G. Knerd

Considering I just graduated from college a few years ago (thus giving you some idea of how young I am), I have a relatively impressive yarn stash.  In volumetric terms, it’s about 18 cubic feet (roughly half a cubic meter, for you metric types), and that’s under pretty heavy compression.  The only reason it’s not double that size is because over the last few years I’ve done a few systematic cullings of synthetic or crappy yarn, so everything that’s left is at least Cascade 220 quality or higher, and I’ve also been on a yarn diet for more than three years.

Of course, “yarn diet” is a very flexible term when I  use it.  In theory, it was supposed to mean “knit from stash and stop buying new yarn, stupid”, but what it ends up meaning is “don’t go to the yarn store by yourself, but when someone invites you to come with them then you probably will end up buying something there.”  Or if you’re at a yarn store you’ve never been to.  Or if there’s a sale.  Or if you’re sure you know what you’re going to do with it.  Or if you need a reward to motivate you to get through something really crappy at work.

The end result is that it’s unclear whether my stash has grown or shrunk over the last few years.  Given that I’ve given away bags of yarn in that time frame, that realization alone is rather disturbing.

So on Saturday, I was forced to understand why the “yarn diet” wasn’t really working.  It started with this box from Knit Picks…

Which when opened up revealed  30 balls of the gorgeously soft and squishy yarn (Simply Cotton Organic Sport in Marshmallow) for my friend’s wedding blanket.  When I ordered it, I figured 30 balls would be enough (it’s 4,920 yards, for goodness sake!), but now I’m wondering if maybe I shouldn’t order 10-20 more…you know, just in case…

But then, upon taking that yarn out of the box, I also found the Elegant Edibles kit, with it’s own set of 14 balls.

This kit is my reward for surviving March.  Remember how I posted maybe twice the whole month?  I’m counting myself lucky that my head didn’t turn around backwards while my eyes imploded and my insides were sucked into a black hole.

…that’s just a lovely image, isn’t it?  Here, why don’t you look at the picture of the knitted fruit and vegetable bags instead of imagining that other thing:

All told, though, that’s 44 balls of yarn acquired in one day.  And, sure, I didn’t buy any yarn in the month or two before, so maybe that averages to less than one per day.  Except that, I went to the yarn store a few weeks ago with a couple friends, where there was also a sale, and may have walked out with some yarn for an imaginary sweater.  But even if we forget that particular purchase of yarn, and even if the things in the box were justified because it’s for a gift and a reward respectively, well…

…that still doesn’t explain this:

That’s right, the day after that box arrived I found myself in a yarn store, and I managed to pick up 5 skeins of Cascade 220 (and a pom-pom maker, inspired by the Yarn Harlot’s post).  And as soon as I walked out of the store, I realized…I have a problem.

So here it is – I’m really committed this time.  I’m on a yarn diet, and yes, that really does mean that I will not be buying any more yarn.  If that means I can’t go to any more yarn stores, so be it.  If that means I have to find different rewards for my difficult projects, oh well.  Until my stash is of a reasonable size – which we’ll say is roughly 12 cubic feet, when it will fit in the one giant tub I have without overflow or major compression – I will not buy any more yarn.

Unless, you know, I need more yarn for the wedding blanket.  Because I’m actually really worried that five thousand yards might not be enough…

…Monkey Kitty will find it.

It’s like he has a sixth sense about where to find knitting and related supplies, and I swear he must have some kind of extreme instinctual imperative telling him to “Destroy!  Maim!  Kill!  Bitebitebite!”  I’d say he could smell the animals that were involved in making the yarn (see exhibits A and B) except that he also seeks and destroys polyester (exhibit C).  I haven’t given him the opportunity to get at any cotton yarn (yet, although the wedding blanket will be 100% cotton), but something tells me he’d be an equal opportunity yarn attacker.

A few weeks ago, I started another pair of go-everywhere-while-doing-anything socks.  This is what they looked like right after casting on.

(Also, I’d just like to point out that I’m giving Deborah Norville another try here.  I’ve got yet another set of a different colorway in my stash as well, so here’s hoping this one works out better than the last…)

Apparently, I forgot to put the knitting away properly (it was in a bag, but not out of Monkey Kitty’s reach).  In the morning, this is what I found:

A close up of the yarn under Monkey Kitty’s feet:

Notice that both balls of yarn are on this floor of the house, near the table (one is actually wound quite effectively over, under, and around several chairs as well).  That doesn’t really explain why there’s yarn going here:

Or why my knitting is here (almost hidden by the jacket):

Or why the yarn got wound around the stair posts at the top of the stairs before winding its way back down:

And yet, even then, all that was recoverable.  Sure, I had a lot of yarn wound around the outside of the balls, which was annoying, but overall the damage was actually rather superficial.

Then Monkey Kitty upped the stakes.

I had this pair of socks in a bag in my purse, which I apparently didn’t zip closed last night.  Quietly, sneakily, Monkey Kitty took the knitting out of my bag and hid it (note: he didn’t pull the yarn out of the bag until after we left for work, thus having all day to play with it).

On the way home, the Blanket Thief and I were talking about how my purse was much lighter than it normally was, and since neither of us could remember taking anything out of it, we were pretty sure who the culprit was and what we’d find when we came home.

At first glance, it might not look like there’s even anything wrong here – there’s barely any extra yarn pulled out at all.  But this time Monkey Kitty took a more subtle approach to his knitting destruction:

That’s the current state of the once-neat balls of yarn.  Somehow they both still seem to work as center pull balls, although the yarn now comes out the side of the ball instead of the top, but they’re about twice as big as they used to be and seriously more disordered.  And even then, I would just shrug it off and keep going, except…

Monkey Kitty took out the cable on the needle too.  I think we can conclude only one thing from this: Monkey Kitty has declared War on Knitting.  In between bouts with the scratching post, that is.

You know that feeling you get, when you’re really, really close to finishing a project, how you feel like you can’t put it down until it’s done?

Yeah, I’m there.  I don’t think I’ll get much done tonight, but I expect to have a pair of socks before I fall asleep.

Also, the hourglass pattern on Knitty?  Totally just flies by.  I swear, I feel like I just started these socks yesterday.  Although, like all patterns I knit from, there are plenty of modifications I made to the original.  When I post about the finished pair, I’ll do my best to call out the differences in case anyone wants to go down the crazy path I’m on instead of the well established original.

Every now and then, I’ve been having the Blanket Thief “try on” the cARGHdigan to see if the arm holes are big enough.  Generally, this process looks something like this:

(I had a better picture, but the Blanket Thief forbid me from posting it.  If he ever pisses me off, though…)

Given that the needle I’m using isn’t exactly long enough to go all the way around his shoulders, “trying on the cARGHdigan” translates into “Honey, stand still while I wrap this knitting around your arm.  What do you think?  Is it cutting off circulation?  Can you still feel your fingers?”

A few days ago, however, we made the transition from “not even close” to “really, actually almost there.”

Now, I have this idea for how I want the shoulders to work, and it involves using short rows to build up the knitting directly below the neck such that the back angles down from the neck to the arm holes, and then knit the front sides a bit longer than the back so that the seam at the shoulders actually falls towards the back and follows the line of the body.  It’s something I’ve noticed in store bought sweaters, but not so much on hand-knitted ones (so, of course, I had to try the way no one else uses…).

I did some quick calculations for how many stitches I wanted in the neck vs. each side, decided to do 8 rows, skipping an extra 10 or 11 stitches at each turn, which would ultimately give me 42 shoulder stitches on each side and 30 stitches at the neck.  Thus committed, I started merrily knitting away until I reached this point:

Each bit of red indicates somewhere that I’ve ended a short row, so at this point I’m about six rows into this shaping.  It was at this point that I thought to myself, “You know, I probably want to have the same number of stitches on the sides of the back as I do on the sides of the front…”

It amazes me how oblivious I am to the obvious sometimes…

Practically holding my breath, I dropped everything to count how many stitches were on the needles, feverishly hoping that the number was somewhere between 39-45, because I was pretty sure I could make any of those numbers eventually work.  Imagine my surprise when I came up with exactly 42 stitches.

I didn’t believe it either.

Four recounts of both sides later, though, it was clear that somehow the Knitting Fates had allowed me to pick the exact right number on the back to correspond to what I’d already done on the front.  It was an amazing, amazing moment, made even better when I realized that 42 was, in fact, the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

My best friend from college is getting married in September.  Not only have I repeatedly said that I’ll help her out with whatever she needs (she lives in Ohio and the wedding is in Seattle, so there’s a lot of help needed), but at her bridal shower I might have said the words, “So…would you prefer a hand-knitted blanket, or a gift card/something off your registry?”

Being the lovely person that she is, she said, “Well, I have plenty of people who can buy me stuff, but when it comes to knitting…”

I asked, “Okay, would you want something more heirloom/traditional, or something crazy?”

And she said, “Whatever you want to knit, I’ll love.”

Which…wasn’t as helpful as I’m sure she intended it.

So now I have to figure out what I want to knit (not easy), acquire the yarn (easy), and then somehow knit the entire thing in the next five months (depending on pattern, medium difficulty).  I’ve got a bunch of patterns queued up on Ravelry so that I don’t loose track of them, but I don’t know if I’m really in love with any of them.

Any thoughts?  Any blankets you’ve made (or been eyeballing)?  I seem to be leaning towards traditional with a medium difficulty level, but at this point I’m open to any and all suggestions.

Also, there has been progress on the cARGHdigan – I’m winging the shoulder shaping at the moment.  When I get to a point that’s easier to photograph (or maybe just manage to take a pic of the Blanket Thief trying to try it on), I’ll post more about how that’s going.

I’ve been super swamped lately with various work and life things, so instead of posting about what I”m doing now, I’m going to delve a bit into the past.  Why I think that blogging about a past project instead of a current one will have any affect on my general stress level I have no idea, but it’s not a good idea to argue with me right now.

A few years ago, I dated this guy.  To say the relationship was unusual would be, er, understating it.  I’m not going to go into all the details, but he’s the reason that I once knitted Ex-Cursed Ex-Ex-Ex-Boyfriend Socks.

A couple days ago, completely out of the blue, I got a text from this guy, and it reminded me about the first thing I ever knit for him.

Yes, it’s a sweater.  And yes, as soon as I finished it, we broke up.  This wasn’t the first time the Boyfriend Sweater Curse had bitten me, and it wasn’t the last time either, but…there’s a part of me that likes to think that if you’re meant to be with someone, a curse made of yarn and love and warmth can’t possibly break you up.  Or, to put it another way, the Boyfriend Sweater Curse is a way for the Knitting Fates to keep you away from people you shouldn’t end up with.

Or maybe I’m justifying, because I can’t seem to learn my lesson…

But…look!  Flames!

The pattern itself was from one of the Stitch & Bitch books (can’t remember which one, and too rushed to find a link unfortunately – if it really matters let me know and I’ll dig it up for you later) and the sweater was knit in Lion Brand Wool Ease.  Not the best yarn ever, but this was when I was still getting over acrylic.  On the other hand, it looks pretty impressive, what with the intarsia and double-knitting.

Ultimately, it just really wasn’t meant to be when it came to the relationship between me and Flaming Sweater Man, and the fact that the Boyfriend Sweater Curse worked against us proved it.

Some of you might wonder, then, if I feel comfortable with the fact that I’m now knitting a sweater for the man I’m dating (aka The Blanket Thief).  But I’m not worried – I think the Knitting Fates agree with me in thinking that it’s for keeps between me and the Blanket Thief.

I also think I can be forgiven for reveling a bit in the fact that the cARGHdigan is a much more difficult and awesome sweater than the flaming sleeves sweater…right?

When I last left all of you, it was Friday night and I was waiting for the left sleeve to dry so I could pick out the grafted seam, knit another repeat of the pattern, and then try blocking it again – this time with the requisite twelve points (as opposed to the eleven I’d actually done).

Saturday morning, I woke up excited to fix the mistake I’d made, sure that I still had a chance to get this thing handled.

The sleeve wasn’t dry.

I’m going to point out again that there are a lot of things I’d do differently if I did this pattern again (like, say, learn to count past 10?), and blocking before the fabric is doubled is only one of them.  If for nothing else, it would allow me to recover from my mistakes faster.

In desperation, I recalled a post from the Yarn Harlot, where she put her knitting in the oven in order to dry it more quickly.  I was in so much of a hurry that I didn’t even look up the post to figure out the details (I looked it up just for this post), I just turned the oven on as low as it would go and shoved the knitting in.

It took about twenty minutes before the combination of wanting to make progress and fear of scorching the yarn combined to make me take it out.  Frankly, it was still a little damp at that point, but…yeah, I needed to move on.  The next hour or so was spent correcting my (stupid) mistake, after which the sleeve went back into the water and was ruthlessly pinned out for blocking, with a fan blowing across it and the rest of the pieces (which, surprise, surprise, also weren’t dry yet due to their doubled nature).

Sunday morning, I woke up as early as I could stand it, pulled the blocking needles out, and got ready to do some serious seaming.

I only had to go back and redo part of a seam once due to lack of counting (note to self: if the ratio is 4:5, grafting 1:1 will not work.  at all.).  It was down to the wire, but with about 15 minutes to spare before the Closing Ceremonies started, I snipped the thread for the last end after weaving it in.

I was done.

I did it.  Somehow.  I was surprised at how relieved I was, how important I’d let the Knitting Olympics become.  It seems like all I’ve been finishing lately have been things for the feet, and it’s nice to know that, when push comes to shove, I really can actually finish something that goes on my torso.

Also, it doesn’t look too bad.  Not like I was picturing in my head, and I’ll certainly need to find a shirt that will work underneath it, but…not bad at all.

Anjou from French Girl Knits

As you might have noticed, I’m not quite thrilled with the way the pattern is written, and if I were to do it again, I’d make even more modifications than I did already.  The results are lovely, but I feel like they could have been lovelier if I’d done a few other things to rework the pattern.

Also, you know, if I’d been able to tell the difference between a size 9 (5.5 mm) and size 10 (6.0 mm) knitting needle – I was supposed to go from 9s to 10s after the yoke, but ended up going from 9s to 9s.  That was kind of pointless, but luckily it doesn’t seem to have hurt the finished project too much.

But really, the most important lesson?  Learn to count past ten before you take on a major project.  Seriously.  And eleven really doesn’t equal twelve, no matter how much you want it to.

I may have bragged last night that I had picked a project for the Knitting Olympics which was, if not easy, at least possibly not hard enough to qualify for Olympic status.  Nothing in the pattern was particularly hard (except, maybe, understanding it…), the large gauge meant that there weren’t too many stitches, and it centered around a simple lace pattern that I could easily memorize.  I haven’t even been knitting on the bus or at work at all, and yet I knit the last stitch last night.

I should have known better.

This is what everything looked like when I was all ready to start blocking:

And since I like to get things really wet when I block them, everything went straight into the sink for a soak.  I was feeling so cocky about getting finished on time that I even cleaned the sink first instead of just getting a mixing bowl.

Blocking has always been one of my most favorite parts of knitting, at least whenever there’s lace involved.  You’re basically taking something wrinkled and blotchy and in no way resembling something amazing, and with a little water and a few pins you’re turning into a magical weightless sheet of fabric – I don’t care how many times you do it, it’s always going to be awesome.  I started with blocking out the top – having the lace attached to the body and double layered made the process somewhat ridiculous – if I were to do it again, I think I’d make the lace around the neck separately and graft it on after blocking.

Once I had that straight (or as good as it was going to get), I moved on to the right sleeve with its twelve beautiful points.  This is another place where, if I were to do the pattern again, I’d probably do the grafting post blocking instead of before so I didn’t have to double the fabric at all and I could make it straighter overall.

I wanted to be sure to have the same size for the left sleeve, so I tried to fold the right side in half to get six pairs of points like I had with the right sleeve.

That didn’t work out so well.  It’s hard to tell with this picture, but the farthest point to the left doesn’t actually have a pair.  Somehow, I managed to knit a sleeve with eleven points.  It took counting both sets of sleeve points about seven times each before I accepted it – the left sleeve did not in any way match the right.

Normally, this discovery wouldn’t be too bad – I’d just unpick the grafted row, unravel the bind-off edge, knit another repeat of the pattern, and do it all over again.  Given that it’s only ten rows, that shouldn’t take me more than the evening to fix.  The problem?

It’s wet.

