Tricotomania and more

I posted an in progress post about this stole a while back. Searching for that link, I discovered that this yarn was delivered on September 24 last year so that’s not bad, considering I didn’t take it to Europe with me. Taking advantage of the fact that Tigger is away at camp, the Hanami Stole is blocking on her bed.

This is an asymmetric pattern and I couldn’t get a good shot of the whole thing so these two photos show it from each end. One end is meant to represent cherry blossom falling and the other end is based on Japanese Sashiko textile patterns. The geometric end has a beaded cast-on. The other end has a ruffle. I knit it in Zephyr, colour garnet (or ruby).

Here are some close ups of each end so you get a better sense of the stitch pattern. I really like it. And the yarn was wonderful. I seem to have quite a bit of one ball left, so I might have to knit a scarf or something. I have a whole batch of lace patterns that I ordered ages ago so should have something nice.

I initially really resisted knitting lace. I liked the look of it but couldn’t imagine what I’d do with it. I actually started with a stole in aran weight yarn that I gave to Mat’s mom for use in their conservatory (which isn’t very warm in the winter). Then I knit a shawl for my own mom, on the principle that she couldn’t complain it was old lady-ish because she is an old lady. I gave it to her for her 78th birthday, if I recall. She loves it. But then I just dove in and knit lace shawls. And I wear them. They are surprisingly warm, despite the holes, and they can be an elegant addition to my wardrobe. In the summer, I don’t even care if I need to be elegant, they are a good thing to take in case it gets a bit chilly later.

I would give them away, and have, though I always worry that folks will want to wash them and then they need to be blocked again. I generally suggest not washing them. Airing them outside (wool is particularly good at letting go of smells if hung out to air) if necessary. For scarves, I’ve included washing instructions that suggest stretching out flat to dry, making sure to open up the pattern.

Lace requires concentration to knit, so not good for the bus or sitting chatting to friends, but it is very relaxing. Well, I think it is, in kind of a meditative way. You have to focus your mind. But as I was finishing this, I did listen to the 2 free lectures on the Ancient Origins of the Olympic Games from the Teaching Company (very interesting; go ahead and download it yourself) and the introductory lecture to the Victorian Britain course I bought the other day.

Other knitting projects that I’m considering include Jaali and Come Together from the Twist Collective (HT Yarn Harlot). Though I should finish that damned sweater that is on the needles and not quite turning out how I imagined first…

Cadenza by Estelle. 80% merino, 20% tussah silk.

I saw the cover pattern on the summer Knitty and thought “ooh, Tigger would love that”.  I went and got some yarn while I was out yesterday.

I have been in a bit of a knitting funk recently but I’m starting to get back into the swing. First up a Finished Object:

Friends of ours in Victoria have a new baby boy. Since January. It’s about time I knitted him something. I went searching through the stash and found some Mission Falls cotton. I modified a pattern from Debbie Bliss’s Baby Knits for Beginners, using a garter rib and adding stripes. Some parts of this were knit several times because I did goofy things like forgot to divide for the armholes (I knit the body in one piece), or to add an extra stripe to the sleeves so the beige yarn would go far enough. The sizing on the pattern was bizarre. This is apparently the 6 month size but it is pretty roomy. Now someone just has to get it in the mail.

BTW, if you are thinking of learning to knit, learn well from books, and have a baby to knit for, that Debbie Bliss book would be an ideal manual. The projects done in order would teach you one new skill per project. The instructions are excellent with good illustrations. And it has the best instructions on seaming that I’ve seen.

Next up, a lace project that I bought the materials for before our Europe trip. Before one of my recent trips, Mat asked if I’d packed some knitting and I realized that I hadn’t. I looked at the sock yarn stash and was uninspired (it is pretty small). And then remembered this project. So I got started. All that time in airports and planes has meant substantial progress. I’m really enjoying it. And the folks sitting next to me in those various locations have been suitably impressed.

That is how far I am… Right through the basketweave section and 75 rows into the cherry blossoms (much of that is over the top of the railing).

A detail of the basketweave pattern.

This is the Hanami stole. Click through to see how it will look finished. I’m not much of a baby pink person so am doing it in Zephyr Wool/Silk, colour ruby (I think). I think the yarn called for in the pattern might be a bit thicker. I’m using 3 mm needles and it is producing a nice fabric. We’ll see what size it is when it is finished and blocked but I suspect it might be a bit smaller than the pattern due to that change.

One of my friends has requested some socks so I need to go shop for sock yarn. The stole is lovely but not really conversational knitting. I’m thinking about  more lace though. I do love knitting lace.

The sweater is finished. I even bought ribbon and sewed it on before I went away last weekend so I could wear it. It is very cozy. On the weekend I put a pin at the bottom of the V to keep me decent. It looks fine that way but I could also buy some nice camisoles to wear under it.

The pattern is Otis from Knitty. Modifications included lengthening the sleeves and adding about a 2″ band of seed/moss stitch at the cuff (I knit them top down and just tried it on to judge length. The sweater relaxed a bit with washing so they are a bit longer than I thought. It looks good with the cuff turned up as well.) and lengthening the body below the waist. I knit that downwards, too, and wished I had started with a provisional cast on. I increased outwards from the waist a bit, too. I did all of that in seed/moss stitch and I think it might have worked better longer. I failed to account for the ribbon bringing it in a bit. It was knit in Jo Sharpe Silk Road Aran Tweed.

Franklin has done it again. The logo at the bottom of the post is priceless. But I think there might be a problem with his pie chart. I suspect I fall into at least 2 categories (knitters and uppity women) as would quite a few knitters I know.

Since the hats, I haven’t really done a lot of knitting. The hats were mostly Germany, so October. I’ve knit some socks and a couple of baby hats and some mittens since then but I was in a real knitting funk. I might be coming out of that now.

My main knitting right now is Otis in some navy blue Silk Road Aran Tweed with little purple flecks in it. Very soft. (The cats love it!) Given that yarn choice, it is obvious that I’m thinking of this as a winter cardigan/top rather than the spring/summer one it is designed as. So I’m making the sleeves longer. I have also now decided to add a few inches to the bottom. I don’t know why I didn’t do a provisional cast-on since I was also ambivalent about the designed length.

But the front and back are done, blocked (in the sense of washed and layed flat to dry) and seamed and it fits well. I’m knitting the sleeves top down so I can keep trying them on to check length and whatnot. I picked up around the armhole in a kind of reverse of the cap shaping and have been knitting down in the round. After a couple of inches I started decreasing 2 stitches at the underarm “seam” every 8 rows. I’ve just switched to seed stich on the first sleeve and am debating whether to just have a couple of inches at the bottom (to match what I’m adding to the body of the sweater) or whether to double that and fold it back.

I plan to cut off the 3 rows of seed stitch around the bottom of the body (after running a thread through the last stockingnette row) and knitting down in seed stitch for about 4 inches with some increases. The sweater as designed comes to my natural waist so I need to add some shaping as I go down. I can kind of imagine how that will look and I think with the matching wide seed stitch band on the sleeve it’ll be quite nice. I’m sticking with the ribbon ties. I figure a bit of grosgrain ribbon is in order.

The other thing I am knitting is a pair of socks for my dad. Tigger told me I had to. His birthday is at the end of the month (he’ll be 78). Since he very much appreciated the last 2 pair I’ve knit him, I’m okay with this. They didn’t have any appropriate colours of the Regia Silk in the LYS, so I got Arequipa in a brown/green colour. This has alpaca in it and is very soft. The colours are very dark and masculine in a conservative guy kind of way. I’m sticking with the garter rib because one of the things Dad effusively appreciates is the fact that the socks I have knit him “don’t even think about falling down”. I decided to go with garter toes and heels this time. Shake it up. Live on the edge.

In case you thought that it was all tourism and teaching around here, I have some knitting to show you. When last we spoke of knitting, I was experimenting with fair-isle. I have now completed three hats.

The first, I am not so pleased with. I tried to do too much. I was using multiple colours for both the background and the pattern and without any clear bands this ended up muddy in places. There is also a spot where a little bit of red contrasts too much and it appears that there are some very grumpy faces marching around the hat. I suspect they are displeased with the overall effect.

All is not lost. This was primarily a learning exercise and I learned much. Not only did I learn that I need to move more slowly in my experimentation with colour, but also that when knitting in the round using magic loop, my tension can get tighter when there are fewer stitches. Although some of the difficulties came out in the wash, I was more attentive to this potential problem in later incarnations.

I decided to take a break from that pattern, though, and try the other. This hat was more successful. I will admit that I have a difficulty with any design that could be considered representational. I don’t often knit leaf lace patterns, for example, because I dislike green and it seems weird to knit leaf lace in a colour that leaves are not. So the trees at the top of this hat constricted my colour choices.

The banded patterns were helpful, though, in that they provided more constrained sections in which to experiment and clear divisions between one and the next. I am not as happy with the bottom pirie band as with the rest of the hat. Perhaps that green is too dark? And the contrast between the white and the beige and light purple is greater than I might have liked. But overall, it works well. One of the darker purples has so much green in it that it appears green when knit with the whites and purples. So I used this, instead of the dark green, for the trees at the top.

Strengthened by this success, I returned to the first pattern and colour palette, though I left out the green. I did start by incorporating the beige from the other hat but it did not distinguish itself at all from the other beige (despite looking different in the ball) so I abandoned it. I stuck to one colour (red) for the pattern and varied the background in bands of different widths. I also sketched out how I might incorporate the decreases into the pattern, and decided to go with the double decrease every 3rd row, as in the 2nd hat, as I liked the shape better.

I am much happier with this hat, though it doesn’t really capture that autumn leaves colour palette that inspired me. I think that I really need some other colours of wool. That other red (which has now come in, but in a place where I am not) will help, though now I’m out of this red. I will also have to examine the sample card for a wider range of greens (and maybe oranges).

