KnitMe

One per person

Emily and I each have one sock. Does that constitute a pair of socks??

(That, by the way, is Emily's first photograph taken for this blog. She proceeded to photograph cats for awhile.)

My sock is the Jaywalker sock in Lisa's Emerald City Sock! and Emily's is a plain old sock in old Patons Kroy. I had a whole bunch of this yarn, bought on sale at a discounter. I later sold it all off except for two balls because I knew Emily would love the color. I think I can see why it was at the discounter - it's not like any other Kroy I've ever laid hands on, and the ball band has what has to be a mistake on it. The yarn is thin, splitty, and has no body whatsoever - I'm hoping it will firm up after a machine wash, but I have no clue how well it will wear. Luckily little feet will outgrow it before it wears out. Also, the ball band says 8 spi on a 3mm needle. ??? This yarn knit on a size 3 needle would look like lace. I'm using a size 1 and thinking it'd be better on a size 0. A very peculiar little yarn for sure.

Speaking of peculiar yarn, I knitted myself the 'Fetching' fingerless mitts from the summer issue of knitty. They use one ball of Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran, the pilling champion - I had a few balls left from a sweater I once knitted. The sweater is a mass of pills but these mitts are knitted at a much tighter gauge and it seems to improve the yarn. They are cozy and comfortable and it's amazing how much warmer they make me feel at night when the house is cold.

The pattern says you will finish with less than a yard of yarn. I finished with two yards but I think it's because I made a couple of modifications to the pattern. I didn't want the top to flare around the fingers, so I decreased behind the center cable on each needle when doing the cable row at the knuckles. Instead of knitting the two stitches that twist behind, I knitted them together. This is a trick I learned from knitting Eris - she hides lots of increases and decreases behind cable twists in a clever way. Also, I didn't do the 'picot' bindoff, partly because I couldn't quite figure out how to execute it ahd my hands were cold! It seemed like it would add width there too, and I didn't want that, so I just bound off. If I had done the pattern exactly as written I probably would have had to break into another ball. But it was easy - only about 4 hours of knitting, and I have been wearing them every night.

I plyed two more skeins of my brown bluefaced leicester. These are about 3 1/2 ounces and 180 yards each. I still have a ton to go, so I will have a very usable batch of aran-weight yarn.

I was eyeing the 'Pewter Coat' from the winter issue of Interweave for this yarn, as it's exactly the shape I'm looking for (sort of a swing coat) - but I am very put off by how she achieves her shaping. She starts knitting at the bottom on size 8 needles, changes to size 7 at the hips and size 6 at the waist, back to size 7 at the chest... The sleeves begin on size 8 and go to size 9. Now how can it be that the yarn will make just as nice a fabric and show the patterning just as well on 4mm needles as on 6mm?? The answer, to me, is that it won't, and therefore I won't knit the pattern. The yarn she uses is 85% cashmere (rob a bank, anyone?), I don't know if that yarn would be more likely to perform the required miracle than ordinary wool. I would honestly prefer that designers do a little more work and make something that has real shaping.

I also made a lot of progress on the Marseilles pullover (Interweave, summer 2006).

I am really enjoying knitting this pattern and working with this yarn (WEBS Lenox). Very very pleasant to the touch. I want to have this one to wear around the house come January.

Meet the New Addition

I succumbed to the siren call of the Forrester spindles with ony the slightest nudge from Kerry, an enabler of the first degree. It was a birthday gift from my sweetie. It's a Linum Lace Fancy in pink ivory witha sapele shaft, weighing 29.2 g., or a hair over an ounce. This tiny work of art was purchased from Gemini Fibres

There has been some knitting going on around here too. That's Fern beneath the spindle. The back is finished and the fronts are all but done. I just finished a pair of stealth knitting socks, pictures to follow when they're not hush-hush any more. They're glam socks in Socks that Rock with beads, ooh la la!

I have wanted to knit Hello Yarn's Irish Hiking Scarf for a while now, and I had 370 yards of handspun alpaca/silk in the stash. It spun up light and lofty and buttery soft. The scarf requires about 350 yards, but when I thought the scarf was long enough there was still a fair bit of yarn left. So I cast on for the gauntlets/wrist warmers. Instead of knitting a thumb gusset, I worked back and forth between two cable twists, leaving a hole for the thumb. The resulting tubes can be worn either as gauntlets or as wrist warmers.

I purchased a Grafton batt at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival this year. I can't recall what the wool breed is, but it sure is pretty. I pulled the batt into strips and spun them as they came, with no attempt to control colour placement. The finished two ply is about sports weight. No plans for this yet.

