links and chains

I just saw that my last previous post was about seven weeks ago. That feels funny, because I've actually been working on lots of things — just not finishing much.

Partly that's because I keep adding on new things to do. My bead collection is a bit of a mess right now, because I've been sorting it into two new sets of drawers I got. They're not "crafty" at all — they're made by MasterCraft and I got them at Canadian Tire. They're the best thing I've found to sort beads, though.

That's got me thinking about jewelry making again, but the whole point of getting the drawers is that my beads are too disorganised to start a new project right now. So I went through my chain maille book (Chained by Rebecca Mojica), and ordered some jump rings in the appropriate sizes and colours from MetalDesignz. I figured since I'm on vacation this week and the Beaches Celtic Festival is this coming weekend, it was appropriate to get some chain maille jewelry done.

So far I've made a Helm chain necklace (about 50cm):

and a Helm Wave bracelet (about 23cm — I like my bracelets loose-fitting):

The bracelet was extra-fun to make. You start with a regular Helm chain that is about 40% longer than what you want the finished bracelet maille to be. In the photo, that's the aluminum links, which if you look closely have copper links every three repeats or so. Then you attach more copper links that form the visual "straight line" through the piece and make the aluminum parts wave.

Right now I'm working on a Byzantine chain necklace. I've played around with the Byzantine pattern before with spare jump rings, but this is the first time I'm actually going to make something with it. In its final form it will be the same length as the Helm chain necklace above:

As for the inevitable "how long did that take" question, the Helm necklace and the bracelet each came in at about two hours apiece. The necklace went a lot faster than I was led to believe from the instruction book, but that may be because I already have done some work with jump rings because of the beading I've done. The Byzantine chain is going more slowly, but that seems to be because the links are smaller and the chain pattern is both denser and a bit more complicated (the photo shows about 8cm).

So what about all those socks I was making? They're still on the go, although I admit I've had a lull lately (surprise 11-hour workdays plus having a sinus infection will do that). But I have got another pair done, the Longitudinal socks from Knitty:

If you squint at the sock on the left in the photo, you'll see there a few dark rows right in the centre. I made the leg section a bit longer than called for in the pattern and wound up being something like 4 metres short. I wound up getting some yarn that was close, but not a perfect match.

Having said that, I think these would be great socks for someone who wants to knit socks but doesn't have the confidence to do sock shaping yet. They're done entirely in garter stitch, and you just need to be able to increase, decrease, and graft. Yes, graft. In fact, these are great socks to learn how to graft on.

The stranded socks are started enough that the pattern is visible now:

That's just before I started the heel shaping. This pattern is about the third time I've tried toe-up socks, and I have to say I am not a convert. It's one time where I really can't figure out what everyone's raving about. I usually wind up doing the heels twice because I seem to have this magical power to make asymmetrical short-row heels, and contrary to the claims of adherents, I have a hard time getting the foot the right length.

The other three pairs of socks on the needles have all had good progress, but nothing worth taking a photo of. Next time I blog it will probably be to announce the BMP Space Invaders socks are done, which means I'll have one more item done for Knit That Shit. Can't wait.

this is so socked up

First, some good news: I finished the Heelix socks this morning! Here they are:

Okay, the ends still need to be darned in. But the knitting is done. So, yay!

The thing is, I've decided that I must have a Sock Project for Every Occasion on the go. That means that there are more socks on the needles.

For example, there's the colourwork socks I started with the leftovers from the pair I just finished (plus two skeins of background colour I bought):

But don't worry! I've been working on socks I was already working on. I made it past the heel shaping on the Carousel socks:

And it's not like I've forgotten about Knit that Shit either! Progress has been made on the Space Invaders socks, the last pair of socks from the meta-project:

And I've been stash-busting by starting a pair of Longitudinal socks:

That sock is considerably farther along already since I took the photo this morning.

I also did some more stash-busting by starting the Grün ist die Hoffnung pattern from Ravelry:

All in all, I have six pairs of socks on the go (one pair of which only needs the ends darned in), and I only bought two new skeins of sock yarn in order to use up some leftovers. That's a net loss of 600g of sock yarn. Plus for once I'll go through a winter with more than two pairs of warm socks to my name. Plus, as you can somewhat see from the photos, every single pair is constructed in a different way: heel out, toe-up half-stranded, sideways, cuff-down stranded, lengthwise in garter stitch, and finally instep-toe-sole-heel-leg. Educational. And fun.

And while it is fun, I can't wait for all of them to be done.

geometry

It is summer, which means that here at The Eyrea it's time for sock-making and stash-busting. Sock-making because it's one of the few projects one can work as a take-along during the summer without dying of heat exhaustion, and stash-busting because the summer always makes me want to de-clutter more.

I always seem to wind up with as many socks on the needles as I have needles to make socks with. In addition to the Space Invaders socks from the Knit that Shit meta-project (now on the second sock!), I have a pair of Double Heelix socks doing a decent job of using up some stash yarn:

The sock in the photo is done, and the second sock has the heel done and the foot about halfway done, with the leg left to go after that. These are surprisingly comfy socks (surprising because the heel is similar to a short-row heel, and those never fit me right). They have been getting a lot of positive comments from non-knitters when I work on them in public, mostly about the colour combination. Sadly, no-one appreciates the implications of the heel-out construction unless they are a knitter themselves, and even then they don't always spot it until I point it out. It's interesting: a sock that starts off as a very tricky geometric construction, but gets admired for its aesthetics!

If anyone reading this has been wanting to try to this pattern but is getting put off by the heel construction, don't be. For both socks I worked from the YouTube video, pausing it as I worked each step after watching the relevant part of the video. Once you get as far as the video takes you, it's not hard to work at all. I also made these to my usual 72 stitches, which is not given in the pattern but is easy enough to get to if you've made a few socks before.

I also used some more stash yarn to start the Carousel sock:

For this one, you knit a 12-stitch strip around the circumference of the leg and foot, attaching it in a spiraling fashion. That's most of the leg part in the photo. These are a little boring to work after you get the first round done, but are a great excuse to practise knitting back backwards.

On top of the three pairs of socks I have on the go, there's also the mitred jacket I started from leftovers. It's from the Swing, Swagger, Drape book by Jane Slicer-Smith:

That's most of a sleeve in the photo. I discovered to my horror that I have over two kilos of mismatched white, off-white and black yarn lying around, and this seemed like the most logical way to use it up. The yarns are all over the place in terms of shade and texture, but as you can see from the photo, they seem to blend well enough. All of the "white" areas in the photo are different combinations of white and off-white stripes. I'm not really following the stripe combinations in the book — just using them as a guide to make my own combinations. Although I have a lot of black, I have much more white and off-white, so that dictates the colour choices a lot.

The nice thing about mitred squares is that you're pretty much encourages to weave in the ends as you work. The two white ends at the top of the photo will get woven in once the side panels on the sleeves are completed. It makes for a tidy wrong side and, let's face it, uses up a little bit more yarn than having long runs of single colours.

Of all of these, the Space Invaders sock and the Double Heelix are the farthest along. It will be nice to start reporting some finished projects again!

rendered

The crocheted squares blanket is done! Not bad, considering I started on 20 May and finished last night (15 June). Here's the photographic proof, and some statistics to go with it:

• About 1,660g of yarn went towards the blanket, 400g of which I bought especially for the project (because I needed the colours to balance out the scheme). 
• The final blanket weighs 1,452g
• I still have 182g of leftover yarn. That sounds like a lot, but it's all in small balls of stuff that's good for embroidery or waste yarn, and not much else. I was surprised it weighed that much.

So that makes... 53g of ends that just got tossed for lack of anything to do with them.

Assembly:
I worked the blocks in vertical strips, starting with the centre one. I added two blocks extra in length to the original blanket size, but kept the same number of blocks in width. Originally I'd wanted to make it two blocks wider as well, but I would have run out of yarn. Instead, I opted for a wider-than-pattern border that added about another block's worth of width and length.

Finishing:

• Each block had its ends darned in before it was added to its respective strip.
• Blocks were always added as they were made.
• Blocks were slip stitched together using black yarn (a small nod to the Kaffe Fassett/Liza Prior Lucy quilt this blanket's pattern resembles, which was backed with thin black fabric and no batting)
• For the small blocks, I slip stitched them horizontally first, just attaching them to the previous blocks in the strip. Once a run of small blocks was attached, I did a single vertical seam to connect them all.
• Ends from seams were darned in once the seam was joined to another seam. The last ends at the outer edge of the blanket were done once the first round of the edging was done. So there was no angst-ridden "I have all these ends to finish!" moment.

The edging mostly alternated between single crochet and double crochet rounds, until I got near the end and started running out of yarn. The last two rounds were one round of double crochet, then one round of single crochet. I'd saved a 100g ball of yarn especially to do this with, and it took almost all of the ball to finish the rounds.

Overall, I'm pleased with how it turned out, especially in terms of its size and dimensions. It makes a great blanket for the sofa. I'm still not sure it's not ugly, but I am sure it could have been uglier.

KTS: reverse knitting

One of the items in my Knit That Shit meta-project is an Estonian lace shawl I started sometime in the last four years or so.

