Demonic Progress

Update: My Knitting, Spa, Spinning, and My Knitting Weekends

I need to get caught up on my blog postings! I *think* about writing on my blog a lot.... I don't get to it as much as I should, though. But here goes:

My knitting: I am starting down the backside of the Hanne Falkenberg Ballerina's first sleeve. I love working on this project, but I got distracted by other things. I have not worked on my white shawl at all because I have mentally "put it away" until I finish something else. Neither have I worked on my Hedgerow Socks because they are kind of boring and I am beginning to realize if I am going to put the effort into putting even the simplest texture stitch into socks, I would like it to show at least a little, and it really doesn't. So I have it circling in a hold pattern because I am pretty sure I am going to rip them out and do a different sock; I just don't know what yet. I love this Classic Elite Alpaca Socks yarn, though! It is wonderful to feel and to work with. Lastly, I *ahem* started a new project. It is the Portuguese Fisherwoman's shawl, designed by Shelagh Smith. I am almost half done it and I will soon post more information and pictures... but I am kinda waiting until I get my next shipment of patterns from Shelagh because as soon as you see this shawl you are going to want to make one. I had 29 copies of it for sale at the spa, and Shelagh lent me a model to wear, which I wore Friday night and Saturday. I kept one copy of the pattern for myself, and sold all the other 28 copies at the Spa. I am using a strand of laceweight Douceur et Soie held together with a strand of French Hill Farm's fabulous "French Twist" hand dyed fingering weight merino (the two together make a worsted weight). I am using utterly wonderful glass circular needles... this is my ultimate happy project! I love working on it so much!

The SPAAAAAAAAAAAA (New England Textile Arts group's annual get together in Freeport, Maine) was fabulous and I love Freeport as a venue for this event. It was relaxed, comfortable, and I hope they keep it there. True, I didn't make as much money at it as I usually do, but only a part of that was due to the fact that people are spread out over 3 hotels. For one thing, because it was new, people spent this year exploring and enjoying their hotel; next year or the year after, their hotel will be more familiar and they will venture out more readily. Also, there was bad weather on Friday, and the economy in general held people back. There is also more shopping competition within walking distance in Freeport than there was in Portland. There is more to see and do, so people didn't tend to hang out in the vending area. So as a vendor, I guess I should be unhappy that I made about half of what I usually make at this show, but since I went into it expecting that, and was correct in my assessment, I am pretty happy. And as a participant, I would be crazy not to love having it in Freeport. It is more open, more comfortable, the service was great, there is a ton of stuff to see and do, and it is closer for me to get to.

Spinning. Ahh yes. I haven't spun much since the Fiber Frolic in the summer, and then only for about a week. At the Spa I bought a lovely new Bosworth Spindle, some soft and fluffy blue fiber (can't remember what is in it -- silk? merino? angora? it is yummy, anyway), some great sock yarns from Dye Dreams, a fabulous NEW enterprise who had their debut at the Spa, at the booth next to us. I also got from them some fiber for making striped socks, and some gorgeous cashmere/silk fiber. So once again, I came home with fiber and a new spindle. Pretty good for someone who doesn't spin. I have decided to do "meditation" spinning every morning for 20 minutes..... for twenty minutes, I spin (currently the cashmere/silk blend on my new Bosworth spindle) and do nothing but focus on the spinning itself. I don't think about my worries or make plans and mental lists for the day ahead or think about anything at all. The point is, to think of nothing... and just spin. Focus on the fiber, on the moment, how the fiber feels in my hand, how the spindle looks. I have always heard that meditation is good for you, and I never was much of a person for simple "just-sitting" meditation. I need something to focus on. Spinning is my answer. With only a couple exceptions, I have successfully kept up my meditation spinning every morning. I have a nice kop of fiber on my spindle and something to look forward to every morning. It is a good thing.

In another spinning note, I am finally spinning on my marvelous Merlin Tree creation, the reproduction antique Quebec production wheel that David Paul made for me. It is fabulous and it makes me want to spin forever! I love it! I am spinning the blue fiber I got from the Spinning Bunny at the Spa. My life is now filled with wonderful spinning. :)

Lastly, I have two fabulous knitting weekends coming up: March 14, 15, & 16 and March 28, 29, & 30. This will be my third year! Hard to believe. There is still plenty of room available at both weekends and I hope you can come! We are going to relax, laugh, knit, spin, eat good food, learn a little, and HAVE FUN! If you have signed up for one of the weekends, please note that I am sending a letter to participants this week, as I did the last two years, explaining any items you might need to bring with you for classes and giving directions to the Lord Camden Inn and Unique One. I am really looking forward to these knitting weekends! It will be great to see you there! Many of the participants have now become my friends and I am always happy to see my circle of knitting friends growing :) (Oh by the way, they got a new waffle machine in the breakfast room at the LCI and it is even more fabulous than before! Yummy!)

