Hats off to KDO

Wow, it’s already September!  That means Knitters’ Day Out is almost here again.  One week from today, I’ll be taking a class from Candace Eisner Strick called Strick-ly socks.  Here’s the description:

Learn Candace’s revolutionary and simple new method. The toes and heels are worked flat, yet there are no seams. Sounds impossible? Yes, but so easy you will be amazed. Beginners and sock-veterans alike will be enthralled. And you can convert any existing sock pattern to this simple method. Once you have learned the incredible Strick-ly Socks toe, go one step further to customize your sock with an array of gusset and heel options to fit any foot ever invented! End your sock with wonderful stretchy bind off for K1, P1 rib, even if you like to use k2, p2 rib.

Supplies: Light colored SMOOTH wool yarn of dk weight or heavier and appropriately sized set of 4 double pointed needles. (Note: If you know how to do 2 circulars, or 40” circular for magic loop you may use this method, but it will not be taught in class), a few yards of smooth cotton yarn 

Homework:  With light colored, smooth wool yarn of dk weight or heavier, cast on 30 sts and work in K2, P2 ribbing for about 1 inch. NOTE: this homework is worked flat. Leave sts on needles with the yarn attached.

As usual, the KDO registration fee includes bringing a handknit hat to donate to Caps for Kids.  There is always a contest for best hat, which I’ve never entered.  But last year, they started a new category: best hat made using a technique learned in a KDO class.  I decided to dust off my Estonian patent stitch technique, which I learned from Merike Saarniit at KDO 2009.  So I’ve started this:I didn’t have anything in stash that was quite right for this (mostly because my worsted weight yarn isn’t superwash, and I hold that charity hats should be machine washable), so I acquired (thanks, Kris!) some Knit Picks Swish in colors Squirrel Heather and Lava Heather.  I’m in love with these colors. This patent stitch technique makes a double thick fabric that is super squishy and totally reversible.  Mmmmmm….

Hope you’re getting some extra knitting time in this weekend.  (It doesn’t happen to be a long weekend for those of us who work in the private higher ed sector, but I’m being greedy and taking more than my usual knitting time today – I just started this hat last night!)

Baby Boy BSJ

While out of town, I managed to knit another BSJ out of a more boyish colorway.  This is Knit Picks Felici Sport yarn in color “Ecology,” from which I already have a pair of socks.  Doesn’t the resulting fabric look different? The baby jacket has a tweedier effect, I think.  Just as before, I used slightly over 2 balls of Felici.  The buttons are understated, but not quite as neutral as the ones I used on the Neapolitan version: Also note how that diagonal line looks.  I used a different increase technique on this BSJ –for the double increase, I did LRinc – Knit – LLinc (LRinc = Cat Bordhi’s Leaning Right increase and LLinc is obviously the Leaning Left increase).

For the girlish version, I used the double increase specified by Elizabeth Zimmermann: Slip 1, K2tog, PSSO. The diagonal line looks very different, see?I can’t decide which one I prefer.

In other knitting news, I’m almost done with Boy 1’s soon-to-be-electrified socks – I should be able to share those in the next day or two.  And I popped into three LYSs in North Carolina.  I only bought one skein of yarn, though – this lovely Bearfoot from Mountain Colors.This colorway is called Thunderstorm, and it is mostly a deep purple with bits of greyish teal and olive green.  Very moody.  I’ve knit with Bearfoot twice before and really like it.  In fact, the very first pair of socks I made for myself was out of Bearfoot.  They are lovely socks, though a bit large (because I was knitting on – gasp! – size TWO needles then).  This yarn makes EXTREMELY warm socks – it is a 3-ply composed of 60% superwash wool, 25% mohair, and 15% nylon.  I wear my pair in the deepest days of winter, over another pair of thin cotton socks (because the handknit socks are roomy).  I don’t see Bearfoot in shops that often, so I didn’t think too long before deciding to purchase it.  Mmmm, take a closer look: Next: I want to whip up a quick hat to take to Sock Summit for Eloise’s baby shower.  Will dive into stash for that…

Baby Girl BSJ

I was done knitting this weeks ago, but I finally seamed the top of the arms and found some buttons.  All done!The buttons are kind of light brown and cream, like chocolate and vanilla ice cream swirled together – a perfect match for a yarn called Neapolitan.  Because the stripes are fairly bold, I didn’t want buttons that would compete with them.  Lord knows there are plenty of cutesy kid buttons on the market – little bugs, butterflies, legos, etc – in every shade of pink imaginable.  None looked right.  I’m happy with this subtler choice!

Just a reminder – this was knit with Knit Picks Felici Sport (on a US 4 needle) and it took me slightly over 2 balls to do it.  So if you buy yarn for this, buy 3 balls!  I’m going to make another one using my Ecology colorway.  I only have 2 fresh balls, but since I’ve already made a pair of socks out of it, I have some leftovers that should be enough to finish the project.

