I Won! I Won!

Ok, it wasn't the mega-million dollar lottery, but it is pretty cool.  It was a contest on She Shoots Sheep Shots  for a subscription to Knit Circus, an online magazine.  KC has a unique scheme for revenue--the magazine is free to look at.  In order to get the patterns they show, you can either purchase them singly or subscribe and get all of them as a download.  I'm not sure how long my subscription will run, but I got the Winter Issue full pattern download.

The embarrassing thing is that I was notified of my win via a comment on my previous blog post.  Unaccustomed as I am (ahem, I'm talking to you, dear reader/lurker) to receiving comments on my literary effusions, it was many days before I noticed and responded. 

And maybe this is the place to also talk about what I found in the blog stats that Google keeps for me.  I have had hits from Russia, Australia, Denmark, Italy, India, and Hong Kong.  People were searching for the Jali cardigan, the Ptarmigan cowl, and vegan cookies mainly.  No, it's not a major international audience, but it still is kind of a buzz that the power of Google can bring the world to my dusty little old blog.

Finished with Some Objects

Various Finished Objects for show & and tell.  There's the graphic stripe scarf...

And a Baby Surprise jacket and booties for the new granddaughter of a colleague. The yarn is Socks That Rock medium weight in My Wild Irish Girlie, a skein from this year's Rockin Sock Club.

[Aside: I wonder how many warped people like me there are who love sock yarn but aren't keen on wearing handknitted socks.  How crazy is it to belong to a sock club and then knit anything but socks??]

The Surprise Jacket is always a minor miracle.  You knit this very strangely shaped rectanguloid object--

And then sew up two seams and it magically turns into a little jacket.  Awwww.  With little pink heart buttons.  And enough yarn and buttons left over for a darling little pair of booties:

I also managed to resurrect another item from the Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble, the Willow Tunic from Jamieson's Shetland Knitting Book 2.  It had been knitted and just needed sewing up and the neckband added.  Putting it together showed me why I let it slide in the first place--the neck is enormous.  Not so terrible, I guess, because, being made of Shetland yarn, it would be too scratchy to wear against the skin anyway.

Now it's onward and upward with the Christmas knitting!  And the Grandboy needs more mittens.  And his dinosaur sweater.  And a couple more intriguing projects are whispering in the wings...

How Long Can It Go On?

I'm still knitting on the graphic stripe scarf.  Now got over 5 ft of it and there's still plenty of yarn left!  How much longer can it be?  Probably another 2 ft, but I think I'll stop at 6 ft.  That should be long enough to do that double-and-through-the-loop style that's so cool.  At least on other people.

But don't worry about my getting bored with doing the same thing for miles. This is my portable project, good for keeping me out of mischief while keeping the Grandboy out of mischief.  I can say without fear of contradiction that I have the pattern memorized by now, and it's easy to stop and start, say, when somebody climbs on top of the coffee table.

There's another project on the go that demands my full attention when I'm working on it, the Stefan's Dinosaurs cardigan for the aforementioned Grandboy.  It's a whole lot more complicated than I realized when I bought the yarn and plunged in.  (Duh! you quip sagely.  It won a competition.  It wouldn't be just a colorful little old intarsia.  It would have texture.)  And, boy, does it ever have texture!

It has texture moves I've never seen before, like slipped-stitch 2-color bunches of grass and subtle leaf patterns in the green areas, and rough, bumpy dinosaur skin.  Yikes!  You don't know the players without a program:

Now you understand why I have a separate portable project, right?  The body is done in one piece with a chart that I have stitched together from pieces of blown-up pdf files.  Not only have I learned new texture patterns, I've had to learn new computer tricks. This puppy has to stay on a table or desk with the place marker undisturbed!

I've changed the color scheme from the original.  For one thing, the background colors were shades of teal.  Teal!  I ask you--what self-respecting dinosaur would be caught roaming a teal-colored landscape??  Once the teal turned a more pleasing green, dinosaur colors had to shift. Here are the sleeves with some of the other colors:

I like my color scheme a lot better than the original.  Deep primary colors seem more attuned to the preschool aesthetic anyway, don't you think?  I mean, this sweater is for a guy who takes such a fancy to red one day that he colors the whole picture in the coloring book with it.  Staying inside the lines beautifully, but the ground is red; the sky is red; red figures in red vehicles doing red things with obvious enjoyment.  You don't dress a guy like that in teal.

Progress

I've finally finished the single-piece body of the Jali Cardigan and blocked it out:

It's not quite right, but I don't expect to be stopped by the Knitting Police and ordered to throw it away.  Now comes some sewing up and a great deal of stockinette knitting to put the collar/front piece on.  That part is major and will take, I'm guessing, the lion's share of the cone of yarn that remains.  Sort of boring, maybe, but it means I can watch subtitled foreign movies on my computer as I while away the rows (an activity which was absolutely impossible while I was counting lace stitches and cabling knots.)  I love the feel of it--it's going to be a fun light layer over a bright shirt this winter.