I guess that is enough for now.... have a great day, and happy knitting! :)

On the Needles

Okay, as promised.... knitting.

I haven't finished much since my last knitting post. I finished a blue version of these socks, and they are very warm and comfy, too. As a matter of fact, they are already in the laundry, because I have worn them so much.

Around the end of December, I started a shawl with the impossibly fine handspun lace weight yarn that is a marvel to look at, and it is hard to imagine anyone ever being able to spin yarn like that. I chose the Fiber Trends Shoalwater Shawl:

The pattern is written for 4 different weights of yarn, so you can knit it with pretty much anything. It is pictured in a beautiful hand-dyed sport weight, but I of course am knitting it in lace weight off white. So, you have to imagine it looking rather fine and foamy. I am 25% done with it... I was wondering if the yardage on the yarn label was right, because it is a triangular shawl and I am halfway through the 4 pattern repeats that the shawl calls for, but I have only used up one of the 4 balls of yarn that the pattern calls for. So I called up my old math teacher colleague (Hi Barb! if you read my blog) and after a bit of figuring she determined that, in fact, it is correct that in a triangle, half the number of rows would really use up only a quarter the yarn. So that is right.

One thing about handspun laceweight yarn, as opposed to commercial laceweight yarn, will make this an interesting project upon completion. You know how usually, blocked lace items look very crisp and precise? Well... due to the thick and thin characteristic of handspun lace weight yarn (yes, even in the minuteness of this incredibly fine 2-ply yarn, there is diameter variation), the finished product will have a more "textured" look than regular lace yarn would achieve. Also, this rippley lace stitch pattern isn't terribly precise or geometric, so I think that coincidentally goes along very well with the textured look the handspun yarn will impart. I think I did a smart thing in choosing that particular pattern for this yarn, and I wasn't even trying! Woot!

I thought I took some pictures of my shawl but they are nowhere to be found... I will get pictures in a bit.

You remember that I am doing two projects at a time? Originally it was so that I would have one 'challenging' project and one 'mindless' project on the needles at any given time. Now that the lace shawl is well underway, it has moved into the 'mindless' knitting category, since I know the pattern well enough not to have to think about it overly much. Therefore I started a new and very exciting project!

I couple of weeks ago two customers came in, and got very excited about the Hanne Falkenberg "Ballerina" jacket that I have on display in the store. Some of you may remember me wearing it at the NETA Knit & Spin last year. Although I love wearing it, I always have felt a little disappointed that I didn't actually knit the one I have on display; I hired my dear friend Alison to knit it for me. I have always secretly wanted to knit a Ballerina for myself. So as you can imagine, with my two customers so excited to get their Ballerina's going, it didn't take much to persuade myself to order an extra kit and knit one along with them! I am so excited and so happy to finally be knitting this fabulous design. I never knew how much I wanted to knit it until I actually started.

So the three of us are knitting this Ballerina together, which is fun! One of the customers lives nearby, in Rockland; the other, who was just visiting at the time of the purchase, lives in California! I got to thinking, I bet I have other customers who have purchased a Ballerina kit from me, or another shop, but who have either never started knitting it or who started it but put it aside for some reason. Because let me tell you, I have sold a number of the kits, but I have yet to see anyone waltzing in, proudly wearing it.... or even sending me a picture of it finished. Where are you all? Dig out those Ballerina kits, girls, and let's knit them together! It will be fun! If you want to knit your Ballerina along with me, email me: yarndemon (at) gmail dot com, and I can set up some kind of email group or something. If nothing else, you'll have me to call on or email to ask questions, and I will have your email so I can regularly touch base with you and prod you as best I can, to finish your project! And then we can all have a gallery of finished Ballerina jackets when we are done... maybe go out to dinner together, wearing them. Here's what my Ballerina will look like when it is done (it is colorway 16):

I am loving knitting this jacket so much! Yes, it is on little needles (it calls for 3.0 mm, but I needed 3.25 mm to get the right gauge). Yes, the pattern is a little wordy... but it is also packed with helpful information and if you just follow it as it is written, it actually is right! I love the geometric progression of the knitting... watching the progress both mathematically and in color progression is a fascinating thing. Because the Ballerina is done in a series of short rows, with regular increases thrown in to make the hem curve gracefully back, every ridge you knit advances you closer to a checkpoint, at which you do something different and have a chance to make sure you have the right number of stitches. It is very logical and beautiful to watch it unfold. Also, this all makes me want to keep working on it, as progress -- even a little -- is obvious to see and the goal is always a little closer. I have worked on it for a little over a week and already I have the front right done, and I am about a quarter of the way along the sleeve. It is beautiful! It is my new favorite thing. Here are pictures, with comments.

These two pictures give you an overall idea of the shape that I have knit so far. I started at the right front and have already taken off the stitches for what in a 'normal' jacket construction would be the side seam. The working needle is the one I am doing the length of the sleeve with.

I love how the sleeve is contructed.... very clever. The whole garment is an amazing construction of short rows. It is magical. In fact, I love it so much that it was the inspiration for my upcoming Knitting Weekend class on short rows that I will be teaching.

Look at this amazing shaping... it is magic, isn't it? Isn't it? Aren't you as fascinated with it as I am? Well... maybe you are not. But *I* think it is treeeeemendously cooooool.

This is a close up of my provisional cast on. I cast on first with contrasting (stash) wool, then knit a row of fine cotton, and then started the garment itself. That way the row I pick up later to do the finishing band around the front and the neck will be at the proper tension. Clever, no? Heh... that's the way the pattern is written; I can't take credit for it. And although the red and yellow look great with the dark olive green, it is just waste yarn that will be removed later.

This next little tip, however, is of my own creation, and it might be a help -- one comment I have heard from people knitting the Ballerina is, how do I keep track of the short rows and the shaping? The thing about the Ballerina is that, right at first, you have pretty much three things going on simultaneously and it might be overwhelming to keep track of. One is the little "mock" i-cord edging for the bottom of the jacket that you knit as you go along. Trust me on this one, after you have knit about 10 ridges (or less), it will just click and you will get it. From that point on it will be obvious what to do when you get to the edge. The second thing to keep track of is to know where to turn, on each ridge, to make the short row shaping. That too is easy, since it is a regular number, and the gap marking the previous turn is blindingly obvious to see. The third thing, though, is not obvious to see and might result in a need to keep track -- and the accompanying possibility of not keeping track, and therefore getting a wrong stitch count later. In the jacket, you increase every so many ridges -- the number of ridges changes as you work through the jacket -- and you need to keep track of not only *when* to increase but also *how many times* you have already increased. You could make a chart of some sort on paper, and tick it off as you work. That is fine, but I am usually pretty good at forgetting to make the tick marks, or losing the paper entirely. I chose a quicker, easy to spot, impossible to lose method: coilless pins. Pin one of those babies on every ridge you increased on, and count from there. You can easily see how many ridges you have knit since the last increase, and therefore how many ridges you need to knit before doing the next increase ridge (and marking it). You can also see how many increases you have already made, by counting the pins. And if you forget to put the pin on, just count up from the last pin you remembered, put the new pin on, and keep going. Coilless pins are a wonderful thing, for knitting. Here is a picture to illustrate:

So that's my knitting, so far. I am very happy and excited with both of my projects, and I will keep you posted on my progress! Email me if you want to join in on a mega Ballerina knitting adventure (my email link is in the margin somewhere, and in the text above).

Happy knitting :)

Geez, *another* FO!

Wow, I am totally on a roll... or in a role.. or something. Or maybe on drugs. Nah, caffeine is about all I can handle. Anyway....

I started a pair of worsted weight socks on Wednesday last week, after my beloved brown scarf was done, and I finished those socks last night. Another finished object!!! I am loving this finishing thing. Unfortunately the next project, the laceweight rippley shawl, will take longer to finish, but since it appears to be relatively mindless knitting, maybe it will get done in a timely manner. And now that I have my new One Project at a Time program, I must say... things tend to get done, when you spend time actually knitting on them instead of starting a new project every other day. :)
Here is a picture of the socks:
*woohoo! new socks!*

One thing that always amazes me is how hand-dyed yarn has a mind of its own. Take, for example, my socks. I knit them from one skein of yarn, which you would assume to be pretty much the same from beginning to end. I used the same needles and the same number of stitches to make the second sock identical to the first. I even knit them within a few days of each other, so you would think my tension should have been the same for both socks. But look at how the right sock has tighter stripeyness and the left sock is more relaxed, stripe-wise. (Don't you love my highly technical knitting terms? I just made them up.) Why does that happen? I knew the stripes wouldn't line up exactly the same, and I really am not interested in having two socks be exactly the same, but it just makes me say "Huh", because the two socks came out kinda different and I figured they would be kinda more alike. OH well. Just another knitting mystery. In the next couple of days I will be winding up some handspun laceweight yarn to start my ripple stitch shawl and I will let you know how that goes!

