Frogs Everywhere

I think I've done more frogging than knitting the past couple of weeks. 

I can't say much because at least I'm now working on yarn crafting projects again.  Between the month of sewing I had to do this summer and some other miscellaneous stuff going on, I didn't really get back in the yarn crafting gear until the fall hit.

Sure, I did finish a pair of socks for my husband (finally, and without losing one this time!):

But the rest of the time since went like this:

• Finish up the custom baby dress and write up the pattern (which, being a on the fly pattern, mostly involves trying to figure out how the heck you wrote down what you wrote when making the darn thing). 
• Finally start an adult sweater to replace the one I been wearing so long I've had to darn both sleeves at the elbow (anyone remember when the work sweater was completed? It's been awhile; I can't say I'm surprised).
• Realize that I could get a sweater done for NYS Sheep and Wool if I pick up the one I was designing and knitting two years ago and un-screw up the neckline idea. 
• Get past the neckline, do another trim, then decide on another neckline trim to better match the other trim, redo the neckline.
• Finally get to the sleeves, so I do the math for the sleeves, try to work the sleeves, realize sleeve doesn't fit, rip sleeve out, adjust and restart sleeve. Now sleeve is too big on cap but tight elsewhere, rip sleeve out, get peeved at sweater when as I'm not going to finish it in time for Sheep and Wool and have no clue how to actually mathematically calculate an afterthought sleeve.  I then banned sweater to the time-out corner for a couple of days. 
• Decide that due to all the other crap that I should start a nice seed stitch cowl out of some soft yarn bought two years ago. Then I realized that the yarn is too thin to work for a good seed stitch cowl, so I surf patterns, don't like any of the patterns, get idea, try idea, rip idea out, try another idea, rip idea out, chart third idea, start idea, rip idea out, adjust chart, start idea, rip idea out, repeat two more times. I finally get an idea I'm mostly happy with off ground, but at this point I've created a time-consuming pattern for what was supposed to be an easy cowl. I resisted the urge to go find more yarn in the stash to do that seed stitch cowl.  Work on not-easy cowl on the subway for some reason.
• Go back to sweater, figure out a way to recalculate the stupid sleeves, start sleeve again, get half way done, realize it's still screwed up, rip it out.  I then realize I was using the stitch gauge instead of the row gauge to calculate everything for the sleeve, not that my method didn't work. Recalculate using correct gauge and start sleeve again.
• Decide to also work on getting baby dress pattern tech edited, tech editor finds first row has one stitch off of cast on, realize the one stitch off is because all the other calculations are screwed up and spend all night trying to figure out how the heck I managed to knit the thing in the first place.
• Then decided that I should write this blog post instead of working on sleeve or anything else I decided to design or start at the same time.

I mean, it's probably a good thing that I've gotten my design groove back.  I'm looking forward to getting something out there given the time it's been since I've had actual time and inspiration to devote to this.  But why do I have to make it so hard on myself when I could just simply work on something already written or easy without struggling through all the frogs?  Then again, I write software as a day job.  It all involves sitting there and beating your head against the wall wondering why on earth you're doing this when what you did isn't working for the 5th time...until you figure it out, get something done, and feel accomplished and confident.  Then you're more than willing dive right back into another wall because it won't be as crazy this time...right?

And if I have to frog that cowl or the sleeves one more time, the yarn is shot and I won't know what to do with myself.  Probably ban it back to the timeout corner.

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.

Emergency Baby Sweater

I used to have an extra baby sweater lying around, a couple of years ago, until I decided to gift it to my previous downstairs neighbors who had just had a kid.

I should have made one to replace it.  I wasn't expecting to be told a relative of mine was having a kid only two months before being due to have said kid (communication?  Why would there be communication?). However, I decided to try, and managed to pull off making a baby sweater within a month.

The pattern is Preppy Cardigan from 60 Quick Baby Knits, the yarn Cascade Yarns Pacific (which is one of my favorite acrylic/wool blends now; it worked up wonderfully and you can throw it in the washer and dryer no problem.  This is after I washed and dried it, by the way).

And because of that, there's a happy ending to this story.  I managed to mail out the sweater to have it arrive just in time for the baby to be born (as in, the relative I mailed it to took it to the hospital with her to give to the new parents). So I have that going for me.

As well, this is on top of the other relative I've known was pregnant for longer, which luckily is due in March and therefore that project is on the back burner, because holidays are coming up fast and I had to start making presents. I've already made at least two of my presents already and am working on a third:

I based this off of a pattern on Ravelry called Squishy Soft Cowl, but I cast-ed on a lot more stitches. And accidentally twisted the cast on, so it's now a mobius cowl. Oh well.

Pattern is Brain Waves, also on Ravelry.

