Let the cursing begin.

Gauge swatches are lying bastards.
I did a gauge swatch for the Wonderful Wallaby sweater I started on New Years.  I did.
I think I may have done it in Magic Loop, not realizing I knit more tightly when Magic Looping than when knitting on needles normally.

In any event, my sweater that was supposed to be 43 1/2 " around the bust, about the size of the largest commercial hoody I find comfortable.  It's actually going to end up 46 1/2" around the bust -- much too big.

My options are to frog an entire month's work, or work another month for a sweater that will never fit right and so rarely if ever be worn.

The choice seems obvious to me.  Frogging it is.  :P  Suck!

While I'm at it, I think I'll change the various garter edgings to seed stitch.  I like the look somewhat better.

I'm going to have to figure out how to compensate for a larger upper arm diameter, too.  I want more ease there than the pattern allows.

Gosh, this is frustrating.

I think I'll frog the sleeves back to the ribbing, and do them first before redoing the body of the sweater.  I'm not enjoying knitting them, so I can get it out of the way, and the ribbing is OK to a bit large already so I don't have to start completely from scratch.  Mostly, but not completely.

I mentioned suck, right?

I haz a sad.

The alpaca yarn I was going to knit into an Ishbel?  Yeah, something about it is causing allergy-like symptoms.  I'm thinking maybe I'm allergic to some of the VM in it.  Whatever it is, though, I start working with it and my eyes start watering in a matter of seconds.  First time I hoped was a fluke, but the second time in a completely different environment?  Nope, we're talking irritant.  Not gonna keep going with that

Sigh.

Guess I'll wait until my Thursday knit night, have the yarn shop wind a skein of Cascade alpaca lace I bought a while ago, and buy a size 3 needle while I'm there.

Started my Ishbel

I balled up my special alpaca yarn and started my Ishbel scarf.  Let me tell you, though, I was threatening to confiscate the skeiner of the person who wound that hank.  Messiest skein I personally have unwound.  It doesn't help that the stuff is full of sticky grabby vegetable matter, either.

When I started knitting, my eyes started to water and get that "puffed up" feeling, so I'm a little afraid I may be allergic to something about it.  I doubt it's the alpaca itself -- alpaca is considered hypoallergenic -- but it may be the VM is something I'm allergic to, or something used in the processing.  Or it may be throwing off dust and fuzz as I'm working, and it's more an irritation than an allergy thing.  It did seem to clear up as I work, so we'll see if it gets better or if I have to bail and pass this skein on to someone else.

Suddenly developing an alpaca allergy would be utter cruelty on the part of the universe.  I hate to say it, but if that were to happen, I'd go back to wool and the cat's on her own.  (Well, you know, with the meds to help.)

I started this thing with US5 needles, but that was way too loose, so I switched down to 3mm (European size, between a US2 and a US3.)  If you're wondering the method to my madness, those happen to be the sizes of Addi Lace needles I own.  Going up a size from the 3 mm would probably be better, but not enough to wait until Thursday when I get back to the yarn shop.  The 3mm is giving a pretty nice fabric and should block out OK, but I think I will be a bit below gauge even blocked.  (Yes, I'm a bad girl who didn't do a gauge swatch.  It's a flippin' scarf.)  I was already thinking of doing the larger stockinette section from the shawl but stay with the narrower border of the scarf to get a little more size out of it.

I thought on it some more.

The lace + locally produced alpaca thing.  What I've gone and done is bought myself a copy of the Ishbel shawl.  It seems all the time someone in one of my Ravelry groups is sharing one they've done, and I click on their thumbnail going "ooh, pretty, what's that?" and it's the Ishbel.  My 540 yards should be more than enough to make a nice triangular scarf.  Because it starts with a good chunk of stockinette stitch, by the time the growth function gets intimidating I'll be well committed, and even on the big size the last row isn't that big.  As an extra bonus 80% of the purchase price goes to Doctors Without Borders to help in Haiti. :)

I hate it when this happens.

Although I guess I hate when this doesn't happen even more.

This afternoon I was really jonesing to ball up some locally-produced alpaca laceweight I have and start a Swallowtail Shawl.  So this evening I brought up the Ravelry page to see if there was an easy download location, since I'm not exactly sure where I stored my copy.  And suddenly it hit me: I don't really like the Swallowtail Shawl.

Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely shawl.  I just don't care for it.  I'm not very fond of the leaf pattern that makes up the body, and the transitions from body to border and border to edging are a bit abrupt for my tastes.

