Newly finished and newly begun.

The circular vest is now done and even has been worn! Desdemona, my ever faithful mannequin, is modeling the vest for me here. She has a seriously Barbie-doll figure (unlike me these days) but for this garment it doesn't really matter what your shape is as long as the wearer has shoulders to hang the garment from. I wore the vest to work on Monday and it was a big hit from a visual point of view - the drape and flow of the back, especially, got a lot of attention.


However, the vest is a big circle, with the armholes created in a way that is easy to knit, but not necessarily in a shape or angle that is anatomically correct for the human female figure. In a forgiving fibre like wool the vest would probably be just fine; in a non-stretchy fibre like the silk I used it was OK, but every so often throughout the day I found one side down around my elbow instead of up on my shoulder. I pinned the fronts together with a brooch, which did help a lot to keep everything more or less where I wanted it to be.

My suggestion is that if you like the look of a lacy shawl, but find them to be too difficult to keep on, try this vest as an alternative. It has the look of a shawl but with the armholes it stays in place better, but due to the lack of figure-conscious shaping it's not quite a vest either. Think of it as a shawl with a place to put your arms.

Now that the vest is done I have begun a little sweater coat for my baby niece, who just turned 2 last week. Before her birth I bought some Koigu Kersti Merino Crepe in a blue and white colourway to make a blanket for her but for various reasons ended up using Dale of Norway's Baby Ull instead, and have had the Kersti yarn hanging around in the stash ever since. It's beautiful yarn, but it wasn't quite enough for a sweater for myself, and the dye lots on Koigu are so changeable I couldn't really get more that toned in well enough for my personal preferences.

I've been waiting for the right thing to come along to use for Madi (my niece) and finally put a few things together to come up with an idea. I had some adorable hand-made ceramic buttons with blue and white cat faces on them which were too big for a small baby, but now that Madi is two she's big enough for the buttons to suit her. I have wanted to make Sally Melville's Einstein Coat from her The Knit Stitch book for a long time; the yarn and the buttons all come together and will (if all goes according to plan) Madi's Christmas gift this year.

Along with all the knitting is some spinning. My back has felt better lately and I can spin for longer periods of time. During a visit with my Dad and stepmother last weekend at their home in the Sierra Mountains I took along my spinning wheel and the deep brown Perendale wool my Dad brought me from New Zealand and got a good start on spinning up a batch of it.

My Dad is an engineer and is fascinated with how things work, so it was a good project to take along as it kept me occupied and interested him as well. (Last year he made me a clock reel with a yardage counter which is absolutely wonderful for figuring winding off my finished yarn and knowing the yardage at the same time.) I plan to knit some pillows for their home with the finished yarn and have spun it with a bit more twist than I usually do so that the yarn won't be too soft and prone to pilling. All of the furniture in the house was built by my Dad and it just seems fitting to have handknit pillows from handpsun yarn on the couch and chairs.

One pillow will have a deer pattern (based on the Intricate Stag Bag design from Interweave Knitscene) and another based on Hawaiian tapa cloth designs, as my stepmother grew up in Hawaii and loves the arts of the Islands. Tapa cloth designs are traditionally black, brown and white so the deep brown wool plus the creamy merino my Dad also brought me from NZ will be very suitable.

Almost finished things.

At long last I finished knitting on the Pasticchio Circular vest (from elann.com) and it's blocking now. I made the mistake of trying it on before I blocked it and wasn't thrilled with it, but as always happens during the process of blocking lacy things it became so much more beautiful once stretched out and opened up. The vest felt too small while it was still an unblocked, wrinkly, ugly little rag but I gained at least 6" in diameter once it was wet and stretched. It's now about 38" across. I'm taking off for a long weekend in the mountains with my folks so it will be dry by the time I come home - now I'm looking forward to trying it on again.

Earlier this week I started a pair of socks that I've been wanting to make for a while. The yarn is Tofutsies, which is a very fine, loosely twisted blend of superwash wool, cotton, soysilk, and chitin (made from crab shells). Therefore it's very smooth and silky, not wooly, and knits up into a thin smooth fabric. As I like lighter weight socks and get itchy easily it seemed like a great yarn to try. I've also been wanting to try out the Fool's Rush sock pattern from Too Much Wool. After looking at the yarn and the pattern more closely I realized that the elegant lace design down the leg and foot of the sock pattern wouldn't show up much in the variegated yarn I had chosen, so I ended up using the lace ribbing from the cuff for the entire sock. It's a very pretty lace pattern and with only 5 st/4 rw to a repeat it's very easy to work. As Ms. Too Much Wool pointed out, that's quite a change from the pattern so I'm not sure I can honestly say I'm making the Fool's Rush pattern at all, but her love of lace is what got me interested, so I feel she and her pattern deserve the credit for getting me started, at the very least!

