Death to Smooshy

The following blog post contains foul language. Reader discretion is advised.

I am cursed. There is no other explanation for this situation. Fucking cursed.

I have finished several projects recently, and I am itching to cast on my entrelac socks. I have the yarn already- two skeins of Dream in Colour "Smooshy", one teal and one sort of coral-y, watermelony red. They are very large skeins, so I set myself up in front of the TV with my ball winder and swift, carefully placed the red skein on the swift, and began to wind.

Snag. Fuck.

I had made maybe three revolutions when the yarn stuck, a rogue piece of yarn looped around the (supposedly) free end. No big deal-

Wind the yarn off the ball winder.

Slip the end of the yarn through the offending loop.

Re-wind the yarn onto the ball winder.

Turn, turn, turn. Snag. FUCK!

Repeat a few more times, adjusting the yarn on the swift, turning the other direction, removing the whole skein and replacing it upside down.

Say fuck a few more times (this was surprisingly unhelpful).

Decide to take drastic measures, and start winding off by hand. I had a good sized ball going by the time things had worked themselves out, so I wound it back onto the ball winder. Turn, turn, turn.

I'm going along at a good clip, with only a few minor snags, but nothing that requires actually removing the ball again. Turn, turn, turn.

The yarn-winding gods will only let me be happy for so long, though. Turn, turn, whomp! Something hits me in the forehead, hard enough that it takes me a few moments to compose myself and figure out what the fuck that was about.

The tube dealie (yes, that's the official term, fuck off) on the centre of the winder had come loose, and the fucking thing flew right up and clocked me. To add insult to injury, this has also resulted in a fair bit more tangling. This isn't funny.

I spent the better part of 5 hours untangling this yarn (while watching TV, taking computer breaks, and of course eating and drinking) and I am still not done. I am not happy with this yarn, especially since this is one time I know that the tangling is not my fault.

Fuck once more, for good measure.

Update: I have now officially finished untangling the fucking yarn. I haven't forgiven it yet.

Not for lack of knitting...

This blog has been suspiciously empty. We spent a week at our cottage in Bala (the cranberry capital of Ontario, FYI). The ridiculously fresh air seems to have an odd effect on me. Quite frankly, it puts me to sleep- honestly, I just could not get enough sleep. Luckily, the cottage is the one place that I can pretty much lay down anywhere, anytime and take a nap (assuming the kids are with my husband- which they tend to be because he's much more fun on vacation than sleepy mum).

When I wasn't napping, but hadn't risen out of my fog enough to play in the river, I was knitting. I finished my Malabrigo Hourglass sweater- just in time for summer (grrrr). But it is absolutely glorious. I even got to wear it for a whole evening because it does occasionally get cold up there.



This photo was taken pre-blocking, in the dim cottage bathroom. It was the best I could do at the time.

Post blocking, on the bed-



hmm, still looks a little lumpy and wrinkly. I blame the futon.

I also finished my first Baby Surprise Jacket. I used Manos Cotton Stria, in aqua and tangerine. I started out with one skein of each, but at about this point:



I started to worry that maybe there wouldn't be quite enough yarn to finish. My LYS was out- they only had 2 skeins of purple, which I decided I could not work in to this already- erm- eclectic colour scheme. A two-day stopover in TO gave me the opportunity to hit up Romni- even there, I could only find one skein of the tangerine, and it seemed significantly duller than my original skein.

I carried on, hoping that the striping pattern would hide the irregularity. What do you think?



I have to admit that at this point in the sweater, I was more concerned about the fact that I could not for the life of me see how this was going to become a sweater. I worried that EZ knew something I didn't about sewing up seams, or that I had completely misread the pattern, or otherwise entirely fucked this pattern up. Ah, me of little faith...

I love Ravelry

Really, I do. It is such a great concept, and I hope the developers do really really well with it. (If you haven't gotten your invite to Ravelry yet, then I'm sorry if this sounds like taunting or bragging. Trust me, your patience will be rewarded.)

The only downside (and I admit that the fault lies entirely with me) is that I now have so much less to blog about. I started blogging mainly as a way to keep my projects (current and future) organised, and to help keep my few online knitting friends up-to-date on my progress, without flooding our message board with FO posts. I did slowly become more accustomed to writing about knitting as lifestyle, almost approaching actual journaling levels (which is so bizarre to me, since every diary I've ever owned contains two to three very bland "introductory" entries before my interest waned and it became buried under stacks of "Seventeen" magazine).

