KTS: well that sucks

This morning I found four of the crocheted flowers I need for the Doris Daymat Mark II, plus the yarn with which to make some more. This is reassuring, because I only remembered two flowers, and it means that I'm a little bit further ahead than I thought I was.

That's the good news. The bad news is that I also discovered one more project to go on the KTS list: a fractal jacket I started about four years ago whilst standing in queues at the Toronto International Film Festival. The previous year I had knitted most of a Sunrise Circle jacket in the queues (people would check nervously on my progress, realising it was a tangible way to see just how long you wind up standing in those queues with your pre-ordered ticket).

So the year after the Sunrise Circle I decided to make a fractal jacket with random stripes using the snakeskin rule from Debbie New. Because, you know, nothing makes standing in line at a film festival more fun than carting around 600g of knitting yarn and constantly searching for flat surfaces on which to roll a six-sided die (to determine the row height of the next stripe). Any time I got a weird look from someone, I'd explain that I finished nearly an entire jacket in line the previous year, so I needed a bigger challenge. Usually they'd come around and say something encouraging. Usually.

Tonight I got some more done on the double knitted jacket, but also had some more depressing thoughts about it. More on that tomorrow.

KTS: strategy development

The first day of KTS had a lot of opportunities for reaching goals. It also had some conclusions that were, well, shitty.

After a good discussion with the ever-practical J-A last night, I did a rough sort of the projects into two categories: "easy to knit in public/socially" and "headbreakingly difficult".

Easy to knit in public/socially means:

• small enough to carry around comfortably
• able to talk to other people and knit without screwing up the pattern
• not so weird-looking that strangers on the subway will keep asking what the hell it is

Headbreakingly difficult means:

• the project and/or amount of yarn needed to be on hand is too large to carry around comfortably in a garbage bag
• the knitter is slave to the pattern, needing to check the instructions several times per round/row
• the project has previously encouraged strangers on the subway to ask what the hell it is

The current strategy is to keep one project in the "easy" category in a small bag and take it out in public/socially. The first project up for this are the "hearts and harps" socks, whose proper pattern name is "Kristi":

Since this photo was taken on the weekend, I've got one more motif repeat done. One more repeat after that and some toe shaping, and I should have a finished sock to blog about. Which means... I'll be at the 50% mark with that particular project.

I picked the double knitted jacket as the difficult project. It really is freaking difficult, and tedious, and heavy, and impossible to work on when there are other people around. I've tried in the past, and I always wind up ripping out what I did. On 420 stitches, that is no fun. Each row of that thing takes over half an hour.

On the other hand, unlike some of the other stuff on this list, I'm looking forward to wearing this one.

This isn't going to be a series of daily "ta-da" moments. This is going to be more like watching a marathon or the Tour de France. Except, you know, knitting. Stay tuned...

and so it begins

When the film Julie & Julia came out, some of my friends were very insistent that I see it.

"It'll be inspiring," they said.

"It'll give you confidence you can be published," they said.

Instead I sat through a film that was all about getting published thanks to an almost always-supportive husband (which I don't have), and thanks to a blog written in 2002 (which I didn't have, and it's not 2002 anymore). Although I thought Julie Powell's Project was super-cool, it was pretty depressing as far as "inspiring" films go.

But since Nora Ephron passed away recently, it reminded me that I always wanted to give the Julie and Julia book a go, so I read it this past weekend.

And it was still depressing, for much the same reasons.

But, because I finished these socks during the same weekend, it gave me an idea for a Project of my own. So I went around the apartment, gathered all the stuff I already had on the needles (or hook), and made a blog page, and a title.

I called it Knit That Shit (and Crochet, Too!). The goal is to get all the stuff in the photos done before 1 January 2013. So I have almost exactly six months to finish the fourteen projects I already have on the go. I also have beading and sewing stuff to do, but those will be kind of... bonus things.

Usually I keep my posts pretty G-rated (but not always), but it was the only catchy thing I could think of that had the appropriate attitude. Besides, it goes with the whole Julie & Julia aesthetic.

If I'm going to make this work, I'm going to have to check in once a week day and whenever I finish something. I doubt very much this will lead to a book deal, but it will definitely lead to a tidier apartment, and I'm all for that.

Stay tuned.

milestone socks

They are done.

These are one of the three pairs of socks I was working on when my back went out just over a year ago, thanks to a drunk driver rear-ending me two years prior to that (actually, he rear-ended the car behind me — he hit three cars in total that night). For a while, I couldn't knit at all, although I did find I could crochet whilst lying down. If you scan back through my blog posts, you'll see that I have been making a certain amount of stuff since I've gone into spinal maintenance mode. There were a lot of things lying around half-done though, these socks included.

I know they're just socks, but it feels so good to have this pair off the needles. For one thing, the needles I was using for them were my favourite set — the grandmother who taught me how to knit gave them to me when I was in high school, and I use them for almost every pair of socks I make. For another, the pattern is a lace-and-cables super-complex thing from Cookie A's Sock Innovations book. I love Cookie A's designs, but I have the earlier edition of the book that only has everything in small sizes, so I had to do some extra work to make a version that would actually fit me.

