61 posts tagged “wip”
Here I am, breezing along in my sweater, posting daily and then I suddenly realized today that if I want to finish this sweater in the month of November, I have three days to do it!
Oh.
Crap.
I think it's safe to say that isn't going to happen. My NaNoSweMo will have to be like National Gluttony Month (the time from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day): 6 weeks long.
The first sleeve is about halfway down my bicep right now. I tried it on a little while ago because I was afraid it was going to be bunchy under the arm but it looks great. Onward and sleeveward!
Last night I finished sewing in the front panel and
started on the first sleeve. I decided from the outset to do a top-down set-in sleeve following Barbara Walker's instructions in Knitting from the Top. I am doing this for simplicity's sake: I don't have to sew it in, but also because I don't want as slim a sleeve as Norah Gaughan likes on her sweaters. I got a bit of the sleeve cap done last night.
And the rest of the cap done this afternoon.
Since that photo was taken I have knit across the underarm and begun knitting down. I will put in the decreases as written in the pattern: one every 1/25 inches evenly down the edge with two inches straight at the bottom. I think it will make a nice sleeve and if not, it won't be too hard to rip back to this point and change the rate of decrease. Although, I hope I don't have to do that.
Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!
It's always exciting when a sweater reaches a point when it becomes something that can be put on. Today my sweater became a vest.
I wove with the kids at school again today. They didn't seem as fast as last week. One of the other moms and I may have come up with a way to help the warp on the Beka looms stay tighter. I think it helped the kids a bit. I have a couple of weeks off before we weave again so hopefully I'll get my act together and rewarp the looms in advance. I'd actually like to try warping my loom for Niels and seeing if he can do it. He was really interested in it.
I have had a kid-intensive week, with a field trip and Arts Focus and tomorrow I'm working in the preschool to pay someone back for covering for me so it was good to get out tonight to BobaKnit. Those BobaKnitters know how to make me laugh. Hannah especially. <3 you, Hannah!
Both front pieces of my sweater are now done! I am ready to start the top of the back. I think I'm pretty on track to finish this thing by the end of the month! Although, that front middle piece is pretty big so maybe I shouldn't get ahead of myself. Since it's all still on one circular needle it's kind of hard to photograph, but hopefully you can get the idea from this picture.
I'm pleased with it so far. I look forward to the back being done so I can sort of try it on. Right now that's impossible unless I put parts on waste yarn or another needle and that seems like too much work.
I had a post in my head for yesterday, and I even took a picture to go with it of my fake seam in progress.
The fake seam is in the middle of the underarm bind off and the seam went in smoothly but for some reason I miscalculated several times how many stitches to bind off and how they should be divided between the fronts and the back. It started because I was working on it too late at night and somehow it just escalated. Three tries later, I had the number of stitches I wanted bound off (22) and they were divided as I wanted them (10 from the back, 11 from the front and the 1 seam stitch) and I started the left front. I love the fronts of a sweater like this because it's decreasing fairly rapidly and it just goes faster and faster. I'll probably do the right front immediately because it's so fast and satisfying but also so I don't forget what I did on the left. The final advantage will be that if I do the two fronts first when I finish the back I'll be ready to attach the shoulders. I'm doing to do a three needle bind off, I think. I am a fan of the three needle bind off even for shoulder seams. I know others feel that's not strong enough.
I'm getting ahead of myself, though. Before any of this can happen I need to finish off the two woven pieces on the Beka looms and rewarp. The cricket still has a bit of warp left on it so I'm not going to rewarp it yet. We have three more weeks so after this coming Thursday I'll rewarp it with a bit of a longer warp. I'm torn about the Bekas. I'm tempted to just warp them with the same length and let each kid do a bit less so that the end result is pieces that are about the same length. We'll see, though.
I think the silly names for H1N1 are pretty entertaining: hamthrax, aporkalypse, etc. However, six of Niels' classmates and his teacher were all out today with possible swine flu so I'm not laughing anymore. I really don't want it to go through my house. It feels inevitable at this point, though. One of his classmates' mother is a pediatrician and she told me I don't have to panic but she didn't give me much hope that we'd dodge it. Boo.
Anyway, I'm not thinking about swine flu tonight, I'm just working on my sweater and watching TV on Hulu. I love Hulu.
We got a Scholastic order from school today which included a copy of The Invention of Hugo Cabret. I had been considering buying it and thought it was a bargain in the catalog. I see now that it's 39 cents cheaper on Amazon but this way we earned points for our teacher to get more books for class! I feel a bit guilty buying books like this because I feel like I am trying to turn Niels into the same kind of reader I am: the kind who also enjoys comics and graphic novels. This book is half pictures, if not more. I haven't started reading it yet but I flipped through it and it looks really interesting. He already likes comics, of course, but this will help that along too.
I was running around all day so far and the only knitting I did was on the ribbing of my stripey socks. I'm done and am going to bind them off as soon as I finish posting this, which doesn't help me reach my sweater goal, of course, but gives me a fun new pair of socks to wear tomorrow! I will probably knit a bit on the sweater too. I want to watch yesterday's episode of V before I go to bed, even though the things I've read so far have not been terribly positive. It could get better! Right? Right!
In NaNoSweMo news I am up to 5 inches of my sweater. This sweater has an inset front panel but I didn't see any reason not to knit the two fronts and the back in one piece so that's what I'm doing. That makes it difficult to photograph. But here goes. (Plus, you're getting iPhone photos for the next little while until I can figure out why my iPhoto hangs up when I try to export to Flickr.)
Paraphrased: A slim sleeve makes for a flattering garment. But! Knitter, know thyself =)
Well, I know myself and prefer a less slim sleeve! I'm glad it's not just me though.
Like many other knitters, I was at Sock Summit this past weekend. I drove up with my whole family and we stayed with some friends just outside of Portland so my trip was a mix of Sock Summit stuff and visiting friends and family. I don't feel like I got as submerged in Sock Summit as some.
I took "Knitting without Wool" with Amy Singer. I got to see a bunch of socks knit with nonwool yarns that I had heard of but never seen. Wick, for one. I'm glad now that I never tried it for socks because it is very thick and I like my socks to be on the thinner side. We also learned a stretchy bind-off that will be in an article in the next Knitty. Ironically, the socks I was working on at Sock Summit and the pair I started on the drive home are both top-down. Generally, I knit all of my socks toe-up! I'll have to do a pair next to try that bind-off.
I didn't take many photos at Sock Summit, but here's one of the cool pendulum in the convention center, of Freecia at lunch with a giant pita at Nicholas Restaurant and of the luminary panel.
On Sunday before the panel I walked around the marketplace a bit with Cookie and Anne Hanson, who I had never met before and who was very nice. She was working on some gorgeous orange socks (seen in her most recent blog post) that were making me sad that I can't knit with wool. Ah, cootton, why can't you take color like wool? I did do a bit of shopping, but not much. Like Stitches, the nonwool, nonlace options are few and far between.
Anabel told me that she tired the square circular needles in size 0 and she wasn't crazy about them for reasons that totally sounded like I wouldn't like them either. In the heat of the moment at the marketplace I forgot that and bought the exact same needles and am having the exact same problem: the cord is too flexible and the join too bumpy for magic loop. The actual knitting is fine but when it comes time to pushing the stitches back up to the tip of the needle to work on them it's incredibly time consuming and a big pain. I am considering emailing the store where I got them and asking if I can trade them for something larger with a shorter cord because I think they'd be great for actually knitting in the round. I haven't tried the hook yet, but I have a couple of their square hooks in larger sizes (this one is an F) so I expect to like it.
The yarns are, from left to right, Sockina, Kollage Luscious and BMFA Sock Candy. They're all cotton blends. Luscious and Sock Candy both just have elastic and Sockina has Polyamide and Acrylic. i'm looking forward to knitting with all of them but have to settle on a pattern, and finish the sock I started on the trip home!
That would be the Bosnian Toes & Turkish Heels sock by Lucy Neatby (Ravelry link) from Knitter's Magazine. I usually just get Interweave unless I see something I really want to make in one of the other magazines. My aunt, however, gets Interweave, Knitters and Knit n Style and has decided that she doesn't like any of them. She gave me a big stack of Knittters and Knit n Style and a book she doesn't want any more!
I need to go through them, decide which ones have stuff I want to make, read the articles I want to read and then I will probably be sharing the wealth at BobaKnit.
I was considering calculating my stash number again but I think it's a bad idea. I have been mostly working on gift projects with yarn that came from outside of the stash so I don't think I've taken much out of the stash recently. The Lucy Neatby socks are going quickly, though, so that yarn should be taken out soon. I don't think I'm going to make my goal this year of using up 5 more miles of yarn. That sounds ludicrous to me right now since I just bought yarn and Linda destashed some cotton and silks to me. Oops.
Where have I been! It's been more than a month since my last post. Sorry about that. Although, in my defense, that last post was written the day after school ended for Niels, so things have been off-schedule, in good ways and bad challenging ways.
What have I been working on? Well, I crocheted a coaster because I couldn't resist a ball of Sugar n Cream Stripes at JoAnn.
The other knitting related thing that happened was that I gave my mother my February Lady Sweater. I just didn't like the way it looked on me. I don't like having to fasten my cardigans all the way to the top so a cardigan that only fastens at the top is just not a good plan for me. I'm not sure now why I thought it was. I got swept up in the February Lady Sweater excitement, I suppose.
I haven't had many editing clients recently. I don't know if fewer people are publishing patterns because fewer people are buying patterns because the economy sucks or if everyone else is as swept up in summer as I am. I'm hoping it's the latter so that in the fall when the kids are back in school maybe I'll have more to do. Time will tell, I suppose!
