The big finish!

I haven't had any FOs to share lately because they were all sitting and waiting to be lined at the end of the knitathon, or it was the massive and never ending project known as Kai's Blankie.

First, the FOs:



4 iPod sized and 1 Nano sized pouch. Since I started these... uh... last year... we have gotten rubbery iPod covers, so I think these will become notions pouches.

Abby got to pick one of them, because I feel badly that her blankie isn't going to be done for ages and she wants something I made soooooo much


These were inspired by a pattern in the Cool Girl's Guide to Knitting, though I didn't actually use the pattern when I sat down to make them. The nano cozy has a garter border on the edges and for the flap, I just changed from stockinette to seed stitch. They were all knit on tiny needles, though it's been so long I forget the sizes. The larger pouches were made with Sockatta, the green pouch is a cotton yarn from a recycled Gap sweater. They were lined with muslin and have snap closures with a button from the button box on the outside.

The other big FO is the 8-cabeled bag:




My first cabling project. I started this at about this time last year in a class at the LYS. The yarn is hand-dyed 100% wool, dyed by the LYS owner. The pattern she wrote up was horrible--missing steps, wrong row counts, no gauge (which meant having to buy another hank at the last minute, which didn't work for me as she was out of my colors and I ended up frogging one side and reknitting it with the shade closest to what I already had.) I did learn how to cable while in the class, though, so that's all I was after. I just figured out her pattern as best I could and got it to work. I got the lining material a month after I finished knitting it. And then it sat in pieces until the knitathon, when I dug it out and assembled it and lined it. And was reminded once more that the finishing work really isn't as painful as I tell myself.



And, remember, not only did I learn to cable on this project, but I also did my first invisible seam:


Yay!

There is no clasp or snap in this bag yet. I'm not sure if I'm going to put one in. I'm going to live with it for a bit and see how it works and if I don't like it without one, I'll add it later.

Of my remaining UFOs, the one that got the most attention in the last 26 days was Kai's Blankie of DOOOOOM.

Before:


After:


As you can see, I'm another full color repeat and maybe 1/3rd more into it. It's lying on the treadmill if that helps you figure out scale. I thought I only had one more cake of yarn left, but in addition to what is there there is one more cake twice the size. Which is good, because this sucker is way wider than I meant for it to be. If needs be, the stripes will just be vertical instead of horozontal, but I'd like for it to at least be square.

So, that's my big finish to the knitathon. I'm going to be a good girl and continue to plug along on Kai's blankie during any knitting time I may have today, but then tomorrow I'm casting it aside for some other projects! Variety is the spice of life and I have ONLY 7 projects on the needles now. What kind of variety is THAT?

*Yawn*

Well, it almost didn't happen. I have been struggling with a sore throat and/or allergies for the last couple of days. (I'm still not sure if it's a different reaction to seasonal allergies than I've had in the past or if it's a virus of some sort.) I was going to pack it in and not worry about getting the linings in and focus on projects that were mindless and repetitive. Productive yes, but not anything that would be finished in time for the end of the knitathon tomorrow.

Well, I bit the bullet. I did all the handsewing this evening to attach the linings in the ipod cozies/pouches and the 8-cable bag. Cue the trumptets, because that means 11 finished objects! Can I get a w00t?

That still leaves 7 other projects needing to be finished, but when you're starting with 18 that's some pretty awesome progress. My little UFO cubbies are looking very spartan.

I will try to get some photos up tomorrow. We have a spangly, new digital camera and I don't quite have it figured out yet, but I will try!

Looking forward, I'm going to use some linen I got in a swap to try and get some shears knit up for the kitchen window. I think there is a pattern in Mason Dixon Knitting (maybe?) for some shears with random yarn-overs that looked interesting. I don't have the book, though, and I don't think I'd really need it to knit a couple of rectangles with random yarn overs, so I'm just going to wing it and see what happens. I'd also like to start in on a lace project from Victorian Lace Today. And I have a pair of wrist warmers I want to make, but I'm waiting on the yarn. (I bought a skein on vacation, realized it wouldn't be enough, so used a gift certificate from Webs to get another skein. All completely kosher with my NYFAY rules, right? Right?!)

The NYFAY community on LiveJournal is talking about making May a UFO busting month, so I need to get more stuff I want to do on the needles. Cheating? Moi?

More from the UFO list.

