Round One March 31, 2009

I started creating PDFs of all my patterns a few months ago.  If you’re on Ravelry, you might have seen that you can download the PDFs from the pattern pages.  But apparently I never put the PDFs on the blog!  I’m not sure how that slipped my mind.  It might be because my mind is slowly becoming a jelly-like substance that things only occasionally stick to.  I don’t have all the patterns completed yet, but here is Round One, freshly uploaded onto the WordPress servers.

 

Albuquerque Gloves

Cruiser

Snowflake Fingerless Gloves

Arthurian Anklets

Crystalline Socks

Danube Socks

Socks, circa 2008

Emily’s Scarf

Fireflake Hat

Felted Mousie

 

The link to download the PDF is located just under the pattern title and just above the pattern information, like this:

 

 

Patterns not yet PDFed:

WRX

Shenandoah Socks

Grand Tetons Socks

Purling tbl March 25, 2009

I thought I had made an awesome discovery about short row heels.  Turns out I haven’t.  Or maybe I have, but I can’t duplicate the results, so in the end it’s the same thing.  Very disappointing, since I spent the last two hours trying to unvent my own “mistake” and failing miserably.  So instead of an awesome short row heel tutorial, I’m going to put up something certainly less interesting and probably less useful.

 

Purling through the back loop is a lost skill, I think.  Rarely, if ever, does a pattern request that you purl through the back loop.  The only ones I’ve found, really, have been twisted stitch patterns that are worked flat, like the heel flap of my Socks (circa 2008,) where the twisted purl stitch on the wrong side shows as a twisted knit stitch on the right side.  Purling through the back loop is also useful for the occasional unintended twisted purl stitch, like the ones I always get when I have to rip out and then put ribbing back on my needles.  Instead of having to move the stitch to untwist it, I can just purl it through the back loop.  It’s a small time-saver, but I like it.

 

Go behind the stitch with the right needle and insert the needle into the stitch from the back.

Wrap the yarn as usual and pull through the stitch.

 

Easy as pie!  Mmm, pie…

Bio Hazard March 20, 2009

I have to write a thirty-word bio for a submission.  It doesn’t seem that hard, right?  Then why has it taken me all day?!  I dare you to try it.  Summarize yourself in approximately thirty words.  It’s hard.  What makes the cut?  It’s for a knitting publication- do you include that you enjoy other crafts?  Do you mention your family or pets?  Should your bio be humorous or serious?  Oh, the decisions!

 

Yeah, I’m obsessing just a little.  I’m also using this post to procrastinate writing the bio.    I hate writing bios.  You can see that the bio on this site is rather… dull and formulaic.  I’ll have to fix that some day.  I wonder if there’s a “Bio-Writing for Dummies” book.  There seems to be one for every other subject, after all.

 

In other news, I’m really looking forward to the Sock Summit in August. 

 

And by “really looking forward to,” I actually mean chomping-at-the-bit, counting-down-the-days, want-it-to-be-right-now, let-me-at-it!  It looks like it’s going to be incredible.  The Summit is being organized by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (the Yarn Harlot) and Tina Newton (the owner of Blue Moon Fiber Arts.)  That, in and of itself, was enough to send me through the roof.  I didn’t need  any more information to start obsessing about it.  I had it on my calendar and stared at the dates lovingly.  The fact that this conference is taking place in Portland, which is only a few short hours from here, only increased my love of the event.

 

And then.  THEN.  They posted the teacher list and I think I stopped breathing.  Check this out:

Cookie A!

Cat Bordhi!

Nancy Bush!

Priscilla Gibson-Roberts!

Amy R Singer!

Barbara Walker!

The whole list of teachers is much longer.  These are just some of my favorites.  I mean, all of these people are my heroes.  These are giants of knitting.  And I’m going to go take classes from them! Talk to them… if I get up the courage and don’t stammer out something fawning and unintelligent.  It’s just as likely that I will fall on my face or accidentally stab myself with a DPN as it is that I’ll utter a complete sentence around these people.  I’m horribly shy.  When that shyness is coupled with my feeling that I’m still a novice in relation to these masters, well.  I might not speak all weekend!

 

Let me know if you’re thinking of attending the Sock Summit- only you can make sure that I speak at least once in the three days!

