Fiberphile

Et Voilà!

I've finished up the right front for my tweed cardigan and it is now blocking, along with the sleeves that I had finished earlier. I'm a knitter with a mission. I'm not sure when the seaming will start. Clearly it will have to be a quiet evening at home (perhaps with a glass of wine at hand?), and those are going to be few and far between this month. Tomorrow night I have a meeting, Friday is a recruiting dinner, and the weekend is starting to look full. Maybe Thursday if the mood strikes...

In the meantime, I've started a scarf from stash yarn and you can see the beginnings of it in the picture as well. Officially this is the Barclay Scarf from the Jamieson's book Simply Shetland, but it really is just a simple 3 color box stitch. What I love is that the colors complement the tweed Rowan yarn so well. Clearly, I must finish this also for my ski trip so that I can wear the two together. Six inches down, only 84 or so to go, and 17 days and counting. The yarn is some Jo Sharp Classic DK that I got 50% off at last year's Superbowl Sale at Orchardside Yarn Shop. (Which I am unfortunately going to miss this year, due to said ski trip...) But yay! for using up more stash yarn.

Happy New Year!

Yes, I know I'm a little late, but better late than never, right? The holidays here in Charlotte were nice, if a little hectic. I made Christmas Eve dinner for my family and a few friends, and it all came off pretty well I think. But now my decorations are mostly down, and 2006 has hit with a vengeance. Work has changed drastically for me in the past week. Without getting into too many details, our group has merged with another small group about an hour north of Charlotte. The other group lost a couple of physicians in the merger and I was voted volunteered to be the sacrificial lamb to help keep everything afloat and patients happy. Last week I spent three days travelling to and from this northern location, jumping into a foreign electronic records system, techs who aren't familiar with the type of work-ups I like, and a full schedule of patients to be seen. It was challenging, to say the least, but I think the transition went well, considering. From here on out I'll be going up there only two days a week, which will be more manageable.

I know the question everyone has for me is whether I finished the Manos Christmas tree skirt or not. (Well, perhaps not, but humor me please.) Nope! I released myself from any guilt associated with that. It still sits prominently in my living room and I do intend to have it done for next year though, along with the matching Christmas stocking.

After knitting last minute gift scarves like crazy, it was definitely time to start something for me. My next sweater is going to be the Tweedy Aran Cardigan from the winter 01/02 IK that Ei made last spring. I'd have never picked it out of the magazine, but Ei's version was just gorgeous. I'm making fairly quick progress of it. The photo shows the back and left front, but I've also finished both sleeves now, and am working on the right front. I'm using Rowan Yorkshire Tweed Aran in color #415, Maze. I'm knitting it up at a pretty tight gauge, and the yarn and gauge tend to make my hands a little achy, but I'm really looking forward to having a new sweater to wear on my ski trip later this month. It would be only appropriate for me to finish in time for the trip since I brought the yarn back from my ski trip last year.

I also wanted to show off one of my Christmas presents:

I mean, that's a swift! It's from the Strauch Fiber Equipment Co. and my mom and I admired these at Maryland Sheep & Wool last spring. At Thanksgiving I casually mentioned needing a new swift to replace the blue plastic one I had, but didn't think I'd end up with this beauty. Love it!

I don't know what to make of this...

Here's the Danette Taylor sock yarn I bought last Thursday, in the mint-mocha colorway:

And here are the cookies I made last Sunday for a cookie swap, in a completely spur of the moment decision:

And I didn't even see the connection until last night when I sat down with a cookie to work on my socks a little...

Stockings and such

Long time, no post, yet again. I have things to show for my time off though! For one, I finished my stockings, and love them, even if they're not the most practical thing to have knit. Here's the rundown:

Pattern: Over the Knee Stockings from Melanie Falick's Handknit Holidays. Pattern by Cindy Taylor.
Yarn: Haneke Exotics 65% merino, 35% linen blend, 4 skeins of beige. I've gotten some questions about where to find this yarn. I looked online, and didn't find any sources for it, so I called direct to the mill in Idaho, where they were more than happy to ship exactly what I wanted, and the yarn came in only a couple of days. Contact info is in the back of the book, but I'll put it here too... Haneke Wool Fashions, phone # 800-523-9665. It was a nice feeling yarn, and is quite warm on the legs to wear. I'm not sure how the linen will hold up, but it was a fun new fiber to work with.
Thoughts: I really enjoyed knitting these up, and they went much faster than I thought they might, although I was working on several other projects at the same time. There is an errata available on the HH-along blog here for the ankle cable chart that I didn't see until well after I had finished mine. It's something that seemed curious to me when I was knitting them up but I followed the pattern just as it was written, and am very please with how they came out.

They do have a tendency to want to sag after a little wearing, likely at least in part due to the linen in the yarn. I had initially tried weaving elastic thread through the ribbing at the top, but it ended up so tight that I could barely get them on over my knees. So for the time being at least, here's how I solved the issue of keeping them up. I made a garter out of a piece of 1/4" elastic band. I stretched it slightly around my lower thigh to measure for length and then cut and stitched the two ends together with regular needle and thread. Now I put on the garters over the stockings and make sure the rolled cuff cover them. That keeps them up fairly well, although in truth, I do find myself giving a little tug from time to time.

The tree skirt has not fared as well... I'm still working (slowly) on the second piece. There just hasn't been the same time at home for knitting that I 've had in the past. If I had a few hours, maybe this weekend, I think I'm near enough done with that piece that I could finish it, but I don't know that it will all be done and ready for Christmas this year. Next year maybe... I have finished a pair of socks for a friend, and they're blocking today, and I decided kind of last minute to make scarves, one for my technician, and two for people at work, so those are taking precedence over any knitting I'm doing for myself right now. I found this great site I'd never been to before with all kinds of free lacy scarf and shawl patterns on it, as well as other things I haven't had time to explore yet. I'm working on the Spangle Sequins Scarf for my tech using some pink Rowan Kid Classic, and will soon get started on the Opera Scarf for one of my coworkers. Still looking for the right yarn/pattern combination for the other coworker. I got the Rowan yarn from a very LYS that's just about 2 blocks up the street from me a couple nights ago, and found a new yarn, to me at least... I picked up some Danette Taylor hand dyed superwash merino for some socks. I've seen her things around in blog land from time to time, and was aware that she sold on eBay, but apparently she lives here in Charlotte, and now has a nice collection available at Charlotte Yarn. I've already cast on and started a ribbing with the Mint Mocha (scroll down to the middle of the page) that I got, but will just be playing around with it until I decide what kind of sock it really wants to be. Fun, fun, fun!

And now for something completely different...

I've been holding out on you all a little with my WIP's.  Yup, as if stockings and tree skirts weren't project enough, there are actually a couple of other things I've been surreptitiously been knitting on the side.

Here are two fronts and a back for the jacket that was designed for this yarn  that I bought at ArtFibers in SF this past summer.  The pattern was MIA for a few months, but I cast on just as soon as I found it again, and it has been the "comfort knitting" I go to when the intarsia and cables get to be too much to deal with.  I've started the sleeves, and am doing both at the same time so that I can be sure they'll be a match.  Although there's not a bit of wool in this yarn, I'm hoping that I'll still be able to get some winter wear out of this in this temperate NC climate.  I'm starting to think about the closure I'll use for this jacket.  I have some buttons (but no picture today) that I bought with this in mind, but they're not as good of a match as I thought they were when I got them.  Now I'm thinking of making some bands and using a single frog closure close to the top.  It will have a stand up collar, sort of mandarin oollar, and I think that type of closure would be in keeping with the design, but most likely I'll wait and see what everything looks like once it's all put together.

And for Roy, my friend who is teaching me everything he knows about rock climbing, I'm making this pair of socks.  On US 0's.  Yes, man-socks on the tiniest needles I own.  They are the "Gentleman's Sock in Railway Stitch" from Nancy Bush's Knitting Vintage Socks.  I offered to use some sedately colored man-yarn from my stash, but Roy said no, they should be wild.  I hope this is wild enough!  That's some Trekking XXL in colorway 66 for the main color, and a little bit of purple Wildfoote sock yarn thrown in for some contrast on the heel and toe-to-be.  Note the calf shaping there... that was kind of fun, although it made for less auto-pilot knitting than my socks usually are. 

My critter folks have caught one more raccoon, this one in a trap right by my kitchen door, and he was a big one!  That was last week, and there haven't been any more since that time, so perhaps that's all that know about my house and cat doors.  My dad came down to visit yesterday, and we replaced both dysfunctional cat doors with new ones that will actually lock, so hopefully this will not be a problem again (keep your fingers crossed for me). 

