Cattywampus

Comfort Knitting

Sometimes I am baffled by my own actions.

I have all this gorgeous yarn, way too much of it, in fact.  I have lists of lovely, complex sweaters and shawls and socks pages and pages long that I would like to knit.

But what am I knitting?

A faeorese style shawl from scraps of sock yarn.

All blues/purples.  I was going to use random colors, but then I realized I could just use this color family and make it work.

I am going to switch color every 4 rows, alternating between blocks of stockinette and garter stitch for some texture, and I'll use some of the colors at certain intervals through the shawl - if my math of how much I have of each yarn works out in real life.

There are a few reasons for this.

1. I've been wating to do something with my sock yarn for a while but didn't want to make a blanket and this idea just poppped into my head friday afternoon.

2. When life gets complicated, sometimes a little boring knitting is just what you need to stay sane.

Which leads me to Duke, who is slowly losing his battle with the cancer.  The doc stopped the chemo, she thinks we're losing ground and says that there's no point in continuing to pour chemicals into his little body when we don't think they're making a big difference anyway. 

So, he's on his own, fighting off the cancer as best he can.  He still doesn't know he's sick, but it's just a matter of time now, and it's breaking my heart.

I'm also absurdly worried about Pixie, in the logical part of my brain I know she'll be fine, that while she doesn't know what's going on, she understands what's happening on a level that only an animal could know...on the other hand, she's NEVER been alone.  Never.  I had Duke first and they've only been separated three or four times since (11 years), when one or the other of them had to have a procedure done at the vet.  I just don't know how she'll react and if she'll be able to adjust.

There are some other things going on with us that are making my brain zoom around in frantic little circles spewing WHAT IFs in every direction my thoughts turn and I'll update you as I can, but I can't yet.

Also, there's this.

The mystery knit along I joined in the fall.  You can't see the ends because it is approximately 7' long, which is WAY too long for a scarf like this.  It just looks silly.  So I'm going to frog it and reknit it into something better.  

Oddly, after this experience, I have joined the next mystery knit along, but I am using MUCH smaller needles.

I guess between this scarf and the circle jacket I feel as though my attempts to knit beautiful, complicated things are biting me in the a$$, hence the shawl out of scrap sock yarn.

I'll leave you with a question.  If you had this:

What would you do with it?

I'm excited about jumping into the fair isle game, but there is so much yarn and SO many colors, I'm having a hard time deciding where to start!

A Travesty (aka the swirl sweater update)

The swirl sweater.

First, I will just say this:  If you decide to make any of these sweaters, I HEARTILY recommend skipping the cuff section and just picking up and knitting cuffs afterwards.

The reason it took me so long to get to this point is that I was doing intarsia with three balls of yarn (cuff 1, middle of sweater, cuff 2, and back again), and I started this part in mid-october.  I stopped knitting this part after 4 rows (of about 50) made me so angry I couldn't fathom doing it ever again.  I picked it back up over the Christmas holiday break and sat down determinidely to finish it.  It didn't make me any less angry this time, but (stubborn as I am) I wasn't going to be defeated.

What I have been temporarily defeated by is a lack of yarn.

The pattern called for 806 yards.  I purchased 800 b/c the yarn came in 400 yard skeins and it never fails that I use 100-200 less yarn than a pattern calls for.  I don't know why, but it's pretty average, I NEVER underpurchase, but 6 yards short didn't seem like underpurchasing.  

See where my needle is?  One side is finished, the other side is soooooo close.

Honestly I don't think 6 yards would have finished this up, but 400 certainly would have.

Of course, this isn't just any yarn you can buy off the street (or from an LYS), this is Lisa Souza yarn, yarn that was dyed just for me.  

I can hear you groaning all the way over hear.  I KNOW!

The good news is that Lisa Souza is fantastically awesome and I sent a yard or two back to her and she is going to try to match the color for me.  The OTHER good news is that this is TOTALLY on the bottom of the sleeve and if it's off a little bit it shouldn't be noticable.

