a tale of two baskets by Katherine Hajer

Two baskets, both alike in fibre content
In my fair-to-middling apartment, where we lay our scene
From ancient bedclothes break to new crocheting,
Where smaller stash makes smaller households more clean. 

Okay, enough of that! Really, from the blog title I chose, I ought to be mangling Dickens instead.

The two baskets have been in the to-do queue for a while. They're both made from this free pattern, which works up very quickly with a 10mm hook. The purple basket is made of four strands of Bernat Cotton Tots held together, while the yellow is an old bedsheet set torn into "yarn".

I find it interesting that both baskets are made of mostly cotton with some synthetic, yet the structure of the materials gives them such different traits. The purple yarn sheds horribly, and the basket started pilling as soon as I finished it. I'm not surprised Bernat discontinued the yarn.

The bedsheets came from IKEA, and lasted nearly fifteen years. They've definitely earned their basket afterlife. Like anything made from "rag" yarn, the basket has plenty of stray threads. I pulled quite a few out once I finished it, but most of them got crocheted in.

As for their purpose, both baskets, having been constructed 100% from stash, shall be used... to store stash. Even modest, upcycled baskets are far more stylish than the plastic shopping bags I'm using for the stash that won't fit in cubbyholes.

The end game is to empty out the stash storage, period, and then repurpose some of the storage. Onwards. 

the limits of the observable universe by Katherine Hajer

Work on Sophie's Universe continues apace. Last week the blanket finally got squared off again (see above), but I didn't get around to blogging.

The return to a square form means that the blanket creation is in its final movements. From here on out, there are several border patterns to construct, and then washing/blocking.

As of this moment, Sophie looks like this:

The blanket is now just over 1.5m across, which means that it's far too big to travel with. It also means that while before I was easily tearing through 2-3 rounds a night, it now takes a couple of nights to finish even one round.

The photo points to another, blogging-related problem. Not only is the blanket already reaching the edges of my (queen-sized) bed, but I can't get a complete photo of it anymore! The one above was taken standing on the very top of a stepladder, knees pressed against the carry handle, knuckles pressed against the ceiling plaster, and still I cut off a bit of one edge. Next time I'll have to clear the library/office and photograph it from the floor. I can't get any natural light in that room — it's the library because it's the only room in the apartment with walls and no windows — but it does have a good set of overhead halogen lights.

I'll still need a stepladder to get it all in, though.

The rounds are now sufficiently big (1.5m x 4 = 6m around!) that I had to cave in and buy some white yarn to make it across the finish line. It's not that I don't have more white odd-balls — I have a lot — but they're all too small to last through one circumference. I decided to get a 790g super-size skein, not because I'll need that much, but because I didn't want to be stingy and then get caught out. Besides, maybe I can use it with the left-over bits of odd-sized whites to make something else. I have a few candidates already.

Meanwhile, the Toronto summer has hit in full force, with weather advisories all last weekend due to the heat and humidity. The sooner I can get this blanket done, the better!

the universe is expanding by Katherine Hajer

I think I've mentioned before here that I basically have three levels of active-ness. If I'm fully well or just a wee bit ill, I'm able to write. If I'm worn-out or outright sick, I can knit or crochet, so long as the pattern isn't too involved. If I'm truly suffering, the best I can manage is to hide under a pile of blankets and quilts on the couch and scowl at whatever nature documentary on Netflix I haven't seen too many times yet.

Surely I'm not the only person who watches nature documentaries when they're sick. They were one of the few types of shows my entire family would sit down to watch when I was a kid, so they have a certain nostalgic feel to them, even as they show polar bears stranded on ever-shrinking ice caps. Also, I've watched so many that if I doze off into a fever-induced slumber in the middle of one, I can wake up whenever and not have really missed anything.

I've been ill for the past two weeks with some sort of sinus infection, so not much writing has been getting done (grr). For a few nights, I was too busy having fever and chills to get any needlework done either. Right now I'm better but not yet illness-free, so the stash-busting has had more progress than the novel-writing.

The photos show that I'm still working on Sophie's Universe. I'm still not sure it's not ugly — I seem to say that about all my blankets — but it's definitely a lot of fun to do. Every single round has something or other going on. I've learned a lot about the mechanics of overlay crochet, and about what post stitches can do. Everything is still 100% stash. I even [sigh] found a big ball of leftover white yarn I am setting aside for the broad border section with the negative-space butterfly motifs.

The cut-off corners will eventually become the blanket's sides, while the sides with the rows of bobbles will eventually narrow to points. The central square will be tilted 45 degrees in the final version into a diamond. Right now it's almost exactly a metre across; well on its way to the planned finished size of 1.8 metres square.

By which time I hope to be doing more writing than needlework, and to have used up lots and lots of stash.

a universe of stash by Katherine Hajer

Okay, maybe just a medium-sized galaxy...

