In the footsteps of Kitti Ping

Elephant

2009-03-27T13:48:05Z

And while I'm here writing entries, don't let's forget the elephant in the room.

This is in Louet Gems Merino 4-ply, color French Blue, using the leftovers from my dad's sweater for the swatch.

If I can get four elephants I like, they're going on my brother's Discworld sweater. I'm not sure I like this one; it's kind of, well, cute. Maybe one of it would be okay, but I still want to somehow come up with three elephants in more conventional poses.

The problem with the conventional elephant pose, of course, is that I then have to deal with their wide flat backs...

dragoncrafter @ 2009-03-27T08:28:00

2009-03-27T13:42:40Z

I realize that this journal's been a bit TeX-heavy lately, so for those of you who are here for the pretty knitted things, here are Miranda's Jaywalkers:

(Older posts on these here and here.)

It turns out I wasn't quite careful enough when estimating how much yarn I had left; I had to unravel a few rounds at the end.

I hope these things fit. They're a little big on me in the feet...but the real problem is that knitted fabric isn't as stretchy on the bias as it is left and right, so getting these things over the heel is kind of hard.

This is only compounded by the fact that most merino sock yarn, such as the Socks that Rock these are made out of, is tightly spun to make it durable...which tends to make it less stretchy. Something with elastic in it really might be better for this pattern.

This is probably the first pair of socks I've ever actually blocked. Usually they don't need it. These ones did. (And I'm glad I did some short-row stuff to deal with the chevrons; I think that would have been wonky otherwise.)

Knit fonts/TeX code

2009-03-25T20:30:39Z

Okay. I've been working on a way to get knitting charts out of TeX, and I think it's about where I want it:

I've got the font mostly created to my satisfaction; if someone can suggest better-looking or clearer symbols, or more symbols that I should include, then please say so.

I've got some TeX macros that take care of special symbols (like that 5-with-a-hat on it), and that affect the global chart appearance.

The whole thing is bundled into a ZIP file, and I've put it up on a google site: http://sites.google.com/site/knittexlatex/

I think that at this point, I need to (a) revise the documentation, and (b) get some other people to look at it and tell me any other commands/symbols this package needs. So if you know TeX and are into charting knitting patterns, please, download and test it and tell me what you think. There are a few more elaborate things I want to do to the cables, but that can wait.

January knitting post

2009-01-31T18:12:41Z

So, of my goals for 2009, which ones have I made progress on in January?

Well, this month I've made some progress on Miranda's Christmas present, and have completed two socks:

Note that I did not say I'd made a pair of socks.

The one on the left is my timed sock (Goal #2). (For the curious, it took about 10½ movies.) It's made according to my generic toe-up double-gusset short-row-heel sock recipe that I use by default.

The one on the right is half of my little sister's Christmas present (part of Goal #1a). It's from Grumperina's Jaywalker pattern, modified as described here.

After a few cold days in Chicago, I decided I needed a facewarmer more than I needed to finish my Christmas knitting by August. So rather than casting on for the second sock of either pair, or working on Nancy or Rob's present, I started on Goal 3, and did something with the qiviut:

I don't really have enough for a scarf. So I'm making a cowl, which means "a scarf sewn into a tube, so you don't have to waste any fabric holding it on; it can all go into covering things".

The cowl is mostly in 1/1 ribbing. The idea is that it should stretch big enough to get around my face (22"), but should still shrink small enough that if I pull it down to my neck (13.5"), it shouldn't be too ridiculously loose. There's one little narrow lace panel, just for the visual interest.

And in the meta-knitting front, I've made some progress on Goal 11, making a knitting font:

This is the leaf and acorn lace from here (messy and difficult to follow chart my foot, Ms. Bradberry).

The font is mostly made in MetaFont, with some virtual-font stuff to add in the grayscale (which I use to mean "the purl version"), and so that I can nick the numbers (and the letters B and m) from Knuth's fonts.

I have no idea how, or even if I can, get this font to work with Word/Excel. See, I've got it set up so that, if I use the font with TeX, the typesetting program I like, it will do some automatic combination stuff---the gray-5-with-a-hat on it, for example, I get from the keystrokes [5, and I get cables with things like ppKK. TeX is smart enough to turn pK, Kp, Kk, and kK into the four mini-cables, but I don't think Word is. And there's a lot of other nifty stuff I do in TeX that I can't do here. So I may have to just tell everyone who likes this font that they have to use TeX.

Any suggestions for this font? My artistic visual-design skillz are not all they could be.

Knitting fonts

2009-01-15T14:06:22Z

So I think I want to start making myself some knitting symbol fonts. I don't want to use the existing freely available fonts (from Aire River Design and David Xenakis) because

They don't have enough symbols to gracefully handle things like "twist 1 left while simultaneously decreasing one stitch", which comes up more and more with the picture-knit designs I do.
There's not even a way to distinguish between "cable 2 left" and "twist 2 left" with Xenakis's font.
The Aire River Design font is *still* not fixed-width. Also, for simpler designs, I like the "it looks like what you end up with" mode of cable charts. The Xenakis font sort of has this, but ARD does not.
If you use (La)TeX, there's a way to get fonts to be in different colors. And using white for knit, grey for purl makes for (in my opinion) very clear, easy-to-read charts.

So the question becomes, what things do I need a symbol for? I've got a list, but suggestions of things I forgot would be appreciated.

(Also, if you've got a way to convey both "twisted make-1 increase" and "knit through the back loop" that does not involve using letters as chart symbols, let me know.)

Knit
Purl
Knit tbl
Purl tbl
Twisted make-1 increase slanting left
Twisted make-1 increase slanting right
Twisted make-1 purl
Knit front&back
Mirror image of kfb
Purl front&back
Lifted increase (increase by knitting into the stitch of the previous row) slanting left
Lifted increase slanting right
Purled lifted increase slanting left
Purled lifted increase slanting right
Make 3 from 1 increase
Purled make 3 from 1 increase
Make 5 from 1
Make 7 from 1---and do I need symbols for make 4, 6? Do those ever happen?
K2tog
SSK/SKP
P2tog
There will probably be a separate font with wrong-side versions of *everything*, in case you're designing something where both sides are complicated and good-looking. So this list just covers the right side---I'm deliberately not including, say, both p2tog and ssp.
The five double decreases:
LCR
LRC
RCL
RLC
C**
Make 1 from 5
Make 1 from 7
Possibly a slightly different make 1 from 3 from the double decreases, that looks more like m1from5.
Purled make 1 from 3
Purled make 1 from 5
Purled make 1 from 7
Slip one with yarn in front
Slip one with yarn in back
Yarn over
No stitch
Bobble on 3 stitches
Bobble on 5 stitches
Irish knot
Bind off knitwise
Bind off purlwise
Cables
Cable 1 over 1 left
Cable 1 over 1 right
Cable 2 over 2 left
Cable 2 over 2 right
Cable 3 over 3 left
Cable 3 over 3 right
(All six of those need to have both right-side and wrong-side versions.)
Cable 2 over 1 left
Cable 2 over 1 right
Cable 2 over 3 left
Cable 2 over 3 right
Cable 3 over 1 left
Cable 3 over 1 right
Cable 3 over 2 left
Cable 3 over 2 right
Cable 3 over 4 left (?)
Cable 3 over 4 right (?)
The twist versions (with purl background instead of knit) of all of the above
Horizontal cable; possibly a different symbol for the last of them.
And all of the assorted mixed cable/increase and cable/decreases I've ever used (of which there are many.)

