leaving on a jet plane!

If the weather cooperates, I’ll be heading off to Asia tomorrow. I’ll be back in the New Year with a post about my secret gift knitting! I wasn’t nearly as ambitious this year as last, but I did make a few fun things I’m dying to write up.

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season!

Retrofit your mitts! (Afterthought thrums)

Sooo my trip planning is going kind of poorly. One of the airlines I have tickets with (Siem Reap Airways) got blacklisted by the EU for inadequate safety standards and suspended all flights about 6 days after I bought the tickets. Supposedly we can still fly with their parent carrier (but is that any better?) And then tonight, at Stitch ‘n’ Bitch, I broke my glasses! The earpiece just snapped right off. We’re leaving on Monday and tomorrow and Friday we’re supposed to get 6-12 inches of snow, so I’m not sure I want to venture out to the optometrist until the weekend. Not sure what to do about this, and I can’t find my spares. For the moment, I’m supergluing the broken pair back together. Things are not going well!

But I do have something knitting-related that I’m happy about, at least. More than one thing, but I don’t know how many of them I’ll get a chance to write up before I go.

Some background: my absolute favorite mittens are my Bird in Hand mittens (pattern available here.) The only problem is that when it gets down to below zero, like it was here in Madison the other day,

stranded worsted weight knit at a fingering weight gauge, while plenty warm, just isn’t quite warm enough. I wanted a pair of thrummed mittens like the ones I made Rahul (see the guts? I didn’t have a picture of them last time)

but I also wanted to wear my favorite mittens.

So I decided to retrofit my mitts with afterthought thrums!

They are invisible from the outside (aside from the mitten looking a little puffy, and fitting tighter than it used to) and super warm.

Here’s how to do it:
Gather your supplies:

• one pair of stranded mittens, preferably a pair with more ease in them than mine have,
• a couple of ounces of nice woolly roving, matching or not–mine is indigo and osage-dyed Corriedale from Handspun by Stefania, and really I should have used the random bright pink and orange roving I have lying around that I’ll never make anything with, rather than the expensive natural-dyed stuff, but I couldn’t resist the matching green. Whatever color you pick, it won’t show. The important thing is that the fibers should be at least a couple of inches long, and have some crimp, so they’ll stay in the mitten. There was a thread on Ravelry about thrummed mittens where someone suggested cashmere thrums. This is a bad idea, because down fibers are so short, they’ll never stay in place. You want something where you can pull off a decent-sized lock.
• a crochet hook of a decent size (I don’t know much about crochet hook sizing, but I think I used a G hook. Something a reasonable size for worsted-weight yarn)

Turn the mitten inside out.

Pull off a piece of wool about the width of your finger and a few inches long. This is your thrum.

Stick your crochet hook under a couple of floats. Do not go through the main part of the knitted fabric, just under the floats.

Fold the thrum in half and loop the middle over the crochet hook (sorry, this is a little blurry, but you get the idea).

Use the crochet hook to pull the center of the thrum under the floats.

Now go over the floats with the crochet hook and grab the tail ends of the thrum with it…

And pull these through the loop formed by the folded middle of the thrum.

Voila, a thrum attached invisibly to the inside of the mitten, after the fact!

Continue to attach thrums evenly across the back of the fabric so you have a nice woolly layer. I have a short attention span and a lot of Christmas knitting to do, so my mittens are still pretty much in the partially-thrummed state you see below, but it has really improved their insulating powers. (For one mitt. I have part of one mitt thrummed. But on Monday I will be in a place where it’s 80 degrees out, so I’m not in a huge hurry to get this done.)

Pretty awesome, right?

I hope this trick is useful to my fellow knitters in similarly fiercely cold climates!

The latest, greatest, warmest

Look, I made thrummed mittens! (Ravelry page.) And the picture is really terrible because I can’t take good pictures at night. I’ll have to try and wrest the mittens back for a proper photoshoot at some point.

If you’re not familiar with thrummed mittens, they are mittens with little tufts of wool (thrums, originally bits of yarn left over from weaving, but here referring to little bits of unspun roving) knit into the fabric to make a warm, fleecy layer on the inside that keeps the wearer extra-super-duper warm. The Yarn Harlot’s Thrum FAQ has more info and a great photo of an inside-out thrummed mitten. The mittens I made didn’t look nearly as fluffy and nice on the inside, unfortunately.