When I wrote up its entry on the KTS page, I said I couldn't remember why I stopped working on it.

More recently, I picked it up again and realised it was because it was going to take every last centimetre of yarn to finish it to the size given in the pattern book.

I had a lot of misgivings about that. Ideally I'd wanted the shawl to be a little longer than what was given in the pattern book. It also made me wonder if I'd lost some yarn somewhere along the way. I remembered four skeins, and I had four skeins, but still. The yarn had been bought specially to make this shawl, and I know better than to buy just barely enough.

So I stopped knitting, did some math, and had a good consideration of the pros and cons of continuing. In the end I came to a decision I am comfortable and happy with.

The shawl now looks like this:

The ever-perceptive J-A pointed out I should make a special effort to blog about this because, she says, people don't always realise from the blog how much unravelling I do. I think I was lucky in that the grandmother who taught me how to knit emphasised that real knitters unravel when they have to, instead of just crossing their fingers and carrying on even when every bit of reason they possess is screaming that the piece isn't going to work out.

Well, this wasn't going to work out. So I saved myself a lot of grief and time by unravelling now instead of later. I also saved myself from doing a lot of work on a shawl I was never going to wear.

What's going to happen to the yarn? The same Estonian lace pattern book has another pattern for a shawl in a similar shape, but which only takes half the amount of yarn. That's because this pattern had lots of nupps (bobbles) in the fabric, whereas the alternative shawl only has them in the end-borders. In theory, I should be able to make a nice long shawl and have a comfortable abundance of yarn to make it with. I like both patterns equally, so aesthetics aren't an issue.

In the end it will be a net gain.

crochet as decluttering

We just had a long weekend in Canada, which means I did some decluttering. Some of this was pretty basic, along the lines of "if you can't stand seeing it there and there's nowhere else to put it, throw it out." Some of it required another level of thinking:

Like a lot of DIYers, I have a stash problem. I have tons of excuses for it: I used to live in a much bigger apartment where I had an entire room devoted to stash, I inherited stash from two different people, yarn is the one thing besides books I will go shopping for when I'm stressed out... the point is, I have too much damn yarn. I have a sixty-square-metre apartment now, and there is yarn in every single room except the kitchen and washroom.

And there used to be yarn in the kitchen (in the freezer, if you were wondering).

The need to transform yarn into finished objects inspired the Knit that Shit meta-project, which after a brief winter hiatus is ramping up again for the 2013 session. I can envision a day when KTS is a seasonal competitive activity, sort of a marathon version of the Ravelympics, but it's not there yet.

I treat KTS like a giant game of Flux, changing the rules as real life and my own whims intervene. So long as the overall direction is towards finishing the projects and clearing out the excess stash, I'm okay.

The end-goal is to have all the stash yarn fit into the cedar-lined blanket box I inherited from the grandmother who taught me how to knit, with one (one!) WIP basket beside the couch.

I'm years from that. Instead, I'm running Knit that Shit with the current Flux rule that I'm allowed to start a new project if, and only if, it is mostly using up stash yarn. I can buy new yarn to complete the project, but it has to result in a net loss of stash.

Hence the striped squares blanket project:

It's using up ten skeins of various acrylic how'd-that-get-there, plus I bought four more to balance off the colour scheme. Well, that and I want to make the blanket bigger than what the Patons pattern (login required to download, but free) I'm following said to do.

So far I'm about 20% done. Not bad. It will feel good to have it finished.

This is the first time I've worked in acrylic for a while. I acknowledge that sometimes acrylic is the best way to go for some things, but more and more even the nice acrylic squicks me out. The price of acrylic has gone up with the price of oil, but the price of wool has been holding pretty steady and is a comparative bargain again, even for the good stuff.

This blanket will be fine to keep in the living room for when I get a chill when I'm sitting on the couch. But I don't think I'd work a large piece in acrylic again.

knitting in blue

It's been a while since I posted anything here, but I have been making things. Or, at least, finishing off things, which is just about the same. Around here, it's even better, because it means I'm getting stash reduced.

