I’ve resolved to catch up on blogging this year’s knitting, if not by the actual end of this year, then in January. In the meantime, have a picture of the menu.

The trendy new thing in yarn this year, at least going by my local yarn stores, is novelty yarn designed to make us re-evaluate the simple scarf with impulse-buy price points and nearly instant gratification projects. Which is to say, I’m kind of addicted to frilly scarves. Even though the pattern for them is basically, “cast on between 4 and 12 stitches, and knit every row until you run out of yarn”.

This one is Flounce yarn, by Knitting Fever. It’s a ribbon yarn that unfolds into a fishnet mesh, which you crochet or knit by poking the needle about 1/4 of the way down from the top of the ribbon, so it has enough strands to not break. (I find this easier to accomplish with a crochet hook than by knitting.) As with all of these yarns, you don’t ever pull the entire strand of ribbon through a stitch, which leaves the rest of the strand to puff out and create the texture. Flounce looks like feather boa without the feathers, and tends to inspire people to hum burlesque riffs. I’ve made two of these now, both for five year old girls. They appreciate the pink and purple and frilly, and don’t yet know anything about stripper music.

This is Trendsetter’s Cha-Cha yarn. The store sample dragged me in because the ruffles stacked on each other so densely that it looked like brain coral. Brains! Around my neck! I’m not sure why mine doesn’t really give the same effect, but I’m still knitting this one so maybe it needs a good blocking/petting. This yarn is nice because it clearly delineates for you where you’re supposed to be knitting, and what part of the yarn you’re supposed to just leave alone to do its own thing. I find it’s just as easy to knit this as to crochet it. You have to manually place each ‘box’ on the needle, but since I’m a thrower I do that anyway. Unlike the other yarns, which are all acrylic, this one also has some wool content (and is priced accordingly).

The real show-stopper is Filatura di Crosa’s Moda tape yarn:

The netting is bigger and sturdier than the fine strands of Flounce, and reminds me more of a chain link fence than fishnets. You knit into just the topmost link, like for the Cha-Cha. Some colorways have gold or silver sparkles on one edge. Everyone at The Happy Ewe said, “That’s a ridiculous looking scarf”, followed immediately by, “I have to have it!” The Wednesday night spinning group cleaned them out of the sparkle-added yarns when we saw them.

I’m not keeping this scarf for myself, though. I’ve entered it in the Magick4Terri auction over on Livejournal. I grew up reading fantasy and urban fantasy (which back in the day meant Faerie creatures in an urban environment, not the sparkly vampires and paranormal romance that seem to be stealing that label these days). Terri Windling’s name on an anthology always meant there would be Good Stuff inside, so even though I’m not a famous author or artist I wanted to contribute something to the auction. I figure the “ooh, sparkly” appeal, along with being able to get it to a US buyer before Christmas, should help draw at least a couple bids.

I know anyone reading this (Bueller? Bueller?) is probably a knitter who can make her own scarf, but maybe you have non-knitting friends that you don’t like well enough to spend time knitting for them. Link them here! The auction also has some handspun yarns, and projects spun and knitted, or woven, by authors like Emma Bull and Susan Palwick. And, y’know, original art from Brian Froud, Alan Lee and others, plus tons of signed limited edition or out of print books by all sorts of fantasy writers. Bidding doesn’t end until December 15th, so there’s plenty of time to check it out or offer something of your own.

PS- Apologies for the poor quality of pictures today. It’s been drizzling for two days, which, since we need over 17 FEET in the lakes to make it out of this drought, I can’t bring myself to be upset over.

The Alamo Drafthouse creates their own pre-show reels, and we just got to see Elton John’s performance of Crocodile Rock on The Muppet Show. My very favorite! I’m just barely old enough to remember Kermit rushing onstage afterwards, flailing his hands at the muppet crocodiles, yelling “Don’t eat the guest star at the beginning of the show!”. Good times. And I have bacon and cheddar scones coming, so I’d better post this to get a few rows of knitting done before the show.

