Won’t Quit my Day Job

Yesterday I decided to do a little dabbling in a field related to knitting, ie: dying yarn. I had absolutely no expectations that I would identify a long hidden talent with my savant like dye job – and I must say that I was not disappointed.

Somewhere on the internet I had read something about dying yarn in cake form and it magically becoming a gradient. Woo Hoo, for shortcuts. And then I vaguely remembered being able to dye with food coloring. I just so happened to have some Wilton’s Powdered icing coloring stuff and a cheapo ball of yarn lying around, so hey – no time like the present.

The Creature from the Blue Lagoon

Apparently Kool-aide brings its’ own acid to the party, but I needed to add acid myself. I also figured that the dye would wick into the ball better if the yarn was already wet. Into a measuring cup went a mixture of water and vinegar and the yarn ball.

It floated.

I piled a plate and a can of potatoes on top and let it sit for a good long while. It took forever for the bugger to quit floating. While this was going on I mixed water, dye powder and vinegar in my little crock pot (usually dedicated to delicious, delicious cheese dip) and started it heating up.

Once the ball sank, it went into the hot-tub for a good long while. It looked fabulous. Until I took it out and poked it with some chopsticks and identified that the dye had only penetrated about 1/2 inch. So I got my trusty ball winder and re-wound it from the outside – effectively turning it inside out. After adding more dye to the crock-pot I chucked the yarn back in.

Deceptively dyed looking yarn.

The little bugger floated, but I decided not to worry about it and got a hard cider. After several more hours I fished it out and re-skeined it to see what I had wrought. That is a whole story in and of itself – a hint? At one point the swift collapsed.

Finito, except for I need to rinse some more. And maybe nuke it.

It was almost midnight by the time I got finished and this picture was taken with the on-camera flash. It sucks more than a Dyson vacuum, but you get the idea. Lesson of this story? I am gonna stick to buying awesome yarn from awesome dyers who know what the heck they are doing.

Do you have any indy dyers that you love and would recommend to me? Please feel free to share links in the comments (even if you are the dyer in question – toot your own horn!)

Roller Coaster!

It was time to come up with a new pattern, with a goal to create a texture pattern that would stand up to the crazy color changes of variegated sock yarn. And luckily enough I had received a fabulous skein of Sliced Blood Oranges from the indy dyer SoftnShiny to work with. Enter the Roller Coaster Cowl.

I am irrationally fond of this shot of the cowl.

I decided to make a cowl. Don’t know why, but it just seemed to be the thing to do. One of those really long cowls that can be worn like a scarf with no ends. My guess is that I keep seeing all of these lovely cowl patterns and I have a stumpy little neck that, when paired with a tight fitting cowl, makes me look like a psychedelic turtle.

So I found a stitch pattern that I really liked, but faced a problem. Both sides of the pattern were awesome and completely different in appearance. A swatching we will go! First I rewrote the stitch pattern to convert it from flat knitting to knitting in the round. Then I rewrote it again and basically swapped all of the knits & purls so that I would be knitting with the wrong side out. Easy peasy right?

Wrong.

This led to a couple of problems.

a) Tension is different with regards to knitting & purling, the inside out one just didn’t look the same as when I looked  at the wrong side of the knitted portion.

2) OMG ALL OF THE PURLING! Won’t someone think of my poor yarn tension-ing hand?

Can you guess which is the “right” and “wrong” side of the stitch?

Which brought me back to square one. I noodled around a bit and then decided hey, you know that thing that they always tell you not to do? That whole “make sure you are working on the correct side of the work”? What if I ignore that?

So I did. I turned the whole thing inside out and simply worked the knit version of the pattern. One did have the foresight to wrap and turn the last stitch of the previous row, because One is aware of holes and stuff. And guess what? It worked! I had a fabric where I could see the front and back of the stitch at the same time. With the added extra bonus of it being a truly reversible piece.

My model is moving to Florida. It makes me very cranky.

The end result is a pattern that produces a piece that looks insanely complicated, but is a blast to knit. It is predominantly knit stitches with slip stitches coming in second in frequency. And then things get really exciting for a row before you coast back into knitting. Hence it’s name.