Today at Unique One I have to knit a special order sweater for a customer, one of our lupine sweaters. Maybe you don't know this... I have a great yarn shop here in Camden, but Unique One is also a great sweater shop. I and a few of my home knitters use standard gauge knitting looms to create sweaters that we sell here at the store and online. The lupine sweater is a popular item here, even in the winter, and I am actually completely out of stock of them right now. Thus the need to knit one for the dear customer :) I'll try to take pictures while I knit it so you can see how we make the sweaters here.... maybe someone is interested in that. I know that people wandering through like to watch while I knit the sweaters. Lots of people have never seen a knitting machine in operation. So wish me luck & have a good day knitting whatever you're working on!

:)

[UPDATE] I ended up having somebody else knit the aforementioned lupine sweater.... so the knitting photo journal will have to wait for another time! Sorry!

OMG I finished something!

Well, it had to happen sometime... I actually finished a project. Yup, a UFO became a FO.

Ever since I cleaned up, put away and organized all the knitting crap I had been kicking around downstairs for about a year, I have been on this new stringent knitting regime, whereby I remove NO MORE THAN 2 knitting projects at a time from its prison bin, and do not allow myself to start another new project until one of the existing projects is done. It is actually working pretty well!! I kinda scared myself when I cleaned up and realized that the load of crap I had sitting around in bags "around" my chair filled 5 (yes, F-I-V-E) large Rubbermaid plastic bins. [Not the bathtub sized ones; those are upstairs ... these are the half-bathtub sized ones). So I numbered my bins and wrote down what is in each bin, and I am working my way through them, one (or two) project(s) at a time. I am allowing myself one project of any difficulty level and one project of Knitting-in-Line-at-the-Post-Office difficulty level. Gotta have that walkaround project, ya know? It's like having a security blanket. But with needles.

So anyway, back to my victory dance.... mid-November, I suddenly had a strange and urgent desire to knit a fine-gauge dark brown scarf, long enough to wrap a couple times around my neck or possibly strangle an unknowing terrorist, if the need arose. This was strange because I actually really do NOT like brown, I tend to avoid it, despite it being the color of chocolate. So that was weird, but I grabbed 4 skeins of Dale of Norway's Baby Ull in a luscious dark brown and cast on 70 sts on size 4 needles and proceeded to k2, p2 forever. I loved it. I knit and knit and knit, night after night... loving every minute of it... not straying from my one project, until lo and behold, suddenly it was done! Geez, it really does work... if you keep knitting on something, it becomes "finished". Wow. So I wove in the ends and wore it out in this freaking nasty storm that manifested itself... personally, I am blaming Canada for it. I closed the store at 3 today. It was nasty out there. Here's a picture of my finished scarf, modeled on a truly lovely Unique One sweater; also there is a picture of my scarf in action, on me... after I fought my way through the blizzard to get into the store this morning. BTW it is very difficult to take a picture of yourself in a mirror without getting the camera in on the act. So oh well:

Meanwhile, back at the rocking chair, I already started my next One Project, a pair of worsted weight socks in a hand-dyed lovely yarn from some farm in Maine... I will have to get back to you on the name of the place. It is lovely wool yarn, which has nylon in it. It looks handspun, but isnt; but it is hand-dyed. I got it at this year's Fiber Frolic. I have one sock done and the second one is already half done:

Since I appear to be zooming through this second project, I have already been shopping in Blue Plastic Bin Yarn Mart #5 for my next project, and I chose to use some handspun laceweight yarn that I have been hanging onto for I swear, about 8 years. This was amazing yarn and we used to sell it when I could get it. A wonderful man from Rhode Island, whose name I unfortunately do not recall, had some amazing supernatural powers of spinning, and he used to spin this *2-PLY* lace weight yarn from Shetland sheep that were raised right here, in Lincolnville or Northport, I believe. It is amazing... it still makes me shiver to think that anyone could spin like that. I am finally going to use the 3 skeins of white and 1 skein of brown to make a ripple-stitch shawl. This yarn is one of those yarns (we all have them) that we hold onto and never use because it is "too nice" to use. You know you have that yarn in your stash, admit it. Maybe it is cashmere or handspun or yarn made from a pet dog you used to have... or maybe it is just the most luscious, amazing yarn you have ever seen in your life, and you are in such utter AWE of it, that you can't possibly use it because, after all, NO project could ever do it justice. Right? Right? Yeah... well I got over it. I have this impossibly amazing yarn that has been (sometimes literally) kicking around in my yarn stash for okay, maybe it's been 10 years. And dammit, it is time to knit something with it!!! Wooo hooo! I feel such a sense of freedom, of adventure, of fear that is is going to take 20 years to wind this stuff into a ball....
Pictures below.... please note that I am showing the close-up shot as well as the not close-up shot of the yarn on a background of my recently finished Baby Ull scarf. Yes... Baby Ull... and just look how fat and chunky the Baby Ull looks compared to this *2-PLY* handspun laceweight. Sigh.. I bow before this spinner's abilities... :

