triskellian knits...

Miscellaneous knitting

2008-03-13T15:20:47Z

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 :-(

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Peekapurpleboo

2008-03-06T18:26:21Z

I've been knitting the Peekaboo gloves from Magknits, and I've just finished all but the thumb of the first. And in honour of having figured out iMovie and the camera attached to my computer, here's a video! (The colours are better in the photos, because they had benefit of flash. The video was filmed directly under a bare light bulb, but I think it would have been better if I'd done it in daylight with the light on.)

Flip top mittens

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Lace-up gloves

2008-02-17T12:15:32Z

These are Leigh Radford's lace up gloves from Alterknits. They're a belated Christmas present for female-friend-R, to stop her complaining about how nice mine are. In what might be taken as role reversal, mine are bright-dark-red Manos (or possibly Maya, I can't remember), and hers are purple Knitting4fun spacedyed.

I have no WIP photos for these - I cast them on on Thursday, and finished them yesterday. They barely even appeared as WIPs in my Ravelry projects list before I marked them as finished. I reckon each glove took a maximum of two and a half hours - I can be so specific because I knit everything except the thumb of glove number two on two one-hour train journeys yesterday, then knit the thumb, tidied the ends and threaded the ribbon when I got home.

I had two moments of synchronicity with these. On Friday I was casting off the main body of the first glove while looking through Cat Bordhi's New Pathways for Sock Knitters (of which more later), and as I got to the last couple of stitches to cast off, I arrived at the very last page of the book, which includes "A very fine end, indeed" - a way of finishing a circular cast off that creates a continuous chain, rather than a step. I immediately used this on the glove, and it is indeed very fine. I've gone on to use it on all three other cast off edges in these gloves, and now can't even tell where the ends are from the outside of the glove :-)

The second moment of synchronicity was on the train yesterday. I went into London on my own to meet some friends, and although I'm less travel sick on trains than on most other forms of transport, I prefer not to exacerbate it by reading if I can find something else to do (I can read on trains, which is more than I can on coaches or in cars, but still best not to push it). So I packed needles, yarn and instructions (scribbled out, not the whole book), and an ipod full of back issues of Cast On, which I'm still catching up with, and one of the ones I listened to featured an interview with Leigh Radford, who had just released her one skein book at the time.

Choosing the yarn for these was hard. R wanted them just like mine, and in either red or purple, and she was happy to have mine second hand if I was willing to give them. Although I was theoretically willing to knit myself a nicer pair and give her my old ones, I didn't feel that was really in the spirit of a gift, which left me with the options of either knitting her red ones (which might be too much like mine) or knitting her purple ones (which I'd be likely to like more than mine and would therefore agonise about which to give her). I considered various options from my stash (including my fibre, not-yet-yarn, stash) and others from online stores, and didn't really get anywhere. Then on Thursday I remembered about the Knitting4fun space-dyed, which is in my stash, but some of which is currently a stealth WIP* so I don't think of it as available yarn. I'm hoping it's ideal - I love it, but at this size circumference it's a bit too brightly patterned for me; R will probably think it's 'jolly'. And comparing the texture of the new gloves with the old ones, I'm glad I decided to knit hers fresh - they're all smooth and pretty, whereas mine are a bit bobbly, a bit fluffy around the edges. I love them, but they're clearly used.

*Stealth WIP = one which is not on my Ravelry projects list and therefore doesn't count towards my WIP total. In this case I had an idea for the yarn - and possibly a pattern submission - but it hasn't quite worked out so I'm probably going to frog it, so I don't mind cannibalising yarn for these gloves.

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Elegant ribbed stockings

2007-10-31T22:41:40Z

I'm well into the leg of the first elegant ribbed stocking, and it's lots of fun (plus going really quickly because it's knit on quite large needles - 4.5mm, 4mm and 3.75mm). I'm halfway through the fourth cable turn section, and am expecting to hit the 10" required for my next needle change at the end of the pattern repeat, which will make it neat and easy to replicate on the second.

