kmkat and her kneedles

Knitting for Peace by Betty Christiansen

Knitters are cool. Librarians and libraries are cool. Putting them together is the coolest thing on earth.

Last Saturday afternoon I attended a presentation by Betty Christiansen, author of Knitting for Peace. It was fun and inspirational and fun and interesting and fun and educational... did I mention fun?

It turns out that this author lives in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and her mother lives in this area, so it was kind of a natural for our librarian (a very cool male-type muggle) to invite her.

Spread across the tables were the knitted items pictured in her books. Above, left, you can see a pink and gold Orphans for Orphans sweater lying on a prayer shawl; center, a blue Care Wear preemie jester hat; and right, a Mama Bear Project teddy bear. At the right edge you can just see  a two-toned green Caps for Kids swirled ski cap.

As I have mentioned before, I live in a very small, rural community. This was a very good turnout.

The author's mother is in the red shirt at right, her sister is standing by the window. That's me in the green t-shirt at left. The woman on one side of me was knitting blanket for her nephew; the woman on the other side was knitting a chemo cap for a friend with ovarian cancer.

The book has patterns for 14 different items suitable for charity knitting -- blankets, caps, mittens, vests, a sweater, etc. -- plus a felted messenger bag and instructions and pattern for adding the Knitting for Peace logo to it. There are also the stories behind a number of charity knitting projects, many of which I am sure you are already familiar with: Peace Fleece, Afghans for Afghans, the Shawl Ministry, Project Linus, and a number of others. My personal favorite, the Dulaan Project, was just getting started when Ms. Christiansen wrote her book, so it isn't included, but she was familiar with it as well.

Knitting and libraries. A winning combination.

Doo-laan, Doo-laan, Doo-laan!

(sung to the tune of "He's So Fine," with apologies to The Chiffons and to the spirit of Ronnie Mack, who wrote the song)

They're so fine (Doo-laan Doo-laan Doo-laan)
Wish they were mine (Doo-laan Doo-laan Doo-laan)
Those beautiful kids over there (Doo-laan Doo-laan Doo-laan)
The ones with the coal-black hair (Doo-laan Doo-laan Doo-laan)

My last two Dulaan sweaters are done. The random sweater:

and the sherbet one.

I knitted this one during tax season but didn't sew it together until Saturday. Isn't it just the cutest thing you ever saw? (No false modesty around here. No modesty of any kind, really.) The neck is not actually wonky; I just didn't smooth it out before the photo.

Here's what went into the box. Don't those sweaters look jolly in their chorus line pose?

I sent off the box of winter boots last month. I hope. I can't find it in the house, so I guess I already sent it.

Details, if you are interested:

Random sweater.

Yarn: Bernat Lana 100% merino worsted, two strands held together throughout. I had two skeins (198m/217yd; 100g/3.5oz each) of each color -- black, dark brown, camel, and white -- and used a bit over half.

Needles: KnitPicks Options US10.5

Pattern: Child's raglan from A Handy Book of Sweater Patterns by Ann Budd. I used the 34" pattern but it ended up to be 30". No, I didn't swatch. I described the stripe pattern ad nauseum  here.

Mods: I used a different double decrease for the raglans. Slip 2 tog knitwise; knit 1, pass 2 slipped stitches over. It makes a line of slipped stitches up the raglan and no visible decreases. It also camouflaged the color changes that occurred immediately after the slipped stitches. And I realized after 2-3" of yoke that, at my row gauge, the yoke was gonna be w-a-y too tall, so I decreased every round instead of every other. It seemed to work; the sweater looks more or less proportional.

Sherbet sweater.

Yarn: Tahki Yarns Dazzle, 100% wool, self-striping, bought on eBay last summer. I had five balls, each 100m/108yd/50gr, and I have about enough left to make a nice little cat toy.

Needles: Denise Interchangables US9; 4st/in. I DID swatch for this one. The yarn label said US10.5 needles, 3st/in, and I didn't think that looked right. I much prefer the fabric I got on the smaller needles.

Pattern: Child's drop shoulder sweater from A Handy Book of Sweater Patterns by Ann Budd, size 26", which looks to be about a size 4.

Mods: none. I spit-spliced the yarn to maintain the striping pattern, and I matched the stripes on the front and back, plus the sleeves match each other.

* * * * *
Shortly after the photo shoot the deck looked like this.

 

That is a jar of so-called sun tea on the table. Ah, what is so fine as a day in June?

Vacation, part two: We go to Town.

Who knew that the little grocery/dry goods store in Buffalo, Wyoming

 

would have the world’s best selection of Sugar ‘n’ Cream?

 

That is seven -- seven! -- shelves of SnC, carefully displayed by colorway (the top shelf is Paton's wool). I took several photos to study back at the campsite to help me decide what colors to buy. This display has roughly six or eight times the number of colors found in the typical Wal*Mart back home. I see warshcloths and baby bibs in my future, both for gifts and to sell at the library federation’s booth at the fair. Yee-haw!

This variety store is where last year I pondered the limited selection of Lion Brand® wool when I ran out of knitting. The selection of natural fibers is definitely improved this year. There are a number of lovely wools and blends, Paton's and other brands, plus (of course) far more acrylic and novelty yarn than anyone in their right mind would want.

And there is this – I got myself some souvenir yarn.

 

 

 

(The yarn was completely clean. The bits of vegetable matter you see were picked up in the van and the camper after purchase.) The label calls this a 2-ply sport weight, but I’d consider it DK, almost worsted weight. It was also available in an unplied bulky weight. The photos don’t really convey the soft fuzzy texture, which reminds me of a chenille bathrobe. I’ve never touched wool so cottony soft. It probably wouldn’t be good for socks –- my first thought of what to make with it –- because I think it is too soft to wear well. I liked the yarn but not enough to spend $$$ to buy enough for a sweater. I’m also thinking of felted slippers  with leather soles to overcome the wear problem. It’s certainly soft enough for a scarf, but I made one for myself last winter and don’t really need another. For the immediate future this yarn will marinate in the stash until it tells me what it wants to be.

