Have You Seen My Hat?

These words were said to me on Sunday. Thing was, I had seen his hat -which was not unusual - but where I had seen it was unusual.

I had been sitting at the table eating breakfast that morning, looking out in the backyard, when I saw a small rumpled pile on the path by the garden. Remember the day after Christmas? All that rain and melting? This was the morning after. Then I got distracted and forgot about the small rumpled pile. A few hours later Hal came to me and said those words that are often said by husbands: Have you seen my........?" And I suddenly realized what I had seen in the back yard. Here it is:


First of all: He did feel terrible. He loves this hat. He had been making a snow and light sculpture in the backyard right before Christmas and he must have lost it then. But I have all kinds of confidence in wool and I felt sure we could revive it. I took it inside and I found a small earthworm inside it! It was loaded with dirt. I think it acted as a sieve during all the rain and melting. Here is a picture of the first bath. (I took the worm outside and put it in the garden.)


And here is the second bath:


And here it is all clean (except for a little Wissahickon schist (sp?) sparkles that may never come out. It took five baths to get it clean. Wool is so cool. And I love this hat. I should make another one.

Fingerless Glove Madness

I have been knitting fingerless gloves for one and all. They make a great gift because they don't take very long or use too much yarn. I even made myself a pair and I love them! Above you see the red ones for my mom, the oatmeal ones for me and the light blue pair for Simma. She - as we all know - says she doesn't want any fingerless gloves. We shall see.....
Patterns were all free on the web. Left to right:
Mitt Envy
Short n Sweet Finger Mitts
and of course the most popular pattern on Ravelry:
Fetching

(A Tale of Two) Fingerless Gloves

It seems as if I'm knitting everything twice these days. First, the Colonnade Shawl which I knit and then frogged and knit again (and will frog yet again, but more on that in a future post).

Then, a pair of fingerless gloves which I've been working on for a friend.

First, a little background. My friend Roderick suffers from Raynaud's Syndrome in his fingers. It's basically a circulation problem that causes one's extremities to get very very cold at the slightest provocation (like walking past a freezer in a grocery store). I have it in my feet, so I can completely relate. He was telling me about his hands one day, giving me a demo by putting his chilly white fingers against my neck. Ok, I get it -- you have cold hands. I said, "What you need is a pair of fingerless gloves." I pulled from my coat pocket my pair of fingerless gloves -- made with bright pink Ewa's Sockenwolle -- and suggested he try them out. He loved them and wouldn't take them off -- and this was at a wine and cheese reception after a seminar! He was amazed that his hands warmed up within minutes.

Seriously, I think these things changed his life.

So I told him to hang onto those, and that all he had to do was find someone he knew who knit and ask nicely to get a custom made pair. Hmm. Now who could that be?

Roderick is from Aberdeen, Scotland, which you would know from his accent, his crusty persona (he is a man of No Bullshit), and his occasional donning of The Kilt. (By the way, a man in a kilt is very, very alluring. And not simply because there is Nothing Underneath, but that doesn't hurt.)

Rather than have him go out and buy yarn, I thought I'd make his gloves out of some of my Shetland stash, inspired because of the Scotland connection. I also thought I could customize them further by adding a thistle motif to the thumb. It took me a while to figure out just how the design should look:


So far so good, right? Well, but how does one incorporate a color pattern in just one area of a piece that is otherwise knit in the round? It's trickier than you think. Basically, you knit two rows of the colorwork (back and forth/knit and purl) while slipping all other stitches and then knitting them on the second round. It's brilliantly explained here. Once you get the hang of it, it's not that difficult to do, but you have to keep track of all the stitches you've knit vs. the ones you've slipped:


So here's how it looks. Or rather, looked:


And a close-up, showing the thumb. I chose the goldish color thinking Roderick could wear these inside; close to skin color, they wouldn't be too obtrusive. But here you can see that the colors are not contrasty enough:


So I had no choice but to frog it:


I began again with the darker peat color, salvaging what I could from the original cuff:


Simpler. Different, not necessarily better but a different colorway. You can also see here how I've made the index finger longer than is typical for fingerless gloves. That's because Roderick's index fingers get particularly cold, so I thought I give him a bit more coverage there. Isn't great to be able to customize?

Here's the finished pair:


And a single one. I've also funneled the finger tops by casting off very loosely, because he didn't like how tight the fingers were on the Ewa's gloves.


