Prismatic Scarf KAL

I’m leading a knitalong for the Prismatic Scarf over in the malabrigo junkies group on Ravelry! Linda from Yarnzilla is helping me lead the KAL (neither of us really has any idea what this will entail, honestly, but I’m excited anyway). This is part of Malabrigo March, in which the Malabrigo Nation will apparently attempt to propel Malabrigo up the yarn popularity rankings in Ravelry during the month of March. There will be prizes awarded for most Malabrigo projects cast on, most creative photo involving Malabrigo, best use of color, etc. It’s sort of insane. I really wasn’t kidding when I said this yarn had a cult following.

Anyway, if you’ve been thinking of casting on for something in Malabrigo, apparently now’s the time. The group is giving away nice stuff, like Addi lace needles, Malabrigo sock yarn, and handmade project bags.

• KAL thread here. Come on in and sign up!
• Print or download the pattern here. (It’s available as a free Ravelry PDF download)
• The malabrigo junkies group is here.
• Malabrigo’s website is here.
• People on the malabrigo junkies board have asked where to buy Malabrigo, and here are the responses people have given, along with their notes (I can only personally vouch for a couple of these vendors):
  • WEBS (volume discount works out to $9.60 a skein if you buy at least 5)
  • Jimmy Bean’s ($10.50 a skein)
  • Fabulous Yarn (“It worked out to $8.60 per skein before shipping to order 7. To do that I had to sign up for their knitlist thing, and then they have some automatic discounts. Shipping using the cheapest method worked out to an additional $5.40.” Someone else said it worked out as low as $8.06 a skein)
  • Yarnzilla ($11.95 a skein, large color selection, volume discount, they carry Silky Merino)
  • Discount Yarn Sale (good price, but you have to order an entire bag at a time)
  • Yarn Country ($10.75 a skein)
  • WhitKnits (this is the last place I ordered from–all yarns on sale through tomorrow)
  • Needle Nook (they carry worsted, silky, chunky, laceweight; phone orders only)
  • And additional vendors listed as buying options on Ravelry: Tangle, knot another hat, Make 1 Yarns, and Valley Yarn

Chronicles of the Dayquil kingdom

I’ve been laid out flat by the flu for the last half a week or so, with the result that I ended up missing nearly all the things I had been looking forward to this weekend… knitting night (I was going to wear the beard hat!), working at the business school, drinks and fresh-baked cookies with friends, the farmer’s market, dinner at the new Ethiopian restaurant with a friend I haven’t seen in months, a Prince party (does my sunflower beret count as raspberry-colored?), and an ice cream-themed birthday party. No, instead, I spent my whole damn weekend lying in bed, all achy and coughing and feverish. I’m still not feeling well, but at least the hacking cough is nearly gone.

The weekend did have a few upsides.

I got to watch parts of various movies–I got bored of Flicka, and my DVD player refused to cooperate with more than 15 minutes of Winged Migration, but I managed to make it through Cat Ballou, and that was fun. I saw the Oscars. I liked the part about the Batsuit.  Helen Mirren looked stunning, just like last year. And I’ve sort of met Glen Hansard (the guy who won the Oscar for Best Song). He’s a friend of a friend, so I made it into his company after a concert–but if I remember correctly, there was just about a minute of quick chatter between the two of them before he had to dash off somewhere, and I never actually got introduced. In any case, it was definitely interesting seeing someone I know (if not directly, at least within a degree) win an Oscar on TV.

I was determined to make it out to the new yarn shop, In a Yarn Basket. Bloomington Ravelers have been waiting with bated breath and much discussion for it to open for months, since I spotted the Under Construction sign while dropping off a package at UPS in the same strip mall. So perhaps ill-advisedly (since this short trip wiped me out for the rest of the evening) after I dropped Rahul off at his band practice on Saturday, I decided to go down to the yarn shop.

I looked through the window. People were inside, peacefully browsing. I tried to open the door–and it was locked. I looked at my watch: 3:30. I rattled the door again. The woman came and opened it and said “We’re closed. We close at 4 on Saturdays.”

“But it’s only 3:30.” I showed her my watch.

She looked up at the wall. “It’s 4:20.”

My watch had stopped and in my feverish, cough syrup-addled state, I had no idea!

I looked in anguish at the people inside and she took pity on me and said I could come in if I didn’t take long. True to my word, I took a quick walk around the store. I took note of the price of Cascade 220 as a benchmark ($6.60, and they have tons of colors, and superwash). Then I picked up a hank of Cascade Eco Wool, one of my favorites, and nearly dropped it. $7.50 a skein. For 478 yards! The normal selling price is $15, and it’s a bargain at that price, since it’s soft, sturdy, fairly heavy weight (though I’d call it aran, not chunky as the label suggests) and I haven’t run into a single knot so far in any of the 3 478-yard skeins of it I’ve wound.

