So, as I talked about a few posts ago, I started a 1/3 scale shawl with the, as it turns out, massive amount of laceweight I have that wasn't suitable for the intended project. (I thought I had three skeins. Turns out I had 10.)
This is not the knitting fail, but I very quickly discovered that triangular shawls have the same problem that circular shawls have and then some. They, of course, have a significant growth function, starting with just a few stitches per row and ending with a few hundred per row. This makes them prone to project slog. But on top of that, half of those rows are (dun dun dun) purling. I don't have an epic hatred of purling, but it is a little slower, and takes about twice the finger movement for me, so I rather avoid it.
That's not the knitting fail.
This is the knitting fail. My cat Malcolm (the tuxedo, and only boy) was on my lap while I was knitting, being surprisingly well behaved. He got bored. So JUST as I was about to finish the first motif on this shawl, in the middle of the final row of it, he stands up and jumps off my lap with tail held proudly in the air -- directly behind the knitting, in perfectly alignment with the small gap between the needles while I was working. Hits right where there is no needle to resist, and pulls the project half off them. Of course, I'm working with alpaca, so those stitches immediately make a run for the cast-on with no way to pick them up, and there's nothing I can do except rip out the whole shawl beginning.
Ouch.
At least I learned that when there were 9 and a 1/2 rows, not several hundred and just short of putting in a lifeline.
He doesn't get to sit on my lap while I'm doing lace any more.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Monday, May 4, 2009
Cue the Dammit Chorus
Middle of last month, I ordered 21 skeins of cotton yarn: 20 to make myself a Wonderful Wallaby Sweater, and 1 for swatching.
Got a ship notice.
Shipping company never updated that they'd gotten the package.
Waited a reasonable time, then contacted them asking for a status update.
Package is MIA. They will start a trace, but in the meantime, they'll put together a replacement.
Problem: They only have 19 skeins of that yarn left. Discontinued colorway, not getting any more.
I told them to go ahead and send it. It's a very good price and I'm sure I can find something to use it with. But I just don't think there's enough for the Wallaby. Maybe if it were wool, but cotton I have to wash a swatch to see how much it shrinks, and once it's shrunk I can't frog the yarn and use it to finish the project made of otherwise not-already-shrunk cotton. Even if I had enough, I'd be just squeaking in, and I wouldn't be sure until I was done. I wouldn't be happy with leaving off the hood, and pouch is knit in and can't really be removed later to unravel for the hoodie.
Nope, I just don't think it'll work.
I wonder how well it cables. There might be enough there for a Corona.
And now I'm back to square one on the Wallaby. :P
Got a ship notice.
Shipping company never updated that they'd gotten the package.
Waited a reasonable time, then contacted them asking for a status update.
Package is MIA. They will start a trace, but in the meantime, they'll put together a replacement.
Problem: They only have 19 skeins of that yarn left. Discontinued colorway, not getting any more.
I told them to go ahead and send it. It's a very good price and I'm sure I can find something to use it with. But I just don't think there's enough for the Wallaby. Maybe if it were wool, but cotton I have to wash a swatch to see how much it shrinks, and once it's shrunk I can't frog the yarn and use it to finish the project made of otherwise not-already-shrunk cotton. Even if I had enough, I'd be just squeaking in, and I wouldn't be sure until I was done. I wouldn't be happy with leaving off the hood, and pouch is knit in and can't really be removed later to unravel for the hoodie.
Nope, I just don't think it'll work.
I wonder how well it cables. There might be enough there for a Corona.
And now I'm back to square one on the Wallaby. :P
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Let's Talk Lace Knitting
1. I'm glad to say I did a little more on my Juno Regina weekend before last. This is a good sign, because it means for at least a few days my stress level had lightened enough that I felt up to lace knitting rather than nearly-brainless blankets in the round.
The thing is, I'm just not feeling it any more. I know it's a odd. When I started it, I was so excited about it, and so eager to start, and it was going to be so awesome. Now I look at pictures of the finished stole, and they just kind of look boring to me.
For my own project, I've reached the widest point of the diamond and it's not as wide as I wanted the stole to be. And honestly, I look at the vast expanse of flat stockinette with the occasional YO K2tog, and part of me just cringes in anticipation of the boredom.
I think I'm going to put it on waste yarn, take the needles out, and pack it up completely for a few months. I don't have any projects I want the yarn for right now. Although honestly, even if the love comes back, I think I'll want to start over with a somewhat heavier yarn, more of a heavy lace or light fingering than the thin Alpaca with a Twist Fino. It's beautiful stuff; I'm just wanting a larger piece.
2) Me, and my thing with mystery shawl knit-a-longs. If I'm really honest, the shawls that come out of them usually strike my tastes somewhere between "Meh" and "eww!" That's not to say anything bad about the designs or the designers, not at all. It's just that mystery shawl designs tend to have certain design elements that I don't care for, such as pictorial motifs done in yarn-overs on a stockinette background, or a visible periodic nature -- not necessarily a hard break between clues, but shifts were you can tell where each clue was.
And yet when I find one while it's still open, I feel compelled to sign up for it. I've at least gotten to the point where I don't feel obligated to knit it until enough clues have come out that I can tell if I like the design. (One bad burn took care of that, methinks.) But I'm still there. I think it's that fear of missing out. What if this is the one that turns out awesome and just perfect for me and I missed it? That part of my brain doesn't want to listen to the answer "Then you plunk down $8 at the end when the pattern goes on sale." After all, if it was that awesome and perfect for me, odds are I'd buy the pattern at the end of the knit-along anyway to thank/reward the designer for making it.
Oh well, at least adding another group onto my Yahoo account is harmless.
3) I am dubious about triangular shawls.
But, before I get into that, let me get into a needlessly technical discussion about the nature and function of shawls with far more thought than anyone sane has ever put into the topic. Why? Because I'm an engineer, and as scary as this is, my brain actually works this way.
Now, there are two schools of thought on what a shawl is for. One school is that it is to warm your arms, much like a light sweater, while another is that it is to keep your shoulders warm, like a vest. To complicate matters, it's not unreasonable, and yet not a given, to argue that keeping your shoulders warm keeps your arms warm in the same way that fingerless gloves really do keep your fingers warm by warming the pulse point. (I was dubious about that, too, but experiment has shown me that it does indeed work. I wouldn't have a snowball fight with only fingerless gloves, but they're quite nice in a cold office or on a brisk fall day.) However, as the shoulders are much larger than wrists, and not wrapped by a shawl as completely as a wrist is by fingerless gloves, I am unconvinced.
So personally, I'm in the shawl-to-warm-arms camp, and a triangular shawl doesn't seem like a good way to do this. The most common shape is a right-angle triangle with the hypotenous at the top edge and the right-angle point hanging down towards your butt.
Actually, I'm going to take an aside here. A lot of women don't like triangular shawls because they feel the point forms an arrow pointing to their hinder. However, that's not my experience. At least the way I perceive things, the point is more of a container that holds the eye and keeps it away from the butt. The eye follows the point down, hits the bottom, and then is drawn outwards by the border or pattern.
But that's just me.
Anyway, we've got a right triangle, with the right angle pointing at your butt, and then the narrower points are brought around to the front. This usually means that the part of the shawl covering your arms is roughly half as long the distance from hypotenuse to point (varying on the size of the lady and the shawl). This is not enough cover on my arms for me, especially since triangular shawls are often made so that the hypotenuse length matches wingspan. Make it large enough for adequate arm coverage, and there's tons of material in the back that serves little purpose except to get sat upon. Extra unused material = wasted work.
And yet some of the patterns are so pretty.
A popular construction for triangular shawls right now is this: Still imagine your right triangle with the hypotenuse at the top. Now, draw a straight line from the bottom point to the middle of the hypotenuse, so that you have two right triangles next to each other, with the right angles at the middle and top. The shawls are laid out like that, start at the center top with a few stitches to start the right angles, and then increase outwards to build the two adjoining right triangles.
So, I'm thinking of ways to alter the patterns to get more arm coverage. An obvious one is to just double it and make a square shawl with 4 component triangles. And that's certainly valid. Ironically there, though, a solid square shawl is usually folded in half and worn as a triangle.
However, you can put a split in it so it is worn like a cape. Put it between two triangles, and you'll get something shaped like a poncho, only with an opening in the front -- so consider yourself forewarned. ;) Or, I have some patterns in my queue that are build like this, but have the slit from the center to the middle of one of the square sides. It takes a little (just a little) more work to locate that, but avoids the poncho look.
The other idea I've considered is three component triangles instead of the usual two, which forms a shape like a square with one side removed. It almost looks like a sailor collar laid flat, or a faroese shawl on steroids (or maybe just LSD ^_~ ). I don't know how this would lay when worn, though.
Then another possibility is to put a wedge of material between the two triangles to form a sort of mock Faroese shaping. This is probably the most design work, and isn't suitable for all patterns. But, on some you could do some very nifty things with the back panel. For instance, putting a dragon silhouette in yarn-overs on a panel added to a Dragon Wings shawl.
Now, I've got some lace yarn laying around that I ordered for a project, but found when it arrived that it was unsuitable. I'm thinking of balling up a hank of that, and doing some doll-sized shawls to study the trade-offs of the various shapes that can be done with a triangular shawl pattern. That may seem excessively anal (and I don't think I'm prepared to deny that), but at the same time, when you consider all the nice triangular patterns out there and all the time that goes into a human-sized shawl. Well, it'd be nice to open up my possibilities and yet know beforehand how much work I need to add. Two-foot shawls are a lot faster than 5-foot ones.
The thing is, I'm just not feeling it any more. I know it's a odd. When I started it, I was so excited about it, and so eager to start, and it was going to be so awesome. Now I look at pictures of the finished stole, and they just kind of look boring to me.
For my own project, I've reached the widest point of the diamond and it's not as wide as I wanted the stole to be. And honestly, I look at the vast expanse of flat stockinette with the occasional YO K2tog, and part of me just cringes in anticipation of the boredom.
I think I'm going to put it on waste yarn, take the needles out, and pack it up completely for a few months. I don't have any projects I want the yarn for right now. Although honestly, even if the love comes back, I think I'll want to start over with a somewhat heavier yarn, more of a heavy lace or light fingering than the thin Alpaca with a Twist Fino. It's beautiful stuff; I'm just wanting a larger piece.
2) Me, and my thing with mystery shawl knit-a-longs. If I'm really honest, the shawls that come out of them usually strike my tastes somewhere between "Meh" and "eww!" That's not to say anything bad about the designs or the designers, not at all. It's just that mystery shawl designs tend to have certain design elements that I don't care for, such as pictorial motifs done in yarn-overs on a stockinette background, or a visible periodic nature -- not necessarily a hard break between clues, but shifts were you can tell where each clue was.
And yet when I find one while it's still open, I feel compelled to sign up for it. I've at least gotten to the point where I don't feel obligated to knit it until enough clues have come out that I can tell if I like the design. (One bad burn took care of that, methinks.) But I'm still there. I think it's that fear of missing out. What if this is the one that turns out awesome and just perfect for me and I missed it? That part of my brain doesn't want to listen to the answer "Then you plunk down $8 at the end when the pattern goes on sale." After all, if it was that awesome and perfect for me, odds are I'd buy the pattern at the end of the knit-along anyway to thank/reward the designer for making it.
Oh well, at least adding another group onto my Yahoo account is harmless.
3) I am dubious about triangular shawls.
But, before I get into that, let me get into a needlessly technical discussion about the nature and function of shawls with far more thought than anyone sane has ever put into the topic. Why? Because I'm an engineer, and as scary as this is, my brain actually works this way.
Now, there are two schools of thought on what a shawl is for. One school is that it is to warm your arms, much like a light sweater, while another is that it is to keep your shoulders warm, like a vest. To complicate matters, it's not unreasonable, and yet not a given, to argue that keeping your shoulders warm keeps your arms warm in the same way that fingerless gloves really do keep your fingers warm by warming the pulse point. (I was dubious about that, too, but experiment has shown me that it does indeed work. I wouldn't have a snowball fight with only fingerless gloves, but they're quite nice in a cold office or on a brisk fall day.) However, as the shoulders are much larger than wrists, and not wrapped by a shawl as completely as a wrist is by fingerless gloves, I am unconvinced.
So personally, I'm in the shawl-to-warm-arms camp, and a triangular shawl doesn't seem like a good way to do this. The most common shape is a right-angle triangle with the hypotenous at the top edge and the right-angle point hanging down towards your butt.
Actually, I'm going to take an aside here. A lot of women don't like triangular shawls because they feel the point forms an arrow pointing to their hinder. However, that's not my experience. At least the way I perceive things, the point is more of a container that holds the eye and keeps it away from the butt. The eye follows the point down, hits the bottom, and then is drawn outwards by the border or pattern.
But that's just me.
Anyway, we've got a right triangle, with the right angle pointing at your butt, and then the narrower points are brought around to the front. This usually means that the part of the shawl covering your arms is roughly half as long the distance from hypotenuse to point (varying on the size of the lady and the shawl). This is not enough cover on my arms for me, especially since triangular shawls are often made so that the hypotenuse length matches wingspan. Make it large enough for adequate arm coverage, and there's tons of material in the back that serves little purpose except to get sat upon. Extra unused material = wasted work.
And yet some of the patterns are so pretty.
