I spent a lot of the weekend swatching.  I have, courtesy of my local library system, a copy of Hip to Crochet and have been eyeing the “On-the-Side” cardigan.  I actually noticed this when the book was first published, but since it was the only thing in the book that appealed to me, I decided not to spend the $19.95.  The library is your friend :)

I became enchanted with the pattern stitch this sweater uses (while not being enchanted with the pattern) and decided to play around with it some.  The stitch is a multiple of 6 + 2 and a row consists of alternating Vsts and 3dc fans.  On subsequent rows, Vsts are worked into the Vsts of previous rows and fans are worked into the center dc of the fans on the previous row so you end up with alternating columns of Vsts and fans.  I altered that so that Vsts are made in the center dc of the fans and fans are made in the ch1 of the Vst.  I really like the look this produces. 

I liked it so much, in fact, that I started work on two things.  Well, all right, I started work on the same project twice, switching to a different material when it became clear that I wasn’t going to have enough of the originally chosen fiber.

This started out as an idea for a possible sweater but there is seriously not enough yarn for that and I was nuts to even imagine there might be.  The material is Classic Elite Spotlight Cotton which is really nice stuff.  I love working with it as it doesn’t have any of the hard feel so many cotton yarns do and the fabric it makes is positively silky!

Once I realized that there really wasn’t going to be enough yarn for a garment, I thought about ripping this back, but I like the stitch and color patterning too much, so I’m going to leave it and pick it up again later.  It will become a runner for the coffee table or a small tablecloth for the kitchen table - and it will be adorable :)

So I tried it again with something different:

I still don’t know that there’s going to be enough yarn, but it doesn’t look too bad at the moment.  I would like this to be a basic, kimono-style coat.  I’m working the pattern sideways in panels of 5 rows of pattern stitch with a row of single crochet - to give things a little more structure.  It starts with the left front, divides for the sleeve, goes on across the back, divides for the right sleeve and then finishes with the right front.

Like this:

...only with straighter lines :)

I will probably also borrow the little square motif from the On-the-Side sweater too because I like the way it looks and think it will work well.  A contrasting color for that, I think…

I am pleased to report that the swatching was worth doing and that the math derived from the exercise seems to be working out properly.  I really tend to be more of a seat-of-the-pants kind of gal and swatching is always a grumpy process for me as I want to get on with things and not waste time with swatches.  Except that it can be useful :)

Oh yeah - we put up the new feeder last week (see sidebar photo) and it is going to be successful.  The first visitor - not ten minutes after it had been hung, was a blue jay.  There have also been nuthatches and sparrows.  It is so nice to have my birds back!

I hope all your holiday weekends were peaceful and pleasant!

I’m taking the day off except to mention one thing.  This film is finally available on DVD.  I found it in, of all places, WalMart and it was only $9.00 or so.  The last time I checked for availability, it could only be had used in VHS tape format.

Nobody thought a lot of this film but I loved it for its slyness, it’s interesting depictions of a monastery at that time being a repository for the imperfect and the second sons, and for the performances of Sean Connery, Christian Slater (17 years old, full of promise and utterly beautiful) and Ron Perlman.  The mystery is handled well and the whole is quite entertaining in a cerebral sort of fashion.

I would also recommend the book.  It is a long and sometimes dark look at life in a medieval monastery.  The surface story is a mystery - men are dying in a very strange fashion.  Who is killing them and why?  The answer is, I think, pretty nifty.  If you are a scholar specializing in ancient things, there will probably be a great deal more to this tome for you than there was for me (though I have no complaints whatsoever).  Eco has written many allusions, references and so forth into the story that go right over my head.  I know they’re there because I’ve read that they are.  To me, they are just part of a quite involving story.  To a scholar, I’m sure they would be very entertaining indeed.

And that labyrinthine library - all those books!  Be still my heart….

