Come and join the fun!

Okay, I lied…

Well, it wasn’t exactly a lie so much as a sin of omission.

My name is Robbyn and I joined a Knit-Along…

It all has to do with what I was ranting about on Monday - discipline, paying attention - being willing to learn something from someone else for a change :)

All the finished MS3s (Mystery Stole 3) are hitting blogdom and looking very lovely indeed - look here at Opal’s beautiful stole or here, at Kathleen’s masterpiece-in-the-making.  And I was looking at all these gorgeous stoles and thinking hmmmm...

When we were little, my folks used to take my brother and I on Mystery Rides.  We would be told to dress in particular clothes and then everyone would pile into the car.  We would try and guess what the destination was.  My folks never spilled the beans though, and we never knew where we were going until we got there.

Well, a mystery project is something like that, isn’t it?  You’re told what kind of yarn, needles, etc are recommended and what other extras you might need and then you get serial clues (chart segments, I gather) at intervals and work one after the other until the item is finished and the theme becomes clear.

So when I heard about this…

The Secret of the Stole, my fingers got itchy :) I thought about it for a while.  Here I am, a stubborn and independent middle-aged person who generally makes things up as she goes along, works to few rules but her own and has a lousy record of actually finishing things.  And I’m thinking about participating in something where the only choices I get to make are yarn and bead color?  I’m going to let someone take my hand and lead me into the dark?

Does this sound like a good idea?

Well, actually, it does - for many reasons some of which I can articulate and which you already know and some of which remain slightly fuzzy :)

Anyway - that’s what the beaded pieces were about :) Here they are again:

That last one is new and those are the beads I’m going to use on the stole.  They are clear, lined with a light sherry opalescence.  I know they’re a bit difficult to see in the photo (that’s why that photo is a little bigger than the others), but they are subtle enough not to scream and still have a quiet, shimmering presence.  The beads are “E” beads (about size 6) which would be a little bulky I think for lace weight, but which seem to work well with the fingering weight I’ll be using.  The swatches were made in the same yarn I’ll be using for the stole.  The first two were done on size 6 needles and the last on size 7s.  I’ll probably be using the 7s.

I did try some size 8 beads(smaller), a bronze and copper mix…

...but they seem to be a little overwhelmed by the yarn.  I think the bigger bead works better.  Also, while I could get the bead over the crochet hook (and obviously did), it was much more work than with the E beads - in fact I almost poked a hole in my thumb :)

So that’s what’s going on right now.  There is still plenty of time to join if you’re inclined that way - The actual project doesn’t start until October.

Chatters is on tomorrow night :) Hope to see you there!

It was rather cool here this morning - about 59ºF - and I decided to put on the Autumn Seeds sweater.  We went out to do some pick-up shopping - you know, milk, bread, etc., and on the way I stopped at a convenience store to pick up something to drink.  When I got to the counter, the Indian gentleman behind it did a mild double-take and started studying my sweater.  He told me it was handmade (it wasn’t a question, but simply a statement of fact) and that it was beautiful work; that in India and Nepal they made sweaters like this.  A little stunned, I thanked him and told him that I had made it, that it was my first knitted sweater.  He looked it over again and said, rather wistfully I thought, that it was beautiful.  I thanked him again and backed out the door, my face as red as my top, I’m sure :)

It’s not every day that you get complimented on your knitting by the Indian gentleman in the convenience store!

I have two finished objects to show you!  First…

...the Kimono Scarf.

I would like to do this again someday in a softer yarn and a different color - probably a different, solid color :) It was interesting at first to see the play of the color and the pattern - but I was tired of it by the time I finished.  I don’t think it’s all bad - actually it’s kind of playful and would be fine with a casual dark sweater.  The stitch pattern is beautiful and I will definitely be using it again - perhaps in another scarf or maybe in a shawl of some sort :)

The ends are still out because this hasn’t been blocked yet.  I’ll weave the ends in then.