Circle game

You haven’t seen these yet… they are Circle Socks (free pattern!) and they are for Boy 1: This honeycomb pattern is pretty neat.  Look at all the versions on Ravelry – many people use a single, multi-colored yarn throughout (there are some beautiful versions with Felici), but some use two yarns, as I am doing here.  The solid yarn which frames the circles is Knit Picks Stroll in Midnight Heather – it is a very deep blue that looks black unless you’re in good light.  The multi is Knit Picks Stroll Hand Painted in the colorway “Lullaby.”

This pattern looks far more complicated than it is.  You never use more than one color on any round (thank goodness, stranded colorwork does not seem to be my thing!).  The magic is achieved by using slipped stitches to the extreme. I’ve just started the heel flap – it and the entire foot of the sock will be in the solid yarn.

These socks are my homework for the Sock Summit class Twinkle Toes.  Boy 1 thought it would be be neat to have blue lights on his socks that look like stars in the night sky.  He also wanted a busy yarn.  We spent some time on Ravelry and came up with this pattern as a compromise.  Some blue lights can go in the little circles.  You’ll have to stay tuned to see how that works out!

Scrambled Eggs with Waffles (sock version)

Back before the Felici obsession took over again, I started a simple office sock.  I’ve been enjoying my Yum Yum Waffle socks this winter, so I decided to make another pair.  Here are mine: This stitch pattern has such well-defined texture:

I grabbed this from stash – it’s Knit Picks Stroll Tonal in color Golden Glow:

These are for S1.  She commented that the variation in shades of yellow looks just like scrambled eggs – so these are Scrambled Eggs with Waffles socks.  First one is done:This is the second pair I’ve knit with Stroll Tonal and I really like this yarn.  The first pair has been worn a lot this winter, and it’s holding up very well.  I don’t adore a lot of the colors in this line – most of it is dayglo little girl bright - but I’m thinking about stashing some Kindling.

FO: Pile-able Pups

The pups are done!  I like them way better now that they’re finished.  The cuteness factor grows exponentially in the final minutes of knitting.I used the tutorials on the Mochimochi Land website to sew on the arms and legs at an angle.  Look how perky those tails are: I bought two 50 gram balls of each color yarn, and I needed both – but not much of the second ball.  I got the entire body plus 2 legs out of the first ball.  So if you have more than one but less than two balls, you might have enough.

By the way, this is Knit Picks Wool of the Andes in Avocado, Papaya Heather, and Chestnut. 

I’ll incorporate the leftovers in my Fabulous Fair Isle Felted Fun Bag, which has grown a bit since this last photo.  I’ll share it again soon!

FO: Orange Pumpkin Socks

After struggling with a couple of other projects, I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to finish something that I LIKE and that FITS! There are S1’s new fall socks for Fall 2010.  The yarn is Knit Picks Stroll Tonal in colorway “Foliage,” which is aptly named.  I love this yarn.  The 75% superwash merino/25% nylon blend should wear very well.  It has at least 8 distinctly recognizable colors in it, but they work together harmoniously and don’t pool.

I worked out the ribbing on the cuff so that it flows into the cable pattern well – that pleases me.I really had to focus on the cable pattern at first, but once I figured out the errata and remembered how to cable without a cable needle, these were straightforward enough to knit at the office (which is where they mostly were knit).

I tried a new heel flap this time: the eye of partridge.  I love it!  It creates a super strong fabric that isn’t as thick and puffy as my regular slip stitch heel flap. I had to modify the way I do my “pre-darning” on the inside of the heel, but it worked fine to weave in a strand of yarn diagonally.  I think you can see what’s going on here:I didn’t skimp on these socks (the legs are a good 7.5” long), but I have a lot of yarn left – 23 g.  If you’re knitting really big socks, this may be the yarn for you!  I think the Kindling colorway would be perfect for a pair of men’s socks.  And you sure can’t beat the price at $9.99/hank (that’s for the whole 100 g).

Next, my boys both need new socks for fall… those will be my next office knitting projects.  They should go MUCH more quickly than the orange socks.

Ack!

This sock just wasn’t looking like the picture in the book.  I kept going a bit, thinking that it might be a few repeats until the cable pattern would really begin to show.  But no.  This is supposed to be a cable braid and it doesn’t look braid-y at all. I stared at it pretty hard during my morning meeting and decided it looked too stretched out.  It might look more braid-y if I made this an 8-round repeat rather than a 12-round repeat.  I started that pattern (seen here at the very top) and decided I was right – isn’t this starting to braid now?

