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.

Les Miserables

This scarf is weird. I mean, I knew that when I started. You hand felt lace-weight yarn--of course it's going to look a little higgity in process. The stitches adjacent to the drops are always encroaching on the empty space and trying to grow by consuming that extra yarn no one seems to be using. The fabric is all crinkly because the yarn doesn't know how to behave at this gauge. It's all very odd.

I popped into a yarn shop on my way out of Puyallup this past weekend and the nice lady 1) complemented my bag (which Mrs. Penny Dreadfuls made for me, all those years ago. It still makes me very happy) and 2) wanted to know what I was knitting. So I pulled 2 feet of crinkled mess out of my purse and tried to show her. She made a face as if she was fruitlessly trying to comprehend the mess in front of her, and said something to the effect of, "I think I understand," in a tone of voice that said, "I have no idea what you're saying, but talking doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere, so let's just abandon ship and move on to the yarn which surrounds us."


And so we did just that and talked about how pretty Madeline Tosh is. (which it definitely is.)

Since then, I've put about a foot and a half onto the thing. It feels like it's slow going, but it's really not. I don't have enough yarn for the full 8 feet (nor the desire. Let's be absolutely clear about that. No one will ever receive a scarf that is 8 feet long unless >1.5 feet is made up of fringe.) I think I'll probably make it to 6, maybe even flirt with 7. This is because I'm using stash yarn left over from a Swallowtail. I've got about 1.5 hanks and the pattern definitely wants at least 2.

But I doubt I'll lose so much length during the felting process that it will somehow be unusable. I just need to stop measuring and knit the yarn that I have and call it a day. Right now I'm contemplating where I'm going to felt this...

Aftermath

Finishing Yggdrasil meant two things--1) I now had much more knitting time, and 2) I didn't want to knit heavy things for a while. This meant that Wakame needs to snooze for a bit longer because that thing is going to be quite a chore to lift once I divide for the sleeves (which, honestly, is quite a ways off, but even the thought of maneuvering something heavy is so off-putting that I can't bring myself to pick up the needles to get to that point).  Instead, I've been making some hats. I had promised my brother a hat back in October... for his birthday... in November... (oops) but I had picked a hat knit on size 1 needles with a gentle texture that you have to pay attention to knit properly.

And so that hat was taking forever. I finally sat down and did the math for the crown--I cut out a repeat and needed to rework the numbers for the set up round. Once hat decreases have been set, it's always smooth sailing, but getting things appropriately lined up when you're working with 156 stitches can be quite a pain.

Still, it's done and it looks nice. The pattern is Eliot's Ass-Kicking Hat (a reference to some tv show which I don't watch), and it does churn out a solid "man hat." I knit it in Bamboo and Ewe, which has since been rebranded as Truly for reasons which escape me. Perhaps it's because the bamboo has been spun into rayon, and so they felt they were being a bit mis-leading, but almost all bamboo that is spun to last more than 1 washing that I've encountered has been converted to rayon.  My major beef with this hat is that it looks like a machine made it. And I don't mean that in a "look how spectacular this is, I can hardly believe how even the work looks." No, it honestly looks like something you would purchase from a skating store for 15 bucks. Part of the joy of knitting is creating beautiful things that cause strangers to turn and ask "Where on earth did you get such a lovely 'X'," not "I bought one just like that at Zumiez last week."

My cousin also received a hat this weekend. He graduated from high school this past week and is continuing his education in much colder climes, so cold weather gear is in order. I may make him a scarf before he goes as well. The pattern is Knitty's Knotty but Nice and it's my go-to "man hat." It looks hand-made (unlike Eliot's hat, much to my chagrin after investing all that labor) and it's also well constructed and clever. I move the decreases 1 stitch to the right so that the flow of the ribbing isn't interrupted, but that's all I change when I make this. The yarn is Paton's Classic Wool, and it knits up quite nicely. It's a bit pricey for the yardage, especially considering I purchased it from a box store, but the color is quite nice.

I think I'll churn away at Les Miserables for the rest of the week and see if I can't finish that sometime soon. Hopefully my shoulders will feel up to tackling Wakame after that. I'm looking forward to the finished product on that one (hence perpetually bringing it up to remind myself that it's waiting for me).

Saying Goodbye to the World (Tree)

This weekend I did it. I sat down on Saturday for what must have been 14 hours and I knit the last side and a quarter of Yggdrasil. My shoulders are sore and my back's kind of angry at me. I thought maybe I could soak it in my green bucket, but it took a glance to realize that I was going to need to scrub the tub.

And it needed the whole tub.

I pinned it out after about an hour and a half (lanolin is tough stuff on the water-repelling front) and let it dry. Actually, first I had to move all our large furniture because the blanket is about 6 feet square. Less than 24 hours later, I'm snuggling in the world tree.

 If I block it again in the near future, I'll be a little less aggressive. It looks fine but it's a little... lofty?... for a blanket. So, what did I change, what did I do wrong (bahaha) and what's wrong in the pattern?

Well, in the leaf border, all the increases are m1s. I didn't want to interrupt the flow of the vine-y bits, so I used "lift 1" from the outside edge. The effect is really quite nice. I did use a m1 for all the purl increases.

There's a small-ish error in row 51 of the leaf braid corner chart--it's a miscrossed cable, but by this point you probably won't even see it since you've knit the darn leaf braid about 70 times. There's some weirdness back in the wide cable chart, but I don't remember what it was and I kind of threw away that sheet of paper because I was so happy to be finished with that section.

I screwed up the increases in the central panel... somehow... I'm still not really sure what went wrong even as I look at it. Probably a shift for 3 rows and just 3 rows or something crazy like that. It's the top left corner. So strange. A lot of folks have said that they hate the way the increases look. I don't really mind them, but if they really do annoy you there are a few solutions. Properly pairing right and left m1s (rather than using just m1 right) will get you a long way--it'll even out and thin down the line. During the field of reverse stockinette in the center panel, kfb would probably look just fine. And since I'm currently partial to lifting stitches, you could do that anywhere, but there would be some concern with holes .

So now I'm knitting a hat. A small hat on large needles. A quickly accomplished project for a recent graduate moving to colder climes. Then it's back to all those Works In Progress that have been anything but in progress. Maybe we'll finish Les Mis before we hang out with Wakame again, but I really can't say one way or the other.

I'm just happy to have the world tree off my needles and in my lap.