Hermione's Scarf

Yet again I've been bad about updating. Life seems to zip on by these days without leaving me enough time to either knit or write about knitting. It's all I can do to keep up with my book blog these days.

I've made progress on Arwen. The hood is finished and it's now waiting for the sleeves. Unfortunately, the weather's gotten warmer and I'm not fond of sitting with nearly a kilo of wool in my lap when it's this warm, so it's going to have to wait a bit. That will, however, give me time to decide whether I want to just pick up stitches at the arm holes, or if I should do shaped sleeves (cuff up). I'm afraid picking up stitches will make the shape unwearable. I'm going to have to peruse my patterns to see if I can find any reason to do one or the other. In the meantime, I have a picture of the back panel. I'm pleased with this, if I do say so myself.


My alternate project for warmer days is a scarf based on the Hermione Hat.

The yarn is Kappa Color, in the colorway Toy. I've used it before and like it very much. It's comfortable and makes great spring/fall items. The pattern itself is a little too easy and a little too difficult. It's so easy that I tend to forget to pay attention and too difficult because if you don't pay attention, you wind up frogging quite a lot. I swear I'd be finished with this if I hadn't had to rip back several times. Ah well, that'll teach me to knit when I'm tired.

Maybe, Just Maybe

Gauge might be trusted after all.

OK, just having said that, I realize that no, you can't. Because now that I have said that, Gauge is going to rush up and bite me in some vital part of my anatomy, just to teach me a lesson.

Still, all seems to be going well with the Arwen Cardi. This is the last photo I took of it, although I'm a bit further along now.

This is the back panel. The front is mostly just boring, so I won't subject you to a picture of grey tweed knitting. I've actually finished the front sides and have all but the last 40 rows or so of the back done. From what I've got, it looks like it might even fit, despite my fiddling with the pattern in 27 different ways. I'm using the sizing and the front cables from the Arwen, the panel (St. John's Cross) from Louhi and the shaping from Rogue. I even changed the side cables on the Louhi panel so they are never ending and will be putting the centre bit of the cross on the sleeves, just to make them interesting. I love what I have so far and hope it continues that way. I did have one slight problem with it, or rather, my inability to pay attention caused me a problem. I messed up the cable band slightly in one place, and on both bands at the same time. It took me much too long to notice it and by the time I did, I was already another 40 rows (256 stiches to a row) and couldn't be bothered to frog. However, it did look bad, as I had forgotten to go "under" with one of my cables thus causing it to lose the woven look, so I had to do something with it. Finally I basically just fudged the "under" bit by weaving in faux stitches to make it look like it went under when it should have. I think it looks good enough to get away with. If not, at least it looks the same on both sides. This is before

and this is after. See where the white thread is on the lower half right side? That's it. The white thread is actually part of the yarn, but it's a handy marker.

You'll notice that these are two different sides of the sweater, but like I said, I did the same thing on both sides and this is just the fix for the other side and not the one in the above picture. 6 to one, half a dozen to another.

Finally, I finished a pair of Phone Socks. I call these coffee socks because they remind me of coffee just after you put cream in it, but before you've stirred. The yarn is a wool, bamboo mix and is very comfortable to wear. I need to make more of these.

Yarn Pimp

A good friend of mine has set up an Etsy shop with hand dyed yarn. If you're interested, pop over and take a look ThePinkSheep's Shop .

Arwen is coming along nicely, although it may be causing a little tendonitis. I know I should leave it be for a couple of days, but I can't. I don't want to. I may regret this, but, yes, well, you know...

No Trust in Gauge

Where the time goes, I'll never know. There are so many little things I'd like to do, vaguely think I'll do them some time this morning/afternoon/evening and suddenly it's the next day and I'm thinking the same thing all over again. At this rate, I know I'm going to get to the end of my life by what will seem like tomorrow. I'm going to look back and wonder where it all went.

