Knit faster - that'll work

I've been happily knitting away at a lacy shawl/scarf in the evenings, using a beautiful gradient teal yarn.  (I'd show a better picture, but it's for a gift and I don't want to spill all the beans...)

When I hit the part where I was to start the last chart, for the lacy edging, I stopped for a bit of a think.  It looked to me like I was going to finish that last chart with a lot of yarn left over, which meant a good bit of that gradient was going to go to waste.  A bit of geometry was applied and I figured that I was at the halfway point knitting wise, but I had lots more than half the yarn left.  Hurray!  I could do one more repeat of the lace pattern used for the body of the shawl!

Famous last words, right?
As I inched up that last chart, row by row, I watched my rapidly-diminishing ball of yarn with increasing alarm.
There's a time-honored technique deployed by knitters everywhere when they find themselves in this situation - I knit faster and faster, hoping I'd finish before I ran out of yarn.
(Note to non-knitters:  No, this doesn't work.  It has never worked, but we keep doing it anyway.)
One moment I was lying to reassuring myself that it was going to be fine, just fine, don't worry, fine, and the next moment I'd start to get a little panicky again.
I had a row and a half of chart left -

but only this much yarn.

I needed to work one wrong side row, then the last row of the chart, and then I figured I could cheat and skip the last wrong side row and just head right for the bind off instead.
So, over, back, and over once more.
Yeah, yeah, this'll work.  Yeah...
I marked the halfway point of that little ball of yarn and set off knitting.  I barely made it over once, before hitting that mark.  Even cheating, I was still going to end up a full row short.

Rip...  Rewind.  I went back to before the last chart started, then took out two extra rows from the body of the shawl (never miss them, right?), and started that last chart again.
I'm only a couple of rows from where I was last time, but I've got way more yarn left.

I'm sure it's going to work this time.  Absolutely.  Yep.
It's going to be fine.
Though I might start knitting a little faster...

This one's for The Kat!

My dear friend kmkat has been waiting patiently (and waiting and waiting and waiting some more) for me to do a knitting post.  Because I love her dearly and because it's totally her fault anyway (check the third link), here it is.
I saw these mitts and fell madly in love.  Gotta have 'em.  Just gotta.
Of course, I had to modify the pattern right off the bat.  Because that's what I do.  Why do anything the easy way when I can complicate it?
My preferred cast on for starting with a k1p1 ribbing is a tubular cast on.  I work it flat for the first couple of rows (and here I've cast on with contrasting color 2, just for grins)

and then when I'm ready to join to knit in the round, I don't have to worry about twisting my work because it's so honkin' obvious if I do.  Hurray for no twist!  (Been there, done that, got a dozen t-shirts.)

I'm not really very far yet, but words have appeared.  The Labyrinth itself will be starting on the next row.

And I've got the perfect thing to watch while I knit.

Amazon had it on sale.  I had a gift certificate.  My old copy of this movie currently lives with one of my daughters.  My path was obvious - not labyrinthine at all...

Brioche everywhere I look!

The new Knitty just went live, and guess which pattern caught my eye?

Yep, Willow.

No surprise there, eh?

I see a lot of barking and burping in my future!  (Those are brioche technical terms.  And you wonder why I like brioche knitting so much...)

Brioche brioche brioche

Go ahead!  Say it three times - it's fun!

I got a book today for a late birthday gift.

The brioche class I took on Craftsy last month was taught by Nancy Marchant.  I've been drooling over this book ever since. 
Knitpicks has a sale on yarn.
It was fate, I tell ya.  Fate. 
And the order has been shipped...

Occasional knitting

I still knit, though quilting seems to have taken me quite firmly by the throat.  (As evidence of this, every single time I type the word 'quite', it comes out 'quilt' and I have to go back and fix it.  Including the 'quite' I just typed.  And that one, too.  *sigh*)
So, anyway.
When Craftsy ran their 'free pass for October' deal, I took advantage and became a total glutton for classes.  One of my favorites was brioche knitting.  I knit a hat last year at Christmas using brioche in the round, which was fun and not particularly fantastically horrifyingly hard.  (As long as I kept my wits about me, of course.  But what isn't that true of, when you get right down to it?)
But brioche in the round, even two color brioche in the round, is nowhere near as complicated as flat two color brioche.

It was going to be a scarf.  This is a month's work.
It's trying to kick my butt.  Not as bad as origami-butt-kicking, but still...
It's not going to be a scarf.  Maybe a potholder.
Yeah, that'll work.

I see knitting in my future!

Because this came out today!

Only I'm going to use double knitting, to avoid the floats and to make it even warmer.  And reversible.  And because it's twice as much work.
Because that's how I approach life:  What can I possibly do to complicate this?

Not completely devoid of knitting content

Though I will admit that I've lost my sense of urgency for warm woolies once the temperatures hit the 70s every day...

I'm still plugging along on my Bramblewood vest, though not without problems.

Right now it's sitting in timeout.  (Actually, I'm the one who should be in timeout, but it's not big enough to send me, so there.)  Things were going smoothly round and round until the last time I got to the cable section on the center back.  Something didn't look right.  I checked the cable section at center front and discovered that this round should have been a cable round, but I'd knitted a plain one.  Drat!  I started tinking back to the center front to have another go at it.
Unfortunately, I got interrupted.  No idea what it was, but the upshot is that I dropped my knitting into the basket and wandered off.  The next time I reached for the knitting, I forgot that I was supposed to be going in reverse and just blithely started knitting away.  Until I got to the cable section at the center back again.  Double drat!  Drat drat drat in mighty drattiness!  So I started tinking back again, and (you guessed it) got interrupted again.
But hey!  I'm getting smarter - I only knit a couple of inches the third time before I realized I should STILL be going in reverse...

So, let's talk about alpacas instead!
Saturday was the big shearing day for Wicked Good Stepmother's alpacas.  The shearers, consisting of a mom, a dad, and the three kids, arrived with mats and muscles and got down to business.

The muscles came in handy.

Not that alpacas are stubborn or anything.  Or dumb.  Unh unh. 

Lovely cooperative intelligent creatures, each and every one.

(We won't talk about the fact that this gray one peed on the girl's leg while she was trying to hold it steady...)

  Soon all four had their new spring haircuts and were looking pretty spiffy.  Unfortunately, I didn't get any pics of them at the spiffy stage, since they all had a good roll in the dirt as soon as they were released back in their pasture.  At that point they just looked like four big dustballs, so I went back to helping gather up fleece.
I really need to get that spinning wheel going, don't I?





 

I didn't actually cast on that sweater.

Well, mostly, anyway.  It's a swatch cuff swatch cuff swatch.  Definitely a swatch.
And wow is that a busy cable.  There are crossings in every single right-side row.  Looks like I'm embarking on another Keep-Your-Wits-About-You-At-All-times project.
You know.  My favorite kind.

And in quilty news, in between the other two quilts I'm working on, I threw together this mini quilt top as a kind of rest from all the brightness.

It measures just a little bit shy of 11x14 inches.  Eventually I'll get it quilted and bound.
Well, that is, if I don't start any more quilts or sweaters, I guess.

At least I don't need to glue it.

I seem to have broken the card reader for my computer, so no pictures for a while.  I was so focused on not putting the card in backwards that I managed to put it in upside down.  Apparently this has a bad effect on the various electronic bits inside, as it is so broken that it won't even let the computer boot up if it's plugged in.  Thorough is me, I guess.
And I was so excited about the pictures on the card!  I got hooked on Pinterest (Did anyone ever
tellwarn me about Pinterest?  Like how wonderful it is?  Like what a timesuck it is?), which led to me looking at a lot of pictures of quilts, which led to me looking at a lot of blogs about quilts (and my feedly is now fatter, because you know how much I love a good timesuck), which led to me missing quilting a lot, since it's been a long time.
So, thanks to wonderful folks like Bonnie Hunter and a bunch of others, I dug out a bunch of fabric, bought a couple of new tools, and made a bunch of progress on an old project that has been bogged down for far too long.

