Cowl finished
pattern: 7 repeats of feather and fan around (18 stitch f&f)
yarn: “Source of Gilgamesh” 2-ply leftovers from RedFish Dyeworks (bought at Stitches West 2008) 19g [1].
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| From cowl one |
(Click on any thumbnail to be taken to the larger image page.)
Let me see. Stuff going on:
Fiber drama is getting better. Whenever there is drama, I tell myself, “Stop reading Ravelry fora. They just upset you.”
I am currently bored with my kniting projects; I believe this is largely due to their un-named state. (I work on things that I have named.)
I sent out a link to a bunch of fiber friends and realized normally I would just have put it here. http://featherandfan.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/new-knitty-new-seaming-technique-new-books/
I am feeling really bitter about that situation and have resolved not to email people blog contents anymore. Probably the email recipients will be grateful I am no longer cluttering their inboxes.
I finished spinning and washing a really nice (even!) Wensleydale sock yarn. Then while winding, I knocked the swift off the table and recreated the Flying Spaghetti Monster canon in my living room. It is not really rescue-able and I am somewhat crushed.
I am about to turn the heel on the Schaeffer Heather sock yarn sock. Meaning at the halfway point, I have completed about 25% of my planned accomplishments. The sock texture does not look amazing unblocked. No idea whether it will look better after blocking. Maybe this just is not an attractive texture?
My non-fiber life is filled with errands, so there might be even less progress than usual. And what progress there is, it will remain unillustrated because the picture posting is really irritating.
Hi. I am an idiot. Feel free to point and laugh. My computer got a virus. I could not fix it. I did have anti-virus. I did have anti-spyware. I did have router firewalls in place. Nothing worked. I got help. The help could not fix it. The whole thing had to be wiped. I did retrieve my data and most things are back to normal. But the remaining things are going to especially affect you my readers. I cannot get pictures off my camera. Admittedly, this will be relatively easily solved by the installation of some software, whenever that becomes a priority.
I received the February fiber club shipment. It is a really ridiculously soft baby llama fiber and a spool of embroidery thread for plying. The llama is a hazel gray color that goes between oatmeal and sea green depending on the light and what the ambient colors are. The embroidery thread is an unfortunate shade of electric turquoise and is 100% polyester. However, I have a plan. I have some dyed silk fiber. It looks fabulous next to the llama. I am so excited about this that I am finding it hard to finish working on the January fiber.
The second Raspberry Friday Sock is progressing. I am about halfway through the foot now. I have finished 2 of 6 pattern repeats.
I realized that I am on track to knit 12 pair of socks this year. I sort of want to push for that, but sock knitting really detracts from other fibery projects. Weighing in the other pan is the fact that I have decided to bail on the 50 books per year for the first time in about 5 years– (Feel free to email if you want to discuss my reasons.) so it might be nice if there was something to measure my progress through time against. Plus I have bought the yarn, I better do something with it.
Finished the first Raspberry Friday sock. Cast on for second sock. I will not say I am immune to Second Sock Syndrome, but I do have a treatment plan in place.
That was when I discovered that Addi and Knitpicks and my needle gauge all have completely different ideas as to what each size means. Now. I love the super pointy KP tips with their long bevel. It is exactly the opposite of what I liked as a beginning knitter, which is very close to the tips Addi has. (Why they make wood and bamboo with pointy tips and metal with blunt, I really cannot understand.) But the Addis are a full .5mm larger. KP sells a US #1.5 which is the same size as the Addi #1. And the KP people warn that they sell those for consistency with other brands. But it is no surprise I kept thinking I needed #0 or #00 needles if I cannot get the same gauge everyone else is getting when my needles are 25% fatter than everyone else’s. It was not my fault!
I am going to go back to the Addi needles for the second sock after I finish the short-row toe, which I am slovenly knitting (my hands are freezing) to approximate the larger gauge. When this sock is done, I am going to have several pair of Addi needles in need of new homes. #”1″s and #4s. Not that anyone reads this.
I need needle storage now though. My current system looks like a shelf of purple spaghettini.
Normally I would have expected a lot of progress on the sock, which remains at that ~half-done state, because there was a lot of news I planned to record. What I had not expected was how redundant and useless the news covering the inauguration was if one had actually watched the inauguration. So I had very little knitting time. Of course I could have re-watched Kung Fu Panda, but it was easier to just go off and read instead.
I have started the cuff of my second sock. (It is toe-up, so 2/3 done.) Then today I worked on it again and it occurred to me that most people do not talk about how they deal with complicated patterns and motifs.
What helped me the most was coming up with a method for the one lace row in feather-and-fan. In this pattern, the lacework is done with three rounds plain stockinette (all K* since the sock is in-the-round) and one round: [k2tog, k2tog, k2tog, k, yo, k yo, k yo, k yo, k yo, k yo, k2tog, k2tog, k2tog]*. I flubbed this several times, when I got to the end of a section, I would not have the 18 stitches back again. I fudged it on subsequent rounds because tinking back lacework in the round really bites for an off-by-one error. Add in the cumbersome-ness of keeping track of 3 rounds of plain knit, because it was easy to have just 2 or go on to 4 rounds. It was too much to store in my mind. I am a “bear of very little brain” some days.
So I pulled out my homemade abacus. ( I should take a picture of it to share. ) I said the hundreds would be for keeping track of which round of the pattern and the ones would count how many sets had been done. Now I can easily track where I am in the patterning and where I am on the sock. Row counters have nothing on an actual abacus!
The internal stitches for the lacework row were another issue. I came up with a counting for that. A, B, C, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, 6, J, K, L. I had to count the YO as its own number or I was losing it.
When I started knitting I had no problems with any texture or colorwork. It just took more attention than plainwork does. Since I was a very slow knitter anyway, I would often choose something with a more complex motif. That way when I was done with the project no one wondered how I could have been working on that for months.
Now that I have some speed improvement, I find the complex motifs frustratingly slow. And I find that I am not thinking ahead as much so it is easy to make mistakes just when they are hardest to fix.
It would be really nice if motifs came with mnemonics. If there was a poem or a song, that might help. What about for this feather-and-fan: Fist bog, fist cog, fist dog, thumb around, two around, tree ground, ring around, five no rosy, thumb around [again], fist fog, fist hog, fist jog? The -og words would be for together, “fist” for knit… because when I am doing a k2tog, I end up with 2 clenched fists. By incrementing the starting letter for the -og words, there is a means to track where you are. I like “around” for yarn overs and counting by fingers, but I suspect that is just a lack of creativity. If I was creative, there could be a rhyming couplet poem:
Cyclops needs another eye, sun and moon,
Fill an empty lie, clock rings noon,
Don’t ask why, just be home soon.
Feel free to share how you keep track of your complex motifs or pattern segments.
I am blocking my bent scarf today. First real “lace” blocking. Lace being a bit of a misnomer since I just swapped in needles that were 6 sizes bigger every 6th row or so. But that was more interesting than dealing with yarn overs.
Sock progress has been slower than expected. I am a handful of rounds from starting the heel. But the slog from toe to heel took ages.
I am looking into my next knitting project and fiber-related things for the year.
Spinning projects are pretty much set. I have that “Source of Gilgamesh” to finish spinning singles for and then its plying. With the fiber club shipment here, I feel some obligation to actually spin it so I can participate— but pink bamboo yarn and a kiddy sweater? Yeah, zero enthusiasm. Who makes unwashable things for children anyway? That has to be on par with giving a kid a one-man band. By the time I finish the SoG yarn, I might need to skip ahead to the February shipment though. I wanted to spin the January shipment and post about it to the Rav group so I could collect praise, but I do not want that enough to interrupt a big and dear project.
Knitting projects upcoming are:
Updated version of the Promethean Pocket instructions, this time with pictures! Corry came up with a really good idea.
Leuca sweater pictures, though this cast on edge will likely be frogged and started again after I see what the sleeves look like:
