knitting – Page 12 – A picture and a thousand words

One night of watching all of the backloaded Grey’s Anatomy and 24, and I actually got a lot done on the Isabella tank. Enough, even to take a picture that isn’t just a mad curl.

It’s at the waist, now — once I hit 6″, I’ll start increasing again. The knitting is shown to advantage with the Batchelor Party Tulips. Kevin went to Vegas this weekend with his fraternity. I came home to find that before he left, he went grocery shopping and bought tulips. 🙂 He’s clearly with the program, and gets what makes me happy. 🙂 Nothing (and I’m being totally serious) better than $4 tulips.

Only three weeks till the wedding!

Knitting, flowers, spiders

I started working on Isabella (a new knitty pattern). The major draw was all of that stockinette, plus I have hopes (we’ll see…) that it will be a perfect amount of yarn for the leaf green Jaeger Siena 4-ply that I bought on sale in New Hampshire last year. In any case, given the things to think about , and the buses (I’ve gotten back on the public transportation bandwagon), and the impending planes for the wedding and honeymoon, stockinette seems perfect. 🙂

Despite many hours and many rows, at a gauge of 7 st/inch it doesn’t really knit up all that quickly, so pictures so far are boring. The best I can do is show you it with the over-bright pansies, geraniums, and mystery pink flowers. 🙂

The interesting part of that picture though, is the little dude that you can’t see without the zoom. I discovered him a week ago when I was watering the planter and inadvertantly watered him. He was not pleased.

The best I can tell is that he’s one of the 3000 species of the family Thomisidae. The common names are Flower Spiders or Crab Spiders. Both are apt, but the second one especially rings true — when I first saw him, especially moving, he looks like something we’d discover in our tank at one in the morning.

The lavendar spots are especially cool. While I am *not* a spider fan, and he’s big, he genuinely acts more scared of me than I am of him. He’s always on or under the same bloom, and I’m getting used to him.

Knitting progress

Two plane flights, and I have two Fetchings just in need of thumbs and a side seam!

Don’t they look festive with the sunflowers? After a weekend of clouds, the sun finally broke through this morning. Pretty!

P.S. No, your RSS feed didn’t break. I just had a backup of posts awaiting pictures, and so I figured better to load them all at once than let April 2007 fade into oblivion. 🙂 Sorry for the delay!

I miss college

I was blog-cruising through knitter sites, clicked on an odd mini-banner link, and ended up at the “Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster” — an pro-evolution site aimed at all of the hoopla in Kansas in 2005. (The pirate portion of the debate amused me. Yarr. Love the x-axis values.) The site has been kept up to date, and there was a post from exactly a month ago that had a video of a lecture on (the flaws of) Intelligent Design by a Brown professor, Kenneth Miller. It’s almost two hours long (and the questions are as interesting as the lecture). If you want something to entertain you as you knit, I recommend it highly.

I have a terrible guilt complex when it comes to biology. The last course I took was as a freshman in high school. My sister graduated with a college degree in it; I’m marrying someone who earned a minor in it and earned his masters in a bio lab. I wish that I’d taken at the very least the freshman bio weed-out course (taught by the aforementioned Prof. Miller), so that I could at least pretend to keep up with either of them. But I didn’t, and while I may know, thanks to Kevin, way more about maps of proteins than would be expected, I regretfully admit that most of my bio knowledge comes from news snippets and political debate.

The lecture captured on youtube is all interesting to me because it’s personally timely — Kenneth Miller is coming to town this weekend to talk to the alums. Neat! But I also wonder — if his guest lectures are up on youtube, what else might be? It certainly deserves more investigation. I was listening to him talk, and remembered that this sort of mind-expansion was a twice daily luxury in college (not to mention the rest of the day, where socializing was equivalent to the Q&A session)… Brown was so interesting. I miss learning. There were so many perspectives in college, and so many experts (some real, some self-imagined). My view of the world deepened by the week, and I was always reading or hearing something that took what I knew and would spin it completely around. There were informed opinions from every side. Now, very few things upend all of my theories. New bits of information change my opinions marginally. I gravitate towards what I already know, and assume that I have a framework that new knowledge will mesh into. The stability is nice: a sign of independence/confidence/calm. Too bad that the lecture’s made me think that it would be nice to be overwhelmed with totally new ideas again. 🙂

p.s. I enjoyed the response to the final question in the video, given all of the recent Gonzales trials, etc. Uplifting.

p.p.s. I’m generally totally opposed to posts without pictures. So, here’s what I knit while I listened to Kenneth Miller and pondered the post-college picture: a few rows of Fetching from knitty, using the extra ball of yarn from the premie sweater. 🙂

A pretty pink project

Ages ago in Boston, I bought three colors of cotton classic. At the time I was thinking a scarf, but with only 324 yards, and my preference for wide scarves, it just didn’t seem like enough. By the time I’d done the math, I could no longer find the colors, and so they’ve been sitting, wound and waiting for new ideas.

After seeing some lovely entrelac, I decided to give fingerless gloves a shot. I’ve been playing all weekend. My first try was torn out because I hadn’t understood the need for even numbers of stitches in the squares. (If the squares are odd, you’d have to cut the yarn at the end of each square instead of at the end of each row. Got it.) My second try was way too large. And my third try, while lovely, will be ripped after pictures because these would be gloves for monster hands. They’re about 9″ in diameter, and they need to be 7″. While I’m starting over anyway, I’m mulling over casting on in the round. I would still have to have knit and purl sides, I think, but it would eliminate the side triangles and the seam.

