Body Block

The main part of my Shepherd sweater is off the needles and on the blocking board! The cables had it scrooched up pretty tight, and I was worried about it being too small until I got it wet and spread it out:

The water relaxed it into just the right dimensions, and everything is fine. I intentionally made it about an inch shorter than the pattern said, which I think will be a more flattering length for me. My non-seed K1P1 front edges were still a little wavy from cable scrooching, so I used blocking wires to straighten them, and they look great. The next steps, collar and sleeves, may have to wait until a small amount of Christmas Knitting is complete.

And what of the voyage of the Sixareen Cape? Alas, we are stranded high and dry (for the last time!) awaiting the last dose of Shetland Heritage yarn, but the neck is looking much more reasonable, and will be fine when I have the materials to finish. I'll block it first, but I'm pretty sure I'll have to do something with the flippy, frilly seed stitch lower edge. The Cape may have to lie in dry dock for  a wee while also, while the Christmas Knitting gets knitted.

If I am desperate to make progress, I think I found a few tails to weave in..

Blockage

Front and back of dark Fassett stripe sweater are done and blocking:

I never get tired of looking at how well the colors in this thing blend and shift. And even more so on the purl side, as the piece on the right shows. Hmmm...maybe I need to find a reverse stockinette stitch pattern for this stuff....? And before you ask, both pieces are the same size. The camera lens has distorted the one on the right. Compare the grid sizes.

I'm proceeding on both sleeves at the same time in order to avoid Second Sleeve Syndrome (Like Second Sock, only bigger) and to have the best chance of 2 sleeves that are the same size, shape, and length.

And notice how I slyly managed to show off the bumper tomato harvest? Every year, the unheated Alaska tomato grower has to pick a cutoff date for literally cutting all the tomatoes off the vines, ripe or not. Daylight is shrinking (only a week to equinox), the weather is rainy and cool, and we come to face the fact (reminded by yellowing leaves) that those babies are never going to blush on the vine. But tomatoes have a secret. Everything they need to be red tomatoes is sealed up inside green tomatoes, so all they need is to come inside the house and hang out in a shallow basket for a while until they get around to reaching their carmine potential. They even are kind enough not to ripen all at once, so we may be eating fresh homegrown tomatoes for over a month! Let's have another look and revel in the delights of salads to come:

One more thing--the most prolific plant was not any of those I nurtured from seeds and planted in big deck containers. The winner was an afterthought nursery start called Tumbler plopped in a hanging pot. On a per-yard-of-vine basis it whupped the Sunchocola, Scotia, Beaverlodge, and Fourth of July all to pieces! And their flavor is incomparable!

Goodness Gracious, What's This?

Well, my stars! I do believe these are the last blocks of Viola a-blocking! Crazy to believe that this is all going to look sorta like a flower someday, isn't it?

Blocking Blocks Block Unblocked

Whew! I was all bummed out about all the blocking I had to do, remember? All those stupid little squares to wet, squeeze out and individually pin to the board to the tune of a million pins? No more! I found a short cut. Now, maybe you're smarter or more efficient than I am, and you wouldn't have needed to do it all 7 (seven) times in order to slap yourself upside the head and wonder, "What if I sewed a dozen of them together first, and then blocked that chunk? Would it still come out ok?" Well, YES! It turns out that it does:

 On the left, a block done by blocking squares first, then sewing. On the right, a sewn-together block blocked all at once. (And requiring many, many fewer pins!)

So here we go with a lot more blocks in a lot less time:

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.

Bootie-Scootin' Boogie

I'm sure you were tossing and turning last night wondering if I have run out of gas on the bootie/blanket marathon. After all, it's been a month since the last blog post. Actually, you could have checked the scorecard on the right--the numbers are ratcheting up regularly. And feast your eyes on this:

Baby boots among the summer herbs. Actually, the two projects work well together. The booties are small and portable. When at home, the latest boot-on-the-go is on my desk, ready for long telephone calls or online videos. Easy to pick up and take out on the deck, in the car, etc. It's fun to come up with different color combinations, and each yarn feels slightly different flowing through the fingers. It's great to be putting odd bits of sock yarn to good use. (OK, the white merino was a purchase, but it was on sale. I promise! And it's soooooo soft, it was begging for baby toes to cuddle.)

The blanket squares really require an established knitting station with all the current yarns in play in reach, remaining balls nearby, pattern binder, pen, label stickers, scissors...you get the idea. With all of the necessaries to hand and a good movie, I can crank out about 5 squares in an evening, but it's just not a portable project. My least favorite part is the blocking. No matter how organized you are, it's a bit of a headache to keep the squares identified with their labels off and very pin-fiddly sticking them to the board.  The reward comes with the seaming and making a section of the big picture come together. That's why I added the block count to the scorecard. Maybe making notches in the blog will motivate me to block some more. There are several sections ready and waiting.

The First Blocked Block!

Here it is, the squares from the upper left hand corner, the first chart page, all sewn together in the first block. Not as hard to put together as I had feared because the squares had first been blocked to a uniform 4x4 size. You definitely have to be wide awake, though, and make sure everything is going together the right way around. Like that upper right hand rascal up there--some of the placement only makes sense in the Big Picture. One down and only 17 more to go. Yikes! Still, the squares knitting is rattling along at a decent pace; it's creeping up to the halfway point.

Love, love, love all those beautiful reds together!

Blocking a Block

Sometimes observing what you're doing changes what you're doing. And so it is with a blog. If I weren't blogging about knitting, I would probably crank on with Viola until I had all the squares knitted. Boring, boring, boring, but progress. There can't be that many people cheering just to see the scorecard total going up day after day. Progress, but boring. I've done a lot of squares, but am not even to the halfway mark yet. How long till both the readers of this blog are sound asleep?

Am I getting bored knitting all these squares? Surprisingly, not really. A lot of Netflix is getting watched, but the squares are different enough from each other to keep me wide awake--changing from bias to miter to straight and all different patterns of color now that the plain squares are done.

Still...the part of me that sometimes checks the last pages of a novel before I've naturally got there wants to see how hairy putting all these guys together is going to be. And will it really look like the picture? There's a practical aspect, too. Won't it be a huge headache to sort out 206 squares into the right pattern if I wait till the very end? Much easier to assemble sections of the whole first and then put those together. See? All rationalized.

So I picked out the squares from the first page of the charts and organized them as given on the page:

Now all those labels have to come off as the squares go in the water, but even if they get all muddled, it can't be that hard to sort out only 12. Into the sink they go:

And out into a towel to be gently squozen out:

Then for the blockage! I am really glad I have this gridded blocking board for the task. Immersion, yarn bloom, and natural garter stitch stretchiness has made them bigger than when I originally knit and measured them. So instead of stretching, as happens with blocking lace, a whole lot of smooshing is going on to get them within their 4x4 borders and all squared up instead of diamonded, as the biases and miters are wont to do on their own.

Ta daaaaaa------

Next chapter: the stitching and the burying of 1,000,000 ends!