Vactioning at home

There are few things I love better than having uninterrupted time in my own home, so the 2nd week of my vacation was every bit as wonderful as the trip to the Northwest. Since having a big chunk of time to spend at home is such a luxury I didn't want to be writing this post on the final Sunday wondering why I hadn't gotten much done, so I came up with a project to focus on over the whole week. More on that later.

The biggest news from the home front is that the Must Have Cardigan is finally done! It's a substantial sweater, so like the Hex Coat, it probably won't see any wearing action until colder weather arrives, but it's done and it's beautiful. It fits like a glove (Jezebel, my mannequin, is too small for the sweater) and the small effort in adding the waist shaping really paid off. Cables are often bulky, and the braided cables along the sides of the sweater are somewhat stiff. If I had made the body straight up and down it would have given me a much bulkier look than I wanted or needed. Otherwise I made only a few modifications to the pattern as written. I added about 4 inches in length to the body of the sweater to balance out my proportions better, but reduced the sleeve length by a couple of inches. I had read somewhere (sorry; I can't recall if it was on another blog or on someones' Ravelry description) that adding four of stitches to the armhole edges made for a better finish. In the pattern, the braided cable extends close to the armholes with just a couple of reverse stockinette stitches along the edges. To make that edge more stable and visually pleasing, I worked slightly fewer armhole decreases to enable 2 additional stitches in remain in moss stitch to form the armhole edges after the shaping was complete.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I had two button choices - 5 made of deer antler, and 7 from mother of pearl. I was leaning towards the antler choice to start with but ultimately went with the mother of pearl. The antler buttons ended up looking more yellow than I expected, and I preferred to have 7 buttons instead of 5. I did still prefer the heft of the antler buttons, so to give the mother of pearl a little more mass I stacked another very similar but smaller mother of pearl button on top of the larger one, which made them much more interesting. I sewed them on with the sweater yarn, first sewing down the larger one, than stacking on the smaller one with a couple extra stitches. The look is just what I wanted - interesting, but not distracting from the sweater itself.

I also finished a little project that got done so fast I didn't have time to blog about starting it! It's a baby sweater for a co-worker who's expecting her first child, and even thought the baby isn't due until December I was too excited to wait to make something for her. As of the last time I spoke to her before my vacation she didn't yet know the baby'sgender, so I chose bright colours that didn't scream girl or boy either way. The pattern is the One-Piece Baby Kimono (on Ravelry here)in Mason-Dixon Knitting, and is so easy-peasy it's hard to believe. I added the stripes and a neckband, but otherwise it's by the pattern. I used Mission Falls 1824 cotton.

So what was my major project for the week? I decided to drum card a big batch of fibres for spinning. After pulling out all of my available fibres (an embarrassment of riches, I must say) I found that I had a lot of corals, pinks, and red/orange colours, none of which was enough to do much with by itself but all massed together was enough for a sweater or shawl, or something much bigger than a scarf. I almost always do 2 ply yarns, so in order to try something different I deliberately set out to design a 3-ply yarn, mixing together as many of these analogous but different colours as I could without making a muddy mess out of them. I made a little swatch card of all the fibres I chose to work with, and got started.

I had a considerable amount more of 2 of the fibres than of the others - a bright coral Cormo and a pink wool/silk blend with lots of blue silk noil fibres. I first carded those 2 together to form a base from which to create 3 separate but related blends; 1 for each ply. The base colour ended up as an intense, cool salmon pink. For blend #1 (bottom) I used a touch of watermelon red along with more substantial amounts of marigold yellow and tomato red to make a warmer, lighter colour. Blend #2 (center) includes a lot more of the watermelon colour along with some red/blue/rust Firestar ( a metallicy nylon fibre) to add some sparkle; this blend is closest to the original base colour. Blend # 3 includes more watermelon red along with an intense blue violet and more Firestar; this blend is the coolest and darkest of the 3. In the photo a sample of the individual blend is shown on top of its corresponding blend, and the larger skein is a sample of the resulting 3-ply. While from a distance it is still very similar to the original base fibre in colour, up close it has loads of life and interest. The bits of silk noil in blue from the original blend really speak to the blue violet in blend #3 as well as adding a spark of a complimentary colour.

The goal for this week was to get the blend carded and ready to spin, which has been accomplished. I'll work on spinning it all up over the next few weeks so there will (hopefully!) be more and better pictures in the near future. What will I make with tis fibre? I have no idea. It will depend a lot on what yardage I end up with, and as doing 3-ply yarns is not as familiar to me I don't have a good sense of how far my fibre will go. All together I have about a pound if fibre so I'm hoping to have enough for a sweater of some sort.

Vacations and other delights

After seven wonderful days visiting the Northwest including the Columbia River Gorge, Mt St Helens, Seattle, and Crater Lake, TW and I are home again. As always, I love to head off into the unknown for a vacation, and then am equally thrilled to return home again. Our annual road trip was filled with amazing sights, good food, new adventures, and best of all, time to be together, just the two of us. This year was the first time we included a city as a major destination point in the trip, and while we had a terrific time in Seattle and enjoyed the city very much, we both concluded that our biggest pleasures came from the natural environment - towering mountains, lush forests, beautiful rivers and lakes, and the like. Cities have wonderful things to offer, but they make for a very different type of trip, and we will keep that in mind for future planning.

The decision to include the stops at the Columbia River Gorge, Mt St Helens, and Crater Lake was a last minute one, which also precipitated our departure a day earlier than originally planned, but those were the parts of the trip that really moved us deeply. Mt St Helens was the highlight, I think - there's an observation center astonishingly close to the crater, with a panoramic view of the devastation area from the 1980 eruption. The mountain is huge, even with a significant portion of it having blown up during the blast, and it inspired nothing short of awe. The volcano itself is still completely barren, but the forests a little farther away have grown back (many of them re-planted by the lumber industries). The volcano is still technically active, but not in any kind of eruption cycle at the moment.

Part of the visit to Seattle included a ferry trip over to Bainbridge Island on a beautiful, sunny day. There's quite a nice yarn shop on the Island called Churchmouse Yarns and Teas, with lots of good yarns, sample garments, patterns, etc. A small section of the shop had a variety of tea for sale along with teapots, cups and saucers, etc. I always love to pick up some souvenir yarn while on vacation, and this time it's a double pleasure, as TW bought me a gorgeous skein as both my souvenir and a birthday gift. Along with several other brands of hand-dyed yarns the shop carried some yarns by Shoalwater Bay (I haven't been able to locate a website for them). The yarn is dyed with natural dyes and is a local company, so it's something I probably wouldn't be able to get anywhere else. It's a cotton/rayon slub yarn dyed a luscious aqua blue-green that will be beautiful with the turquoise earrings TW gave me last year. He also gave me a copy of A Fine Fleece, a beautiful book focusing on knitting with handspun yarns. There are a number of patterns based on traditional Aran and Guernsey designs, but each one is written for both handspun and commercially available yarns. While I would have liked to see some close up photos of the handspun yarns and/or fabrics, the sections discussing the author's thoughts on spinning, fibres, and design are well worth the price of the book. There are several scarf patterns in it, and the Shoalwater Bay skein is destined to become one of them.

And did I knit at all on the trip this year? Yes, I did! I got a good start on the Monkey socks, completing most of the leg. As I mentioned in last week's post I am using the variations from Cara of January One (see links in previous post), but did 5 repeats of the stitch pattern before starting the heel rather than the 4 she used. I also did a slip stitch heel flap instead of the plain stockinette in the pattern. I find hotel rooms to have poor sitting conditions and lighting so I didn't make a huge amount of progress but am enjoying the socks so far. This is my first experience with Socks That Rock yarn. The yarn itself is soft and spongy, which I like a lot, but I must admit that I am not really in love with such highly variegated yarns. The colour changes are quite frequent and are a little distracting from the stitch pattern. But I have decided to go ahead and use it for these socks as that was my original intention in purchasing it, so for once I will attempt to actually do what I set out to do, knitting-wise.