Yeah, I've got the socks done.  And a baby sweater.  And a cowl. And part of a hat.  Wow, that's a lot given that I've had no time recently (going to grad school on top of everything can do that to you.  Oh, and getting this fur-ball doesn't help either:

This is Murphy.  This is Murphy sleeping on the bag my project is in that I brought over to knit on because he was trying to sleep next to me on the couch. Instead, he immediately sat on the bag and fell asleep.

). At least I still have my commuting time to work on things.

Of course, the one thing I did sacrifice this year was making a Halloween costume, so I did forgo something. Can't have it all.

It's Going to Be Full Of Stars

With the sucess of finally doing and finishing Xeina behind me, I decided to start another I-planned-to-do-this-and-bought-the-yarn-ages-ago project:

Yes, I ended up using DPNs in the beginning.  It turns out while Magic Loop works for starting, it doesn't once you get a few rows in -- it puts too much pressure at the corners with only two points.

This is Celestarium.  It's a pi shawl.  Why am I doing another shawl?  Well, because this one's a freaking star chart of the northern sky in knitted form.

Honestly, since this was the other yarn purchase I screwed up on and got the wrong weight for (using sport weight yarn for a fingering weight shawl...because who knew a yarn with socks in the name would be sport weight?), it may come out bigger than planned.  This works because I'm not planning to wear it. If it's big enough, I'll most likely use it as a blanket, or do what my boyfriend suggests and hang it up as a wall decoration.  Especially if I, um, borrow the edging pattern idea from this lovely person (I'm a sucker for infinity cables).

If you're familiar with the pattern, you might have noticed that I've adapted it a bit.  I decided to not do the yarn overs that were paired with the beads. I want it to look like the sky.  Let me tell you, this makes it so much simpler as well; I don't have to worry about one star over two rows, I just have to find the stitch to put the bead on.

However, I upped the complexity a bit by also deciding to the luminosity version, which is the one where someone marked all the starts by their luminosity rating so that you could use different bead sizes for each rating. But it's actually not all that complex.  If you're planning to do this, here's the trick: take an couple of hours to go through the charts and color each bead by the colors in the luminosity chart (this works if your doing the different color version as well, or both). Write a chart matching color to the bead size you're using. Ta da, don't have to worry about it again:

Of course, I ran into a snag where I couldn't get enough different bead sizes to do all the luminosities. Hell, the 6/0 beads are a pain to string on the stitch with this yarn, since it's thicker, and you can only go so big.  So I'm using the 6/0 beads for the lowest two luminosities, then scaling up. Also, watch out for total bead size vs hole size; I actually have to flip the 5/0 and the 4/0 mappings because while the hole is bigger in the 4/0s, the 5/0s I bought are bigger beads overall.

Despite all this, it's actually a rather simple pattern. It's mostly knit, knit, knit...place bead, knit, knit, knit... The only trick is looking at the chart and knowing where the next bead needs to be placed, which of course is easy if you put a set of stitch markers every 20 stitches in the circle, and mark where they are on the chart. This makes the thought process go: 'OK, my next bead is two stitch markers and 13 stitches away'. Boom, get there, put bead, look where next one is. And there are rows where it's mostly knits.

The only demoralizing thing is that I got this far so quickly and I'm on the second to last section, but now I'm slowing down (because pi shawl: the stitch count doubles when you double the rows). Also, looking it up?  Less than 10% done, of course.

It doesn't help when this happens:

This is my parent's cat, Atticus. Why the cat decided to sit there when there was a whole rest of the chair available is the mystery every cat owner has.

It also doesn't help that the yarn keeps dumping dye on my hands, so every time I have to put it down, I have to go wash my hands:

Yeah, I've never had a yarn do this to me. Bleed when washed? Sure, all the time.  Bleed a little on my hands? Yeah, once.  Make it so half my hand is discolored? Never.  The color is worth it, however.  It really does look like a night sky.

A Cacophony of Chaos

Well...I would say a lot of things have happened in this void, but in terms of yarn craft, I would be stretching the truth somewhat. I mean, sure, I got a couple of minor things done, mainly these bags here:

No pattern; made these up.

I got the second one done just in time to use it, so I guess that was good. As well, I did finally get and set up a new place to store my yarn stash:

But otherwise, I've been starting and working on a number of things that still ain't done, of course. Like the Xenia Shawl:

Ok, if I huff it I could probably get it done this weekend, which means most likely I'll be distracted by other shiny things to do and not touch it.  But I could. Maybe.

I also, thanks to one of my knitting group people, ended up starting a dish towel that, due to the fact that I'm using scrap cotton, thought I ran out of the blue color, then found another fourth of a skein of it, is coming out just a little funky:

Pattern is Triple L Tweed Dishcloth by Purl Soho, though I'm making it much longer and with different weight yarn.

