Chainmaille Pt 2 July 29, 2009

This post is way overdue.  I’ll blame the laundry.  I can’t blame the brutal heat wave, since I have air conditioning.  I’ve been dealing with some crappy stuff (not just laundry) but now I have drugs to help so hopefully the blog will go back to having entries on a regular schedule. 

 

Last year at this time I was teaching some chainmaille classes at a local Girl Scout camp.  This year, I’ve passed my classes on to a good friend.  She’s using my handouts, though, so it finally forced me to put them all in PDF form.  Which means that now you get to see them too!

 

Today’s chainmaille lesson is the classic chainmaille weave: European 4-in-1.  This was the weave used in actual chainmaille armor.  It makes beautiful, supple jewelry.  This weave has great drape, which make it perfect for earrings.

 

    

 

I’m going to quote what I wrote last year about chainmaille and there’s some more weave-specific information in the PDF:

To make chainmaille, you need two pairs of piers. Most chainmaillers use needle nose or chain nose, but I like to use a pair of bent nose pliers and a pair of flat nose pliers. Pliers without teeth are best if you’re going to be making silver or gold jewelry (the bracelets above are made with silver). You’ll hold a pair in each hand, using them to open and close jump rings by twisting them towards and away from you. (Never pull jump rings from side to side! It’ll weaken the metal and mess up the shape of the ring.)

The jump rings can be made by hand by wrapping wire around a dowel to get a coil, then cutting the coil with snips or a jeweler’s saw to get individual rings. Or, my favorite method, save yourself the hassle and let a machine do all that coiling and cutting for you! Trust me, it takes forever to get enough rings for a large project like a necklace. Some of my favorite jump ring suppliers are the Ring Lord (great prices and variety, but terrible shipping time) and Spiderchain, a very talented chainmaille artist and of course, there are many suppliers on Etsy.

Chainmaille rings are “named” using the gauge of the wire used and the diameter of the dowel used to make the rings. For example, if I were to wrap a 20ga wire around a 1/8″ dowel rod, I would have a 20ga 1/8″ ring. Some ring sizes are better than others for certain weaves, like suggested needle sizes for knitting. You don’t want to knit fingering weight with size 7 needles (most of the time) and you don’t want to make a Byzantine weave with 18ga 1/8″ rings. Unlike knitting, though, where you can still knit with non-recommended needles, if you have a ring that is too small the weave will just not work. You just won’t be able to fit all the rings together. Most weaves have an “aspect ratio” that works best. The aspect ratio of a ring is the mm or inch measurement of the ring’s inner diameter (the space inside the ring) divided by the width of the wire (the mm or inch measurement, not the gauge). This is a great article about the effect of aspect ratio (or AR) on chainmaille: Aspect Ratio on Maille Artisans.

Download the tutorial here: European 4-in1 (PDF)

 

For the adventurous, these items all use the European 4-in-1 weave with some simple adjustments.  Have fun!

      

Knitdar July 17, 2009

I’ll admit it.  I’m a pretty big Harry Potter fan.  No, I don’t have any wizard memorabilia or costumes and I don’t listen to wizard rock.  But I have read the books once (…or thrice) and I enjoy the movies.  I’m not ashamed.  The series hits all of my buttons… well-written, good characters, thoroughly developed world, and completely over the top magic.

 

We went to see the latest movie (which was fun) and I got distracted by this hat:

 

 

Pretty pretty hat!  In the back of my mind I was deconstructing that hat, even as [important plot elements] were going on.  Luckily, they showed a lot of that hat!  Sadly, the same cannot be said of the matching gloves Hermione was wearing or the Fair Isle scarf.  An industrious knitter has already written a pattern for this hat at JL Yarnworks. 

 

The top decreases are really beautiful (there’s a picture on Ravelry,) but personally, I’d go a different way.  The original hat was not quite a beanie.  It had little “ears” sticking off the sides, as if the hat had been knitted in a tube, decreased slightly, and then grafted together to form a rectangle instead of a dome.  Just my two cents.

 

Even though I’ve been knitting straight for almost three years now, I never noticed knitwear in the movies much before.  Now I can’t help it!  I was watching some old episodes of How I Met Your Mother and my eyes were glued to a chunky Aran vest.  It’s a good thing that character changed or I might not have paid any attention to the rest of the episode!  Well, it’s not that bad.  But it’s like I’ve got a “knitdar;” my eye is unnaturally attracted to Hollywood knitwear.

 

Knitdar: Be careful, it could happen to you!

Must… Knit… July 14, 2009

Today I’m knitting.  Besides a little laundry on the side, all I’m doing is knitting.  I have to see if the chart I finished yesterday actually looks good in sock form.

 

That’s all I have to say.  Maybe I’ll surface in a few more days to write a real post when this knitting frenzy has past.  If it passes…

Intarsia Multi-Directional Scarf July 10, 2009

It took me forever to write up this tutorial.  It’s kind of hard to explain, but once you get the hang of it, it seems really simple.  This scarf looks great in handpainted yarns, but if you want solid colors this is a great way to go.  So, I hope that I’ve written the instructions clear enough so that you can experiment on your own.  It will be helpful to have a read the directions of the Multi-Directional scarf, since I haven’t rewritten the instructions, just made them confusing! 