So I'm going to give blogging-as-journaling a shot, please bear with me (and I'm going to need to learn how to spell "journaling", since this is 3 times now I've written it with two ls. Thank you little red line...)

So. Hmmm.

*cough*


I'll be back...

not so very long ago

I couldn't resist posting this. I found it buried in my crafty folder while adding projects to Ravelry.

This must have been taken around February or March 2004. I'm knitting my first sock ever, for Miles (out of Pingouin 100% cotton. Sigh. I've learned so much).

Miles is "helping".

The knitting bag behind me was hand-woven by my mother, for her mother.

There are so many things in this photo that make me so very very happy.

I crawled with the Yarn Harlot...

Not to mention about 20 other fabulous knitters. I'm sure everyone has seen some version of this picture a thousand times, but I find it so farking hilarious that I have to share my own version.



The whole day was awesome. If you want details, go to the Yarn Harlot's blog. She tells it better than I could.

A few assorted photos from the Toronto Extravaganza, just for my entertainment:



This is actually the night before at the book release. Just before I was to give the hat I knit to the Harlot, I realised I didn't have a picture of it. This picture didn't show much of the hat, but it did manage to capture me in all my flushed-and-sweaty glory (In case anyone was wondering, it does get warm in a bookstore filled with hundreds of knitters, and donning a wool hat does nothing to relieve it, surprisingly)

Side note- this photo was taken by the lovely Erin, who I just happened to sit down next to in line, and ended up being my crawl buddy the next day as well. I got to make sure she didn't pass out at Romni. Hee!

First stop on the crawl was The Naked Sheep (again, I'm not going into major detail, I'm not linking to all the stores, it's all on Stephanie's blog, as well as about a dozen others). I convinced my wonderful friend/spare mum Gaye to pose for a "First Sock" photo. It's a dandy first sock.



At Americo, I bought some lovely handspun llama that matches my knitting bag. When I got home that evening, my 4 year old decided to wear it. On his face.



Yeah, kids are weird.

I also coveted this fantastic wooden ball winder:



Note to self: Find out if Sherri ever got a quote on that. Live vicariously through Sherri. Sigh.

Romni, Lettuce Knit, Big Fat Burritos. It's not that this wasn't all awesome, I just don't have anything to add that hasn't been said. That's what I get for procrastinating.

Alterknit was a great place to wind down. Yummy iced coffee. And their front window display still has me giggling:


What also got me giggling was someone's (I can't remember who, was it Barb?) comment that it looked like all the monkeys were knitting "peter heaters". Hee!

Long story short, I bought a lot of yarn, met a lot of cool people, and I got my picture taken with "The Yarn Harlot" aka "The Wool Pig" aka "Stephanie"



She's holding my socks. She even said they looked good. Speaking of which...



Ahhh, FO bliss...

My yarn nightmare

I am a tangler. There is no way around it. When I wind my yarn from a hank to a ball, it tangles. When I try to knit with more than one ball of yarn at a time, it tangles (don't ask how this has affected my two-socks-at-once habit). I especially tangle when I get a bug up my butt about something that many people would just ignore (stripy matchyness, for example). Still, I press on, hoping that next time will be different. Sigh.

Here is a little taste of my ridiculousness,

Last week at my knitting group, I sat happily knitting my Pomatomus socks:



(aren't they pretty? Fleece Artist Sea Wool, colourway unknown but gorgeous).

I start to notice that the yarn is being annoyingly splitty. It seems that the two plies of the yarn were coming un-twisted. It was kinking the yarn, making knitting with it a rather frustrating experience.



(Please note, I in no way hold the yarn itself responsible for what happened here. This was one skein that I split into two nearly equal balls, so that I could knit the two socks at once. That was a yarn disaster in itself, but it ended with two neatly wound balls. However, I can't rule out the possibility that the winding and re-winding of the balls may have been responsible for this.)

With the support and advice of many of my knitting group friends, I tried spinning the ball, twisting the ball, dangling the ball over the railing- all of this did nothing to correct the twist of the plies, nor did it do anything to stay my ever-increasing frustration:



As we wrapped up for the night, it became clear that this yarn was not going to respond to gentler encouragement. It was time to get tough with it:



It should have been easy. Cut out the offending section of yarn (really only a few inches) re-wind the rest of the ball, checking carefully for more twisty bits, and re-join to the sock. No big deal.

Until at some point during the winding, I was momentarily distracted, and my yarn snagged, and the partially-wound ball went flying off the winder in a great lump:



Once again, this shouldn't have posed a serious problem. I should have just collected myself, and very slowly, cautiously and gently pulled apart the tangled mess. Indeed, that is what I intended to do. But it was like some cruel Sisyphean torture- the more I untangled, the tighter the remaining tangles would get.

Understand that my children were asleep, and my husband was out for the evening. If there had been another human awake with me in the house, I hope they would've been able to extricate me from this mess before things got worse.

Two hours later, I found myself stuck with this:



This is the point where it stopped being funny. This is also the point where I stopped taking pictures.

Long story short (too late, I know), I got the yarn down to about 3 knots that were determined to be permanent. Another encounter with the scissors, and a few (very, very careful) winding sessions later, and I had an un-twisty, un-tangly (if slightly shorter) ball of yarn.

In retrospect, I don't really think it was worth the effort. If I ever think about doing something like this again, somebody smack me, okay?

Just for a little variety

Here is some of the spinning I've been doing. I'm not progressing all that quickly, simply because I need to lock myself away in a room away from cats and children in order to spin. The opportunity just doesn't arise that often.



These are some mystery fibres that I acquired at the end of my spinning classes in December. The oatmeal-coloured one was very wispy, with and it had a bit of darker, coarse hairs running through it. I have no idea what it is, but it was nice to spin.

The purple/green was actually just a bunch of dyed locks that I flick-carded and spun, mostly just to experiment with blending colours.



This is the espresso Shetland wool that I got for Christmas. I have spun two bobbins full like the one above, and I still have this much to go:



Yeah, I know it's a crappy picture and it's hard to see. It's sitting on my knees. For those who don't know how big a spinning wheel is for reference, the ball is more-or-less soccer ball sized.

I wanted to see how my spinning was shaping, so I plied the two bobbins together and got this:



Oh it is really pretty. I'm going to have a lot of it by the time I'm done, too. Hours and hours of fun-this was the best gift ever.

still with the socks...

I haven't gotten totally bored of them yet. I suppose that's a good thing, since I still have a fair bit of sock yarn (not to mention several patterns I want to try).

Several FO:

M. has been bugging me to knit him something with the leftover yarn from my husband's socks. I decided to whip off a pair of teensy wrist-warmers, because I wasn't sure I'd have enough for socks.




My sister's socks became my mom's socks, because they fit her and so I worried they'd be too roomy on my sis. Plus I don't think I could've gotten them off my mom once she tried them on.



Forgive the carpet. It's my grandma's, so I think it gets a pass.

Then of course, M. wanted to know where his socks were, and I definitely had enough of this yarn left over.



And since my sister still had no birthday socks, I cast on these:



Lang Jawoll cotton jacquard in a mock cable pattern. Simple enough to work on anywhere, anytime. Fancy enough that I don't die from boredom.

And I know the stripes don't match. Believe me, I know. The twitch in my eye is just starting to go away.

Last but not least, I finished the boyfriend socks for me:



I made them pretty short more or less on purpose. If I'd done another cable pattern repeat, they would have been tall enough to reach past my bizarrely muscular calves, and I would've had to work an increase in there, and it was after easter dinner and frankly I was too stuffed and lazy to bother. It also leaves me with a bit more blue for a...something small and blue. Hmm.

...and here are all the pictures

Lana Grossa Meilenweit cotton. Note the slightly crappy short-row heel. I find my gauge on this yarn is a little loose, but the resulting socks are coming out very very soft.


Fleece Artist merino socks. Pardon my stash in the background.


I did the afterthought heel on these ones. Nice finished look, but I'm not sure it's worth the trouble of getting the heel stitches on the needles.


Now these are my socks-to-be:

This is Lang Jawoll cotton. These will be for my mom, so they are going to be the plainest socks ever. She has issues with tightness, scratchiness, texture, etc. It's going to be pretty boring. She's lucky I love her.


Koigu KPPPM. I have no pattern ideas for this one. I'm waiting for it to tell me what it wants to be.


Fleece artist Sea Wool (in Cosmic Dawn, I think). Yes, it really is that shiny. I think this wants to be Pomatomus, don't you?

Update- no pictures

We spent the day at "Maple Madness" with the kids, so I am entirely too tired and lazy to get up and get my camera, and my knitting, and find a cat-and-child-free space to take pictures. You're just going to have to take my word for it that I'm progressing.

My boyfriend socks are nearing the end, I think. I did the heels (afterthought heels, which I loved the first time I did them on my husband's socks, but this time it seemed unnecessarily fiddly) and I'm now just knitting up the leg, I guess until I'm out of yarn. I have discovered the one drawback to toe-up socks though, at least for me: I can see that I am going to do a lot of coaxing to get myself to knit these up to the appropriate height. I'm so tempted to just cast off now and turn them into ankle socks, but I know I'd be disappointed later.

My sister's socks, which are top-down, are also just past the heel. I decided to try a short-row heel on those, and I do believe I'm a convert. I like the evenness and roundness of them, and there is no fiddly picking up of held stitches. And no flaps. I'm very not fond of flaps for some reason.

I have already started planning for my next socks- since I've decided to join the Slow-Poke Socks KAL, I am going to have to start thinking ahead. And I realise now that if I'm actually going to talk about future socks, I should put in pictures of the damn yarn. So I'll have to save that for a less lazy day.

Socks!

If someone had ever told me that I would derive such pleasure from socks, and that I would dedicate significant chunks of my life to talking, writing and thinking about socks, I would've thought they were nuts. Gosh, I can only imagine what you all think of me.

Well, no matter- I have finished socks!

First, this pair has actually been finished since the beginning of this year. I just haven't gotten around to taking pictures until now. They are the Fleece Artist soft sock/mitt kit (blue-face/mohair).



I have no idea why they look like they are two completely different colours.

Next, I have the socks I made for my husband, out of Lana Grossa Meilenweit. The pattern is Thuja from knitty.com, except I knit them toe-up.



Here is a decidedly cuter picture of the socks.



These are my half (okay, maybe 1/3) finished socks, just for meeeee! I'm using the boyfriend socks pattern, and Fleece Artist again, just the standard merino socks. Yum!



Finally, I just cast on another pair last night, more Lana Grossa, but the cotton blend. These are going to be for my sister, for her birthday (I'm quite sure she doesn't even know I have a blog, so I'm probably safe to post that).



I also have 3 pairs-worth of sock yarn all wound into balls, waiting to be knit up as soon as I decide on the patterns. I have sock fever, and the only prescription is more cowb...err, socks.

Toes!

My toe-up fleece artist socks are making me giddy. I'm making very slow progress, simply because I can't help but stop to admire them every row. I'll get over it eventually...I hope.

I used the Magic Cast-On from Knitty.com. It is perfect and flawless, and I have beautiful, seamless toes. Even the insides are pretty.



I'm sick, I know. But I'll have the nicest socks in the asylum, I'll tell you right now...

FO alert!

I've completed the rumple scarf, and I'm very pleased with it. It's not going to be practical as a winter scarf, so now I can't wait for spring.

It's about 5 feet long, and I used up every last scrap possible of the silk. I have a small hunk of the mohair left for some reason. I'm not sure what to do with it. It's way too small to make anything useful.

WIPs!

More of them than I usually have at once. Four of them, which may be insignificant for some, but i tend to be fairly single-minded, so I'm finding this pretty cool. The truly remarkable thing is that they are all actually in progress, all at once. Shocking, no?

First is my Hourglass sweater in Malabrigo. I did end up frogging the sleeves, after I washed and measured them and used them as swatches (see, it wasn't a total waste). Then I started on the body instead of the sleeves, because I have a really hard time ripping out something and then re-knitting the exact same thing immediately. It makes no difference in the long run, but it seems to help psychologically.

Here's the finished body (up to where you do the raglan shaping):



And the sleeves in progress now:



I not only started with a lot fewer stitches than before, but I am not doing the full belled sleeve. I'm only doing one decrease between the wrist and arm sections. I think that the cushy thickness of the finished material makes the bells much clunkier than is really practical.

The rumple scarf is still on needles. It's taking it's time, because, well, it's a scarf, and it's mostly my take-along project because it is brainless and can be put down anywhere. And thus it gets put down a lot. But I think it is almost done. I will say, I got a heck of a lot of yardage out of this kit:



Pretty no? Only one tiny issue. About it being 'brainless'- sometimes that leads to the most brainless mistakes.



I must've knit two plain rows instead of alternating with the YO row at this point. I didn't even notice until I had knit a good 5 inches past this point. So frogging it was completely out of the question. The good thing is that it seems to be landing itself smack in the middle of the scarf (or close enough anyway). So I may actually be able to pass it off as a creative design alteration, rather than a flaw. Yay creativity!

The cashmere/silk is making it's way into a lovely Diamond Fantasy shawl/scarf. I love the way the colours are lining up, I love the look of it, the feel of it, it's absolutely luscious. The only issue I'm having is that the yarn feels really really fragile, like if I pull it too hard it will just snap. Because of this, it's all coming out a little loose, and progress is really slow because I'm terrified of making a mistake, and I don't think the yarn would hold up very well to frogging.

But man is it lovely, even if it wouldn't stay flat for the photo:




Last thing I'm working on at the moment is a pair of socks for dh. I'm using a ball of Lana Grossa that I won as a door prize at my LYS holiday party. I've never been particularly drawn to these kinds of sock yarns (the 75/25 wool/acrylic blends) because they always seem terribly scratchy when they're wound into a ball*. But dh is less picky than I am, and as I'm knitting them up, I'm finding the scratchiness quite tolerable, and the finished fabric is really nice. I'm also using my new knitpicks circulars on these (not the options, since they don't come in 2 and 2.5mm sizes) and I'm smitten. The metal needles aren't bugging me as much as they have in the past- probably because they are so slidy- and the cord is amazingly flexible. These would be fantastic for magic loop.

I'm doing these toe-up, two at once, which I think is going to be my technique of choice for socks for a while. Avoids second sock syndrome, and all that counting of rows, and there's less yarn waste. And because I bought the knitpicks needles instead of getting bamboos or addis at my LYS, I got 4 sets of needles (two of each size) for the cost of maybe 2 bamboo sets, or one and a quarter addis. Wheee!



*(I tried to explain this to dh last night, but unfortunately my choice of words was "scratchy in the balls" and we were too hysterical to form a complete sentence for a good hour after that, because we are both 12)

I love bell sleeves...

I really do love them. But for some reason, I can't stop obsessing over the fact that these sleeves are going to be too belled.



I'm really playing with fire with this hourglass sweater.

Firstly, I didn't actually swatch (I know, I know, don't hurt me). I realised that for my swatch to be at all accurate, I'd have to knit it in the round, and therefore I'd have to have enough stitches that I could get an accurate gauge on half the stitches. Since the sleeves are worked in the round anyway, I had a brilliant idea. The sleeves can be my swatch! That way, if I get gauge right away, I won't have wasted all that time knitting a swatch. Besides, I had already started the body of the sweater on 5mm needles and determined that it was way, way too big, so I had a good starting point with 4.5mm.

After knitting the up to the hem for the sleeves- Oh yes, sleeves. I knit them both at once, so that I can avoid obsessive row counting and still have sleeves the same length. Again, this seemed like a brilliant idea, but perhaps not so much when combined with the "sleeves as swatch" idea, since it's much harder to just scrap-and-start-over two sleeves, rather than one. Which is how I managed to get this far before questioning my progress.



So as I was saying, I knit up to the hems on 4.5mm, and measured my gauge. It was about 16sts/inch, still a little big (I'm going for 19), but I was not concerned. I knit the hems up (provisional cast on, then k2tog the hem and sleeve stitches to avoid sewing later) then switched to my 4.25 needles for the rest of the sleeves. After several rows, I checked again. About 21 sts/inch. Well, that's actually smaller, but since it's already looking a little big, I'm okay with that. In fact, to prevent the extreme belled-ness of the sleeves from translating all the way up the arm, I've actually knit 2 extra decrease rows already. I'm pretty much trying to get the sleeves to the small sized measurements (from the medium which is what I cast on).

Goodness, if anyone is still following this, good for you. I'm totally lost.

The second thing that is vaguely concerning me is the colour difference. It's a double edged sword with Malabrigo. I love the variation, it's gorgeous, and subtle, and makes a much more interesting knit than a super consistent colour (at least for plain stockinette stitch). But doing both sleeves at once (hence two balls) makes it difficult to alternate balls to prevent pooling of a lighter or darker skein- since that would require four balls at once. I think I'd go mad(der). This has left me with two gorgeous sleeves of slightly different colours. I'm okay with this, I think.



Of course, the fact that I'm posting this all is a sign that I have not completely resigned myself to continuing.

I may need to switch projects for a while, to keep myself from progressing on the hourglass if I am going to eventually frog it. I can't believe I just typed that.