Pattern: Basic Mitten Pattern from The Knitter’s Book of Patterns, by Ann Budd

Size made: Used the cast-on and increase/decrease numbers for Men’s Large (to allow extra ease for the thrums), but knit to the specified lengths for Men’s Medium, 5 sts per inch gauge

Yarn used: Patons Classic Wool (looks like they don’t call it Merino on the label anymore) in 00231 Chestnut Brown, a little bit less than 1 skein; charcoal gray 70% superwash merino/30% alpaca  roving from River’s Edge Weaving Studio, about 2 oz.

Needles used: US size 7/4.5 mm 40″ circulars (Options)

Date started: December 6, 2008

Date finished: December 8, 2008

Mods:

• Knit the cuff in twisted rib (knit every knit stitch through back loop, purl every purl stitch)
• Thrums! I added thrums to these mittens by pulling off about pencil-width pieces of the roving. It was slippery and wouldn’t pull into short enough pieces, so I ended up knitting two stitches with each thrum, stranding it across the back of the three intervening stitches like for stranded knitting. I used more or less the following chart, where | = plain knit stitch, T = thrummed stitch. I had to kind of fudge the thrum pattern on the thumb and top decreases where the stitch counts didn’t quite work out right.

|	|	|	|	|	|	|	|	8
|	|	|	|	|	|	|	|	7
|	|	|	|	|	|	|	|	6
|	T	|	|	|	T	|	|	5
|	|	|	|	|	|	|	|	4
|	|	|	|	|	|	|	|	3
|	|	|	|	|	|	|	|	2
|	|	|	T	|	|	|	T	1

Notes: I made these as a birthday/Christmas present for Rahul because it’s cold here, and I thought they would be good to keep him warm on his way to school. I meant for them to be a surprise but, as it turns out, I’m really terrible at keeping things secret. He came home while I was knitting them and I decided to go on working on them anyway since he usually doesn’t pay attention to what I’m knitting until I’m done, and he usually sits in the other room to study.

He came and sat by me to study and I decided to act natural and go on knitting the mittens anyway.

Then I finished them and thought as I was weaving in the ends that perhaps I should block them and wrap them up nicely before giving them to him, but that sentiment lasted about 2 seconds before I burst out with “Guess what, I have a present for you!”

“Wow!” he said, laughing, when I presented him with them. “Why, I haven’t seen you working on these at all.” They fit him perfectly, and he says they’re warm.

The fiber I used wasn’t that great for thrums–I would try to avoid it next time in favor of a more curly, woolly yarn. I guess I can’t quite say “crimpier” since the superwash merino has crimp, but it’s so fine that along with the superwash process, it makes the whole fiber come out seeming quite straight and silky rather than in curly, fluffy locks. In its favor, it’s very soft, I had it lying around in a nice manly color that coordinated with the yarn, and the staple length was way shorter than the natural Icelandic roving that was my other choice (though still a bit too long, as it turned out).

My hope is that as the mittens see some use, the outer shell will felt a bit while the superwash roving knit into them will stay warm and fluffy.

The lion in winter

As planned, after posting about Eastlake, I put on my mittens and thermal underwear and headed off to the Vilas Zoo to look at penguins.

It was about 15 degrees out and snowing–big, loose, fluffy flakes. The surrounding park was empty and covered in deep drifts of snow. I couldn’t see a soul and wasn’t sure if the zoo was even open, but apparently it was:

I headed to the penguin exhibit, but they were nowhere to be seen. Same with the polar bear enclosure, and most of the other animal pens: empty, clean, silent.

The lion was gone, hidden away somewhere and dreaming of the savanna, so I had to settle for the stone sculpture at the gate.

It wasn’t clear where most of the animals had gone. A few of them were still out in the snow, or visible in their normal shelters: the Great Horned Owl was glowering out from its nest box, harbor seals were swimming in their pool, the camels and alpacas huddled in their barn so that only their snow-dusted rear ends were visible, and the Barbados sheep were milling around the door anxiously, waiting for food, perhaps.

Every so often I’d see someone else pass by, bundled in winter gear, but mostly the zoo was empty.

Some of the animals were in buildings right by their normal pens.

The giraffes normally have a big pen outside.

In the winter, though, they’re confined to a tiny concrete cage with acacias painted on the walls and artificial suns above.

Inside the aviary building, it’s as steamy and verdant as ever.