 

The Multi-Directional Scarf is basically made of triangles that are formed with short rows.  The triangles start at the bottom as essentially one stitch and increase from there, with a decrease eating up the stitches from the previous triangle.  A typical multidirectional scarf looks like this, with the arrows showing the direction of the knitting:

 

To knit the scarf with intarsia blocks, the essential construction is the same except that at a certain point in the triangle, a new color is added.  This is done by adding the new color at the beginning of the row as part of the increase instructions.  The old color becomes a stripe and the new color is a little triangle inside the overall bigger triangle.  The color changes are the dotted lines on the line drawing.

  

 

Start the Multi-Directional scarf according to the directions with your first color.  When you’re sick of that color and before you reach the desired width, change to the next color.  At the beginning of a row, work the increase with the new color.  Bring the old color’s working yarn up from under the new color (to prevent holes) and continue the row with the old color.  The side that has the yarn wrap showing is now the WS.  On the next row, work the old color until you reach the new color; bring the new yarn up from under the old yarn on the WS (you’ll have to bring the working yarn to the front to do this on alternate rows) and work the remaining stitches with the new yarn.  Continue this way until your triangle is as wide as you want.

  

Wrong side:

Right side:

 

Now, you’ve got your base triangle.  Mine looks all wrong because I forgot to increase every row.  But the principle is the same!

Main Triangles

Choose a new color.  This is the stripe part of the larger triangle.  It won’t look like a stripe yet, because of the short rows.  The key is to add the new color when the side of the triangle is as tall as you’d like the stripe.  It can be as short as two rows or as tall as twenty-five, it’s up to you.  Work the instructions in this color until the side is as tall as you’d like, then make the next set of increases in a new color.  Bring the old yarn up from under the new on the WS to prevent holes and continue the row (including decrease) in the old yarn.  Work back with the old yarn until the first stitch of the new yarn, bring the new yarn up from under the old on the WS and continue the row.  Work this way until the triangle is completed.

If you want, you can use more than two colors per triangle.  It can get a little dicey, because every new color in a triangle means another ball of yarn hanging from the back, but if you can handle the tangle, go right ahead!  The principle is the same, work the increases in the new color and switch yarns as you reach them.

 

Just remember to always twist your yarns on the same side of the scarf for neatness.  And good luck weaving in all those ends… that was not fun!

Birthday Yarn July 5, 2009

Ever have one of those weeks that seemed to be very busy, but at the end of it you haven’t actually completed much?  Yeah.  I did get a few things done, including a project for Knotions that had been hanging over my head for a long time.  And I ordered my Sock Summit souvenirs, which was fun.  But I didn’t write any of the blog posts or take pictures for a tutorial I’ve had planned for a while…  Where did the time go?

 

It was also my birthday last week.  My in-laws have started a great tradition where they take me to a yarn store.  Need more be said?  It’s probably my favorite part of my birthday!  This year we visited CDA Yarn and Fiber while we were in Coeur d’Alene. 

 

 

So, here’s the haul!

 

 

First up, Handmaiden Casbah.  This yarn is so yummy.  I was first drawn to the deep saturated colors, but the fiber content really sealed the deal.  Merino, cashmere, nylon.  This is a sock yarn, but I’m pretty sure it’s not destined to be a pair of socks.  It’s too pretty to be covered by shoes.  I have no idea what it’ll be instead though. 

 

 

 

 

Malabrigo!  I’d actually never run across Malabrigo sock at a yarn store before and it was love at first sight.  Like the Casbah, the color was the first thing that caught my eye.  This skein is a gorgeous blue with that classic wool shimmer.  It’s got subtle color changes from dark blue to very light.  I love it.  It’s so soft.  I got two skeins, one in Persia and one in Archangel, which is a strangely fascinating colorway.  It’s hard to describe and I don’t think the picture really captures it.  It’s lilac and pink but not pink and gold/green… Crazy.  I can’t wait to see how it knits up.

  

 

 

Speaking of Malabrigo, my brother-in-law bought me this squooshy skein of Malabrigo Chunky.  He has pretty good taste in yarn for a non-fiber-addict. He got me some Misti Alpaca lace-weight last winter.  He said that he looks for yarn that he would want to wear, something soft and cuddly.  Can that criteria ever steer you wrong?  After all, the number one cause of unexpected yarn purchases is the inability to put a skein down after picking it up “just to feel.”  He chooses colors that he likes which rounds out my stash nicely.  This isn’t a colorway that I would have picked for myself even though I really like the colors.  But my stash has a distinct lack of red and gold no longer!

 

 

I got one other thing from this shopping spree which is really neat, but I’m not going to post it yet.  I have my reasons, don’t think I don’t!  Stop judging me!