Turtles/Miranda socks

2009-01-11T20:38:00Z

Since ireth_telruenya likes garish colors, I decided to make her socks for next year in the loudest colorway of Socks that Rock I could find.

Now, the thing about loud colorways is that you can't actually do anything with them. Cables? Totally lost in the color. Lace? Ditto. So none of my usual sock-enhancing techniques are a good idea.

The thing is, at this point, I've got three knitting projects: my timed socks (at the moment, I've got 23 grams of yarn knitted up, and 28 grams left in the ball, in 629 minutes of TV-watching, so we're looking at about 20-30 hours per sock), a green sock I started when I needed something to do when I was stumped on Faramir II, and which, while I have vague plans of doing something interesting on the leg, have plain undecorated feet, and ireth_telruenya's socks. After a while, doing plain socks all the time just got boring.

The one thing that does show up beautifully with garish yarn is knitting in strange directions, that is, going in zigzags. So I decided to make these socks into Jaywalkers. This is sort of a homebrew Arielized mix of bigger Jaywalkers (apparently we have big feet, or STR lightweight is thin, or something) and doing them toe-up instead of cuff-down.

So I started that and then I realized the problem with Jaywalkers. You start out with a toe, with a nice smooth top, and then you attach a zigzag-shaped piece of fabric. I don't know if this is a bigger problem with more-stitch Jaywalkers (I think mine have more stitches around than the biggest size she provides instructions for), or a toe-up thing (the middle of the sock is being pulled in by the zigzag rather than pushed out) or with working with stiffer yarn or what, but attaching a straight-edged toe to a zigzag leads to wonkiness for me: stretched out bits, puffy bits, ugh.

(I tried to take photos to show you what I meant, but they came out badly, and I didn't realize that they would until after I'd unraveled this bit. This picture and this picture show some of what I'm talking about.)

So I decided to fix this by throwing in some short rows under the high points (the increases) of the zigzag. While it isn't giving me a totally smooth fabric, it's considerably better than before.

This is the turtle from Walker III I mentioned earlier. It's about 2½'' wide and about 5'' tall.

The book doesn't really convey how multidimensional this thing is:

While this is sort of okay for, say, a blanket, I think I'd like this thing to lie a little flatter if I used it for a sweater. And frankly, I think I'm a good enough cable designer to do better than this. So I'm probably going to be doing a lot of redesigning of this thing before I use it in a garment.

Goals for 2009

2009-01-04T18:41:57Z

Start my Christmas knitting in January, so that it will be finished in time with no rush knitting involved.
This year, the planned recipients are:
- My sister ireth_telruenya will receive one pair of socks, knitted in this yarn. (I don't think she's particularly active in the queer rights movement (besides being a Bay Arean 20something and therefore being in favor of it) but she does like garish colors.) I will have to look over Knitty and see if there are any particularly good patterns for handpainted yarn.
- I drew my aunt N in my family's not-so-secret-secret-santa pool. Or, rather, I drew several members of my immediate family, drew two people I've knitted for before, drew my cousin Z (who is male, and not particularly enthusiastic about this sort of thing, and was not there for me to interrogate), and then someone said, "Just give her N" (who is the only woman who I have not knitted for, and also who has expressed her disappointment in me not drawing her every year since I started knitting gifts).
  Having completely given up on this surprise Christmas present thing, I got her to tell me exactly what she wanted: a hat, the size of my green Coronet, and a scarf, 6"x48", both in off-white (I figure this probably means natural wool).
- I've made my mother one sweater and my father two sweaters, so I figure my siblings need some too. So my brother R is getting one this year, and my sister is getting one next year. (My mother has expressed the strong opinion that she should get one in 2011.)
  He expressed a preference in favor of "not boring". He used to be a big Discworld fan (he seems to be less into it lately, but he doesn't seem to have a particular replacement fandom). There is already a turtle pattern out there (although I'm likely going to end up scaling it up...maybe the little one can go on the sleeves or something), and I've been meaning to make an elephant pattern for a while (elephants are distinctive; two lines for tusks, one line that opens up into a triangle for a trunk/head, bump for an eye, big flappy ears and you're there), and eight-rib cables are easy enough to do. ("Eight is the magic number" is a Discworld idea that is more prominent in the earlier books than the later ones, but since R has actually read all the early ones, this is okay.) So he is probably getting a Discworld sweater.

People keep asking me how long it takes me to knit a pair of socks. So the next pair of plain socks I knit I am going to time. That is, I will knit them while watching Netflix, only while watching Netflix, and write down what I see in the course of one sock. Then I will be able to tell people that "one sock is about five movies", or whatever the true answer is.
(Yes. The correct unit for the time it takes to knit a sock is a movie. This is something I'm reasonably likely to be able to do while knitting a sock, it gives people reasonable estimates on both knitting time and overall time (five movies is about ten hours, but it's also a couple of weeks), and also it's funny.)
I only got three skeins of yarn for Christmas this year: two skeins of mellow variegated tan sock yarn (which will probably be used in the great sock timing event above), and one little ball of qiviut. That one little ball of qiviut is probably destined to be a lace scarf.

I have 454 grams of Louet Gems 4-ply left over in French blue from (a) my dad's sweater, and (b) Stuart's hat. I think I bought 14 skeins overall. So this isn't far from making a sweater for me, if I don't add a hood or too much cabling. And another soft wool sweater that can be machine-washed is always good.
(Yes, I'll have dye lot issues buying extras. But you know something? I think color-matching technology has improved. I suspect I'll probably be fine.)

