This Week In WIPs.

I thought it would be fun to show the projects I've worked on this week.  So, in no particular order...

First up, a ginormous cross stitch of a mama tiger and a few cubs.  Ultimately it will by 10" by 28" and look like this:

You can see I've got a long way to go.  I didn't do all that this week, either.  I started this thing way back maybe even in college, and I usually work on it for a few weeks, get fed up with it and shove it away somewhere for a few years before going at it again.  It's been excruciately slow.  I hope it speeds up a bit once I'm not having to sort through floss and add several new colors a row, but I think it's always going to be slow.

This time around I'm using the parking method.  I was so excited when I found out about this method.  "Oh wow, you mean the cross stitch police won't come after me if I do this?!  Yay!"  When I was taught to cross stitch, that way was verboten, but it's very logical to me.  I think it's come about because computer use in cross stitch design has resulted in a large number of modern patterns that are beautiful, but not what I would call well-designed.  I'll go into what I consider a well-designed pattern in a later entry.  For now, though, this one is not terribly well designed IMHO.

Also cross-stitching is this little kimono card.

Also started long ago and picked up again.  This little guy is living in my bed to work on while waiting for appointments and what not.  Since I have a kimono hanging on my wall, I am regularly laughing my ass off at how completely not accurate that silouhette is.  But at the same time, the actually outline of a kimono hanging with the side panels spread wouldn't translate well to cross stitch, so I can maybe forgive it.  Although they could have been a little less extreme in the wrongness.

Also worked on a piece of crazy quilting:

I need to put the cross stitch down and work on this a bit more.  The size of the tracing paper transfer isn't much smaller than the hoop, so I can't really take the hoop off between stitching.  I don't want to leave it on indefinitely, though, because it can distort the fabric.

This is part of a piece that's going to be made into a duffle bag.  The white basting you can see is lining out approximate cutting lines and where the straps will be.  This are blocks that were originally intended for a coverlet back before I had a queen-sized bed, and now I'm trying to use them in other ways.  Another week maybe I'll think to lay it out on the floor and take a picture of the whole thing.

And of course, there is the infamous Spiderman blanket:

Growth functions suck.  You can see I'm really far along on this.  I only have to do two more wide stripes, one in blue and one in red.  The problem?  Thanks to the growth function, on a stitch-count basis this is only about halfway done.  I still have 46% of this bastard to finish. :P
It's TV and social knitting.  Luckily it's a super-simple pattern; I hardly have to look at it.

Design decisions

I'm working along on my Ondas blanket, which I've renamed "kitty crack" for it's feline attraction due to the yarn and all the stitch markers. And I think I'm pushing my luck on whether I'll have enough of the green yarn for it. If I can make it to row 27, I'm probably OK as long as none of the other skeins are shorter. But I'm just not convinced that's going to happen. And on top of that, oops, the LYS doesn't carry this color after all.

Now, I could probably buy an extra skein or two off another Raveler. But where's the fun in that. The LYS does carry a blue colorway I thought would work with it, so I got a couple of skeins of that just in case, since if I need them, I'll need them before next Knit Night. Pic:


I probably wouldn't have bought the two colors together for this, since the green is to the yellow side and the blue is quite blue. But I don't think it'll look bad. Sort of a "grassy bank to a river/lake/pond" kind of thing.

I've thought of several ways I could put the blue in, but what I'm liking most right now is this: The green skeins don't match each other. Normally one would alternate rows to blend them together to avoid color jumps, but when I thought I would use just the green, I intentionally didn't do it so I'd get some subtle stripes -- which I think would look nice in this pattern. So now I'm thinking a narrow stripe of the blue between each skein of the green. That'll be three blue stripes, and four green. The farther out to the edge of the blanket I get, the narrower the green will be due to the joys of growth functions. (Each row is an average of 4 stitches larger than the last. So the outermost rows suck up a LOT more yarn than the inside ones.) Then when I finish the last green stripe, I'll do a wider band of the blue, and maybe end with the Wave Edging from Walker's second stitch treasury (which happened to arrive earlier this week). And maybe I'll lop off that outermost row of eyelets on the edging.

The edging is still up in the air. It maybe be a little too much, in which case I would do either a simpler edging, or the garter band the pattern calls for. Either way, I'm going for that 'grassy bank' look.

If I have blue yarn left over, I really do think it would make a nice hat.

