don’t worry, Howard; I’m queen of the mods

So, lately I’ve been making quite small things, maybe to contrast with all the big things I have in my head and on my needles that linger unfinished and unloved (sorry, ufo dudes). One of my favourite things came off the needles last week after four days of almost constant knitting and reknitting:

It’s MagKnit’s Evangeline fingerless gloves! Well, sort of. I adored the cables running up the back of the glove, but I sort of hated the finger/thumb part. I tweaked the pattern a bit and came up with something I really loved, so I decided to write up a little tutorial in case anyone else was looking for a mod for this pattern.

I didn’t use the recommended yarn, or even a yarn that was the same weight as the recommended yarn, so already I was knitting by the seat of my pants. I still had almost a skein and a half of Handmaiden 4-ply cashmere (the same yarn I used to make my Odessa) and I really wanted to make gloves with it. So I grabbed some 3.25 dpns and cast on. My hands are fairly small and the cashmere is fairly stretchy, so using Michelle’s numbers worked fine for me, but it would have been the easiest thing in the world to add (or subtract) any multiple of 4 additional stitches to improve fit.

The first real mod I made, though, was to make the root of the cables match up with the ribbing:

This is a fairly small, nitpicky thing, but it makes me happy every time I look at it, and it was piss easy to do. All I had to do was transpose the pattern over one stitch. That is, after I finished the last round of the K1P2 ribbing, I took the marker off the needles, knit one more stitch, and replaced the marker. This means that the first two knit stitches of the cable pattern occur directly above two knit stitches. A little thing, but a nice thing.

I wanted these gloves to extend quite a few inches beyond my wrists, so I knit four complete repeats of the cable pattern before starting hand shaping. You could wait ten cable repeats before you started hand shaping, or begin the shaping as soon as you started knitting the cables. The point at which you start the hand shaping depends on how many stitches you want to end up with for the thumb, and how long (or short) you want the wrist portion to be, but it’s probably easiest just to start at Row 1 of a new cable repeat. As you can see in this picture, I moved my round marker back three stitches, so the increases start six stitches from the first cable stitch. This centres the pattern more precisely on the arm, and keeps the increases looking nice and neat.

The thumb shaping is exactly the same as described in the Flying Gloves “pattern”: increase one stitch per pattern row, and knit all stitches plain each plain row. Although I only wanted twelve stitches for the thumb, I knit four cable pattern repeats (four repeats x four increases per repeat = 16 extra sts) to give myself some extra ease across the hand, since my gauge was so tight.

Another thing I did to give myself some extra ease across the hand was to perform a few increases on the other side of my hand:

I started these at the beginning of Cable Repeat #7 (aka Repeat 3 of the hand shaping). I stopped increasing here at the same time as I stopped increasing for the thumb gusset, but if you felt like you wanted some more ease for your fingers, you could easily keep increasing here until you were satisfied. Anyway. Eight extra stitches here plus the four extra stitches that were left over after separating out the twelve stitches for the thumb equals twelve extra stitches of ease across the hand, which added to the 40 stitches I originally cast on makes 52 stitches total. It’s important to note that 52 is divisible by 4; however many stitches you increase, be sure it is a multiple of four so your final ribbing turns out nice and even!

The last mod I made to the pattern was to knit a couple extra repeats on the fingers to make them nice and long. I wanted gloves that were kind of more like pseudomitts; the fabric comes down to shield my fingers from the wind, but it doesn’t get in my way when I have to dig around for something.

And if it’s not too cold outside (or I want my fingers free, like for driving), I can fold the ribbing down and the fabric doesn’t get in my way at all:

I picked up four extra stitches for the thumb, and topped it off with some ribbing to make it easier to flip down. Cast off the fingers and the thumb with something extra stretchy (I used the sewn bind-off method, outlined in this great knitty.com article)

Aaaaaaaand that’s about it! I’m not sure if anyone cares, but at the very least I have some “notes” written down in case I ever want to knit these again the same way. And I might; they’re really cute, and very, very easy. And the cashmere makes me feel like a princess every time I wear them! I’ve got two more skeins of Handmaiden cashmere that I don’t have plans for yet; maybe there will be some more modded Evangelines in my future…!

 

reentry

Two of the blogs I read had this title last week. The funniest part was that the posts both appeared on the same day, and just happened to appear consecutively in my Bloglines. A sign? Maybe not. But a title, at least.