The biggest and most recent Finished Object is the blue assymetrical jacket I made for myself, sort of as a Yule present. I finished it just in time to put it away for the summer. That's okay — it's better than having it 90% done all summer and lying around. Here's the finished jacket:

The pattern came from the Fall 2012 issue of knit.wear, and has a really cool construction method. To wit:

• Knit the back flat from the top down, using short rows to shape the back neck. 
• Knit the fronts from the top down, also using short rows to shape the neck. This was the first of the two mods I made to the pattern: instead of knitting the pieces separately and seaming them to the back, I picked up the stitches and knitted down. This made for a still-firm but less bulky shoulder seam, and a nigh-invisible one too. I am all about the firm, non-bulky, nigh-invisible shoulder seams. I've probably spent more time figuring out how to achieve this than any other finishing in my 30+ years as a knitter.
• Pick up the sleeve stitches from the armholes and knit down, using short-row shaping to fit the set-in armholes. This was my second mod: I made full-length sleeves instead of the half-length ones given in the pattern. Who wants to wear a heavy worsted jacket with sleeves that only go down to the elbows? If the rest of you isn't overheated, it means your bare forearms will be freezing.
• The sleeves are finished by casting on new stitches and knitting the cabled cuff around the bottom edge, domino-style. Then the edges on the body are done the same way. The last part involves I-cording across the top of the cabled border and then I-cording around the neck.

It's all a rather neat trick. The whole thing is held together by a single button near the neck. I haven't found the right button yet.

Here's a loving close-up of that nigh-invisible shoulder seam:

And because it has the back cast-on underneath, it won't stretch out easily. So there.

Just as I'd promised myself, I went back to the Knit That Shit meta-project once I'd done the jacket. I thought I'd line the summer purse that's been languishing, or work on the socks or the doily, but for some reason I grabbed the Estonian stole that's been sitting in its own project bag for months:

I think I know why I got discouraged about this one. It's become very evident that it will take every last centimetre of yarn to make this thing as big as the pattern book says to, and I was hoping to make it a bit larger (as with her sock books, Nancy Bush designs gorgeous stuff for short people). The ever-resourceful J-A suggested going back to Americo and buying one more ball of yarn, assuming they still carry this colour. There's absolutely no hope in matching the dye lots since I bought the yarn about five years ago, but if I use something close for the border, then I'll have plenty of yarn. It's a good idea. At this point I'd even consider a different-coloured border that looked cool.

Onwards.

photo finish

After an epic week of extreme knitting, ie: knitting every moment I was awake and not working or getting ready for work, I managed to knit the fronts, button bands, collar, and sleeves of the tiger jacket, then get it finished. It wasn't quite in the time for the nieces' birthday party, because I wound up darning in ends for almost two hours during the party itself, but at last I don't have any knitting that's on a deadline.

Here's how the final hours went down: I knitted off and on all Saturday, finally putting away my knitting needles at 3:30am Sunday. Four hours later I was up again, darning in ends and seaming. Even though I knitted in all the ends I could and clipped them off before seaming, there were still a lot of ends. I enjoy darning in ends, but it was a bit daunting on a tight deadline.

At 8:30 in the morning, the jacket pieces looked like this:

The first thing I did was a little out of the usual order — I sewed on the buttons. In this particular case, it made sense to me because it meant I could close the two fronts into one piece, making it easier to handle:

Next up was attaching the sleeves. My brother texted me that he was on his way to pick me up for the birthday party just as I had the second sleeve safety-pinned in place. I finished the seaming in the car (sooo glad it was his turn to drive this time) and started darning in the ends. The ends got finished at the party, and the finished product looked like this:

It got folded up and put on top of the toy tiger I got to match with it:

My niece seemed to be all right with the jacket (hey, she's four), but she was absolutely smitten with the tiger cub doll, and had him jumping, roaring, and talking in no time.

That's it for deadline knitting for this year. Now it's back to Knit That Shit, although the first thing I want to do is sew in the lining for the cotton purse. The knitting's already done for that part.

smitten. with scones.

Recently (and for the life of me I can't remember how), I came across the Smitten Kitchen recipe blog run by Deb Perelman.

Honestly: most recipe blogs I could do without. Either they have bizarre ingredients choices (Splenda in KAISER ROLLS? What, are you putting the yeast on a diet? The sugar is for the yeast in the bread, not the people eating the bread!!!!), or else they assume you have a giant suburban kitchen and all freaking day to cook stuff, or that you shop at the same supermarket as the blogger and therefore just need to know the brand names, not the size or type of ingredient.

Perelman doesn't pull any of that. Her recipes are all made with real food, with stuff you probably already have on hand, for kitchens that will never be on The Food Network because there's no way you could ever fit a camera in there, much less see what the cook is doing.

There is a Smitten Kitchen cookbook out, which I may well request as a birthday present. In the meantime, I've been going through the blog archives, and have been pleasantly surprised by how often I think, "Yeah! That would be great to make!" I even made a Pinterest board to keep track of my Smitten finds.

I love baking scones — they're like baking's answer to Play Doh — and the Smitten Kitchen blog has several scone recipes. This morning, I got up early and rebelled against the dangerous-to-drive-in sleet-and-snow mix we were getting by making the roasted pear and chocolate chunk scones.

