I’m very suspicious.
The Incense scarf is done, and it turned out just the way I wanted, and I didn’t have to change anything in my original pattern notes, and this never happens. Why is my knitting suddenly well-behaved? I don’t know what to make of this.
I guess I should just shut up and be happy.
Pattern: Serpentina (look how good I’m getting at writing up patterns before I blog them!)
Yarn: Elann Incense in Brick, 4 balls
Needles: US 7
It really did turn out just the way I wanted and I’m happy with it. And I’d recommend the pattern to anyone feeling some scarf lust – it’s a totally headache-free pattern. I know. But it seriously is! The lace rib is easy and just interesting enough that you won’t die of boredom, and as soon as you start to suffer from Repetitive Stitch Syndrome there’s that little bit of stockinette to break things up. I like this pattern a lot. Wow. This is weird. I am totally, completely, 100% satisfied with a pattern. Either I’m getting better at designing, or I’ve just lowered my standards. (Pick option A! PICK OPTION A!)
It’s not reversible, but the wrong side looks fairly nice anyway.
It is a Very Long Scarf. You know that guideline that the ideal scarf length should be about your height? Um. I am… not so much obeying that guideline. Unless I’m nine feet tall. But I’m not.
Can’t sleep, scarf’ll eat me.
Yeah, so that was a bit unexpected, but I like long scarves. I’ve made a few scarves with yarn yardage in the 200-300 range, and find that they often come out a bit short. So I bought 4 balls of Incense – 456 yards – and decided to feed them all to the scarf and see what happened. This pattern? Not so much a yarn-eating pattern, because those 4 balls got me 110 inches of scarf.
And I mean exactly 4 balls. This is what I had left over:
Not so much “left over” as “clipped off after weaving in the ends”. That’s all there is. I spit-spliced balls together (yup, Incense does spit-splice, w00t!). I had a foot or so of yarn that I snipped off because of a knot, and I had to splice in that measly foot of yarn at the end just to finish the bind-off row. Yeesh. That yarn messed with my head towards the end.
Oh look, there’s lots of yarn left, maybe I can even do another repeat after this one.
Okay, not so much yarn left, I guess I’ll just do this last repeat.
Huh, that yarn is running a bit low, good thing I’m almost done.
Ooh, I’m really going to use up all of this yarn, aren’t I.
OH CRAP OH CRAP I’M GOING TO RUN OUT OF YARN CRAP CRAP CRAP.
FYI: Knitting faster does not stop you from running out of yarn.
I don’t know, it seemed logical at the time.
But I made it (with inches to spare!) and got me a nice Very Long Scarf. Don’t knock Very Long Scarves. You can wrap ’em around your neck seven billion times.
Or do neat crazy loopy things!
Yes, I love me some nine foot scarves.
(There has to be some sort of phallus-related scarf-length joke here, but I’m not going to make it. See how classy I am?)
Now let’s talk yarn, shall we? I know people want to hear about the Incense – in fact, I know that I have already lured several people into buying some Incense – muhahahahaha! If I’m going to Yarn Lust Hell, I’m taking you down with me!
I reported a potential knot situation earlier, and I’m happy to say that it wasn’t a problem. The two knots that I spied turned out to be the only two knots in all four balls. The first ball had a few weird rough spots in the yarn – I don’t know how else to describe them – but only one of those spots was bad enough to have to cut the yarn. The rest I could just roll between my fingers and they pretty much went away. Given the price of the yarn (cheap!), I’ll put up with two knots and a rough spot.
Knitting with it was lovely – it feels like wool, nice and sproingy, the silk and bamboo don’t kill the elasticity at all. It definitely has that silk sheen, and great stitch definition, and nothing weird happened to it after a wash and block. It’s quite soft. Not Malabrigo soft, or alpaca soft, but softer than Cascade 220 or Patons Merino.
Oh – there is one thing – it’s kind of bleedy. I soaked it in cold water and a little Eucalan, and the water went quite pink. So if you plan to mix colours, test for colourfastness first. (Is that a word? That’s a word, right?)
I would definitely use it again – in fact, next time I have some spare cash I’ll probably buy a sweater’s worth of it. I hope Elann keeps it around for a while. I hope it doesn’t sell out before I have a chance to get my sweater’s worth. Don’t buy my yarn, people. I’ll get you if you buy my yarn. I’ll send fun fur to your house.
I’m still rather wary of this problem-free knit. Maybe I should get started on Cursebreaker while this good knitting behaviour lasts. Surely nothing can go wrong! I’m on a knitting roll!
Huh… I hear something that sounds suspiciously like six skeins of Cascade 220 laughing at me.
Goldilocks is back, and this time she’s pissed.