I googled the name of the pattern (braided cable with garter bead) and discovered that there are errata on the publisher’s website.  DOH!  This has happened to me before and I swore I would never begin a new pattern without checking Ravelry for errata.  Serves me right, I guess.  I was kind of pleased that I figured out the correction without seeing the errata first, though.

Home for lunch.  Rip rip rip.  I tried to pick up a row of stitches near the top of my ribbing (see the bottom needle inserted in the photo above?), but it didn’t work very well.  I can pick up knit stitches and stay in the same row just fine, but purls are another matter.  Fixing it was so time consuming that I finally just ripped out the whole sock.

Started over in afternoon meeting.

Tomorrow I have an ALL-DAY meeting, the kind with tons of people and not much audience participation.  Primo knitting, people!  I’ll post a progress report.

So far I love the colors of this yarn – so many shades of orange and brown and gold.  But it’s kind of splitty and all this ripping isn’t helping. 

Felici, di nuovo

I was at a conference last weekend so of course, I took my knitting along.  When I travel, I always worry that I’ll run out of knitting (doesn’t everyone?) so I cast on for another pair of simple socks and threw them in.  I didn’t touch them at the conference, but they’ll be perfect for my next travel knitting.

A plain vanilla pair of socks for Boy 2 out of Felici: When I was knitting the pink Felici socks recently, Boy 2 frequently petted them and talked about how soft they were.  (Felici is unusually soft for a sock yarn that includes nylon.)  I promised him a pair of Felicis and showed him the colors I have in stash.  He picked this one.  This is one boy who’s not afraid of color!  This is one of their older colorways, called Aurora, that has stripes of differing widths.

Boy 2 responds strongly to softness and texture.  I have a tiny yarn cake of cashmere laceweight yarn out in the living room right now which he immediately asked me about.  “Mama, what is that blue yarn? It is soooooooo soft!”  It was fun to be able to tell him about cashmere and let him rub it on his neck.  This is the first laceweight yarn I have ever purchased.  Lace normally isn’t my thing.  But was I entranced by one of Anne Hanson’s latest creations, the Campanula Scarf, and thought I’d give it a try.  I actually cast on and knit a few rows of this, but I struggled so with the slippery metal needle I had.  I think I need a different needle to work this.  I ended up goofing and frogged the whole thing.

But this scarf will be MINE – lacy cashmere scarves should NOT go to kindergarten!

Diagonal DONE

I feel like I’ve been knitting these socks forever.  My notes say I started on May 9, so I guess they did take about 7 weeks.  One of the curiosities of summertime library work is that there are far fewer meetings, which results in less office knitting.  I modified the pattern slightly.  Instead of beginning the heel with K20 as directed, I worked 6 more stitches in pattern and then rearranged the stitches so there were 31 on the heel needle and 34 on the instep needle (I work on 2 circs). This centers the pattern on the instep and frames it with a single purl stitch on each side.  Much better, I think!I really wanted to like this yarn, but it disappointed.  I ordered it because I swatched with Wool of the Andes in Tidepool Heather for my Must Have Cardigan and liked it a lot. I ended up using another color, but Tidepool Heather haunted me. When I saw that Stroll came in it, too, I bought it. But it let me down. This particular yarn had an acrylic-y hand that wasn’t nice to knit with. I’m not sure why. It should have been fine, just the usual 75% superwash wool 25% nylon blend.

Still, this is a serviceable pair of socks for winter.  What next?

In faster than out

I’ve been making good progress on my current socks, but somehow the yarn keeps coming into my house faster than it’s turning into socks.  Motivated by an impending visit to a little girl who loves pink, I wanted to order the new Felici colorway called “positively pink.”  And then several other colorways came along with it:

Positively pink will be fast knitting, I think – probably just a simple ribbed cuff edge and the rest stockinette.  Round and round and round…

I finished the first Retro Rib sock in Bearfoot.  This isn’t a great photo, but it’s proof that it’s done (and look! spring plants!): I’m about 2/3 down the leg of sock #2 now.

And since I finished the possum socks, I needed another office knitting project.  There was only one left in my personal sock club basket, the Diagonal Rib Socks (free pattern!).  I’ve had 5 hours of webinar and 5 hours of workshop this week so far.  That doesn’t equal 10 hours of knitting, but it equals a fair amount.  So now I have this:This sock alternates the same type of diagonal rib stitch I used in Night Gulls with a 7-stitch panel of 1x1 rib.  Easy breezy.

Positively Pink will be another good office/travel knitting project, but I need to line up some more patterns for subsequent office knitting.

And that’s it for now!

Boxes of Yarn

No, not a mail delivery… felted boxes!  I just love this pattern from the first Mason-Dixon Knitting book.  It calls for double-stranded bulky yarn, and Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Bulky works great.  (I’ve also tried double- and quadruple-stranding worsted weight yarn, and it didn’t work very well, so skip that if you’re tempted.)  These nest and look useful for any number of things, don’t you think? I made some of these back in 2008 and really liked them.  Let’s revisit them and see what they are up to, shall we?

