Not finishing enough, and the sock in my purse

I’ve started feeling desperate about not producing enough FO’s (Finished Objects) lately.  So I’ve cast on a lovely bulky red/purple yarn for the Jenny Cloche.  Theoretically this should be a quick knit, but at my crawling pace of late… well, we’ll see.  I plan to knit the style without the big floppy bow (eg. this Raveler’s lovely project), because I am not a big floppy bow sort of person.

 

There is still an ever-present sock in my purse.  It’s possible that the sock is part of the reason I feel so angsty about finishing something.  I was cruising along cuff-down and about to do the toe decreases when I discovered that my creation would not slip over the recipient’s heel.  I was concerned that I wouldn’t have enough yarn for three socks, so rather than having a mismatched sock for myself (yes, I would happily wear mismatched hand-knit socks, I am that sort of kooky), I had to frog it.  O!  The agony! Actually, at the time I felt I took my gauge mistake rather philosophically.  I frogged, changed needle sizes, went a size-step over on the chart, and cast on again immediately.  It is only now that I feel this terrible weight of not finishing anything for a long time.  Some sort of delayed frogger’s-remorse.

 

It’s my own fault, of course.  I was using my favorite Grannie Linda Siskiyou sock chart but I failed to realize that the Zwerger Garn Opal Saphir 8ply yarn I previously used successfully with this chart is actually a very different yarn from the current project’s Zwerger Garn Opal Harry Potter 4ply yarn…

 

I know, I know, I honestly didn’t see that it was a different ply count until I looked up the proper names just now.  But the yarn difference was visible too, if I had only paid attention to the “gauge instinct”.  You know the one?  The one we all ignore at our peril, the instinct that tells us that there is NO WAY that we are making a garment that will reasonably fit the body part it is intended for.  When we ignore the gauge instinct we wing it, even though we know better, and don’t stop even when some innocent bystander asks if we are ‘making that sock for a little nephew’?  The Yarn Harlot does much better justice to this subject than I ever could.   I can’t find the specific story I’m thinking of on her blog, so I’m guessing I read it in one of her books.

 

As an aside:  I love the Yarn Harlot’s writing, I added all her books to my holiday wishlist, even though I’ve enjoyed half of them from the library already, just because they’re great to refer back to in times of knitterly trial.  She normalizes all those painful mistakes and reminds us that most  knitters do make them, because all knitters are human.  She’ll make you feel better about your stash guilt too – really, she is delightful!

 

Back to my sock gauge confessions:  it wasn’t just the yarn size.  Way back in March, I discovered that the TKGA Master Knitter Program had changed my gauge (for the better!).  So I should have also been taking into account that my gauge had changed when I started casting on for a sock without doing any kind of gauge swatch.

 

So yes, foolish mortal that I am, I paid no heed to either the yarn size or changes in my gauge before casting on blithely and knitting a too-small-sock.  That was about a month ago.  Due to this knitting-impediment called graduate classes, I have gotten only so far as to make it back to the heel flap.  And thus my story has come full circle, I have cast on a hat in bulky yarn hoping for some near-term Finished-Object gratification… I also have bulbs to plant this weekend, apple butter to can, applesauce to make and then can, a porch railing to stain, and a few other little projects in mind for this weekend… so as I said, we’ll see.

 

That said, let me make myself feel better by sharing photos of another project I finished this summer, that I only recently remembered to take photos of:

Captain Capacitor (pattern here):

Captain Capacitor - knitted toy

Resisty the Resistor (pattern here):

Resisty the Resistor - knitted toy

I made these cute little guys for my favorite geek, my husband, who has been taking electrical engineering courses over at the community college.  I made sure to pick a resistor banding pattern that really meant something – no point in making an inaccurate geek-gift!  As for the patterns, they were free, delightful, and easy to follow.  And Anna, the designer over at the Mochimochi Land blog, has a zillion other irresistibly cute (very kawaii inspired) patterns to whet your toy-knitting appetite if you don’t know any budding electrical engineers.

 

Until next time, keep your needles clicking…

Updates in slow motion

I took some more fun pictures of the dragon toy, and sent them one by one with humorous “sightings” emails, and a little silly “newspaper clipping” to the recipient of the gift as a teaser before giving her the dragon:

Whoooosh!

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's... a dragonling!

Here are the finished/dried samples of what I took home from dye day:

Dye Day 2009 samples

From left to right I believe they are (it’s been a while):  Red onion skin & alum, carrot top & copper, carrot top & tin, cochineal & alum, and kool-aid!  I loved the kool-aid process and resultant colorway so much that I immediately dyed up another skein for a total of 440 yds of pink and blue goodness.  I hope I can get a tank top out of it.  All of it was Knit Picks Bare: Peruvian Highland Worsted.