We saw a few interesting sights around town. Around the IGA:

   

   

Parked downtown:

 

Now, I'm not making fun of the folks in Buffalo. FSM knows that you guys could find lots to point fingers at in my life. These are just things that reminded me, once again, that I'm not in Wisconsin any more. And who would have expected to find a pickup truck-driving Tool/Nine Inch Nails fan?

The funniest thing, though, was just now. Here I am in the espresso bar I mentioned in the last post. It's a charming place, funky and friendly and comfortable, although it gets a tad noisy after 3:30 when school gets out. #2 was here, too, with Smokey's computer, IMing with his friends back home. He was sitting at another table, but when I looked for him I couldn't see him. I figured he had taken the van to go explore the town and didn't think too much about it. About an hour later he suddenly called to me from across the room. Turns out he had made some new friends.

 

The boy takes after his father.

* * * * *

And now, the knitting: The Lure of Random.

Stripes are easy. Stripes are fun. A knitter can devise a stripe pattern to accommodate any amounts of yarn. If you have 300 yards of color A, 100 yards of color B, 500 yards of color C, and 50 yards of color D, you can, with the judicious application of a little math, make a 900-yard sweater in a stripe pattern that will use pretty much all the yarn without running out of any colors. In that situation I would use color D for a narrow edge or stripe in the ribbing at bottom, cuffs, and neck. I’d probably make the rest of the ribbing from color C, and the body and sleeves in a stripe pattern that was 3/8 color A, 1/8 color B, and 4/8 color C. (300 A + 100 B + 400 C (the amount I’m estimating would be left after all the ribbing) = 800).

I brought along a bit less than eight 200-yard skeins of worsted weight Bernat Lana merino, bought on sale from Smileysyarn.com last fall: 2 skeins each of black, dark brown, light camel, and ivory. I had used some of the camel and black for a Dulaan hat and some of the ivory in the Lopi Lite sweater I just finished, so the only color of which I had the full two skeins was the brown.

My original plan was to make a sweater modeled after one by Elizabeth Zimmerman that Meg Swanson showed us in the Yarnover class. It was a child’s sweater done in four wide bands of color, black at the bottom, dark gray above that, then a lighter gray, then white at the top. It was all stockinette and had eight vertical lines of faux seam stitches evenly spaced around the sweater (one line at center front, one line at center back, one on each side, and the other four evenly spaced between them; I think there was one more on top of each sleeve to take over after the side ones ended at the underarms) that turned into lines of double decreases in the yoke.

The problem was that I was afraid that a, I might run out of one color of yarn, and 2, I might run out of brain trying to figure out the eight-way decrease. (Thinking about it now, I realize that the yoke of a typical raglan has four lines of double decreases every other row, so a sweater with eight lines of double decreases would need them every fourth row. I’ll keep that in mind for a future Dulaan sweater.)

Anyway, back to stripes. After I discarded the EZ idea I decided to make the sweater striped. But my on-vacation brain didn’t want to concentrate long enough to figure out an appropriate stripe pattern. Call me lazy, call me slothful, call me whatever, I just didn’t want to do it. So I hit on the idea of a random stripe pattern. Given the weight of yarn (worsted weight doubled) and the size of the sweater (large child) I decided that the widest stripe should be 6 rows, which would be perfect for using dice. I would roll the die and knit the number of rows that came up. The only problem was we didn’t happen to bring along any dice. How to figure out a random pattern?

Remember all the electronics we brought along? I used the RAND function in Excel. In the first cell I typed “=RAND()*(6-0)”, which will generate a random number between 0 and 6, and copied and pasted it down the first column for a hundred or so rows. The problem was that the numbers generated were ones like 1.47653 and 4.59385. (There is probably a way to tell Excel that I only wanted integers, but I was too lazy to look for it.) It’s hard to knit .47653 of a row. So, in the second column I typed “=ROUND(A1,0)” and copied and pasted it down the column. Perfect. If I had access to a printer I would have printed it out, but I didn’t so I couldn’t.

 

Here you see the four columns of random numbers. At the bottom of each is the cumulative number of rows so far. I’ve written abbreviations for the colors in the first column to help keep it straight. The sequence is black, camel, brown, white; rinse and repeat.

I set up my knitting bag to minimize yarn tangles.

 

Here’s how it looks.

 

I'm going to match the stripes on the sleeves to those on the body for continuity -- the human eye always tries to discern a pattern, even when there is none -- then continue the Excel-determined random sequence on the yoke. I did a couple short rows in the back at the level of the underarm and will do a couple more near the top of the yoke, all to raise the back of the neck. Another cozy warm sweater for Dulaan.

Vacation, part one.

We camped in the Black Hills for the first couple nights. These two boxes, one packed by each son for himself, demonstrate some of the differences between my boys. The upper box is #2's -- lots of clothes.

The lower box is #1's -- 75 pounds of books. His [few] clothes are packed in a small backpack somewhere.

You already saw what I packed for amusement; besides the yarn I've also got six or eight books. Smokey brought a portable DVD player and a 3-disc set of 20 John Wayne movies. #2 brought his bike and Quake and Home World to play on one of the computers.*

* * * * *

Guess what?! We have knitting!

#2 modeled it for me.

The sweater is sized for a 10 - 12 year-old child. #2 is 18. The sweater is a tad small on him.

But it should keep some 10-year-old Mongolian child mighty toasty next winter.

Yarn: 1 strand Reynolds Lopi Light held together throughout with 1 strand worsted weight wool: teal Lopi with KnitPicks Wool of the Andes "Artic Pool Heather", creamy white Lopi with the same color of Bernat Lana merino, Oxford gray Lopi with camel-y brown Ella Rae (I couldn't locate a KP WotA the right shade of gray).

Needles: KP Options, US10.