I recently got an E-Flyer, E-Hook and some Baby Bobbins for my Little Gem 2. They make that baby hum. You can ckeck out the specs on the Majacraft site. The smaller flyer and bobbins, and the ceramic inserts in the yarn guide and the orifice really make a difference.

That's some of Lisa Souza's superfine merino in the Wild Things colourway on the bobbin. I had a 4 oz. bump that looked like this:

This is it all plyed up. It's about 400 yards of fingering weight yarn. I think it will become a mistake rib scarf in the near future.

Just when you think things will calm down...

Things aren't slowing down around here even though the angst and activity of the election are over. I got promoted at work, which means I'm going to have to work more and blog (maybe) less...

I hope I won't be knitting any less, though.

I finished Venus.

I'm really happy with the way it came out. It's light as a feather - the whole thing doesn't weigh anywhere near 16 ounces. Knitting with 2 balls of yarn helped mask the variations in grist and give it a slightly nubbly texture. It's hard to see in the photo but the pattern is argyle worked in knits and purls. Here are a couple of closeups for folks who like this sort of thing.

The whole thing is incredibly elastic as you'd expect from cormo wool and it fits quite well. The pattern was probably intended to have a snugger fit, but this is about as snug as I want it especially in wool.

This took me two months and I was very dedicated. Other things didn't really get done once this started to roll.

The Jaywalker sock has a heel now, but I neglected it a little to work on socks for Emily. I have one done. It's just plain blue, so a photo won't be useful until they're on her little feet.

I did work on my stealth Christmas project for her, though.

This is the Northern Sun mitten from Knitpicks. The pattern is very difficult to find on their site and even once you find it, it doesn't tell you which colors of Palette are used in the sample - it assumes you want to color your own I suppose. I went back to an old catalog to find out which colors to order. (In case you are wondering, they are Blue, Pool, Bark, Red, Orange, Apricot, and Peach. The pattern has an error and calls for Fawn instead of Bark which makes a huge difference and not a nice one either.) When I saw the big bag of 50 gram balls of yarn I realized I could do more with it than just make mittens for myself, so I sat down with graph paper and pencils and downsized the pattern by about 30%. It looks like it will be a bit big for her now but fit for 2 years - of course I can't try it on her. We'll see. It doesn't look too small does it?

The yarn is very good for this application. It makes a nice firm fabric on size 1 needles and has a smooth surface. I think it would felt in a heartbeat, so these aren't mittens for throwing snowballs with. I'm happy with how these are coming out and will make mine after I finish hers. They go pretty quickly even at this gauge.

Now that I'm finally finished with Venus, I started something else. I hate this tendency to start whatever is the most recent item in the door, but I keep doing it anyway and I'm sure everyone else does too. This is the 'Marseilles' pullover from the summer issue of Interweave.

The yarn is Lenox by WEBS - 60% baby alpaca and 40% merino (maybe a little cashmere thrown in - it was suppose to be 60/30/10 but when they received it back, the amount of cashmere was inconsistent so they priced it down a little and took the cashmere off the label). It is very yummy - I laid hands on it at Stitches last weekend and had to have some.

I swatched on size 7 needles although the label says 4spi on size 9 - because that just seemed too loose for alpaca. The yarn is puffier in hand than it looks in the ball, but it made a lovely fabric on size 7 needles and I got gauge for the pattern. Don't tell anybody, but I BLOCKED MY SWATCH. The pattern specifically said to measure the gauge after blocking and in this case (1x4 ribbing) I could understand why. It definitely relaxed horizontally in blocking, right out to the specified gauge, so I was happy I did. Then I decided to live dangerously, a la Stephanie: I switched from rosewood needles to my nice shiny pointy Knitpicks needles. If anything, I will knit looser with the metal needles, so I think it will work out fine in the end.

This will be a cuddly sweater to wear on cold evenings in the winter. I was puzzling over the name of the pattern and the descriptive text in the magazine. The idea of Marseilles appealed to me, it's a city I would love to visit, but the text said the diamonds within diamonds were based on the idea of formal gardens. That isn't an idea I associate with Marseilles. Maybe something got lost in the transmission and she meant 'Versailles'??

I got a nice little package in the mail the other day from Rosemary:

Isn't it adorable?

In Stitches; and, A New Look

I have no knitting or spinning content today. I have people content and that is better.

But first: Yes, you are in the right place. Pink Tea has changed its name. Although we have called it the same thing for three years, the person who named it is long gone from the group that maintains it, and we decided that we would like it to be called something we picked ourselves. So: Say hello to KnitMe. A snip from the A.E. Housman poem that provided the name is floated over the pretty banner photo.

