spud says hi

Right enough

Although most of my knitting over the past two weeks has been ravelympics inspired, and though I finished up another cool woven ball (which ravelers can see there), this one in grey, olive green, and striped khaki and multigreys, earlier in the week, and then just this morning finished grafting the end of the thumb of my second Latvian mitten, I'm not ready to write about that one yet (and particularly because the second mitten is drying, so photography... well, later.

Instead, there's this, which I have decided is right enough to be considered finished.

 

It is my somewhat modified version of A Cardigan for Arwen, knit in Textiles a Mano Bariloche.

The modifications?  Seamless construction.  I knit the body in the round up to the armpits.  Then I knit two bands of the cable pattern, grafted the bands shut into cuffs, picked up stitches along one edge of the cuffs, and knit up the sleeves.  Then I joined the sleeves to the body and did your normal raglan shaping for the sleeve caps.  I as I got close to the proper armhole length, I had a few more stitches along the back neck than I wanted, so I did a row or two with extra decreases in the middle, and in the end I think that actually helps the collar/hood hold its shape well.

I like it.  The pattern doesn't call for any closures on the front, and I think I'm OK with that.  There's a chance I'll want to put some sort of single clasp closure on it... but I'm not sure about it.  It's a snug fit pulling the edges together, though I could do it--I could even do a zip front if I really wanted to do that.

The one remaining question is... the hood.  I am very, very unlikely to wear the hood up, for two reasons.  One, I almost never wear hoods, and two, it is, as I suspected, a tiny bit too short, so although it's wearable, it looks a little awkward.  The question is, do I leave it as it is, as a design element, or do I do some other kind of collar.  I'm thinking the answer is leave it as it is, but I'd be interested in strong opinions toward the other possibility.

OK, and what the heck... a picture of the first Latvian mitten.

Yeah, just a few ends to weave in.  Just a few.

America's next top model

So, here we have my rather adorable new (well, relatively--she's 3.5 months old) niece M, modeling my latest knitting creation.  Granted, at this point she needs some help with the sitting upright, but, still.  I think she's clearly in the running for future glory.

This is a slightly modified version of the Pinwheel Sweater pattern available at Elan's.  The child version of the sweater is supposed to be for someone from 6-9 months up to 3-4 years; it's a big coat on a small child, an then a regular sweater on a bigger one.  I made this smaller than the original, largely due to the yarn I used.  It's TyDy sock, so a much thinner, lighter yarn, on size 2 needles.  The entire sweater was made from one skein, plus a tiny bit--seriously, like one inch of one sleeve--of a second skein.  It's big enough on M that I'm hoping it'll take her through this spring and then next fall/spring, too.  The sleeves were made extra long to cope with that--right now they're significantly cuffed, but later that can be adjusted.

The construction of this is almost exactly like that of the circle sweater I made when I first started this blog, many moons ago.  You start in the center, knit out a circle, more or less, and place waste yarn (well, the pattern calls for doing a provisional cast on, but I did an afterthought heel waste yarn placement).  The only differences are that this has a stockinette section at the center, while the other was all garter stitch (well, actually, that original pattern called for a slip stitch pattern, but I did just garter), and that this uses the increases to make the circle grow as a decorative element, while the other hid them.

The result is a sweater that wraps around with a cut-away front, basically, and a big huge collar that can be almost a hood, at this point.  (Though M's clearly more interested in eating her hand than in modeling.)

Or, turned down, a big shawl collar.  I put one button on it, to be closed with the loops of the edging (a quite clever i-cord bind-off, which took a long time [basically, a car trip from Chicago to Madison, plus some extra time] but was worth it in the end).  I think that as M gets bigger, the button will have to move--but that's very easily done.

Also, this qualified for the Ravelympics!  I cast on on Tuesday, finished the knitting on Friday, and added the button on Saturday.  Amazing!

So simple, so clever

OK, I think I have a new favorite thing to knit for kids.

Could this be any cleverer?  It's a ball made out of six (or you can do nine) plain knit bands, woven together in what's really a cube, but which turns ball-like with a little squishing.

You knit six bands of stockinette stitch, and the pattern takes advantage of the fact that stockinette curls in on itself.  That turns what would be long flat panels into narrower plump bands.

For this one, I used leftovers from: baby sophisticate, from the dyed yarn for the ten stitch twist blanket, and a pair of golden monkey socks (that yarn was used doubled).  I had to cut the bands down in length from the original pattern (which I can only find a link to from ravelry) to make the ball firm enough--originally it was a little too loose, which I fortunately realized when I had only four of the bands woven together and was knitting the fifth.  The shorter bands make it harder to weave the last band, in particular, but give it much better shape.

Basically?  Highly recommended.  I'm going to make another this size out of more leftovers, and then possible a couple out of sock yarn alone (those will obviously be smaller) to use as cat toys.

Not again.

So, I am finally nearing the end of my mauvey-pinky Cardigan for Arwen.  And once again... I don't have quite enough yarn, I fear.  What is it about this yarn and my choices for it??

Now, really, it's not that bad.  Basically, the hood, visible at the top above, is probably just a hair too short.  Maybe a little more than a hair.  I think I can squeeze another row or two out of the yarn I have, but that's going to be it.

It's not that bad because I can easily change it into a different kind of collar, probably a big sailor type collar because that seems to go well with the cardigan.  The fancy thing to do with that would be to try to make the cable go along the bottom of that, but that's probably beyond what I want to figure out how to do.  Because, seriously, this hood has taken ridiculously long.  I can't figure out why.  Maybe I'm just tired of knitting it?  I don't know.

The other thing the hood did is pool.  That is, the slight variegation of the yarn started to stack up in big color patches rather than be evenly spread around, as it was in the rest of the sweater.  Unexpected!  But, given the slight degree of variegation, nothing to problematic.  Now, if it had ended up looking like giant, I don't know, red and yellow patches, well, that... I'm not sure I'd appreciate that.

In other news, I'm currently living with a cat named Daisy.  Daisy is very, very sweet, with a little meow, who sleeps on my legs and begs to be petted first thing in the morning.

She's also good at camouflage. 

 

See?  Well, do you??

Which?

I've almost decided to make some colorwork Latvian mittens for the Ravelympics (i.e., a project that should be cast on during or after the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, and finished by the end of the closing ceremonies).  I was so inspired by the ones I saw in Riga, and I did buy yarn there.  And there was this cool site, which is also amazingly inspiring.

(Oh, hey, here's some more cool stuff about what the designs mean!)

And so, I took one of the pictures from the first site, and used excel to play around with some colors.  And I've got two things I'm thinking right now.

First, pale with darker designs on it.  The color of the background is particularly not true to what the end result would be.  The yarn I've got is more oatmeal colored, I'd say, but excel has limited color options.

Second is dark with lighter designs (well, and just contrasting designs, I suppose).  Again, the orangey yellow is a truer, duskier gold in real life, the red almost more maroon, and the blue darker.

So, which should it be?  One or two?  Light or dark?  I'm torn...

Where've I been?

Any guesses?  How about this?

 

Hmmm... that might not be helpful either.  What about this one?

The answer, my friends, is southern California.  Now, it's been a few weeks since I got back, and I've just been extremely lazy about posting them.  Well, and I went to Toronto for a few days, and I moved into a housesitting gig, and I spent time with my sister and niece and nephew when they came to town last week.

But earlier in January I had a wonderful, wonderful time visiting friends near LA and in San Diego.  So the pictures are, in order, a giraffe at The Living Desert, knitted wire jellyfish at the Mingei museum in San Diego, and part of the Getty Center, but more the amazing late day sky.

What else?  I had my first In-n-Out burger, I saw people I haven't seen in too many years, I had really good Georgian food at a very odd restaurant (which you can get a sense of from its website).  I talked and talked and talked.  I dabbled my feet in the Pacific (not that I haven't done that before, but I believe in doing that when one has the chance).

And now I'm back and settling down to work.  And knit.  I'm starting to plan for the ravelympics, but I'm not sure if the yarn I just ordered to do the most ambitious project I'm considering will arrive in time.  We'll see.

In the meantime, I'm closing in on the end of this.

This is my somewhat altered version of the Cardigan for Arwen (ravelry).  I've liked this pattern for ages, and I always thought this might be a nice melding of yarn and pattern.  This is the yarn I used for the cable wrap thingy that I had to frog due to not enough yarn.  But I loved how the cables looked in that other version, and so thought that using the yarn for something with cables made sense.  Thus, this.

The somewhat altered bit is the sleeves, as you can perhaps see.  The original pattern involves knitting the sleeves kind of sideways (kind of like in the sayuri pattern I just did), but I decided to knit the cuffs as bands, then pick up stitches on one side and knit up two normal sleeves, and then to join the body (which I'd knit in the round) and do raglan decreases.  I'm happy with this decision.  I'm just now at the hood part, so... I'm nearing the end, and can perhaps finish before the Olympics... er, ravelympics, start.