I checked a few skeins, just to be sure the price gun hadn’t misfired. They all said $7.50. So I picked up a couple of skeins in white and bought them. (I should have bought more–but I was trying to restrain myself, thinking I could always come back and get more.) I remarked on what a great price it was at the register, and to my surprise they didn’t look at it and immediately say “Oh, this is a mistake!” They just smiled and said “Yes, isn’t it great!”

But then, wouldn’t you know it, it was too good to be true. Someone else on Ravelry went in the next day and bought some and found them repricing all the skeins. They had made a mistake. They sold her the skeins she’d picked out at the cheaper price anyway, so I don’t feel too bad about holding onto the ones I bought, but alas–the permanent price of $7.50 for local Eco Wool was not to be. (Deep sigh…) At least the store has a different selection from Yarns Unlimited, and they seem to be very reasonably priced, so I look forward to going back to browse when I’m less sick and have more time. Oh, and they were giving away reusable fabric shopping bags rather than disposable plastic. I don’t know if that’s a permanent thing or not, but I appreciated it.

Since I didn’t have things like an appetite or mobility in the outside world to distract me, I also spent the weekend working on some creative projects. I got my Ravelry PDF pattern downloads working, sorta. You can download from each individual pattern page, but for some reason my store keeps saying “no PDF uploaded” when I know that’s untrue. I’ll give it a few days and try again. It’s exciting seeing people download my work–not like there’s any huge number of them, but still. Cool! I’ll add Ravelry download links to the individual pattern pages. The PDFs should print out nicely, no sidebar or comments or other browsery nonsense, and I’ve deleted most pictures from the pattern pages to make a nice copy to work from.

I also got back to work on rewriting a shawl pattern I’ve been working on for months. I think I finally have it right now–it’s a good thing I sat on it for a while, because some glaring charting errors jumped out at me when I picked it up again and started working. It’s kind of amazing how much work lies in the divide between your own scribbled notes and a product that can be used and understood by other people.

I slaved away, too, at a pattern for a little sock yarn baby sweater and a test-knit of the smallest size, only to run into various annoying pitfalls, first numerous problems having to do with getting the length right, since the front border repeats are rather long compared to the total length of the sweater, and then, as I was nearing the raglan decreases at the top, running out of sleeve stitches to decrease. AAGH! I have test knitters for the other sizes waiting for me, so I can’t let the frustration stop me, but trying to resize a sweater while your head is fogged up with germs and generic cold medicine is seriously difficult.

Here are some pictures of the prototype of the baby sweater I’m working on. I’m calling it the Botany Baby Sweater (rav link), and hoping it will be a nice sock yarn stashbuster. This version, knit at light speed in Brown Sheep Wildfoote in Mistletoe for a baby that’s due any day now, was subject to numerous terrible math errors and last-minute fudging,  and I was hoping that the new version I was working on over the weekend would be immune to the same problems. Alas, it had its own, different set of problems.

I feel like the usual 8-sts-every-other-round ratio of increase/decrease for raglan shoulders doesn’t really seem to work when it comes to babies, because, as I mentioned in an earlier post, they are apparently very squat, fat creatures. So if you want to go from a reasonable body and sleeves size to a reasonable neck size, and you decrease 8 sts every other round, it seems to me that you will end up with an extremely long and ill-fitting raglan.

Of course, this is all still a theory, since my stupid nearly-finished test knit is sitting on the dining room table looking even squattier than I had planned for, and the baby raglan patterns I’ve seen always seem to follow that same rate of increase/decrease, so it’s possible there just may be some kind of underlying fundamental problem in my calculations. Will report back later. But not tonight–I think tonight I might need to take a break, rest my brain, and work on something relaxing that won’t stand such a high chance of being ripped back after 20 hours of work.

My old friend Detergent Baby is modeling. I really need to find a more photogenic model.

The sweater’s cute, at least, isn’t it? But like I mentioned, it’s annoying trying to get all the leaves to match up with the desired lengths in the different sizes. I’m working up my new sample in Colinette Jitterbug in Velvet Leaf, and if one thing kept me going nonstop on this sweater all weekend, it was the absolutely stunning look of the Jitterbug. I love the color and the softness and the bounce of it.  The body of the sweater is knit in reverse stockinette stitch and the sleeves in stockinette, and I just love the effect of the semi-solid yarn in reverse stockinette. (Plus, it hides the slight unevenness of my reverse stockinette better than the solid Wildfoote.)