Finishing these socks made me more aware of just how much stuff is lying around on the needles in my apartment. Some of it I started but set aside because it was wool and the Toronto summer squelched down on us like a sponge soaked in boiling water. Some of it got put away before I had friends over and then wasn't dug out again after they left. Some of it isn't very portable, or needs a lot of attention paid to a pattern chart. Some of it got set aside while I made a gift for someone, and then I never found my way back to it.

So I'm going to start a Project, with a capital P. Yesterday was the first day of the second half of 2012. My goal is to have all the stuff I'm going to list finished by New Year's Eve.

As I wrote those last two sentences, I thought of two more things I need to photograph and add to the list. Julie Powell ain't got nothing on me in the nutty deadline department.

two designs in one

Sometimes I think each issue of Knitty is a challenge whereby knitters have to pull inspiration and recombine the pattern ideas to make something totally new. Or, as many of my knitting friends would tell me, I think too much.

It's hard to ignore coincidences like this, though. I've been wanting to make one of those cardigans with very long fronts, sort of like shawls with sleeves, and Knitty featured one called Daedalus in its Spring + Summer 2011 issue. I loved the shape, the instructions, and the faux cable border. Even though I liked the staggered eyelet pattern called for in the original design, though, I thought it was a shame that there wasn't a feather pattern. I've had a thing for shawls with feather patterns ever since I saw a magnificent example of one someone else had made at the Naked Sheep.

As it happens, in the very same issue of Knitty, there was a shawl pattern called Lilah that featured lace feather motifs. Again, the original pattern is goregeous, but it was just one of those peanut-butter-and-chocolate moments where two separate things combined very well.

I decided to just keep the faux cable pattern at the top of the Daedalus cardigan (instead of the top and bottom as in the original), and use the Lilah feathers for the rest of the body and the sleeves. To make things symmetrical, I knitted from the centre back on a provisional cast-on for one half of the jacket, then from the centre back again for the other half. The feather motifs were lengthened to match the pattern repeat length of the faux cables, the faux cables were mirror imaged to make knitting from the centre back easier, and the sleeves were knitted from the top down instead of side to side as in the original.

Hardly took any work at all. No, really, it didn't. The feather motifs all have a central part where you just repeat the same pattern row X amount of times to make up the length, and the Daedalus schematic clearly shows how big the sleeves need to be (and they're just plain rectangles, so no shaping to recalculate).

I decided that the final feathers should be twice the length of the overlapping ones. Because of how the motif transitions work, the final row of feathers is slightly longer than the second-last row — perfect. Here's the body drying on the floor after being stretched out with blocking wires (the light-coloured short lines in the cardigan are waste yarn which was unpicked to create armholes):

I did a little bit of fudging at the centre back so that the flip line where the lace mirror images is a true flip, instead of being half a stitch off as in "normal" knitting in the reverse direction. Since I rotated the working of the sleeves by ninety degrees, I set them into the body of the cardigan using a three-needle bind-off.

The finished cardigan is wonderful warm to wear, but light and comfortable.

Should mention: the yarn is Tove by SandnesGarn, and it was only five dollars a ball at Romni. It's not the softest stuff in the world, but I've just been wearing a t-shirt under the cardigan and it's been fine. It comes in lots of colours, and is a heavy fingering/light sport weight. The dark colour rubbed off on my hands when I was knitting it, but since washing and block it's behaved itself.

getting warmer

I finally found a beret pattern I liked to go with the mittens I made last winter, which in turn were made to be in the same colour scheme as the gloves (scroll down) I made the winter before that. The pattern is Ogiku from Knitty; the original has beautiful colours, but it renders into the red-and-black theme I have going very well:

The sides of the beret feature profile views of a similar Japanese chrysanthemum motif.

Now I just need a red-and-black scarf to go with all of this, and I might be ready for winter after all.

faux twinset

I made this faux twinset cardigan from a knit.1 pattern:

It's knit from the top down, and since I had already bought both the purple yarn and the buttons for a different project, it even counts as stash reduction.

Modifications: the original pattern instructed the knitter to work the cardigan in intarsia after the collar was completed. No thanks — I made the olive green part first, then worked the blackberry stitch fronts. I'm okay with intarsia when it's the right technique to use, but managing five full balls of yarn just to avoid four perfectly straight seams is silly.

I also got rid of the strip of contrast-colour blackberry stitch that was supposed to go in the back. The whole reason I wanted to make this is because it looks like you're wearing a cardigan under another cardigan. Having a stripe down the back would ruin the effect.

The third major modification was to change the straight neck to a deep crew neck. The original pattern didn't have the collar dip down like that. I noticed that the photo in the magazine showed the model wearing the top few buttons undone to create a neckline, and decided to knit that in. It makes for a more comfortable neck, and it sits better.

The one thing I wish I had done was make the collar deeper as well. It needs it with the more-rounded neckline, but that wasn't obvious to me when I was working it top-down. Live and learn.

creative leftovers

Over ten years ago I bought a pair of classic Roots boots with some gift certificates I'd won at work. It was definitely not about fashion — I was just sick of having to worry about falling down on Toronto's icy sidewalks every winter.

To my great surprise, the boots have held up, although they're no longer as waterproof as they used to be. Usually at the most I get two seasons out of a pair of winter boots.

The one thing that does keep wearing out on these are the bootlaces. For years I would buy replacement laces, but this was a bigger deal than it sounds because for some reason it's hard to find replacement laces for boots (shoes are easy, but not boots).

I finally remembered reading about I-cord laces in an old copy of Interweave Knits, grabbed my Inox I-cord maker, and cranked off some of my own.

Turns out I-cord makes great laces for hiking-style boots. If you leave the tails on the ends of the I-cord, it's easy to pull the laces through the grommits, and if you use leftover variegated sock yarn like I did, you can get a nice funky look going:

Just make sure to take into account that the laces will stretch a little once you use them a few times. I couldn't get the laces comfortably into the top grommits when I first made the laces, but now they not only fit, but they're plenty left over for tying them up.

comfy

I just got back from a 10-day business trip to Orlando, Florida. It took some serious clothes wrangling to find ten days' worth of office-ready clothes in my closet, and more wrangling still to fit them all in my suitcase.

One of the things I decided to do for the trip was finish off this recycled-cotton pullover I've been working on:

The pattern can be found free on Knitty here. The original was made in wool, but the simple lines made me think that it would be good for cotton too. The shape is a wonderfully flattering A-line, the armholes are low enough to be comfy but high enough to be elegant, and it has those neato-keen pleats at the neck and on the slightly belled sleeves (the back has darts that imitate the pleats without adding bulk). The vast majority of the knitting was just that wide 2x6 rib that you can see forming the vertical lines. And yes, the back does work out to be wider than the front, which in wearing means it's also longer, but that keeps it from riding up, so I'm fine with that.

The recycled cotton was from a "sweater's-worth" kit that I picked up from Summit Yarns in the early 00s, right before they went out of business. The idea was that you would knit up a largish swatch in the stitch pattern you wanted to use, then machine-wash and -dry it. The yarn would shrink (mostly lengthwise — denim yarn is famous for this), and you would know your finished gauge. You could then knit the sweater to the finished gauge, and have a machine washable sweater made out of eco-friendly yarn.

Knitting the sweater was a breeze, despite the 20% increase in all the lengths I had to knit in. The yarn itself was kind of like knitting with cotton kitchen twine — not unpleasant, but not exactly "luxurious" either. It's an artifact of how quickly our "green" sensibilities have changed. While part of me is glad it's made from recycled fibre and is unbleached, another part is shrieking, "I have to throw this thing in the dryer to make it keep its shape? I never put clothes in the dryer!" Oh well, it seems to be happy being washed with the towels.

I still have another Summit kit in a hemp/cotton blend that knits up to about the same gauge.

insanity

One of the things I had planned to make over my winter holiday was a new pair of plain black mittens. When I make plain mittens, I use the same Patons leaflet pattern I have been using since I was twelve years old — I think it's called "Two Needle Mitts for the Family" or something like that. I almost have the whole thing memorised, and can do a mitten in about one round trip on the streetcar between the Beach and downtown.

Instead, I wound up making these:

They took a bit longer than a couple of streetcar rides.

The mitten and gauntlet pattern are from different examples in Anna Zilboorg's Magnificent Mittens, and the only saving grace of the whole thing (besides that I can keep my hands warm to about -25C with ease now) is that I used up a nice chunk of stash yarn. I deliberately chose the patterns to maximise the stashbusting — I had more red than black left, and that dictated which patterns I knit.

I wasn't paying attention to row counts when I picked the gauntlet pattern. I just cared about the proportions of the background and foreground. Most of the gauntlets in the book go a few inches past one's wrist — enough to go over a coat cuff nicely and block out the wind. These gauntlets go almost all the way to my elbow, and I have long arms! I feel like a superhero with some kind of DIY angle to their identity when I'm wearing them. They sag a little when I'm walking with my arms hanging down naturally, but they still stay over my coat cuffs, so that's fine.

The second time I wore them, I got the best compliment a DIYer can get from a stranger. A lady came up to me and asked me where she could buy a pair. I gave her the book title, but she doesn't know any knitters who could tackle mittens in two colours. Pity.

Actually, if you're a knitter who would like to try out two-colour knitting for the first time, I'd recommend mittens. They're small and it's easy to find patterns that can be committed to memory easily. The Zilboorg book has clear instructions and lots of variety, and is as good a place to start as any.

wardrobe stuff

I have this bad habit of knack for wearing out the left elbow on my jackets. Not just knitted ones — store-bought blazer-type ones too. Not only do I get to be annoyed by having a jacket that is perfectly wearable except for the one elbow ruining it, but I get to have insult added to injury when various people tell me to get those suede patches that everyone loved to hate in the 70s.

Right. Because suede patches look so incredibly good on tailored suit jackets

Instead, I've been busy making up some knitted jackets. Not cardigans, exactly, although technically I suppose they are. "Cardigan" implies something casual. These are office-ready, and have some dressmaker details to make them more tailored-looking.

The first one I finished is a Fiona Ellis pattern:

It's a basic shaped jacket, with just a little two-colour work as trim. I made two changes from the original design. The first change was to add hems to the bottom of all the body pieces. The original pattern just called for a few rows of the contrast colour in garter stitch, and it was doing absolutely nothing to keep the edges from curling, so I had to rework.

