Ramblings of a Knitting Obsessive

I got a new camera for Christmas.

I was rereading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and decided to try out the ‘macro’ setting. It’s pretty easy to tell if you read the words, but try guessing what chapter this is from.

I finally dyed one of the alpaca skeins! It turned out more ‘melon’ colored than ‘black cherry’, but still looks beautiful, and will still make a great pair with the natural off-white.

Ah, the beauty of lace. I’m loving this scarf more and more as the winter goes on – it’s amazing how it can be both incredibly warm and so delicate at the same time.

It actually snowed on Christmas. My sister Gracie and I were outside revelling in the wintry-ness and a lot of the snow was landing in her hair, so I took a picture of the snowflakes in it.

My mom’s backyard in Portland as viewed from my window, during that blissful hour.

I had a lot of fun running around and taking pictures of the snow…

Sadly, it didn’t last long and had melted within a few hours, replaced by the mundane rain.

Another Wisp photo! I think this one looks like a wave on the ocean, maybe at sunset (which might justify it being pink).

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Hi everyone! Sorry this is a photo-free post, as I have no access to my normal computer with iPhoto and ability to hook my camera up to upload photos.
Anyway, I just thought I’d check in.
My knitting is going good, although I’ll have to wait until another post to show you what I’ve been working on.

I had an idea a few days ago of thinking back through the months of this past year and trying to sum up each with a song that stands out that I may have listened to more than others. It was surprising, too, doing that, because some of them actually represented somewhat accurately what how I was feeling at that particular time. Others, though, were just caused by the buying a new album or receiving a mix from a friend (like the awesome one Liv gave me for my birthday) and listening a lot to get familiar with the songs.
For November and December, the songs I’ve been listening to most are fresher in my mind than, say, February, so I had trouble picking just one.

My Soundtrack to 2007:
January…A Lack of Color (Death Cab for Cutie)
February…No Hay Problema (Pink Martini)
March…Yankee Bayonet (The Decemberists)
April…Brand New Colony (The Postal Service)
May…Song for You (Alexi Murdoch)
June…Annie Waits (Ben Folds)
July…Bubble Toes (Jack Johnson)
August…The Engine Driver (The Decemberists)
September…Blackbird (The Beatles)
October…Gone (Ben Folds)
November…Trapeze Swinger (Iron & Wine) / The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out To Get Us (Sufjan Stevens)
December…Casimir Pulaski Day (Sufjan Stevens) / Baby We’ll Be Fine (The National)

I hope you all are having a good Christmastime/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/whatever holiday you celebrate!

My grandma and I went on a sort of yarn shopping spree yesterday (a.k.a. stash enrichment expedition), going to Northwest Wools, Knit/Purl, Yarn Garden, and Mill End. I just thought I should show you guys what I got.

7 skeins of Malabrigo Worsted Merino in Lettuce. I’m loving this stuff! So yummy and soft. I’m thinking either a Tilted Duster or Clapotis for this.

Enough Rowan Felted Tweed to make a Tangled Yoke Cardigan (also 7 balls) in Melody. I swatched this last night to see if I got the right gauge, and the fabric this stuff makes is so cool! I can’t wait to start on my cardigan. For some reason, the naming of this color makes me think of Casimir Pulaski Day by Sufjan Stevens (a beautiful song that I’ve had stuck in my head for the last few days) when I look at it.

Guess what: more Malabrigo! This time, it’s 3 skeins in the colorway Rich Chocolate, which makes me almost want to eat it. I’m not really sure what I’ll do with this, but it was so luscious looking I couldn’t pass it by. Maybe a vest? Or another Briar Rose? Maybe in time I’ll know what it wants to be.
I just now realized that both of the colors of this that I bought are named after food. Coincidence? I think not…

Last but not least, a sampler 3 pack of Soak wool wash and a Knitter’s Handy Guide to Yarn Requirements booklet. I haven’t gotten to use the Soak yet, but I smelled each of them and I think the ‘aquae’ scent is already my favorite. I love that it’s biodegradeable, too, and that you don’t have to rinse it out.

I hope you all have had a good weekend!
Please wish me luck in finals this week!

ps. I decided what I want to do with the fingering weight alpaca (at least most of it) that I mentioned before: Anemoi Mittens. I plan to dye one of the hanks with Black Cherry Kool-Aid (making it a sort of dark red color) and leave the other undyed. I’m still not sure what I’ll do with the third one, though.

This is taking me WAY too long.

