Robynettely

Yesterday I went to the Downtown Knit Collective's Knitter's Frolic. I bought: 5 balls of Briggs and Little 1 ply in color Jade 1 ball of Opal in a yellow-and-blue mix which calls itself Magic but as I'm not really a sock afficionado, I don't know what it means Brittany size 2 DPNs Addi Turbo 36" size 4 circular "Heirloom Knitting" by Sharon Miller "Inspired Cable Knits" by Fiona Ellis Parking was hellish and looked hopeless, so after driving around for maybe five minutes I gave up, went home and rode my bike down even though it was about 7 degrees Celcius and raining. Besides the parking advantage of a bicycle, it also kept me from buying more than I could carry. It was interesting. Venders I was surprised not to see there included Fiddlesticks Knitting (though her patterns were somewhat ubiquitous) and She Ewe Knits. I saw Robin Melanson at the Needle Arts Bookshop booth.

I didn't finish Sigyn. I didn't finish the pirate socks. The Jade hat is still in time-out. I didn't even work on Sahara to Selbu (or the other way around), though I did think about whether I should try to do something about the length error I made on the sleeve. There's no way I'm going to reknit the whole sleeve for a half-inch error just above the cuff. Maybe I could snip it and remove the cuff, then rework it down, removing the affronting four rows. I think I will do the body the way it's written, then attach the sleeve, and make my decision at that point. It's just that the sweater's dimensions are already on the large side. I'm doing the smaller of two sizes, and it's supposed to come out 24 inches long. I have often shortened sweaters designed for that length to be closer to 20 inches, because I'm only 5'3". It's hard to tell from the "artistic" (Ed referred to it as Allanah Myles-like, but I bet the Norse photog...

I finished the Victoria tank by Veronik Avery from IK Summer '04. I'm quite happy with how it turned out. It fits properly even though I didn't use the suggested yarn, didn't do a swatch, and was having a panic near the end that it was going to come out too big. Mine is about an inch more around than the schematic suggests, and I think it looks fine on me. Victoria tank finished And with that done, I decided that it was time to finish the sleeve of Selbu to Sahara (or the other way around). Sleeve Sahara to Selbu And I started the body. This was mostly so I could have a project to carry around last weekend. With the Jade hat in time-out still, I needed something portable. Start of Body I'm making the small/medium, and I noticed as I started the alternating color stripes on the body that I made a mistake on the sleeves. I did medium/large length, but small/medium width. So I'm replicating the error on the body. You can't tell in the picture (because I took it...

Well, I finished the Jade gloves, but the hat wasn't going so well after four starts so I've given it a time out. I won't be wearing a hat for about eight months, anyway. But I'll be able to wear this soon... Victoria Tank Yep, it's the Victoria Tank by Veronik Avery from IK Summer 2004. I'm using Jaeger Siena in Marshmallow. I just finished the first ball of five, just finished the seventh pattern repeat. I'm not sure if it's the yarn I love, or the pattern, or just the fact that it's not that frigging Jade hat. Or Sigyn. Or Selbu to Sahara. Maybe it's that I bought the perfect pale pink tank top to wear under it last week.

I'm at work so I'll be brief. In two months, I didn't post at all. However, I finished Jade and Manhattan. I like them both. I wear them a lot. They both fit pretty well. My concerns about Manhattan coming out really large did not happen. The cast-on edges stopped rolling after I blocked it. Manhattan and Jade  Jade's armholes are too large, but I know what I did wrong, so I'm itching to start another top-down set-in-sleeve sweater so I can try it out. Very wearable. I've started gloves to fraternally match it, and then I'm going to do a hat. And then I'll probably send it all to IK. Okay, I have to say what the problem was. You know how when you knit the front and back of a sweater, the armhole goes up to the top of your shoulder? Well, when I calculated the armhole, I forgot that, and I used the number that should have been the height of the armhole as the depth of the sleeve cap. So my sleeve cap is 2.5 inches taller than it should be, and the armhole...

I got a ball-winder and swift for Christmas, and I just made this. My first ball That's a lot easier than the ones I made with my nostepinde. Oh, and the yarn was the Christmas present I bought myself (You know the average person buys themselves a gift, and its average cost is $87) -- eight skeins each of Rowan 4-ply in Holly and Gingerbread. The ball is Gingerbread. My total was $78 or so. I bought it at Webs because by the time I got back from a lunch the day it went on sale at Elann, there was only one shade left, and not mine. For Christmas I also got Scarf Style from my sister (because I asked for it because so many people raved about it, though I had never seen it) and I gifted myself with "Mary Thomas's book of Knitting Patterns" while we were at Borders on the 29th. While I was there, I looked at lots of knitting books, because the stores in the US seem to have so many more books than Chapters does in Toronto. (I will save my rant on that topic for some other ...

