My Life is Baby Projects

Jeez, where do I start? Well, I guess that one of the reasons I haven't posted any of my projects in half a year is that my life is currently baby patterns, and for awhile I couldn't even talk about it.

I was merrily carrying along up to the end of last year working on things like the sweater pattern I swore I'd create and the sky shawl when one of my sisters announced she was pregnant.  In my family's house, that goes quickly from 'yay!' to 'oh, shit now I need to buy yarn and make stuff!'

Well, maybe that was just me.  But other members of my family are also making stuff.

Anyway, so for the past 6-8 months or so, almost all of my projects have been baby stuff.  I made this sweater:

I have to credit the woman who works at the button section of the notions store I go to.  I'll be looking at something that would work, and then she'll come up with completely different buttons that work perfectly.

and a matching hat and booties:

and then started this blanket (haven't finished it yet, though):

and then got this out of the way:

and then started another, cooler weather sweater, for which I have no picture yet.

We're not going to talk about the amount of yarn I bought for this (more than I've used, certainly). I always get into this 'I can make all the things!' mode when it comes to special things like having an excuse to make really nice baby items (since this is my niece).  However, it turns out that, no, when you work full time and go to school part time and have to do things like keep up with an apartment and get distracted by my fiance and my attention-whore of a cat:

Who then proceeded to attack the sweater.  He's already claimed the extra, wrong-sized, baby bootie.

, let alone all the scheming and planning I've done for various things, one being the baby shower, you in fact cannot make all the things.  I can barely make the baby stuff; I haven't even touched the other projects in months, and I'm still in the middle of it.

My niece is due next month.  Oops.

For What it's Worth

While, given it's a week into February, that my hopes for getting a new pattern out around New Year's are dashed, I am working on one.  Here's a hint:

One of the reasons I have no pattern still is simply because I keep changing my mind.  I keep changing my mind partly because I keep trying things out and they don't work.  Or I don't like them.  Or it's too small, too big, wrong yarn, etc, etc. It isn't helping that I only did one swatch, and it was small.

This is what happens when you think you can knock out a 'simple' item of your own design without doing much pre-planning, out of scrap yarn.  I should have known it doesn't work that way. Now, it doesn't help that I haven't had much time for knitting recently, let alone calculating things officially in a spreadsheet.  Spreadsheets require hours in front of the computer working on them.  I can knit on the subway,  the bus, and wherever I may be at the moment. Might have contributed to my throw-it-to-the-wind half-ass planning, that did.

Anyway, it seems to be working now.  Hopefully.  Though I can't promise when it'll be written up and out, or if I'll be more than one size,  I can promise that I'll release it for free.

I actually thought about that for a bit, even though this pattern is pretty simple and in the end I decided that it'd only be worth between $0.50 and a dollar, which means it doesn't pay to get it tech edited.  And I won't sell a pattern that hasn't been tech edited, because that's not respectful of my users.  If it's free, well, I try to make sure there's no errors, but that's the trade off for getting a free pattern.

However, it does have a different aspect to it, which is why I paused at first.  Even something as simple as this takes a good amount of planning and some time investment.  This is something I have very little of at the moment.  And since my last pattern was put for sale, there's the aspect of going legit on top of it.  Where's the line between free and not?  Should I give my efforts away like that, after I've said they're worth something?

But then I realize, who am I kidding, I ain't a professional in this nor do I want to be.  So, free pattern. At some point.

I did also get this done:

Pattern is Flame Hat by Irina Dmitrieva.  I did the beret version.

Yay, shiny cable hat.  It's a little big, but it stays on my head, covers my ears, and is warm enough. Now what to do with the other skein of that yarn...

Here We Go Again

For one of the few projects I'm currently working on, I'm making a baby sweater for one of my cousins.  Par for the course; I usually have at least one cousin who has a baby per year.  Gives me an excuse to make baby stuff again.

However, this time I decided that I should use some of the baby yarn I currently have in my stash, the majority of which is three mostly full skeins of some baby acrylic I bought for a blanket, all in different colors.  That shouldn't be a problem; if I use one of the other colors as an accent color I should have plenty of yarn for a sweater and...

Yep, I'm almost out of yarn.  And I still have another sleeve and the trim to do.  And the only reason I don't have less than that is that I realized that I was running low on yarn about four rows away from starting the striping sequence you see at the bottom of the sweater there, and therefore deciding to start it early and then make up the length using the other color.