Pattern: seamless yoke raglan from Ann Budd's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns, size 34". (My gauge is a bit tight; the sweater doesn't look that big to me. Must measure before I send it.) I didn't use that pattern's yoke decreasing, though. It has you do four decreasing rounds spaced evenly up the yoke. That wouldn't work very well with my planned yoke color work, so instead I used Elizabeth Zimmerman's system of decreasing, which I got from the handout at a class I took from Meg Swanson for EZ's percentage system updated. In that you do three decreasing rounds, at halfway, three-quarters of the way, and at the top of the yoke; that way I could put the decreasing rounds in the two-round strip of solid blue between the color work rounds. (In the photo it looks like those blue strips and decreasing rounds are lower in the yoke; it's because the crew neck makes the top of the yoke look taller.) I made up the fair isle pattern as I went. :-) Simple as it is, I am inordinately proud of it.

Here is a close look at the fair isle (please click to embiggen and truly appreciate the fuzzy wooliness).

Now, y'all have seen fair isle done by really good knitters, where the pattern lies smoothly even before it is blocked and the floats are perfectly even. My knitting is not like that. These are the kind of floats done by a rank beginner. Here is the first set:

And here is the back of the yoke. I can see improvement there, even if you can't see it in the photo.

As I said, I am inordinately proud of the this sweater. Color work no longer scares me. I can slip stitch and I can fair isle. As they say here in the west, yahoo!

* * * * *

After the Black Hills we moved on to our main camping venue in the Big Horn mountains near Buffalo, Wyoming. Friday night we went to a rodeo in nearby Kaycee. There were cowboys

 

and cowgirls.

There was bronc riding, both with and without a saddle.

There was calf roping.

 

There were bull riding and other kinds of roping and trying out some new bucking horses without riders. It was especially interesting to watch the pick-up riders take the bronc rider off the bucking bronco once the whistle had blown.

We are definitely in The West.

* Although we are camping in a National Forest campground with outhouses, no electric hook-ups, and only a hand pump for water, we are not exactly roughing it. We have with us a small generator** with which to power and recharge our two computers, three iPods, DVD player, two cell phones, camera, hair dryer, and waffle iron :)

** If you have ever been camping next to someone with a generator, you are probably shaking your head right now. Let me reassure you that ours is a small and fairly quiet generator, plus we have 120' of extension cord so we set it up f-a-r from the nearest campsite.

* * * * *

ETA: The first hot spot we found here in Buffalo was the McDonald's by the interstate, $2.95 for two hours. The price was very reasonable, but the place was a little lacking in ambience. Today we found that the (sadly website-less) Deerfield Boutique & Espresso Bar, est.1994, on Main Street has excellent cappucinos and scones and comfy couches and little tables and free high-speed internet. Woot! It is a totally charming splace, very spacious and full of plants and works by local artists and a bookcase of paperbacks and games and chess boards and a fenced-off play area full of toys for the littlies. This shows about a third of the space.

We have knitting!

I finished the second sleeve and joined the pieces yesterday in the car on the way to Minneapolis. (I took #2 son, the theater techie, to see Major Barbara at the Guthrie.) I plan to have lots of stranded colorwork in the yoke, but I haven't exactly decided how it's going to look. Seat-of-the-pants patterning.

But wait... what's going on in the upper right?

That, my friends, is an arm that has been joined to its body... upside down. The underarm stitches that will eventually be grafted to the body are sitting right out there on top of the bicep. Where, of course, they Do Not Belong.

Oh, snap.

* * * * *

Just to remove the nasty vision from your eyes I give you this photo of a huge canvas that hangs on the back of a building on Washington Avenue South almost across the street from the Guthrie Theatre. The building is two or three stories high -- that canvas is HUGE. I think the tenant is an advertising agency or graphic design firm. The back wall of the building is painted a lovely dark slate blue that you see at the bottom of the photo.

It wasn't until after I had taken the photo that I noticed what was pictured in the lower left of the canvas. Is that cool or what?

Drive-by posting.

Hi, there, remember me?

Nah, didn't think so. It's been a while.

I've been knitting, though...

That's the body of my latest Dulaan sweater. Notice the fair isle band right above the ribbing. That's a new skill for me. Not that I haven't attempted fair isle before, it's just that this is the first time I feel like I can say I've really done it. The secret to keeping my tension smooth and the floats long enough was to keep the stitches on the right-hand needle stretched as far apart as possible. My previous fair isle attempts always puckered because they were too tight. Not this time, though :-) I'll do the same band on the lower sleeves and lots of similar stuff on the yoke.

The pattern is the seamless yoke raglan from Ann Budd's A Handy Book of Sweater Patterns, which is my Dulaan bible. (The fair isle pattern I made up as I went.) The main color is one strand of Reynold's Lopi Lite held together with one strand of Knit Picks Wool of the Andes. The two colors of blue are a bit closer together than they look in the picture -- the Lopi is accurate, the WotA is darker. The white is one strand of cream Lopi Lite held with one strand of some Bernat ivory [purportedly] merino worsted. The little dark squares are one strand of oxford gray Lopi Lite held together with one strand of Ella Rae wool worsted in camel (I didn't have a gray worsted weight and didn't feel like waiting until I got some). I'm making the sweater on KnitPicks Options size 10s, which is giving me a gauge of ~15 st/4".

I bought the Lopi Lite during a Webs sale last year, intending it for a Dulaan sweater. But it is soooooo harsh that I couldn't face knitting it nor forcing some poor Mongolian child to wear it. I'd had such good luck with the double-stranding thing on my last Dulaan sweater that I decided to try it again. The white and camel worsted wools were in my stash; I had enough of the WotA blue to know it was the right color but had to buy a few more skeins to have enough. (I heart WotA.) The resulting fabric is dense but supple, sturdy and warm, not snuggly soft but definitely an improvement over using just the Lopi Lite. I swatched on KP 10.5s to get the 3st/1" gauge that I intended, but the fabric just didn't seem quite right, so I went to the size 10s.