My only excuse for this project is that I can work on it on the subway, unlike the shawl.  That's what I'm going with.  But having a subway project, of course, didn't stop me from swatching for a pair of socks with some really, really brightly offensive yarn (that I bought at WEBS, because one of the things I did in this void was go on the annal WEBS trip (I'm one of the drivers; I kind of have to).  It turns out that between having moved my yarn stash recently and bringing my sister along, I spent way less money than usual (I got my sister to spend more than me, he he he. But she doesn't have a stash, so that made it easy).  That didn't stop me from buying a number of skeins of yarn, of course):

This is not my type of yarn.  That's because it's for my other sister, as she likes the loud bright colors. I'm planning Hanukkah presents early this year.

Also, I started swatching and doing the spreadsheet formulas for another sweater design. Because it's about time I started attempting a design again; I have way too many of them in my head, with the yarn ready to go as well, and no other work done on them.  It doesn't help that I have a bit of a deadline to my free time (well, what little I have left after being in the middle of selling a house and going a little crazy at work).  I'm going for my master's starting this month, and will be in class four evenings a week, plus using my weekends to do school work. This should be fun.

 But maybe I can get that all but started (I still need to order the needles for it because I need a different length circular; unfortunately a thought that only occurred to me after I attempted to create a sheet for my size to start it). Oh, who am I kidding, I'll spend this weekend (of which I'm taking off two days so it's a four day weekend) mostly playing Skyrim or XCOM or maybe even Karmaflow, if I feel like frustrating myself.  Or actually cleaning the apartment. Or doing the thousand other things I should be doing that I didn't do yet because last week, I took a little vacation:

Went fishing one morning; caught nothing. Oh well. This is Lake George, if you want to know.

Of course, got very little knitting done there either.  There was too much to do, and any downtime we usually spent playing board and card games.  I did, however, start teaching my boyfriend to knit. He's now attempting a one colored version of the dishcloth I'm doing, because it's only knit and slip stitches, it's a little more complicated than garter stitch, and I haven't taught him the purl stitch yet:

He wants it a certain size, so I'm teaching him how to swatch at the moment.

We'll see how this goes.

I Fail at Yarn Chicken

I guess this doesn't really count as yarn chicken as I actually had another skein of it, but I was hoping not to have to break into it, damnit:

That was how much farther I had to go with the royal blue color to finish the last repeat I decided to do.  A measly one or so inches.  But of course, since the other choice was ripping the whole last repeat of the pattern out, I did bother winding the second skein to use a tiny, little bit to finish the body.

I'm now on the border, which is a bit more fiddly:

 And oh so even slower. But it's still coming along, which I guess is a good thing.
 
However, as it's a lace pattern and so I can't travel with it much, I've ended up knitting this as well:

A bag.  Where it's obvious I got bored and changed up the pattern a couple of times.  I was going for a medieval look, but the yarn I used kind of ruins that...however, that's what I had at the time, and I was playing with a concept there.

However, since I now have to carry my work phone on me for my next SCA event (yay for being the only support for my apps now), I thought I would make a new bag with the first pattern there.  With better colors. Though it also turns out that all my sock and lace yarn is variegated modern stuff.  Because of course it is; why else would I buy the random skein unless it was nicely colored variegated sock yarn? 

Guess I know what to get at WEBS this year now. 

The Computer Ate My Yarn

I'm not kidding:

I was knitting at my computer desk while surfing the interwebz when I heard a *slurp* and looked down to see a piece of yarn attached to the project I was working on sticking out of the back of my computer.

I may need to clarify a couple of things here.  One, there's a huge open space in the back of my computer due to the fact that I have a slim-sized motherboard in a full-sized chassis.  Two, one of the case fans is right next to that lovely hole.  Three, my computer is currently sitting next to my chair because I don't want to shove it in the corner it belongs until I get the switch I need to complete my setup (and of course I haven't bought the switch yet).

So I guess it was a matter of time before it ate my yarn.

Luckily for me, it only ate the piece left over from the start of my project and the top of the chassis comes right off.  So I was able to cut the yarn off the project and open the computer up to unwrap the yarn from the back fan:

 Now I know to keep my yarn away from the damn thing. Oye.

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?

Misadventures in Shawls, Part 4: For Better or Worse, It's the End of the Road

Hey, I had a productive time void for once:

I am done.

I have to say, the last chart and half the chart before were pretty fast and simple.  Actually, they were so easy I went on autopilot and missed the fact that the second to last row had a double decrease.  On both charts.  The first I really had to hack the fix, so bad I did some weird 5 stitch increase, then had to pick up a bar from a couple rows below it on the next right side row to attempt to fill up the gap the crazy decrease had made.  I was partially successful:

Unfortunately, at that point the life line was so far down I didn't want to rip it out to do it right.