And a not great picture of the thumb:


Fingerless gloves made from Shetland wool with a thistle motif for my Scottish friend. He loves them.

And it's nice to know I've done something that's made somebody's life better. That's the power of knitting.

Girls Who Knit...

Thought you girls (and boy) would enjoy this! (Published in Bernat Fashions for Girls to Knit, Book No. 83, 1960.)

Bustin' That Stash

So we've been doing our knit-along of the Colonnade Shawl and I decided to use some really nice wool/angora blend I bought last spring at the Maryland Sheep and Wool. Here it is:


I got this far and realized that while I love the yarn, I don't think it's the best for this pattern, which calls for something with more heft to bring out the lace pattern. So I decided to unravel it and start again, also thinking this yarn would be better suited for something else. So above is before. Here, during:


And here, after:


In addition to doing a knit-along, Jennifer and I have decided to do some serious stash-busting, and are trying to devise projects requiring no new yarn purchases until the 2010 Maryland S&W. It's liberating and challenging and feels very good to use up old yarn stock. So here, I begin the Colonnade Shawl once again, using some beautiful Classic Elite Miracle (an alpaca and tencel blend) stranded with some leftover Habu mohair and green stainless steel:

And voila:


The mohair is all gone. Only a few yards of the stainless steel remain, and only a few feet of the alpaca, since I was also able to bang out some fingerless gloves based on the Fetching pattern from Knitty. The two tiny balls above the gloves is all that's left:


Best of all, since the set is finished I can take both the shawl and gloves to Madrid and stay warm. We're leaving tonight and I'm all ready except I don't have a travel knitting project yet. Maybe I'll start a pair of herringbone gloves.

Knockin' the Socks Out

Two pairs of socks, pre-blocking.

I've been knocking out quite a few knitting projects this past week and it feels good to finish up some of these works in progress. Don't know where all the mojo's coming from but I'm riding the wave of productivity.

My brother's Christmas socks are finished. I know it's early but the holidays always sneak up on me so I'll be especially grateful to have these done come December. I used Trekking XXL knit with JWR's size 1 needles because I wanted a really tight fabric. The ribbing is a nice, interesting, and simple pattern, Ridges and Ribs, found on Ravelry.


I wish the photos were better. It's a gray day today and the lighting in the house is not that great. The yarn is actually much darker than it appears -- a charcoal gray with flecks of bright purples and blues. It's nice stuff, manly-man yarn. The socks were really stiff when I knit them -- not a bad quality, really -- but softened up markedly once they were blocked. Hopefully they won't get saggy like the other socks I've knit for my bro, a design flaw I haven't figured out how to rectify quite yet.


And I finally finished the herringbone socks, too. After starting at several different points in my balls, I finally found a part of the yarn that didn't pool as badly as before. There are some slight differences in the color striping but only enough to be noticeable to the discerning eye. Again, blocking relaxed these nicely and evened out the fabric from the two-color knitting.



Here, a close-up of the herringbone and the checkered heel (toes are checkered as well).

And here, a sock landscape:

A Day of Blocking

I've been knitting like a fiend since last Sunday's SnB. Maybe because of all the baseball on tv. Or perhaps because the urgency of the chillier weather. Or, most likely, because I'm putting off other things I should be doing instead.

Today I'm blocking three projects: my brother's Christmas socks, my stranded herringbone socks (finished at last), and a winter hat for David.

I'll post before-and-after shots in the next few days. In the meantime, here are some pictures of the hat. It's the Botanic Hat pattern, an ingenious, fun, and fairly quick pattern to knit. It gets a little dicey at the crown, as most hats do when you're doing the final decreases and have only a few stitches on each needle. Look at this crazy jumble of dpns, stitch markers, and yarns:


And voila. Including a side that's ribbed, for her pleasure:


And a smooth side:


Best of all, I was able to use up more of my stash. The light gray is some lambswool I had left over from, appropriately enough, a sweater I knit for David a few years ago. The contrasting color is Bartlett. It has flecks of their other colorways in it, making it a fairly complex and interesting yarn with blips of blues and reds and teals. (Click on the photo to see it in better detail):


Now, to go fetch the Eucalan and get blocking!

SnB Knit Along

Starting with this upcoming SnB, a few of us will be knitting the "Colonnade Shawl". If you would like to join in, bring along your yarn and needles. The more the merrier! You can get the pattern here. I think this can be knit in a lighter weight yarn if you want. The result will just be smaller. As always, I will bring along my ball winder and umbrella swift for your ball winding pleasure!

