spud says hi

Just made it

Here's a sad attempt to make a post before yet another month goes by without one.  I've thought of many a possible blog post over the last little while, but failed to make anything of those thought.  And so, a post in bullet points.

• I moved, into a place I bought, and then did some renovations on, and so it was a super crazy end of summer into the start of the new academic year.  Because I actually moved in five days before classes started.
• My yarn now lives happily in a bookcase, and seems to have multiplied while it was hanging out in storage, or moving from Chicago back here.

 

• Yes, even the bag at the top is filled with yarn (that's the KnitPicks Palette, ready to turn into Venezia, whenever I get up the gumption to tackle that), and that bin in the bottom is filled with scraps and leftovers.  And even though I've got multiple sweaters' worth of yarn in there, yesterday I had to add another bunch, because I went to Romni Wools to buy something very specific (which I did!) and stupidly went into the sale basement and saw 12 skeins of luscious Jo Sharp Silkroad DK in a... I guess I'd call it a celery-colored tweed.  And it jumped into my arms, and there we go.

• The start of the school year has been crazy, because I'm teaching a new class--a co-taught one, for the first time ever, which turns out to be both very interesting and more work than you'd think--and there's been a lot of hullabaloo on campus about issues that interest and concern me.
• Despite that, I have knitted.  I did indeed frog and reknit the skirt I last posted about, this time removing all the pink (well, there are traces of it, but essentially removing it).  I am MUCH HAPPIER with the result.

• Here it is, slightly over-exposed, after blocking but before I frogged and reknit the waistband.  It added too much bulk, and no one actually needs extra bulk around the waist, right?  So I pulled it out, picked up fewer stitches, and then knit it in straight stockinette for an inch and a half, folded it over and sewed it into a tube, inserting elastic before finishing that sewing.

• And here's what it looks like on, in a kind of mediocre picture taken with my office computer.  Except I've just realized that it should be mirror flipped.  Eh, whatever.  I LIKE IT.  It's not exactly any of the dimensions of the pattern--I just knit until it seemed long and wide enough.  And I used MUCH smaller needles than called for, because I wanted a firmer fabric.  This was a very good idea, because it still definitely requires a slip.
• I also learned that one should not wear a skirt knitted out of feltable wool while riding one's bicycle, if said bicycle has a rough spot on its seat from where a squirrel chewed on it while it was living on the deck for a couple of years, because if one does, one ends up with a slightly felted area on said skirt.
• I knit a couple of pairs of socks, but am showing neither yet, because the prettier pair is in the laundry and deserve to have a picture taken while my feet are modeling them, because, again, they're pretty.
• The pretty pair were (was?) my TIFF2010 knitting.  I saw eight movies this year, despite the fact that I WAS STARTING CLASSES AND MOVING INTO A NEW PLACE AND IT WAS INSANE.  I only saw eight because I took people to see two of them.  The eight movies were, in approximate order of how much I liked them:
  • The Poll Diaries (aka The Summer of My Estonian Anarchist)
  • Aftershock (aka Sophie's Choice in China, but with an earthquake, and generally better outcomes)
  • In a Better World (aka bullies suck, and produce more bullies)
  • Home for Christmas (aka they celebrate Christmas in Norway--plus, there are immigrants there!)
  • How I Ended This Summer (aka two guys at an Arctic weather station, and one of them has seen too many horror movies)
  • Outside the Law (aka every mafia movie you've ever seen, tied in with Algerian independence and French bastardry)
  • Mama Gogo (aka they drink a lot in Iceland)
  • The Strange Case of Angelica (aka the movie that had one exciting moment: wondering whether a cat was going to jump at a bird.  It didn't.)
• I've been trying to deal with the massive number of leftovers from various projects, especially socks, by starting a blanket made of many scraps.  I'm basically doing a giant garter stitch square, made by casting on two stitches and then increasing one at the start of each row.  Eventually I'll decide it's wide enough and start decreasing at the start of each row, but I'm not there yet.  I'm knitting with three strands of sock yarn at a time, on 10.5 needles.  It's... interesting.

• See?

Embellished Squares, or Last gasp of winter

Well, that exaggerates a bit.  But after a very, very warm stretch in late winter, it suddenly got colder quite quickly, and stayed a bit on the breezy side for a while.  On the one hand, I was ready for spring to come for sure.  But on the other, it gave me reason to pull out some very, very wooly yarn and play around with it.

A couple years ago I bought 8 skeins of Sirdar Eco Wool DK, and 2 skeins of a complementary colorway of Noro Kureyon, at a going out of business sale.  I kind of thought I'd make a sweater with the yarn, something mostly brown, with a stripy waist, or something.  But when I started playing around with the yarn, I decided that actually, it wanted to be an afghan.  And as it turned out, that last gasp of cooler weather was absolutely perfect for knitting what turned out to be quite a large wooly project.

And so, Embellished Squares.

Size:  44" square unblocked, 50" square blocked (and it could probably have been blocked even bigger than that, had I wanted to)

Yarn:  Main color:  Sirdar Eco Wool DK, colorway 203, 8 skeins; Contrast color: Noro Kureyon, colorway 149, 2 skeins

(this means a total of 1092 yarns of more or less DK weight yarn; although the yarns claim to be different weights, they're very, very close; you could easily use more than two colors on this, too--or just one, for that matter)

Needles: US size 7 (4.5 mm) 40" long circular needle (or double pointed needles and circular needles, perhaps of multiple sizes, in the same size, if you're not comfortable with magic loop)

(I am a very loose knitter, so if you're not, you might want to go up a size)

Pattern notes:  In the second row, I've noted places to put 4 markers.  While you're using double pointed needles or magic loop, you won't need all of them.  Even later, because the increases are open, it's very obvious where the end of the four sections are, so you may not need anything but a marker for the start of the round.

