34 posts tagged “knitting”
This has already been a crazy fall and it's going to get crazier as it goes on. On the school/career front, I have started collecting data for my dissertation. This has eaten up a huge chunk of my time and has created a constant stream of things that I need to do each day. I should be done by the end of this week and I'll be relieved when it's over. I will then move directly into doing job interviews. We do everything way in advance in the accounting field, so I'll be interviewing for faculty positions that will start next fall. I've done one already and have more over the coming weeks. These interviews are all day affairs with research and sometimes teaching presentations and two days of travel to get there and then home again, so they are both fun and exhausting. Plus sometime in there I have to analyze the dissertation data and get it written up.
On to a more fun topic... knitting! I have finished up a number of projects that I haven't had time to blog about, so I'll just give quick details and pictures on each. The first up is the Wisp.
Over the summer, just about everyone my LYS made this out of the pattern yarn (Rowan Kidsilk Haze) and I just didn't like it. I think I just don't like that yarn because at some point someone made one out of malabrigo lace and I just loved it. After several false starts on other patterns with my Azul Profundo Malabrigo lace weight, I decided to jump on the Wisp band wagon. I knitted this on size 8 needles. I used the square circular needles which were kind of neat to knit with. The malabrigo is smaller gauged than the kidsilk haze, so it ended up a lot narrower, which was ok with me since what I really wanted was a scarf. I did 24 pattern repeats to get enough length on it.
The second project that I finished up was a pair of crazy, striped socks:
I made these out of two colorways of Noro Silk Garden Sock. One colorway was #252 and I lost the yarn band on the other colorway, so I'm not sure what it was. I think it was the same colorway that I made my very first scarf and hat out of. I used a basic sock pattern with just 12 rows of ribbing at the top and then the rest stockinette stitch. I alternated the colorways every 4 rounds on leg and foot of the sock and every 2 rows on the heel. I did the entire heel turn and toe in the non-#252 colorway. These turned out great. They are extremely warm and dense though, so I haven't gotten to wear them yet. I look forward to wearing them on some dreary day this winter when my dissertation and job search has me stressed and depressed, because really how can one not be happy when wearing crazy striped socks.
The next project was a quick little hat. I joined a Halloween Vampire swap on Ravelry. It's been fun. It's kind of like secret santa except that it's for Halloween and it's supposed to have a vampire theme. My spoilee for the swap appears to be a big Twilight fan, so I knitted her on of the patterns that were designed to replicate the hat that Bella wore in the movie on the beach at La Push.
I actually didn't care for the hat in the movie, but I've decided it's just the way the actress is wearing it. I had M. model the hat it looks adorable on her. I think I'm going to knit her one now. The hat knits up fast, but it's a killer on the hands. It's moss stitch, knitted in bulky yarn on size 7 needles.
The final project that I've finished up is what I have dubbed my "Vampire Scarf":
This is actually the Montego Bay Scarf pattern. I love this pattern and tried to knit it out of a different yarn a while back, but that yarn just wasn't right for this pattern. This time, I've knitted it in the much coveted Wollmeise Sockenwolle 100% Superwash yarn in the Rosenrot colorway. I call this my vampire scarf because I started knitting it only while watching True Blood this summer and then finished up while watching the Twilight movie and The Vampire Diaries. I love the scarf. I think my favorite part is the fringe, which is the only modification I made. The fringe was supposed to be braided with five strands folded double and I didn't like how thick the braids were, so I made them with three strands folded over.
M. and I did some kool-aid dying of yarn a while back and I overdyed some of it just recently, but I'm going to put those pictures in another post.
Behold, my "Blanket of Insanity", a work in progress. When I was looking at quilt patterns and quilting material for the quilt that my grandmother made me, I fell in love with scrap quilts. I have tried three different times to learn to sew, once as a child, once a teenager, and once as an adult, and it has never stuck, so there is no way I will ever become a quilter or make myself a scrap quilt. Then I heard about sock yarn blankets, which seem to be the knitters equivalent to scrap quilts. These are blankets knit out of leftover sock yarn. I favorited a bunch of these on Ravelry, but never found a pattern that I just fell for. They all seemed so complicated that I felt like I would need to knit it all at once or else forget how to do it. Then I found the Zig Zag Pram Blanket pattern. I love zig zagged stripes as evidenced by the quilt I did have my grandmother make me and it's a simple enough pattern that I don't think I'll forget what I'm doing if I don't knit on it for a while. The pattern was for a small baby blanket, but I wanted a larger blanket, so I cast on 361 stitches instead of the stitch count called for by the pattern. I was hoping this would give me 5' wide blanket. I measured today and it's 56" wide, so not quite 5', but close. I also decided that it would drive me nuts to try to put a solid border around it as I go, so I decided to just skip the border.
