I'm at a strange place in my knitting. I am no longer an eager beaver beginner excited by each new technique or pattern but I'm not yet an experienced skilled knitter able to eyeball a sweater and recreate it. I still like learning something new with every (now maybe every other) project but I find I get impatient with my rate of progress even as my knitting speeds up.
Contributing to this is that I am trying to not buy yarn without a specific project in mind or, better yet, only use stash yarn. Makes me realize that shopping must be an integral part of my knitting enjoyment.
As for my blogging silence, much of what drew me to blogging -- documenting projects -- is being satisfied by Ravelry. Coincidentally my invitation to join came the same month as my last post.
Visited south Louisiana last month. Geese, chickens, peacocks, and lots of lovely friends and family.
So, I am rushing to finish a lace scarf/stole for Mother's Day. I was trying an experiment and knitting it in the round with the plan to drop stitches at the end to make the fringe. Perhaps lace is too strong a word -- it is stockinette, sock yarn, and size 9 needles. And it was taking me twenty minutes to complete one round so I had put in at least 11 hours when --- a stitch was caught and pulled out. We are not talking a small pull we are talking feet of yarn, my scarf looked like an open-ended drawstring bag. "Don't panic," I thought. "You can fix this."
No, I couldn't. I tried pulling what I thought was the errant thread at a further point to help (!!!) the process but it was a different thread so now I had two hideous pulls. And the part that I had un-pursed looked like crap anyway so I decided to let it go. I haven't frogged it yet but that's its future.
I have had the yarn (3 balls of expensive Touch Me Due) for the Minimum Scarf from The Knit Stitch by Sally Melville (love that book) forever. I had started it with two balls thinking I would just make it shorter than the pattern (which calls for four), bought a third when I realized it would be way too short, then frogged it after finishing one ball which showed me it would still be too short with three.
I cast-on 24 rather than the 32 called for (3/4 stitches for 3/4 the yarn so hopefully) and have been knitting like mad since last night. I've put in around three hours and have over 15 inches (the final length should be close to 39 inches) so I still have hope I can mail it off to my mother in time. And I received the fun scarf pin I purchased for Mother this weekend (all the way from Canada) so perhaps the stars are in alignment. I do have to felt the scarf after it is done which means a laundromat for me but I am feeling strong.
I used to crochet. I crocheted an itsy-bitsy bikini for myself in high school and wore it outside while I wrote a term paper. Omigod -- I was burned on every part of my body because folks, at least the way I crocheted, crochet has holes!!! Although it wasn't crochet's fault that I was a foolish teenager I pretty much never crocheted again.
Fast forward twenty + years. Now I knit. I love to knit. I love to read about knitting and look at knitting patterns. And I love all the tools and gadgets. I love how knitted fabric looks and feels. No interest in trying crochet again.
Until. . . Wendy showed a cute striped bag she is working on. I followed her link to kpixie and beheld this tiny purse kit and it is crochet. With tiny yarn and a tiny hook required (1.75 mm -- smaller than US size 0 -- whoever heard of such a thing?). But it is very very cute. And it is a bag, another obsession of mine (really containers of all sorts and each large bag must have several small bags in it to contain my other obsession -- tools).
So, I've been eyeing this cute Aero hook set (why buy one hook when you can satisfy two hungers at once -- tools in a container!). And the other colors of the adorable yarn.
Stop me.
Well, obviously I am not a dedicated blogger which is funny because I get impatient for a new entry in the blogs I read if a week goes by without one. My knitting has increased in one sense -- I am knitting hats and vests for a great charity, Warm Woolies -- and slowed in another sense -- I'm trying to stop doing as much knitting for individuals because I find it rather stressful, at least if they know about it.
A case in point; I have been trying to make the half-dome hat for a friend who requested a kufi-style hat (moslem prayer hat) and it turned into the CURSED hat. You knit the majority of the hat on number 5 needles but the brim is knitted with 3s! I started with addi turbos which I have liked on other projects but they were a nightmare on this one. I made more errors in the first three rounds than I had for all my previous projects put together. Small needles are hard enough for me but small slippery needles? And to get gauge I should have gone down a size but that wasn't going to happen. So I frogged it, got some bamboo needles and started again.
