Needles & Hooks

I spent most of hour 3 knitting on a ribbing to the entrelac basket-cap I made from an issue of Wool Gathering. And most of the second hour trying to do a sewn bind-off. I was following Nancy Wiseman’s technique in her book of finishing techniques, thinking that blind following would be fine. But after getting 10 stitches in twice and having a twisted purl bind-off instead of the desired knit rib bind-off, I gave up. I realized that I know kitchener and I can read my knitting, so I’m gonna stop reading the book. When my movie (Spellbound) ended, this is where it was:

This is a view of the mess that surrounds me:

Then I decided it was time to stop soaking things and block.

Here’s the Walker swatches:

Mermaid takes a spin:

Mermaid takes a nap:

Now, it’s back to finish that hat. Tivo has ER and Earl for me.

Okay, so there’s been 1/2 an episode of SNL, 2 episodes of the Daily Show, and dinner.

One frogged project that I lost interest in:

Two swatches for The Walker Treasury Project that are currently soaking before blocking:

And Mermaid is taking a swim:

Mough is wishing for 24 hours of cat:

It needs to be blocked. But it needs no more knitting. It took me a year, but it’s done. Now, I’m off to finalize the spreadsheet!

I think it must have been so overwhelming laying out all my UFOs that I haven’t been able to post! But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on them. So I’ll try to show you what I’ve been doing.

I sewed the shoulder and collar seams and finished the body of Mermaid with the applied i-cord around the front lapels. The i-cord turned out to be quite pleasant. Here’s what she looks like:

I had a long plane trip, so I started on the sleeve. And then I spent the afternoon at the Boston Knit Out and Crochet Too! working on it more. I love the sleeve cap shaping:

The weather wasn’t the greatest for knitting outdoors. It sprinkled a little and was very humid. Sometimes the sun beat down, sometimes there was a bit of a breeze. I won a hat pattern as a door prize and one of the sponsors was giving away a small skein of red Manos cotton. I competed in both the fastest knitter and fastest crocheter contests, coming in 2 stitches behind the winners in each. And as I sat in the audience knitting on Mermaid, I held it up during the Show and Tell and a number of people came over to ask for the pattern.

Just a few more rows on this sleeve, and I can start the second.

More former UFOs tomorrow.

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.

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).

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.

Just wanted to show you what I did with the M&M’s the other night. It’s all wound up and ready to go. It’s soaking in water right now. I will probably do the dyeing tomorrow. And I’m working on one other stripe pattern. I “swatched” two up with the perforated paper and dye samples and they’re stewing for a bit while I decide.

Update: I looked closely at Mermaid. Here she is:

So, it seems that my gauge took a turn for the tight after the last dark purple hem gusset. I’m guessing that’s because I could finally see the end in sight and I was madly knitting to get there. Fast and tight. And looking at it, and how much denser the fabric is compared to the front and how much shorter (I lined up the bottom hems, which you can’t see), I think I will rip back to that gusset and re-finish from there. I don’t think I can block that side that much bigger, so I’m not gonna even try. It should only take a couple of days.

Also, in case you’re wondering what the white yarn is — it’s holding live stitches for the i-cord bind-off.

I spent the weekend cleaning up around the house. The last few weeks have had some travel and some stress and things were piling up. And I needed the house to be functional.

One of the things I unearthed was my May Project: Colorswap package from Jen of MonkeyKnits.

Here’s what I saw when I opened the box:

And inside was a pile of goodies. Mini planters of Parsley and Thyme; a Feng Shui candle; two gorgeous colors of Malabrigo; a green Chibi; a pretty journal; some great little flower magnets (Jen, did you make these?); some fruity ice cubes; a pair of fuzzy socks; and some fab stitch markers (Jen, did you make these?!):

Some close ups under the Ott-Lite:
Rainforest Malabrigo (green and purple!):

Olive Malabrigo:

The stitch markers (is that jasper?):

Thank you, Jen!

This photo might tell you what I did with the rest of my weekend:

Yep, I played with my Jacquard acid dyes. I dyed up a pile of ~20 ft sample skeins in all my colors to play around with. This post is already kind of long, so I’ll describe my colors and process in more detail tomorrow. But why did I dye such long skeins? So I could do this:

Using a piece of perforated paper (commonly used in cross-stitch), I carefully trimmed the sides to expose a set of holes. Then, after winding all my samples into small butterflies, I wound colors around the paper to try out different striping patterns. I used one strand of yarn to represent one row of a knitted stripe and used the perforation notches at the sides to hold each strand in place. Obviously, this pattern is rather simple, and won’t be one getting sent off to my swap partner, but I wanted to show you how it worked. After I eat a bit, I’m going to spent most of tonight trying out different stripes.

Also, about yesterday’s post. From Chris’ comment, I can tell she figured it out, but Mari put words to it. My gauge on Mermaid got tighter as I knit it. So the left front is shorter (and denser) than the right front. Given my above activities (and a lack of good will toward Mermaid at the moment), I haven’t looked closely to figure out how far back I need to rip it to make things right. At least back to the second armhole. Expect to see another post like this soon.

It’s glorious otherwise:

Oh, and for those wondering, my LYS is Wild and Woolly in Lexington, MA. Aside from being staffed by friendly people that remember you, it’s also just about exactly halfway between my work and home on my preferred commute route. It’s a little too far out to be near a train, so it might be challenging for you to get to when you visit, Jocelyn. Ava, no it’s not online, but they do make good use of their e-mailing list. And Mari, didn’t realize you were local! Anyway, I’m sure there will be lots of Jaeger left, I didn’t even touch the bags of 4-Ply. And there was at least one bag of a Matchmaker purple that I left because it was a different dye lot. However, I didn’t see much Rowan and I know the reason they’re no longer going to carry the Jaegers they had on sale was that they are replacing them with Rowans.