7 posts tagged “jaywalker”

I've finished the first elegant ribbed stocking (photos later), and am very happy with it. I've even cast on and done the first six rows of the second, but my eye is wandering. I knit one needle of Pomatomus, but it needed too much attention, and that's not the kind of knitting I do in work crises (not feeling well this evening, hence knitting instead of working). Couldn't even bring myself to finish the round.

I knit the first elegant rib in a week, so I really shouldn't be bored yet, but I've been flipping through Favorite Socks, and my Ravelry queue, thinking about what other sock yarn I've got stashed, and wandering about what to make with it. Red smooshy is probably going to be the embossed leaves socks; purple Cherry Tree Hill for clessidra. The purple Knitwitches is variegated, so probably wants to be something plain, and is suggesting it might want to be the main colour for Ilga's socks, but they're Fair Isle and require other colours for the pattern. I've got ordinary black which would work for the dark colour, but the only other unassigned yarns I've got are Opal handpaint, which is too fussy, or ordinary dark green, which wouldn't go. One of the assigned yarns - the red smooshy or the purple CTH - would go better, but I'd have to knit their assigned socks first in case there's not enough yarn. And the purple colour would go better, but the red texture would be better, because the CTH has a really different texture from the others (tighter spun and less fluffy). I've got some purple CTH and some Lorna's Laces valentine left over from other things, but probably not enough :-(

If I don't want to knit the other elegant rib just now, what I should do is knit friend-R's other jaywalker, or even some of my stalled red cardigan. The cardigan's too boring, but if I can force myself to get through the next few inches, I'm at sleeve-splitting-off time, which is itself interesting, and which leaves me with shorter - therefore less boring - rows. But it's big and heavy and requires five balls of yarn at once, and just thinking about it makes me tired. And anyway, I really want to be knitting socks.

Jaywalker is probably the right level of interesting - something to do, but easy to remember and not at all taxing - but I'm all out of enthusiasm for the pattern.

I keep looking at the existing pairs of socks that I've made, and marvelling that I ever managed to finish both, let alone that in all cases I knit the second straight after the first (although I did have a shortish hiatus in knitting the triskell cable socks). What was it that kept me going? When did I lose it? And how do I get it back again?

Ahem. Seem to have turned into Carrie from Sex and the City for a moment there.

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 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 :-)

My blog may have been quiet, but my knitting has not been inactive, until this weekend, when I nearly came off my bicycle, and I think most of the force required to keep it to "nearly" went through my right wrist (I'm right handed). It's not broken, but it is splinted and painful, and the splint doesn't allow enough movement in my fingers to knit :-(

So now I can't knit, what I should be doing is photographing and documenting the things I've been working on, and writing about plans and schemes I'm considering. I've got things to say about the dyed-purple yarn (which is now, variously, in balls, a swatch, and the beginning of a project), and about Jaywalkers (approaching toe number one). I haven't done anything else with the red cardigan because I got bored of wrangling five balls of yarn while knitting long stretches of stocking stitch, but if I start a complicated pattern after I finish the Jaywalkers (or after I finish one of them, cos I think I'm too bored of the pattern to immediately start on number two) I'll have no choice but to take up the cardigan as TV knitting ;-)

I've got plenty of stashed sock yarn (oops, sorry, sock yarn doesn't count as stash, does it?), and a new sock book. The world is my oyster...

The newly-dyed wool was nearly dry, and looking passably purple-ish, when I realised that I had forgotten to wash it when it came out of the oven. It reeked of vinegar, and was weirdly sticky in places, so I steeled myself to take it down, wash it, and begin the slow drying process all over again. At this rate I'll never get to knit with it.

After that setback, 4" into the leg of the first Jaywalker, I decided I'd better try it on to make sure (my feet are slightly bigger than R's, but only slightly). Much tugging ensued. It would just about go on, but wasn't at all keen at coming off again. I wondered for a while if I'd have to frog it while wearing it; fortunately it wasn't that bad, but it was destined for frogging anyway. And since the original cast on, while nicely loose, looked very sloppy, I thought I'd try a different one. Five minutes with the Knitty archives later, I was trying my first ever tubular cast-on. I've not got any further than the cast on, but I strongly suspect it's far too tight, so I foresee more frogging in my future. Sigh.

(I wrote some of this yesterday, but Firefox crashed before I could post it, and I was too frustrated to write it all again.)

Clapotis-in-progress 1

This is where I'm up to with the clapotis. Well, actually, I'm further along than that, because I've done another pattern repeat or so since I took the photo. I'm more than halfway through now (which is good because I'm nearly halfway through my yarn!), and I still really like this. I'm starting to get bored with knitting it, though, which is why this post will go on to talk about plans and schemes that are forming in my mind ;-) Still, the clapotis is good mindless TV knitting, so I don't think I'll abandon it, even while thinking about other things I could knit!

Closeup clapotis-in-progress

There's a slight problem with a couple of the  stocking-stitch-stripes, where my fingers got confused with "kfb" and "ktbl", and increased some stitches when they were supposed to be only twisting them, so a couple of the stripes are rather bulbous, which you can see in the picture to the right - counting down from the top-right, the second and third stocking-stitch-stripes are swollen near the top. Probably no one but me (and now you!) will ever notice, though.

The plots and schemes I mentioned earlier are to do with the sock yarn that arrived with the clapotis yarn - blue and green Cascade Sassy Stripes, and Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in "Valentine" (still much pinker and tamer in real life, but in my head it's still the colour of blood oozing from a heart. Which probably makes me really gross, but never mind). I swatched the Cascade last night; I don't have the needle size the Jaywalker pattern calls for, just the one below and the one above, but even with the smaller one, my gauge is way off, and the number of cast-on stitches would produce an enormous tube, so I think I'll have to rejig the pattern. Fortunately, it comes in nice simple repeats, and the length of each zig-zag is also adjustable, so it should be really straightforward once I've re-swatched properly. Which I will probably put off, because I hate swatching in the round - either you have to cast on millions of stitches to make a tube wide enough to measure properly, or you leave loose yarn around the back, but then the three-or-four stitches on the edges are too loose to be any good at all, and it's really fiddly to manage. Sadly, my purl tension is different from my knit tension, so I do have to do circular swatches.

sock yarn

The Lorna's Laces is more troublesome. I knew when I bought the Cascade that it would be for Jaywalkers; all I knew about the Lorna's Laces is that it would be socks for me. I hadn't really got any idea what kind of socks. Now I have a plan to test out - more swatching! - to see if it works with the variegated yarn. The colours are fairly similar, so I think it might well work. The plan is (surprise, surprise!) cables. Frax suggested using my triskell cable on socks, and since the jumper of doom is destined for frogging, I still want something knitted with the thing, having designed it. So I'm going to swatch that, and see how it works. And because a whole sock will be two cable repeats around (give or take a few ribs), I might as well guess a number of stitches and actually cast on for a toe-up sock and see if it works. (Has to be toe-up because the pattern is charted bottom-up, and I'm too lazy to rechart it.) I'm going to use the toe-up heel-flap method from Baudelaire, because I like it, and because it gives me a good number of stitches to be able to start the back cable panel on the heel flap itself, which I think would be rather cool.

Someone told me the other day that knitting doesn't count as a vice. Needless to say, said someone has never had the joy of opening a parcel from Get Knitted containing approximately £70 worth of gorgeous, gorgeous yarn.

new yarn