So, while I was waiting for my Kyoto pieces to block, I got distracted and started on a new project that is going to be for a new baby of a friend, to be born early next year. It’s a new challenge for me, in intarsia, my own design, charted from a photo of a t-shirt I found on Google images. Said friend is a fan of a particular comic book hero, and not a common one, so it was fun coming up with the design. This way, father and son will have matching tees. I’ll post pics after Dad gets the gift, sometime in January.
The point of the story is that I am using the same needles I knit my Kyoto on, and so now I am stuck. I measured the blocked pieces so I could cast on for the collar that wraps up the side, around the back,and down the other side, but then had no needle to cast on to. I guess I could have used another needle, but the gauge is right with the needle I started with, so I don’t want to jinx it.
With the weather the way it’s been the past few days, I am thinking my next project will be some fiber trends felted clogs. I bought the yarn and slipper bottoms at least a year ago, but it’s going to be cold this winter and gas is more expensive, and the heat doesn’t work in the master bedroom anyway, so I think slippers are the way to go. When I got up yesterday morning, it was 57F, in my bedroom. You Minnesotans can laugh all you want, but once you move to SoCal, the blood thins or something, and this feels cold! I did my time with the frosty nose-hair and the fingers too cold to bend when I was a kid, and I put up with the 405 for a reason, and that reason is beautiful weather all year. So I can complain if it’s 57F in my bedroom even when the heat is on! Stop laughing.

I’ve been working on Kyoto for quite a while, because I had to rip out and reknit some of it as I mentioned earlier. I have finished the sleeves, which I did as my gauge swatch to make sure I really liked the new gauge before continuing on. Now I am working on the fronts, together on one needle.
I had to regauge this sweater, and resize it too, since I am bigger than the pattern size. But, it’s quite an easy pattern to resize since it’s drop shoulder and most of the pieces are square, but it still involved some math.
Here’s what’s great about the internet. I was reading GADGETS – STUPID STITCH MARKER TRICKS (string-or-nothing.blog-city.com) a few months ago and paid attention and sort of filed away the reference that Kim makes to a knitting abacus. I didn’t really have a need for it … yet … but knew the idea would roll around in my brain and file itself away for later.
Well, later came last week when I was at Stitch ‘n Bitch Long Beach and got out my calculator to figure out how to gradually whittle away 23 stitches from my front pieces, over 156 rows of knitting. Naturally, 156/23 = 6.7 stitches, not a good even number.
Since I only want to decrease on the public side of my knitting, I would have to have even numbers. The closest even numbers to 6.7 are 6 and 8. Using 6x+8y=156 and x+y=23, I came up with “Decrease 1 stitch every 8 rows 9 times and 1 stitch every 6 rows 14 times.” (See kids, you do use some of that math you had to suffer through!)

To make it slope more evenly, I decided to alternate between the 8 and 6 row decreases til I get to the last five decreases which will happen a little faster (14-9=5). This brings me back to Kim’s post about her knittng abacus. I knew that on each piece, I need to decrease 23 stitches, so I placed a marker after the 23rd stitch. Since I know that the last 5 decreases are different from the first 9, I put a marker 5 stitches out from the first – closer to the edge that’s being decreased. Then I made the long chain of markers you see here. The first marker is pink, followed by seven greens, and 6 pinks, for a total of … you guessed it … 14. I start at the lone pink marker and do a decrease on that row. Each time I pass the marker chain, I pass the next link up onto my needle, inching closer to the solid pink end. When I change color to pink, I do another decrease. When I reach the end, I start back at the lone pink marker and do another decrease. When I reach the first marker that’s in the knitting, I will know that I am done with the 8 row decreases and will remove the last 8 markers from the chain, leaving me with one pink and 5 green, and will continue til I reach the second marker in the knitting, at which point I will be done with the decreases. Whew!
If I hadn’t come across her entries on the tricks she uses to avoid counting stitches (something I detest) I would have never thought of doing the decreases this way. It’s been great so far, both fronts are decreasing evenly, and I haven’t had to count anything since first placing the markers.
I just have to re-do that back piece and the collar, and then I’ll be able to put this baby together. I’ve left the sleeves on stitch holders with the balls of yarn still attached because I am not quite sure where I want them to fall. Either longish so the hands can be slipped into the other sleeve, or short so the sleeves are out of the way. I stopped at the short sleeve point and will pin it all together and see if I like it, and if not, I will add a few more inches to the sleeves. Any opinions on the sleeve length?

…and finally have a perfect graft between the two ends of my scarf. Since I always seem to end up with an extra stitch or two at the end, I thought I would try the method where you add some waste yarn and then sort of trace the stitches of the waste yarn as you join the two pieces together.
Well, I added the waste yarn, as you can see, and began to try grafting. It was a disaster. I couldn’t tell if I was even joining the ends or just looping near it. Of course, I had no directions, so that didn’t help. In the end, I just took out the waste yarn, got out my trusty friend and did it the old fashioned way. And darned if it didn’t come out perfect this time? No extra stitches at the end.
Here she is, all blocked and with the lace opened up nicely.
I’m off to Memorial Park in Pasadena, CA for the Knit in the City event, where I will be handing over the scarf, and teaching some new folk to knit. Since I learned to knit just 4 years ago at the Knit-Out 2001, at the hands of a kind woman with a great attitude, I figure it’s now my turn. Trouble is, I knit continental, and really have a hard time knitting English, so that will be hard to teach, but I am sure if I go slow, I’ll be good.
See you there!