April 2007 goals

Posted on 04 April 2007 by Kris

I feel like such a slacker. I know I was productive in not-knitting ways, but that’s not the point. My March 2007 goal progress still makes me sad.

  1. Finish Falling Leaves v2 – Not done.
  2. Finish one Fairways sock and make some sort of progress on the other – Not done.
  3. Work on Eris – Not done.
  4. Start a new lace project – Done! (Pictures to come!)

The progress on my year goals was no better. I’m not going to do the full run-down just because I’m at mostly the same place as I was last month. The one change was that I actually added to my stash instead of decreased it. There was a sale at Knitting in La Jolla a couple of weekends ago; of course, a few of us had to check it out and of course, I came away with some sock yarn. It was only one skein of Colinette Jitterbug, though, so I don’t feel too bad – I’ve never used it before and it’s a pretty plum color to boot.

Anyway, due to the turns my life has taken, my knitting time has increased exponentially, so April’s goals:

  1. Finish Falling Leaves v2
  2. Finish one Fairways sock and make some progress on the other
  3. Knit at least 1 1/2 inches for Eris
  4. Knit at least three repeats of the Mountain Stream Scarf
  5. Start a new pair of fingerless mitts, but only after finishing a Fairways sock.
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March 2007 goals

Posted on 01 March 2007 by Kris

Despite my unusual productivity in February, I still did a fairly shabby job when it came to meeting my goals:

  1. Finish Peacock Feathers – Done!
  2. Finish a pair of socks – Not done.
  3. Finish at least one other WIP – Done! (I actually finished two!)
  4. Work on all remaining WIPs – Done! Well, if frogging one counts as “work.” I say it does because it’s a progress change.
  5. Start a new lace project – Not done.

At least the progress on my year goals was slightly better:

  1. Have only one project of each type (socks, lace, fitted garment, etc.) in progress at any one time. – I got most of the way there by mid month. Okay, so I still have two pairs of socks in progress, but one is my self-design project. (What? I said at the beginning of the year that I would categorize projects as I saw fit, right?)
  2. Have a maximum of five projects on the needles at any given time. – Got here before month’s end; I’m now down to three projects.
  3. Finish at least five pairs of socks. – No new progress. I did rip out half of a sock, but I finished one this month, so it’s about even.
  4. Finish at least two shawls or stoles. – One down, one to go!
  5. Finish at least one of the two WIPs started in 2005, and rip out the remaining one if no progress has been made by the end of the year. – I frogged the toe socks early. And I knit a few rows on Eris. No new pictures of the latter, though, since who really wants to see the sleeves the third time around?
  6. Decrease the amount of yarn in my stash. – No go. I broke into another hank of Koigu (for the second Falling Leaves sock), but I also bought a hank of Schaefer Anne early this month. And frogging the toe socks reintroduced even more yarn to my stash.
  7. Attend SnBs more regularly (at least once a month) – So far, so good!

And now, March’s goals!

  1. Finish Falling Leaves v2
  2. Finish one Fairways sock and make some sort of progress on the other.
  3. Work on Eris
  4. Start a new lace project
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Light as a feather

Posted on 27 February 2007 by Kris

If painstakingly pinning out 164 crochet loops isn’t an exercise of patience, I don’t know what is. But after unpinning the shawl on Sunday, I decided it was definitely worth it:

I love this shawl!

Detail shots:

(The color’s hard for me to photograph; the second detail is probably closest on my monitor, but that’s really not saying much.)

Pattern:
Peacock Feathers by Dorothy Siemens

Yarn:
One ball of Jade Sapphire Lacey Lamb in Turquoise

Needles and hooks:
US0 / 2.00mm Inox Express circulars
US3 / 2.10mm Susan Bates Steelite crochet hook for the bindoff

Modifications:
I used cobweb weight yarn and smaller needles to produce a more reasonably sized shawl. Well, reasonable for me, anyway. My shawl is 60″ across the top edge, and 29″ from top to bottom.

 
Overall, this was a good knitting experience. It did drag a bit in the middle, because it was the same stitch pattern over and over again, but once I got past that, I pretty much flew through the rest.

The crocheted loops were even more tedious to work than they were to pin out. Crocheting with cobweb weight yarn is no fun. Would I do that again? Hell no. But do I think it was worth the effort this one time? Hell yes! I love the look.

The pattern, like other Fiddlesticks patterns I’ve knit, is nice and easy to follow, with big, clear, easily readable charts. If you’re thinking about knitting it, I definitely recommend this pattern!

I also recommend the yarn, though it took me awhile to get past the “oh my god it’s like thread I’m so going to break this” panicked feeling. But the Lacey Lamb is stronger than it looks; yes, I can break an individual strand if I give it a good hard tug, but it stands up to regular old knitting just fine. The yarn is soft and springy and lovely to work with. Mine bled a bit during blocking, but it’s nothing that a vinegar soak couldn’t cure.

