the future was wide open

As I near completion on Christmas 2011 gifts, I'm letting myself daydream about some upcoming knits.

This yarn is destined to be a celebratory wisp of a project, which I'm very much looking forward to knitting.
And I've got a design in my head for these beauties.... Here's hoping I can translate what's in my head to reality! I also need to come up with a plan for completing some long-lingering WIPs. (My current thought is that I may take a break from all Christmas knitting this year, and focus on long overdue years, but we'll see if I can stick to that plan.)

And, just in case you were longing for a shot of my poor continental knitting, here you go:

It's not a trick of the photo: those stitches really are that wonky. They're getting better as I go along, however, and I'm hopeful that they will all block out in the end.

What are your spring knitting plans?

leave me out with the waste

This is not what I do.

So far, I hate knitting continental. Anyone have any tricks to make me like it more?

It's supposed to be 70 degrees tomorrow and I've still got three (relatively wintery) Christmas gifts to finish. Two are almost done and then there's this one....

would this bother you?

Of the knits I'm currently working on, I've recently been most disciplined about a baby cardigan. I donated a custom baby sweater to the Public Interest auction at school last spring and was amazed at how high the bids went. (It might have helped that I had a handful of friends who needed baby gifts for newborn relatives and kept pushing the bidding...) I had a whole plan about how quickly I would knit the sweater, and, in consultation with the auction winner, picked out the yarn colors and the oh-so-popular Baby Surprise Jacket pattern.

And then. It turned out ugly. Really ugly. So ugly I didn't even bother with pictures before frogging it. So ugly that it disheartened me. So ugly that when the winner said, "Well, the baby won't need a sweater for a while" I took that to heart and shoved the yarn in a bag for six months. But the baby lives in New York, and the Northeast is getting darn close to sweater weather, so I decided at the beginning of the month that I couldn't ignore it any longer. Originally, I thought that I would reknit the BSJ, since I'm pretty sure that I learned enough from the uglyness to produce a cute one. But I then got nervous that I'd go through all that garter stitch and it would still be ugly, so I picked a pattern from the reliable Natural Knits for Baby and Moms and started in. (I'm hoping the auction recipient will be so happy to see a finished sweater that she will forget that it's not the BSJ.)

There are a few things about the pattern (ravelry link) that I don't get, however. One is why you'd use three-needle bind-off at the shoulder seams when you could kitchener. I just don't see why you'd want a really obvious shoulder seam since the cardigan isn't heavy enough to need a distinct seam. And aren't you supposed to strive for seamless in baby knits? So, thinking how smart and knitterly I was, I kitchener stitched to my heart's content and gazed upon the beautiful results of my grafting.

And then. Hmmm.... As you can see from the top picture, the pattern is four-row stripes of blue with alternating two-row stripes of brown and green. But, since I didn't think too hard before starting my kitchener stitch, the shoulder seam stripe is a three-row stripe of brown. (The top and bottom row were the live stitches that I grafted together and the middle row is the kitchener stitch row of grafting.) So the question is: how much should this bother me? On the one hand, when you look at it from the top, it's clearly wrong. On the other hand, when you look at it from the front or the back, doesn't it probably look better to have a little extra brown up at the shoulder's bend? So it might even be good that there are three rows of brown up there, right? Or is that just me rationalizing a silly mistake?
It probably wouldn't take me that long to fix, but I guess I'm a little tired of frogging this yarn. Yet I also feel like there's no point in rushing through a mistake, considering that I'm already embarrassingly late in producing this. (Also, I'm knitting the two-year-old size, so it won't fit the baby for at least another year, so there's no worry that it will outgrow the cardigan anytime soon.) What do you all think? Careless mistake or serendipidous solution?

Socks!!

Observe knitting and crocheting friends: socks!

I knit these with the help of Article Pract's Two-at-a-Time, Toe-Up, Magic Loop Sock class. It was quite fun, and I recommend knitting classes to others. It was actually really heartening to see how everyone in the class, which had a fair range of experience struggled and then succeeded in the making of these socks.


The basic sock pattern is really simple, and we knit them on number 5 needles. This makes a thick "housesock" more than something I would wear with shoes (exception: Chicago winter, with boots.) The really cool part, in addition to the basic sock knitting, was learning several other knitting skills that can be applied to lots of other projects.

Before I get to those those, I need to make a little bow towards the Addi Turbo Circular Needles. I’d always wondered before why people would mention what kind of needle they used for a project. Who cares about the brand I would think to myself. And now I understand. Dear Addi Turbo Needles, thank you for being awesome.

First off: Turkish Toe Cast On. I don't know what the history of this cast on is, though I enjoy imagining adventures in knitting in Istanbul. This blog has what looks like a good explanation, pictures and all. The other cool thing about using this method is that you don't have an edge or seam on the cast on edge. I actually used this a while ago to make a pouch that I hope to shrink to iPod size, though my felting attempt so far has not gone well.

Next, Magic Loop: This is ultimately a rather mysteries name for a fairly simple process. Effectively, this kind of knitting requires a long circular needle with good joins (see tribute to Addi Turbos at the top). Instead of using all of the length of the circular needle as is normally done, you cast on however many stitches you need for your glove or mitten or sock and then bend the cable and pull half the stitches onto one needle and leave the other half on the cable. Here's a video with a better visual instruction if you're interested.

Basically anything that would require double pointed needles can be fairly easily replaced with magic loop. I finished up my hat with magic loop when I had to decrease the number of stitches to a point where there were not enough to use the entire length of the circular needle but was too unwieldy to switch to double pointed needles.

I'm looking forward to knitting my next set of mittens or gloves with the two at a time method, so hopefully I'll remember to take some pictures when that time comes, but after the cast on, that method is fairly straight forward (though does require dealing with multiple balls or strands of yarn ala intarsia.)

I will note that I made the bind off a little tight and will have to pay attention to that in the future.

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.)

geeky but useful...

So I told EW about a blog I just came across and her enthusiasm suggested that others might enjoy as well. Beware, it has some great explanations but it's easy to get lost in way too much information. Don't start reading unless you're prepared to lose some time to it.

http://techknitting.blogspot.com/