I bought a set of size 7 circular needles with something like a six foot cable on them that I could just dedicate to this project. The plan was to knit up all of the sock yarn scraps that I currently have and then just put the blanket aside and knit in the leftovers each time I finish a pair of socks or any other project that uses sock weight yarn. I now have all of my scraps on hand knit in and the blanket is about 19" long. The yarns included so far are (from bottom of blanket up to the needles):
· Knit Picks Essential Sock Yarn Navy – used for garter stitch bottom border, never knit with before.
· Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Medium weight Lemongrass – leftover from chevron scarf.
· Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Medium weight Rolling Stone – left over from chevron scarf.
· Colinette Jitterbug Toscana – left over from first pair of simple socks.
· Brown Sheep Wildfoote Luxury Socks Brown Sugar – left over from second pair of simple socks (Wasn’t knitting up well with the size 7 needles, only knit a partial row with it and then switched to a different yarn).
· Claudia Handpaints Yarn Fingering Dessert Dusk – left over from the Dickerson Park Monkey socks.
· Claudia Handpaints Yarn Fingering Hokies – left over from the Hokie walker socks. This is the yarn that I traded S. for that turned our fingers orange.
· Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Medium weight Farmhouse – leftover from second chevron scarf.
· Collinete Jitterbug Velvet Leaf – left over from second chevron scarf.
· Shubui Knits Socks 5001 – left over from nutkins socks.
· Claudia Handpaints Yarn Fingering Hokies – left over from Hokie socks for M.
· Misty Mountain Farms Jubilee Evergreen – left over from Broadripple socks.
· Pagewood Farms Alyeska Fabulous Fall – left over from Fawkes Sawkes.
My initial estimate was that this blanket might take me 20 years to finish, but I'm saved by the fact that I knit short socks and thus generally have a lot of yarn left over. Now I'm thinking that it might only take me 5 years to finish. I've also been weaving the ends in as I go so that I don't have hours worth of ends to weave in once I'm done.
I'll keep you updated on this one as I go. The only bad thing about these blanket is that now that I have all of my scraps knit in, I almost hate to finish the socks that I currently have on the needles, because that means more scraps!
I feel in love with the Wicked Sweater a while ago. According to the pattern, the short sleeved version in my size could be made with three skeins of Malabrigo. Spring before last, thats right, Spring of 2008, when my LYS first really started carrying Malabrigo, I bought three skeins of the beautiful Azul Profundo colorway to make the sweater.
The Malabrigo laid idle in my stash while I spent the rest of 2008 knitting Christmas gifts and then spent the first part of 2009 catching up on the other projects in my queue while at the same time getting distracted by new exciting projects. A few weeks ago I found these great striped long-sleeved shirts at Old Navy that I thought would look fantastic under the Wicked. I bought 4 different colors of the shirts and finally busted out the yarn and pattern for the Wicked. The first thing that I do now when I start a new project is go to Ravelry and see if anyone has made the pattern in the same yarn to get an idea on how gauge ran with that yarn and how the fit was and that sort of thing. I immediately started getting nervous when I discovered that many of the people who made the sweater in the two sizes I was contemplating used more than 3 skeins of Malabrigo. Many of these folks had skipped the kangaroo pocket, but had made the sweater longer, so I was holding out hope that I would be ok.
I had a hard time deciding what size to make this sweater. My bust size hit right at the break between the medium and the large. Several folks noted that this sweater was a good fit with zero or negative ease and since I was worried about the amount of yarn I had, I went with the medium. I knit this on size 8 needles although I think now that I probably should have gone up to 9's as I was a little small on gauge. The sweater is definitely fitted. I was a little worried that it was a bit too fitted, but several friends have assured me that it looks good.
As you can see, I also skipped the kangaroo pocket. I was worried about the amount of yarn I had and I thought it was going to hit me in an awkward and unflattering spot. I wish I would have made it a little longer and even though I was tight on yarn, I would have had enough to make it a tad longer. Unfortunately at the point that I made the length decision, I still had to finish up the arms and didn't know how much yarn that would take.