They came out looking like this:

I made the following substitutes:

• brown spelt flour instead of all-purpose
• 1 tbsp of demerrara sugar instead of 1/4 cup granulated (I would leave this out entirely next time — the pears and semi-sweet chocolate add enough sweetness)
• no added salt because I was using salted butter
• Balkan-style plain yogurt instead of heavy cream
• no egg wash (ergo no further added salt or sugar)
• hand mixing instead of stand mixing ('cos I don't own a stand mixer)

I also baked the scones as a single giant, scored patty instead of cutting the dough into six pieces, but that's because my dough came out very wet, even after I added more flour. Then I let them bake for ten minutes longer to make up for the different configuration. But they came out great anyhow, because, you know, they're scones.

(And yes, just like with knitting, I can never just follow the damn directions.)

The results have a great texture and a surprisingly filling. There's only a quarter-cup of chocolate in the whole batch, so while they can't count as regular breakfast food, but they're a nice occasional thing. Definitely the next time it's my turn to bring the goodies for an office meeting, I'll be including a batch of these.

I finished something!

Right, so two weekends ago (oops) was a long weekend here in Ontario. I made it even longer by taking the Friday off, and it's just as well I did, because all I did that day  was knit my mum's birthday shawl.

The birthday brunch was the following day. The shawl got finished around 10pm Friday night, took a trip through a cold soak wash and a spin in the washing machine, and then got pinned out on some foam safety squares I keep just for such occasions:

The squares (you can't see them because the entire width and length of the shawl covers them) are just over 60cm wide. The shawl was supposed to be blocked out to 55cm, but I figured with the strong vertical rib, it would shrink back once it was off the blocking wires, so I overstretched it slightly.

Before the trip through the wash, I was worried that the shawl would be way too narrow. When I was working on it in public, not a few people stopped me and admired it, but they always thought it was a scarf. After washing, the fabric went "limp" (ie: none of that knitted springiness at all) and it was very easy to stretch it out. I could have gone a few more centimetres if I'd had the space.

The shawl was pinned out by 11:30pm, at which time I crashed into bed. I was (and still am) sick with a sinus/walking pneumonia thing that makes me cough and feel tired. I wound up sleeping through my weekly Saturday morning chiropractic appointment for the first time ever, but had enough time to unpin the shawl, fold it up, and toss it in a gift bag before my brother Steve picked me up so we could carpool to the birthday brunch.

The shawl is one of those patterns that one appreciates more in a finished state than in the knitting, I think, although I'm glad I made it. The secret seems to be to go like hell — go as fast as you can, working on it as often as you can, and take it anywhere you might plausibly have five minutes to knit with. Like many simple knits, it's a great excuse to push yourself to learn to knit faster.

Speaking of knitting faster, I have eleven more days until my niece's tiger jacket needs to be done, so I need to get cracking on that. And then the entire family is cut off from handmade gifts until next year!

why is conservation a zero-sum game?

The good news: the WWF is once again holding its National Sweater Day.

The bad news: they're still running with that "only grannies knit sweaters, and although they're skilful, the aesthetics are awful" idea.

Now look, I think grannies who make sweaters are incredibly cool — after all, the Oma who taught me how to knit was one. But here's the thing: since the 1990s — that is, over twenty years ago — knitting has once again become popular with people who aren't grannies. Many knitters aren't old enough to be mums, much less grannies.

Actually, the last two paragraphs themselves are far too specific, because I left out a lot of crafters doing a lot of cool crafts that don't involve knitting. Last time I researched a particular crochet stitch I was trying to learn, fully 50% of the web sites with the tutorials I needed were by men who crochet. And there are, at my last count, approximately fifty gazillion crochet sites. That doesn't even begin to include the quilters, weavers, spinners, and other enthusiastic textile DIYers of all ages, genders, and family roles who are doing their bit to keep themselves warm without stressing out the furnace.
Now, there is one (only one) counter-argument I can think of in defence of the WWF. It runs like this: the WWF isn't trying to reach the DIYers, because we're already warm 'n' wooly and don't need to be told to turn our heat down.

The problem is, the message that is getting out is that handmade sweaters are unfashionable crap and the only reason to wear them is to save the planet.

Here's another trend that the WWF seems unaware of: up until the 1980s, hand-knitters tried to keep up with fashion, but because hand-knitting takes longer than running industrial machinery (the price of producing superior fabric), the hand-knitters tended to be about two years behind fashion. In the late 80s more and more knitters started to design their own, and the rise of the World Wide Web led to a globel idea exchange that accelerated this trend right past the industrial knitwear designers.

Now the industrialists try to keep up with the DIYers. Don't believe me? Look, I have walked through The Eaton Centre and found sweaters for sale exactly the same as the one I was wearing at the time. The difference was, my sweater was custom-sized to fit me, in the colour and fibre content I wanted, and was three years old at the time of the discovery of its industrially-made clone. Yeah baby. Three years. And I altered that pattern a lot.

If the WWF thinks enabling the adjustment of thermostats is power to the people, imagine what they could do with transferring some of the means of production, fashion, and creativity back into skilled hands. We could save the energy on machinery overhead, shipping, and marketing. That's a lot more energy saved than just in some domestic dwellings.

They need to dial down the stereotypes as well as the heat.

halfway

I took this photo last Saturday, when the reversible cabled shawl was at 85cm, or almost halfway. It's just past halfway now, at about 105cm.

It's still working out to almost exactly 10cm per pattern repeat (one left cable, one right cable), but the yarn has been gaining on the pattern repeats a little bit each time. I'm estimating that it will use up about 18 skeins of the Smart by Sandnesgarn, maybe even 17.

What definitely continues to hold true is that this is one of those patterns where you have to go as quickly as you physically can. The cable rows add some interest, as does (for me) running out of a skein and splicing on a new one, but those eleven rows of plain 2x2 rib in between those two events can get to be a drag if one doesn't keep to the objective of working through them as quickly as possible.

As for the tiger jacket... I have the pocket lining and one front started, but I've been concentrating on the shawl. I'm just not into switching back and forth right now. It will be nice to get a large project (meaning this shawl) off the needles, so full steam ahead.

entr'acte

My mum requested a warm shawl to wear, preferably with cables. We sat down with some of my pattern books on Christmas Day, once the nieces had gone to bed and things had settled down a bit, and after some discussion we decided to go with the reversible cabled shawl from an old Vogue Knitting (never throw out your pattern magazines!). She asked for it to be grey, and in a more "substantial" yarn than the thin stuff they'd used for the magazine photo.

I checked Ravelry (login may be required), and people have made this same shawl in everything from lace to worsted weight. Impressively, they all look good. Different, of course, but good.

I decided to stick with a DK weight yarn, since that matched the original pattern gauge most closely, and wound up with some superwash wool. Here's what the first 20cm looked like:

I keep thinking it's too narrow, but when I measure it, it's exactly what the pattern calls for, and falls to waist-length on me when I hold it up to my shoulder. The fabric is nice and substantial without being heavy. I like scrunching it a lot.

It's taking about one skein for 10cm, so at the present rate it will take 18 skeins to get done. I bought 20, so no worries there.

The tiger jacket for the eldest niece continues as well. I got the back done:

Whenever I talk to other knitters about intarsia, there's always someone who makes a comment about "all those ends." The trick for dealing with ends to is weave them in as you knit. That way, when you're done, you can just clip them off. Here's what the back of the jacket looks like right now:

I still have to do some weaving-in at the edges, where there weren't long enough runs of one colour to knit in the ends, but compared to the original number, there really isn't a lot to do. And, unlike the intarsia knitting itself, weaving in ends on a finished piece is portable.

I suspect the shawl will get done a lot sooner than the jacket. I'm having a hard time staying motivated on the jacket. Not because it's nasty evil intarsia — I quite like intarsia — but because I have a bad feeling it's never going to get worn. We'll see.

I'm also missing Knit That Shit terribly. It feels good to miss finishing things so badly. That didn't *ahem* stop me from getting yarn for a jacket for me while I was getting the shawl yarn, but still, I would like to get back to the meta-project. Besides, the jacket for me should go quickly. Really.

happy you! a free pattern for yule/solstice

When my brother Rob and I were very little, we misheard our grandmother's seasonal greeting of "Happy Yule!" as "Happy You!". Of course we were happy — we were getting presents and treats. Does it get any better than that for a kid?

Oma thought this was hilarious and never bothered to correct us. Which, in a family where all the grownups knew at least three languages while the Canadian-born kids only had English and whatever French they'd learned at school, was pretty normal.

Along with all the regular presents we would each get a pair of slippers Oma had knitted us. Unfortunately for Oma, we learned very quickly that these slippers made it very easy to "surf" laminated flooring, so they were usually worn to holes in about a week.

This year, I've been requested to make cute animal boot cuffs for my nieces. Fingers crossed they won't wear out quickly — they have no soles, so they're no good for surfing laminated flooring — but since the design work took far more time than the knitting, I thought I would share them as a Yule present for any knitter who would like an extra stocking stuffer for little ones. Mine are of a kitty and a panda, but dogs, pigs, foxes, brown bears, and other animals could be figured out by mixing and matching different facial features and colours. I rather think the kitty's hair bow would make a cute bow tie on a bear or a dog.