The strange thing about the Jitterbug is that, like alexandrite, or maybe like Gwen the two-face in Seinfeld, it seems to look completely different in different types of light. In incandescent light, it seems like sort of an ugly, muddy brown, but in natural sunlight, it takes on a beautiful, rich, dark green color, tinged with gold.
My thought, by the way, with the Eco Wool was to make a Botany sweater sized up for adults, with pockets–but I’m really getting ahead of myself. Maybe once the pattern is in the hands of my test knitters and I’ve successfully finished at least the newborn-sized version.

So also over the weekend, I was horrified and kind of depressed to read this story about Virgin Mobile using random Flickr photos licensed under Creative Commons in their Australian ad campaign without contacting the photographers or the people pictured in the photos for permission. It made me all sad and paranoid to read people’s comments saying that a lot of people thought the 15-year-old girl in the linked story didn’t have a legal leg to stand on because the photographer (her camp counselor) had put up the photo under a Creative Commons attribution license, meaning Virgin Mobile could use it to promote their products without paying a red cent, and (according to some commenters) Australian law doesn’t require a model release for normal, everyday people who are neither celebrities nor professional models. Even if they’re not legally obligated to obtain a release or inform the photographer, it seems like the courteous, ethical thing to do–and it seems like they should have at least paid what they would have for normal stock photos. I mean, they’re Virgin, it’s not like they can’t afford it! I don’t want to watermark my photos, and it annoys me mightily when people disable right-click on their webpages out of fear of other people stealing their content, but sometimes I wonder if they have the right idea. I mean, there really are worse things to worry about, but it sucks to think of a multinational corporation grabbing your photos off Flickr and using them for their billboard ad campaigns without your explicit consent or knowledge. Especially since some of them are considerably more derogatory/defamatory than the “dump your pen friend” one.

Ravelry’s blog feed feature has been acting up (at least for me) and lately I’ve been getting new blog posts dumped into the feed in big chunks every couple of days–so it seems like everything’s quiet, then suddenly I have a huge list of blog posts to wade through. I’ll have to spend some time going back through everything I’ve missed because of the hiccups.

New online knitting magazines

Thank you all for the nice comments on my phyllotaxis hat and sweater! I’m sorry I’m being a flake about writing back right now, but I’m coming down with some kind of nasty, mucousy cough thing (soon to be accompanied by fever, if Rahul’s current state of health is any gauge) and feeling kind of tired.

Sick or not, I was excited to find not one but two new knitting magazines with free patterns today! AND the total lunar eclipse was wonderfully, clearly visible, to boot–I was afraid the weather would spoil it.

Here are the two magazines:

MetaPostModern Knitting

and

The Inside Loop

I also found this peacock washcloth through a passing remark someone made on Ravelry. I love it! This site has instructions for buying the pattern, though I haven’t called for availability.

My coworker sent out a link today to keming, from Ironic Sans.

And I thought this article about the possibility of life adapted to living in clouds was the most wonderful thing I’ve read in a long time.

Ugh. I hope I feel better soon. I have all kinds of excitement later this week and weekend that I don’t want to miss–knitting night with new people and a new venue, working at the business school Friday and Saturday, going to the new yarn shop that’s opening on Friday, meeting up with a friend so we can put together and mail a package of baby presents, going to another friend’s ice cream-themed birthday party.

A Martian Sends A Postcard Home

(Non-knitting content:) I saw this poem today and learned of the genre of Martian poetry for the first time. For a moment, I dismissed the poem as meaningless science-fictiony nonsense, but then took a closer look and was charmed. I also found a page with 7th-graders discussing the meaning of the poem for their homework assignments, which was a lot less charming, but did clarify for me that Caxtons are books. I was thinking, stupidly, about helicopters.

A Martian Sends A Postcard Home

by Craig Raine
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings -

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside -
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone’s pain has a different smell.

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves -
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

One hat, hold the beard

A stealth project crept in last night; nothing I “should” have been working on (i.e. neither a gift, an existing WIP, nor an original design), but I had gotten this Malabrigo from the WhitKnits sale, and really wanted to try it out because it’s one of those yarns everyone seems to be madly passionate about. So I cast on for a hat, knit for about 5 hours between watching a movie last night and waiting for files to process today, and suddenly, miraculously, I had a beret with a beautiful spirally flower design on top.

Even though I didn’t really accomplish anything with it, at least it’s red(dish), so it makes a good Project Spectrum entry.