Somewhere in my travels I came across the Sophie's Universe crochet-a-long. I've been wanting to do more mandala/surface crochet for a while, and the pattern looked like a great way to use up the ~2kg of white and cream odd-balls I have, plus a lot of other colours as well.

Even if I didn't like the pattern, the sheer amount of technical writing, reference links, and planning that went into the instructions for three (!) different versions is staggering. While the stitching for each of the three different yarn weights is the same, the colourways and checkpoint dimensions (as in, "if you have hit round X your work should be Y centimetres across") is very impressive.

Every single round starts with separate instructions for whether you are continuing with the colour from the previous round or starting with a new colour. Meanwhile, I've done 21 rounds and have yet to encounter a single error.

And, oh yes, the pattern has been fully or partially translated into seven other languages, plus one more language for a series of video tutorials.

And for this particular version? I've done a quick estimate based on the yarn pack information given in the introduction to the crochet-a-long, and I should be able to pull this one off entirely from stash. And still complete the stripey blanket from stash, even though they share some of the same colours (and yarn sources).

In the photo above, all of the colours are worked in single strands of worsted-weight yarn, except for the burgundy and cranberry, which are thinner yarns held double. The burgundy isn't even made of the same two yarns. Instead, it's a thinner 100% acrylic held with a thicker 100% wool. Now that they're crocheted together, it's difficult to see the colour difference even up close and in good light. Go figure.

This means that the weight of each particular round of work varies a lot, but so far Sophie has been lying flat and adjusting to the physics of each yarn type very well.

Since this photo was taken, I've started part 3. The rounds are getting big enough now that they take a while to finish. The completed blanket is supposed to be about 1.8m square, although when I've done gauge-check measurements the work seems to be coming out slightly too big for a change. Usually it comes out slightly too small and I have to either try again or improvise.

It'll be great to weigh the finished blanket and see how much stash I've used up.

a smaller mess by Katherine Hajer

Now that the latest gift makes are done and delivered for the spring, I have been working on larger, ongoing stash-busting projects. The giant stripey blanket is back in rotation, in part because the leftover yarn from the mermaid afghans can be incorporated into the colour scheme and used up.

While I was checking how much yarn I had already set aside for this project, I realised there was only this much left (plus the mermaid yarn):

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, "er, Katherine, that basket is completely full." But that's when I raise my shaking hands into the air and cackle, "Yes! But it's only one basket!". When I started the blanket, I had two baskets plus a shopping bag. So getting it down to one basket is excellent.

Is it making a dent in the actual yarn storage requirements? Yes and no. I mean, once it's done, the blanket will have used up a lot of yarn. The broadest periwinkle and pink stripes in the photo below are made from single 100g skeins — already it's a heavy blanket. And it'll mean that I don't have to store stash yarn in the main sitting/working area of my apartment anymore. But the bedroom yarn storage — the bulk of the stash — is in a sad state. There are already two more blankets queued after this one to keep stash-busting efforts up.

Onwards.

fiddle faddle by Katherine Hajer

Elizabeth Zimmermann had a way of giving the exact right name to categories of things, so much so that in the knitting world, a lot of the personal jargon she used in her books have become the standard terms. A favourite of mine is the "fiddle faddle" she dedicated a chapter to in Knitter's Almanac. In the book, Zimmermann provides patterns for little nets, used for holding oranges so they can adorn Christmas trees. There's also little knitted stars and other small, decorative items.

Zimmermann being Zimmermann, she also lists off some items which are fiddle faddle, but which, if anything, are less useful than Christmas ornaments. I remember this was the first time I'd heard of doorknob cozies which, sadly, seem to be becoming more popular again.

Coffee cup cuffs are a more recent invention for this category, and have a major advantage over doorknob cozies in that they are actually useful, protecting the user's fingers from discomfort and helping reduce waste by removing the need for cardboard equivalents.

I used a free pattern for a dress-up crown, and just reduced the number of pattern repeats until it fit around a standard take-away cup (20cm). The designer did a thorough job of writing out the pattern, but it hurt my brain, and I'm not sure the decreases are written out correctly, so I did some experimenting and came up with my own version... which looks exactly the same as her finished-item photos. I'm not sure I actually changed anything or not.

The leaf pattern is something I copied from a photo a while ago when I made a lot of cuffs at once. If you know how a basic aspen leaf motif works in knitting, it's not hard to reproduce. This cuff makes for a lot of ends to darn in (two per leaf), but it's not difficult to work and I like the finished effect.

The friend I gave the crown cuff to gave me a leaf charm she'd bought. She had several, and had intended to make a bracelet with them until she saw how big they were. I thought it looked like the dangle part of a bookmark, so I dug up some tatted and crocheted thread bookmarks on Pinterest and decided to try this graduated pineapple one (Ravelry, free pattern):

Mine is purple just because that's the first reel of crochet thread I came across that wasn't white. I figured white would just get grubby. The bookmark took the second half of Ant-Man and disc 2 of Archer season 3 to finish. It's a very straightforward pattern — once you see where the geometry is going, you hardly need to follow the pattern at all. It's also the first time I've done the very traditional pineapple pattern, so hooray for personal firsts!