I’m really trying to get this edging done so I can block and get on to knitting the arms, but a rare 2D showing was too good to miss. Fortunately this theater has good light levels pre-show.

I’ve been working on another sweater with a self-imposed deadline, this time Lalique, from the Sanguine Gryphon’s spring Art Nouveau line. I’m making it out of this gorgeous purple Wollmeise lace that I got from The Loopy Ewe last summer:

To celebrate the occasion of turning 39 for the first time, I have an appointment to have my hair dyed purple and blue at the end of this month. I figure having crazy hair is the prerogative of those who don’t have to adhere to office dress standards, and I can’t think why I haven’t gotten it done before now. I then realized that my new hair will match my new sweater marvelously, IF I can get the sweater done in time. Usually this wouldn’t be much of a problem, but I’m knitting at a glacial pace right now. I got that broken tooth removed last week, and while my mouth has healed up nicely, the, er, sinus involvement, has not. (Trying not to gross anyone out here.) So I’m taking 3 hr naps and still sleeping 9 hrs at night, and I’m smart enough to not knit lace when tired, and to absolutely not knit at all under the influence of Vicodin, however little good it seemed to do as a painkiller.

Of course, no sweater-shaped-object can ever be easy. The designer, Laura Patterson (FiberDreams) has us make a large swatch, three body repeats and one edging, for a total of 12 x 7.5″ to gauge. My swatch… was not that. Of course, it turns out when the pattern clearly says that WS rows aren’t charted because you just purl, and then I look at a knitted RS row and think, “Oh, that’s just the WS, I’ll ignore that”, the pattern ends up half as high as it was meant to be, and the wrong shape entirely. D’oh! And I made this mistake BEFORE the dental surgery, so I really have no excuse. On the plus side, I have two more swatches to add to my collection instead of one.

I like the fabric I got in that second swatch, and I kind of think any bigger a needle size would create too much holeyness in the bellflower edging, and make it harder to tell that they’re bellflowers and not just abstract lace. You may note that this swatch which I like is NOT 12″. Thus, math.

I did enough math to figure out how many body repeats I’ll need… and let me tell you, I’m still shocked by the size I need to knit handmade sweaters to, as compared to the size I wear in off-the-rack, or my bra band. A 40G ends up being a 51″ sweater, with about 2″ of ease. I don’t feel like I’m 51″… yay body image, I guess? Anyhoo, I did just enough math that I could start in on the body of the sweater up to the armholes, which I finished yesterday.

It’s a gorgeous day for knitting today… overcast and with the promise of a couple sprinkles of rain if we’re lucky. My family room, which is usually nastily sun-drenched in the daytime, is dark enough that I might be able to watch NCIS or Criminal Minds without glare (on a normal day I can’t watch anything too dark, which usually leaves me with just Hawaii 5-0 as an option). Except that before I can knit, I have to do math. Figure out the armhole castoffs, the neckline castoffs, etc. I’m sure it will go fine, but I will procrastinate this as long as I can… which may be why blogging seemed like a good idea this morning. And I have to copy out a few recipes I’ve promised people, and maybe go scrub toilets or something.

To jump ahead in the narrative a bit, I’ve already chosen my next sweater project. Marly Bird is hosting a KAL/Class for her Barton Cardigan starting June 1. The Barton is in the same Knitting Plus book that’s been a lifesaver for recalculating sleeve caps, as I did on the Leaving sweater and will be doing on Lalique. I’ve never steeked before, and after all this lace, it will be nice to work on a fabric that can support the needles all by itself. I’m supposed to be on a yarn diet, so yesterday my mom and I picked out Knitpicks Wool of the Andes Sport in a pretty sapphire blue, which will be my birthday present from her. Gee, I could go browse the Internets for frog clasps for the Barton… or I could just sit down and do ALL THE MATH.

I’ve always believed in swatching, mostly because I’m picky and if I don’t like the fabric, I won’t wear the [whatever]. Usually I take the easy way out, though, and swatch, hand-block, take gauge measurements, then frog the swatch and reuse the yarn. So for all the swatching I’ve done, I don’t have much to show for it.

