Everyone knows that the yarn diet goes out the window when a friend announces a pregnancy, right?
I’m pleased that the solid red matches the red in the variegated colourway so well, and I’m curious to try knitting with this yarn. I generally don’t like cotton yarn, but it’s so good for babies’ sensitive skin. This yarn, Cascade Fixation, has 1.7% elastic in it. Will that help mitigate the harshness of knitting with cotton yarn, or will the elastic only make it even harder to knit up?
There’s really not much to blog about the project yet, since the yarn is still neatly wound up just as it came from the store. It will soon become a little hat and a pair of booties, but first I want to finish the Timey-Wimey socks. The baby isn’t due until late December, so I’m not hurried at all.
In non-knitting news (there’s such a thing?) I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I live on top of a mountain, and I thought it might be nice to share the view from my window. It was just luck that I had my camera on the table with me, since it’s usually nowhere in sight. But I’d just taken the pictures of the yarn and still had the camera out. When I saw the deer drinking from my fishpond, I grabbed the opportunity to shoot this quick video. Hope you like it! :)
I’m just past the gusset decreases and into the foot of the first Timey-Wimey Jaywalker, and very near the toe of the second Sibling Sock, so I’ve swapped them out: the Jaywalkers are going to become my traveling sock and I’m cranking away on the Sibling sock right now, hoping to finish it (and the pair!) tonight. Pirate-Husband and I are going to be at a party from tomorrow morning into Monday afternoon, so I should be able to put a few more inches onto the Jaywalkers then. One of the goals of the gathering is to fell three large trees, something I’m just not physically up to right now, so I plan to knit and watch stronger people swing axes and wield chainsaws.
The math to convert my Fleep-Tops to a larger size for Michael was giving me fits. I mis-read my notes, then I mis-judged, and then I mis-calculated, but eventually figured out what to do. The numbers should all be right now, but there’s only so far I can go before I’ll want him to try them on for perfect sizing. Once I have the first one done, the second will be much faster.
Happy news: I just found out that my friend Angie is pregnant with her first! She’s only seven weeks along, but I’m already planning out what to knit for her. I ordered the yarn from WEBS this morning, and downloaded some patterns from Ravelry. Knitting babyclothes is total instant gratification!
Last night I gave in to further temptation and started a new project – the second pair of Fleep-Tops, slightly larger than my pair. I struggled with my notes and the math for a little while until I realized that I was making it much more difficult than it really needed to be: mine were sized down from the smallest size, but these can be knit following the small size of the pattern. I’m using Cigar from Knitty, and then I’ll add mitten-tops a la Gnomittens.
There’s a method to my madness. I don’t need to start a new project now… but these are for Michael, and he’s visiting this weekend, so I can conveniently try them on the live model, instead of guessing at the size and hoping to get it right.
I’ve got the cuff done (right size! woo!) and now it’s on to the gussets. Hopefully I don’t have to make too many edits and adjustments. Maybe this will be something I only knit on when he’s visiting… as long as I can get them done before next February.
P.S. He didn’t sucker me into anything. It was all the yarn. I could hear it calling me from upstairs. *sigh*
This is the last yarn I’ll be getting for a while, I think! It is Cascade Heritage Paints in the “Isle of Skye” colourway, and it seems like the perfect colours for Mom. I hope she doesn’t mind the tinges of purple amongst the blues!
I plan to make a simple ribbed sock, 64 stitches around, since my 64-stitch socks fit her just fine. The only measurement I need to get is the length of her foot, and then I’m good to go – as soon as I finish some other projects! (Psst, Mom, can you measure your foot for me please?)
It is becoming more difficult by the day to refrain from casting on for a new project! I’m doing my best to hold out but I don’t know how long I can manage…
I came home from the Maryland Sheep and Wool festival with $40 still in my pocket, but I knew that I wasn’t done shopping. I’d kept my eyes open on Saturday for the perfect sock yarn for Mom, and hadn’t found it – so I ordered the Cascade Heritage Paints from WEBS in the Isle of Skye colourway. It’s the perfect bluesy colours for her, with just enough variegation to be interesting but not enough to stripe or pool. Admittedly, I didn’t look very hard for her yarn at the festival, because I was kind of set on getting this brand. I’ve knit with it before and I trust it to be good. While I’m willing to take risks on my own socks, I’m hesitant to do so when I’m making a gift for someone else. Especially when that someone else is a little bit skeptical about hand-knit socks in the first place. (It’s sad that my LYS didn’t have the colourway I wanted in stock; it’s even sadder that it cost the same to order it from WEBS even with the shipping. Why is the yarn marked up $3.00 at the local store? I want to shop locally, but sometimes money matters.)