So. November, eh? Well, a lot of things have happened since November. Most of them were good. Some of them were pretty okay. And one was fucking devastating. This isn’t a personal blog so I don’t really want to get into it, but it’s important to me and I think about it pretty much every day with fresh shock and disbelief, so I don’t feel like I can come back without saying anything about it. My dad’s best friend died suddenly and unexpectedly from a massive brain tumour a few days after I posted my last entry. I don’t know or can’t remember most of the medical details, but he’d been suffering headaches for a few weeks, put it down to work stress/travel fatigue and basically ignored it until his wife marched him to Emergency. He was admitted that evening and died just over a week later. His funeral was on Remembrance Day and fuck yes he will be remembered. Robert was more than family to us, and more awesome than most people I’ve ever known. His kids are very close in age to both me and my brother, and we all grew up together even though we only saw each other a couple of times a year. The whole family is awesome and supertight, and I know I can’t even imagine how they feel. Sometimes I’ll sort of start daydreaming about summers at the cottage or skiing or whatever, and I’ll remember suddenly and all over again that he’s gone, and it hits me exactly the same way it did the first time I heard the news. The funeral was standing room only. He will be sorely missed.

But life doesn’t always give you much of a chance to grieve. We all travelled down the lake for the funeral, and when we got back I started working for real and for serious on my final research paper (you know, the one I’ve been warning you not to ask about since the summer). I pretty much moved into the basement, spread my papers out and rigged up an enormous corkboard to pin ideas to. I entered the dungeon around 9 every morning and crawled back into bed around midnight every night. Getting to go upstairs to pee was a break, nay, a treat; something to look forward to. Grant fixed me lunch, cooked me dinner and cleared up every day. More importantly, he encouraged me to get started, to keep going, and to believe in myself. He drove with me to Ottawa during a huge snowstorm to hand it in. I owe him everything. I owe him my Mastery of Rock!

\m/ \m/

Because Master of Rock sounds way more awesome than Master of Canadian Studies. It’s my degree and I get to call it what I want on my blog (as opposed to on my CV!)

But that was only the beginning of December. A few days after we drove to Ottawa, we flew to Scotland to have Christmas with Grant’s sister, her Geordie husband and their Thomas The Tank Engine-obsessed 2 1/2 year old son. And my camera died soon after we got there, so these blurry pics are really the only ones I have of the trip:

Grant at the Christmas Market in Edinburgh

Grant and Sam enjoying fresh mini doughnuts. mmmm lard

Christmas was pretty fun, especially since we all clubbed together and got our brother-in-law Guitar Hero III! Grant and I immediately decided we must now buy a Wii and also every piece of music-performance-related software available. This might mean saving up for awhile. A loooooooong while. But good things come to those who wait, right?

Speaking of waiting and good things…I do have knitting content.

I knit one of the two hats in the picture above. Unfortunately, it was not Sam’s supercool Ming The Merciless helmet (you can’t really see it in this pic, but the brim comes to a tiny peak in the middle of his forehead. I covet this hat). Grant’s hat is the Marsan Watchcap, knit with almost 2 whole skeins of Noro Kureyon (dude has a bigass head, and he wanted a wide flip-up brim. But he wears it lots and lots, so it’s okay). Here’s a slightly better picture of it:

Even when he’s looking cute, there’s still more than a hint of smarm. Just how I like ‘em.

Grant’s hat was the last thing I knit before I put everything on hold for my paper. Which means I didn’t have a hat for myself when we went to Edinburgh. So, of course, I had to make myself one:

It’s Grumperina’s Odessa, but to make it nice and warm I did lifted increases in place of yarn-overs. The rest is pretty well exactly to pattern, except where I missed out a single bead in the second beaded row. It’s the one mistake that makes it perfect, right? Even I have to really search for it when I’m putting it on (because, of course, the mistake goes to the back!). Nothing but glowing praise for this pattern!

The yarn was a yay-you-did-it! treat for myself: Handmaiden 4-ply Cashmere from The Naked Sheep in the Beaches. I can tell that it’s going to bag a wee bit, but since I made it the tiniest bit too tight for just this reason, it shouldn’t be a problem. Here’s a slightly closer-up shot of the hat:

As you can see in the background, it’s been pretty green here for awhile now. I’d been putting off FO photoshoots until we got some nice white to shoot against, but the few flurries we’d been getting always blew away so I finally just went ahead and took pictures. Of course, today I woke up to snow-covered everything, but whatev, Trev. Maybe now I won’t feel so silly going out in my mittens:

