You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2008.
Just a quick preview of my Leaf Lace pullover from Loop-D-Loop
Oh, and as you can see, I got a haircut. Kind of a terrible and cheap haircut from Master Cuts in the mall, but it’s a relief to get all that hair chopped off. I lost patience over the weekend and decided to go to the first place I could find that would take walk-ins, despite having carefully compiled a list of salons to try. (One of my friends says Boomerang, next to the Bike Project, is good. I’ve been getting my hair cut at Hi-Tek Hair and it’s pretty good too. Any other suggestions, Bloomingtonians? I am not a stylist-monogamous type of person)
I really like the sweater despite the fit issues around the neck and the shoulders. The merino/acrylic blend is soft and cozy, and I think the cabled construction gives it nice stitch definition for the leaves and will help it resist pilling:
You can’t see it too well in this photo, but I made a Sculpey button printed with a swallow to close the neckline. It looks like a Mentos. The color is a bit too light for the sweater, I think, but it’s quite pleasing anyway.
I also took a picture of the Shetland Triangle
And since the Black over Wine Sundara sock yarn I talked about in my last entry is now sold out, here’s a copy of the photo taken from her website (hope this is not bad etiquette… Sundara, if you see this and you want me to take it down, please let me know):
Sundara updated her shop yesterday with new sock yarns, and I succumbed to the cultish hype about her colors and ordered a skein. Even though I was an hour late to the sale, I got my first choice, a limited edition yarn called Black over Wine. I have to admit that a certain doubt about my choice crept into my mind when I realized that as of today there are still two skeins left of it, while all of my other choices have completely vanished. It’s not quite as unpopular as Evergreen Over Lime (8 skeins left) but all the others, the gray roses, autumn peaches, deep blue-purples, are all gone. Then I wondered what kind of brainless sheep I must be to think such a thing. I loved Black over Wine when I saw it, so why should other people’s opinions matter, especially considering other people haven’t seen it in person?
I was on the fence about even ordering in the first place. I didn’t want to succumb to the feeding frenzy that occurs when certain cult favorite yarns are posted for sale (Wollmeise at the Loopy Ewe comes to mind). But I keep seeing gorgeous finished objects posted, with rave reviews of Sundara’s yarn, like Kristen’s February Baby Sweater and Emily’s Mossy socks–and of course the “celebrity endorsements” from superstar bloggers like Grumperina, Eunny, and Brooklyntweed.
I’ve heard so many good things about this yarn. Hope it lives up to the hype! I’m not even sure what to make from it. Socks? Gloves? Mittens? A beret? A lacy little shawl? A scarf?
Oh, and on the subject of yarn shopping, I noticed the other day that A Verb for Keeping Warm sells all natural-dyed yarns and rovings: indigo, logwood, madder, etc. Pretty fascinating.
I’ve also been using yarn up, in addition to just buying it. I finished the Loop-D-Loop Leaf Lace Pullover and hopefully will have some pictures of it soon. The shoulders and arms are a bit tight on me, and I’m hoping the wet-blocking I gave it last night will have fixed that. It seems terribly unfair that while my arms and shoulders are apparently linebackerish in proportion to my bust size, they possess all the strength of the mighty biceps of the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Blaaaaah!
I have a serious case of the doldrums. Despite the fact that it’s a sunny Friday and I have things to do for work, and a kitchen sink full of dirty dishes, and a sweater that needs seaming, I don’t feel like doing anything, and everything I’ve done so far today has taken about 10 times longer than usual. I’m drinking a big mug of coffee in the hopes that it will revive me. If I had my druthers right now, I’d just go back to bed and read a book for a few hours.
Maybe it’s Seasonal Affective Disorder. I felt really blue the other day, too, and did a bunch of virtual shopping–putting tons of things in the shopping cart, comparison-shopping for shipping costs, then closing the window–lather, rinse, repeat. I may as well put up links to some of the fun things I was looking at:
Oceanwind Knits yarn. I love all their subtle, murky color blends, especially Truffle and Indigo, but I’m a little afraid they might not look that nice in person–I read a couple of comments on Ravelry about the colors looking really washed out compared to the online photos.
Simplicity 4403. There’s no way I have the sewing skills to make this pattern, but I LOVE the smocked velvet version on Sugar City Journal.
Doilyhead’s Niebling doilies, again. My current favorite is Mallins 44. I was thinking about them again since Kalani mentioned them last night after showing off her amazing silk-cashmere Frost Flowers and Leaves shawl (Ravelry link), which was gorgeous but apparently very boring to knit (unlike, presumably, Niebling patterns).
Marcel the Mime Frog, perhaps the polar opposite in pattern-land of the Niebling pattern
Colinette Jitterbug in the Velvet colors, especially Velvet Damson… so gorgeous despite all the bad things I’ve heard about Jitterbug, like bleeding colors, short yardage, lots of knots.
Rings with little houses on them
Dream in Color yarns, especially Dusky Aurora, which I saw in San Francisco and adored even before Jeanie came out
In the end, the Leaf Lace Pullover won out as my next project, because Loop-D-Loop came back in at the library and I decided to knit the project before I have to return the book. I’m making the largest size in a smaller gauge (3.25 sts/inch), in chocolate brown Cascade Bollicine Victor (a nice, soft cabled merino/acrylic blend that was exceptionally cheap during the big WEBS sale), and I’m already done with the body and halfway up the sleeves (knitting both at once, flat). I love quick knits!
I added waist shaping and knit the whole body in one piece from the top down rather than grafting (messed up the leaf chart a bit by turning it upside down, though) and used a proper tubular bind-off at the bottom edge and tubular cast-on for the sleeves. I am knitting both sleeves the same, i.e. with leaves at the wrists and no lace ladder going up the side. From a store-bought lacy cardigan, I have come to the conclusion that when I’m wearing a sweater, I really don’t like having cold air blowing onto my upper arms.
The speed of this knit might also inspire me to finish my long-suffering Hourglass Pullover. I’m dying to have the finished sweater, really, I just don’t want to knit it, for some reason.
As Leigh pointed out in the comments, I didn’t mention Kalani’s Half Circle Cardigan in the list last time, because when I wrote it up I had neither the yarn nor the pattern in hand. Now I have both! A bag of delicious Shibui sock yarn in Mulberry–so beautiful!–and a genius customizable pattern that looks to be a lot of fun to knit. It may be next to be cast on.
I was honored to receive this “You Make My Day” award from Green Apples:
“Give the award to 10 people whose blogs bring you happiness and inspiration and make you feel happy about blogland. Let them know by posting a comment on their blog so they can pass it on. Beware you may get the award several times.”
It’s horribly hard to decide on 10 people to pass this on to–I read a ton of blogs through my Ravelry friends list, and every one of them is interesting and inspiring in its own way. So, in no particular order, a few of the knitting blogs that make my day on a regular basis:
1. the chemgrrl chronicles
2. All Buttoned Up
3. Elliphantom Knits
4. Knitting Kninja
5. Quelle Erqsome
6. Needle Exchange
7. Desi Knitter
8. A Mingled Yarn
9. Team Knit
10. Domesticat
Thanks for the good reads!
In other news, it’s snowy and cold but sunny around here. There are some trees in front of my apartment covered in little brown berries, and in the last few days, a big flock of dozens of fat, energetic blackbirds has decided to gorge themselves on these. I spent a lot of yesterday looking out the front window at blackbirds bickering and swooping back and forth from our roof to the trees, eating berries and crapping brown, seedy berry poop all over our front walk and the cars in the parking lot.
Even though it’s all cold and wintry out, I bought Rahul a Black and Decker soft serve machine
I also helped him with a product survey for some marketing class he’s taking. I was supposed to write down all the words/phrases I associated with Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and then draw lines to each one, with the number of lines representing how strongly I associated each phrase with the product.
“You only associate macaroni and cheese weakly with ‘CHEESY’?” Rahul said incredulously, looking at my finished diagram.
“Well, I drew three lines to ‘ORANGE,’” I explained. “It’s very orange. And goopy. But that’s not really the same thing as being cheesy.”