The second change was to omit the floppy pleated cuffs and replace them with a plain hem that had the same trim as the front and neck bands. I thought the dramatic cuffs were great, but not terribly practical for the office. I have to type a lot for my day job, and worried I would have to do a Liberace-style wrist flourish every time I went to edit a new version of a requirements document.

The second jacket is from a recent issue of Interweave Knits:

This one had a lot more mods to the original pattern.

• I added extra rows of garter stitch to the bottom of the body and sleeves to keep the lace edging from curling. It still does, a little bit. The directions said steaming would get rid of this. I am not inclined to steam a jacket every time I want to wear it, so decided to let the knitting do the work.
• I added a 5-stitch garter stitch border at the fronts of the body's lace edging so the edges wouldn't curl in. The original pattern called for the knitter to flip back X number of stitches and tack them down to the wrong side. "X" didn't equal a pattern repeat or half-repeat, so the lace on the back of the facing wouldn't have lined up with the front of the facing. I had to re-jig the stitch counts a little, but was pleased with the garter stitch.
• The stranded colourwork (the stylised plants around the body) were worked in the round with a steek up the middle, because purling back through a 25-st repeat with no symmetry in it did not appeal.
• I worked the colourwork chart so that only whole motifs were knitted in, instead of partial motifs per the instructions. I figured since I was creating the fabric instead of working with printed & cut stuff, I could pull off little niceties like that.
• Because of the steek, I changed the way the front facings were worked from the original directions.
• I added some rows of I-cord and I-cord knot buttons with loops to close the fronts. The original pattern had a single hook-and-eye closure just below the collar.
• I made the sleeves full-length, instead of the original 3/4 length. If I'm wearing a 100% wool jacket, I want to stay warm. Also, 3/4 sleeves look ridiculous on me.

I don't think the alterations on either of these were any big deal — having it "your way" is a big motivator in DIY. Even with all the mods to the purple jacket, I only needed one sticky note to track all the numbers, and it's still perfectly recognisable as a rendition of the original jacket in the magazine.

What are your favourite DIY wardrobe tricks?

thinking too much

I finished these socks recently:

The pattern is from Cookie A.'s Sock Innovations. They were dead easy to knit, and I like how the ribbing, diagonal lace panel, and plain stocking stitches work together to warp the self-striping when the socks are worn. Which is just as well, because I've tried no fewer than five different patterns on this yarn and hated the knitting, or the results, or both, for all of them except for this last (sixth) attempt. This yarn was The Yarn That Didn't Want to Be Anything for over five years. It probably doesn't help that the stripe colours and the background colour remind me of sweat socks from the mid-70s.

If the socks were over-thinking materials with pattern, this bath mat had me over-thinking the execution:

The pattern is the Doris Daymat from The Happy Hooker book. I've been wanting to make this as a bath mat for years, but could never wrap my head around estimating the yarn quantities for a finer gauge and a different mat size. I finally had a "duh" moment, found a baby blanket estimate in Ann Budd's handy crochet brochure, and everything worked out swimmingly. (Okay, except for the edge distortion you can see in the photo, but I'm trying to pitch that to myself as "whimsy" because I can't bear the thought of taking it out and doing it over with fewer stitches on the short edges.) I already have another one on the go. Incidentally, the flowers can be detached and reattached easily for those times when less funky decor is required.

Lesson learned: don't make things so complicated that execution paralysis sets in. When in doubt, try it out.

it's august. fuck.

Today is the first day of the second half of summer for people in the Northern Hemisphere. It's all shorter days and end of the growing season from here, folks.

[ducks as rotten fruit and verbal abuse get thrown]

Still here? Don't blame me — get angry at the Earth's orbit or move to New Zealand or something. I'm just pointing out the obvious.

The obvious, if you're a knitter, is that all those lovely sweater-weather sweaters you want to wear this fall aren't going to make themselves. So if you want at least one new jacket to wear this fall, you're going to have to find some air conditioning and get started on it now.

That's precisely what I did this morning. I agonised a little (and still am, a little) over finishing some stuff that's been on the needles for an embarrassing amount of time, but in the end I decided to grab some stash and start Sway by Fiona Ellis (it's in her Inspired Fair Isle Knits book). The original is in a lilac grey with pink trim; me being me, I'm making mine in brick red with black trim, and have decided to make some modifications. If I ever get the thing done, I'll be posting photos here. Wish me luck.

The other "September is less than five weeks away" crisis I'm going through is that I started cleaning out my bedroom closet this weekend, and I discovered that moths had eaten five pairs of my hand-knit socks, plus three skeins of sock yarn that I was keeping in the same closet. That explains why, as of Friday night, I had three new pairs of socks on the go and plans for several more. I'm all for tossing stuff I don't want anymore, but I'd like it to be me that decides what goes, not a bunch of stupid fibre-eating insects.

(By the bye, in case you are smugly patting yourself on the back because you only buy cotton and synthetics, I have some bad news for you: I have had moths eat 100% acrylic gloves with plastic palm grips. They are evil vermin right up there with raccoons.)

Two of the socks on the needles are from Cookie A.'s Sock Innovation book. The last one is a free download from Knitty, but by the same designer. I like how this woman thinks. Her suggestions for resizing the patterns are reasonable and treat the reader like a grown-up.