I started these in Edinburgh out of some Rowan Tapestry (a wool/soy mix) that I grabbed at the John Lewis department store in Glasgow. I just wanted to make something superfast to cover my hands. Well, I didn’t end up finishing these guys until a couple of days ago, so so much for the bum’s rush. Now I wish I’d done something a little more ambitious, like cables or tone-on-tone colourwork or something, but here we are. I’m not the hugest fan of the yarn anyhow, but they’ll do for what they’re for. Anyway, I probably wouldn’t have had enough yardage to make anything but what I made. Since I was just improvising these guys, I didn’t know how much yarn I’d need for each mitt. In the end, I had to unpick the first mitt’s cuff to finish off the second mitt. Here’s how much I had left over:

Yeah. Not a whole lot. Hooray for spit-splicing, I probably wouldn’t have made it without it!

Grant says the pointy tips make my hands look like flippers, but I like the roominess of them. I hate the feeling of too-small mitts with my hands slightly bowed inside; these guys give my middle finger lots of breathing space. Anyway, I have much bigger hand-covering plans a-brewin. Actually, it is pretty much exactly the same idea another blogger I just spent ten fruitless minutes searching for had: a pair of fingerless gloves with an extra-long finger section that can be folded back when you need to use your fingers, or flipped down when you want to keep them warm. Seriously, I thought of it one evening, really loved the idea, and then the NEXT MORNING checked my Bloglines to see the EXACT IDEA in a FO shot! I mean, it’s not a genius or revolutionary idea, and I certainly never intended to patent it or anything, but I still think it was a pretty funny coincidence. They were even cabled down the back of the hand and everything! The cables were slightly different than the ones I had in mind, tho. I envisioned Sweet Sheep’s Evangeline gloves from the winter MagKnits as the base, and I keep pawing through my little stash to see if I have something suitable. I still haven’t decided if I need to go shopping yet.

Okay, one more FO on parade and then I’m going to close the gates. Like most of the projects in this post, I started this in Edinburgh (we were there for almost three weeks, okay? And Edinbugh pretty much closes down for a week over Christmas and Hogmanay) It’s a toque for my dad that I sort of made up as I went along (a familiar tune here at knittingmixtapes). But I think it turned out looking pretty pretty good:

Denny wound the wool for me when I bought it at Lettuce Knit, so of course I’ve lost the tag by now. It’s a thick, single-ply pure wool that I think really helps the cables pop just enough to admire them, but not so much that you’re all like, “whoa, cables!” The wool is a bit scratchy, but I also made a cashmere liner for it it’s nice and soft on my dad’s bald head. It’s also not pointy on my dad’s head the way it is on mine (my head is not quite big enough to make a perfect model, but here we are).

It’s basically half a Marsan Watchcap with a Saxon Braid stuck to the bottom of it. This hat also represents my very first go at cables, which are dead easy and very fun to work. I provisionally cast on, then knit a few repeats of the Saxon Braid cable (I got my instructions from the Samus cardigan) and grafted the ends together when I thought I’d done enough (the cables don’t quite match up seamlessly, but it’s good enough in this hairy yarn that you really have to hunt for the seam) Then I picked up a bunch of stitches for the rest of it, knit a twisted rib pattern, and shaped the crown like in the Marsan Watchcap pattern. Finally, with the Handmaiden 4 ply Cashmere (a much, much finer yarn than the grey wool) I picked up some stitches at the bottom of the brim and knit a liner for it at a very loose gauge (I picked up the stitches with some 4.25mm dpns, then switched to 5mm dpns about a half-inch in, and ended up knitting most of the liner with a 6mm circular. I switched back to the 5mm dpns for the crown shaping).

It’s the tiniest bit tight on my dad’s head (I knit most of it while we were on different continents, so although I measured his skull before I started, it was a bit of a crossed-fingers situation), but the wool and the cashmere will likely stretch out a bit with wear. The cables are nice and warm on his ears, and the looser-knit crown should allow plenty of air circulation, which is important as this hat is destined to be a ski toque!

I’d definitely knit it again, which is saying a lot as I very rarely choose to re-knit things I’ve already made (which, I guess, is where Second Sock/Mitt Syndrome comes from). The first time I started the body/crown knitting, I tried it in plain stockinette, but I thought it looked too feminine so I switched to an exaggerated rib for some manliness. If I reknit this for myself, I’d probably stick with the stockinette, although you could also get creative and stick something like an Odessa swirl on the top! We’ll see. Right now I’m pretty happy with my straight-up Odessa, but you can never have too many lovely handknit hats, right?