Thus far, things are looking pretty good with the Arwen. I'm doing the bottom in one piece on a long cable and it looks like it will fit just fine. I'm waiting for all hell to break loose when I block. I think I may just wash it in a sweater bag this time and lay it out flat asap so I don't have to worry about water weight stretching it out or anything similar. I really, really want this sweater to fit. I'm loving what I have done to the point where I sit and stroke it before putting it away at night. It's so soft and smooth and pretty and lovely and I want to be able to wear it. If it fits, it will be my crowning project as a knitter. Please, please fit! Please! Mr. Gauge, I promise to swatch properly for every sweater I ever knit again if it does fit, so please let it fit me!

Now that we've had the party, I can blog about my Little LotR Cardy with pictures. Theoretically, I shouldn't have said anything at all pre-party, but I'm almost always knitting for other people and my blog would die if I hid everything (besides, I love this little sweater). Anyway, here it is:

I knit this for a friend in Michigan who's having a baby next month. It's for a 18-24 month old, but I wasn't sure what to knit for a new born in Michigan in April. The weather could go either way and if I picked the wrong thing, it would never get worn. This should hopefully be wearable two autumns/winters from now. The yarn is a 50/50 wool/cotton blend and is fabulous. Unfortunately, the store I bought it from is no longer stocking it. Had I known about it and known it would be running out, I would have gone and bought more colours for stash purposes because it's fabulous. It's soft and warm, just like you would want for a baby. It also knits up really well. I used 2.75mm needles, so it's a tight knit which will help keep the warmth in. Since I still wasn't getting gauge even with the small needles (I spent over a week gauge swatching this one. The knitting gods hate me.), I added another band of cables on each side to take up some of the extra width, which I think worked. I seriously hope that I one day get pictures of little Ife in this sweater, because I love it and I think Mommy did too.

Deep Sense of Foreboding

*looks around shiftily*

I'm searching for evil things lurking in dark corners, which have every intention of jumping out, grabbing me and winding me up into a gigantic ball of yarn before smuggling me off to some small sweatshop somewhere on an unknown continent where they force me to knit pink lace for the rest of my life.

OK, so that's a little over dramatic, but something's not good. I haven't been well recently (yes, I know. I really need to have the tonsils out. I have a pre-op appointment in a couple of weeks (although this won't be happening until Oct.)). Not feeling well makes me rather un-inventive, so I've been knitting things like socks, which I could knit in my sleep if I had to, which may have actually happened once or twice, but I'm straying again. Anyway, I figured it was a good chance to get a boring gauge swatch out of the way, since that's pretty much mechanical straight knitting which doesn't require much brain power. So, I got out the yarn, picked out the needles it says to use on the yarn and...

got gauge.

Then I promtly fainted. Honestly. I knit a 5 inch swatch, measured pre-washing, washed, dried, measured again and I'll be bound if I didn't get gauge on the first try. True gauge. No stretching, no pulling, no half stitches, no wishful thinking. I got gauge. Theoretically, I should be jumping for joy, but it's too good to be true. As a severily cynical and jaded person, I don't trust it. It's Gauge's new way of playing with my mind. It wants to lull me into thinking I'm on the smooth road to sucess before biting me in the butt, hard.

This is just to let Gauge know, your evil plan has backfired. I'm now prepared for the worst. Muhahahahahaha!

After the tonsils, I may need to seek out psychiatric help, don't you think?

I feel ever so much better now

Because I just read the Yarn Harlot's blog. Even though I still feel totally incompetent, at least I know it happens to the best of them.




In the meantime, I've finished the sweater and have moved on to the Yarn Harlot's Earl Grey socks, which, in following her own tradition, I've modified to a smaller size so I can make them for me. I'm using the Knit Picks Essential Kettle Dyed yarn I got from Thepinksheep for Christmas. Most of you may not consider this fancy yarn, but it's much softer than what I normally use (which is the yarn that will be left over after a nuclear bomb goes off) and the colour is fabbity! It's blue. A deep, dark, rich blue with some lighter highlights and I love it.

I can't wait to finish these so I can sit there petting them and drooling over the colour. I rather like blue, just in case you hadn't noticed.

It's funny though. I remember not knowing what my favourite colour was as a child. I used to sit there thinking about it and thinking I was odd for not knowing when everyone else in the world did. I went through a red phase, a purple phase and possibly a yellow phase. Any green other than forest green was out because my room was lime green and that got a little old after a while. The one phase I am absolutely sure I never went though at all was pink. If you had asked me what colour I didn't like, I would have been able to tell you that pink and brown, and definitely the two together are out. Oh, and then there were the brown/orange/yellow combos that were fortunately going out as I was becoming aware of colour schemes. Anyway, I have never liked pink. Unfortunately for me, my mother liked both pink and lace and often forced, or tried to force, me into them anyway. This became quite expensive with time because not only did I do my utmost to ensure that these items of clothing were "worn out" or damaged beyond all repair as soon as humanly possible (I may have enlisted the dogs help in this, but I don't want to unfairly incriminate those who rest in peace), but both of us wound up needing therapy as well. I've still not recovered from a certain pink, purple and white striped t-shirt with lace at the neck and sleeves. I hold this t-shirt personally responsible for my failing to develop any sort of sense of fashion and pleasure for pretty clothing. It represented my conscious choice to reject any items of clothing my mother selected for me because they would all be like this t-shirt - frilly, girly, and Dumb (I was 4 at the time. My vocabulary was limited and much of my world was Dumb). After that t-shirt, I went for sporty, cool, boyish and basically anything my mother really didn't want me to wear. I never recovered from that. Sorry Mom, but you shouldn't have made me wear it. You clearly should have just allowed me to wear horrible things and do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. This was all so obvious to me, but you just failed to see its advantages *dramatic sigh* /tongue in cheek

Back to knitting, I'm hoping that knitting something simple and blue (there, I've just jinxed it, haven't I?) will help me relax this weekend and return me to sanity, or at least return the little I have to me. Like The Harlot says, knitting a garter stitch scarf has it's theraputic value.

Knitter's Primal Scream

This was one of those days knitters loathe. You know the ones. The ones which start out so promising, as in, just an hour or two and I will finish this project! You're on high. You can't wait to see the final result of all your efforts. You want to finish, not because you no longer want to knit it, but because you're so happy with what you're knitting. What it turns into is one of those days during which you knit for 3 hours and wind up back at the exact same place you were the day before. Today was one of those days.

It all started out with a Happy Mistake I made a few days ago. I had been knitting back and forth (with 2.75mm needles), but switched to knitting the next piece in the round (3.5mm to get gauge). Knit said piece, looked at it and it was wonderful. This particular project requires two of the same (yes, you guessed it, it is a sweater) pieces. Next day I picked up the needles to cast on the second sleeve and to my absolute horror, I discovered that I had two very different size needles on my cable (Knit Picks Options set). One side had a 4.5mm, the other a 3.5mm. I looked at the first sleeve and it was brilliant. All smooth and nice and lovely. The gauge was right, the size was right, even the sleeve cap looked great and not a bit lumpy like the rest of the sweater where I had been knitting back and forth - I knit my knit stitches much tighter than I knit my purl stitches, ergo the lumpy look on the flat bits. I looked for the proper needle, but there were no others laying around with which I could have exchanged it. How in heaven's sake could I not have noticed this the night before? How? It's a whole size difference! Suffice it to say, I didn't notice, and after much head scratching, I know what happened. I got lucky. Very lucky. I must have knit off the 4.5mm onto the 3.5mm, which is why I got the proper gauge in the round. Then, I got even luckier. I must have been knitting onto the 4.5mm needle for the knit rows and onto the 3.5mm for the purl rows which meant I kept gauge and the piece looks all smooth and nice and lovely like it is supposed to. Talk about a happy mistake! I even learned something from it. Next time I knit flat, I will use a size smaller for the purl rows to get a better finish.