And in other updates, here’s what happened with the dye-day scarf:

Exhibit A:  rusty objects and steel wool on the silk scarf soaked in vinegar, more vinegar spritzed on and salt applied, scarf + objects rolled carefully and left in plastic overnight to set.

Silk scarf/rusty object imprint in progress

Result:

Rust-dyed scarves, interesting pattern, but color...

Suffice it to say that I wasn’t in love with the color.  I’m not an orange person generally, and this staining on the translucent white was evocative of… unpleasant things.  Another lady at dye day had rust-dyed onto denim – I think that might have been a better look.

So what do dyers do when they don’t like a color?

Exhibit B:

Kool-aid: the fastest tool in the dyer's handbag

A couple of Kool-aid colors later and I had something with some pretty colors, but alas, not a good combo with that particular shade of orange.  It still looked… less than purposeful – which is not a good attribute in a hand-crafted item in my opinion.  Perhaps that sounds odd, to clarify:  I don’t think there is anything wrong with randomness or organic-ness in color, line or form, but if the entire effect is too arbitrary, then the piece will simply look poorly planned or poorly executed and thereby fall into the dreaded category of “homemade” instead of “handcrafted”.  Anyway, I digress.

I remembered something about turning rust black… I googled like mad and came up with a natural answer: tea-dyeing!  I adore tea dyeing, it can be used to make such organic, lovely, cloudy stains.  The color is dependent largely on the tea used and the material being dyed, you get anything from light tan to orangey-brown to dark grey.  I’ve used it to good effect on cottons in some of my art pieces.  How is this related to rust?  Well the tannins in black tea supposedly will make your rust stains turn black, or blackish, or at least tone down the orange.  I cannot find the original source I read it on, but here is someone else’s cool experiments with rust and tannins.  So I made up a tea bath for the scarves.

Exhibit C:

Tea-dyed + kool-aid dyed + rust-dyed scarves

I finally gave in.  The combo isn’t bad, sort of fall-festive.  The orange-rust color is definitely toned down.  I’m satisfied.  I’ve gone from “will never wear it” to “can wear it in certain seasons”.  Good enough!

After the dye day extravaganza (and some extra effort put into the scarves) was concluded, I rode on the inspiration high to start some color spinning.  Now I’m no spinning expert, and I’ve never spun multi-colored rovings before, so I got some books on the library for guidance, separated the colors in the roving and got to work.  The roving was from CJ Kopec Creations and was a colorway called “Vintage Charm”: 2/3 merino, 1/3 Colonial and very luxurious.

Roving from CJ Kopec Creations "Vintage Charm"

I haven’t finished the whole 16 oz, but I have worked up a couple of skeins.

Spinning Pastels

Just a simple 2-ply, aiming for a worsted weight.  In the first couple of skeins the color changes were sort of short and random, but now I’m trying to separate the colors into longer sections of color so that the colors are more intense in sections (plying like-to-like, er, hopefully).  I’m sure I’ll have to switch from skein to skein in the knitting to keep it from looking erratic.  The colors are really gorgeous and inspiring, but I think for the sporadic nature of my spinning, I’m better off spinning undyed roving and dyeing the finished yarn.  It’s hard enough to keep the size consistent between one session and the next, let alone the color separations.

The biggest problem I’m having is that between sessions, I have to hide my box of roving from my kitten (for the squeamish amongst you, do not fear, this is not a video of him destroying anything fiber related, just a demonstration of his energy, which he has not yet outgrown, despite being several months older than he was in this film).  But this means the roving is also hidden from me, which means it requires more motivation for me to start a spinning session.  But it’s better than finding tufts of beautiful purple fluff all around the house.  At least so far he hasn’t molested the spinning wheel or bobbins too much.

And just because it’s lovely, below are some scenes of the September harvest in my garden.  Why, oh why, are none of my hobbies compatible?  I cannot garden and knit, I cannot play videogames or board games and garden, I cannot cook and knit… oh so many distractions in life, so many things keeping my hands busy.  At least I can do some of those things and read audiobooks simultaneously.

Sunflower and the bean harvest

Cornplanter Purple Beans

Tune in next time for more of my fiber-related adventures…

Dye Day

This Saturday, the lovely ladies of the Spinning/Weaving Guild  that my Mom belongs to (name withheld because I didn’t think to ask if they were ok with me name-dropping them online) held their annual Dye Day.

One of the members volunteered her garage (located on a lovely 12 acre farm with sheep), and set up tables and tents.  They had a very cool 12- or 16-burner pot-boiling contraption that was ideal for a dyeing extravaganza, but it’s a mystery to me what the normal purpose of such a device would be.

Dye Day Pot Burners

Various guild member had charge of different pots and recipes, and all I had to do was show up with some 50-yard skeins for myself. 

Toys make me feel clever

I don’t knit toys very often, that’s usually my sister’s territory.  She has produced a number of wonderful knitted toys and finger-puppets both from her own design and from patterns.  I love toys, and even as an adult I’ve acquired many, I’ve even sewn several sock monkeys,  so I don’t know why I’ve neglected this area of knitting.  Having recently completed  only my second knitted toy (if I recall correctly), I can safely say that I understand why my sister likes knitting toys.  They make me feel clever, even if I’m going from a pattern.  It’s really fun to watch complicated 3-d objects curling off of the needles.  This particular one required a fair amount of seaming, which wasn’t my favorite aspect, however, the result was very worthwhile.

Knitted Dragon from Nicky Epstein pattern

This is the “Hai-Riyo” pattern from Nicky Epstein’s Knitting on Top of the World

Sometime after Father’s day has past by (no need to overshadow celebrations of the male parent), I will be giving this to my Mother-in-law who collects dragon things.  My husband and I have a fun way of giving the gift planned,

So many ways to have socks

Where have I been for the last month?  I have been working away at a gift.  Isn’t that the mantra of knitters everywhere?  It always seems like we have a plan for a gift, a gift on the needles, or a deadline that is fast approaching – almost upon us – just passed -!  And then the lull of:  well, I didn’t get it done on time, but maybe I can get it done this week and it will be ok.

Fortunately, the recipient this time is my mom, and she is a knitter herself, so she knows all about how knitting time required for gifts is completely incalculable.  Even if you give yourself lots of lead time, it never seems to get done on time.  Or you are up all night the evening before the event cranking out the last stitches in a rush.

I am finally almost done with a pair of mini-cabled socks.  They started as an experiment in two-at-at-once magic looping… which is a method I have decided is now dead to me!

A word about graph paper

I have been looking around at different graph papers that I might use for knitting designs.  A co-worker gave me a freebie pad of graph paper (with a sponsoring agency’s logo on it) that just so happens to be ruled so that it’s blocks are wider than they are tall.  If you’ve looked into charting your own designs before, you probably have already been informed that knit stitches are not perfectly square, which makes using regular graph paper for your designs misleading.

So my freebie pad of graph paper is kind of nice with it’s rectangular blocks

One less albatross

I often overcommit myself.  This was one of my concerns when starting the TKGA Master Hand-Knitter program.  I tried to clear a few gift-making projects (that were gravely overdue) early in January before I got my Level I instructions.  But as I have gotten into the heart of the Level I tasks, I have started getting more involved with Ravelry as it is a great resource for TKGA discussions and information.  I have also been using Raverly to organize my stash and get serious about a queue of projects that should help me through some extreme stash-busting.  There are a lot of vests and shrugs on my queue because it seems I almost never get a whole sweater’s worth of yarn.

But this queuing has lead to some extreme stash-guilt.  I hadn’t realized how much stash I had collected that was intended for some project or another.  I hadn’t realized how much stash I really had until I moved last year!  Now all of the craft resources are in one place, and rather than inspiring me, I feel like they are all mocking me.  I am being taunted by my foolish good intentions. 

Distractions

When I first started this blog, I envisioned being able to regularly update based on only Master-Hand-Knitter discoveries.  As it turns out, my life is not that streamlined.  Other knitting distracts me, and other things distract me.  Therefore, in order to post regularly (which is good blog-keeping etiquette, regardless of whether anyone actually reads this thing), I feel the need to expand my scope a little.

So here are my latest distractions:  I finished a fingerless mitt

Making peace with the cables

My confusion over the tight braid cable made me put the whole Master Hand Knitting project aside for a couple of weeks.  I wasn’t ready to call it quits on that tight braid (Swatch #15, first attempt), and yet I wasn’t able to find a solution to make it better.  I even dolefully tried to finish it knowing that I wouldn’t like it.  This was a non-starter.  I guess that makes me a true “product knitter”.  I can’t stand to work on something knowing that I won’t like the results and that it will serve no good purpose.

Now I’m fairly convinced that this “tight braid cable” really just isn’t a very good pattern (or maybe just a bad pattern for this size yarn and needles).  Because it’s so tight, and there is no room for knit stitches that aren’t crossed in one direction or another, there is no place for a shadow to gather.  Cables seem to need

A Cabling Conundrum

In order to illustrate the effect of different stitch patterns on row and stitch gauge, the TKGA Level I instructions require a comparison between the top halves of swatch #1 (garter stitch) and #2 (stockinette) with the entire swatch of #3 (seed stitch) and #14 (horseshoe cable).  The comparison of these four swatches means that they all have to be in the same yarn and knit on the same needles.

It might be nerdy, but I found it rather fun calculate the row and stitch gauges and find experimentally what I knew intuitively:  that it takes more rows of garter stitch to achieve the same length fabric as stockinette, or that in terms of stitches per inch a pattern of cable> seed stitch> stockinette> garter stitch.  It really reinforces the importance of making gauge swatches “in pattern”.

After agonizing about the ribbing tension