FO: Multidirectional Diagonal Scarf

Pattern: Multidirectional Diagonal Scarf

Yarn: Artyarn Hand Paint Stripe in Farmhouse

Needles: Size 8 Bamboo

I had completely forgotten about this scarf. I had the last half-triangle to do. That’s it! I stalled out on it, put it in a bag, and forgot about it for at least two months. I’m sure the last time I worked on it was well before Thanksgiving. It was a matter of an hour to finish this up. The yarn is so incredibly squishy, made only squishier by the fact that it’s in garter stitch.  It’s my second time knitting with this yarn, and this project suited it much better.

When it rains it pours

I’ve been busy with school and I’ve had a bunch of extra assignments for work, and when you top that off with a burgeoning creative urge, I’ve been aswarm with things to do. This will last for a while, but in the honor of the first fallish day in this dreary summer, and for the commemoration of having to pull out the first long-sleeved shirt of the season in the house last night, I decided to knit my first cardigan.

I knew exactly what yarn I wanted. It’s called Mirasol Miski, a baby llama yarn. One of my local yarn stores has a display piece knit up in it. I accidentally brushed the piece one day, and I’ve been slavering over it ever since. I went and bought a ton of it the other day, not knowing what type of jacket/cardigan/wrap/hoodie I wanted to make. It’s been an agonizing couple of days, but I finally decided on this Drops pattern:

But of course I could not just knit a pattern as written. Oh no. I had to go and make it all fancy.  I’ve decided to work it in Coral and French Navy colorways with a pattern around the bottom edge and sleeves, and also with the textured stitch worked in the navy. The image is from a pattern called Winter Twilight Mitts.

This picture is similar to the correct colors. It should be one hell of a jacket when I’m finished.

Since I’ve never knit a fitted article of clothing, nor have I ever done colorwork, I highly anticipate this to be quite an adventure.

Yarn Penance

Sigh. I cast on the scarf on both size 11s and size 9s, but, as expected, both were wrong. I didn’t like the look of the lumpy, lacy pattern of the 11s and the 9s? We’ll not talk about the nines, except to say that it’s a very, very gorgeous pattern for this yarn. And, of course, I have no straight tens. Another trip to the store is in order. I just need to make a catalog of all the needles I have, so that I can see at a glance what sort of needles I *don’t* have before I get started on a project. I also can’t decide if I want to knit this pattern on wood or metal. On one hand, the wood is a bit blunt, and it’s sticky. The metal ones are pointier, but be damned if the slipperiness doesn’t make the stars (p3tog/k/p in one stitch) really hard because the yarn falls off the needles. I’ve been practicing hard to keep my tension loose, because those stars are a real bitch. I’m thinking of experimenting either with crochet hooks or with circulars, hoping that will give the flex or delicacy that would make this easier.

I finished knitting the Robin’s Egg hat last night. I have mixed feelings about it. It’s really cute, but now that the whole hat is together, I can see what else I would change. I would cast on a few more stitches, and narrow the band by two rows. It looks fine off the head, but on the head it looks really strange. I might also experiment with turning the brim rather than having it be a false turn. That more than anything else would make a huge difference. I (of course) couldn’t find any of my finishing needles, so I still have to weave my ends, tack down the flap, and sew on the button. I probably won’t be keeping this particular hat, but I have enough yarn to make another one for me. Pictures once it’s finished.

I also began to experiment with what shall be known as the trauma mohair (black and blue and brown). I have four balls of this stuff, and I have a rather sentimental attachment to this particular yarn, despite its really horrid colorway. I taught myself to knit on this yarn, and I think it deserves to be honored. But augh. Another case of the variegated yarns reeling me in. Maybe an overdyed green to put some blending color into the 20% mohair will tone down the funky 80% acrylic. Maybe.

I started playing around with a lace pattern from one of my library books. It calls for laceweight, and this mohair “works up to worsted” though other descriptions call it aran weight. I need to both enlarge the pattern from a M-L to a 2x, but it’s pretty simple. I’m swatching now, and I’ll post pictures once the swatch is finished. I’m pretty sure I have enough to do with what I have in mind, but we’ll see.

I promised myself I would work through some of my stash yarns before I bought any more yarn from the stores. This, this is my penance.

Manos Success!

Several years ago, I came across the Manos del Uruguay handdyed handspun 100% wool yarn. It comes in gorgeous solids and some very interesting colorways. I was going to buy a skein of the Wildflower colorway, and then I remembered that one skein doesn’t go very far, and so I bought two. Which isn’t really enough to do much of with either, unless you’re making hats and scarves and whatnot.

