Friday, March 17, 2006
Remember this, my knitting muse?
 
Left: Blouse from anthropologie. Right: Beginnings of Cate in Kidsilk Haze
This is progress from the last 3 weeks. Whadya think so far? Kinda sorta like the original? I spent 2 of that swatching about a dozen different patterns for the hem, all of them some type of lace, all of them abandoned because I just couldn't make up my mind which looked best. It was hard to judge with the black yarn. Then I reminded myself that the reason why I was drawn to this blouse in the first place was because of its minimalist straight lines. It was settled: plain ol' stockinette and reverse stockinette.
For the reverse stockinette rows in the hem, I held yarn double for more visible stripes. Same for the thick vertical stripes in the body.
I worked the hem in size 3 needles, then switched to size 6 for the body, which I will make a little long, and no shaping. I want it to drape some over the hem/obi. I might make this a boatneck too.
It'll be interesting to see how this turns out. Honestly at the start, after finishing the hem, I was feeling rather unenthusiastic about it. But as the fabric grows, so does my opinion of it.
And I've named this Cate, as in Cate Blanchett. I love that actress and the name. Simple and clean. Normally I'd say that "Kate" looks better than "Cate", but "Kate" now leads me to "Katie" which then leads me to "Tom" which then makes me think "crazy wackjob" and my knit deserves better associations.
In other news, I just discovered through my referral logs that I am a member of some "Southern Knit Bloggers" webring. How odd, considering I never signed up to join and I am not southern. Not at the moment. Not southern geographically anyways. (I grew up in various parts of the Deep South: Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia)
I'm not politically southern either. Most definitely not religiously southern.
Nor linguistically, for that matter, although I did use to say things like "fixin' to," like "I'm fixin' to go to the store," but then I came up North for college and got laughed at.
Maybe I'm a little southern gastronomically speaking...but only for very NICHE southern dishes like boiled crawfish and beignets.
But Oh I'm DEFINITELY southern climatically speaking. Every single year around this time, when March rolls around, I begin hyperventilating because March up north heralds not the start of spring, but the start of THREE MORE MONTHS of cold, hard, barren and perhaps even snowy blizzardy weather. Spring is what, this Monday right? I'm going to be scratching my eyes out in 30 degree weather. Where are all the bees? Where is all the pollen? The wonderful faint scent of WISTERIA in the air? Not here my friends, not here. And then I threaten to move back south.
Sigh. If only Boston had Atlanta weather, or if only Atlanta looked more like Boston.
Filed Under: Cate
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
For the first time ever, all the winter sweaters, plus one Butterfly, that I've knitted are clean AT THE SAME TIME. I folded them all nicely and placed them together in my bureau and stepped back to admire. I usually don't treat them with this much respect. Like the rest of my clothes, they spend most of their time splayed on the floor.
1. Cabled Toad
I just made this, as you are aware. I've worn it four times already. Even though I was down on the collar at first, I do really like this sweater.
2. Electra
It saddens me to say this, but I must. I don't like you anymore. I picked out the wrong color combo for you. Also, after handwashing you carefully you have stretched to quite an unflattering size. Perhaps I will toss you in the dryer. Or give you away to my mother. Sorry dude.
3. Aimee
I handwashed Aimee too. It is fascinating that something so beautiful when dry could turn into something so horrible when wet, like that girl at the bottom of the well in The Ring, if she had dyed her hair punk. This stretched too. Next time I'll stick to dry cleaning.
4. Savanna
You're nearly a year old! I used Debbie Bliss Merino Chunky and it has held up really well, with minimal pilling and little stretch. Definitely one of my favorite sweaters. Dry clean only.
5. Butterfly
I've worn Butterfly to a couple of weddings. I'm looking forward to warmer weather so I can start wearing this again.
6. Aubergine Bolero
Guess what. DB Cashmerino Aran sucks. This is a pretty recent knit but unfortunately it's already collapsing on itself. With all the pilling and stretching, it looks pretty tattered and much older than it is. Aubergine Bolero is no longer allowed in public.
7. Apricot Jacket
I love you.
8. Simply Marilyn.
Happy belated first birthday to you, my sweet, first sweater. This one doesn't go out in public anymore either. Somehow I have less width on one side of the front panel, so it's sort of twisted around the waist area. It makes me giggle. I wear it around the house a lot though. I remember trying to seam the armholes for the first time and what a massive headache it gave me, and how I was convinced I would never manage to pull the whole thing together. How glad I am to have stuck it out.
9. Sweater with Diagonal Ribs. (Not pictured)
It was too bulky to fit with the rest of the sweaters, and also, too ugly, so ugly, lock it up in a dark corner forever ugly. Lion Brand's Kool Wool (discontinued now) does not stand up to wear. It's only a month older than Savanna but is 10000 times more pilled and ragged. Also it was my first attempt to seam capped sleeves (again a process I thought I'd never live through), and combined with such chunky yarn, even non-knitters can tell the SWDR is Not Quite Right. It is however, warm and squishy. Another great sweater to wear around the house. So there is still some love left.
How much love do your sweaters get?
Filed Under: General Knitting
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
How do you guys do it? How do you guys start a sock on a Friday night and have a finished pair by Saturday morning?
This lone sock took two loooong weeks. It just wouldn't finish! I think I despise working with size 1 dpns. I probably won't like size 0 or 2's. Which makes me think that my sock knitting days are over.
Just let it be known that my lack of fun while knitting this sock has nothing to do with the pattern. Besides the toothpick needles, it might have to do with the color of the yarn. But only slightly, really. I have some cashmere fingering yarn (I have no idea when/where I got them) that I had thought about turning into socks, like to wear on long plane flights or something, but I shiver now thinking about going through the process again and wrestling with tiny needles.
I'm happy to have made it through one though. At least the construction of socks themselves is no longer a complete mystery, even if the pleasure of knitting them eludes me.
Don't look directly into the light, Veebs!
DAMN it's so bright!
Filed Under: Socks
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Pattern: Natasha Cabled Pullover from Adrienne Vittadini Fall 2003, size xs
Yarn: Filatura di Crosa 501, 7 balls
Needles: US5 in rib, US6 rest of body, approx 26 st/4in in cable, stretched
I finished the Toad last week. The photo of this sweater in the book misleads. The collar doesn't flap wide open, nearly off the shoulders like mine does. Dirty, rotten photo. I see why they have the sleeves pushed up. It shifts the weight upward so that minimizes any pull downward on the neck. I am constantly adjusting the sleeves, tugging the bottom down, pulling at the collar to get this thing to stay on right.
 The wide-collared shirt makes yet another appearance underneath this sweater to keep skin exposure at a minimum. The distibution of weight on this sweater is all wrong. The problem I think has to do with the construction of the raglan sleeves. The stitches that make up the neck is distributed rather lopsidedly. Or, too little raglan decreases on the body, and too much raglan decreases on the sleeves. There were only 4 stitches on each sleeve that contributed to the final collar. As a result, the neck is more boatneck, but with that v-neck opening, the ends of the v-neck is pulled open by its own weight and folds over like a lapel. Does that make any sense?
The accidental lapels don't look TOO bad actually. At first I was like UGH! WTF! but then I thought, OK I can live with this. It looks a little interesting when the collar folds over slightly. I just hate having to readjust. If I don't tug at the sleeves the "lapels" will just keep opening up, until the thing is nearly off the shoulders.
Naughty, naughty toad.
The color isn't usually my style but I like it. And the cables are yummy. I went down 2 needle sizes, from 8 to 6, on the body and sleeves. It worked nicely for the body, but the sleeves were really tight. Maybe that's not such a horrible thing as it really shows off the cables.
I guess I'm happy with this. Not absolutely positively can't-sleep-at-nights THRILLED, but happy enough to wear it.