Here's the big picture:

Can you see all those ends?  (Oy Vey!)  I am not sure when this is going to get seamed up, but I am not looking forward to the weaving.

Also, can you believe this is actually going to be a sweater that I will wear out in public?  It's a little hard to believe looking at it right now, but it looks just like the diagram in the book, so I guess I'm doing it right.

I will say this: the next one of these I do, because seriously, all of that aside, it was totally fun to knit, I am using cascade 220 and I am TOTALLY spit splicing the ends in between ridges so I don't have to seam in the ends.  Totally.

Let's chat about needles.

What kind of needles do you use?

Do you find that you are obsessive and once you find a set you like, you buy all your needles in that kind and just knit with those?  Or do you switch from bamboo to metal to plastic without worrying about the effect that it might (or might not) have on your gauge?

I'm curious.

I recently decided I had to switch my needles.  I had been using Knit Picks Harmony interchangeables and I loved them, I still don't have a bad word to speak about them, for what you pay, they are fabulous.  Even though I decided to switch to something different, I still love the needles - but it's the construction that was an issue.  Within about a month, I had 3 different needles sort of pop apart, like the glue holding the needle into the metal casing just came undone.  If you call customer service, they will absolutely replace them when this happens, but I had gotten to a point where this was starting to be annoying.

So I turned to Ravelry to see what else was out there.

I knew I wanted wood, metal seems to tire my hands, so that was off the table.  I found Dyak Darn Pretties and after reading OODLES of things online, I decided to spend some of my stash selling money to buy these.  They are a bit pricey, but they are handcarved, made by a small business, and made in america, so for all that, I was willing to spend a bit more, and besides the reviews won me over, hands down.

Apparently, I discovered the Darn Pretties at about the same time as the rest of the knitting world because some time over the late summer/early fall the company got so many orders that it extended the delivery time significantly.  I ordered mine labor day weekend and was initially given a 10-12 week lead time.  In late October, yet another one of my Knit Picks needles broke and I had to make a decision (if I wanted to keep knitting on that project), wait for the Darn Pretties, order a new needle from Knit Picks, or try the Knitter's Pride needles that Webs had recently come out with.

I contacted Dyak Craft and was told that there was a delay on my needles, so I decided to try one of the Knitter's Pride needles - and since the issue I'd been having had been with interchangeables (although granted, not at all with the part that was interchangeable) I decided to try fixed in the size I most commonly use, 24".

This is all a very long way of giving you my comparison of the Knit Picks Harmony vs the Knitter's Pride Dreamz.

Honestly, either of them are a good bargain for the money, even given the above issues I'd had in the past with Knit Picks needles I have found their customer service and replacement policy to be top-notch.

I think the Dreamz cord is a teensy-tiny bit more flexible than the Knit Picks cord, but I doubt you would notice that anywhere other than trying to do magic loop in a tight space, so to speak.

As far as I can tell the points are the same amount of pointiness and they feel the same in the hand.  The Dreamz needles felt a little sticky at first, but it wore off after the first few rounds.

(Knit Picks on the top, Dreamz on the bottom)

It may be as simple as which type of colors you prefer - do you like multicolor needles, or do you want every size to be a different color so you can tell them apart?  

Or, if you can wait a bit, and you have a bit of extra cash from Christmas, maybe you want to try the Darn Pretties.  I'll be sure to let you know what I think about them once I have them in my hot little hands!

Happy New Year!

I have no resolutions to share with you.  Not because I don't want to share, but because I'm not making them...

I have a few things I'd LIKE to do, but I think making resulotions is just a bad idea, personally, I mean, I'm just bad with absolutes one way or the other.  I need a little wiggle room in my life when I'm trying to change habits.

I'm going to continue to try for the 2 for 1 stash reduction (use or sell twice what I buy), this year it ended up around 1.5:1, but that is extremely better than I was doing before.  I have no idea what my ratio was before, but I can gaurantee I was bringing in WAY more yarn that I was sending out.

I will go through my stash AGAIN and see what I can sell.  I'm not selling anything at bargain basement price, but at about 10% less than what I paid for it, that way I'm not throwing away my money.  It isn't going out the door like a fire sale, but I've had pretty good success with people buying things here & there.  You can see what I currently have listed here. 

I've been keeping a spreadsheet of what I knit and what I've purchased and I can see a definite trend in my purchases.  There were a few trips (like the yarn crawl to NYC) that I bought without really thinking because something was SHINY, and I haven't knit up any of it.  Then there is the time I ordered from WEBS to get the yarn for Scott's sweater...and I had to buy enough yarn to get the discount.  

Basically, I can see a difference between my impulse purchases and buying yarn that I legitimately wanted to make something out of immediately.  I think if I focus on curbing that this year I can cut down even more on my purchases.

Another thing I want to do is MORE FAIR ISLE!  And along those lines, I asked for the Palette sampler from Knit Picks from my darling hubby, and he actually got it for me!

It is this great big box of yarn and I would like to dive right in and swim in it!  SO PRETTY.

Also, along those lines, my mother and I are going to a Norwegian, Fair Isle and Fareo knitting retreat in April , how fun is THAT??  I'm super excited.  I'm honestly not sure I want to do any of the projects they have listed, I may bring my own instead, but I am hoping I can learn oodles while I'm there and really work on my technique.

Along the lines of stash busting, my mother gave me this handspun for Christmas last year (from Coldbrook Farm in my little hometown, they keep a spinning flock of Rambouillet) and I couldn't figure out how to best use it.

I FINALLY settled on a pattern this past week and it quickly knit up into this.

It's a lovely shoulder shawl, I love the red accent along the bottom.  The pattern is Comfy Shawl, from Miriam Felton's Twist and Knit, patterns designed for handspun and/or yarn that you may not have QUITE enough of.

You can see the grading of the color in the flash picture below.

I am making good progress with the quilting, I don't seem to have the same sorts of issues with that as I do with the knitting.  It's different in so many ways, and for all of those reasons it's much easier to work a project linearly.  Decide what to make, pick out fabric, cut the fabric, sew it all together, quilt it, bind it - voila - quilt!

I have a quilt in the 'sew it all together' phase right now.

It is all different shades of blue from fat quarters and scraps.  I always think these are a good idea when I start and then end up flummuxed when trying to put the blocks together because there's no "right" way to do it.  You have to do it so there is some pattern through it, but when it's all one color it is much more difficult.

One thing I do is take a pic in black & white before I sew it all together to make sure everything looks right.  Here is how this one looks in black & white.

I'm always amazed by that; how color values just jump out at you in greyscale. 

That's it for now, I have one scarf/shawlette waiting for a photographer and my Swirl jacket is so close to being done I can almost taste it, so I'll be back soon!

The great reveal

Well, here's the biggie.  Rene, by Anne Hanson

This is, of course, what I spent the last month frantically knitting.  It came down to the wire, and I didn't know if I was going to finish it in time, but in the end (with an extra day taken off work to finish a sleeve and seam) it was blocking by the afternoon of the 23rd.

As you can see, it was unwrapped and immediately put on, so I consider that a rousing success.  The sleeves are too long, they stretched like mad.

So I'll probably need to cut the sleeves and put a regular ribbing on the bottoms to keep him from having to roll them up, but I did use superwash, so it was a danger.

I used berroco vintage, he tends to be too hot in 100% wool sweaters, so I thought this was a good compromise.  The top color is the most accurate, it's a dark reddish/burgundy color.  

He opened it, looked at me in amazement and immediately says "but when did you knit this??" and was flabbergasted to realize that I had been knitting it in front him for a month solid.  Sweetheart that he is, he immediately felt bad for not noticing what I had been knitting - lol - that's just fine with me - otherwise I would never be able to knit him anything!

I also finished a scarf for my step-mother (it seems so odd to call her that in the sense that most people hear it - she and my father will have been married for 30 years this year!).

(the fireplace takes good pictures)

This is knit in a cashmere silk blend I picked up at School Products in New York.  The pattern is some version of feather in fan that I UNvented when I screwed up the original pattern by doing it on a stockinette background.

We will be seeing them tomorrow, but I doubt she'll be on my blog between now & then.

Last but not least, a quilt for my mother.

This was made from a layer cake that I picked up a few years ago, and then I found the fabric I used for the backing on clearance a year or so later, a happy coincidence as they say.  I am really, really happy with the way this turned out.

.  

(note the hand knitted socks under the bottom edge of the quilt, my mother knit those for herself - her first finished pair!)

I moved away from spirals for the quilting (tho I really do love doing the spirals, they are fun to sew) and tried these echo stitches and did an "edge to edge" pattern instead of going block by block and doing something different for the borders.

The yarn blends so well I'm not sure if you can really see the quilting, but it's in there, I promise!

On a completely different note, I tried this really fabulous (and amazingly simple) sticky bun ring recipe on Christmas morning, and it was fabulous.  In fact I ate so many I gave myself a serious sugar high.  I didn't think to take a picture of it, I was too busy enjoying them, but it turned out really pretty as well, I highly recommend it for your next special breakfast treat.

I have some goodies that I got myself that I want to share with you too, but that's for another day.

And again.

My work ate my life.

And now it's 5 days til xmas and I am super behind in updating you on anything.  There are few reasons for this.  

1.  I haven't finished much other than stockinette socks.

2. I have been making xmas gifts and even though I don't think said giftees check my blog, I'm not posting about them just in case.

3. Really it's just that work ate my life.

Here the few things I have finished.

First, the evil hexagonal quilt of dooooooooom, which I have to admit is completely gorgeous, no matter how much I hated the process of putting it together.

And I really am getting better at quilting.

There are a few puckers in this one, but considering how skewed the quilt was in one place, I don't think it's bad at all.  Wait 'til you see the next one I'm working on!

I jumped on the band wagon and made a brambles beret, totally fun pattern.

Bad lighting, but there it is, it's a lovely medium blue color.

Saturday rainy day socks.

Fun stripey socks.

And last but certainly not least, puppies.

The mister is still doing okay, his monthly vet visits for check ups and chemo refills are adding up, but I don't see that there are any other options.  As long as he is still healthy and enjoying life, we will keep handing over the credit card.  The vet is impressed with his health, she didn't think we could hold the cancer at bay this long.  We can tell that the cancer is slowly growing, but we are at status quo until his behavior changes, so we will continue to spoil him rotten and cuddle him to pieces for as long as we can.

Pixie seems to be taking it all in stride...it's hard to tell how much she understands about his situation, but when he has a bad patch (a 20-30 min period where he gets all shakey from a histamine reaction and it is really, really obvious that he feels awful - these happen about once a week) she acts really weird, so she definitely knows that there is something going on.  Poor sweet Pixie.

I will update after Christmas when I can post the gifts that have been given, hopefully on the giftees!

I wish you all a safe and happy holiday season!!

A Columbus Day list

1. I went to Denver for a conference.  It was pretty there, the food was good, and we found a fabulous yarn store where I purchased too many things.  (Not THAT much, but considering I didn't need ANYTHING, it was too much)  They had Mini Mochi...I've never seen it in person before!  SO FUN.

So fun that I got two colors...  :-)

2.  I started a sweater for Scott for xmas, Rene by Anne Hanson, the v neck pullover version.  I am knitting it in Berroco Vintage because he thinks 100% wool is hot, and this way he can wash it without fear of ruining it in some way, which I think will allow him to wear it more.  I got about 7 inches done on the way to & from Denver.  Considering we're in October, I'm happy with that.

I have made him two other sweaters, but more at the beginning of my knitting and this one should look quite a bit more "ready to wear" than homemade.  He does wear the others around the house, but not out - but I don't wear the sweaters I knit 5 years ago out either...so we'll see.

3.  The Swirl is coming along.  Here it is a week or so ago.

And here it is now.  

Progress is happening, and it's AMAZING how fast those 300 stitch rows go compared to the 600+ stitch rows at the very beginning!  I am a bit concerned about yarn usage, but nothing to do but keep on knitting and keep my fingers crossed.  Also, it looks a little small, I assume extreme blocking will happen because of the laceweight in there, but still...a little nervewracking.

I am having SO much fun knitting this that I already bought yarn to make one of the other Swirls in the book (see Denver yarn shopping above).

4.  It is fall in the Poconos.

Fall is just so very pretty in the country, in the city it doesn't look like much at all.

5. Duke is still hanging in there.  Right now we seem to be at an uneasy truce with the cancer.  His lymph nodes are not getting any bigger (he is on a chemo regimen that we give at home), and he is still himself and not in any pain (as far as we can tell, he acts like normal other than a few side effects from the drugs he's on).  We've been here for 4 months, and they had given him 6 months 4 months ago, so I assumed he would be starting to decline by now.  

The vet says it is possible, but unlikely, that we can hold the cancer at bay for a year or more, it all just depends on how his particular cancer responds to the drugs.  

So, I am taking nothing for granted, watching him like a mother hen for signs of Something Very Bad happening, but so far, we're just status quo.  I am too worried to let my guard down and think that we are in the unlikely set that can fend off the cancer indefinitely, but I am accepting that for now, he's comfortable, happy, and enjoying life, so I can stop being SO very anxious until he gives us a sign that he doesn't feel well anymore.

A buddy pic:

6. Cream cheese ice cream is amazing.  Thanks to Jodi for posting it as a suggestion.  I added cinnamon and allspice and a bit of vanilla extract to make it sort of apple pie flavoried, then I served it with crumbled graham crackers on top.  YUM.

7. I have Jury Duty tomorrow.  I don't mind it AS LONG AS I don't actually get picked to serve.  In a big place like Philly it's a pretty organized and crazy system, about 400+ people show up in the morning and get taken to a court for the selection process, then whoever isn't chosen gets bumped back to the main pool of people and the whole process starts over.  So in a regular 8 hour day I might get to sit through jury selection on as many as 3 or 4 trials.  It's interesting to be part of the process, and I get a lot of knitting done, so fingers crossed I don't actually get picked, and it won't be a bad day at all.

8. Christmas is just over 2 months away.  OMG.  Commence panic and planning.

9. I have a quilt ready to go, my not enough energy to complete it.

Maybe in a week or two.  I love the way quilt tops look with light behind them, all sort of glowy and luminscent.  It helps get a good sense for the color values too.

10.  Finally, a book review:  (it's been quite a while since anything has been good enough for me to post)

Carrion Comfort, by Dan Simmons

This book is very good, Simmons has a lot to say about the nature of evil and human nature and how those two things play both with and against each other. It was a little long for me, one too many "the bad guy isn't really dead" scenes, but he's really an extraordinary writer. One of the few authors I've run into who actually expands my vocab (along with China Mieville), it's nice, for change, to read a book isn't written for the lowest common denominator.

If you haven't read any Simmons, I would recommend checking him out, he has other books & series if this isn't to your taste.

 

The thing is...

Here is my last FO of this FO string.

This is my 'make a funny pose' face. 

This is the Lettuce Pullover, in Wollmeise lace (the one time I saw the Loopy Ewe update in the first 5 minutes and managed to frantically purchase some).  I have to say...I'm not ecstatic.

There is nothing WRONG with the sweater, I love the color, the fit is good, I can see that it's going to be totally practical.  

But...the thing is...I could have bought it at the Gap, y'know?  Granted, it was my decision to leave off the mini cowl neck, but it didn't really look great on the finished ones in Ravelry, so I decided not to take my chances.  I joined the fronts earlier and "made it work" for a square-ish neckline.

So I just spent an insane amount of hours (I don't think I can adequately express how slowly those sleeves went) making a laceweight sweater (an expensive laceweight sweater), that I could have bought at the Gap for probably 24.99 (or less if I caught it on sale).  

There's the color, that makes it not Gap-ish, and I guess the neckline is fairly unique (I'm not sure that's in a good way) but I think that's it.

I am not criticizing the designer, she turned out a very practical, very wearable pattern...I just didn't think it through.

For the hours I spent on this sweater, I would much rather have a gorgeous piece of lace, completely unduplicatable in the commercial world for many reasons, not the least of which being the time I invested in it...I feel a bit like a traitor saying this, but I would rather have spent my money at the Gap.  I spent more on the YARN than this sweater would have cost me if I had purchased it instead of knitting it.

We'll chalk this up to lessons learned.  I'm not distressed, I like the sweater, it's comfy, it fits, I love the color...I'm just sort of baffled about the whole thing.  I will definitely knit lightweight sweaters in the future...just not plain stockinette sweaters that could be purchased at any big box store.

(I PROMISE to post my progress on the Swirl in my next post, it really just looks like a compressed squiggly circle right now, hopefully it will look more interesting after the upcoming work conference.  I will say that it's totally fun to knit and I'm already thinking about the next one!)

And one more for the road

So, here I go and tell you that I'm thinking about bailing on my blog, and now all of a sudden I have all this fun stuff to show you!  Maybe I just went through a slump in the early summer...knitting doesn't seem to be on the top of my mind when I know that temps below 90 are too far away to contemplate, but now with fall right around the corner (the weather at least) I am picking up speed.

This is the Inversion Gansey, to be honest, I had NO IDEA what was going to happen with this when I finished it.  I figured it could go either way, a total winner or an OMG I want my 60 hours back.  This pattern was seriously complicated.  Seriously.  It had cables and lace, a gussett, two different sections of increases and decreases in the body, saddle shoulders, and a seriously wide boatneck that I think I successfully thwarted.

I had a hard time getting into this one because it was so complicated, I had started it thinking it would be TV knitting, a bit of entertainment, but mostly stockinette and it just didn't work out that way in reality.  

Mods:  Instead of leaving live stitches on the front and back which would have had me with over 140 stitches for the collar, I bound off and then picked up at a 2:3 ratio, giving me 110 st.  I did this because the FOs on Rav looked sort of off-the-shoulder, not a look I favor, and HOORAY! it worked out for me.  It's still really wide in the neck, but I think it will stay on my shoulders, so it'll be fine with a cami.

I am excited to see how this yarn wears, it is Ella Rae Merino Heather, and it is SOFT.  I usually need any undershirt even with most merino yarns, but this feels like cotton on my skin, so soft and smooth!  Maybe it's the cable construction...I'm not sure, but I'll definitely be using it again if it wears well.

Bottom line, I guess I would recommend the pattern, obviously it worked out fine, I'm just not a fan of following blindly along and hoping things work out for the best, but if you want to knit it, be aware that it is not an easy knit!

I have one more sweater 2/3 done...a bit more persistance and I'll have to show you soon!

It's all about lace

For some reason, the fall brings with it thoughts of lace, maybe it's the idea of wrapping oneself in lovely warm shawls, whatever it is, this book was timely for me.

I received a review copy of Wendy Knits Lace, and there are some really sweet things in this book.  

This book would be good for someone who is ready to jump into lace and wants some options, some mitts with a touch of lace, a sweater with a bit (or a lot) of lace on it, or ultimately a full-on lace shawl.  There is a bit of instruction in it, but it is not a how to knit lace book.  I think an intermediate knitter could use this book as an introduction to lace, but it isn't in depth.

Of course, it would also be great for an experienced knitter if you simply love one or more of the patterns.  Personally, I love this one. 

 

Isn't that just luscious?  Delicate and summery, the perfect addition to a summer dress for the evening.  Gorgeous.

If you're feeling a bit more wintery...

A pair of pretty gloves that are dainty and feminine, but ultimately practical and warm.

Or of course, a lovely shawl

There are quite a few of these, both stole and traditional triangular shapes.

Take a gander at all the patterns in Ravelry and see if this is one that needs to go on your holiday wishlist!