One thing I hate about small needles is I find the small stitches hard to see (and this was in a dark slate blue) so I end up dropping or mistakenly adding stitches and not discovering the problem until several rounds later. I frogged the middle section of the hat a half a dozen times. I also hate how long everything seems to take with small needles. And my friend had a much larger than usual head (he wears a size 8 fedora -- I have a big head and I wear a 7 3/4 hat so we're talking a long circumference to knit around.
Then the decreases added a fresh level of hell. Not the decreases themselves but more needle issues. I switched to two circulars and had one of my Denise needles separate and drop a boatload of stitches. I love my Denise needles and they had never come undone like that before. But this was the CURSED hat. So I laboriously picked up the stitches and started using dpns (look at these great colors). They fell (were pushed?) out. So I put the hat aside and my friend pretty much gave up.
Then I saw the Knitty sweater pattern Thermal and I loved the waffle stitch. She described it as stretchy so I thought it would make an excellent hat. I decided to make my own pattern using the waffle stitch but I couldn't bear to unravel the hat and use the same yarn, what if the curse came with it? I bought a new ball of what I thought was the same slate blue color and cast-on a narrow brim with silver gray (from the CH but it hadn't actually been knit so I thought it would be safe) and started away.
It went very fast at first and was enjoyable (size 6 needles - yeah!) but then I got to the decreases and realized that I had cast on too many stitches for the decreases I wanted to do (but what was needed for the stitch pattern and his size) so I had to do a lot of thinking and decided to decrease 5 stitches in the non-ribbing section of the waffle stitch and then I'd be fine. But I wasn't. I had thought to do the waffle stitch on the entire hat and because I was doing double decreases it should reduce in each section by one rib pair. But I somehow added a stitch or forgot to do one of the decreases and couldn't figure out what I should do so I put it aside again. Then I was reading AlterKnit and she had a beautiful silk kufi style hat that changed to stockinette stitch at the decreases and there were 5 paired decreases which looked cool. Aha! I started doing the same and it looked great but then I started to panic a bit because I was getting close to the end of the skein. No problem, I'll just use a teeny bit of the cursed skein, right? Oh no, different blues entirely. Thankfully I eked out the yarn and finished the hat 6 months after I started. And here, modeled by me is the no-longer-cursed hat (And my friend liked it):
Other recent projects (I love that you can see the snow falling in the earflap shot:
And projects for the Charmed Knits Knitalong: A Ravenclaw beret is on the needles (using the cursed yarn but the curse appears to have been broken) and Gryffindor and Slytherin waiting in the wings. I don't have a yellow wool so Hufflepuff will just have to wait.
I did finish a scarf for myself. Lengthwise scarves are great. I know it is the same number of stitches as a scarf knitted the usual way but without as much turning of the project it felt faster. I used two colors of a yarn I first saw and loved in Yarnplay called Filatura Di Crosa 127 print and made a simple garter stitch scarf.
Well, I thought it would be brilliant for my co-worker's dog to model it since she has similar coloring but she was much more interested in treats. She's a sweetie and I wish she visited the office more often. She is a coonhound though and every once in a while let's loose a bay that rattles the windows.
Here is a non-modeled version draped artistically around a bookend.
... is that I finished none of them. I started hating the striped one so I unraveled it and made a hat for my friend in New York out of the cream colored yarn. One of my partners kindly modeled it for me. You can't see it but I used the decreases used in the Half Dome hat which don't spiral. With this thicker yarn they weren't a total success but I still liked them.
As for the other scarves, I still think they were a great idea but I just ran out of time. And I'm thinking of frogging the ribbed one to make a slipped stitch pattern I like instead. The colors are a continuing exploration of bright colors with bright colors. I've always had a bit of color around but always paired it with something muted, usually black. An example of my new style is a hat I knit for myself using the same yarn as the unfinished Xmas scarves. The pattern is a K6P6 rib and I had to make it twice because the
first one was huge (I don't like tight hats and I have a big head but, come on, it looked like I was wearing a placemat balanced on my head).