I find my knitting goes through phases. I don't just mean in terms of colour, technique, and output, although that happens too. Right now I'm in high production gear because I need the clothes. I like to wear jacket-y cardigans to work because actual jackets are too uncomfortable when I'm going to be sitting in a cubicle all day. Last winter, though, I wore the left elbow out on no fewer than three cardigans, leaving me with just one that I could wear (I have a bad habit of propping my head up on my left hand when I'm reading, in case you're wondering how I managed that). So it's time for more jackets, even though I also need to get the first draft of my novel done. I have enough stash for [glances around the living room] three more plain coloured ones, plus one or two that are already on the needles. There is one that I bought the pattern for and would like to make in a colour I don't have in stash. Maybe that can be this fall's yarn purchase. Yeah, I know. But hey, it's mostly stash-busting!

And, thanks to the moths, it's also time for more socks, and that can definitely be 100% stash-busting. To be honest, a lot of those socks were near to worn-out anyhow, so the critters just sped up the process a little. Not that I'll be forgiving them any time soon.

except do it on purpose

Regular readers of the DIY Eyrea will know that I'm not much one for knitting fads — and, given that the craft dates back 800-1,000 years, I count a "fad" as anything less than a century old.

By that count, felting (I am not going to call if "fulling" outside of a textile studies programme) via washing machine is most definitely a fad. Felting knitted stuff itself dates back to the first time someone pulled a shrunken, matted piece of work out of the laundry tub and thought to themselves, "You know, if I planned for that before the knitting that could be kind of useful fabric..." Felting by machine, of course, only dates back to since the invention of washing machines. Until the fad, most felting by machine was unintentional.

The Naked Sheep recently got some felted clog-style slipper kits in, and they interested me because slippers are one of the few things I feel justify felting these days. Unless you are a Dutch fisherman, you probably will never need a felted sweater. Felted bags? Meh. Depends on the bag design. Felted slippers, on the other hand, are both warm and hard-wearing. The first is probably less important in these days of central heating, but hard-wearing still counts.

I'd just finished the ballerina slippers from the mercerised wool Gina gave me (see previous post), but felted slippers sounded interesting from a longevity point of view. Knit them once, quickly, on big needles, felt them, and then enjoy them for a long, long time. It sounded like a great return on investment. So I headed down to the Sheep, checked out the kits they still had left, and came home with a purple/blue/burgundy/turquoise blend.

The slippers looked like this initially:

They were almost twice as big as they needed to be. Since I had never caused serious shrinkage to anything woolen in my life, I was very nervous that I would wind up ripping out the things and making more ballerina slippers with them, but followed the instructions with the pattern and dutifully tossed them in the washing machine.

Three and a half hours later, they were this size:

In the photo, it looks like the slippers are still way too big, but when I put them on, they're only a little too big. In other words, they feel like clogs.

I hope these really do last a long time. The felting took more time than the knitting, and it got excruciating after a while having to stop the washer every five minutes to check on the progress. If someone were going to make an entire family's worth of these things, I strongly recommend felting them all in one go. My washer survived the ordeal pretty well, but I'm much more likely to believe those stories about burning out the washer motor while felting now.

Pattern notes: this is a Fibre Trends pattern and assumes you will want to knit in the round. Because most of the slipper is worked in short rows, however, it made more sense to me to convert the whole thing to flat knitting. This only adds 12 rows of seaming to the slipper, and since there are already two sole seams to stitch up, it doesn't seem like that big a deal.

finally

Sometimes you tell the yarn what to be, and sometimes the yarn tells you what it wants to be.

Once upon a time, the ever-cool Gina came to visit TO from Alberta. Being the ever-cool person that she is, she brought hostess gifts with her, and I put a picture of mine on this blog, like so:

Check out that gorgeous blue-green yarn. That colour combo has since become the main colour scheme for the entire on-line part of The Eyrea. I don't know if it came directly from the yarn — more likely, it came from something Gina said that I can never quite remember — but this is definitely the first instance of it showing up in tangible form.

The reason why the yarn came in one big skein of green-blue with two smaller skeins of blue-green is because you're supposed to make socks from it. It's a fine worsted weight, though, and I'm not big on thick socks for all the usual reasons — they don't fit in boots, they look chunky, blah blah blah. At first, I thought I'd make mittens with contrast cuffs or in a colour pattern. The yarn is mercerised wool (very strong stuff, but still soft to touch), so it would make a nice pair of hard-wearing mittens. I even started a cuff, but somehow they never got done.

Then, over the summer, moths ate the first pair of handmade slippers I'd knitted for myself in years. This time, I decided to try the slipper pattern in the most recent Interweave Holiday issue, since it still had that ballerina slipper shape I like and, most importantly, had instructions for my size.

They were a quick and easy knit, but I found the top edge was a little too big to get them to stay on my feet (this may be a quirk of my feet, my knitting, or the pattern — not sure). So I headed over to Mokuba, picked up some grosgrain ribbon that happened to come in the exact same colours as are in the yarn, and threaded it around the edge so I could adjust the opening:

With the addition of the ribbon, the slippers are dead comfy. I've worn them enough that there should be some "fuzzing" on the soles, but the mercerised wool is holding up very well and shows no signs of wear. It went flat on the sole, but doesn't look like it's fuzzing or pilling anywhere.