The other FO is this -

...pair of little person socks - the first I have made from Charlene Schurch’s wonderful book.  I liked the process and I love the way the socks turned out.

I’m basically caught up now.  I went through my work basket the other day, ripping, tossing, organizing, storing and generally just cleaning things up.  I have two things on the immediate horizon, and will be starting one of them tonight!  As it’s a bigger project, I’ll probably be filling in with some smaller things.

I tell you what, though, this bead knitting has got me all in a twirl!  In fact I bought some more beads to play with this morning - who knew it would be this much fun :)

I’ve been thinking a lot about discipline lately - you know, that thing that gets you to do the dishes, even though you’d rather work on the sock or read a book?  I don’t have much.  In fact, I’m far less disciplined and far more self-indulgent and impatient than I was as a younger woman.

One of the biggest reflections of this is my knitting.  Not the actual knitting, of which I’m a bit proud, but the many, many projects that get started and then wander off to gather dust while I, like a grasshopper on speed, start another dozen.  Oh one or two may get finished, but the rest will languish, eventually to be frogged or tossed - and it will be a long time before even that happens because I’ll be...class?  That’s right - starting more projects.

Another problem is that if something doesn’t come easily to me, I’m apt to pass it by.  I’ll tell myself I don’t need it, don’t really want it and it was probably sour anyway :) I had this attitude about knitting with double-pointed needles.  Socks?  Feh - who cares about knitting socks...I don’t need no steenking socks!  Lace?  Beautiful, lovely - work of art, really.  Me?  No, ham-handed, fumble-fingered me could never manage lace - but thank you very much for asking…

And the Universe is funny about all of this - almost perverse :) Have trouble finishing projects?  Think the powers that be would bless you with a craving for small things like hats?  Mitts?  Baby booties?  No, you’re obsessions include shawls, blankets, car cozies....  Afraid of lace?  The Universe trots out the most beautiful examples of the art - pieces that should be hanging in the Louvre - and tempts you till you’re ready to stick your knitting needles in your eyes just to stop the torment!

And then it shows you lace with beads.

And then you know your crafting soul is totally and irrevocably lost…

Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while, may remember that I have worked knitting with beads before.  There’s the Little Beaded Bag.  That project involved stringing all the needed beads on your chosen yarn before the knitting even began and then utilizing a slip-stitch technique to place the beads.  This isn’t difficult at all.  The only problem with this technique is that while it may be perfectly fine for something like a dice bag, it’s not going to work for something finer.  Stringing beads on fine yarn will do nothing but shred your yarn and the slip-stitch placement technique is too loose and not really strong enough to hold beads in place on a somewhat delicate fabric.

So then what?

The thing I had been avoiding, of course :) The thing I told myself I couldn’t do and therefore didn’t really want to do.

The technique isn’t that difficult.  You use a crochet hook - a small enough one to go through the hole of your bead.  You pick up a bead with the hook and insert the business end of the hook into the stitch on your left needle.  Then you pull the loop of yarn through the bead, replace the loop on the needle and then knit the stitch.  This fixes the bead much more firmly than the slip-stitch method and is more stable because both loops of the stitch go through the bead.

The problem for me is that I knit right-handed but I crochet left-handed.  I finally realized that in order to make this work, I was going to have to manipulate the crochet hook with my right hand.  So, Friday night I sat down with my tools and gave it a try.  The yarn is fingering weight and the beads are size 6.  I needed a size 12 crochet hook (very, very small) to get through the holes in the beads and that meant that manipulating the yarn with it was almost impossible.  However, I tried it that way many times - pick up bead, insert hook into stitch and try to draw the yarn back through the bead.  Each time, I split the yarn because the hook couldn’t catch the whole thickness and wound up with half the yarn on each side of the bead - a mess, in other words.