Given the rather harsh nature of the wool I modified my original plan for a pullover into a cardigan, reasoning that this sweater could function as a jacket. And I did knit it back and forth until the fair isle. But I just couldn't face doing fair isle -- for the first time *for real* -- flat, so I joined and began knitting in the round. At some point the weird look of the cardigan-style first 3" began to bug me so I sewed it together. If I had thought of it when I was shooting these pictures this morning I would have taken a shot of the seam -- it looks pretty good, if I do say so myself -- but I didn't so I can't. I'll try to remember when I shoot the finished sweater.

And now some gratuitous feline shots for your amusement.

Tabby keeps an eye on the neighborhood:

and snuggles the yarn:

Random Sunday

Yeah, I know, it's supposedly to be random Wednesday. I'm busy on Wednesday.

* * * * *
We got some snow.

Some of us like it.

* * * * *

Kat's tip of the day:

Crocs. Not so good on snow.

* * * * *
Remember yesterday's moose-y wine? This stuff is good, too.

* * * * *

Experience trumps science.

Whenever I feel the least tickle or sniffle or other symptom of an upper respiratory thing, I break out the vitamin C and take it every hour. [Goes to kitchen and swallows another 500 mg.] That has allowed me to avoid well over half of the colds that have attempted to take over my body in the past ten years or so. I am fully aware that double-blind testing has totally failed to validate the vitamin C vs. URI hypothesis.

I don't care. It works for me. The key for me is to take it immediately upon detecting the first symptom. Two hours later doesn't work. I keep a bottle of 100mg vitamin C tabs in my desk at work, in my purse, and at home.

I sure hope it staves off this thing that keeps threatening me. I've done the vitamin C thing three times since Thursday.

* * * * *

Lucy was very helpful today. She modeled the Dulaan sweater for me.

Lucy, stay!

Good dog, Lucy, stay.

Lucy, GOOD DOG!

Where did her tail go?

Yarn: Lion Brand Wool, color "Flower Garden," and KnitPicks Wool of the Andes, color "Mulled Wine"; 1 strand of each held together; ~500+ yards of each

Needles: Denise interchangables, US#10.5

Pattern: seamless yoke raglan from Ann Budd's Book of Handy Sweater Patterns; 32" circumference -- it looks like it would fit a typical American 5 - 8-year-old child

I LOVED knitting this sweater. Had I not taken out time to knit hats for for Rabbitch's homeless and Rachel's Soaring Eagles Project and a sock and a pair of clogs for Christmas and a scarf and a pair of fingerless mitts and a Calorimetry for myself, it would have been done in three weeks instead of three months. The Lion Brand wool is nothing special but I really like the feel of KP WotA. Knitting the two together made a very thick, warm sweater, perfect for Dulaan.

Until I got to the armholes I had intended to knit the raglan from Ann Budd's book, but when I was nearing that point on the sleeves I realized that the seamless yoke sweater pattern calls for a decreasing row every X inches vs. the raglan, which decreases every other row. Just in case the light bulb didn't go on for you when you read that sentence, let me explain the implications. Row gauge doesn't matter(!) in the seamless raglan. Is that good news or what?

Methinks I shall be knitting more of these seamless yoke raglans.

Attention, Dulaaners!

It's time!

Remember the heart-breaking photo of the little Mongolian girl, barefoot in sub-freezing temperature? Winter boots are now on sale at Target! I scored many pairs at well under $5/pair.

What the above photos don't convey is the unbearable cuteness of boots in tiny sizes.

Note: I hesitated to post this because it is uncomfortably like tooting my own horn. Please ignore that aspect and focus on the good we can all do -- at sale prices! -- for those little people with cold feet.

Welcome, 2007

I live in a beautiful place.

The little island you can see in the distance we call Loon Island. There are nesting loons on our lake every summer -- we are right at the southern limit of their range -- and several years they nested on this island. My boys tell me that it is covered in loon excrement and very stinky in summer.

Here is the view from my laundry/craft room window on the back of the house. Matthew hasn't blown the snow yet.

The building half-hidden by the hill is the garage. The other is a 28'x40' pole barn for my husband's car collection and assorted oddments.

As you can see, we got fresh snow for New Year's -- after it rained for 18 hours straight. Lucy was glad to come in after her outdoor break on her chain, which is the straight line downward from the birch tree in the middle of the picture above. She refuses to use the doghouse, no matter what the weather. Duh.

+

Here's where we grill our steaks and burgers, on the little deck outside the laundry room. Poor grill looks pretty sad after all the rain and snow and melting.

 

More of the lake side of the house:

The bird feeder on the deck railing hangs right outside my office window. But the goldfinches don't seem to like the last bag of thistle seed I filled it with. They steadfastly ignore it, whereas in the past there was a steady stream of little yellow and black birds feasting there. Come spring I may have to bite the bullet and throw away $10 worth of unwanted thistle seed. Finches! There are birds starving in China -- get over here and eat your seeds!

I've been listening to Brenda Dayne's Cast On podcasts, starting from #1, and she mentions there how beautiful is her spot in Wales. Like her, I thank providence every day to be lucky enough to live where I do.

* * * * *

Other bloggers seem to be toting up their 2006 production so I thought I'd look back, too. It seems that my speciality this past year were the small objects d'knit.

37 hats
12 (or so) warshrags
9 baby bibs
3-1/2 pairs socks
3 Korknisse
2 3 scarves
1-2/2* sweaters
1 pair fingerless gloves
1 pair felted clogs

...and a partridge in a pear tree.

* Re the 2/2: I knit about half a sweater for Dulaan, then decided that worsted on size 7s wasn't warm enough, so I frogged it, bought some Knit Picks worsted to double-strand with the original Lion Brand variegated, and knit it again -- I'm about half done, again.

* * * * *

This weekend I cranked out a couple newborn hats for Caps for the Capital. Apparently the head of a newborn child in the third world is slightly smaller than an ostrich egg. Who knew?

In which I have a contest. Plus some other stuff

Contest: how many hats can I knit in a week?

Rachel has asked for 325 hats, beanies, headbands, mittens, etc., for the Soaring Eagles Project. She needs them by December 18th so her school staff can get them ready for the giveout at a school assembly on December 20th or 21. As of last Sunday, she had about 3. Okay, I am grossly exaggerating, but she was well short of her goal so I decided to move some of my hats from the Dulaan pile to the Soaring Eagles pile. And to knit some more.

She wants the items to be machine washable and dryable, I scrounged around my severely acrylic-challenged stash (I unloaded donated all my acrylic awhile back) and found a couple skeins of Plymouth Encore and set to work.

Tonight I went to W*l-M**t and loaded up on more machine washable yarn.

At back left is the first hat I knit this week; at center right is the second, still in progress. Both of those were knit from worsted-weight yarn. The whack of WM yarn purchased tonight is all heavier and will be knit on needles in the 10-11 range. I'm guesstimating I got enough for 10-11 hats. (What a coincidence.) The orange and purple heather skeins in the lower right are both stash Red Heart, and I'm hoping to avoid using those. It's scratchy/icky/good only for dog sweaters.

So, the big question is, how many hats can I knit in time to get them to Rachel by the 18th? Make your guess in the comments. The winner will be chosen by random draw from all the [hundreds of - hah!] correct answers.

Hmmm. There's something else I need to add. What was it...

Oh, yeah. The prize.

The winner will have his or her choice of one of the following:

I won't go into too much detail now (that would take away from my hat-knitting time). Suffice to say that you can tell what the first two are by the labels, and all three in the second photo are superwash merino sock yarns that I won myself in Cara's SpinOut/Heifer International contest last June. They are lovely but haven't told me yet what they want to be; maybe they will speak to someone else.

Guess away!

* * * * *

Actual knitting content.

Before I got so involved in the hat thing I was really rolling on a Dulaan sweater.

I started this last June (!) when we were on vacation, camping in the Big Horn mountains in Wyoming. I had taken along everything I needed for two projects, the ribbon X-back tank from Knitty (promised to Andrew's then-girlfriend) and a Dulaan sweater, but two-thirds of the way through the two-week vacation I realized (panic! sound the alarm!) that I was going to run out of projects before we ran out of vacation.

So I commanded that on our next trip into town -- Buffalo, WY, a charming town of something over 4,000 souls -- we had to find a LYS. Inquiry at the restaurant where we ate dinner (camping for us is definitely not of the primitive variety; we eat out nearly every night) directed me to a combination grocery/dry goods store, where I found the pink variegated Lion Brand yarn, worsted weight. By the time we got home I had knitted the body to the armholes and had about 6" done on the first sleeve. Problem was that a worsted-weight sweater just didn't seem warm enough for Mongolia, so once we got home the project languished, ignored although not forgotten.

Finally I had the brilliant idea of double-stranding the Lion wool with another strand of solid color worsted, even though it meant I had to frog what I had already done. I got the pink heathery Knit Picks yarn a couple months ago, and over the Thanksgiving weekend frogged, skeined, bathed, re-balled, and swatched. The knitting you see on the sweater, plus the beginnings of the first sleeve (not pictured) took less than a week. Hurrah for projects on size 10-1/2 needles.

I'm really liking this sweater now. The Knit Picks yarn is a lot softer than the Lion Brand so the fabric has a nicer feel, plus now it is thick and dense enough to be really warm. Once Rachel's hats are in the mail and a couple top-secret Christmas presents are finished, I'll be back to it.

* * * * *

Prospective candidates for this year's Darwin Awards.

I took these last Sunday. The lake had had ice on it for barely a week and had only been covered completely for a few days. Although the ice at the edges was probably safe, I would consider the ice in the center where they were to be very questionable. Matthew and I both considered these two to be candidates for gene pool elimination.

Cheap yarny goodness and visual funnsies

One of the posts at the Yahoo Dulaan group mentioned that www.smileysyarns.com was having a sale, so I surfed on over and scored myself some yarn.

All told, a little over $100 and I'm set for some charity knitting. On the outside of the box:

At left, 2 balls of Lion Brand Watercolors, an ack-wool blend destined for a fluffy-but-warm Dulaan scarf or two.

On top, 12 skeins of Bernat Lana worsted, 100% merino wool. I've already made 2 Dulaan hats from this. Although the label says merino, it doesn't feel as soft as merino, more like ordinary wool.  I've been wanting to have a whack of worsted-weight wool for when I feel like knocking out a hat or attempting some mittens. Now I'm set for a while.

At the right, 3 50-gram skeins of Filatura Lanarota Puno, 100% alpaca, worsted weight, destined for the Red Scarf Project.

Inside the box, from left:

6 balls of Cervinia Londra, a wool/alpaca/ acrylic chunky weight. I'm hoping to get one Dulaan hat from each 86-yd. ball; if not, I'll have to combine some of them. The colors all look good together so that shouldn't be difficult.

8 skeins of Lite-Lopi worsted; 5 blue, 2 natural, 1 gray, for a Dulaan sweater, pattern TBD.

8 skeins of Panda Woolbale (yeah, I'd never heard of it either) 100% Australian wool worsted. I bought it intending to make Dulaan socks of it, but after seeing the pictures of the barefoot children in Ryan's blog I'm thinking felted clogs instead. I bought the Fiber Trends pattern to make a Christmas present, knowing that I would probably use that pattern again and again.

* * * * *

My sweetie recently bought me a delightful new/used camera, a Fuji FinePix S5100.

(I can't show a picture of my actual camera because obviously I would have to take it with the old cheapo Kodak, whose batteries are, as always, dead. That thing ate batteries like there was no tomorrow. So here a couple pictures from the web.)