Then, I missed it again with the last chart, but at least all that took was an extra row of knitting added to decrease down to where I needed to be.  That did cause a gap in the beads in the top band:

Oh well.

Of course, blocking it wasn't very simple either.  I'm not talking about the multitude of pins; that's to be expected.  I mean that I forgot what Madelinetosh yarn loves to do:

Bleed.  Two vinegar baths later, it's still bleeding but no where near as badly:

That's when I ran out of vinegar and therefore gave up.  I gave it one more soap bath and took it out.  Good enough.

That first picture, by the way, doesn't do it justice as to how shiny those beads can be.  They gleam blue and other colors depending on the light:

That picture still doesn't do it justice, but whatever.

Part of me feels I should still do a proper debrief but...meh.  I covered most of what I would put into a debrief into this post series.  The only thing I can think of that I didn't mention was row 67.

Row 67 was the only row where I did it, checked my work, checked my work again, and still couldn't figure out why it was wonky because as far as I can tell, I followed the pattern right.  You see, row 67 did something weird.  It shifted the pattern over by a couple of stitches.  It also seemed to want 8 stitches for the end of the row section, yet there were only 6 before that and 6 after.  It made what I thought were small leaves look a bit more like spirals, or at least leafy blobs with something trailing off the left side.  It jagged the lines of yarn-overs and stockinette sections.  It looks better after blocking, but still.  I don't get what happened there or if I screwed up somewhere, or the pattern was the wonky one.  No one else on Ravelry who has done the pattern has mentioned it.

But oh well.  I guess it worked out well enough in the end.  As more than one person has said to me (and I've said to others, not that it stops me from doing the same thing), no one else notices all the mistakes you do.  So while I'm beating myself up about how it's not my best effort and it's got so many mistakes in it, and it's a wedding shawl and it should be my best effort and so forth, the two people I've sent the picture to have both complemented it.  One of these was the recipient.  So I did something right.

Misadventures in Shawls, Part 3: The Pitfalls of Combined Knitting and Stitch Markers

I have to say, despite my semi-laziness in devoting time to working on this, I've gotten pretty far.  Things are speeding up a bit, as I'm well into the part where there's a lot of decreasing going on:

On row 81 yay.

When you hit chart C and beyond, though, it may lose stitches but it gets way more fiddly for a good section of it.   Unfortunately, my tension during that part was shot to hell, and there are stitches and yarn-overs that are small, and others that are huge.

Also, I have two running problems with my stitches at the moment:

1) The markers denoting the repeats are after a purl stitch, which means my purl stitch there is waaaay to loose, as it's eating the slack going around the stitch marker (this is not the first time I've had this problem, but I haven't figured out how to correct it yet other than taking out the stitch marker, which isn't an option here):

This is the back of the work, if you're wondering.

2)   My usual knitting style is a combined style. For me and many combined knitters, this means I knit 'normally', where I twist my yarn around the needle so the right leg is facing the knitter, but I purl in a manner that results in the right leg facing away from the knitter (I've talked about this before).  There turns out there's one issue with that.  When you yarn-over counter-clockwise after or before a stitch that was knitted or purled clockwise, the yarn-over pulls the other stitch down, and makes it really hard to find the right leg of either one.

It took me more than a few rows to realize why my stitches looked screwed up, or where my 'missing' yarn-overs went.  There is several places in the shawl where I knitted the stitch wrongly by working the wrong stitch or side of the stitch.  Luckily, since this always happens near a yarn-over, it just looks a bit messy and the yarn-over is a bit smaller or bigger than normal. I might have ripped it all out when I realized I had been reading those stitches wrong, but I don't have the patience or time for that at the moment.

So, how do you read this mess to work it correctly?

If you have a stitch with the right leg out before a yarn-over, you'll usually see it as this:

Ignore my lovely pajama pants; it might have been around midnight when I took these

The first stitch you need to work is not that string that looks like a loop below the weird twist (that's the stitch below your last one), it's the outer loop tilted away from you here:

Green arrow, not the red

There's the right leg...

So just work that loop as instructed:

Once you drop the stitch, you should be able to see the yarn over much better: 

Work it as instructed, and then you're done with that.


On the other hand...

If you have a stitch with the right leg out after the yarn-over, it'll look like this:

The difference to the set above is that the first stitch you see there is longer and usually angled more to the left, and the twist where the two stitches meet is more towards the knitter (this is because the YO is pulling it down towards the knitter, vs above where it was pulling it away).  Also helps to know where you are in the pattern.

The yarn-over is actually the yarn bar slightly below the needle towards the knitter:

Use that loop to work as instructed:

Once you slip the yarn-over off, then the other stitch will look like a normal stitch (for combined knitters at least).  Work that as instructed.

And that's it.  Now, if there were some easy way to correct those darn huge purl stitches.