Today is Midwinter, the shortest day of the year. Here in the PNW that would mean about eight and a half hours of daylight, if the sun were anywhere to be found. As my second winter here in the PNW, I'm tolerating it quite a bit better than last year. For many months during the summer, I never even saw the night. It as twilight when I went to bed and pre-dawn light when I awoke. Long nights seem like a nice counterpoint to what felt like the unending daylight of the summer. I even find myself complaining about how bright it is when the sun is out, so much am I enjoying the quiet, slow pace of the unyielding rain. It has been a time of rest, peacefulness, and contemplation on the seasons and of the year as a whole. I find the Yuletide season as an excellent marker for each year's changes. What fears and worries plagued me last Christmas? What joys and discoveries awaited me? How did I use the things given to me? How did others use the things given by me? I have tried this year to focus more on gifts that encourage doing, rather than simply owning: a model kit for my dad, a puzzle for my mom, travel gifts for my brother. I think these are the best things to give. Hats and socks that encourage others to go outside in the winter without fear of cold.
As the year is closing, I'm reflecting on my resolutions for this past year and what I want from next year. Some things were a resounding success: I made well over my output goals for 2015, with 22 finished projects so far (and another two I believe I can finish before the year's end). This year was the first time I made garments for myself: a huge undertaking! I'm proud that I finished them, although I'm not very happy overall with the results. Both my Lewis and Gemini sweaters are ill-fitting and not flattering in the least, as well as both being in colors I don't actually wear. The challenge of knitting from my stash is that I used to buy a lot of colors I have no interest in wearing. In 2016, I want to focus on only obtaining colors and yarns I love and will wear: neutrals, jewel tones, and rich autumnal colors. I want to make garments that fill a need in my wardrobe. I want to focus on cardigans, shawls, and some of the tees I love. I intend to make some heavier-weight items, but mostly lighter pieces as the everyday climate of west of the Cascades doesn't really require heavy sweaters. I've already started honing my Ravelry queue to be filled with useful projects I want to make.
I want to keep working within the two balls out for every one in as I did this year. It encouraged me to work from my stash and also allowed me to focus my knitting spending on better tools. Next year I want to focus more on supporting designers as well. I'll write out a full list of my resolutions as I think more on what I want my focus to be. For now, I am still working on a Christmas present!
Monday, December 21, 2015
Thursday, September 3, 2015
Fall plans
Summer is quickly fading in these parts. For a couple of weeks I've noticed it's been dark in the morning when I take the dogs out and I've had to turn on lights at around 7 PM (when before it wasn't even really dark when we went to bed!) The rain has also returned. I know it borders on sacrilege to say so, but I'm not sad to see summer go this year. I miss cool temperatures, rain, soup, wearing woolies. Bring on the fall!
Since my attention has been drawn to the coming cold, I've also started thinking about planning gifts for the gift-giving season. I'm trying to shop my stash and use up some of the yarn I have on hand, but I'm having some trouble with it. I used to buy yarn for the pretty colors with no thought to whether I or anyone else would actually wear it. As a result, I ended up with many bright or outlandish colors that I don't feel comfortable gifting to others lest they not like it. When I started my 2-out-1-in challenge this year I made myself a caveat about gifts, so I could buy some more yarn, but I have more than I will ever need for garments for myself. Maybe it's time to think about selling some!
Some things I have finished:
Jaywalker Socks in Knitpicks Felici "Tiki"
Turquoise Hat in Brown Sheep Lanaloft Worsted "Costal Mist" and Sport "Grey Heather"
I am currently working on:
Nocturne Mist Lace Scarf in KnitPicks Shadow "Nocturne"
Since my attention has been drawn to the coming cold, I've also started thinking about planning gifts for the gift-giving season. I'm trying to shop my stash and use up some of the yarn I have on hand, but I'm having some trouble with it. I used to buy yarn for the pretty colors with no thought to whether I or anyone else would actually wear it. As a result, I ended up with many bright or outlandish colors that I don't feel comfortable gifting to others lest they not like it. When I started my 2-out-1-in challenge this year I made myself a caveat about gifts, so I could buy some more yarn, but I have more than I will ever need for garments for myself. Maybe it's time to think about selling some!