I'm loving this camera. It has all the usual digital camera bells and whistles, plus a 10X optical zoom (take that, Kodak! I spit on your 3X optical zoom!), what seems to me to be a very good "recovery time" between shots, and makes the most endearing electronically amplified click when I snap the shutter. It's totally autofocus if I want that, which I do, but also allows for several other methods that I haven't explored yet. Plus it has a macro setting, ditto. And videos with sound, ditto. And other stuff I don't even know that I don't know.

What I need to do is dedicate some time to learn the features and read the manual and experiment. I've done a little of that but not nearly enough. Time is always in short supply. Anybody got a day stretcher I could borrow?

Besides learning about the new camera, I have been acclimating myself in the Mac world after 20+ years as a PC person. The same sweetie that gave me the camera got me a Mac Mini to replace my 5-year-old Dell because he knew that was what I
really wanted. But the bootleg PhotoShop I was using was obviously for Windows and there was no way I would fork over the hundred$ it would cost for a real Mac version, plus I never used 90% of the features of the program. So I have been learning about iPhoto. I was having trouble shrinking the photo files to a manageable size; unlike PhotoShop, iPhoto -- or at least the version I have -- doesn't have that handy "Save for web" feature that automatically does whatever it needs to in order for the photo file to be around 300k. You may have noticed that the photos I've posted in the past couple weeks download v-e-r-y slowly. Sorry about that. I had downloaded a 30-day trial version of PhotoShop for Mac, but I never found the magic "Save for web" button in it.

Since that 30-day trial version expired, though, I searched the web and found a Mac freeware program called Imagewell that seems to do the trick. It's not as one-click as PhotoShop was, but overall it seems to work quite well. There's an upgrade version for sale, but I am resisting even seeing how much it costs. Freeware = good.

Edited to add: I just checked the Imagewell site to get the URL for the link and discovered the upgrade costs all of $9.95. So I did it. Primo me.

 

In which I display [lots of] FOs...

...and more pictures than you may want to see. My apologies to those on dial-up.

No. 1 (each stripe is knit with two strands of slightly different shades of blue):

No. 1, reversed (yup, it's reversible -- it wouldn't have been warm enough otherwise; here I used two strands that were not so similar):

No. 2 (lined but not reversible; done with the Simple Check Pattern pattern from Barbara Walker's A Treasury of Knitting Patterns, p.51):

No. 3 (not the greatest hat -- I probably should have doubled-stranded the red -- but servicable):

What can be made of these yarns? The two in the back are a sport weight wool and a Kroy wool sock yarn.

Why, it's No. 4 (I truly had no idea when I worked out the stripe pattern in my head that it would turn out all Scandinavian-looking):

No. 5 (this is my favorite -- can you see how yummy, cutesy softly cuddly it is? it makes me think of a skier in about 1955):

No. 6 (this is really the first hat where I felt like I designed something that turned out (these photos are not in anything like chronological order)):

Nos. 7 and 8 we've seen before:

My career as a  user-up of old acrylic may be over. Jennifer over at majorknitter.com is asking for yarn for a school teach-the-kids-to-knit project, and my chunky

and worsted

and baby-weight

are going to the post office for her on Monday.

I'm still waiting to hear if they can use the sport weight

or the crochet cotton (loom warping?)

or the novelty yarns

If any of you can recommend a specific charity that could use these, please let me know in the comments. I know I could hunt one up myself, but I'm guessing y'all can help and save me the effort ;-)

When all that crapylic is gone, guess what I get to knit?

The wools, baby, the wools!

Several are destined to become Dulaan sweaters and maybe socks. Others have more selfish destinations ;-)

Note: that person in the background is my son, scrubbing the ashes off his shoes in the laundry tub. (I sent him outside to burn all the cardboard boxes that had accumulated.) When he saw me about to crop the photo he said to leave him in it so everyone could see his belt and his headphones ("It's a cool picture of me, Mom!"). I suspect that you who are parents are much more impressed that he is scrubbing his shoes :-)

In which I rant and generally expose my total ineptitude with computers

Knitting:

I started another Dulaan hat. Big whoop.

Computers.

As little as 10 years ago I was the computer guru around our house. My husband, while a genius at electronics and fixing things in general, had never taken much interest in the inner workings of computers, either hardware or software. If a power supply or a fan needed to be replaced he was the go-to guy around here; if the task were installing a second HD or updating software, I was in charge.

Boy, have things changed. Smokey is a lot more fluent with the hardware now – his desktop computer currently lies open on the floor behind me, awaiting the new motherboard he ordered for it (the old one apparently got fried during an electrical storm, despite the surge protector/odds against it happening/yadda yadda). But the big change, one that everyone with a teenager has probably seen, is that #2 son is now the go-to guy for pretty much everything electronic except the actual electronics, and he’s not exactly behind the curve on those, either.

Should I download the latest version of iTunes? Ask Matthew.

I can’t make this frickin’ [fill in the blank] work! Ask Matthew.

How do I start a blog? Ask Matthew.

So yesterday I was trying to figure out how to use Bloglines when the boy came home from work. (Sound and light guy at a nearby professional theater, natch.) I asked him something about BL and amazingly he didn’t know anything about them. One thing led to another and the next thing I knew, I had downloaded the latest version of Opera and updated to IE 7.0, both of which offer built-in feeds. He also recommended that I ditch IE and switch to using Opera, saying he really likes their latest version.

Now, I had finally gotten Bloglines to work and was well into subscribing to my favorite blogs when he entered the scene. After his advice and downloading both browsers, I stopped messing with Bloglines and started using the automatic feed feature of Opera. Have any of you used it? Because I have some issues.

1. Once I subscribe to a blog, I can’t figure out how to Unsubscribe to it. I had the same problem with Bloglines. Ha! I just figured it out:  Feeds | Manage feeds | (select a feed) | Delete. Boy, that was a tough one, huh?

