Boring or Soothing?

The Highland Triangle Shawl is now coming along well (after some painful recovery from more mistakes than I'd care to admit).

Working the edging alternates between boring and soothing, depending on my state of mind. It's a vertically oriented pattern from a 6 stitch repeat, creating a rather nifty ribbed effect. Ok, so I like my laces geometric rather than organic.

I love how it's turning out. And after some encouragement from Denny, I've been working without markers!! The patterning is so obvious that once I got established, the markers were just slowing me down.

Way to go Marnie!

My sister-in-law, who is entirely humble about her knitting skills, produced this. She designed it all on her own. My contribution was to design the closure, based on those beautiful buttons, and sew it up.

It's made from the Paton's Lopi knock-off, which isn't a bad yarn at all.

Cash Iroha Ruffles

Love this yarn.

Great hand, lovely "organic" texture -- slightly slubby, slight variations in the colour.

Cashmere and silk, how could it be bad, really?

Life is getting in the way of blogging

Forgive me if I go quiet for a bit...

I'm knitting, just not writing.

I Broke Down

I wanted to do the Ribwarmer in black. (Of course I did.) But after all the emails back and forth with Emma about hers, after seeing the pics, and being in the middle of a design slump, I knew I just had to get one going.

So I dug through the stash and found two almost complete balls of Lamb's Pride in not-at-all complementary colours. Beggars can't be choosers, you know. (The other colour choices can be spotted in the pic, on the right hand side, on the lower shelf of the coffee table.)

And here we are. The knitting went very fast. Sewing up was unexpectedly a pain in the butt, and the edging was slow because I was playing "nearly out of yarn" chicken. There was lots of ripping back and measuring of the tiny bit of yarn I had left.

Yes, Denny, those are ends which I will weave in.

And that's Avery. She's the best dog in the world. You might think you know the best dog in the world. But her name is Avery, she's a 13 year old yellow lab, and she lives with us.

Fall 2006 Knitty

Woolly Acres farm visit
To quote Amy and Jillian: ...in which Kate learns that wool comes from sheep!

Pattern: sheep wrap
To quote Amy and Jillian: ...in which the sheepy wool turns into something to keep Kate warm

Thanks to the inimitable Denny for her help!

On Tension & A Ribwarmer

Emma Jane has finished her Ribwarmer and it's terrific! Cannot wait to make one myself. Am still waiting for the yarn, unfortunately.

I was talking to Denny and one of her friends this week; Denny introduced me as the Queen of Tension. "Kate always checks her tension," she said. I'd like to think there was a bit of awe in her voice, but I suspect it was more that she thinks I'm crazy. Denny's heard me give my lecture about measuring tension in a class several times. Yet she still never checks. (She also knits lace in angora with neither stitch markers nor a lifeline. Draw what conclusions you will.)

"My friend Emma never checks hers." Yeah, yeah, I know. And who got a Ribwarmer done first?
Anyway, Emma has kindly measured her tension for me, and I remain confident that Lamb's Pride worsted will do the trick.

Pride Goeth

You know the old Pride goeth before a fall thing?

Well, it goeth big time.

I was feeling all proud and smug about my first completed lace design -- the red thing of which I'm not posting pics. I had shared a pic with a couple of my best knitting pals, and their feedback was terrific. (Thanks Abby and Lorena!)

So on a quiet evening at home, I went back to the edging on the Highland Lace shawl, and discovered a colossal and unrecoverable mistake in the third row. And of course I hadn't bothered feeding a lifeline... So I had to pull back 5 rows of 360+ stitches very very carefully, and pick the stitches one by one -- including a billion yarnovers.

Argh.

B*gger.

So it's a no. Not enough yarn.

I ripped back a full 10-row repeat and was able to finish the edging, with not a heck of a lot left over. Others have said this before, but I continue to be surprised by how much yarn those last few rows use up...

Object is now finished, and I can move on.

(You want pics? Sorry, no, it's destined for somewhere else... you'll get to see them eventually, just not here.)

What now? I have three balls for swatching for design ideas... Needful's fluffy and rather sweet Joy, Noro's swoonworthy Cash Iroha (silk and cashmere and wool... ) and Rowan's oddly enchanting and not overdone Romance.

I'll let you know what I think of the yarns as I work with them.

Estimating yardage, part two

So I'm working a lace shawl design. (!!!)

It's worked from the tip up. I'm trying to keep it to 3 balls of the particular yarn I'm working with, and I feel like I'm playing chicken.

I've got this much yarn left. ...
I need to work a knit row, an eyelet row, 5 or 6 garter rows and a cast off - and I'm at 175 stitiches. I'm really not confident I have enough.

It's a delicate balance -- maximum use of yarn. I personally hate a pattern that makes me buy 3 balls and barely uses the third. But if I pull it back a full 10-row repeat, there's going to be a fair bit of yarn left over, I fear.

Oh well, I'll just have to keep working and keep my fingers crossed. .

Estimating yardage

Fell in love yesterday with some yarn in the bargain basement of the aforementioned R___ shop. It was inexpensive, a really great colour, and clearly 100% wool. Oh yes, and unlabelled. The woman working the (probably awful) basement shift could confirm it would wool, and that it was from Philopher's. It was 4 ounces (because she'd measured it, she told me). But she couldn't tell me the yardage.

