hooked on lace

I'd never been that interested in knitting lace shawls until I saw this one (check out the picture at the bottom of the post). And, then, I pretty much had to have that shawl. I've grown quite fond of constantly wearing a huge scarf and I thought that I'd

like it even more if I made that huge scarf myself. And what is a shawl but a huge scarf? But I'm not crazy. I knew there was no way that I would finish that shawl and still graduate from law school. And, in my current state of sleep deprivation, anything that required me to look at a knitting chart regularly was just going to be painful rather than enjoyable. But then the same designer published this pattern, which looked to be easy to remember and soothing to knit. And then I fell hard in love with this yarn (top picture), which was all sold out, but I found a raveler who had bought it and wanted to resell it (crazy, as far as I'm concerned, but I wasn't going to question it) and I wanted that yarn enough to sign up for a paypal account and contract with someone who is clearly very fond of cats.

Preview

Beyond the compulsion to knit it, I don't really have much more to say about this project. The pattern was easy to remember and soothing to knit. I learned that I enjoy knitting lace shawls, to the point where I've committed to knit two wedding shawls this summer. I really adored the yarn and am so glad that I have quite a bit leftover to do something else with. (Even though it's really hard to capture the actual color of this yarn in photos; it's much more blue than it appears in these pictures.) The end product is so soft and shiny that I will feel guilty knitting those wedding shawls in any other yarn. I've added blocking wires to my graduation wish-list, since I couldn't block a straight lace edge with just pins to save my life. I will definitely reblock this once I do have blocking wires, but, for now, I don't mind the scalloped edge so much. (For those of you who don't want to follow all the links, this is the Gale Stole pattern by Anne Hanson, knit in The Plucky Knitter's Merino Silk Lace in the Bingley Wallpaper colorway.)

There are lots of different ways to wear this, depending on how elegant I'm feeling. Can you all guess which way I'm more likely to wear it?

some men do crochet

this is more of an amusing anecdote in between the impressive knitting being displayed on this blog.

Background:
about 9 am in the morning, sunny day, i'm sitting in my car in a very small park overlooking the water. there are about 5 other cars in the lot around me (guys fishing off the dock mostly). i'm working on the thing at the right, windows down. A guy parked next to me is walking back to his car after fishing.

Guy: (hispanic accent) You been in jail?
Me: (bewildered) huh.. no...
Guy: (points at crochet) oh cause they do that
Me: (not sure what to say) oh ok

as i told heb, at least this goes well towards my cover of not being the 5-0.

guy wasn't making it up either, there's a whole article about crochet in prison here (pdf).

at least it's too warm now anyway

After sharpening my seaming skills, I decided I wanted to finish this sweater before it was too warm to wear. The pattern is the Swirled Pentagon Pullover from Knitting Nature (same book as the droplets; many of its patterns are on my "to knit" list.) It's knit in Rowan Pure Wool Aran, a Christmas gift (which also included my mom allowing me to drag her around a lovely yarn store calculating yardage requirements and debating over colors for days on end).

Great pattern, great yarn, great. Right? I'd even thought that superwash wool was a big plus. In fact, it might have been, had I tried washing my swatch before starting. But, honestly, that seemed like a useless step. I'd knit the swatch. I'd gotten gauge. What else could the yarn want from me? Turns out that superwash wool grows by about a third after washing. So blocking left me with a sweater that had a ridiculously floppy collar and was about 7 inches too long and much, much too wide. (It's a pity I didn't have a working camera during this process. Although, I guess you all don't really need pictures of me crying over a lot of blue-green yarn.)

Luckily, Ravelry saved the day, by letting me know that this was totally normal and all I had to do was put the sweater into the dryer and check it every five minutes until it was back to size. (This is why everyone needs to sign up for Ravelry!) And, luckily, my laundry room has open outlets so I could bring my computer and work. This did get me a few choice comments, including one that suggested that the laundry room must be a great place to steal my neighbors' wireless. And it almost completely worked: I'm perfectly happy with the length and if the arms are a little too long, it will just encourage me to stretch.

But, you see, what that picture above doesn't show is the amount of fabric that's pinned behind my back. As Keren has pointed out, this is an important piece of information. So there it is: about 6 inches of extra width. It's not that big of a deal except when I sit down and then the fabric balloons all over the place and looks totally goofy.

Having knit other sweaters too large, I know my options: frog, seam or block? Clearly, blocking is not the way to go. And frogging seems like a darn shame. I think I have a seaming plan that will work, but I may also decide that I just won't sit down on the days I wear this sweater. Since spring is slowly coming to town, this seems like a plan that might work for the next six months or so.

Knitting in the Great State of Texas

Texas is generally a pretty warm place. Some might even say that it's too warm a place to bother with knitting.

But to those knitting naysayers, I respond: "Untrue!"

However if you need further proof of the true necessity for knitted things in a place where snow and hurricane, desert and swamp shade into one another across the miles, reference: my mother.

She knit this scarf for herself out of some lovely bulky alpaca yarn and found inspiration in Joan (of Arcadia's) long, long scarves. Go Mom!

These fingerless mittens (halfings, lessmitts, halfmitts) are based on knitty's Fetching. I knit a couple of pairs for my grandmother's last year and since then my mom has been constantly hoping and hinting for a pair of her own. I'd meant to finish them for Valentine's Day, but just barely managed to do it in time to leave them in Tejas on my last visit.