The ball band claims a gauge of 8 st per inch on US size 2/2.75 mm needles - with my loose tension it took US sz 0/2mm needles to get 8 st per inch. Admittedly I don't do a swatch for socks - they're small enough I just launch into them with my best guess for needle size and check how the sizing is coming out later. I don't often even check to see what gauge I did get - I just try the sock on and if I like the fit I keep going; if I don't like it I start over. I wouldn't have checked the gauge on this one if I weren't blogging about it right now.

So one sock is done, and the 2nd will wait until next week when I'm back to work and commuting again. Socks are better as commuter projects for me than a being with family project when I need something even more mindless than even a simple lace rib. There's always lots of talking while I'm there and I'm much too likely to screw the thing up. Instead I'm taking my spinning wheel and a bunch of beautiful deep brown Perendale wool that my Dad brought me from New Zealand last year (he bought a whole kilo - about 2.25 pounds - plus another kilo of luscious creamy white merino - yum). I can spin and talk with no problem, and I'm planning on knitting some pillows for them from the wool once I've spun enough. Not sure yet what they will look like but we shall see........

Sad news.

This Sunday's post will be a short one. While I finished the chemo cap for my friend and mailed it off yesterday, I just heard that she passed away late last night. While it means that I was too late for my gift to benefit my friend, the making of it still helped me through a rough week, and I will ask her family to pass the cap along to someone else at the clinic where she was being treated.

The finished cap was exactly what I was looking for. In case anyone else reading this has a need to make a chemo cap for someone they care about here's some pictures and information about what I made.

I used the Striped Chemotherapy Cap by Essle Woods Bruell, found in the free pattern section on elann.com. It's knitted in 2 colours of Esprit elasticized cotton yarn (elann's version of Cascade Fixation) and as I had 2 balls left over from the several pairs of socks I made a few months ago and the colours were perfect for my friend, it was a great choice (the photos are somewhat grayed out - the colours are actually a deep teal green and a lighter soft teal).

The cap was knitted sidewise in garter stitch, using short rows to shape the crown and mitre the stripes. It looks better in reality than in the picture.

It's knitted wide enough to be able to roll the brim up a couple of times, giving a nice full roll around the face. The stretchy cotton is very terry-cloth like - soft, cushy and very stretchy. I will definitely make this cap again for some sad reason I have need of another one.

Love, healing, and other knitterly thoughts.

I have been thinking a lot lately how, for me, knitting can convey so much love and a sense of healing. Whether I am knitting a hat for a soon to be born baby, or a birthday gift for a dear friend, or a chemo hat for someone with cancer, I can express so many of my cluttered, unformed, and wordless thoughts and feelings by the act of knitting. In many ways the final completed object and the act of giving it are secondary; it's what goes on in my head and heart that matters the most to me. Still, I do think in some way those good thoughts go into the knitting and are passed on to my recipient. So today's post is a brief list of some of the ways I've been trying to heal, show love and caring, and to help in some small way when it is needed - all through the small act of knitting.

A recent post on Interweave Knits Knitting Daily blog had a pattern for knitted stuffed animals (Knitted Cuddlies,; look in their pattern library) along with a story about how the Sandi (the Knitting Daily blogger) had recently lost her cat, and had made the knitted cat design from the pattern as a means of solace for the loss of her cat. An outpouring of comments including many stories about recently departed and deeply-missed kitties (including one from me for my beloved Inky, who died last January) showed how closely Sandi's story matched many of our own lives. I have a young friend who is in many ways like a little sister to me who's going through a really rough time, and has expressed interest in getting a cat to help her through some of it (a similar situation is why I had gotten Inky 13 years ago) so I made her a knitted kitty to help keep her company and to use as a "test cat" for a while. I hope it will help her, but knitting it certainly helped me to do something positive with the concern I am feeling for her right now.

Another friend is having a birthday today, so I made her a flower-shaped washcloth from cotton chenille. The pattern is from Weekend Knitting and I've wanted to try it for a long time. It's very easy and went so quickly I will definitely make more. I sent it off on Friday wrapped up with a bar of lavender soap (the chenille was purple) and forgot to take a picture before sending it so no photo for this one.