If anyone knows/remembers this amazing spinner's name, please leave it in the Comments... I would love to recover that bit of info so I can give him appropriate credit!

Happy knitting, & try not to hurt yourself :)

In Which the Heroine Discovers a New Use for Scotch Tape

Hi!

Okay, so I jumped on the bandwagon for the Mystery Stole 3 knit-along. I figured, 3000+ knitters can't be all wrong, right? And you know me... I can't be happy just doing a "good job"... I have to be an overachiever. So despite the fact that I am working 55 hours a week at the shop, I jumped into two (yes... 2) Mystery Stole projects. So far, it's good.

I am knitting one stole in black merino laceweight yarn (oh yes... and knitting lace in black, well, that just makes it even more mind-bendingly difficult, no? so of course, I want want to do that ...) with iridescent sorta-black beads. Yes, it's beaded, too. With teensy-weensy seed beads. It just gets worse and worse, doesn't it? Sigh. Shoot me now. I really like the Addi Lace Needles I'm using, mostly because of the cord, which is thin and very flexible. This stole will be stunning in black, and the little seed beads look like drops of dew. Here are a couple pictures of it, after I finished clue #1:

And now, children, let me tell you of my new knitting tool discovery: scotch tape! I love this stuff. Did you know, it comes out of the dispenser and it actually sticks to things??? How cool is that? I wanted to lay out my marvelously-knitted-and-beaded stole beginnings to show them off to my loyal readers, but being the lazy cuss that I am, I didn't want to block it with a spritzer and pin it out and be all proper about it. Down and dirty, that's me. So I just taped that sucker down on the counter with scotch tape. Yessah, b'god, it worked just fine, deah. (That's Maine talk for 'My, what a marvelous invention Scotch tape is for knitters!')

I also am knitting a second Mystery Stole 3 from the teal-y, ocean-y alpaca lace weight yarn that astute yarndemon readers will remember I dyed about a year or two ago (the "Blue Spaghetti" post). Yup, I never found the perfect use for it. But now, I can make at least two Mystery Stole 3 stoles from the 2400 yards of it that I have, with enough for a scarf left over, maybe. I am beading this one too, because I guess I don't know what that word "optional" means. The yarn is a lot darker and greener than I remembered it being, but it is still a nice ocean color, and I am using light blue iridescent beads which I am preferring to think of as seafoam along the edge of the shawl. Poetic, no? I have only got about 70 rows of the first 100 rows of the stole done on the teal stole, and the picture below was taken after only about 20 rows, I think, but it is enough to show you how it looks in the teal alpaca with the light blue beads. And plus, I got to use that fun Scotch tape again:

The second clue was released on Friday, July 6, and no, I haven't even begun it yet, unless you call printing out the charts and Scotch taping them together a beginning. But I plan to at least have the black stole clue #2 done by this coming Friday. My primary knitting target is the black merino stole, with the teal alpaca stole suffering along as an also-ran, to be done if I have time. So far, so good. We will see how it goes. :)

Finished :)

Okay, so yesterday I wove in the last of my ends about 4 p.m. and I did it in front of Victoria so she would know.

All through this project I kept feeling like the sweater was really wide and really short.... but when I tried the finished sweater on, it fit me fine. I guess that means that I am wide and short! Well.... I am not *that* short.... unfortunately for me, the sweater is a model for the store, so I won't be wearing it unless the yarn and/or pattern is discontinued.

One thing about this pattern is that making it in any size you want is certainly do-able, BUT ... it takes quite a bit of figuring. So I would say that it is a pretty intermediate level of difficulty if you want to knit the pattern exactly as it is written, and it was pretty easy to knit. However, if you want to re-size it, you will need not to be afraid of the math, and be able to think in terms of gauge and measurements. To resize it you almost need to have knit it once, to understand how it goes together, or be pretty adept at being able to read written directions and be able to picture in your mind what is going on where. I will say, though, that it is eminently possible to resize this sweater to whatever width you want it to be. Resizing to a really specific different length is a little more tricky, because you have to add TWO rows rows of diamonds at a time, in order to make the neck be shaped right. If you only add one row of diamonds, there will be no V-shape in the center, because the diamonds are offset on every row. I would have liked my sweater to be one row of diamonds longer (at least, that's what I thought as I was knitting it; in reality, the length was fine). Thinking about it afterward, I think you could add half-diamonds (triangles) at the bottom, making the bottom straight across instead of zig zag, and then pick up stitches and knit down in some pattern stitch, maybe even ribbing, to get exactly the length you want... but then of course, the triangle pieces would be canted in a different direction from all the others, and depending on the edging you choose for the bottom, the fit would be different, perhaps. Like I said earlier, working on this design makes me want to branch off and come up with my own, nearly entirely different ideas....

I loved making this pullover and I want to make another one. But different, of course :)

Here's my finished product:

The Race Is On....

..... and now it is nearly over.

On May 8th or so, Victoria and I discussed what model we should knit from the new Vita yarn from Alchemy. It is a great 100% raw silk, so it has a nice texture to it, and it comes in luscious colors, of course:

Usually, if Victoria volunteers to knit something for the store, I approve wholeheartedly, and am thankful that she wants to make it! Unfortunately, I didn't really like the tank top from the book Knitting Nature that was Victoria's choice to knit the model from..... or was it because I had found the thing that *I* really wanted to knit from Vita? I had become quite fond of the Just One More Row pattern from Jill Vosburg, the Diamond Patch Sweater. But when I frowned down Victoria's choice, I could see she wasn't happy about it.... and then I had a brilliant idea.

Why don't we both knit a model from the same yarn, and see which one we like best? Plus, it would be fun. I am not sure exactly when it became a race, to see who would finish first, but it was a race before we wound up our first balls of yarn. Here are the two patterns we picked out:

Victoria chose Vita in red, and I chose a dark, mulberryish purple. My first instinct was to pick the pretty light blue... but I kinda wanted to see what the pattern would look like in a darker color, and it was already pictured in a light color. Here are the colors we chose:

So off we went. Both of us immediately wound the skeins into balls and started gauge swatches. Here are pictures, of yarn balls and beginnings:

Victoria was soon done her swatch and started on her project; I was lucky because my swatch could also double as my first modular piece.

Each of our projects has a somewhat unusual method of construction; mine is knit in modular diamond shapes, and they are knitted in as you go. Victoria's top is knit in a long, thin piece that spirals around as you go, and you add the piece to the lower part of the spiral as you work along, so it is all joined together.

I gave Victoria an extra day to work on her top, because 1) her project required one more ball of yarn than mine did; 2) she is so much younger and less experienced than I am; 3) I am a WAAAAY better knitter, of course; and 3) she gave me a cookie when I begged her for it. It was a really good cookie.

So now it has been a month. I actually finished knitting my top on Sunday night. I still have to weave in the ends, so it really isn't technically finished yet.... but I will weave them in by the end of knitting tonight. So that means Victoria has to finish her top by the end of her knitting group tomorrow night, for the race to be a tie. Hope she isn't reading my blog :D

We both have loved knitting with the Vita yarn ... I would certainly knit with it again! And I know it will be a comfy fiber to wear, too... it is soft and feels good against my skin. The Diamond Patch Sweater is a little shorter than I would have liked it to be... but the directions did give options on how to lengthen it. I liked this pattern well enough that maybe sometime I will even knit it again, or a slightly different version of it... it's the sort of design that makes me start thinking of lots of ideas. That can only lead to trouble!

:)

The Fabulous Fantastic Yet Simple Nautical Sweater Story, Part 1

It’s odd how a sweater design is conceived, sometimes. I am currently working on a sweater design that I *hope* to have completed to hand out to passengers on the knitting cruise. Hopefully I will have it done for both the June and the September cruises... but we’ll see how it goes. I did not, however, wake up one morning and say, “Wow, I want to design a sweater today!” .... no. It came about in a far more basic way. You see, I had this yarn I needed to use up or get rid of.......

It came about as a result of the Knitting Weekends we just had. Victoria had wound many balls of Renaissance yarn for her class to use, and I told her to wind more than the required number in order to allow people to have a larger choice of color they would want to use. So she did. Unbeknownst to us, apparently no one wanted to knit cables in the most traditional aran cable color of all.... off white. We thought it might be the most popular color, because it is traditional, easy to see, goes with everything..... but no.

So when I finally came down out of the stratosphere of post-Knitting-Weekend excitement, I noticed the basket of off-white Renaissance sitting forlornly in the office. What to do with it? It looked so pretty. There were 6 skeins. Unwanted, unloved, pristine skeins. I could have put them in the sale bin. I could have pushed them in a corner for a couple years and forgotten about them. Yet my immediate thought was, I could design something for the boat and use up this yarn!

Six skeins was not a lot. Maybe enough for a baby sweater, but I am not reallly a baby-stuff knitter, let alone designer. Maybe if I liked babies more, I would be, but in my experience they produce a good amount of bodily fluid in various forms, and they make a lot of noise when people are trying to sleep. They are harmless enough, I suppose. Please don’t send me hate mail ... I do not hate babies. I just eschew them. Luckily we had 4 more bags of this off white Renaissance stored downstairs, and I started thinking about the cabled sweater I started designing with Renaissance a year or two ago, but abandoned because basically the stitches I wanted to use together didnt like each other much. I brought the bags of yarn up and tried to see if they looked like the same dyelot as what I had (the tags, of course, were missing.) Sigh. Even in dim light I could see it was a different dye lot.

I pondered. I thought. I considered putting them in the sale bin again. Then, a vision of a navy blue sweater with an all-over white pattern appeared in my head! An all-over pattern of nautical motifs! Yes! For the knitting cruise! I am a genius!!!

But did we have any navy blue Renaissance? My heart trembled... but yes, we did. Yay! So I greedily set aside the navy blue and began thinking of a motif to use. A clever girl, a girl who likes to actually *think* while she designs, would have pulled out drawing paper, sketched a few things, translated them to a graph.... and would be very, very creative, not to mention hard-working. Not me, though. Nope. I planned to skim through some pattern and chart books and simply pull motifs that someone else had already made, and plug them into a plain stockinette drop-sleeve sweater. I do not like to agonize over things. I pulled out several books... Babara Walker.... Harmony guides....Dale of Norway patterns.... lots of books... and finally settled on Sheila McGregor’s Traditional Scandinavian Knitting and Traditional Fair Isle Knitting. I realized I needed a gauge to start with before I could go further (DUH DUH DUH).

I grabbed my circular #8’s and cast on a bunch of stitches and started working a two-color pattern to see what my gauge would be. About 15 rows into it I knew the #8’s would not work. Darn it. I wanted them to, because they would go faster.... darn it. So I knit a garter ridge and continued with #7 circs. It was perfect, looked just the way I wanted it to. I knit for a number of inches, measured my gauge about 12 times to make sure, and set the swatch aside.
In Sheila McGregor’s Traditional Fair Isle Knitting, I found two motifs I wanted to use. One is an anchor motif that I recognized as the one I used in my Anchor Socks pattern. That was good, so I put that on graph paper. I found a compass rose motif that I liked better than the rest of them, but it was too fat and chunky-looking, so I sighed heavily and set about re-designing it. Finally I graphed it out the way I wanted to look in the knitted fabric. One thing I learned a long time ago is that you just cannot use standard graph paper to graph knitted motifs.... they end up looking all squashed when you knit them because the knitted stitch is wider than it is high. Luckily I have a great software tool called Knitting Wizard from Black Cat Systems, that lets you plug in the stitches and rows per inch to create graph paper that you then print out & play with. It also lets you weight the lines every so many stitches, so if you have say, a 21-stitch repeat, you can make the lines of the repeated section be heavier than the other lines. It also does a ton of other stuff to make your knitted graph paper experience pure heaven! I highly recommend it.

I charted the compass rose and the anchor a couple times, and discovered too much empty space between them... too much space to carry the yarn strand comfortably. I needed to add a few small doo-dads to fill in the space. I didn’t want it to look too busy, and I wanted it to retain a nautical flavor. I came up with two small motifs (yes, darn it, I had to design them myself, too) to represent a ship’s anchor light, and seaweed. I scanned my working chart for ya:

Now I have to chart the motif repeat and figure out what sizes the sweater will be in. Sizing will be determined largely by width of the pattern chart. I can tweak it to make the sizing the way I want it to be. I have to be careful to have the chart centered in order to avoid a Quasimodo effect on the wearer. The sweater will most likely be a simple drop shoulder crewneck pullover because a) it is unisex, and I think a man might wear this sweater, and b) it is easy as hell to design and knit.

Of course, all bets are off as soon as I pick up the needles. That’s when the swearing starts. :D

I’ll keep you posted as to the outcome...... and hopefully I can get a new digital camera one of these days so I can share with you more of what I am knitting!

I Am My Worst Student

Gah. People tell me a lot that I am so patient.... yeah, sure, with other people. I can sit with a new knitter, a knitter wannabe, a person who is truly in danger of  impaling themselves on their own needles (don't laugh; it has happened) and be perfectly happy as they struggle with furrowed brows, making the same error time after time. I can smile sweetly as they become infuriated with themselves, and calm them down with true serenity in my eyes. It never ever bothers me to repeat things many, many times to people whom I am teaching, it really is kind of fun.

But.

When I am the learner, I suck at learning. I am whiney, petulant, indignant, angry, and distracted. I am angry because I want to just sit down and have it come out perfect the first time. I want never to make a mistake, even on the first time I am trying a new thing, or a new technique. And it wasn't until today that I realized how ludicrous this is, and how laughable I must be to any observers who notice me when I am trying to learn something new.

As owner of Unique One, I feel it is imperative that I should be able to knit every single sweater that we sell, if I need to. However for the past two years I have harbored a dark little secret.... there are some sweaters that we sell that until now I couldn't have knit for you myself for love or money. I just didn't know how. There are sweaters that have three colors in a row, and our knitting machines only can do two colors in a row... that means that the third color has to be "hand knit" on the machine, i.e., hand-manipulated to replicate the look of the knitted stitches around them. I got the general idea... but there also was the issue of wrapping the edges of the single motifs to prevent holes... and the exact placement of the needles was beyond me. So I lived in fear of the day when someone ordered, for example, a Belted Galloway sweater ... and Susan, the only one who knows how to knit them, might be unavailable to knit it. I really hated the thought that there was something I didn't know how to do. I mean geez, this is my livelihood, after all.

So today, it being slow in the store, and me looking to avoid doing any filing..... I sat down at the machine and cast on a Beltie swatch. The Belted Galloway motif is only 26 rows high. Twenty six. And I only cast on 48 stitches for the swatch. And I was, remember, knitting it on a knitting machine.

But oh, my God. It was like I was trying to tie my shoes and I had no thumbs.  The first seven rows were fine, just like any single motif sweater I've made before. And then the three-colors-in-a-row crap  fun began. Every row, I had to read the instructions Susan had written out for me.... several times. Every row. Several times. And then to actually do the task, to move the carriage across... to lift the yarn off the tops of the needles.... to hand-knit the white belt stitches, matching the tension....to REMEMBER to pull the dang white belt stitch needles back into the hold position ( I screwed that up twice.... how many times do I have to make the same blasted stupid mistake before I remember to do it right?!)... to wrap the contrast color and then the main color to prevent holes... man. It was hard. The whole time I kept thinking about how fast, how effortlessly Susan knit these belted galloway motifs... a matter of moments, and another little belted cow had appeared on a sweater. She makes it look so easy!  And I was struggling along at such a snail's pace. It was infuriating, to know how fast it was possible to go, and to see how slow I was. At one point as I was ranting about how slow I was, Tracy said, "See? That's how we all feel when you go zip, zip, zip and fix our knitting, and we sit there feeling so sloooooow." I have heard people say things like that as I worked on their knitting problems, things like, wow, you knit so fast! But until today I never really knew how they felt. Now, I do.

Guess! Guess how long it took me to knit one stinking swatch with a twenty-six row pattern on a  knitting machine?  Hmmmmmmm? I asked Susan to guess... she doubled what it would take her and said, "Twenty minutes?" I laughed. "Oh no," she said, "you were probably waiting on customers too... thirty minutes?" I laughed harder and also assured her I hadn't waited on any customers.

"An hour and a half!!!!!!" I crowed. "NINETY minutes!!!!"  I don't think she really believed me. But its true. I make a terrible student. However... I did do it! And it came out right! And now there is nothing Unique One sells that I can't theoretically make myself if I have to. Whether I enjoy it or not... well, that's beside the point. And besides, the more I do it, the easier and faster it will be. I just have this delusion that it should be easy and I should excel at it from the first moment on. Heh heh, I think I need to grow up. :D

So, y'all... go out there and learn something! Challenge yourself! If I can do it, you can!!

Wists!

Thank you to whoever put my Ribbed Leaves Lace Scarf up on the Wists Social Shopping site! I feel so special.... :D