They're very simple, but even without the made up (and thus oddly shaped!) intarsia, they can be very lovely. The cabling is pretty, and depending on the yarn can be done all the way up instead of just on the cuff and fingers.

spring is bolero season

At least it is in New Haven, where the springlike temperatures are hovering in the high 30s. I started work on this last spring, finished knitting all the pieces and then left it for ages because I was too afraid of seaming. Luckily, I needed something to keep my shoulders warm at a friend's wedding, so I picked up my yarn needle and my courage.

Turns out, I didn't need to be afraid. With the knitty tutorial on seaming at my side, no sleeve could stand in my way. I'm not going to lie: I even enjoyed seaming. I think my hang-up in the past was that seaming took a long time and still looked bad. Now that it looks decent (even though it still takes a long time) and results in a finished product that I can wear, I love seaming!

The yarn is Rowan Scottish Tweed Aran, and if it's scratchier than I might like, it is definitely versatile: I wore the bolero to the wedding, and to Easter, and to class today. I knit the picot edging during an entertaining conference call with EW and CH, so I've told myself that my mistakes aren't super noticeable.

I was so inspired by learning to seam that I worked my way through the seams on another unfinished piece this past weekend. And then I learned about blocking superwash wool. Apparently, I'm not the first to learn this the hard way. (last two are ravelry links; sign up for an invite!) Full story to come.

(For those of you who think about such things, that picture is from EW's lovely house in Oakland. You should all be so lucky as to visit her.)

Knitting for Myself after Christmas

Since Christmas, I've been knitting for myself. I've finished two sweaters and my first pair of socks.


I started the socks rights after Christmas and quickly finished one, and then took a break while I knit a sweater. That was probably a mistake because the second sock is much tighter knit so they don't fit the same. I have a book about using two long flexible double pointed needles instead of a set of five double pointed needles so that you knit both socks at the same time to prevent this problem. Maybe I'll try that next time. I usually wear thinner socks, so I'm not sure about handknit socks in any case, but it was fun to try, and they work well with clogs. It was self striping yarn, so the stripes aren't as impressive to knit as they look.


Next, I hurried to knit a winter sweater before the weather got too warm to wear it, but I needn't have worried! I had plenty of opportunities. This was a very expensive yarn and I had some worries that the lace pattern I picked didn't really maximize it's potential, but I am pretty happy with the finished product. The yarn had two strands, one mohair and the other a loopy synthetic strand that was a little shiny. Very dramatic!

Finally I knit a sweater to wear for Easter. The yarn is 55% cotton/45% silk - very soft. I actually knit the sample guage square twice to make sure the size would be right since fit seemed important. I was glad I did and I'm very happy with this sweater.

I've knit so much I have a pain in my right elbow. I may have to take a break! I have more projects lined up but haven't decided what to tackle next.

posting to procrastinate

In need of a baby gift, and a project that I could knit while reading, I designed a simple baby blanket. I had some Blue Skies Alpaca Blue Sky Cotton in a lovely blue and I thought that I'd knit up some stockinette squares and then attach them with a contrasting color. Nine squares, probably about 8 inches square each. With an i-cord border. Maybe in another color. And I'd add a seed-stitch star to the central square to make it a little more special. Simple, right?

Problem #1: Does this really look like a star?

I wasn't so sure it was appealing enough to be the one highlight in an otherwise plain blanket. So the solution, of course, was to make more squares with star patterns. And maybe some hearts too. Though potentially ugly individually, they had to be cute en masse, right? The problem with this plan is that I couldn't really knit the patterned sqaures while reading, so knitting five of them instead of one was a big time-suck.

Problem #2: By the time I got to the end of my first skein of blue yarn, I'd only finished 4 squares. Obvious that I would not get the remaining 5 out of the other skein, I had to reassess. I decided that I could make the squares shorter by 4 rows without hurting the aesthetic of the baby blanket too much. Add to that the smidge of yarn that was leftover from the first skein and I should be able to squeek out nine squares, right? Wrong. I neglected to add to my calculations the fact that the seed-stitched squares would take up more yarn than the stockinette ones. So instead of picking up the orange stitches from the bound off edges of the blue squares, I tore out the bind-offs and started knitting in orange (as if the bind-offs were functioning as stitch holders). Salvaging the yarn from the bind-offs got me to the end of that ninth square, but you can see the final square and count how many times I added a new piece of yarn:

Problem #3: Blue yarn wasn't the only limiting factor. I decided a green i-Cord edging would be pretty and luckily I had some of the same yarn leftover from another project in a nice bright green. Unluckily, I had enough of the green to edge three and one-third sides, and no more. Here you can sort of see where I started the new skein of green, on the fourth side of the blanket:

So, after all the effort to resist buying an extra skein of blue, I had to buy an extra skein of green. (Yes, I did have plenty of orange left for the edging. So I considered tearing out the green and redoing it in orange. But, basically, being lazy won out over being frugal. This was the project where I'd cursed myself for not just buying an extra skein of blue, after all.)

I also learned a lot about steam blocking so that the squidgy shape you see in the prior picture now reasonably resembles a square. But this post is long enough already, so I'll save all those lessons for some other time.