Aaaaaaaaaand I’m spent. There is more to say and to see, but they will have to wait for another day. I don’t mean to contribute to the Only Posting FO Shots thing that is allegedly Sweeping The Blogosphere Like A Plague, but when you don’t post for two months there is a lot to get caught up with. Next Time: New Year Crafting Resolutions and Sam’s Jacket: Now With Hood (Arms Pending). See you all soon!

 

treading water…but thar’s a storm brewing

No knitting pics today, I have to make a list of Christmas gifts I’ve started/imagined that won’t get lost in the wash etc (all links lead to Ravelry):

1. Hooded jacket for Nephew, pattern of my own maniacal design

2. Branching Out “stole” (that is, the regular scarf with improvised lace border) for ma

3. Modified Hawkeye Hat for da (he wants earflaps)

4. Marsan Watchcap for the husband

5. …something for BIL? A hat? Maybe another earflapped Hawkeye? A modishly striped knit hat? Maybe I’ll wait until after the One Of A Kind Show and see if I don’t find him something there first.

Actually, that’s not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. I mean, sure, I still have to find the time to write an entire 60-page research paper in there somewhere, but overall, I’m feeling a lot better about it. Even tho the Nephew Sweater is probably a project that could take up more time than all the other projects put together…ah well. We’ll see how that one goes. Dude is two and a half; he won’t even notice if he doesn’t unwrap it on Christmas morning. So I really have until January to finish that one (and if it still isn’t done by then…meh. It’ll get there eventually. That’s what the postal service is for, right?)

Right.

 

this little piggie stayed home

So, some people didn’t go to Rhinebeck. More specificially, *I* didn’t go to Rhinebeck. And I am not bitter about it at all. Noooooooo, not me. Bitter? HA! Ha, I say. I say this to you.

But some of us did go on yarn-related roadtrips all the same. More specifically, *I* went on a yarn-related roadtrip. Last Tuesday. With my husband. And he didn’t even complain (that much). Yay roadtrip!

Okay, so it’s not as awesome as Rhinebeck, what with the sunshine and the animals and the babies and the knitting royalty. Tuesday was a pretty crappy day, and the leaves had fallen off all the trees. I took a picture, but it doesn’t want to upload, for some reason, and two days of fighting with it are enough. But it really doesn’t matter. We didn’t go for the view.

We came for the wool.

Camilla Valley Farm is about a 90-minute drive from where we live, and took even longer coming home with all the traffic and stuff. But it was worth it. I got all the Jamieson DK I’ll need for my nephew’s zip hoodie aaaaaaaand a little extra. They had Fleece Artist Sea Wool! I am not made of stone, people. But I limited myself to two skeins. This time. Sock yarn doesn’t count, right?

In case you decide to visit Camilla Valley Farms, this is the shop.

There’s no sign or anything (that I noticed), but it’s reasonably obvious that the house isn’t the shop and the barn isn’t the shop and the grain silo *probably* isn’t the shop either, so this must be the shop. Here is my darling husband carrying nearly $200 in yarn with nary a complaint to be heard (mostly because the Nephew Sweater was his idea in the first place, and he is very interested in each stage of its construction. But he didn’t make a peep about the Fleece Artist, and that is to his credit).

The weather was pretty bad in the early afternoon, while we tried to navigate our way to CVF with EZ-style pithy (but clear and concise) directions along nearly-deserted roads that ended up covering 60% of the car in mud (to the point where you wouldn’t have been able to tell the colour of the paint underneath!) However, the skies had started to clear by the time we were on our way back, which made the trek back to “civilization” a pleasure:

As for actual knitting, I seem to have that starteritis bug that I hear is going around. I was suddenly and unexpectedly obsessed by Saartje’s Bootees (link to pdf on the sidebar of that page) and whipped out three adorable pairs until I could stop (they’re so easy! and quick! and addictive!) But as I have not yet found the perfect tiny little buttons for them (I need to start a button stash, stat!), they are not FOs and as such will not be shown yet (the crisscross straps flap about too much to allow the audience to fully appreciate the cuteness without buttons). So, instead, check this out:

Yes, the picture of me making a weird face was the best picture of my finished (if slightly modified) Circular Shrug. Always ends up that way, doesn’t it? Ah well. It’s still one of my favourite-ever (and easiest-ever) knits!

I think the shrug looks great from the back, too, even if it does pucker weirdly a bit and give me faux-backfat (I have enough of my own, damnit!)

I thought I’d decided not to put in sleeves, but after about ten minutes of wearing the things I realised I really, really needed them, if only to have something to anchor the shawl collar thing so it doesn’t ride up and get all mussed every five seconds. So it’s not an FO as such, but I still wanted to show it off. I am still so so so in love with Dream In Color yarn! Here’s another closeup shot, in situ:

Now, I don’t know if everyone’s browser does this, but when I roll over the pics on my blog, it shows the filename. If yours does this, too, you might notice that all the shrug pics have the name ‘Julie’ in the title. That’s not my name; it’s what I’ve taken to calling this piece in honour of one of my all-time favourite musicians, Julie Doiron. She’s been a successful solo artist for the last decade or so, but before then, she was in the seminal Canadian indie rock band Eric’s Trip, who broke up in the late 90s but have gotten together again a few times over the years for some “reunion” shows. I was lucky enough to catch them in 1996 just before they dropped over the horizon, and was there to welcome them back again in 2001 when they started playing together again, “just for fun”. While I was knitting this shrug, ET was touring southern Ontario, and I talked my sweet, indulgent husband into travelling with me to London and Ottawa to see them on two different weekends (and driving some of the way, so I could knit in the car). Of course, the anticipation of a reunion tour inspired me to make like three different mixes of ET and side project tracks, which I have been listening to obsessively for almost a month now (I can be sort of OCD about stuff sometimes — what? knitters often have OCD tendencies? whoda thunk, right?) Anyway, the link between the yarn and the band came pretty naturally if you remember the last proper album they put out: Purple Blue. It’s an ET album, not a Julie album, but Eric’s Shrug didn’t seem right, somehow…it seemed wrong to give such a feminine knit a masculine name. So, despite my serious doubts that Julie herself would ever wear a garment like this, it has come to be called Julie Shrugged in my head, and in my Ravelry notebook.

The proper title of this blog is knittingmixtapes, which I meant to be both a (lame-ass) pun on ‘mistakes’ and an allusion to music; I envisioned this as sort of a crafty mp3 blog. I haven’t done that until now, but then again, no other post or knitted object has ever been more closely related to a piece of music. Songs like the one at the bottom of this paragraph are why I love Julie’s music so much, and probably why music in general is so important to me. I discovered Eric’s Trip when I was fifteen, and their music became sort of enmeshed in my own personality, my psyche. Like the music, I’m kind of selfconsciously sentimental and naive, incredibly introverted but self-revelatory at the same time. I’ve gone months, even years, without listening to any ET or ET-related music, but every time I dust off the albums, I feel very much myself. This song has meant a lot to me over the years, but never more than after I met my husband. I dream about him often, and through the course of our relationship there’s been a lot of time when all we could do was dream about each other; being in a relationship, even a marriage, with someone from the other side of the world comes with its own peculiarities and challenges.

Julie Doiron – Tell You Again

In less sentimental news, my “knitting students” are getting on quite well. As well as can be expected, anyway. It’s a busy time of year. But I did meet up with one of them (Fair Isle Vest) for a shopping spree and mini-lesson over the weekend. We fondled many yarns in Lettuce Knit, scoured the wall for needles at Romni Wools, and repaired to the Just Us Cafe for bagels and tea and hot chocolate and knitting.

Unfortunately, that pic isn’t uploading either, so we will have to do without it for now. Dudes, I think something is seriously wrong with something somewhere. I’m not sure if it’s my wordpress account (I bought more room! I’ve only used 7%!) or my internet connection (it’s been patchy since some dude came over to “fix” it) or an unsympathetic alignment of the stars or what, but I’ve been writing this sucker for two days and it’s time to post it. Maybe there will be more Amateur Hour next time. And maybe even some progress on The Nephew Sweater. And if you’re really lucky, maybe it won’t take me two weeks to post again! We can only wait and see.

 

Teacher’s Pet! I wanna be…Teacher’s Pet!

So, recently I started trying to create knitting friends out of regular friends. By their individual request, of course. It’s going pretty well, actually, but I wish I’d had my camera when three of us — (me and two have-never-even-held-needles students/friends — were browsing Romni’s pattern section. “Can I make this?” one would ask, holding up a pattern for a Fair Isle vest. “Yes,” I replied, “but maybe not for your first project. “Oooh, I like this one!” another would exclaim, pulling down a pattern of a seed-stitch tailored jacket. “You could make that too,” I told her, “but maybe not for your first project.” Romni Wools is huge and slightly intimidating when you have no idea what you want to make or what you want to make it with, so after a long hour or so of searching and deciding and weighing options, we decided to just buy one skein each and a pair of needles, repair somewhere quiet and learn how to cast-on. Unfortunately, that “quiet place” ended up being the Seed Stitch Jacket friend’s condo where Ugly Betty was playing, but I think they got the hang of casting on.