I've been dating tortoise for...seven and a half years now? And in all that time, I've never knitted him anything. (I crocheted him a Klein bottle hat once.) The thing is, he loses hats and scarves and gloves, so he doesn't really want them, and he seems pretty happy with his current footgear. But maybe this year I'll knit him a sweater. With tortoises. And nine-strand metabraids. And probably in two different colors, so he can have a sweater that is green and not green.

I want to reknit the butterfly sweater to get rid of the wonkiness at the edges of the reverse-stockinette patches. (Which may mean just doing the entire thing in reverse stockinette, à la Leaves in Relief.) Once I've done that, I want to write up the pattern, properly, in sizes from "Newborn" (or possibly "preemie") up to about six years or so. (There's an age when this sort of thing becomes deeply uncool. I'm guessing it's about seven or eight, which is the age I was when my classmates all suddenly got mean.) Then I will sell it through Ravelry, or the Knitting Vault, or something.
Of course, to do this, I'm going to have to find out what those sweater sizes are, not to mention when a child becomes developed enough that doing set-in sleeves instead of a modified drop shoulder is actually worthwhile. zathrus could probably tell me, but if any of the readers of this blog know, I'd love to hear your opinions.

squirrelloid and ashke are getting married this summer, so I might want to make them something. ashke has expressed an opinion in favor of a pink blanket with Cthulhu on the front in some way. I think this is a bit unlikely (blankets are big) but I could maybe make them a lap blanket in chunky weight, or a pillow, or just some fuzzy dice or miniatures, since they're big roleplaying geeks.

Write up an article for Knitty on...oh, right, if I tell you, they won't take it.

Update this blog more often.

Keep better track of when I start projects, when I finish them, and how much yarn they take. (I hear rumors that this Ravelry thing helps with that...)

(edit) Finish making a knitting symbol metafont, write the requisite (La)TeX macros, and post the whole thing to CTAN. Possibly other places too---the knitting community probably needs to see this more than the TeX community does.

Faramir II

2009-01-02T19:25:01Z

The front:

The back:

(Sorry about the photo quality. The thing is, it's foggy today, and I'm flying away tomorrow, so I don't really think the lighting will let me take better photographs; if it clears up, I'll edit this to include better pictures.)

Three years ago, I knitted a sweater for my father. He was really enthusiastic about it. Unfortunately, I made the neckline *far* too big, and I also used KnitPicks Shine, a cotton/modal blend, that is starting to look kind of battered and pilly. Also, it sags. So I decided that knitting him a new one in wool was probably worth the effort. It was meant to be a Christmas present, but I was a little late finishing it.

Yarn: Louet Gems Merino, worsted weight, French blue. I originally bought 12 100-gram skeins; I think I've got almost three skeins left.

More than half of the skeins had knots in them. (Fortunately, none of them had two knots.) This is not enough knots to really bother me, but it's something other users of this yarn might like to know.

Needles: KnitPicks Options nickel-plated, size #6/4.00mm circular knitting needles, and corresponding double-pointed needles for the sleeves.

I bought a pair of the Harmony wood tips midway through the project and used them for a few rounds. I can confirm that these needles are not that grabby. In fact, I quite liked them; knitting with wood in a Chicago winter is nice because it's warmer than steel. Unfortunately, my gauge was a little bit looser with the wooden tips; I therefore finished the sweater up with the steel tips.

I quite like the tips on the KnitPicks needles: they're pointy, but not too pointy, and the tapered bit is very long, which is lovely for cabling without a cable needle, which is what I prefer to do.

On the other hand, I like the connectors on the Denise needles a lot better. One, it takes a nontrivial amount of time to screw the Options tips onto and off of the cables. And two, the Denise join hardly ever comes apart, and it's all done by hand; you don't need a special tool to tighten it. The KnitPicks needle cables come with a little wire "key" (it's the funny bit of wire in the picture). If you attach the cables and the needle tips without using the key, then they come loose fairly quickly---not enough to actually fall apart, but they separate enough that your stitches start catching instead of sliding smoothly. And if you use the key, the tips and cables stay together longer---but not permanently, so you have to carry the key in your knitting bag. I'd be more comfortable with this if I could tie a nice thick un-losable piece of yarn through that loop at the top---but that loop doesn't actually close, so my piece of yarn would just slide off.

Pattern: The basic sweater pattern is from Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns (set-in sleeve, crew neck, pullover version). The cabling is (of course) my own.

Modifications: My gauge was not quite 6 sts/inch, so I used a mix of the instructions for the 46'' size and the 48'' size to get a 46'' sweater at my gauge.

I did the sweater body in one piece, knitting in the round, rather than making a front and a back, and I modified the sleeves so I didn't have to sew those long straight boring underarm seams. I also did a three-needle bind-off on the shoulders. (I did actually sew the sleeves to the body.)

Ann Budd does a curved or slanted edge (top of shoulders, top of sleeve, neckline) by binding off small chunks of stitches at a time. This leads to an edge which goes up in stair-steps, which are annoying to sew together. By the time I got to the shoulder seams, I'd remembered that there's another way to do this: short rows. (I think I came across this in Jenna's patterns---or maybe articles.) Basically, rather than binding off the first 10 stitches 3 times, you work short rows of 20 and 10 stitches, then knit one or two rows across to pick up and hide all the wraps, then bind off. This produces a smoother edge which is easier to sew and/or pick up stitches along. It's also more symmetrical: If you do the short rows on the right first, you will do (effectively) an extra plain row afterwards, so you don't have one side of the sleeve being one row longer than the other. I think next time I will do this for underarms and sleeve cap shapings as well as the neck.

Cables: The front is the same tree from Faramir's breastplate combined with roots from Arwen's coronation banner that I used last time. I had to rescale it; this sweater was knit at a looser gauge than the other.

Last time, I used Tolkien's Cirth to write a message because the Cirth look like Anglo-Saxon or Norse runes, which are designed to be possible to carve into stone or wood. I don't know about stone, but from what I hear, if you carve into wood, it's fine to carve perpendicular or diagonal to the grain of the wood, but carving across it makes the block more prone to splitting and is also harder to see. So runes have lots of vertical and diagonal lines but no horizontal ones. But these are precisely the directions in which it is easy to run lines in cabled/textured knitting, so it's easy to translate runes to knits. (I didn't come up with this idea; Elsebeth Lavold did. Although she did Viking runes (futhark) and the Cirth include more characters than that, so I did have to design a few of them.)

