Needles & hooks

Pocket Blog

I haven’t seen anyone post about these yet, so it could be that I have my head in a hole, but I’m sharing anyway. If you’ve already heard of them, pat me on the head and scroll down to the actual knitting content below.

From time to time I talk to people about this blog and there’s never anything convenient to write the whole URL down on, so I just offer up “you can google ‘needles & hooks’ and I’ll pop right up”. When I was planning to go see The Yarn Harlot, and planning to bring my Giant Glove, I decided to splurge on something a friend of mine had shown me, fun little mini-photo cards: Moo Cards. You upload photos, you pick what you want the back to say, you give them your credit card, and $25 and about a week later, you get 100 fun little cards.

I picked a selection of images of my finished knitted items (a sample of the blog, right in a box):

Sadly, they didn’t arrive in time for my Harlot visit, but next time you see me, I can hand you one. They really are tiny:

Now for the knitting content…

Most of the stuff I bought at Webs will be used as raffle prizes when I ask you all to donate to my Breast Cancer 3-Day Walk one of these days soon, so I’m not going to show it to you now. But I did get a few things for projects. Including a pile of white cotton for this:

That’s a swatch for this vest, which I’m knitting long as a beach cover-up for a friend. I’ve only got 3 weeks before she goes on vacation, so you’ll be seeing a lot of it.

Comments: 5 — Posted under: Knitting

And the answer is “no”

I started toe-up 2-at-a time, just to see if I could actually make a pair. I ran out just about where I needed to turn the heels. So, not enough yarn. I think I’ll take this with me to Webs tomorrow night and see if I can find something suitable for a solid color. Then maybe do feet solid and cuffs fun, or stripe it.

Comments: 2 — Posted under: Knitting

Yarn Intrigue

Is there enough of this yarn:

To make a pair of baby socks to match the Baby Surplice Jacket and Hat I posted yesterday? There’s 10 grams. It’s anyone’s guess.

Comments: 2 — Posted under: Knitting, Absurd

It’s the small things

I spent the last 2 days running errands and doing chores so that I could spend all of today “ass-sitting”. A pleasant pastime involving me, a couch, my Tivo, and knitting. It was foiled around 8am when our listing service called to tell me that they wanted to show my house at 11:30am. So the first few hours of my day were spent making the house presentable and then making myself scarce. But come 12:30, after a little lunch, ass it was.

Now, it’s not as ambitious as when I did the 24 Hours of Knitting, but I’m still hoping to knock a few things out.

First up, the cardigan set for my niece. I think last time we saw it, there were a lot of ends and the hat still needed pom-poms. Well, it’s all done now. It’s been done for a while, really. All that I needed to do today was take photos to show you:

The sleeves are a little poofy because I could have set them in better. But I don’t care.

And the hat:

The next thing I finished is the Baby Surplice Jacket I’ve been working on. I showed you that before. But it was missing a hat and buttons. Here’s the finished set:

What’s been holding this one up? This:

I needed to pick buttons. And not just any buttons. There’s a band of button holes around the bottom edge that allow it to be fastened at any size. So I didn’t want to sew the buttons on anywhere, I wanted cufflink-style buttons. But the best buttons I found weren’t shank-style, so I had to get creative to join two together. Some quality time with some 6-strand embroidery floss gave me this:

What did I do? I cut off a length of floss, about 18 inches, and threaded it through the holes on the button so that I had equal lengths of floss coming out the back side of the button. I separated each side into 3 sets of 2 strands each, and then matched each pair with one from the other side. That gave me 3 sets of 4 strands each. I braided these for about 1/2 inch. Then I separated them back and threaded each back through opposite holes on the back of the 2nd button. Each went around the front and back out the other hole. Back on the back side, I tied all the ends together in a knot, making sure everything was tight.

The next step was to give the braid some strength and to make sure that the knot doesn’t unravel. To do this, I tied the two ends together repeatedly, switching sides of the braid each time I tied them. I slowly climbed the knots up the length of the braid, back to the first button. This created a solid rope-like connection between the two buttons.