Given how much stash yarn (er, and crochet thread) I have left over, I can see a lot more fiddle faddle in my future. Hey, so long as it's the useful, non-cringey kind.

mermaid aftermath by Katherine Hajer

After I finished both mermaid blankets, I had a lot of yarn left over. Lots and lots and lots. You can see it in the photo at the top of this post — weight-wise, it works out to:

  • 233g turquoise
  • 235g jade
  • 186g macaw (variegated) 
  • 410g peacock

That totals just over a kilo of leftover yarn. In fact, I'm just one skein short of the variegated to have enough to make a third mermaid blanket. I saw some comments on-line that the yarn estimates in the pattern are off, and now I have proof. It happens.

But no, I am not making a third mermaid blanket. That would be boring to the point of masochism.

Instead, I've been making some quick, small things to use up the yarn and get it out of the apartment as soon as possible. No net gains to stash!

I knew the most difficult yarn to get rid of would be the variegated. I like handpainted and self-striping yarn as much as the next knitter, but old-school variegated has always been... difficult. It has strong connotations with the items left over after the church bazaar, or gifts from well-meaning relatives you just couldn't get rid of politely.

The macaw called for in the pattern has the benefit that it isn't as ugly as the brown/gold/rust/white blends we saw in the 70s. I had a vague recollection of a feature set of patterns for self-striping/variegated yarn from a recent crochet magazine I'd bought, found the article in question, and stuffed the yarn in a tote bag before I headed to my hairdresser's. I picked a pattern (the Swoopy Cowl from Interweave's Crochet Accessories 2014) and started stitching between the colouring and the shampooing, and by the end of the following day I had a finished cowl:

I skipped the shaping and just made it straight-sided — it seemed like it would be too tight around the neck otherwise. This one is headed for the donation box since I don't need it and don't know anyone who wants it. I hope someone takes a liking to it.

Crocheted blankets are still of interest for me, because they are great for using up a lot of leftover yarn quickly. I tried out some of the square patterns I've been collecting on Pinterest:

I'm not completely thrilled with these, just because they're uncomfortably close to putting the "granny" back in "granny square", but they were all good exercises. The geometric-patterns square at the back and the mandala square on the left were both copied from photographs, and the flower square at the bottom right is a free pattern (Ravelry link). It's also my first attempt at crocodile stitch, so it was educational.

At this point, I have nearly all the variegated yarn used up (one more dahlia square should do it), but most of the turquoise, jade, and peacock solid-coloured yarn left over. I think it will go towards the stripey blanket I've had on the go for a while.

That's the next major stash-busting to complete: the two blankets I have on the go. There's always something.

shark week! month, years... by Katherine Hajer

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Have you ever had a project which took much longer than expected? Maybe it wound up as an unfinished object, or maybe the materials got recycled into something you did finish.

Or maybe you stuck with it, kept working on it in fits and starts, and finally got it done.

After Hurricane Sandy, knit designer the Tsarina of Tsocks created the Shark Week pattern. She made it available for a limited time, and sold it to raise money to help those affected by the hurricane.

I thought that the pattern would be a great birthday gift for my friend Cheshin. She once made a papier-maché shark for a Hallowe’en party, and made herself a chum bucket costume.

What I didn't count in was how challenging the pattern was. I've been knitting since I was a kid -- I've got forty years of experience doing this stuff, which always sounds strange to say. The only other artifice I've had skill in that long is reading. I figured if someone else could knit it, I could.

For a while it looked like that wasn't going to be true. These socks wound up taking three years to finish, working on and off between other projects.

Both socks are constructed, for the most part, using short rows which are attached to another colour block as you knit  (think domino squares). There’s not a single seam in either sock, and the eyes are the only embroidery.

The grey parts are done in a herringbone stitch, with the wrong side facing out. It's bumpier than regular reverse stocking stitch, the better to imitate a shark's rough skin. You have to be careful to balance the increases and decreases which form the herringbone, especially when you're increasing or decreasing for shaping as well. These constraints alone made me have to rip out several centimetres, more than once.

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Along the way, besides the shaping, there are gills to knit in with a different pattern stitch, and the bases of the fins. Missing the point to knit in gills or fin bases led to more ripping out.

The fins are picked up and knit in the round, in seed stitch, and also feature both decreases and short rows for shaping.

The white belly parts and beige foot parts weren't so bad. Maybe one ripping-out per section.

The pattern is wordy, as patterns tend to be these days, but is well-organised. The only thing that really annoyed me is that the picot pattern used to form the teeth on the shark swimming up the wearer's foot is referenced but not included, and it's not a standard stitch pattern I could just look up elsewhere. It took a few tries to find a picot that looked toothy and used up the stitches around the mouth/leg opening gracefully.

The last few parts to do were relatively easy, so the ending was a bit anticlimactic. Of course, now that these are done, I feel like making a pair for myself! Maybe after I get some more stash-busting accomplished.

Special thanks to Cheshin for modeling the finished socks and providing the photos! 

second afghan syndrome by Katherine Hajer

Second Sock and Second Sleeve syndromes are well known in crafting — the idea that an item, if big enough, means that the second version of the same item will be boring and onerous to do. This is working reason behind why picture sweaters and mirror imaged socks were invented (and deliberately mismatched earrings, no doubt).

I have two nieces so I have had to work through Second Toy and now, Second Afghan Syndrome.

The photo above is of the first, finished mermaid afghan. I started it around the middle of December and finished it around the end of January. It's now the beginning of March, and the second one has been... languishing. I'm just at the point where the initial rows will be joined in the round. I'm hoping it will let me pick up the pace a little, because it's when things get joined in the round that the decreases start.

The original pattern calls for the opening slit (not shown) to be almost all the way to the bottom of the afghan, and for the decreases to be both abrupt and late. The afghan is to go from full width (25 shells) to something like 4 shells in about the minimum number of rounds it is possible to do that in gracefully.

The end effect is much like a nineteenth-century reticule purse, and although there are plenty of crocheters on-line who reported they liked this way of ending, I didn't. I joined the work into the round after only about 45cm, and decreased gradually until the body of the afghan was just wide enough to accommodate the tail (16 shells). The tail closes off the bottom by being slip-stitched directly onto the bottom of the body, working from the inside so no seams were on the outside.

Today after work I marked each decrease in the finished afghan with a safety pin (take notes? what do you mean, take notes?), so I'd know when to make the same decreases in the second afghan. With preparation comes effiency and all that good stuff.

knitted bargello by Katherine Hajer

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Canvas needlepoint was the first craft I ever learned, but I really haven't done any since my early teens. Those paint-by-numbers canvases done in tent stitch would probably go well with mid-century modern furniture, but my favourites have always been the long smooth stitches that spanned multiple squares of canvas. Brick stitch, say, or a Florentine flame stitch. Or go full rococo with bargello, tilting that mid-century look from the fifties to the sixties. 

It so turns out that a knitter much cleverer than I has figured out how to get a bargello-type effect from knitted stripes. Xandy Peters calls her pattern Fox Paws because the tight crests of colour look like little paws reaching across the fabric. It makes a wonderful flame stitch, and does some interesting things with stacked increases and decreases that I've never seen before. 

The yarn I'm using is from an old project I started about sixteen (!) years ago, and never got more than a few centimetres done on. All of the yarn is Butterfly mercerised cotton, which comes in wonderful colours and is great to work with... but maybe not for this pattern. Something with a little stretch, like wool obviously, would be much better. 

Still, I like how the different stripe sections are coming out. 

Do take a look at the project gallery on Ravelry. It's amazing how different such a distinctive pattern looks in different colour combinations and in different garment types.  

functional failures by Katherine Hajer

I've had an idea to make slippers which look like sneakers for a while. There are some patterns around, but the ones that don't look terrible you have to pay for. Maybe it's just me being cheap, but I've yet to see a slipper design that blew me away so much I wanted to pay for it.

Fortunately, I did find a free, multi-sized pattern for loafers at Whistle & Ivy. I used them for making the slippers for my chiropractor's office, and I used them again for the sneaker slippers.

The great thing about the Whistle & Ivy pattern is that the construction is very shoe-like. That means that you can keep the sole construction the same and play around with different uppers shapes. Although the blog claims the sole is supposed to be a little smaller than your foot, I find the sole comes out much smaller. The pattern makes it easy to make the sole bigger, though — I just make the measurements comparable with a pair of commercially-made ballet flats I own. This time I also made triple soles, instead of the double soles called for in the pattern. I figured the extra layer wasn't a bad thing, and it makes the side of the soles closer in thickness to those on actual sneakers.

I'm pleased with everything about the sneaker slippers except for the white toe box, which is far too big. Next time, I'm going to make it shorter, and start the rest of the upper sooner, and make the tongue longer.

These are entirely made of stash. The bottom sole uses the same black wool as the upper, and the middle sole is some variegated yarn left over from when I made felted slippers. The inside sole is made from turquoise dishcloth cotton so my feet will stay dry. The white parts of the uppers and the embellishments (outer rim of all the sole layers, toe box, star applique, laces, red striping) are all acrylic. Meh. I hand wash all my handmade stuff anyhow.