Of course, since the original amount of yarn was intended for socks, I have a lot left over. The next time I feel like knitting up some of these slippers, I'm thinking of making one with green-blue yarn and blue-green trim, and the other in the reverse colour scheme — sort of a medieval thing. It'll look fun, and they only get worn at home or in the homes of friends and family, after all.

blocking en masse

Some people block their knitted stuff just as a matter of finishing it — just one more step towards the end, like darning in the ends.

I was always taught that if you have to block it, it means you did a crappy job knitting it in the first place. Knitters who claim you have to block to "get rid of uneven stitches" make me cringe. How about just not making the uneven stitches in the first place?

My mum told me recently the lace scarf I made her had been admired by a friend of hers, but was astonished that I did not iron my work. Iron? Iron? It's got bobbles in it! And it's made out of Kidsilk Haze! Even the biggest blocking fanatic won't iron bobbles, especially ones knitted into yarn of silk and mohair.

Apparently I have found one who would.

One of the tricks with craftsmanship is knowing when to deviate from your usual best practices, though, and I recently made four things that require blocking. Not ironing, mind you (shudder) —just some stretching to get them in the right form.

Three of the items are Estonian lace: two shawls and a scarf. One is a beret in stranded colourwork.

I waited until I had a nice, quiet stretch of time. In this case, it was Christmas Day. That might shock some folks, but I had a perfectly nice winter solstice celebration on the 20th, thank you.

I woke up, brushed my teeth, and got to work.

Soak

I gathered together everything I needed to block, filled up the sink with cool water, added Soak, and set a timer for fifteen minutes.
Note: Normally soaking several different-coloured items together like this would not necessarily be a good idea, because dye can bleed out and discolour other items. Since all my items were in the same colour range, I decided to risk it. Nothing bad happened to the knits themselves, although the jury's still out on my bedsheet.

During the fifteen minutes, I stripped the bed, put on an old fitted sheet, and scarfed down some breakfast.

Then the pinning started. Some knitters block things lovingly, measuring and re-measuring. I'm more of the school of "er, yeah, looks right, and I'm sick of pinning so I'm going to use some blocking wires now." Here are the two shawls blocked out on the bed, both using a combination of pins and blocking wires:
What's impressive about both these pieces is that they were half to two-thirds the size on the needles before blocking. Lace can be weird that way.

The beret got popped over a dinner plate. I tried just putting it on the mattress with the shawls, but it was draining too much water, so I set up my drying rack and put it on that.

By the time I got to the scarf, I had run out of room on the bed. Also, the scarf is made from Handmaiden Sea Silk, so it tends to smell like seaweed when wet, and I didn't want the smell near the shawls. so I just draped it over the top of the drying rack and gave it some tugs to set the width:
Yes, my living room looks like a workshop.

As of this writing, everything has been drying for about an hour and a half. I'm going to set this post to delay publishing until the first week of January. With any luck, the three items here that are gifts will be in their recipients' hands by then.

I'm not sure how long things will take to dry. If the stuff on the bed isn't ready by tonight, though, at least I have my sofa bed to sleep on. DIYers need sofa beds.

More things I've finished lately

Some of these things have actually been off the needles for months, but I would set up stupid "efficiency" tasks for myself like: "Oh, I'll darn in the ends on these when I finish that other pair of socks I have on the needles," and then I would go off and work on something else, and both projects would languish. But here's the latest this week:

Bacchus socks

These are from the Fall 2008 issue of Interweave Knits and are the first socks knitted from the toe up that I've ever got to fit a human foot. I like the idea of having a full toolkit of methods for knitting, but I really don't get why people are fanatical about toe-up socks. Then again, I still don't get why people are fanatical about knitting in the round, even though I'm knitting in the round a lot myself lately (although expecting that to change somewhat this fall when I start making sweaters and jackets again).

I'm not the biggest fan of making bobbles, but these were no more than two bobbles per round, so it was fine. I like the use of ribbing to make the whole sock a bit more shapely. I had to make these wider and longer than what the pattern called for, but everything worked out in the end.

Celtic knot socks

These are from the same issue of Interweave Knits as the Bacchus socks — lots of great patterns in this issue! These were also written for toe-up construction, but since the texture pattern is symmetrical, I knit them cuff-down since that was easier on my brain.

Beaded earrings

I bought all the beads and findings for these a couple of years ago, and they've been languishing in my bead box ever since. One night I spontaneously decided I was sick of them using up the space in the bead box, pulled out my pliers, and put them together. I had to redo them once (but only once). In the end they seemed to turn out:

French Girl lace jacket

I finished this one a while ago, but (as you can see) have been having trouble photographing it. To make this one, you knit two halves —cuff to centre back, and then cuff to centre back for the other side — and then knit the collar separately, using a three-needle cast-0ff to attach it. The three-needle cast-off is what gives the jacket structure — there are absolutely no seams anywhere else. My two big modifications for this one from the original pattern were to make it long-sleeved and to add a garter stitch border to the bottom, instead of the single crochet originally called for.

The back gusset adds some nice shaping to the jacket and makes it a bit more difficult to see where the graft line is that joins the two halves at the back (it's along one side of the gusset and up the centre back).The collar is made from the twisted edge up and then joined with a gathered three-needle cast-off. I'm finding French Girl Knits has some great construction ideas that make you think "Hey, I could use that for..."

Now what?

I started my first knitted doily today, and even though I took several hours out to visit some friends, I am still 60% done by the round count. The rounds are getting bigger and bigger, of course, but there are also more plain rounds, so the progress has actually been pretty linear.

I'm also working on another French Girl constructed-in-two-halves jacket. I need more jackets, and since I am sitting down in a cubicle most of the day, I prefer knitted ones. It would be loved to post finished photos of both of these soon, because that means they're getting used!

Things I've finished lately

I've been having trouble finishing DIY things in the last few months. Not finishing, the part where you seam and darn in ends — that part is enjoyable, and means the bulk of the work is over if you've done the job right to begin with.

No, this is more like: getting an idea, diving into the stash, rummaging amongst the needles until I find the right size, casting on, getting 50-80% done... and then repeating the same process from the beginning. It's getting to the point that I'm "missing" some needle sizes because all the available pairs have half-finished work hanging off them. Not good.

I think it might finally be coming to an end. Not only do I feel like finishing things, but I actually am finishing them. Some things are more finished than others:

Unintentional beaded flowers

Note: these are made from seed beads. They are sitting on the wrist rest of my laptop in the photo. Think small and finicky.

I couldn't sleep one night, so I decided to look through pattern books I already know well —I find the photos pleasant, but because I already know the material, it's boring enough to make me sleepy.

On this particular night, I was looking through a copy of Bead & Button and found the instructions for these seed-stitch flowers. All of a sudden I had this brilliant idea: to make a lot of seed-stitch flowers, sew them over a wire frame with seed-stitch mesh in between, and make a funky lampshade for the bare light bulb in my laundry room!

The ideal would have been to write the idea down and go to sleep. Nope. Couldn't. So I got up around midnight, pulled out my beading stuff, and got the pink-pearl flower with the burgundy centre done around five AM. I would have been done early, but this was my first attempt at brick stitch and the thread got so tangled I had to start over after completing just one petal. The burgundy flower with the turquoise trim went more quickly.

No, I never made the lamp shade, although I did pick out some lampworked beads from my stash so that I wouldn't have to make several dozen flowers just to cover one light bulb.

Dishcloths

I've been needing new dishcloths for a while, so these were intentional. Usually I just do the cast on three stitches, do an eyelet edge increase 'til it's wide enough, decrease back to three stitches kind of dishcloths, but I liked the 1950s factor on these spiky petal ones (think starburst clocks and things knit sideways in short rows to make a circular shape). They are dead quick, and somehow only use about half a ball of standard dishcloth cotton. The green one is made from Bernat, the blue and yellow ones from Lily Sugar 'n' Cream, and the multi-coloured one is an attempt to use up the leftovers. I still have another leftovers one on the needles, and it looks like I'll have enough yarn and then some.
One thing I am irrational about: dishcloths must be reversible. The multi-coloured one bothers me a bit because the colour changes aren't the same on the other side (physically impossible in knitting, of course, although one can minimise the effect). If you graft these to finish them instead of seaming per the pattern, they're almost exactly the same on both sides.

French Girl cover jacket... and other stuff

I've been really getting into the designs in the French Girl Knits book. They're all seamless without going to convoluted lengths just to be seamless —the seamlessness is worked sensibly into the design. I made some mods to my version, but since none of the photos I took of this this morning turned out, that will have to be another blog post. This one has run long enough!

the slipper experiment

A few days ago I hauled up the last of the yarn from my locker to my apartment. As I suspected, most of the nice stuff had wound up in the locker (in sealed plastic bags, in a suitcase, thank goodness). Now that it's all in my living space, I'm starting to appreciate what a gargantuan task reducing the stash will be. The idea is to have it all fit in my cedar-lined chest. That means I need to decrease the volume to about 20% of what I have now. That's okay: part of knowing how to solve the problem is knowing the size of it.

I count any unfinished knitting as stash, even though it's really living in that strange twilight-land between stash and knitting. The truth is, I have so many ideas that sometimes things that are on their way to being finished wind up being unraveled and turned into stash again. I hate that silly debate between "process" and "project" knitting (reminds me too much of left-brain vs. right-brain, and all the other stupid binaries we impose on ourselves), but it's true I like to experiment at least as much as I like to get things done.

The past couple of weeks have been good for finishing things and experimenting at the same time. I finally finished the Lana Grossa socks I first blogged about last May, and started the second Noro sock of the pair I was working on at the same time. It had been so long, I had to look up my old blog post to find out what size needles I had used for the Noro, because all I could remember was that it was smaller-than-usual. (I knew there was a reason why I kept this blog!)

I also just finished a new pair of slippers for myself, because my old ones were ruined when I painted my bedroom. My old slippers were Isotoners, but this time I decided to knit my own.

