The Scarlet Knitter

A way out of boredom

I started a new sweater last weekend. I had received some nice, smooth dark purple wool as a gift, enough to make a pullover for the current afghans For Afghans campaign. The yarn has great stitch definition but it is also a dark colorway that wouldn't really show off textured stitches to their best advantage, as I found out while playing with swatches. I have this fantasy of knitting at least one pattern from every book or magazine I own, so I spent some time browsing through a lot of pages in search of the Right One. It never materialized, so I decided on an old favorite that I had knitted a couple of times.

After about one hour of knitting, I was bored. I went on for two more days, but my heart wasn't in it.

So I took a break from monogamy; I picked up a skein of Kureyon, a skein of Berocco Peruvia, and I knitted this:

Kay Gardiner's Mitered Crosses for Japan. So nifty. So Noro. So addictive.

While I was building up the four squares that make up this larger one, I thought about how much I can get caught up in "product" versus "process" knitting at times. In the past few years I have been a bit too focused on using up stash yarns, to the point of churning out items in a way that had more to do with obsessiveness than with the pleasure of relaxing with needles and yarn. It is a fine line for me.  On occasion, the nothing-but-stash rule actually leads me to a project that is both challenging and fun. But too often these days I don't take the time to think out the project first. I jump in fast and repeat a previous knitting experience that will work but not really surprise me or stretch my creative or knitting ability, or even simply keep me entertained throughout.

It isn't that I mind a bit of "automatic pilot" knitting. On the contrary, there are times where I absolutely need that simple comfort the way my oldest daughter relied on her security blanket as a toddler -- that very primitive feeling of soft wool moving fast between my fingers. And in a way, the 20 squares or so that I hope to turn out for the mitered crosses blanket will be just that -- fairly mindless garter stitch. The thrill is in the way the colors will be combined and with Noro Kureyon, that too will take care of itself.

Rather, the purely-product projects feel like a page out of a coloring book, while the take-your-time, make-the-pattern-yours projects require me to define the shape and fill it in at the same time. Now, I do like to follow a good pattern, but I need to figure out ways to make it my own in order to keep the game more fun. Right now, I am on the fence about the purple sweater. I may go on and start striping it with other colors. Or I may frog it and go with a pattern that is new to me. Decisions... At first it felt ridiculous to frog eight full inches of a sweater's body. But just giving myself permission to start fresh feels really good. Which is and should always be the point.

Green cardis come in three

Here are three non-sock baby and toddler items I finished recently. Actually, two were finished a long time ago but I kept forgetting to sit down and sew buttons. I finally got it done, and they are now ready for their moment in the sun. How I wish I had a baby handy for modeling! But we'll have to do with the ritual dining-room window sill, the one with the good afternoon light.

 

Cardigan #1 is a carbon copy of one of the baby gifts I ended up using the most, back in the days. The version I was given was a classic ivory white. This one followed a request for blues and greens, which I chose to interpret as teal after I stumbled upon this yarn, while browsing the needlework area of the Bon Marché department store in Paris last June. It is Anny Blatt's Baby Blatt, a very nice superwash wool, not too soft, not too splitty. The colorway is richer and greener than on this photograph -- a true "bleu canard" as teal is called in French, although Anny Blatt calls it "libellule" (dragonfly).

I used Sweater Wizard to come up with a pretty standard pattern, knitted in one piece to the armholes. Shoulders were attached with a 3-needle bind-off and sleeves were knitted in the round from the top down. As it is, the cardigan has virtually no seams. The only catch is that I can really see a difference between the even stitches of the sleeves and the more irregular stitches of the body, caused by uneven tension on my purl rows. I hate it when that happens. I just hope this sweater will get so much use that the variation will disappear as it gets worn and laundered frequently.

 

I blogged about #2 once before, while I was working on it. This one too was finished mid-August, but buttons failed to sew themselves even though I gave them several weeks to do so... and I finally took action today. Like the previous cardigan, this one is meant for little Lola and the colors were again picked according to my daughter's pronounced taste in aqua and lime green.

This time I followed a published pattern, Louisa Harding's Geordie from her book Natural Knits for Babies and Moms.  I picked the 3-6 months size, but the finished sweater will probably fit Lola up to age 9 months easily. The yarn is Knit Picks Swish DK in Big Sky and Parrot. It is very soft and springy. 2 skeins of the main color and 1 skein of the contrasting colorway were enough to complete the sweater.

Not able to leave well enough alone, I made the following modifications to the pattern: the body was knitted in one piece to the armholes, and instead of knitting the collar separately then whip-stitch it on, I picked up bound-off stitches from the two fronts and live stitches from the back.

One interesting feature of this pattern is that the 3 needle-bind off at the shoulders is meant to be decorative: it is executed with the two right sides together, creating a visible chain in the contrast color on the shoulder line.

 

I had heard about this technique before but I had never had the chance to try it. Nice. Especially on a stripey pattern.

 

 

Cardi #3 is the newest and greenest of all. A greener cardi could not be found anywhere. I was told that Vivian, one-year-old, loves green, "real green, not lime green or pale green -- actual green." With those marching orders, I went to peruse Miss Babs' website. Babs and I even traded emails to determine what the best green would be, and we ended up with Yowza! Monochrome in the most gorgeous shade of green, called Fraser.

 

 

Imagine the green above, but a tad darker and with even more depth. It is glorious. If Vivian still loves green by the time the cardigan reaches her, I think she will like it.

 

Apparently, her second favorite color is purple, so those purplish-pinkish buttons seemed just right.

Armed with the right yarn, I turned again to Sweater Wizard. This time I selected an A-line shape although it is barely visible in the finished sweater. Body knitted in one piece to the armholes, sleeves knitted down in the round, you know the drill. I made the collar a bit deeper than the pattern suggested in order to make the sweater more  feminine.