Anyway, I came away from it with a plan to make some real mac and cheese this week, with a real bechamel-based sauce, and the principal cheese flavor coming from a block of morel-and-leek Jack cheese. And I will add some of the veggie broth I made over the weekend from a big bag of saved-up vegetable peelings. I’ve been cooking a lot–made pretzels from scratch the other day, and a pot of onion soup with onions properly caramelized, slow-cooked for more than an hour in my prized Le Creuset Dutch oven. Yum.
While I’m on the subject of food, I saw Sweeney Todd recently and didn’t see what all the fuss was about. There was too much blood in that movie, the makeup was overdone, and the whole thing just seemed like one long, flat, depressing, gory note played over and over again. The exception, for me, was the seaside scene–wish there had been more tongue-in-cheek humor in that vein. And there should have been more close-ups of juicy, savory meat pies. (Perhaps the next thing I’ll make, after mac and cheese.)
I am totally paralyzed with indecision about what sweater to work on next. Some of the candidates:
- Hourglass Pullover in Fleece Artist BFL DK in Periwinkle. Pros: one sleeve already knit. Would be useful in wardrobe. Would be very virtuous of me to finish a WIP instead of casting on for a new project. Cons: very boring to knit. Need to do math to figure out proper gauge. Ginormous skeins of BFL are annoying to carry around and knit from. Here is a picture of the cuff from the one sleeve I’ve knit.
- Tangled Yoke Cardigan in Rowan Felted Tweed. Pros: Beautiful sweater, useful in wardrobe. Cons: Seems like it would take ages, and be very boring aside from the yoke. Need to locate small enough needles to get gauge. Yarn seems to bloom quite a bit on washing, increasing the risk of a gauge disaster.
- Flicca in RYC Soft Tweed in some kind of nondescript beige color. Pros: Should be pretty fast because of the big needles. Have been lusting after this sweater for ages. Would be warm and cozy, perfect to wear while working inside and looking out at the snow. Would use up large volume of yarn. Cons: Possibly very boring to knit. So much ribbing–ack! Brown color not very exciting. Also, I already have lots of cardigans.
- Son of Samus in Cascade Eco Wool, gray background, burgundy cables. This cardigan started out as Samus, and I changed nearly everything about it–changed the gauge, made a two-color cable that bends at the corner and proceeds up one of the fronts of the cardigan. I got to the armpits (assuming this is going to be a hip-length jacket) and it has been sitting in a drawer for about a year because I can’t decide where to proceed from here with the design. Pros: Pretty. Would give opportunity to do something interesting and exciting with the rest of the design. See above re: virtuousness of finishing an unfinished work in progress. Cons: Lots of ease knit into the body already–may not be flattering. I feel like poking my eyes out with a cable needle every time I think about doing yet more two-color Saxon braid cables. See above re: cardigans.
- Rogue in gray Cascade Eco Wool. Pros: Probably useful in the wardrobe, beautiful sweater and one I’ve been wanting to make for ages. Probably a good balance of interesting cables and fast stockinette. Cons: Need to wind up mega-skeins of Eco Wool.
- Leaf Lace Pullover in brown Bollicine Victor. Pros: Should be very fast, cozy. Cons: may be too chunky to either be flattering or fit under my coat. Someone else has Loop-D-Loop checked out from the library right now.
I will!
Pattern: Kate Gilbert’s Bird in Hand
Size: Smallest size, downsized further for a 7″ hand; finished size about 7″ around and 5″ from thumb crotch to fingertip; thumb about 2.5″ long and 3″ around. They fit my hands perfectly!
Yarn used: Knit Picks Wool of the Andes in Chocolate, about 1.5 skeins; Classic Elite Tapestry (Ravelry link) color 2272 (green), just less than one skein.
This photo shows the amount of yarn I had left afterwards. I started with about 1.5 skeins of WOTA (one full skein plus about half a skein left over from a scarf) and exactly 1 skein of Tapestry.
Needles used: Knit Picks nickel-plated DPNs, US size 0/2.0 mm, for about 80% of the hand of the first mitten, and Knit Picks Harmony DPNs, US size 1.5/2.5 mm for the rest.
Started: 1/3/08
Finished: 1/11/08
Mods: Aimed for a gauge of about 8 sts per inch to downsize the mittens. Since my gauge went down as I was knitting the first mitten, the size shrank accordingly and I had to block severely to fix it–the mittens are roughly the same size now, but you can see that they’re fraternal in the side-by-side pictures:
Following the advice of some people on the Ravelry Bird in Hand KAL, I used a two-color Estonian braid for the middle braid of the second mitten, to mix things up a bit. Link to the two-color braid discussion here. I like the look of it better than the single-color braid. I went back and duplicate-stitched over the middle braid in the first mitten so it would match. They look nearly identical, see?
To work a two-color braid: M1 using CC, put it back on left needle.
*From behind, knit the second st through the back loop using MC and leave it on the needle, knit the first st through the front loop using MC and drop both sts, put new st back on left needle;
From behind, knit the second st using MC and leave it on the needle, knit the first st through the front loop using CC and drop both sts, put new st back on left needle;* and so on, always knitting the back st with MC and alternating colors for the front st, until the end of the round.
Notes: The best advice I got on making these from the knitalong was to do the embroidery before closing up the thumb. My embroidery could use some work. Maybe I’ll have to make another pair so I can have another go at making realistic birds.
Here they are:
And some colorwork close-ups:
I have lots of other notes on these mittens in the previous posts about them. So I don’t have much more to say right now–I just have to say I love these mittens, they fit wonderfully, and I’d totally make another pair. I’m not sure I could say that about any of the other ones I’ve knit so far–with their repeating motifs, they somehow all seemed like much more of a slog.
Soundtrack: The Littlest Birds, by the Be Good Tanyas
“Well, the littlest birds sing the prettiest songs…”
I guess I should get around to writing up the official finished object post for the Selbuvotter Black Lilies mittens, too. There are lots more pictures and details on these in the archives.
Pattern: NHM #7 from Selbuvotter
Size: Finished size: About 6″ from thumb crotch to fingertip (i.e. about 1″ too long for my hands); thumb about 3″ long and 3.75″ around; hand about 9″ around (i.e. about 2″ too wide for my hands). There’s probably enough room in there for a fuzzy mitten liner, if I get around to making one. I think my gauge (and row gauge) is about 8 sts per inch.
Yarn used: Knit Picks Telemark in cream and black, 2 skeins each. About 1.25 skeins of black, 1.75 skeins of cream.
Needles used: US 1/2.25 mm (What was I doing with these? I wrote it down but don’t remember why I used them–the ribbing, maybe, and/or the thumb?) and US 1.5/2.5 mm circs, magic looped, for most of the mitten
Started: 9/26/07
Finished: 12/22/07
Mods: Used a striped thumb instead of the charted thumb from the pattern, as detailed here.
Notes: I ran out of black yarn when I was thisclose to finishing the second mitten:
And I stalled for a while. I don’t think a pair of mittens would normally take me three months to make.
My gauge changed kind of a lot between mittens. You can see the difference in size here, with the smaller mitten placed on top of the larger one:
Eh. They’re pretty anyway!
Here are the lilies:
The palms with the stripey thumbs:
and the undersides of the thumbs, where I more or less successfully continued the palm pattern upwards–a detail I’m quite proud of, but which would be lost on most non-knitters:
I might need some convertible mittens/glittens next. I do have a pair I cobbled together by making Knucks and putting together my own flip-top pattern, but the yarn is thin and they’re not that warm.
Berroco has their Spring 2008 collection up now. I kind of love Currer, from Norah Gaughan Vol. 2, but started to worry that perhaps this was one of those things where I’m drawn to a pattern because it’s unusual and has an interesting construction technique, but it’s actually a major fashion mistake when viewed by any non-knitter. I’m thinking this because when I looked at Ellis, Currer’s sister pattern, my first thought was that the model looked very much like a grasshopper , with wings folded neatly back.
I also like the circular neckline insert thing going on with Athos and Porthos, but I’d probably make the Lacy Waves top from Lace Style before going with either of those.
I’ve made four pairs of stranded mittens in the last year or so:
1. North Star mittens from Robin Hansen’s Knit Mittens!
2. Top-down mittens 5/16 from Anna Zilboorg’s Magnificent Mittens
3. NHM #7 mittens from Terri Shea’s Selbuvotter in Knit Picks Telemark
4. and my Bird in Hand mittens from Kate Gilbert’s site, in Knit Picks Wool of the Andes and Classic Elite Tapestry (Ravelry link). These are still blocking, so this post is still not the big reveal.
I’ve learned some things from each project, and from the fascinating hive mind of the internet, along the way, so I just wanted to post about the tips and techniques I’ve been using, and the lessons I’ve learned. I am still far from an expert on colorwork and I look forward to learning more from each project I try.
Things I’ve learned the hard way:
- Yarn choice matters. (Duh! But I always seem to learn this the hard way.) I realized after my first two pairs of mittens, particularly after seeing the contrast between HelloYarn’s Magnificent Mittens in Cascade 220 and mine, in two different weights of leftover yarn, one woolly and tweedy, the other a fuzzy, hairy singles, that using a smooth, plied yarn (and using the same weight for both colors) can make all the difference in getting your colorwork to stand out and look good. The mohair haze and sheen muddled up my colorwork, and the tension suffered from the different yarns, so your eye is drawn more to the contrast between the textures in the two yarns than the contrast between the colors. So I went with Telemark for the next pair, and the difference is plain to see.
- Color choice matters a lot. For best results, pick two colors that contrast as much as possible in both color warmth and color saturation/value. One warm, light color and one cool, dark color, or vice versa. The Patons SWS in my first pair was pretty, but because the two colorways I picked (Natural Plum and Natural Navy) were too similar in tone, the pattern got lost and you have to search a little to pick it out. Swatch as much as possible before deciding on your colors; something that looks like it should make a good combination when you’re holding the skeins next to each other might not look so great once it’s been knit up. I swatched with a couple of other colors before deciding on brown and green for my Bird in Hand mittens; the front runner going into the swatch-off was a combination of brown and periwinkle that looked very pretty in the skein, but once I swatched it, I realized the periwinkle was too close in value to the brown and wouldn’t stand out… I needed something lighter and brighter. So lime green pulled a surprise upset victory.
- Knitting at a tight gauge makes for warm hands and pretty colorwork. Knitting at a looser gauge makes for soft, comfy mittens. Three of the four mittens above are knit at a bulletproof gauge–worsted weight on size 0, 1.5, and 3 needles and sport weight on size 1.5 needles. The Magnificent Mittens were knit on size 6 needles. They’re soft and pliable, but the wind gets into them on cold days, and I can’t make snowballs with them without the snow getting into them in about 2 seconds. I wore the Patons SWS mittens through a whole day of snowman-building and snowball fights and it was hours before the snow seeped through.
- Size matters. A lot. Check your row gauge against the number of rows before and after the thumb, and make sure you’ll wind up with some correspondence to your actual hand size. Unlike plain-colored or cabled pieces, many colorwork mittens are not really properly structured for easily lengthening or shortening without destroying the pattern. (Patterns with small repeats of geometric patterns are an exception–Elli’s Herringbone Mittens or Squirrelly Swedish Mittens come to mind.)
You’ll note the strange and non-anatomical thumb placement in my North Star mittens. Contrary to what you might believe from careful study of those mittens, my thumb does not emerge from my second finger joint and shoot up from there to the length of my fingertips. (I blithely assumed that all hands were roughly the same shape and that by following the directions, I’d be fine.) They were slightly better once on, but all the blocking in the world couldn’t save the fingers from being uncomfortably short. When I rode my bike while wearing those mittens, I’d have trouble squeezing the hand brakes because my fingers wouldn’t comfortably reach that far if my thumbs were still on the handlebars.
The Magnificent Mittens and Bird in Hand mittens fit the best. The Selbuvotter, as it turns out after blocking, are tragically about half an inch or an inch too long and quite a bit too wide in the hand. However, I might use the extra space to add an angora mitten liner.
- As techniques for working a small circumference in the round, Two circs, Magic Loop, and double-pointed needles (DPNs) all have their pluses and minuses. Two circs and Magic Loop are easy to transport and easy to work with–with DPNs, I tend to get all tangled up every now and then with the yarns getting caught on stray needle tips, and sometimes the needles fall out of my work. Also, you can divide the stitches into halves, a natural way to divide them up when you’re working on a mitten. Two circs has an advantage over Magic Loop in that you can use this technique with stiff-cabled or short circular needles. Magic Loop has the fewest needle tips to wrangle with, so it’s the easiest and tidiest in many circumstances, but you do need a flexible-cabled needle like Addi Turbos or Knit Picks Options to use with it. I think that generally, for colorwork, DPNs work the best for me. The reason for this is that you can always flatten the two needles you’re working on and keep the join between needles as flat as possible, minimizing the tendency to pull too tight on the yarn or strand the floats too tightly at corners. They also have a built-in stitch marker system without annoying dangly things–you can tell by the end of each needle if you’ve muffed up the pattern somewhere because your stitch count will be wrong by that point.
If you’re doing colorwork for the first time, making a hat, like the Inga Hat, the Red Light Special, or We Call Them Pirates, would be an easier way to start than mittens, because for most of the hat, you can just work on a 16″ circular needle instead of having the double frustration of keeping your colorwork even on DPNs, magic loop, or two circs.
Things I’ve learned the easy way (aka reading up in books and on the internet, and doing what I was told):
- Knitting two-handed makes colorwork much easier for me. I couldn’t work out holding two yarns in my left hand, so I re-learned how to knit English style, and now I hold the contrast color in my left hand and the main color in my right hand.
- Be consistent with the way you carry your yarns, and carry the contrast color ahead. Nonaknits has a good post on this. Since I knit colorwork two-handed, her notes about establishing color dominance couldn’t be applied to my knitting wholesale and I had to figure out that I first need to pick up the contrast color in my left hand, and then pick up the main color in my right hand so that it travels over the left-hand strand of yarn when I wrap it around the needle.
- Catch your floats as you go. (The float being the strand of yarn carried across the back of the work while not in use.) If a float travels over a significant number of stitches in a row–”significant” may vary from two stitches to five or six stitches–you should weave it in using the other color to keep it from snagging on your fingers when wearing the mitten. I also usually catch floats in the corners of my mittens, on the last stitch of a needle or the first stitch of the next one, so that the yarn doesn’t take the shortest path possible across the corner and make the work pucker on the right side. There are a lot of tutorials out there for how to do this. Sockpr0n has an extensive tutorial. I found this Knit Picks tutorial (warning, PDF) the most helpful, personally.
If I’m weaving in a float from my left hand (CC), I keep my left hand where it is, and instead of moving my right hand over the CC yarn to wrap the MC around the needle, I move my right hand under the CC yarn and wrap the MC around the needle. I resume knitting the normal way on the next stitch.
If I’m weaving in a float from my right hand (MC)–this isn’t a concern in most patterns, but the Bird in Hand mittens feature long runs of both MC and CC–I use the method shown in the Knit Picks PDF: wrap the MC as if to knit, wrap the CC as if to knit, unwrap the MC while leaving the CC on the needle, then complete the stitch. Unfortunately, it’s not as fluid of a motion for me as weaving in CC yarn and I find it much slower.
Either way, I have to give the stranded yarn a little tug after it’s caught in order to to pull it back, away from the front of the fabric.
- On a related note, strand your yarn as loosely as possible. I’m not very good at this yet, but in theory, your work will look best if you leave big sloppy floats hanging off the back of it. I have an unfortunate tendency to pull my floats pretty tight.
- Blocking is essential to colorwork, and covers a multitude of sins, so choose a blockable yarn and preferably one that can be ironed (i.e. no acrylic). Your colorwork will almost certainly look like crap once it comes off the needles, but it will undergo a magical transformation into a flat, even, well-behaved piece of knitting once it’s been blocked. I love blocking colorwork so much, I block twice. I soak the piece in Eucalan for a while (free samples at that link), squeeze the water out with a towel, and let the piece dry, either flat or stretched out on a bottle. After it’s dry, or mostly dry, I iron it with a hot iron, and it becomes ever so flat and lovely.