2. Opera doesn’t seem to be able to handle comments on Blogger. Twice today I have tried to comment on a blog post, and both times – after typing the whole damned comment and clicking either “Preview” or “Submit” – I got a little screen saying Blogger couldn’t find the blog I was looking for. After the second time, I opened said blog in IE, wrote the comment (I had ctrl-A’d and ctrl-C’d my comment so I wouldn’t lose it altogether; aren’t I the clever one?), and previewed/posted it with no problem. I guess I will have to subscribe to Blogger feeds in IE and the rest in Opera. Not exactly zipless, but oh, well. Remind me why this is better than Bloglines, please.

3. In Bloglines, when I begin the process to subscribe to a new blog, it lets me preview the different feeds (RSS1, RSS2, atom, whatever). I like that feature because it seems that some feed formats will show the photos and some will not. This preview feature is not present in Opera, as far as I can tell. Remind me again why this is better than Bloglines, please.

4. Lest you think I am trashing Opera, I am not. I like the feeling of NOT using a Microsoft product. It also has a nifty feature that puts an icon at the far right in the address bar whenever I am viewing a site that offers a feed. Click that icon to start the subscription process. Nifty, like I said.

5. IE 7.0 has a nice clean, streamlined toolbar setup at the top of the screen, but I haven’t used it enough yet to make an informed judgment. (My first impression was that it was so streamlined as to be completely useless, but I may be wrong.) I may never use it enough to make that judgment, though, because the &$%*$ browser insists on telling me EVERY SINGLE TIME I OPEN IT

(that’s the screen it opens with) and ON EVERY FRICKIN’ SCREEN THEREAFTER that “Your current security setting put your computer at risk. Click here to change your security settings.” Dammit, I LIKE MY SECURITY SETTINGS! If I wanted to change them I will do so in my own sweet time. There seems to be absolutely no way to turn off this cursed warning. Could it be that the Microsoft behemoth has decided that the way to correct the security flaws that seem to be inherent in every stinkin’ program they write in certain programs is to hound the user until they are sick up and fed change the security settings to whatever it is that MicroGodKingEmperorOfTheUniverseSoft has decided they should be?

7. The so-called “information bar” that appears between the toolbars and the actual website screen has always annoyed me. In IE 6.0 I got rid of it easily and never missed it. In IE 7.0, they say in the so-called “Help” section, “Can I turn off the Information bar? Yes, you can, but we don't recommend it. If you do want to turn it off, you have to turn it off for each type of message.” Do they tell you how? Only to turn it off for pop-up blocking. Nothing about the security warning thing, so it is always there, annoying me at every screen.

8. And another thing I just discovered. In IE 6.0, Typepad offered the choice of viewing a post in progress either as text with the uploaded images or as html. In Opera all I get is the html version. That may be turn out to be a good thing; it certainly forces me to learn their version of more html. Can anyone tell me how to make the print larger in the final post? There was a drop-down list in the no-longer-available view of the editing screen, but no such animal in the html-only screen. (Or I may have found the answer myself. I wrote the post in Word and saved it there in a .txt file. From what I have now read in the Typepad Knowledge Base, if I had saved it in .rtf format, I would see the editing window I was used to. I'll try that next time. Live and learn.)

/rant

I had originally been planning a post in which I asked for help in getting things onto my sidebar in Typepad, but I seem to have spent all my energy and time in venting. Sheesh.

Socks and stuff

After I finished the scarf I couldn't decide what to cast on next.  Currently on the needles were the second of a pair of socks and a dog sweater.  I tried to work on the sock the day we went to Eau Claire to see La Harlot, but I was at the heel-turning stage and there was no way I could concentrate enough to do it.  (Don't ask how I know.) Luckily I had had the foresight to pack some other needles and yarn so I made a dumb dishcloth.  Here it is, reposing gracefully with my son's gas mask:

 

Yarn: either Peaches & Cream or Sugar & Cream, lost the ball band
Needles: Denise US#7
Pattern: mine.  CO 36 st.  K3, P3 for 4 rows.  P3, K3 for 4 rows.  Repeat.

Don't all 17-year-old boys have a gas mask?

Last Saturday I didn't feel like working on the sock or the dog sweater so I cast on for a Dulaan hat:

 

The next night I finished it (the colors here are more accurate):

 

Yarn: 20+-year-old acrylic, worsted weight
Needles: Denise US#7
Pattern: mine

The notable thing about the hat is that I knit most of it while at the computer (reading Cara's archives, if you must know).  I am determined to learn how to knit without watching my hands.  Stockinette and 2x2 ribbing with worsted on size 7s is not too hard, I found, but it will be awhile before I can do it with a real pattern or something on smaller needles.

Last night I finished the sock:

 

Yarn: Schoeller Eslinger Limbo Mexiko, color 2585
Needles: Crystal Palace bamboo, US #3
Pattern: Widdershins, from knitty.com, summer 2006

A few words here about Schoeller yarn: I'm sufficiently anal that I really would have liked the stripes to line up, but it was impossible.  The two skeins of yarn started at almost exactly the same place in the color pattern, and I could have made it work if that were the only problem.  But as I was winding the second skein into a ball after the first sock was done, I found that the color repeats were not the same - there was a whole bunch of other repeats in the middle of the skein that weren't there in the first one.  So I just had to suck it up and let the stripes fall where they fell.  When I knit my first pair of socks, also from Schoeller yarn, I came upon a knot in the yarn just after doing the heel of the first sock.  After which the color repeats reversed!  Now I ask you, what kind of happy horseshit nonsense is that?  I dutifully reproduced the knot and reversed color repeats in the second sock (did I mention I was a tad anal?), but hmmph, I say, hmmph.

The colors of the latest socks are remarkably similar to those of that first pair of socks I knit:

 

Yarn: Schoeller & Stahl Fortissima Colori Socka, color 9070
Needles: Crystal Palace bamboo, US #1
Pattern: (don't remember; it was chosen for me by the clerk in the yarn store.  I think it started out "cast on 68 st.")

Boyhowdy, did these latest ones go fast, once I started working on them consistently - only 48 st per round.  The first ones were knit the conventional top-down way.  These were toe-up using the Widdershins pattern from knitty.com.