Bamboo Socks March 18, 2009

Apparently writing this post is less interesting than taking silly Facebook quizes today.  I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook (seems I’m even an introvert online,) but I happened to be there and there was this silly quiz… which led to another silly quiz… Apparently I’d be happiest living in Seattle (which I am) and the animal I’m most like is a mongoose.  Maybe I should make a silly knitting quiz; you know, are you a circ or a DPN?  Which fiber are you most like?  How does your IQ compare to a sheep’s?  Things like that.  Although I think I know all the results to the last quiz there.

 

It’s been gray and rainy today so I couldn’t go outside to take pictures of the Orencia socks.  I really have to come up with a better name for them; I don’t want them going through their whole lives thinking they have rheumatoid arthritis.  But I did take some pictures in my lightbox, so here they are.

 

  

 

 

The socks have a lace front and a stockinette back.  I originally knit (all the way down to the heel flap!) the sock with the lace design on both the front and the back, but the sock turned out huge!  I had to rip the whole thing out.  Painful, and I almost gave up on the design.  It’s rare for me to have a design element that makes the sock too large or stretchy.  Since I normally gravitate towards cables or colorwork, I often have the opposite problem- I can’t use the design I want because the sock won’t fit over a normal human ankle.  I knew that lace is stretchier than cables or even stockinette, but the swatch did nothing to prepare me for how baggy that sock was!  Just another example of a lying, evil swatch trying to cause mental instability in a knitter.

 

 

The yarn is Five Oaks Ranch Bamboo (80% bamboo, 20% wool) from Argosy Luxury Fibers in Sage.  The lace pattern is simple and easy to memorize, making it a nice, quick knit spring sock, even though it doesn’t seem like spring is coming any time soon.  I think they turned out very close to the original inspiration.  You can see why I wanted to knit them in a cute pink or yellow, but I think the ice blue lends them an air of elegance.  I should have the pattern written up and ready to go in a few days, now that I don’t have any travel plans to mess up my schedule.

Cardigan Update March 16, 2009

I was going to post some pictures of the Orencia socks that I had made such a big deal of before.  I finished them on my trip to Virginia.  But as I set the photo-shoot up, I realized that they really needed to be blocked.  I don’t normally block socks, as they don’t really need much encouragement to look sock-shaped.  But these socks are mostly lace and lace really shines after it’s been blocked.  At least, I hope so.  They looked a little shabby sitting there all wet and pinned down.  I hope they recover!  Anyway, I can’t take pictures of them while they’re in that state.  That just wouldn’t be fair to them.

 

So instead, I’ll give you an update on my cardigan.  You know, the one that’s given me so much trouble so far?

 

Now, I’ve dragged this thing all around the country.  I took it to New Mexico, figuring that it was a good car project.  Well, it was far too warm to be working on a wool sweater.  I think I knit one row in the car. 

 

I took this sweater to Virginia.  It stayed in the suitcase the entire time.  Didn’t even look at it.  Honestly, didn’t even think about it.

 

But I finally took it out and worked on it this weekend.  I finally finished the cabling around the bottom and I even have about seven rows of stockinette done.

Of course, being the evil, evil project that it is, it punished me for my neglect.  Having such nice cabling along the bottom means that I had to cast on more stitches for the bottom than I will need for the rest of the body, since cables cause the fabric to contract.  Easy, I thought, I’ll just add an extra repeat in the cable and then decrease the stitches out when I’m done.

 

Well, that’s perfectly fine if you work on the project continuously and remember to decrease the sixteen stitches before knitting six more rows of almost three hundred stitches each!  I decided not to rip back, as that would just have been too painful.  So I dropped certain stitches and reknit them with decreases.  This left me with some unsightly tension issues which I then had to tease back into place.  It likely would have been faster to rip and reknit.  But I’m stubborn and I did it the drop-and-reknit way.

 

The decreases did finally all get into place, although I am making no claims to them being “evenly spaced.”  In the picture above, you can see the five stitches that will form the steek for the zipper- or the nice stockinette stripe up the front if I chicken out on the steek.  It has cables running up either side, which are the only bit of interest in the body anymore. 

 

It remains to be seen if I’ll go insane before I reach the underarms, but if I do it’ll be a toss up between the boredom or the cantankerous nature of this sweater.