Of course, I couldn’t be the only one not buying yarn. They had just gotten in a new shipment of mercerized cotton, and I couldn’t resist these colours:

I was pretty tired by the end of our shopping expedition, so by the time I noticed the cotton wall I could only remember than I wanted some, but I couldn’t remember why. After I got home (and had a good sleep), I remembered that I wanted to try my hand at some crochet hexagons…which means I need a third colour. Oh well! It’s a longterm project idea anyway.

Fair Isle Vest and I have plans to meet up next weekend at Lettuce Knit to pick out some yarn for the circular shrug I’ve been making, because I am still so in love with Dream In Colour yarn, and I think she will be, too. Teaching two friends at once also introduces a slight competitive element to the learning process, which I hope will motivate them both to finish at least one project before they decide whether or not knitting is for them. It’s a pretty steep learning curve, but such a satisfying skill! At least, I think so.

Speaking of DiC yarns and LK, I finally made it down there again to pick up another two skeins to finish my own shrug, but I couldn’t make the time until Saturday, two full weeks after my first visit. Two weeks of other people petting the skeins and exclaiming at colours. Two full weeks of other people picking out yarns for their projects. Two full weeks…

“Oh no. Are you out of Dusky Aurora worsted weight?” I asked the lovely shoppeople worriedly. How was I going to finish my shrug without more yarn?? I knew I should have bought more than two skeins!!! Even if they just had one, I could at least finish the lace edging, it doesn’t need sleeves, but oh, I really wanted sleeves, I guess I could order some from somewhere online but it would certainly be a different dyelot but does that really matter with variegated yarns and damnit I knew I should have bought more than two skeins…

[Triumphant Music Played Here!] Luckily, The Awesome Laura was on duty. She got a “hmm, let’s see” gleam in her eye, rummaged around in the bottom “Unlit Pit Of Doom” shelfcubby, and produced NOT one, but TWO skeins of Dusky Aurora!!

THE DAY. LET ME SAVE IT FOR YOU.

Since then, I’ve only gotten through another inch or so of the lace, so no pics yet. But at least now there will be a shrug to finish!!

In other pictureless news, I have ordered a small truckload of Jamison Spindrift from She Ewe Knits to start swatching for my 2 1/2 year old nephew’s Christmas present. He and his parents are going to be living in Scotland for the next couple of years, and he could really use something light but warm and water-resistant to keep off the drizzle, so I’m planning to make him a little lined zip hooded sweater jacket thing with a bit of colourwork. And by “lined”, I mean I intend to buy some fabric, whip up a little coat, and attach it to the inside of the sweater. It’ll be my First Real Sewing Evar, so I hope it goes well! We’re going to be visiting with them in Edinburgh for most of December (my family has had the last two Christmases, it’s the inlaws’ turn this year), so hopefully I’ll be able to get him to try it on as I make it. Obviously I plan to make it a little on the big side, but I have a tendency to make kids’ things too small, which would be completely useless. So hopefully that will go well.

So many things to look forward to, so few pictures to illustrate them! So in closing, I’ll share with you some pictures I took a couple of weeks ago, but never got around to blogging:

Could it be…?

Heck yes!

It’s Andre the Mini-Mantis from Soto Softies‘ Etsy shop! He spent quite a few happy days in my mom’s garden before the weather turned, but has since come inside for the season (dudes, it’s getting chilly bananas outside. Which I love, but is also giving me a cold. Thanks, dusty forced air furnace). Right now he’s sort of living on my bookshelf with all our other “important things”, but he needs a proper home, and soon. Lots of things around here need proper homes. My yarns, they live in shopping bags. But I guess we should get a home before we get furniture, no? So many plans, so few ways to bring them to fruition…

 

dream in circles

I have been knitting and ripping and re-knitting this shrug, and I am still no less in love:

The mock rib looks so nice and went so quickly! Which was lucky, as I ended up ripping it all back as soon as I’d finished it in order to add another 3″ to the lace rib section. I’m not totally convinced that the lace rib was the right choice for the garment (the WS is okay, but not lovely), but it was certainly more interesting to knit than kkppkkppkkppkkppaippdfkpkpkpkapdsfadkf

RS:

WS:

Unfortunately, I ran out of yarn a few rows into the second lace rib section, so I’ve got to go back downtown and get another couple of balls (poor me!) But until I can find the time to do that…

This is the Debbie Bliss stuff that came last week that I have been so looking forward to knitting with! It’s going to be a fitted empire waist-y sweater, with lace around the torso and a V-neck with elbow-length sleeves. And red ribbon accents. Probably. I’m so excited to get started! I’ve never been so happy to run out of yarn!

