From here to there.

So, no sooner had I finished Andrea’s Shawl (which I keep calling Amanda’s Shawl, for some reason), than I decided it would be frogged.  Within 24 hours after posting about it and, utilizing the leftover mink yarn I had on hand, I began a new one, Andrea’s Shawl Redux.  I’d figured that rather than out-and-out ripping it out, and being thereby committed to not having my Andrea’s Shawl at all, you know, in case I’d lost my resolve to make a new one, I’d take the conservative approach and start a new one with the leftovers first.  I decided to go as far as I could with leftover yarn, all the while periodically checking with myself on how I felt about the thought of ripping out the first shawl.  I just didn’t like the way the whole first one ended-up:  a bit too small for all my effort and my work on the top edging was just plain disappointing.  The top edging curled because I was too hasty, too sloppy, and my perfectionist tendencies just couldn’t accept it.  Besides, I couldn’t stand the thought of a triangular “shawl” that barely covered my shoulders, so, there you go…  I’ve finished the bottom lace edging of Redux (Phase I of the four parts of the shawl), and have now ripped-out the first attempt.  It was only two week’s worth of knitting time that I’d spent on the first one.  So, here I am with a frogged shawl, and who knows when I’ll get there and finish the new one.  Typical of non-committal me, I still might not complete my second attempt so then I’d be without one altogether, but that’s the journey, isn’t it?

Color me purple.

Amanda Shawl is done.

What a pleasant project it was, and I like that it has some lacework in it and that the bulk of it is stockinette.

Stripes are not my usual thing, but I’m trying to step outside my “usual” and do things that stretch me and push me out of my comfort zone.

It’s a fairly easy knit, although I have to say that I hate it when I have pick-up tons of stitches to knit with as this pattern calls for.  The instructions come in PDF format, providing both written instructions and chart for the lace work, but my only criticism is that the chart is so small, it was too hard to read easily as I went along, so I went with the written instructions.

My gauge was slightly smaller than called for, so it made the shawl smaller,  and instead of the medium-sized one I’d hoped for, I ended-up with something closer to the small-sized one, and measuring 44″ across the top.  I knew it was smaller going into it, but felt that a larger needle would have made for a looser knit.  It’s okay, I’ll live with it. I think…

Progress at about a week ago.

Details
Pattern: Amanda’s Shawl by Kirsten Kapur
Yarn: Great Northern Mink (sheared)/Cashmere Yarn in purple and Michell & CIA Indiecita 3-ply Alpaca in brown.
Needle: 4 mm (US 6)

I don’t know what it is with me and purple lately, but I’m all about purple.  There was Ribbed Mini-Scarf in purple Shokay Shambala yarn, then there was Veste Croisée in purple La Droguerie Alpaga Plumette, Shawl Neck Cardigan in purple Elann Quechua, and then there was the purple Great Northern Mink (Sheared) Yarn I used for Amanda Shawl.

We’ve been swined.

We’ve all completely recovered from our bout with H1N1,  a.k.a. the dreaded and much-hyped about Swine Flu. It passed among the four of us from Christmas through the first week of January.  It’s great to be back among the living. Whew!

On the knitting side, I took a break from knitting that first week of January.  In January 2009 my husband challenged me to stop knitting for a week, which I flat-out said I couldn’t do.  However, this January I decided that it just seemed like the right time to do it. It turned out to be a good thing to do, because I was able to do other things that are often procrastinated because of my knitting. My hands and arms needed a much-needed rest because I injured my right elbow gardening 14 months ago and knitting seems aggravate it. As luck would have it, Seattle Knitters Guild had a guest speaker come talk about injury from repetitive activities, and he taught us some helpful exercises.  After a week off from knitting, my elbow felt much better, so I think that knitting at a slower pace, doing hand exercises, and icing my elbow after knitting will help it heal.

With my vacation from knitting over, I have started Andrea’s Shawl by Kirsten Kapur, available at Knit Picks and Ravelry. I was going to knit Dipsy’s Cable-Lace Scarf, but at the last minute I saw Nadia’s version of Andrea’s Shawl and I was hooked.  By the way, if you don’t know Nadia, I recommend visiting her blog.  Nadia, who lives in Switzerland and whose blog is written in French, is a prolific knitter and mother to six young children, and you only need understand the language of knitting to enjoy her blog.

Working end of beginning lace border.

Unblocked lace border.

So for Andrea’s Shawl, I’m using Great Northern Mink Yarn (70% sheared mink, 30% cashmere) in purple and some old stashed alpaca (Michell & CIA Indiecita 3-ply alpaca) in brown.  I was intrigued by the concept of shearing mink rather than the alternative, and Great Northern Yarns states that the yarn comes from “Healthy, stress-free minks sheared once a year…” So I thought I’d give it a try, and it seems to be pretty nice stuff.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’m crocheting a duck for my son.  It’s my pattern (really, no pattern at all) and is based on a plush toy duck called Daisy which my son fell in love with at the preschool he went to last year. This very cute plush duck named Daisy is from a series of books by Jane Simmons about a young duck named Daisy and all of her adventures. He really wants his own Daisy, which doesn’t looked like your average duck, and has begged me to make one. I’ve stalled a number of times but finally it’s coming along and he’s excited.

The body is almost done, and it looks more lumpy and bumpy, but I think he’ll like it.  He’s being very patient about it, but he’s watching the construction of Daisy closely, and whenever I pull the project out, he asks, “Is that my Daisy your making?”

Card-again?

Just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, and in keeping with what seems to be a trend, I finished Shawl Neck Cardigan, making it my 5th cardigan for 2009, and making it my 10th and final finished object for 2009. The number of finished items is something close to phenomenal for me, considering how little available time I have knit in a typical day. Posting about it has been delayed by a nasty cold that has held us all captive since December 27, causing us to ring in the new year so differently than I’d thought.

(There's style: I'm standing in front of in front of the shower curtain in the bathroom.)

There were times when I thought I’d never finish it.

(It's my IKEA shower curtain.)

Apparently my stitch gauge went off while knitting it. This became evident when I discovered that the side seams didn’t match-up properly with the waistband piece. This was most obvious when I put it on and the side seams were too far forward. The thought occurred to me that this is a flaw that most people wouldn’t notice, especially with dark yarn and on a garment with a lot of drape. But I quickly set about undoing part of the seams and re-sewing them so that everything looks as it should. It looks fine.

Having worked on it in minute increments, I’m happy it’s done much sooner than I’d thought. Back when I started my second attempt on it last July, I thought I’d have it done 2 months later.  But then we got the call to get our daughter in South Korea, life got more busy, knitting schedules fell to the wayside, and I thought I would lucky to have it done by March 2010.

The yarn, Elann’s Peruvian Quechua, is very nice, maybe splitting a bit, and the tencel gives it a silky feel and a lot of drape, while the alpaca makes it soft. I used almost all 12 skeins of it (for medium size cardigan), with only 25 grams left; that’s cutting it too close for my comfort. Of course, it probably wouldn’t be so close if my gauge hadn’t loosened-up so much.

Details
Pattern: #14 Shawl Neck Cardigan by Vladimir Teriokhin (Knit.1, Winter 2007)
Yarn: Elann Peruvian Quechua (65% alpaca, 35% tencel)
Needle: 3.25 mm/U.S. 3

The only thing I changed in the design was that I added a 4th button.

Don't know where I bought these pretty purple buttons....

Math is not my forte.

With a 2-week hiatus from Shawl Neck Cardigan to work on Randall Herringbone Scarf for my husband for Christmas, I’ve resumed work on it and the end is truly within grasp.  If only I can get a window of just a couple of hours, Shawl Neck would be done.  Maybe tonight, maybe not.  The scary thing is that I have only 45 grams left of Elann Peruvian Quechua for it, which I found out after launching a search of the usual places I stow yarn and came up with numerous stitch gauge swatches and weighed them.  I think it will be enough, but it’s really hard to say.  I could attempt some sort of math, but my math may have failed me when I calculated the yardage for it in the first place, so why rely on it now?

Back seam, before work on collar last week.

Last week my husband sent me off for a couple of nights at the Bellevue Westin, just me and my knitting, and I had a great time getting a lot done on Shawl Neck.

Mt. Rainier (left) on Christmas Eve morning from Bellevue Westin.

Not only did I work on Shawl Neck, but I brought three store-bought sweaters that needed mending, because lately I’d become rather heavy-handed in how I took the sweaters off and they’d all had the left armpit ripped.

Those darn ripped sweaters!

So, stay tuned, you should be seeing a post about another finished object soon!

I did the math…

You know all those old postage stamps from previous years that you have stuffed in various locations around your home, but never got around to using them before the US Postal Service changed the rates?  Well, I got fed up and got even this year.  I figured that with all the first class stamps I had hanging around here, that I wouldn’t need to buy new stamps to mail our Christmas cards, and I was right.  So, I did the math and calculated how many stamps for each previous postal rate I had on hand and ordered the appropriate number of 1- and 2-cent stamps I would need to use the old ones under the current 44-cent postal rate.  I had an handful of 37-cent, quite a few 41-cent, and a ton of 42-cent first class stamps all decked-out in various Christmas themes just begging to be put into commission.

Of course, it slowed down the process of mailing by an half hour or so, but it worked out fine and now they’re off and doing their job.

Randall is done! It turned-out that the 4-row stitch pattern was easily memorized.  It took me a bit of fiddling around with the stitch pattern to grasp how it would look, but once I understood it, I just coasted along.

I put a keyhole in it because I figured that my husband wouldn’t be able to lose it as quickly if it is fastened around his neck.  Only thing is that I made the keyhole too long and rather than ripping it out to the keyhole, I just sewed the keyhole smaller.  He said he doesn’t care, and who’s going to really notice?

Nice project and it progressed much faster than I thought it would.

Nice yarn, too.

Details

Pattern: Randall Herringbone Scarf by Regina Fulton
Yarn: Filatura Di Crosa Zara Solid (100% merino), just over two skeins
Needles: 4 mm/U.S. 6
Finished dimensions: 106 cm x 17 cm (41.5″ x 6.75″), keyhole length is 7 cm (2.75″)

This is the first item I’ve knit for him and I know he’ll enjoy it.  My husband and son run on the warm side and never want too much on, and my son adamantly refuses to wear a jacket most days, so I haven’t made much for them.  Now I have not only a Christmas gift for my husband (we don’t technically gift eachother for Christmas), but a knitted one at that.

Inching along.

I think the speed with which Vine Lace Cardigan progressed must have inspired me, because as soon as that was done I hopped right back onto Shawl Neck Cardigan, a project that at times has seemed as if it would never end.  It’s amazing to me that given the interesting twists and turns that Vine Lace pattern has, and despite its size (it’s really a jacket), and helped by the fact that it was made with bulky yarn on big needles, I didn’t get bored.  Whereas, Shawl Neck has seemed to inch along.  No matter.  Truth be told, with Vine Lace I became the almost a monogamist knitter, spending the bulk of my knitting time on it, and since then Shawl Neck had been coming along with the same degree of dedication and I’ve finished the two halves and am at 28″ of the 36″ required for the waistband (pictured above).  That is, until this ungodly cold snap hit our area, and as of yesterday I’m splitting knitting time between Shawl Neck (I save it for knitting at long red lights—we have tons of those around here—or for knitting when my husband drives) and a scarf for my husband (Randall Herringbone Scarf), who is in desperate need of some warmth.  So much for my flirtation with monogamy-knitting.

Randall Herringbone Scarf

How cold is it? Outdoor cat water dish on ice.

And now, for something completely different…

It’s a finished object! Vine Lace Cardigan went amazingly fast, so fast that while working on the body, I was surprised to find that I had come to the bind-off. Of course, that was while I was at the Seattle Knitters Guild meeting listening to Jared Flood talk about his knitting and photography.

The beauty of Vince Lace is that not only is the pattern written so that it can be knit in one piece and from the top down, but it also calls for chunky yarn and therefore an equally chunky stitch gauge. This, I figured, this is the project for time-crunched me, and it was. After ripping-out the first 10 rows a few times because I kept misreading the instructions, the whole thing went along quite well. Before I knew it, it was done. I finished within in my projected time frame of 3-4 weeks, in fact, I was just one day over 3 weeks.

After all the knitting was done, it was tenderly steamed, buttered—oops, that was dinner—it was tenderly steamed and I tried it on. I couldn’t believe my eyes in seeing that one sleeve was about 1/2″ shorter than the other. I don’t know how that happened, but, oh well, I figured, No problem, since it was knit top-down, I’d just undo the offending sleeve’s bind-off and add a few more rows. Yet when I laid the two sleeves side-by-side one more time to see if my eyes were playing tricks on me, I saw that not only was the same sleeve a bit short, it was also vastly too narrow! No idea how that happened. I’m glad it was the same sleeve so that I wouldn’t have to re-do both. It was easy to do, and to be on the safe side as far as stitch count went, I took it all the way out, down to one row short of where the underarm was stitched to the body. That turned out to be a good move, because it was then in line with Row 41 of the instructions for the sleeves and a perfect re-starting point. Anyhow, the error was easily fixed and soon I was wearing the sweater.

Details
Pattern: #77 Vine Lace Top Down Cardigan by SweaterBabe (Ravelry link here)
Yarn: Brown Sheep Lamb’s Pride Bulky
Needles: US 11 (8.0 mm)

I think if I were to knit it again I would make a few changes. I would omit the waistline ribbing, because I think only the skinniest of women would look good with something that makes you look thicker in the middle, and I believe that omitting the ribbing will give it a more timeless classic look. I would also use a yarn that sheds less.  I have some old skeins of Lamb’s Pride Bulky from a few years ago, and they shed no where near as much as this stuff does; it’s like wearing a cat all day, and I shed wherever I go and on anyone I come into close contact with. The car now has mohair fuzz in it, and all around the house there are these mohair fuzz balls I keep picking up in addition to the usual cat fur, and my children go about the day sporting mohair on their clothes. Despite this, I still like the cardigan very much and thoroughly enjoy it.  It’s wonderfully comfortable and warm enough to be worn on it’s own when temps are moderately cool.

Before I dash off, here are pictures from our Thanksgiving dinner:

Wine-basted turkey---Yum!

Pecan Pie

Have a great rest of the weekend!

Would you believe?

Vine Lace Cardigan has been finished for over a week now, but finding someone to take a picture of it being worn and in good light without using a flash has been challenging. Now with Thanksgiving looming this Thursday, I don’t know when I’ll be able to post pictures. Stay tuned.

How do I spell relief? Vine Lace Cardigan

It’s about time for me to decide what I’m going to make for dinner tonight, and as is typical, what am I thinking about instead? Knitting. I suppose it’s a delay tactic to think of something fun rather than something mundane. Whatever.

Vine Lace Cardigan (Ravelry) is progressing at a fast clip. How refreshing it is to have something that I can actually see take shape with minimal effort and time. There were some times at the beginning when I thought it was going to be another Cabled Coat experience, because I had to start over a couple of times after I realized I was doing something wrong, but once it got going for real, Vine Lace has become a breeze. Mind you, at 12 pages long, even though the pattern is quite thorough, it’s quite easy once you get your bearings. I don’t think it is for the novice knitter, unless the novice is able to get some help from time to time to get back on course. The pattern is mostly stockinette stitch, with very basic lace panels, so that’s not a problem, but the instructions require close attention because they are quite detailed, and necessarily so. But what a great project, and I have fallen in love all over again with Lamb’s Pride Bulky; it’s just so squishy and warm. Worked from the top down, I’ve finished the sleeves and am now on the waist. I seem to be on schedule, if you could call it that, to finish within my projected window for completion (3-4 weeks), so if it’s not done by the end of this week, it should be done by the end of next.

Knitting Vine Lace has mostly been accomplished while catching-up on all of this season’s episodes of ABC’s Dancing With The Stars. We’ve watched Seasons 5 & 6 previously, and for some reason, we never watched Season 7 and even deleted it off of our Tivo, having never found the time to do catch-up viewing. We’d missed watching all of this seasons episodes, but kept them on the Tivo and we’ve been watching 1-2 episodes at a sitting, time permitting, after the kids are asleep. I have really become quite a fan and when my husband reminds me that it’s past my bedtime, the protest he hears from me is not, “One more row of knitting!”, but “Just one more dance! One more dance!  I’ve got to have one more dance!” I have become a DWTS addict, my friends. Despite all that glitter and spray tan, despite how ABC is using it in excess as a vehicle to promote it’s other TV shows and its recording artists, and despite that I haven’t a clue who many of the celebrity competitors are, it’s a great show. I just love the way the celebrities come on the show and really try their best to accomplish something that has very little to do with their real “day” job. There seems to be little room in the competition for big celebrity egos, because they are worked so hard to learn the dances and compete. It’s unusual for me to watch reality-type shows, but this one is well worth it.