Ickle Wickle

I thought the ring pillow was the littlest finished object I would make. Well, here are some even littler ones:



Baby socks for a friend who just had an ickle wittle baby boy. (I hope they aren't too pinkish for a boy! I don't think they are, personally, but who knows what the parents will think.) Ann Budd's basic pattern, size 0 needles, Regia bamboo sock yarn (lovely stuff).

But wait! Things get even littler!



J. had to send his wedding ring back to be resized, so I made him this temporary one. I mentioned the idea as a joke but he really seemed keen on it. I didn't think he would actually wear it, but it took about ten minutes so I thought what the hey. But he actually wore it to work today. It's already looking quite a bit worse for the wear from going through a softball game. I guess there's a reason wedding rings aren't usually made out of yarn.

I got married!

Thank god for web-savvy friends with digital cameras, that we can have pics 2 days later!

The littlest finished object

I made a little ring pillow for our wedding last night:



Just made a stockinette rectangle using size 10 1/2s and some leftover Elann Peruvian Cuzco in vanilla cream, sewed it up and stuffed it with polyfill. Made some ties with a sportweight alpaca yarn. We're not having a ring bearer, but we're going to do a "ring warming" where we pass the rings around to everyone and ask for their good wishes/blessings/whatever. This was the solution to someone potentially dropping a ring or people deciding they want to try them on. Then we were joking after we have the ring warming and everyone has touched the rings we'll have to have some purell up there and do a ring disinfecting.

Flash yo' stash (beeyotch)

Happy flash your stash day! I wish I had done this last year, it would have been interesting to see the changes. I'm hoping it will be smaller by next year.

Here are the storage units:


The yarn I have in sweater amounts:


Clockwise from bottom right: pine green Debbie Bliss cashmerino aran, some fingering/sportweight brandless peach wool blend, fingering brandless white linen, Dove Jo Sharp Silkroad aran tweed, cobalt blue SWTC bamboo, above it is indigo Noro Cash Iroha, orangey Rowanspun dk, 2 big cakes of white cashmere from ebay.

Now the sock yarns. I have divided them into 3 groups in my mind.

Knitpicks sock yarn:


Memories in fly fishing, Essential Tweed in plum, Dancing, Essential in various colors, Palette in various colors, and Gloss in dusk and burgandy.

Fancy sock yarns:


Lorna's laces in sand ridge, buck's bar, and happy stripe, Mountain colors bearfoot in Ruby River, Colinette jitterbug in I forget, Lisa Souza, Cherry tree hill millends, Knitting Notions, more CTH, STR, Koigu, Sereknity, Sugar Bunny Boulevard

The "workhorse" sock yarns. I'm not really sure why I've made this classification in my mind, I guess most of these are not handpainted and the above ones are.


Katia Mississipi, some weird cotton ones, Regia cotton, Sockotta, Cascade Fixation, Regia bamboo, Trekking XXL, Elann baby cashmere something, more Regia, Hill Country Yarns, Louet Gems Pearl, Some KP koolaid dyed by me in the upper right, and some Elann sock yarn.

The laceweights:


Misti alpaca, orange cashmere from Ebay, Alpaca fino with a twist, Malabrigo laceweight, 2 KP koolaid dyed skeins, Jaggerspun Zephyr, some KP one

Handspun alpaca from J's mom:


(That grey monstrosity is the one I spun!)

Everything else:


The green cake at the bottom right is wool that a friend brought me back from Chile, then there's some merino bulky from Handpaintedyarn, some random purple cotton from an exchange, a few skeins of sportweight alpaca, a bunch of black alpaca blends, a black/white cotton in the corner, 2 skeins of wool, Lamb's pride, some cashmere in the back from Colourmart on ebay, some superbulky white yarns I forget what brand, and some other random skeins.

Finally, a big ol' bag of leftovers, because I never throw anything out:


(Flickr is still being weird about some of my vertical pictures. I don't get it.)

While this was probably not the most productive use of my time, what with all that so-called wedding and thesis garbage I need to do, I'm glad I did it because now my yarn is much more organized. Specifically, all my sock yarn is in one place now so I don't have to go hunting through all my boxes every time I want to pet a specific skein.