Blah!

I am not sure what went wrong. These all started out blue (you saw it in the last post!) but then faded to gray. The silk hankies and the wool are the worst. The cotton/silk/tencel was a little better (I actually like the color). I have read that if you heat the leaves to over 70 degrees c you will get tans. I had a thermometer and I don't think I ever went over 70. Also, Tara suggested that maybe the chemicals (washing soda and color run remover) were old. This is true. I should have gotten fresh chemicals. Maybe that was it. Something was definitely off. Dyeing must be one of those things that takes a lot of experience and a sort of sixth-sense about when things seem right or not. Ah well. Now I will have to think of a way to over-dye the wools and silk. I do have those elderberries that Hal picked for me a while back taking up space in my freezer...

Japanese Indigo

Hal asked me to harvest my Japanese indigo so that he could plant some lettuce. The plant was HUGE. I got it at MD sheep & Wool and it was about 4 inches tall. It had thrived in the spot we planted it and had spread to about 5' x 5' and was covered with pretty hot pink flowers.

So I yanked the whole thing out. It had sent out roots to different areas so it seemed like several plants even though it was only one. I was able to fill a bushel bucket.

Then I had to pick off as many leaves as I could stand to. I filled my crockpot with the leaves and cold water and slowly started to heat it.
Until it looked like this with a kind of oily surface:
Then I drained it and added washing soda and whisked it to add oxygen to the dyebath. It was supposed to get all frothy and blue, but it only got a bit blue and a bit frothy. So I was kind of worried that I had done something wrong...
But then I put it back in the Crockpot and added the color-run remover which is supposed to remove the oxygen from the bath. And right after that, I tried to dye some silk "hankies" (processed cocoons) and some handspun yarn and some cotton/silk yarn. Before:
And this is how it looks on the bath:
And here is a video of the dyeing magic:



It worked!!!

A Sock Challenge

I'm still working on my herringbone socks. As you can see, one is finished except for the toe. The other one I'm having more of a challenge with because of the color pooling that's happening. All the colors keep repeating at the same place, hence the concentration of browns and blues.

Here's another view. See how the sock on the left is nice and evenly striped, even at the instep. The sock on the right is not as even.

So, there's no choice but to rip back, from this:


To this:
Since this is color knitting, I had to tink rather than rip, which I did over 21 rows, back to the instep decreases. Then I started at another place in my ball, hoping to get to a place in the yarn where the dye was closer to making even stripes. And now the pooling is worse:

It figures this is happening at the top of the foot, where it's most noticeable. I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe I'll put these aside until our SnB and hopefully get a good consult.

Ideas??

A Feeling of Accomplishment

Today I finally got around to washing all the hand knitted stuff. I was a job and a half, but when I was done everything smelled so good and I could see a lot of the stuff I knit in the last few years. It was kind of satisfying!


Oh, and I turned the heel...

I was babbling away to Wendy yesterday that I would never really change the way I make a sock (the one I can do from memory without a pattern), but I have to say that this one works pretty well. It almost makes you wonder why it is made the other way. And it has the benefit of continuing the pattern if you are using yarn that has color changes because the only back and forth is on the bottom of the heel. So you don't get the abrupt change when you knit the foot after the heel. But I don't know...your first sock is kind of seared into your memory and it will always be the "way I make a sock". Sorry to get all philosophical...

Knitting in Australia

Good Morning everyone. Australia is amazing! I've got some hand dyed alpaca wool, and will hopefully get some more of something special while I'm here.
This morning, like every morning, the birds woke me up. The kookaburra's start arguing promptly at sunrise and they are loud. Then of course everyone else starts in too. So I was up getting a glass of water looking down on my friend Julie's back yard, and a wallaby hopped slowly across the grass! I made a cup of coffee, bundled up, and went outside and worked out the heal of our socks on the back porch. I was hoping to see more wild life - but just the birds were around. And yeah, I didn't understand the instruction either - so I just wung it, and they look okay.
Cheers! - Tara

Starting the Gusset

After a bit of frogging and tinking- I think I have the gusset figured out. My tip: cross out all the K1's and p1's that you don't need in the instructions so that you can see what you have to do. It is very confusing otherwise. My other wish: pointier needles to pick up all those yarnovers. But other than that, I really like these socks and I am excited to try a new heel.