Needles & Hooks

I’ve waded into Mermaid.

I did a simple long tail cast on with Color C that is intended as a provisional cast on to be removed later and replaced with an i-cord bind off. Started knitting with Color A from the collar down and started the main directions. I made good headway on the plane. Just about to start the 2nd gusset.

Working with my spreadsheet is a breeze. Noticed a few tiny issues, but mostly it’s spot on. Will issue an update soon.

Pictures later.

Last night I finished the principal knitting on Zig Zag, delving into old episodes of The Twilight Zone on the Tivo to finish the last sleeve not long before midnight. I was all set to fix the errors in that sleeve with the pins and crochet hook, but after I ripped the column of stitches back and started working on it, and looked at the other one that also needed to be done, I gave in and ripped it out. And then knit like a mad-woman.

So all that’s left is sewing in the sleeves. Tomorrow I fly out to LA for work for a couple of days, so the finishing has to wait until I get back.

But Mermaid is coming with me. Having tested out the techniques and decided on my i-cord treatment, I was able to do a little gauge swatching yesterday. I’m using my size 3 Addis (3.25 mm). I would a few balls of yarn and I’m all ready to cast on. Maybe if I pack quickly tonight, I’ll get it started.

The pattern for my Whirlygig Scarf is ready. Enjoy!

No, I’m not going to participate in the Knitting Olympics. But I am gearing up to start Mermaid. I hit a little snag in Zig Zag which means it needs some extra care in finishing and I have some long plane rides coming up soon, so Mermaid gets to go.

I made a spreadsheet listing the pattern instructions row-by-row. This means I don’t have to remember multiple things to get the shaping right. Tonight I used some spare yarn and tried out some of the techniques to see how they work.

The knitalong has been discussing using a provisional cast on and a later i-cord bind-off in place of the i-cord then pick-up-and-knit technique listed in the pattern. This appealed to me because I could tell from photos (and from what the pattern says) that the two edges in the front won’t match exactly. I wanted to see if I could do something that would.

So I tried it.

What you see in the photo above are two swatches (right-click and choose “view image” to see them larger). The one on the right side starts with the i-cord pick-up-and-knit that the pattern recommends (over the number “2″). You can see the white bumps showing through. This would be visible along the front of the jacket, but not on the collar where it folds over. Over the “3″ (almost) is the i-cord bind-off that the pattern calls for. As you can see, these don’t match. Disregard the stockinette bits in the middle, those are for a different project that I’ll show you later.

After the first swatch, I tried the method that Holly described, making a provisional cast on, knitting a few ridges, and then removing the provisional cast on and doing an i-cord bind-off (over the “1″). Starting my bind-off at the top of the swatch and moving toward the “bottom hem”, I was able to exactly duplicate the look of the bind-off at the end of the pattern. This is clearly what I’ll be doing for my Mermaid.

In case anyone is curious, here is what the back of the swatch looks like. The i-cord pick-up and i-cord bind-off look fairly identical.

Finally, I also wanted to see exactly what happens with all the slipped stitches called for. So I made a small swatch with the stripe pattern.

As you can see, the treatment of the stitches at the hem edge of the swatch make a nice, single color stockinette hem. The selvedge edge of the garment naturally tucks itself up underneath. At the top, there is a little ridge next to the selvedge edge (the reverse being stockinette). This is where you will put the shoulder seams. Clever touch.

I think I have a good understanding of the techniques involved, now. Time to start swatching for gauge!

And the winner is….Lisa, who contributed the name Whirlygig! Waiting to hear which yarn she prefers. The random drawing winner from all who submitted names is Wendy.

I’m hard at work on testing the pattern. I think I’ve got it all ironed out and should post it tomorrow. Keep your eyes peeled. Here’s a look at the prototype:

Many thanks to everyone who submitted name ideas. There were a lot of good ones to choose from. I thought I’d share all the ones I got:

• ‘57 Chevy (if it were 57 inches long)
• The Accidentally on Purpose Scarf
• Bluesy Ruffles
• Churros
• Clematis
• Cool Curling Chevrons
• Curly Blue
• Curvaceous
• Double Helix
• DNA
• F5
• Flying V’s
• Helix
• Loop It
• Meandering Scarf
• Ribbon Candy
• Ring around the Blues
• Spiral Staircase
• Swirly Burly
• Tendril Scarf
• Tessalatwist
• Tilt-a-Whirl
• Twirler
• Twist and Shout
• Twist for a Kiss
• Twist It Up Baby
• Twister II - The Scarf
• Twisted Chevrons
• Twistytessal
• Twizzler Scarf
• Whirlygig
• X-volution!

(Many thanks to everyone who submitted scarf names. The contest is now closed. I’ll go through the entries this weekend and select some winners)

I’ve been using Bloglines to keep track of blog feeds for about a year now. I had some issues with it, primarily that if a blog has a list of unread posts and you click on it, all the posts get marked read. I’ve missed stuff that way, either because it was too many to read in one sitting or because my browser crashed before I was finished. And there were the rumors of Bloglines not updating feeds on a regular basis.

So last month, after hearing about it on other blogs, I gave NewsGator a whirl.

And I’m back to Bloglines.

I liked that NewsGator leaves posts marked “unread” by default and you have to explicitly mark them “read”. But that was about the only thing I liked about it. It’s biggest crime was that it only stores a history of 15 unread posts whereas Bloglines will store 200. That’s not such an issue with a single-contributor knitting blog. I could probably go on a 2-week vacation and come back and not miss any posts. But things like Overheard in New York, Stuff on My Cat and Slog (see another side of Dan Savage) can get 15 posts in a couple of days, or even a few hours. I couldn’t find a way to tell NewsGator to save more posts for those feeds, and I was missing too much.

Watching both Bloglines and NewsGator for a week, I didn’t notice a big difference in which service updated which blogs more quickly. New posts showed in both. However, Bloglines continually refreshes itself in your browser window if you leave it open. So I would just keep it in a tab and glance at it from time to time between other tasks. NewsGator requires an explicit refresh that always felt clunky.

There’s a couple of other differences that I found.

When you’re trying to subscribe to a feed, Bloglines will give you a list of options that it knows about for a certain blog. And let you preview them. So you can see if one format will give you images or full posts. And it would take just the main URL of the blog. NewsGator wasn’t that smart. It needed the complete feed URL.

Finally, Bloglines will always display a detail page for any blog on your list, even if it doesn’t have posts. So if you wanted to go back to a blog and find a post you remembered, you could click on the Bloglines entry and click through to the main blog. With NewsGator, if there were no posts, it didn’t display anything. This might have been something you could set with preferences, but there were enough issues with NewsGator that I didn’t bother looking.

Overall, it was a good experiment. But I’m happy where I am.

Remember when I showed you this?

And I said I found an error in it?

Well, on Monday night, it became this:

I pulled out about 30 rows in the middle zig-zag column, back down to the misplaced eyelet, and attempted to fix it. I used a long piece of styrofoam and a handful of T pins to keep track of the individual stitches. I turned the sleeve inside out because it is much easier to use a crochet hook to fix knit stitches than purl stitches. And one by one, I started “re-knitting” the row.

This is not for the impatient or the faint of heart.

As it turns out, it made me sick to my stomach. Literally. After repairing about 15 rows, I was huddled in a ball on the couch, moaning. And feeling chills. And my husband watched me nervously. After a sleepless night, an offer of a visit to the hospital, and a very unproductive day at work, we decided that it probably wasn’t the knitting, but rather an unfortunately timed bout of food poisoning. Something similar happened to me many years ago after my first Yoga class. I’ve never returned to Yoga.

Tonight, I decided to cling to my Addis and tempt fate with another run at Zig Zag. I’m glad I did. I finished up the one sleeve. It now looks like this:

And I feel confident in attempting to fix the two errors in the other sleeve. I got into quite a groove near the end of this one, so it should be rather efficient. And not at all worse than simply re-knitting it from scratch. I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, if you haven’t contributed an entry for the scarf-naming contest, you have 24 more hours left. The pattern is all ready to post, as soon as the prototype is finished. And it gets a name…

I thought it might be crochet, not knitting. Turns out it is. But there’s a lot more stuff.

I warn you, it’s funny but disturbing.