Knithropology

Good grief, folks. My apologies for being away so long; life was full of excitement. I earned my bachelor’s degree last month - on 8 August, which was of course a special day for other reasons - and took a week off work after that to knit and celebrate. And then…life went a bit mad. I’ll try to be here more often; I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’d been eaten by moths.

8 August, then. Opening day of the Ravelympics. I went pre-event insane and put three projects into the running: Masala Bay (Montego Bay Scarf in Handmaiden Sea Silk, colourway Masala), my Razoresque Cami (Razor Cami for WIPs Wrestling) and (this might be the most insane bit of it) a Central Park Hoodie. I’ll spare you the inevitably crushing details and give you the results.

The Razoresque Cami was finished just in time. The cotton in the yarn (Lana Grossa Novella) hurt my wrists a bit and triggered some wristy badness that would get me later on. Despite knitting on this through bits of my two graduation dinners and a graduation breakfast (woof, what a food-based weekend) the yarn didn’t have enough give for me to knit comfortably for too long.

I finished the Masala Bay the Monday after the Ravelympics (so no medal) and it is wonderful. Oh, how I love it. I can see myself making many more as gifts in the future. The yarn is stunning to regard, feel and knit and the end result is an absolute peach. I’m so pleased. Here, have a look (though I despair that my camera brings out a stripiness in this scarf that isn’t as noticeable in real life):

I wore thIS scarf when I had my photograph taken for work recently, which was a nice chance to show it off…except that the picture was printed in black and white. Ah well.

And last but not in the least silly, that Central Park Hoodie? It isn’t a CPH by any stretch of anything. It’s a top-down raglan pullover (with a seed stitch steek strip - say that ten times fast! - at the front) with a staghorn cable on the back, small staghorns on the sides, and, as of yet, no hood. I only managed to knit it to just about where I’d separate the sleeves and body before some sort of carpaly tunnely nonsense hit and I had to put it down. I’m working on it at a safe pace now, though I’m having to frog a bit because one of the cables got away from me, and not in a way I could fix without frogging. So really, this is no CPH. I’ll put up a picture of my Staghorn Cardigan when it looks like less of a Cascade 220 Heathers lump and more like a garment (But you can see the lump on my Ravelry projects page if you’re into lumpy things).

But wait, I hear you saying, there’s something here that doesn’t add up: the Razoresque Cami was nearly finished before the Ravelympics - how could I possibly have been working on it for so long? Well, friend…let me tell you a story.

Yarn overs. They always frustrated me, always dogged me - why didn’t mine look right? Why were they too small? Why were they so hard to knit into?  For two years, I’ve been nearly unable to do lace. Why?

(big sigh)

I was wrapping the wrong way! As the folks from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (which just returned to our screens last night!) might say, “God damn it, Charlie.” Once I started wrapping properly, thanks to a combination of videos and text descriptions found all over the internet (three cheers for the internet!), I was insistent that my Razoresque Cami would not bear the shame of my inexperience - so I frogged it. Again. Alllllllll the way back to the ribbing. Again. From 95% to 5% finished. Two weeks and some wrist pain later, I had this to show for it:

Not bad. I feel like an ice cream van on the beach when I wear it (because of the colours, not the size), which is rather nice. I’ll have to wear it the next time we make and serve sorbet at home. I rather like the way it fits - it shows the world that I have breasts and a waist and doesn’t make me look like a sack. That’s my life’s goal, really. “My driving force in life has been not to look like a sack. Or a sausage, but mostly a sack.” I cast on loads of extra stitches to go up to my 44″ bust, and I’m really pleased with the results. The lace stretches very nicely. In fact, it stretches so nicely that I need to buy an appropriate bra to wear it outside the house, which is the perfect excuse to make another one in a different yarn!

And of course, finishing the cami and getting my head round the YOs meant I could start and complete Masala Bay (like I said, no medal but yay for my knitting pride!). Now when I look at lace, instead of being confused as to how they got their holes so holey, I think, “Yes, I can do that. Lad, bring me my laceweight!”

