red.

I started Jim's red scarf. I started it about ten times... I tried the red herring scarf but it really bothered me. Then tried Henry and that wasn't working either... then I got a clue that I just wasn't liking anything non-reversible for this project. So.


K1, P1, lather rinse repeat.


Slipping the first stitch of every row to create a nice edge. I'm a little touchy about edges.


My current small-project bag, courtesy of my mom. Owls! The scarf just barely fits in there now, I think it's a little better suited to socks and the like. Luckily the scarf should be finished soon.



So socks. I'm doing the Rockin' Sock Club again this year, and the first shipment came, reminding me that I knit a grand total of one (1) RSC sock last year. Not one pair. One sock. I did the first Cascadia and got so frustrated with the heel that it took me 6 months to finish the first and then another 6 months to cast on the second. Of course all that time I told myself not to start any other socks as Cascadia wasn't done.


So here we go: Cascadia #2. What you see is what I did in...2 weeks? I think that's right. I'm a little worried about having enough yarn to finish, though I suppose now that I'm out of the heel there's really not that much left.

I have this vague idea that I might try to both keep up with this year's club patterns AND knock out the corresponding patterns from last year. 12 pairs of socks in 2011?

The latest acquisitions...


From left to right: STR Pinky Swear, STR Aubergenius, and the Araucania Ranco Multy that I won from Kate! Yay! It got here last weekend but I only got to take a picture today.

Anyone else on Pinterest? Wanna be pinning friends? Holla at your boy, I mean girl...(say in a Tim Gunn voice)

greetings from michigan

Where I am without my usual photographer for a few days, so in order to document the Christmas gifts I made this year and gave to Michigander recipients, I was forced to use my little point-and-shoot. So please excuse this momentary lapse in artistic quality, but the blogging gods demand sacrifice. The knitting must be recorded!


Hey I made gloves! I made gloves in a week! And they were very nearly finished on Christmas morning...but not quite. I made these for my sister out of the leftover Cascade 220 from my Central Park Hoodie, and some Dale of Norway something-or-other for the trim. I used the Garter-Cuff Gloves pattern in Weekend Knitting, a book I've gotten a lot of nice gift patterns out of. These were my first-ever knitted gloves and I had fun making the fingers and trying on the gloves as I went (and throwing up the horns 'cause the pattern has you knit the pinky and index fingers first). They don't gap at all between the fingers (as far as I know...Molly will have to let me know how they stand up to wear) but the fingertips are a little pointy - perhaps a different bind-off would fix it.

My only other yarn-type gift this year was a set of ornaments for my mom:

That's a lousy picture, but you get the idea - I used scraps from some past projects to make tiny knitting ornaments, using this tutorial. I used mod podge to tack the yarn to the "needles" in an effort to prevent them from falling apart in the future, but I don't think that's actually much of a risk as the balls are wound tightly.

And what is Christmas without a little stash enhancement?

Oregon yarn, from Jim's brother (thanks Jon!)


Michigan yarn, courtesy of my grandma


And super soft Debbie Bliss yarn, from my dad with the condition that I make something for Molly, as this is her color - I'm thinking some kind of shawl as she's constantly cold and draped in blankets.

And if you'd like to enhance your stash as well, Kate is having a giveaway on her blog where you can win one of three lovely-looking skeins of yarn. So go comment!

I'm working on a list of all of my UFOs, but it's going to have to wait till I'm back in Ithaca and can look through everything - so far just based on the blog I've listed about 9 projects...eek! Maybe I can make the start of 2011 good and productive on the knitting front.

this one is just right

I knit a scarf.


Just enough ruffles, exactly what I was going for. (I love Laura's designs, the Galileo mittens are just about the coolest things ever. Next to my scarf of course.)



Knit with Lana Grossa Evento, which is mostly cotton, but wrapped in fluffy merino and oh so warm, as I learned during this photoshoot.


Ruffles ruffles love love.

And soon I'll start a new scarf since someone around here said he wanted one.



It's Cascade 220! Are you surprised?!

december?