So I’ve hung on to this gorgeous yarn for ages, and the problems just keep wracking up.

1. It’s not very soft. It’s not scratchy, but it’s just not something I want to have against my skin for a whole day. That means no shirts, and no little neckwarmers. Scarves, hats, gloves, sure, cause I won’t spend all day with them on.

2. Vareigated? Seriously, when will I learn. I hate the stripey look this type of yarn gives when the color repeats match up, so I have to pick my patterns very carefully. I swear off this sort of yarn frequently, but pretty colorways suck me in time and time again.

3. It’s kinda bulky. Aran weight? Yeah, but single ply, and it blooms. Don’t get me wrong, I like bulky yarns, but I don’t want to end up with stiff, thick fabric once it’s knit up.

My options have been pretty limited so far. I could, I suppose, go buy more, but I just don’t relish the thought of fighting with stripes I don’t want for a large garment or whatever.

I found a scarf that was designed with this yarn in mind. Even in the colorway. I’m trying to find out if the library has a copy, because I really like it. But I don’t want to buy a book of about 100 patterns, of which I only care for about four. Here’s the scarf, called the Cross stitch scarf.

Reservations? It’s SUPER thick when it knits up. And some days I’m not in love with it. So I guess the search is still on.

I found another scarf called the “My So Called Scarf” and I hate the name enough for me to dislike the pattern. I thought it was pretty. For a while. Now I can’t stand it. I was going to post it, but I’ve come to hate it, and I don’t even want it on my blog.

Then I found it. Absolutely found it. It’s called the “Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks” scarf, and it’s a modified star stitch. There have been many many many scarves knit in manos and in this colorway on Ravelry, and I just wanted to show you how dang pretty this is.

Hopefully I will still love it tomorrow. In any event, I am going to cast on tomorrow and do some gauge swatches. I’ll post pics as they come.

Project progress?

Both of the hats have been delayed to different degrees by not having the right needles.

I decided that working with two sets of dpns for this huge to-be-felted hat was a bit much, and I bought a pair of 10 1/2 circulars. The gauge was so different that I had to undo the entire hat. I’ll probably start on it again soon, now that the sting of having lost all that work is going away.

The Robin’s Egg hat needed a set of dpns, and I bought them but ended up busy the next few days. I sat down with them last night and knit a few inches into the body of the hat, but I really didn’t like the look of the changeover from the hat band, nor did I like the join I made to begin knitting in the round. The pattern said to bind off 12 stiches and knit to the end of the row before joining, but this gave it a very gradual transition to the body, and I really wanted a ridge. I if I purled instead of knit to the end of the row, then it would be fine. I ripped back to the join, painstakingly picked up all the stitches, and began the experiment, but it just didn’t look right at all. I realized that it was because I didn’t need to rip back to the join, I needed to rip back to the bound off stitches, so I undid everything again and once again painstakingly picked up the stitches. The good news is that it worked, and it looks even more awesome than I thought it would.

I can’t wait to show off this hat. I went button shopping for it, and I had a really hard time finding one I liked. I ended up choosing between three: A white button with a pink sheen to it, a natural wood button, and a huge black button with some off-center concentric shimmery gold rings. The pink button was too small, the wood button was too plain, and I just sort of really liked the black button, so it came home.

I came to a conclusion about yarn the other day: I really like novelty yarn. Not to the exclusion of natural fibers, but I will still plan a bunch of projects out of it. I decided to make the Golden Compass hat largely out of natural materials (alpaca, wool, and a tiny bit of metallic something or another.) The alpaca was sinful and deserves it’s own hat, I will give it that. But ultimately? Meh. I’m not jumping up and down. It’s not way better than something I could have knit for a quarter of the cost. In fact, I’m positive that I could knit something I liked way better out of some novelty yarn I saw when I was out buying needles.

I still want to explore natural fibers to a much greater extent, and in fact, I made an appointment to see a woman who has a spinning and weaving studio in her house. I showed up and we chatted for probably an hour and a half. She showed me how to use a drop spindle, how to card clean fleece, and she confirmed that my intended proceedure for washing my fleece using the washing machine was indeed a good move. I left with a fairly heavy drop spindle and some roving to practice on, both of which were scads cheaper than I had been expecting. She sells spools of lace weight yarn, and I will definitely be back when I get brave enough to attempt my first lace shawl. She also sells niddy-noddies, and I really need one of them now, to help unwind my sweaters. I’ll have to decide what skein length I want before I go back for one.