Ondas Update

I'm moving along on my Ondas blanket. The center set-up is finished, and I'm ready to start on the lace-y part. I have a feeling I'm going to have to buy more yarn, though. I definitely will if I want to make it Kati-sized rather than baby sized, but I think I may need another skein or two just to finish the pattern as written. Luckily, the LYS carries it, including this colorway, and I don't need to worry about matching dye lot. It's Araucania Atacama, which is hand-dyed. I got the drab green in a swap, which isn't a color I would have chosen but is working up fairly nice. It would have made a nice hat or beret, if I'd wanted to use it for that.

... And Ravelry tells me it's been discontinued. Dammit. Well, it won't take me too terribly long to get through the first skein, and I've figure out stitch counts for the whole blanket, so I can figure out if I've got enough based on how far that first one takes me. I'll keep a watch on the store's stock/the discount wall, and if I see it down to a skein or two before I can make a call, I'll pick them up. Shame, though. It's not bad yarn. A little 'rustic', perhaps (OK, it's scratchy as common wool), but not bad.

Options, I still haz dem.

So, I'm working on this pair of gloves:


And ya know what? They're gonna be too small. The hand is OK, if a little tight, but the fingers? Totally not going to happen. It's time I faced that fact.

So, my options:
1) Finish them by the pattern and give them away. :P No! Mine! Mine, mine, mine!
I think that shows what the inner child thinks about that option.
2) Frog the pinkies and turn them into fingerless gloves. I'm thinking do a couple of rounds of ribbing at each finger, and half the colorwork thumb then a couple rounds of ribbing there. That should give me enough width at the fingers, but I don't know if I'll have enough length in the right hand to be comfy.
3) If that doesn't work, tranform them into fingerless mitts. No finger divisions, just a few rounds of ribbing around the top. I'm not huge on fingerless mitts, but if it's the only way these will fit, it's the only way they'll fit.

Some foot fetishist is going to love me.

I don't usually keep a design notebook, so you all will have to put up with my ramblings instead. (Well, not really, you can always scroll right by me.) Anyway, the socks in progress:



Learning process. First, learned that I really am pale enough to glow in the dark. Lookit my ankle blow the top right off the photo histogram there.

Ahem, anyway. I did an afterthought heel, but next time I think I might use Charlene Schurch's "forethought heel" method instead to avoid ungodly fighting with getting stitches picked up without getting needles tangle while having two balls of yarn hanging off the project. OK, the two balls of yarn part would have been inevitable, but I think the picking up stitches bit would have been easier still. I probably did not start the heel in the right place; next time I'll do the math with the row gauge, conveniently available there on the sole of the sock. Still less frustrating than a short row heel is for me, though. I might also work the heel over closer to 2/3 of the sock stitches instead of 1/2, but that needs some playing around with.

Ignore the gaping hole of death right at the ankle. I know that happened because I didn't pick up a stitch across the end. At that point, I'd literally been fighting with needles for 45 minutes, I couldn't figure out how to nab that stitch in the two-at-a-time method, and I didn't bloody well care anymore anyway. I'll duplicate-stitch that closed later.

I also learned that my ankle is about an inch larger around than the ball of my foot. This is not what designers usually assume; socks are basically designed as a tube with a heel stuck somewhere in the middle. In the future, I'll try to sneak in a few increases between the toe and the heel to compensate for this. It kind of pisses me off on these particular socks, because I thought about doing a chevron pattern on the cuff, but it has an 8-stitch repeat and I was at 60 -- about half an inch off of either interval that would work. Didn't realize I could use those extra four stitches anyway, and now I don't want to rip back. Although there or a little higher up might not be a bad place to switch to the chevron. What do you guys think?

I may have spoiled myself doing my first real pair of socks two-at-a-time, because I don't think I'll ever want to do them one-by-one after this. I think the magic loop method is growing on me, too, which is good. I discovered by accident that two-at-a-time two-circular method won't work with one of the circulars being a 16", so I'd have to buy extra needles for that method that I wouldn't normally otherwise. Ultimately, I am a cheapskate, and magic loop has the advantage that one long circular needle is usually cheaper than two shorter circulars or two sets of DPNs.

Unfortunately, I realized that I may not have needles for the next project I want to do. When I finish these, I'd like to start either another pair of socks, or a pair of mittens, and I don't have a lot of bunch of needles in smaller sizes -- and none other than the one I'm using long and flexible enough for two-at-a-time. If I get lucky I might hit gauge for something on the current needle, but I've got nothing else in the house to try if I don't. So now I'm trying to get up the guts to push the "order" button on a fairly large Knitpicks order to fix that needle deficiency. :P