I'd rate this project as beginner-level, so long as you're okay with doing a bit of free-form embroidery. If you're a knitter who only knows how to knit, as opposed to someone with a general background in needlecraft, this would be a good opportunity to stretch your skill set. The knitting part is very quick; if you're exchanging gifts on the 24th or 25th, you still have time.

Download the pattern PDF here. If you have any feedback (especially if you find something that needs correcting!), please leave a comment!

Happy Yule!

DIYers are batshit

So, what do you get up to on Friday nights? Watch a film, maybe? Have a cuddle with your boyfriend/girlfriend/both?

This is a DIY blog, so you already know I got up to no good.

Tonight, I was playing around with ground glass and industrial chemicals, all in an effort to make something pretty.People who like to make their own stuff are all batshit the same way.

But you have to understand. I started making a bracelet, but needed a clasp for it. The clasp I wanted (a five-loop slide clasp) wasn't as easy to find as it should have been, but the helpful bead shop clerk suggested these 5-to-1 connectors. Great! Just the thing!

But you see, they had a part in the middle for a cabochon, and I couldn't find any to match the bracelet bits I'd already made.

So I ground up some glass in my mortar with my pestle, putting a small plastic bag over top so bits of glass wouldn't go everywhere. Safety first!

You can see a bit of the bracelet in the top right. It's a blend of blue and white-blue beads, so I made a 50:50 mix when I ground them up.

Next, I mixed up some Ice Resin, spooned the ground glass into the cab part of the connectors, and then dropped Ice Resin over the glass with a toothpick. The resin picked up the glass bits and I had to sort of roll the resulting mixture around to get it to stay. The final step was to drop extra bits of ground glass onto any connectors which looked a bit light on colorant. Here are the connectors with the resin curing:

Tomorrow I'll check them for sharp edges and file them with my new jewelry files if I have to. It's just a touch of colour, but it will be nice once the beaded strands are added. I have enough for a couple of bracelets, a necklace, and a couple of earrings.

I wonder what it's like just to be happy buying whatever's available without changing it up.

no pressure or anything

This is where the most-finished boot cuffs for the nieces were at, as of this afternoon:

That's supposed to be a panda on the left, and a Japanese-style cartoon kitty (like a Hello Kitty) on the right. I feel pretty good about the panda, but am not entirely pleased with the kitty. However, that might just be because she's not supposed to have a mouth.

The panda shows how the boot cuffs get worn — with the ribbed part around the wearer's leg and the cute animal part cuffed over. The kitty shows the full structure.

The other two cuffs are knitted, but not embroidered. I also have to knit two sets of ears (one panda, one kitty), and one more pink bow.

Then it's back to the tiger jacket, which is looking less and less likely to get done on time. Oh well, technically it's for the elder niece's birthday. Erm, which gives me an extra week.

seasonal disruptions

I've been knitting a lot lately, but none of it has been for the Knit That Shit meta-project. Why? Two interdependent reasons.

The first one is: non-knitting relatives.

The second one is: Yule.

Relatives requested that I make my nieces some stuff for Yule. That's cool; I'm into making stuff for my nieces, and I'd already figured out that I wouldn't make my initial KTS deadline of New Year's Eve (although I'm still bound and determined to finish the list!).

The stuff I'm making are boot toppers. I'll post photos eventually, but for now, be it known that I had to design these things from scratch. I couldn't find any patterns that were close to what was desired, and one pair requires some colour work that also needs to be done from scratch (again, more on that when I have something to show off).

In order to make the boot toppers, I had to measure my eldest niece's boots. The easiest way to achieve this was to get her to help me. This led naturally into her being interested in knitting for the first time (she's three going on four), so I brought some books along of children's patterns for her to look at.

We measured the boots, and we looked at pictures of kids wearing sweaters, and then we did some spool knitting (which she picked up right away, I'm proud to say). And about an hour after all of that was put away, I was working the first few centimetres of the first boot topper as we all watch cartoons on TV, and a little voice said:

"Auntie Kat, will you make me a sweater?"

It's the first request from either of the nieces (the youngest one is just starting to talk, mind you), so it was bound to be honoured. And that is why last week, in a year where I have publicly announced in blogland that I'm not buying any more yarn except to use up stash yarn, I found myself at the local Mary Maxim's picking out DK yarn to make the eldest niece a DK cardigan from Zoë Mellor's Animal Knits.

Said cardigan was moving along swimmingly, with thirty rows of seed stitch and intarsia already completed, when I took at look at it and thought, "Those stitches look awfully small."

So I measured, and discovered that instead of 4mm diameter needles, I had used American size 4 needles. American size 4 needles are in actuality only 3.5mm in diameter.

This leads to a 1.57mm smaller circumference, and a smaller stitch by the same length. That's a straight-line difference across the 93 stitches of the back of 146mm, but of course knitted stitches are formed of waves, not straight lines. Typically it takes 3-4 times the straight-line width of a row in yarn to knit that row (5-6 times for crochet). Assuming, therefore, the wave of stitches is 3.5 times the straight-line width of the row, I was using up 511mm less yarn each row than I was supposed to be. Over, remember 93 stitches.

511 divided by 93 is 5.4, and 5.4cm just happens to be almost exactly the amount I was too narrow on the knitted piece.

Which is all a very long, mathematical way of saying that a) I'm pretty sure that when I use actual 4mm diameter needles, I'll be exactly on-gauge and b) I ripped out all 30 completed rows today, so I'm behind even on the new projects. Argh.

Also, c): when oh when will Americans join the rest of the world and use metric? And if they won't, can the Canadian government at least make them re-label needlework tools for sale in Canada so that they're in metric? Please? Pretty please?

KTS: the problem with vacations

Still knitting the double-knit jacket, still blogging, but even I've noticed that it's slowed down considerably since I went to New York City (just in time to avoid the hurricane, as it turns out —  it will be a relief to hear things have gone back to normal there).

Thursday night I had a knit night at a friend's, and got a decent amount of work done on the double-knit jacket's sleeve. That's still the first sleeve, which seems to go slower the more I work on it. At this point the top of the tree is done (you know the sleeves from the shoulder down, remember), and I'm on the trunk part, which is just a straight vertical with geometrically arranged birds artfully scattered around it. I worked all evening on this thing and never even had to crack open the pattern book for a glance at the chart.

So I should just be zooming through, right? I should be, but I'm finding these "relaxing" parts freaking tedious for some reason. The parts with the charts seem to go faster, maybe because I make myself do a complete round so I don't lose my place.

Still, at this point I'm at about 41cm. Another 5cm and I can switch over to the cuff part of the chart. Then it's just the other sleeve (slog), the collar (plain stripes, but only a few rows), and the ties to keep the coat closed when I wear it.

It's like one of those dreams where the more you run, the more your goal gets further away.

KTS: still going

I didn't bring anything from the Knit That Shit meta-project with me to New York City, simply because lugging needlework along when I was trying to travel light didn't make much sense — not to mention I didn't want to check my bags if I didn't want to, and somehow sock needles are now considered deadly weapons. (And people wonder where I get my ideas for my Friday Flash stories).

Now that I'm back home in TO, I've been sticking to the double-knitted jacket, even though it is getting very large indeed. I still question the fanaticism some people have for making everything seamless and yet making the sleeves last, which means you wind up working on the narrow tube of the sleeve with the rest of the jacket (or sweater, or whatever) hanging off it. It's got to the point where the jacket can't really be worked in public anymore, because even supporting it whilst sitting in a chair gets too awkward. I pretty much need a couch or a love seat to myself.

Still, when I do sit down and work on it, it seem to go quickly — although maybe that's just because of how long it took to do the body. The sleeve was about 37cm long last time I measured it, and needs to be 50cm to be done. So I'm on the last third, with another sleeve and a collar left to do (okay, plus those ties I want to add, but they're not absolutely necessary).

So the marathon continues on.

KTS: lost the photo op, winning the war

I really wanted to wear my Central Park double knitted jacket in the actual Central Park in New York City. As Veronica in Heathers would have put it, it would have been so very. But as of today I only have about 40cm done on the first sleeve, and there's simply no way for it to get done in time. Here's how the jacket looked the last time I had a chance to take a photo (mostly it's a photo of the sleeve, of course):

Still, I've got a lot of knitting done on this jacket in a short amount of time. It will get done, and it will be worn this autumn/winter. If the Knit That Shit project means anything, it means that I'll have one largeish project completed and wearable.

One thing that's been speeding up the process is that I fished around in my circular needles bag for shorter circulars for the sleeve (the ones I used for the body are too long to use without the so-called Magic Loop method, aka pulling out the excess cord two or three times per round). I found out I have Addi Turbos of all things in the right size and cord length. I normally don't put out the money for Addis, so I must have been pretty desperate when I bought these, but they really do make the knitting go faster. Normally I don't give a rat's ass about the speed of the knitting so long as it's not mind-numbingly slow, either, but in the case of Knit That Shit, time is somewhat of the essence.

I haven't been blogging every day, just because I was committed to a strategy of "better to knit than to blog". The project still continues on, though. It's even been going at a slightly faster pace than before.