- Floats give you a nice way to weave in ends so nobody can see them from the outside. My end-weaving technique is not very beautiful or elegant, but it works. I thread a tapestry needle and weave the tail in and out over the floats like I’m darning a sock. I usually weave in ends by following the path of the yarn through the backs of stitches, but I can’t usually see the actual stitches due to all the floats, and my gauge is usually so tight with colorwork that weaving into the stitches is a royal pain. So I use my hybrid weaving technique and it works just fine for me.
As a general rule, I try to let the ends of yarn do double duty wherever possible so as to minimize the number of ends to weave in. So, for example, in the Bird in Hand mittens, which call for sewing down a picot hem on the inside of the work, I left a very long tail from the cast-on and used it to sew up the hem at the end. I also left long tails from where I attached the yarn again to knit the thumb, carried them up the inside of the thumb along the inside of the floats as I worked, and used them to embroider the details (eye, wing, beak, legs) on the bird on the tip of the thumb.
I hope this is helpful and I hope I haven’t left anything out! If you have any colorwork tips, techniques, or lessons learned the hard way, please share.
I have two Bird in Hand mittens finished! I made it to the top decreases after 3 hours at knitting night; the cafe closed and kicked us out, so I went home and knit, embroidered, and wove in ends for another few hours… and I have one more Bird in Hand mitten to show for it. I did not run out of yarn, but it was close–I have probably less than 10 yards of yarn left, of either color. So 50g/95 yards seems to be (barely) sufficient yardage for the contrast color (Classic Elite Tapestry), and roughly 100g/220 yards would be safest to get for the main color–I had 1.5 skeins of chocolate brown Wool of the Andes to start with, but I have no idea exactly how many yards it was, nor how many are left over.
I love the bird on the thumb–such a little treat to look forward to. It’s like saving the cherry on top of your ice cream sundae for last.
Pictures coming soon. Mitten #1, at least, fits and is gorgeous. Mitten #2, 80% of which was knit on different sized needles than mitten #1, is somewhere in the neighborhood of the same size. I will see how it fits after blocking.
I had a bit of a scare yesterday and the day before as I was working on my Bird in Hand mittens. I was about 80% done with the first mitten when I looked at it and thought “hmm… these look awfully small.” I checked my gauge and somewhere between the cuff and the hand, I’d gone from about 8 stitches per inch to more than 9 stitches per inch. (I was watching Heroes while I knit–perhaps the plot just got too gripping?) I looked at the remaining length of the chart, did some quick calculations using my new row gauge… and realized my mittens were going to be about a inch too short.
I stamped despairingly around the house for a while. This pattern is quirky and asymmetrical, which is charming, but it also means it offers no easy way to lengthen the fingers by adding extra repeats.
Before I went to bed, I decided to soak the mitten and stretch it (still on the needles) over a Snapple bottle with the sadistic enthusiasm of a Spanish Inquisitioner, or one of the Oompa Loompas on the Mike Teavee case. In the morning, I checked it. It looked promising. Praying to the gods of knitting, I knit the rest of the mitten tip with needles two sizes larger (US size 1.5 instead of 0)…
and lo and behold, the mitten fit. Snugly, but it fit!
(As an aside, I’m now knitting with the Knit Picks Harmony DPNs and I really like them. I prefer metal needles to wood for larger sizes, but I’ve found wooden DPNs to be much more comfortable than metal ones for me. I don’t like the idea that they might snap, but I guess that’s why they include 6 DPNs in the Harmony packages.)
I raced through the thumb so I could have the fun of knitting and embroidering the Bird in Hand. I read a wonderful tip on Ravelry–seems like common sense, but I am sure I wouldn’t have thought of it myself until after it was too late–to embroider the details on the bird before closing up the top of the thumb. I don’t know how I would have done it if I had finished knitting the thumb before doing the finishing.
I love how the mitten looks, but I’m not crazy about the bird. The French knot I made for his eye is too big, so he looks kind of bug-eyed and crazy, like that crackhead cereal-box squirrel. Also, Rahul couldn’t even see the bird and was squinting at it like a Magic Eye picture until I pointed out the beak and eye.
I have high hopes for the second bird, though. I’m about a quarter of the way through the second mitten (and through 3 discs of Heroes) and still loving this pattern. (Knitting on larger needles from the start this time, so my mittens might end up quite fraternal.)