A popular construction for triangular shawls right now is this: Still imagine your right triangle with the hypotenuse at the top. Now, draw a straight line from the bottom point to the middle of the hypotenuse, so that you have two right triangles next to each other, with the right angles at the middle and top. The shawls are laid out like that, start at the center top with a few stitches to start the right angles, and then increase outwards to build the two adjoining right triangles.
So, I'm thinking of ways to alter the patterns to get more arm coverage. An obvious one is to just double it and make a square shawl with 4 component triangles. And that's certainly valid. Ironically there, though, a solid square shawl is usually folded in half and worn as a triangle.
However, you can put a split in it so it is worn like a cape. Put it between two triangles, and you'll get something shaped like a poncho, only with an opening in the front -- so consider yourself forewarned. ;) Or, I have some patterns in my queue that are build like this, but have the slit from the center to the middle of one of the square sides. It takes a little (just a little) more work to locate that, but avoids the poncho look.
The other idea I've considered is three component triangles instead of the usual two, which forms a shape like a square with one side removed. It almost looks like a sailor collar laid flat, or a faroese shawl on steroids (or maybe just LSD ^_~ ). I don't know how this would lay when worn, though.
Then another possibility is to put a wedge of material between the two triangles to form a sort of mock Faroese shaping. This is probably the most design work, and isn't suitable for all patterns. But, on some you could do some very nifty things with the back panel. For instance, putting a dragon silhouette in yarn-overs on a panel added to a Dragon Wings shawl.
Now, I've got some lace yarn laying around that I ordered for a project, but found when it arrived that it was unsuitable. I'm thinking of balling up a hank of that, and doing some doll-sized shawls to study the trade-offs of the various shapes that can be done with a triangular shawl pattern. That may seem excessively anal (and I don't think I'm prepared to deny that), but at the same time, when you consider all the nice triangular patterns out there and all the time that goes into a human-sized shawl. Well, it'd be nice to open up my possibilities and yet know beforehand how much work I need to add. Two-foot shawls are a lot faster than 5-foot ones.
Adventures in Katidom
I went on a little road trip today. Today was the Illinois Alpaca Owners and Breeders Association's annual Alpacafest.
First, feel free to sit in surprise with me that there are enough alpaca owners and breeders in Illinois for there to be an association.
OK, anyway. The Alpacafest was held in East Peoria in previous years, but lost their venue, so this year they were an hour+ north in Princeton.
I'm not a "small town" kind of person, but I have to give some respect to any place that has a tattoo parlor named "Torrid Tattoos."
I've never been to the Alpacafest, but the fibery people in my life spoke rather gleefully about it, and I need to get out of the basement more, so I went up with not much idea of what to expect. It's a fairly small show: two buildings of I'd guess 1000 sq ft each of animals waiting to be judged, and another building with half a dozen or so vendors.
Alpacas are smaller than I realized. Most of them were about waist/ribcage high on me at the shoulders and as tall as me at the head -- and I'm right at 5', and short waisted. So about 3 feet at the shoulders and 5' at head. The nice lady who sold me toys told me they usually weigh around 160 lbs. I'll confess to jokingly thinking "a girl could just about hide one of those in her basement."
Seriously, it's one of those shows that makes you go "I wanna be an alpaca farmer!" Until you see someone sweeping alpaca poop, and then you think "On second thought, you be the alpaca farmer. I'll just pet your critters and buy some fleece."
No one told me that alpacas make the cutest noise! It's this squeaky whiney cooing thing. It's cute, especially coming from a critter this size.
And of course, I bought things.
That's 500 yds of laceweight alpaca yarn (enough for a basic shawl), 4 oz of cria roving (baby alpaca. It's soooo soft!), and a teddy bear made from alpaca. The bear isn't squishable, but it is really terribly pettable. The fur is so soft, you'll pick it up and not want to put it back down.
I got a chuckle out of the vendor with the roving and bear with one of my usual mannerisms. Said I wanted 4 oz of roving, and "one of the bears wants to come home with me".
I also do enjoy a show where when you walk up to one vendor carrying bags from another, they go "ooh, where'd you get that?" in a yummy voice.
If the Alpacafest is back around Peoria next year, I'll definitely go again, but I'll probably skip it if its in Princeton again. It was fun, but as I said, small. I only spent about an hour there, and spent more than twice that on the driving.
On the way back, I went through Chillicothe, and along the road saw a sign for an antique store that said "Big sale today". I'm not the type who stops in every antique store along the way, but I do enjoy them. They sell me fountain pens cheap. So I found somewhere in town to get lunch, then went back to it.