So now, instead of waiting for my pieces to dry so I can seam them together, I’m waiting for my sleeve to dry so I can unravel it, knit more onto it, graft it together again (even though I’d do it differently if I were doing the whole pattern again, I think I should do both sleeves for this time the same – even if it’s wrong), weave in the ends again, string up the sides for blocking again, get it wet again, and then finally get to the blocking it and waiting for it to dry part.  I’ve put an extra day into the process, at least.

If there were anything I could do about it, I wouldn’t be writing this post.  If I owned a hairdryer, I’d be sitting next to an outlet gently forcing the yarn dry.

Luckily for you, my hairdryer died a couple months ago after more than a decade of being mostly ignored in the cupboard.  At the time, I remember thinking, “You know, the only reason I can think of to get a new one would be if I had a knitting project I wanted to dry faster…and even then, I can always just wait for the yarn to dry naturally.”

I hate it when the Knitting Fates take perfectly reasonable and sound arguments and use them against you.

At least everything except the sleeve is properly blocked and gorgeous.  My favorite is how the hip band just seems to go on forever.

After all, it’s almost seven feet long.  In knitting, that’s like miles!

I’ve been frantically trying to get my Knitting Olympics project finished, so I haven’t had time for a real post (and unfortunately, I only seemed to plan for one week’s worth of Knitting Olympics ahead of time…).  For now, hopefully this will tide you over:

That’s the current state of the cARGHdigan for the Blanket Thief – right at the point where I have to figure out what I’m going to do about the sleeves.  I’ve always done raglan or drop sleeves when making my own sweater patterns (mostly because they require so little calculations or precision), but for this one the Blanket Thief was adamant that the sleeve cap be set in.  He’s being pretty understanding about me randomly picking up and putting down his [at this point long overdue] Christmas present, I figure the least I can do is make it the way he wants it.

Of course, I’m not even thinking about it until after the Knitting Olympics are over.  Speaking of which…

I’ve heard that the Amish have a tradition in the amazing quilts they make, that there’s always at least one small mistake in those intricate pieced compositions, because only God can be perfect or make perfect things.  Now, given that they’re introducing these flaws on purpose, that always seemed a bit egotistical to me (kind of a “well, I could be perfect if I wanted to, but I think I’ll let God have the glory this time”), but at the same time, I kind of thought it was a neat tradition.

Then I found this:

If you can’t see it (the picture isn’t as clear as I’d like) that’s a lone purl stitch in what is supposed to be a column of knit stitches in 2×1 ribbing.  I generally do 2×2 or 1×1, so the 2×1 was giving me a bit of trouble, but I didn’t realize I’d messed it up until I was a few inches past that point.  And the pattern doesn’t really lend itself to surgery, given the “p3 tog” all over the place.

If that were the only problem with this sock, I think I would have embraced the Amish tradition and just went with it, all the while smirking about how I could fix it if I really wanted to, but…

…well, that’s not how it went down.

It all started when I got it in my head that I wanted to knit my next pair of socks with Tofutsies.

I picked a stitch pattern, and swatched to determine how many stitches to cast on.

This was the first place I thought “er, maybe this won’t work out”.  See how the picture is really pretty and elegant, and the swatch just…isnt?  That’s largely due to the fact that the knitting in the picture is severely blocked, and since my socks will, er, likely never be blocked in their lifetimes, that should have given me a clue.

Still, I thought maybe being stretched around my foot would kind of act like a pseudo blocking, so I figured out how many stitches I needed to get around my foot and stretch to get over my ankle, and I did some math to come up with cuff ribbing that would flow into the pattern, and I was off.

At this point, I probably should have noticed that things weren’t coming out like I wanted, that instead of being elegant and graceful this was just…bumpy.  And angular.  And not what I wanted at all.

I should have noticed…but I’m stubborn, so I kept going.  I thought to myself, “Well, that’s just the first few rows in pattern – after a few more, it’ll even out and look okay.”

It wasn’t until I was two and half times through the pattern (42 rows + 12 rows of cuff), that I tried it on again.  And, well, it wasn’t really getting more elegant.

Plus, around the same time, I discovered that purl stitch.  And in light of everything else about this sock, it seems like it’s just foolish to keep going.  It’s off to the frog pond for this one.

Because, you know, I’m not Amish.