Here’s take three, nestled in amidst the blooming periwinkle. 🙂

And while I love that picture, the colors weren’t accurate, so here’s a sunny closeup. The medium pink is a dusty rose (not lavendar), and the light color is a pearly pink.

The yarn clashes

I’d been all excited about using the extra ball of Rowan Cotton Glace from the baby sweater to make a pair of Fetching gloves. I showed up at knitting on Wednesday with the pattern, the yarn, and the needles (a minor victory in organization). But, I was promptly foiled when I tried to find the end of the yarn to cast on. Someone had snipped off about ten sections, each between a few inches and a few feet long, and then painstakingly re-wrapped the snipped bits and tucked the ends back into the middle. So aggravating.

So, since the pattern appears to call for just about every inch (and since I felt sort of ripped off), I went back to the yarn store to exchange the ball for new yarn. I was expecting a battle despite the receipt, but they were great about the exchange — sweet!

So here’s the new ball, basking in the sun (yay!!), next to my frilly tulips.

Success?

All of a sudden, on Saint Patricks day, I realized that I’d hit the decreases for my second sock. Crazy! Here’s (finally!) a good shot of the color, with one row to go.

And a shot of the picot edge, lace ribbing, and the interlocking double diamond lace:

So, I finished, sewed in the ends, and dunked them. Since I don’t have sock blockers, here they are blocking on a towel:

I’m convinced that I should have used size 0 needles instead of 2s. I’d gone down a size from the recommended 3s, but it really wasn’t enough. Not only is the fabric loose, but they are quite large. They look like they would fit well over my slippers, instead of under them. I’ll have to assess once they’re dry. Is it possible to shrink things knit with sock yarn?

Teeny knitting

When the project is this tiny, a little bit of knitting goes a long way. Here’s the knitting after day two:

Can you believe that the split for the armholes came after only 3 and a quarter inches?

Here’s a closeup of the shell edging at the hip — totally worth the effort. 🙂

The exciting part is that decreasing at the end of every row is conforming perfectly to my 45-degree graph paper slope. Very cool. I’ve divided for the upper body, and just have the back, two fronts, and very teeny sleeves to go.

Suddenly, a new project

Friends from my Brown dinner group just delivered a baby eight and a half weeks early. I’d been plannning a sweater, but when she arrived so early, the need became a bit more pressing. The baby seems to be doing incredibly well (even if all of my news is filtered through a pair of very proud parents), but at 2 lbs, 12.5 ounces, she’s tiny. The parents are also amazingly positive — I’ve been so impressed. I want Kathy and James to have some sort of girly, cute baby clothes to put on her (regardless of whether they’re really useful in NICU — I called the hospital to ensure that they’d at least be allowed), so I’ve been researching and designing. The internet resources are sparse — I’ve never encountered that before for knitting patterns. So many of the patterns and clothes available online for premies are burial gowns, which made most of the research phase sad and depressing.

Given how lively she is, and the lack of great patterns online, I decided to design Claire her own sweater. Lots of research on premie sizes and NICU recommendations for clothing, and I’m still not sure I have the perfect mix. She seems very tall for her height at almost 15 inches.

My plan is a wrap cardigan that will be fastened by a cute plastic button and have a fancy edge. I find it’s hard not to put a million details into everything when I make my own version, so I’m trying to exercise restraint. I designed it on graph paper (4 squares = 1 inch), and have been knitting off of that. I underestimated the complexity of the knitting. It’s the Lacy Shells pattern from Knitting on the Edge, modified to have only one row of eyelets. I was planning for it to take about 45 minutes, but it took nearly 3 hours. Oops. Here’s a picture of the progress before I head off to bed.

Haven’t I touched this already?

Woot! I’m done with the first sock, and all cast on for the second! Casting on took fortitude — the picot-like double-long-tail cast on was very, very tricky for me. The first sock took many do-overs and lots of concentration. The second only took two starts, but I’m still not sold on the edging for the amount of work, even if it is fussy and pretty. Now that I’m done the first sock and able to try it on for real, I’m wishing that I’d gone down a needle to 1s. The sock is very loose. It feels nice, but so delicate. These socks wouldn’t have much elasticity, so better too loose than too tight, but I think one needle size smaller would have been ideal. I’ll have to remember that if I buy the yard again.

This yarn came with a spool of reinforcing thread. This is only my second pair of socks, and I could see how that might be helpful, but it just seemed like way too big a pain to actually incorporate into my knitting. I’m not a spinner, and I’m not a “holding two threads together” sort. Now that I’ve started the second sock, though, I’m appreciating my reluctance. The two spools are not only completely different sizes, but totally different colors.

I’m glad I didn’t bother.

Now that I have one sock done in about three weeks, even if it has been my only knitting, I’m starting to get all sock-yarn-happy again. My knitting group had an exchange last spring, and I was essentially gifted some awesome Lorna’s Laces* (generally way outside my budget). Here it is cuddling with the completed sock.

Since socks actually seem to actually move along for me, I wonder if this is my next project waiting in the wings? 🙂

*(Kevin is deeply unimpressed by sock yarn, even Lorna’s Laces, and credited with the title quote for this post.)