Pattern: The Sunflower Tam, by Norah Gaughan, from Knitting Nature
Size: Child’s, with mods (see below). Finished size is about 20″ around the ribbing. The tam is about 12″ in diameter at its widest.
Yarn used: Malabrigo Merino Worsted from WhitKnits, about 3/4 of a skein, color #610, “Red Mahogany”
Needle size: US size 6/4.0 mm 16″ circular for the ribbing, US size 9/5.5 mm 16″ circular for most of the top, size 8 DPNs once the stitches wouldn’t stretch to fit on the 16″ circ anymore
Date started: 2/18/08
Date finished: 2/19/08
Mods: I started out the ribbing by using the Italian tubular cast-on, working k1 sl1 for 4 rows, then joining into the round for the 1×1 ribbing. Isn’t the edge pretty?

The pattern in the book makes a sort of weird, fez-like hat, with a purled turning row making the top into a crisp, flat, round flowerpot shape. I wanted a slouchy beret/classic Benjamin Bunny tam shape instead. To achieve this, I worked the ribbing on smaller needles–I knew my gauge would be slightly looser than specified, and indeed I ended up with a hat that is 20″ around the ribbing instead of 18″–then switched to larger needles right after the ribbing to help create the poofy shape. I rearranged the order of the increase rounds: I stacked up all the increase rounds immediately after the ribbing to create a sudden flare, and then knit 17 rounds even. Since I didn’t want the fez shape, I omitted the purled turning rounds. I worked the top pattern exactly as specified in the pattern, but instead of working the i-cord tie at the top, I just ran the yarn through the last 4 sts a couple of times and pulled tight to close. I’m quite happy with the resulting shape at the moment, but I suspect the Malabrigo may grow (especially if I let it touch water!) and then I may need to run some elastic through it or something to keep it fitting.



Notes: I’m not quite sure what all the fuss is about with this yarn. The Malabrigo is definitely soft and cuddly, but knitting with it was not, in my opinion, the kind of experience that defines a generation and changes lives. You’d think this yarn was the second coming, from the way everyone talks about it.

The Red Mahogany color didn’t really photograph right. It came out too washed out and looks far too pale and purple in most of these photos. I tweaked the colors a bit on one of the pictures, and came up with this version, which is closer, but still not great–too warm and bright.

The true color is a sort of semi-solid wine color, a noncommittal brownish-purplish-red, with deep almost-black spots where the yarn sucked up the dye. It looks, if I may be so pretentious, the way a soft Merlot tastes.

The pattern is gorgeous and very well written: the twisted stitch pattern on top is inspired by the phyllotaxis spirals of sunflower seeds, and I think it’s just beautiful and brilliantly done. In my opinion, the phyllotaxis section of the book contains the most beautiful and wearable designs–this opinion evidenced by the fact that I’ve made two designs out of the book so far, both of them from the phyllotaxis section.

The other one, if you’re wondering, was the Phyllo Yoked Pullover. I was thrilled to have my version chosen by Norah Gaughan herself as the “face” of the design in Ravelry–the first picture below, the yoke close-up, is the little icon you see in search results or when you queue the pattern.

Further adventures in beards

I finally got around to finding my ball of Boku scraps and adding some thumbs to the fingerless Hyphening mitts I was making for my friend Ken back in November, when I visited him in New York! I was dashing (Ha! ha! that is a Pune, or a Play on Words) to finish these for him as a thank-you gift for letting me stay at his place. I misread the amount of yarn called for in the pattern, brought only 1 skein of yarn, and thus ran out of yarn before I got to the thumbs, so I ended up giving him a 3-D drawing pad instead. But he’s quitting his Corporate Suit job soon and taking up a new, thrilling, idealistic, creative job at a nonprofit, so I thought it would be a good congratulations-on-the-new-job present instead.

Pattern: Dashing, by Cheryl Niamath, from Knitty Spring 2007

Size made: the larger size

Yarn used: Plymouth Boku, one skein and a tiny bit more, colorway 4 (brown, purple, green, yellow)

Needles used: US size 7/4.5 mm circs for the main part of the mitts; US size 6/4.0 mm DPNs for the thumbs

Date started: 11/28/07, on the airport shuttle on my way to the airport; finished knitting by 11/29/07 (it took about 3.5 or 4 hours per mitt), but had run out of yarn and put these in hibernation for a couple of months

Date finished: 2/18/08

Mods:First of all, I made these much shorter than the pattern called for–hyphens instead of dashes–bound them off after the 15th row after the last cable twist.

When I resurrected the project tonight, I inserted afterthought thumbs: snipped a single stitch on each mitt about 2.5” down from the top edge, and unraveled to either side until I had 5 sts above the hole and 5 stitches below. I put these live stitches on DPNs, then picked up an additional 3 sts on each side of the hole for 16 sts total. I knit 1 round, then worked the thumb in 1×1 rib for a total of 9 rounds, and bound off with a suspended 1×1 rib bindoff. Easy as pie, and it took probably half an hour.