As I mentioned, my access to my camera is kaput, so this is part of the pattern image.  (The quilt is called Starry Nine Patch and is just gorgeous, but the pattern doesn't seem to be available any more.)  The things I like best about it are that it looks fabulous in lots and lots of colors (scrap happy!), it uses lots of 9-patches (which are my favorite block!), and there are stars and stars and stars everywhere you look.
While I was working on the cutting and sewing, I took lots and lots of photos of the process.  Unfortunately, all those photos are stuck in that itty bitty SD card, and will remain so until I can get to town and buy a new reader.  *sigh*
But all the sewing doesn't mean I've abandoned the knitting!  I've also been plugging away at my vest and am in the home stretch.
Which of course means that I may or may not have printed out the pattern for this

as my next project.
In red.
Because I've always wanted a red cabled sweater.
Red.  Oh, yeah...

And more knitting, since it's too cold to do anything else...

I've got three finishes for 2015 already!

Dad has an old pair of leather mittens.

Clearly he's had them for a while. The pair of wool mittens that line them have become too worn to serve their function.  RIP old wool mittens.  (I didn't get a picture of them.  Your first thought on seeing them would have been "Oh, the poor little things...")
He requested new mittens.  With temperatures hovering in the single digits, with occasional dips into the negative, leather mitts lined with wool mitts are extremely useful at chore time.

This is actually Pair of Mittens Number Two.  The first pair was knit in black wool; warm enough, but the cuffs were too short.  (Again, no picture.  You can probably picture them yourself.  Black mittens.  See?  No picture necessary, really.)  So Pair of Mittens Number One was downgraded to just regular old mittens, and I made Pair of Mittens Number Two to line the leather gloves.  And despite what it looks like in the picture, they really are the same size.  It's just a crappy picture.  (sigh)

Finish number three is a nice warm cowl for Wicked Good Stepmother, made from yarn spun from alpaca fleeces from her own alpacas.

Though full disclosure here - this is a total cheat.  I'd actually started this project last year, using yarn I'd had left from a scarf I knit her a couple of years ago.   It started out to be a Frost hat, in black, because I'm crazy and knit cables with black yarn.  More than once.  I was afraid I didn't have enough of the black yarn to knit the whole thing, so I'd cast on with the gray and knit the ribbed band, trying to stretch the black.  Turned out I had even less yarn that I'd thought, so I'd put the 'hat' in timeout while I considered options.  For a year.  I came across it recently, along with what was left of the gray alpaca yarn, and a light bulb went off.  So, I turned the hat into a cowl by knitting gray ribbing to match the cast on edge, and casting off.  Ta da!  WGS has enjoyed the warmth (alpaca!) in the aforementioned cold temps.

So, with three finishes under my belt, I figured I was entitled to cast on something new.  (We'll ignore the UFOs in various bags here and there.  (And there, too.)  I'm working from stash, so it's all good.)  I recalled that I had some pretty green yarn that WGS had given me a while back.  I was pretty sure there were two skeins, which might be enough for a hat and/or maybe some fingerless mitts.  (Vancouver Fog has been nibbling on the edge of my brain for a while, thanks to kmkat.)  When I went and hunted it up, I was pleasantly surprised to find I actually had four skeins!  Woohoo!

I totaled up yardage and realized I could really expand my expectations.
What to knit, what to knit?  I thought I might have enough for a vest.  Ravelry to the rescue!  I started pattern-hunting, trying out various criteria.  Yardage.  Yarn weight.  It occured to me that top-down might be a good plan, since the yardage I had was right on the borderline of the smallest sizes of what I was finding.
Yep, Ravelry comes through:  Bramblewood.  There are even cables!

 (Someone stole all the color out of my picture.  It's really a deep forest green.)

So, let's step back for moment and think about how this came about.
1.  I want to knit something.
2. I want to knit something with this yarn.
3. What can I knit with this yarn?
4. I can knit a vest with this yarn.
5. I cast on a vest.


Do you think I might be a process person?

Still here. Really.

I've just been suffering the Worst Cold Ever for the last couple of weeks.  A walking Snot Factory.  A Snotomaton.  Buy stock in tissues, y'all.  Srsly.
It's been hard to summon the brain power to even comment on other people's blogs, let alone construct a post for my own.  I'm still reading, but not so much with the writing...
I did manage to finish knitting a hat, but I gifted it before getting a picture.  I highly recommend Frost - gorgeous and fun to knit, which is the perfect combination!

My butt still hurts

Yesterday was the second Jury Draw (of the three that I have to endure to meet my civic duty this year) and I spent 8 hours sitting on a hard wooden bench with only a thin cushion (very thin.  Like 1/2 inch thin.  Thin.) to protect my bony little butt.*
The good news is that I got the cuff of a sock knit.  The bad news is that I'll probably have to rip it out.  While I like a little negative ease in my socks, this one is turning out a little too negative-easish.  Like somewhere between tourniquet and Chinese footbinding.  I'm not even going to bother taking a photo, since I'm going to rip it.  So the good news 2 is that I'll be able to knit it over, and it's good that I have knitting to look forward to because the bad news 2 is that we didn't finish picking a jury and have to go back next Thursday to continue the whole longwinded boring process.
*sigh*


*  My theory is that they don't want us to get too comfortable and fall asleep from boredom.  Which I did anyway.  I seem to be making a habit of sleeping in the courtroom.  Maybe I should point this out if they try to select me for a jury.  I'm sure it wouldn't look good if the bailiff had to keep poking me to wake me up.

Hey! What happened to August?!?

And how did it get to be September already...

So, what have I got to show for the summer?

Here's the sum total of the knitting I got done:

Wingspan.  (This is the best of a bunch of really bad pictures.  I can't get the colors right and the focus defeats me.)  I love this project.  Though if you count over to the fourth and fifth wedges, starting from the right, you'll see that the color sequence went south.  Minutes after I posted about how the colors were transitioning perfectly for the pattern, I hit a knot in the yarn.  *sigh*

The garden pretty well went south this summer too.  What with the sheep getting out and eating most of it, there's not much left but swiss chard and green beans.  And the tomatoes are being eaten nearly to the ground by a sudden infestation of hornworms, which we've never had before in all our years of gardening up here.  Growing up in Kansas and upstate NY, I was familiar with them, but Madman was all "WTF?!?" because he'd never seen one before.  Picture a caterpillar the size of your middle finger, chomping on your tomato plants and pooping the equivalent of elephant droppings.  The only good thing about them is that they explode rather spectacularly when you stomp on them.  (Just be careful not to point them at anyone, as they go off like a cannon.)

One of the few bright spots is that my lovely Black Austrolorps have started laying eggs.  (*sniff*  They grow up so fast...)  They've now been moved in with the main laying flock, though they spend most of their time next to the fence between poultry pens, gazing at their beloved turkeys.  The turkeys are also now spending all their time pressed up against the other side of the fence, gazing right back at their little chicken friends.  And this morning, Madman found the hen turkey in with the layer flock - she must have climbed the fence since she's now too fat to fly.  We foresee trouble, but the turkeys' days are numbered (because Thanksgiving.  And possibly Christmas.  You know.  Don't tell them.) so it will all work out in the end.   Because it would be just great if something on this little farmlet would just stay where it's supposed to.

But I'm not holding my breath...

The flutter of Wingspan

When I first cast on for this scarf/shawlette, I was a little worried about how much yarn I had - would it be enough?  The skein of Marks and Katten Fame Trend says it contains ca 420 meters, which sounds like plenty in the face of the 330-425 m that the original pattern calls for.  But I was pretty sure I was going to want it longer, with more triangles. 
Ah, I thought.  If that turns out to be the case, I'll just frog and reknit with fewer stitches, which would make it end up narrower and longer.  No problem.

But then, this:

The color transitions are happening perfectly...  It's as if the yarn was made for the pattern.  There'll be no frogging here - whatever I get, I get.

Now why is it that, even when a plan is working perfectly, it still bites me on the ass?

Distraction

If I could find a pair of size 5 needles, I'd so be casting on for this. 
With this:

From here.

Oh, wait.  I found a pair of size 4s.  Close enough...

That's what I get for ignoring that little voice in the back of my head...

Remember that post where I was almost done with the second sock?  (You know what's coming, right?  Cue Ominous Music.  Yep.)
I'd been knitting the foot portion of the sock, trying to ignore that little niggling voice in my head that kept trying to tell me that Something is Wrong.  "No, no."  I kept saying to myself.  "It's really fine.  The fact that this sock seems shorter than the first one is clearly an optical illusion, since I've knit the same number of rows of the pattern stitch from the point of the gusset to the start of the toe.  I know this because I've counted them 14 times.  Not that I'm worried that there is a Mistake somewhere or anything.  I just like compulsively counting rows of knitting.  Especially with my hands over my ears: one, la la la, two, la la la, three, la la la..."
Eventually, though, even I can't maintain that level of denial.  The second sock is clearly shorter than the first, despite my best efforts to stretch it.
Once I stopped looking just at the knitting after the gusset, and looked at the gusset itself, I found the problem.
Here are the socks, lined up sole to sole:

The one on the right is First Sock.  The one on the left is Second Sock.  See the problem?  Count the rows in the gusset - which is easy to do, since they're conveniently knit in stripes.  A fact I ruthlessly ignored in my denial.

Honestly, I could just cry.

No Lambies Yet, and Other Mid-March Updates

(And how did it get to be the middle of March, anyway?  Did we skip a week or so somewhere?  Why wasn't I told?)
 I've been spinning a bit here and there.  My long-draw is slowly improving as I get more practice, but I still haven't put in enough time with it for it to seem easy.  Not proficient, by any means.  (Is there such a thing as antificient?  Still antificient...)

 And still unable to get a good pic of that fiber.

 Still knitting.  I only seem to get a row or two done a night, but patience is rewarded.  (Eventually...)  I'm this close to finishing the toe of sock #2:

  

And it's time to think gardening.  The damn snow will be gone soon - Spring is going to come.  (I keep telling myself that to keep my spirits up...)                                                                                                              

Tomato seedling are happy little things.  Notice the white marker in the lower left corner - I cut up the lid from a sour cream container to make plant markers.  Usually we use the cut-up container itself to make markers from, but this year I had more lids than containers, so I'm testing the lids.  (Write on them with pencil, rather than pen or marker.  Ink fades in the sun, pencil does not.  Just a little tip from your Auntie Mango.)

Last chance for entries in the great LambWatch of 2012.  I really am going to close entries this time!

Can't talk now, turning the heel on the second sock

And trying to remember to take pictures as I go.
I found my notes from Sock 1 were a little sketchy in places as I worked on Sock 2.  Like exactly how I turned the heel.  Whatever I did the first time, it worked perfectly. 

Sure wish I had written it down...

Here ya go

Remember the Piggy Hat?  In case anyone's interested, here's the pattern:

Yeah, it's a post-it note.

(If there are any mistakes in the math, don't tell me.  It's way too late...)

Here, Piggy, Piggy...

So I can now reveal the secret knit project, since it has been gifted to the happy recipient.
It's double-knitting again, since I seem to have been bitten hard by this particular technique. 

Behold, the Pig Hat:

A fully reversible earflap hat.  With pigs.

I designed it on the fly, since I had the wonderful idea for it way too late to actually finish it in time.  By starting with the earflaps, I was able to work out what my gauge was, and then do the calculations for the body of the hat from there.  The pigs are a re-work of some charts for a sock in the Socks, Socks, Socks book, altered from the 3 colors of the charts (meant for duplicate stitch) which I changed for 2 colors.  The stripes are just because I like stripes, and they make it easy to count rows.  I finished weaving in the last end after supper at the giftee's house, after making her hunt me up a yarn needle.  (Because I'd forgotten to bring one.  Preparedness is not my middle name...)

The recipient is my wonderful Wicked Good Stepmother - since she and my dad raise pigs, it seemed wildly appropriate.  I told her that with one side out, it shows Yorkshire pigs, and the other side is flashing Red Durocs. 

She was pretty pleased with the hat...