IMAG0435

IMAG0435
Originally uploaded by bareblueskin

Breathing Life into Emmaline

I started Emmaline, a lovely empire waist short sleeve top knit in bulky organic cotton, last April hoping to wear it in summer and have my very first adult sized finished garment. I've blogged about this a few times, and Emmaline slipped into the pile of unfinished projects due to size confusion. I didn't really want to make a garment in my current size, knowing that I was changing. It looks like I put it down some time in the fall. I know I've tried to pick it up a few times and been nervous about where I had left off. I have completed the top raglan portion and knit and bound off both sleeves, tried on, and gone back and modified the bind off so my arms won't turn blue from circulation issues.

Now, I've lost over 20 pounds since starting this project. You would think the arms would be loose by now, right? No such luck. They do fit properly though, and that makes me think that they were still too tight before. I had planned to modify the torso area and put in some ease to account for my stomach, but I've changed my mind. I'm going to knit as written and try it on in stages. I'm sure the finished garment will loosen up during the wearing of it, and I'd rather have things a little snug than baggy. A first for me!

In the past week I've made quite a bit of progress. I fixed my confusing stitch count, moved past the one purl stitch row, and started the more fitted torso section. I also took care of all the ends under the arms to make sure I was measuring properly - there were some loose stitches there that needed sewing up.

Taking a peek at my Ravelry project page, I started this project April 17, 2010. Let's see if I can finish knitting this and have a FINISH for the 17th...

FO: Cabled Chapeau

The lovely Cabled Chapeau. I finished this hat back in December, wrote the majority of this post in January, and here it is, April 5th. And it's raining, not snowing, so no need for the hat. But oh, how I love this hat! I wore it on the cold, but not arctic, winter days here in New England. it was quick to knit (when I spent time knitting), soft and conforming, and most importantly, big enough for my head! We have big heads in my family and most feminine hats squeeze the dickens out of my head. That said, I'm sure other patterns can be customized to accommodate my cranium but I loved this pattern from the start - big cables, flexible brim, and covers my ears.



Knitting the brim was a a bit odd. I couldn't figure out what doing short rows in the middle would do to the shape. I just couldn't picture it. Also, the way the pattern is written, the two long edges are not the same length, and I thought they would be since they just fit on the inside and outside of the hat. Weird. I just kept on going with the pattern instructions and tried not to question it.

Once I finished all the pieces they cuddled up together in a bag on the couch as I tried to gather up my nerve to tackle the brim. I did have another hat to follow for brim shape, but I was anxious about doing it wrong. Then I realized if I didn't cut something, I wouldn't have a hat to wear when I went home for Christmas. And of course, I wanted to show off my handiwork!

I would have made the knit piece for the brim smaller but I just sewed it in father on the inside so I wouldn't have a baggy brim. If I make this hat again (and I think my friends back home are preparing to put in their orders) I will figure out how to make the knit piece a bit smaller, and use the cardboard template I made for the brim as a guide.

It's time to give this hat a wash in the sink and put it in with my other winter things. Or maybe I'll wear it on particularly chilling spring days...it is the perfect shade of blue!

Here is a photo of me and my big sister after the crazy northeast storm that made getting home from Christmas an adventure. Instead of flying from Rochester to Boston, I rode with my sister and brother-in-law to Montclair, NJ, then took the commuter rail in to NYC, then a Bolt bus to Boston, and then the subway home. A roundabout way of getting home after the holidays, but better than waiting for the snow to clear. I know this photo doesn't show off the hat all that well, but you get the picture!

Blog or Journal?

I think I need to make a decision on whether to journal, or to blog. I find the allure of paper hard to resist, and I like having an archival copy of my thoughts, insignificant as they may be, to reflect on in future times. I like seeing the ink on the paper, worn pages, books bursting with my effort. I’ve always struggled with keeping an electronic version of this, since the format of blogging does not match up with my paper record, and I can’t paint on a website. I always meant to print out the pages, to keep them in some hard format, but then isn’t that wasting resources and storage space? How many apartments will I move those boxes to?

So far I have one box of journals in my closet. I think it contains only the writing journals since my move to Boston in 2000. That means that there is a box in my parents’ house containing my formative years, highly productive high school days, when I took up journaling as a mission, and probably part of my turbulent college years, where things turned dark and multimedia expressive.

I would like to find a more expressive blog format, so I might be changing hosts soon after watching fellow bloggers go through this quest.

There are things I want to record and remember that haven’t been written anywhere, just some thoughts.

Just this year:

-Fitting into smaller jeans – a size I never really believed possible, and now I’m looking beyond it to new numbers

-the death of my best friend’s mother

-finding the strength of self preservation, and learning it has a price

-missing my family so much at times it hurts, even at this stage in my adult life. I think this is something I will never lose, and I'm grateful to have that bond

-feeling able to stand on my own financial feet and take the changes as they come
-having so many friends that my social calendar swells and overlaps

Funny, now that I'm thinking I should stop blogging, I've written a bunch of draft posts and have 4 finished items to post too. So for now, conscious duality.

What was old is new again

My suit fits!!!! I bought it in June 2004, it has been too small since 2005 and  I have moved it 4 apartments. What a way to kick off my spring cleaning weekend, with a closet clear out session resulting in clothes that fit!

Knowing when to cut and run

Last January I started Wabenschal, a hexagonal lace scarf. I was itchy to start something new for the new year. Against my better judgment, that loud voice in my head that gets pillows thrown at it, I started this instead of plugging away at my ocean waves scarf which is still unfinished at the time of this post. I only worked on Wabenschal while knitting with others, and I think I should have spent some time by myself getting to know the chart and the pattern. It was my first attempt at using a chart for any kind of knitting instead of following the written instructions, or creating written instructions from the chart.

I bought the yarn, Patons Lacette, on clearance for $.50 a skein, and I can see why. In the skein it's very soft - you can feel the mohair content. Knit up it feels like baling twine. Maybe once it's blocked it will soften up and show off the stitch pattern better.I don't know if this yarn and pattern combination is working. I haven't worked on this project in a year, and I can't decide whether to scrap what I've done and put the pattern back in my binder for future use, or to start up again with it. At this point the work I've done is about as large as a swatch. Maybe I'll bind off, block it, and use it as a reference when I start the pattern again. It's another one of those lurker projects, taking up space on my shelf, my Ravelry list, and my mind.

I don't want to abandon my work. It always makes me feel like a bit of a failure, even though it's just a knitting project. I expect myself to start and finish everything with perfection! Is that so difficult? How do I know when it's time to throw in the towel?


My project link Wabenschal in Maroon Mist

P.S. I broke down and bought size 8 straight needles two weeks ago after what I thought was a thorough search of my apartment. I determined that yes, remember, I lent this pair of needles to someone two years ago and never got them back. And didn't buy replacements. So, I picked up another pair at Windsor Button, even though I prefer the Boye straight needles purely for the thumbtack like end. The pair I bought at Windsor are by Susan Bates. They are a lovely blue but have a pinched, flattened end which I don't find aesthetically pleasing. It turns out that this Wabenshal is parked on my size 8 needles!

Baby Sizing

It's that time again, time to put the pedal to the metal and crank out some baby things for a shower. How do these things creep up on me? My friend Mary made a special request for purple booties and I am happy to oblige, but of course I can't just make booties, I need to make a hat too! I've known about this since sometime in the fall, and Mary is due in April, so I had plenty of time. I made a winter hat for myself, the Cabled Chapeau (which you will see a finished picture of soon), worked on some other unfinished projects, and started but didn't finish a scarf for my sister's birthday in December. I wanted to finish the scarf before starting the baby things, but now I'm getting down to the wire.

Mary's baby shower is March 5th so I need to mail the gift by March 1st. That's two weeks from today! Now if I could just get knitting...though that hasn't been the problem. The problem is size.

I picked out the patterns months ago, bought the yarn a few weeks ago, but didn't sit down and read through everything until I was ready to start. Common mistake. I bought Plymouth Encore in worsted, but the Etanapipa snail hat calls for bulky, and Saartje's Bootees call for fingering weight. Ugh!


-Snail Hat-
1st cast on - size 10 needles, yarn doubled. Too confusing, can't figure out if the hat is the right size, pulling from both ends of one skein. Frogged.
2nd cast one - size 9 needles. Cast on 64 stitches. Slightly stretched it's 16-17" - too big for a baby, more like a toddler size. And I had added a stitch somewhere. Frogged.
3rd cast on - size 9 needles. Cast on 48 stitches. Stretched it's 12" - way too small. Frogged.
4th cast on - size 9 needles. Cast on 56 stitches. Stretched it's 14-15". Sticking with this one.

Never mind that bebecita probably doesn't need a woolly knitted hat in April. It's upstate NY. It still snows in April and May sometimes.

I've been referencing this size chart to figure out how big to make the hat.

-Saartje's Bootees-
1st cast on - size 7 needles. Seemed to crowded. Frogged.
Waiting until I'm finished with the hat to cast on again, probably with size 8 needles.

A late start...

I had big plans for this January; blogging, crafting, getting fit, trying new things, and generally living a wonderful life. I underestimated the impact that major tragedies in my friends lives would have on mine, and I have spent January mourning and comforting, getting sick, and watching the structure in my own life disappear as I lose sight of my goals.

I need to treat February as my fresh start. February is usually the toughest month for me. It's the bleakest month. No end to winter in sight, resolutions abandoned or broken, no more holidays for a long while (none that I celebrate anyway - we don't have to talk about that pulsating pink target in the middle of the month) and it's harder than ever to get out of bed and get things done.

Not only that, but it seems that the knitting callus on my left index finger is disappearing from lack of use. Come back! I didn't even know I had achieved a knitting callus! I can't imagine what else it would be from that I'm not doing at the moment...does reading cause calluses? I'm not doing much of that either.

I still have my yearly goal of reading 52 books in 52 weeks, but I'm off to a bad start this year.

Still, I have a bunch of knitting projects in the works, and am planning on spending the rest of February working on my knitting. I need to start and finish two items for a friend's baby shower in early March.
I'm making the Etanapipa - Snail hat in a wee size and Saartje's Bootees by Saartje de Bruijn. I've had both of these in my Ravelry queue since I learned to knit a few years back and haven't tried them until now becuase I was intimidated. Why? They aren't difficult items in complexity or difficulty. And they're small. It should take me a week or less for each item.


Citron update - I knit and knit and knit, and still I have not reached the end of the first ball of Malabrigo. I brought this project with me on my trip to Las Vegas, small, light, and not too complicated. I knit on it during my flight across the country, but was way too busy to knit a thing once I got to my destination. Still, I managed to knit 10 rows and listen to all of my downloaded podcasts from Sticks and String.

Other knitting updates and many more posts to follow. I have a bunch in draft form that are waiting for completion. Maybe this weekend...

Cable complications

I got to row 10 on the Cabled Chapeau hat and just didn't like what was happening with the purl stitches in between the cables. I was ending up with loose purl stitches, particularly to the right of the cable (for most knitters this happens in the column of stitches to the left of the cable, but I'm a lefty so it's reversed, remember?) I started searching online for help and ended up with some pretty complicated methods to try.

Cat bordhi has a video for just such a problem, however it's a complicated move that I could not grasp. Side linked with this were clips on how to do the Norwegian purl stitch, which looks to be the same move. Again, a bit tricky. I read somewhere that you could leave out a purl stitch in each place where the loose purl happens, knit the garment, then go back and pull up a line of stitches in that loose area with a crochet hook. Sort of picking up a dropped stitch that wasn't there. This seems like a lot of trouble to go to, modifying the pattern, adding the potential for lots of error. Knitty has a great section on knitting cables that does mention the loose purl stitch problem and essentially says, pull it real tight!

I decided to rip back to the ribbing section and start the cables over. I realized though that my cast-on/ribbing section was looser than I normally knit, and so the stitch spacing of the whole hat would be off, and after knitting two rows I ripped it all out again.

On row 2 of the second try I noticed that when I joined the yarn I didn't join it properly and once again, I have an infinite loop instead of a hat. I did this with my second try for the baby berry hat too. I never used to have a problem joining, but it seems to happen when I use a circular needle that's longer than I need it. If I plan to use magic loop for the knitting I just cast on with the longer needle, but then it's very easy to twist the join without noticing. So, 6 days after starting the hat and knitting along, I cast on for the third time. *sigh*

I decided to reverse the directions for the cable. The pattern calls for a 4/4 LPC (slip 4 stitches to cable needle and hold to front) to make left twist cables. For me, since I am lefty, I do this and get right twist cables. I really like how the hat looks as is, so I held the stitches in the back.

I managed to finish the main body of the hat while away for Thanksgiving, and started in on the brim only to realize that I needed a refresher on short rows. The hat pattern does not include full instructions on short rows. Once I was back home and could sit in front of the computer I sought some visual aids. Everyone has their own way of explaining the strange 'wrap and turn' function that makes short rows possible. I found watching the video on knitting help to be the most straight forward for me. I think this time I finally understand! Maybe now toe-up socks won't seem so scary.

So, all I have to do is finish the brim, knit the band for across the front, find buttons, eat a container of Cool-Whip, cut a brim out of Cool-Whip lid, sew it all together, and...I think I need a nap.

I got motivated after returning from P-town and lugged the abandoned radiator cover upstairs. Here it is drying in my bathtub after a good scrub. It's bigger than my radiator but at least it'll be a shelf and it's worth trying right?