Notes: The mitts are pretty loose-fitting on me, but probably will work well for my friend, assuming he doesn’t have tiny, skinny, bird-boned hands. Because I don’t have a professional photography setup, these pictures were taken with flash and look terrible.

Also, I added a couple more things to that bearded hat that make it even more amazing.

First of all, I added some ties to the back, to keep it fitting snugly around the neck:

Then I thought about what I would want if I had a beard of my very own, and I said to myself, Well, I would want to store things in it. That’s what I would want. So I added a little pocket to the inside of the beard, with a button flap, so now Rahul or I can hide little treasures in the beard. If we lived in Boston or Hong Kong or another place with RFID-based public transit cards, I could put my Charlie Card or Octopus Card or whatever in the beard and just casually wave my chin over the sensor as I went by, like the Subway Knitter’s mittens, but with more panache.
Here it is with a cell phone inside:

And open:

And buttoned closed:

I have not yet extracted any promises from Rahul regarding his wearing this hat in public, but he did go and look at himself in the mirror for a while and adjust his mustache (he prefers a narrower mustache, with the bottom edge folded up) and then announce that he wanted to grow a big gray beard himself.

Here he is, working on a marketing assignment about cereal.

Here’s how I added those modifications:

Ties: At about 5.5” back from each side of the beard, at the lower edge of the cap, I picked up 6 sts with the yarn single-stranded on a size 6 DPN and knit an 8.5” tie in 1×1 rib, slipping the last st of each row and knitting the first st.

Pocket: Cast on 15 sts single-stranded on size 6 DPNs. Work in half-linen st for 3.5” (3” wide), knitting the first WS row instead of purling to create a ridge at the top of the pocket. Bind off.

Pocket flap: CO 15 sts single-stranded on size 6 DPNs with long-tail cast-on. Work 7 rows half-linen st, ending w/WS row. Work 6 or 7 sts (last st s/b k), yo, k2tog, work to end. work 1 row even. k1, ssk, work to last 3 sts, k2tog, k1. p1, p2tog, work to last 3 sts, ssp, p1. k1, ssk, work to last 3 sts, k2tog, k1. BO all sts. Use yarn tail to buttonhole-stitch around the edges of the buttonhole to tidy it up.

Sew the pocket in place, then sew the pocket flap directly above it. (I used the yarn tails to do the sewing, and just whipstitched around the edges, being careful not to pull too tight.) Sew button to pocket in location corresponding to pocket flap buttonhole.

I knitted the pocket pieces separately and sewed them on because I wanted them to be as invisible as possible from the outside, and I thought picking up stitches would be more visible. I used half-linen stitch because it doesn’t have a lot of stretch, and I thought it would make for a more stable and strong pocket.

Half-linen stitch is:

Rows 1 and 3 (WS): purl

Row 2: *k1, sl1 wyif* across

Row 4: *sl1 wyif, k1* across

Efrivararskegg

“Efrivararskegg” is the Icelandic word for “mustache,” apparently.

Why is that important?

Because today, I knit what might possibly be the pinnacle of my hat-knitting career. Behold the mustachey goodness, and sorry about the lousy overexposed self-portraits:

Pattern: Bearded Toque, by giftable, inspired by this bearded cap by Vik Prjónsdóttir

Yarn used: Lion Brand Wool-Ease in 152 Oxford Gray, double-stranded. I used about 1.5 skeins total. Machine washable, and I got it on sale for $2 a skein at Jo-Ann yesterday, plus a 10% off everything coupon. So this hat cost less than $4 to make!

Needles used: size 8 DPNs and 16″ circular

Date started: 2/17/08, 1:30 PM

Date finished: 2/17/08, 7 PM

Mods:Instead of knitting in the stitch 2 rows below as suggested for the increases, I knit in the front of the stitch below for KLL. Gauge was off: 3.5 sts per inch instead of 4.5, but it seems to fit fine at the given stitch count. I used the yarn double-stranded on size 8 needles, which made for a firm, thick fabric.

For the seed stitch part, I ignored most of the directions about shaping it and just knit about 1″ of seed stitch even after the hat was about 5.5″ from the crown, then (at 6.5″) bound off 20 sts at the front as specified. I did do the two k2tog decrease rounds and followed the rest of the face shaping instructions as specified, up until the part where you’re supposed to start shaping the beard. I bound off stitches at the back neck until there were 43 sts remaining at the front (20 sts + 3 soul patch sts + 20 sts), then bound off another 10 sts on either side using the sloped bindoff (leave 1 st unworked, turn, work 1 st, pass slipped st over worked st, BO remaining sts as usual). I worked back and forth on the beard for about 1.5″, then bound off 1 st at the beginning of the row for 2 rows, then bound off 2 sts at the beginning of each row until about 6 sts remained–bound off all of these at once.

