Post-Christmas Knitting

The week after Christmas has been filled with Alias and knitting.

Brooks Farm Scarf

Like the Neverending Scarf over at The Knitty Gritty, my scarf from Brooks Farm Duet went on and on and on. I finally decided I was tired of it and it was long enough, so I bound off and blocked it. I worked it in the Ostrich Plume pattern from Barbara Walker's Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns (pg. 278 in the new edition). A closeup of the stitch can be seen here. It doesn't show up as beautifully in this two-tone yarn as it would in a solid color, but I still love it. Finished, blocked length: 51". I probably have about half of the hank left. I haven't decided what to do with it yet.

Red-and-Black Sweater

I finally swatched for the Red-and-Black sweater. (Bigger picture available if you click the photo.) Maybe it needs a name. I'm incorporating a pattern from Kim Salazar's book, The New Carolingian Modelbook: Counted Embroidery Patterns from Before 1600. I fell in love with the Star and Leaf shirt yoke and its matching band and it looks great in this yarn (a Webs purchase this summer). Right now I'm at a mind-numbing 9 stitches per inch, and the pattern repeat dictates that I can get a 40" or 48" sweater. 48" would be way too big and 40" might be a touch small (or I'll have to wear a lightweight shirt!), so I'm going to try swatching again on slightly bigger needles to see if I can get something in between.

I put the whole chart into Excel a while ago and started to play with it again now that I had a gauge. My mom and I sat down with the computer and Sheila McGregor's Traditional Scandinavian Knitting and sketched out the whole chart, front and back. (I don't have a current way to take a screen shot of the chart, so you'll just have to wait and see it.) Challenges I forsee in this project:

• School starts January 10 and will be even busier than last semester, with less knitting time.
  
• Once I start this, I'm not going to want to put it down.
  
• Knitting time that's meant to be a relaxing break from school is not conducive to fair isle.
  
• Doing the yoke will require some sort of intarsia in the round technique, which I have no idea how to do.
  
• I'm going to have to cut steeks. I don't know how to do this, but I have a capable teacher, so that will be ok when I get there.

This may turn into a mother-daughter project and we'll each have one.

It's going to be a fabulous sweater, and the yarn is great, once it's washed. We saw this yarn in the warehouse at Webs and passed it by because it was really scratchy, but then found a swatch and had to go back (we each got a few cones, I think). It's very stiff before washing, but after two washes, my swatch is getting quite soft.

When can I cast on?

Goddess Shawl

I now have the necessary needles for my shawl from the Goddess Knitting class I took at Circles this spring. This will be a möbius shawl with a circumference of about 54". Since I need to knit both edges of the strip at the same time, that means about 108" of knitting per round. I have one 40" needle on each "edge" and just work around and around. I cast on (provisional crochet, 168 sts) and knit a few rounds, then took it out because I thought I had gotten it twisted around the beginning of the round. So I took it all out and started over and got it right this time. I even figured out how to tell which needle to pick up next at the beginning of each half-round, because I have a choice of two, and choosing incorrectly would lead to that extra twist.

I'm only knitting (no purling) on this project. This leads to two interesting things. First, this will be really easy to knit during school -- no thinking. Unfortunately, this project will become bulky pretty quickly, so it may not be the easiest thing to drag around with me. Second, since there's a half twist in the knitting, when you look at the shawl, one half is in stockinette and the other in reverse stockinette. I can't photograph it very well yet, but maybe after a few more rounds it will be easy to see and I'll try again. I think this will give a really interesting look to the shawl. We'll see how it turns out.

Socks!

And finally, I whipped out these cute socks in about a week around Christmas. They were the May 2004 Sock of the Month from theknitter.com. They're knit in Mountain Colors Bearfoot, which is soft and cuddly (60% superwash wool, 25% mohair, 15% nylon). I loved the three easy patterns and the sock and the lucious yarn. I'd wear them every day, but I don't want to wear them out!

More socks are on the way when school starts. I should have a couple pairs of heavy-weight socks that are close to finished that I'll try to finish up during group meeting. It's kind of disappointing to make plain, stockinette socks, but it really does make those meetings more enjoyable, and I'm sure my toes will appreciate my work when the socks are done.

Christmas Sweaters

I'm feeling a little lazy about blogging, so I'll just give the Christmas update today...

My mom always knits for her granddaughters (my nieces), and this year the two older girls got sweaters and the younger one got a poncho. Poncho pictures weren't possible (Sadie wasn't too cooperative), but the older girls loved their sweaters and happily displayed them.

Leslie in a modified Accordian and Peyton in her pink sweater

On Christmas Eve, the girls wanted to wear my sister Michelle's red scarf that my mom had made for her out of some shiny, red yarn, so we decided to make them some little scarves. About an hour each, and we each made one, so it went fast. We got a little group picture.

Two smiles out of three isn't too bad. I had to choose a picture where you oculdn't see my braces. ;)

And perhaps most exciting of all, although there's no picture, is that my sister asked to learn to knit! We picked up some spare Debbie Bliss yarn and got her started. We were all shocked, but she was pretty diligent about it and knit several rows. Maybe we'll purl next week!

Hope everyone had happy holidays. Thankfully I have two more weeks before I have to go back to school, which should give me plenty of time to watch my newly-acquired DVDs of season 3 of Alias.

Jewelled Tank

The jewelled tank wasn't done for the party I'd hoped to wear it to, but I did get to wear it to knitting at a friends' house yesterday. My favorite part: the "jewels" at the bottom of the V. $0.60 at the bead store, plus the $0.60 for the beads I bought in order to figure out which I wanted to put on.

You can play with the zoomable image below to see those beads, or the fluffiness of the mohair. The little triangle slides to zoom, or you can zoom with the plus and minus. The arrows move the box around the image, or you can click and drag it around or you can move the box on the inset. The rightmost symbol resets the image.

It's been Zoomified!

Is this good for looking at knit stuff, or unnecessary? What do you think? I realize it's a little hard to judge with the dark color and mohair, which leave little to see as far as stitch definition, but I think for texture, lace, and cables it could be really cool.

More pictures of WIPs should appear in the next couple days; hopefully more stuff will be finished by then.

Backlog

Hurray for vacation! It's so nice to be a little free from school, to stay up late KNITTING, to sleep late, get up, make a cup of tea, and knit some more!

My finals were manageable (one tougher than the other), and I passed the cumulative exam ("cume") on mass spectrometry that I took the previous weekend, so that was excelent news (one down, five to go!). Grades are due in on Friday, so hopefully soon I'll find out how things went.

But what about the knitting??

I decided a while ago that when the weather is cool out and I take the bus, I can knit. And then when I'm sitting in the lecture for the undergrad class I was TAing, I could knit. And also during the TA meeting. And then I got permission to knit during group meeting, and world was a happy, knitful place. And then the end of the semester led to a number of beginnings (of new projects!), so there's lots to talk about. (Unfortunately, the camera is on loan right now, but I'll add pictures when I get it back.)

(These projects are in walking-around-the-apartment-and-look-at-stuff order, which is no particular order at all.)

1. Unfinished socks. Group meeting is for knitting socks. Plain, boring, stockinette socks. It keeps my hands busy and my eyes free for looking at people's slides, and at two hours a week (occasionally more!), it's time well spent. Cuffs, heels, gussets, and toes have to be done at other times, but that's not too much of a problem. I'd originally decided to do afterthought heels, but I hated the first one I did, so I went back to heel flaps. Some of these just need to be kichenered at the toe and some are in progress, waiting for meetings to start again.

2. Ostrich Plume scarf in Brooks Farm yarn. I bought this to-die-for yarn at Circles last spring. It's beautiful and soooo soft. I've really liked the Ostrich Plume pattern (Barbara Walker. Second Treasury) for a long time, and I think this is looking beautiful. I think it will look great with my trenchcoat and should be very warm.

3. Tangerinia. You remember Tangerinia, right? No? Cute overalls for a growing boy in Boston. They're done! Well, they need four ends woven in and two buttons sewn on. Yes, I should do it soon. Really. Maybe this week. And then it will be off of my table.

4. Surprise knitting. Project 1 has been done for a while. Project 2 is in progress and is coming along nicely.

5. Jewelled Shell from Knitty. This is done, except for the jewels. I need to go down to the bead store and pick something out. It's warm and fuzzy. I think I'll wear it for Christmas Eve. And maybe New Year's Eve! I did this over the last week of classes, hoping that I could finish it to wear to a party last week (which didn't happen). I cast on last Monday morning, at 5 am, as I was printing out my spectroscopy paper, and managed to count to 170 correctly, on the first try! And I would have finished it in time for the party if it hadn't been for all that pesky schoolwork.

6. Bulky sweater. I bought these really cool yarns at Webs when Mom visited Boston, and I finally swatched for this jacket. I still need to wash and measure the swatch; I'd decided I was too busy to do that during the end of school.

7. Accordian from Knitty. This project is also moments from finished. I just need to sew in the zipper (shortening it first -- any tips on shortening a separating zipper?) and tack down the collar.

8. Copy of a magazine sweater. I've gotten a lot of clothing catalogs this fall and usually flip through them to see whether there are any decent sweaters, and the answer is usually no. I saw this sweater in the Sundance catalog, though, and thought it was really cute. (The picture of it on a person (here) is better. Click on "Additional Views" and choose View 2. It takes Macromedia Flash.) Mom and I did some detailed viewing of the picture and figued out how to do it (it's not that complex), but made a bunch of suggested changes (smaller gauge, more cables closer together, decreasing to the single rib instead of just stopping most of the cable stitches, and maybe only running the rib from one side of the cable). I have two bags of Lana d'Oro in a darkish purple (also a Webs purchase) that I think will be fabulous and yummy and I've started to swatch. Since I'm doing smaller cables and closer together, I'm thinking about crossing them about at the rate that's in the sweater in the picture, or if I should make them taller between crosses to elongate the look of the sweater. Or is it fine the way it is because of the rib at the top?

Well, that seems like enough for now! There are other things I want to do, but haven't started yet or figured out enough how to start, but my needles seem pretty full, I think. Hopefully I can accomplish a lot in the next few weeks!
Pictures should be up in the next day, I hope.

It's almost over!

Completed this week:

• 12-page paper on spectroscopy technique
• grading 35 lab reports
• writing comments on 40 students
• 10-page paper on final lab project
• prepared and gave presentation on said project
• resisted the temptation to kill project partners
  
  
  
• started the jeweled shell from Knitty, Spring '04 and am just about done with the body
• got 4 or fewer hours of sleep two nights.

Still to come:

• Two finals
• vacation!!

Hopefullly around Monday or Tuesday i'll be in a more normal posting mode. Hurray for the end of term!

Oops! But now I'm back

Somehow an old photo became the number 1 hit on Google images for a particular NPR voice, and most of my months' bandwidth was gobbled up in three short days. Hopefully that will never happen again. Don't worry, corrective meausres are being taken!

I can't believe it's been a month since I wrote. Here are the knitting updates: