Cleaning Up and Colour Q

I won't be boring you with crochet blanketings today except to say UGH this is why one should not do a long series of tiny stripes of colour...

So many ends to run in, and so much scrap afterward. Thankfully, [my red-eared monster] Gwen's diet of choice is yarn scraps. The pile was bigger before she started eating them.

 

Moving on: I've been cleaning up my yarn stash while hunting for something the right colour for a friend's gift, which I am not knitting fast enough for Christmas because BLANKET!, and found this handspun yarn I made, probably from Twisted Fiber Art fleece, lo these many years ago.  

 

Like, I made it and washed it and never caked it, or even thought of a project for it! Must remedy that.

 

I especially admire this green and brown one but the blue and brown yarn looks like it kinda works with the aforementioned Christmas knit, right? Assuming I can come up with an idea that embraces the extreme wonkiness of the ever-changing weight because I was not a good spinner when I did this apparently.

Not sure this background shows it at its best...

Maybe it's too close without being right? Or if it only needs to be a coordinating piece... 

I'll have to think it over. While doing this!
 

bwa ha ha ha ha you knew I wasn't going to leave without a progress report, right? This blanket is 18.5 inches along now, which is about the halfway point. I'm still (hopefully) in a position to finish in time to curl up under it on Boxing Day. Even if I'm only curled up under it to do the edging, ahem.

Hope you have a lovely weekend lined up? I've been baking, here, so whatever else happens the house smells marvellous, and I have cute new festive tea mugs to drink out of, yum. 

See you next Saturday, and thanks again for dropping by!

 

 

Someone had a busy week

Check out the stems on my amaryllis friend!

Compared to last Saturday, that's amazing. Especially since we had about 10 minutes of sun this past week, and not all at once either. 

On the other hand, this onion that's spent a little too much time in a dark cold space managed to put out some pretty impressive greenery too. I decided to shift it to a sunny window to see what happens. 

Love the deep purple / fresh green colour combo. Am I wrong to think of fingerless mitts, looking at this closeup? 

Regardless, here are some fingerless mitts that are getting good use this winter, albeit with a pair of fleecy gloves underneath. If it's not cold enough for twined mitts, this is what I'm wearing. 

I handspun the yarn for these years ago, and knit them not long afterward. I still can't believe I got all the singles even enough to make something functional! I used the Ferryboat Mitts pattern from Churchmouse Yarns and Teas... my goodness, I love the whole aesthetic of their patterns, and they're so clearly written too. I made so many pairs of their Turkish Bed Socks when I was a perpetual knitting machine. I wonder if I need a new pair? 

The answer is Yes, naturally, but not till I get this new manuscript finished, so I'd best be off and make some progress on that. I hope you have a lovely weekend and as always, thank you for joining me for part of it! See you next Saturday.

Making adjustments

It's getting to be that magical cold-weather time of year where I live, and that means two things.

I get to wear my beautiful handspun twined mittens, and I get to feel guilty about the matching hat. Yay!

Or rather, ugh. I had such good intentions with this hat, and way too much confidence in my abilities to knit a garter band and pick up stitches for the rest. Not sure if you can see the problem in this photo, so perhaps we'll try another angle:

There is a LOT of ease on top. I think the handspun was just too heavy to flop properly, because the crown decreases are perfectly flat, a critical element I did get right.

Ignoring the fact that wearing this hat makes me look like the stem on a mushroom, I even did this elaborate trim feature:

I still really like this element, even though it's wasted on this hat. I look awful with it on, and it keeps sinking and shifting as I walk, too. It's way too big. If I had one of those gazelle necks I could tuck my long hair into it and stride out of the house looking like I have an attractive hat on. Sadly I was not so blessed. So I'm going to have to find a way to make the hat smaller. I see two routes to this destination.

Option A: tuck the excess inside the band, and stitch it down.

 

Option B: fold the excess over the band, and stitch it down.

And at this crossroads, I have stopped. I'm not sure which is better, and also, I need to dig out my leftover handspun so the stitches don't show. Otherwise I'll have to do decorative stitches that look like they were done on purpose, and that's another area where I'm more confident than adept, heh.

I do think it's worth it though, don't you? I mean this hat is WARM. The halo on it is incredible. The colours are beautiful. And, you know, I handspun this yarn and everything.

The good news is, we're doing a whole-house overhaul at the moment to accommodate home offices. I'm sure to find the leftover yarn in my travels, and when the work is done, I'll have a few more cosy nest options for actually doing the alterations. If I'm really careful and lucky, I'll be out in style in January. A girl can hope.

Another hope: that you are having a great weekend. Thanks for coming to see me, and let's do this again next Saturday!

Mistakes were made

This is what happens when you forget to bring home any of your knitting for the weekend:

You finally get around to finishing the thumbs on a pair of fingerless gloves you were supposed to finish a year before!  (and run in rather a lot of ends, too.)

Looks nice though, doesn't it?  Even though I also forgot my camera, and had to take these pictures with my phone.

Even without all my things (I might add toothpaste to the list, and my hair dryer) it was so wonderful to come back to our house after a long first week at the condo.  It's still unfinished and practically unfurnished, and every morning before going out for the day I'd have to shift what little we did take out of the way so Ray and Al could paint and sand and so on, only to bring them back out again when I got home for the evening.  It was worth it to be near where I needed to be every day, because driving through heavy snow is much harder for me than shifting suitcases and pushing a bed back into a sofa.

I haven't lived downtown since I was a student in residence, and I find it funny now that every single day I approach our building I hear sirens.  There are so many emergency trucks racing around all the time!  You can barely hear them inside the unit - it faces onto a courtyard with another six or seven stories above our floor to block the sound - but you can hear birds in the trees outside our living room window.

Another thing I'd forgotten is how hard concrete is on your feet and legs, even with wood flooring laid over it.  I was two days living at the condo before I realized its enormous size is a liability, because you walk so much from one end to the other.  I finally had to go out and buy a pair of Crocs to compensate for the lack of give in the floor, backup for the walking shoes I took to Italy - the ones that got me through two weeks of relentless cobblestones.

Anyway: home, and a practically hibernating knit complete at last.

This is the second pair of Churchmouse Ferryboat Mitts I've made with this particular batch of handspun, and it was a bit stressful to go on working with it until I made myself relax already about the stripes not matching up or looking very logical.

Mostly they're just beautiful, and I'm pleased with the way the thumbs made an extension of the stripes they started with even though they were knit after both mitts were otherwise finished.

See?  completely non-matchy, and gorgeous anyway, and photographed outside in the snow, at home.  How I will miss the little house when it's being reconfigured, and how grateful I am that Ray and Al will be taking as good care of it as they have of our condo!

A warm handknit hat

Oh, how coveted is the soft, warm handknit hat - at least by me.  I also enjoy a good storebought hat, but it's hard to find those as soft or as dense or as warm as what I'm after.  Not that this gorgeous thing didn't give me a ton of trouble.

I really love this light pink snaily swirl, don't you?

Seriously: I knit this hat four times.  On the upside, I did that while listening to Martin Short talk about his life.  This is a very pleasant thing to do with or without the knitting, especially if,immediately after you've finished it, you find yourself at two funerals over three days.  He has a lot of insights that will help you with that.

The colourway is 'Princess and the Pea' from a recent Twisted Fiber Art club. I knew right away I wasn't giving this stuff to anybody else, and I spun it bulky for a warm hat, somehow messing up so completely that I didn't get the yardage I needed.  No idea how that happened.

So there I am knitting the hat instead of the Ferdy socks somebody with cold toes is still waiting for, and I run out of yarn!  And that was after I'd ripped it out and started again with bigger needles and fewer stitches, because on my first attempt I got only about 2.5" out of the first half of my supply.