I made the first example mustache, using ssk where applicable and using sl1-k2tog-psso as the double decrease at each end.

Notes: I made this for my boyfriend, who normally wears a ski mask when he rides his bike to school in the winter. He was curiously unappreciative when I presented it to him and said he would wear it on Halloween. I am hoping to get him to wear it when he bikes around town. I can’t believe he doesn’t find this hat as hilarious as I do.

I loved using Emily Ocker’s circular cast-on and knitting this hat from the top. When I had to have the victim try it on, I put some of the sts on my DPNs rather than on waste yarn–then I could just knit right off them when it came time to continue.

The fit around the neck is not great, kind of baggy–if I made it again, I might try adding some decreases around the back of the neck. For this hat, I may have to add a button and loop to gather in the extra fullness at the back. Also, the mustache seems sort of loose. I may have to reposition it.

I got this amazing Random Act of Kindness package this weekend from Raveler Zanna, who tried out Plymouth Boku and didn’t like it, noticed my rabid love for this yarn, and sent me the 4 skeins she didn’t want. And I think I may have been remiss in mentioning this before, but I also got a RAK recently from knottygnome, who sent me a copy of Rusted Root, which I may make with some of the red Cotlin I’m getting soon in a swap with Leigh.

I am sometimes just amazed by people’s generosity. If you’re reading this, Zanna and Sara, thank you, again!

So I made that bearded hat this weekend. I also sewed this needle roll out of two fat quarters:

The workmanship is absolutely shameful, but I love the color combo. The combo of these two prints, charcoal gray pinstripes and lime green vines and leaves, feels very modern and Scandinavian to me. (I wouldn’t really recommend anyone following what I did, because my work is all crooked and crazy, and has open seams in bizarre places, and the DPNs only barely fit in the case, so I’m not posting any specs for this project. It’s surprisingly hard to sew what should be a simple folded rectangle.)

I have some baby things I made to post about next time, but in the meantime, here are some beautiful photos of a beautiful Prismatic Scarf made by a Raveler named JellyJ. She used Malabrigo in Autumn Forest and I think her photos and finished scarf are just gorgeous–if I do say so myself.

Chicken and Egg, sales, socks

Work has been kicking my ass all over the place this week and I’m super tired but I just wanted to take a moment to say that I love this Mochimochiland reversible chicken and egg so! much! I might buy the issue of Craft (I usually think they’re too expensive) just for that pattern.

Also, I thought I’d point out a couple of sales I noticed lately.

• 25% off EVERYTHING (including books, patterns, needles) at Sakonnet Purls/letsknit.com, with an extra 5% off on red yarns. Ends today. They have a really good selection, including Hanne Falkenberg kits!
• 25% off clearance sale at The Knitting Hutch. It’s for sad reasons, the owner got laid off and decided to close her store. But they have nice stuff, too, Habu and Handmaiden.
• Tons of stuff on sale at Knit Purl through Monday, including 25% off all Classic Elite yarns, 20% off all RYC yarns, 20% off various Lorna’s Laces yarns, and 40% off Jo Sharp Classic DK and Rare Comfort mohair. But the list goes on and on.
• 20% off pink yarns at Two Swans Yarn through the end of the month.

My Amazon order with Hollywood Knits and a couple of other things in it finally shipped! My book club book (the original reason for the order) wasn’t going to be in stock till March, weeks after the meeting. So I canceled that and put in a lace knitting book and a back issue of CRAFT instead, for the free shipping. Only after doing so did I realize the absurdity of this since I had originally only ordered Hollywood Knits to get free shipping for my book club selection. Silly. But I’ll have some nice new books soon.

I have decided I want to learn more about socks. Even if I don’t end up making them for myself, the construction techniques are valuable, as I realized when I was trying to kluge together some baby booties and kept having to look up the stitch and row counts for the heel flap, and where to pick up stitches, how much to decrease the gussets, and so on.  Any suggestions for good overview sock books? I put the Vogue Ultimate Sock Book and Nancy Bush’s Vintage Socks on hold at the library. I’m interested in overviews of construction techniques and general recipes/formulas to help me understand various ways of putting them together, rather than straight stitch by stitch patterns. I know there are a lot of free patterns in Knitty with interesting construction, too, so that will be my next step.

Squat wombat babies

If I am to believe various online design resources,

- children require approximately 6″ of positive ease in their garments to be comfortable

- a three-month-old baby has a back waist length of 6″ and a chest size of 16″

- a baby of approximately that age also has an armhole depth of 3.25″, leaving the distance from armpit to waist 2.75″

- Nobody is very forthcoming about an appropriate neck size for a baby sweater, but thankfully this is a cardigan and I can put off such decisions for a later date, should I ever decide that I simply MUST design a baby pullover. Elizabeth Zimmermann suggests a neck size of 50% of the chest size, but I think even the most diminutive 3-month-old probably has a skull larger than 8″ in circumference. (Perhaps I am mistaken.)