I'm glad I realized this before knitting several tens of thousands of stitches into the thing.  But, now what do I do with 540 yards of locally-produced alpaca laceweight?

Guess that'll live in the stash for a while.

I'm still kind of jonesing to knit some lace, though.  But not the Alka shawl I've got started.  I'm barely into it, and each row already takes 1/2 hour to do, and it's a top-down faroese so it's one of those shawls with a growth function that just gets worse and worse.

I'm thinking maybe a Frost Flowers and Leaves shawl or a Cap shawl (both Ravelry links; you'll only be able to see if you have an account, I'm afraid), but both are knit from the center out, and the Alka has me a little gun shy about those growth functions in laceweight.

I'll have to think on it some more.

OMG Squee!

Hansi Singh has a book!

Hansi Singh is the mastermind behind Hansigurumi and hands down the best pattern writer in modern knitting.  I've done her squid and started her octopus, and you absolutely can not beat her for creativity or for completeness.  She documents the hell out of how to make her stuff.  I really can't say enough good things about the way she writes her patterns. 

And she's got a book out!  Amigurumi Knits!  Brand new.  The knitting store just got it in today, and they don't have it anymore, because I bought it.  (Well, hopefully they have more copies.)

I'm super glad I stayed late, because I hadn't seen it on the table earlier.  I'm not sure if Lynn or someone brought it over to look at or if Deb had set it out for perusing, but I look down and I see a book with Hansigurumi's octopus on the cover.  Oh hey, she must have contributed to a book.  Wait, that's her praying mantis.  And her hermit crab.  Oh, she's the author; it's all her stuff.  *snatch*

There's tons of stuff in here I've wanted to do, but couldn't really justify buying the individual patterns for until I was ready to make them.  The mantis, the hermit crab, the Loch Ness monster, the jackalope, and several more.  But to have a whole book of them right there in front of my face and in my hot little hand...  Yarn stores are dangerous.  It HAD to come home with me.

Now, flipping through the book I can see that not all of the photos in the stand-alone patterns were put into the book, but it looks to me like the most crucial are.  The mantis especially has tons.  So if you're a knitter and you like awesome toys, go buy this.  I'm sure you will not be disappointed.  And she's got even more in her Etsy store.

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.

Official Knitting Fail

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.

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

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.

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. :)

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.

That there be a finished object.

The Strawberry Pie shawl is off the blocking pads and ready to show on backgrounds that won't strike you blind.

On the back of my couch:

It really would look nice there permanently, wouldn't it?

Full view of the circle:


And a modeled pic:

Me and the camera timer, we're not such good friends. But hey, I'm doin' what I can.

Unfortunately, the yarn went kind of... stringy feeling when I blocked it, I guess because it was stretched so hard in the process. It's a shame, because it was wonderfully soft and snuggly while I was working on it. I would absolutely use the Elann Baby Silk again, but not on something that's blocked so hard.

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.

Whew! Blocking lace is hard work!

I haven't talked about my creative endeavors nearly enough in that past. I should remedy that, starting right now.

I have been working on a Strawberry Pie shawl converted to circular instead of semi-circular, and I finished it up yesterday, so I blocked it today. This involved a lot of crawling around and a lot of stretching wet knit. I do have photos, but let me warn you first that my blocking pads are bright neon green. Perfectly saturated 00FF00 green. This means they throw the camera's sensor for a bit of a loop because THAT color isn't supposed to appear in nature, and photos of things block on them tend to look not so good because of it. I've desaturated it so you can see the shawl without going blind, but it still looks a little funny.

Here it is blocking:


And here it is all curly pre-block so you can see the color. (Which is against the ass ugly carpet currently in my craft room, which is also green but not such an eye-bleeding bright color that it screws with electronic minds.)


I plan to take a final picture with a nicer background, or a modeled one, once it's dried off and ready to wear.

It's a pretty color. It's an alpaca-silk blend I got it in a swap for some of my wool yarn, which I really enjoyed. I've still got four balls left.

I should have kept going on the shawl a few more pattern repeats. It's about 4-feet across, which is shoulder shawl sized. I'm not big on shoulder shawls. I want something that'll keep my arms and chest warm. But, I'll figure something out with it. I bet it would look damn cute on the back of my couch. (The kitties would like that, too, although that's more of a detriment.)

This also has me thinking that I need to indulge my Startitis more often than I do. Startitis is the condition wherein a knitter starts projects more quickly than they finish them. Now, I've been a relatively monogamous knitter lately. Not truly "mono"gamous, but a limited number of projects with different purposes. One complex for a challenge, one easy for TV and knitting group, one small and simple for waiting rooms, for example.

Well, lately there's been a bit of a wrinkle in that. There is only one sort of project I want to do right now: relatively simple circular shawls and blankets. The complex stuff has been mothballed, the small projects I usually enjoyed are going "that's nice, but I don't want to do that right now." I know why this is: I'm under such a massive amount of stress between work and family problems that the last thing I need right now is a flippin' challenge. I want something meditative, comforting, and satisfying. Simple-but-not-boring circular pieces are the comfort foods of the knitting world to me right now, and I'm perfectly OK with that.

The problem there is that right now, for example, I finished my comfort project. Now I need to start a new one.
I don't want to start a new one, I just want to work on one. Starting is harder than continuing. Only I don't have that option right now. My options are start something new, work on something that isn't my comfort knitting, or not knit at all. So as soon as I feel up to dodging around the drying shawl so I can ball up some hanked yarn, I'll get going on an Ondas blanket. I know I said I was going to do a Radiating Star blanket next, but I don't want to work on the Radiating Star. I want to work on the Ondas. And in a couple of days if I want to work on the Radiating Star, I'll start it then. Or if instead I decide I want to work on my Maelstrom shawl, I'll cast it on. Hell, I might even get enough of a bug to order the yarn for a Spiderman blanket. (Yes, you read that right. Go look; how cool is that?)

I guess I've just got different hobby needs at different times. Before the economy self-destructed and I ended up doing the work of two or more people, I needed some challenge and the sense of accomplishment from finished projects. Sometime down the line I'll probably feel the need to stash knit, or to kill off UFOs. For now, I need lots of easy comfort knits I can just pick up and do. So, for now, when I get the urge to cast something on, I will do it right then and there so that I don't have to do it when I don't want to. At absolutely worst, there's not much in my stash that can't handle being frogged if I completely change my mind later. Project bags are cheap, after all. I can make project bags if I need more. And UFOs can be put onto scrap yarn for holding if I need to reclaim the needles for something else. There's absolutely no reason not to do this if it's what I need to help maintain my sanity right now.

In Which Kati Waxes About Yarn

My favorite LYS is having a big sale this week, and I didn't go to knit-night as usual because I was sick, so I went in this morning to do a little stash enhancement. And ooh, I thought I'd found the yarn for my Wallaby sweater. It was all cotton but not stringy, pilly, or excessively heavy; surprisingly inexpensive; there was a colorway I really liked and there was just enough of it on the shelf to make a Kati-sized sweater if I cleaned them out. Only one problem: I finally had to admit that as much as I liked it in the skein, that colorway was just not going to look good with my complexion. It was too pink, and too much of a ruddy pink. A little more lavendar could have worked, but not this.

I did, however, buy enough of it for a throw I plan to make next, a radiating star blanket. (The pattern is on Ravelry, but this way all y'all can see what it looks like.) I was planning to do it in Plymouth Kudo, a long-color-repeat cotton/rayon/silk blend I'm looking forward to trying, but the LYS won't be getting it in for a few weeks yet, and I expect to be ready to start my next project before then. Besides, photos of finished projects suggest that the Kudo's color transitions are fairly harsh, and I haven't liked the radiating star blankets I've seen with hard stripes. This may work out better. What I've got is multicolored but not striped. Each ply is a different color, so it should knit up with a tweedy look that hopefully will add visual interest without overwhelming the star pattern.

As I'm shopping, though, I'm realizing that I don't really like buying just one ball to sample with the wool-free stuff. Maybe not so much the alpaca, but with non-animal fibers, I question the usefulness of that single ball in my knitting life. I can do a lot of projects with a single ball of wool (or alpaca, really), depending on the yarn weight: winter hats, scarves, mittens. But cotton or linen doesn't make good winter wear. And there's not a whole lot of other one-skein projects I'm into.

So I'm thinking that I should buy enough for a project I would actually make. Granted, it will cost more that way, but yarn that is never used and never will be is money wasted. A lot of people do this and buy sweater quantities. I'm not willing to go that far, though. I am not a small woman.

Actually, an aside here. I'm a slightly-below-average woman -- which is absolutely unforgiveable in this country. This article here makes an excellent point right in the first 2 paragraphs: the average American man is a little bigger than designers think, but he can walk into any non-specialty store in the country and find fashionable clothes that fit him, look good on him, and unless he is very eccentric, suit his tastes.
The average woman, on the other hand, is defined as "plus size". If you've ever tried to shop plus-size clothing (and statistically speaking, more than half the women reading this have), then you know that plus-size is the nemesis of fashionable, or good fit, or variety, or generally worth wearing except to not be naked. More than half of the female population is defined as niche! It's insane, it's stupid, there's no logical reason for it, but institutionalized sexism sure explains it well.

I also like the quote from the model on the second page, who is considered "plus size" because she wears a 10 (horrors!): "On the street, I'm skinny. At castings, I'm a cow." This is getting into "scary stuff" land.

Anyway, back to yarn. A sweater for an average size person takes between 1500 and 2000 yards of yarn. I don't care to buy quite that much at once, especially since that would typically be over a $100. Not always; the yarn I was looking at today would have been around $50 for the 1800 yards I need for the Wallaby (as I said, unusually inexpensive), but usually good basic yarns starts around $3/100 yards and goes up from there.

However, I have REALLY been enjoying working on a simple circular shawl. Specifically a Strawberry Pie Shawl somewhat blasphemously converted into a circle instead of semicircle. (I say blasphemous because the design specifically made it semicircular because she doesn't like circular shawls.) The radiating star blanket is the same general idea, as are several others on my list to do. They're easy, sometimes I don't even have to carry the pattern which makes them excellent waiting room knitting, you can pick them up and put them down at any point because they're circular, and they look awesome. The nasty critical part of me gripes "isn't that a waste of your mad knitting skillz", but the rest of me goes "Maybe, but I don't care because it's so damn fun! Nyah!"

One of those in worsted or bulky takes 500 to 600 yards of yarn. That's a doable quantity to buy at a time. Not necessarily cheap in some stuff, but doable. And there's a lot of flexibility in what fiber you use. Even a cotton blanket can be nice when the themostat is just a little low, or if you want something to sit on at the park. Or just to look nice draped across furniture.

Thinner yarns will take more yards, but they also come more per skein. I'll just have to dig into some patterns I like and figure out some average yardages.

So, in conclusion: Yay yarn!

I'm going to be testing yarns FOREVER...

I went and became obsessed with the Wonderful Wallaby sweater pattern. It's a pullover hoodie with a kangaroo pouch, that's all, but it looks like it'd be fun to do and comfy to wear. The problem now is choosing a sweater yarn.

A year ago, this would have been easy. I would have gone to Jojoland and ordered a buttload of Rhythm in either M05, M06, or M13.
But nooooooo, I have to have a wool-allergic cat and an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. :P

Doing a search on finished projects on Ravelry with wool and merino filtered out doesn't really bring up anything that grabs me and goes "Me! You want to make one just like me!"

I'm probably going to have to swallow my pride and use an acrylic blend. The idea of doing this in pure cotton makes me woozy just thinking about it. My poor hands, to say nothing of the weight! Linen and hemp have the same hand problem, although less weight, but more cost. Alpaca would cost, maybe not more than I'd care to spend, but enough to make me think twice or thrice about my choice, and I think it would be too hot for me to wear most of the time. Not that acrylic is much better in the heat department. Acrylic yarns have this unfortunate trait that they don't breath, so I personally tend to get hot wearing them in moderate temperatures, but at the same time they don't insulate well in cold temps.

Still, since the Uber-fiber is verboten, the fact is that none of my remaining options are really ideal. So, I think I'm going to be doing a lot of sampling before I commit to a yarn, although you never know. I might get lucky on my first or second try and go "yup, this is it."

I at least have a start on it. I went to Hobby Lobby today and picked up skeins of several different yarns I wanted to try for it (although I forgot to get one of Lion Cotton-Ease. I seem to have this mental block where Lion yarns are concerned). They include Caron Simply Soft Shadows, a 100% acrylic but with a long color repeat, which I like; Bernat Denim Style, which was on sale and looked like it had potential; Hobby Lobby's house brand I Love This Cotton, which is probably a bit thin and would have to soften up quite a bit in the wash; and Patons new Silk Bamboo, which is surprisingly around the middle of the price range I'm willing to pay.