In the original pattern the bottom band of the sweater is supposed to be knit in seed stitch to mirror the seed stitch border around the kangaroo pocket, but since I skipped the kangaroo pocket, I just did the bottom in the same rib as the neckline. I of course managed to screw this rib up. You are supposed to alternate the set of knit stitches that you do the crossover stitch on, so that you have a 4 row repeat in the rib, but I misread the pattern and did the crossover on the same set of knit stitches every time so that I have alternating knit stitches with the crossover and straight knit stitches in the rib. I didn't discover the error until the neckline was almost done and someone at my LYS said she thought it gave the sweater more visual interest anyway, so I just kept on knitting! I just made sure to repeat the same mistake on the rib around the bottom of the sweater and arms.
I'm not as excited about the finished product here as I was about the pattern before I knit it, but I think it will be a warm little sweater for casual weekend wear. I'm just worried that I won't ever be able to get over the fear that it's too fitted and won't be comfortable wearing it out in public.
I love the look of a long, gauzy, fringed scarf worn in the summer with a tank or cap sleeved shirt, but now that I knit, I'm loath to purchase a scarf, so I don't own any of this type of scarf. At the beginning of this summer, there was a rash of people I know knitting entrelac, and my love of the entrelac is well documented, so it wasn't long until I was itching to start another entrelac scarf. I decided to make one out of Noro Matsuri, which is a cotton/wool blend because I thought I could wear it as a long, fringed summer scarf. I even picked out a bright, happy summer-ish colorway (colorway #5).
I knit the scarf with just over three balls on size 7 needles, and this time I used the pattern written by S. down at my LYS instead of the Lady Eleanor pattern from scarf style. S.'s pattern is written for a 10 stitch block, but I much prefer a smaller block, so I modified it down to 8 stitches per block. I also only did three blocks across, because I wanted to keep it narrow and less bulky so that it would be a more summery weight. Unfortunately, it didn't matter, the worsted weight yarn is just too substantial, and the entrelac stitch pattern is too structured. I didn't get the effect that I wanted. I guess I really need a sock or lace weight yarn and an open stitch pattern to pull off what I was going for.
I still really like the scarf. It is entrelac out of Noro yarn, after all. You just can't go wrong with that. I think it's going to be more of an early spring scarf. Something to wear with a light jacket when you expect the tulips to sprout any day now, but the early mornings are still chilly. It does look pretty sharp with my linen jacket.
I did a little fan girl knitting in honor of the new Harry Potter movie. This is a free, Harry Potter inspired pattern on Ravelry and is called Fawkes. According to the blurb on the pattern, the stitch motif is designed to look like a flame, which I think it does.
This was a great pattern and I'm thinking about knitting it again out of a solid colored yarn that will really show off the stitch pattern. I almost knit these out of a solid hunter's orange yarn that I have, but then switched yarns at the last minute. I may still go back and knit the solid orange pair at some point. I ended up knitting them out of Pagewood Farms Alyeska sock yarn in the Fabulous Fall colorway. The colors in this yarn just reminded me of some of the pictures that I'd seen of Fawkes. Given the 10% cashmere content, this yarn was a bit splurgy, even for me, but it was an absolute dream to knit with. I was a bit worried about running out of yarn. The yarn requirment on the pattern was 350 - 400 yards and the yardadge on this yarn is only 360. Of course, I made the socks a little shorter than was called for in the pattern and had plenty of yarn for the socks plus a little left over for my sock yarn blanket (which I'll talk about in a later post).
I'm trying to decide what to do next in terms of knitting. I have a lace cardigan on the needles that I really should be working on, but all I really want to do is cast on for more socks and the Wicked sweater. We'll see how disciplined I manage to be.
The summer school session has left me pretty short on knitting time over the last six weeks, but I did manage to finish up a couple of projects in the last week. The first was the Shay Cap Sleeve Pullover from Valley Yarns.
