Tag Archives: Shimmer

I just finished the nth sleeve for Shimmer (pictures to come once I’ve got my camera batteries charged), so now I have to figure out what the heck I’m going to do about the back.

The back measurement is 17″ for the smallest size. That might actually be a little bit too big for me. Now I do want some ease, of course, but I don’t know if I want quite that much ease. My tape measure’s disappeared again so I can’t remeasure right now, but given what I know about my body’s proportions and how I like my garments fitted, I’m fairly sure I’m going to want this about an inch narrower across the back. I’ll have to see how the pattern stretches before I make the final decision, though.

I guess I’m only medium-framed relative to my height. :-P I mean, I haven’t been under 100 pounds since before puberty; I’d hardly call myself skinny. But I keep forgetting that a woman of average height with my upper body width and circumference would be closer to a small. It only seems like I’m a bit wider because I’m shorter. I also have a wacked-out perception of clothing sizes, because of the whole juniors/petite/standard discrepancies.

Whew, that was sort of rambly…

The good thing about this wonkiness is that I’m getting to be a lot more familiar with my actual size. It’s one thing to know that I have a proportionally short torso, but another to know what my torso length actually is, you know?

I’ve been quite the social knitter lately. I blame Jess.

Not that that’s a bad thing.

We went to Claire de Lune last night. I saw some familiar faces and some new ones, and despite my brain breaking after certain remarks, I had a good time. Unfortunately I didn’t catch everyone’s names, but in a very rare moment, I realized that I actually remembered everyone I’d met before. (I’m good with faces, terrible with names.)

So if I met you last night, say hi!

I made some progress on my sleeve for Shimmer. Technically it’s the third sleeve I’ve knit for this project, but it’s a re-knit of the first sleeve and I only have one complete sleeve, so I have no idea what to number it. :-P Whatever. I think I’ll watch a film and get a couple of more inches into the sleeve tonight.

I’m going to need to swatch and do more math-y things before I work on the back, though. Not only does the pattern fail to mention a gauge for that section, I also have to do a bit of tweaking for size, seeing as I have a short torso but a medium frame.

As far as blog news goes, the URL for this site changed a bit after I changed the LJ settings, but that probably won’t affect anyone because who the heck would bookmark this thing? :-P

I’ll be able to repost and backdate older entries now, instead of just having links to my other journal. So I’ll probably get around to that sometime this weekend. It’ll be nice to consolidate all the knitting content.

I finished a sleeve for Shimmer. Seriously, if I didn’t know any better, I’d honestly think it was supposed to be a 3/4 sleeve… it looks so short! I’d take a picture, but it’s kind of awkward taking a picture of your own arm, and my tripod’s kind of wonky at the moment (need to fix it).

I reached the end of the first ball just a few rows before I finished the sleeve, and I decided to try the Russian join this time around. It works great, but the join’s a lot more noticeable than a spit-splice join would be. I’m not sure how much blocking would fix that (part of the issue is just that stitches are uneven in that spot). Whatever it is, I’m thinking I’m definitely going to just splice for the rest of the joins.

I also found the pattern for my black lace scarf, though I haven’t picked up the needles again yet.

I’ve been too tired to knit much for the past couple of days… I’m readjusting my internal clock to account for my new work hours, so at the moment I pretty much want to collapse once I’m done for the day. And since I went out for a run both yesterday and today after work, you can just imagine how little energy I had left for knitting afterward. Once I get used to it I’ll be knitting more on weeknights, though. And in the meantime, there’s always the weekend!

I still need to post the pictures for my yarn-dyeing experiment; I’ll probably get around to that by this weekend.

So I haven’t been knitting much lately. I’ve been dedicating more time to reading and cooking, and I also haven’t been home a whole lot, which meant projects were going to the wayside.

Um, let’s see, early this month I broke my yarn-purchasing freeze. I just bought one ball of Fisherman’s Wool because I wanted to try dyeing yarn, and have lots available for test skeins and such. (I then re-instated the freeze.) It turned out okay; I’ll make another post soon with details.

I frogged the last sock I’d started. I’m going to look into different patterns again and play around more. Meh, I’ll get it done eventually.

I misplaced the pattern for the black lacy scarf/shawl I was making! And I didn’t have it memorized yet. I’ll have to see if I can re-find the pattern. Ah, the problems with copying from books…

Oh, on the plus side, I started a new project tonight!

I’ve had the yarn for Shimmer for months, and I actually swatched for it a couple of weeks ago, but I hadn’t gotten around to starting it. Tonight was the SnB at Starbucks, though, and I wasn’t about to show up to a knitting event without something to knit. So, I’m now a couple of inches into the first sleeve. :-) I’m going to have modify it a bit, because the whole thing’s too long for me (I’m just small in general, but I have a particularly short torso and arms), but that shouldn’t be too hard.

I decided to try the Magic Loop method with this, because while I don’t have size 8 DPNs, I do have a long-ish size 8 circular. I kind of fumbled around with it at first, as Jess can attest to, but I finally got the hang of it by the time I finished with the ruffle. I’ve decided that I like this method. I’d like it better if these particular circs didn’t suck so much, though.