After the second time I ripped back again, cast on with fewer stitches, and tried anew.

No dice.

So in the end I cast on 36 stitches - yes, THIRTY SIX - and hoped very hard.  It is the teensiest bit snug around the bottom as you can imagine, owing to my not having used a stretchy enough cast on.  But had I done so, I would have been knitting a fifth time: I had exactly six inches of yarn left when I ran the end through the last of remaining stitches post-crown, and I needed them all for the bow on the top.

Here's an interesting item.  After a short amount of ribbing I decided to splurge a bit and make my increases every other row straight out from the band, leading to this shape:

instead of making them every fourth row after a more generous band, which looks like this.

The other interesting thing is that my orange hat is made from less yardage than the pinky green one.  Needle size makes such a difference, doesn't it?  I needed a bigger size for the pink hat and just didn't have it.  I should soon though because Online Shopping.

As it is the gauge is pretty loose and airy, and the yarn over increases are huge.

Also: the hat overall is very short and pixie-like.

And yet, I can vouch for its being warm.  This hat went through one of the most rigorous of testing operations last week when I wore it to my cousin's funeral and then on to his graveside service.  The day was sunny but the cold and wind extreme; our cluster of mourners did nothing to produce body heat and I still don't understand why because that side of the family is very, very big and we were very, very close together.  My toes were freezing, my hands barely speaking to me, my core - in spite of two wool sweaters under a down coat - trembling to bring up my body temperature, but my head was warm thanks to this hat.  I am so grateful I grabbed it at the last minute instead of the lighter one that looks more sombre, and could concentrate on what we were doing instead of willing my hair to bulk up for insulation.

Yep: it's a good hat.

But not so good that I don't kinda want another.  Sometimes I wish I weren't so greedy about knitting but then I think, I should just love myself the way I am and keep knitting the cosy.

What about you?  Have you knit something for yourself lately?  Think maybe you should?

The joy of a successful knit hat

Today I want to show you what happens when orange handspun yarn is transformed into a warm and comfy hat.  Because what else would you do on a Friday?  Especially the first Friday after a blistering cold week spent wearing said hat. 

After the disaster that was Orange Hat #1, I found and made use of my 4.5mm needles, plus the essentials of my free Instant Love Hat pattern.  I could have gone to 6.0mm with this very bulky yarn, but I couldn't find my 6.0mm double pointed needles for the crown and I'm only human after all.  I wanted this hat done!

It has to be said that with 4.5mm needles and bulky yarn, you are going to get a fabric so stiff it will stand up on its own.

Bit scary, isn't it?

Still: done.  With enough yarn to spare (not much yarn - you can see the scrap that's left in the bowl up there - but enough) to tie a little bow at the top.

The beret shape does hold, at least from back view:

Essentially though, this is a long, completely itch-free hat that will come down over my ears and keep my forehead warm no matter how much snow falls.

Even with eyelet increases instead of the very dense closed increases I wrote into the pattern.

Once I'd given up improvising as I knit and just followed instructions I knew would work, the whole hat was done in about three hours.  So if you're thinking about making an Instant Love Hat yourself this winter, you won't have to invest a lot of time in the decision!

Hope you have a wonderful weekend and I'll see you again on Monday.  I might have another little project to show you, ahem.

Forensic knitting

Sometimes, no matter how innocent it looks just sitting on the arm of a chair, knitting goes wrong.

Very wrong.   So wrong, you have to assess all the ways in which it did that, to avoid it happening again.

In the case of my orange hat, several factors came into play - starting with the fact that the available yarn was limited to 100g of handspun.  Often with a hat you'll need to tip over into 110g of yarn, and the only way to do that when you start with 100g of hand dyed handspun is to find a complementary Other Yarn to help eke things out.