Here's a pre-knitathon shot of the iPod cozies:



The pattern is from The Cool Girl's Guide to Knitting. Sort of. It's a really basic pattern that I saw while going through the book, so when I actually got the yarn (Sockatta) and got to work on them, I just cast on enough to be wide enough, knit until it was long enough, decreased for the flap, and bound off. As you can see, I knit quite a few of them. The smaller one is a pared down version for Adam's Nano. Since this shot was taken, they have all be seamed, but they are just sitting around on the "to be lined" pile until sometime next week when I dust off the sewing machine and get to work.

Lining, my old nemesis...

Another UFO sighting

Before I begin, I've been pimping my swap pretty heavily around the ole intarwebs, so if you're here for that, scroll on down and you'll find it.

For those of you who are here for my crafty ramblings, let me begin:

First of all, until I picked up the needles last night, I hadn't knit for 2 days, so I don't have tons to report. I did manage to finish the other side of the cabled bag tonight. But, since I can't show it, instead, I'll share another UFO shot.

This is Abby's blankie:



I ordered the yarn from Webs a few months before Christmas. I was actually ordering yarn for the sweaters I was making the girls for Christmas, but when you order from Webs, you HAVE to check out their close-out and Grandpa's Garage Sale sections. I mean, hello bargains. So, the first time I placed the order, these cones were $3 each. $3!! So I added one on to my order. Now, I THOUGHT I was getting a worsted weight, thick/thin cotton like one I'd ordered from them before and subsequently used to make a blankie for Kai. But when it arrived, it was more like a thick/thin laceweight. So, when I came up short on yarn for the girls' sweaters, I ordered a second cone ($3!!) and am using it doubled to make the blankie for Abby. I picked a denser stitch pattern than the one I used on Kai's, and between the thinness of the yarn and the stitch pattern, it's very slow going. The photo above is at least a solid week of work, which, if it was knit would be impressive. But crocheted? Draaaaaaging. I'm used to my crochet projects being much zippier than this one has been. I had some pipe-dream going that I'd have this thing done in time for Christmas, but you can see that didn't happen. The new goal is for their birthday party in October. I have a feeling that it will be my project for the next knitathon.

Is my seam showing?

As promised, a shot of my first invisible seem:



(No, you don't need glasses. That's just one heck of a fuzzy shot.)

Can you believe it? There is no possible way you could tell where that sucker is.

Ok, well, the color change gives it away, I 'spose. Ahem.

You have to wait until the lining is in to see a photo of the whole thing. Suffice it to say that it is awesome.

Knit club was good last night. It was just Linda and I, because Debi had a conflict and Amanda's husband is a putz. He's all like, "I need to work for a living," and stuff like that. Psh. Whatever, dude.

We only stayed until about 7:45 and then took off to deal with errands. I resisted the urge to swing through Half Price Books as I usually do because, oh my gosh, I have so many books right now it's out of control. And with the coming rennovations, it's time to cull, not augment. I actually have a swap going on right now if anyone is interested. A lot of it is vintage stuff, some is more recent. I have tons more, but it's all in storage and it was some of the first stuff I packed up, so I won't be able to get at it again until the house is done.

I picked up one of the cabeled bags I'm designing and got back to work on it yesterday. Only I noticed that I'd been twisting two of the cables the wrong way throughout. And I wasn't sure if, after this long, my guage would be consistant anyway, so I just frogged the 18 rows I'd done and started over. By the time I went to bed last night, I had finished a full 24 row repeat. Only then I noticed that I hadn't mirrored the cables properly on either side of the piece and so now, today, I'm going to be dropping stitches and recrossing cables. Oh, heavens. I just had to do this a few weeks ago and now I've made the same mistake again. At least this time I know what I'm doing so hopefully I can redo all 8 crosses in less than an hour. I think I'm being very ambitious, though, considering the fact that our yard is a massive mud puddle and I can't send the kids out to play. In fact, I think trying to knit at all today will be an excercise in futility.

One step closer...

Most of my knitting time yesterday was spent assembling the cable bag. I worked my first successful invisible seams, too. w00t! I couldn't wrap my brain around those hand-drawn directions you see in all the knitting books until 3 days ago when I happened to be flipping through a book to find information on something totally different and I looked and, voila, it clicked. I don't know why, but that's pretty much how it goes with me and the black-and-white how-to diagrams. My brain doesn't process them right until a) someone has shown me how to do them in person or b) I've seen them umpteen times. Anyway, I'm very pleased with how it turned out, and I'll get a photo as soon as the batteries are done charging for the camera.

So, yeah, the cable bag is all assembled now and in the 'to line' pile with all the iPod cozies. I still have 2 bags on my UFO list to get done before I have my Days of Lining Torture.