Looking at these numbers, I must be misunderstanding something, like the definition of “underarm” or “length” or something, because I feel like a baby of these proportions would be incredibly wide, squatty and bizarre, like a wombat or a bulldog. Possibly a Dr. Moreau monster wombat with gorilla arms.

The basic point I’m getting to is that based roughly on these measurements, I came up with a quick-n-dirty baby sweater pattern (to be further refined) for a friend who’s expecting this week. About 3/4 of the way through the body (which I sized at 4″ from hem to underarm), I discovered I’d cast on 10 sts less than I thought I had, i.e. the chest measurement was about 1.5″ less than what I thought I had: about 16.5″ total, for only about 1/2″ ease instead of about 2″ ease as I’d planned.

Then, 3/4 of the way through the raglan, I realized I had accidentally forgotten to include the back stitches in my calculations for the decreases, and would wind up with a Tempting-style neckline if I didn’t take some fast action, and knit a Frankensteined compound raglan out of necessity.

The result, while apparently more or less adhering to the Yarn Standards idea of 3-month-old baby size, seemed drastically wrong in shape. The arms seem super long (though the cuffs can be rolled up, of course), the body seems super wide (despite being a couple inches smaller than I had planned for) and short–and this design is not one that is easily lengthened by picking up stitches and knitting downwards. I have a hard time believing babies are really this shape!

The sweater will be gifted as-is, but I’d like to write up the pattern and refine it for use with future babies. If you know of any good resources for accurate baby sizing, or if you have any helpful tips for sizing for babies, please do share! I have a few books with baby patterns in them (Last Minute Knitted Gifts, Knit 2 Together, The Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns, Knitter’s Workshop) but have little idea of how well these books actually reflect normal baby sizes, and the schematics are of varying degrees of detail and helpfulness.

I’m thinking that checking out some Debbie Bliss books from the library might be a good place to start for compiling a non-wombat baby schematic, as she’s famous for her baby designs, but really my master plan consisted of going to Target and measuring some baby clothes in various sizes. I know babies are not just shaped like miniature adults, but are their torsos really almost 3 times as wide as they are long? It should be easier to design for babies, because they’re small and not very sartorially sophisticated or demanding, but the free resources out there for baby sizes are much more scarce than the ones for adult women, it seems.

In other news, I’ve decided that manicures are vastly overrated. I got a manicure and pedicure tonight; hadn’t had either one in years and had forgotten all the unpleasantness that can go along with a manicure. I cut my nails very short, but they felt obligated to “shape” my nonexistent nail stubs, i.e. diligently apply an emery board to my fingertips like I was a safecracker on the lam and they were trying to rub off my fingerprints as a favor to the Don. I was kind of terrified when they started trimming my cuticles, as I don’t have a lot of cuticle to trim and was imagining painful, open cuticle wounds resulting from overenthusiastic, well-intentioned snipping; and as the final blow, I had forgotten how long the smell of nail polish lingers. I enjoyed the pampering, having my hands rubbed with lotion, having pretty pink nails to look at, etc.; but it’s been five hours since the polish dried and the smell is still coming off my hands in thick chemical waves and making me feel kind of sick.

Pedicures still have my seal of approval, since I am in no danger of smelling offgassing from my polished toes, and I guess my callused toes can take a little tiny bit of sanding.  But manicures, ugh, thumbs down.

My new hit album

I went to look at Gloriana’s new Lush and Lacy cardigan today. (Isn’t it lovely? I want one too.)

From there, I found fingers and toes, and after looking at her Lush and Lacy cardigan, I found the following meme:

“First you need a wikipedia random article . The article title is your band name.

Second, go here. The last four words of the last quotation on the page is your debut album title.

Thirdly, go here. The third picture on the page is your album cover.”

I wasn’t really meaning to put anything together, but I so liked the combination of the adorable hedgehog and the album title that I just had to go stick something together in Picnik.

Here’s Tim Bricheno.

The happy hedgehog image belongs to Apple and Eve, whose adorable embroidered plush animals are for sale at http://appleandeve.etsy.com/).
And, as it turns out–this is what I liked most about the results of the meme–the joyful Learning to Love You More-type title comes not from a Sarky exhortation to live every moment to the fullest, but rather from from the bitingly sarcastic Dorothy Parker’s famous quip, “If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

I was going to say I didn’t do anything special for Chinese New Year this year, but I did realize I’ve had a pretty happy couple of days. I went to knitting night last night, where sheepdream kindly surprised me with a Ziploc baggie of BFL lambswool, wonderfully crimpy, raw, and sheepy, and I saw Nicole’s famed Giant Monster Twinkle Skirt in action (cute, in its own chunky, high-fashion way!), and I met some new folks; got the hem of the Hourglass Pullover knitted up without any provisional-cast-on mishaps; went to the gym and felt very virtuous; talked to my family (my dad sounded stressed because my grandma was supervising the cooking of the New Year’s dinner, but my grandma at least sounded pretty happy about it all); and got a ton of wonderful crap in the mail.