That may not be enough, though.  I may have to rip out at least part of the other sleeve, and do some more hacking of the pattern to get them to match.  But right now I'm just carrying on as normal, hoping that the ball doesn't run out.

On the other hand, there are good endings to some things:

While I can't say she wore the shawl for that long, my sister did put it on at her wedding and show it off to some of the guests.  Good enough.

The Scrap Project Paradox and The Law Of More Yarn Required

After finishing the lovely but long and complex shawl, I was trying to be good and go back to the stupid scrap project I've been working on for far too long (try two and a half years):

To remind everyone (though I've mentioned this project before), this is a simple log cabin squares put into a small blanket project that I started to get rid of all the Simply Soft I had laying around.  I've been working on it on and off, but during the Olympics I made a effort to get all the squares done and sewn up, which I accomplished.  I, however, only started the border before dropping it to do the shawl.  Priorities, priorities.

Anyway, this, of course, has gone the way of every scrap project, which is it fell for the Law of More Yarn Required.  The Law of More Yarn Required states that if you do something trying to use up random not full skeins of yarn, such as undertaking a scrap project, you will need more yarn to complete it than you have in your stash.  It isn't the worse thing in the world if you use all that extra yarn, but this goes hand-in-hand with the Scrap Project Paradox, which is any scrap project doesn't actually use up your scrap yarn.  It may change the dynamic or amount of such, but it never will use up all the scrap yarn.  You will always have some left.

Trying to avoid that for my scrap project, when I started the border I planned out the design so that I would use more of the yarn I had more of while still maintaining some semblance of a design.  I would not fall for this rule...and yeah:

I made the black sections way too big, and ran out of black yarn on the last side I had to do (I'm also log-cabining the border). Ten more rows of black I don't have the yarn for, nowhere, not even in my stash (for obvious reasons the half-skein of black wool I still have would not work, unfortunately).  So now I need more yarn for the scrap project I was doing to get rid of yarn. Sigh.

Not that I wasn't falling for this law even without the black yarn shortage (though, to be far, less yarn than I started with):

Best laid plans of mice and men and all that.  Next time I may do the whole thing properly; that is, weight the damn yarn and see how much area I can cover with it.  Maybe then I'll actually defeat the Law and the Paradox...or at least I can dream, right?

Problems with Vinegar Baths and a Resultion to Ribbing Woes

Ok, so I decided to still do the 1x1 ribbing on the bust of my Milk Maiden sweater:

To keep it tighter, I kept all the stitches I either knitted or purled on the tip of the right hand needle until I did the next one.  It seems to be working as good as the examples of other peoples' work I looked at.

On the other hand, I was helping my mom block a shawl she crocheted today (yay corporate holidays).  I ended up doing most of the work because the yarn she used, Madelinetosh's Tosh Light, bleeds oh so very much, and I dealt with the same problem with my Tosh Light shawl.  Now, for my shawl, I stopped the bleeding with two vinegar washes.  Hers...well, it was still bleeding after soaking it in three vinegar baths.  I just gave up and told her to tell the giftee that if they wash it, not to wash it with anything else.  It at least wasn't as bad as it had been.

Now, from my research, I know that vinegar is supposed to be the best way to stop bleeding yarn.  So I don't get what I'm doing wrong.  Am I diluting the vinegar too much?  Does it not work for some yarn dyes? Was I not using enough vinegar (the shawl was a whole lot bigger than mine, but I can't say I measured the vinegar out any of the times I used it)? I'm confused. 

At least I wasn't as confused as my stepfather, who was questioning my use of the vinegar, saying that he used vinegar as a caustic agent to clean out the coffee pot (that had recently decided to clog up and overflow coffee every time someone made it.  I claim no fault.  It worked fine for me last Friday).  I stupidly replied: 'Well, don't you know that that's how Easter eggs are set?,' completely forgetting that my stepfather has never dyed Easter eggs (explaining this would unfortunately require a whole paragraph, so I'm not).  My mom and I had to explain that vinegar is used in Easter egg dye to set the dye on the egg (for any other folks out there who've never dyed Easter eggs for one reason or another).

Tomorrow, it's back to my actual paying job, and not knitting the crazy cable blanket.  That I just found a mis-crossed cable on.  Ug.