My new goal in (knitting) life is to have a pile of swatches like Anne Hanson’s. Just look at these:

The bright blue at the top of the stack is the swatch for the Sprössling sweater Anne was wearing at the time. The swatches out on the table are the pattern for the sweater she made for her husband last Christmas, handspun on top, and then two commercial yarns for writing the pattern up for the rest of us.

I couldn’t resist getting a picture of her swatch for the Leaving sweater I just made (even though the iPhone judges color terribly sometimes… the swatch is actually more of a beigey-browny-gray neutral sort of color):

I used sport weight merino (from the dearly departed Mission Falls company) for my Leaving, which made it more stiff and utilitarian-looking than the original Woolen Rabbit Oasis. Since I didn’t make the pullover version softness next to the skin didn’t matter, but Anne pointed out how I got less lace definition (sproingy yarn springing back after blocking) but better twisted rib definition than hers, which drapes beautifully. My sweater is less elegant, but I’m kind of glad it has less drape, since it would probably just drape itself all over the curves I don’t want to accentuate! That was a happy accident, because in substituting yarns I hadn’t really considered much beyond whether I could get gauge. Anne was very gracious and complimented me on my sweater, even though I kind of think I turned her Porsche of a pattern into a minivan.

(Srsly, I haven’t yet gotten a decent picture of the front of my sweater. Other pics are in the blog post just before this one, or here.)

I also kind of think that, were she any less nice of a human being, “Yarn Voyage” would really be titled “Why You Need To Swatch, And Don’t Complain To Me If Your Substituted Yarn Looks Bad”. I don’t know how the pro’s do it, watching us make their designs with poor yarn choice, uneven knitting, etc. I love the sweater I made, but now I know a lot more about how to predict what I’ll get ahead of time, instead of just making gauge and hoping for the best.

Here’s another gratuitous swatch picture, just ’cause…

My friend who took the classes with me (also, confusingly, named Anne) doesn’t like swatching. So it was particularly fun to sit there with her, working on swatches because Anne Hanson told us to, and learning the reasons why we should swatch All The Things.

Advanced Lace was, well, advanced lace. How lacy knitting (purl WS rows) differs from knitted lace (pattern every rows), how shapes look different in one versus the other, why it’s actually a good idea to have knitted lace on those loooooong edgings of triangular shawls, etc. We learned a way of picking up provisional cast-ons that I wasn’t familiar with, and how to read our knitting from the wrong side of knitted lace. And now I finally have a project to use up the skein of Dream In Color Starry that I didn’t want to use for socks (even though I learned you really shouldn’t use sock yarn for lacy shawls, no matter what the latest fads in knitting patterns do):

The class pattern is a Baby Bee Mini-Sampler and is just big enough to fit an American Girl doll (not something my lifestyle has ever encountered). I’m going to try making a few more repeats of the second chart, to make a neckerchief and use up the skein of Starry.

That project is going to have to share needles with my new project though, Lalique, which should have just the right amount of coverage to wear in restaurants with vorpal air conditioning. I’ll get to use my violently purple Wollmeise Lace (Lavendel colorway), and guess what? Lalique insists that you swatch! This makes, er, three swatches that I’ve made and kept so far. I need to do a LOT more knitting to build up my swatch collection.

Please excuse the stupid expression on my face.

Please also excuse the saggy elbow. We took these pictures after staggering out of a day of wonderful classes with @knitspot herself, so my elbow had been in knitting position for the better part of six hours. The fabric made by the Mission Falls 136 Merino (on size US 5) is medium weight and on the tighter side, with lots of sproinginess, so I’m sure the elbows will be fine after a bit of a rest.

I realize that I only mentioned this sweater once, back in January, and that I should probably have posted as I went along, but there were extenuating circumstances. A month ago I was happily playing with spinning, and sock knitting, and maybe working on the sweater a few rows here and there, when I read on Twitter that Anne Hanson would be teaching classes in my city in just a month. Cue a mad scramble to Finish The Sweater, wherein I took pictures but never posted them.