Then I went over to KnitPicks to check out the new colourways of their Felici sock yarn, and for the first time, one called out to me and *needed to be mine*. The name of the colourway is “Time Traveler”. I’ve been catching up on back episodes of Doctor Who (why I haven’t watched it before is a mystery to me) and I just had to have these socks. The description makes them even better:
Wear these brightly striped socks whether you are going to the office or traveling through time and space. Time Traveler is a colorful mix of purple, tan, red, gold, ivory, and gray stripes. While you can knit some really really long socks, this colorway will not create socks that are larger on the inside than they appear on the outside.
Even better than the description, my sister the Ninja has bought the same yarn and we’re going to have matching socks! She says the colours are perfect, and she should know, ’cause she’s working on one of those extra-long stripey scarves right now. We’ve decided to both knit Jaywalkers, because then the stripes will be sort of straight (like the scarf) and yet wibbly-wobbly at the same time. This is going to be awesome.
As long as I was already shopping at KnitPicks, I bought a set of sock blockers (in large, for my long feet). I’ve been wanting them for a while, primarily for taking pictures of finished socks. It’s not always easy to get good pictures of one’s own feet!
(a note: the two pictures of yarn are from the WEBS and KnitPicks sites, respectively.)
Did I really make plans to be out of town on the same weekend as the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival? That’s what I get for not looking at my calendar. Boy, did I feel stupid when I realized my mistake. Fortunately, Amtrak doesn’t charge change fees, and I am able to move my trip to the following weekendweekend before (the following weekend is Mothers Day, and I can’t miss that either!) Whew!
Despite not remembering when it is, I’m pretty excited about MDSW. Like last year, I plan to buy mostly fibre – the hand-dyed stuff that I love to touch before deciding to buy. I’m going to help a friend look for her first drop spindle and some fibre so I can teach her to spin. I’m *not* going to buy anything that hasn’t already been washed. I haven’t gotten around to carding any of the solid-coloured stuff that I bought last year, so I don’t think I need more of those. I meant to bring the carder out over the weekend, but it didn’t quite work out. I *am* going to buy a braid of fibre in colours that I don’t usually go for, and something in a semi-solid, and maybe a sort of fibre that I haven’t yet tried – perhaps a blend that will spin into a tweedy yarn.
If I see the perfect sock yarn for my mom, I’ll pick it up; otherwise I’m going to have to order from WEBS as my local yarn store doesn’t have the colourway and wasn’t very forthcoming about their ability to order it in for me. I was a little disappointed at the hedging about ordering, and the implication that I’d have to buy a full bag of the yarn when all I need is one skein. (But ordering from WEBS is dangerous! I never want to get just one thing; I always want to get up to a $60 order so that I can have the 20% discount!)
The Baby Bunny Hat was a free pattern that I got with the purchase of Plymouth Yarn, and I finished it in just four evenings of lazy knitting. The “Sweet Caroline” yarn wasn’t as hard on my hands as some other cotton yarns I’ve tried (Sugar ‘n Cream, I’m looking at you) and I was impressed by how soft it felt both as a ball and after it was knit. The single dyed strand in the yarn shaded nicely from one colour to the next and didn’t pool or flash at all. I think it looks a lot like vanilla ice cream with sprinkles.
The pattern was actually written for Baby Bunny yarn, which has slightly more yardage per 50g ball than the Sweet Caroline does. I have seven grams left over after knitting the three-month size, so there might even be enough for the six-month size… but you’d probably need to dip into a second ball for the 9-12 or 18-24 month sizes.
The only modification that I made to the pattern was that I worked in the round, rather than knitting flat and then seaming it up afterward. The stitch pattern gets broken up across double-pointed needles, but it was easy enough to keep my place. Perhaps some people prefer seaming to knitting in the round, but I’m not one of them!
Baby-sized knits are fantastic instant gratification projects. I always forget how tiny baby clothes are; it seemed like I’d barely cast on when it was time to weave the ends in! Yesterday I picked up a little pink bag and some tissue paper, and tomorrow I will mail the hat off! I really hope the mom-to-be likes it.
Monday was a terrible day in which nothing went right, so I was determined to make Tuesday a good day in which everything went wonderfully. I started off by wearing my new socks – because really, how can I be in a bad mood if I’m wearing new socks? And on the way home from work, I stopped at With Yarn In Front to show them off… and to pick out some cotton yarn. My swornbrother Michael is going to become an uncle in just a few more weeks, and I thought it might be nice for me to knit a little something for the baby.