The only problem is that I have this nasty, sneaking suspicion I might run out of brown yarn. I had a skein and a half of Wool of the Andes, so I thought I would be good, but the second skein is looking pretty thin right now… anyway, in a few days, I guess I’ll find out for sure if I need to put in another Knit Picks order.
Notes to self:
Lesson #1: Gauge matters for mittens. Even if a mitten is not much bigger than a gauge swatch itself, I should still knit a swatch for it, because I hate, hate, hate ripping my knitting back.
Lesson #2: In the future, buy more yarn than you think you need if you’re making mittens.
The Bird in Hand mittens, as I mentioned in my last post, have been hurting my hands. I bent one or two of my steel DPNs into gentle arcs trying to force the decreases. Still, soldiering on with them in search of the perfect mittens–the Selbuvotter mittens, as it turns out, are about an inch too long for my hands, and rather loose, so they’re not as warm or comfortable as they should be. I’m considering making liners, but the thumbs are already pretty stiff and snug, so that might not work well.
Here’s the palm of the mitten in progress, no flash…
And here’s the back of the hand in progress, with flash.
Because my fingers were hurting from wrestling with the DPNs, I just had to take a break when my package from WEBS arrived.
On the left, one of the size 0 DPNs I’m using for the mittens; on the right, one of the size 19 Denise needles I used for this latest FO.
The sweater in question? The Shopping Tunic, from Twinkle’s Big City Knits
Unfortunately, you kind of get out of it what you put into it. All my photos came out hideous and I have a sinking feeling this is because the sweater itself is hideous.
Here’s the least hideous of the snapshots. Gah! I mean, I love it in theory, but the gauge looks so loose and sloppy. I blocked it and everything. And it’s certainly not very flattering. Perhaps if I wore sleeker clothes underneath, in similar and darker colors, it would work better. I don’t like that big lump where you can see the waistband of my jeans.
Rahul was not a big fan of this. I tried it on to show him, and he looked dubious.
“Um. Are you giving this to someone else?”
“No.”
“Is it meant for wearing around the house?”
“No, you’re supposed to wear it out.”
He considered this for a moment and said, diplomatically, “I think the stitch size is too big.”
“But that’s the designer’s signature style!”
“Sorry. I guess I’m just a plebeian.”
“Well… it’s stylish! It was in Anthropologie!”
“No WAY!!” he exclaimed, unable to restrain his disbelief–then added, “Actually, I don’t know what Anthropologie is, but whoever they are, they did not have this sweater.”
I had to try and find the Butter Hill funnelneck online to show him. Then, because it was striped and this is not, he wouldn’t believe it was the same sweater.
“It looks like chain mail!”
“Nooo!”
“It looks like you’re about to ride into battle! You look like Barbarossa!”
Anyway–I’ll have to see if I can do anything with the styling to make it more wearable. Till then, the jury is still out on this one.
Thankfully, I do like this Flared Lace Smoke Ring I finished last week. (Isn’t that a great sweater I’m wearing? Sadly, I didn’t make it–I bought it at an Old Navy after-Christmas sale)
And this is how we wear the cowl in the old country:
Pattern: Heartstrings Flared Lace Smoke Ring
Size: As specified by the pattern: 28″ around at the base, 22″ around at the top, 18″ long.
Yarn used: Elann Silken Kydd in Baked Apple, 1 skein
Needles used: US size 6/4.0 mm Denises
Started: 12/26/07
Finished: 1/3/08
Mods: Used less than the specified yardage of yarn. Bound off with a *k1, k2tog, slip st back to left needle* BO to create a stretchy, ruffled BO edge. Other than that, nothing.
Notes: Fluffy, soft, easy, and pretty–a nice use for one skein of laceweight. Notes on the yarn are here. The stitch pattern looks complicated, but is repetitive enough that this became my TV knitting once I got through the decrease charts. (You knit from the bottom up, decreasing for a few lace repeats, and then work the last chart, keeping the stitch count constant, until the cowl is the length you want it.)
I might send this to my grandma. I’m not sure if she would wear it or if she would prefer the traditionally shaped scarves/shawls she already has.
I’m buying Barbara Abbey’s Knitting Lace