I hope to have some pictures up later, but in the meantime, I’ll just list some of the goodies I’ve gotten in the past few days:

• some skeins of Noro Kureyon from a swap,
• two skeins of Malabrigo worsted in Red Mahogany–I’ve never tried Malabrigo before!–because Whitknits had a sale and I had no self-control (I want to go all Gaughan and make a Sunflower Tam and Here and There Cables as a scarf-hat set),
• zero stitch markers from the free shipping sale–I picked out a surprise set, and not only are they lovely (pink pearls), but Aija was a sweetie and included a couple of freebies sized for lace or sock knitting, and a whole sheaf of Etsy coupons for other vendors,
• three separate packages from my mom, including, among other things, a sheep necklace , various silky scarves and pashminas she picked up for me on her recent trip to Korea, and a long, warm Calvin Klein down coat,
• a sweet thank-you note for the February Baby Sweater,
• a bunch of tax documents. OK, that part is not so exciting, but at least the other stuff made up for it.

And after a brief moment of malaise, I suddenly feel overcome with project ADD and want to cast on for a million things all at once.

• Flicca, because the yarn takes up so much goddamn room in my closet, and I would much rather have it in the form of a sweater; it would go a long way towards 2 lbs. of yarn for the Sonny and Shear stashbusting coupon, and would be excellent for cuddling up in while I work at home;
• The Half Circle Cardigan, because my natural inclination is apparently to take a LIFO/stack approach to my knitting and the yarn (Shibui Sock in mulberry) and pattern are newly acquired, hence burning a hole in my pocket; however, it will be useful later in the year, unlike the bulky, woolly knits I want to make, so perhaps I should hold off;
• A Giant February Baby Sweater like Jenny’s, I’m thinking in organic cotton–it’s February and so of course it seems like the natural time to make one; but again, I should wait until the appropriate season…
• The aforementioned Sunflower Tam and/or Here and There Cables;
• Backyard Leaves. I really want to knit one of these, but I have more than enough scarves;
• The Tangled Yoke cardigan, because it’s just so gorgeous, and I just found my long-lost size 3 Addi circular, which I suspect would get me gauge and would be long enough for the infinite loop cables;
• Squares for a baby blanket for my friend who’s having a baby in the next month;
• A lobster for my friend who’s having a baby in July;
• A Baby Surprise Jacket for my friend who’s having a baby in approximately one week (I found out two days ago; wouldn’t the name be appropriate?);
• a bearded hat for my darling for Valentine’s Day–he wears a ski mask when riding his bike to school in the cold, and I think he would appreciate a beardy hat with interchangeable mustaches instead;
• I want to finish up the Dashing mitts I was making for my friend–they just need the thumbs and the ends woven in;
• and on top of all this, I have about five patterns in a half-written state that really need to be tidied up and test-knitted and/or released into the wild. Codenames Helen, Slow Wave, Red, Botany, and Esmeralda, for my own personal reference. It’s frustrating for me–very easy to push these ultimately more fulfilling projects aside in favor of picking up other people’s patterns because I can crank those out mindlessly. I think I just need to set aside time to devote to thinking about designs and writing up patterns, and then just approach the patterns I’ve written like they were someone else’s; good for TV knitting, or knitting while reading. And I need to focus. I keep working on one for a while, then another, then going back and completely redoing the first, then losing patience with the knitting and re-knitting and starting something new.

So–that’s a lot of stuff. Perhaps I’ll have another Giftblitz weekend and try to at least take care of some or all of: the hat, the squares and jacket for the imminent babies, and the mitts. Then reassess priorities and try to make my project stack more of a queue like it should be.

I should also try to destash some more soon. I did a few destashes/swaps in the past couple of weeks and except for having to pay shipping (boo!) it felt great to get rid of things I wasn’t using.

Anyway, other goodness: I’m going to have a nice dinner with my boyfriend and some friends in about half an hour, I’m going to a training session for my moonlighting job tomorrow morning, the weekend should be reasonably warm and sunny, and I’m getting a cost-subsidized manicure and pedicure on Monday night. There’s a new quilt exhibit at the anthropology museum and I want to go see it.

Time to go eat some country-fried seitan now. Starving!