Amazing Stupidity, Amazing Brilliance

I am DONE!!! I am very happy with these mittens. My daughter wants them- she's not getting them:-) They are too special to me. (I will make her another pair.) I love the yarn. I am totally sold on Jamieson's Spindrift. I even bought (at great expense) the shade card.

Ok, so here's a funny story. I really wish I had taken a picture of this. I was about three rows from being done with the second mitten. These are three short rows because it was the thumb. Maybe ten minutes from being done, when I finally noticed that I had been knitting my second mitten with the thumb in the same place as the first mitten. In other words, I had knitted two right hands! How stupid is that?! Especially since I had the other mitten with me the whole time and was using it to compare the patterns. I could not believe how stupid that was. So I had all these complicated plans about removing the thumb and snipping (ha!) my knitting and grafting the thumb back in. But Wendy (and this is where the brilliance comes in) said that all I had to do was rip back the decreases at the top of the mitten and shift the whole thing a quarter turn, and then re-knit the top of the mitten. Saved!! So I did that and now all is well. You can see in the mitten on the right how the jog where the new rows start is now in the palm instead of at the side. But who cares? (I do a little bit, but not enough...)

Stitch & Pitch 2008

The Phillies held their first Stitch & Pitch event last year and, apparently, it was a big enough success to follow up with a second one this summer. Not planning on giving birth this summer, as I was last, I hope to attend. I think it would be really fun if a group of us went. This is planning far in the future, as the game is not until August 5, but I thought I would just get a bug in folks' ears. This will give you all plenty of time to think of a pattern for a felted Fanatic!

Tree Man Hat

Since Hal's birthday is in February, and he has a shaved head, I take great pleasure in making him his annual hat. He wears them all the time, even in the house, as seen here. I especially like this hat. Its that old 70's ski hat and you can get the pattern online here. We used to wear them when I was growing up in snowy Syracuse.

The wool has a story. I have always wanted to make a hat with wool that was dyed from trees. I had been telling H (Master Arborist that he is) that his helping me find bark that I could dye with is a no-brainer. Something we could do together! Not to mention that he loves to peel bark off of branches almost as much as I enjoy knitting. So when he trimmed our birch tree in the front yard, I asked him to peel the bark from the branches he had cut.

Also, a while back, he had mentioned to his boss that I would like some oak galls. (His boss had access to a lot of them because they are a problem in his area. We couldn't find them here.) I got enough of oak galls to pass them out to all my artist (they made ink) and knitting (dye) friends.

So this is what I did: I used the oak galls to mordant a nice large skein of white handspun that my mom had bought me in New Zealand. I separated out three small balls and dyed two in some dye from osage orange woodchips (yellow), then took one of those and added it to an iron modifier (basically rusty water) to turn it olive green. Then I took the larger skein and dyed it in the birch bark, which had been sitting for a week in water and simmering all that day. It came out a nice brown. Then I left the other small skin in the birch bath for much longer and I got an even darker brown. I was so happy with the results! In knitting the hat, I used some tan alpaca I had around for the inner lining so that it would be soft. The dying process can cause the wool to become a bit harsh, and I think that was true in this case. So I felt the liner should be soft. Below are more pictures of the process. I really love this hat!

All Thumbs

My mittens are finished and blocked. Amazing how the blocking really smooths them out and makes the fabric flat and cohesive. I wasn't really liking how the cuffs were relating (or not) to the design on the hand. So rather than doing little teeny checks on the thumbs, which was my plan, I decided to repeat the grey and white stripes instead. I think it makes the whole design more unified. I really like these guys now.

I'm not sure why one mitten is so much taller than the other. The one on the right I knit first. Maybe I'm easing up on the tension?


See how my braids are going in two different directions? Pretty cool, huh. Just don't ask me how I did it.

Very Fun S&B

Isn't this great?
Pineapple and paper!
Click on the link to the right to see more...

A Really Cool Blog

I have emailed a few of you about a blog that I think is really great, but I want to be sure you all know about it. This woman lives in Finland and has a business dyeing wool with plants and mushrooms. The colors are so beautiful. And, she translates all her posts to English. AND, she is selling mitten kits. Her current post shows some of her mittens. Be sure to scroll down to see her mushroom dyings. Awesome. Click here. WW and I are contemplating an order....

Second Sock!

I am ready to finish the second sock. I started last summer so it's about time. The yarn is wonderful. It is called Sea Cell from Fleece Artist. It is 70% wool and 30% sea cell - from sea weed. Wendy ordered it from Kitty Knoddy and it costs $23 a skein. It feels like silk!

Easy Head-Hugger Hat

Hi, I just finished knitting this hat - really fun. It is knit in triangles. Now I have to sew it up! Here's a link to the pattern.

Finished, kinda

Very, very happy with this mitten!

Not so happy about all the weaving in I gotta do...

Progress Report

Angela and I had our own little S&B this afternoon. Here's how we are doing on our Latvian Mittens. Angela is following one of the patterns in the Upitis book. I am doing a kind of sampler of six-stitch patterns. (Ang says that is not very Latvian of me :-) I cast on 66 stitches and I felt it would be easiest- and maybe kind of fun - to find and make up as many six-stitch patterns as I could. I may not even make the two mittens the same, but just keep thinking up patterns. We shall see. BTW, the green line is thumb marker.

Almost There. . .

It's not easy to take a photograph with only one hand. This is the best I could do. I'm almost ready to begin my decreases. Lizbeth Upitis recommends beginning the decreases when you're at the first (top) joint of the middle finger. She says from this point figure an additional length equivalent to about half the width of your mitten. So a 4" wide mitten will have about 2" of decrease length. That seems like a lot to me.

(And yes, I know my cuff is totally out of control. I don't know what I was thinking. My only defense is that I knit the cuffs while sitting at gate 25 of Terminal A of the Philadelphia airport. It was my only solace, so I just kept knitting. And knitting. And knitting.)

I might begin my decreases earlier than that. Like do one more 4-row pattern repeat and then start. I don't want to end up with mittens so long I can't really wear them. You know, like having claw hands or something.

The thumb hole is an entirely other issue. Looks like I'll have a lot of stitches to pick up. This is all a learning process, right?? Stay tuned.

What is that you say? I have to do another one after this?