I decided to borrow the "swatch tube" idea from the Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook, except work it comfortably around 16" circulars for heavier yarns. Who knows, maybe down the line it'll make a nifty scarf, or can be turned into Christmas stockings, or something. In any event, since I'm not nearly as familiar with wool-free yarns as I am with the wool that's out there, there's going to be a lot of swatching in my future until I get some staple yarns settled on.

I started the sample tube off with some Andean Treasure from Knitpicks, which is 100% alpaca. It actually feels pretty nice, but it's the most expensive option on my list right now AND none of the colors really grab me. If only one of those were true, I'd probably have my sweater yarn picked out already, but with both of them working against, I'll probably try a few other things before making a decision.

I guess I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed. There doesn't seem to be a clear best choice for me right now, and it's going to take some patience to come up with the best of available options.

Project Musings

I am wanting to make a Strawberry Pie Shawl with some pink Elann Baby Silk I got in a swap.
Well, kinda.

I don't get how she wrote the strawberries. When I follow her instructions I get lopsided thingies I don't care for. I don't know if it's her or me, but I recharted the strawberries.

And I don't think the shape was fully thought out. It appears the thought process was "I don't want a solid circle. What I want to do is take a circle and cut a slit in it so that it goes on like a cape." So there are normal circular increases, but when you reach the end of a 'round', instead of going around, you turn and knit back in rows. Sounds like it should work, right?

Not if you're using spiraling increases.

It's got this odd shape where one side is straight and the other's flared. It's very obvious why that happens. Each 'wedge' has increases on the right side, only. So your right side has increases, and the left doesn't. In circular knitting, you just keep going around and that's cool, but in back and forth, not so much.

So, I'm trying to figure out how to address this.

I could just do it as a circular shawl. That actually makes things easier, because it becomes all knitting instead of having to purl back across some long-ass rows at the end there. But, I'm not completely sure I want a circular shawl. They take more futzing to wear, and really need a shawl pin. (Although that would be a good excuse to get myself a nice shawl pin. ;) )

To keep it cape-like, I don't think I could just put another increase at the other end, because then that last wedge is going to grow faster than the others. Even if that would work, then both ends will flare, and that will hang oddly. Trying to straighten the increases wouldn't really be practical; single increases in circular knitting naturally want to spiral.

So, after mentally rambling for far too long, I guess my options are J-shaped or circular. If I can't have what I really want without lots of redesign, I'll go for the option that saves me metric buttloads of purling. I'll do circular.

If it pisses off the bigots, it's gotta be good!

1) The "Conservative Knitters" group on Ravelry might as well be renamed "Bigots R Us." (Stumbled into it by accident via another member's profile.)
2) Although not directly related to that, they made me laugh quite heartily with their hypocrisy, too. Direct quote: "No surprise that she is a nasty lefty (but that’s redundant). She isn’t satisfied with talking about her book, she has to go insult conservatives." Look me in the eye and tell me you didn't snert.
3) This is the book that has them all a fluster. You can see just how horrible and insulting it is. (Hell yes I want a copy.)

Today's Awesome Vendor Award Goes To...

Sophie's Fine Yarn Shoppe.

Due to my new wool-free status, I was looking for some alpaca or llama in yellow/gold to make a Gryffindor-colored felted hedgehog. (No, I don't have a reason for a Gryffindor hedgie. I just want one.) My wonderful LYS identified a likely candidate, Alpaca with a Twist Baby Twist in Lemon Zest, but they don't carry it themselves and I couldn't make up the minimum order.

Well, a search of the internet suggests that Sophie's is the only place in the States that carries the Lemon Zest. Which is awesome, but not why they get the awesome vendor award. I placed an order with them for (1) 50 g ball of yellow, (1) 50 g ball of red, and (1) 50 g ball of grey to fart around with.

Package arrived today. I opened it, dumped it out, and out came (1) 50 g ball of yellow, (1) 50 g ball of grey, and (1) ginormous hank of red. Baby Twist comes in two sizes, 50 g and 250 g. The 250g hanks do not give you a discount. So immediately I think "Oh no, what stupid-ass thing did I do? I could have sworn the check-out was priced for three small balls." So I look for the invoice to try to figure out how I screwed up this order, and on it is a little sticky note:

"We have sent a jumbo hank of Red at no additional charge as the small hanks are backordered."

O_O
Guys, one hank costs more than my entire order. They just sent one along instead of making me wait for a back-order or asking if I want to cancel? First time, small order customer? WOW! That is above and beyond in the area of customer service.

I know where I will be getting my Alpaca With A Twist from now on.