We're not going to change the URL for awhile, so you will be able to find us at the same location. Finding and notifying all the people who link to us is a big effort and I would be bound to miss someone. We'll decide at some point in the future if we want to migrate ourselves entirely to have a new URL. If you link to us, and you think we are not likely to be aware of that, please leave a comment for our future reference.

Thanks to Mary, whose 'Mostly Dogs' photo gallery is linked in the sidebar, for the beautiful redesign.

Now on to the people news.

Stitches East happened this past weekend at the Baltimore Convention Center, and our good friends Lisa and Sheila came to vend there for the first time. Of course we had to go visit them. Emily and I and Liz and Robyn and Catherine got to the Market about 12:30. Lisa's booth looked like this:

It pretty much looked like this all day. We did get a chance to slip in and visit a couple of times, but Lisa and Rod were doing a brisk business in all her beautiful stuff. I decided I was too overwhelmed to pick anything, and I'll place an order sometime soon online. The alpaca/silk and the merino/angora really are as nice as you would expect them to be. An interesting thing I learned was how differently they take dye than the sock yarn and merino fiber that Lisa has dyed for a long time - the same colorway looked entirely different on Sock than it did on alpaca/silk.

Sheila had a slightly bigger booth space, so it was easier to get in and visit with her.

She had good lighting to show off all her beautiful buttons and needles and hooks, and she seemed to be selling quite a few of those glass circular needles.

While wandering through the Market I ran across a display of Rosemary's shawl pins at the Black Water Abbey booth.

Blue Moon Fiber Arts had Denise's new line of yarn-related greeting cards, but I couldn't get a clear shot at their booth, what with people grabbing Socks That Rock left and right. (There weren't many skeins left by Saturday afternoon and they were all in ho-hum colors I can't wear.)

Emily and I hung in there till closing time so we could go to dinner with the distinguished guests. By 5:30 it had gotten quieter in the place and there was time for Lisa to wander away from her post.

Melissa was there too, her booth backed right up to Lisa's, but when I went back to take her picture and buy Emily a sheep puppet, she had gone shopping.

Part way through the afternoon I was informed of XRX's strict no-photography policy. Apparently if I had been caught taking any of these photos I could have been ejected from the site and barred from returning. I suppose if my friends being photographed had leaped to my defense and said they had consented, I might have gotten a reprieve. Is theft of knitting designs by lurking Stitches attendees with cameras REALLY comparable to photographing military or nuclear sites in foreign dictatorships?

We moved ourselves to an Indian restaurant in Federal Hill to eat dinner. Emily became fast friends with Sheila's friend Trish.

On the right hand side you see the Queenie Sisters, Faylene in the back with the orange t-shirt (the woman with the New York accent who lives and North Carolina) and Ellen on the end of the table (the woman with the North Carolina accent who lives in New York). They were attending Stitches and taking classes, but joined up with us at the end of the day.

Although the service was lackadaisical, the food was great and a good time was had by all.

I did, indeed, buy a couple of things. I tried very hard to be good.

Wrapped around the pile is a hank of fingering weight superwash merino from Tess Yarns. I kept walking by this and walking by this and walking by this, and finally went back to it although I had already bought sock yarn, because I couldn't keep away from it. It is 660 yards and should make a nice big Flower Basket or other type of shawl. There were three hanks in the dyelot and I wish I could have justified buying them all. I suppose I could send this picture to them and say - are the other two still left???

In the center are two hanks of sock yarn also from Tess. One is very similar in colors to the big hank, and the other one (green and violet) seems to be a duplicate of one I bought at this year's Maryland Sheep and Wool festival. I must really like it.

At the bottom is a hank of sock yarn from Sheila's friend Pat Fly - it is dark green and dark violet, and instantly made me think of african violets. It was the first thing I bought.

I also ordered a bag of the new Lenox yarn from WEBS, which is merino and alpaca and knits up at 4 - 4.5 stitches per inch - the WEBS yarns are really lovely (I was not crazy about Berkshire, but Deerfield and Lenox and Amherst in particular are very very nice). I wanted a full bag in this nice dark red, and all that remained was a bag that had had one skein removed from it. I am not sure what I want to do with it but the shade of red was really attractive.

I didn't buy any of Erin's dyed top because I had already done that the week before.

Erin comes to our local spinning group and dyed this merino/tencel in a shimmery dark silver shade she calls Platinum. Her stuff was to be found in the Cloverhill booth but I just waved and went by because I already had mine.

So we came home tired but happy. I think Lisa is planning to come back next year - she said she was leaving all her wire basket bins at Jen's mom's house...