A Rummage in the Rubble

My first FO from the Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble! It is the Rainbow Yoke Sweater from Knitscene Spring 2009 using Noro Silk Garden instead of Kureyon for the yoke (same effect, fewer itchies), and an old old Adrienne Vittadini yarn, Maria, (and by old I mean purchased at the Knitting Frenzy going-out-of-business sale years ago!) for the main body. I love the Maria even more than I thought I would. It's 48% merino, 48% acrylic, and the portion that makes it truly amazing is the 4% Lycra. It's made by winding the wool and acrylic threads loosely around a Lycra strand giving an extremely stretchy yarn with a rough boucle sort of look. I had been afraid that the stretch would make for an unflattering second skin fit, but knit in the right gauge it just gives ease and comfort.

Now why would I abandon such a beauty with all done but the stitching up? Here's why:
I got all clever and changed the neck from a plain stocking stitch foldover to K2P2 ribs with a stst rollover top. Consumed with my cleverness, I didn't realize until I was done that the place where the purl stitches take off from the Silk Garden looks absolutely awful. And that's where I lost interest and got seduced by another project, chucking this on the Heap.

The resurrection entailed ripping out all the brown neckband and knitting the first row of the neck (or last row of the yoke) in a final stst row before starting the ribs. Hey presto no more ugly pink bumps showing through!

Ain't she a beauty now?
So now I have a great new sweater with a fancy yoke that was done with a single yarn--no bohus, no fair isle! And what, you ask, has become of the Winter Sunset Cardigan? Why, I'm up to the top of the body, ready to 3-needle bind off the shoulders, sew & cut me some steeks, and start some sleeves!

Sunset in the Daylight

There weren't enough people to show off to at knitting group on Sunday, so TA-DAAA:

I'm really cranking along on the Winter Sunset Cardigan and loving the way it's turning out. Only 22 more rows until I start the front neck decreases! And it's about time for something to change, as I've got the pattern down pretty well now and make mistakes only when I'm watching foreign language movies and have to look at the subtitles a lot.

Feel free to post paeans of praise in the comments.....

The Knitty by the Bay

Yes, that's right, I've escaped Anchorage for a week in San Francisco, and a wonderful, wonderful week it was! Besides the wine, the walking, the boutique chocolate, the meetings with old friends, the fabulous meals and bracing breezes from the bay, there were some knit bits:
Doesn't the sculpture in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency look like a giant multistory ball of yarn? I confess the idea never occurred to me when I lived in SF, but that was before I became a knitter.

One of the places we visited was the Museum of Craft and Folk Art. It's more like a little gallery with a single show at a time. When we were there the exhibit was about the intersection of needlework and computers, an import from Sweden. Therefore, if you blow up the photo below of a quilt of embroidered squares, you still may not be able to read it unless you're fluent in Swedish.

But my favorite was the crocheted black and silver computer cosy. Swedish here, too.
And I managed a visit to the most acclaimed knit shop in the city, Imagiknit.
I can see the reason for the acclaim. A double storefront, 4+ giant walls of yarn that look like this:
It is overwhelming. I really needed a half a day to take it all in and all I had was a couple of hours. So I escaped with only a single skein in hand, but had a feel and a gander at a whole bunch of yarns I had only seen on web sites, met some new ones, and had dozens of inspirations which I promised myself I would act upon only after making progress on the Heap. If you're ever in SF it's worth whatever time you can spare to see the place. Let me share one of the inspirations with you, though.

Go back to their web site and scroll down to the thrummed hat. My thrumming ambitions just changed focus. Is that or is it not totally an Alaskan hat? I love it! And can't you just imagine the fleece from some wild multicolor roving? Who says fleece has to be sheep-colored?

And they have a feature that I've never seen in any LYS or web site--every yarn is tagged with not only skein weight, yardage, and price, but the price per yard. What a concept! You can immediately calculate the price difference of alternate yarns for a project! I think it ought to be a requirement. Or at least, one of the cool iPhone apps ought to include it.

Blinding Insight In the Lamplight

In the depth of winter in Alaska one thinks a good deal about light. There's plenty of darkness to think about it in. Cranking along on the WSC, it suddenly struck me that much as I adore seeing the subtle colors of this thing as it develops, it's easy to work on because there are only two strands in each row, Light and Dark. And as long as you can keep your eesit for this row distinct from the ball of cream for that row, it's 3 lights, 1 dark, 1 light, 1 dark, 5 lights and no bother as long as you've got the right yarn balls for the right rows.

Now, the Shetland Islands and Fair Isle, where this brand of knitting was concocted or perfected, is on a similar lattitude to Alaska. And for sure it was developed in a world that was lit only by fire, right? In wintertime knitters were sitting by a peat-burning fireplace, an oil or a kerosene lamp. Less light even than all the bulbs and tubes burning in my house. (And I still can't see the colors properly except in daylight.)

Here comes the Blinding Insight, which I'm sure has occurred to you by now, too: The majority of knitting time would have been in the winter when there were fewer outdoor chores to do. Wouldn't it have been a natural thing to limit your colorwork to two per row, a Dark and a Light, so that you could carry on without daylight and have fewer chances for mistakes?

This idea is suddenly so totally obvious that I don't want to check knitting histories to find out who has already thought of it. I don't care. It came to me independently, as it did to the first fair isle knitters (probably), and I like to feel a kinship with them as they sat before the fire, chatting, telling and hearing stories, or singing, and I sit before the dvd film with an electric lamp on my work, while we all create a dance of color in wool.

PS: Scandinavian knitting. Two colors, dark and light. Think about it.

PPS: I'm now halfway through the second pattern repeat!

My Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble

I am a process knitter. I love assembling the project--falling in love with the pattern, finding the right yarn, figuring out how the pattern and its techniques work, adapting the pattern to my needs/wants/desires/whims/fantasies, knitting merrily away on long winter evenings while my Netflix play on tv or computer. This means that when all the knitting is done I lose interest (or am seduced by the next project) before a product is produced. My dirty secret is that I have a huge pile of completed knitting that is not yet a product. That is to say, it has not been sewn up or finished into an actual garment. The collection I have amassed of this stuff I call my Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble. The phrase is one I cribbed from elsewhere. It's from the title of a book published by these guys. Go ahead and read some of the sample articles on their site. I promise they will make you laugh.

Back to my Heap. Here it is:


Now, aren't you feeling better about the two nearly-finished sweaters and the single mitten languishing in the middle of your stash? I thought so. Glad to be of service. The even greater embarrassment is that this isn't even all of the Heap, but when I started hauling stuff out of the stash closet a shelf collapsed, dumping books, sewing and knitting stuff all over, and I was frightened out of further excavation. What if it's only knitting that's holding up the rest of the shelves?

Back to the Heap again. You see how easily distracted I can be? I have recently realized that one of the uses of this blog could be to embarrass myself into diminishing this thing. Say, at the rate of one a month. If the result is a sweater or whatever that's wearable--swell. I have an addition to my wardrobe. If it doesn't fit, then I donate it or give it to someone and somebody has a new garment. Sound like a good idea? I thought so.

We'll see. Good intentions are all very well, but the road to hell is paved with couches.

Progress in the Afternoon

When the light got bright this afternoon I just had to mark the progress of the WSC. Crunching on toward the end of the first pattern repeat. And once I got outside with camera and knitting, it filled me with a crazy amount of pleasure to see how great the colors are and how totally appropriate the Winter Sunset Cardigan looked set in the snow against the spruces in the late winter afternoon. Melanie Elizondo, all is forgiven.

Department of Corrections

I nearly called this post "Smack Upside the Head" or "Duh". Why I didn't think of looking for the errata for this book I can't imagine. Head to the publisher's web site and there it is, a pdf ready to download. And confirmation of the flubs in all 3 charts, and a bunch of fixes for text that describes the armholes and armhole steeks. Goodness, am I glad I found this before I got any further!

So--lesson learned. Check for errata before beginning a complex project. This should tone down the dialogue a good deal, but it's still no substitute for thinking through the instructions of a pattern and having a little mental chat with the designer anyway.

And take a look--I'm out of the border and into the main pattern!