Then, today, I decided to be incredibly clever and continue the rest of the sweater using my new smaller/larger size method. The principle was good, the implementation went completely haywire. It turns out that this method does not work when knitting cables. Not at all. The flat bits looked brilliant, the cables looked like mashed potatoes thrown onto the plate in a lump. Not good. So, I ripped out all but two rows and started reknitting with 2.75mm's at the cables and the 4.5/3.5 method for the stockinette stitch. That was going really well, until I looked at the cables and realized that something was very wrong. Very wrong indeed. I had cables going in directions they were never meant to go in. It looked like a round of free-style cabling. Great if you're competing in the knitting olympics, bad if you're knitting a serious sweater. Now if the cable panels hadn't been on the ends, I would have just undone the panels and re-knit them without frogging the whole piece. However, they're at the edges, which makes doing that a bit fiddly when you're doing more than 2 or 3 rows, so I decided there was nothing for it. It had to be frogged.

At this point I was a little frustrated, but saw no particular point in getting upset. It wasn't an especially big piece of knitting and there were one or two things I knew I would be able to do a little better if I redid the whole thing. So I started taking out the needles to frog. This was the proverbial straw. The drop that made the bucket overflow. That one drip too many from the faucet. I pulled and the cable came out of the needle. I need this needle to finish the project. I've never seen a 2.75mm needle here and would have to order one and wait for it to come from the States. Gah! As much as I love circulars and Knit Picks needles, this is a huge fault they have. I've had it happen with the Options set before, but not with the fixed needles. Today, it had to happen. So, one repressed primal scream (I have neighbours, it's past 10pm, I don't think they would appreciate my need to express a primal scream for whatever reason. Explaining that it arose from the crumbling of knitting needle would probably have landed me in the local psychiatric clinic.) later, I pulled out the cable, frogged the piece and put it away for the evening.

Desperate to fix said needle so I can continue tomorrow, I got out the glue and tried to glue it. This would have worked brilliantly had the cable gone back in, but it steadfastly refused to go back into the end of the needle. I twisted gently, I pushed, I begged, I coerced, I used pliers to help push, all to no avail. Then, I looked at the burning candle on the table. Thinking that if I made the cable soft, it might go back in, I held it over the flame. It did get soft, but it also expanded. Although upon reflection this was a logical development, it was not the desired effect. I was hoping for smaller and not larger. So, still not panicking out of fear of the above mentioned clinic because I'm a rational being and am aware that it's not worth the emotional exertion, I cut off the tip which was now too big to ever fit into the needle. I sat and thought (like the rational person I am :P) and realized that metal expands when it gets hot. This time I held the needle in the flame until it got quite hot and Bob's your aunt, it went on the cable. Just to make sure it stays there, I put glue over the join and am letting it dry until tomorrow. It's not like I was going to do any more knitting tonight anyway - although I suppose I could go mend the GAPING HOLE in the BRAND NEW PAIR OF SOCKS I JUST FINISHED THE OTHER DAY (I'm repressing another primal scream as we speak, so you'll forgive the all caps). 5 min. old and the sock catches on a large sliver of wood in the floor which would usually be covered up by a rug but wasn't because the cat had just barfed on said rug and it needed to be cleaned. The result is a gash the size of Africa in the heel of my sock. Bugger.

Sometimes I do wonder why I knit.

Then I look at my Ravelry project page and realize that some things do go well. Then I remember certain family members who might actually resort to forcing me to knit socks for them at gunpoint, but would prefer I do it voluntarily. Then I look at the thank you card with photo I got of my little cousin in her cat's paw shawl and I remember why I bother. It's worth it in the end. I'm sure this one will be too.