KnitMe

It isn't yarn anymore

That is my odd sentiment on finishing the Gathered Pullover with my handspun bluefaced leicester. It isn't pretty skeins anymore.

Of course, I made a couple of changes. I raised the neckline and made it narrower - I saw a photo somewhere of someone wearing her Gathered Pullover over a blouse and it was totally falling off her shoulders, it really didn't look all that nice, so I wanted to avoid that. I also knitted the sleeves top-down, as I described the other week. The shoulders fit well. I knitted too long before starting to do decreases, so from certain angles the shape of the sleeves is a little funny, but they won't bind on my elbows and upper arms and that was my biggest concern. They came out about bracelet length which is fine with me.

The most important thing for me was to be sure that the center of the cable motif, and the decreases that went with it, fell at the right location. I think if I had followed the vertical dimensions of the pattern, they would have fallen too high and just looked goofy on me. So I tried to be sure that I placed them just below the bustline so they would cinch in the right place like a Georgian empire waist. I came pretty close.

When I was done I had this much yarn left.

I was VERY fond of this yarn. Here's a reminder.

Sigh. Yarn is like the ball at the top of the hill - so much potential energy. A knitted object is like the ball at the bottom of the hill - the only thing you can do to get its potential energy back is push it up the hill (i.e. frog it).

OK enough of the tortured analogy. I finished my blue socks too.

They came out great. I've started the 'master Riverbed' pattern from the same book, I'm just at the point where I'm rearranging all the stitches to make the heel. Once I've turned the heel I will know if my master numbers math was right or if I need to frog the whole thing and try again. Rolling the ball up the hill...

Better never than late

Dyeing experiments, that is. But we'll get to that later.

Here is the indigo dyed bluefaced leicester I spun up last weekend.

I am pretty pleased with how it came out. I think I underplyed it a little but it 's not too bad. It's somewhere between 275 and 300 yards, and 2 ounces. I have no idea what to do with it, I just like looking at it.

I finished off one of my Bartholomew's Tantalizing Socks and am down to the foot of the second one.

I am still enjoying the architecture of these and I can't wait to see how they fit when I actually put the pair on and stand up. Then I want to try a different architecture. Of course, we won't be needing wool socks for awhile, but with all the lovely yarn I have, I have got to keep knitting them, now don't I?

I finally gave in and bought some Knitpicks Cotlin to make some hand towels. Of all the ones I saw on Ravelry, this 'Moss Grid' towel from Mason-Dixon Knitting was the one I thought looked the nicest. Lucky for me, my library has that book.

The design turns out not to be reversible, but maybe I can invent a variation that would be reversible.

By the way - is moss stitch the same as seed stitch? Because to me, this towel is all about seed stitch....

For awhile I have had a bee in my bonnet about this photo, taken by Lisa Souza in New Zealand a few years ago.

I wanted it in yarn, dammit. That blue sky, that slate-grey sand, that coke-bottle colored water. (I realize that nobody under a certain age would have any idea why I call that color 'coke bottle'. Sigh.) So I decided to try. I bought a cheap skein of undyed sock yarn (good thing I opted for the cheap stuff...), selected some colors of Cushing dye (dark grey, sky blue, and I chose jade green and aqualon blue to try to mix up that water color). I wrapped strips of plastic around the skein where I wanted there to be white clouds in the blue sky. I was so smart. But, feh.

There was too much dye in the solution so the green and grey are too dark. I didn't put enough blue into the mix for the water so it's bright green. I made the blue sections too short. Phooey. This looks like nothing.

LIFO

This is NOT me spinning from stash - I sat right down this weekend and spun the indigo-dyed bluefaced leicester from A Verb for Keeping Warm that I bought last weekend.

It spun beautifully and I tried to keep it very fine so I will have some yardage out of my two ounces. I love rolling out a piece of fiber and being able to see the shape of the fleece's crimp reflected in it. I'll get it plyed next weekend and see how much yardage I eked out.