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Cables here, cables there

Posted on 25 February 2007 by Kris

This seems to be the season for scarves here at Knitting Affairs, since Here and There Cables is the second one I’ve finished in as many months. I actually finished knitting it last Saturday, but it wasn’t dry by the time I ran out of natural light last Sunday. But what else is new, right?

Anyway…

The detail shot is truer to color, but in person it’s a bit darker and richer.

Pattern:
Here and There Cables by Norah Gaughan (published in Scarf Style)

Yarn:
Three balls of Louisa Harding Grace in color 9

Needles:
Three US6 / 4.25mm Crystal Palace bamboo DPNs

Modifications:
I knit four plain ribbed rows in between each cable crossing row, rather than six. Also, I worked the pattern over 38 stitches instead of 74.

 
This scarf proves how bored I normally get when knitting the same stitch pattern over and over. It was really fun when I started it back in October, but by the time I got halfway through the second ball, this was seriously starting to drag. I managed to finish it because it was pretty much the only project I brought out with me to SnBs. I wasn’t going to touch something so monotonous if I had more enjoyable projects lying around, after all.

This is why I usually try to strike a balance between process and product when selecting new knits.

I do love the finished product, at least. I think it’s pretty, and I know I’ll use it because it coordinates with much of my wardrobe and it’s very warm, thanks to the reversible cables. It’s noticeably narrow, though. I mean, I do like narrower scarves as a rule, but if this one weren’t so thick and squishy, even I think it would be too narrow for practical use – it’s only about 3.5 inches wide. But it’s just as well that I didn’t make it wider. I only had three balls of the yarn, and I would’ve run out much more quickly if I’d had to knit an extra eighteen stitches per row.

Speaking of the yarn, I really like Grace a lot. It’s very soft and it has a lovely sheen to it. One (fairly minor) annoyance is that it’s a bit on the slippery side, and thus I actually had to use a spare DPN when working the cable crossings. I’d never cabled using an extra needle before, and even after I got used to it, I still found it a bit fiddly. But it’s better than dropping stitches, right?

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Smitten

Posted on 18 February 2007 by Kris

The second mitten went even faster than I’d expected. I finished the knitting on Friday evening and laid it out for a light blocking yesterday. It figures I would finish a pair of mittens when it’s too warm to wear them…

Pattern:
Anemoi Mittens by Eunny Jang

Yarn:
Dale Baby Ull in colors 2203 and 5135, less than one ball each

Needles:
US0 / 2.00mm Knitpicks DPNs for the cuff of the right mitten
US0 / 2.00mm Inox grey DPNs for the cuff of the left mitten
US2 / 2.75mm Brittany Birch DPNs for a couple of rows in the right mitten
US2 / 2.50mm Inox grey DPNs for the rest of the right mitten and the entire hand of the left mitten

(The boatload of needles is because I started the first mitten while hanging out at Jess‘s. I’d gone to Common Threads during my lunch break that day and so I had yarn with me, but I had to borrow needles from her. No, I don’t always keep an active knitting project with me. Sacrilege, I know.)

 
Overall, this was a really fun project to knit, and I highly recommend it! The pattern itself is nice and clear and easy to follow. Okay, so the charts are a bit smaller than I personally prefer, but they’re still perfectly readable.

I like how the semi-corrugated rib looks. It’s a bit tighter than I’d like on the left mitten, but I suspect that’s mostly due to the needles I used – the Inox needles are a little more grippy than the Knitpicks ones, and I neglected to swatch for the cuff with the Inoxes. Oops. At least it still fits!

It was kind of interesting having longer stretches of the contrast color. Dale Baby Ull won’t really felt to itself after wear, and knowing me, I will somehow get a finger caught in a six-stitch-long float. So I had to weave in the background color here and there. I’d never done that before, and since I hold both strands in the left hand, good photo tutorials are harder to find. But I found the (text-only) explanation over at Let Me Explaiknit to be pretty helpful.

I loved how the pattern was asymmetrical and non-repeating. It’s not the most intuitive one out there, but that actually worked well for me. It was interesting enough to keep my attention, but not difficult enough to really frustrate me. And I was always looking forward to seeing how the pattern unfolded with every row. That level of excitement that doesn’t really happen when you’re knitting the same eight rows over and over, not for me, anyway.

These fit me well enough pre-blocking, so I decided I didn’t want to block these very aggressively. I did a wet block without pins or anything, just to even out the colorwork. I’m probably going to have to go back and redo it and pin out just the cuffs, because some of the stitches there are still a bit wonky.

I probably won’t get a ton of use out of these, but I know I’ll love wearing them when I get the chance.

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