My awesome model has been such a dream to work with. I could not get half the gorgeous shots that I have gotten without her. It is going to be really tough to find someone when she leaves. If you think that her modeling is as awesome as I do, please consider leaving a note in the comments to tell her goodbye!

A different kind of Convention

I probably shouldn’t be posting a post. My brain, she is made out of mush. But after the sheer number of business cards I gave out this weekend (both real and “MacGyver” style) I wanted to post something new and just say Howdy!

Howdy!

The typical convention that has been part of my life has been the Science-Fiction convention, possibly mentioned as “typical” here for the first time ever in the history of print. They are a whole different world of craziness from the convention from which I am currently recovering. Because this weekend I went to an awesome Knitting convention by the name of Stitches South. Half work/half play and 100% awesome!

I was insanely busy and did not take a single photograph, but I made up for that with the sheer number of fabulous knitterly type people I met. For the second year in a row I worked in the Malabrigo booth and actually being encouraged to talk non-stop about how awesome Malabrigo’s yarns are is beyond fun. I made sure to have several of my shawls knit up in their yarn (oh! my! what a hardship!) and I was sporting one or the other the whole time.

Of course, I designed Caladan in Malabrigo Sock:

Mmmmm Malabrigo

My apologies are sent out to my booth neighbor Buffy Ann from Buffy Ann Designs (I totally cannot wait to use the yarn cozies I bought for the color-work shawl I am getting ready to cast on) because she heard this story at least a couple of hundred times, but here it goes.

I designed this shawl in and for Malabrigo sock, my sample in Aguas was knit and used 400 yards (of a total of 440 yards, I stopped short for wiggle room). Then my test knitters worked on it and they ended up using between 450 and 490 yards. You can imagine my surprise. A good chunk of my brain-power has been used up trying to figure out where my math went wrong and how this was possible. Then I had an ah-ha moment.

Malabrigo Sock is light fingering. My test knitters all used standard (and a bit heavy) fingering. I think that must be the difference. So I believe it is entirely possible to makeCaladan  in a single skein of Mal-Sock, as long as you are attentive to gauge. Which I know is not the most favoritest thing in the knitting world. But I very much want people to have a shawl they are happy with.

So included in the pattern are suggestions on what to do if you run into yardage issues, starting with a little note that says “This is the 50% point, if you don’t have at least 51% of your yarn to go – you are gonna have issues.” There are instructions on how to drop one of the vertical motif repeats to shorten up the body a bit. And my personal favorite solution – where to start a new color to make the wave pattern in a contrasting or complementary color.

I cannot wait to see someone do that. If they have even half way decent photos of their piece I will probably beg to be able to show off their work.

So much else happened at Stitches that I could go on, and on, and on. But this has already gotten a bit wordy and my brain is still in a state that would not even tempt a Zombie. If I met you, chatted with you, scared you (it happened once) at Stitches, comment and say hello! I promise I enjoyed meeting you – even if I don’t remember right now because my brain checked out.

Completion of a Series

There is a part of me that kinda doesn’t believe that I have made it this far, I didn’t really know what I was getting into – and I still am not particularly sure where this is going. But I do know that this is something that is finished.

Specifically, I have completed a 5 shawl series of crescent shaped shawls inspired by House Atreides from Frank Herbert’s Dune. The first was Atreides which was then followed by, Mapes, Alia,  and Lady Jessica. Originally the vision was for 3 shawls. Then Mapes just happened, and Alia & Jessica could not find their way into being only one pattern – insisting on being a duality.

But finally the shawl that was planned to be third but that has become fifth has been released into the wild.

A beautiful sample knit by my tester, Jenn Lopez.

Caladan, the Atreides home planet. An ocean world of mystery that Herbert spends far to little time exploring. Possibly the only thing he spent too little time explaining. I had definite ideas of how this one should look, and it took time to make it happen.

Some of the planned elements did not pan out, but I am exceptionally pleased with the result. I love the beads and hopefully they do not feel like an “add on”. I wanted them to be integral to the design, not just a little something slapped on for the shiny. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

The “swoop” in all it’s glory.

This one has slightly different construction than the previous shawls. I fiddled with the shaping a bit and changed the “YO swoop” that provides the shoulder hugging element of this shape. It has been gussied up with beads and augmented with a bonus yarn over.

