Needles & hooks

Warning, This is a Knitting Blog

I know, you think I’ve forgotten how to knit. Well, I haven’t. And here’s proof:

That’s a Swallow Hill beaded necklace with a few modifications. This time I wanted to make a rope length necklace, so I got an extra bag of beads. And I’m working it in the round so I don’t have to worry about the clasp cutting through the nylon cord. Also, that purple thread you see? Provisional cast on. To finish this puppy, I plan to sew the last row to the first row and have a seamless rope. No issues with cast on or cast off being too tight.

Based on my last one, it should be about 30 inches around. However, right now it’s barely filling a 24-inch circular (getting started was really hard, despite casting on with a much larger needle). So keep your fingers crossed for me. If it’s too short, my only option is to frog and redo. And that would SUCK!

Here’s a couple of close-ups:

In other knitting news, I oversee a small knitting group at work. A few of us get together at lunch over other week or so and I teach and advise. Today, I taught one of our summer students to knit. She picked up the slingshot cast on pretty easily but pulled the yarn way too tight. So I cast on for her and knit a few rows to give her something to work from and she tried both English and Continental styles of knitting. She had a lot of trouble managing the yarn and the needles English style. She did much better with Continental. She knit a couple of rows and then had to go, so we sent her off with the needles and the yarn to practice. But she was totally smiling.

Comments: 3 — Posted under: Knitting, Beading

Knitters ADD

So, I have 4 projects on the needles. But I’m starting this:

As for the dyeing, Cookie asked how I’d compare the Knit Picks to the Henry’s Attic yarns. My Knit Picks is probably a year old, so I’m not sure that it compares to what they’re sending now. It’s serviceable yarn, but it didn’t like the dye. The difference was very stark when I was dyeing them. And, it’s not superwash.

And Chris observed that Knit Picks needs to be washed to be properly examined. I didn’t notice that. Again, maybe it’s because I was using older stuff. But I’ve done a few dye jobs with it, and I haven’t noticed any blooming at all.

Comments: 3 — Posted under: Knitting, Dyeing

Once More Into The Dyepot

Finally got to dye up the yarn I wound with my Candy Striping technique. Here’s what it looked like after it dried:

And then in-skein:

Close-up:

For this one, I used Knit Picks Dye Your Own as a the base yarn. It behaved very differently from the yarn I dyed for Dye-O-Rama, which was Henry’s Attic Kona Superwash (from Diva Knitting). For one thing, the Knit Picks yarn didn’t bloom at all, so the size the strands before and after dyeing were the same. I’m much more confident that the knitting gauge that I based the striping on will work out on this one. However, it also took a lot longer to absorb the dye than the Kona did and as a result, a lot of dye crept up the damp strands and got into the white:

If you want to have an idea what the knitted yarn will look like, click here. Just remember that with the Candy Striping technique, the order of the stripes will be random.

Anyway, I’m done with dyeing for the time being. I have a bunch of big stuff coming up and as much fun as the dyeing is, I want to work on projects again. Maybe I finally finish Mermaid.

Comments: 4 — Posted under: Dyeing

Mermaids and Jellyfish

Spreadsheet version 0.91 has now been distributed. If you’re not knitting with it, you’re behind the times!

My spa weekend was lovely. Kim and I had chocolate-covered strawberries and champagne in the room, along with special robes and fuzzy slippers. And we spent about 8 hours in the spa, getting rubbed with various smelly things, laying in the sun in our robes, reading trashy novels, and eating lots of fruit. I got a pedicure with “Bitches Brew”, a lovely dark maroon. We walked into town and had fried brie on garlic bread. As we walked past the marina, we saw lots of small jellyfish in the water. We vowed only to swim in the pool.

Here’s giant strawberries in tuxedos:

I didn’t get any knitting done, but while we were down in the spa, housekeeping cleaned our sink counters and somehow managed to turn Kim’s bead and chain Y-necklace into jewelry vomit. She fussed with it for a while, before I insisted that I had the skills to untangle it. To help me with some “extra hands”, I pulled out the size 1 DPNs I’d brought with me to work on my Rock and Weave socks. When I opened some slack in one part of the knot, I’d slip a needle in to hold it. Eventually, I got it worked out. The moral of the story is “always bring your knitting bag”.

On the way home, we passed people flying kites at the state beach. My camera batteries died so I didn’t get many shots. But I’ll leave you with one. This was early on, and they kept putting out more kites.

I wonder if you could knit a kite. I wonder if I knit a kite if it would qualify me for one of the snark sites.

Comments: 2 — Posted under: Almost Random, Mermaid

Mermaid Spreadsheet Update

Having actually finished the body of Mermaid (even though I just frogged a couple dozen rows) I figured I’d proofed knitting the spreadsheet and finally got around to updating it last night. And I mailed it out this morning to my distribution lists. And then I went through my Inbox to send it out to people who have asked me for it in the last week or so. And noticed an e-mail from Dede with a correction that I had marked on the spreadsheet, but then couldn’t make sense of when I was entering it into Excel. So all the ones I mailed out are missing it! And my work version of Excel doesn’t like the file I made at home (pagination is all off), so I give up. I’m not mailing the updated update out until Sunday.

Instead, I’m heading down to a spa in Newport, RI for a relaxing getaway with a girlfriend. We’re both gonna have stuff rubbed and lay around in the sun. After a week of 12+ hour work days, this will be welcome relief. And what will I knit in the car? I don’t think it will be Mermaid. Maybe I’ll try to fix my Rock and Weave socks.

If you are a new Mermaid knitter, I’ve written out line-by-line instructions in a spreadsheet that is available in Excel or PDF formats. If you have the kit and would like a copy, send me an e-mail requesting it. I will reply with a challenge question based on the pattern to verify that you own it. After you answer the question, I’ll mail you the spreadsheet (after Sunday).

Comments: 3 — Posted under: Mermaid

Oddities of Yarn

First, I really don’t know what to say about this.

But about this, I’ll say: If you can dream it, you can knit it.

Comments: 5 — Posted under: Absurd, Dyeing

New media

Surfing around today, I found a link to Jelly Yarns. Basically plastic cord in fun colors. Aside from the purses on the site, I’m really not sure what you’d make with it. Maybe some funky fetish wear?

Comments: 4 — Posted under: Absurd

Bloomin’ Yarn!

After my yarn dried out, I had this lovely mess to wind into a skein:

It wasn’t as bad as it seems. I did a good job binding the subskeins and keeping them sorted. And I marked the “top” end so I was able to lay it all out and rewind it with a minimum of fuss. First I wound it into a ball because my ball winder made for convenient storage as I sorted out small bits of yarn vomit. Then I used a PVC niddy noddy to make it into this:

And a close-up:

I mailed it off to my swap buddy yesterday morning. I’m guessing she’ll get it tomorrow. It does stripe, and I believe that I wound it without errors, but the proof’s in the knitting. For those who don’t want to wait to see what it might look like, you can see the prototype I based my calculations on by clicking here.

The only thing I didn’t count on with all my copious planning was to see how the yarn would change after it was dyed. I bought fingering weight yarn to dye, but it bloomed quite a bit and almost looked worsted weight. On the one hand, I didn’t expect this, because I haven’t seen any change with the Knit Picks yarn I used to practice with. On the other hand, I’ve made and washed plenty of gauge swatches. I just didn’t even think about it.

So, I have one other skein to dye up for something else. It’s been sitting in a ziplock of water waiting for me to get a few free moments. But I worked 13.5 hours today, so all I could do when I got home was eat and watch some TV. I knit a few rows on Mermaid, but now I’m overcompensating and my gauge is really loose. I’ll have to knit a few more rows and see how it sits with me.

Comments: 5 — Posted under: Dyeing, Swaps!

Knitting, with a side of Spam

I have a comment-spam catcher installed on my blogging software (Akismet on WordPress). It’s very good at catching the bad comments and keeping them from seeing the light of day. It misses one from time to time, but that’s easy to deal with. But occasionally, there are false positives, so I make sure to glance through what it catches every few days so I don’t miss a comment from one of you.

Most of the spam is the usual variety — links for prescription drugs, online casinos, hair loss remedies. But lately I’ve gotten a few for soccer?!

Comments: 3 — Posted under: WordPress

Slluuurrrrppp!

I finally decided on my striping pattern and the colors I’m using and had to get my butt in gear because the yarn has to be mailed on Monday!!

This is what it looked like after I wound it up last night:

Today I mixed up more dye and dunked each subskein in a dish of water, dye, and vinegar. After my far too saturated navy blue, I started slowly. What I didn’t expect was that the “good” yarn I’d bought for the swap sucked up dye like it was going out of style.

What you see in this shot is the dark blue yarn in a dish of clear water. Water that only a couple of minutes before had been filled with dye as dark as the dish you see to its right. I’d pick up the yarn, squeeze out the extra water, swap the dishes, and put the yarn back in. In almost no time, the yarn soaked up all the dye and the water was clear.

As you can see in this next shot, after I repeated that process many times, it got darker. There’s the light blue I used too.

Several trips through the microwave and a bunch of rinsing and now it’s hanging up to dry. It’s dripping madly right now, causing my cat, Mough (with a fascination with water), to keep an eye on it and tell me about the progress. Hopefully it will be mostly dry tomorrow so that I can package it up.

Also tonight I ripped back Mermaid. Somehow, I have one more stitch than I’m supposed to here, but I don’t feel like ripping back further to figure out why. One little stitch won’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

And since I was in a ripping mood, I also ripped back my Rock and Weave socks. You may remember, they were too big when I tried them on. Well, I’ve ripped back several rows on the heel flap and I’m ready to turn the heel and get back to working on the foot again.

That’s all for today. Aside from finishing up the dyed skein, I have to do some real work tomorrow, so I won’t be having much fun. But I will leave you with one last piece of wisdom. If you’re dyeing and have vinegar in a glass and water in a glass and need to know which is which, don’t sniff too hard. The vinegar hurts.

Comments: 4 — Posted under: Mermaid, Rockin' Socks, Dyeing