Bag

I would like to report that I finished the knitting bag, sadly that is not the case.  Progress continues, but oh so slowly.

 I did some light, wavy quilting across the bottom to keep the layers together; I am still loving this explosion of girly, pink flowers!










I also just cast on for a light weight wrap type sweater, the pattern is called Odelia.  I bought the pattern and the yarn at the Stitches event this year.  The yarn came from a company called A Verb For Keeping Warm and it feels so nice, it's got a little cashmere in the blend.  The pattern is Odelia from Cocoknits. Below is my knitting swatch (the little practice piece to measure how many stitches per inch and row, this allows each person to size their own garment based on their actual yarn and needles), which shows that I am getting 5.5 stitches/inch using size 7 needles.

Crafty projects old & new

I just finished my first ever Baby Surprise Jacket, a gift for a friend at work having her first baby in June.  The surprise part of this jacket is the amazing construction, designed by the famous, Elizabeth Zimmerman, okay so maybe she's not famous in a Bruce Springsteen/Lady Gaga kind of way, but definately a Rock Star in the knitting world. 

It's knit as a single piece, when done it sort of looks like a giant knitted tortilla chip, below is an example of what the finished jacket looks like before seaming (in my excitement to put it together I forgot to take a picture of my actual jacket in progress).

 after folding it together and seaming just across the shoulders, voila, the cutest little baby jacket ever!

and Craig helped me pick out the best buttons for it at the local fabric store

 

And now, onward to a new project, a bag for holding knitting projects in progress (yes, I have still have many more knitting projects in the queue).  I picked up this great pattern from the GillianBags booth at the Stitches event in February and just now got around to getting the fabric and other supplies.

 I just couldn't resist the pretty pink flowers

this is what the finished bag should look like.  I really liked the way it opens all the way up, sometimes when I am happily knitting away the yarn gets hung up on the sides of my current bag, which totally breaks me out of the zen stitching zone, I don't think that will happen with this design.

Voodoo Glove

Christmas is just 2 days away! Craig and I are excitedly waiting for daughter and grandson to arrive tomorrow. The holidays are good for many reasons, but one of the best reasons is family and friends sharing happy times together.

I decided to get a jump start on this year's resolution to henceforth refrain from uttering vile obscenities. I am blessed with a prodigious vocabulary from which I should be able to more creatively shout invectives, engage in character assignation, offer guidance to fellow drivers and reproach miscellaneous poorly guided individuals.

So, last night as I was laying aside my knitting project on the coffee table, I was amazed to realize that, wow, I actually know what each of the many pointy things are and what to do with each one. I have learned a lot over the last couple of years after all.

as I look at this picture all I can think is that is looks like some kind of tortured "Voodoo Glove"

I can make the Can-Can

Next knitting challenge: to turn this:

into this:making progress

Kazak Star Felting Complete

my first stranded color work and felting project is now complete! Below is the mess that resulted when I was trying to work with all 5 colors in the same row. I tried to do this with the Fair Isle method, but eventually realized that the Fair Isle technique of carrying all the colors along the entire row really only works well for 2 or maybe 3 colors, any more than that is just too much yarn to mess around with.
by the middle of the piece, I switched to using just the minimum colors needed to make the background pattern, finished the entire piece and then went back over it using the duplicate stitch method to fill in the additional colors (like the purple middle stitch and yellow outlines). Overall this worked much better.
After I got it all seamed together came the fun part of felting it. I simply put it into the washing machine hot water, put a towel in for additional agitation and balance and then let it go through the normal wash cycle. Next time I will probably put it into a mesh bag and stop it before it goes into the spin cycle, but on this go round it worked out just fine with my "let er rip" approach.

The bag came out feeling like it felted properly (no pun intended), but it was really "furry" and so I took a shaver and trimmed off the excess "fur".
this is just one side's worth of removed fur.

and Viola! the finished product, looks pretty damned good if I say so myself.

news from the knitting front

Oh, how I love t0 get fun packages in the mail, recently I got a yarn winder from Knit Picks and a super cool swift from a custom woodworker on an Etsy website, Hornshaw. This swift is really beautiful just by itself, that it actually has a function and performs that function well is a bonus.

I have 3 projects on the needles at the moment.

Swallowtail shawl

Still working on the shawl, I'm having a really hard time with the final pattern of peaked edging. I keep messing up the stitch count and every row is more than 200 stitches long now, so tinking back is excruciating. I have to start putting in stitch markers for the pattern repeats and lifelines every other row.

Kazak Star Bag

the next project is really an exercise in learning continental style knitting (where you hold the working yarn in your left hand). A while ago I purchased a kit, Kazak Star, from the local yarn store for making a small, felted bag. The wool has a good thickness and feel, the overall bag will be felted so variations in tension will be erased in the felting process and finally there is a small amount of fair isle pattern in this bag, which calls for 2 colors of yarn. The fair isle part will be good for practicing holding one color in the right hand and the other color in the left hand (this looks like the best method if I can actually manage it). So far I'm only working on the back of the bag which is just stockinette for 62 rows. Good for practice.

Branching Out Scarf

and finally my friend, M, encouraged me to do a knit along (KAL) lace project with her, so we are making the Branching Out pattern scarf, which has most of the common lace stitches and is still pretty good for relative beginners. I must say 25 stitch rows really are much easier to follow, fix and "see" the pattern than that darn swallowtail. I'm having fun with this project and I simply love, love, love this yarn, it's a deep, rich ruby colored silk with integrated beads. The picture doesn't do it justice as the color is richer than shown and it's got that beautiful silk sheen to it..

Stitches West 2009

On Saturday, Feb 28th we went to the knitter's mecca known as Stitches West. There was a special 7 car train just for all the knitters that took us from Davis to Santa Clara. 500 of us enjoyed a bright, sunny ride on the train. Mary and Yvette brought delicious breakfast food and we met one of Yvette's friends from work there, Alison, who joined us for the ride.
this is THE way to travel! Quite relaxed, enjoying each others company, snacking and oh, yeah some knitting.

We were interviewed and photographed extensively by a reporter from the Enterprise, but I have not seen if we actually made the paper. This was some subtle payback by Yvette for a previous incident when Mary sicced a photographer-in-training on us who needed portraits for her final class project. Yvette kept that reporter at our table for at least 45 minutes, egging her on to ask Mary all about her project.

The event itself was, like last year, overwhelming in the sheer numbers. There were 262 booths and it was crowded! No pictures inside allowed, but this is what I remember most:

• Best: guy vest with removable sleeves at the Fashion show
• Worst: getting trapped in the back of a popular booth
• Oddest: hay bale twine knitting (ok, this was actually Mary's test project to see if it's even possible to recycle the plastic twine that comes on the goat hay and turn it into a market bag).

The ride home was a relief from the maddening crowd and last minute buying frenzy, Yvette actually witnessed some pushing/shoving/yelling to get at some highly sought after yarn.

We took the time to admire our lovely new yarn. Mary was quite a sweetheart and gifted both Yvette and I with some cool sockyarn made out of wool and Tencel, a fiber made from woodpulp. It's one of the many new "green" fibers, which is nice, but really we just thought it made the yarn sort of shiny, and you know how we like shiny stuff. Alison scored some gorgeous handdyed silk yarn for a sweater she has been dreaming up in her head for a while and I finally found the perfect yarn for a sweater I've been itching to make since the time I first laid eyes on the pattern.
below is a wool/tencel skein I will most likely turn into socks on the tinest needles I've used yet, #1.5 (2.5mm), about the size of ballpoint pen refills. and this is the fabulous, slightly variegated brown wool yarn I intend to turn into a sweater with the cutest cabled owls you've ever seen on the yoke. This picture doesn't really do it justice.

Knitting update

the Swallowtail shawl is progressing, sometimes at a good clip (finished all the Lily of the Valley pattern without a headache), sometimes agonizingly slowly (having trouble getting the pattern to match up between Lily of the Valley and Peaked Edging). I've ripped back 3 times so far trying to get it right, had to put it aside until the frustration subsides.

In the meantime, I've completed my first sock ever, YAH!

Beading the Swallowtail

I finally finished all 19 of the budding lace repeats on the Swallowtail shawl, whew! Jardee ran out of yarn on hers, so purchased another skein of yarn of the same dye lot from my local yarn shop (LYN), Spin a Yarn, for insurance. I just learned she ran out of beads too, aargh, I guess I'll just watch my supply and hopefully beads are not like yarn in that the color varies by dye lot.

Now I get to do the exciting Lily of the Valley pattern, adding the beads as needed to represent the little flower buds in the pattern. I feel like a magpie who just really likes sparkly things! As an odd side note, the beads have a strong peppermint smell and taste (sometimes I have to use my teeth as a third hand) due being stored in a little breath mint tin : )

ChemoCap project for Stitches West 2009

It's been a while since I updated the blog, so I have a few things to catch up on. First of all, I will be attending Stitches West in a couple of weeks. This is a HUGE event for obsessed knitters and crocheters, Mary and I went last year and were stunned at the sheer number of people there, literally thousands!
We took a special, dedicated train for the event from Davis to Santa Clara and will be doing so again. The people who organize the train ride (Stitch & Ride) also organize a charity project, last year and this year it's knitted caps for chemo patients who have lost their hair. The only requirement is to make it out of non-wool yarn, too many people find wool itchy, especially if their skin is already sensitive due to the treatment.
So, I found a cool pattern in an old knitting magazine (Nomad Hat and Scarf), and headed out to Joannes to procure some nice, chunky acrylic yarn to make this cap. The pattern actually calls for the hat and scarf to be knitted as one piece, but I thought that looks really funky, so I just deleted the scarf part and knit the hat alone with a 2-stitch I-cord bind off. It was fun to learn how to do the I-cord bind-off, many thanks to this YouTube video by CraftyAndy.

It's a little big on my pointy head, but fits Craig's big noggin perfectly, so it should be OK for someone.

Another Convert

Saturday morning was gloriously sunny but quite a bit chill (37F when I left the house at 9am). I met up with friends at a quirky cafe in Davis, Delta of Venus. It looks like something from the 60's with Art Deco murals and band posters everywhere.

We has ourselves a nice little "Stitch & Bitch" session, Mary working on her Mobius scarf/cowl (here is a link to a KnitPicks mobius pattern, one of the many patterns and examples on the Internet). Mary's is made of a green and green worsted weight yarn. The brown yarn is actually from one of Mary's neighbors, West Valley Alpaca, from an very nice creature named "Pi" pictured below.

Jardee and I are still working on the Swallowtail shawl, although she is quite a bit farther along, having already completed all 19 repeats of the budding lace and starting the exciting Lily of the Valley pattern (this is where we get add the beads!). I am on repeat 11 of the budding lace, slowly but surely getting there. I try to do a little bit everyday.

A friend from work, Kathy, joined us to learn how to knit. This is her making her first official stitch under Jardee's tutelage. Yess! another convert!

Swallowtail progressing

I've been making good progress on the swallowtail shawl, one might almost say it's been swallowing all my spare time. It is really kind of addictive.

As of Saturday I've made it to row 8 and still have all the hair on my head, have ripped and made wonky repairs on many rows, but the good news is I’m learning and understand the pattern now. My goal at this point is to complete at least 1 budding lace repeat without errors : )


As the rows get longer (this pattern starts from a 5 stitch row and expands every row thereafter to create large triangle), the prospect of ripping back one or more rows is getting more unattractive, and so I have been trying to make repairs where I can. After the umpteenth repair where I just kind of bumbled along adding/deleting stitches somewhat randomly to make the stitch count match, I've started really looking at the pattern after every right side row, marking where the mistake is with a safety pin, then fixing on the wrong side row (all purl stitches).

I finally hit on the bright idea of photographing what the correct stitch should look like in order to recreate it from the wrong side (WS) row. Above is what a correct yarn over looks like just before purling on the WS row.

this is how the pattern looks after correcting the yarn over and purling through. I cannot express how happy I was to catch the mistake and actually fix it so it looks perfect!

I am finding this pattern pretty addictive, it's kind of fun to do the pattern correctly, but even more compelling is if I do find a mistake I feel like I have to complete at least 1 more row in order to fix it before I forget there was a mistake.

New year, new project

To start the new year I am starting a challenging new project. It will be a beautiful lace project using a pattern loved by many on Ravelry, the Swallowtail Shawl designed by Evelyn Clark. The pattern can be found as a .pdf from this site, Portfolio - Evelyn Clark. I will also be making a couple of popular modifications, using beads instead of knitting the nupps in the Lily of the Valley pattern and doing 19 repeats of the Budding Lace pattern instead of 14 to make it larger (thanks to some help from MintyFresh for the modification math)

8/0 venetian beads, to be added as needed with a size #13/14 (0.90mm) crochet hook.

Material list:

• Malabrigo lace weight yarn (100% merino wool)
• size 5 knitpicks circular needles
• split stitch marker
• concentration
• focus
• patience, patience, patience

Using the knit picks needles is working well for 2 reasons:

1. they have nice sharp points which makes it a little easier to get into this really delicate yarn and,
2. bonus benefit of making it super easy to insert a lifeline (this is a piece of string or waste yarn inserted through any row that makes it much easier to unravel stitches when the inevitable mistakes occur). Check out this great tutorial video on how to do lifelines with and without the KnitPicks needles for more details.
   
   

   this is a nice weight lifeline to use for the lace weight yarn and it is pretty easy to thread through the KnitPicks needle hole
   

More helpful hints from my knitting expert friend, Jardee:

1. use the charts, not the text and note that the symbols sort of represent how the finished stitches look (for example a yarn over is represented by a circle (hole) and the right slant symbol is a right slanting knit 2 together decrease)
2. put in a lifeline after every pattern repeat (for example, this shawl uses the budding lace pattern (a 6 row pattern) 19 times, so put a lifeline after every 6 rows).
3. Tie a loose knot in the lifeline after insertion just in case the lifeline snags on something, this will prevent it from accidentally coming out.
4. use 3 lifelines; insert at repeat 1, at repeat 2 and when you insert the lifeline for repeat 3, check everything looks OK and then remove the 1st lifeline. This is the most conservative lifeline strategy, but I will definitely follow this for my first lace project.
5. use a sticky note to cover the rows above where you are working to make it easier for the eye to follow the current row, the pattern and not accidentally start on the next row.
6. how to use a crochet hook to insert beads instead of having to pre-string all the beads. See Jardee's great little instructional video below (this is her first video tutorial, doesn't she sound like a pro!)
   

Noro Mitts completed

I finished the Noro mitts last night, yah! They came out very nice, warm, comfortable and very pretty. As I only had 1 skein I knew they would be mismatched for color, but that's OK as now I will easily know which is right or left and probably will only wear around house when using the computer.

Got to use my new animal mug (Christmas gift) for the first time this morning, it's a cute and yet elegant penguin. I just love these type of mugs, so far I've collected a tiger and zebra as well.

Noro Mitts

12/20/08 I started this hopefully simple project for the long drive to and from LA using this online pattern for fingerless mittens using a single skein of Noro yarn.

12/21/08 3rd times the charm for the cast on, silly me, I forgot that my circulars had to be SHORTER the the circumference of the knitted object. After an emergency run to Joanne’s for DPN’s I am on my way.
12/22/08 I guess 3rd time isn’t the charm as I have knitted up about 10 rows, tried it on and realized that the wrist is really quite a bit too large for me. So, with a gauge of 4st/in and a wrist of just over 5.5in circumference I am going to cast on 27 stitches instead of the 32 called for in the pattern.

12/25/08 finished most of the left hand mitt on the 7 hour drive to LA, whew! I’m not quite sure how to pick up and knit for the thumb stitches, so I think I will save this and ask my knitting mentor later and just start on the right mitt for the long drive home. So far, I am loving the color and feel. Now that they have seen some of my FO’s my sister-inlaw and mom-inlaw want some knitted stuff too!

garter stitch edge, very easy and I think it looks nice too.

I knit the right hand mitt on the way home and finished that one to the same point. Now, I only need to finish the thumbs.