Silkiest bunch of silk that ever silked…
This is the top that never ends…
Yes it goes on and on my friends…
Some people started knitting it not knowing what it was
And now continue knitting it forever just because…
It is taking forever plus fifteen minutes, it looks like hot buttered ass and it’s pissing me off. Okay, it looks like shiny, silky ass, which is marginally better, but still. I like the pattern. Well, the non-pattern. The pattern in my head, which I have managed to write up about 3% of. I am just kind of wishing that I made it in some nice, cheap, mercerized cotton. Not only would it probably look better, but if it didn’t, I wouldn’t care, because it was cheap!
I can’t even take a proper picture because the bottom is crammed onto a 24″ circ, but I tried:
I’m telling myself to do 1 repeat of the lace pattern (8 rows) every day, time permitting. Otherwise I think I would ball it up and throw it in the yarn bin, and stick my fingers in my ears and hum whenever I was forced to remember its existence.
4 repeats in, at least 4 more to go, at which point I’ll see whether it’s long enough. It won’t be, of course, because the universe hates me. Lousy stinking universe.
But damn if it isn’t kind of pretty, in all its hotbutteredassiness…
Noooo. I will stand firm. I will not be seduced by its silky silk silkiness. YOU WON’T TAKE ME ALIVE, FOUL YARNY TEMPTRESS.
I am clearly going mad.
I’ve been rereading my Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books lately (and relistening to the radio series, and getting the Krikkit song stuck in my head for days, driving me mad, and OH GOD I AM A NERD). I have also been cursing my knitting.
The Fake-astanje Cardigan has been relegated to the yarn bin because it’s freaking June and I will knit summery things or die trying, dammit. Also because I don’t feel like knitting sleeves. The silk thing is pissing me off because it’s not perfect, and also because it doesn’t have a name yet. I don’t understand why inanimate objects won’t take some initiative and name themselves.
But never mind.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy presents the concept of a recipriversexcluson, which is a number that is defined as being anything but itself. Got it?
I’m not going to say that there is no purpose in gauge swatches. There is, but not the purpose one would expect. I’ve decided that my swatched gauge measurement is a recipriversexcluson. So it does give me some information, which is that whatever I think my gauge is, is exactly what it isn’t.
(No, I do not have a 27″ bust. This yarn grows a LOT after washing/blocking.)
I know that my gauge changes a bit between knitting flat and in the round, and I’m pretty sure I factored that in when I did all my fancy gauge math, so I can only assume that I am being foiled by Bistromathics. Which is very strange, given that I am not in a restaurant, and neither is the little notebook in which I wrote down my gauge info.
Another safe assumption would be that I should quit rereading my Hitchhiker’s books.
The silk thing is frustrating me, it really is. Apart from two of the skeins of yarn being completely different colours (can you tell in the pictures? If you can, I don’t want to hear about it LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU), and the total impracticality of 100% silk yarn (but it’s so purty), and the fact that I had to tink back in one little section three times because I used the wrong increase, then went back and did the right increase, then realized that the right increase was actually the wrong increase and I’d had it right in the first place, I… forget what I was going to say.
No, wait. The gauge stuff. Which is now erring on the side of “too big”, and so help me, I am going to have to cut a bitch if this thing is too big. Because that is the issue that plagues every damn knit garment I attempt, and I thought I finally had a good solid theory on sizing, which is “make it way too small, and it will somehow fit in the end”. I can only hope that I overestimated how much the yarn will grow, and… it will somehow fit in the end. Oy.
It is nice to be past the stockinette and well into the interesting bit, though.
I made the cardigan bottom stop curling. Without redoing the button bands.
Don’t ask how I did it.
I need a drink.
I’ll get you, stockinette, and your little (curling) dog too.
I’ve gone back to the wool cardigan. In June. I know.
I went with modified (of course) Little Arrowhead Lace for the black section. It worked out pretty well, except that the bottom isn’t scalloping like I thought it would. I think it would scallop if it wasn’t busy CURLING LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER. (Do motherfuckers curl? I don’t know. But I needed a very strong word because it is PISSING ME OFF. FEAR THE WRATH OF MY ALL-CAPS SEMI-PROFANITIES.) I knew it was going to curl, it’s stockinette-based lace and there are a couple rows of plain stockinette at the bottom, I just didn’t think it was going to curl this much. It’s similar to the fishtail lace I used for Lelah and that doesn’t curl much.
I could rip, but I’m not going to, mostly because I went and knitted on the (button-less) button bands, so I’d have to rip those too. And I also wove in all the ends, and I don’t feel like doing that again either. Maybe blocking will fix it. Maybe I’ll add beads at the bottom to weigh it down. I mean, to make it look pretty. Shhhh.
(And no, the button bands are not uneven, even though one looks thinner in the picture. I know this because I looked at the picture, went OH CRAP WHAT DID I DO NOW, double checked the button bands, and was reassured that it was just a weird picture angle or something. Because they are the same size. I maintain that my sucking is restricted to sewing. Well, sewing and estimating how much stockinette-based lace will curl.)