Some things I have finished:
Jaywalker Socks in Knitpicks Felici "Tiki"
Turquoise Hat in Brown Sheep Lanaloft Worsted "Costal Mist" and Sport "Grey Heather"
The turquoise hat is a gift I promised ages ago to my best friend. I'm ashamed to say I bought this yarn in 2009, asked my friend what type of hat she wanted, and, when she replied one that was warm with ear flaps, promptly got freaked out by the perceived difficulty of ear flaps and never knit it. I texted my mom a few weeks back asking for some ideas for winter knits for the family. She told me she wanted a "hat with ties or a scarf." After asking her to clarify, she sent me pictures of ear flap hats and I knew the time of reckoning was nigh. I've knit some complicated things and I felt I was up to the challenge. Imagine my impatience with myself when I discovered that ear flap hats were actually quite easy! I crocheted a border in the only other Lanaloft I had, some Sport weight held double and made some pom-poms with the two colors together. I think the hat is retro-adorable, and if I had use for one, I'd make one for myself. Regarding the one I am planning for my mom, I have settled on either a Tobnoggan or a Neon Ski Bonnet, to be decided when I settle on a yarn.
I am currently working on:
Nocturne Mist Lace Scarf in KnitPicks Shadow "Nocturne"
as well as a hat made in the leftover Tiki for a new baby in the family. I hope your own early fall is filled with lots of fun planning, warm wool socks, and comforting food.
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
FO: Graham
Being a monogamous knitter can have its drawbacks. While I knit sweaters, I will usually have a portable project going as well, but when I finish I decide that it's time to focus my energy and finish my large project. As a result, I haven't tended to have another project going when I finish my sweater, leaving me with knitting hangover. Predictably, when I finished my Gemini tee last week, I had a bad knitting hangover. I wanted something to work on, but I just could not find anything that really caught my attention. It's summer and I don't have many "summer" yarns; there are few items I will need this winter. I thought about working on some Christmas presents, but I wasn't ready to give a project the attention to detail a gift needs. I needed something mindless and quick.
Thus I present, the Graham hat:
Thus I present, the Graham hat:
The yarn is Malabrigo worsted. I lost the ball band, but as best I can tell, the color is Periwinkle. I bought this yarn all the way back in 2011 to make a hat for a friend, then decided to use some Knit Picks yarn instead. I love my Rikke hat, knit in Rios, but it's starting to look a little ragged (it needs a date with a sweater stone), so I decided to make another hat. It's really slouchy and the color is a really nice jewel tone purple. I'm trying to add more cohesion to my wardrobe by paring it down to neutrals and jewel tones, so I think this hat will be a go-to for me this winter. It also did an excellent job of curing me of my sweater hangover, and I immediately cast on for some Jaywalker socks when it was finished.
The yarn is KP Felici in Tiki and I have also had it since 2010-2011 as best I can tell. I have a lot of self-striping yarn in the stash so I am attempting to use up some of it. I just completed the heel turn, using the Fish Lips Kiss heel method for the first time. I haven't tried it on yet, but it looks promising! What are you working on today?
Friday, July 10, 2015
FO: Summerflies
I hope that everyone had a lovely start to their July. We spent the weekend of the 4th in Oregon camping in the Columbia River Gorge and my birthday on the beautiful coast.
Over the long weekend I finished a shawl! Since I haven't blogged much I hadn't talked about it before, but I cast on a Summerflies shawl to avoid working on my Gemini tee. Before this year, I really thought I didn't like shawls. I had knit one, The Age of Brass and Steam shawl, which has been worn exactly twice. But boredom with large projects and seeing beautiful shawls on other blogs has created an inexplicable urge within me that I am still loathe to admit. Just like the Oscilloscope shawl earlier this year, I had been feeling the urge to cast on for something with some beautiful plant fiber yarn, but I kept trying to rationalize my way out of it. I don't like shawls. I don't like knitting them and I don't like wearing them. Then I found myself at Fibers, Etc, looking around for the perfect skein. I settled on Sublime Baby Silk & Bamboo in Roly Poly.
This yarn is gorgeous. I was drawn to it because it was cool to the touch in the store and I liked the shiny cool grey color. I tried to put off casting on, but later that day, I found a Summerflies shawl on Ravelry in a similar-looking color and it was all over.
The shawl itself was a pretty quick knit. I left out the "butterflies" in favor of plain stockinette and added some extra rows of the latticework. The bind off felt like the longest knitting hours of my life, though. After the last stockinette row, I had 17g of yarn left. Each row at that point was taking 5g of yarn (400 stitches is a lot) and I assumed that the picot edge might take twice the yarn of the normal row. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I realized about halfway through the BO that I was going to run out. So I ripped back and added an extra BO stitch between the picots here and there. Still not enough. Tried again. Didn't work that time, either. Resigned to my fate, I ripped all the way back and bound off twice the number of plain stitches between the picots (from 3 to 6) which worked like a charm. It made binding off quite a bit faster, I like the look, and I had yarn to spare at the end.
I finished my bind off on the car ride to the gorge and wore the shawl all through the long weekend, despite the ridiculous heat. I admit I'm quite taken with it and am thinking about some other shawls I would like to knit... if I ever finish this Gemini (I started the bottom ribbing today, whee!)
Monday, June 1, 2015
State of the Stash
Here we are on June 1st, six months from New Year's Resolution time, so I thought I would check in on my resolutions and see if any tweaks are necessary.
My first was a goal of 15 projects in 2015. So far I have completed 8 projects and currently have 3 in progress, so I would say I'm doing pretty well on this front. Since I'm only working, not going to school, I have more free time than ever to work on knitting and making my own clothes has taken on a lot of importance to me. I'm also learning to sew to reduce my fast fashion dependence.
As a subset of the first goal, I aimed to make at least 2 garments and 1 pair of selbuvotter. After completing my Lewis sweater, I was dreaming of all the garments that were possible. I recently started a Gemini tee and have been knitting merrily away at it for the past few days, so I think I'm making short work of this goal. I finished a pair of selbuvotter, the dala horses, but they were started last year and I'm trying to decide if I want to frog them because of their vastly different gauges. I'll start a new pair later in the year, I'm sure. I've got summer knits on the brain and wool mittens aren't capturing my imagination right now.
The next goal is the one that I knew would present my biggest challenge. I resolved to knit two balls of yarn for every one I bought. It's actually fortunate, because as I joined the third ball of Cotlin to my Gemini sweater last night, the end of the second ball squared me up on my Destash spreadsheet! I've been in the red all year, what with my first time at Madrona, the incredibly low prices of Craftsy's winter sale, and wanting to support some LYS's we've come across during day trips around Washington. I can now focus on building up some sweater quantities. Even though I'm only now in the black ball-wise, I've been steadily decreasing the yardage of my stash. As it stands right now, I've used about 1100.4 more yards than I have purchased, a conservative estimate, since I haven't included the two contrasting colors of Ringo's blanket or the 2nd ball of yarn on A's socks.
Slowing down on my yarn purchases has allowed me to evaluate how I buy yarn. Since I only started making garments this year, my stash is made up of a lot of odd single skeins intended for accessories. It also doesn't very accurately reflect how I like to dress, as I generally stick to neutrals and jewel tones when I purchase clothing. On the contrary, the sweater quantities I buy seem to be in pastel colors for some reason I can't discern. Going forward, I certainly intend to think more about what I already like to wear when making purchases.
The second part of my yarn goal was that I wanted to make an effort to try out different brands of yarn because I tend to stick to less expensive workhorse brands with some forays into expensive single skeins or some Malabrigo here and there. Honestly, I haven't been too successful on this one. Looking at the spreadsheet shows that I am buying brands I haven't before, but I'm tending to use the same old brands in my knitting. Knitpicks, especially. Granted, KP yarns are a large percentage of my stash so that explains why I'm knitting with it so much, but I still need to expand my horizons and use those odd skeins of other brands. I did finally try some madtosh and some Pickles yarn and Lewis is made in an Araucania Itata, but going forward I need to more consciously choose other brands.
The last was to take pictures of everything I knit. I started off strongly, but I've fallen off the wagon. Since warm weather has come around, the thought of donning a pair of alpaca socks or a wool hat has seemed increasingly unpleasant, but Washington weather can surprise you, so I may be back to wanting them soon.
My first was a goal of 15 projects in 2015. So far I have completed 8 projects and currently have 3 in progress, so I would say I'm doing pretty well on this front. Since I'm only working, not going to school, I have more free time than ever to work on knitting and making my own clothes has taken on a lot of importance to me. I'm also learning to sew to reduce my fast fashion dependence.
As a subset of the first goal, I aimed to make at least 2 garments and 1 pair of selbuvotter. After completing my Lewis sweater, I was dreaming of all the garments that were possible. I recently started a Gemini tee and have been knitting merrily away at it for the past few days, so I think I'm making short work of this goal. I finished a pair of selbuvotter, the dala horses, but they were started last year and I'm trying to decide if I want to frog them because of their vastly different gauges. I'll start a new pair later in the year, I'm sure. I've got summer knits on the brain and wool mittens aren't capturing my imagination right now.
Gemini Tee in progress in KnitPicks Cotlin "Crème Brulee"
The next goal is the one that I knew would present my biggest challenge. I resolved to knit two balls of yarn for every one I bought. It's actually fortunate, because as I joined the third ball of Cotlin to my Gemini sweater last night, the end of the second ball squared me up on my Destash spreadsheet! I've been in the red all year, what with my first time at Madrona, the incredibly low prices of Craftsy's winter sale, and wanting to support some LYS's we've come across during day trips around Washington. I can now focus on building up some sweater quantities. Even though I'm only now in the black ball-wise, I've been steadily decreasing the yardage of my stash. As it stands right now, I've used about 1100.4 more yards than I have purchased, a conservative estimate, since I haven't included the two contrasting colors of Ringo's blanket or the 2nd ball of yarn on A's socks.
Slowing down on my yarn purchases has allowed me to evaluate how I buy yarn. Since I only started making garments this year, my stash is made up of a lot of odd single skeins intended for accessories. It also doesn't very accurately reflect how I like to dress, as I generally stick to neutrals and jewel tones when I purchase clothing. On the contrary, the sweater quantities I buy seem to be in pastel colors for some reason I can't discern. Going forward, I certainly intend to think more about what I already like to wear when making purchases.
The second part of my yarn goal was that I wanted to make an effort to try out different brands of yarn because I tend to stick to less expensive workhorse brands with some forays into expensive single skeins or some Malabrigo here and there. Honestly, I haven't been too successful on this one. Looking at the spreadsheet shows that I am buying brands I haven't before, but I'm tending to use the same old brands in my knitting. Knitpicks, especially. Granted, KP yarns are a large percentage of my stash so that explains why I'm knitting with it so much, but I still need to expand my horizons and use those odd skeins of other brands. I did finally try some madtosh and some Pickles yarn and Lewis is made in an Araucania Itata, but going forward I need to more consciously choose other brands.
The last was to take pictures of everything I knit. I started off strongly, but I've fallen off the wagon. Since warm weather has come around, the thought of donning a pair of alpaca socks or a wool hat has seemed increasingly unpleasant, but Washington weather can surprise you, so I may be back to wanting them soon.
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Unexpected Free Day!
I haven't felt too creative lately. The weather is now constantly beautiful and summery and it hasn't made me want to plan sweaters or take photos of FO's that are too warm to wear. We did go camping in Wenatchee National Forest a few weeks ago and both my Leyburn socks and Lewis sweater enjoyed some wear before being cast aside as too warm.
There were too many people at work today so I was allowed to go home early! I'm enjoying this beautiful unexpected free day. The dogs ran around at the dog park and are now dreaming puppy dreams while I plough away at the gusset on my 2nd Hermione's Everyday Sock. It's a vanilla project that has been boring me lately, but I want them finished, so I haven't cast on anything else.
I recently frogged the progress on my Amour's Arrow sweater. I had attempted to make a provisional cast on below the sweetheart neckline in the hopes of knitting "up" flat for the lace and then knitting from the bust down to maximize my yarn. The plan worked well enough until it came time to pick up the stitches to work down and there was a noticeable jog in the bust. I continued on for a few rounds hoping the weight would smooth out the jump before coming to the conclusion that it was not going away. Being the kind of person that doesn't like to call extra attention to my bust anyway, I decided to frog. I love the look of the sweater but I ultimately decided that it was a little too trendy for me to put extra effort into trying to fix it. I'm still a garment newbie and want to focus on making basic pieces that will see plenty of wear. I've been kicking around the idea of starting on a tank, but I'm not a huge fan of tank tops, so I'm not sure I'll wear it too often.
A dog blanket was begun on Monday to eat up some scraps of Caron Simply Soft that have been lying around. It's mostly finished, but I'm unsure if I have enough yarn for one more repeat before adding a border.
Here's hoping inspiration strikes soon.
There were too many people at work today so I was allowed to go home early! I'm enjoying this beautiful unexpected free day. The dogs ran around at the dog park and are now dreaming puppy dreams while I plough away at the gusset on my 2nd Hermione's Everyday Sock. It's a vanilla project that has been boring me lately, but I want them finished, so I haven't cast on anything else.
I recently frogged the progress on my Amour's Arrow sweater. I had attempted to make a provisional cast on below the sweetheart neckline in the hopes of knitting "up" flat for the lace and then knitting from the bust down to maximize my yarn. The plan worked well enough until it came time to pick up the stitches to work down and there was a noticeable jog in the bust. I continued on for a few rounds hoping the weight would smooth out the jump before coming to the conclusion that it was not going away. Being the kind of person that doesn't like to call extra attention to my bust anyway, I decided to frog. I love the look of the sweater but I ultimately decided that it was a little too trendy for me to put extra effort into trying to fix it. I'm still a garment newbie and want to focus on making basic pieces that will see plenty of wear. I've been kicking around the idea of starting on a tank, but I'm not a huge fan of tank tops, so I'm not sure I'll wear it too often.
A dog blanket was begun on Monday to eat up some scraps of Caron Simply Soft that have been lying around. It's mostly finished, but I'm unsure if I have enough yarn for one more repeat before adding a border.
Here's hoping inspiration strikes soon.
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Moving on
It is with pure elation that I report that I am knitting something other than the Lewis pullover or Leyburn socks.
It is an Opus Spicatum in madelinetosh tosh vintage, colors "Earl Grey" & "Antler" that I cast on for last night. I tried to cast on this hat earlier this year, only to discover that the sky blue color I had chosen to pair with the Earl Grey didn't contrast it enough. I bought the ball of Antler during Craftsy's winter sale, so it hasn't quite come "into the black" on my Excel Spreadsheet for Yarn Destashing yet, but after this hat, I only have to use 2 more skeins and I'll be set!
It is an Opus Spicatum in madelinetosh tosh vintage, colors "Earl Grey" & "Antler" that I cast on for last night. I tried to cast on this hat earlier this year, only to discover that the sky blue color I had chosen to pair with the Earl Grey didn't contrast it enough. I bought the ball of Antler during Craftsy's winter sale, so it hasn't quite come "into the black" on my Excel Spreadsheet for Yarn Destashing yet, but after this hat, I only have to use 2 more skeins and I'll be set!
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