I have made 3 pairs of socks top-down and hate both the "what if I run out of yarn" thing and the hard-to-use-up leftovers that that occur if I guess wrong too far in the other direction.  I made a couple pairs of baby booties from the leftovers from the first socks, and that was okay, I guess, but the patterns and colors I chose for socks don't always lend themselves to baby footwear.  I've done a couple pairs of short-row heel socks but didn't like them for a several reasons.  For one, I seem to be incapable of counting correctly, so the short rows don't come out even at the end of the heel.  It hasn't affected the fit of the socks but makes for a less-than-satisfying knitting experience.  For another, the pattern - a generic one I found at elann.com  - makes a row of holes diagonally along each side of the heel.  There is very little chance that this isn't due to my screwing up, but I can't seem to avoid it.* Third, if I put a bunch of hours into knitting a sock, I want it to last roughly… forever!  Short-row heels don't have that nice thick, corrugated slip-stitch heel flap that seems like it might do just that.  The Widdershins pattern solves 2 of these 3 problems.  The counting thing continues.

Heels, good:

 

Heels, bad:

 

The heel of the first sock, on the right in both photos, came out perfectly (on the third try).  I'm very happy with it.  The heel of the second, not so much.  I had already knit and frogged it several times by the time I got to the heel flap.  So when I realized, about three-quarters of the way through the flap, that it wasn't going to come out right, did I say, Oh, I must fix that!  I must rip it out and do it right!  Nope.  I just finagled some strategically placed decreases and went on with my life.  Clearly I will never be a knitter-for-hire.

On the dog sweater project, I need to corral the dog and hold the knitting against her body to determine exactly where the "sleeves" need to be. I'm making this one up as I go along.  She is not going to enter any fashion shows or need to impress her friends at the vet.  I'll tell you more about this project when I finish.  For now, I leave you to consider these two words: huntin' season.

* Once I re-found this pattern so I could link it here, I scrutinized the photo v-e-r-y closely.  I think the pictured sock has the diagonal row of holes, too!  Hmmph (again).  I feel better knowing the holes are not because I was unable to knit wrapped stitches correctly, but jeez!  Don't you think Elann could have found a better pattern for their website?

Well, I've gone and done it.  Started me a blog.  By the title one could expect it to be about knitting (okay), sewing (okay), or shooting up (not okay).  Lets go for Door #1, shall we?

I'm a knitter of a certain age.  Well, to be perfectly frank, I'm over 50 (just turned 57 this month -- it was the birthday that prompted me to start the blog, which I had been contemplating for a while).  I've been playing with yarn and needles and such for over 40 years and someday, darn it, I'm gonna get really, really good.  In the meantime, though, I'm gonna have fun.  Or maybe...  screw the really really good, cue the fun.

My favorite blogs are ones with excellent photos and good writing; my goal is make mine one of those.  High-res photos of exquisite fibery goodness, writing that makes the reader laugh and cry and Think Deeply About Life.  Oh, have I mentioned that I frequently set extremely high goals for myself?

For now, I'll just describe one of the things currently on the needles and give you some pictures taken with my El Cheapo Kodak digital.

It's a kids hat for the Dulaan Project.  Ryan and Cuzzin Tom and F.I.R.E. are racking up the karma points bigtime.  I've been using up 20-year-old crappy acrylic stash making hats and a sweater for the Mongolian kids.  Now, I know that warm is the name of the game here, and that warm generally means wool.  I've read Norma's thoughts on the subject and generally, I concur.  She's right on the money.  It's just that I have all this damned acrylic.  So I have Taken Measures to ensure that my crappy acrylic hats are really and truly warm.  Having lived all but the first ten years of my life north of the 45th parallel -- that's northern Minnesota and Wisconsin to the geographically challenged -- I feel that I know something about warm.  My hats follow one of two basic designs: a watch cap style with a 4"-deep cuff, which means there is a double layer of knitting over the ears; or, if the design doesn't allow for a cuff, I do a provisional cast on, come back when the outer hat is done, and knit a lining.  The current hat, unfortunately, is the first one that hasn't followed that formula.  It doesn't have a cuff, and I didn't do the provisional cast on.  Neither option exactly worked with what I had in mind, so I went with a smaller-than-normal needle and made the fabric fairly dense.

The yarn is from an afghan kit I bought at a yard sale about 15 years ago.

It was a traditional ripple afghan done in eight shades of blue from navy to very pale.  Someone, probably a sweet little ol' granny, had already crocheted about 24" of the afghan, and I thought, Easy peasy, I'll just finish it and have an afghan with only half the work.  (I was in my afghan stage at the time.) But I soon discovered that, although I had crocheted a number of garments and afghans and shawls that required reading and following a pattern, I was apparently incapable of following this one.  The ripple pattern.  The single most common crochet pattern in the universe. Couldn't do it.  So the half-finished afghan hung around the house for...  a while.  Until Dulaan called.

The yarn is 2-ply, approximately sport weight or a little thinner.  For the hat I'm holding three strands together and knitting on size 7 needles, which makes a nice, dense fuzzysoft fabric.  The initial inch or so of ribbing is dark navy; when I started the stockinette I dropped one strand of the dark navy and picked up a strand of the next shade, a bright navy.  Two rows of that, then drop the second strand of dark navy and pick up a second strand of bright navy.  Rinse and repeat.  I like the way it worked.  Incredibly, my seat-of-the-pants calculations, based on how many rows it would take to follow this pattern and intending that the last inch at the top would be all of the lightest blue, worked out perfectly.  Sometimes you do something right, who knows how or why?

You may have noticed that in the picture, the yarn was wound into one ball of each color.  But knitting three strands together is impossible if the yarn in question is in one ball.

Observe Step 2:

Did I mention that I'm also a wee bit compulsive?

So, here's the hat, hanging out with its cousins and some random buttons that wandered by:

I quite like it.