Oh, last week’s knitting lesson was canceled and rescheduled for this week. Now I’m worried that the circular shrug, while piss easy, might take too much time to complete, and thus put them off knitting. I’m a process knitter, so I like things that take a long time, but that might not be the best way to begin learning the skill…we’ll see.

 

scotchtober

September was hot and sunny here in Toronto…not exactly knitting weather. But I managed to get some done anyway:

MintyFresh’s Anastasia Socks made with Socks That Rock mediumweight in Socktopus. The yarn turned out to be a lot pinker than I expected when I ordered it; the picture of the skein on the site has the pink hiding in the back, I guess, or that dyelot wasn’t as pink as the one I got etc etc…oh well! Such is the danger of ordering from the internet! But they look so perfect with my shoes, which were my inspiration for hand-knit socks in the first place!

Fantastic. Except for the pooling on one (just one!) of the socks’ legs (you can sort of see it in the pics above, but here is a more blatant example):

I used 2mm needles to the ankle, then switched to 2.75mm needles for the legs for some “calf shaping”. One leg pooled, the other didn’t. Life is a mystery. But now I have my first pair of wearable socks! The Pomatomii are going to be ripped back to the ankle and re-knit on my pair of brand-new 2.25mm circular needles. And when I say pair, I mean pair! I would like to think that, for the rest of my days, I will knit all my socks two at a time on two circulars. Because I am totally the kind of girl who finds it hard to go back to a project once it’s been conquered, and once a new one has been dreamed up. Lookit this:

Now, here, my friends, is a yarn the internet didn’t lie about. That’s my swatch, made from Dream In Colour’s Classy yarn in Dusky Aurora. I loved it on the net, I squealed when I saw the skeins at Lettuce Knit, and I paid for two skeins of it in a haze (said haze was contributed to by a skein of Colinette Jitterbug in the long-coveted shade of Castagna…I have since decided I need to go back and purchase another skein in order to make matching kneesocks!! Sorry, no photos of this one yet…it was horrible and dark today)

I was at LK with a friend of mine who has recently become a “student” of mine…I’m creating knitting friends! She also bought some DiC, although I’m not certain of the colourway…it was bright pink with streaks of purple…I’m going to guess Ruby River. Anyway, for once I remembered to ask the lovely shopgirl to wind our skeins into cakes:

Good thing, too, because I lack both swift and ball-winder, which can sometimes lead to quite a mess:

me and my Fleece Artist in the kitchen…this became the Sofi Sweater

me and the un-blogged-about Sundara yarn that arrived in disappointing shades of purple, which later became two pairs of un-blogged-about Flying Gloves, one of which was given to one of my young girlcousins (they all got a different pair, and seemed really excited about them!); the other is waiting patiently in my knitting bag for Christmas and a suitable giftee…I was trying to wind this up at the Ministry of Transportation while I waited for the husband to futz around with driver’s license-related things, which was maybe not the wisest idea

Ach well. My birthday is coming up, so you never know, maybe I’ll get one then (and by “get one”, I mean “get my husband to make me one, it’s not very difficult and there are lots of examples of homemade swifts on the net, plus he like doing that kind of thing! Don’t you, honey!”) In the meantime, the DiC yarn is slowly but surely turning into a Circular Shrug that I am very excited about!! Of course, this doesn’t mean I’m following the pattern to the letter or anything, but I’ve done about two inches of the rib so far (with a slight modification, to keep it from being too boring) and I can’t wait.

Well, part of the reason I can’t wait is the yarn that came in the mail today from eBay. Because of the aforebemoaned yucky day outside (plus, it’s night now), I have no pics, but it’s Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk in Teal, aka colour# 25005. Oh, I have big plans for this lovely soft smooshy stuff!! But I’d better save some surprises for later…

Also to come: pics of the shrug-in-progress! I think I need more DiC yarn…for sleeves. Yes. Sleeves. That’s it.