Between then and now, I discovered horizontal cables. So suddenly I could do tengwar. (Technically, I could do heavily italicized tengwar without horizontal cables...sort of...but I had to knit it sideways, and trees really want to be knit vertically, so I didn't want to use tengwar and trees on the same sweater.) The thing is, runes aren't actually that much more common in Middle-Earth than they are in our world. Tengwar are really the "letters" of Tolkien's world. So in some sense they're better.

Last time, I used a Sindarin near-quote ("Im Ariel hain echant"); this time I decided to eschew the Tolkien language and references and go with something with more personal meaning to me and my dad. (I wouldn't tell him what it said; I told him he had to figure it out for himself. Aren't I mean?)

I'd been thinking about this sweater, off and on, since I discovered horizontal cables two years ago. But, of course, to do this I had to learn tengwar. And all the basic material on tengwar is about writing Elvish or Swedish. So eventually I wound up writing the basic instructions for writing English with tengwar. This is the project that got me started.

Cross-posted to lotr_knits and (in shortened form) tengwar.

Butterfly sweater

2008-04-27T14:18:48Z

It's finally finished!

The photos aren't quite of the finished project; I was still attaching the zipper when I took those photos, but I don't have any totally finished pictures. That's why there's still bright red basting thread visible.

Here's some close-ups of the butterflies:

The last one is wonky because it's the butterfly in the underarm, and arranging that bit of fabric to be flat takes more time than I happened to have.

And here are some close-ups of the cables:

Project statistics:
Yarn: Cascade Dolly (100% Merino). I don't think I'd use this yarn again. Nothing specific, I just find I enjoy, say, Louet more.
Needles: Susan Bates #3/3.25mm circulars (and DPNS for some of the cables and the sleeves)
Pattern: My own.

I've been wanting to do something with the butterfly pattern ever since I made it. This is what I did.

The schematics for the sweater come from Ann Budd. However, given how the butterfly pattern works, I had to knit the sweater sideways from usual.

The notion of smooth, rounded cabling along the edges comes from Eris by Jenna Wilson. (Follow that link. Her stuff is brilliant.)

I started with a provisional cast-on down the middle of the back, and with that vertical strip next to the zipper down the front. I knit until the edge of the neck, working the collar and the bottom cable as I went, then joined and made the bit over the shoulders, and split again for the underarms. There's a graft right in the center of the underarm butterfly, right under the arms.

I then did the arm cap using short rows (remember, I was knitting sideways, so I had live stitches most of the way around the armseye), picked up underarm stitches, and knit down to the end, attaching the wrist cables at the end by knitting the side stitch together with one or two live stitches.

Then I picked up from the provisional cast-on and knit the second half.

The butterfly bodies down the middle are made of I-cord and sewn on. Horizontal cables are wonky too near the provisional cast-on.

Things I will do differently next time: I think it would work better if I started by knitting the sleeves and the bits under the arms, picked up stitches around the edges of the sleeves, and then knit to the front and back, grafted, and attatched cables all around the edges afterwards. This will make the armseye more stable (which is good) and I kind of like the way the sleeve cables look. Also, as a general design principle, applying the cables at the end means that if the child puts on a sudden growth spurt, you can make the sweater taller by doing more elaborate cabling.

I might also change the bottom cable to be a two-strand braid (like the collar and cuffs) instead of being the one three-strand braid present. (It's not like this sweater doesn't have enough going on already.) I will try to adjust the width such that I get an integer number of repeats of cable around the collar and the bottom; you might not be able to see this, but there's an extra-long loop right above each shoulder.

Also, I will make the butterfly bodies be several rows of stockinette surrounded by horizontal cables, hopefully enough to not get wonky despite the presence of the provisional cast-on.

Next time I think I'll use some weight of Louet instead of the Dolly.

(And there will be a next time. I will one day have children, neices, cousins-once-removed, or more friends' children who will recieve these. Someday I will write up the pattern for this, after I've made an improved version, and then I will post it on The Knitting Vault. However, this will probably have to wait until the next time I want to make a baby sweater.)

Problem I'm still thinking about: Stockinette curls at the edges. This is why we put ribbing around the bottoms of our sweaters. The thing is, if you put a big panel of reverse stockinette next to a big panel of stockinette, they will try to curl up on each other.

Normally, vertical-to-vertical isn't too much of a problem, but I found that knitting a bunch of stockinette and then knitting a bunch of reverse stockinette was. The solution I found was to put a single welt of garter stitch in. (Look at the left and right edges of the butterfly squares. You should see it.) I'd like to find a better-looking solution. (The obvious one is to make the entire body be reverse stockinette. In this case, do I make the sleeves reverse stockinette or not?) I tried edging it in seed stitch and didn't like the result. I'd like to find another solution. Any ideas?

dragoncrafter @ 2008-02-19T08:51:00

2008-02-19T15:00:03Z

So, now that my Internet is working again, I'm going to post something I made a while ago, but somehow never got around to posting.

The character is Dolores, © Franklin Habit. The knitting pattern is mine, but it's based pretty closely on on Franklin's picture. The yarn is KnitPicks Color Your Own, which I think they might be calling “Bare Fingering Weight” now. It's undyed fingering-weight merino, anyway. The needles are Inox 2.25mm. This thing is pretty small (4¼ by 6¾ inches). I'm not sure if I'm ever going to do anything with it, but it was fun to make.

What I have been up to lately on the knitting front

2007-11-11T21:07:15Z

Two more (embarrasingly blurry) pictures are on Photobucket, here and here. If this was the finished object photo, I would go back and do it right, but...well...it's not. And the cabling looks like a mess pre-blocking anyway.

Project specs: Yarn is Cascade 220 Dolly, which is machine-washable. (I've never used this stuff before, so I'm not totally sure.) I'm using 3.25mm needles.

The butterfly pattern is the one I've used before. The cables on the hem and collar are pretty simple; the method of attaching them is based on that of Jenna Wilson's Eris. I'm designing this myself. It's going to be a child-sized cardigan, knit side to side. The pattern will probably end up on the Knitting Vault.

One thing I've noticed about side-to-side sweaters: you have to plan out the entire thing in advance. When you start, you are working on the hem, body, and collar all at once; you have to know what they all look like. Bottom-up (or top-down) sweaters you don't have to know everything in advance. So it's been a slow start, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.

Miranda scarf is finished!

2007-07-28T03:25:03Z

Here are the pictures:

The two ends:

The middle:

No, I don't have any pictures showing the whole thing, because this thing is long.

Project specifications
Needles: INOX 3.00mm circular
Yarn: Zephyr Wool-Silk in Ebony. I bought two 2-oz balls, and for some reason I used some but not all of both of them. So this thing took between 2 and 4 ounces.
Finished dimensions: Width about 35 cm; length about 170 cm.
Pattern: My own. The middle is "Spider Stitch" and "Wings of the Swan" from The Craft of Lace Knitting; the ends are a combination of Elaborated Print O' the Wave from Heirloom Knitting and some things that I thought would look good. The edging is the one on the Legends of the Shetland Seas shawl, with purl rows added (so it's about half as pointy).

Things I would do differently next time: I did a plain, simple center and two complicated ends. For some reason, I knit the center first. Next time, I will knit the first border first, then the center, then the second border. This is because six stitches more or less would make a big difference in the center (I wish I had had six more stitches), whereas the center I could have added or subtracted a couple of spider repeats without changing anything.

I sort of wish I had just left out the Wings of the Swan and done the center in plain, simple spider stitch. I also wish I'd chosen a different edging: I think that just a zigzag lace trellis would perhaps be better than the thing with three holes that I went with.

Miranda scarf

2007-05-06T15:08:51Z

So, here are pictures of what I've got so far:

Here is what I am definitely going to do.

I am going to put a second Print O' the Wave zigzag diamonds border on the other side; the spider stitch (the one on the left) is going to be in the middle. I am probably not putting an M diamond on that one; just five or six of those little clusters of four solid diamonds.

Then I am going to pick some pretty garter stitch edging (such as the one on the edge of the shawl in my icon) and put it on the four sides of the scarf, and then I will be done.

Here are the things I am considering doing.

I think the scarf will be a bit long. To deal with this, I can do a number of things. The obvious thing is to unravel the bottom tier of the zigzags on the side I have, and just not knit it on the other side.
Another option would be to remove a few repeats from the middle bit. My grafting skillz are definitely 1337 enough to do this, so it's what I will do once I have the ends looking the way I want and discover that the scarf is still too long.
A third option would be to take out the M diamond and redo it a bit smaller. See, the problem here is that I swatched a little rectangle around the M. So the M looks fine, but it takes up less of the lace diamond than I expected. So I could make the M diamond about 1/6 shorter, and I think it would look better. The problem with this idea is that the M diamond is currently exactly as long as two tiers of standard diamonds, and shortening the M diamond would require me to do a non-integer number of tiers on the other side.

And so, gentle readers, I request your opinions. Would removing the bottom tier make the scarf look bad, and should I or should I not do something about the M diamond?

Swatching for Miranda's scarf

2007-03-24T14:13:55Z

Spider Stitch:

Wings of the Swan:

Ostrich Plumes:

Elaborated Print O' the Wave:

Conclusions:

I'm still planning to use some elaboration of Print O' the Wave in the borders, so I won't be getting to it just yet.
I probably will not be using Ostrich Plumes in this. Don't get me wrong, it's gorgeous-but it's also flowy and curvy and organic, which the rest of it isn't, and it has fewer YOs than the rest of it, so it looks denser.
I really like the Spider Stitch. Unfortunately, I think I will go crazy if I try to knit an entire shawl center in the stuff.
I also like Wings of the Swan. So that is probably the plan for saving Ariel from the monotony: do the center with a stripe of Wings of the Swan down the middle and two panels of Spider Stitch on either side.

Miranda's lace

2007-03-20T01:48:26Z

So a while ago, my sister sent me a request:

I thought if you hadn't started working on anything for my birthday or anything I could put in a request? do you mind requests? would you rather make something up yourself? I figured at this point you wouldn't be offended if I asked, and you are totally free to do whatever.
and really, what I want is just a scarf. but a black lace scarf. keep in mind that I don't know how complicated it is to knit lace, so I might be asking for way more than the average birthday present, in which case maybe it could be a combined birthday/christmas/next birthday present? the thing is that I have this dress which I got in spain because it's fun and twirly and fits me really well, but it's strapless, which means that there's lots of bare back and shoulders. while I get that that's the point of the dress, I'm so used to tee shirts that that much skin exposed makes me cold jsut because it's exposed, not because I'm actually cold. So when I wear my coat it's fine, but then I take off my coat and I get a little cold. I'm not looking for anything thick, just any kind of layer between my skin (or most of my skin, since this would be lace which is supposed to be loopy) and the drafts of a room.
the attachment is a picture of the dress with a scarf my friend loaned me (the dress totally makes me look like a christmas present when I have it on). While I like her scarf, it has kind of a lot of tan in it and I was thinking either simple black or a reddish black or just something dark. so I was thinking a wide black scarf, somewhere between 30 and 35 cm (i don't know if that's wide, it's just wide in comparison to the ones you made trice and sierra), and then probably 90-100 cm long so that it's long enough to play with and throw over shoulders and under elbows at the same time and all that. (you know scarf lengths better than me.) if you wanted to do something like dark red, or throw in shiny red beads or something, I wouldn't be adverse to it, I just also don't know what's easy or what you like to do or what.
this is a scarf to wear with the dressy dress, so I probably wouldn't be washing it for years if then (unless I spilled something on it) since I don't really wear dressy dresses that much.
again, I know lace is time consuming and that a shawl was sierra's wedding present, so I'm all for combining this with christmas and next year's birthday and all that (and I'd expect it would take at least that long to get done) but I realized that it would really really work with this dress and that you do amazing work and it's worth it to at least ask. if you don't want to, I'll probably ask you for advice on lace thread and lace patterns and see about making it myself, since I really like the idea, but you'd do it better since you've be doing it longer.

So I went looking online for black laceweight.

KnitPicks did not have any. That is, they have four kinds of laceweight, two of which come in solids, and none of which are black. I checked a few of the other usual suspects (elann, kpixie, etc.) and eventually settled on Zephyr Wool-Silk, which I elected to order from theknitter.com.

The thing about theknitter.com is this: their prices are lovely, and they have a good selection (of lighter weights, at least), and they take Paypal. All three of these are good things. So I will probably continue to order from them.

The only thing I don't like about theknitter.com is that their shipping time is usually about two and a half weeks, most of which is just administrative stuff on their end. So when I order things from them, I shall have to remember to order it weeks before my previous project finishes.

The yarn finally arrived today. It's not quite black; it looks dark gray. I think it's mostly that it's half silk; consequently, it is shiny, and the shiny bits are dark gray, not black. I hope that this is okay with Miranda.

The only lace pattern I am definitely including somewhere is an M. Miranda has a big silver ring that she made with my uncle the metalsmith about a year ago, and it has an M in it. She also has a pocketwatch, with a handy clip that attaches it to her pants. Unfortunately, the clip is silver-plated copper, and the plating has worn off. As of Christmas, she and my uncle were planning to make a new clip with an M on it. So I think I would like to include an M on the scarf.