I bought fancy sillk hand-dyed ribbon for these, since the pictures in the book include a ribbon tie around the top, but I think it will look silly - these are going to be thick, chunky socks (not at all well named, although the stitch pattern is quite elegant, I suppose), and a ribbon would strike a bum note. But all is not lost! I've just been looking at the pictures of Clessidra (which may be my next sock project), and that - more delicate pattern, finer gauge, etc - would be a much better home for the pretty ribbon.

I'm loving the Cascade 220, by the way, and am trying to resist the urge to plan something else to knit with it, requiring the purchase of more. It seems a crazily thick yarn for socks, but it's the same weight as the yarn mentioned in the book, and I've already said I'm probably not planning to wear these socks out and about - strictly lazing-around-the-house socks - so it's no big deal. And I meant it when I said it was going really quickly :-) I'm cabling sans cable needle, which is helping, too, although I doubt I'd be brave enough to do it for cables wider than two stitches.

Red and pink sock yarn

One final picture, the last photo of the Ally Pally haul: the very bright red and pink sock yarn of which Frax and I have joint custody. Well, she's the resident parent, but I'm hoping for visiting rights! Thanks to Frax for the photo.

There are so many pairs of socks in my immediate knitting future it's quite scary, but now the weather is being seriously cold, I've taken the unusual step of wearing socks indoors! And they're mostly my currently-meagre supply of handknitted socks, because they're so much warmer than bought socks, because it means I get to wear them without worrying about wearing them out too quickly, and because it's the only time I wear socks without boots, so I get to admire the pretty (I'm wearing Baudelaires as I type). So I'm looking forward to expanding my hand-knitted sock wardrobe and having many pairs of beautiful red and purple socks to choose from.

In not-news unrelated to socks, I've got photos of the nearly-completed Urban Rustic gloves that I keep meaning to (a) write about, and (b) weave in the damned ends, but I can never quite summon the energy to do either. I hate weaving in ends, and I'm worried that these will sit in my WIPs pile forever, although they're actually really nice gloves, and I'm pleased with my mods: the double-sided dual-yarn effect, and the added multi-directional cuffs. The pics are in my Vox library and on Flickr, anyway.

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All sorts of things...

2007-10-10T21:20:21Z

I'm knitting again :-) My wrist isn't completely recovered, but it's basically OK unless I use it a lot, or bear weight on it at certain angles. So I've actually worked on (counts) four different projects in the last week. Four! I should get round to taking some photos to prove this, but words will have to suffice in the mean time.

I've finished knitting the Urban Rustic gloves, with added cuffs to make them longer. The sticking point now is weaving in the approximately fifty million ends and closing up the holes. I've done about half of one glove, but can't quite bring myself to finish. I'm well aware that this is ridiculous.

I've finished the first Jaywalker, at last. I even took it over to female-friend-R's house to show her and get her to try it on before I made the second, but then I forgot about it and didn't show her. I'm taking a break before I make the next anyway, because I got very bored of knitting them.

I've picked up the red cardigan again, but it's hard going - it's top-down all-in-one raglan, and I'm approaching the point where I can split off the sleeves, so it's very long rows of boring boring stocking stitch, and it's on the Denise needles, which aren't really quite slippery enough for the yarn, so there's an awful lot of moving stitches around.

In an effort to make me knit the red cardigan, I've cast on something else. It does make sense, honestly. If my other project is complicated, I'll have to have the cardigan as TV knitting because it's simple and doesn't need looking at. The theory is that if I'm doing it while I'm thinking about something else, I might not notice the very, very long time it takes to knit a single row. So for this to work, the other project has to need me to look at it and think about it. And since the cardigan is large, the second project should probably be small: it's Pomatomus, knit with the tweedy blue Trekking I bought in Cornwall. I spent a while looking through sock patterns to find one that I thought would work with either the Trekking or the Opal handpaint, and this was the combination that grabbed me. God only knows what I'm going to do with the Opal. It might have been a poor purchasing decision - maybe I'll see if I can trade it with someone.