And inside the aquarium, as dark and cool as ever. Stingrays and arawannas swim endlessly through the dim light, unaware of the seasons changing.

The most surreal juxtaposition was probably the flamingos. I saw their cheerfully painted building through the blowing snow. It looked like a little piece of Florida.

Inside, the flamingos wander around on concrete painted to look vaguely like sand, wade in a shallow pool of water in a corner where the floor dips down, and strain their brine shrimp from black plastic buckets instead of silty shallows.

Oddly, they seem just as happy here as in their little lake outdoors, occupied with dabbling around in the various buckets and tubs, but since I’m not a flamingo, I can’t know what they’re really thinking, what makes a flamingo happy.

mah Eastlake, let me show you it

OK, I really meant to go out and look at penguins at the zoo, but then about an hour ago I noticed the light was bright enough to take some photos indoors (albeit mostly very blurry ones) and got sidetracked by taking photos of my latest, favoritest FO: Eastlake. It’s still a little damp, but I can’t believe how great it came out. Once I finish writing this post, it’s off to penguinland. I haven’t made it to that corner of the Vilas Zoo yet, and I suspect those little guys are having a ball in this weather.



Pattern: Eastlake, by Norah Gaughan, from Norah Gaughan Volume 3. Used the errata corrections shown here. My ravelry page for this is here.

Size made: smallest (32″)

Yarn used: Taupe/mushroom School Products Multi-Strand Cashmere, bought from Stephanie’s destash sale, 450 grams used total (no idea of the actual yardage, unfortunately, since the yarn doesn’t have ballbands and it’s not on the School Products site anymore).

I LOVE this yarn–it knit into a dense, plush, velvety fabric, and the stockinette looks beautifully rich and even. However, it’s made up of three chainette strands wound together into a ball with no twist added, so it was very snaggy indeed, and I encountered a pretty high number of knots in one strand or another, at which point I would have to cut the yarn.

I felt kind of bad about this yarn for a while. Stephanie was destashing a lot of yarn at a very good price because she wanted to give it all a new home where it would be loved and appreciated, and then once I bought this, it sat around in my closet for ages, with no project in mind, and somehow I felt vaguely like I’d let her down, or snatched the yarn away from someplace where it would really be loved and confined it in a new, neglectful, unloving home. No such worries anymore; I think this is the perfect pattern for this yarn, so it’s time to transfer my stash guilt to something else.

Needles used: US size 5/3.75 mm for the ribbing, US size 7/4.5 mm for the rest of the sweater

Date started: November 25, 2008

Date finished: December 6, 2008

Mods:

• Knit the front and back in one piece in the round up to the underarms, and knit the sleeves in the round, two at a time, magic loop.
• Due to knitting in the round, I subtracted 2 stitches where each seam would have gone. If you also choose to do this, note that the ribbing in the back has to start with p2 k2 rather than k2 p2 to line up right with the front ribbing. Also, on the even-numbered rows, the YOs have to be purled, not knit (this is obvious, if you think about it, since these are WS rows in the original directions, but it took me a couple of rounds wondering why I was knitting the stitches on one round and purling them on the next before the shoe dropped and I realized I hadn’t fully reversed the pattern directions).
• Also due to knitting in the round, once I split for the front and back and started doing the armhole shaping, I omitted the first decrease round after binding off the armpits, to get to the proper stitch count. (Otherwise, since I omitted 2 sts for the side seam, I would have had 2 sts too few.)
• Accidentally left out the plain knit round before the eyelet round on the eyelet decoration round on the chest and the first one on the sleeves. I noticed my mistake and knit the extra round on the 2 eyelet rounds at the elbow.
• Knit 3 reverse stockinette rounds for each purl ridge. (I think the pattern calls for only two rounds on one piece, either the front or the back)
• Because I didn’t have the right length cable handy when I knit the purl band around the neckline, I knit it back and forth rather than in the round, and seamed it at the back neck.
• Twisted the stem stitches in the front panel on every round rather than every other round, since I was working in the round and it was easy to see which stitches these were
• Didn’t twist my M1 sts in the front panel, so they came out as eyelets along the main stem. This was actually an accident at first, but I liked the effect and left it alone.

Notes: Norah Gaughan is a genius. There are no words for how much I love this sweater–I think it’s my new favorite. It was an easy knit, addictive to work on because of the interesting, constantly changing but also predictable front wheat sheaf panel, and the finished product is gorgeous, flattering, and elegant, if I do say so myself.

I have to admit the pattern is sort of hard to follow. Not because it’s poorly written, but because it’s written to follow particular style/space guidelines, so all the directions are crammed into these slightly cryptic running text paragraphs, and I kept losing my place. Also, the wheat sheaf pattern isn’t charted. You can get a chart from someone on Ravelry if you can prove you own the pattern, but I didn’t bother. It would have been nice, but it’s not terribly hard to follow the written directions; the pattern is very intuitive as long as you pay attention to where to start the top decreases for each leaf and where to start each new stem.

I only finished the sweater so quickly because I had some huge blocks of time during the Thanksgiving holiday to work on it–about 12 hours in the car, plus hours of idle time spent watching movies and such.  I wouldn’t have rushed it so much, either, but I was trying to finish it during NaKniSweMo as part of a Stash and Burn challenge/knitalong. I didn’t make it, but I came really close–I finished the front and back and several inches of the sleeves before throwing in the towel at midnight on the last day of November.

This photo is not especially nice or exciting or anything, but it might be helpful for anyone making this sweater who wants to see how the back neck extensions get seamed:

just what I needed

I’ve been doing lots of knitting! Most of today has been spent lounging around, knitting, watching TV, and reading. I finally finished up my Eastlake sweater and it’s all seamed and sewn, ends woven in, and blocking now. I also got around to blocking my Flicca–it’s so huge that I couldn’t block it in the bathroom sink, where I normally block my handknits, so I had to throw it in the washing machine with some Eucalan to soak and spin dry. (Grapefruit scented, my favorite.)

So Eastlake was the bulk of my knitting today, but I also knit up a pretty cream wool hat last night, I’m halfway through another hat intended as a present, and I cast on for a super secret present for Rahul. I’m not being very strategic about my gift crafting, but at least I’ve started, which is something, and proved to myself that I can at least make one hat per evening if I put my mind to it, even on work days.

I’ve been feeling kind of sore and under the weather all week, either due to fighting off infections or due to the 3 vaccines I got last week in preparation for my trip (tetanus/diphtheria/whooping cough, Hepatitis A, influenza) plus the course of oral typhoid vaccine I’m halfway through right now. So I think a day filled with wearing pajamas, drinking tea, and knitting cashmere was just what I needed. Especially since the snow season in Wisconsin is here now, with several inches of fluffy snow blanketing the streets and the smaller lakes freezing over already. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go take a look at the ice on Lake Wingra.

Prismatic Scarf pattern update

My stupid internet access at home has been down almost constantly for the past two days, so I’ve been bouncing from cafe to cafe to work, using their wi-fi and praying it won’t be too slow. Today we might get 6 inches of snow–there are lots of windblown flakes out there looking very wintry–and there’s nothing I would like more than the luxury of staying at home and drinking hot chocolate instead of going out to work. On the bright side, without the temptation of aimless internet surfing, it’s much easier to go to bed at a reasonable time.

Anyway, until my internet connection is fixed, I can’t do much blogging. I just wanted to post today to let you all know that I’ve revised the pattern for the Prismatic Scarf to fix some common problems people were having with it: I used knitting symbols on the chart instead of the extremely confusing “k” and “p” I had chosen originally, changed the pattern to start on the RS instead of the WS, and incorporated the i-cord edging into the stitch pattern instructions instead of saying “work edging, work from stitch pattern chart, work edging”–several people on Ravelry had gotten confused because of this and left out the i-cord edging altogether. Anyway, hopefully it will be an improvement, and hopefully I haven’t accidentally introduced other, worse problems while making these revisions. Also, due to the change to the chart symbols, the pattern is now only available as a PDF, instead of as both HTML and PDF.

Tyro!

Sorry about the silence for a while there–I really needed that Thanksgiving break! I was drowning in work, and a week or two spent working into the wee hours of the morning paid off in allowing me to spend the long Thanksgiving weekend relatively work-free and relaxed.

On Thanksgiving day, we drove about 5 hours south to Rahul’s aunt and uncle’s house in rural central Illinois, and his parents drove up from Missouri to meet us there.  It’s deep in America’s flat, corn-filled heartland, the type of area where they show GM seed corn ads on prime time TV and you can listen to radio call-in shows dedicated to farm equipment classifieds (RFD Trading Post)–fascinating for an urban Californian! “Uh, hello, I’m interested in buying some billy goats, but I only want billy goats without horns. No horns. So if you have a billy goat with no horns, please call me at XXX-XXX-XXXX.” “I got some farm fresh eggs for sale. XXX-XXX-XXXX. Thanks.”