I am still on vacation this week, but will be spending it at home and am cooking up a major project to occupy myself for the week. What will it be? I'm not sure yet, but stay tuned........

On vacation!

TW and I decided to head off on our vacation to Seattle and the Northwest a day early, so I'll catch up on my posts after my return in about a week. I'm sure there is mass anticipation out there in blog land to learn what my trip knitting projects will be. I think I am being the soul of restraint by merely taking 2 pairs-worth of sock yarn - Socks that Rock Lightweight in Purple Rain (this colour might be discontinued) that will be come a pair of Cookie A's Monkey socks, but using January One's version with a picot hem top and shorter leg; and Knit Picks Gloss is Concord Grape for a pair of Fool's Rush socks by Too Much Wool.

Last year I took along enough sock yarn to properly shod an entire village and ended up not knitting a single stitch, much to my amazement. I know some out there have doubts that I will actually knit what I am bringing this time, but the thought of traveling without knitting within reach is such an appalling thought that I simple cannot do it.

So, I'm off to the wilds of Seattle, Crater Lake, Mt St Helens, and other environs - a full report when I return!

Madison and Must Haves

I spent the 4th of July at my mom's and had a great time playing with my niece, Madi. She's 2 1/2 now, and while still tiny for her age is now really a little girl instead of a baby. She's so cute, and isn't shy of me after the first few minutes. She's in preschool now a couple mornings a week and loves to read and do crafts of various kinds. I'm just bidding my time for a little longer before I teach her how to knit! (If my posture looks a little awkward it's because I am attempting to sit on a child-size rocking chair that my grandmother gave me many years ago, and now my mother keeps at her house for Madi. Needless to say, I can't quite fit into it any more.)


The Must Have Cardigan is progressing very well. I now have the back done and most of the left front. As the sleeves are already done (hurray!) there's just the right front and finishing left to do. My fears of running out of yarn appear quite unfounded. I still have 2 full balls of yarn left, and the fronts are only taking 1 ball so I'll have plenty left for the button bands, etc.

I'm still deciding between two button choices - a plain silvery white mother of pearl (simple, classy, a bit shiny, I have 7 of them) or creamy beige and white antler buttons (simple, more rustic, a great colour match, I only have 5 buttons + 2 smaller ones). As I also have 2 smaller ones, I could possibly use them in some interesting way in combination with the other 5. The pattern specifies 7 buttons, and since I am making the cardigan longer by 3-4 inches, I might need more than 7. By the same token, the antler buttons (which I overall prefer just on looks) are more weighty in appearance and it might be fine to use fewer of them, just spaced farther apart. I think I'll have to wait until the body is all sewn together to look at my choices and make a decision.

Now I have a major decision to make. What project shall I take on my road trip to Seattle next week???????

A good weekend after a tough week

This past week verged on apocalyptic in California. An unusually dry spring coupled with a weekend of freak dry lightning strikes has brought the usual wildfire season to a ferocious and early start, with more than 1,100 wildfires burning throughout the state (Update - it's up to 1,400 wild fires as of Monday, 6/30/08. See news story here). While none of them have been anywhere near enough to me to be dangerous, that's not been the case for a number of friends of mine but as of the last I have heard everyone I know is safe, unharmed, and still has a home. But the air quality has been appalling. Smoke hangs heavy in the air, and the sun has been deep red at sunrise and sunset, casting blood-red streaks across the waters of the Bay and the Carquinez Strait near my home. It's an oppressive feeling having the air hang so heavy and making breathing difficult. But at last the winds have finally picked up a bit in the Bay Area to help clear out the air, so hopefully the scent of smoke will soon be swept away. Fires are still burning, but at least the air feels more normal now.
But life goes on, and I had a chance to spend some time with my friends from Sew Group today. We met at Patricia's house and had a nice sized group - 11 of us, which meant we had the opportunity to spend more time chatting with each other than sometimes is possible when the crowd is larger. As always, we had a wonderful time showing off our recent sewing adventures or bemoaning our failures, and I found new and happy homes for three of my items that were nice garments, but for various reasons just didn't work for me. Patricia's house is beautiful, the weather was comfortably warm without being too hot, our potluck was stellar, and the company fabulous. What more can one ask for?!

