Category Archives: knitting

Fuzzy Ocean Scarf

knitting

I just realized that I never posted a picture of the scarf I made for my daughter for her birthday –  Well, which is to say I made it for the one week anniversary of her birthday.

I did wrap the yarn, though, and let her open that on her birthday. The look on her face as she tried to figure out how to articulate “Mom, you are crazy” without being ungrateful was priceless.

She does love the scarf, though. Since it took me a couple months to remember to get a picture, you can tell from the wrinkles that it has been well-used (my daughter doesn’t mess around when it comes to wrapping scarves around things). The magic here is in the yarn itself, which shades oh-so-slowly between blue and aqua-green. The pattern is just a garter stitch until the yarn ran out.

Silk garden hitchhiker scarf

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Noro’s silk garden has beautiful colors, but I guess hadn’t thought too much about how the colors cycled. They cycle slowly. Very, very slowly. So, as usual for me, I ended up with something that I like, but not quite what I had envisioned in my head.

I really liked the beginning (the narrow purple to yellow at the bottom in the right picture), but then a little light went off about halfway into the orange/red section – my stripes were going to get thinner and thinner as I went further into hitchhiker, because the pattern works by expanding each row (it’s a fantastic pattern, by the way!). I went through the usual Stages of Knitting, all done while still knitting away on the project:

1. Surprise (???)
2. Disbelief (But, but… It’s not possible that this yarn cycles through colors so slowly!)
3. Despair (Crap – This is going to be the goofiest looking hitchhiker scarf ever)
4. Anger (Why didn’t anyone tell me? Why did I ever think I liked this yarn?)
5. Wild Thoughts (I should just rip this all apart and pick a different project.)
6. Acceptance (I’m not wasting all this effort. I still like the colors. So, I get to have a stripy scarf.)

As it turns out, the stripes didn’t get as narrow as I thought they would (though only because I ran out of yarn). And I like the final result – using a thicker yarn makes it more snuggly than usual, and the stripes create an interesting effect when I wear it (because they are diagonal).

Redbeard gets a hat

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Just in time for the thaw (it got up to a balmy 35 degrees today), I made Redbeard a hat:

It’s a criminally soft yarn (an alpaca cotton blend) that he chose himself while dutifully accompanying me to the yarn store as we made the rounds of shopping errands. Positive reinforcement is a good thing.

 

No lessons this time – it went remarkably smoothly and as expected.

Mittens, part twee

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Well, I ran out of yarn right at the end, but managed to bind off the fingers. However, I was still left with thumb holes. Faced with the choice of waiting until I could get back to the yarn store and having mittens right now, but with different colored thumbs, my daughter decided color contrast was good.

The end result is funky, but sort of cute. I had just a couple options, since I left the vast majority of my stash back in Florida.

The interesting this here is that this white yarn (that my daughter picked) is actually some that I spun myself, and this is the first time that I have put any yarn I’ve spun to real use. The mitten yarn is DK weight, but the homespun is…. thick. The end result, after a lot of cursing while trying to knit 2 stitches together over and over (I actually bent one of my needles a little – those puny size 3s just couldn’t handle my fearsome yarn!) was having really thick, dense mitten thumbs. I’m going to spin this as a good thing – extra protection against the cold while making snow balls!

Lessons learned: You CAN switch up a needle size (or two… or four) in the middle of a project if your needles are too small. For the thumbs, once I switched up to size 7, things went much better. Plus, at least in this case, you can’t tell when I made the switch. My other lesson? Sadly, I think it is “Always buy an extra skein” – I am going to be able to make a heck of a scrap blanket very soon, I suspect!

Still here!

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We’re still here and up to beer- and fiber-related things. Just not much to say much about at the moment.

I extended my son’s “silver” mittens, which went fine. My daughter has demanded a pair of her own, which is fine except that I’ve realized, as I finished her first mitten (minus the thumb) that I HATE double-pointed knitting. I’m also knitting Redbeard a hat, which I love to knit because I can knit in the round. Pictures soon, I want to wait until I can get the mitten finished enough for my daughter to model, because they scrunch up into yarn-balls when not worn. Does one actually have to block mittens? That just seems wrong!

(A “Massive” snow “storm” here (read: 2 inches over the course of the morning) in the Netherlands meant we had to cancel our trip to Paris this weekend. I know, world’s smallest violin and all, but it was still pretty pitiful to watch our son standing in the snow at the outdoor-only train platform crying while we waited for our train that never came. Plus, this was supposed to be our birthday present to our daughter, so she was only barely managing not to cry herself, at least at one point. Poor things!)

Mittens (and beer)

Beer, knitting,

It’s dropped down into the low 30s here (or -4/-2 C, which sounds so much more alarming), and so I experienced some increased pressure to finish the mittens. (Especially because my son was resisting going outside for recess.)