The above shawl was knitted and modeled by one of my awesome test knitters – she chose a stunningly beautiful shade of Dream in Color Smooshy called Aqua Jet. My prototype was knit in one of my favorite yarns, Malabrigo Sock.

The model isn’t as great – but she’s cheaper.

The name of this color is Aguas. Fitting isn’t it? While blue is the logical choice for this shawl, I am chomping at the bit to see how it works in other colors. The central lace pattern in this one has a significant amount of non-holey space that moves around a goodly bit; which should provide a great palette for a more variegated yarn. There is also room for some improvisation.

In the pattern I suggest a point where, should one be inclined, you could start a contrasting or complementary color yarn to provide a different effect with the wavy “trim” along the bottom. There are so many different possibilities with different colors of yarn, different colors of beads … I could knit at least 2 or 3 more of these and have drastically different shawls. You can check out Caladan on Ravelry.

But I need to move on. House Corrino is next.

Irulan … nuff said.

GQ Eat Your Heart Out

This weekend past my little man and I attended his first wedding. A little over 5 years old, we haven’t had to go anywhere where he needed to be anything that resembled “dressed up”. Of course this means I had to go buy him an entire new outfit – including shoes.

White shirt, khaki pants, slip on loafers … all procured. But the ties? Horrendously ugly. Take the most boring and drab ties from the mens department and reduce them to pint sized and you have the selection of ties I was browsing.

Not to be deterred, I found one that was marked down on clearance (this was a clip on by the way – do you honestly think I was going to try and tie a tie onto a struggling 5 yr old?) and brought it home.

What is it with boys and pockets?

Knitting seemed to be the obvious solution. I kinda made a cozy for the knot end and then knitted a tie shape. Then I cut off the ugly tie and volia! Instant cute little boy tie. It looked fantastic right out of the gate but the test run was not without problems.

Oh the little stinker.

He kept on tugging on it and distorting the shape. And it was pretty humid, which made it curl up like a mother. If I am going to make more of these I need to either explore double knitting or the idea of some sort of backing.

For something that I just “whipped up”, I am inordinately pleased with how it came out. I cannot see writing a pattern for it because it is so simple, but I can see making more. But I waver, because there are so few cute patterns for little boys. What do y’all think I should do?

Keeping Ears Warm

Jumping into the design pool has been both exciting and terrifying. But mostly terrifying. In November of 2011 I hit what I think is a pretty significant milestone – I had my first pattern published in a real life, hard copy magazine. Beyond exciting is what that was!

I didn’t blog about it when it happened because there was a little glitch in the whole situation – the magazine is a UK magazine and was only available there. Teasing y’all with something you couldn’t get seemed to be kind of mean, so I played those cards close to my chest. But no more.

This fantastic new magazine, Knit Now, is published monthly and everything about it is a bit … sped up… from normal publication timelines. On the plus side this means that the rights for publication revert to me in a shorter period of time. Which means that I have been able to put the pattern up on Ravelry!

Sleek, non-bulky cables

And now, some thoughts on the piece itself. What I had published was an ear-warmer. What precisely is an ear-warmer one might ask? Well it is either a headband on steroids or a hat on a diet. Here in the South it is often chilly enough to need the top of your head and your ears covered, but not cold enough to warrant a full on stocking cap. That is where this particular accessory comes into play.

And of course the lack of significant hat head is also a major selling point of our friend the ear-warmer. I took some time to look at patterns and found that the cable seems to be a popular design motif for this application. I guess something about a cable just screams warm, warm, warm. But for me, these large, bulky cables running from ear to ear across the top of one’s head screams sideways Klingon!

And who wants to walk around looking like a Sci-Fi convention costume gone horribly, horribly wrong?

With this in mind I worked on coming up with a low profile cable that doesn’t present a significant silhouette when viewed from the front. I think that this has just enough cable to give that ski lodge je ne sais quoi without going overboard. The “cables” framing the central motif are not cables at all, but twisted stitches. Totally cheating. The end result is a cable pattern where  you only have to use a cable needle every once in a blue moon. Most of the crosses are very easy and the faux cables are just a trick of the knitting.