Progress on all fronts

Wow!  Who'd have thought there'd be so much raccoon input on a knitting blog.  Thanks to everyone who left ideas.   The traps are working, and I got my first raccoon.  He's been retrived by the critter folks, and the traps are reset.  What you can't see in the picture is how he tried to dig himself out of that trap.  He excavated some earth all the way around it, so that it's like a little moat surrounding him.  Almost makes me feel sorry for the poor thing. Well, at least sorry that he didn't pick someone else's tree to live in anyway.  I am working on securing the cat doors better as well.  Both are old, and neither has a functional lock on them.  I'm even thinking of just replacing the doors altogether and leaving the at doors out.  My cat uses a litter box inside, and rarely goes out at all (that I know of), so I don't think either of us would miss them too much.

Here's the first wedge of tree skirt, done.  Well, close to done... there are a couple of places I'm going to go back and add some duplicate stitch.  I just didn't feel like testing my luck with 10 stitch floats.  I'm sure it would have been fine, but this will be, too, I think. This has kind of been my test piece, and I'm hoping the next pieces will be even better if I can come away with any lessons learned.  I'll keep you posted.

And, I'm halfway done with the second stocking.  Just getting ready to add in the second ball of yarn.  I haven't tried on the first one since it's been blocked, but I think they're going to need a bit of elastic woven in around the ribbing to reliably keep them up, so a little trip to the sewing shop around the corner will be on my to-do list soon.  Actually I'm debating between an invisible elastic thread that I could weave in vs just sewing a half inch elastic band to the inside.  I think the latter might be more effective, but I'm afraid it might show too much.  Any thoughts? 

My house is not a fortress...

I've got critter problems. The previous owners of the house had mentioned something about raccoons in a very offhanded way when I bought the house, but I didn't think about them again until a few weeks ago. I woke up in the middle of the night to hear my cat howling at something in the next room. Then I heard a tap, tap, tap, on the kitty door that exits to the back of the house through that room. I fumbled for my glasses and stumbled into the room, but nothing was there. I started to head back to bed when I heard the same tap, tap, tap, now at the kitty door in the kitchen. I got there and turned the light on just in time to see a bushy tail exiting through the door. It was a little freaky, to say the least, but didn't leap up my priority list of things to do until this week.

Yesterday morning they came back.

My house alarm went off at 4:30 announcing there had been a glass break. I heard no glass, so I cautiously got up to investigate, and indeed found everything OK. Until I got to cat door #1, that is, which was swinging in the breeze, with no cat anywhere to be found. I went back to bed, listening for any other noises, but heard none. When I got up and started to make my breakfast I saw cat door #2 propped open, so I'm certain they'd been inside again. UGH. "Raccoons make nice pets," someone has said to me, but I think not. Just coincidentally, I looked up "raccoon" in the dictionary to make sure it had 2 c's (didn't look right to me for some reason), and the entry just before "raccoon" was "rabies," which they happen to carry with high frequency. So today I'm meeting with a pest contol guy who has to inspect my house to determine the ports of entry (duh...) and then we'll start trapping. For the low-low price of $325 he'll cart away as many animals as we can trap in a 2 week period.

Anyway, knitting. I've had busy evenings the past two nights, but there has been some growth on the tree skirt, and although the back of it is a nightmare of ends, I think it's not looking half bad from the front. I'm going to try to go back and tighten up some of the stitches once I've detached more of the yarn, but I'm fairly pleased so far. And you may have noticed a little GKC (gratuitous knitting content) in one of the above pictures. That's the first of my over the knee stockings from Handknit Holidays, blocking. The second one has been cast on, but that's it. Perhaps I'll get a little farther on it today and over the weekend.

2FO's

It's nice to know that there are a few folks still sticking around.  Thanks for the comments.  We had a beautiful weekend, and I was able to get a few shots of my finished projects in the warm sunshine.

Here is my finished and blocked Charlotte.  It was a great pattern, fun to knit, and quite cozy!  For those (few) who don't know this pattern intimately, this is the Charlotte's Web Shawl, made with 5 different skeins of Koigu KPPPM.  I actually bought a 6th skein just like the 5th one used so that the crocheted edging would match that last section of knitting (and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have had enough of that skein left to do it).  I knit her up on US 6 Addi Turbos. The pattern stitch was complex enough to keep the knitting interesting, but easy enough that I could memorize the repeat after a few repeats had been done.   She's been perfect for my chilly evenings inside the house.  As has been mentioned before elsewhere, the transformation she makes with blocking is really pretty amazing.  Charlotte on the needles is a shriveled little mass, and it's hard to imagine what the finished product will look like.  However, once she's been blocked and is allowed to spread her wings, she's really gorgeous.  Me likey.

And Rogue is the other knit that's finally been all put together.  The ends are even all woven in.  Again, this is a pattern that's been all around blogland so I don't feel compelled to talk about it too much.  I knit it using Claudia's zipped cardigan modification.  The zipper was matched to my yarn at ZipperStop in NY.  The yarn I used was Jo Sharp Aran Tweed in the color Saltbush.  I'm just echoing what has been said elsewhere, but this was so fun and fast to knit up, and the pattern was very well written.  I'm almost considering making more of these as gifts.  You can click for the side view that shows off the hood and side cables. 

So there they are.  I'll update my sidebar soon, when I'm at home, and my recent return to knitting schizophrenia will become evident.  I can say that the Christmas tree skirt is showing some good progress, but as predicted is going pretty slowly by my standards.  My goal is just to give it some time each night.  With all the yarn mess that's attached to it, it's definitely not a project that goes beyond my coffee table.  I'll get some photos of it up again soon. 

Back again

I know I've been very erratic in my posting lately, and I actually feel a little sheepish about blogging today, like I have no right to think that anyone is still around to read what I've got to say here.  I've actually missed blogging and really want to get back into a routine with it.  My biggest issue has been getting good pictures.  Work keeps me busy enough now that I'm rarely home during daylight hours, and I rarely like the photos I take indoors with flash.  Enough with the excuses!  I know that at least my mother wants to see what I've been up to with my knitting lately.

When I saw the intarsia Christmas tree skirt in Handknit Holidays I knew it was going to be a must-knit for me.  So that's a whole lotta Manos that I needed to track down.  Did you know that you cannot buy Manos del Uruguay anywhere in Charlotte?  I found that very hard to believe, but came up totally empty handed after calling the 5 shops that I know about here.  So the search broadened, and I came home with a bunch from Nina in Chicago, called up Earth Guild in Asheville and found more there (the best deal that I found by far, especially when you need a lot... the more you buy, the bigger the discount gets), and got the last few skeins from Purl in NYC.  So now I've got a happy and full basket o' Manos .

So of course when the last bit arrived at my door, I had to cast on immediately.  This is the start of the skirt, and I've just reached the point where the intarsia will begin. This is knit in 4 quadrants that are all the same.  It might make me totally crazy, we'll just have to see.  Before I started, my attitude was all, "intarsia... I've done that before.  No prob!"  And now I'm a little like, "huh, yeah, that last thing I did was just colorblocks and everything was all straight and square.  This?  not so much!"  We'll see.  It would be great to have it done by the time my tree goes up, but it may be more realistic to finish before the tree comes down again.

I've also whipped up a little neck warmer based on one I saw a Talbot's in Chicago.  (Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be picured anywhere on their website.)  It's basically a knitted tube with a pompom at each end.  At the first end the pompom is attached so that a buttonhole is formed.  On the original the other end was gathered and attached, but I did a couple rounds of decreases, like the toe of a sock, and then kitchenered the two sides together before attaching the pompom.  Then the idea is that you just stick the one pompom through the buttonhole, and voila!  Fun, cozy, neck-warmy thing!  I love it.

Rogue is done, as is the Charlotte shawl, and I'm just looking for time to photograph them, which I hope to do this weekend.  I went ahead and blocked Charlotte without the Zonta wires, which is just as well, because I've found out since that they've been discontinued.  That might explain why the check I sent hadn't been cashed for three weeks.  And I've got 4 other new things on the needles as well, but those will have to wait for another day for their reveal.

Zipped Up

Life has been busy here, but in a good way. Work has been picking up and so my days have felt a little fuller. Accordingly, my knitting has slowed down a little, although I have been hit with a touch of the startitis that's been going around. (Is there a vaccine for that?) I'm still plugging away at the same things I've been working on, but have added a few new things as well.

A couple of weekends ago I sent off a swatch of the yarn I'm using for Rogue to ZipperStop so that they could pick out the most coordinating color for my zipper, and it had arrived after I got home from a conference in Chicago. This is my very first zipper, and I'm pretty please with how it all turned out. I know, the photo doesn't show off the zipper all that well, so you can click here to see a detail of the zipper at the throat. Looking at the photo on the left though, I'm thinking that Rogue would make a mighty fine vest. Maybe with a little more of the applied i-cord around the armholes, no? Not to worry, the sleeves for this Rogue have been knitted and blocked, and they'll get sewn on soon, but it's an interesting thought. Anyway, I remembered having seen several discussions about sewing a zipper into your knitting, and ultimately referred to Stephannie's photos from her adventures with her Eris, which was mighty helpful.