Recovering Anhinga

I was staring at my pile 'o balls 'o reclaimed wool yesterday and I decided to knit up a swatch. The good news was I got my expected gauge. The bad news was it looked like absolute dirt. It's very difficult to knit an even, wonk-free fabric when your yarn looks like a pile of ramen noodles. So any attempt to reuse this yarn would need to be either 1) something that was supposed to look grungy/textured or 2) a process which started with a long yarn bath.

I hadn't actually relaxed recycled yarn before--I should have on my Leitmotif cardigan, but that yarn was on its last legs and probably couldn't have taken the stress, plus the example sweater had some textured goodness to it as well. Also I am lazy. This whole thing would have been considered a learning experience if I had bothered to look up any resources, but, like most things I do in life, I figured I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing and if it blew up in my face I could always go look up the right way later.

This life philosophy has had mixed results.

So I got out my umbrella swift and set to work de-caking my three largest balls of salvaged wool. The result was, unsurprisingly, a pile of ramen noodles.

I have a theory that someday, somewhere, someone is going to try to market something like this as a very fetching cowl.

Albeit one with the propensity to snag everything.

From there, I gave it a good, long soak in some cold water. Wool is a fickle mistress, and with the way this yarn looked after I had frogged it (all frizzy), I didn't want to risk felting it to itself. That being said, I'm willing to bet warm water would have been a faster soak.

Pictured: Ramen Noodles

After it was completely saturated, I threw it over a hanger, stuck it in the shower, and then weighted it with a hoodie.

Turns out that hanks with greater circumference dry faster and decrimp better.

After that, it was just a waiting game. We don't have very good airflow in our new apartment and it's been hot and humid lately, so the drying process took a while.

It looks like totally different yarn. I am pleased.

This morning I took them down. They look just lovely. They aren't completely de-crimped, but the yarn is significantly more relaxed and I think it will work up a lot better thank its untreated brethren (which will get a bath later).

Before and After

I call it a success.
I have heard in the past that a steamy shower is usually enough to decrimp yarn, but I'm pretty well sold on this method. Also, it's so hot here that the idea of intentionally taking a steaming hot shower is repulsive.

Welcome to the frog pond

About 2 years ago, I bought enough yarn to make a sweater, and then I pawed around the LYS until I found the perfect pattern. I turned up a Norah Gaughan's Anhinga, which intrigued me with its asymmetrical panel, nifty structure, and the way my brain couldn't help but read it as Angina.Well, it was a bad decision for several reasons, including yarn choice and the fact that it's designed for a woman completely devoid of mammary tissue. The sweater looked awful on me.

But I had sewn it all together, even blocked it, and thought that it just needed to "relax" a bit to make it work.      2 years later, well, nothing magically got better, and since I'm not really in to owning clothing that I don't wear it was time to hit the frog pond.

(a note of clarification: the frog pond is so named because when you deconstruct something knitted, you rip it out, and if you rip it, rip it, rip it, well, you're a frog. It's a bad pun)

And so the sweater has been reduced to 10 balls of various sizes. I should probably wind them into hanks and relax out their ramen noodle shape, but my motivation is slim to none at the moment. I think it's destined to become a vest. I have ideas for a design, but again with the motivation.

Other than picking out miles of seams and ripping back yarn that's felted into itself, I've been making my second Aeolian. I made my first one years and years ago, and I loved it. It's like a piece of knitted jewelry. And then I snagged 3 rows along the edge, effectively breaking the yarn in 3 separate, nupp and decrease related spots. The result was an unfixable nightmare, complete with weeping and gnashing of teeth (less weeping than gnashing, though). I was pawing through my stash and grabbed some black laceweight left over from my Crown Prince Square--there's quite a bit of it. And then I remembered all of my silver beads, and I thought, "well, I have all of the materials. I might as well start this thing."

I prestrung my beads (a matter of personal preference--I feel that prestrung beads can sit on top of the knitting, but beads added individually are inside the work, as they cover a single stitch entirely. Also I don't own a crochet hook that small, and the idea of manually adding 850 seed beads makes me want to cry.), rewound my skein so as to evenly distribute them (success), and set to work. The little skein looks like stars, which is my hope for the shawl as well. Word to the wise, don't center pull from a beaded skein. You are unprepared for the knots that will result.