But in the most exciting knitting news, I'm going to the Knitting and Stitching Show this weekend with Frax and assorted other knitters, and I'm really looking forward to it. I need to spend some time with my Ravelry queue in preparation for the trip, so I know how much of different weights I 'need' for different things I'm considering - it would be a terrible calamity to find the perfect yarn for a project but not be able to remember how much it requires.

So, things I'm actively planning to make, that I need to look up before the show:

Elegant ribbed stockings from Favorite Socks (plain or semi-solid sport weight)
Embossed leaves socks, ditto (semi-solid or muted variegated sock yarn)
Henry from Knitty (burgundy sock yarn, for large-male-friend-R)
Entrelac shawl (something variegated)

I think that's all on the yarn front. I am not buying a cardigansworth of anything, because I have one cardigan OTN and another in planning (and am considering frogging and reknitting my Rogue), so no large piles of aran-weight for me, no matter how beautiful. If it's very beautiful, I'll buy smallish quantities and make hats and/or scarves. Or gloves. Or maybe even bags. But no more large garments, apart from the entrelac shawl, and that's only on the list because it specifically requires variegated, which I otherwise try not to buy because it's too patterned for me when it's knitted up.

I have needle wants, too. I want some 2.25mm circs to fill the gap in my sock tools; I need to check what size needles I've used for the random lace jumper and get some pointy lace needles for it to increase the chance of me ever going back to it (just too fiddly with blunt Denises), and I'd like some Addis to replace the Denises in the red cardigan too. Hell, who am I kidding? I'd like Addis in all sizes and all lengths, please. But no straight needles, even if they are the most beautiful thing ever, because I hate knitting with them. They can be made of beautifully carved amethyst and I won't buy them. Well, maybe if they really were amethyst I'd buy them as an ornament ;-)

Finally, I'd like some undyed yarn, probably just sock weight, because I've had so much fun dyeing that I want to do more. But mostly I want to spend the day with my friends talking about knitting and drooling over all the shiny :-)

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Urban Rustic gloves

2007-09-15T23:24:41Z

So I've been chafing at the bit to start knitting again, after hurting my wrist a couple of weeks ago. My two (main) existing wips were out, because the Jaywalkers are on small needles and knit tight, which I find makes my hands ache more even under normal circumstances, and the red cardigan is long rows, and fairly heavy even at this early stage. Clearly an excuse to cast on a new project, which - combined with the two balls of Noro I acquired on holiday - led me to the Urban Rustic gloves from Knitty.

I've finished the knitting of the first one, which actually means there's quite a lot still to do, even though I did the finger-side grafting as I went along (I love grafting; it's like magic) - lots of tidying away ends and closing up holes. I'm not keen on garter stitch, so I used stocking stitch. Or reverse stocking stitch, I haven't yet decided (opinions welcome - there are photos of both sides). I started off thinking I was going to alternate rows of the Silk Garden and the Kureyon, but of course that doesn't work with short rows, so instead I took advantage of the peculiarities of the pattern to knit one side of the glove in one yarn and the other in the other. I think I like the effect on the first glove; I'll withhold judgement on the overall effect till I see which colours turn up on the second glove - the long colour repeats in both yarns mean the second glove will probably be quite different to the first ;-) The glove is shorter than I like, so depending on how much yarn is over after the second glove, I'll probably pick up stitches around the wrist and knit it longer (perhaps swapping the position of the yarns, so the Kureyon side has a Silk Garden cuff and vice versa).

The pattern is lovely. I really like this approach to knitting gloves (not that I've ever knit fingers using the traditional approach); I'm generally a fan of holding stitches and them knitting them in later, and I even like the line of contrast on one side of each finger where I grafted with yarn which was out of sequence with the main body of the glove. Stupidly, I forgot to photograph that line on the stocking stitch side, and the camera is both nearly out of battery, and put away back in its bag, so it'll have to wait.

(The colours on the Silk Garden aren't true, by the way: the 'red' is pink, the 'blue' is purple, and the 'pink' is lilac. It's a much nicer combination in real life.)

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