Oh! And on Thursday I’m teaching two more non-knitting friends to knit!! Do you think the circular shrug is too ambitious a first project? That’s what I’m thinking of starting with…the skill set is challenging without being too intimidating, but I’m afraid the project is too big and will take too long to complete. We’ll see what they think on Thursday. I have lots more ideas if they don’t like this one. I’m so excited, even if it means missing The Office! If they could have made it down any other day…oh well. DVR, sometimes you are my best friend. How would I do anything without you? I hate normal tv now; I so resent having to SIT through the commercials! The gall!! But that’s a rant for another blog.

 

socks that…well…

Cookie wasn’t kidding; this pattern has teeth!

But it helped me cut mine. On socks!

These little bastards are addictive, no?

The darker ones are actually my First Evar Socks, Cider Moon’s Campfire Socks, made out of some very squishy Mission Falls 1842 Wool. They don’t remotely fit me, but that’s just fine as they’re actually a (belated) Father’s Day present for my da.

The lighter ones are, of course, the ubiquitous (but still totally awesome!) Pomatomus, made from the beautiful greeny bluey Fleece Artist Basic Merino Sock skein from the previous post (I *think* it’s the Nova Scotia colourway, but it’s hard to tell when the skeins are neither labeled nor necessarily consistent with the “official” colourway…luckily, that’s part of the charm of handdyed!)

Speaking of inconsistencies, my camera doesn’t *quite* seem to be able to capture the exact colour of this yarn; sometimes it’s blue, sometimes green…

But I like it that way.

Now to battle SSS…

 

for sofi

Whoa, almost two weeks since my last post! Sorry dudes! I, uh…I got my Ravelry invite awhile ago and I have to say, the rumours are true; Ravelry can tempt you into more drooling than knitting. But I did get a few pieces finished:

A Tomten for my pseudoniece, Sofi!

Pattern: Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Tomten Jacket

Materials: One and some skeins of STR Puck’s Mischief; maybe half a skein of STR Scottish Highlands, both Heavyweight (I knitted two ridges of PM to one ridge of SH, because I’m not such a fan of yellow)

Needles: 3.75 mm Addi Turbos (I think…I can’t read the wire anymore, and I don’t have a gague thingy yet!) I was pretty meh about these needles (too clickety clackity for me)

Sadly, I don’t have any action shots to share…the Tomten might actually be a tiny bit too incredibly huge for her yet, plus it’s been really hot here lately. Maybe later.

The heat has also stopped me getting an action shot of the second, much smaller (I fear maybe too small!) sweater I made for her (I’m a proud auntie!):

(skein of Noro for scale; a future hat for the mister!)

Pattern: heavily adapted from EZ’s February Baby Sweater, with the stitch pattern used in minty’s Leyburn socks

Materials: Maybe 2/3 of a skein of Fleece Artist Sea Wool in Hercules

Needles: 2.75mm Crystal Palace Bamboo Needles (which I ADORE!) and some 2.75mm bamboo DPNs

It took a lot of trial and error to work out the numbers, and even then I’m not sure if it worked out in the end. Her mama assures me it will, but it remains to be seen! Ah well.

Next up: a little something for me…

Some Fleece Artist Merino sock yarn, perfect for a pair of Pomatomus! A little ambitious for my Second-Ever socks, maybe, but when has that ever stopped me?

 

och aye the noo etc

I finished the sweater!

Here’s a blurry pic of me wearing it in my sister-in-law’s garden, a few days after the wedding:

*sigh* My husband, I adore him, but he is not an awesome photographer. Anyway. As you can see, the wrap sweater became a regular ol’ cardigan, but it’s still my first “proper” cardi, so I’m very excited about it! (my REAL first one, which still needs to be photographed, is closed with a tie, not buttons)

Here it is “in action”, on the bridge overlooking the monastery beyond the Royal Mile in Edinburgh (about ten seconds from our fantastic flat; cheaper than a weeks’ hostel accommodation for four people, and eleven hundred times more comfy):

me: Was that a good picture?

him: It sort of looks like you’re being mugged.

me: Well, how bout we –

him: No more time for blog pictures! We gotta go!

So that’s pretty much all I got of the sweater, except for some random holiday snaps that never seemed to turn out all that well. Most of them are kind of blurry, actually:

Ah well. The good news is, I found some Real Irish Wool during our “honeymoon” in the southwest of Ireland!

Lovely tweedy green, but it’s a bit scratchy for next-to-the-skin wear. I’m dreaming of a felted bag, maybe with a celtic-y knot-y thing intarsia’d on the flap. But that will have to wait a wee while, I’ve got another obsession or two on the go just now that need completing. But I’ll save them for another post, when (hopefully) I’ll have all the elements together at long (long!) last! Oh, surprises…