Have a great weekend :)

Continental Airlines distributes a set of these to each passenger and invites you to keep them for use on your next Continental flight.  Since my flying schedule is erratic to say the least and I don’t get to pick the airline anyway - there may never be another Continental flight :)

But I didn’t just want to toss these either because they delivered a decent sound and they were very comfortable - something I’ve always had problems with in headsets because of my glasses.  Only problem was that this set had a 2-prong jack.  Most American headsets (for computers, stereos, etc) have a 1-prong jack.  So I tucked them into my purse and hit the local electronics store at my earliest opportunity.  There I bought an adapter and wound up with a nice, comfortable, lightweight little head set that would fit in my purse or my pocket easily…

...and get broken just as easily.  So, it needed something in which to reside for a bit of protection which meant making it a little bag.  But we had been out running around all day yesterday and I didn’t think I wanted to bother last night…except as I was reading, a thought struck me about how the bag could be constructed and, of course, then I couldn’t rest until I had tried it out - and actually tried out the whole bag.

Materials

Worsted weight cotton
Set of 4, US size 5 double point needles
Tapestry needle

Using a provisional cast-on, cast 30 stitches on to three needles and join, being careful not to twist.  Knit one round plain.

Round 1:  *K14, sl 1 purlwise, place marker; repeat from *
Round 2:  Knit around

Repeat these rounds three more times (slipping markers as you go).

Rounds 9: *(K2, P2) 3 times, K2, sl 1; repeat from*
Rounds 10: (K2, P2) 3 times, K5, (P2, K2) 2 times, P2, K3

Round 11: *K14, sl 1 purlwise; repeat from *
Round 12: Knit around
Round 13: *K14, sl 1 purlwise; repeat from *

Round 14: (K2, P2) 3 times, K5, (P2, K2) 2 times, P2, K3
Round 15: (K2, P2) 3 times, K2, sl 1; repeat from*

Round 15: Knit around
Round 16: *K14, sl 1 purlwise; repeat from *
Round 17: Knit around

Round 18: *(K2, P2) 3 times, K2, sl 1; repeat from*
Round 19: (K2, P2) 3 times, K5, (P2, K2) 2 times, P2, K3

Rounds 20-27: Repeat rounds 1 and 2.

Round 28: K2tog, yo around.
Round 29: Knit around.

Round 30 (Cast off round): K2tog and slip this stitch back onto the left hand needle.  Continue in this fashion all around until all the stitches are bound off.

You should now have a knitted tube with little purled rectangles on both sides. 
Turn tube inside out.
Unzip your provisional cast-on, placing 15 stitches on each of two needles using the slipped stitches as a guide to the sides of the bag (15 stitches on one side and 15 stitches on the other).
Attach yarn and do a three needle bind-off.
Weave in ends.
Turn bag right side to.
Run monk’s cord, or braid or whatever you like through the eyelets at the top and you have a nice sturdy little bag for only about 2 hours work :)

Sorry the picture isn’t better - I wasn’t thinking about how the white cotton would (or wouldn’t) photograph when I picked it out last night - it was the size I was looking for and I had plenty of it to play with (should playing be necessary).

Enjoy!

We’re on our I-don’t remember how manyth day of wind, rain and unseasonably cool temperatures.  Getting a little old, frankly.  The temps I can live with - even rain now and again.  But I sure do miss the light.  And, to add injury to insult, the feeder blew off the tree, smashing in the alleyway below.  Just when we were getting our customers back, too.  Oh well, a trip to WalMart will fix that but I’m going to be afraid to hang the new one until the wind subsides some.

I’ve made a little more progress with the stole, as you can see :)  I’m liking the cable patterning very much and it’s coming out nicely.  I believe, if I continue this project, that I will twine the center cable all the way from beginning to end.  The side motifs will intertwine periodically and symmetrically, but not continuously. 