Yowza! What a Skein is fast becoming one of my favorite wool yarns -- superwash yet with real character, a wooly feel, and body. Textured stitches look beautiful and stockinette shows off the depth of the hand-dyed color. The cardigan used up barely half of my gigantic skein. I went on to knit a pair of socks with the leftovers and still have a bit of yarn left. Baby booties, anyone?

Pumpkin time

Our Indian summer is a tad elusive this year. Two gorgeously warm days followed by grey skies, a cycle that repeats itself over and over. Last night it rained and rained and today the sky cannot make up its mind. It started blue and golden this morning, and now the sun and clouds are competing and chill is definitely in the air.

Halloween has meant a lot to me since I moved to this country.  I first heard of it in High School English class, although what was described to us then was the hard-core, darker, more ghoulish British version. My very first Halloween happened soon after I arrived to the U.S. to start graduate school. Friends explained what I was supposed to do that evening: open my cottage-door to the children who would not fail to visit, and give them the treats they were expecting. After being told over and over that America could be a dangerous and violent place where doors must be locked and strangers kept at bay, I loved having permission to trust at least this subset of the "stranger" category. I wrote to my parents an enthusiastic letter, describing the ritual phrase, the costumes, the sheer pleasure of distributing candy to children.

It felt absolutely fitting, then, that my first child was born precisely on Halloween, seven short years later.  Our Halloween-birthday celebrations were never huge but I loved each one, and I am looking forward to mark the occasion with Lola as she grows and makes the day her own happy occasion to celebrate along with the birthday "girl".

 

For this year, I started small, making a pumpkin hat. How could I resist? I searched for "pumpkin hats" on Ravelry and found lots and lots. I settled on this one , but I cast on 63 stitches instead of the 56 suggested. The yarn has long been without a ballband but I am pretty sure it is either Pastaza or Peruvia. The stem is a bit of Lamb's Pride Worsted.

While I was pondering various options for Halloween footwear, I stumbled upon some leftover sock yarn from this project. So I made socks:

I had exactly enough yarn to make the stripes match exactly, although you can tell at the toe that one sock is one-round shorter than its mate. I finished with less than one yard to spare. The result is pretty cute, I think, due to the fact that this yarn (Regia Design Line Kaffe Fassett)  combines short and long repeats.

All in all, a good way to wish my little granddaughter a happy first Autumn.

 

Tickled pink

My new pink and brown socks are so cozy I may never take them off.

 

The pattern is the garter rib sock from Charlene Schurch's Sensational Knitted Socks . I really should branch out beyond this pretty basic version, but I like its texture and I think it works well with a busy variegated like this one,  Miss Babs' Yummy Sock yarn  in the Chocolate Roses colorway. 

One virtue of socks, I can now tell after a year or so of knitting them, is that they can really handle the business of variegated yarns much better than just about any other piece of knitting. Not just handle it, actually, but show it off nicely. It is a way to satisfy my sweet tooth, the one that leads me to buy something which I know will look unflattering or worse if turned into a sweater or cardigan.

As usual, my finishing goes in pairs. I finished the socks while the reversible cabled scarf was on the blocking board.

 

It turned out really, really big. Close to 90" in length, and 13" in width. I followed the example of two fellow Ravelers and cast on for two and a half pattern repeats, removing 48 stitches from the original pattern. I did emphasize width over length in blocking and only steamed very lightly, holding my iron over the cables as I didn't want to risk flattening them.

 

I love it so much I am not afraid to show my face in public (of course with this much fabric, the scarf could easily double as a face-mask if necessary).

 

Five whole skeins of Rowan Kidsilk Haze were consumed by this thoroughly addictive project, which was knitted with a #7 needle. The colorway is #583, Blushes. I have had this yarn in my stash for years, to the point where I don't remember when I bought it. Confession: not all the skeins were the same dye lot, and I decided that I didn't care. Even in bright daylight, I haven't been able to spot a difference. And no, I didn't bother alternating 2 rows of one dye lot with 2 rows of the other. I could see it all ending up in a nightmarish Kidsilk Haze tangle, so I took my chance and knitted one whole skein at a time. I probably wouldn't be this reckless for a sweater but I figured a scarf carried little risk of a contrast between colors happening near an embarrassing focal point, if you follow my drift.

Confession #2: I did perform a ridiculous bit of surgery early on. At some point I noticed that I had crossed one cable in the wrong direction. Could I let things be? Could I relax, secure in the knowledge that, lost in a sea of correctly-crossed cables, this one wavy bit would not really be noticed by anyone? Could I at least wait until the next morning not to take a rash action (needless to say, this incident happened late one evening)?

No. I could not. I decided to frog twenty rows of kid mohair and silk, right then and there.

After two rows or so, the yarn snapped as I was tugging to free it at one row end.

Then it happened again. At which point, inspiration struck: since I had made up my mind anyway, and since I was now ruining this precious yarn a few yards at a time, why not simply snip off the 2 inches or so of knitted cables? And so I did just that. By then it was close to midnight, and I was already regretting my original impulse, but I had to finish what I had started.

After an agitated night and fugitive dreams in which I attempted to save dropped stitches, I woke up much too early, determined to tackle the big mess I had made. It took strong coffee, good daylight and a couple of good podcasts, but I did succeed in fishing a whole row of stitches, then I was on my way. Lesson learned: do not frog Kidsilk Haze (or any mohair blend in general) if you can help it. It is just not worth the effort or the aggravation.

 

 

Just be happy that you have made yourself a cozy pink cloud for the winter months ahead.