When I finished assembly last night, I worked more on the mohair cravat. Today, we took the kids to the zoo and I worked some more on Kai's pink and purple blankie while Adam drove. Oooh, I'll show you the pre-knitathon photo of that!



This is a never-ending project. The yarn is available at JoAnns and was sent to me in a care package from my Mom. See that cake of yarn there above the project? All that yarn worked up, plus that cake, is only half of the skein of yarn. It is one massive skein. It's a 100% nylon (I think?) boucle. And, to be honest, I almost donated it on to someone else. I was not in love with the yarn, and in the shipping, a bunch of the outer layers got all yarn-barfy. But Kai LOVES purple and pink, so I thought I'd work it up into a simple, garter-stitch lapghan for her. I cast on ages ago. I'm working it on size 7s and for a while it was my go-to project for mindless knitting. But I got so, so sick of it.

It's. Just. Knit.

And it takes forever to see any progress on it. So, it just sat around for a long while. I pulled it out 2 days ago to work on while homeschooling, because our math lesson consisted of me making a design on the geoboard and then Kai spent 5 or so minutes trying to copy it. I have a tendancy toward impatience and wanting to do things for her, so I worked on it while she took her turn so I'd have something to do in lieu of being a control freak.

Just so you understand the scope of this sucker, it's a 30 minute drive to the zoo and I got 2 rows knit on the way there and 2 rows knit on the way back. Uuuuuuugh... Thank goodness for this UFO knitathon or I think it would have just languished for ages and eventually been chucked.

Another FO, and progress

I got quite a bit of progress done last night.

First, the unfinished washcloth:



I joined the Monthly Dishcloth group on yahoo groups oh... almost a year ago. And I was really on the bandwagon for a while. They feed you a pattern 5-10 lines at a time, twice a month. The first pattern of the month is usually a seasonal- or holiday-themed knit and purl pattern. The second pattern is usually a bit of lace or some other the technique. I tend to skip the first pattern of the month and take on the second one, because they are nice, bite-sized projects that are just challenging enough to be interesting without being overwhelming. The only issue with this new obsession was that no one in our house uses washcloths, and I prefer sponges to dishrags. So... what to do?

Well, at about the same time, I decided to try my hand at recycling sweaters. One of the first to get butchered was a cotton pull-over from the Gap. This left me with copious amounts of dk-weight cotton. It was very soft, but the unraveling process unplied it. I didn't think reknitting into a sweater was the way to go, but thought instead it would be perfect for the dishcloth projects, and it became my yarn of choice. I used size 4 needles instead of 7 or 8s, and they knit up to about half the size. They are perfect for face-cloths, and my daughters like to use them to wash up after eatting.

But then one day while working on the one above, I lost my place in the pattern and no matter how many times I counted rows, I was coming up in the wrong spot. So, it got set aside. For, oh, 6 months at least.

When I picked it up again yesterday, I realized I'd skipped a few rows and that's why I wasn't able to figure out where I was by row count. So, I frogged back and reknit. In the reknitting, I didn't go back far enough, so there is an elongated row of "leaves" in the finished item, but you know what? It's a face cloth. I'm not going to sweat it. It's off the needles now. Bing, bang, boom.



Obviously, that is unblocked. That's one of the things with using recycled yarn; even though you wash it and weight it to remove the kinks, there are still some left, so anything you knit from it looks really wonky until it's been blocked.

Then I moved on to another project. This one is a cabeled bag that was my Learn to Do Cabels project. I took this class at the same LYS where I learned entrelac and had a similar experience. First of all, the owner wrote up the pattern, and it was both incomplete and unclear. It was a bit like studying French all year and getting to the final exam and finding that it's in Spanish. Yeah, you can sort of figure out what you are reading and are being asked to do, but it takes a lot of extra time and thought. Also, the yarn estimates were way too low and after hitting the half-way mark, I realized I would need to knit the strap one ribbing repeat narrower so it would be long enough. And even now it's not long enough. I'd like it to be long enough to wear as a messenger bag, but I'm afraid it's going to be a longish-strapped tote instead. I couldn't even get more yarn to add to the length, because the yarn was hand-dyed by the owner and it was the last skein of that color. As it is, I got the front and back pieces knit with only about 1 yard of yarn left to sew it all together, so I had to go buy another hank of the green so I could finish it off. This was another class o'frustration for those of us in attendance.



All that said, though, I actually really, really like this bag. I went and got fabric to line it with, oh, AGES ago. And then it sat in its little UFO cubby for months and months and months because of my severe aversion to sewing. But, last night I got it out and steam blocked it and sewed the ends of the strap together.