Then it occurred to me to try it another way.  Instead of attempting to draw the yarn through the bead, I tried drawing the bead over the end of the hook and down onto the stitch.  Okay, use the hook, pick up the bead and insert it through the stitch.  Then, holding the stitch firmly down on the hook with my left hand, I then used my right thumb(nail) to scoot the bead over the yarn, off the hook and down onto the stitch.

That worked!

As it turns out, using the hook in my right hand wasn’t a big issue because I wasn’t really crocheting - just using it to hold the yarn and the bead.

I was slack-jawed with amazement.  I had tried this technique many times before and gotten nowhere with it.  All I had ever achieved was shredded yarn - and shredded patience.

It really, really worked!

I was so dumbfounded that when I finished the first practice piece, I started another one…

Back to what I was saying in the beginning…

I have become lazy and self-indulgent.  There’s nothing wrong with designing and executing the ideas in your own head - but not when you’re using it as an excuse not to have to deal with standard patterns, methods and techniques. 

I am going to finish the projects I have under way.  I’m thinking specifically of the Kimono Scarf here because now that I’ve seen how the stitch pattern works, and how the multi-colored yarn and the pattern play together - it’s gotten a little boring :) This is the point where I would normally lose interest and start another project.  But I’m no going to do that - I’m going to keep working on the scarf until it’s done.  I am also going to try some other patterns - other than the ones in my head, I mean.  And I am going to try very hard not to mess with them until they are something entirely other than what the originator intended.  I will probably always be more interested in expressing what’s in my own mind and heart than reproducing what someone else’s dream might have been.  However doing my own thing is different than not doing someone else’s thing and I need to work on that :)

Ev - that baby jacket?  Frogged…

And about ignoring things you think you can’t do?  The problem for me was that some part of me really did want to do them.  I would tell myself I didn’t want to make socks and then find myself with double-points in hand trying to figure out how to “join”.  And I told myself that beaded knitting was fussy, slow and unappealing…

I may have lied :)

Oh, and about the Universe being perverse?  I found this Beading with Needle Tutorial this morning :)

See you there!

This…

...came home with me yesterday (among other things - more about that later).  The picture doesn’t quite do justice (if that’s the right word) to the true, antique gold mustard which was the actual shade.  Think of the gold kitchen appliances of the 70s and you’ll be in the right ballpark :) There are two hanks there, 7.2 oz (a little over 200 grams) and it’s nice wool.

It was just an awful color.

So without wasting any time, I got down my trusty crock-pot and, with the help of 6 tablets of red Easter Egg dye, changed the color to this:

It’s not quite as bright as the picture seems to report and is closer to a copper than a true orange.  This is good :) And, for what it’s worth, I think the addition of just a tiny bit of green would have intensified the coppery appearance.  Anyway, I now have useable yarn!  I know the mustard was perfectly useable, but it wouldn’t matter how nice the wool was, I would never have knitted that color up :)

I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday morning (everything’s fine).  I hate the tension and dread that accompanies these things, but my sane half knows they’re important...sigh...so off I went :) However, I also felt that in exchange for being a good girl, I should be able to reward myself a little too :) So I stopped at the mill shop on the way home.

In addition to the mustard wool, there was a gorgeous hank of deep red…

...another 100 gram skein of nice wool.  It’s the same type as the mustard/copper but none of the hanks had labels or any information.  I know they’re wool because I burn-tested them when I got home.  Well, and the mustard wouldn’t have dyed so well if it hadn’t been wool!

To round things out, there was also this:

This is Chanteleine Goliath washable wool.  The color in the photo is pretty accurate, a very pale grey-beige - and if you’re thinking it likely won’t stay that color, you’re probably right.  There were 9 balls of this and as it was pure virgin wool (does that term make anyone else but me snicker?), washable and a good candidate for the dye pot, it was definitely coming home with me :) The yarn is springy and has a lovely, soft hand so whatever this gets made into is going to be really nice :)

But something puzzled me.  The band indicated that there were 73 yards to the 50 gram ball.  Good enough, that probably means it’s a bulky yarn.  But looking for information on what needle size was suggested, this is what I saw…

4 to 4.5 needles?  Since this is French yarn, at first I though 4.5 was some weird European needle size but pretty quickly I decided that it must mean 4 to 4.5 mm needles - that would make it a size 6 or 7 in US terms.  So I tried working this yarn with size 7 needles.  It’s doable, but not acceptable :) A size 9 needle would be way more appropriate.  All I can figure, is that the numbers on the ball band refer to stitches per inch.  It seems to me that’s the only way it makes sense.  Have any of you seen this sort of thing?

Chatters is on for tomorrow evening.  Come by and say hello!

Have a great weekend, all :)

Oh what splendid Labor Day weekend I had.  I dove in and didn’t come out until yesterday.  Elves and orcs and dwarves, warlocks and hunters and warriors.  No, I didn’t go to a Lord of the Rings film festival, I fell headfirst into World of Warcraft.  Probably some of you know this game, maybe even play it yourselves.  It involves struggle and survival in another world where you can be one of any number of sentient races and take one of many different jobs - many of them using magic. 

It can be a time sink, but played judiciously, it can be a lot of fun.  And over a long weekend with no other plans, it’s just the thing :)

What, knitting?  You’re asking me about knitting?

How’s this?

This is essentially the same shawl from Friday’s post except that instead of a single center line of stitches down the back, there’s a whole pattern repeat in there between the increase stitches.  The idea worked out very well for me.  There is no (or very little) stress on the stitches.  Bur something even more interesting happened as well.

This is started with a garter stitch strip - you all know I’ve been playing with this for a while now :) On a shawl that’s started like this, this strip acts as a means to curve the shawl around the neck and shoulders.  For some pieces, the curve may be very slight - like Kiri.  On others, such as the Moonlight Sonata, the curve is much more pronounced and the shawl has almost a crescent shape.

Here, because of both the garter strip and the center panel, I got something of a bat-wing shape which just charmed the stuffing out of me because I’m fond of bats - poor, maligned little things.  This shape should be ideal for keeping the shawl on the shoulders.  For a scarf, the single panel would probably be enough.  For a shoulder shawl, I might be tempted to use two repeats of the stitch pattern - depending upon yarn type and needle size, of course.  For a full blown, all-enveloping winter coat of a shawl, perhaps three repeats - and maybe a hood?  Hmmmmmm…

The idea of the center panel came about because of the type of increases I wanted to use.  I did want an eyelet to either side of the panel and a yarn over would be the typical increase to use here.  But I have trouble with yarn overs and stitch markers.  Yarn overs tend to ramble around stitch markers and don’t reliably stay to one side of the marker where you want them.  A more experienced lace knitter would just tell herself that was something to be aware of and take it into account.  Me?  I’d be stopping to count stitches on every single increase row and I’m already obsessive enough about counting.  So I decided to use a lifted bar increase which is normally knitted through the back so that it doesn’t produce a hole.  Here, I just knitted it through the front because I wanted the hole.  All of you who suggested the e-loop or backwards loop - I appreciate the suggestion which would be great in other applications.  But it wouldn’t make an eyelet and that’s what I wanted - something that would leave a hole, but that wasn’t a yarn over.





The fish tail lace is easy and produces a very pretty result.  Carried out to full shawl size this will be very nice, I think.  I am also tickled that pulling the points out when blocking really enhanced the bat-wing resemblance.  Of course, that’s only me :)

I would probably make this in fingering weight yarn although worsted weight yarn, larger needles and a different stitch pattern would yield a wonderfully warm outdoor garment.  Hey, some of us don’t like coats :) The sample above was made out of dyed sock yarn on size 6 US (4.25 mm) needles and that seems to work nicely - maybe even a size 7 US (4.5 mm) needle would work and give a slightly lacier appearance.

Lace - the final frontier…