The sweaters I don't wear (Or, what a knitter will produce in a vacuum)

While I was working on my cabled pull-over (front and back now complete!):



I had a thought. Or a few thoughts. One, this will be the first sweater I've made for myself since I started blogging (although there was also the itchy Somewhat Cowl that I started for myself and finished for Sienna). And two, it may well be (knock on wood) the first sweater I've made for myself that I actually like. Then I thought, since I don't have a whole lot to blog about in terms of WIPs (sweater, see above, socks, boring stockinette), maybe I'll show you some of the sweaters I made before I started this blog.

Besides the four you're about to see, there are 2 others waiting in the frog pile - one horribly felted (OK, obviously this one isn't going to be frogged, but maybe cut up and sewn into something else), and the other one just horrible. And then there was a 7th, my first sweater, that I made in high school, that was a giant potato sack and I gave it to Goodwill and now really regret it. But I did not know the concept of frogging at that point.

And that brings me to my other thought, of how much I think I've learned in the time that I've been aware of all the knitting goodness out there on the internet. For which I have Marie to thank (but she has me to thank for badgering her into learning how to knit, so we're even). I learned how to knit when I was 14 from a friend, who showed me how to make a hat, and from there on out I just sort of winged it. Which, as it turned out, did not work so well. I did eventually find some patterns and tried to follow them, but I never looked at a knitting instruction book or website, and almost never asked anyone for help with parts of a pattern I didn't get, I just fudged them. I don't think this is really due to pride on my part, but rather ignorance of knitting resources and laziness in looking for them (that friend who taught me how to make a hat only knew how to make a hat, so there were about ten girls in my high school who had learned how to knit a hat from her, but I didn't know anyone else who knitted). Anyway, not to brag, but I think I've come about ten times further in the last year than I did in the 13 years before it. I also was a much more sporadic knitter until the last year or two. Now I constantly have something on the needles.

Oh, and I just realized that this is my 50th post, so maybe this little exercise on reflection is in order.

Anyway enough gabbing. Here are the sweaters I don't wear (in reverse chronological order).

I don't know why I'm sticking my stomach out in this picture. Not like it needs to be emphasized.



Some cowlneck pattern from vogue knitting, in some chenille yarn. This one I made in high school. It's very comfy, but if I wear it for more than a few hours it stretches out like crazy and then I have to throw it in the wash to shrink it up again. Plus it is riddled with errors, the seams look horrible.



This I made while I was living in Italy, in 2002. It's also some pattern from VK. (Can you tell that VK was the only pattern source I knew about? Imagine my delight when I found out about Knitty and interweave and the ilk.) I made it because I had left my winter jacket in the US and it turns out, Rome is really cold in the winter. This one I actually wore a lot that year, but I don't wear it anymore unless it's really cold in the house, and I never wear it out. It was knit on some ginormous size needles with 1 strand of a superbulky red wool and 1 strand of a tweedy orange wool held together and then it turned out as big as a fat man's bathrobe, so I felted it a little bit. It miraculously came out to be just the right size, which made me cocky about felting as a means to get something to fit you, which resulted in the aforementioned felted sweater that is now sitting in the to-be-cut-up pile. I've learned my lesson.





This one is also from VK. I hope it's not bothering anyone that I'm not looking up which issues, but I'm lazy. And I don't think any of these are really examples anyone will want to duplicate. I started it in college and finished it in grad school, so it sort of pre-dates the red jacket. This one I actually think is the most aesthetically pleasing (love that keyhole) but I've never worn it. For one, I don't know that I will ever wear a knitted tank top. For two, there's a lot of side-boob action when I move, and I can't wear a bra under it. For three, it's a little short. (And for four, shhh, it's made of an acrylic yarn I got at a thrift store. But that actually doesn't bother me so much.)


(Jeez, there goes my stomach again. Apparently I really need to work on my posture.)

And this one I made just a few months before starting this blog. It's the Hot Lava Cardigan, in Knitpicks Sierra in Tide. So you can see at this point I had sort of discovered some internet knitting resources, but hadn't yet discovered that there were so many knitting blogs out there or Knitty or Magknits etc. This one I do wear sometimes. It's comfy. But the sleeves are awfully long. And it has some icky gaping ladders in the armpits.

Whew! That was a long post.

Ahhhh....

That's better.