I had every intention of assembling it in preparation for lining, but I got a little carried away with the steam and it ended up pretty wet, so I had to leave it to dry over night.

Instead, I pulled out the mohair lace scarf to work on.



This is some Skacel mohair that I got from the goodie bag at Stitch and Pitch last year. I wasn't all that thrilled with how it was working up. It had a pretty high yawn-factor. So, I frogged it 2 or 3 times trying different stitch patterns until I found one I liked. And, I can't show you an updated photo, because, well, I REALLY like it and I think I may try to pitch it somewhere. It's being reborn as a cravat instead of a scarf. Also, switching from bamboo to metal needles made the yarn much faster to knit with.

So, yeah, that's all the stuff I got done yesterday afternoon and evening. The kids were very content to play on their own last night, so I had a lot of time with my hands free and was exceptionally productive! w00t!

The UFO saga continues...

This fine day, I bring you the tale of another UFO. Also one that has languished for months and months, but, thanks to the stash-busting knit-a-thon starting in just a few hours, should be finished sometime in the next 26 days.

This UFO comes from Simple Knits for Cherished Babies by Erika Knight. The book certainly lives up to its name; the trickiest pattern in the book is a pair of basic booties. I’ve already used the monogrammed baby blanket as inspiration for a blanket for my new niece. (I double stranded DK weight yarn to make it, so I had to do a little math.) The only issue I have with the book is the “It costs HOW MUCH?!” factor of the yarns used. I’m sorry, but I will not be knitting baby pants out of cashmere. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest one is that I don’t particularly want to spend $50 to knit a baby garment that will likely have poo leaked on it. I know I can't guarantee that anything I make won't, in time, come in contact with poo, but pants for an infant is pretty much a sure thing. I would like to think that my cashmere scarf project is never going to come in contact with poo, but who knows what the future brings? I could be wrong. Finding suitable replacement yarns has sometimes been an issue, but for my current project from the book—the garter stitch cardigan—Patons Grace was a perfect substitution. (And I’ll be using less than 2 balls, so if I remember correctly, it’s $10 worth of yarn instead of $40. Much more realistic a price tag for an item that will be worn for 3 months and will most likely be doused in regurgitated lunch at some point or another.)

To be honest, I wasn't all that in love with this particular sweater when I first saw it, but I cast on out of necessity. When my youngest turned 18 months old, she started climbing out of her crib. And, my then 3.5 year old started climbing into the crib. So, fearing a crib collapse or a serious smooshing incident, we moved Abby into a big girl bed. We had been putting the girls to bed 30 minutes apart so Abby would be asleep by the time it was Kai’s turn to pass out, but in a big girl bed, it’s much harder for Abby to wind down, and in no time we had given up on spacing bedtimes and went to putting them to sleep together.

That’s when chaos sprung forth in our home.

Bedtimes turned into 90-minute affairs on good nights. In an attempt to curb the more outrageous bedtime behavior, one of us would stay in the room with the kids and enforce the “stay in your own bed” rule. When it looked like things weren’t going to improve anytime soon, I hauled the kids to a second-hand store and got myself a small, rocking recliner to sit in on my nights as Enforcer. Sitting in semi-dark repeating, "Lie down and close your eyes," for 90 minutes got old fast, so in no time at all, I followed the example of the old lady whispering “hush” and had some knitting on my lap. The garter-stitch cardigan was the perfect project. Not only is it all garter, but there was no increasing or decreasing for the first half of the project. I made it halfway through and realized that I’d made a counting error way back when I cast on, so it all got frogged one night. After another few nights of knitting, we decided to change tack with bedtimes and went to just telling 1 story and singing 2 songs and leaving them after that, and the project was set aside at that point in favor of projects that were more demanding now that I wasn’t working on them in the dark.



I picked up the project again last night. You can see how quickly it knits up; three-quarters of what is done in that photo was done last night while getting caught up on The Black Donnellys and fast-forwarding to the performances in American Idol. My only complaint thus far about the pattern is that it's very unspecific. Fine for an intermediate knitter, but you would think that a book called Simple Knits Anything would be geared toward beginners. Not so. It tells you to cast on for sleeves after getting to a certain point of the body, but doesn't tell what method. I imagine that a newbie would assume long-tail cast on, but a cable cast on would be more flexible and leaves no more ends to weave in. Likewise, the pattern calls for increasing to form a v-neck, but doesn't say if you should k1fb or work a m1 or what. Plus, for some reason, instead of including the sizing info with the pattern, all the sizing info for all the projects are at the back of the book. It probably made the patterns fit in their allocated space better, but it's a bit annoying to have to flip back and forth. Anyway, for an intermediate or adventurous-beginner knitter, it is a very good book. Simple, relatively mindless projects in classic looks that will be just as stylish for the recipient's own grandbabies 50 years from now. You need to be willing to make some construction choices on your own, but worth looking into.