It was one of those places that isn't really so much an antique store, as the stash of a packrat who justifies their collecting by claiming it's a store. Very packed with everything to really old unopened soda bottles/cans (seriously, Coke in the old bottles, some M.A.S.H. Beer), to a Gameboy that was running around there. No prices on anything, and the owner absolutely talked my ear off. No fountain pens, either, but I did find some pirns with yarn on them, and a miniature spinning wheel.
Everything spins that's supposed to on the wheel. Just add a little driveband, and it'll actually work. Well, technically; you don't have a whole lot of capacity on the spindle there.
And, all of that there was $5. If I'd known he only wanted $1 each for the pirns, I might have cleaned him out. Not that I have any idea what to do with the things, but they're kind of cool.
Oh, it just hit me that most people don't know what the hell a pirn is. It's used in weaving to hold the thread in the shuttle that makes the weft (cross threads). Handweavers often use them, but I understand a lot of modern weaving mills no longer do (although they're still common in less developed countries). They end up in antique shops or eBay when mills close shop or upgrade, and often they still have the yarn on them.
So, that was my day. :)
First, feel free to sit in surprise with me that there are enough alpaca owners and breeders in Illinois for there to be an association.
OK, anyway. The Alpacafest was held in East Peoria in previous years, but lost their venue, so this year they were an hour+ north in Princeton.
I'm not a "small town" kind of person, but I have to give some respect to any place that has a tattoo parlor named "Torrid Tattoos."
I've never been to the Alpacafest, but the fibery people in my life spoke rather gleefully about it, and I need to get out of the basement more, so I went up with not much idea of what to expect. It's a fairly small show: two buildings of I'd guess 1000 sq ft each of animals waiting to be judged, and another building with half a dozen or so vendors.
Alpacas are smaller than I realized. Most of them were about waist/ribcage high on me at the shoulders and as tall as me at the head -- and I'm right at 5', and short waisted. So about 3 feet at the shoulders and 5' at head. The nice lady who sold me toys told me they usually weigh around 160 lbs. I'll confess to jokingly thinking "a girl could just about hide one of those in her basement."
Seriously, it's one of those shows that makes you go "I wanna be an alpaca farmer!" Until you see someone sweeping alpaca poop, and then you think "On second thought, you be the alpaca farmer. I'll just pet your critters and buy some fleece."
No one told me that alpacas make the cutest noise! It's this squeaky whiney cooing thing. It's cute, especially coming from a critter this size.
And of course, I bought things.
That's 500 yds of laceweight alpaca yarn (enough for a basic shawl), 4 oz of cria roving (baby alpaca. It's soooo soft!), and a teddy bear made from alpaca. The bear isn't squishable, but it is really terribly pettable. The fur is so soft, you'll pick it up and not want to put it back down.I got a chuckle out of the vendor with the roving and bear with one of my usual mannerisms. Said I wanted 4 oz of roving, and "one of the bears wants to come home with me".
I also do enjoy a show where when you walk up to one vendor carrying bags from another, they go "ooh, where'd you get that?" in a yummy voice.
If the Alpacafest is back around Peoria next year, I'll definitely go again, but I'll probably skip it if its in Princeton again. It was fun, but as I said, small. I only spent about an hour there, and spent more than twice that on the driving.
On the way back, I went through Chillicothe, and along the road saw a sign for an antique store that said "Big sale today". I'm not the type who stops in every antique store along the way, but I do enjoy them. They sell me fountain pens cheap. So I found somewhere in town to get lunch, then went back to it.
It was one of those places that isn't really so much an antique store, as the stash of a packrat who justifies their collecting by claiming it's a store. Very packed with everything to really old unopened soda bottles/cans (seriously, Coke in the old bottles, some M.A.S.H. Beer), to a Gameboy that was running around there. No prices on anything, and the owner absolutely talked my ear off. No fountain pens, either, but I did find some pirns with yarn on them, and a miniature spinning wheel.
Everything spins that's supposed to on the wheel. Just add a little driveband, and it'll actually work. Well, technically; you don't have a whole lot of capacity on the spindle there.And, all of that there was $5. If I'd known he only wanted $1 each for the pirns, I might have cleaned him out. Not that I have any idea what to do with the things, but they're kind of cool.
Oh, it just hit me that most people don't know what the hell a pirn is. It's used in weaving to hold the thread in the shuttle that makes the weft (cross threads). Handweavers often use them, but I understand a lot of modern weaving mills no longer do (although they're still common in less developed countries). They end up in antique shops or eBay when mills close shop or upgrade, and often they still have the yarn on them.
So, that was my day. :)
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