So that’s the Fake-astanje Cardigan status. It just needs sleeves now. I don’t actually know how to knit long sleeves, but whatever, I’ll figure it out.
I’m still working on the as-yet-nameless silk thing, but right now I’m on the plain stockinette section. And the only thing more boring than knitting round after round of stockinette is blogging about it.
Painful Monster Dental Surgery
Two things.
One: how in the hell do I reply to comments when Blogger apparently turned off everyone’s damn email display when it switched to “new” Blogger, and hardly anybody has turned it back on? Oh Blogger, how I loathe you.
I really need to switch webhosts so that I can install WordPress or something, but… effort.
Two:
Just have to sew in the little pocket (for keys and stuff), and finish and sew on the straps. Those straps are the most mind-numbingly boring things I have ever knitted. The pocket is the second most mind-numbingly boring thing. This is a Monster-Bag-Of-Masochism that I’m making here.
But never mind that. Let me tell you about the fun I had sewing on the face. I mean, the “fun”.
I started by grabbing a tooth, centering it perfectly, and merrily starting to sew. I was almost finished when I noticed… that I was sewing on a top tooth, and it’s the bottom teeth that should be centered. Um. Shit. Okay, rip that out, let’s start again. Off-center teeth for the top. Sew on one, sew on another.
Admired my work… and the teeth were crooked. Oh, goody. So I thought that I could rip out the left-side tooth and shift it slightly, and all would be well. I started ripping… and then noticed I was ripping out the right-side tooth.
… I am too stupid to live.
At this point I decided they were both crooked and ripped the damn things out. You know how sometimes you’re frustrated trying to get something to work, and you try and try and FAIL and eventually you just give up and throw it at a potted plant or something? Well, this was the knitted-monster-tooth equivalent of that.
Started over. This time I pinned all the teeth into place to make sure I actually put them where they were supposed to go.
The pins distorted the teeth and generally annoyed me so I ripped them out too.
Obviously I eventually got them sewed on, and they’re still crooked, but I don’t care. I moved on to the eyes, and it was more of the same.
Attached one eye, attached the other, held up the bag, noticed they were crooked. Okay, fine, at least this would be easier to fix than the teeth. Moved an eye down. Still too high. Moved it down again. Still a bit too high. Starting to wish I was high. Moved it down some more. Now too low. Are you kidding me, eye?
You can probably tell from the picture that they’re still wonky. I have decided not to care about this either. Apathy is the solution to all project mishaps.
I am really liking how the bag is turning out, wonky face aside, but let me tell you… if I ever make another one of these, I am making sure I’m drunk during the entire process. I think it will help.
And by the way, I will probably write up a pattern for this and post it. Because I know everyone will be lining up to make one after reading about how much “fun” I’m having with it.
FO: Mohair Minisweater Monstrosity
I might still mess around with the button placement, but the mohair monster is pretty much done.
Pattern: Buttony Sweater (very, very modified)
Size: Hell if I know. Small?
Yarn: Fleece Artist Country Mohair, 1 skein (EVIL YARN OF EVIL!!!), colour unknown, since they’re not marked. I would guess Indian Summer or Mahogany or maybe Origin.
Needles: Size 10
(A rare picture in which I have a head…)
(… and in which I look like I want to violently murder the camera. Now you know why I cut my head out of FO pics.)
I clearly modified the living crap out of this pattern, so let’s talk about that, shall we?
I did some gauge math, since the Cursed Mohair of Evil was bulkier than the suggested yarn. Since it’s a top-down raglan, I only had to do math to figure out how many stitches to cast on.
I also moved the button band a bit closer to the center. So the original pattern has section divides of 5, 13, 32, 13, 33. Mine were 10, 10, 25, 10, 20. I only know this because I happened to write it down. Do you really think I can remember these things?
I decided to make the sleeves ribbed so that they’d be very fitted. Who wants baggy cap sleeves? Not me. They’re done in 2×2 ribbing, to “match” the collar and bottom.
And then, there is the obvious “short sleeved minisweater” vs “long sleeved normal sweater”, and… yeah. 200 metres of yarn, people, what was I supposed to do? You think I’m going to buy another skein of $30 Cursed Mohair? That is beyond slight yarn-masochism, all the way to yarn-related self-hatred. Teeny tiny minisweater it was, and I used every last bit of that yarn. This is how much was left over:
(And the other thing in that picture? That would be one knitting session’s worth of shedding. Every single time I worked on this… thing… I got a pile of hair like that. Because this yarn sheds. Did I mention the shedding? I think maybe I might have.)
Anyway, all I did was bind off the sleeve stitches at the point where you’d usually slip them onto scrap yarn, and then join the fronts and back on the following row, casting on a few extra stitches at each underarm.
It came out pretty cute. Didn’t it? Despite the yarn. Oh, the yarn. It sure is beautiful, isn’t it? Fleece Artist yarns always are. Not going to dispute that, and I will still gladly give other Fleece Artist yarns a try, because I’ve heard wonderful things about them.
But, lovely appearance aside, this particular yarn? Country Mohair? STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM IT. IF YOU SEE IT, RUN FAR, FAR AWAY, AND THEN RUN A LITTLE BIT FARTHER, JUST TO BE SAFE. THEN LOOK BACK, BECAUSE IT MIGHT BE FOLLOWING YOU, AND IF IT IS, RUN A LITTLE BIT MORE.
I think that should make my feelings on the yarn quite clear. Luckily, it’s discontinued (gee, I wonder why), so you probably won’t run into it often.
I told you I’d conquer you, you Evil Cursed Mohair From Hell. MUHAHAHAHAHA!
THE LONG, SOUL-EATING NIGHTMARE IS OVER!
It’s done, it’s done, it’s fucking DONE. And it fits, and it’s adorable, and now I’m going to take a very long nap.
Pattern: Lelah
Size: I sort of followed the Large instructions, but my gauge was way tighter so it’s more like a Small
Yarn: Rowan Calmer in 469 (I dunno, that’s what the ball band says), every last bit of 3 skeins
Needles: size 7
As you may know, Lelah ate my soul.
See this entry.
And this one.
Aaaand this one.
Why? I don’t know. I will offer this word of advice: if you look at the pattern, it gives instructions for a medium and a large, and also instructions on how to measure yourself and create your own size. Use the latter instructions. Decide how big you want the bottom to be, and how big you want the top to be, and check your gauge, and then the pattern tells you where to decrease and blah blah blah. I think doing that will save your soul from being devoured.
Anyway, my main mods were messing around with gauge (GRAAAAH!), and not decreasing for the top part because I didn’t want it to stretch too much and go see-through. My only other mod was adding an extra few repeats of the lace pattern to make it a bit longer. So this is the closest I’ve come to actually following a pattern in quite some time.
Hey, and I think I figured out what causes the weird back-wrinkle. It’s something to do with my strapless bra, because it wasn’t wrinkling nearly as much with a regular bra. It figures.
Strapless bras are the devil, folks.
I’m very, very glad it’s done, and it really is a damn cute top, and surprisingly wearable, given that I don’t really have a tube top body. So now that the ordeal is over, I will stop whining, and be happy that I have a lovely FO.
Okay, okay, I will stop whining about this particular project. I mean, let’s be realistic.
Tentatively reclaiming my soul…
I decided to finish the soul-eating Lelah and see what happened.
Fresh off the needles…
It… really isn’t too big! It totally fits! If it doesn’t grow during blocking, and if I don’t lose too much boob-coverage after installing the elastic, I’m home free!
Notice the weird back-wrinkle?
Seriously, what IS that? How does it… I… don’t understand. Whatever. WhatEVER. Blocking will fix it. Blocking fixes everything. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
The other day I went looking for some elastic for it, and some buttons for the mohair monstrosity, and could not find either. Even the stores are against me! So they’ll both be sitting in the almost-but-not-quite-finished pile for awhile, and on my Current Projects sidebar, taunting me. Oh, Lelah. Oh, cursed mohair. Why won’t you let me LIVE?
JUST TRY AND SHED ON ME NOW, BITCH.
I know it’s going to shed on me as soon as I attempt to wear it. I know this. Just let me have this moment.
The mohair that ate New York (or just shed on it a lot)
A few months ago, I was innocently wandering through Romni, looking for yarn to make the soul-eating Lelah. Suddenly, a skein of Fleece Artist Country Mohair jumped at me, a menacing look in its imaginary eyes. “BUY ME,” it said, “OR ELSE.” Or else what? Silly yarn, you can’t hurt me. But I had to admit that it was beautiful. The colours! The sheen! The adorable fuzzy halo! The strange but intriguing heaviness! The fact that it was made out of goats! I like goats. They’re neat. So I bought it.
Eventually I came to the sad realization that there is very little one can do with 200 metres of heavy worsted 100% mohair. I glared at it, and it retaliated by shedding on me. And on the Calmer I bought for the soul-eating Lelah. And on me again. And then, it shed some more.
I tried to turn it into a Cloud Bolero. “HA HA HA,” said the mohair. “NICE TRY. I DON’T THINK SO. FROG ME NOW.” Then it shed on me just a little bit more.
I’ll get you, mohair.
Right now I’m trying to turn it into a very, very, very modified Buttony Sweater. Obviously 200 metres won’t make a sweater, so it’s going to be a short-sleeved minisweater. With ribbed sleeves. (Why? I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea at the time.) That sheds a lot.
Here it is yesterday, a charming pile of constantly-shedding mohair barf:
Today I split off the sleeves, and so it is a vaguely sweater-top-shaped pile of mohair barf. I am cautiously optimistic; so far it isn’t sending out “FROG ME NOW” signals. I am covered in mohair, though. Because it sheds. Did I mention the shedding?