While knitting this, I have apparently become anal retentive for the first time in my life. ever. Normally when I make a mistake, I just correct it as best I can on the next row and move on.

Not so much this time. I have ripped back 8 rows twice trying to get this thing perfect. I think it's because the yarn is black, making the contrast between right and wrong more obvious, but it might just be that I'm growing as a person and actually care about my finished product instead of the process of making it. (however extremely unlikely that may be.) The practical upshot of ripping back work is my new found skill--post-hoc lifeline installation.

I have 10 more rows and a bind-off, but given the mathematical nature of triangle shawls and their area, I think I'll be done with this somewhere inside of a month.

...it's been a while...

Moving has this nasty habit of making me not want to do anything ever again. I attribute this to having handled all of my belongings twice (packing and unpacking) in a short period of time. Also the manual labor. That never helps.

As a result, I haven't really been knitting lately. Well, not only as a result of the moving. I'm also learning all sorts of things about university bureaucracy or why you shouldn't digitize your enrollment without testing the page on every browser. The last thing a future grad student wants to hear 2 months before she sells her soul to your department is, "oh, you're not actually enrolled here." Especially when that jeopardizes things like her stipend and that whole waived tuition thing.

Fortunately, my adviser (or the man who is probably my adviser, but we can't check since all of office management is on vacation through early September) is a competent, understanding individual and can call in favors so that I can actually attend school during the fall and not force my husband to drive 20 more miles to work for no real reason.

All is right with the academic world now. probably. I hope.

Also, it's been unrelentingly, blazingly hot here, and we don't even own a box fan let alone AC, so that really puts a cramp on the wool business.

So when I have been knitting instead of office hopping, it's been one of two things. The first is the hoarfrost moebius, which I freely admit I am making only as an excuse to use steel wool yarn. I don't really like the look of what I've got so far, and I'm not sure I'll like the finished product, but darn it, I've got two cones of the stuff and it's not going to knit itself. The fabric is really quite unique, and I love the drape or perhaps absence of drape it creates. Structure. The word I'm looking for is structure.

The second knitting project was a stash buster effort to not knit the hoarfrost moebius, and it's the honey cowl. It's a pretty quick knit, even in the largest size, though that may also be due to the yarn. I am deeply, madly in love with Arucania's Aysen. I love the colors, I love the fabric knitted up, I love the feel, I love the ply. This yarn can do no wrong for me, and the long slips in the honeycomb pattern let the beautiful dye job sing.

I was about 40 yards short, so I did some quick math and reduced the width to 9.5". This was a very, very good decision. I also worked a sewn bind-off to match my cast-on. They two are juxtaposed closely enough that I wanted them to be casually indistinguishable from one another.

Also, it's really hard to take good pictures of yourself wearing a winter cowl when it's >90 degrees in your apartment.

Knots and Thumbs

I'll be honest with you. I hate fiddly knitting. What is fiddly knitting? Well, I think it's probably a personal definition, but it's working in the round over only a few stitches on double points so that every 3 seconds you have to pause, rotate, and start again.

It's annoying. This probably explains why I have a bunch of thumb-less mittens and finger-less gloves in my box o' unfinished business.

Fortunately I'm in the process of moving, though, and so even fiddly knitting can pass as an activity which is "not packing." It also counts double because I want to stab myself in the eye while doing it. But somehow, every time I put it down to seek out better things, the allure of packing everything I own into boxes for the 3rd move in a little over a year seems so non-existent that I cannot help but pick the mittens back up again.

In other words, if you hate doing something, sign up for something you hate more and *snap* the chore's a game (at least I think that's what Mary Poppins told me.) And so, over the past few days I have finished two of three hand coverings.