Muriel does not like sharing my lap with a sweater, and thinks I should stick to socks:

Dot does her best Firefox impression, and doesn’t give a crap what else is on my lap:

Dot takes a look at the sleeve picture from the pattern, as I start knitting the sleeve:

I think technically the fiber content of this sweater is 95% Mission Falls 136 Merino, and 5% cat.

Some comments about this pattern: it’s written beautifully. No mistakes that I found, no confusing bits. Detailed schematics for blocking out to the proper size. The good news is that this is a fitted sweater — it fits my arms beautifully and flatters them, I think (baggy elbow notwithstanding). The bad news is it also fits my back fat, my belly, etc… but that’s not the sweater’s fault; it’s just showing what’s there. The button band doesn’t stretch or gape when I button it up, the hips don’t bind, and the waist, while disconcertingly revealing, is not stretched tighter than any other part of the body. It’s a very honest sort of sweater, fit-wise.

I did make some modifications, and the book Knitting Plus helped me understand how to do them right. Because I’m so short, I took two inches off the fronts and back between the bust and shoulder. The book mostly talked about horizontal changes to patterns, including enlarging sleeves to accommodate what the author gently termed “fleshy arms”, and then fixing the sleeve caps to match. The pattern’s sleeve width actually worked for me, but since I had shortened the armholes, I needed to reshape my sleeve caps to fit the same decreases into fewer rows. There was math — hell, folks, the Pythagorean Theorem even made an appearance — but I just followed the book’s instructions step by step, and hoped for the best.

That is one damn fine sleeve-to-armhole curve, if I do say so myself.

One of the things that surprised me, since I’ve never made a cardigan before, was the number of separating stitch markers I needed. Because when you have to pick up 117 stitches along the front for the button band, the only sane way to do that is fold and subdivide until you’re down to a reasonably manageable 15 or 16 stitches per section.

(I have no idea what’s going on with the blurry Kodachrome look here, but I did just start using the Camera+ app, so maybe I hit the wrong button accidentally. This is actually the most color accurate picture, though… teal isn’t easy for an amateur photographer to get right.)

I used the fold-and-mark technique again to figure out where buttons would go (more separating stitch markers) and count ribs to transfer those to the other side, where yarnovers would create the button holes (still more separating stitch markers). I needed to sew the buttons on so some markers could be reclaimed and pressed into service for the 175 stitches picked up for the collar, but I was trying to finish the sweater by a deadline, and didn’t exactly have time to go button shopping.

Lucky for me, the Spring/Summer Knitty had a pattern that included directions for making Dorset buttons. I really like how they turned out:

I just wish I’d used something sturdier than Susan Bates plastic stitch markers (the round ones), because they feel like I’ll be able to fit them through the buttonholes only so many times before the button collapses, or goes on strike, or is otherwise rendered non-buttoning.

It took the better part of last week to finish the sleeve caps, wash and block everything, then do more knitting for the button bands and collar, before seaming everything (this weekend). It takes two episodes of Hawaii 5-0 just to pick up 175 stitches around a wide collar, y’all. I wasn’t even looking at the tv (much). This isn’t the best picture I have of the pieces being blocked, but I like how it looks like it had art direction by Clive Barker:

So long story short (too late!), I finished the sweater just in time, including the mandatory “oops there’s one end I forgot to weave in” moment. Anne was kind enough to say nice things about my sweater, and take a picture, so I figured I should hustle to get this posted just in case I show up in her blog and people come looking for sweater pictures. I’ll probably have a stupid expression on my face, but that’s okay, as long as the knitting looks good.

tl;dr: Love the Leaving sweater pattern in specific and Anne Hanson’s patterns in general. Sad that Mission Falls is out of business. Hugely in favor of swatching and blocking and math (as needed). Will post about the classes I took, after I have slept at least 8 hours, cats willing.