So, in the pipeline now? Finishing the Staghorn Cardigan, casting on a Autumn Forest Malabrigo Koolhaas for The Lad, a top down raglan cardi for me (which I cast on out of boredom and haven’t yet listed on Ravelry), making a baby blanket for an oncoming child (I made two bibs earlier this month but gave them to the mother before I could get pictures) and some scarves for folks in my life who really deserve them. Oh, and finishing this:

I frogged my Malabrigo So-Called Scarf in Curacao and let the yarn mope around for ages until it could figure out what it wanted - and I think it finally has. It’s a Curacaopotis! I’m really thrilled, and it should be finished tomorrow if I really put my wrists into it.

Ah, and one last thing - want to know what the best graduation present ever is? A fifty-dollar gift certificate to my LYS. Thanks, Karen. I’ll be sure to put it to good use.

That’s sort of where I’m at right now. I’ve just entered the second half of my first summer class, and straightforward, relaxing (though maybe not as rewarding) knitting has been on my mental menu. Fulling by hand is a great way to get out tension as well as exercise the arms and shoulders - I’ve got fabulous forearms at the mo.

Of course, it all started with Michaela’s Hurried Sidekick. I promised pictures of it in my last post, so here it is, starting with the pre-fulling view (look at that SWS shine!):

It took two goes to get this to the right size; after the first bout of fulling, it didn’t seem the right size for someone as fast-moving and electric as Michaela, so in it went again and aaaaahhhh, perfect:

I’m happy to say she loved it, and she was even using it on a day she didn’t know she was going to see me, so that’s something. You can see - if you squint a bit - that there’s a snap sewn in; I think that was the most difficult part of the whole bag!

Elated by getting some of my SWS stash out of my house, I went on a mission. Fulled bags. First was the Slice of Sea bag (SWS in Natural Denim):

And that was followed by the slightly different Slice of Slate bag:

I might give this another round in the sink, but here it is at its current fulled state:

I have enough SWS in Natural Earth from old projects so that I could do another Sidekick-esque small bag, but we’ll see. I’m still chugging away on my Razoresque Cami (sigh), though I’m concentrating on another fulled bag at the moment - and eek, I’m doing colourwork!

I was so nervous before starting; my very first attempts at colourwork ended in tears and shouting. This time, after a few false starts, I was on my way. I’m making a new mp3 player bag using the chart from KnitPicks’ Come in from the Cold coaster and cuff set. I’m sort of using the Fake Isle technique - my snowflake is in Noro Kureyon (scraps from my Beige-Fighting Bag) and the rest in Cascade 220 (leftover from my Dashing Aubergines). I’m really chuffed at how well this is going. I’m sure that listening to David Reidy talk to Kaffe Fassett recently helped - I was very impressed (and later calmed) by Kaffe’s comfort with messes. All those bits of string!

But so far so good with my fledgling attempts at colourwork. I got over the puckering quickly enough, and I’m really happy with the results.  I’m definitely going to include colourwork in future projects, though I’ve got a long way before I attempt anything by the ‘messy’ Mr Fassett.

I continue to put up old projects on Ravelry; every time I think I’m finished, I look at something in my house and say to myself, “Hey, that’s [crocheted/knitted]!” I suppose it’s like art on the wall - you forget about it, take it for granted after a while. Oh fibre creations, I still love you, you’ve just lost that sheen of newness. But they’re slowly going up on Ravelry. The Even Better than the Topsy Turvy I put up recently has been getting some attention over there, which is really nice. I may make another one of those soon, but crocheting has been giving my wrists a bit of bother recently. I suppose doing a knitted version isn’t out of the question…but first, the colourwork!

Edited to add: the first half is finished! I like the gradual shift in the blue; I’m going to try and get a similar shade shift in whatever colour I choose for the other side.

Colourwork + me = fabulous.

The sooner we bring back victory gardens the better, I think. We’re doing our part, I reckon - over the past fortnight we’ve put in this year’s garden. We’re doing four varieties of tomatoes, a Mariachi pepper plant, lemon cucumbers, peas, two types of radish and a huge variety of herbs (including catnip for Denora). No, we don’t have a huge yard - we have one raised bed (about three by five feet) and a panoply of pots. Pictures as things develop, and perhaps some squirrel meat recipes for the omnivores in the audience, as our local greys are already pillaging this new food source. Those are my tomatoes, you little buggers! (sigh)

They certainly won’t get to one of my tomatoes - it’s in the Even Better than the Topsy Turvy that I crocheted three or four years ago:

Nice, hey? And I didn’t think I’d ever have use for a soda bottle again. Ha!

Now to the knitting front. The Dawn Chorus Danica is finished! Complicating its finishing were two competing projects: the Springy Garden and the Lad Topper Mark I. The Dawn Chorus Danica is (obviously) a Danica, the Springy Garden is the Misty Garden from Scarf Style and the Lad Topper is another Pi Topper cap. Here are pictures of all three, with The Lad as my ever-patient model:

On the needles: the Masala Moonlight is coming along slowly; I made a couple of errors that really put me off it for a bit, but I’m over it and it doubled in length last night.

I’ve fought my way through a Quinn Bag for my mum in Cascade 220 Heathers, and I had no idea how much I had missed cables. This is a welcome return to reordering stitches…and reordering I did, as after finishing the body of the bag, I realised that I’d done an entire row of C4Fs as C4B. ARGH. Dumb mistake, knitter. To make things worse, it was halfway down the body. (sigh) After failed attempts at using the Yarn Harlot’s cable fixing techniques, I took a deep breath, had a swig of coffee and frogged. It is all reknit and lovely now, and the frogging experience was, as ever, incredibly humbling. Here’s a picture of the body of the bag; I’m working my way through the i-cord handle now, and I’m going to line it with denim to confirm its rustic look:

At the same time I was put off the Masala Moonlight, I was making those cable errors in the Quinn and had a bit of a freakout. So what did I do? I got desperate. I pulled my Razoresque Cami out of hibernation, frogged it back to the ribbing and began it nearly anew. I’m a much better knitter now than I was when I originally started it, and I’m happier with the result (Though in my next project, I need to loosen up my YOs a bit more. I’m managing alright in the Masala Moonlight, but I’m tight on this cami).

Finally, I did something fabulous. I designed and knit up a French press cosy. One day of work resulted in a fantastic new finished object. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the Sunday Afternoon Coffee Cosy, hard at work Monday morning:

Isn’t it lovely? I’m so happy with it. Instead of using one of our crocheted cotton kitchen towels to wrap up my press, now I have this beautiful dedicated cosy. Simply looking at it makes me smile. And the observant among you will see also that it matches my mini-placemat and coaster. Yay! I’ll need smiles and coffee over the next two months, as I began summer classes today. Where did the month of May go? I needed a longer break! Ah well, I’ll get all the break I can handle after August.

Aware that my lazy summer was about to end, I embarked on a project that would alleviate some of my knitting disorganisation: a pattern binder. I thought I’d print out the ten or so pattern pdfs I had sitting on my laptop’s hard drive, but soon realised that I had loads more pdfs on my desktop’s drive, and while I was at it, I could print out some of the patterns I have queued on Ravelry, and…well, you see where this is going. I printed enough patterns to fill a 1″ binder and still have more to do. Eek. (cue Jaws music) “We’re gonna need a bigger binder.”

Current knitting plans: yet another Quinn (no miscrossed cable madness with this one), a Sideways Spencer Redux (finally, a cardigan for women with alpine curves), a square or two on a Lizard Ridge (yes, I’m giving in to that one), a Womb for a good friend and some baby and charity items.

In the meantime, lectures and work are calling. Farewell, lazy summer!