At this end, I could probably have cut off the strands and all would be fine. But for some added security, I separated the strands back out into sets of two and then ran each one back through the “rope” several times before snipping it off.

(p.s. for some reason, WordPress overwrote my theme with the default. I’m not sure why. It’s fixed now. But I am a little worried. Maybe that’s karma’s way of telling me I need to upgrade it!)

Comments: 7 — Posted under: Knitting

Excel is my Master

Announcing the availability of another Hanne Falkenberg spreadsheet. This time for LaStrada, in the medium size. I didn’t create this one, I’m just distributing it, since I have the infrastructure in place. Anyway, if you’d like a copy, the instructions are always the same: e-mail me and I’ll send you a challenge question to verify that you own the pattern.

Comments: 0 — Posted under: Knitting

Short rows? Short rows! (an update)

Old post:
Okay, I’m having a senior moment. And I’m not even that old.

Anyway, in the last week or so, one of the blogs I follow pointed to another one that had a neat short-row technique. It might have been a way to do toes on a sock? All I can remember is that the punchline was “just try it”. Anyway, that pink and white thing I’m experimenting with uses short rows at the color change and I’m trying to figure out a way to make those gaps more manageable. I got it in my head that I should try that method, but now that I look for it, I can’t remember what I did with the link. And googling isn’t helping. So, if you have any clue what I’m talking about, if this rings a bell for you, please leave me a comment.

thanks!

Update:

The internet does it again. Vaguely describe something enough and someone will recognize what you are talking about. In this case, Donna pointed me to the post I was looking for. I should have been a little more clear, I do know how to do short rows with the wrap or gap techniques. What I was looking for was a non-hole, non-wrap technique I’d come across recently. And it was this post, about the Sherman toe with “encroachments”.

But thanks also to Patsy and Marianne for suggesting a few things. I’m off to go play with some scrap yarn.

Comments: 5 — Posted under: Knitting, Almost Random

What to do after a big FO?

Seriously? You want a giant glove pattern?!

I was half thinking about putting something together. Even sketched something out. But then I’d have to knit a prototype to test the pattern. And really, I don’t have that in me. And where would it end? Because a giant glove would need a giant hat. And a giant sock. And a giant scarf. And while “Knitting for Giants” is probably a new niche for knitting books, I think I’ll leave the giant pattern writing to others.

Instead, I started thinking about what to do next. I still have a pile of FOs that need attention. Some much less than others. But I figured that after finishing something so big, I really deserved to start something new. And while my realtor was having my first open house, I found myself returning things near a Fabric Place. So I wandered in and looked around at the yarn. And some ideas I’ve had for a pattern to support my Breast Cancer 3-Day Walk started percolating. And I bought some swatching yarn.

I went over to a friend’s house to pick up my cat, who was banished for the weekend, and sat and watched a movie with her. And hand-wound the new yarn. And started swatching:

But that’s all you get.

Comments: 3 — Posted under: Knitting

Talk to the Hand

I’m thrilled that so many of you love my giant glove!

In response to some of your questions in the comments:

Where can you get your own hand chair?
You can get your own here in a variety of colors. There are other places too, just Google “hand chair”, but that one seemed the most affordable. Sorry, you’ll have to knit your own glove though. And no, I don’t have a pattern, I literally made it up as I went along.

How long did it take to knit?
In all, it probably took me a month to knit, in fits and spurts. Remember - big needles! I’d work on it a few hours a day while I was page proofing over the last month. My eyes were reading, my hands were knitting. Throughout this process, my desk was littered with marking pens, empty Pepsi bottles, drafts of the document I was working on, stitch markers, and random pieces of my Options set.

Will there be a spreadsheet?
Ha haha ahahha ahahahh ahahha hahah hah ahhah ahah…ha.

Will you go into mass production?
See above.

Second glove syndrome?
For me this is a one of a kind. And really, there’s only left hands. Although, my co-worker brought a second one from home for the photo shoot, which was at a local farm ice cream stand. And when he set it down, before I dressed it, I did gasp “Oh no! That’s the other hand!”.

Is that the largest glove ever knitted?
Until someone proves me wrong, I’m going to say it is. As for the record books, someone should start one. Wonder if we can get sponsorship? The Rowan Book of World Knitting Records?

Who has “a few” hand chairs?
My co-worker. Quite a wacky guy. I could tell you stories. Never seen a food item he wouldn’t eat (we got him Bacon Cheesecake at The Cheesecake Factory once and he loved it). Has an office filled with wacky toys (I got him a chicken chucker, he’s got a box of wind-up walking sushi). Freely provides food to anyone and everyone (there’s always something chocolate in his office). Part of the team of “food scientists” that I hang out with at work (we don’t work with food, we just try every new candy and cookie offering out there - in the name of science!; we make liquid nitrogen ice cream regularly). I got him a gummi t-bone steak that has a place of honor on his wall. I adore him.

Why did Hillary climb Everest?
Because it was there.

Some Notes
Sadly, cameras are not allowed at my workplace, so there aren’t any “in-progress” shots. It was quite a production. Almost everyone who passes my office notices the hand, many of them noticed the glove-in-progress as well. In the ~10-month gap between fingers 1&2 and the rest, everyone was quiet about it. Then I started finger #3. And by finger #4, a couple of people asked if I was working on it again. One of my supervisors even came by one morning as I was putting it back on the hand and expressed relief that it wasn’t gone for good — he’d passed my office the night before and noticed it missing because I’d taken it off to do some knitting at home.

This effort highlighted the beliefs about yarn in the world. One person who stopped by said “Wow, that’s a lot of wool”. Yeah, because wool would be affordable! Someone else said “well, it would be cheaper if you used cotton, right?” Um, no. No, this would not have been possible without the wonders of modern plastic. With Caron acrylic, the total cost was around $30. However, wool would have been a lot more pleasant to knit. The yarn was absolute murder on my hands.

Finally, I have to give a real shout-out to my Knit Picks Options needles. Doing this without an interchangeable set would have been a royal pain. I used (and broke) both of my 60″ cables (and successfully super-glued them back together). I swapped out my working size 11 tips with smaller ones to move stitches onto a holding needle so that I could fit it back over to try it on for sizing. I used (and broke) a smaller cable when I was knitting across a smaller number of stitches at the narrowest point of ribbing. The only thing that would have made the Options better was if I had a cable coupler - because I really did need more than one 60″ cable to get it around the palm when working that part of it.

Comments: 14 — Posted under: Knitting, Absurd

Why Hillary Climbed Everest…

Now I show you the secret project I’ve been working on at work while I’ve been page proofing.

A co-worker had a bunch of these:

And so I did this:

There’s a lot of photos, so I’m using a cut. Click for the full story…

Update (5/2/07) Welcome everyone who is coming from the Yarn Harlot! Thanks for all your wonderful comments. Before you ask questions, read the ones I’ve already answered: Click here for Giant Glove FAQ
Read the rest of this entry »

Comments: 204 — Posted under: Knitting, Absurd

Hour 27

Okay, I have plans to be good and do house-selling stuff all weekend, so I decided to extend the knit-fest until bed tonight.

Since my last update, I’ve sewn all the seams on the baby cardigan set from Knit It! that I finished knitting so long ago. Good thing it turns out that it’s huge, so my niece will have plenty of time to grow into it still.

Here it is all ready for a collar and buttons:

Of course, that’s only half the story…

I ran out just after dinner and bought buttons for both this cardigan and the Surplice Jacket. So tonight will be a night of finishing. If I get finished with those, maybe I’ll allow myself to start on a hat for Surplice. Or another Walker Project swatch.

Wish me luck.

Comments: 4 — Posted under: Knitting, Almost Random