Swatching for Featherweight

Sometime earlier this spring I decided I wanted to knit a Featherweight, which is a cardigan knit from laceweight.  I chose Alpaca Cloud, a very fine laceweight made of baby alpaca.  I have Dill and Stream, and I'm planning to knit the cardigan out of Stream (a dark denim color).

Last Saturday, I started a swatch, before I bought the pattern, just to see if I liked knitting laceweight on size 6 nickelplated needles. I put the needles and yarn in my purse, and started at a baby shower, after I took it to the zoo but didn’t take it out of my purse. The next day, partly to show off, I worked several rows in church.

Today I measured what I had so far.  The stockinette section came out an even 5 inches, so stitch gauge is right on the money, but row gauge is a bit long, 12 the only problem I can see is to make sure arms don't grow too long, I guess. The fabric is airy, but with a sort of net-like effect. I feel like this is maybe a lighter laceweight? I like this yarn. I can see myself burning through miles of it.

The swatch has a garter border and a stockinette section inside. I cast on 40, for a more accurate check, and always knit the first and last 5 stitches.  The pattern page called for a gauge of 24 st/in and 36 rows/in, and my central 30 stitches measure an even 5 inches, which is exactly right.  I haven't gotten more than 2 inches into the swatch, and my row gauge isn't right (yet!) but it's on the side of too long rather than too short.  I wonder if alpaca blocks well.

Tomato Tuesday: Digging the Holes

Partly Saturday and partly yesterday, I dug the holes for my tomatoes.  During the process, I found three volunteers from last year's rotten tomatoes that fell from the vine before I could pick them.

Today I almost did nothing but the yarn sampler. Over 100 minis in the last 24 hours.  Which sounds good, until you realize that there are 500 minis in the worsted side. I have to do the exact same feverish pace all week to finish before Matt gets here.

WIP Wednesday tomorrow: Kwalla socks, a storied life.

Tomato Tuesday

This afternoon, I replanted a plant (some kind of oregano) that was drying out too quickly into a shadier spot.  I replanted it deeper, and put in hydration bottles (water bottles filled with tap water and rapidly plunged upside down into the dirt).

I have watered my tomatoes, and the first yellow flowers are starting to bloom.  It's almost worth having tomatoes just for the hopefulness of those yellow flowers.

Hi. Been a while.

I keep knitting when I have time. I've done 6 socks now, of which 2 are pairs.   Working on another 3, one of them will match one of those already done, and the other two are 2 at a time and will match each other.

Learned to spin.  Pretty proud of my efforts; once plied, the yarn is really nice and I would knit with it. My first effort is about a worsted weight plied on itself.  My second effort was just to see how thin I could spin. Yesterday morning I plied it into a Navajo ply and it turned into a very even fingering-weight purple yarn.

Can't figure out how to post pictures right now. Hopefully I will be able to in future posts.  It may just be an issue on my tablet.

Coming on Tomato Tuesday: picking the spot and digging the holes.

WIP Wednesday: Dragonscale Shawl

Yesterday, I bought 6 skeins of acrylic yarn: two pink for my daughter, two grey, and the last two in shades of yellow, lemon and vanilla.  I'll talk more about the yellow ones on Saturday, because I don't intend to cast on before then.

The grey skeins were Simply Soft (hey, I'm a beginner, and a broke college student to boot) and they were intended to be for charity knitting, since my friend from church C--- loved my Palindrome in green and suggested that I make one much wider for a charity shawl.  However, when I cast on, I didn't have my cable needle on me, and it's such a wide cable that I didn't feel comfortable just trying to knit them out of sequence.  I was going to try to use a smaller DPN as a substitute for the day.  I cast on for 6 repeats although I really should have cast on for 8, as it turns out.  It's not nearly wide enough even at 80sts.  When I got 4 rows in, I liked the look of the abbreviated ribbing so much, that I decided to knit the whole thing in what I'm calling dragonscale, or abbreviated rib.  It's 2x2 rib that alternates on every third row, and that's what gives it the scaled appearance: the third row of purls bumps up, like it sits on top of the next row up.

The biggest problem I have is that it seems too narrow, only 15 inches, to donate as a prayer shawl, and yet it's very much too wide to be classified as a scarf. The saving grace, why I didn't rip it out at 2 inches in, is that I was absolutely in love with the pattern and wanted to just keep going.  (Also that the twist in Simply Soft sort of disintegrates if you rip.)  It's an absolutely gorgeous silver grey, and I'm already starting to plan the next project in Dragonscale in my mind.

For the future:
I bought a pretty supported spindle, and it's coming packed in fiber. When my friend J--- heard about this, she and her daughter gave me a huge bag of undyed wool.  Spinning Sundays, anyone?
Also, I think I'll produce a new section called F.O. Fridays, where I show you the completed work, a few weeks after the WIP Wednesday. And maybe, if you're lucky, Cast-On (AKA Pattern Search) Saturdays, which is where the yellow will come in.

For now, I'm sick, and feel like curling up with hot tea and my knitting.  And maybe watching TV.

WIP Wednesday

I decided to create a new feature, to help me update more regularly, called WIP (Work-in-Progress) Wednesday. The idea comes from redknits.wordpress.com, who has Covet Wednesdays, but I like the alliteration of WIP Wednesday better, and I have several WIP to document, anyway.

When I post a WIP here, it will be something that I'm actively working on. Today, I'd like to document my blue Fleegle socks, in Stroll Sport, that I began in early spring and recently began to actively knit again. They were meant to have a contrast short-row heel, but it evaded me for long enough (despite knitting a short-row toe adequately) that I sought out a new method.

I think the Fleegle is an elegant, but hard to measure heel. I'm using kfb because they're easier for me. My sock is probably going to be too long for my foot. She only tells you to start the increases during the period when "the sock reaches the part where your ankle meets your leg" but for some people, I suppose, that's too far back. I'm going to try it on when I get well past the turn, and if it flops around, I guess I'll have to rip back. But these *will* get finished. Pictures to come.

"Branching" out

Last month I bought some lovely Brittany birch double pointed needles; I immediately changed out the WIPs off of the loooong metal needles, even though they were flat projects. I like the shorter, lighter needles incomparably better. They're comfortable, light, and they don't bump Chris if he's sitting by me (or snag a blanket or something).

That said, I immediately started seeing gaps in their utility. For instance, I tried to make a market bag, but it called for a circular needle--and for good reason. The stitches would barely fit on my 7.5" needles, and every single DPN started with a yarn over. How the hell do you do a yarn over when you've just started with the needle? I figured it out, but managed to keep dropping them anyway.

Notwithstanding the dropped yarnovers, which are a special case, I actually took to DPNs pretty fast, I think. No strange V-shaped ladders at my joins: all-in-all, I like them a lot. I haven't been poking myself. I did realize that I've been wrapping my purls backwards and all of a sudden I'm using a WIP to test out different purls, which is making the gauge fluctuate in the middle of a stinking row, since, until I realized that I had twisted every knit alternating rows (because a backwards wrapped purl makes an Eastern-oriented stitch, which, knitted through the front loop twists it). I suck at purling, all of a sudden. I may actually finish the rest of the project with the backwards wrapped purls to make the texture consistent (aside from the hesitatingly knitted half-inch I did today). ...However! I do realize why knitting was so much harder than purling to this point: I was knitting twisted stitches, as a matter of fact every single one in stockinette. The only purl I know that DOESN'T twist the stitch starts with the yarn behind the left needle and has the working needle come behind and through, grab and turn. But pulling it through is very hard. I'm back to throwing. Shit.

Then there are socks. Apparently light, convenient, addictively fun immediate gratification, I however kept seeing project pages calling for sizes 0,1,2. My current set only goes as small as size 3 (3.25mm) of which I accidentally ordered 2 sets, and although I thought I corrected that, in the final tally I received two sets but was only billed for one. Hooray for my luck with customer service, huh? However, they didn't sell smaller needles... and now I'm left wondering how much my gauge will change from 2mm to 3.25mm. A lot more than I'd rather, probably.

So I need some smaller needles: sock needles. And in general, I'd rather buy something I'm going to continue using, and although I would like a few more smaller sets of DPNs, the wood is just a bit too grabby to see myself using once I speed (back) up. So I'm looking at Knit Picks' nickel "sock set", or at least one or two sizes thereof. But they're so damn close in size that I can't be sure which size to get. If I don't get the set, I would probably end up getting all of them due to my nagging lust for completed sets. (The Harmony wood is too busy for my taste, so I would get Surina or Brittany Birch if I were planning to get wood... which I still might. The Brittanys come in 5" and the Surina comes in a darker wood, from Fabulous Yarns, and I Really Like the look of the darker wood.)

Honestly, since the plain vanilla sock is stockinette or ribbing, but in the round, where a previous row's backwards wrapped purl doesn't really affect this row's knit, I'm sorely tempted to begin a pair of socks for myself or Chris or the girls, in Sport weight or something, and just have a few twisted stitches or ktbl where the ribbing ends. What do you think?

Since I know that nobody's out there, it's mostly a question for my subconscious. I think I'll buy sport weight in a color that doesn't show mistakes, maybe black Stroll, and use my size 3 needles. I knit sort of tight anyhow.

(Next time: 5 whole fleeces and fiber prep: carding vs. combing, roving vs. top, washing vs. scouring, hand dying and spinning... all in a Northern Californian summer???)