The Druid Mittens finished first, but also slowest for 2 reasons: I insisted on working on them at night when light was low and I miscrossed a cable in the 2nd thumb and couldn't bring myself to pick back 3 rows of slippery, tear inducing yarn... in the dark... The yarn I used for these (Berroco Ultra Alpaca Fine) is not a nice yarn. I dislike it. I have purchased it twice out of ignorance. It will not happen again. It doesn't cling to itself very well, and once wound from a hank into a cake it devolves into a mess of knots involving the interaction of multiple layers of the cake (and not neighboring ones). We're talking colossal, brain bending, MENSA level knots that will leave you sitting on the floor for hours after telling your husband to take the scissors to the other end of the apartment.

The mittens themselves are alright. They're a bit short through the hand, but I can't really think of how to best remedy this. They also have this weird curve to them because of the slipped stitch palm--every other stitch is slipped every other row, creating a nice linen stitch pattern. This means that for 4 rows of pattern worked, each stitch on the palm is worked only 3 times and the palm itself is a full 1/4 shorter than the hand.

Still, a fun pattern--very intellectually stimulating. I think I'll give them to my sister, who has "the hands of an infant" in spite of her six foot frame. She's been asking for mittens for a while.

The second set I finished in about 3 hours--the Snapdragon Flip-tops. I had to knit the entirety of mitten #2 but the mitten body is only 56 rows. The cable chart is a bit confusing, but once you finish it, the rest of the mitt is smooth sailing. I am very much enamored with my button choice.

The yarn I chose was Queensland Leche and as that name indicates, it is spun in part from milk protein. I don't know if that actually effects the fiber very much, but it's nice to work with (except for the silk. I hate silk. It gives me the heeby-jeebies) and the stitch definition is lovely for something with as much of a halo as this has. 

All that's left is 2 fingers and a thumb on a pair of gloves. Also >40 ends associated with those fingers... hoo boy. This one may convince me to pack

Progress

I've been trying to get things done lately. I've finished everything which I've cast on in the past year (and desired to bring to completion. We'll include that exception since there have definitely been projects that were not meant to be.) This includes, of course, Wakame, which I finished on Tuesday much to my delight. This is the first pattern in a long, long time that has been error free and modification free, and that is enough to make me sing its well deserved praises.

Not that the finished product is anything to sniff at, either. I happen to think it's quite fetching.

I ended up blocking it like it was a synthetic yarn, even with the high bamboo-to-rayon content (I was a little worried the rayon would melt. It didn't). Gentle steaming evened out the cables, let the arms hang appropriately, and helped the lower lace hang like the bodice lace, even though they are moving perpendicular to each other.

So, it was time to go through my project bin. It took about an hour. Multiple moves had tied multiple knots in and between multiple skeins and the resulting web of stress was a bit of a headache to untangle. Once everything had been freed from its neighbor, I started sorting into piles--stuff that would be finished and stuff that would not. I also rewound several balls of wool, including some of the left-over fisherman's wool from Yggdrasil (I have plans for this. It would not be in the box of projects without a purpose.)

Upon evaluating the two piles, I discovered something very interesting about myself.

I knit a lot of single mittens and gloves. and by a lot, I mean there are probably 10 different hand warmers in various stages of completion. Most of them are going to take a trip to the frog pond, but three sets will be completed. The first, herringbone gloves, come from a pattern written entirely in Japanese that served as a lesson in reading charts written in other languages and a reminder that Google translate may not be helpful when it comes to technical jargon. They needs 3 fingers and a thumb on the left hand, and then about 10,000 ends woven in. The second set is a Jared Flood design called Green Autumn (or the Druid Mittens, depending on who you ask. like, say, the designer...). They need thumbs. Actually, they need one and a half thumbs, but they were put aside for reasons which became obvious the moment I pulled them from the box. The yarn had tied itself into knots involving at least 3 layers of the inside. It's bad. The third set is a pair of Snapdragon flip tops by Ysolda Teague. I need to knit the 2nd mitten.

The others are all too small, suffering from yarn deficiencies, ugly as sin when worn, or the result of bad decision making that combines any number of the aforementioned issues. There are even 3 different mits made from the same yarn as I was desperately trying to figure out how to make it play nice. There was also something weird in the box that I had forgotten about:

A Dale of Norway kit for a houndstooth bag which I inherited from another knitter's stash upon her passing. I have mixed feelings about this bag, and they really boil down to me thinking this bag is ugly, but having a kit with all the bells and whistles from Dale makes me want to finish it regardless. (Oh gosh... it's so ugly, though). I'll finish it like a good girl. I'm sure I can find someone who wants it, as it's clearly well engineered.

