Waste of a Perfectly Good Education

Eight years of arithmetic. Algebra. Geometry, advanced algebra, precalculus and calculus. Statistics. At least 14 years of my life spent studying mathematics and I apparently still can't friggin' COUNT!

Making two equal sleeves on a striped sweater is so easy. All you have to do is count the stripes on sleeve #1 and start the cap shaping at the same place on sleeve #2. Did I do that right? Nope. Do I have to frog the top of #2 and re-knit it? Yup. Am I pissed off at myself? Most certainly.

After a period of mature reflection, I have decided to postpone the fixing of the sleeve problem until after I have completed the sweater front, have sewed the two halves together and tried them on. Because, once I was able to quit cussing myself out, it occurred to me that this might be a timesaver in disguise. If I try on the body of the sweater and then pin a sleeve in place, I will be able to tell if even one of them is the right length. The sleeve caps in this pattern are very shallow, so if the whole thing needs a couple of inches off, there won't actually be that much frogging involved, and it would be very worthwhile for a sweater that fits well, right?

Meanwhile, Sixareen Cape is taking a rest. Not that I have abandoned it, far from it. But after a long, long winter I'm not feeling the chilly-shouldered need for it. At least for as long as the sun is out.

Fear not, however, that I have monomaniacally wed myself to a single project. No--summer weather has brought on fond thoughts of the cool shirt pattern I got: Trigere. And if I'm going to have a chance to wear it before the snow flies again, I'd better get knitting! And so, dear reader, I cast on. I cast on with the original yarn, Lara. It's a wonderful color, much more to my taste than the orange, but it's not really big fun to knit with. It's like having 10 cotton sewing threads loosely twisted together, and it's really easy to miss one of those stinkers as you knit. And if you miss one, you've got a stupid little loopy thread messing up the texture of your fabric, so the knitting has to go a lot slower and more carefully than you'd think for acres of stockinette.

It struck me that beads mixed in with the lace inserts would look cool (you know how I love me some beads), so I've been fooling around figuring out where to put them, and I think after several tries I got it. (Because the lace is knitted upside down, the bottom two repeats are the preferred option.)

Now I've got to sign off and get busy--I've got so much knitting to do!

Glass Caviar

Yeah, long time, no blog. Well--holidays, travel, this 'n that. Mostly I have been hiding from the blog because I have been hiding from, nay, daunted by the task of sewing up all those Viola squares. Yes, the Viola blanket squares are finished, and have been for a considerable time. The daunting comes from the prospect of wetting, squeezing out, and pinning all those danged 4" squares to the blocking board. It's fiddly; it's time-consuming (by which I mean that it uses up a lot of time that a person could otherwise spend actually knitting); it's pin-intensive; the amount to be done in a day is limited by board space and pin supply so you can't just bang it all out in a one-day orgy and be done with it. But I have recently hatched a cunning plan for the blocking and will try it out and let you know how it fares. Meanwhile, this is what I'm up against:

Nonetheless, a knitter has to knit. And when traveling, a knitter needs a portable project. So I wound up some balls and quickly grabbed Southern Sun. I have been fascinated by the prescribed yarn, Riveting (dk/sport weight), a recycled yarn made from reprocessed denim.

Color is Charcoal, best reproduction in the lower left corner. Winter light is really hard on true colors. In person, there's a blue-ish cast to the grey. Not surprising, if it's made of ground-up denim. And the astute observers among you will be wondering what a bowl of caviar with a crochet hook in it is doing here. It certainly confused the dog. Heaven knows what he thought was in the little plastic bag, but he ripped it open in hopes of something edible and found instead indigestible metallic core gray #6 beads. Maybe he just wanted to try a craft of his own--beaded poo. I don't care what he says, I'm not letting him enter it in the State Fair this year. He's more likely to end up on Dogshaming.

And, yes, I am making some changes to the original pattern. Shifted the motif to the other side. Beads instead of yarn-overs for the flower. Longer body, full-length sleeves, higher neckline with some beaded accents, and a beaded echo of the motif on the left sleeve. Just like the pattern, only different.

Ptarmigan Made a Peacock

Proud as a Peacock is finished, plenty of time to git 'er done while waiting for what I swear is the last resupply of yarn for greedy Viola.