ARGH. Could I have come up with some kind of approximation, by looking at other yarns of similar gauge and fibre composition... but I was without my calculator, and wasn't feeling particularly clever.

Very annoying.

She told me that none of the small Canadian yarn producers put the yardage on their labels. I have a hard time believing this. I shall have to do some research, I think.

Banned from planes again?

Great story about a woman's knitting needle exploding as she was using it....

It's just absurd enough to be true. There's even a plausible science-y explanation.

That doesn't stop the conspiracy theorists and rumours, though... "space aliens"?

I'm just worried that the TSA will hear about this and ban knitting needles from planes again.

Lace Designing!

I'm chosing to blame this on Cheryl Oberle and Barbara Walker, rather than Denny.

As I get into the zen of it, as I get more familiar with the lace pattern of the Highland Shawl, I'm able to think more about the shape of the stitch patterns, rather than just trying to figure out what comes next in a row. And as I do that, I think about what might happen if I do a left-leaning decrease rather than a right-leaning decrease, or what might happen if I put the yarnover before rather than after the decrease... and hey presto! I'm designing lace.


The Highland Shawl continues apace, and with it, in red, you see the start of an idea upon which I am noodling.

Correction - Oops!

The fingering weight yarn for the lovely Cat's Paw shawl actually came from Hopeful Farms, not Woolly Acres as I'd previously mentioned.

Thanks -- and apologies -- to Michele and Gil of Hopeful Farms.

It's Official

I am a lace knitter. I bought blocking wires.

I blame Denny.

The Ribwarmer is on Hold

So the answer is indeed a heavier yarn. Emma Jane proved it. Although she did confess that she often plays fast and loose with gauge... with sometimes hilarious results... in this case, she got it right.

LK doesn't have Lamb's Pride in the colour I want, so I've ordered it, and will be forced to focus on one of my other existing projects until it arrives.

That's not a bad thing.

What is on my needles right now?

For Boring TV:
There's the Highland Lace Shawl. Requires much attention.

For Exciting TV and Car Journeys:
Requires little attention, but is large and hard to carry around: a feather-and-fan shawl in some hitherto abandoned cast-off Fleece Artist Country Wool.

For Commuting:
Small and requires no attention at all: rainbow socks.

Newsflash!

Thanks to a chat with Abby, I solved the problem. The yarn required for the ribwarmer is a heavy, heavy worsted.

I just swatched with Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride worsted on 5mm needles and it matches the cable pattern gauge.

The rib pattern gauge has got to be the misprint.

Wahoo! Off to buy some more yarn! The good news is I know it will knit up very quickly.

ARGHHH

They don't call it "tension" for nothing.

The yarn substitution I made for the ribwarmer isn't working. In a big way.

First all, it's pretty clear that the original yarn must be an aran, not a worsted. That, I can handle.

But I'm still hugely puzzled about the difference in row gauge across the two stitch patterns.

A k4 p4 rib should be 18 sts/24 rows when lightly stretched... that's basically st st, so that's a perfect aran.

But then a 8-row cable pattern with the same yarn, same needles should have 16 rows to 3 inches. Which is 21.3 rows for 4 inches. WTF? It's got to be a typo, must be 16 rows to 2 inches.

I spent some time with the schematic, and I'm even more puzzled.

10 repeats of a second 8-row cable pattern, essentially the same as the other one, should provide 15 inches. Which means that they're serious about the 16 rows to 3 inches thing. I have NO idea how this is supposed to work.

Am I missing something about the behaviour of cable patterns that the row gauge changes so radically? I thought I was pretty good at this stuff, pretty smart.

ARGH.

Distracted

I got distracted.

The new fall Vogue Knitting has this faboo little cable vesty shrug ribwarmer thing.

I'd seen someone wearing something like it last year, sketched it out as a possible design project, and then promptly forgot about it.

In my recent survey the pre-fall offerings in my local megamall, I saw and tried on a similar thing. It was indeed as stylish on as I thought it would be.

So I hurried my butt over to LK, picked up the mag and some yarn, and cast on.

I bought Nashau "Julia". The gauge seems slightly off what the pattern calls for. The manufacturer of the original yarn says it's a worsted weight; other sites suggest it's an aran.

I'm a bit suspicious, because there's wildy different row gauges given for the two (not that) different cable patterns. One gives 24 rows/4 inches, another gives 16 rows/3 inches. That doesn't feel right to me.

We shall see how this goes.

The Zen of It

I'm getting the hang of this new lace pattern, slowly but surely. The approach is entirely different.

Instead of mindlessly placing markers and repeating patterns between the markers, the pattern requires a careful count at the start of each row.

I've got to repeat a 24-row chart 5 times. The wrong side rows are plain knits (other than an increase). The 12 right-side rows repeat 2 different stitch patterns, at a different offset...

stitch pattern one: k2tog k1 k2tog yo k1 yo
stitch pattern two: k3 yo [slip 2 together knitwise, k1, pass 2 slipped stitches over] yo

The magic is in knowing how many stitches in from the edge you start the pattern, and which stitch of the pattern you start on. The rest is just repeats of the 6 stitch pattern from there. Markers don't help because of the offset, and because of the yarnovers. I find it tricky to keep a marker in the right place when you're doing yarnovers either before or after it.

I've got a copy of the chart with the key rows labelled, I've got a sticky note and a pencil. When I'm done a row of the chart I note it. Simple! Well, easy enough that I can mostly pay attention to the TV.