6 posts tagged “black”

The second crafting date was with two knitters (Dyddgu and White_hart), one of whom had come to play with my spinning wheel. I gave a mini-spinning lesson (and my student produced a mini-skein of genuine yarn!), learnt the Norwegian purl technique, and talked a lot about knitting as well as about many other subjects. I knitted on the new stranded project, which you can see to the left. This is going to be a slipper rather than a sock, and the swirly pattern is from "Kiehkuralapaset - Swirly Mittens" by goldenknits / AnneL, which I found on Ravelry. I'm really happy with this project so far. The colour contrast is much better than both of the previous attempts, I love the swirly pattern, and I'm really starting to get into the two-handed knitting thing. I even, with benefit of Dyddgu's Norwegian purl lesson, added some short rows on the sole at the base of the toe, to lift the pointed toe up slightly.

Also inspired by the knitterly conversation, I've taken up the purple cable cardigan again, and am making solid progress. For once I seem to be doing quite well on having two projects actively on the go at the same time - this is now nearing the point where I can split off the sleeves, and it will then go much more quickly. 

Part of the reason I'm now making progress on this cardigan is that I've finished spinning the yarn for my next purple cardigan, but I am being strict with myself and not casting on until I've finished another one. Three cardigans in progress is too much! And to minimise the chances of me cheating on this, I haven't yet washed and set the yarn, so I can't just cast on on a whim - it'll take a few days of washing and drying first, by which time I might be able to summon up enough sternness to tell myself off ;-) 

A quick update with some photos...

The top picture is the completed peekapurpleboo (no one else around at the time to wield the camera, so I couldn't wear them to photograph them).

The second picture is an idea from the Twisted Sisters' Sock Workbook: the endless circular swatch. I purl looser than I knit, so I need to swatch circularly, but casting on enough stitches for a decent-sized swatch is a pain, and I don't like the thing where you leave long strands of yarn behind a flat swatch in order to knit every stitch (I have a vague recollection of once inventing a much better way of making a flat swatch and still only needing to knit, but I can't for the life of me work out what it was, so I might have dreamt it). The idea is that, unless I need to cannibalise the swatch to finish the project, this will just be an ongoing swatch tube, possibly to be made into a little bag or something eventually, but just sitting there, waiting for the next needles and yarn that need to swatch. And the cast on is Judy's magic cast on (which I got from New Pathways, but is also IIRC on Knitty somewhere), which really is magic.

The third and fourth pictures are the Riverbed BMP in progress. There's an unfortunate problem: I didn't anticipate what the effect on the fabric would be of me switching which hand I hold which yarn in, hence the line where the red suddenly becomes dominant. I like the red dominant better, but not enough more to frog the whole thing and start from scratch, so I think I'm just going to live with it.

The different yarn in each hand technique is loads of fun, and - colour dominance problem aside - I really like how these look.

The last picture is of my solution to the only problem with the otherwise gorgeous Harmony interchangeable needles. These needle tips are not marked with their size, and although the bag includes a number of perfectly needle-sized pockets, the needle tips come tucked into elastic on a piece of card with their sizes marked, and this annoyed me. I have now written their US and metric sizes onto both sides of little card labels (which I otherwise use for labelling skeins of handspun), and tucked a label and a pair of needle tips into each pocket. And added a needle gauge in case needles get separated from labels. This is a much more sensible arrangement, and I'm a bit cross they didn't come like this :-( 

To the right is BMP, just before I frogged it. I love the pattern, I love the stranded technique, I love using one hand for each colour, knitting one yarn continental and the other English. Unfortunately, the purple is too dark and too variegated for the fine details of the space invaders to show up. So I frogged it.

For the second attempt at stranded socks, I used the same yarn but switched to the riverbed pattern from New Pathways for Sock Knitting. Specifically to the clematis vine variant, although I had no plans to knit the clematis vine pattern itself. I couldn't find the needles I wanted (Addi 2.5mm) so I settled for Knitpicks 2.25mm, but the number of stitches per inch was off the chart, the toe was too pointy, and the contrast still wasn't working. I frogged it, with no pictures taken.

(I feel as if I'm echoing Neil Gaiman here, with Eve's story about the wives of Adam, and her description of Adam's second wife: "the nameless one, the virgin, was made of flesh and of blood, forgotten, perhaps coldly destroyed, and unmentioned save in the dustiest of books" (The Sandman, "Parliament of Rooks").)

For the third attempt, I switched yarn. I've put the purple Knitwitches away, and I'm using the Vino Veritas colourway of Dream in Color's 'smooshy'. It's a bit fatter than the Knitwitches, and it's very lovely indeed. I'd originally intended to make the embossed leaves socks with it, but I'm a bit uneasy about the idea of the pretty delicate pattern in the strong bold colour, and I don't currently want to knit lace socks, so I'm happy with the repurposing.

