State of the Knits 2013: Part 2.

From my parents' house, after Christmas, I proceeded to a large social house party, then after a week, to a guild party lasting nearly another week.

The plan was to ride down to the house party in a car with Kathy, Kevin and John. I met up with them at Kathy's house, where Kathy proceeded to give me this amazing present. USB-powered handwarmers. Kitschy doesn't describe them. The only adequate description I can give is that they were obviously designed in China. (Click through and look. The first picture doesn't show off the pom-poms on strings to their fullest effect.) I've tried them out since, and they actually work rather nicely, even if they're almost too small for my hands and I had to tear apart a section of the wiring so that I could reach my keyboard and mouse at the same time. Unfortunately they don't allow my hands enough range of motion for unfettered knitting. (And there's a lot of knitting that has to go on right about now, but that's an explanation for a future post.)

When we reached the house, I received a lovely present from Andrew which I very foolishly neglected to take a picture of. It consisted in part of a beautiful skein of merino laceweight from Rhino Fluff (formerly Traveling Rhinos), dyed in a one-of-a-kind colorway ranging from pale blue to rich purple. I'm half contemplating what sort of project I want to knit with it, and half contemplating just keeping it to pet.

The house party was as impressive as always. The main house, which I was staying in, had three full stories and was within a block of the beach. It was also never quite warm enough, being designed as a summer beach house, and so I (and the various other knitters I reunited with from the summer party) often had some yarn in my hands and lap. I only saw the second house (the quiet house) once, but it was nearly as large. We also had some overflow of people staying in a nearby hotel. For a full week we ate, drank, gamed, laughed, and (in some cases) knitted, and I only regret that I hadn't managed to socialize more while I was there.

From there I went to the guild party, which was a much smaller and more intimate gathering in comparison. Amy (whom I hope has been able to find this blog - hi Amy!) and Luna had combined forces in order to mob me with a whole array of knitterly gifts:

A gorgeous mawata silk square, wonderfully soft bamboo fiber, a lavender-scented lotion bar, handmade stitch markers, a carved wooden shawl pin, and two DPN holders. You can only see one in the picture because the second is busy holding a sock in progress. (Also, this makes two shawl pins I own now. Why did I give away the only shawl I've knitted?) The mawata is so delicate that I have to keep it in a plastic bag in order to keep it from snagging on everything, including my own fingers. I know that I want to knit something directly from it without spinning it first. A warm hat? A scarf? A cowl? I just can't bear to decide on something and stop happily speculating what it should be.

Over the course of the guild party, I finished Amy's first sock and started on the second.

But as I looked at the remaining yarn for the second sock, my heart sank. There wasn't going to be enough, I knew. I looked up the vendor from whom I'd purchased my yarn, Greenwood Fiberworks. There wasn't any more of this yarn in their Etsy store. I remembered that Amy had bought some yarn in the same weight and colorway, but with sparkles added, and asked if she still had some left over. She didn't. I frogged the little bit of the second sock that I had, and covered up my dejection with amusement at the horror that Amy expressed when I talked about frogging the first as well.

As luck would have it, though, when I was able to weigh both sock and remaining yarn, the sock weighed 52 grams and the remaining yarn weighed 48 grams. This is a little irritating - so close! - but also reassuring, because when I reknit these, I won't have to worry about reapportioning the yarn, recutting and grafting on for the second sock. I'll just have to knit the first one a little smaller. As the finished sock is somewhat too large on Amy anyway, that's not such a bad thing.

Everyone told me that Bandit had been wearing the socks I knit for him all the time, and an inspection of the partially-felted soles corroborated this. Incredibly flattered, I immediately bought yarn for another pair for him.

Anxious not to repeat the mistake I made in Amy's socks, I'm working these two-at-a-time and toe-up (there's a story about the cast-on for this), using the few yards of leftover Alpaca Sox from last pair for the contrasting toes. Should I run out of yarn before I get to the cuffs, I have some Patons Kroy waiting in the wings as well.

Finally, in the week or so that I stayed on after the party was officially over, I worked a little on Bandit's sweater. I'm just about two-thirds of the way through the second sleeve, which gives me hope that the sweater as a whole might be finished in time to wear next winter.

Next part: the full list of projects I intend (at the moment!) to knit this year.

State of the Knits 2013: Part 1.

A belated happy new year to all! I've been fairly busy during the blog silence of the past month or so - and only a portion of it (albeit a substantial portion!) involved yarn and fiber. Let's get up to speed and see where my crafting stands now:

First, I told myself that I wouldn't work on any project except the stress scrap mitts until all my final papers were done. See, knitting is good for dealing with stress - sometimes a little too good. I was finding myself turning to my knitting as a way to run from all the things I had to do. So when there were only four rows remaining on the second mitt and a paper and a half still to write, I reminded myself that if I finished the mitt now, I'd be knitless for the next few days. I ended up turning in all my papers in record time.

And the mitts were fixed. After the photos in the last post were taken, I decided to rip back to the wrist and knit with the grey Road to China until I ran out, then resume knitting with the black angora again. This solved the bear-paw problem quite handily. I love how elegant they look now, and of course they're as soft as a dream. The top portion is starting to loosen from repeated use, though, and I'm considering ripping back yet again and reknitting that portion with a smaller needle size.

I spent the holiday season with my parents. On the long flight there, I worked on the Alliance Lion mitts:

Well, that picture was taken in late December, and I actually haven't made much progress on it since. I discovered that colorwork is fairly easy to master. I also discovered that it's, well, tedious. This is not a good project for travel knitting, despite how small the FO might be. It requires two balls of yarn that I have to constantly untangle from each other, a tiny row counter that I dare not lose (and therefore need to stuff into the middle of one of the balls of yarn), a printed-out chart that I have to keep referring to... and twice I've nearly lost stitch markers. Plus, as this pattern is written to be knitted flat, I'm not looking forward to all the seaming and finishing when I'm done. Every time I was traveling, I found myself reaching for socks or something else small and tame, and this lay neglected most of the time.

While I was there, my mother helped me block Radiance for the first time. I'd been wearing it a few times unblocked, and it looked fine enough, in an artistically rumpled sort of way. But the blocking made a distinct difference. Since the yarn was silk and alpaca, we didn't even have to use pins; we just arranged it on a large towel while it was damp and it lay there obediently. After it dried, we picked it up and it was still all orderly and neat, crisp and refined. My mother clearly envied it so much that I just gave it to her as a gift.

Next part: people start giving me gifts!

Stress knits: scrap mitts.

I am a stress knitter. Actually, I'm a chronic stress procrastinator, and knitting is one of the best ways I know to procrastinate. (Others include reading Ravelry forums, pursuing achievements in Warcraft, and the newst addition, watching old episodes of my favorite web series.)

The past few days have been particularly stressful for me, and I've indulged liberally in all my favorite procrastination methods, sometimes at the same time. The colorwork cuffs have been fun to work on, especially because each row is interesting enough to capture my attention but also short enough that I can believably tell myself that just one more row really won't hurt. However, the other day I noticed that at the bottom of the second cuff I had skipped an entire subsection of cabling. Disheartened, I frogged back to before the mistake and slowly started knitting it up again. But it wasn't the same. I needed a new distraction.

Enter... the scrap mitts. I've needed nice warm winter gloves for a while. I have so much yarn left over from knitting my mother's hat. And I've had two miniskeins of pure angora sitting around for a while. Why not whip up some nice simple ribbed gloves for myself, to soak up the anxious minutes? I envisioned elegant angora cuffs giving way to a plainer dark gray mitt, all done in a snug k4p2 rib. Such a simple, quick knit. Could this go wrong?

Well... yes.

It looks awful.

Really awful.

I think I can state definitively that this angora is not to be used for gloves. At all. It's not elegant; it's so furry that my arm actually looks like a bear's paw. And it sheds like mad. I know I had complaints about the Road to China Light shedding, but this angora is really in another league. There is black fuzz all over my laptop keyboard and behind my glasses and up my nose. I wouldn't be surprised if this yarn is a legitimate respiratory hazard.

I would be tempted to rip back and start all over again, maybe with a much smaller cuff, switching to the Road to China Light at the wrist... but I've kept such detailed notes on the process already, and I'd have to redo the row counts all over again.

Plus, as ugly as it is, the glove is insanely warm.

Socks Saturday: Redemption?

I've started reknitting Amy's sock, and it's going fairly well so far.

I'm up to the heel flap. I love the way that the eye of partridge heel looks with this yarn - because of the short color changes, there are all of these individual stitches that sort of visually pop out of this mottled background.

The reknitted sock is huge. Casting on another sixteen inches added something like an inch and a half to the circumference. This had better be big enough. In fact, I'm starting to wonder what I'll do if it's too big.

Oh well. It'll be Amy's problem then.

Learning.

Remember the surprise yarn purchase that I couldn't show you before?

Well, I can show you now.

It's my very first colorwork project! I'm knitting the Alliance Lion Mitts, which are basically the perfect culmination of my knitting and Warcraft obsessions. And, quite possibly, the only project that could have impelled me to push my knitting boundaries so far and so quickly.

See, I think there are really two types of learning, when you learn how to knit. One is learning techniques - how to cast on and bind off, how to make various stitches and increases and decreases, how to cable and do colorwork and bead your knitting and so on. The other is learning structure - the general pattern that a hat or sock or sweater should take, the way that certain techniques will alter your fabric, the way that the construction of something fits together and makes sense. Learning techniques allows you to follow patterns. Learning structure allows you to understand why they're written the way they are, and how to alter them to fit the needs of your own knitting.

I was originally going to write that colorwork is the first new thing that I've learned in a long time. But this isn't really true, you see. The last major technique I learned was probably cabling, a couple of years ago. But there has been a steady stream of smaller things I've been learning too. The shape (and shaping) of a sock. The structure of a stitch, and how to diagnose and fix unruly ones.

So while learning this new technique is very exciting, and is something that I can easily show off to other people and myself as a milestone, a big step of progress, it's really my knowledge of structure that gives me the quiet confidence that really, I'm becoming quite a decent knitter. No matter how many false starts and curse words I have to expend over other projects.

In conclusion, look at my pretty floats!