This is knitted on size 6 and 8 needles using Knit Picks Comfy yarn in the Blackberry colorway. I chose the comfy yarn for it's cotton content and washability. Plus I just really love how that yarn knits up. For a nice easy sweater, I sure had a hard time with this pattern. For starters, I just did not get along with the cable in the pattern. I kept messing it up and leaving big holes in it. Plus I wanted something easily memorizable and mindless. I ripped it out and replaced it with a modified version of the diamond cable pattern from the Rose Tyler Wristwarmers. I'm really happy with how the substituted cable came out. Then I had a heck of a time getting the appropriate number of stitches picked up and the short rows done correctly on the sleeves. I had to rip each sleeve out and start over again at least three times. Finally, I couldn't quite get the ribbing around the neck right. The first time through, I left big holes around my picked up stitches and ended up with a bind-off that was so tight I could barely squeeze my head through it. I ripped it out, redid it and then used a sewn bind-off and it worked much better.
Now that it's finished, I'm not sure how I feel about this sweater. I don't wear sleeveless stuff and the little cap sleeves on this sweater are pretty close to sleeveless. A friend suggested that this would be a good sweater to wear over a long-sleeved t-shirt when the weather gets chilly. I like that idea. I might get more wear out of it that way. It's also a very snug sweater. I knit the size that would have zero ease and I was hitting pretty darn close to gauge, but it's a good thing that I lost 10 lbs between when I began knitting it and when I finished knitting it, because otherwise, I'm not sure it would have fit.
The second project that I've finished is the Broadripple Socks. These have been in the queue for a about a year, but I'm just now getting around to knitting them.
The yarn is Misty Mountain Farm Jubiliee. These aren't really my colors, but I picked this yarn up from the half price bin at my LYS last year thinking that I would use it to learn to knit socks with. Then when it was time to learn, I magically bought new yarn for my first socks, so I'm just now getting around to knitting this yarn up. I'm not sure that I love the yarn, but the pattern is great. I especially love how these are knit on size 3 needles! It makes them go so fast. I'll definitely make this pattern again, just with a yarn that I'm more in love with.
The only thing that I think I'll change next time I knit these socks will be the number of rows of the "garter ripple" stitch that make up the cuff. With as short as I make my socks, the number of rows called for in the pattern just seems like too much.
I turned in my final grades for summer school tonight, so hopefully I'll get some more knitting time in over the next few weeks. I certainly have plenty of projects on the needles to keep me busy and I was thinking about casting on for another simple sweater soon. Although there is a lot of traveling in my future, so we'll see. M. and I are headed out tomorrow for our annual summer trip to Missouri. I'm not looking forward to the 90 degree weather there. It might put a damper on my desire to knit.
I'm hunting an assistant professor in accounting position.
I decided a while back that I should make some lace scarves to wear with suits when I am doing (hopefully) job interviews next fall. I have since decided it's going to be hard to figure out a way to wear the scarves I'm making with the styles of interview suits I have, but I'll still have some beautiful lace scarves to wear to work. This is actually the second one I've made. It's made out of Jade Sapphire 2 ply 100% Cashmere in the Camo colorway. I love the colors in this yarn and it's amazingly soft, and there's just something I love about the idea of a lace camoflouge scarf. I've been calling it my "job hunting scarf" and one of the ladies in my knitting group pointed out that I really want to stand out rather than blend in when looking for a job. I have some hunter's orange sock yarn, so maybe I'll make my next scarf in that... probably not.
Because this is a pretty varigated yarn, I wanted a nice simple lace pattern, so I chose the Lucious Lace Scarf pattern. The pattern and the yarn worked together really nicely. Between how simple the pattern was and the varigation in the yarn, it was very forgiving and hid mistakes very well. The only thing that I don't like about this scarf is the length. I used up all of the yarn that I had, but I would like the scarf to be a little longer. I also can't figure out why it's not longer. The picture of the scarf in the pattern looks so much longer than mine and even though I didn't use the pattern yarn, my yarn was the same weight and had the same yardadge on the skein and I knitted it with the same size needles. I even narrowed the scarf by one set of pattern stitches and did four additional lace repeats on the length. The only thing that I can figure out is that the scarf on the pattern looks to be very heavily blocked and with the gauziness of my yarn, I really liked how the pattern made the scarf sort of wavy, so I just very lightly blocked mine.
A couple of final pictures. I borrowed a photographer's backdrop from a friend of mine to take pictures of M. in her dance costumes from this year, so I had D. take the pictures of me modeling the scarf in front of the backdrop while I had it up. So here's a picture of me modeling the scarf and then one of the pictures of M. just because she is so darn cute.
I'm not going to be knitting much over the next few weeks because of summer teaching (boo), but I have three projects on the needles, so hopefully I'll be able to finish up at least a couple of those during summer school. We'll see. I have big plan for big projects that I want to get to.
I have been wanting to try my hand at felting for a while, and then a month or so back, I went into a knitting store while traveling and saw a store sample of the Sopie Bag by Black Sheep Bags. I really liked this bag and decided to make one using up a bunch of my leftovers and scraps. I knitted it up out of leftover cascade 220 from my Bella Mittens, one skein of Noro Silk Garden leftover from my clapotis, some Claudia Felt Me from my grandmother's vest, and some Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride from some Christmas hats. The pattern knitted up quickly and easily and I loved the color combinations. It was beautiful before it was felted.
Then I attempted felting it. Apparently the high silk content in Noro Silk Garden means that it doesn't felt up very well. The other yarns felted very well. The bag still looks very cute, though I need to run a sweater shaver over it, and I think it's usable.
It's just a lot floppier than it should be. When you sit on it's bottom it just sort of collapses. Also I don't really like the way the handle came out.
This pattern was great, and I will definitly knit it again. I'll just be a little more careful with my yarn choices and I'll make the non-twisted handle option next time I make the bag.
This is the "A Good Stripe Dress" from the spring 2008 Interweave Knits. I've been planning on making this since last spring when the issue came out. I wanted to make it then, but felt like I would finish it too late for M. to get much good out of it last summer. The yarn called for in the pattern is linen, but I hate knitting with linen, so I made it with Knitpicks Shine Sport which is a cotton/modal mix. I ended up really liking the yarn. It's nice and soft and washes well. The yarn is sport weight, but the dress is knitted on size 2 needles, which makes a really dense fabric which is good for a dress, but it took for-freaking-ever to knit.
I let M. pick the colors that she wanted for the dress. I tried to push M. towards a khaki color, the pale pink, and a deep burgandy for the accent, but she wanted the yellow, pink, and bright cherry colors. I was really skeptical about the choices when she picked them out, but I think they turned out awesome. My friend C. says they remind her of Starburst. I think she has a point.
The construction of this dress is really neat. You do a provisional cast-on across the top, knit the back down to the bottom of the armpits, pick up the provisional stitches at the top and knit the front down to the bottom of the armpits, and then connect the peices and knit in the round to the bottom of the skirt. The only thing that bothers me is that you put 6 rounds of garter stitch at the bottom of the skirt and it flips up at the bottom. I only made one modification. You are supposed to increase a bunch of stitches (I never could get the increases to work out right) on the third row of each color stripe on the skirt. By the time I got to the second to last stripe, I decided the skirt was flared enough, especially given how willowy M. is, so I didn't do any decreases on the last couple of color stripes. The skirt is still big enough to flare out when she spins around, so that is all M. needs to be happy.
Mosaic got in another shipment of Claudia Handpaints in the Hokies colorway shortly after I finished the pair of Hokies socks that I was making for myself. When M. found this out, she requested a pair of Hokie socks for her. I wanted to do something a little different than a basic ribbed sock, so I looked up the instructions for a spiral rib and did a spiral rib on the cuff.
After getting past the cuff of the first sock, I sort of wished that I had stuck with a basic rib. The spiral rib mixed the colors up oddly and without the spiral rib they were actually striping nicely. I asked M. what she thought and she said she was happy with how the cuff looked, so I left it as it was. Beyond the spiral rib cuff, this is just the basic sock pattern written by S. down at the knitting store, adjusted in size to fit a child's size 12-13 foot. I'm actually not terribly happy with how these turned out, but M. seemed very pleased with them, so that is all that matters.
The other project that I've finished up recently but didn't blog about at the time because it was such a small little thing was some to-go cup cozies for the administrative staff in my departmental office for administrative professionals day.
I had enough of the Hokie-ish colored Malabrigo left over to make each of the ladies in the office a cup cozy. Then all of us PhD students chipped in for Starbucks gift cards to go with them. We'll be giving them out tomorrow. Hopefully they like them (and drink coffee or at least tea or hot chocolate). As much as I love the Hokie colors, I think I've about OD'd on knitting with the Hokie colored yarn for this year. I still have three more skeins of the Claudia Hokies sock yarn from the last round, but it will have to hang out in my stash and wait for a while before I knit with it.