I did find backup yarn as I ran out of my handspun - knitting frantically fast, as if it would make the yarn last longer so I'd know as soon as possible if I was going to run out really - but it wasn't a perfect match for weight, colour, or fiber, even once it was held double.

Still, it was just a few rounds at the top.  Not necessarily a dealbreaker, right?  HA.

Another problem was the needle size.  When I knit something that works, in a yarn weight I expect to use again (in this case, bulky handspun: it's so much easier for me to spin bulky yarn than sport weight), I will often leave the needles I used in a bag with my pattern notes so I can replicate it more easily later.  This time though, instead of the 4.5mm needle set I used for a lot of handspun hats last winter, I mistakenly picked up a 3.25mm combination which was just - well.  Too small.

I don't know why I didn't notice that, fighting every single stitch as I was and not finding any elasticity in the yarn At. All, even though I'd spun it myself and watched all that springy twist embedding itself in there.  But I kept thinking It'll work! It's going to be a nice dense knit that no wind will get through! and I kept going.

Mistake.

Then too, the stitch let me down.   I really, really wanted a super textured moss stitch for this hat, but I thought some lace to open up the fabric a bit would help me get more mileage out of the yarn, so I added in a lace panel.

With tiny needles for bulky yarn, I knew this was unlikely to help, but I didn't think it would turn out quite so obnoxious-looking, like some sort of bizarre flame tiara.  I mean: why?


Lessons learned:

a/ before you start, make sure you have enough yarn.  find backup yarns for extra distance ahead of time so you can work them into the fabric mindfully as you go.

b/ do a gauge swatch and be sensible about needle size for the yarn weight you are using.

c/ big needles and plain or, better still, open lace stitches will help a yarn go farther.

d/ be open to ripping out and starting over.

Criminy, that looks better already, doesn't it?  And it went on looking better still - not to spoil anything but it did come right in the end.  And it's SO COMFY.  I'll show you the Finished pictures soon!

Meanwhile: hope your day is comfy too and I'll see you tomorrow.

Instant Hat: disaster cowl rescue

Hello, gift cowl:

Yeah, as if.  I knit this thing worrying the whole time that it was too narrow to work as a decorative accessory type cowl.  For an against-the-cold, chin warming cowl? sure.  But I was pretty sure it wouldn't be something you could leave around your neck all day indoors, just to keep the chill off.  Too tight.  And I messed up the cast off.  It's way snugger than the rest of the cowl.

Solution A: rip out and reknit on bigger needles (after buying bigger needles.)

Solution B: run a drawstring through the stitch gaps at the too-tight cast off end, and turn it into a hat.

Obviously, I went with Solution B.  I loved this cowl and the yarn and the way it made the stitch look.  I wanted to hand onto it way too much even to think of giving it away.  I did try, but every time I convinced myself it was all right really, and put it into the gift cowl bag, I had to pull it back out.

Luckily, I had yarn in this same colourway, so making a matchy braid for the drawstring was no problem.

If only the hat didn't keep falling over my eyes all the time.  I mean, I can get past the acutely late 1960s feel of it - I keep looking at it in the mirror and thinking it would be a great wrap for Julie Christie's updo in War and Peace - but I do need to be able to see. 

So, I restrung the drawstring, a little lower this time...

and tied it tight...

and tried it on again.  What do you think - bulky Hatcowl, or Purple Tea Cosy?

I can't help thinking Tea Cosy, but I don't care, because this hat is WARM.

And purple.

Now, it's true that these small changes turned a failed gift cowl into a viable handknit gift (admittedly, only for somebody who sees the late 60s as fashion heaven.)  It should totally have gone back into the gift pile as a hat.  But the selfish knitter inside me isn't having any of it.

Lesson learned: never write off a knit - you may well be able to turn it into a roaring success.

(and also, don't go counting on me for a gift knit, because I am weak.)

Have a wonderful weekend and if you trip over any lemons, best of luck making delicious lemonade.  See you Monday!