I had heard hand spinners talking about “oh, this is corriedale, oh that is blue-faced leicester, this is shetland, etc etc and despite my familiarity with fabrics that I can name with a look or a feel, I somehow didn’t understand how they could tell what type of roving they had just by feel. I completely understand now, and this changes the whole dimension of choosing sheep to raise. It’s not a question of “oh, these sheep all have fine wool, these sheep all have coarse wool” but it’s truly an exquisite feel, an experience of texture and weight, a sin on the fingertips.

Can you tell I’m hooked?

The Robin’s Egg Blues

I’ve wanted to make this hat since I first saw it, and I quite joyously ended up with a sweater the appropriate color, and, I thought, in an appropriate weight if I doubled the yarn. A word about recycled yarn: It is crinkly like ramen when you unravel it. Some fibers have more memory than others, and there are different ways to deal with this: stretching, steaming, a gentle bath… sounds quite luxurious, doesn’t it?

Anyhow, I decided to knit up a swatch in the blue wool/cotton yarn, and also a swatch in an equally cheerful cerise in cotton and cashmere. The blue is a finer yarn than the cerise, but the pattern calls for a chunky yarn and a needle size that I don’t have (which was ok, since I had to go smaller anyhow). It is important to get the correct gauge, especially if you are knitting with different yarn and/or needles than a pattern called for. The cerise knit up beautifully, but was two stitches too wide for the gauge. The blue was significantly closer to the correct gauge, but it knit up into lumpy, uneven, weird fabric with poor stitch definition. Not good. Observe:

This can, of course, be solved by the stretching/steaming/soaking method above, BUT I like the look of the larger stitches, and I am not quite prepared to use three strands of yarn for this hat.

This *does* solve a problem I had been having. I have a lacy mohair-ish sweater that is exactly the same color as the blue yarn, and I was lamenting the hat project because there wouldn’t be enough left for me to use both yarns in something. Because the something was quite undefined, and that had is way too cute to pass up, I opted for the hat anyway. This afternoon I found an appropriate pattern for both yarns, and even though I could fix the yarn to make the hat, I will be quite happy to leave the hat for this:

It’s called the side-to-side lace cardigan, and it has lace panels across the back and on the shoulders, and the sleeves and body are knit in more solid yarn. It’s perfect.

I will continue to knit the hat in the cerise, and do the rather simple math it will take in order to change the hat to accommodate the yarn. I hope to finish it by the end of the weekend.

A little bad habit

So I have a little bad habit of buying single skeins of yarn when i find something interesting at the yarn store. I do this because I think something is neat, not because I have a project in mind, and I’m not rich enough or dedicated enough to buy the 10-20 skeins it would take to complete an undefined larger project that I might never get around to sometime in the future. What this means for me is that I tend to acquire a number of really great yarns that I don’t have enough to do anything with.

It frustrates me when I sit down and take a look at what I have. I end up with quantity of sale acrylics and novelty earmarked for specific projects that I’ve since thought better of, and single skeins of really nice wool or other natural fiber. I’ve been trying to mend my ways, and I have made some really pretty scarves out of novel combinations of this yarn in an effort to clear out these singletons.

While one can never have too many scarves in a chilly place like Alaska, I’ve been wanting to branch out a bit. My last rummage came up with a dark skein of Manos del Uruguay in a variegated warm black and shades of dove gray. It’s *much* darker than anything that I usually like, and it must have looked very different in the store. It’s so dark, in fact, that I couldn’t think of a single thing to do with it once I got it home.

When I was going through hat patterns for something to knit the Landscapes into, I came across a pattern for a cloche hat that I particularly liked. It was felted, which is something that I’ve been experimenting with a little, and I just think it looks really snazzy.

I wondered what yarn they used, and when I checked, lo and behold it was one skein of Manos del Uruguay. Sweet. After tearing through my supplies looking for the correct sized  needles and some stitch markers, I realized I could knit it on double pointed needles instead of circular needles (not instantly obvious to me, I’m still new at this) and I found exactly FOUR stitch markers, which I cannibalized from a dead project. I cast on immediately, and man, this wool feels good to knit. It’s a bit sticky in hand, but it slides well even on my wooden needles. I have great faith in its ability to felt.

Since my hat will be dark, I shouldn’t use a dark band for it. I like that ribbon, but I don’t want to do a light colored ribbon because I don’t think it will look as nice. Instead, I plan to find a matching cabochon and bead it, perhaps in dark teal for contrast, perhaps pink, with a medium toned ribbon that brings out the lighter colors in the wool.

I’m starting to see the necessity of a project notebook.