Making progress with test knitting a larger size of Dylan’s Elephants – just starting on the first striped sleeve, after careful yarn weighing and calculating to decide which sections to do in which colours. Just crossing my fingers that the blue holds out for two striped sleeves!
This is Annis, pinned to the futon in my library, blocking. I added some more rows of plain stocking stitch with a row of eyelets just before the cast off edge (ribbon is threaded through them in the picture, although I haven’t decided yet if I’ll wear it with the ribbon or if it’s just a blocking aid). I went round the cast on edge afterwards with a teen tiny crochet hook (three single crochet to each cast on loop) and added beads to each point.
This is to wear for a friend’s wedding in a week and a bit, and I’ve been putting off finishing the edging before suddenly realising quite how soon it is!
Talking of things I’ve been putting off… the sheer weight of unblogged projects has been hanging over me and harshing my blog mojo, but I got fed up with it 
I might blog the unblogged stuff; I might not. For now, I’ll just do a list of things I’m currently working on:
Oh, and I knit yet another pair of baby Coriolis for the imminent arrival of T’s baby, but despite finishing them ages ago, I have not yet posted them, and the baby was due a couple of days ago. Note to self: post socks.
These are the four faces of my first suffragette cuff. Naturally, I prefer the purple side
There are some mistakes in the white side, although I’ve checked and they’re mistakes in the knitting, not in the chart, so at some point soon I’ll publish the both-sides-right-way chart to go with the simple one. (It’s very exciting publishing a pattern on Ravelry and then watching people adding it to favourites and queue!)
I’m also planning some adjustments to the chart to suit a wider range of stitch counts – it should be fairly easy to narrow the pattern in several places. And I’m thinking about serifs…
Over a month ago, I was half-heartedly whining about having only one thing on the needles, and the need to go and cast on for something else. Now I once again only have one thing on the needles (the same thing – selbu modern, which I’ve hardly touched in the meantime), but in between I have knit lots of things. My course kindly provides the required reading in A4-photocopies, which are conveniently flat, making it easy to knit and read at the same time as long as I choose my knitting carefully, and I’ve been doing a lot of reading since I last blogged. Sadly, I haven’t yet worked out how to blog and read at the same time.
Immediately after hitting ‘publish post’ on my last post, I did indeed go and start preparing to start something else – I wound some handspun yarn (peacock) into a ball and started swatching. I’d been thinking for a while that this wanted to be a scarf in a peacock-tail lace pattern, and now it is! (Although it still needs blocking…)
While knitting the scarf, I decided that I really needed a new hat. This is my own design, although I misjudged the width of the ribbing – it’s this wide so I can fold back the hem, but I don’t like how it looks folded, so I wear it unfolded and covering most of my face I’m planning to make another, with less ribbing, and then perhaps publish the pattern (heh, I’m always saying that and never do. Eventually!) The hat got christened on a very rainy Reclaim the Night march, and kept my head warm and toasty and dry throughout, so I am declaring it a success!
When I said I only had one thing on the needles, I was using a rather strict definition of the term, because one of the off-the-needles things is a single mitten, the pair for which I’m going to cast on next. This is a modified version of Susie’s reading mitts, worked upside down, with a different gauge and thumb gusset, and with the hem edges knit into the fabric rather than sewed down later. The lace pattern, which was drew me to the mitts in the first place, is unaltered
I spun the yarn for this over my birthday weekend, having given myself the weekend off all study-work and work-work (I’m still behind on both kinds of work because of this, but it’s an article of faith that I don’t work on my birthday). The yarn is rather more brown than I usually like, but I think the colours suit the pattern, and I’m enjoying how the colour shifts in different kinds of light, looking sometimes more purple, sometimes more brown, and sometimes more grey. This is chain-plyed to keep the colour changes intact, but I’ve got half of the fibre still unspun, so I think I’ll two- or three-ply that to see the difference in finished colours. I’m getting quite interested in achieving different colour effects in finished yarn from the same fibre, and I’ve got some ideas about other ways to play with this, which I’ll blog about if I get round to doing it before I lose interest in the idea!
If this doesn’t sound like quite enough knitting in a month to be called ‘lots’, it’s because about half of my November knitting has been on gifts for people who might conceivably read this blog, so the rest will have to stay unblogged until after Christmas!
I currently only have one thing on the needles! And unfortunately, it requires too much looking-at to be practical to knit while watching TV or reading, but it’s moving along slowly:
What had brought about this strange state of affairs is finishing off two things in the last week: the dragon’s breath scarf, and the swimming coriolis. This is the scarf in its unblocked state:
And this is it held taut-ish to show the pattern off:
(That’s the edge of my Wisteria sleeve visible on the left, and the edge of Making Money by Terry Pratchett (which I haven’t yet read) on the right.)
I’m planning to only lightly block this – I like how it looks like very complex cables as it is now, and I think blocking it completely flat would lose some of its charm.
These are the swimming coriolis:
They look rather more leftovery (which they are) than I hoped, because the roll of the cast-off edge obscures most of the second band of the variegated yarn, so I’m rethinking my original intention of giving these as a gift – I don’t think they’re nice enough :-/
I’ve got various other projects (all gifts) wandering around in my head, but I haven’t got round to doing anything concrete like swatching or sketching or even winding the yarn into balls. Unusually, I want to be already knitting rather than starting to knit, which is a bit of a problem when most of my knitting time isn’t well suited to my sole current project. I’m hoping that writing this post will serve as a kind of catalyst, and prompt me to go and do one of those things, but I’m sufficiently distrustful of today’s energy levels (I’m coming down with a cold) to avoid saying that I’m going to go and start something as soon as I click “publish post”
This is Ella blocking, all flat! I’ve worn her a couple of times, and she’s nice and warm, and I’m pleased I paid attention to alternating the more- and less-variegated skeins in knitting her.
This is the Zauberball I mentioned in my last post, in the process of becoming the dragon’s breath scarf (so named because this is an adaptation of the flickering flames pattern, and red). I’m a lot further on now than in this picture – I just haven’t taken any photos for ages.
I’ve finally finished both Lucas’s Tomten and the red cardigan, both of which were waiting for fastenings, and I’d failed to find the green toggles and reddish-purple ribbon, respectively, I wanted, so in the end I plied some yarn (orange for tomten and the silk mix edging yarn for the red cardigan) against itself twice to make cord ties. The double plying means the cord is stable, and it’s four times thicker than the working yarn, which is a good thickness.
I’ve now got three knitting projects on the go, and they’re all actually in progress: yesterday I worked on all three of them, depending on how much my eyes were free to look at them:
This is the state of the Selbu Modern:
Since doing a stitch count spreadsheet for Wisteria, I seem to be hooked – I’ve done another one for this, and it’s serving the dual purpose of being a place to note which row of the chart I’ve finished, and telling me how far through I am (currently 36%).
Now I’ve got enough of it done to get a proper look at it, I’ve more-or-less decided that I prefer the dark band, and the light base colour for the pattern. Luckily, these are on the same side of the hat Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind later, which is why I’m glad I’ve made this as double knitting instead of stranded. It’s loads of fun to knit, as well – I prefer double knitting to stranding anyway – and now I’m over some early clumsiness with the pattern, I’m sailing along and only needing to look at the chart occasionally. I still need to look at my knitting most of the time, which is a bit of a pain because it limits what I can do at the same time, but it’s fun enough on its own that I mostly don’t mind.
Having finished Wisteria, even though I’m enjoying both of my other projects and finding both of them easy, interesting and quick, I started getting the urge to cast on something else. The stranded knitting on the starry kimono, and the double-knit-esque hem on Wisteria reminded me of my intention to make some non-sock thing in two-handed knitting, so I stand some chance of finishing it before I get fed up with the fiddliness of the technique. My new short hair and excursions into red in my wardrobe suggested a red hat, and after some Ravelring, I decided upon Selbu Modern. I’m double knitting this, rather than stranding it, because I couldn’t decide which way round the colours should be. Hence this two-sided swatch:
That’s only a little bit of the pattern, obviously. Just enough to measure gauge and make adjustments for the looser gauge of double knitting compared with stranded, and for the fact that the needles I wanted to use are larger than those the pattern calls for, so technically I suppose this is 7/8 of a Selbu Modern
This is what Ella looks like at the moment (photo taken without flash to better capture the texture):
It’s crazily three-dimensional, with squarish bobbles that pop up or down, and I keep having to stretch it out to reassure myself that it will probably block flat:
I’m only a few rows away from the point where the back splits into the two fronts, which is good going, especially since I’ve been knitting most of this in the same timeframe as Wisteria.
While knitting Wisteria, I’ve also done some other knitting…
After I’d finished the heel (eye of partridge, which looks gorgeous with this yarn) of the first sock, I weighed the remaining yarn, and discovered that it’s not going to be enough for two full socks, so I immediately put the live stitches on waste yarn and cast on for the second sock with the other end of the ball. These will have contrast legs, but I haven’t decided on yarn for them yet. The available one that goes best is the dark red Dream in Colour Smooshy that went with this yarn for the push-me-pull-you socks, but there’s more of that leftover – probably actually enough for a whole pair – so I’m reluctant to use it. None of my other sock yarn goes as well, so these might end up being very short socks. On the other hand, the DiC is a suspect in a hat-in-planning I’m thinking about, which would probably leave enough to finish off these socks…