I have a friend who saw a lot of my sweaters before she saw my apartment, and when she finally came over, the first thing she said was, "Where's all the knitted household stuff?" The truth is, I'm not that big on afghans, knitted pillows, tea cosies, or (gack!) wall hangings, much less door-knob cosies, toilet paper roll covers, or other ways people have found over the years to use up leftovers. That includes household slippers. When I was little, my grandmother used to knit my brothers and I slippers. We used their natural slippiness to our advantage, and would "surf" down the cushion-floored hallway after a running start. We would have our new slippers completely worn out in about a week, maybe two if they were made from Phentex instead of the usual leftover Eaton's Lady Fair Sayelle acrylic. Come to think of it, maybe that's why Oma taught me that slipper pattern as soon as I was past the scarf stage.

There's a nice pair of slippers in Melanie Falick's Handknit Holidays, though, and the idea of reducing some stash and replacing my slippers for "free" appealed. Also, this pattern calls for fingering-weight yarn, so I felt confident substituting some sock yarn. It takes me a couple of years to wear out a pair of hand-knit socks.

Here's the finished version:

Besides the yarn substitution, the major changes I made to the original pattern were:

• Altering the size to something that would fit my feet. The pattern instructions are, as is typical for women's socks and slippers patterns, too small for me, even at the largest size. I take a North American size 10 shoe (that's a European 41, or a UK size 8), so I had to do some math to size it up myself. It wasn't that hard once I had compared the instructions to the schematics a few times, but it would be nice if someone remembered that not all women are five feet four with a size six shoe when they're publishing these things. There's a reason why I could design my own sweaters by the time I was sixteen, and it's not because I'm a fashion genius, unfortunately.
  
• Ditching the long laces that were supposed to cross and tie halfway up the calf and replacing them with short laces that hold up the sides but don't require any tying, because they're sewn onto the slipper at both ends. (They can't be eliminated entirely because they're what's keeping the sides of the slipper from curling and falling off the foot.) The laces are still threaded through the centre-foot points to allow for the slipper to stretch and flex correctly as I wear it.
  
• Removing the yarn-overs the pattern called for and replacing them with make-one increases instead. I don't have anything against lace patterns; I just thought this would look better. I also eliminated the yarn-over at the back of the heel since there wasn't going to be any lace to run through it.

I'd like to get some leather partial soles for them (the kind with the separate toe and heel pieces that come with the tough linen thread to sew them on with), but haven't seen these for sale in a long time. If you have a lead, please let me know.

The slippers fit and stay on a lot better than you would be led to believe when you're making them (the uppers curl something awful until they're on your feet), and the minimal upper means that your feet stay warm, but not too warm when you're wearing them. The final effect is that of a dancing slipper — pretty and elegant.

Naked Sheep 2.0 Rocks!!!

(I feel like everyone who reads that title needs to do so out loud, preferably using one of those microphones that imitates a large stadium echo.)

Tonight the ever-amazing Lisa hosted the first knitting night at the newly rebooted Naked Sheep, and an excellent time was had by all. If you live anywhere near Toronto, you simply must go and see. Yes, even if you don't knit or crochet.

Lisa and I met at the original opening of the Naked Sheep four years ago, and the first thing she told me after announcing she had bought the shop was that she was going to rearrange the shelves so that there was room to sit and knit in the centre of the shop, and so that things were more spacious.

"Makes sense," I said, but wondered about the narrow shape of the shop and whether it could be made "spacious" and still have a decent stock of yarn and pattern books.

Well, I got to see with my own two eyes tonight, and after I picked up my jaw from off the floor, I couldn't stop saying how much of a difference the new layout makes. Not only is there room to sit and knit, there is room to dance. I know, because we did some dancing towards the end of the night when everyone was packing up their knitting.

"Wow, I can't believe how open it all is," I said to Lisa. "How many shelves did you get rid of?"

"Actually, I bought a new one," she said, and pointed to a six-by-six foot cubbyhole rack on the wall behind her.

I am amazed. More space to move around and knit, and yet more space for yarn.

The energy tonight at the knitting drop-in was incredible. I don't want to moan about all the details, but I had a very busy day at work followed by a stressful drive to Mississauga to return a rental car. I wasn't even sure I was going to make it, but I wanted to see the new shop and check things out, so I went. It's almost 11:00pm as I write this blog, and I still feel buzzed.

Some people who dropped by tonight, like Brenda and Sandra, were people I met at the Sheep during the opening of the original version of the shop. Other people were new to me, and some were even new to the shop, but everyone got welcomed in and invited to pull up a chair. (And I would give them shout-outs too, but I can't remember everyone's name! If you were there, please e-mail me so I can say hi to everyone!) Knitters of all sorts of different skill levels were there, which to me just makes things more fun — some projects even got worked by several sets of hands. Variety is very cool when it comes to DIY.

On the way over, it occurred to me that I should at least give Lisa a card — I mean, that is one of the things you're supposed to do when someone you know takes over a business — so I made a quick dash into my favourite card shop. They had all sorts of cool blank cards, and a couple of "congratulations" cards, but in the end I picked one that had a neat collage on the front: a pen-and-ink drawing of a woman's head from the 1950s, a diagram of an atom picked out in sparkly ink, bright happy shapes. On the inside it was blank; on the outside it said "Inspired".

In a single word, it describes Naked Sheep 2.0 perfectly.

Go see.