As for technique, I am quite comfortable knitting these and rectified the tension problem immediately. I should get some 3 mm dpns as these would make it easier to do the crown but working with a long 3 mm Addi using magic loop is fine. I carry both colours in my right hand (I knit English style) and have developed a rhythm for knitting 2 colours in that way. I have also mastered minimizing or eliminating twisting of the two colours. On the last hat, I also managed to incorporate most of my ends as I went along.

As this is primarily a learning exercise for me, I welcome all comments and suggestions about the colour choices and how they work together. What areas do you think work well? Can you articulate what exactly is not working with the sections that are not working as well? Do you have any suggestions for the kinds of colours that I might incorporate? In particular, I am not that good at identifying that one less obvious colour that would really bring some zing to the mix if used in small quantities. So suggestions of possibilities for this would be particularly welcome.

We are on the move again on Saturday* with a long (but beautiful) train journey down the Rhine to Switzerland. I have packed socks, which I can do without looking fort the most part. I’m on the second of a pair for Tigger out of the yarn we bought in Trier. There should be enough left over to do some small child’s socks, too. And I’ve wound the Koigu I brought with me into balls so that I can start a pair for myself.

*It is hard to write about time when I am writing these in Word with no idea when I will actually be able to upload them. But we head to Switzerland on October 27. Actually we are going to be met at the Geneva station by Mat’s parents and will be staying with them in Annecy, just over the border in France for about 10 days.

P.S. I am not reading blogs right now. We don’t have internet access where we are staying and have been paying for time in a T-Mobile hotspot. Now that we are in France we have found free wi-fi but I’m in a place with no electric connection and the battery on this machine is not great so no time for that. When we get to Paris (Nov 10-18) we’ll have wi-fi in the flat and I might spend some time catching up. I have been reading the comments, though, and trust you are okay.)

It is funny that Franklin has been blogging about experimenting with colour. Before I came away, I ordered some J&S jumper weight wool so that I could try some fair-isle knitting. I have been reading Janine’s blog for a while and when she gave a class on colour last spring, it looked fascinating. Unfortunately she lives over 3000 miles away from where I normally am but she sent me the patterns she used and I read her posts about the class and mulled.

I ordered the yarn from the shade card, which isn’t the ideal way to do things (though better than the representations on a website). I’m not sure what I was thinking at the time but I know I had the idea that I should have shades close to each other so I could make subtle transitions. And one of the patterns had a tree on it, so I got some dark green. Two colours never came (a slightly lighter green and a solid red) but I have a bit to play with.

As we have been walking around Lund, I have been noticing the Virginia Creeper on the buildings. Yesterday we took the box of pastels and some sketchpads and went and did some colour studies. It was so interesting looking carefully at the leaves and the colour combinations. The dark green seemed to have deep red and maybe brown mixed in. The oranges varied from a very pale almost beige to a very bright orange. There were some pale greens in there in very small amounts. As I worked, I realized that the colours I had purchased were ideal. And when I got back to the flat, I even noticed that the pale green appears in the heathered orangey beiges and that the deep heathered red has some deep green and maybe some brown in it.

Although I didn’t take Janine’s class, I recall from her report that she suggested that people look carefully at things they liked — in nature, in photos, etc. And then choose colour pallets from there. This is such an amazing method. I’m sure it works better in her class because she has the full range of colours of J&S there and you can play, play, play. It was pure serendipity that I happened to have chosen these colours from the card as I wasn’t thinking of autumn leaf colour at all at the time.

So I’ve started a hat and am playing with the colour transitions in both the background and pattern. I haven’t swatched because a hat is a swatch, isn’t it? And I have friends with big heads if my gauge is off. I’m quite enjoying it.

For those of you on the West coast, I think Janine is giving more classes soon. You might want to look into them, especially if you are unsure about choosing and combining colours in stranded knitting.

My mail. At the back some Koigu for socks, some Zephyr laceweight in Ruby for the Hanami stole (HT to Sara S), and a bunch of Jameson and Smith jumper weight for a foray into stranded knitting. Two colours are backordered and I’m hoping they’ll come in before I go. I have found a Canadian supplier that I like — Four Season’s Knitting. Ted told me about them and I have had good service.

I’m going to knit some hats that Janine designed for a workshop. I’d love to go to one of her workshops, not least because she has the whole range of J&S colours and you can play with them in the workshop and get a feel for how to combine things. But she lives on the west coast which is a long way from here. So I invested in a shade card and made do with that. I’m reasonably happy with how it turned out.

This is Blitzen’s mail. He does love a box. I’ve taken a bunch of photos of him today but I’ll put them in a separate post.

(For those that don’t know, click on the photos to make them bigger.)

I came across instructions for making funky thingamies to keep your DPNs from (a) poking through your bag and (b) coming out of the socks that are the reason they are in your bag in the first place. I thought I’d post the link here so I can find it when I actually have time to maybe make some.