geekin’ on yarn, parenting, and whatever else comes up.

Holy cow, y’all. Seriously. What a month this has been. First of all, I show you the important stuff.

Finished Object(s)!

Nutkin socks for The Sainted Husband.

I knit these two at the same time on magic loop with Addi lace needles in an effort to avoid second sock syndrome.

This was one of those yarns that called out to be purchased with no project in mind. It’s Fleece Artist Cherry Tree Hill in a colorway that just had to be my husband’s — Java, it’s called. Anyway, it had to do with coffee, and if TSH could mainline that stuff, he totally would. Therefore, it was a no-brainer that he had to have something made from this colorway of yarn.

I absolutely loved knitting with this colorway. The tiny splotches of burgundy, and the continually shifting greys, browns, greens, blues, and shadings were soothing and yet stimulating at the same time. I was very surprised to be so engaged with colors so subtle, but now that I know I may have to try some other similar colors.

Toe detail; very cool method of short row toes and heels is documented in the pattern. I found the pattern via the wonder that is Ravelry, and it’s published by the folks at Knitzi. (see link below)

• Pattern: Nutkin Sock (Ravelry link) or Nutkin Socks (actual pattern download link from Knitzi - and if I ever knit with DPNs again, I want one of their DPN project savers!)
• Yarn: Fleece Artist merino sock, Cherry Tree Hill Supersock, in Java
• Needles: 32″ Addi Turbo Lace Circulars, US 3? 2?
• Notes: For whatever reason, the first time I sat down to knit the heels on these socks, reading the instructions I was totally baffled. Ultimately I put them down and restarted with a short row heel that I already knew. Then, when it came time to knit the toes, you repeat the same process as outlined for the heels, and suddenly it was very clear to me and I couldn’t figure out why I’d been so stymied the first round through. Just goes to show you how differently the brain can operate (or not, as the case may be) on any given day.

Later this week I’ll show you some progress on my Noni Medallion Travel Bag, and explain why these Nutkin socks were knitted largely in Alexandria Hospital. (everybody’s fine, so don’t worry. It’s just been, as I say, quite an adventure.)

Curtains, part the first, for our front window that has plagued my OMG WE ARE EXPOSED sensibilities for the four years we’ve been living here:

Pardon the light.

I went back to get another three yards of this fabric while it was still on sale and naturally they were out of it. ~headdesk~ So either our back window (that is 180 degrees/immediately across from this one in the same room)  will have to have different fabric, or I will have to see if a different branch of the same fabric store still has this particular colorway. (they still have it in blacks and greys, which is stunning in its own way but not so ideal for this room)

I also picked up some fabric to attempt a One Block Wonder quilt today, although naturally I fouled up and didn’t get enough yardage. Grr. To steal a phrase from some dear friends: Myriad Things That Thwart Me!

Max consents to be the gratuitous cat photo for the day:

This got much wordier than I originally intended, so advance apologies.

Over the years (which makes me sound like I mean more than the 10-odd I’m actually referring to), I have surfed about through eBay, thrift stores, antique shops and yard sales, snapping up anything vaguely quilt-related that was scrappy, included feedsack fabrics, and/or was under $50. While I love quilting, quilts, applique and the other assorted needlearts, I find that piecing the sorts of quilts I love most (see above re: scrappy, feedsacks, etc.) is not my favorite part of the process. The actual quilting, however, IS, being the same sort of soothing repetitive hand motion that knitting brings to the table.

(That brown and white print in the upper right hand corner is one of my favourite fabrics in this quilt top)

Generally, because I have my hands into so many different crafty pursuits and only so many minutes in a day in which I might indulge them, I have machine quilted most of my own projects. All the while, though, I have been stashing away quilt tops found here and about, and got it into my head that while machine quilting would be faster, what I really wanted was to hand quilt them.

(This shot was an accident, but I love it — my current camera is not an SLR, so getting this kind of depth of field on purpose can be sort of a crapshoot.)

Certainly my blog presence in 2007 — or rather, the lack thereof — is an excellent demonstration of roads paved with intentions galore, so what with one thing and another, I never seemed to get around to these beauties.

Cleaning up my creative space most recently, however, seems to have triggered the impetus needed to get my hands into the quilts at long last. The quilt in these photos was an eBay purchase, a 1930’s apple core charm quilt that I got for under $25, WITH shipping. How can you walk away from that?

(I have a thing for that cherries fabric. It was the first core I quilted because it kept catching my eye.)

As a legacy from my mother and gifts from my Dad, I have several options for quilting frames; the largest of these, a Grace company frame that was my mother’s, is still in pieces in our garage, yet another casualty of good intentions but no actual activity. However, my dad and stepmom – knowing that I love the needlearts and being thoughtful — brought me a floor-standing quilt frame some time ago that they found at a church sale. (along with a box of quilting fabric squares that I need to show you another time.)

I found, however, that the floor stand made me lean forward in a way that hurt my back, and I tired very quickly. So I removed the hoop from the stand, and found it was much easier to quilt when I held the whole thing in my lap. The hoop that came with the floor stand, however, was too large for me to reach all the fabric in a given hooping.

(Brutus is “helping”.)

Here is what I’ve learned about hand quilting in your lap that I didn’t know before — when choosing a hoop for hand quilting, the entire hoop needs to fit between your elbow and your fingertips, if you lay it on your arm, so that you know you can easily reach all the fabric in the hoop at any given time. Sure, it means you reposition the hoop fairly frequently, but this is much less of an annoyance than I expected it might be. (Note to self: take picture of the hoop thing.) Ultimately I ended up purchasing a simple wooden hoop, 16″ size, and it is working perfectly with much greater comfort than anything else I’ve tried so far.

 (About two minutes after the last photo)

You will note that behind Brutus there it is grey and rainy. While our temps here have been very spring-like, it caused some interesting weather patterns to blast through last night, creating a state of minor anxiety in our house as to whether or not there was a tornado in our backyard. (The answer was, ” sort of” — it didn’t touch down and lasted about a minute. But it was still scary for an area that doesn’t typically get swirly weather.)

So I’ve gotten a little sidetracked since we last chatted; any guesses as to what with?

I’ll have you know that taking photos of your own fingers involves some creative use of Yoga and flexibility. I took several pictures to try and show you the tips of my first two fingers, there. That first image was the best one for showing you the callouses, but then I wanted to put this next one up, too, simply because I liked the composition and was sort of proud of myself that it actually turned out, given the contortions I had to make in order to get the image:

You get on a bloggy roll, post nearly every day for a whole week! Then the weather gets crappy and your stash of photos taken on the last good light day is depleted.

Then you go on a startitis binge and have nothing really to show except MORE Lizard Ridge squares (boring), the rolled-edge beginnings of massive colorwork bag that really is nothing much to look at yet; and no progress on Husband Sox.

Also I was going to have a drawing for commenters on a post a while back — but there were only four comments made! So I am stash-diving to find yarny goodness for those commenters, since it seems silly to choose only one out of four. (I think maybe I waited thinking there might be more peeps than that, since last time I did a giveaway it brought out the lurkers and how. But alas, I really have depleted my readership since going dormant for so much of last year. No one to blame but myself for it, but it does make  me a wee bit sad. I console myself with the fact that some of you are still out there reading! And therefore I must find you yarn. YARN POUR TOUT LE MONDE! /GraceJones)

I did spend all day President’s Day sewing curtains for our big bay window in the great room, which is still in chaos because I chose to sew instead of tidy.

Do posts with no pictures annoy you? Or is SOME rambling better than NO rambling, so long as photos are forthcoming without too much delay?

Choose the musical version wisely, lest your earworm become an 80’s has-been rather than a 70’s rock deity. (ETA: Evidently Wendy and I shared the same sentiments towards weather. :))

Outside, the trees, bushes, roads and walkways are encased in a fairly icky ice storm. I discovered that it was perhaps a bit more than slush when I stepped outside our front door yesterday, took one step, and promptly fell on my arse.

Oh. Perhaps we’ll add salt then, aye? ~sheepish~ Also, I have a bruise on my forearm that should look pretty spectacular ’round about tomorrow.

A box of Morton’s kosher salt later, and our walkway and steps are once again navigable without having to bring crampons and stout rope along, but the storm has also brought with it very grey skies, making photography for my planned duvet tutorial a touch difficult. That may be pushed off to next week if the weather continues this way, or I might be able to pull it off over the weekend. I won’t leave it off, though.

Instead, today I give you: A new project. (Because one can never have too many projects on the needles at one time, I say.)

I might have gotten a bit carried away with the grey winter when I decided on color for this bag — although I prefer to believe I am influenced by the colors of belly dance costumes and rajasthani dancers.

I substituted Ella Rae Classic wool in lieu of the suggested Cascade 220, because that’s what Knit Happens carries and I wanted brighter colors for slightly less cost. The Ella Rae I know is lovely because I’m using it for Tom’s skully scarf, it’s at least a dollar less per skein than the Cascade, and it has 219 yards to a ball, making it close enough to equal to be a score in my book. (By the way, I don’t always feel that cheaper is better, but sometimes it just makes sense, all other items being equal, to save as much as you can, wherever you can.) ETA: Thanks, Rosemary, for pointing out that the Ella Rae in fact IS equal to Cascade 220 in all things except price and name. Score!

Thus far I have about six rows of the bottom of the bag completed. Twice, in fact — the first iteration had to be ripped out because I forget that my concentration really can’t be interrupted in the middle of a row, because whenever it is, I WILL persist in effing it up.

This is one of the first patterns I’ve worked with for which I have a bit of a negative preliminary review, although my complaints are really minor in the grand scheme of things:

My biggest complaint so far with this pattern is that the chart is really tiny and difficult to read, and I would like very much to have an enlarged copy of the chart made so I can read it more easily. But the copyright is laid out VERY explicitly in the pattern booklet that there can be NO reproduction of ANY kind for ANY reason — which I take to mean very clearly that you cannot make enlargements for personal purposes. I’m actually pretty frustrated that there’s not an allowance for that in the pattern booklet, but I know designers are very concerned about unauthorized reproductions of their patterns, and rightly so, as it’s a commonplace practice that does take money from their pockets that most can ill afford. But it still bothers me and is causing me difficulty in enjoying the knitting of the pattern. I really really want the finished product, though, so I imagine I will figure out a way to slog through it.

Another bit to this piece is that the bag handles used in the example are way more than I’m willing to spend, after spending as much as it takes for the yarn to make the bag to begin with. $50 for the handles alone seems pretty darned excessive to me, so I won’t be using those handles. I’m aware of course that you needn’t make any given pattern as it is made in the sample, and that in fact shop owners bemoan the fact that people seldom wish to deviate from what’s in the photograph. It’s an easy fix as well in terms of not using the suggested finishing item, but I think it’s still a legitimate personal annoyance to mention.

What will I use for handles instead? I don’t know, I haven’t decided yet. I think I may actually go the route of heavy duty webbed strapping going all the way under the bag, to give additional support to the bottom of the bag and a bit of added structure to the bag itself. I may improvise using leather belting instead of webbing, I don’t know, the ideas are still sort of tumbling around in my head. But there you have my wee bit of brightness for the grey winter.

Does this count as an F.O?

The first finished…I can’t say square, because it isn’t, it’s a rectangle. Unit? Anyway, it’s the first one-of-those I’ve completed for this project, so it feels as though it ought to be a finished object, even though technically it’s not.

This is the last time I’ll subject you to this particular square, though, since I’m sure you’re tired of looking at it already. But there’s that one, all finished, and I hope you’ll agree that Cat Bordhi’s instructions for picking up wraps in short rows worked to fix my previous issues that caused all the frogging.

Somewhat related to that — same project, different yarn — is some stash enhancement!

Thus far the Kureyon count stands at about 12 different colorways for the Lizard Ridge — there may be the odd ball floating around that I’m not sure of, but I think in the Great Sort-Of-A-Cleanup I did the other week I managed to gather all the yarn into one place, so that’s probably accurate. If I want to stick to my original stated plan (on which I am already behind, natch),  I have another three units to complete before the end of February. What do you think — can I do it?

I am totally cheating with this photo, because I didn’t want to give you all the blather to follow without SOMEthing to look at, even if it’s only an obligatory Lizard Ridge image. (but here’s a hint — that square? DONE.)

So here’s what’s good: WordPress has upgrades to fix some security holes, etcetera, and the latest of these was released about a week ago.

What I did: Upgraded my WordPress. What I did NOT do: Remember to save all my theme information duplicated someplace else BEFORE I upgraded. What’s frustrating? My WordPress admin page STILL says I have an upgrade that needs to get done. ~headdesk~

There was a very scary few minutes there tonight where the whole site was blown away, everything looked like hell, and BOY-HOWDY-I-tell-you-whut*, there were some interesting curse words flowing from this here YarnGeek for a bit. But all now seems to be functioning okay, the headers are still rotating and seem to be the correct images, so let me know if you see something out of whack, but I will call it fixed the noo. (also, I sense A Disturbance In The Force that means there should be new header images getting added in over the next little while, so if you’re the sort who refreshes the page to entertain yourself or to find a header that better matches your mood, have some fun with that sometime after Thursday, won’t you?)

This week’s agenda includes a duvet-making tutorial for Elspeth (now with miniature duvets!), some more information on my local thrift store haunt for Sarah, a finished Lizard Ridge square rectangle, some gifty yarn for my three or four remaining readers who commented on the post in which I begged for comments, and a new project on the needles with some new yarn to go with it. I was on a roll there last week with the blogging, and I MEANT to have a post for you every day, but I fell short of that (somewhat lofty) goal. I’m not making promises because life is bound to interfere, but just check back now and again, as the knitting/blogging mojo has definitely returned, and I hope to have lots more to say and share this year than last.

I wish the camera had not been scattered in all its parts to the four winds prior to the deconstruction of my last thrift store sweater purchase.

We have a very large thrift store down Route 1 South from where I live in Alexandria, Virginia. I believe it goes by the inspired name of Virginia Thrift. Remind me, please, that I ought to take a photo of it for you.

At any rate, I tend to do whirlwind tours through the place, digging only briefly at the back right corner of the store where they keep the grab-bags of crafty ingredients and fabric remnants, and then on the way to the registers I go down the aisle set up for men’s sweaters.

On my last trip down that aisle, I found a very large man’s cardigan that had obviously been hand knit. (ETA: The whole point of the title to this post is that the sweater reminded me very much of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and was even the proper pale blue for a non-red-cardigan day in his Neighborhood.)

I am relatively certain the yarn is wool, because the sweater was ever so slightly felted before I started de-constructing it — a process which initially brought me a fair portion of pain and suffering, because I, ostensibly a knitter myself, forgot that if there are decreases anywhere in the knitting, you really need to pick apart and unravel from the *beginning*/top of the knitting, not the end/hem. ~facepalm~

In any event, cordial relations with ballwinder and knitting sense restored, there later came this:

This being a somewhat startling quantity of tweedy blue yarn of indeterminate fiber.

Anybody care to hazard a guess as to whether or not it’s wool?

This is Max:

Max would like it to stop raining now, please, so that he can chitter at the birdies some more. Max also is in the window that overlooks the pool in our backyard, shuttered for mechanical problems and the winter, which resembles the frog pond my knitting is about to become. (Stretching Segue, meet YarnGeek. YarnGeek, meet Stretching Segue.)

I am making the Elizabeth Zimmerman saddle-shouldered aran cardigan for TSH. It began thus:

The front — note steek stockinette portion in center — and the back:

Classic Elite Skye Tweed, because Jared’s was so lovely in the same yarn, and because WEBS had it on sale. Look closely, because all that knitting is going to get frogged.

There are a number of issues, most of which aren’t readily visible in those images because to confront them directly even in photography was too much for my delicate sensibilities. Chief amongst my troubles with this iteration is that I made mistakes in cabling that I was able to drop down and fix, only to discover yet more issues, etc., and on until I’d dropped down so many times that it all just looks a right mess. I don’t care if blocking would bring the huge ladders thus created back in line, I just can’t stand looking at it another minute.

Secondly, I forgot when I cast on for this sweater that you pick up stitches for garter stitch edging all the way around the cardigan post-steek. See the twisted ribbing at the bottom of that?

Yeah.

So, it’s getting frogged. As is the Lizard Ridge Square. Sigh.

True to Renee’s advice, I consulted Cat Bordhi’s New Pathways for Sock Knitters book for her instructions on picking up wraps and I agree that this should solve my issue with Lizard Ridge. So maybe I can show you more than one square in the not-so-distant future, eh?

I leave you with today’s drug of choice:

Crack, I tell you! (Dear Peninah, THANK YOU for introducing me to Vosges! Are you still out there so I can send you your bag I promised way back when?)