What I want to be doing: Knitting.
What I am doing: Untangling yarn.
What I should be doing: [buffer overflow error]
Tag Archives: yarn
Sunny summer wrap
Just for a moment I’m pretending that I won’t be going back a hot, swampy mess in Florida, and so I’m going to call my newest project a “summer” wrap. Also, it’s made with Rowan’s Summer Tweed, so that helps me keep up the illusion.
It’s a Lintilla wrap/scarf, much bigger because I used a heavy yarn and appropriately larger needles. It is a little narrower than I thought it would be, but I love the pattern and plan to use it again as soon as I can get my hands on a beautiful (and lighter!) yarn.
Lots of lessons in this pattern – I learned how to do partial rows with “wrap and turn” along with picking up the wrapped yarn. I have to confess that despite doing this about a thousand times, I still don’t get why you can’t just turn yourself around and stitch back the way to came. Maybe it reinforces the stitches at the turn? Avoids a hole? I think I’m going to have to try a test patch without the wrapping and turning just to see what happens. In the meantime, I’m planning to wear this with a pretty sundress here in the Netherlands, and then probably put it away until December when we move back to Florida. “Summer” indeed.
Silk garden hitchhiker scarf
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).
Mittens, part twee
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!
Dangerous knowledge and fun with metric
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.
A tale of two yarns
I had fun knitting these two mini-scarves for the twin daughters of a friend of mine, who have some beloved stuffed cats that would love them.
In order to make them as to scale as possible, I used sock yarn. And in order to make them similar, yet different, I knitted one vertically and one horizontally. I am fascinated by how different the same yarn can look, depending on the row lengths.
Feeling All Spindly
A couple weeks ago a friend of mine and I were talking about how fun it would be to learn how to spin, and now, lo and behold, we spin! She invited a veteran spinner (and spinning teacher) to our small knitting group (average size = 4) and away we went. Our teacher was great: patient, low-key and, most importantly, patient. I came away with a spindle of a pretty green and surprisingly yarn-like substance:
The stuff on the right is what I spun. Me! And it started like the stuff on the left! It was kind of magical. It even – and this is the importantly part -continued to work outside of the knitting group. Amazing! Why am I still sitting here typing when I could go spin?