Here they are:

I started to move my beer and its stray bottle cap out of the way, and then thought “Well, it is Knittles and BEER after all…” and so here we see the mittens, plus the beer that helped me finish them last night.

For once my second copy was better than the first, thought I did have to frog my first attempt at the second mitten. The pattern is actually meant for a two-color mitten, with columns of a different color in the cuffs. My son was not at all interested in this, so I just stuck with “silver”, but now I think I understand the basic logic of slipping stitches to do multi-color patterns. So, that’s my lesson for this project. 🙂

Also, I’m not so happy with the length of the cuffs. I did what the pattern called for, but they seem too short to me. My son seems to agree- he kept trying to pull his coat sleeves over them all the way to school. I may try to lengthen them after the fact with just a simple ribbed pattern.

Dangerous knowledge and fun with metric

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So, Google completely lied. The yarn store is actually more like 4 minutes from my house. This is dangerous, dangerous news for me. Luckily (at least for my bank account), I have pretty much no time to knit right now.

It turns out the store is not really a yarn shop, it’s more of a general store of fiber-related crafts. This is good and bad, actually, because I now have pretty much a one-stop shop for most of my addictions hobbies, but it also means that there’s not the kind of diversity of offerings that you’d expect from a yarn shop. As Redbeard would say – there’s breadth but not depth.

Though some interesting depths are there! There is a huge selection of large, interesting buttons, and I think they must stock every color of embroidery floss ever made. The yarn selection is… interesting. I found some really neat things, but in the end just got this as my first haul:

Why grey? My son has Made It Known that he requires mittens. Silver mittens. I took him with me and we looked at our options together before he wandered off to the play nook (where he promptly barricaded himself in). I actually did find a cool, glossy, multi-colored yarn that could possibly be said to have silver in it, if you are 4. But, it was the good stuff, meaning hand wash only. There is no point where knitting my 4-year-old (“Look at the rocks I found today!”) son hand-wash-only mittens becomes a good idea. But, then I found this (acrylic) grey. I uptalked it into silver to my son and bought some “3.5mm” needles to go with it.

On a totally unrelated topic, I predict that a new “metric woes” tag is going to get really big over in the side bar before this trip is up. In this shop, I stared hard at the yarn label, willing it to reveal its secrets:

Washable …

 

 

 

 

… Made in Kosovo (?!) …

 

 

 

 

…. and Jackpot! … even in English! … kind of …

So, machine wash in 40 degree water, no bleach, tumble dry okay, don’t iron it… good, good….

And… it’s okay to park on it. Near it? With it. In a parking garage. Or perhaps a stadium …

Crochet or knitting needles, use size 3 to 4. Hmm…. does that mean 3-4mm? And what about this gauge. Well, I can’t read those yet in English, so no wonder it makes even less sense in Metric. The last picture has only just now clicked – it will take about 450 grams to make a sweater. But, for a 40 year old? Size 40?

In the end, I bought the 3.5 DP needles on the idea that the label must mean 3-4mm. Once home, I ended up looking up the yarn online and found that it is a “3” (equally silly measurement system, btw), and so my new US size 4 needles will work just fine. Apparently in this one case, metric and US work out the same.

SHEEP!

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So, while I have not yet sighted any wooden shoes, I have seen many windmills. Old ones, all wooden, quaint and squat, and new ones like these:

The biggest surprise, though, is the all the SHEEP! They are everywhere, around every corner. It seems like every patch of green has at least 3 sheep happily grazing on it. I halfway expect to wake up one morning and find them in my yard. Though, they would surely be terrorized by the freakishly large neighborhood cats. And squirrels. In fact, the squirrels may be larger than the cats. But, that’s for another post.

It is remarkably difficult to get a picture of sheep from a moving car. Here is the best of my embarrassingly high number of attempts:

Google claims that I have a yarn store that’s about a 5 minute walk from my house. I am going to try my very best to make that walk tomorrow.

I’m sure it will be useful someday

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I finally finished that darn felted bag that I started ages ago. I have to show you a sideways pictures because I can’t get the computer to save the rotated version (No matter how I point my camera, WordPress always shows the picture sideways. At least it normally lets me change the orientation, but today it likes it sideways. This bag is cursed. And sideways.)

The important thing – the really important thing, and I can’t stress this enough – is that it is finished.

 

Christmas knitting revealed

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At long last, I can reveal some projects that I made as gifts.

First up – a scarf and hat combination that I made for my sister:

The scarf was incredibly fun to make – I bought the orange yarn, but otherwise used yarns that I had remaining from other projects. The stitch is stockinette, with the occasional garter thrown in. This meant I also wanted to block it because the edges really, really wanted to curl in and make the scarf a tube. It was a little trickier finding space than usual because it’s so long. But, there’s always a solution, and this one was a small runner rug with towel thrown over it: