Weekend Wonder #5

Wow! This is my fifth Weekend Wonder! I was starting to think I wasn't going to make it tonight, as if Ravelry, Blogger, and Wordpress were all against me, but it's finally all come together.

This fifth WW is my first knit pattern. I wanted that milestone to go to something more... exciting, like the shrug (that didn't work) but I remembered this simple little number and decided to share it instead. I made these fingerless glove (or mitts, or whatever you want to call them) to have something warm and cushy to wear while typing. I've been working off and on on version 2.0 for the summer (i.e. not warm, but still cushy) and I'll let you know if they ever work out. In the meantime, these maintain their trusty position at my computer desk because my office is frigid any time the building's air conditioner is on. I bet some of you know that feeling.

The pattern is available here and on Ravelry as a PDF. If you would be interested in test knitting a needle knit version, I would be thrilled to send you the draft. I don't needle knit, but I would like my patterns to be ... cross platform whenever possible. Just comment, email, or Ravelry-message me (JennieMac).

P.S. I promise my next post will be about some of my recent FOs.

To Frog or To Fix?

Time for a bit of reader feedback. (Come on lurkers, time to contribute!) :)

I made a shrug on a yellow KK long loom in mock rib stitch (my pics below). I love the way the fabric itself turned out, but the design does not fit the way I wanted. Essentially, I was trying to imitate a design I'd seen on Ravelry - something similar to this crochet shrug at left from http://www.crochet.org/. I wanted something that would go across both my shoulders and my collarbone with nice long sleeves for my super long arms. And I wanted to knit it. There was no shoulder shaping involved, essentially it is just a long panel split down the middle for the neck opening and seamed up the undersides of the sleeves. My original plan had been to do short row shaping and to make the front and back wider than just half the sleeve, but I got lazy about the increases and was fooled by the project while it was on the loom.

What's wrong with it? Some things I can fix and some I can't.
1. The neck opening is wider than I intended, but I've already crocheted it shut a little to reinforce it - I could do more.
2. The arms are too narrow to seam up any higher than just above my elbows, meaning that this won't work for its primary purpose (my office is berry, berry cold in the summer, and I had hoped to have something to slip on over sleeveless tops, but this would leave an unattractive swath of ... my husband gets mad if I call it turkey arms, so I'll just leave it at that.
3. The lack of shaping and the long sleeves mean I can't just seam up the neck opening and wear it across my back - it falls down.

So, in the "Frog it" category is the argument that now that I've seen it finished, I know where I could put short rows for the shoulder shaping and how wide the neck should be and how I would like to make one change to the stitching... Plus, I have nearly a skein of yarn left over to add to the height of the front and back.

In the "Fix it" category, I could crochet gussets into the arms to lengthen the sleeves and even add height using crochet with no frogging required. (That won't get rid of the lack of shaping in the shoulders and puckering that results though.) Also, I need to get to work on a time sensitive project for my husband, and I'm not sure I'll have time to do both before he needs his done, and by then, I'll be home for the summer and packing to move to colder climes where a completely redone shrug will be more appropriate.

I'm still debating, and I promised my husband (who needs a cute knitblog nickname) that I wouldn't rush into frogging it. It was time consuming to make 450 rows of 30+ stitches...
What think ye?

Yikes! Must get back to work!

Weekend Wonder #2

Hello again! I'm sorry for a lack of posting this week. It's a crunch time at work, so there hasn't been much time. And, sadly, my latest FO is also a disappointment. But(!) I'll save that for another post. This one is a Weekend Wonder! wonder... wonder... wonder...

For this Weekend Wonder, I wanted to share with you three of my favorite knitblogs. There's a lot of memes and such out there about top ten blogs, but I wanted to just do three to share something nice about these lovely ladies. As we all know, the great thing about blogs is that they give us a window into someone else's world. For some of us, this satisfies our inner voyeur, but I also think that for many of us, especially crafters, blog reading is about feeling like we are a part of a community.

While these aren't the three blogs that got me sucked into the the Inter-knit (heehee), they are three that make me love knitters and the whole knit community. I don't have everything in common with these ladies - I'm not a homeschooler, a book author, a knit designer, a mom, a divorcé... I don't drink as much ;) as they do, and I'm not even a needle knitter. Because of that last one, I often feel on the outskirts of knitting conversations, which is similar to a lot of the rest of my life. But reading these three blogs gets me excited about my own stuff - knitting, crafting, living. And THAT's what makes for a good blog.

Without further ado:

Knit and Tonic, by Wendy
Wendy has a design eye that I really like, both fresh and classic, but she's also a natural storyteller. She'll make you laugh with stories from the gym and stories about her family. She'll make you feel like you're in her backyard, enjoying knitting on a spring day. I'm not sure I can put it into words she would admire, but I feel like Wendy is a person, that I like her and she would like me and we could hang.

Shut Up, I'm Counting, by Cass
What to say about Cass? She'll crack you up. She's a great mom who makes me want to have teenagers RIGHT NOW, though as far as knitting goes ... she does much more colorful stuff than I do. :) She's real and messy (like me) and reminds me often of the value of laughing at one's self. Her blog is always either the first I read or the one I save for last.

CrazyAuntPurl, by Laurie
Crazy Aunt Purl is a recent discovery for me. I admired her book in the store a few months ago but managed to resist (a feat for me) until recently. The humor on her blog the last few months really drew me in until I couldn't help but buy the book. I haven't started reading it yet, but I did start at the beginning of her blog the other night. Laurie's story... Well, her book is titled Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair, so that says a lot. I'm still happily married and still believe in marriage - and my husband doesn't read this blog, so I'm not just saying that - but Laurie has been helpful to me in my own efforts at self-discovery of late, of remembering and learning who I am as a person. And I'm admiring her journey (as well as laughing at her wonderful writing).

I hope you enjoy these links. I'll try to check in early next week when I've mounted the next hill of grading. :) Future Weekend Wonders may include... (bum, bum, bummm) crochet blogs, loom knitting blogs, patterns that work (the shrug has fallen off that list) and tips and tricks from little ol' me!

My current WIPs and an almost FO

Wow! A crafting post! Imagine! This is what I've been working on recently, though not as much as I'd like.

1. An FO revisited - I ripped the ribbon lining of the Calla Lily strap out and re-felted the bag. A little denser and a little more pilled, I like it better and have been using it for about two weeks without the ribbon sewn back in. I like it and haven't noticed any stretching; so far, so good. I also haven't put my heaviest item - my journal - in it lately.

2. An almost FO - I improvised a camera bag out of some left over Landscapes yarn but I don't have the ribbon to thread through the top to cinch it, so the effect isn't quite complete. Plus, my husband had his camera, so I couldn't take a picture of it with a camera in it. I wrote my first crochet pattern and put all of this up on Ravelry if you want to take a look. (Please do!)

3. A WIP - The shrug I designed hit the 100 row mark tonight - and stopped on the 135 row mark at the end of tonight's faculty senate meeting. :) It's knit sideways on the yellow KK straight loom. The stitch pattern is described here informally for loom and needles. If anyone knows what the "proper" name for this stitch is, I'd love to know. (Sadly, I spotted my first screw up in this piece tonight, but since it's for me, I'm not going to tink it. It was just a purl where there should have been a knit.)

As Rachel said today, click to embiggen. You can see my crochet cast on in both pictures. I was trying a new technique.

For Loom: Cast on an odd number of stitches, R to L (CW). Row 1: Knit off all stitches. Row 2: K, P, to end of row. Repeat Rows 1-2.

For Needles: Cast on an odd number of stitches. Row 1: Knit all stitches. Row 2: P, K, to end of row. Repeat Rows 1-2.

(Note, I don't think that's actually quite right, because the way I loom knit, you only knit the end pegs once, but I'm too tired to translate it perfectly. This would get the body of the stitch right.) :)

FO: Calla Lily Bag

Before:

The bag was assembled in a very rectangular way and completely seamed together at this stage. It was looking big, but not so big that I thought it wouldn't felt down to a good size. The proportions weren't quite looking right for the final product, but I'd had to do a couple of fixes already, and without knowing how it would felt, I took the chance.

I washed it in my environmentally-friendly Kenmore for about half an hour, maybe a little longer, and it felted up well. In retrospect, I might have been more patient and let it felt for one more cycle.

And After:

Apologies for the slightly blurry picture. We were trying desperately to catch the last of the light today. I'd love to set up a place inside for good pictures... but I digress.
I lined the bag handle with a strip of pale blue ribbon (see below) to prevent it from stretching out. Note how the outer walls are higher than the inner - this isn't part of the pattern, nor was it intentional on my part. I didn't notice the inner wall was shorter than the outer until I had two done, and until I finished the third, I thought I might be imagining it. I made the fourth (the other outer wall) ten rows longer to try to make them match up better, and felted you can't tell at all.

I already have ideas for how I will do the next one differently - shorter, slightly tapered corners, garter stitch maybe - but I do think this one turned out well. It holds my basics plus some, and I really like the color.

The Calla Lily Bag, adapted for the loom/rake, ladies and gentlemen.

Christmas Scarves and My Little Helper

The infamous gift scarves! Actually, there's nothing infamous about them. These are just two scarves, modeled by their recipients, that I made in December for two female relatives. The light blue started out as a straight garter stitch, but the yarn was a pain to work with, so I frogged and started doing it in the round so that I only had to knit, not purl. I realized a couple dozen rows in that this scarf was going to be far too thick for Arizona and that I might run out of yarn. So, I got creative. I think the Yarn Harlot would be proud.

I stopped working in the round by reversing at the end of one rotation and then decreased a stitch at the end of the row. Repeat back and forth until you have a flat panel half the width of the loom and you get a scarf end with a tube and a V-shaped opening. What I did then is knit garter stitch to the end of the skein, repeat the same procedure to create another short tube and length of scarf of about the same size, and seam them together roughly in the middle. Finally, I seamed up the end of those tubes so I'd made a scarf with pockets. I would actually do this again if I was going to make another scarf - for an impromptu fix it worked out really well. She dug the pockets, and I certainly didn't tell her they weren't part of the plan.

The other scarf suffered a similar glitch of a different nature. I was using Lion Brand Homespun to make a chevron pattern, which is really a waste of neat stitches since you can't see them in the yarn. I got about 20-25 rows in (I wasn't counting since I planned to do the same pattern for as long as it took) when I realized I wasn't going tob able to finish these in time for Christmas. I needed help. (As it ended up, we were still knitting on Christmas.) Well, my husband isn't a knitter; the chevrons would have been too complicated for him, so I had him knit about half of the scarf in a wide rib pattern, then I made the other end approximately the same squirrelly series of chevrons, and seamed it up. The result? A scarf that looks vaguely frilly on the ends, which is nice enough I guess.

Now I am trying to finish up my Calla Lily bag but struggling to spend as much time as I'd like given that classes started this week. I got a lot done last night despite thanks to My Little Helper, pictured here in a poorly lit shot. :) Fortunately, I'm only 15 rows from the end of the strap, which is my last section, and then the seaming will begin! That's going to take a long time - there are eight 70-stitch seams to attach the four panels to the strap. And then - the last step - I have to felt it.

I'll take progress shots and share the whole thing with you and my Ravelry buddies as soon as I can - hopefully over the weekend. Happy Friday!

My Too-Big-Mitts, Mouse Pillow and Unoriginal Hat

My first FOs! Only a week later than I promised myself, but there's three! I've included details of all of these on my Ravelry account too.

My first knit project was a scarf that is fairly useful but not really worth mentioning. My second was the mitts - I call them my Too-Big-Mitts - at right. (Pictures of all projects are available at my Flickr account.) These were my own design, so to speak, of a tube on the blue KK loom, knit in the round except for the thumb hole created by knitting back and forth without completing the round, and a simple cast off. They work very well for their purpose, which was that I needed something to pad my wrists and palms at my laptop during NaNoWriMo. My currently in progress paper has more design flair, is more fitted, and only has the yarn doubled on the bottom (palm) side in order to make the back more breathable.


This is a mouse pillow inspired by pieKnits' pattern. It's really just a moss-stitch square seamed on three sides except for the little bit of flair created by the cast on. Last but not least, this is a hat I made in my first attempt to convert something complicated - cables - from an existing pattern - the Yarn Harlot's Unoriginal Hat.

I'm happy with how all of these turned out, but I definitely learned a different lesson from each of them. (Make the thumb hole bigger, be more careful with stitch patterns, and that technique of cabling didn't quite work, for example.) If you've got comments or questions about how I did anything, I'm happy to chat about it. Now to sleep!