In all, these used up two and a half balls of stash yarn, plus a little red yarn. Next time I'll use up a little less white, but use a different colour for the bottom sole so that I have more black for the uppers. In the meantime these count as a functional failure, in that they are wearable, just not exactly what I was aiming for.

swimming against snobbery by Katherine Hajer

Handmade things get a lot of judgments thrown at them, both fair and unfair. Some people think that anything handmade is automatically misshapen, inferior, and cheap. Other people associate handmade with unique design, superior construction, and natural, high-quality materials.  

The truth, of course, is that both extremes are true, and all points of opinion in between too. It all depends on the person doing the crafting... and the project. 

 My nieces like to cuddle up on the couch under blankets, and they're outgrowing the ones they've had since they were toddlers. I found this free mermaid afghan pattern, got approval from the recipients, and bought the yarn right away because hey, it was on sale. 

It's an example of what I call "Red Heart crochet", because it uses up kilometres of yarn, and so may only be done inexpensively with Red Heart acrylic. It also uses a large-ish hook for worsted weight (6.5mm instead of the expected 4.5 or 5). In this case, that's a good thing — otherwise it would be too heavy and warm.

Since I took the photo above, I've got about twice as many rows done. I've also modified the pattern a bit. More on that next post.

superhero accessories by Katherine Hajer

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I finished the nieces' superhero knits a while ago, but I didn't get around to making the things that go with them until it was almost time to give them as presents. Niece the Younger very specifically asked for a cape to go with her Superman sweater ("so I can fly"). Niece the Elder didn't say she wanted a tiara like Wonder Woman, but she did want the Wonder Woman sweater, and if Niece the Younger was getting a cape accessory, I needed to balance things make something to go with the Wonder Woman theme. At least a tiara is canonically correct.

The cape is sewn, not knitted (it's lighter and less likely to stretch out that way), and I am terrified of sewing, so I did the tiara first:

There are lots of free crown patterns on the web, both in knit and crochet. I took this one and reduced the number of points to one, then embroidered the red star on. The yarn is leftovers from the Wonder Woman sweater itself, with the gold yarn worked double so it's stiff enough to hold its shape when worn.

The tiara only took part of one evening to make, which left me with absolutely no excuse to not start on the cape. I decided to just take it step by step: iron and cut the fabric one day, pin the next, sew the next, finish the day after that.

Olga from work is much better at sewing than I am, and kindly sketched out the shape I needed to cut on a spare piece of paper. I followed her sketch and what she'd given as instructions, measuring against the length of the finished sweater and its neck width to get the inner and outer curve measurements. I surprised myself by cutting straight the first time (I had more fabric ready if I messed up). The next morning, I pinned bias tape along the edges like my chiropractor had explained.

The sewing went better than I thought. I even remembered what my mum had taught me about stitch length. I did wind up having to redo the neck part, but that was okay, because as I was ripping off the original length of bias tape for the neck, I remembered that I should stay stitch the raw edge around the neck curve before applying the bias tape.

And yes, I needed advice from three experienced sewists to finish this thing, and I still felt anxious about it.

The last step was to sew buttons onto the tabs extending from the neckline, and create corresponding button loops on the wrong side of the sweater so Niece the Younger could attach and detach the cape as she liked.

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The sweaters seem to have been well received, in that I've seen both nieces wear them more than once. The day after Yule, Niece the Younger put the Superman sweater on over her pajamas when she woke up in the morning:

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Niece the Elder wore her Wonder Woman sweater to school the first day back after New Year's.

Usually I just let people put their own feedback in the comments, but this time I'm going to let Niece the Elder have the last word, and quote the comment she put on Facebook when she used my mum's iPad to look at the photo at the top of this post:

It. Is awesomely. GOOD!

So there.

 

cardboard: beyond the elastic band by Katherine Hajer

My brother Steve gave me a Google Cardboard VR viewer as a stocking stuffer for Yule, because yes, we live in a time when virtual reality hardware can count as an inexpensive stocking stuffer. I haven't been able to find exactly the model he gave me, but if you do some looking around on sites like Amazon and Aliexpress, you can find working versions for as little as $5.00 CAD.

I've got a review of the experience on my main blog, but this post is about what I did to harden the viewer a bit. The Cardboard viewer Steve gave me is much nicer than the basics — the cardboard is covered in some retro-looking red textured stuff, it has a head strap and an NFC tag, and there is an array of suction cups on the front flap to hold the phone in place — but in practice the viewer turned out to be annoying because of a few design issues. You can see in the photo above that I already bent the top flap to accommodate my Note 2, which is fine. I acknowledge it is a huge phone, and I've had to mod things before to get it to fit them. But I was also having trouble with the viewer starting to fall apart as I used it with Cardboard apps. The side with the magnet switch on it was gummed so it could stick to the layer underneath and hold the whole viewer together, but it had a bad habit of peeling off, especially when I was using the head strap. The divider piece which ensures each of your eyes are fed separate screens of information kept popping out of place and going crooked, and the magnetic switch only worked about 20% of the time.