I have very few (as in, only 1!) knitting pictures of things as I am only working on a single knitting project at the moment (hard to believe, but true). I've been doing a little more sewing lately, but with mixed success, so there is no photographic evidence of that, but which partly explains the number of items I had to give away today. But the Must Have Cardigan is progressing very well - I've just started the armhole shaping on the back, so that piece will soon be done, and then I just have the fronts left to do. As can bee seen in this photo, I have added waist shaping to the back and will do likewise on the fronts. Cables have a tendency to be a bit bulky and stiff, and I thought a little shaping would help keep the cardigan from making me look bigger than I actually am.

I doubt I am going to make my goal of finishing the whole things before my trip to Seattle. TW and I plan to leave on the 14th, and time is getting a little short. But I don't really mind as I can now tell that this will be a very warm garment, and even with Seattle's cooler summers I don't think I'm going to need that kind of warmth.

Mounds of Wool in 100+ Degree Heat

It's been extremely hot over the past several days in California - 104 degrees F/40 C on Friday in Vallejo. This would seem to be an inopportune time to decide to wind my entire cone of Webs Shetland wool into skeins, but I think the heat got to my brain and I indeed decided that this was the right thing to do. And now that it's done I'm glad to have the whole thing not only in skeins, but washed to boot! Coned yarn tends to be flat and ugly right off the cone and needs to be washed to bring out its true nature. The astonishing thing was how much the whole mass of it bloomed after washing. I knew it was going to be around 4,000 yards / 3.657 meters but the shear size of the mound was a surprise. This wild-looking pile is all 9 skeins heaped together after they had dried.

Using the wonderful clock-reel with built-in yardage counter that my Dad built for me, I wound off 500-yard /457 meter skeins at a time. I got 7 full skeins at that size, plus two smaller ones, off of the 2.2 lb / 1 kilo cone. After tying up each skein in 4 places to keep the yarn from tangling, I immersed them all in buckets of warm water with a generous slug of Eucalan wool wash. I like Eucalan because it's a no-rinse formula. The less handling given to wet wool the better, in my opinion, to reduce the risk of felting. I let the skeins soak for 30 minutes before carefully pressing out as much water as I could, and hanging the skeins outside to dry. Given the weather this didn't take long at all. So now the skeins are ready to knit whenever I decide what I want to knit, which is still very much an open question. There's a beginning gauge swatch in the photo; I've knitted up a bit on size 3 US / 3.25 metric needles, which makes a nice fabric, and have just begun on size 4 US / 3.5 metric needles, which is coming out a bit loose for a garment but might be fine for something lacy. The yarn is still not the softest stuff I ever handled so I doubt it will be knit into something that will be against my skin in any way.

Since I was already behaving inappropriately for the weather conditions, I continued the trend by working away on the Must Have Cardigan. Both sleeves are now done and the back has commenced. The only major modification I've made so far is to cross the centre diamonds in opposite directions so they will mirror each other. I'll repeat the mirroring on the body as well, especially since the back has two panels of the diamonds side by side. It would just look weird to me to have them both cross in the same direction.

I have also experienced a major frog attack. This pile of remains is what's left of a Chanel-style jacket I made a while back, and while the jacket looked great it made me look like a small, tweedy, purple whale. Not what I was after, so off to the frog pond with it. I have finally finished the unpleasant task of finding all the buried ends (lots of these as there are 3 colours of yarn in the jacket), picking out the seams, removing the extremely well-sewn-on buttons, and unraveling the double i-cord borders. Now all that's left is the rather pleasant task of unraveling and winding the yarn into balls. I find it easier to wind unraveled yarn into balls on my ball winder and/or nostepinne, and then will rewind it into skeins that I can wash to get the kinks out.

In addition, my good friend Catherine gifted me with a sweater she made but doesn't like that I will also frog. It doesn't fit me as is (it doesn't fit her very well, either, which is why she gave it away) so I will soon convert it back to being usable yarn. I haven't taken a picture of it yet, but it's knit out of a double strand of Plymouth Yarns Bulky Alpaca in a charcoal grey - very, very wonderful yarn! As it's doubled there's probably quite a bit of yarn in it but I don't know for sure how much, so I look forward to exploring it's possibilities once I have the reclaimed yarn in hand.

I will leave you with a picture of beautiful roses from my garden. The garden is an enclosed courtyard and is very much a work in progress, or more like a work waiting to commence. The building was abandoned for about 20 years before Thomas and I made our studio and home here, and the rose bushes somehow managed to survive all that time with no one taking any care of them at all. I have now found that in general the less I do to them the better, and this bouquet is the fruit of my non-labour. Enjoy!

Stopping (or rather, finishing) and starting

At long last - the Hex Coat is done! And I am happy to add, I love it. It was a lengthy project ( I started it at Bodega Bay last March) but it wasn't nearly as much of a slog to get done as I actually anticipated. I did get pretty sick of moss stitch by the time the back was done (which was the final piece) and the hexagons were much more fiddly to do than I expected, but all things considered I never reached a point of not being able to stand the sight of the thing sitting around the house any more.

The hardest part of the hexagons was just the size and weight of the whole thing. Each hexagon is picked up and knitted right onto the front edges in the round on double-pointed needles, and that was a small amount of knitting to keep flipping around with a big weight in my lap. I did the majority of them before sewing the coat together, but it still was a lot of weight. But now it's done!

The neckline is really beautiful, sitting very high up on the back of neck. The photos in the book don't show the neckline at all so it was a pleasant surprise to see how it is shaped. After all of the hexagons for the front were done, I did a 3-needle bind-off for the shoulder seams, and then finished the last three hexagons that cross over the shoulder line and go around the back neck.

So to recap - the pattern is the Hex Coat from Norah Gaughan's Knitting Nature book. I used Cascade 220 worsted-weight wool instead of Lite Lopi as called for, which means I had to adjust the stitch counts, etc. due to my smaller gauge. Both the book and the yarn were gifts from TW - what a guy!

And as any knitter worth her/his wool would do, I've cast on for my next big project. The first sleeve of the Must Have Cardigan from Patons "Street Smart" booklet is well underway (actually, I finished it last night so the photo is a little out of date already). This cardigan has been very popular out there in blogdom, which is how it came to my attention in the first place. I'm even using the yarn called for (a rarity for me) but in a different colour - I'm using Paton's Classic Wool Merino in Aran Tweed, which is a greyed cream with tweedy flecks in blues, browns, and a little black; a great wear-with-everything colour for me. I'm doing the sleeves first to act as a life-size gauge swatch (the pattern just gives a gauge over stockinette stitch) as well as to get them out of the way sooner than later.

As is often the case with Aran-style knitting, the stitches in this cardigan are not as complicated as they appear. All of the row repeats are in multiples of 4 rows, and the wrong-side rows are simply knit the knits and purl the purls - nothing new happens on the wrong side. I did change the working method of smallest cable-like pattern that frames the larger central diamonds. The pattern had a fiddly slipping stitches from needle to needle while wrapping the stitches with yarn maneuver, while the final result was extremely similar to a stitch from the recently completed Loksins socks (in last week's post) that was far easier to work. Otherwise, I'm following the pattern pretty closer (also a rarity for me!) and so it's proving to be quite relaxing to knit.