It's December? What? I haven't posted since...September? Huh? Well - I had family visiting in September, and then work travel and then work got quite hectic and then I had to pass my candidacy exam. Now I finally have a reasonable schedule again and a Masters degree (!) and a little time to knit. So maybe I can have my blog again too. Yay :)

After my exam I knit and I knit and I knit and I bound off the front of isabella (buy yarn for summer top in the spring! start knitting summer top in August! finish knitting summer top in December! it's perfectly logical!) and I got ready to seam the sides and...


Hey that looks kind of funny. Um...


Oh cool! Way to bind off the front two inches shorter than the back! Awesome work! Fantastic. So maybe refusing to get up from the couch when it's time to check length and smoothing the work out on my lap and measuring with too-short ruler...isn't quite as effective as I'd hoped. The back is the correct length, so the front needs to be ripped back. Um...when I get around to it. Maybe after some Christmas crafting. Jim snapped this photo of me making ornaments by our tiny tilted tabletop tree last night:


Yarn + wine + no longer working 15-hour days = life is good. No matter how wonky my other knitting turns out.

ock seeks knitterly advice

I'm embarrassed by my UFO list right now. So embarrassed I don't even want to make it into a real typed-out list, even though I know it's still out there. Waiting.

So...hey look at my new scarf!



Schaefer Yarn Anne (the solid brown skein - merino, mohair and nylon) and Audrey (the rainbow skein - merino and SILK!), going to be a linen stitch scarf but seriously, I could just wear the bare skeins around my neck all winter and probably be happy. My mom bought me this yarn when she and my grandma were visiting Ithaca last weekend. My mom is a nice mom. The woman who rang us up at the yarn store asked to borrow her.

Because I have no shame, I cast on all 400 stitches last Sunday (the scarf is knit lengthwise) and took this as my travel/comfort project on a trip to a conference this week while lovely Isabella languished on my dresser (along with the second cascadia sock, 3 other unstarted RSC kits, my stained glass scarf, what am I doing I said I wasn't making a real list! la la la can't hear you!)...but I've only managed a row and a half, because my needles, well, they suck. For this project. This is where I need your help, because I had this exact problem on a previous project with these exact needles and I need to escape the cycle of disappointment.

The needles: ChiaGoo bamboo circs, size 7, 24 inch length.
The yarns: for both projects, lovely sticky wool-and-other-animal-fiber blends, fine-ish gauge, 3-ply. Prone to splitting, at least with these %&*! needles.
The problems: myriad. The tips on these needles are way too blunt. The joins frankly suck and I have to yank at the (beautiful, delicate) yarn to get from cord to needle. Because the going is so difficult I end up holding the work in a death grip and making the (did I mention beautiful, delicate) yarn all sweaty and knitting tighter than necessary.
The question: Is there another brand of wood or bamboo circular needle that won't cause these problems? I'd also be willing to go with a plastic needle, but I really don't want to use metal. I'm looking for pointy tips and smooth joins. I've heard good things about the KnitPicks Harmony needles, but I actually don't like the fact that they're colorful. Yeah, I know. I'm like the knitting Grinch or something, but I feel that brightly colored needles would distract from my communion with the yarn.

tl;dr; here's a kitty picture.

what I knit on my summer vacation

After Erin and Ryan's wedding (thanks for the nice comments on my Tree of Life afghan, btw!), Jim and I headed to Lake Michigan for our first real vacation since starting grad school three years ago - yikes! We reeeeeeally needed it. We got to sit on the beach,




and we even got to spend the night on a boat!




What did I do on the boat?



Aside from tasting some Michigan wines (very, very sweet) during the evening sail and watching the sunset and being generally blissed out on VACATION!!!, I started an Isabella tank in red Karabella Vintage Cotton. Every time a spring/summer sale rolls around at a yarn store, I go in all hopeful and leave all dejected because lightweight springy yarns tend not to come in my kind of colors - I don't do so well in pastels. So when I found this deep red cotton at my LYS I jumped on it. (I also bought a skein of pretty dark blue/brown/grey Madelinetosh so that I could see what you all are so excited about, as I've never knit with it before and my LYS just started carrying it!)

I'm liking it so far, thought I always find cotton so splitty and I don't know why I keep gravitating towards projects on tiny needles (the ToL afghan was a great break from that - size 8s seemed so luxurious!). We got back from our trip last Sunday and work was pretty hectic this week, but I got to spend some time sitting on the deck in the 75 degree weather today, knitting and savoring another Michigan summer staple.



