Tuesday, August 15, 2006

more mittens in august

this is the pattern for the double knit mittens i swatched last week. right now the pattern is prettier than the mitten.

i'm making the type of thumb where stitches are picked up from waste yarn. so, there's no gusset, but there is some shaping. Meg, my the camp director's wife, is entering something in a country fair and i'm thinking about entering this or my knit vegetables.


no pictures yet, but i'm swatching the red silky yarn from the last entry. i'm also working on a pair of cabled purple/red fingerless mitts similar to the blue/green ribbed ones.

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

mitts in august


My alarm clock thermometer says 95 today. These are made with with the seahorse yarn I dyed last week.

Here is some more yarn to dye. I unraveled a scarf from the $2 clothing rack. It doesn't feel like 75% silk but it's pretty nice anyway. There's a lot of it - enough for a lace shawl. I think the original scarf was made with two strands of lace weight held together.


This is nautie, an ancient snail with tentacles. I'm using fingering weight instead of worsted. Almost done


I have plans for double knit mittens...maybe to make in the fall. I don't have enough patience right now.

Monday, July 24, 2006

I'm at Pinewoods, a folk dance camp near Cape Cod between two lakes. I'm managing the auction (which raises money for the organization) and organizing parties. I'll try to update this every monday, when i'm off.
Last night me and my friend Amy dyed some yarn in the kitchen. It was awesome because the kitchen is huge and most of the crew was hanging out commenting on the pretty colors between beers and fiddle tunes.
This summer I'm knitting vegetables and sea creatures (suggestions please). I love the tomato I made but the pictures of it are terrible because I guess bright red objects in bright sunlight are difficult. Also I want: a carrot, beet, sea horse, cucumber (with ribbing), octopus, and arugula.

I don't know what I'm going to make with this yarn yet -- octopus?


This one I already started a carrot.


A pale beet perhaps.


Seahorse.


This is my Odessa hat. The yarn is knitpicks elegance in cornflower.



Fishy from leftover sock yarn. It needs eyes.

Thursday, May 18, 2006

i'm back!!!

3.4 socks:

did you miss me? i've been knitting, just too busy/lazy to post. also my laptop died a few days ago. i finished the jaywalkers that i started right after spring break. its a fun pattern, though they did end up a tiny bit too big. i used knitpicks undyed merino sock yarn and spent far too much time making it self-striping. the actual dying was fun enough - lots of walking around the dining room backwards and dying my fingernails blue. balling it required listening to all of rent and much stubborness. from now on i'm only doing variegated!
i only changed the pattern for the toes. i think the original ones are actually nicer, but this way mine are different from all the other jaywalkers
and what about that sock on the right? thats a finished (but unblocked) mini argyle sock. this is the first of the pair but the second one i've made. while i was in paris i finished one that i don't like because the gauge is too loose. maybe i'll post a picture of it and why i don't like it in a few days.
anyway, i really like this one...the toe:the heel:

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

no pictures :(

no pictures because i haven't been knitting anything this week. how sad. i have been studying instead, which is not all that bad. after all, i'm in college to learn stuff. now all i have left is to finish my english paper...
and no pictures because what i have been knitting is white and boring. it's a ribbed silk scarf for my dad which will eventually be dyed blue. i'm probably at about 2 feet out of 5 at this point. i'll work on it on the plane with my lovely wooden needles.
the exciting news is that i received my knitpicks order today: 2 skeins of undyed sockwool, 2 balls of white andean silk (also for dyeing) and several balls of palette for colorwork socks. and of course i have to overdye the palette yarns because the blue is too crayola. so...that means possibly a lot of dyeing when i go home this weekend. i'm hoping to make the undyed sock yarn self-striping. perhaps i'll have some pretty colored pictures in a few days...

Saturday, February 25, 2006

getting ready for spring...

last night i decided to stay in and be a knitting dork. here's the front of the tank top i made last year while i was at pinewoods. its my first and only tank top, and i didn't follow a pattern (probably not a wise choice, but its been a good learning experience).

several problems...since its a cotton/rayon blend (knitpicks shine) i've washed it in the machine a few times and it's shrunk so that the lacy part comes up to high and exposes my bra (which is bad). to prevent this i tended to pull it down every 5 mins, which was so annoying that i did not look forward to wearing it.
this is the back. although it fits, the double decreases in the center are too lumpy and the seed stitch competes with the lace pattern. so, i decided to rip it out to below the seed st and re-knit it 2" longer and with better edging. this is what i've done so far:
you can see a line (near the bottom of the chest) where i ripped to, but i think this will disappear after a washing. i tried a simple yarnover edge instead of seed stitch. so far, much better.

a few days ago i made another swatch for the socks, this time with corrugated ribbing. not stretchy, but very pretty. i've decided on blue and light yellow but i haven't ordered it yet.

this isn't a very good picture, but i started a garter st scarf knit lengthwise with the mohair left over from the shawl. it's actually knit straight, not in the round as it appears. the ends on the right side of the photo will be fringes on either end of the scarf.