So I did what all good crafters do when faced with wobbly bits of assembled cardboard and plastic: I got out my glue gun.

I glued all the tabs into their slots, both for the eye pieces and the divider piece, and I glued the flap with the magnet switch shut. Then I glued the top seam of the flap to the top of the viewer for good measure (far side of photo below):

I discovered after doing this that the bottom tab of the divider was still escaping its slot, so I eased it back into place and then glued along both sides of it. While I was at it, I put glue over the nose rest in several layers, finishing with a piece of sponge. That was to make the nose rest more comfortable when using the head strap. It's still uncomfortable, but it's less uncomfortable than it was before. The glue isn't visible when the viewer is being used.

You can see the hole I cut out of the front flap/viewer bottom in the lower right of the above photo. That's to keep the volume rocker switch on the phone from getting accidentally pressed while it's in the viewer.

There was going to be one more mod, which was to add a simple conductive touch switch made of aluminum foil, cardboard, and sponge as described in this Reddit thread. However, I discovered that now that the shape of the viewer is stabilised by the glue, the magnetic switch works much better. It works around 80-85% of the time instead of 20% — often enough that it's not too annoying anymore.

A lot of the simpler viewers have instructions to hold them together with an elastic band. I'd recommend taking the time to glue to avoid the different parts of the viewer shifting out of alignment. Yes, it will make your viewer look like it's covered in strips of snot and/or ectoplasm, but face it — anyone using any kind of VR viewer looks dorky anyhow, You may as well make sure the experience inside the viewer is worth it.

 

variations on black & silver by Katherine Hajer

J-A asked for Russian leaf earrings for her birthday, using the same pattern as a pair I had made for myself a long time ago (Paisley Drops by Jane Lock, from an old copy of Beadwork magazine). What she didn't know is that I've never been that happy with my pair — they were a stash-busting exercise which turned out a wearable pair of earrings, but looked nothing like what was in the pattern photos.

The main part of the earrings is made with Japanese Delica beads, which are very straight-sided and uniform in size. The contrasting inner ring and "tails" on the outside of the earrings are made with Czech seed beads, which are rounder and more substantial, but less consistent in size and shape. The centre motif and dangles are crystals, which are much more consistent no matter what the origin (the ones I used are Chinese).

I actually like Czech beads better for most things, just because of the roundedness, but in this case if you don't use Delicas for the main part, the leaf shape gets very distorted. I used cylinder beads for my earrings (straight sides but not consistent sizes), and it was difficult to get two matching sides of the leaf for one earring, never mind two matching earrings.

To save frustration this time, I bought Delicas (everything else I had in stash). J-A had said she wanted a black and silver pair so they would go with lots of outfits but be sparkly. The way the different components of the earrings balance out, I wasn't sure whether to go black and silver, or silver and black. Since it takes over half an hour to set up all my beading stuff, I didn't see the harm in making two pairs while I had all my gear and beads out.

The first pair are on the left in the photo, using stainless steel beads for the main leaf component, and metal-lined grey contrast beads and crystals. They get very sparkly under the right light — making them under my halogen work lights actually got kind of intense — but they're not very heavy on black. I didn't want to use black for the lining oval or the tails just because I thought they would "disappear" when worn, especially in low lighting.

The second pair were sort of negative images of the first one. Lots of jet black, but with sparkly bits to outline and highlight them.

J-A says she likes both. I think I do as well, but especially the silver and grey pair, just because they amp up the sparkliness are are a less expected colour combination.

double-knit coffee cup cuff by Katherine Hajer

Yule gift-giving works like this in my family: everyone gets all of the kids something, but the adults draw names at Thanksgiving (which is in October, because we're in Canada), and then get the person whose name they drew presents. We have a dollar amount limit, but it gets broken regularly for "stocking stuffer" things. Basically, you spend the dollar limit getting what the person asks for, and then... top up a little if you find something you know they'll think is cool.

This year I drew my brother Steve's name, which was great because I'm always seeing stuff I know he'll like, but I never seem to get his name. He likes the band The Descendents, and passed me along a link to their 2014 Christmas sweater last year. We joked about making a handmade version that was less Christmas-y, and then the idea just sort of dropped.

I forgot all about it until I was packing up the other stocking stuffer things I'd got him. There wasn't enough time to make a whole sweater, but I figured I could dig out some sock yarn from the stash and make a coffee cup cuff.

I copied the motifs from the Descendents Holiday Mug. If you zoom in and squint a lot, the stitches actually work out — for once it seems that a fake knit design was created by someone who at least understands how knitting works. Steve likes knitted fabric with small stitches, so I automatically reached for my 2mm needles and worked out everything else from there.

Sock yarn on 2mm needles works out to a dense but thin fabric, and I wanted something reversible — because who wants to fuss with right and wrong sides when you just want to insulate a coffee mug? — so I went with double knitting. Double knitting carries a risk in that the method creates very wide, short stitches, so any motifs you knit in also come out wider and shorter than they would appear mapped out on, say, graph paper or cross stitch.

At first I just did a sample square of Milo to find out my gauge and to see how bad the distortion was. The square turned out with Milo looking like Milo, but it was enough work that I decided to just finish it off properly and make it part of the gift.

After that, it was a matter of doing some math, checking various free coffee cuff patterns for measurements, and knitting the cuff itself. I sewed the button onto the edge of the cuff so it could be closed with either side facing out, and made the button loop long enough to accommodate different cup sizes — if Steve wants to put it around a narrower cup, like a take-away paper one, he can just wrap the loop around the button a few times until it fits snugly.

The sample square was too small to work well as a coaster, so I looped a fabric-covered hair elastic onto it and made it a tree ornament.

Coffee cup cuffs are usually considered quick gifts, but this one took around eight hours. It was fun working through the planning and execution, though, so I think it was worth it.

surprise purple projects by Katherine Hajer

My sister-in-law asked if I could knit the nieces some cowls. The brief was: make two the same so she wouldn't have to worry about which one went onto which girl, make them purple to match their winter coats, and make them snug-ish — the whole point was to replace dangly scarves and avoid a scarf's tendency to get caught on things, require tying/arranging to wear, or slip off and get lost.

I did some Googling around, and found this free pattern which comes in both children's and women's sizes. 9mm needles, bulky yarn, 18 stitches, and 72 rows. Graft the ends together and you're done. Both the cowls took about four episodes of Welcome to Night Vale plus a couple episodes of The Musketeers.

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I got two skeins of yarn (acrylic — the nieces aren't ready for wool yet) for the cowls, and they took up just over half a skein of yarn each. That left me with stash, and I really want not to accumulate any more stash. I need slippers, and I had already found this free pattern for slippers that look like Ugg boots. Although sometimes I feel like the only woman in the Western world who doesn't like Uggs, I figured they would make good slippers.

I went back to the yarn shop and picked up two more skeins of yarn. There was enough left over from the cowls to make four sole pieces (I wanted a double sole), and the two new skeins of yarn made the uppers. I was done the slippers in time to wear them for the dinner party I had that night.

There were absolutely no mods to the cowl pattern, and the only thing I changed for the slippers (besides adding an extra sole layer) was that I used foundation single crochet to start each piece, used a standing stitch to start the leg parts of the uppers, and spiralled my way up the leg instead of formally slip-stitching and chain-one-ing at the end of each round. Instead, I just slip-stitched at the top of the boot leg and finished off.

Oh, and I slip-stitched the upper and sole layers together instead of using single crochet (!) like the pattern called for.

After all that, I have virtually no stash — just some odds and ends I'll use for provisional cast on sections on a project I already have in-flight. I'll have to blog about that one shortly.

Meanwhile, this is how the boot slipper soles look after just being worn for a few hours:


Now you can see why I wanted to make double soles. It should last me the winter, anyhow, and the yarn was on sale for Boxing Day, so there's that. They'll be fine. While acrylic is not as warm as other options and will need to be washed more frequently than, say, wool, my apartment tends to be warm anyhow, so I only need light foot insulation, and acrylic is easy to wash.

pow! almost ready for yule by Katherine Hajer

After getting stuck for a while with a double case of Second Sleeve Syndrome, I finally finished the nieces' superhero sweaters. Niece the Younger wanted a Superman sweater, while Niece the Elder wanted Wonder Woman. 

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Both the sweaters were made from free patterns. The Wonder Woman sweater comes from a full sweater pattern sized for adults, while the Superman one is a free colour chart knitted into a standard plain raglan pattern. 

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The Wonder Woman pattern calls for chunky yarn. I made it in DK and followed the instructions for a size large to get a sweater sized for a seven-year-old. 

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Both sweaters are made out of the same yarn (Mary Maxim's Ultra Mellowspun). I thought it was interesting how the yellow and red looks softer against the steel blue of the Superman sweater, as opposed to the royal blue of the Wonder Woman. 

Speaking of colourwork: for the record, these were all done in intarsia, using full balls for main colours (the blue on the sleeves, for instance), and lengths a metre or two for details (like the stars). So yes, there were a lot of ends, but I never find darning in ends that onerous. For one thing, I started darning in as soon as a piece was done, instead of leaving it until the bitter end. For another, ends has the fun of strategy to it. For example. a lot of the ends on the Wonder Woman sweater were left until after the seaming was done, so that they could be buried inside the seams instead of in the main fabric itself. Maybe it's just because it's something I learned how to do when I was about seven, but doing ends on colourwork always feels like a game.

The yarn is a nice, soft synthetic, and remarkably cheap, which is just as well, because I still have this much yarn left:

That is easily enough for another child's sweater. I have looked around my patterns library, and have a few candidates for a multicoloured sweater. Something to do when I take time off at the end of the year, I think.

"asian" pork lettuce wraps by Katherine Hajer

This is the second recipe I cooked from the epic prep 'n' freeze session of a few weeks ago. Of course, in the recipe listing, it's simply Asian Lettuce Wraps, but I feel compelled to put the "asian" in sarcasm quotes every time I mention it.

The ingredients: a pound of ground pork, red sweet pepper, grated carrots, some ketchup (!), soy sauce. I vaguely remember tossing in some dried red chili, but I can't taste it. Mostly, it tastes like pork-based Sloppy Joes — not offensive enough to be bad, exactly, but not terribly Asian either.

I do like having the meat on a bed of lettuce instead of some starch or another. The recipe called for iceberg lettuce, but I'm not a fan, so I used Boston lettuce instead. I've been bringing two dishes to work: the plastic square dish you can see in the photo above, with just the lettuce in it, and my trusty pyrex round dish for the meat so it can be warmed in the microwave. Once the meat is heated through, I dump it on top of the lettuce and enjoy. I suspect eating it in lettuce cups as the recipe calls for would be messy, so I've just been having it as a sort of salad.

Next time, I think I'm going to add some Lee Kum Kee chili garlic sauce in addition to, or in place of, the ketchup. I'd like to drop the meat mixture on top of a bed of bean sprouts and thin rice noodles, maybe with some fresh mint leaves, but I think that's too elaborate for a work lunch.

I used the maximum prescribed cooking time again. At the end, all of the flavouring bits were at the bottom of the pot, and the meat was sitting on top, virtually unseasoned. The photo above shows how things looked after I gave the mixture a stir. I set the pot to cook on high for an hour and left the lid off, just giving the occasional stir whenever I was in the kitchen. That boiled off the excess water and let the flavours cook in a bit.

So yes, I do plan to make this again, but it's going to need tweaking, and while it's a nice dish, I don't think I'm ever going to be comfortable with calling it Asian.

easy vs. hard by Katherine Hajer

This is one of those good news/bad news/good news stories.

The good news is that I calculated how much yarn I would need for the nieces' Yule superhero sweaters, ordered it from Mary Maxim, and received it in the mail. I don't know why it's so hard to find machine washable DK yarn suitable for kids' things in walk-in shops, but it is, so mail order is the way to go. This is Maxim's own-brand Ultra Mellowspun — it's synthetic, but it's soft, durable, and comes in lots of colours.

The yarn arrived just as I was finishing up (I thought) the cotton t-shirt that's been aggravating me all summer. I thought I just had to graft the fronts closed and sew the body onto the yoke when this happened:

Those are the two sets of stitches to be grafted, and as you can see, there are a lot more stitches on the bottom needle than on the top one.

At first I thought there might be a mistake in the pattern, because I've been counting my rows obsessively, but this morning I figured it out.

In my little corner of knitting, when a pattern wants to tell you to increase every row at one end, it says something like, "Inc every row at neck edge, 8 sts from edge of work for 24 rows." Get it? The increasing is happening every row, both right side and wrong side, it's only happening at the neck edge, and it's happening eight stitches in from the actual edge of the fabric. Also you need to do it 24 times total

Instead, the instructions said:

Inc row (WS): Purl to m, sl m, p2, M1P
Inc row (RS): K to 2 sts before m, inc 1, k2, sl m, k to end
Rep last 2 rows 11 more times.

I know they boil down to the same thing, but it's the extra atomisation of the instructions, plus not stating the full number of repeats ("11 more time" as opposed to "12 times total") that throws me off. I've made the same mistake already on this same pattern.

To fix this, I'm going to have to rip back to where I stopped the increasing prematurely (30 rows) and work up again. Meanwhile, I've already tried to do the grafting, so I have to make sure the raw stitches from the provisional cast on stay safe. Also there is the drop-stitch lace right in the middle of all the shaping to contend with.

I am not happy. This was supposed to be an "easy summer knit", and the dumbed-down instructions are driving me crazy.

Given that the summer is practically over and that Yule yarn has arrived, I decided to start Niece the Elder's Wonder Woman sweater from the free pattern I found on Ravelry. The original pattern is in adult sizes and uses worsted weight yarn held doubled. I'm making it in DK yarn to a child's size 8. According to my math, if I follow the largest size in the instructions and use the recommended needle size on the DK yarn ball band (4mm), I'll get a size 8 sweater:

And what do you know? It's working out exactly to size. What's in the photo only took me two days to do as well. Before anyone says, "kid's sweaters go faster", remember, I'm using the exact same stitch counts as for an adult's size large, just on smaller needles with thinner yarn.

It's been a nice reassurance that I can knit something correctly, so long as it's difficult enough!