For another project, a young woman who rides the same ferry I do to work is expecting twins - a boy and a girl - in early November. She and her mother, who also rides the ferry, are very excited about the new babies and their pleasure is so joyful, so full of love, and so contagious that I wanted to share in it and celebrate it just a bit. I am making hats for the twins; the girl's version is done and the boy's hat will be just like it but using powder blue instead of pink, and will have a knot instead of the bow on top. The pattern is my own, loosely based on the proportions in the Yarn Harlot's Knitting Rules book. Her sizes for newborn heads are much smaller than all the other references I have, so since my baby hats are usually too big I'm giving hers a try in the hopes these hats will actually fit before the babies are past the pastel baby colour stage. Besides, the mother 's doctor has told her to expect the babies about 3 weeks early, so a little closer to preemie size is probably a good thing.

And lastly, I am pondering what I can do for a friend who is in very bad shape from lung cancer that has spread to her brain and liver. She is about to start some serious chemo in the hopes of prolonging her life a few months to enjoy her friends, family and new grandson as much as she can. I think a chemo cap might be too late, but at least I can try. She's not an animal lover particularly so a knitted kitty or some such thing wouldn't do her much good either. Two previous friends have been lost to cancer; it is so sobering to face losing another. I can't even imagine how she must feel.

Pillow talk

A while back I posted some pictures of some pillows I had made using Kaffe Fassett's "magic Ball" technique. To make a magic ball, collect a lot (at least 20) colours of yarns in some sort of related or gradually changing tones. Break off an arms-length of a couple of colours, tie them together at one end with 2-3" inch tails, and then add another length, and another, and so on.

The goal is to make a big ball of yarn in colours or tones that change gradually from one to another, and then back again, on and on through the whole ball. When knitting with this magic ball your colours will shade throughout your knitting without having to stop and decide which colour to use next (if this is confusing, see Kaffe's first book, Glorious Color. Examples of his style, and a description of this technique, are all there.)

At any rate, when I last made one of these magic balls I got carried away and ended up making almost 600 yards of blues, purples, and burgundies. Most of the yarns are hand-spun odds and ends, mostly from my early days of spinning when my technique was a little less refined, and I experimented a lot and had oodles of bits and pieces that wouldn't or couldn't be duplicated again. I also had some beautiful, almost-black dark brown llama yarn that was a recent gift. While I had made some pillows using the magic ball on a light mottled-colour background I wanted to see what the colours would look like on a solid, very dark ground. So it was time to make a new magic ball pillow.

I came up with a zig-zag design of three stitches in the magic ball yarn, and three stitches of the brown-black. The diagonals moved one stitch to the left every row for 7 rows, and then back again. I knitted my pillow in the round so that I could always work from the right-side rows. As can be seen from the inside view, all the knotted yarn ends just are left to dangle inside.

The pillow was designed to be 16" square; I provisionally cast on to start; once I got to about 10" up I put half of the stitches on a string to hold them, and provisionally cast on the same number right above to make an opening on the back, and then finished knitting the pillow body. I did a 3-needle bind off on the top and bottom edges to close each end, then picked up the held stitches and knitted an overlap on the top and the bottom of the back opening, with a small hem to finish each edge.

I washed the pillow and let it dry flat to block it, which evened out the knitting beautifully. To finish the whole thing off I knitted a striped, 5-stitch I-cord which was sewn on after completion, with an overhand knot in each corner.

Five vintage mother of pearl buttons and crocheted loops were added to the back flap. I added the pillow insert, which I had made form cotton batting and stuffed with a whole lot of yarn and spinning scraps (thanks to everyone who donated their yarn ends!) And now I have
one beautiful pillow, and enough of my magic ball and black-brown llama yarn to make another one to match!

Just a thought.

I've come to the conclusion that good finishing skills are a mixed blessing. It seems to me that the better job I do of finishing a newly completed knit the more likely I am to later decide to unravel it. So here I am in the midst of unraveling a lace tunic that I knit earlier (pre-blog) this year. To add to the fun of picking out the seams and the woven-in yarn ends was the fact of it being in 2 different yarns that I alternated with each other throughout the lace pattern.

So as the picture shows, as I unraveled I wound each yarn into a separate ball, using used my ball winder to wind the larger quantity (a hand-dyed silk noil yarn) and a nostepinne to wind the lesser quantity (a hand-dyed, cotton/rayon slub). I have learned the hard way not to just unravel the whole thing and then wind back into balls, unless I want to make a hopelessly tangled rat's nest out of my beautiful yarns.

And why am I unraveling this sweater? It was a 2nd attempt at making something with this silk noil that I bought at Pine Tree Yarns in Damariscotta, ME several years ago. The skein was about 800 yards but is a one of a kind item - if I need more yarn I need to add something else. So I added this Blue Heron cotton/rayon yarn that is beautifully blends in without exactly matching. They do look great together. But from there it went downhill, and while the sweater looked nice off of my body it didn't look so wonderful when I had it on. It was much too long, for one thing, and being lacy it felt summery but was heavier than I wanted to wear in the summer. So I'd been thinking about unraveling it to turn it into something like a shawl, but I couldn't decide what exactly I wanted.

And then I found the Pasticcio Circular Vest by Shelley Mackie at elann's website (look in the free patterns) and there it was. Something fun to wear, sort of shawl-like but different, lacy, and a good choice for variegated hand-dyed yarns. This vest is by the same designer as the children's circular Pinwheel cardigans I was making a while back, the difference being it uses a cotton yarn in an easy mesh openwork stitch, and has no sleeves.

So I've just gotten past the stage of needing double-pointed needles and have switched to a 16" circular needle (Knitpicks Options size 5 US). The beginning was hideous with all those points, stitch markers, and lace patts to manage but once I got a couple of repeats underway it got much better fast. As I had done on the now-departed sweater, I am alternating the 2 yarns - on the 4-row lace pattern repeat I'm using the silk for rows 1-3 and the cotton/rayon for row 4 (there's less of that yarn than the silk so I have to use them in different proportions). The pattern is written for a heavier weight yarn on size 9 US needles but I'm going on the philosophy that the shaping to keep the circle flat works equally well at smaller gauges. If I'm wrong there might be more unraveling to come but for now the future of this yarn is bright again.

Since I've beenhome....

After coming home from my wonderful Wyoming trip had some vacation time to spend at home before I had to go back to work, which I put to good use by getting back to knitting and so dispelling most (if not quite all) of the nagging doubts about my sanity. I was able to finish up a few almost completed projects that had been hanging around since before the trip, such as the Pinwheel sweater for Madi (for the pattern look in the free pattern section of elann yarn's website.). I had planned to do the loopy I-cord border shown in the pattern, but failed to actually read the directions thoroughly before I completely bound off the outer edge, only to discover that the loops actually were the bind-off. Rather than unravel the bind off I settled instead on a pretty crocheted scallop border to make it girly for my very girly-girl niece. It will be her birthday sweater for her 2nd birthday in September.

As part of my project clean-up mood I also did a stash clean up and found some stuff to give to Goodwill as well as a few items to knit up quickly into projects - the kind that could be done in an afternoon and use the whole ball up as well. So I got a bunch of hats done to be donated to something or other; probably Afghans for Afghans but I haven't decided yet for sure. In the picture one hat is still on the needles but it's done now. (Not all the hats have been done since I came home - some were in progress before the trip).

I also made a quickie felted box based on the pattern in the Mason Dixon Knitting book. I knew the yarn I was using (a one of a kind skein purchased at the Bath, Maine farmer's market a few years ago) didn't felt completely but it was sturdy enough that even partially felted it would work for a box. It was knit with a double strand on size 10 US needles by the pattern instructions, with the only changes being that I put handles on 2 sides instead of all 4, and made all the sides a few rows shorter, as I ended up running a bit short on the yarn. I felted it inside a pillowcase cover by running it through the washer and dryer once, and then a second wash before shaping it to air-dry. While the stitches are still quit visible it did get a nice soft texture but firmed up enough to make a great project box for all the little balls I'm using for my mom's vest (see below).

Let's see; what else have I gotten done? I finished the Sockotta socks I started right after getting home. I used the Ripple Socks pattern from Not Just More Socks. I like Sockotta because of the high cotton content but the yarn colours bled quite a bit in the warm water I soaked the socks in before blocking them, and now the background colour is a light blueish grey instead of cream. I don't really mind but I'm sure glad I pre-soaked them before tossing them in with a load of light coloured laundry. It seemed to be the purple that bled the most.

And last but not least I've made progress on mom's vest. It starts in the center back and is knit from side to side rather than bottom to top, and I'm finding it trickier that expected to work in all the shaping, the stripe patterns, and the limited quantities of the yarns. But I'm finally happy with how it looks and am almost done with the back. All the little markers in the photo are my tracking method for the decreases, increases, dart shaping, etc; it's proving to be much easier to use the markers than to try to make notes of what I've been doing. This is a design that will never have a chance of being replicated, to say the least.