i really want to make a knit bunny.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

new stuff!

so i decided that it's time i do some teeny fair isle. this swatch is 8.9 sts/in on size 1 needles. i got the idea from Eunny's blog. these were just the colors i happened to have around. i 'll probably make the socks blue and light yellow.
i tried to do two-handed fair isle, where you hold one color in the left hand and knit continental while knitting english with the other color in the right hand. i couldn't do this very well because i have trouble knitting english and keeping the tension the same without dropping everything. oh well, maybe another time i'll figure it out. so for now i'm holding both strands with my left hand, which seems to work fine.
about two weeks ago at 2 am i decided i just had to start a lace scarf. hopefully it will be better after blocking...

Sunday, February 12, 2006

are you tired of purple lace yet?

yeah, i thought so. i'm a bit tired of it too, so i decided to photoshop the first two of these photos so you can see the sock in different colors.

blue looks pretty good, doesn't it?

it's a short-row heel with a slip-stitch pattern and a gusset. it's a tight fitting sock (51 sts on sz 1 needles) so i increased to 59 sts since that area is usually the tightest for me. also, gussets are pretty.

this is the first one. i'm almost finished, i just need to do the ribbing and on the second one i'm almost at the heel. i really like this pattern.

Saturday, February 04, 2006

3 purple FO's this week!

this is a fan and feather scarf made from knitpick's suri dream. its soft and fluffy and about 5 ft long. it's for either my mother or grandmother, not sure yet.i finished my second purple sock! they fit great, even though the heels are different (the one on top is a peasant heel, which is almost identical to the toe). i promise a better photo after they're washed and i feel like doing acrobatics to take pictures of them on my feet :)

Friday, February 03, 2006

Thursday, February 02, 2006

i was tempted to chop the head off this one...

i finished my shawl. see the cute little knot and yo edge?

pretty...closeups. on the right: the yo/sewn bind off edge (on the two short sides) compared to the slip-stitch/yo edge (long side). on the left: yo v's in the center
this is an entrelace bag i started a few days ago. it's made from various green and blue leftovers and i plan to felt it when it's done. i'm also working on those purple socks but the progress photo was too boring to post.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

purple sock update

sock #1 is finished!
feel free to skip all my rambling - i'm discussing how i would change my methods next time...

i am mostly happy with it - it fits quite well and the worsted/fingering weight combo haven't spontaneously combusted (yet!). one weird issue is that the lace pattern takes up more space lengthwise than plain stockinette stitch, so the top part of the foot is longer than the bottom. this isn't a huge problem, but i could probably fix it with some occasional short rows on the bottom. i'm not sure if it's worth it.
also, the cast-on is messy and on the heel the transition from thinner to thicker is smoother than going from thicker to thinner (you can't see it very much in the picture but i'll take another one when i finish the second sock). i'm thinking that on the second sock i'll use an "afterthought" type heel, which is worked from pulling out scrap yarn and making a heel-shaped thing. if i do that then i'll only have to transition from thinner to thicker and i won't have holes and chunky spots from my shorts rows (which i need to learn how to do better at some point).

here's a closeup of the toe:

i'm also making process on the mohair shawl, but it's difficult to see anything until it's finished...

Monday, January 23, 2006

its been awhile...

ok, i just gave on on putting the pictures in the order that i want. how am i supposed to move stuff around when the pictures are as big as the window???

here is a WIP made from pink yarn i found at a thrift shop and dyed and some leftover lambs pride. the heel and toe will be worsted weight while the rest is sock weight - the idea is the my toes will stay warm and the heel will wear well - its an experiment. i'm not crazy about this short-row heel in worsted weight. i might try a different kind in the other sock.

my finished embossed leaves socks. the yarn is knitpicks which i dyed. i like them a lot, but next time i would make the cuff much shorter and perhaps a bit tighter.






this is a shawl i'm making from the mohair chloe gave me from paris. i dyed it in the ball because i thought skeining and dying might make it stick together too much and/or be really really annoying to ball afterwards. the third ball is somewhere at the bottom of my sack of yarn.ps: that's the view from my dorm window. the snow is gross and wet and melty

Monday, January 09, 2006

first, chloe and karen modeling the scarves i gave them:
right now i'm in florida, but before i left i dyed the lovely mohair yarn chloe gave me. its purple and blue and the three skeins don't match exactly because i dyed it by putting a skein halfway in a cup of dye and putting it in the microwave. i started to make a lace shawl out of it but i was only increasing 2 sts every other row so it was making a weird diamond shape and the pattern was too complicated for the colors. so i ripped it out and i'm going to make one like chloe's blue and white alpaca cloud shawl.
i also finished one embossed leaves sock but i left my camera cord at school so i have to wait until i get back to bklyn to upload using more clever/annoying methods. chloe i promise i'm not trying to copy all your projects, you just have such great knitting.