July 2007 Archives

My apologies to those who commented on my blog lately... for some reason I wasn't getting notified of the comments and there were a bunch of them in a pending state - along with all the spam I get on a daily basis. Oops! I hope I found them all before purging the spam.

If I lost your comment, I'm really sorry!

... for now.

I finished up the final chapters of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on Thursday morning, and worked the final stitches of Eris on Saturday.

I finally figured out what the wool reminds me of. You know the old 3-D glasses with one red and one blue lens? And do you remember what the pictures or movies looked like if you looked at them without the glasses on? That's what this yarn looks like. Mostly blue wool, with red threads of alpaca heathered in. I think it's the alpaca that gets up my nose and makes my eyes water.

I put her in my front loader with a little Tide, on the "Ultra Handwash" setting, and hoped that it would take some of the itch out of the wool. I think it did!

I set to work repairing my wooly horse. I used dowels from that big orange place, and the wood was quite soft so many of the pegs broke in their holes. I found the same size dowel in a harder wood and made myself some pegs and a few to spare. Good thing too, because while loading up Eris I broke another one of the soft pegs!

Thirty minutes later and with a bit of wrestling, I set her up on my wooly horse to dry. I tied up the front band along the convenient turning ridge that will be hiding the zipper that I plan to insert this week. It took me a couple of tries to line everything up. In retrospect, the heavy cotton yarn I used for basting wasn't such a good idea - cotton absorbs water and shrinks when wet!

And the waist shaping made the wooly horse not quite work perfectly for blocking, but I love the way the sleeves blocked. All the decreases looked so neat and in rows along the inside edge of the sleeve. Ah well, live and learn.

Here's a closeup of the collar. There's something bloopy going on around the collar, but I think i might be because the sweater is people-shaped, and the wooly horse isn't really.

I said off the needles for now because... the sleeves are too long! I tried it on before completing the first sleeve and it seemed to be right on target, but that was before I sewed the underarm seams. I wonder if maybe the way the stockinette curls at the underarms made the sleeve seem a little shorter that it really was. I do know that it was too much to block out, because I could tell they were too long before I even blocked. But I wanted to see the finished product before making a decision.

I think I'll rip out the cuffs, and back about 8 rows (I'll measure to be sure!) and then reknit the cuffs. I thought about just unravelling some stitches just above where I started the cuffs and then grafting them back on after removing the extra length, but there will be 2-4 more stitches to ease into, which is 4-8 rows of cuff. I've got the pattern memorized now anyway, so I don't mind reknitting it. It will give me another chance to graft the cuff ends together better, too. I think instead of casting on, I'll use a provisional cast-on instead. That might look even smoother in the end.

Then I'll get busy attaching the zipper. I may need some help from my stich-n-bitch sewing gals on Wednesday, since that is certainly not one of my skillz. Finally, I have to stitch down the hem all around. The knitting curls back on itself beautifully, but I'll stitch it down and steam it all into shape.

So, stay tuned for a really finished post soon. I can't wait to wear it to work and show it off. I found another semi-knitter on my current project. She is also a HP fan, a bit of an HP-nerd actually. Way more HP-nerdy than I am. I'm more nerdy about other things though, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer which she also is a fan of. Nothing like establishing safe topics of conversation when you are on a project with someone you may have to argue with about work stuff! Sure comes in handy.

Meanwhile, while I was waiting for Eris to dry, I started on a new interim project: Lavender Fields socks.

It's green, not lavender, I know. But the yarn came from the Lavender Fields in Valley Center, CA where I visited recently. It's a sports weight yarn, which I haven't used for socks before, so this will be a swatch at first. I have no idea how many stitches around it will need to be in sports weight. I'm using 3.00mm needles, which seems a good gauge.

I took out my Barbara Walker 3 last night to see about a lace pattern to use, but didn't really find anything I wanted to use. I always pull out #3 first, because it's charted. I hate lace without charts, it's sooooo hard to follow.

In the car this morning (my huz was driving, I swear) I worked out something that may or may not already exist. Once I finish swatching I'll share the pattern I come up with. I tried the turkish cast on that Meg Swansen wrote about in Vogue Knitting last year (or was it the year before?) and I like the way the toe looks, so I think I'll stick with that.

... 400 pages and one more sleeve to go.

I finished the first sleeve last night, save the grafting of the cuff which I will work on tonight.
My copy of HP didn't arrive as early as last year - it didn't show up until almost 3 pm so I got started a little late, but spent Sunday knitting away and reading at the same time. This is the only way to make the miles of stockinette manageable. Stopping every 6 rows to do the decreases and refocus my eyes off the pages was a perfect balance of adventure and knitting.