Yes, the color really is that bright.
If you’re wondering, this is the back of the Dollar & a Half Cardigan (renamed $1.50 for short from now on) that is going slower than I thought humanly possible. I cast on for it last Monday, and look where I am now. Not even to the armholes! I took this picture a couple of days ago so there’s maybe an inch and a half at most more than that, but still. This is supposed to be done (and I’d like to have it blocked so it looks nice and not all puffy like right now) by next Friday, the 21st as my 3rd self-directed project for CPF class, and I’m starting to have doubts about whether I’ll make that deadline. I’m on the tech crew for the Winter Play at school (‘Arsenic & Old Lace’…it looks like it’ll be a good one. There are two casts; Liv is playing Dr. Einstein in one and Austin plays Officer O’Hara in the other and both casts are doing really well) and have been staying after until 5:30 every day working on set building, so I haven’t gotten hardly any time to knit the past few days. I missed the window for weekend knitting on that because I was working on a different knitting project, Ruthie’s birthday present, which will come later after I give it to her on Friday. So, I guess I’ll just have to keep going and see where I get, if all else fails I can finish it during Christmas break and get partial credit for turning it in on the first day back.
Now that I’m on the subject of this sweater I might as well say why I’m doing this instead of a Tangled Yoke Cardigan, which is what I’ve been hoping to do for this the whole time since school started. When I went to buy yarn for the sweater I thought I would be making, it ended up being at a shop that I thought carried Rowan Felted Tweed. However, when I got there, the only person working in the shop was on her very first day there, did not know the stock and layout of the store, and could not find any. She looked it up in the inventory and found that the shop did indeed carry it, but after another search nothing was turned up. So, being pressed for time, I had to figure out some kind of alternative, and ended up choosing Debbie Bliss Rialto, which though not tweedy, was still soft, and merino is always a good choice. Now, in that moment I seriously underestimated the yardage in one ball of Felted Tweed and thought, “Oh, okay, the pattern I want to make calls for 7 balls of yarn that have about 150 yards in them. Look! This yarn has 115! So I’ll get 9 balls to cover for the difference.”
Not so. When I came home, I found out much to my dismay that Rowan Felted Tweed actually has 191 yards in it, making me over 300 yards short for my desired sweater.
So I went looking for another pattern that calls for less than what I have. The yardage thing on Ravelry’s pattern pages is really a good tool. I found that the smallest size of the $1.50 Cardigan calls for 11 94-yard balls of Reynolds Soft Linen, which is about the same weight as Debbie Bliss Rialto, making it 1034 yards total. I have 1035. I know that the 32-inch circumference may be stretching it a bit, seeing as you’re supposed to wear a cardigan over things, but I guess a little negative ease wouldn’t hurt on this sweater.
The only problem, though, is that I’m almost to the armholes on the back, and am into the 3rd ball. It seems that if only the back takes up 3 balls, there won’t possibly be enough by the time I get to the sleeves and picked-up button bands! Can anyone help me with this? Am I overestimating how much yarn this will take? I know that the back is the biggest piece, but I really do not want to run out of yarn, because that means, aside from the time issue, that I won’t finish the sweater at all, let alone late.
Please wish me luck as I truck along on my Personal-Fashion-Creating!

If you haven’t seen it yet, go check out Winter Knitty, especially my pattern, Dahlia.

First of all, thank you so much to all of you who left me comments! I’ve been really excited for this to go live ever since I heard back from Amy, and now the time is finally here!
I also want to send a huge THANK YOU to Sara, to whom I am extremely grateful for modeling the sweater for me and putting up with my perfectionism.
This issue looks to be a great one! I’m thinking of making an Ice Queen cowl with that extra ball of Kidsilk Haze I have from the Wisp.
Anyway, have fun looking around!

has it really been almost a month?
sorry guys. You must have gotten pretty tired of seeing that dress.
The worst part of it is, I don’t really have much reason for not posting. I finished a few things. I just didn’t really feel like trying to take photos and post about them.
Maybe I should try and do my own NoSoNaBloPoMo (Not So National Blog Post Month – November was NaBloPoMo and I missed it). Even if I couldn’t do it every day, I still want to set a personal all-around standard of at least once a week, though I’d like to do more than that.
Now, however, I have a good reason to end my silence.
I present to you Miss Briar Rose:

I had originally planned to make this in Malabrigo since I’ve heard so many good things about it, but I never got around to getting up to the shops in Portland that carry it, seeing as it’s one of the few things that Boersma’s doesn’t have. Oh well, I can always use it for a future project. I ended up settling for 5 skeins of Cascade Pastaza (I had JUST enough…only a few yards left over) in a pretty mauve-y color, which was originally yummier feeling but is now slightly itchy and sheds all over everything. I do like how it turned out, though. The first time I wore it I kept tugging the fronts together, so I decided to add a button in the middle. I also did eyelet-mock-cable ribbing around the outer edge instead of the lace or baby cable rib, and that turned out pretty nice. The sleeves turned out more just plain baggy and huge rather than puffy, but that’s alright.

I made an iPod cozy with some of the leftover The Knittery Cashmere Merino Sock from my beret, but it refused to be accurately photographed, so maybe I’ll show it to you sometime else.

I also finished my second project for CPF class (Creating Personal Fashions, = sewing, etc.), which was an awesome, gargantuan bag:

You can’t really see in the picture, but the corduroy outside fabric is ever so slightly variegated (and also extremely soft), and the lining is complementary but not too matchy – an allover teeny pink-and-purple flower print. It’s topped off with a big plastic button that almost perfectly matches the lining. I’ve had a lot of fun carrying it around school the past few days, and it fits a ton of stuff. I might have to start calling it my Mary Poppins bag, since you’d be surprised at the amount of things that would fall out if you emptied it. Anyway, I’m really happy with the result, and I think I did better on this than my first project.

The weather around here lately has been typical Oregon winter – we only just emerged today from 3 or 4 days straight of torrential downpour and high winds (there was even flooding in some places, and I got completely soaked walking home yesterday) I suppose it’ll keep raining, but hopefully not in such extreme quantities.

I’ve started on a Dollar-and-a-Half cardigan as my last project for CPF class, but that’ll have to wait for a later post seeing as a) all it consists of at the moment is approximately 1 1/2 inches of ribbing on the back, and b) there’s a semi-long story that accompanies why I am making this instead of a Tangled Yoke cardigan, which is what I had originally planned on.

I also have a surprise to share with you all, but that also has to wait, as I’m not at liberty to reveal it to you just yet.