She returns in the form of one skein of Handmaiden Lady Godiva. A picky, picky, picky skein. This pattern is too hot. This pattern is too cold. This pattern is too big. This pattern is too small. OH MY GOD. And there are no bears in sight to shut her up.
First, there was the experimental Horrible Yellow Acrylic stitch. I kind of knew that this one was doomed from the start, but I gave it a try anyway.
Yep. Doomed. Stitch pattern devoured by the variegation. Luckily, it looks a lot better in some solid Elann Incense…
(5.5 feet down, 1.5 feet to go, and then you get the pattern!)
But we’re talking about Missie Picky Bitch Lady Godiva now. Next up was the White Night scarf attempt. It wasn’t horrible.
But it wasn’t right, sez Lady Goldilocks. And it really wasn’t. The result didn’t make me think “yummy scarf that I will want to show off”. It smacked of “must get this yarn knitted up and out of the way”. I think the pattern will suit my Rowan Chunky Print much better.
So I thought maybe plain stockinette was the answer, given the variegation. But stockinette is so boring. Maybe some ridges of something-or-other to break up the monotony.
I like it, said I.
I don’t, whined GoldieGodiva.
Sigh.
Okay, then, maybe something a little more complex. Maybe some seed stitch. Seed stitch looks good in variegated yarn. And maybe some slip-stitch ridges just to add some visual interest.
It’s pooling all funny, whined Lady Bitchwhine-a, and this time I had to agree. It wasn’t pooling, exactly, but the colours were grouping themselves strangely and unattractively. If I made it any thinner, I’d barely have a scarf. If I made it thicker, the scarf wouldn’t be long enough with my single skein. Back to the frog pond. And now I was getting desperate.
And that was when I found the Morning Surf Scarf.
You know what? I don’t like seafoam stitch. I don’t like the way it looks and I don’t like knitting it. But for some reason, I liked this particular incarnation of it. There are some beautiful FOs on Ravelry and I think something about the rows of stockinette in between the elongated stitches makes it look better. I don’t know. But it was worth a try. And I tried it. AND IT WORKED.
Pattern: Morning Surf Scarf
Yarn: Handmaiden Lady Godiva, 1 skein (I think the colourway is Forest, but I’m not sure)
Needles: US 7
Yeeees. Me likey, and Goldilocks ain’t complaining. This pattern is just right. The yarn is adequately shown off. The colours did a neat diagonal stripey thing. The stitch pattern and the variegation co-exist nicely.
I cast on 26 stitches, and it was looking a little short at bind-off, but after a wash and a block it turned out nice and long.
And the yarn sure is purty.
I. LOVE. THIS. YARN. Variegation issues aside. It has the sheen and softness of silk, and the resilience of wool. It stood up beautifully to repeated froggings. All it did was fuzz slightly, and then after washing/blocking I couldn’t even tell which end of the scarf was the froggy one. I don’t know how well it’ll hold up over time, so I guess I’ll have to wait and see, but for now I love it. I want to knit everything in it. Which I can’t, because, dude, 30 bucks a skein. whimper
But someday, someday I will be filthy rich and buy ALL THE LADY GODIVA IN THE WORLD.
Okay, realistically. Someday I will start selling patterns, and use that money to splurge on a sweater’s worth of Lady Godiva. Yum. Now there’s some motivation to get my designing shit together.
And Goldilocks? I am sick of you, Goldilocks. I am sick of trying tons of patterns with the same yarn and finding that none of them are Just Right. Stop infecting my perfectly good yarn with your obsessive pickiness!
Got that, Goldilocks? Next time – I’m sending bears.
They haunt me. When I run from them, I know they’re always behind me. When I go to sleep at night, they stalk my dreams. They’re always there, haunting, taunting, following me. I try to rid myself of them, but they always foil my intricate plans.
They are the faceless demon in the night. They are my curse. They are four skeins of red Cascade 220 and two skeins of black Cascade 220 AND I HATE THEM WITH MY VERY SOUL.
I tried to turn them into a sweater.
Okay, we won’t speak of that sweater. But, strike one.
Then I tried to turn them into a better sweater.
Strike two. It doesn’t fit. And it looks weird. And I died of boredom while trying to knit a sleeve. In fact, I’m blogging this from beyond the grave. In the afterlife, you can only get dial-up internet. Boy does it suck.
Then there was my next “bright” “idea”.
Yeah, I didn’t even get to cast on for this one before the yarn said “nope, nuh-uh, not going to happen”. After I rewrote the pattern to suit it. You couldn’t have told me that sooner, yarn? Of course you couldn’t. You are the devil. Strike three.
But I’m determined to break the curse, and turn this yarn into a sweater. It’s just yarn! I can conquer it! So I got out the sketchbook and started drawing red-and-black sweaters.
Some that I quite liked, but don’t really feel like knitting:
Some that I, well, imagine that cat macro that says DO NOT WANT:
But eventually I settled on one. I wanted something a little weird looking, something that I hadn’t seen before, and I am on a big asymmetry kick lately so this is what I came up with:
I… think I like it. The diamond pattern was originally “scribbled cross-hatching across the front left panel to represent some sort of pattern”, which looked like diamonds and then I decided I wanted actual diamonds. And then wasted a whole bunch of time swatching cabled and twisted-stitch diamonds only to decide to just do ’em in purls.
I still haven’t frogged the last incarnation of the demon yarn, but that turned out to be a good thing, because I could try it on and make note of all the places where it didn’t fit right, and tweak the measurements accordingly.
(Places where it didn’t fit right = ALL OF THEM. ALL OF THE PLACES.)
So if this latest attempt turns out well, I’ll write up a pattern for it, which will be awesome because I’d like another garment pattern up there besides Maddy. And if I write up a pattern, it shall be called the Cursebreaker sweater. BECAUSE I WILL BREAK THIS CURSE. YOU HEAR THAT, YARN?
And on that note, I’ve been thinking that I ought to set up a proper pattern site. I am liking this designing thing and I think soon I’ll be good enough that I can actually sell some patterns. But Half-Assed Patterns as a name simply will not do. And yet, I’d like a name that’s still in the spirit of my demented sense of humour. I thought that perhaps I could find a fancy schmancy name that is somehow related to halves and/or asses.
And decided to start by looking up the scientific name for “donkey”, because, hey, that could be something. Guess what it is?
Equus asinus.
That’s just great. Not only does it still contain as(s), but it also sort of looks like “anus”. Oh yes, that’s the association I want. I can see it now:
“Ass ‘N’ Anus Design Studio – your bottom line for design!”
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go bang my head against my desk for a while.
If you ever need proof that I am way too easily amused… this entry should do it.
Yesterday, I was browsing the forums on Ravelry, and saw a topic that was intended to read “Need a good first go at cables pattern”. But a space had been left out, so it actually read, “Need a good first goat cables pattern“.
Oh, you know where this is going.
Here is something you may not know about me: I think goats are hilarious and awesome. I heart goats. Even the word “goat” is funny. GOAT GOAT GOAT GOAT. I of course clicked on the thread, hoping it would contain some real live goat cables. Apparently half of Ravelry also clicked on it hoping the same thing, judging from the posts. Clearly there is some serious demand for cabled goats.
Of course there is! Goats are fabulous. Cables are fabulous. You do the math. I already did the math, and so…
Does it look like a goat? It sort of looks like a goat. It would probably look more like a goat if I knew what the hell I was doing. I’ve never tried to design a cable from scratch before. I don’t really know how to design a cable. But I did it anyway, and it’s not perfect, but damned if it isn’t recognizable as a goaty type thing.
When I started knitting – less than two years ago – my first project was a hat. And my second project was another hat, only with cables and i-cord ties and an improvised pattern. This was probably not something I should have been doing for my second project ever, but it never occurred to me that I couldn’t do it, so I did. And my cables looked great, and my i-cord looked… um… adequate (to this day, my i-cord is still kind of, well, knitted ropes of ass).
This is pretty much the attitude I’ve always taken with knitting (and for that matter, most other things). And it’s why I’ve never been afraid to modify a pattern, or make up a pattern completely, or try things that probably won’t work but sometimes they will and hell, it’s worth a try. It’s why I was designing my first sweater when I hadn’t even been knitting a year. And guess what. It sucked! But that’s okay. Sometimes it doesn’t work out and that’s no big deal.
So that’s my advice to any newbie (or slightly timid oldbie) knitters out there. If you think you can’t do something, do it anyway! You’ll either figure it out along the way, or you’ll fuck it up, frog it, and figure it out the next time around with the knowledge of what not to do.
You can even make goat cables!
Um, so yeah, here’s a pattern for the goat cable. All the cables are small enough that you can do ’em without a cable needle if you like.
Row 1 (RS): p6, RC2, LC2, p6.
Row 2: k6, p4, k6.
Row 3: p6, k4, p6.
Row 4: k6, p4, k6.
Row 5: p6, LC4, p6.
Row 6: k6, p4, k6.
Row 7: p5, RPC3, LPC3, p5.
Row 8: k5, p2, k2, p2, k5.
Row 9: p4, RPC3, p2, LPC3, p4.
Row 10: k4, p2, k4, p2, k4.
Row 11: p4, k2, p4, k2, p4.
Row 12: k4, p2, k4, p2, k4.
Row 13: p3, RC2, k1, p4, k1, LC2, p3.
Row 14: k2, LC2, p2, k4, p2, RC2, k2.
Row 15: p1, RC2, k3, p4, k3, LC2, p1.
Row 16: k1, p5, k4, p5, k1.
Row 17: p1, k1, RPC2, k2, p4, k2, LPC2, k1, p1.
Row 18: k1, LPC2, k1, p2, k4, p2, k1, RPC2, k1.
Row 19: p4, LC3, p2, RC3, p4.
Row 20: k4, p1, RC3, LC3, p1, k4.
Row 21: p4, k2, LC2, RC2, k2, p4.
Row 22: k4, p3, k2, p3, k4.
Row 23: p4, k3, p2, k3, p4.
Row 24: k3, LC2, LPC2, k2, RPC2, RC2, k3.
Row 25: p3, k1, RPC2, p4, LPC2, k1, p3.
Row 26: k3, LPC2, k6, RPC2, k3.
LC2 (RS): slip 1st st in front of 2nd st, k2
RC2 (RS): slip 1st st behind 2nd st, k2
LC2 (WS): slip 1st st in front of 2nd st, p2
RC2 (WS): slip 1st st behind 2nd st, p2
LPC2: slip 1st st in front of 2nd st, p1, k1.
RPC2: slip 1st st behind 2nd st, k1, p1.
LC3 (RS): slip 1st and 2nd st in front of 3rd st, k3.
RC3 (RS): slip 1st st behind 2nd and 3rd st, k3.
LC3 (WS): slip 1st st in front of 2nd and 3rd st, p3.
RC3 (WS): slip 1st and 2nd st behind 3rd st, p3.
LPC3: slip 1st and 2nd st in front of 3rd st, p1, k2.
RPC3: slip 1st st behind 2nd and 3rd st, k2, p1.
LC4: slip 1st and 2nd st in front of 3rd and 4th st, k4.
(Vertical lines are knits, horizontal lines are purls, and you should be able to eyeball the cables. Cable stitches coloured grey are purls, the rest are knits.)
Go forth and knit goats! I might have to design something around the goat cable. I’m thinking a sleeveless empire waist tunic, with a seed stitch top and columns of cables (goat and otherwise) interspersed with triangular seed stitch panels for the bottom… oh dammit. I’m going to need another Happy Fun Box of Yarn and I have no money. CABLED GOATS ARE TROUBLE.
I’ve been itching to design, lately. That sounds like something that involves a rash. “Yep, I’ve got The Itch. I tried the ointment, but it didn’t help. Don’t come near me, it might be contagious.”
Alas, the small size of my stash and the smaller size of my yarn budget means that I have no materials! Pffft. I need to become a Big Established Designer so that yarn companies will send me free yarn to design things. I’m sure they’ll be lining up to have their yarn associated with something as professional-sounding as Half-Assed Patterns. Heh.
But wait! There is hope! Hope in the form of a Happy Fun Box of Yarn* from Elann! Probably my last Box of Yarn for awhile, and it’s only a little one, but it should keep me occupied for a little while. What’s in the box? What’s in the boooox?
* Do not taunt Happy Fun Box of Yarn.
Well, first, there’s some Rowan Chunky Print.
This one isn’t itch ointment; I already had a project in mind for it. I saw this scarf on Ravelry and I waaants one. I tried to turn my skein of Lady Godiva into one, but it was having none of that because Lil’ Missie Godiva is a picky bitch. (Oh, I will talk about this later. Not today.) And I thought, well, what I really need for this pattern is something bulky, something that isn’t variegated, and something with a bit of handspun-esque texture. And then, poof, Elann has Chunky Print for cheap, in the exact colour that I had been eyeing-but-not-buying on Webs’ site (I am apprehensive of ordering from there after the previous shipping debacle). It’s a sign!
(Why does every “it’s a sign!” moment result in me either spending too much money or doing something incredibly stupid?)
I was playing “guess the colour from intarwebs pics” game with this, because I wanted it to match this adorably hideous faux-vintage coat I have. I say faux-vintage because it is so very, very faux. Because I bought it at Urban Behaviour shutup shutup.
Works for me!
Okay, next up we have some Elann Incense.
I’ve been dying to try this yarn since I saw it in Elann’s newsletter before it was even available. Wool, silk, and bamboo for 4 bucks a ball? Yes, please!
The good news is that it’s very pretty, and soft, with a nice sheen from the silk. I got it in “Brick”, and played “guess the colour” with this one too – a little-known, harder version of the game called “guess the colour from Elann’s crappy, crappy swatches that are always wrong, but you have no other choice because the yarn’s so new that nobody has photographed it yet, and if it’s orange or pink you’re going to stab it in the neck, and yes I know that yarn doesn’t have a neck but IT’S THE PRINCIPLE OF THE THING DAMMIT”. It’s not a fun game. I don’t recommend it.
But I WON, because it’s not orange, and it’s not pink either, but a genuine true neutral red. Score.
The bad news is that out of 4 skeins, there are visible knots in 2 of them. No, I haven’t rewound them. This is just out of the bits of the balls that I can see. Who knows how many more knots are lurking in their depths. 50% wool yarn will spit-splice, right? Right?! Don’t tell me it won’t! Lalalalanotlistening…
It’ll be a scarf. The scarf of the Horrible Yellow Acrylic experiments. The scarf that I tried to turn that Lady Godiva into, but it was also not having that. Oh yes, I will definitely be talking about that skein of Lady Godiva later, loudly, angrily, possibly involving as many impolite words as I can think of.
Anyway. The scarf that is my own design! Take that, itch. I’ve tweaked it after the Lady Godiva fiasco and have most of the pattern written up. Now I just have to knit the thing.
And now, the final inhabitant of the Happy Fun Box of Yarn is…
Two balls of Elann Tweedy Silk that I bought for absolutely no reason other than wanting to see what the yarn was like. (Answer: it’s boring. Typical rough silk, kind of pretty, whatever. We’ll see how it knits up, though.) I ordered two balls because I figured I can’t make squat with just one. Not that I can make much of anything with two. Maybe I just wanted an excuse to type “two balls” a lot.
But while I waited for the Happy Fun Box to make its way through holiday mail hell to me, I had an idea.
Or rather, a long time ago I had an idea, but could only think up a crappy implementation of it. This time I thought of a much better implementation. A smallish version of which could easily be done with 208 yards of boring silk tweed.
It is the NERDIEST IDEA EVER and you will all think it is stupid but that’s all right. It makes me happy! And I need to go knit it and write it up because it won’t make any sense until it’s in FO-and-pattern form, I don’t think. So for now I will call it the Secret Nerd Scarf. Which is actually not that different from what I’ll probably call it in the end.
Ahhh, the Happy Fun Box is filled with Happy Fun. And it has the potential to treat The Itch. Worship the Happy Fun Box! Love the Happy Fun Box!
Well, I knit the damn mittens. And I was right to fear them.
Pattern: mostly pulled out of my ass, but used Plaid Mittens as a guide and stole the finger opening of Peekaboo
Size: to fit freakishly skinny long hands
Yarn: SWTC Gianna, 2 balls (the small 41.5m balls)
Needles: US 10.5
Yeah, they look innocent, don’t they? Cute, warm, cozy. But there’s a problem. There’s a big problem. Maybe more of a big-and-small problem. Can you see it?
How about now?
They were knit with the same yarn, with the same needles, with the same exact non-pattern (I counted stitches obsessively to be sure), something like one or two days apart with no other projects in between and thus no opportunity for my gauge to go wonky. And one is clearly larger than the other. Freak! Freeeeaaak! Keep your children away from the freakmittens!
Step right up, and see the yarn that spawned the freakmittens! Keep well back from its cage; it doesn’t like strangers!
On your left, ladies and gentlemen, is the yarn left over from the ball of yarn used for the first mitten. On your right, ladies and gentlemen, is the yarn left over from the purportedly identical ball of yarn used for the second mitten. Directly in front of you, ladies and gentlemen, is an angry knitter saying “What the fucking fuck?”
You see, ladies and gentlemen- yeah, okay, I’ll stop that now. You see, the two balls of yarn were not only the same yarn, but were from the same dyelot. The two balls of yarn were not only from the same dyelot, but from the same bag. But when I was knitting the first mitten, I was thinking, hey, this is a weirdly dense fabric on 10.5s and the ball band recommends 10s, what the hell are they smoking? And while knitting the second mitten, I thought, hmm, I don’t know what I was complaining about, this yarn knits up perfectly fine on 10.5s. I thought maybe I was just getting used to the yarn. But when the second mitten looked to be knitting up munchkin-sized, I started to see the horrible truth.
Could it be that one ball of yarn was actually thicker than the other ball of yarn?
I’m not crazy, right? The one on the right looks a bit thinner?
The first mitten’s fabric feels thicker, kind of quilted, while the second feels like normal knitted fabric. The difference is really noticeable. I pulled out a third ball of yarn from the bag and it seems to match the second ball, the thinner one. Maybe the fourth ball will be thicker again. Maybe the fifth ball will be Fun Fur! Okay, now I’m getting angry.
So I think, maybe they’re not that different in the pic, and maybe I’m imagining things, and I pick up the remnants of the second ball and it falls apart in my hands. Into two mini-balls that were apparently wound into one. And one is thick and one is thin.
From the left, Ball One (thick), Chunk of Ball Two (thin), Other Chunk of Ball Two (thick). I’m not imagining things, those are clearly different. The thick bit of Ball Two (which I guess I never reached in the course of knitting the mitten) kind of matches Ball One. The thin bit… doesn’t.
I AM ANGRY!
Because for once (ha), this is not my fault. I didn’t screw up the knitting. The mittens look exactly like they’re supposed to, except that they’re made in two different yarns that claim to be the same yarn! What what what crapmonkey crappy crap is this? And you know, I actually liked the yarn. It’s pretty and soft and cozy, but now I will never be able to trust it.
You deceived me, yarn! How could you to this to me?! WAAAAAH!
I don’t know what to do with the freakmittens. Both of them fit okay and don’t feel all that different when worn, but the little obsessive voice in my head is going the mittens must be identical or I will kill you in your sleep. (I’m already angry at that voice for pointing out my Giant Left Boob. Now my Tiny Right Boob has quite the inferiority complex, thanks to that voice.) I could frog Mitten One and re-knit it with Ball Three, but I have no guarantee that Ball Three will match Ball Two, and even if it does it could turn into Ball One thickness halfway through and GAH I knew I should have been suspicious when Elann was selling a whole bag of this freakyarn for like 20 bucks.
Fear the mittens.
This Post Is Brought To You By The Words “Mittens” And “Suck”
Haven’t been blogging. Blah blah family member recovering from surgery needs lots of care no time to knit or blog etc. blah blee. (Yeah, this is not a personal blog, so I won’t go into detail.) So yeah. And now I’m behind on emails and comment replies yet again and will probably just let a few get ignored. And the promised raglan tutorial has gotten pushed aside, but it’s coming, I swear. I’m just tired and stressed and also I am hating hospitals right about now.
But I’ve finally picked up my knitting again and I will make it all up to you with…
… HORRIBLE YELLOW ACRYLIC! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!
What am I doing with horrible yellow acrylic? Evil things, no doubt? Getting ready to pair it with fun fur and create a poncho? I think the Legendary Fun Fur Poncho is at the top of my mental list of horrifying things to knit. But no, that’s not what I’m doing with horrible yellow acrylic.
I’m just playing with stitch patterns, that’s all. Perfectly innocent.
What I should be knitting is mittens, but I’m not. Instead, I’m getting ready to knit up my skein of Lady Godiva into a scarf. After my horrible yellow acrylic experiments (which look like ass, but are still enough to get the information I needed), I’ve already charted and written up most of a scarf pattern, which will be posted if it turns out well. I seem to be having good FO luck lately, so the yarn gods are on my side.
What’s that, yarn gods? No, I will not sacrifice my Lady Godiva to you. It’s mine. Go away.
Great, now they’re going to be angry and wrathful. That’s all I need.
What I really do need is mittens, but I’m procrastinating. I even found a nice simple pattern, but… I’m procrastinating. Because I’ll have to alter any nice simple pattern for my freakish long skinny hands. My cold hands that need mittens. Sigh. At 3 sts/inch I could probably finish them in a single day. How badly do I suck?
(Don’t answer that.)
What I really don’t need is a vest, but I’m working on the Back to School vest anyway.
Er, make that almost finishing the Back to School vest. That thing is a quick knit. All I have left is the neck and armhole edgings, and the happy fun time that is weaving in ends. I’d go ahead and get those done, except that I loathe picking up stitches along curved edges. The question is, is picking up those stitches preferable to making mittens? Tough call, very tough call. So much hatred, so little time…
The vest sort of fits. It also sort of doesn’t fit. It is right in that murky zone of “it fits but we’ll see what happens after a wash and a block and the added edgings ’cause it also might be too big HAHAHA SUCK ON THAT”. I don’t think the vest can talk, but “hahaha suck on that” is exactly what it would say if it could. I’m not sure what it wants me to suck, but I assume it would be speaking metaphorically anyway.
You know what would be even quicker than a vest? Mittens! I suck I suck I suck.
Brain: Haaaay. Why haven’t you made that Back to School vest from Fitted Knits yet?
Me: Because I am busy angsting over what yarn to use. Angst! Angst!
Brain: So just pick a yarn and buy it already.
Me: But but but it’s all so expensive and I’m poor.
Brain: You know, you could stop looking at yarns that a) contain high percentages of silk or b) contain the words “hand dyed” in their description?
Me: Never!
Brain: Why don’t you just use the recommended Cascade 220? You like Cascade 220. It’s pretty. It’s cheap. It’s practical. And just because your current stash of it may be cursed doesn’t mean a new stash will be.
Me: …
Brain: Ha! I win! Buy the Cascade 220 and shut the hell up!
Me: But… but… I can’t find it locally and I’ll never find the perfect shade of heathered deep brown with a reddish-plum undertone by looking at pics on the intarwebs…
Oh. How about that.
Ordering yarn online is tricky. No matter how many pictures you can dig up of the yarn in question, you’re never quite sure what it’s going to look like for reals. So it’s very satisfying to actually get it right.
And it’s very very satisfying to get it right twice.
Phear me! I will hunt down all the dark brownish-reddish-burgundyish yarn in the universe and I will buy it all! Er, assuming it’s cheap or on crazy clearance at Elann or something. Ahem.
But… I may have a problem.
Hmm, yeah, I am seeing a problem here.
I seem to have left my red-and-coral comfort zone only to plop my weary ass down in the land of reddy-plummy-brown. And it doesn’t stop with yarn. Sitting on my bed right now are a pair of pants, some pyjamas, and a purse, all in that shade of brown. On my night-table is a brown hair clip. Oh, and look over there, there’s a brown sweater with a lovely shawl collar that I need to steal for knitty purposes, and if I go to the front door there’s an adorable pair of brown mary janes that have been eating my feet a lot recently (but they’re so cuuuute), and next to them are a pair of brown slouchy boots and AHHH HELP ME IT’S TAKING OVER.
Gah. Even my nail polish matches the vest-in-progress.
Sick, sick, sick. The good news is that I’ve finally escaped from Ribbing Hell. The Back to School vest pattern seems to make a lot more sense than the Filthy Lying Tunic Of Seventeen Clothespins pattern, so there’s that. But it starts like this:
Cast on.
Purl for awhile.
Knit for awhile.
Purl for awhile.
Work 2×2 rib FOR THE REST OF ALL ETERNITY, UNTIL YOUR FINGERS BLEED AND YOUR HEAD ACHES WITH BOREDOM AND POSSIBLE BRAIN PARASITES AND, WRITHING WITH PAIN, YOU TAKE OUT A BALL OF FUCHSIA FUN FUR AND KNIT A PONCHO WITH IT FOR A CHANGE OF PACE AND THEN WEAR THE PONCHO OUT IN PUBLIC BECAUSE IT’S STILL MORE PLEASANT THAN MORE FUCKING 2X2 RIB oh okay I’ve reached 9 inches I can stop now. whew.
Now it’s time to worry about the sizing. I picked the 35.5″ size and I have a feeling I should have picked the 34″. My reasoning was that I’d be wearing it over a shirt, and I didn’t want it to stretch too much or it would do that thing where you have big white spots over your boobs where your shirt shows through a darker over-sweater. Er. Yeah. But I have a 35″ bust. So this is POSITIVE EASE. I fear positive ease. whimper
Pleasefitpleasefitpleasefit.
I don’t know about the Vest Problem, but there is a tiny ray of hope for the Brown Problem, and here it is.
That is a skein of Handmaiden Lady Godiva (…yuuuum), in, um… brown… but also! Teal! A colour that is not brown, and also is not red or coral or any sort of neutral! Yay! Rejoice! I wish I knew what colourway it was, because I want more of it. The closest I can find is Forest, but it’s greener and the brown is lighter and me no likey. Maybe it’s an especially dark and tealy dyelot of Forest. Or maybe I will never see this colourway again.
Well, I’ll just have to console myself with MORE BROWN YARN. Muhahahaha. Muhahahahahaha! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Um… am I missing the point of NaKniSweMo if I finish in 10 days?
Pattern: Drops Jacket in blah blah long name purple monkey dishwasher, modified up the wazoo
Size: Small (roughly)
Yarn: MMMMMMMMalabrigo merino worsted in Cinnabar, every last little scrap of 4 skeins
Needles: US 9
Here’s a brighter pic, but it shows less details. This sweater doesn’t like to be photographed, apparently. I don’t like to be photographed either, but I’m still on a “no more headless pics!” mission.
So. 10 days. Wait, what? Granted, I did all my pattern reworking, and swatching, and blah dee blah before November. That’s allowed, right? Didn’t cast on until November 1st, though, and finished last Saturday. I haven’t blogged it until now because it took FOUR DAYS TO DRY. Which worked out fine, since I wasn’t able to go button-shopping until yesterday anyway, but still.
I’ll forgive the sweater, though, because I loooooove it.
Yeah, it ate all my yarn, but I had just enough to finish. And I mean just enough. I kept going back and forth between the sleeves and the body, monitoring how much yarn everything was eating. I do not recommend this. Yes, you can make this sweater (in size small, with some modifications) with 4 skeins of Malabrigo. However, you will go mad in the process. Is it worth it? Huh? Is it?
(I already went mad long ago, so what do I care?)
Whether you take the path of sanity or not, make this sweater. It’s yummy. I was very wary of the idea of an A-line sweater, but it works, it does sort of a ruffly thing at the bottom instead of making you look like a giant umbrella.
Yeah, I modified the crap out of mine, but all the unmodified ones on Ravelry look great too, on all sorts of body types. Make it! Make it now! It only takes 10 days!*
* If you’re a lunatic.
So. About the modifications. As written, it’s a bottom-up sweater knit in pieces. I made it as a seamless top-down raglan. And then I got a whooole bunch of messages asking for details on how to do that. Here’s the thing. I took really sparse, messy notes. Mostly they are a bunch of numbers scribbled in my sketchbook. And then I ignored or changed half of those numbers on the fly when I actually made the thing. So no, I cannot rewrite this pattern for you as a top-down raglan, unless I start over from scratch and do it, and I’m not gonna, because I hate writing patterns.
But!
I’ve seen a lot of people on Ravelry and elsewhere trying to turn standard sweater patterns into top-down raglans, whether it’s because they like raglans, or like knitting top-down, or hate seaming, or whatever. So I’m thinking I might write up a tutorial on how to do just that. With any pattern, in general, not necessarily this one. Is there any interest in that sort of thing?
Other mods… let’s see. I left out the 2×2 ribbing at the bottom because I couldn’t figure out why it was there and it looked funny; just went straight to the garter stitch (which was enough to stop any curling). I ignored pretty much everything the pattern said to do with the sleeves. I made the bottom edge smaller than the pattern wanted, because the numbers seemed huuuuge; I think I took off about 4 inches from that measurement. I tweaked lots of the numbers slightly, like, by 2 stitches or so, little things that aren’t really worth documenting and are mostly just me being a control freak.
And then there was the collar. I’d heard horror stories about this collar, and with good reason. I read the instructions for the collar and went “WTF?” I read them again, and got it, but then went “WTF? Why are they doing it that way? Why seam the edges when you can just pick up extra stitches as you go?” So I did. And it seems to have worked out fine. By the way, picking up stitches along a curved edge SUUUUUCKS.
Like the buttons?
I found those within a few minutes of entering the store, then spent a zillion years looking at every damn button in the store, only to go right back to those in the end. It figures.
So. I guess that’s NaKniSweMo all done. I picked something quick and easy to take the pressure off, but I guess I should have picked something slow and impossibly difficult. This wasn’t masochism, it was fun! This is all wrong! Where’s my standard November pain and suffering?
Well, my next project is the Back to School Vest from Fitted Knits, and I hear it’s crawling with errata and weird increases. That sounds promising in the masochism department…
Finally blogging this. I finished it weeks ago, but, well, I suck.
Scarves are annoying to photograph.
Pattern: Knotted Openwork Scarf
Yarn: Araucania Magallanes in colour 311, 1 skein
Needles: US 9
Hey look, I have a head!
I’ve sacrificed a goat to the digital camera gods, which seems to have bumped up my self-portrait quality from “unflattering picture of a retarded monkey” to “unflattering picture of a normal human being”. Yay!
Anyway. The scarf.
… I don’t have much to say about the scarf. Hmm.
I followed the pattern as-is. Except I cast on fewer stitches. If I knew how many, I’d tell you. I’m counting… how do you count stitches in this wacky lace pattern? My best guess is 27 stitches. I guess to try to make it a bit longer. It’s not really long enough; I have to tie it in a knot around my neck instead of that thing where you fold the scarf in half and make a loop and then pull the ends through the loop and oh god I am making no sense. You know, the thing. The thing. Yeah, I got nothing.
The yarn is scratchy.
I’ve complained about this yarn. It is beautiful, useless yarn. I’m never buying it again. And oh, it is scratchy. I already gave it a Eucalan bath, but it’s still scratchy. I guess a conditioner bath is next. Or I can wear it on the outside of my coat collar where it will look pretty and not touch my skin. Why do people wear scarves like that? Well, I know, because it looks pretty, but it doesn’t do much for warmth. This is Canada; I need to keep warm in my igloo. Or something.
Eh, it’s full of giant holes made of delicate lace, so it wasn’t going to keep me warm anyway, right?
So overall? Pattern = yay. Yarn = suck. Make this scarf. Make it with some textured yarn, because it looks pretty neat that way. Do not make it with Magallanes, because Magallanes is made of pointy sheep and sandpaper and bees.