So the next few days are going to be all about the mittens.

Of Socks and Scarves

I have been productive this past week. It makes me happy. I finished my Longitudinal socks days ago. I love them. They match perfectly. I don't know if I'm going to keep them or if I'll send them off to my mother (who is the current owner of every pair of socks which I have ever knit. She wears them. I don't), but one of us will have toasty toes this winter. I highly recommend this pattern. It's a real kick to knit.

Once the socks were finished, I reached over next to me and grabbed Les Miserables. It was time to finish it. As it turns out, I had even less yarn than I previously thought (which isn't a huge surprise. I did make a shawl out of one of the hanks (Swallowtail, if you care) and so the second ball, which I thought would last for the better part of a week bare minimum, ended up lasting only a day and a half. This is the part where I pat myself on the back, because when I looked down at the tiny ball I thought," I don't have enough for a whole repeat. I'd better end it soon." The ending portion of the pattern is 18 rows.

I had 1 yard left when I cut my tail to close my bind off. I guessed right down to a yard. Crazy.

I pray for the day when I encounter a green yarn that doesn't bleed all over everything. Seriously.

From there, it was end weaving and hand felting. I'd never hand felted anything before, but I was pretty sure I knew what I was doing--hot water, agitate, cold water, agitate--and son of a gun I did. My sink looks like it was attacked by a green dog, but the felting process itself went quite well.

Half an hour later my scarf was 2 feet shorter and drying out on our porch as the sun set. I love it. It's gorgeous. The fabric looks a bit like a boucle, with little blebs of yarn poking through the felty mess. I'm going to have to wear it with a pin because it's a bit short, but I'm really glad I made this one.

In other news, I'm 2 repeats away from starting the body of Wakame, so hopefully there will be exciting pictures from now on on the sweater front. We're getting ready to move in not too long, so that may throw a hitch in the knitting productivity giggle, but I'm optimistic for the time being.

Sideways Socks

I started a pair of socks last night. To be honest, I had wanted to start them a while ago, but there were... afghans... in the way. I've had a skein of Kureyon sock yarn sitting in my stash for more than 2 years, waiting for a pattern that suited the long color drags. I picked out the pattern the moment it was published in Knitty--Longitudinal--and spent the next 2 weeks hunting for my 1's. Turns out that they were in my little brothers hat. So I had to finish the hat. And I did. But I had so much on my needles that I was uncomfortable with the prospect of starting something new.

Obviously that sentiment wore off, because I haven't finished anything but that hat (and the other hat). Les Miserables is sitting next to me, but I really really don't want to work on it right now. Wakame is still in the tub, waiting for me to pick it up again. There's this bunny rabbit on my book shelf with a tapestry needle through its nose, one ear attaches, and two limbs sitting next to it. I'm pretty sure that somewhere in my tub 'o projects is a pair of mittens that are complete save for their thumbs and I know there's a set of gloves that is missing 3 fingers.

Basically the last thing I should be doing right now is starting something new. So I need to finish this quickly. It can't go into the tub and languish until I deign to reach in and accidentally pull it from the depths. So I finished the first sock this morning. I grafted 90-ish stitches together and cast on the second sock shortly thereafter. But something nifty happened. Somehow.

I don't usually worry about matching self-striping yarn. This is because I am lazy and because I'm usually making things for myself. So when I started these guys, I thought to myself, "at least it's a pattern where matching socks isn't really the point." And so I cast on in yellow. And so I bound off in yellow. The socks, barring some knots disrupting the color scheme (NOOOOOROOOOO! How your knots anger me!) will match perfectly.

Accidentally perfectly.
Rock on.

It is also worth noting that I am incredibly bad at taking pictures of socks on my feet, so the likelihood that those will exist depends highly on sheer luck or my husband's yet undiscovered photography skills.