I added 3 more repeats, bringing it to a grand total of 14. I think it's just right now. I blocked it this time with the blocking wires, I bought some U-shaped pins so that the wires couldn't just pop over the pins. I think the blocking looks a lot better, although the edges still aren't 100% straight - there are all these loops where the wires went through. How do people get such perfectly straight edges when blocking lace, especially with pins? I don't get it.

Anyway, onwards and upwards to something else. I'm sick of working on this stole.

River of Malabrigo

Mmmm, I'd like to go swimming please:



Pattern - My So-called Scarf
Yarn - 2 skeins Malabrigo worsted, I forget what the colorway is called.
Needles - 11s? I think? I just cast off the other day but damned if I can remember.
Changes - cast on 36 stitches instead of 30.

I just kept knitting until all the yarn was gone, it's definitely a double wrapper. Of course now it's in the 70s here. Oh well.

Conveniently hides the zits on my chin (all from my thesis talk, baby):



Flickr is doing this annoying thing all of a sudden where it is turning the small sizes of some of my pictures sideways, and I can't figure out how to make it stop. I usually don't like posting the medium size ones because they seem huge, but I guess it's better than sideways.

This is how much yarn there was leftover:



I don't think of myself as a very anal person, but I love when a project uses the amount of yarn I have exactly. Because anything more than like 10 yds I can't bring myself to throw out. Maybe it's my pack rat nature more than an anal nature.

Suddenly plagued with doubts

Is the stole too short? IS IT???? I think it might be.



Look, it hardly goes past my arms! Also, I think the edges look really horrible! HELP!!!

I have NEVER spent so much preparation ahead of time for my appearance for one day, and I'm starting to have the sneaking suspicion that I'm not really going to look that different from how I normally look, except that I don't normally wear a dress, or white things.

Fret fret fret.

Less blob, more stole

Someone wants to meet you.



Come out, little stole!



It's shy.



There we go.

I was feeling the model vibe, here are some more shots:





Hee hee, my feet look funny in that one.

Specarinos:
Pattern - Baltic Sea Stole
Yarn - Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk blend in Sage, approx. 900-1000 yards
Needles - Addi turbos size 5 (started on size 4s and couldn't see what the hell I was doing, going up a size made a huge difference).
Changes - In laceweight instead of sportweight, so I added a few pattern repeats and used smaller needles.
Reason for being - to wear in my wedding! Finished a whole 5 weeks ahead of time even!

Between the waiting for blocking wires to show up and a surprise trip to Vegas from little sis, there was a long time between knitting the last stitch and getting to take these pictures today. As it turns out, blocking wires suck. They make it sound like, or I thought that, it would be so much faster than pinning, but it's not. For one thing the ends of the wires are flat, not tapered, how retarded is that? It seemed to take just as long if not longer to thread the wires through the edge stitches as it would have to just pin every edge stitch. It was much more awkward than pinning, and I had to lift parts of the stole up while it was still wet which seemed like a bad idea. And then once I got the damn things threaded through, I couldn't figure out how to actually stretch it out, the instructions say to put a few pins to hold the wires in place, but the wires kept popping right over the pins as soon as I stretched it even a little. So I ended up just yanking them out and pinning the thing instead. It took me so long that the stole was dry before I'd even gotten most of the pins in so I spritzed it before continuing. I don't know if that was necessary or not.

I realized once I was close to the end of this that it was my first real lace project - I've made lacey patterned things before, like Ella and Branching Out, but this was my first with real laceweight yarn, and where every row had funky stuff to do on it instead of getting a purl row for resting. I think it's good I didn't realize that earlier, I might have chickened out and picked an easier pattern. But this one wasn't too difficult at all and I'm glad I picked it. I think it turned out quite well, if I do say so myself. The only part that bugs me is the edges, they aren't very even and I'm not sure if this is because I was too fed up to do a good job pinning or if I stretched it too hard. I definitely had a much harder time getting straight edges while pinning this than with other things I've blocked in the past. I don't know why that is exactly.

Now it is wrapped in tissue and sitting in my closet where it will stay until the wedding. I will not take it out to wear before then as much as I am tempted to, knowing me I would spill ketchup on it.

Oooo.... sparkly

Picked up my wedding ring today.
Here it is with my engagement ring:



Holy crap, I'm getting married in 6 weeks!!!