I am planning to make it bigger than she said. I mean, one meter? That's way too short to attach securely. I am thinking I will make it to the dimensions of Convertible, and perhaps include an edging with holes large enough to use little buttony things in, so that if she decides she wants to button it into a shrug, she can.

Now, I know the size and shape, I just need to figure out some nice lace patterns to use.

The big problem is this: I do not think floral or leaf patterns go with black yarn. A lot of lace patterns do look like flowers. So I will have to avoid those. Also, anything that relies too much on contrast between knits and purls (as opposed to knits and YOs) I want to avoid. Admittedly, the shiny yarn will probably show it decently well, but not as well as a light-colored yarn.

I have several books I'm working from.

Here's the patterns I'm going to swatch from Heirloom Knitting:

Print O' the Wave and Elongated Print O' the Wave
Some sort of allover trellis diamonds pattern (e.g. Mrs. Montague's Pattern)
Small leaf pattern (which does not look like leaves to me.) Note: this is also used in narrow stripes in Walker, and looks cool; Miller uses it as an allover pattern
Lace hole diamonds pattern

Here's the patterns I like from The Craft of Lace Knitting (which is basically all the lace patterns from the first two Barbara Walker treasuries)

Lace Butterfly (p. 11)
Crystal pattern (p. 66)
Checkerboard mesh (p. 67)
Lyre pattern (p. 103)
Spider stitch (p. 68)
Arrow pattern (p. 73)
Ostrich Plumes (p. 78)
Arrowhead lace (p. 15)
Pique lace (p. 22)
Wings of the Swan (p. 106)

These I kind of like, but they cause the rows to zigzag, so I'm not sure I want to combine them with other stitches:

Feather and fan
Horseshoe pattern (which is in both Walker and Miller)
Fountain lace (from Walker)
Frost flowers (another that doesn't look particularly floral) (from Walker)
Feather and Fan Border Pattern (from Heirloom Knitting)
Old Spanish Lace Border/Madeira Cascade (another they both have)

My big worry is this. Abby is doing a scarf that's all elaborated Print O' the Wave, and is getting bored with it. I also have a little lace scarf that's all Frost Flowers, and I got bored with it. The point is, if I do a scarf that's all one stitch pattern, I will memorize it, then get bored with it. So I need something where I switch patterns fairly often.

I have this picture in my head of Elaborated Print O' the Wave zigging in and out, leaving big triangles and diamonds in which I can put various little motifs. Of course, this does require that I have a fair number of little motifs that look good as triangles or diamonds. Also, the "big diamonds" are about 18 right-side rows tall and 18 stitches wide, so I can't actually use motifs that are that big, unless of course I decide to make Elaborated POTW even more elaborated...

I'm also thinking I will follow tradition in making the middle of the scarf in some smaller, simpler lace patterns (possibly striped, to avoid boredom). The question, of course, is which simpler lace patterns.

I'm also pondering including little red beads...

Getting back to my roots

2007-01-07T20:42:37Z

I really think this one needs work.

First, the bare tree (trunk/root/branches) should either (1) look good on its own, or (2) be covered by the fronds.

Second, I need to do something about the tops of the clusters of leaves. They look kind of odd. The one branch in front of another looks fine, but the rest? Ugh.

Third, I'm doing the leaves as columns of twisted stitches, and this means right-slanting cables look a lot worse than left-slanting ones, so I should get rid of those. On that note, I should make some of the fronds in the top tier slant, or make the ones in the bottom tier not.

A while ago, I did one of those "comment to recieve art" memes in my personal LJ. I got about three responses, and here's what I came up with for the first of them:

I call this "The Butterfly Effect"; it's for a meteorologist-in-training. Those strange symbols are weather symbols; the top one is "thunderstorms", and the bottom ones are "snow", "dust storm", and "fog". It's worked in KnitPicks yarn on 2.25mm needles. The yarn is what used to be called "Color your own", but I think these days they're calling it "Bare-fingering weight". I did one draft swatch of each symbol (and of course I already had a draft of the butterfly lying around).

I discovered something about horizontal cables, doing this. I used to wrap my yarn in a weird way while doing horizontal cables, to avoid having twisted stitches. I tried just wrapping the yarn in the normal way. It turns out that if this twists things (and horizontal stitches are weird enough that it might not), then you can't see it, and it tightens up the background stitches quite a bit. (They're still loose enough to be noticeable, but not a huge problem anymore.)

Goals for 2007

2007-01-06T16:27:25Z

So, let's recall my goals for the end of 2006:

Christmas presents - all done.
A sweater, for me, in Malabrigo - not done.
Convert a nontrivial fraction of my sock yarn into a more useful form - Done, although most of the socks were plain stockinette that I did not feel merited a blog post.
Dragon shawl - not done.
Design work - I got some design work done, but not nearly as much as I had wanted.

Here is the WIP roundup:

The green Malabrigo sweater. This is probably the first thing in my project queue, as it is the only thing I both (1) have an immediate use for, and (2) will not take ages.
The cabled picture knitting afghan. I would like to do more of this. I think I will stop putting off revised versions of squares; if I can't think of anything I want to/can do that week, I'll just do an improved dragon/butterfly/castle/alphabet/willow square.
If anyone has any suggestions for things that would be cool as cabled picture knitting, leave them in comments. No promises I'll ever make them, but suggestions are appreciated.
The dragon shawl. This is still a WIP, and probably will be for a long time, as I have gotten to the point where I have to work from two charts at once, and so it's not that portable-and I have the green Malabrigo sweater to work on for non-portable projects.

And here's the plans roundup:

More socks!
Handwarmers that fit properly, and mittens and a hood in (probably) an angora blend for really cold days.
Do something with the 200g of wool my mother brought me from Ireland. I'm thinking some sort of bag with aran patterns.
Art meme. A while ago, on my other journal, I did one of those ``comment to recieve free art'' memes, and got three responses. So far I've made art for one of them.
Christmas presents for next year.
My mother's family gets together every December 24 for food/talk/gift exchange. We draw names out of a hat so that everyone gets gifts from exactly one other person. We used to do this drawing at Thanksgiving, but when people started asking for handknits from me, I asked them to move it up, just in case I decided to make someone a lacy shawl or something else massively fun but time consuming. So they did. To the previous Christmas. So I know who I am knitting for: my cousin's husband. I am planning to make him a hat and gloves. (Not something I really need a year's lead time for, but...)
We also do immediate-family gift exchange, and I am planning to knit sweaters for both my dad and my sister. Faramir seems to get a lot of use, but I knitted it in cotton, and the neckline was too big to begin with, and cotton sags. So I think I am going to make a new one in wool. (Same tree for the front, tengwar instead of runes for the back, maybe set-in sleeves instead of drop-shoulder, maybe a different cable for the sleeves.)
I've never made my sister a sweater, and I think she would like one with a butterfly on it.

To make this a proper goals post, I suppose I should have due dates. But really, I don't see the point. There's the stuff that's due December 24, and the sweater that's due ASAP, and the rest of it-which is all due whenever. I suppose I could redo this post with proper due dates once the green sweater's finished.

La la la...

2006-11-13T03:25:12Z

Those are five-stitch, four-row bobbles, made with slipping the first stitch of each row to make them rounder (a tip from Wikipedia.) Clever note: on the wrong-side row immediately after the bobble, cable the stitch coming out of the bobble with the one after it, then use the bobble stitch to make the vertical line.

The background doesn't really show up that well; it's three rows reverse stockinette alternating with one row of stockinette to produce those horizontal grid lines that tortoise informs me are called a staff. Perhaps they would show up better if this was wider, or after it is blocked. I am not willing to do horizontal cables to make the staff, because the staff is not all that important, and horizontal cables are slow.

dragoncrafter @ 2006-11-04T11:45:00

2006-11-04T17:45:36Z

Lately I've mostly been knitting utterly boring things: plain socks, some plain handwarmers, and a plain sleeve for a sweater in green Malabrigo, a yarn so variegated I cannot do any cabling. Maybe I'll put a lace leaf somewhere or something. While this is fun knitting I can do while reading, it's not something I feel excited enough about to actually do blog posts about.

I have done a little bit of design work recently:

Castles!

2006-10-15T14:27:49Z

This is the gingerbread castle from Walker II. I made a swatch of it just because I felt like it. It is in Yarn Place Gentle on 1.5mm needles, just like the dragon shawl.

This is yet another original cabled pattern. Three things I will be changing about this in the final draft: (1) The top bit behind the crenellations will become seed stitch. (2) All the horizontal cables which have stockinette on both sides will become likes of purl. This is faster and looks as good. (3) I will switch this to be worked on an odd number of stitches. This may mean I make some slight revisions to make it less symmetrical, so the fact it is off-center won't be quite so noticeable. It may also mean that I change all the patterns to be worked on one more stitch; the dragon and butterfly are not symmetric, and letters aren't either, so thus far this is the only pattern where parity of stitch numbers matters.

Nobody suspects...the BUTTERFLY!

2006-10-02T03:30:16Z

I went over to sit next to Lake Michigan, listen to the waves, and work on these yesterday, and finally finished them; I've been working on them for weeks.

The color is not at all accurate, but this was the only picture that (1) was not blurry and (2) shows the lace pattern, so I'm keeping it.

The lace pattern is ``Print o' the Wave'', which I got from Heirloom Knitting. I edited it a bit; those zigzags of YO holes are a triple zigzag instead of a double one in the original.

This is a combination of knitting while watching Battlestar Galactica a week or two ago, last night while watching the first half of ``The Marriage of Figaro'', and this afternoon when I picked it up, wandered over to the lake, and knit until it was done. I'm starting to really like knitting near the lake. Too bad I realized this a few months before it's going to get far too cold to do it.

Last night's alphabet block was actually done about a week ago; it just took a while to get around to photographing it. In other words, contrary to appearances, I did not do an insane amount of knitting this weekend. I am just a sporadic blogger.

The right half is actually the top half-no, that is not a whole lot of horizontal cables, that's a bunch of columns of knit stitches that cable a little. It looks better because (1) I had a good picture of what went wrong in the left half, and (2) I got to use decreases in the way I want. I shall have to think about it, to see if I can get the bottom side to look good. The other alternative of course involves provisional cast-on and working out from the middle, which would work, but which is more complicated than I really would like.

I should also remember that blind increases exist. I know four kinds of increases: YO (big hole, use only if you want a lacy effect), twisted YO/twisted make-1 (tends to leave a small hole), knit into front and back of st (leaves a little purl bump) and blind increases, done by knitting into the row below (the closest to invisible, at least on stockinette ground. Nothing is invisible in reverse stockinette.) I remembered them when I was almost done; I shall have to rethink their positioning.

Letters

2006-09-30T14:41:57Z

Here is the next in the Cables That Look Like Stuff series: the alphabet.

Letters b, c, e, f are done in twisted stitches (knit through back loop) because it looks terrific when Eunny does it. She must be using a yarn with more definition than I am; it didn't really come out well for me.

The top few rows got done out of order, to cut down on how big this particular swatch had to be; I plan to do the final draft in order. I also left out `a' and `d' on the grounds that they look like `b', only reversed or shorter, and `n' because it's just like `m' with the middle bits (or right bits, or whatever) deleted.

I also left out `z', because I just couldn't figure out a good way to do it.

And then I discovered something brilliant.

Tales of the Dragon Shawl

Some of you may recall I was planning to make the Dragon shawl in yarn I was going to buy with my Knitty money. However, when Halcyon Yarn decided to back-order my Malabrigo, I decided I wanted to start a large non-self-designed project at once, and with the sweater not going to work, it would have to be the shawl.

So I went to Loopy Yarns downtown and bought a ball of laceweight.

It's the red stuff on the left. It's Yarn Place Gentle, 1380 yards/100 grams, 95% Australian Merino, 5% cashmere, and feels wonderful. For comparison, the stuff on the right is Blackberry Ridge Thistledown Singles, Knitpicks Shimmer, and DMC crochet cotton #20.

As you may note, this is pretty fine yarn. So I didn't want to go with big needles; I wanted some sort of steel Os.

Now, I have a full set of steel multi-0s, and my 00s gave me utterly reasonable fabric.

The problem is, my 0s, 00s, and 000s are made by Addi. I have never used Addi Turbos (I tend to be happy with cheap needles), but if their tips are like these ones, I see why Grumperina persists in calling them Blunti Stumpos. I can do stockinette with them. I can knit socks, in sock yarn, just fine on the 0s, although it was a bit annoying when I was using Lorna's Laces instead of Cherry Tree Hill/Koigu. (I love CTH/Koigu; much less splitty.) With laceweight, I just could not do a k2tog.

Then I remembered that, years ago, I bought some 1.5mm (000) needles from Lacis. I think Inox made them. I somehow contrived to lose two of them, but since I only need two needles to knit flat, and I had three left, that was all right.