I finished the body of my Gathered Pullover and started a sleeve. I am adapting this to have the sleeve knitted from the shoulder down to maximize my remaining yardage. Basically this is how I did it, with tips from Liz and from Barbara Walker's top-down knitting book.

According to Barbara Walker, the number of stitches you need around your upper arm, as per your yarn and gauge, is how many stitches you need around the armhole. When you actually execute this move, that concept makes perfect sense. I figured I wanted my sleeve a little looser than the pattern suggested (tight sleeves seem to be a trend these days, I guess real women don't have biceps...), so I measured my upper arm and gave myself some ease and calculated a number of stitches. In my case it was 75. Then I subtracted from that number the number bound off at the base of the armholes (in my case, 5 on the front and 5 on the back). That left 65 stitches. Since it was odd, I allowed one stitch to be exactly in the shoulder seam, and that left 32 stitches on each side.

Beginning at the shoulder seam, I picked up one stitch in the seam, 32 down the side, 10 across the two bound-off places, and 32 back up the other side. I placed a marker and joined. The pattern had 11 stitches bound off at the top of the sleeve cap, so I knit the center stitch, plus 5 stitches, plus one more. I turned, slipped the picked up stitch with a twist, knitted back to the marker, knit 5 down the other side, plus one more. I turned and slipped the picked up stitch, and then continued to knit back and forth across the top of the sleeve, taking one more of my picked up stitches at the end of each row. After awhile I removed the shoulder marker and held it out so I could put it at the underarm center when I joined to knit in the round.

After I got a couple of inches below the armhole I tried it on, and it fit perfectly. I have to say, this is turning out to be a remarkably pretty sweater even with all the changes I'm making. It looks funny in the photo, with the dark green mysteriously being introduced into the yarn just when it will really stand out in wider stripes above the armholes, and the neckline seeming high and pinched, but when I put it on it looks great. The important thing for me was to not start the armholes too soon - the row with the most cable twists also has decreases in it, to cinch it up a little like an empire waistline, followed by increases to put the stitches back in the following row, and it is REALLY important to have that fall below your bustline or the thing will be perpetually pulled out of shape. This pattern really is designed for very flat chested women, so if you are not flat chested you need to be certain to keep checking what you are doing as you go along.

I finished my first 'Tantalizing Sock' from Cat Bordhi's New Pathways book. In this photo I'm closing in on the toe.

I love how this sock fits, but you do have to be sure to knit a little longer in the foot than you might otherwise. The use of the reinforced heel stitch on the bottom of the heel makes the bottom of the sock a little shorter than the top, so you have to compensate for that or end up with a sock that is too tight. I don't know if I'd do a reinforced heel if I were doing it again. It makes the bottom hug your foot but it does introduce length issues.

Overload

This:

and this:

and this:

are mine.

Whee! I was pretty thrilled. Bee Fields was in the shawls, scarves, and afghans from commercial yarns category, the white cormo 3-ply was in the medium plyed yarn from hand-prepared wool category, and the rainbow silk/merino was in the plyed yarn from commercial fiber category.

Emmy was delighted too and she kept making me tell people all day.

I was so befuddled by this that I neglected to take photos of some of the other lovely things in the competition exhibit - the fair isle cardigan in shades of purple that won best in show, the circular lace shawl that won best knitted item in show, or the beautiful laceweight that won a blue ribbon.

(UPDATE: Here is link to a photo of the best-in-show cardigan.)

I neglected to take photos of a lot of things. This was the first year that Emily was with me on the hoof and she was content to be there pretty much all day, so we looked at sheep dogs working and we watched sheep judging. She ate cotton candy while I looked at fleece.

My shopping goals were very small and I met them.

I visited my LYS, which is under new ownership and this year took a focus on indie dyers for the festival. They had all the stuff you hear about all the time and don't get to see in person - Sweet Sheep, A Verb for Keeping Warm, Ceyberfiber, Neighborhood Fiber.... So I bought things from them.