A wiggly cabled toad and a wiggly orange cat
Filed Under: Adrienne V | Cabled Toad | Completed Projects
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Kitty: dude i keep looking at your knitting today and by god i want to try knitting
Me: do it kitty do it!
Kitty: maybe i'll try
Me: yay! i'd start with a scarf
* 30 minutes and quick trip to yarn store later *
Kitty: mission accomplished! three balls of rowan cashsoft baby DK in a nice lavender. they were really nice in there. the girl who rang me up was wearing a horrible loose knit yellow SHRUG though
Me: Ha ha
Kitty: i was disheartened by the shrug
Me: did it look like she made it
Kitty: oh yeah it looked like a MONKEY made it
Me: dude you could potentially go down a bad road with knitting
Kitty: what road?
Me: a bad one kitty. a bad one. like one day you'll start wearing that shrug simply because you MADE it, not because it's NICE.
Kitty: um. mayday? my scarf is getting wider. i cast on like 75 and i'm at 100 wide now. what's happening.
* sends photo *
Kitty's first attempts. On the left is the beginning and end of a very wide, lacy, curvy scarf. On the right is a more advanced sampler scarf. All on the same day!
Me: I JUST REALIZED
Me: i thought you turned the scarf 90 degrees when taking the pic. THAT IS A WIDE MOFO
Kitty: YES THAT WAS HORRIBLE
Me: HAHAHAHA
Kitty: and I was like, it's taking me 15-20 minutes to do a ROW what the hell. on my little needles. oh it was so cramped
Me: HAHAHA!
Kitty: everything JAMMED together. i was like, is this how it has to be?
Me: what made you cast on so many stitches. what made you
Kitty: it looked too little and I like my scarves to have width
Me: i'm surprised it didn't come out worse actually. all those stitches jammed together makes it hard to see
Kitty: it didn't help that i added like 30% over the course of 12 rows or something, hahaha
Me: no wonder you have lace
Kitty: yeah well, i kept busting through strands and being like what happened there
Me: so how many did you cast on?
Kitty: if you blog about me you'd best paint me in a good light
Kitty: yeah i cast on like 70. but ended up with 102
Me: HAHAHAHAHA
But look at the improvement from just a few days later.
Seed stitch! I'm so proud. Welcome Kitty to the so fun and the so obsessive world of knitting!!!!
I have made hardly any more progress on the sock. I have a feeling if I finish this one I will not make its pair. I'm SORRY I'm just NOT INTO SOCKS!
Cabled Toad is finished. I wore it to the office yesterday. There is a major flaw in it but I am viewing that flaw as a special feature. Pictures forthcoming.
Filed Under: General Knitting
Friday, February 24, 2006
 I gave the sock another go, and look! Heel! The color of the yarn still gives me the heebie jeebies, but I love how the mini ringel stripes up.
This was last night's worth of work, and right now my neck and shoulders are killing me. Knitting socks is a labor of painful love.
Filed Under: Socks
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
What do we have here? Could it be, the beginnings of a sock?!
No. It is the beginnings of a mitten, a mitten that if all goes well, will have a bushy-tailed squirrel on it.
This is the beginnings of a sock.
I am nauseating. I am ill-fated.
Let us all gather 'round and revel in all its hideous, hideous glory.
The yarn is Regia Mini Ringel in color #666, get it, because it's so evil and nasty. I didn't have much of a choice though. I was determined to try to knit a sock, and I would only do it with Regia Mini Ringel or Regia Banner. But after scouring through three yarn stores, nothing! No one carries these Regias. It took a special trip to yarn store number 4 - Wild & Wooly - to scrounge up the yarn you see above. I mean I really had to dig deep for these trolls. The two skeins were the only left.
I was disappointed. They really didn't have a great selection of sock yarn. If you can't get it at W&W, which is stocked with two floors of yarn, then where I ask you? You all talk about Lorna's Laces and Koigu and whatever this and that and I could find nothing of the sort.
Anyway, I was going to make the best of it and chalk this up to a learning process. I too would like to experience the magic of TURNING THE HEEL.
But right off the bat the squirrels in my head start rotating the wheels too quickly. I decided I would use my own a pattern for the leg, and came up with this wavy pattern, which in theory would be nicely accentuated by the stripes. I thought I could make it more 3-D by adding a row of purls here and there.
After several pattern repeats I decided the wave pattern was unexciting and the purl rows were disgusting. Instead of ripping back, because that would require starting over, which is a horrible thing for me to consider, I switched gears midway and started Jaywalking. I didn't last long. Of course the peaks of this pattern did not match the peaks of mine, so the sock became distorted and now looks like a crushed Coke can.
About this time my hands started to burn. Isn't it funny, knitting with size 1 needles hurts about as badly as knitting with a size 15. At some point the sizes become too ridiculously big or small that it doesn't matter what size they are exactly. It just hurts.
In conclusion, I suck, I do not sock. Sad face. But I do want to learn, so I'll give it another go later.
I hope to fare better with the mittens.
SO. Speaking of the JAYWALKER socks...I was at a certain yarn store in Harvard Square on certain evening on a certain this past Thursday, looking for those certain yarn socks that I didn't find, and spied in the store a certain celebrity knit blogger roaming about.
We made very brief eye contact while walking past each other. In that millisecond, I recognized who she was, didn't know why, thought about it (college? work? neighbor? tv? internet? internet? INTERNET?), then realized who she was, then wasn't sure, then was sure, then went "Hee hee" because she had just left a comment in my last post not half an hour before, how funny is that? then went back to my own browsing.
Filed Under: General Knitting
Thursday, February 16, 2006
I'm nearly done with the Cabled Toad, and while knitting this piece
I've been thinking, thinking too hard really, about what to knit next.
This slight knitting funk is still hanging around. I'm still not
totally fired about knitting socks, even though I'd like to give it a
go. It just depends on what sock yarn speaks to me, if any. Lacy shawls
are somewhat more interesting - it would be a lot of fun I think. But
for it to be a must-knit-it-now! project it has be
practical/wearable too. I love the idea of shawls and stoles, but as it
turns out don't much love wearing them, and it's not enough for me
right now to knit one for the sake of kntting one.
And neither my mom nor mother-in-law are into them either so I can't use them as an excuse to make one.
None of my knitting books are magazines are calling to me at the moment.
So I'm just surfing through the sweater section at bluefly.com and
anthropologie.com looking for inspiration, things I would enjoy
knitting and wearing as well.
These are from bluefly.com The cowl sweater on the left is Dolce
& Gabbana, made of acrylic and mohair. It's got Kidsilk Haze
written all over it. It's lovely, but I think I'd get bored of the
repetitive pattern quickly. The cardigan on the right is Catherine
Malandrino (LOVE her). You can't see very well but the pattern is
leafish, diamondish. Only problem is that it's knitted in very
fine gauge. I wouldn't want to substitute a chunkier yarn but that same
time fine gauge might try my patience. And eyesight. And hands.
Onwards to anthropologie.com.
Both of these are really cute.
But then I saw this blouse.
There she is, my knitting muse! So elegant! So pretty! It's not
a knit piece, but I think it could be reinterpreted nicely into a one,
using our BFF Kidsilk Haze. Yes? Yes I think so! I'm not
participating in the Knitting Olympics, but if I were, you'd be
watching me as I attempt to GO FOR THE GOLD in the sporting
category of DESIGNING MY FIRST SWEATER! I already have ideas
as to the lace pattern to use, and am going to try to be diligent and
meticulous, and swatch and test and test and swatch, and take copious
notes, and have patience, instead of jumping headlong hoping it
will all turn out.
By the way, I have two skeins of KSH in Dewberry, brand-spankin new.
I'm not crazy about this color, and am looking for something
darker. Anybody up for a swap? Two skeins of Dewberry for two
skeins in Villain? Nightly? Wicked? Elegance? Anybody?
Filed Under: General Knitting
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