Here it is in all its beady glory:

Yarn is (as you might say of your kitty cat) a rescue from a kit project that I finally decided was too fiddly to actually make. It would have involved a terrible rats' nest of bobbins and colors difficult to discriminate in dim winter light. The yarn was Knit Picks Palette, background color Opal Heather as per pattern, but the contrast colors are Blue Note Heather, Pool, Bluebell, and Tidepool Heather. There's not as much contrast between the Tidepool and Opal as with the original green, which led me to make some changes from the pattern's top:

I repeated the sequence of the blue contrasts and added beads instead of a plain stitch for the "eyes" of the feather shape. I like the hat and this interpretation of it just fine. The model, by the way, is Louisa May Alcott at the library.

What's up with Viola? I couldn't finish the last few squares without yet another resupply of 3 more colors of yarn. It's just a few ridges missing for each color, and I did consider faking it with substitutions of near-neighbor colors. I don't even think it's the fault of the pattern's yarn estimation. I suspect that if I had been less liberal with the starting and finishing tails for all those colors in all those squares, I probably could have eked it out with the original quantity. Too late now.

Don't ask me to explain why I'm such an improvisor on one project and a pattern slave on the other. It's just the way the fiber flops for me. Thank goodness There Are No Knitting Police!

Portable Peacock

Here, take a peek at the new portable project:

Proud as a Peacock hat by Deborah Tomasello.  It's lovely, absolutely lovely. The colors I'm using aren't the prescribed ones, but the palette is similar, and I have the satisfaction of using some yarns for a kit that I decided was just too fiddly to go on with. The green yarn barely shows up at all, being too close a cousin to the Opal Heather background color (the only color that matches the pattern prescription). Because of the lack of contrast, I have my own plans for the crown pattern. Let's just say that beads will be involved.

What of Viola? She continues, slowly but surely. Only a few squares left now, but wouldn't you know it--I've run out of another color! Rats! I suppose if I were a bit more somethingorother (organized? anal? methodical? thrifty?) I would have knit until I had done all the squares possible with the original yarn quantity, and then ordered all the additional balls needed at once. Lucky for Knit Picks, I'm not that methodical etc. Lucky for me, this is cheap Knit Picks yarn and not baby bison/virgin cashmere/angels' navel lint yarn. (Although that stuff would be pretty soft, wouldn't it?) Anyway, awaiting resupply of Hollyberry this time.

And actually, taking a look at the photo with so many squares bagged up by page awaiting blocking, actual blocking on the board by page, so many squares awaiting page completion in labeled serried rows, I don't think I'm so disorganized, after all!

Away on the sleigh

A couple of recent Finished Objects have been carried away on the sleigh and delivered and now can be revealed to a waiting world!

Two knitted necklaces, pattern lost, so recreated from memory of the general idea, which was: cast on a whole bunch of stitches, join in circle, knit stocking stitch for 6 rounds, cast off all but, say, 20 stitches, knit across 'em, cast on another buncha stitches (but fewer than before), st st for 6 rounds, cast off the whole business, and voila! through the magic of the Stocking Stitch Curl, you have a 2-strand knitted necklace with strands joined at the back!

The black one was made with Katia Gatsby yarn, a fingering weight synthetic chain with a little strand of gold.  Beads were added to the smaller strand by threading them on a linen thread that was knitted in with a bead every 6 stitches, advanced 1 st every round to get the spiral effect.  Had to use the thread because the dang beads didn't fit on the yarn!

The beads did fit on the Dream In Color Starry in Visual Purple.  The yarn is really magic-looking--merino sock yarn with a tiny real silver fiber running through that glints like, yes, stars in a purple sky without being blingingly overwhelming.  Beads knitted in here at random, with more on the inner strand than the outer.

You may have to click on the photo to embiggen it and see the matching earrings hooked into the top. After I got the necklaces knitted and tried them on, I could see that they needed matching earrings to look cooler than "some dumb loops of knitting that a knitter made for me."  I cast on 8 stitches, knit a bead in between each stitch, cast off, and used the tails to tie them up in loops.  Tiny dot of glue on the knot, clip the tails, and put them on wires.

One of the recipients missed the earrings entirely until I spoke to her on the phone.  "Oh, wonderful!  I wondered why it was so scratchy on the back of my neck!"

This whole multi-loops thing could be developed in a lot of interesting ways.  I can imagine a lot of same-size loops as a cowl/scarf.  What could you do with/without different colors, different yarns, charms, doughnut beads, feathers, big gauge, felting.......

Update: I found the pattern!  And it's a free download from Ravelry! It's Kirsten Johnstone's sev[en] circle.