It was a year ago yesterday that I started Manhattan. Now it sits on my drafting table with several hundred ends to be dealt with, and I can't seem to make myself work on it. Perhaps I need to cut myself a deal: When I finish Manhattan and four other things: + Capelet #6 from VK Fall 2005 + Matching Mittens (as yet unstarted) + Matching hat (also unstarted) + Jade + Matching hat (unstarted) + Matching gloves (unstarted) ...then I can buy HF Mermaid. All right, that was six other things. I'm accepting of the fact that I need to buy som aran yarn in the meantime. Sounds like a deal, though. Deal-making is what, the third stage of dealing with... well, death technically, but perhaps I'm a specially morbid person because I can apply the same system to choosing where to eat lunch. Denial, Anger, Deal-making, Depression, Acceptance.

My fault, really. I was here: Pre-frog And then I went to look at the book to find out how the armhole was going to be handled. I'm doing a set-in sleeve from the top down in the round, and the instructions are... well, spread throughout two or three chapters. But that's no excuse for what I did. Rather than increasing four stitches every other round, I did them EVERY round. So I ripped it out. Post-frog That's what, four times now? Five? I am so sick of this sweater.

I used to be queen of the universe. Ugly increases The increases here are really ugly and create a hideous gap. Hole And here I've created a hole because I did the increase on the wrong side of the pin a couple of times and tried to fix it without ripping it out, but I don't think I can fix that hole without major surgery. So I'm ripping it out.

Last night I crocheted the shoulders and the sides and back of the neck of the Ribbed Lace pullover, and it feels much better now. It looks pretty much the same, but doesn't have the same sensation of collapsing around me, so I didn't take a picture. I ripped out Jade to just below the "pickup for armhole" again, and last night during speeches at YMCA volunteer thank you night, I knitted about an inch back onto it. This time, I think I am happy. My increases line up neatly. I have the same number of stitches in each armhole, and across the back and the front. Only 4.5 inches and the stranded portion begins -- so I guess I'd better work on that chart. And I tidied four blobs on Manhattan. If I do four a day, it will be done in 2005. Maybe that should be my goal.

I was apparently feeling dour this morning. Here I am wearing Ribbed Lace by Norah Gaughan from "Gathering of Lace". I wore it all day. The neckline is an inch lower now. Rib Lace by Norah Gaughan The sleeves are too long, also. If I had thought it through, I should have set them in. But this was meant to be a mindless project (as if!) and I'm relatively satisfied with the garment. Maybe next weekend I'll throw it on again and decide if I need to reinforce certain parts of it (neckline or shoulders). While answering the door for Halloween trick-or-treaters, I worked on Jade. I wonder if I can be back where I was (almost at the armhole) by the end of the weekend?

If you go back a couple of posts to the one with all the pictures in it, you'll see a balled up thing. It's this now. Jade... Why yes, you are correct, it was more before. Off to the side of this picture is a big ball of yarn that is most of what I ripped out. There were three problems with it as I see it: The pink wasn't working on the fair isle band. Maybe I'll switch to one of the three shades of blue I have lying around that would work with the peacock. I'm thinking the Danube from harris tweed, but I haven't even pulled it out yet, and I have weeks to decide. For some reason I had six more stitches on the back than the front. I don't know how that happened. My fair isle band was way too wide for my purposes. At 20 stitches across, it made five repeats across the front, and it looked stupid, for all the three rows I did of it. It was also 63 rows long. I think I need to redesign it to be more like 12 x 40. I got over-excited I think on the part where I g...

If Ribbed Lace was meant to be a pinney, I'd be almost done by now. This picture doesn't share the hell that was doing the three-needle bind off on the second shoulder. For some reason I couldn't get it to work out right, and then I looked down a couple of inches and realized that I had decreased 12 instead of eight stitches on the front neck on one side, which explained everything. So again, I got to rip out a couple of inches. I am getting heartily sick of this sweater. I was considering doing the neck next, but then I decided to go the easy route and start a sleeve. Fortunately I have the first one done, so I really might be done this sucker by Halloween. Rib Lace sleeve Why yes, that is a still inside-out, still incomplete Manhattan this sleeve is reclining on. Don't say a word.

But my camera battery is dead, which isn't an auspicious start. Hopefully the pictures will just fall into place smoothly later on. Yesterday I started the front neck decreases on Ribbed Lace. I finished the decreases on the right (the instructions say to do both sides at once, but I find that to be living hell, so I was doing them one at a time). I held the work up to admire it... And then I ripped out six inches. There was a mistake in a whole row right in the middle of one of the knots. In essence, I had forgotten the "rest row", which meant that my knot was two rows too short, squished in the middle. Now, it may be that no one else would ever notice. But as I figure that row is going to fall right across my chest, I would always be self-conscious about it. That six inches was probably about one ball of yarn. Rib Lace Front But I was watching "A Fish Called Wanda" on Family Channel at the time -- who knew they had no commercials? And I got a bodhran for my bi...

Last night I finished the 12th ball of baby silk on Norah Gaughan's Ribbed Lace pullover. I wish I had a better name for it, because I know I'm going to love this sweater. The pattern has five staggered knots, and then launches into just ribs and lace the rest of the way up. I got to the bit above the knots, and then knitted until the ball was finished, because at midnight there was a "World's Best Helicopters" show on Discovery so it wasn't hard to get Ed to stay up past bedtime. I don't have any pictures. This would all make more sense if I had pictures. And yesterday I got a card in the mail from IK saying they had received my package. I think that's a sweet touch, becuase it gives me the feeling they're considering my designs, rather than just looking at them and saying "There's no way we're printing that!" and shipping it all back immediately. This is just an excuse to have a visual, since I've got no pictures. Your Hair ...

Well, more than a month since my last post, now I owe eight. That would be because I spent most of the rest of September finishing two garments for my IK submission package and doing four swatches. I still haven't finished Manhattan. However, two weekends ago I finished the back of Norah Gaughan's Ribbed Lace pullover from GOL, and I'm half-way up the front. Which reminds me, I should measure and plan for the front neck bind-off, since it's lower than the back. I'm shortening this garment by three or four inches, because I'm 5'3" and don't need another 25-inch-long sweater. Oversized isn't my thing these days. I also started a sleeve on "From Selbu to Sahara" from Norsk Strikkegarn. I'm thinking I'll revise the rules about how many balls a garment knit from a cone counts as, because I just can't imagine only getting nine "points" for this sweater. Maybe if something is knit in fair isle at more than 6 stitches per...

I don't know if I've mentioned them before, but I have a set of rules I've invented for myself to keep myself on track. Some are way too stupid for words, like I've never missed a karate class if I've been in town for it on a Thursday evening or a Saturday afternoon. Others are about knitting. I must knit two balls of yarn per week. I think this rule might have originated because once I said I could knit a ball a week to a yarn store employee (at Romni Wools), and she said "surely you can knit two." So I've been obligated to knit more ever since. A completed project (finishing) counts as a ball. A swatch counts as a ball, if I'm happy with the product. This is a good thing, as it coerces me to swatch. In a project knit from a cone, a front, a back or a sleeve counts as two balls. So the most a project knit from a cone can be worth is nine balls. A shawl also counts as nine balls, if it's knit from a cone or a giant ball. I can choose at the out...

Yesterday at a truck stop east of Cambridge, Ontario on the 401, somebody did this to my car. Some people suck Double click on the image to see the total carnage. I am going to put filler on it now. As a matter of fact, yes, I am peeved. But what can I do? I was standing there with my coffee, in the parking lot, staring at it, and other people came and stood around saying they were so sorry. And then, rather than using this truck stop, they were just driving away. I don't blame them. It's the only way to say "this sucks" that I could think of too. What are the staff going to do, look at the parking lot security tapes? I guess that's what I get for being a "bimmer bitch". I finished tying one sleeve worth of loose ends on Manhattan this weekend, and saw "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill", and did a ball of Norah Gaughan's Ribbed Lace from GOL. Maybe I'll have a picture of one of those next time.

I started Manhattan on 29 November, 2004, and I think it's never going to end. It was lying around like this: Manhattan from the inside When I was in Maine and my younger sister saw it. Her comment was "Why would you make something like that?" I turned it right-side out, and it all became clear. But still, I calculated about 700 loose ends to deal with. I hope I'm doing it all right. I also hope it ends soon.

This is Moor. Moor is from "Yorkshire Fable". You might not recognize it. I seem to have deviated a bit from the pattern. You can see the original here: http://www.colourway.co.uk/rowan/yfable/yfable.htm It clearly has no skulls or scorpions but whatever. I knit this sweater in the round, as not specified in the pattern instructions. And then I did "fair isle short row shoulders in the round" as taught on Janine's blog at http://feralknitter.typepad.com/feral_knitter/ Try it, it works. The instructions are written for working the shoulder seam with an i-cord bind-off, but I've never done that, and Moor called for a knitted-off shoulder and why would I want to do that, since I had deviated from the pattern so much? From the outside: A look at the shoulder. To me it's acceptable, but my standards may be low. This is the same seam from the inside. I three-needle binded (bound?) off the shoulder seams, which involved a lot of yelling at my family to be quie...