I'm also not describing moving the markers, necessarily, but the markers should separate the four pattern repeats on all the even rows.

I'm putting in color changes as I knit them, but you can add in more or fewer color repeats.  This is what happened to work with the yarn I had, but you could experiment with all sorts of different striping designs.

Pattern:

Cast on 8 stitches of main color, using TechKnitter's circular cast on, here, or another method suitable for starting in the middle.  Join for knitting in the round by distributing stitches on double pointed needles or magic loop.  When you're able to move from either double pointed needles or magic loop onto a regular circular needle, do. (I just used the one long one, magic looping until the whole thing was big enough to fit on the circular needle I had, but you could use a shorter one for a while.)

Set up section:

R1: knit all stitches.

R2: [pm, yo, k1, yo, k1] 4 times.

R3: knit all stitches

R4: [yo, k3, yo, k1] 4 times

R5: knit all stitches

R6: [yo, k1, yo, k2tog, yo, k2tog, yo, k1] 4 times

R7: knit all stitches

R8: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

Section 1:

R1: purl all stitches

R2: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R3: knit all stitches

R4: [yo, k1, (yo, k2tog) until one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R5: knit all stitches

R6: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

Repeat Section 1 three more times, using contrast color for the first repeat (in other words, the four total repeats go main color, contrast color, main color, main color)

Section 2:

Use contrast color for first repeat of this section.

R1: purl all stitches

R2: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R3: knit all stitches

R4: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R5: knit all stitches

R6: [yo, k1, (yo, k2tog) until one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R7: knit all stitches

R8: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R9: knit all stitches

R10: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

Repeat section 2 two more times, using main color.

Section 3:

Use contrast color for first repeat of this section.

R1: purl all stitches

R2: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R3: knit all stitches

R4: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R5: knit all stitches

R6: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R7: knit all stitches

R8: [yo, k1, (yo, k2tog) until one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R9: knit all stitches

R10: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R11: knit all stitches

R12: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

R13: knit all stitches

R14: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

Repeat Section 3 two more times, using main color.

Border:

Finish with garter stitch border

R1: purl all stitches

R2: [yo, k to one stitch before marker, yo, k1] 4 times

Repeat these two rows until somewhat before you run out of yarn, ending with R1.  I ended up with 11.5 repeats of the garter border, which meant 12 garter ridges on the right side of the afghan.

Bind off: use a fairly loose bind off method of your choice.  I used a modification of Jeny's surprisingly stretchy bind off; her method has you "processing" each stitch by adding in a particular kind of yo, and I did that processing every other stitch, not every stitch.  It's not that I didn't want the resulting edge to be super stretchy, it's that I worried about running out of yarn.

Weave in ends.  Frankly, I think it looks fine unblocked...

but blocking does make it a little neater, so block as much or as little as you like.  I blocked it gently, I'd say, which certainly smoothed out the wrong side significantly.

It also made it fold more neatly.

And even the edges look nice.

This was, incidentally, a perfect, soothing, meditative knit.  All those primarily knit rows, with just a little interest... perfect for tv watching or procrastination.  And particularly at the beginning, center out blankets are so much fun because you just keep seeing them grow and grow.  At the end, the rows are mighty long, it's true... but they're worth it in the end.

Good grief, where has August gone?

Honestly, folks, I don't know where my blogging mojo went this summer.  I think it was part not having my camera with me all that much, and not much feeling like writing about other things.  I had a lot of fun spending time with some very young friends here, and could write about how interesting I find seeing babies learning to imitate and to do things, or four-year-olds negotiating social interactions at the playground, but that just starts to sound weird.

And then there's the fact that most of my knitting has continued to be either secret or not all that interesting to photograph.  But one secret's out, so I can show that.

 

Here's a blanket for a twin--Knitty's OpArt pattern (original, ravelry), which was knit from the center out to the edges.  That means each row is four stitches longer than the row before it, which means you think you've made tons of progress and then it turns out you're only 13.2 percent through the whole thing.  How do I know this?  I made an excel file to calculate just that information (click here to download it).

 

The ravelry link above has my extensive notes on the project, which most of include the note that if you follow the directions exactly as written, the blanket's going to be much, much bigger than the written dimensions, unless you're a super tight knitter.  I did two fewer stripes than the small pattern, and still ended up with a blanket about 46 inches square (the pattern claims 38 for the small, IIRC).  I also used more yarn than the small pattern called for, even doing two fewer stripes.  And, since the final stripe even here took just over two balls of yarn alone, if I'd followed the pattern I'd have run out of yarn (I bought yarn for the large, fortunately).  So, BUY A LOT OF EXTRA YARN IF YOU CHOOSE TO KNIT THIS.

 

And here's the other major difference, and the difference that links up to my last post.  This is another project in garter stitch, which means either knitting every row if you're knitting back and forth, or alternating knit and purl rows if you're knitting in the round.  On those baby booties, I decided to eliminate seams by knitting in the round, and thus alternated knit and purl.  On this one, since the final rows were VERY VERY LONG, I decided I just didn't want to do that much purling.  I'm not someone who hates purling by any means, but I'm a lot faster knitting than purling.  So, I knit this back and forth, and then sewed one seam up the back.  It does make for a ridge, but since this pattern has a definite right and wrong side because of the way color changes look in garter stitch, I figured, what the hell.

 

I also did a nice i-cord bind off, which I think also gives this really a nice finished edge.

Now, of course, I'm in a bit of a quandry when it comes to knitting.  On Tuesday, I'm heading off again, first to the UK for just under two weeks, for some fun travel and a conference, and then to St. Petersburg for just under two months.  I'm actually nearly packed already, but I haven't made up my mind what knitting to bring.  Well, we'll see.