Meanwhile, having finally found the second yarn I wanted for the Strips of Stripes, I couldn't help starting the scarf [Ravelry link].  In San Francisco I acquired a mostly-black skein of Madelinetosh Tosh Sock in #5 graphite.  Nowhere could I find its opposite, white with a little gray, until Knit Purl in Portland, when a skein of Kathee Nelson Art Yarn Little Lambie in the "tweed" colorway lept into my hands.  Huzzah!  I cast on almost as soon as I got home.

It's very much like the original in the pattern photo (sorry about the Ravelry link above, but it's the only one I can find).  The stitch pattern is a combination of garter and slipped stitches that make a cool graphic look in black and white, but I think this is one I will knit again, probably with bright contrasting painted yarns.  I'm undecided about whether I will keep it or give it as a gift.  Do I know anyone in a cold climate who would appreciate it?

Newly Hatched Ptarmigan

It's a knitted ptarmigan, of course, the Ptarmigan cowl/neckwarmer design by Jared Flood.  Once I saw the design, I knew I had to make it at least once, and when I found this yarn: I knew I had found the perfect summer ptarmigan feathers:

 It's Madelinetosh sock yarn in a colorway called Parchment.

Here it is knitted up:

And being blocked (How did I have such a perfect blocking board, you ask?  By cutting a piece of cardboard to the dimensions specified for the finished product in the pattern, covering it in plastic, and severely stretching and pinning, that's how.):

And here's the final product, modeled by an actual Ptarmigan:

I can verify that it is a very warm little accessory, and will be very useful when the cold winter winds blow.  Now I have to make a winter Ptarmigan, and I have a skein of cream colored alpaca in the stash somewhere...

Up From the Heap and Down to the Frog Pond

Ever since I got back from vacation I have been on a knitting treadmill with the Jali Cardigan [ravelry link] pattern.  I am vastly enamored of the combination of lace and cabling, the concept of a layer showing through the lace, and the silk-bamboo yarn I found to make it with.  I'm not sure whether my obsession is a good thing or a bad thing, though, because just after I took this picture:

it was time to divide for armholes and I discovered the pattern had sneaked around and was off as much as 8 stitches in some areas.  Crap!  There is just no way to fake or finagle that big a miss.  So merrily I frogged away clear down to the middle of the first repeat.  FOR THE 6TH TIME.  Mind you, I didn't get so far the first 5 times, but still...

This has certainly taught me something about my approach to lace knitting, which is that I don't do well just reading off the chart.  I need to learn the rhythm and proportion of the pattern so that I can work without the chart much of the time, knowing what to expect and where stitches are likely to get lost or created.  Apparently, at least in this case, I am a very slow learner.  Add to my trouble the fact that I'm working with black, which hides problems in all but the best light.  This will certainly be in my favor with little glitches, but I've got to do better than my previous tries.  What keeps me going is the two (plain stockinette) sleeves already made, the forgiving strength of the yarn, and the fact that despite it all, dammit, I still am fascinated with the pattern.

But I took a little break to complete an item from the Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble and regain a little of my self-respect and sense of accomplishment.  Aided by the discovery of the tiny ball of yarn I needed to finish sewing up my Dancing Vines sweater made, I dimly recall, out of Elann's denim yarn in a currently-not-available light blue.

Also visible in the picture is the poisonous jolly fairy ring of fly agaric mushrooms that have sprung up around one of our birch trees, just one of the features of the mushroom farm our yard has become as a result of the rainy rainy summer.  I guess the rain is a good reason excuse to stay inside and try (again) to knit the Jali cardigan.

Ptropical Ptarmigan

I'm back from a wonderful time in Tahiti! I think I will blog up the trip and its pictures separately for family and friends, but meanwhile, here are a couple of knittish bits that only you will appreciate.

First thing:

Doesn't this underwater sponge thingy look a whole lot like a pile of unblocked lace knitting?  Well, I thought so, anyway.  Maybe I should have taken video of it, because it was soft and waved around in the water.








Second thing:

During the partial phases of the eclipse you can create an amazing pinhole camera effect that shows the crescent shape of the partially obscured sun by casting the shadow of anything with small holes on a white surface.  Now, let's see--what do I have with small holes??  A knitted lace shawl!!  Tougher to photograph than I thought for various technical reasons and spousal reasons (there is a limited amount of time that a willing spouse will stand on the crowded deck of a ship holding a lace shawl up in front of a wall).  But in the lower right part of the picture you can see that the smaller holes definitely show up as crescents!
The real deal was done by a guy with much prior experience who makes elaborate arrangements of holes drilled in thin sheets of wood in advance of the event:

See all those bazillions of tiny crescents? (Click on the photo to embiggen & truly appreciate.)  Maybe next time I will knit a specially themed lace pattern to do the same thing? Probably not.

But none of this is very colorful, is it?  And bright color in the bright sunshine is the hallmark of the tropics, n'est ce pas?  So here's a colorful Tahitian fiberwork for you, a tifaifai, the beautiful applique Tahitian quilt: