knitting in blue

It's been a while since I posted anything here, but I have been making things. Or, at least, finishing off things, which is just about the same. Around here, it's even better, because it means I'm getting stash reduced.

The biggest and most recent Finished Object is the blue assymetrical jacket I made for myself, sort of as a Yule present. I finished it just in time to put it away for the summer. That's okay — it's better than having it 90% done all summer and lying around. Here's the finished jacket:

The pattern came from the Fall 2012 issue of knit.wear, and has a really cool construction method. To wit:

• Knit the back flat from the top down, using short rows to shape the back neck. 
• Knit the fronts from the top down, also using short rows to shape the neck. This was the first of the two mods I made to the pattern: instead of knitting the pieces separately and seaming them to the back, I picked up the stitches and knitted down. This made for a still-firm but less bulky shoulder seam, and a nigh-invisible one too. I am all about the firm, non-bulky, nigh-invisible shoulder seams. I've probably spent more time figuring out how to achieve this than any other finishing in my 30+ years as a knitter.
• Pick up the sleeve stitches from the armholes and knit down, using short-row shaping to fit the set-in armholes. This was my second mod: I made full-length sleeves instead of the half-length ones given in the pattern. Who wants to wear a heavy worsted jacket with sleeves that only go down to the elbows? If the rest of you isn't overheated, it means your bare forearms will be freezing.
• The sleeves are finished by casting on new stitches and knitting the cabled cuff around the bottom edge, domino-style. Then the edges on the body are done the same way. The last part involves I-cording across the top of the cabled border and then I-cording around the neck.

It's all a rather neat trick. The whole thing is held together by a single button near the neck. I haven't found the right button yet.

Here's a loving close-up of that nigh-invisible shoulder seam:

And because it has the back cast-on underneath, it won't stretch out easily. So there.

Just as I'd promised myself, I went back to the Knit That Shit meta-project once I'd done the jacket. I thought I'd line the summer purse that's been languishing, or work on the socks or the doily, but for some reason I grabbed the Estonian stole that's been sitting in its own project bag for months:

I think I know why I got discouraged about this one. It's become very evident that it will take every last centimetre of yarn to make this thing as big as the pattern book says to, and I was hoping to make it a bit larger (as with her sock books, Nancy Bush designs gorgeous stuff for short people). The ever-resourceful J-A suggested going back to Americo and buying one more ball of yarn, assuming they still carry this colour. There's absolutely no hope in matching the dye lots since I bought the yarn about five years ago, but if I use something close for the border, then I'll have plenty of yarn. It's a good idea. At this point I'd even consider a different-coloured border that looked cool.

Onwards.

photo finish

After an epic week of extreme knitting, ie: knitting every moment I was awake and not working or getting ready for work, I managed to knit the fronts, button bands, collar, and sleeves of the tiger jacket, then get it finished. It wasn't quite in the time for the nieces' birthday party, because I wound up darning in ends for almost two hours during the party itself, but at last I don't have any knitting that's on a deadline.

Here's how the final hours went down: I knitted off and on all Saturday, finally putting away my knitting needles at 3:30am Sunday. Four hours later I was up again, darning in ends and seaming. Even though I knitted in all the ends I could and clipped them off before seaming, there were still a lot of ends. I enjoy darning in ends, but it was a bit daunting on a tight deadline.

At 8:30 in the morning, the jacket pieces looked like this:

The first thing I did was a little out of the usual order — I sewed on the buttons. In this particular case, it made sense to me because it meant I could close the two fronts into one piece, making it easier to handle:

Next up was attaching the sleeves. My brother texted me that he was on his way to pick me up for the birthday party just as I had the second sleeve safety-pinned in place. I finished the seaming in the car (sooo glad it was his turn to drive this time) and started darning in the ends. The ends got finished at the party, and the finished product looked like this:

It got folded up and put on top of the toy tiger I got to match with it:

My niece seemed to be all right with the jacket (hey, she's four), but she was absolutely smitten with the tiger cub doll, and had him jumping, roaring, and talking in no time.

That's it for deadline knitting for this year. Now it's back to Knit That Shit, although the first thing I want to do is sew in the lining for the cotton purse. The knitting's already done for that part.

smitten. with scones.

Recently (and for the life of me I can't remember how), I came across the Smitten Kitchen recipe blog run by Deb Perelman.

Honestly: most recipe blogs I could do without. Either they have bizarre ingredients choices (Splenda in KAISER ROLLS? What, are you putting the yeast on a diet? The sugar is for the yeast in the bread, not the people eating the bread!!!!), or else they assume you have a giant suburban kitchen and all freaking day to cook stuff, or that you shop at the same supermarket as the blogger and therefore just need to know the brand names, not the size or type of ingredient.

Perelman doesn't pull any of that. Her recipes are all made with real food, with stuff you probably already have on hand, for kitchens that will never be on The Food Network because there's no way you could ever fit a camera in there, much less see what the cook is doing.

There is a Smitten Kitchen cookbook out, which I may well request as a birthday present. In the meantime, I've been going through the blog archives, and have been pleasantly surprised by how often I think, "Yeah! That would be great to make!" I even made a Pinterest board to keep track of my Smitten finds.

I love baking scones — they're like baking's answer to Play Doh — and the Smitten Kitchen blog has several scone recipes. This morning, I got up early and rebelled against the dangerous-to-drive-in sleet-and-snow mix we were getting by making the roasted pear and chocolate chunk scones.

They came out looking like this:

I made the following substitutes:

• brown spelt flour instead of all-purpose
• 1 tbsp of demerrara sugar instead of 1/4 cup granulated (I would leave this out entirely next time — the pears and semi-sweet chocolate add enough sweetness)
• no added salt because I was using salted butter
• Balkan-style plain yogurt instead of heavy cream
• no egg wash (ergo no further added salt or sugar)
• hand mixing instead of stand mixing ('cos I don't own a stand mixer)

I also baked the scones as a single giant, scored patty instead of cutting the dough into six pieces, but that's because my dough came out very wet, even after I added more flour. Then I let them bake for ten minutes longer to make up for the different configuration. But they came out great anyhow, because, you know, they're scones.

(And yes, just like with knitting, I can never just follow the damn directions.)

The results have a great texture and a surprisingly filling. There's only a quarter-cup of chocolate in the whole batch, so while they can't count as regular breakfast food, but they're a nice occasional thing. Definitely the next time it's my turn to bring the goodies for an office meeting, I'll be including a batch of these.

I finished something!

Right, so two weekends ago (oops) was a long weekend here in Ontario. I made it even longer by taking the Friday off, and it's just as well I did, because all I did that day  was knit my mum's birthday shawl.

The birthday brunch was the following day. The shawl got finished around 10pm Friday night, took a trip through a cold soak wash and a spin in the washing machine, and then got pinned out on some foam safety squares I keep just for such occasions:

The squares (you can't see them because the entire width and length of the shawl covers them) are just over 60cm wide. The shawl was supposed to be blocked out to 55cm, but I figured with the strong vertical rib, it would shrink back once it was off the blocking wires, so I overstretched it slightly.

Before the trip through the wash, I was worried that the shawl would be way too narrow. When I was working on it in public, not a few people stopped me and admired it, but they always thought it was a scarf. After washing, the fabric went "limp" (ie: none of that knitted springiness at all) and it was very easy to stretch it out. I could have gone a few more centimetres if I'd had the space.

The shawl was pinned out by 11:30pm, at which time I crashed into bed. I was (and still am) sick with a sinus/walking pneumonia thing that makes me cough and feel tired. I wound up sleeping through my weekly Saturday morning chiropractic appointment for the first time ever, but had enough time to unpin the shawl, fold it up, and toss it in a gift bag before my brother Steve picked me up so we could carpool to the birthday brunch.

The shawl is one of those patterns that one appreciates more in a finished state than in the knitting, I think, although I'm glad I made it. The secret seems to be to go like hell — go as fast as you can, working on it as often as you can, and take it anywhere you might plausibly have five minutes to knit with. Like many simple knits, it's a great excuse to push yourself to learn to knit faster.

Speaking of knitting faster, I have eleven more days until my niece's tiger jacket needs to be done, so I need to get cracking on that. And then the entire family is cut off from handmade gifts until next year!

why is conservation a zero-sum game?

The good news: the WWF is once again holding its National Sweater Day.

The bad news: they're still running with that "only grannies knit sweaters, and although they're skilful, the aesthetics are awful" idea.

Now look, I think grannies who make sweaters are incredibly cool — after all, the Oma who taught me how to knit was one. But here's the thing: since the 1990s — that is, over twenty years ago — knitting has once again become popular with people who aren't grannies. Many knitters aren't old enough to be mums, much less grannies.

Actually, the last two paragraphs themselves are far too specific, because I left out a lot of crafters doing a lot of cool crafts that don't involve knitting. Last time I researched a particular crochet stitch I was trying to learn, fully 50% of the web sites with the tutorials I needed were by men who crochet. And there are, at my last count, approximately fifty gazillion crochet sites. That doesn't even begin to include the quilters, weavers, spinners, and other enthusiastic textile DIYers of all ages, genders, and family roles who are doing their bit to keep themselves warm without stressing out the furnace.
Now, there is one (only one) counter-argument I can think of in defence of the WWF. It runs like this: the WWF isn't trying to reach the DIYers, because we're already warm 'n' wooly and don't need to be told to turn our heat down.

The problem is, the message that is getting out is that handmade sweaters are unfashionable crap and the only reason to wear them is to save the planet.

Here's another trend that the WWF seems unaware of: up until the 1980s, hand-knitters tried to keep up with fashion, but because hand-knitting takes longer than running industrial machinery (the price of producing superior fabric), the hand-knitters tended to be about two years behind fashion. In the late 80s more and more knitters started to design their own, and the rise of the World Wide Web led to a globel idea exchange that accelerated this trend right past the industrial knitwear designers.

Now the industrialists try to keep up with the DIYers. Don't believe me? Look, I have walked through The Eaton Centre and found sweaters for sale exactly the same as the one I was wearing at the time. The difference was, my sweater was custom-sized to fit me, in the colour and fibre content I wanted, and was three years old at the time of the discovery of its industrially-made clone. Yeah baby. Three years. And I altered that pattern a lot.

If the WWF thinks enabling the adjustment of thermostats is power to the people, imagine what they could do with transferring some of the means of production, fashion, and creativity back into skilled hands. We could save the energy on machinery overhead, shipping, and marketing. That's a lot more energy saved than just in some domestic dwellings.

They need to dial down the stereotypes as well as the heat.

halfway

I took this photo last Saturday, when the reversible cabled shawl was at 85cm, or almost halfway. It's just past halfway now, at about 105cm.

It's still working out to almost exactly 10cm per pattern repeat (one left cable, one right cable), but the yarn has been gaining on the pattern repeats a little bit each time. I'm estimating that it will use up about 18 skeins of the Smart by Sandnesgarn, maybe even 17.

What definitely continues to hold true is that this is one of those patterns where you have to go as quickly as you physically can. The cable rows add some interest, as does (for me) running out of a skein and splicing on a new one, but those eleven rows of plain 2x2 rib in between those two events can get to be a drag if one doesn't keep to the objective of working through them as quickly as possible.

As for the tiger jacket... I have the pocket lining and one front started, but I've been concentrating on the shawl. I'm just not into switching back and forth right now. It will be nice to get a large project (meaning this shawl) off the needles, so full steam ahead.

entr'acte

My mum requested a warm shawl to wear, preferably with cables. We sat down with some of my pattern books on Christmas Day, once the nieces had gone to bed and things had settled down a bit, and after some discussion we decided to go with the reversible cabled shawl from an old Vogue Knitting (never throw out your pattern magazines!). She asked for it to be grey, and in a more "substantial" yarn than the thin stuff they'd used for the magazine photo.

I checked Ravelry (login may be required), and people have made this same shawl in everything from lace to worsted weight. Impressively, they all look good. Different, of course, but good.

I decided to stick with a DK weight yarn, since that matched the original pattern gauge most closely, and wound up with some superwash wool. Here's what the first 20cm looked like:

I keep thinking it's too narrow, but when I measure it, it's exactly what the pattern calls for, and falls to waist-length on me when I hold it up to my shoulder. The fabric is nice and substantial without being heavy. I like scrunching it a lot.

It's taking about one skein for 10cm, so at the present rate it will take 18 skeins to get done. I bought 20, so no worries there.

The tiger jacket for the eldest niece continues as well. I got the back done:

Whenever I talk to other knitters about intarsia, there's always someone who makes a comment about "all those ends." The trick for dealing with ends to is weave them in as you knit. That way, when you're done, you can just clip them off. Here's what the back of the jacket looks like right now:

I still have to do some weaving-in at the edges, where there weren't long enough runs of one colour to knit in the ends, but compared to the original number, there really isn't a lot to do. And, unlike the intarsia knitting itself, weaving in ends on a finished piece is portable.

I suspect the shawl will get done a lot sooner than the jacket. I'm having a hard time staying motivated on the jacket. Not because it's nasty evil intarsia — I quite like intarsia — but because I have a bad feeling it's never going to get worn. We'll see.

I'm also missing Knit That Shit terribly. It feels good to miss finishing things so badly. That didn't *ahem* stop me from getting yarn for a jacket for me while I was getting the shawl yarn, but still, I would like to get back to the meta-project. Besides, the jacket for me should go quickly. Really.