It's a "thon," not a "thong"

One of the links you'll find to the right on my blog is a link to a community on LiveJournal that hosts "knit-a-thons." Twenty-six days to pursue a challenging project. This month's knit-a-thon starts March 15th and the theme is stash busting/UFOs. I'm already on the no-yarn-for-a-year bandwagon, so I'm going to concentrating on the UFOs.

The UFOs... Wow... Taking a look at the list to the right, my UFOs total 17 at this point in time. Seven. Teen. That's just not right. The oldest is at least 18 months old and is a bag that just needs to be lined. The next oldest is about 9 months old, so that's not so bad, right? And, again, it's a bag that needs to be assembled and lined. (Sensing a trend?) My goal is to knock that list down by at least 10 items during the knit-a-thon.

As I happen to find myself between projects in these last few days before the official start, I've gotten a jump on things and finished the knitting portion of a pillow cover. This particular project started it's life as a woefully complicated entrelac purse. The YSO who was teaching the class picked it as the project for a beginners class on entrelac. It involved 2 different stitch patterns for the entrelac pieces, increasing and decreasing in those 2 different patterns while working the entrelac to form a hobo-bag shape, and I picked a boucle (Patons Canadiana Boucle, 97% acrylic/3% Nylon in color 7078) as my contrast yarn so the stitch pattern in those levels were next to impossible to keep track of anyway. While teaching the class, the YSO kept getting up to help customers, and for some reason my class members kept asking me for help, so I had very little chance to make progress in the class as it was. By the time I got home, I had decided a few things:

1. The boucle was way too stretchy on its own.
2. The stitch patterns were making everything way to complicated.
3. The stitch patterns in the boucle were impossible to see.
4. Turning the project every 9 stitches was insanely annoying.

So, I decided to rip back and start over. Only the boucle was such a pain that I could only rip back so much before I finally just cut the yarn and threw away the bottom level and a half of the project. When I restarted, I ran a thread of black size 20 crochet cotton with the boucle to give it more stability. Also, I threw the stitch patterns out the window and just went with stockinet. And, now that I'd changed over to stockinet, I looked up a video on how to knit backwards so I wouldn't have to turn the project constantly. I finished one half of the bag and set it aside for months while I took on other projects that weren't the fiber equivalent of dealing with a bloated government beurocracy. When I finally picked it up again, I discovered the final, and ultimately project-killing, point:

5. I really, really didn't like it.

The increasing and decreasing were still an annoyance, but I could live with that with the other modifications I made. But the bag itself? It's shape and construction? I just didn't like it. And I didn't know anyone who would like it. When I looked at the photo that came with the pattern, it just said "60-year-old phD candidate with an unhealthy obsession with India." I couldn't think of a single person in my life who would enjoy the bag. So even though I was more than half done, I frogged it all back again.

This time, I decided to just go square. There was one row of the original pattern that didn't involve any increasing or decreasing, and from that row and the directions for the starting and ending rows of triangles, I was able to extrapolate how to get straight-sided entrelac to work. And, hey, it did! I managed to get a square done relatively quickly. However, due to all the cutting and frogging and throwing-out of unfrogable pieces, I was going to be tight on how much yarn I would have left. When I started this final reattempt, I was thinking I'd do a small tote bag. But in the end I decided to do a pillow cover. So, using the main color (The Leader, 100% acrylic, color 601) I knit a 2-piece stockinet backing. The smaller of the 2 pieces has a garter edge with button holes. When it's all sewed in place, I'll be able to open it up to remove the pillow form for washing. A plus, given the 2 toddlers who roam wild and free in our house.




In my new-project frenzy, I finished the front and the larger back piece and left the smaller back piece with 2 inches left to be knit. And there it sat. So, last night, I picked it up again and finished the knitting. I have about 3/4 of a yard left of the acrylic, so it's all going to have to be sewn together on the machine or by hand. But all the bits are done for now and I'm sure it will sit undisturbed for several more days until the UFO-busting knitathon is well underway and I have nothing else to do but weave in ends and assemble pieces.