We had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner–turkey with all the fixings–but some yummy Indian food the other days, too: tandoori chicken, shrimp curry, biryani, a coconut-rice vermicelli dish called shevia (the last half of the word should be pronounced in a sort of slurry of vowels and approximants, sort of like Ozzy Osborne in that Samsung commercial).

We went shopping in Springfield on Black Friday and the day after. I feel sort of ashamed to admit that I had any part of this celebration of gluttonous American consumerism, but we were fairly practical, buying useful, cold-weather things on sale like chapstick and flannel sheets and a fake-down comforter, instead of silly things like Bacon-Waves and talking football-shaped candy dishes. We did buy a semi-frivolous Roomba at a doorbuster sale but found upon opening it that it didn’t have all the features we wanted: you have to manually start it–it can’t be set up to run automatically, and it doesn’t “go home” to charge afterwards, you just have to stumble over it wherever it happened to stop vacuuming and take it back to recharge. So we returned it, and my dreams of an amazing robot maid will have to be deferred. (An aside: I think iRobot is a terrible name for a robot company, don’t you?)

We did see some good old-fashioned Black Friday douchebaggery: a woman asked Rahul to hold her place in line for a sec when we first lined up, then she came back 45 minutes later, when we were about 5 people from the front of the line, and said “Oh, there you are! Thanks for holding my place” and shamelessly ducked back into line, completely ignoring her mortified husband telling her they had to go to the end of the line. Amazingly, aside from some complaining from us, a manager, and the people directly behind her, there were essentially no consequences for her jerkface behavior: she got to check out pretty much right away. But that was the biggest drama we saw, no fistfights over Wiis or anything like that.

Aside from that, we spent lots of time vegetating and hanging out with Rahul’s family. We watched lots and lots and lots of news about Mumbai, and I saw The Godfather for the first time, and the The Last King of Scotland. Both fantastic, of course.

Plus, at the same time, I did lots and lots of knitting! I cast on for Eastlake just before we left, and knit for a total of 20+ hours over the course of 4 days during car rides and while we watched movies or TV. I was trying desperately to meet my NaKniSweMo goal of finishing Flicca plus making one more sweater during the month of November, but fell short last night, only getting a few inches into the sleeves before calling it quits for the night. Still, I made good progress, and the sweater is going to be cushy and delicious once I’m done–I’m making it in a velvety taupe worsted-weight cashmere from School Products (via Klosekraft’s destash sale), and knitting as much of it as possible in the round. The leaf motif is so addictive I think I might even make an Eastscarf.

Last but not least, I finished the Malabrigo socks that were giving me such fits before, and wrote up the pattern! It’s available as a free download, with the caveat that this is a sock pattern by a sock moron and thus is not at all guaranteed to be any good. Here they are, the Tyro Socks, knit in the lovely Indiecita colorway:

Toe-up socks written for beginners, using the yarn-over short-row toe and heel described by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts in Simple Socks: Plain and Fancy (photo tutorial included in the pattern, for sock morons like me), and a simple, softly curving lace pattern mirrored on the left and right feet. The lace pattern is easy to read and to memorize, and it’s mostly stockinette (every other row is plain knit stitches).

You may notice some visual similarities to other patterns: the Pomatomus socks and Spirogyra mitts in particular. (There may be others, too, but those are the only ones I know of.) However, despite the similarities, which only occurred to me after I’d started, I can assure you that these socks were designed the old-fashioned way, from scratch, futzing around with a stitch dictionary and doing some swatching and math to mirror the stitch pattern and make it work with the stitch count. Namely, the parent stitch pattern is the Overlapping Waves pattern in The Big Book of Knitting Stitch Patterns.

This is a pattern of many knitting milestones for me. First pair of socks, first sock pattern, first short-row toe, and last but not least, first semi-creepy Flickr group request for photos of my feet. Ha! I’d read all kinds of tempest-in-a-teapot discussions on Ravelry about foot fetishists lurking on knitting websites to ogle sock FO photos, but this was the first direct encounter I’d had with them.