Tonight I'll graft that cuff, prop up my book and start again on sleeve two. At the rate I'm going, I might be done, really done including blocking and the zipper, by the weekend.

Last weekend I found some harder wood dowels to improve the pegs on my wooly board. The cheap ones I bought at the house of orange kept breaking on me because the wood was too soft. So I'll have to spend an hour or two out in the garage to cut the dowel into pegs and then drill the broken pegs out of the hole so I can wash and block this sweater the right way.

I can't wait!

I bought two different zippers, I'm not sure whether to go with the lightweight or the sporty zipper - I may just baste them both on and see which one l like better.

I bought some nice coordinating thread, the perfect color really, so I can't wait to finish this Eris cardigan.

Pictures soon. Can't stop reading to take photos!

Vacation was such a needful thing. I had a whole week off, but only had to burn 4 days of vacay time. I had time to catch up on my knitting. I had time to catch up on my blogroll, some of which had been sitting in my queue since April.

What a wild collection of things I missed while ignoring my blogroll.

Annie Modesitt's husband is going through a hellish illness right now. She's offering a pattern for a donation to help raise funds to make his life a little more comfortable. It's beautiful. I am alternately awed and appalled by some of her garments. I've been wanting to knit the Morris Fern Cardigan for ages, and her corsets are beautiful, but then that bobbled thing from the (I think) winter Vogue scares me. :) She's an amazing architect, and could really use some help. This pattern can be knitted as a dress or a corset!

Then over at January One there was a row over whether or not a woman can post her own opinion of her own experiences on her own blog. Huh?

My most happy find were these from way back in May: Karen attended a class taught by Janine and showed one of the exercises they worked on for seeing how colors relate to each other for a fair isle. Seeing these swatches was such an 'Aha!' moment for me on what to do next. I've got several balls of Jamieson's, Jamieson & Smith, and recently some of the KnitPicks heathered fingering weight yarns that I can't wait to play with. Separating the color play from the pattern seems so liberating to me.

Earlier in the week, I re-read The Art of Fair Isle Knitting: History, Technique, Color & Patterns, but still wasn't feeling the love. She does her swatches as solid rows of color stacked on top of each other. But I was having trouble envisioning which colors to stack. After reading Karen's blog, now I don't have to, I can use them all! Muahhahahahha!

Well, I didn't quite finish the sweater, but here's my progress mid-week. We went to Vegas to see Spamalot. I knitted all the way there and back on the plane.

Here's a closeup of the clever waist shaping. Cables pull in -- plus there are some decreases in there too. I love how it looks.

It was 116F in Vegas, (during the day, that is) and was 98F at midnight. Kinda hot. Not so much fun with the wool, dry heat or no. At some point, it's just too hot for wool. But I pressed on.

We stayed at the Wynn. Wow, I think the suite was bigger than my house. Seriously. We could only afford to stay one night, but it was a beautiful thing. The bathroom was bigger than my master bedroom and guest room combined. If anyone ever offers to comp you a room there, say yes without even thinking about it, it was that good. They even had room service, pretty much unheard of in Vegas, unless that has started to change. I had an amazing Japanese breakfast, something I've always wanted to try. And for dinner before the show, I had a lobster sushi roll that I can still remember the taste of, it was so good. Spamalot was not as good as I had hoped. I laughed plenty, but I had higher hopes for it.

We came home and chilled in the A/C for a few days. Since Independence Day fell on our Stich n' Bitch night, I didn't get to knit with my women, so I visited up at the WEHO Stitch n' Bitch at the Farmer's Market. It was a pretty small crowd, a few women that I have known for a while from the Santa Monica Stitch n' Bitch, and some complete strangers, and some in-betweens.

Then on Friday, we went to see something that I've never seen except on TV - the Giant Sequioas. All I could say was "Wow". To see something that has been alive for over 3000 years is pretty awe-inspiring. It makes you wonder how anyone could see this bit of nature and not want to do everything possible to protect it.


Husband included for scale.

More crazy heat, plus the 7000 ft elevation + my asthma left me a little woozy up there. I lost my cable needle somewhere between the car and the room, so I had to cable with the clip of a pencil. I've made more progress on Eris, and am only a few rows from starting the hem cables. So maybe a couple more weeks to finally finish it. It was just so hot!