There are two things threatening this.  The first, and probably most curable condition is the needles.  They are incredibly slick so that doing the cabling-without-a-needle trick is an exercise in terror.  I have resorted to the old tried and true method using my gull-wing cable needle and that works just fine.  However, it interrupts the flow of the work something fierce and really slows down the progress.

Solution?  Try wooden or bamboo needles.  My Brittany walnuts are probably long enough to handle the number of stitches so I’m going to give that a shot.  Probably…  If I can make peace with the second issue which is…

This color is dull.  Green isn’t my favorite in the first place (I had originally gotten this yarn with the idea of making an afghan for my father who does like green) and this heathery abomination grates on my nerves.  But I have a bunch of it and I really should use it for something.

This is nearing conclusion though the jury’s still out as to whether to end it when the first ball of yarn runs out or continue onto the second ball to see what the colors will do as the rows get long enough to span the color shift.  Part of me wants to be done with the project because this yarn is so funky to work with.  The other part, of course, is really curious to see what happens with the colors.  I guess I’ll know when I get there :)  Yesterday, Myria asked me if this yarn came in pink.  It does :)

For all my bitching about the boucle, I have to admit that the fabric is nice - soft, plushy and surprisingly warm so I believe the shawl will be useful after all.  This might make a nice baby blanket.  While it is synthetic, acrylic and nylon, I think, it has a nicer feel to it that, say, Snowflake or any of the similar kid’s fluffy yarns that were so popular this past year or so.  This is just my opinion, of course.  While the boucle is a bit of a challenge to work with, the resulting fabric is pretty nice.  The feel of the fluffy-puffy yarns makes my skin crawl and I don’t think I’d be able to work with them even if I wanted to.

I think maybe I’m going to track down a new bird feeder this afternoon.  Since I’m planning on dropping by my dad’s, going a bit further north afterwards shouldn’t be any big deal.  Any bets that dad’s built an addition on to the house since I saw him last?  Why let a little thing like a broken hand slow you down, after all?

I’ve gotten very little knitting done over the last few days - or much of anything else for that matter.  My father broke his hand last Saturday and has since been walking around insisting that he is just fine and doesn’t need any help doing anything, thanks.  While his driving is only slightly more alarming than usual, his refusal to be even remotely sensible about issues like picking up heavy things is tremendously frustrating.

The only knitting I got done was on Saturday when I finished the Whitby socks.

I’m hoping to get some more done on the Seraphina shawl (and if you haven’t seen Bron’s completed item, go have a look - it’s sensational!), enough progress made on the Celtic stole to see whether it’s worth continuing with or not, a little more time with Lady Eleanor (hmmmm…stoles and shawls - is there a pattern developing here?) and I have at least one more thing to finish up for Dulann.  And I’d like to start another pair of socks :)

Don’t want much, eh?  I hope the beginnings of your weeks are a little sunnier!

Oh - and does the pink Chibi look like a hobbit sized dildo to anyone else but me?

We have a lovely, sunny day here for a change.  I don’t know if it will stay that way, but it’s certainly starting out nicely :)  As I am headed out this afternoon for lunch and a long overdue visit with a friend, this is promising.

I went to work in earnest last night on the cabled stole and was pleased to see the numbers were still right and that it wasn’t just an anomaly of late hours and annoyance deluding me into thinking everything was perfect.

This is interesting because the front side is variously cabled in many places on every right side row.  Last night I was marveling at how it seemed I was slogging through a right-side row and positively racing through a wrong-side row.  It really isn’t far enough along to get a feel for how it’s going to look, but I remain hopeful :)

You may notice an error in the cabling here.  I made the same mistake in each of the three sets of cables.  Soooo…I’m considering repeating the “sequence” when I get to the other end and calling it a feature rather than a bug :)

I really need to get back to work on the Lady Eleanor from the Scarf Style book and finish up my Dulaan projects so they can get shipped out next month.

I hope you all have wonderful weekends!