I browsed around the store for a little while and eventually decided to get a ball of Plymouth Sweet Caroline, a 100% cotton, worsted-weight yarn. Three strands are solid-coloured, and the fourth is variegated in the standard baby colours. It was a tossup between a colourway that was mostly pink with the one variegated strand, or the white one that I got. I went with white because I don’t know if Michael’s sister is a fan of baby-pink! The yarn came with a free pattern for this lacy Baby Bunny Hat, perfect for a little girl to wear in the springtime.
The pattern is written for the hat to be knit flat and seamed, but I decided to knit it in the round. The WS rows are only purling back with no lace, so I figured it wouldn’t be too difficult.
“Cast on 101 stitches,” the pattern said. I got out my DPNs and measured out a length of yarn for my usual long-tail cast-on, very carefully counted out 100 stitches, and knit a full round before I realized that I’d forgotten to add stitch #26 to the fourth needle. Rip, rip.
I cast on again, 101 stitches this time, and knit a full round before I realized that the first row of the edging is actually the wrong side of the work, and when the pattern said “knit” I should have purled because I’m working in the round instead of flat. Hooray for reading comprehension! …so I cheated. I turned the work inside out. Voila, a purl round! Then I worked back the other way, and I used the tail from the cast-on to fill in the little hole that was left.
This might be the least terrible cotton yarn I’ve ever worked with. I never find cotton to be as nice on the hands as wool, but I knit the edging and a full pattern repeat last night and my hands aren’t complaining. In addition, the yarn is theoretically machine-washable (excellent for baby clothing!), but the label had no care instructions. Cold-cold? Delicate cycle? I want to include a little tag with the gift, but I don’t know what to write on it!
Finally, a completed project to show! Ribbed socks for Michael, in Cascade Heritage Paints #9922. He bought the yarn for me back in November, and I broke the queue to cast on for them.
This is my new favorite sock yarn. It’s smooth, yet squooshy. It got a little splitty around the SSKs, but so does most yarn, since working that stitch takes some of the twist out. The colors were evenly distributed without any garish pooling. There was a little bit of pooling over the gusset, which is expected, and a vague hint of spiraling down the foot.
It’s a simple pattern, but I am considering writing it up for publication anyway. Like the Highwayman Armwarmers, it would be a freebie. This time around I would use a Creative Commons license, most likely Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike – in other words, you can distribute the pattern as long as I get credit; you can’t sell the pattern itself but you can sell the items you knit from it; and you can make changes and distribute them under the same license. I’m a big supporter of Creative Commons licensing; why keep something to myself if there’s no good reason to do so?
(Speaking of the Highwayman Armwarmers, one of my readers was kind enough to inform me of a typo in the pattern. It’s been corrected and a new version has been uploaded, both here and on Ravelry.)
Most commercial sock yarns are the same. Opal, Regia, Lang Jawoll, Lane Cervinia, Online… I’ll get about 36 stitches to four inches on US #1 needles. Without even thinking about it, I know that I should make a 64-stitch stockinette sock for myself with these yarns. I know that with Trekking XXL, I get 45 stitches to four inches on US #0 needles.
But now here is a new yarn, Cascade Heritage. It looks to be about the same thickness as the ‘standard’ commercial sock yarn. I know I have to make these socks slightly larger, ’cause they’re not for me. But swatching? Pfft. I’ll just start the sock with 72 stitches, I say to myself. The cuff can be the swatch… and oh, man, that’s large. After twenty rounds of cuff and five rounds of sock leg, I stretched the cuff out around a tape measure, and there would be no negative ease in these socks at all. Okay, well, twenty-five rounds isn’t much to rip out and start over.
Second try, 2×2 ribbing over 68 stitches, and I realized that while the socks are a much better size, I don’t really like the way that 2×2 ribbing will flow into 3×1 ribbing on the sock leg… so I ripped it out again, only six rounds this time, and started over with a 1×1 twisted rib on the cuff. Since there will be 3×1 ribbing all the way down the leg and top of the foot, I’m not relying on the cuff to hold up the whole sock. I like the look of the twisted rib, and it will fit nicely into the body of the sock.
I really like the yarn so far. It’s very smooth on my hands, and slides nicely across the needles, and what little I’ve knitted up felt pleasantly squooshy. I can’t tell yet if the colors will pool, flash, or distribute evenly. I’m hoping for the latter, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it does something funky across the gusset.
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