So long summer, I hope we sent you off in style.

"happiness is only real when shared"

Why so little blog posting this summer?



Not for a lack of knitting.



Just a lack of knitting that wasn't intended as a surprise for someone who reads this blog.

Last May some friends from college got engaged. I met Erin back in sophomore year physics lab and we got through many homework sets, lectures, Society of Physics Students meetings, and crazy outreach projects together. At the end of junior year when she IM'ed me to tell me she had a crush on this boy in our circle of friends (omg squee!) I did my best to pitch in and help the flirting effort by deviously arranging SPS social events where they could oh-so-casually hang out. They started dating (yay!), Ryan left Michigan a year before us for grad school (boo...), but Erin rejoined him after graduation and hey coincidence, grad school brought me to the same town too (huzzah!).

So now we have friends + impending wedding + knitter, not to mention that Erin is a knitter herself. A knitted gift seems inevitable. But, you know, they set a date for August, and all I could think was afghan, and who really wants to think about a wool blanket in August, right? So la de da, months pass, I'm knitting other stuff. Sometime in April it occurs to me, as really obvious things tend to do, that a wedding is one day in a marriage. August is fleeting compared to what they're embarking on.

I start thinking about afghans again. I harness the power of Ravelry search engine and a secret livejournal poll and narrow the field down to our finalist: the Tree of Life Afghan by Nicky Epstein. I download the pattern, I buy ten skeins of Cascade 220, I get funny looks from the yarn store clerk when I ask if they have any more of my colorway as I was considering making the blanket bigger. (Long story. 4 is an unlucky number in Japan, where my grandma is from. The ToL afghan is full of 4s. Final conclusion: the ratio of stitches per repeat of the two main motifs doesn't support extending the blanket to 5 tree repeats, and neither Erin nor Ryan is Japanese, so. Bad luck averted.)

April 11th: I start knitting. I calculate that I need average about 3 rows per day in order to have a month left for the border and finishing, before their wedding on August 14th.
April-June: life events transpire. I do not average 3 rows per day. I finish some socks, though.
July-August: OMG BLANKET KNITTING! Wash helps.



August 5th, ish: I finish the body of the blanket! On to the border.



August 12: Jim and I drive to drives me to Michigan for the wedding. I knit a lot of border leaves on the drive. I get kinda nervous about how many more leaves I need to knit.
August 13: I knit more leaves. I start sewing the border on. I bridesmaid it up at the rehearsal dinner. I stay up past my bedtime working on the border. I almost make it all the way to the last corner before turning in.



August 14: We basically don't leave the hotel all morning because I'm knitting and seaming leaves. I finish weaving in ends at 12:40 PM, run out to eat a sandwich, run back to the hotel, make myself pretty, and make it to pre-ceremony photos by 2. Then Erin and Ryan get TOTES MARRIED YAY!



So that's the personal side to the blanket story. Now the technical side. I made a lot of mistakes on this project, but I'm still feeling good because 1) I fixed them ALL! so the end product is fine and 2) I fixed them ALL! so I now have a lot more practice fixing things! I misread didn't really read the instructions out of hubris, so I didn't realize that the first row of the chart was supposed to be a wrong side row...easily fixable, or more accurately ignored. Related to this mistake, I had 4-stitch-wide stockinette columns running between each set of trees in the first tree repeat which I didn't realize was a mistake until I had to start the next section. Hey, now I'm really great at ripping back selected columns and turning knits into purls! The second tree repeat was cursed by many, MANY mis-crossed cables. Again: valuable practice with my trusty crochet hook. Oh yeah, and after I wove in the first end? I went to trim the last bit off and totally cut off a neighboring end that still needed weaving in instead. I immediately called my knitting guru, AKA my mom, and she saved me and the blanket by reminding me that I could splice the prematurely cut strand back together. Despite a few typos in the chart and the fact that I still think it's weird to start a chart on a wrong side row, this is a great pattern and fun to knit, and as always I loved working with old reliable, Cascade 220 - many of my biggest/happiest projects have used this yarn.

Anyway. Congratulations, you crazy kids.

P.S. Title quote on this post comes from Chris McCandless via Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild.