bit distorted immediately below the big flowers (are they tulips?), but whatever, it's not glaring. Blocking it wasn't a problem. It's a bit reluctant to lay flat now that it's been paraded around, but that's the yarn's fault again (and also my fault for failing to learn my lesson after this).

The binding becomes less of an issue if it's spread out on a smaller table. This way the yarn also gets to act out some of its desire to sproing, and everyone gets to admire the drape. Maybe a cashmere tablecloth is not that stupid an idea.