99 posts tagged “knitting”

I am now declaring the spinning for the red leaf wrap to be completed!

Finished yarn for the red leaf wrap

That's the red leaf singles for the weft on the left, and the two-ply merino for the warp on the right, finished just now. My next task is warping the loom, so I can take my weaving to a crafting date tomorrow :-)

And I've been making decent progress on the red cardigan too:

Red cardigan progress

Notice that the arm holding the camera is clad in a finished sleeve, the other sleeve reaches the elbow, and the body is considerably longer than in the last photo I posted.

The first sekrit project is what many partners of knitters will have been given today, the heart from Knitty. This was loads of fun to knit, and small enough that R didn't even notice that for a couple of evenings, every time he looked in my direction, my hand 'happened to' cover what I was knitting. The yarns are Dream in Colour Smooshy in dark red, and Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in Valentine - luxury sock yarns for a luxury heart :-)

Heart, front view

Heart, back view

And I'm continuing to make progress on the red cardigan, which now just hits my hips, although there's a way to go still on the body. The current plan is to knit to the minimum acceptable body length, and then switch to the sleeves, then switch back to the body to keep knitting until I run out of yarn.

Red cardigan in progress in the mirror

(My mirror is now slightly cleaner than it was last time, but I can't figure out how to get it not to smear.)

Socks drying on radiator

While taking photos for the previous post, I spotted this cheerful view in the background. Left to right: Baudelaire, Clessidra, Elegant ribbed stockings, Push-me-pull-you, Triskell cable, Coriolis. I've got a pretty good wardrobe of handknitted socks now - there are several more pairs which aren't on the radiator, including the dissertation socks currently on my feet :-)

Knitting is like building a house. Even if you only have a rough idea of what the finished house will be like, you still have to make decisions about what kind of foundations to build before you can lay the first brick. And once you start laying bricks there's a certain order things must happen in, and a limit to what you can change on the fly.

Crochet, on the other hand, is like a paper and pencil sketch. You start with a rough outline, maybe some tentative lines, and build up from there. If you think you need a bit more on one side, you just go over and add some more. There are of course still limits to what you can change on the fly, but they're different limits, and I think - from brief exposure to it - that they are fewer.

I'm surprised how different the two crafts are, and surprised it's taken me this long to pick up a hook for something other than fixing dropped knit stitches. I've not fallen instantly in love: I don't like the appearance of crocheted fabric as much as I do knitted fabric, and I don't understand crochet yet. But for toys, and playing, and making things up as I go along, it has definite possibilities.

I've just done a brief re-organise of my stash, just moved some things around, and looked at some other things I'd forgotten. One of the things this has shown up is that there's a bigger reorganisation needed, where I get everything out and look at it and check my Rav cataloguing, and so on, which I might do tomorrow.

Looking at it has crystalised my intention to try and work through my stash, rather than buying more yarn and fibre. I have a good selection of yarn for various knitting and weaving purposes; plain-dyed, undyed and hand-dyed fibre; and base materials for several different dyeing and/or blending projects. This should be enough to keep me going for a while! (Exceptions are permitted for making baby things as gifts, because most of my stash is not washable enough for baby clothes. Although I do have enough bits and pieces of sock yarn that I can make quite a lot of baby socks from stash.)

So this seems like a good time to list the things I think I might do this year, some more settled than others...

• Red leaf wrap (red leaf fibre partially spun; plain burgundy fibre still to spin)
• Gothmerino alpaca wrap (need to finish carding the black alpaca with the purple merino, then spin, then weave)
• At least one hat (either a hood or a beret-like thing with space for hair)
• Another pair of long fingerless gloves, perhaps to match the hat
• Make more handspun oddballs (spin up bits of leftover fibre and make up third oddball)
• (Probably) a scarf with the handspun oddballs. Either garter stitch lengthwise, or possibly entrelac or something
• Finish the red cardigan!
• Harden myself to frogging the purple cable one
• Go back to the drawing board on what to do with five million balls of Debbie Bliss merino DK in a rather lovely solid purple
• Design and knit a cardigan for the purple slubby singles currently in swatch; think about writing the pattern up for publishing
  
• Publish the pattern for the push-me-pull-you socks
• Make socks from the grey shimmery yarn I carded and spun
• Finish spinning the undyed BFL; dye, ply, and sock.
• Learn patterned weaving
• Knit another hat for partner-R
• Finish Henry for large-male-friend-R
• Complete something in stranded knitting
• Spin and weave some silk
  

But my cardigan is very progressy :-)

Red cardigan in mirror

Slubby purple swatch

While doing the boring knitting of the red cardigan, I have been convinced by Frax to start thinking about the design of my next cardigan. I spun this yarn with a particular garment in mind, modelled vaguely after my favourite bought cardigan, and now I've washed and set half the yarn, wound a ball, and have proceeded with swatching. The pattern is a drop-stitch rib from Vogue Stitchionary vol 1, and I've now frogged back the stocking stitch to reknit it with some drop stitches incorporated to see how I like it. The yarn is lovely, exactly how I wanted it to be, and very soft, and I really like how it's knitting up - I just have to decide on a design...

Before:

Red cardigan

After:

Red cardigan

Since finishing the push-me-pull-you socks and sending the pattern off for test knitting (thank you, Frax!), I've been in a bit of knitting no-woman's-land. I did start making Henry, but three rows in I started placing markers so I'd know where I was, and I've already gone wrong somewhere, and I can't summon up the enthusiasm to work out where, and how to fix it. I'm still technically knitting the two interminable cardigans, although as I said yesterday, I think I might frog the purple one. I'm planning (always ;-) to resurrect the red one, but it's dull knitting and the design decisions are all already made. Juno is OTN, but I don't want to knit either cotton or lace, so that leaves me with nothing I want to knit. I've got lots of spinning projects in planning, and some in progress, and some of these even have relationships with planned knitted or woven things, but none of them are ready to go, and what I want to do is knit, not spin.

So I've been spending some quality time with my Rav queue, and with the advanced pattern search, and with my stash (in virtual form, because it's easier to see that way!), and trying to work out what to do next, and I have a bit of a problem: my queue has metamorphosed while I wasn't looking into merely a list of 'things I might make, some day, with some mods', and not things I'm queuing up to knit now.

I think what I want to knit now is a hat. But I also think there are at least two hats lurking in my head: one is a hood, which might even have a yoke, and the other is a pull-down-over-my-ears hat which has space at the back for me to tuck my hair into. Beret-like, sort of. And I need a hat: I only have one sensibly-warm hat for this cold weather, and, well, its warmth is the only way it's sensible - it's a pointy stocking cap with a tassel. I love it, but it's slightly sillier than I like to be at work. I'm wearing a lot of red this winter, and my favourite gloves and two of my current rotation of scarves are red, so ideally I need a red hat to go with them, but I don't have any appropriate yarn available, or any available fibre with which to spin appropriate yarn. (There's the yarn and fibre that will be leftover from the red cardigan and the red leaf wrap, but I need to finish the projects before using the leftovers!)

Hence, impasse.

Also, I want a new hand-made cardigan, because I'm loving my existing ones so much, but I really shouldn't cast on for another cardigan with two so hopelessly stalled. Should I? But sitting waiting in my stash is some purple slubby singles yarn which I spun for a cardigan. And the cardigan in my head is loose-knit, airy and drapey, so it'll knit up quickly. And it might break the cardigan-block. Or it might make it worse, and leave me with three cardigans on the needles.

And all this while, my fingers are itching to knit.