I found the large one in the living room, holding interchangeable needles and a few notions:I found the medium one in the library, holding sock darning eggs, extra tape measures (you can never have too many), various buttons, etc: And I found the small one in Boy2’s bedroom, full of something I may have lost years ago: The red boxes are a bit smaller than the blue/green ones due to the needles I used.  The book edition that I have had a nasty misprint in it and said to use size US 10 needles (which I did – ouch – on 2 strands of bulky).  The pattern should have read US 15 needles (which I used on the next ones – much more comfortable).  That lesson has not been lost on me – I always check Ravelry for errata now before casting on!

I used 3 skeins each of Scuba and Oregano and only had 39 grams of yarn left (14 of green and 25 of blue).  Great project – fast, fun, functional.

Must have finally finished!

… as in, “surely you must have finally finished your Must Have Cardigan!”  This project definitely was a crock pot kind of knit rather than a stir fry or a pressure cooker sort. Kristina and I cast on together on September 1, 2008.  I took a hiatus from the project around the holidays, but finished knitting in March 2009.  I finished seaming and knitting the buttonband sometime in the summer, and finally bought buttons (in Boston) and sewed them on in July.  But YOU haven’t seen it since then, because it hadn’t been photographed.  Well, here it is – ta-dah! The sleeves are a tiny bit long but I’m still happy with them.  I kept some notes about what I learned knitting this sweater.  Here is what I want to remember for the next sweater project:

1. Adjust the rib pattern on the waist so that it flows into the main pattern. There’s really no reason that this waistband shouldn’t flow nicely into the main pattern, but it doesn’t.
2. I found it a little difficult to pick up stitches for the buttonband from reverse stockinette. It is SO EASY to pick them up in stockinette, but in reverse stockinette, there is no neat little “channel” to stay in. I will modify future patterns to avoid this situation.
3. In future pieces which require seaming, I will remember to put the increase/decrease stitches at least 2 stitches in from the edge that will be seamed. The increases/decreases got in the way of following a nice neat channel when seaming.
4. I will consider changing needle size downward for part of the sweater body in order to create subtle waist shaping. (I thought about doing this before I started this project, but frankly, I forgot once I was in the heat of things. This sweater is a bit boxy and could do with a little shaping!)

I have a tendency to overbuy yarn for large projects, fearing that I will run out.  Initially I had 16 balls of this (Knit Picks Wool of the Andes, color “lake ice heather,” 110 yards/ball, 1760 yards total).  I can only find 4 untouched balls in my stash now, so I guess I used 11-12 balls in all.  I’m still hazy about whether my initial swatching ball was included in the 16-ball count (I swatched a lot for this project, in 5 different yarns).  Well, anyway, I guess this sweater used about 12 balls, around 1300 yards.

Watch for me wearing it next week!

…and we’re back.

Long time no post!  I won’t bog you down with a ton of details about our trip.  Here are the highlights:

On our unexpected snow day at home (13” before it stopped), I knit two more Deck the Balls.  I tried to pick manly colorways – these ended up on Steven & Jeff’s tree in Austin. The blue striped one is Regia yarn from the arch-shaped socks I just finished: This is Austermann Step from a pair I made several years ago:

Steven and I visited his LYS, The Knitting Nest, while I was in Austin.  What a fun shop!  It was really neat to see so many shades of Cascade 220 in one place (particularly those yummy heathers).  I left the shop with some spinning fiber hand-dyed by Stephig of Spinning Colors (this is 4 oz of Corriedale in color “Amethyst”) and one of those cool multi-compartmented boxes with the store logo on it (I had admired Steven’s in Portland): Also while in Texas, I finished the Cochineal Arch-Shaped Socks I started at home (sock #1 finished in Austin, sock #2 finished in Georgetown).  The yarn is Knit Picks Felici in colorway Cochineal, one of the prettiest color combos they’ve produced (imho):The photo shoot in my parents’ front yard was kind of silly: I also started the Christmas Charade socks and finished up the final toe decrease on January 2 at home.  The yarn is Wollmeise (a prize) and the pattern is Charade.  This photo makes the yarn look a little more orangey than it really is. Now Sharon should be all set for red socks for a while.

What’s next?  Hmmmm.  The only other WIP I have is the Butternut Scarf, which I’m considering ripping back.  The yarn isn’t quite soft enough for next-to-neck wear, so I’m thinking of making it wider and calling it a shawl.  What holds me back is that I’m not really a shawl wearer.  Thoughts?

I’m anxious to get spinning again.

And there must be a new pair of socks – soon.  Gotta have office knitting when I go back to work in a couple of days!