On top, two ounces of indigo-dyed bluefaced leicester from A Verb for Keeping Warm. In the middle, a skein of sock yarn from The Sweet Sheep in a colorway called Surf, which made me think of the colors of snoballs. At the bottom, a skein of sock yarn from the Neighborhood Fiber Company - they name their colorways after neighborhoods in Washington DC and the one I happened to pick up was called 'Mount Pleasant' which is a neighborhood I lived in once upon a time. Cheers to Jolene and Jody for putting together an extremely appealing booth!

We were at the Ravelry meetup for 15 minutes, and met Jess and Casey coming in as we were running out to make a dash to swimming class - Emily actually pushed me to return, so we came back in the afternoon and got into the t-shirt line which was much shorter. While standing there, I saw there was no longer a line at The Fold to pay for Socks That Rock, so I made a dash to see if they had any skeins left of the colorway I had fallen in love with the first time I saw it, and they did. Rock Star:

We paid a second visit to the fleeces and this time I noticed a little bag stuck back in the corner among all the brazillion Romneys and Lincolns and Border Leicesters - the label said 'CVM X' which was enough to get me to open the bag having just recently spun 8 ounces of nice CVM.

The fleece was very interesting - a bigger crimp than I expected from CVM and not as soft, with a little luster and very white outside of the dirty tips, and a nice healthy staple of about 4 inches. Inside the bag was this:

A washed lock, a spun sample, a photo of the sheep, and more about her. Arianna is 4 years old, her mother was a CVM ewe and her father was a bluefaced leicester/coopworth cross ram. Interesting! The shepherd felt there were too many second cuts in the fleece so she had priced it down. I took it out and a volunteer rolled it out for me and looked it over and she said that it could not have been skirted better and that she didn't see many second cuts. Arianna was $35 for 5 pounds, so she came home with me. Well, actually, she only came with me as far as the Zeilinger's dropoff tent, and I will see her again sometime about July 1. The guy taking the fleeces said this was one of the more interesting things he had seen come in. I think it will have a crisp hand, sort of like a medium corriedale, and would make a good jacket, and maybe a bit of nice firm-bodied laceweight.

Bumper sticker of the day:

I would have a runner up bumper sticker of the day but I was trying to take a photo of it while following the car up the on ramp of route 70 which didn't work out so well. To the people in the little silver car with the Louet box in the back and the "Make gloves, not war" bumper sticker - sorry if I freaked you out, but I liked your bumper sticker...

There was knitting done over the past two weeks. I finished the Marilinda socks in the middle of last week.

The Classic Elite Alpaca Sox makes a very warm soft sock that will not get worn until cool weather. The pattern is lovely. I added one pattern repeat to the leg, which meant that I was off ever after on which row had the little fake cable motif, but it was easy to keep track.

I made one pair of Fetching mitts for teacher gifts and started on another.

I got up past the motif on the front of the Gathered Pullover and then divided fronts from back. I will raise the neckline a little as it is just too low for me, and also not open it so wide. I saw a photo on someone's blog of a person wearing this and I felt bad for her - it was beautifully knitted but the shoulders were just too wide and it was falling down awkwardly and looking uncomfortable. I won't take that risk.

I think I will try knitting the sleeves top-down to be sure I have enough yarn. I have never changed a set-in sleeve to be knit top down, this will be an adventure.

I also made a little hand towel out of a stray ball of Knit Picks Cotlin.

Wow, I loved this yarn. Especially after it came out of the washer and dryer. It did shrink up just a small amount, but it plumped up and got soft, instead of hard like regular cotton does. I have to make a summer sweater out of this.

At the end of the weekend, after all was said and done, we had this:

"Teach me to knit." Maybe soon we will have the other sweetest four words in the world: "Ssssh Mom I'm counting!"