This time I changed the toe increases to make a more rounded toe, I found my Addis, and I've actually made an attempt at taking measurements and making calculations. My gauge is still off the chart (this is an annoying flaw in the book - even though knitting stranded tightens up my stitches, this doesn't strike me as a particularly tiny gauge, and 2.5mm is a perfectly sensible (possibly tending to slightly large) size needle, so I'm surprised it's not within the included range), but I've nevertheless worked out roughly what I'm doing. There's a minor problem with some increases, but it looks OK, and it's not enough of a problem to bother frogging back. And to combine the riverbed sockitecture with the BMP I started knitting, I'm putting a single column of space invaders in place of the clematis vine panel. The red is a better contrast than the purple, and I'm just really enjoying knitting this.

These are the (finally!) finished Shadow and Ghost socks (from the Cheshire cat pattern at Purlescence). They're a late birthday present for female-friend-R (in honour of her grey-Ghost-cat and her black-Shadow-cat), who seemed pleased with them and impressed at the cleverness of me (even though I explained that it's entirely Alice Bell who's clever; I'm just following instructions ;-)

I'm plotting lots of other socks, several of which are inspired by New Pathways: Bartholomew's Tantalising Socks for partner-R, who turns out to like the handpainted red and green Opal I ill-advisedly bought on holiday last year, hoorah; Coriolis spirals for me from the red and pink sock yarn that Frax currently has custody of, and especially the Clematis vine socks, with vertical stripes, because I agree with Cat Bordhi: two-handed knitting is coooool.

Which brings me to my 'new' project. It's not new at all, really. I cast on for BMP sometime towards the end of November, and almost immediately sent the project into hibernation awaiting me getting around to learning to knit continental - dropping and picking up the yarn every other stitch was driving me potty. But now I've finished a project I'm allowed* to start another, and since I've now learnt continental (knit stitch, anyway; I still have to look up how to purl, and my muscles haven't learnt it yet), I've now properly started making gothic space invaders :-) The contrast between the purple and the black isn't perfect, but I figure over the whole sock it will become more obvious. And I really like how they look so far. The Knitwitches yarn is lovely, and knitting one yarn with one hand and the other with the other is loads of fun.

*This doesn't, of course, mean that I only ever have a certain number of projects on the needles - I might easily start yet another before I finish the next, but I'll worry a tiny bit about my attention span and lack of finishing ability. If I've just finished a project I don't need to worry ;-)

I'm actually plotting another sock project, which I might end up casting on for before these are done, but that's a matter for my next post...

Getting there with these - one down, one maybe a quarter of the way through. I want to finish them by Saturday, which is R's birthday. She won't mind if they're a bit late, but I will. Still, lots of dissertation-reading this week, and I can read and knit at the same time, especially since most of the knitting is basically stocking stitch.

I'm loving these socks. If I liked to wear the colours of my own cats (tortie and ginger) I'd make another pair for myself on the same theme. Sadly, I don't wear brown or orange, so that's not going to happen. Or maybe I'll make up some other illusion design for something. Or maybe I'll just finish these and go on and do something else ;-)

These pictures are of what I think I shall call my first successful spinning project - it's turned out roughly as I planned, and it looks lovely :-) (The tape measure shows centimetres for scale.)

This is the end result of the purple spinning from my last post - the big skein is about 90m of two-ply, and the smaller is about 26m of singles. The plied yarn alternates solid lilac, solid purple, and a candy-cane effect of both. The thickness of the singles and the twist in the ply varies quite a lot, but I still love it. I think it's probably going to be a hat, because it's about the right quantity, and because I need a hat that's a bit more sensible than my current silly pointy hat.

The singles are what was left after I'd filled the spindle with plied yarn - it would take no more, and since I'd plied enough to make a hat, I thought I'd leave the remaining singles. I might use them to trim something, or they might go into the ongoing scrap scarf (which I've actually knit some of this week, after being inspired to take it up again by someone on the LJ brit_knits community).

This is my current spinning project. Mostly I'm just trying to spin as thin and as evenly as possible; I'll decide how to ply it (and what with) and what to knit with it when it's finished and I can see how well I've succeeded. I'm more-or-less getting the hang of drafting now; I started off pulling sections as wide as I wanted from the tops, and hardly drafting at all, which meant it was slow because I had to make lots of joins. Now, I'm starting with a much thicker piece of fibre and thinning it down just before it meets the twist. As far as I can tell from my reading on the subject, this is what I'm supposed to be doing ;-) It's getting easier, and producing better results, all the time, which is always a nice thing in a new hobby.