Alterations

Garment: High Verocity
Problem: Ribbon ties at collar, sleeves and waist kept coming undone, no matter how tightly knotted
Solution: Remove ties and sew up gaps
Summary: To be honest, I thought the ribbons were a bit w*nky anyway

Before

After

Garment: Violet Femme
Problem: Growth post-blocking makes vest hang like a sack
Solution: Add more closures to bring in at waist
Summary: It doesn’t make it any smaller, but it does hang better

Before

After

Garment: Inca Vest
Problem: Fronts too narrow between bust and shoulders, giving odd shape
Solution: Remove 8 rows from area, grafting back together
Summary: The ribbed ‘grooves’ at the waist are now a bit high, and it looks better if not fully zipped up, but definitely a better fit

Before

After

Overall summary: Grafting is the pits

Garments waiting in the alteration queue: Sideways Spencer, and a pair of socks that aren’t machine washable so I never wear them that I want to turn into fingerless mitts!

Knit From Your Scraps

Scrappy Socks #1 are done!

As you can see, I ran out of the dark blue yarn on the last cuff. Did it matter? Not a bit.

I love these socks and can’t wait to knit another pair. So much so that last night I started knitting up a lingering ball of Regia self-patterning yarn I had lost interest in. It’s all reds and burgundys and I want to knit a red-based scrappy sock next.

Last Friday I told my mum I had nothing planned for the weekend. By Saturday morning I was wondering how I was going to get everything done.

The most fun part of the weekend was going to Sticks and Stones‘ house and meeting up with the girls from my spinning class for spinning and chat. Since I haven’t spun since last year and would probably make a huge clutz of myself, I took lots of fos I wanted to alter. I did take a drop spindle to work with once my alteration work was done, but I didn’t get all the alteration work done. (I got more done when I got home, too – that’ll be another post.)

Lots of beautiful work was shown off, including some delightful orange socks and a very cute baby cap, both made from handspun. Homes were offered for all the leftover stash-for-adoption. I got the itch to teach sock knitting. And I want to buy a wheel just like Natasha’s.

One of the unexpected chores for the weekend was cutting and polishing our new flooring. Here’s a shot for those of my friends nagging for pics:

The ‘wood plank’ vinyl that needs polishing is in the hall, the super stain-resistant polyflor is in the room at the end (my workroom, where I hope to have many arty crafty adventures… when not hard at work writing).

We managed to get through the ‘cutting’ stage last night, which was easy until it came to the ‘wash off the residue’ bit. That took so long I sent the beau up the street to buy another mop so we could both get stuck in. Today we have to do the polishing bit.

See? A weekend so busy it gained an extra day.

Dyeing to Please Me

What’s this? The emperor’s new yarn?

Maybe it’s a photo I took because I forgot to take a pre-skeined shot.

Pink and a bit scratchy, but not without promise.

And a bit moth-eaten, as it turned out. Still, they’d only nibbled on the ends of a few balls, resulting in this many shortish bits. I tied them all together to dye up anyway. After all, I might want a fringe.

Soaking…

Blue and red food colouring mixed together to hopefully make purple.

Or maybe not. Maybe just a slightly purply pink with patches of blue, and an overall pastelly grey effect.

It’s a mystery why it took in some places and not others. It’s 100% wool. But it did come up a lot softer. However… while it’s pretty, it’s still not very ‘me’.

Still, it’s no loss. It kept me entertained on Monday when my back was too stuffed for knitting. I’ve had my fun, now it’s in the ‘yarn to give away’ bag to hopefully delight another knitter.

(I do wonder if I subconsciously influenced the dyeing somehow in order to not add more yarn to my stash. Surely not. That would be taking the stash-reduction thing to a whole new level of silliness.)

From FO to WIP

I wore Violet Femme most of yesterday. It seemed to relax even more, but that wasn’t too bad because having a body to relax around meant it draped in vaguely flattering ways.

Unfortunately, it makes me itch. Not entirely unexpected since it contains ‘lambswool’ and I’m sensitive to wool. I’ll be doing my usual wearing a polo neck underneath thing from now on.

I really like the pattern, now that I’ve done the math to make it a top-down knit. I’m thinking of knitting it again in 100% wool with a plainer collar knit from handspun. But first there’s the Sunrise Circle Jacket to knit. I’ve done lots of math to adapt it to 12ply yarn, but there are parts where I’m going to have to just wing it.

I’m in a sort of transitional period, really. Finishing old projects and starting new ones. Or not so new. The Scrappy Socks are rocking along so fast you can hardly call them ‘new’ any more:

They’re a fast knit, there being only 52 stitches of plain stocking stitch each round. I started the second sock last night. Can’t believe I got up past the heel in one sitting. I suspect there was a little pent up knitting frustration coming out after being too sick to knit for a few days. My hands were a little stiff this morning, though.

Last Monday there was a visitor in our front garden:

A blue-tongue. He was about 30cm long. When we got back home a few hour later he had scurried off somewhere. Somewhere safe from cats and dogs, I hope.

Violet Femme

It’s been a while since I finished the collar and blocked Violet Femme, but I only just tried it on and added the final touches today. And when I did, I discovered that it grew when it was blocked. It grew a LOT.

Before blocking it was nicely fitted. Now it is, erm, ‘roomy’. Did I swatch? Yes. Did I wash the swatch? Um… can’t remember.

As you can see from the quick photo I took just after it had dried, the crochet edging around the armholes wasn’t quite right. It was stiff, and because I’d skipped every fourth or fifth loop in an attempt to reduce the crowding of the stitches, there was a scalloping affect:

So I pulled it apart and skipped every second loop. This seems to have fixed the stiffness and distortion. But it ain’t gonna make it fit as nicely as it did before I blocked it.

Oh well. I do still like it. It’s hard not to forgive the yarn for going all spready on me, when it is so, so soft and warm. For those who haven’t read previous posts, it’s a cashmere/angora/lambswool blend from Shilasdair on the Isle of Skye, coloured with natural dyes.

While I’d still recommend the yarn despite the post-blocking change, good luck to anyone who tries to contact the company. They never responded to my email. Perhaps they prefer customers to contact them via phone. I kept going to ring during the day, remembering that it was the middle of the night there, then telling myself I’d ring them at night, then forgetting. Eventually I decided to just try knitting the collar with a single thread, and that worked.

Even More Podcasts!

I’ve been pretty sick this weekend – partly my own fault – and playing host to interstate friends, so knitting and photographing of knitting has been on hold. Thanks to Manda of Knitting Psychos, I’ve been trying out a few new podcasts and have other blog fodder to offer:

Christa Knits
Good podcast. Not too long. A little bit talk-heavy – could do with some breaking up into segments by inserting either music or just a little ‘subtitle’ soundbite like those in Sleepy Eyes Knits. Christa is venturing into the world of designing knitwear, which is the most interesting bit of the podcast. She’s keen on including interviews, but hampered by being new at the podcasting thing. In the first show she interviews herself, which was fun. In the second there’s an interview by another (non-knitting) podcaster with a woman who sounds like she’d rather be doing anything else. But the interview on the third show, despite it being between non-knitting podcasters, is fun.

Moonlight Stitches
Lots of promise. Suffers from the opposite problem to Christa Knits in that it’s music-heavy. The talk just starts to get interesting when she stops for another song. This was extra painful on the St Patrick’s day episode. But it has potential, and I can skip songs, so I’ll keep listening.

Fluffalicious
After starting with a slightly snarky comment about other podcasts, this one then gets…well… boring. It’s recorded over the phone. Badly. I didn’t get through the first episode. Which means I didn’t stick to my four-episode-before-rejecting rule. I’ll probably try another episode in that case.

SSK
Two knitters living thousands of miles away from each other, getting to know each other and talking craft via phone calls. Could have been awful, but works because the quality of the recording is good – doesn’t have that horrible recorded phone call tinniness – and the knitters are charming and fun. They keep it to around half an hour, which suits the format. My only critism is the sound levels are a bit uneven, but I’m sure they’ll sort that out in time.

So, a new format (phone calls) and much potential. Give ’em a try. (Even Fluffalicious – you may like it!)

Not THAT stash, THIS stash!

I’ve been squeeing a lot this last 24 hours.

Two weeks ago, when my friend (let’s call her friend 1) told me she had a stash for me to adopt, she described great yarn in my sort of colours – enough of some for entire garments. The following Friday friends of this friend (let’s call them friends 2), who are also the beau and I’s friends, but who see friend 1 more often than we do, came to a social get-together and handed over several bags of yarn. I assumed friend 1 had encountered friend 2 and, expecting them to see us at the social get-togther, gave them the yarn to give to me.

Now, friend 1 does knit, and knows about good yarn, so I was quite puzzled to find the yarn was either acrylic or the closest thing I’ve seen to greasy steel wool. My friend knows fibre. She wouldn’t get it this wrong. Some of the colours were the sort I like, but not most of them. And there wasn’t enough of anything (except the greasy steel wool) to make a whole garment, really.

Well, I was still immensely grateful that my friends had thought of me when a pile of yarn needed a home. A few days ago I was talking to friend 1 and she mentioned having all this yarn for me. I said, “wait… you said that in future tense, not past tense. Do you still have the yarn? What did friend 2 give me last Friday?”

It turned out that friend 2 gave me a stash from a different source, and the nice, plentiful yarn that friend 1 had for me was still waiting for me to adopt it.

So last night we headed over to her house and she presented me with a HUGE garbage bag AND an additional box full of yarn. Just the sheer amount of it… you could have knocked me over with a feather. Pulling out balls from the numerous bags, I discovered cashmere and alpaca and cotton and camel. (Camel!) It was like some fibrey lucky dip where I got to keep all the prizes.

When I got home I spread it over our three-seater couch, matching up plies and fibres:

It filled the whole couch, and more. There was cashmere:

There was alpaca:

There was alpaca silk:

And (squeeee!) camel:

There was some slubby art yarn, very different to the rest of the stash.

There was a box of silk cord of various thicknesses. Not sure what it’s for, but I have a love for cute wooden spools and a hunch that the yarn will be great for delicate crochet, or macrame or something.

I always check the shopping bags old yarn comes in. These two were interesting: a shop I’ve never heard of, and it looks like Wondoflex had two other stores once, or perhaps a business alliance of some sort with two others.

And then I found this – a stash tease if ever there was one:

It was too overwhelming to do any more than just lay it out last night. This morning I gave it all a closer look, and moved what I wanted to keep onto the other couch. To the left (of the top photo) are the “ooooh-aaaah” yarns, in the middle is a lot of 5ply wool and cotton, and to the right is the box of reels and some yarn I think I’ll dye up.

And the bottom pic is what I don’t think I’ll use and will find a new home for. About a third of the yarn, I’m guessing. (I do have some self-control. Just a bit.)

Since there were some signs of moth activity in one batch, I’ve put all the yarn I’m keeping into zip-lock bags, squishing air out so it fits (almost) into the box. This has the double benefit of putting the yarn ‘in quarantine’ for a while to see if any moths hatch, and of keeping it separate from the ‘official’ stash.

I know that, according to my KFYS rules, gift yarn is exempt. Somehow, by sticking to the rules, I’ve ended up with more yarn in my storage boxes than I started with. It’s almost as though the Yarn Harlot’s knitting goddess is playing a game with me.

But if it means I end up with cashmere and camel yarn to play with… do you hear me complaining?

Maybe I should. Then she might send some silk my way.

Sideways Spencer Done… Maybe

Buttons on…

… but is it finished?

I ran out of yarn halfway through the collar, so it’s a little short. Too short to fold over, in fact. I don’t mind this, but the look is a bit severe.

The waistband is a bit loose and gapey. Not so bad if I’m not twisting around to look, as I discovered when I took these photos.

As I expected, I keep wanting to tug the waistband downward. When I first bookmarked this pattern I thought I’d make it one day with a longer section of ribbing, so I wouldn’t get ‘cold kidneys’. But, of course, yarn quantity restrictions stopped me.

I’m tempted to make two changes:
1) reduce the collar to only a few cms wide, so it’s more of a hem than a collar. I think this would make a softer, more feminine look than the current collar and it would be quick to do.

2) pull out the waistband and make it 20 cm narrower and add as much length as the extra yarn allows. Unfortunately this means frogging the collar and front bands, so I’m going to put the jacket aside and think about it for a while. Especially as I was considering trying to find some similar yarn in black and using it to lengthen the ribbing and collar. If I frog the entire waistband I might just change all the bands and cuffs to black, and lengthen the waistband so it covers my waist.

Lesson learned:
I should have blocked it before sewing up and adding cuffs, waistband, front bands and collar. I don’t tend to block things before they’re made, because I figure I won’t be unpicking the garment in order to block it each time it’s washed. But the cables made this garment bunch up a lot, which made it difficult to see what was going on when I tried it on. If I’d blocked it before sewing up, I would have tried it on after the ribbing went on, and noticed that the waistband was too wide.

Mistakes in the pattern:
1) I made the smallest size. There was a small mis-match between the instructions and the chart toward the end of the left sleeves, but I can’t remember the exact details and it was easy enough to work it out.

2) Maybe it’s my inexperience, but the buttonhole didn’t make sense. It asks you to do 2 yarn-overs, then bind off 2 purl stitches, then k2. The first time I did this I found it offset the ribbing pattern (it should have said 2yo, bo2 then k1). The second time I thought perhaps I was supposed to use one of the yarn-overs in the binding off, but then the instructions on the next row didn’t match up. In the end I gave up and just did the sort of buttonholes I’m used to.

3) The front bands have a nifty little i-cord bind-off edge. Instructions for the knit bind off are wrong – it should use a ssk rather than a k2tog. Using a ssk puts a nice row of ‘v’s up the side of the edge, while a k2tog puts a ladder-like stitch there instead. Unfortunately I did this side first, and only worked out it was wrong after I had done the purl bind off on the other side and saw that it matched the picture better, so I had to frog and reknit the other band for the fourth time.

Another lesson learned:
I think I’ll stick to 8ply and 10ply from now on. I hate weaving in ends of thick yarn. They just work their way out again. And the thicker the yarn, the more loopy and unsupportive the buttonbands and their buttonholes are.

Final verdict:
Happy with the design overall, the cables were fun to knit, but I might make some adjustments.

And in other news:
Violet Femme is finished and blocking. Yaaaaaay! All wips done. Yaaaaaaaay! Started Scrappy Socks. Yaaaaaaay! Blue yarn is too thick to make Sunrise Circle Jacket. Boooooooo! Thinking about doing some math to the pattern so I can use it anyway. Yiiiiiiikes!

Blacksmith Socks

Yesterday headcold #2 took hold, and I spent the day wrapped up in a blanket on the day bed, either sleeping or listening to podcasts and knitting. The blacksmith socks were relatively unchallenging, since I was past the heel and there was only stocking stitch and ribbing to go.

I like ’em. If I knit stripey socks again, I’ll definitely use the spiral method. But I have to admit, I’m glad all that swapping and untwisting of three balls of yarn is over. Now is definitely not the time to start an intarsia project.

Last night I picked up stitches for the collar/band of Violet Femme and knit a few rows. The pattern says to knit the band separately and sew it on, but I’ve never been one to sew when I don’t have to. Mind you, it’s also supposed to have a little border edge between the body and the collar. If I did that I might not have enough yarn for the collar. At this point, whatever works with the remaining yarn is good enough. (Obviously Shilasdair never replied to my email and I can’t be bothered calling the UK.)

Sideways Spencer feels dry enough to add buttons this morning, so if all goes well and the head cold goddess doesn’t smack me to the ground I might have two fos to post about tomorrow.

Wheee! Finished objects everywhere!

Scrappy Socks

Last night I finished knitting Sideways Spencer and sewed in the ends, but it needs blocking and buttons before having its photo taken, so I’ll leave that blog entry for another time. Now I have the leg and cuff of a sock and the collar of Violet Femme to do before my wips are done and I can start another project.

One of my up-coming projects is Scrappy Socks, inspired by Peevish’s recent odd sock knitting. The other day I dumped all my sock yarn leftovers on the day bed to see what I had:

Immediately I could see that I’ve been quite limited in my sock yarn colour selections. There is a lot of red based, brown based and blue based yarn here. Even the one green yarn is a very brown sort of olive – and that yarn was used to make socks for the beau, not me.

It’s not that I’m unadventurous with colour, but that I love these three colour ranges. Still, when I start buying stash yarn again I’ll definitely be looking for other colours. Like green – I particularly like apple, emerald and olive greens. And I like good saturated purples, too.

Anyway, I didn’t want to combine yarns completely randomly, partly to avoid copying Peevish’s idea exactly, partly because those obvious ranges of colour looked so good together. But should I knit brown, red or blue socks?

I looked at my unknit sock yarn. There are a couple of delicious red colourways and some brown based ones waiting to be knit. Both were worth waiting until I’d knit them up and had scraps to include in scrappy socks. But the two blue balls were of yarn either much thinner than my usual sock yarn, or not so exciting that I’d hold off knitting blue scrappy socks in order to include the yarn. So blue was the best colour selection to start with:

I also threw in some mega boots that had a bit of orange in it, because adding a little of a contracting colour to the dominant colour range adds a bit of zing to a mix.

I can’t wait to start playing, which is certainly adding some much-needed motivation to finish the Blacksmith Socks.