So I started the shawl on the Inox 000s. Since I'm planning to hang this on the wall, I don't really care that it will end up far too small. It works fine, but I have pretty limited ability to do it without looking. Normally, I can read while working a plain purl row. Not with this. So it's going surprisingly slowly; on the other hand, I have made progress with my latest pair of socks.

I finally got up to the bottom of the dragon's tail. And I discovered something brilliant.

Sharon Winsauer attributes it to Margaret Stove. In her book, Margaret Stove says it is ``attributed to the late Trude Guermonprez''. Whoever it is who came up with it, thank you.

I took this stitch, that is used at the bottom of the dragon's tail, and used it to make a Z.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is, in fact, a horizontal cable.

The general idea is to work a mini-cable crossing, then another one not on the next two stitches, but the next stitch and the stitch just worked.

Being the mini-cable tinkerer I am, this is what I came up with.

First stitch: Knit front and back. Alternatively (chiyo_no_saru, thanks for the suggestion!) make 1 knitwise. Or, if you already had a (one-stitch) vertical cable that you just want to continue at an angle, just knit to just before it and then slip it...purlwise, I think.
**Slip next stitch as if to knit. Insert left needle through the first two stitches on the right needle, from front to back and from right to left; this is the mirror image of inserting the right needle as if to k2tog. Remove right needle; your first two stitches on the left needle are now switched.
{Work first stitch through front loop/slip 1 purlwise with yarn held to back.} Then knit the next stitch through the front loop.** Technically, this twists the stitches that go into the horizontal cable, but that's actually a good thing because it tightens it up.
Repeat between **s for the length of your horizontal cable, but on the last stitch, end just after the section in {}s.
If you want to continue this thing as a vertical cable (as I did at the bottom of the Z) just go on knitting. Otherwise, do a decrease to get rid of the next stitch. (p2tog or ssk both seem to work okay, but some experimentation is in order to make this work with {slipping} above.)

Note: I've made a few edits to the stuff above, mostly regarding starting and stopping this thing.

The big thing I've realized is this: the row after a horizontal cable is always too loose. However, if you slip 1 purlwise instead of knitting or purling it in the {}s above, it will instead be too tight—which often looks better, if you don't have too many of these things.

Note: chiyo_no_saru has been playing with ways to do thicker cables; see her entry here.

This is brilliant. I am so glad I found it. Thank you, Trude Guermonprez.

dragoncrafter @ 2006-09-24T20:24:00

2006-09-25T01:43:54Z

Apparently yesterday was Leaves in Relief day over on knitting.

I am quite fond of the pillow. There's a reason why my current cable design project is an afghan instead of more sweaters.

And speaking of my patterns on Knitty:

A tale of two socks

The first thing I thought of was actually the article, and then I decided to write a pattern to go with it. At the time, I thought it would all be ready for the sock issue, so I decided to make mini-cabled socks, based sort of loosely on these or these. I really liked the interlocking cables on the second set, so I decided to expand on that.

(Jenna Wilson has a funny story about the cables on Rogue: she was convinced that if she didn't break the six-rib plait with those funny twisting things, she wouldn't be able to hear. I have an equally silly belief: that if I didn't link all of the mini-cables up in the back, the socks would fall apart.)

This is what I came up with first:

It looks fine if you're wearing shoes:

However, Amy thought that it looked unfinished, and would I mind redoing it so the cables went down the foot? I decided I didn't, and then worked up the final version. I had to turn it around: the original version is toe-up with double-gusset short-row heels (my favorite), but I decided that if I was going to have cables on the heel, I had to use a heel flap, and if I wanted them on the heel and the instep, I had to work the leg first. Otherwise it would be just too easy to start the heel flap a row too soon or too late, and then the cables wouldn't line up.

I now think that if I had done toe-up socks the way described in Sensational Knitted Socks, I could have made it work. Those work toe-up heels exactly the way they work cuff-down heels. So the heel flap ends up under the heel instead of behind it, and the gussets extend up the ankle instead of down the foot. The point is, the end of the instep and the heel are worked at the same time; I could have just said ``Work row N of cable chart over the instep, work gusset stitches, then work the same row over the heel.'' Well, a little more complicated than that, but you get the idea.

Ah well. It worked out fine this way.

Now for it to get cold enough to justify wool socks!

Justifying the title of this blog II

2006-09-14T22:07:07Z

I have a Grand Plan: to create lots and lots of cable patterns that look like real things, or at least, like things other than knots, assemble them into an afghan, and then send the pattern to the Knitting Vault.

This is the rough draft of the first such pattern.

When I originally sat down to design this, I failed to realize something fairly obvious, namely that the dragon's head was positioned in front of its wing. Now, the head and body have to be in stockinette, just because stockinette cables are smooth and good. The wings I want to be some sort of smooth stitch, and the background has to be distinct from both of them. Originally, I was going to make the background reverse stockinette, and the wings stockinette, just like the head.

This might be made to work, if I was willing to outline the head with columns of purl stitches. However, halfway through I instead decided to try making it with the background in seed stitch, so I could use reverse stockinette for the wings. I think it worked out pretty well.

There are a few other little details I plan to revise, when and if I get around to fixing this pattern.

Knitting-related plans

2006-09-14T03:25:42Z

So, I think I shall change this to a rest-of-the-year goals post, and just post monthly updates.

My goals for September-December:

Christmas presents. This time, I'm only making stuff for two people (my sister Miranda and my cousin Sierra), and none of it will be large.
A sweater, for me, in Malabrigo. I'm thinking Menja. Due date: Ideally, by the end of September, but since I only ordered the yarn tonight, this might or might not be practical. Edit: I am unimpressed with Halcyon Yarn. Not only are their shipping charges notably high, their back-ordering policy is: we won't tell you if an item will be back-ordered, we'll just charge you for it and ship it out whenever we can, without asking if perhaps you would like to change your mind or edit your order. It's sounding like I will be lucky to get the yarn by the end of September, let alone knit it up.
Convert a nontrivial fraction of my sock yarn into a more useful form. Due date: whenever.
The shawl of justifying the title of this blog-thanks, page68, for bringing this to my attention. I'm planning to do this in superfine merino which I shall order from here. This site takes Paypal. So I will wait to order the yarn until the middle of next month, or whenever it is that Amy gets around to paying contributors to the last issue of Knitty. Unless, of course, I lose patience entirely (which is possible.)
Design work. I think I will set up an ongoing goal of one 10'' x 10'' swatch (in DK weight yarn) per two weekends. I've completed one such swatch, last weekend. One of these days I will remember to photograph it during daylight, and then you will get to see it.