I want to thank you all for your kind thoughts and good wishes :)  It tickles me to death to know such a nice bunch of people!  For those who are curious, the brownies were passed over in favor of chocolate cake with cream-cheese frosting.  YOW!!  Was that good :)

I hadn’t planned to go out yesterday, but Myria and I wound up heading out to my little, country yarn shop just to look around.  I didn’t see any yarn that I was desperate to have but I did find a couple of things…

You may recall that someone on the KnitList a while back was looking for a pink Chibi - absolutely, positively had to be pink.  This resulted in a minor uproar when it was discovered that Clover doesn’t make the pink ones any more - only the green ones.  A couple of entrepreneurial types also hit E-bay where bids got into the ridiculous range rather quickly.

I have been thinking about a Chibi for a while now though, honestly, I couldn’t care less what color the case is.  I tend to keep my tapestry needles in their original packages until the cardboard gets so worn it won’t hold together any more.  The case is a better idea I think and gives me two of the bent-tip needles to play with and see if they’re easier or more efficient than the straight-tip kind.  The LYS also had the green type but I thought the pink was prettier :)  It was the last one.

Then there were these DPNs.  I have resisted wooden DPNs because I’ve heard too many reports of them breaking, down in the size 1, 2, and 3 range.  I like the metal pins I normally use, but there are times (and some materials) where something with a bit more friction would be useful.

The first bamboo needles I ever tried were Crystal Palace.  They were interesting as I had never seen or imagined a needle that wasn’t metal or plastic and I used them for a while.  A brief while…  For some reason, these needles seemed to provide too much friction.  Everything stuck to them and they had very sharp points that split everything I tried to work with.  After a while I went back to my metal needles and decided that bamboo probably just wasn’t for me.

Forward a couple of years.  In conjunction with the Dulaan project (hat knitting, to be precise) I wound up buying a set of 10.5 Clover DPNs.  Checking them in the store, I was impressed with their nice silky feel and their blunt points.  Well, I say blunt but I’m not talking the eraser end of the pencil here.  The needles have nice points where the end is sufficiently rounded so as not to split yarn or cause permanent bodily injury.  This is a good thing :)  Anyway, I bought them and loved them. 

Lately I’ve been seized with the notion that bamboo sock needles might be a useful thing to acquire - they’d be more flexible (and hopefully less breakable) than the wooden ones as well as being light and warm to hold.  So I acquired another set yesterday and am here to tell you that they rock :)  I couldn’t wait until we got home last night so I could knit the sock on to these needles and play with them for a while.  They’re wonderful and I love them :)

Finally, there is this.  If I seem a bit random and incoherent this morning, blame it here:

I had this wonderful idea for a cabled stole so, around 10:30 last night, I sat down with pen and paper to work out the numbers.  Let’s see, garter stitch borders, rope cable on either side, twisted and intertwined lozenges in the middle…check!  I put Thunderheart in the DVD player and cast on, knit the border rows and started the pattern work.  Way, way too many stitches…

Pull it out, check the figures…aha!...and cast on a different number of stitches.  Work the border rows and procede to the first pattern row…still wrong.

I gave it one more try - it was now about 1:30 AM.  This wasn’t successful either so I gave it up and went to bed.  I did not, however, get to sleep.  The numbers buzzed and spun in my brain and I simply couldn’t seem to shut my head down.  It seemed to be determined to figure out the correct stitch number or never let me sleep again.  So I got back up, turned the light on and did the stupid thing one more time - this time, successfully!  I finally got to sleep around 2:30 AM.

Obsessive?  Moi?

Oh, one more thing!  We went to dinner at a place called On the Border.  We had avoided it because it looked like a Mexican version of Red Lobster where everything tastes the same no matter what you order.  But, our favorite Mexican restaurant was torn down a few months ago to make way for office condos and we’d been looking for another one.  Yesterday, we decided to give this one a try and we found it to be pretty, darned good!  We’ll definitely be going back :)