Another feature of the finished product is that it tapers to two separate ends (ie: not a circular piece) and buttons together. That way if you want to wear your hair down you won’t have all of that bunchy width making you look all lumpily at the nape of your neck.

Now, I know it isn’t precisely the season for this kind of knitting – but I don’t have a lot of control over that. Is it ever to early to get started on Holiday presents? I know several people on my list who might be getting one of these this year.

ps: To some long time readers of this blog, this post might look familiar, don’t worry – you aren’t going crazy. I did do a bit of recycling … but it is new and improved!

What is it with little things?

Amigurumi – is the Japanese art of knitting or crocheting small stuffed animals and anthropomorphic creatures. The word is derived from a combination of the Japanese words ami, meaning crocheted or knitted, and nuigurumi, meaning stuffed doll.Amigurumi are typically animals, but can include artistic renderings or inanimate objects endowed with anthropomorphic features, as is typical in Japanese culture.^[1]

What is it with twee little things? Why are we drawn to them? I can see absolutely no purpose to having these things unless you are a compulsive cleaner looking for something else to dust on a regular basis.

And yet.

Wookit da widdle bunny wabbit.

I made this. Using this pattern from Mochimochi Land. A land of very small and terribly cute crafting. What possessed me to make this is a mystery to me. It has the added bonus of being knit amigurumi – which for me is a step further into insanity.

It is possible that I have mentioned here that I knit tightly. Like so tightly that my dearest friend makes fun of me. And this was in fingering weight on size 1 needles. The cast on I managed, but the joining into a round was a significant problem.

There were only 6 stitches being joined, which for even those as math challenged as I comes out to 2 stitches per needle on DPNs. If I am going to do this more I am going to need muchshorter DPNs. What I ended up doing, after 5 failed attempts at joining & working the 1st round, was casting on to a miniscule 9 inch #2 circular needle. From there I proceeded to transfer to DPNs, while knitting the 1st round after joining.

For anyone keeping count, I was using 6 needles to knit 6 stitches.

An hour and a half, and substantial amounts of cussing, later – I had the little guy you see above. Knitting very small things is apparently not happy-making for me. For me, I find it a fiddily enterprise in making a craft do something that another craft is infinitely more suited to produce.

I Pinch, I Pinch

So to sooth my frayed crafting nerves I crocheted a wee crab. At least that was the theory. It is possible that deciding to use fingering weight yarn with a B hook for a pattern that calls for worsted was  … ill advised.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws, Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

There was not quite so much cussing, but soothing is not the word I would use to describe the experience. But he is hella cute and for some reason I am happier having him in my life. Even without it being as Zen an experience as I had hoped, I still stand by my belief that crochet is superior in this particular application.

It is so much easier to just stick your hook in and start attaching limbs and stuff wherever you want them to go. You don’t have to go through all of the irritating sewing together parts that you procrastinate for so long  your husband asks you why you have a basket of knitted animal body parts sitting next to your knitting chair.

HEY! Hey, hey, hey, hey …

Or maybe that’s just me? Regardless, I love having these wee guys so I guess I will have to deal with the fiddily-ness of the whole process. And I do have to admit that knitted animals have a certain lookto them that might be willing to go through the PITA factor to achieve.

Do you do any essentially pointless crafting? What is your favorite thing to make?

[1]

A little bit of nothing

Last night the radio told me that we were going to have a freeze before morning. Apparently no-one notified the daffodils so I went out with my trusty kitchen shears and brought them inside for safety. I have a wide variety of narcissus planted that bloom in a progression from early to late.

There are wee ones and big floofy ones and brilliantly colored ones and plain ole yellow ones … the entire gamut. Luckily the ones blooming right now appear to be the highly fragrant ones. So this morning while I sat with my little man and ate breakfast he kept talking about how much he loved the flowers.

I have a fantastic bay window in the kitchen and the light in the morning and evenings is inspiring. So inspiring that I couldn’t resist taking some pictures. They aren’t fine art or anything, but I thought I would share my favorite.

Thank goodness for short depth of field.

And just to keep things on topic, I also took some pictures of a little bracelet I have been knitting on for the last month or so.

Another Pinterest inspired piece.

It isn’t that it has taken me a month of work to make this, it is just that I haven’t been working on it constantly. It has been sitting on top of the bunny cage and I occasionally pick it up as I walk by. I would sit and knit a few inches of I-cord and then get bored. Last night I decided to finish it up and put the button on.

Once again this is something I saw on Pinterest that I thought – “Hey I could make that easy peasy.” And much to my surprise, I did. It is really ridiculously easy.

• Cast 3 stitches on to a DPN.
• Make a metric butt tonne of I-cord¹,
• Get bored and declare it done.
• Sew it onto itself to make a loop at one end.
• Sew button onto other end.

I futzed with it a bit to decide how to wrap it, and you can do some interesting things by criss-crossing the strands. Certainly someone with some knot know-how could come up with something spectacular, but I am pretty much a square knot kinda gal.

So, have you recently seen something that called “Hey I can make that” and then actually made it?

¹ A metric butt tonne is a precise measurement, it is slightly less than an ass load – which is obviously an Imperial measurement.

A Big Shawl

I rarely serve as my own model.

But this shawl is mine, all mine!

About 2 weeks before I was ready to go live with Alia & Lady Jessica Malabrigo introduced a new sport weight yarn, Arroyo. This made me both very excited & vexed at the same time. I love Malabrigo’s yarns, but had they introduced it earlier I would have been able to include a sample of it in my test knitting.

But alas, it was not to be. What else was there for me to do but to knit my own? So far I have made both Alia and Lady Jessica in the small size options – but nothing in the large. And as long as I am going large, I might as well go large.

Go big or go home.

I have almost exclusively knit “shawlettes” to date, so this was quite the experience. It just kept going and going, but man was it worth it! I love wearing this shawl. The yarn is absolutely fantastic. When they introduced Rios I fell in love with that yarn – and this is essentially a skinnier version of Rios.

Because of Malabrigo’s tendency to have a good bit of variation in their colors (even within “dye lots”) when I got close to the end of my first ball of yarn (about 1/4 left by weight) I started alternating with the new ball. As far as I can tell, it made the transition invisible.

But this is a cuddly, squooshy, hug of a shawl. It might just have me designing more big ‘ole shawls. What is your favorite sized shawl?

Playing with shaping

I believe that I have mentioned before that one of the easiest ways to shape a crescent shawl is to increase 4 stitches every right side row and 2 stitches every wrong side row.

That sounds crazy simple doesn’t it? Like that should be the end of the story. Crescents figured out … done … on to next fun thing! But really, it isn’t that simple. There are so many variables to play with in this format alone (don’t even get me started on short row shaping, side to side shaping, shaping that hasn’t been figured out yet …) that I could spend years exploring the shaping.

What all is there to tinker with you may ask? I am so glad that you are curious! To start with, there are a myriad of different increases to be explored, each one having different visual characteristics and effects on the resultant fabric. And then there are the locations of the decreases both in relation to the shawl and in relation to one another.

The winged crescent I have been working with has the second pair of increases on the right side as a moving target – which gives those shawls their distinctive shapes. But it also makes the pattern writing a bit complex and dictates the motifs used (to an extent). Maybe it is time to look at other locations for the increases?

But how to do this without busting out a whole shawl. I hear that there are those who can visualize knitting and know how a written pattern can turn out. I am not to that point yet, I have to develop my theories and then test them out. I am frequently surprised by the results – in good and not so good ways.

My solution for the moment

make a tiny shawl! It doesn’t take too long and it allows me to play with some ideas I have had with regards to increase placement. And I made the stitches up as I went along. Which actually lead to more questions.

What a great model!

But I might end  up with the world’s best dressed stuffies. I do know that I forsee many more wee shawls in my future. It helps me work through things and allows me to experiment freely without the worries of screwing up weeks worth of knitting – and that is a bonus.

It was unintentional, but I actually really like the proportions of the lower portion of this wee shawl. The three repeats of a modification of the classic eyelet row, stockinette and then the little points around the edge are very aesthetically pleasing to me. But this is fingering weight.

I am trying to decide if it would be cool to try and replicate this proportionally for a full sized shawl made out of super big yarn? I could, of course, simply us a more traditionally sized yarn and make more repeats – but I don’t know if I would like the proportions as much.

Anyone out there looking for a super chunky shawl pattern?