Persistent Knitter

Finished! And before the next kit is here. Which means I need to cast on a pair of socks for my son. I let him dig through my sock yarn stash and pick what he liked. They’ll be bright.. that’s for sure :)

I have been working on socks, baby sweaters, spinning some stuff; but nothing picture worthy lately since I finished my daughter’s lilac rose cardigan (which she wears All. The. Time, I’m proud to say).

So since my blog fodder is non-existant, I’m going to leech off my mom’s spinning.

First, we see some yarn that she sent me a picture of:

The colors are nice, but to me, it really didn’t have enough twist in it. So we talked about it. How it might be splitty when knit with; what she might want to knit with it, and so on. She decided to add more twist to the yarn.

Here’s the result:

I really like the 2nd one better.  I think she does too.  I haven’t been able to see how the yarn feels; but I would bet it has a bit of bounce to it. :)

It’s done! It’s beautiful. I’m very pleased I worked so hard to get this done so she can wear it before she outgrows it.

While knitting I was hoping I’d be able to block this out to around 15″ across total; it was measuring around 14″ across when I was knitting it. A quick dunk in the sink; gentle squeezing out in a towel and I laid it out to be 15″ across.

I finished the first sleeve last night too – but won’t block that until it’s mate is done. I did a sample fitting into the body (pre-blocking) and it was fitting nicely. One more sleeve, a collar, some sewing, weaving in of ends and it’ll be done.

Sometimes you just gotta make a chart! I recently took a look at the February Lady sweater pattern available for free – and it has a simple lace pattern in it. No chart provided, so I whipped this up in Knit Visualizer lickety split.

You can download the free pattern here.

I started a sweater last August for my daughter. I realize now that she is going to outgrow it before too long, so I have to finish it asap so she can wear it. Here is what the body looks like after I cut all the steeks. I had steeks for the front; for the armholes, and for the front neckline area. I did the shaping around the steeks using extra k2tog and such when necessary (instructions would say “bind off 3″ and I’d split that over two rows, doing k2tog k2tog on one row and k2tog on the next row) This gives the neckline a nice gentle curve and no stair steps where the bind offs would have happened.

I sewed the steaks on the machine. I realize it was much easier to do the arm steeks because I had used the contrasting color as the center stitch of the steek. That meant I didn’t have to pay attention quite as much and gave me a natural line to follow when sewing it on the machine.

I tried it on my daughter this morning (see picture here ) and it fits! I’m about 2″ into the first sleeve. I’ve started that 3 times trying to get the cuff sizing right. Now I just have to get it to fit into the resized armhole knit a second one, sew it all together.  I want to finish this before Madrona (that’s next week) but I doubt I’ll make it. If I block the body this weekend maybe I can take it with me to Madrona to finish the sewing.

After going to my knitting group; and seeing some other Kauni that another member have (hi Janet!), I realized what was wrong with the other yarn I was looking at. It was too non-rustic. A heathery shetland yarn would be a much better match than the bright white, or bright cream that I was looking at.

A trip to my LYS today yielded these balls of yarn to try out. Jamieson’s Shetland Spindrift in (left to right) Mooskit, Mogit and Moorit.

In a way I like the darkest one best; but think maybe it won’t have enough contrast with all the colors in the other yarn. The Mooskit almost looks like a light grey; the others read a bit more brown.

Any of them would work (except maybe not the darkest one); so now I have to decide on a pattern; how much of the background would I need, and then actually get knitting!

I have acquired quite a bit of superwash merino roving in the past year or so. In an attempt to use it up (and then get to knit fabulous socks out of it) I’m working on spinning more sock yarn.

This roving started out as two 4 ounce bumps; the colorway is Water Lilies from the Loopy Ewe ( here). Because it’s a duo, you have two strands of roving in each pack, each one a different color. In this case it was blue/purple and purple/green.

this means I had 50% of blue/purple and 50% purple/green. This presents a problem when you want to make a three ply sock yarn with even color distribution. I had thought I’d just split it all in thirds; but didn’t like breaking the green off so it’d be only in part of one of the plys. I have other roving from this same dyer; and found a pile of blue/purlple that matched that I hadn’t used yet.

Are you with me? I’m lost too.

Each bag in the picture represents one ply of a three ply yarn. Two of those plies will be blue and purple. (those are in the back of the picture). The third ply will be the green/purple. I divided them by weight +/- .1 ounce.

Because I added more roving to the pile, I will end up with 12+ ounces of sock yarn. I can normally knit a pair of socks from 4 ounces of my handspun. So I’ll either knit 2 pairs plus a small pair (maybe for one of my kids) or one pair plus something else.  Actually I seem to remember each bag weighing around 5 ounces. This is going to be a LOT of sock yarn :)

I acquired some Kauni yarn not quite a year ago. I’m thinking it’s aged approrpiately and is now time to knit something with it. The problem is that I don’t necessarily like the Kauni cardigan; and I haven’t found a project I want to even swatch yet.

This is colorway EF; which has dark blue, burgandy, dark green, medium purple, and so on. Most of the Kauni cardigans you see have the rainbow of colors in them with lots of yellow and reds and greens and blues and purples. You also use the same colorway, but shifting it so that you are always using a different color for background and foreground. I thought those colorways were a bit bright for my taste; so this is what I have (I also have another colorway which we’ll get into later).

I could use the yarn as most others have, and just shift the colors off by one or two; but the sweaters I’ve seen made this way with this colorway don’t have great contrast with each other. I could use a completely different colorway as the background; but the other one I have also has some blues in it, and I’d have to be careful to line up the color contrasts properly; and I’m not sure I’d like the two colorways combined.

My current thought is to knit some sort of fair isle-type pattern like a Dale pattern using the Kauni as the pattern yarn. I’ve done this for a baby sweater before using white and some koigu. (see blog post  here ) Worked great then – so I wonder if it would work for this. The problem is what to use as a contrast color?

From left to right, we have medium gray (the wrong weight, but you see the color); dark grey, black (heathered, but basically black), Cream, and White.

The black is too close in color to the dark parts of the yarn. When doing colorwork you have to make sure your background always contrasts with every color of the pattern yarn. The darker grey might work, but I think you’d lose the contrast with the dark blue; and it would be very very subtle. The light grey would work – but would the whole sweater feel too grey? The white contrasts well, but is very very bright; so not something I’d choose by choice as a background color (can you say “messy?”) The cream works well as a contrast to all the colors too.

For now this ball of yarn will live on my desk next to my computer until I decide to swatch or start a project.

A bit fuzzy of a picture; but you can see the texture in the pattern nicely even so. It’s a nice knit; easy to memorize and more interesting than plain stockinette.

Updated to add : The pattern is Copper Penny from this book: