while I was away

pretty girly, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

Remember when I had no idea how much yarn to pack? Apparently that was a non-issue. I didn't even touch the blanket, although I did finish the socks... and started on the April Self-Imposed-Accessory-Club: the Accidental Girly Mitts.

Oh, and got married:



So, you know, I guess it's understandable that I didn't find much knitting time!

socks: wedding edition

socks: wedding edition, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

Just under the wire, but the socks that the boy wants to wear on our big day are done! If you look at the original picture of the first sock you might notice that it doesn't really look quite like either of these final ones. It is the sock on the right in this picture, but I had to cannibalize a bit from the cuff in order to make them the same length.

Originally I had thought that the yarn had the same colour-repeats from both ends of the skein, but it turns out the inside had less green to start with (check out the toes). So in the end I had slightly less yarn than I thought and the repeats don't quite match up. Still, I think they're fun.

Yarn is: Zitron Unisono
Needles: US 2 stainless steel hiya hiya dpns which I'm now madly in love with (having always been a bamboo needle kind of gal, this is a big admission)
Pattern: toe-up heel gusset from in my head.

I think panicking and packing are similarly spelled for a reason

packing, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

So I'm heading home to Canada for 10 days... no particular reason ;) and I'm trying to figure out what to pack... I have all my clothes packed, of course, but I'm wavering on how much knitting I need to take. On the one hand, I'll be busy as all get-out, but on the other... well... you never know, right?! I'm taking the second sock of these: for the plane but is that going to be enough? I'm already increasing for the heel gussets.... it's not a super long flight or anything, but still, there could be delays and whatnot.

As for the downtime at home type knitting, I'm taking the blanket (as pictured) and April's self-imposed accessory club pick: the yarn (the pink in the corner of the above picture) is the Mirasol Tupa and it has been slotted to become some Accidental Girly Mitts. Now I just need to remember to pack the appropriate needles....

march revisited

march blocked, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

Finishing foils me again! I finished knitting this on March 13 and finally got around to blocking it yesterday. Why is this so hard for me to do? Well, ok, space, for one thing. The only decent space for me to block anything is on the murphy bed in the spare room, except that when the bed is pulled down there is pretty much zero room for anything else back there. So everything we store back there has to be pulled out and the fact that the boy uses it as office space is pretty much lost.

But hey, now it's done, and with 2 weeks to spare! It looks so much better blocked, too (as is so often the case...).

Pattern is the Emily Capelet from Ysolda's Whimsical Little Knits 2.
Yarn is Araucania Ranco Solid, about 3/4 of a skein.
Needles were US 7/4.5mm.
Mods were none that I can think of... 14 repeats total.

What to do....

wullenstudio pink cadillac , originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

A friend picked up this great pack of sock yarns that gradiate from a light pink to a deep fuchsia. I'm thinking some kind of shawl that will really show off the slow change of colour.

Beware the blob!

happily ever after, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

Actually, it's a wedding blanket...

It doesn't look like much of anything, maybe an oversized tam, but eventually it will be an adult sized undercover, for some friends who got married in January. It's a bit late, but it's been a hectic few months... who knew wedding planning + dissertation writing would be so complex!?

a sock and a stretchy bind-off

, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

Tah-daaaah! A sock! Ignore the long stretch of time since my last post...

I'm actually "home" visiting in Canada, to put the final touches on the wedding preparations. Fortunately we're not too fussy about things being just so, so everything is working out wonderfully.

This morning I finished up the first of a pair of very rainbow-ish socks for the boy who thinks grey is a colour... so hopefully he'll like them.

I didn't have a tapestry needle handy but really wanted to use EZ's stretchy bind-off (a good demo of which can be found towards the bottom of this page), so I just used what I had on-hand... my knitting needles.

If you aren't familiar with EZ's version, you might want to take a look first... or not, maybe it would get confusing?

Anywho, here it is:

First of all, cut your yarn, leaving a decent length (enough to work all stitches twice... I find if I wrap it around my hand about 4 times, I have plenty left over).



Insert your needle into the first two stitches, as if to knit them together. Wrap the yarn around the needle and pull the needle back out (just like a knit stitch)... but instead of slipping them off the left-hand needle, just keep pulling your right hand needle until the yarn comes all the way through.



Now go back to the first stitch and insert your needle as if to purl. Wrap your yarn around and pull it out the back, all the way, just as for the first step. Slip this first stitch off the needle.

Repeat both steps until one stitch remains. Work it as a knit stitch and then (if you do have a tapestry needle or crochet hook lying around) weave in your ends. Or be lazy like me and just start the next sock, leaving your ends loose! (Ok, eventually I will weave them in... just not today.)

P.S. The blanket keeping me warm in the demo shots is a never-before-photographed knit of mine from... maybe 2002? Before I really got back into knitting, but needed something to keep me busy over a Christmas break, I made that blanket, a feather and fan pattern in Lion's Brand HomeSpun.

P.P.S. In case anyone was wonder, the yarn for the socks is much more exciting... it's Zitron Unisono, which I also used for a shawl for my mom last year. It's lovely, soft stuff, with aloe vera and jojoba mixed in. Needles are US 2s and pattern is just cast-on, increase, heel, cuff from my head.

an inheritance, of sorts

inheritance #1, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

For the most part, I didn't knit these socks.

Or these ones, for that matter:



But now they're mine, I guess. I won't go into too many details about how they came into my possession, out of respect for the people involved, but these belonged to a knitter I never knew... although I wish I could have. This knitter that I would never know was very special to someone who is very special to me. Her other unfinished projects have since been finished and given to family members who would treasure them and keep them as memories. No one, however, knew how to finish socks. So these socks have sat, for a few years, only to finally find their way into my hands, and, perhaps, eventually onto my feet.

We knit a little differently, this knitter and I... you might be able to tell, if you look closely on the first picture, that the sock that is almost done and the sock that is still in progress are resting on different needles. She used a size 3... to mimic her stitches I had to go down a size. (I tried to finish them using her needles... but the difference was too stark.)

The visible differences, however, stop there. The colours (green and purple on the first and that teal in the second) are exactly what I would have chosen, given the chance.

But this... this was perhaps the most shocking discovery to me:



They're a perfect fit.

caving to convention

alice socks #2, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

It's Wednesday, right? Let there be wips!

So I almost never do a wips update, and probably even less so on a Wednesday... but hey, stranger things, right?

Above is the 2nd sock in my down the rabbit hole set. After the first one these got cast aside for a while for other, more pressing things (read: chapter 1 of my thesis got handed in, didn't it?) and then forgotten about (feb SIAC had to get done too).

I have to admit, I wasn't thrilled with the pooling on the first sock (raveled here), and clearly the second will be no different. But I've come to terms with it. It's a sock after all, and hardly anyone will actually see it.

But this... this is a much more important WIP:



It is my March entry in the Self Imposed Accessory Club, but more importantly, it is the shawl/shawlette/capelette/whatever you want to call it, that I will be wearing on my wedding day.

The pattern is Emily by Ysolda Teague, and I love, love love it. I love most of her stuff, and I'm slowly realizing that it is her incorporation of garter stitch into most everything that I really can't resist. The yarn is the Araucania Ranco Solid that I received in a swap package last fall. As soon as I saw the yarn I knew I wanted to make myself a shawl for the wedding out of it. I just hope I have enough!

under the wire

feb siac, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

With 7 mins to spare, here is the february SIAC entry. Simple toe-up, heel-flap socks with a picot hem.

Maybe more about them later... now it's time to collapse.

wedding gloves, groom edition

wedding gloves for a groom, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

excuse the picture, I had to hand them off immediately and I was in the library with only my camera phone on hand... aka the grad student excuse.

Finally finished up the gloves for my friend's husband. She's off to visit him tomorrow (another perk of the grad student life: potentially living apart while your partner works in one place and you are making the mad dash to finish your dissertation...), so I wanted to give them to her before she left.

Pattern is: Dancing at Lughnasa (rav link).
Yarn is: Cascade Heritage Solid
Needles: US 1 & 2 DPNs
Mods: None, actually.

My original rav post here.

Happy Valentines' Day

A hat, for my Valentine. He's already caught glimpses of it, on flickr or ravelry and said "hey, what's that?" to which I quickly and smartly (ha!) reply "NOTHING!" in a really squeaky voice, so I'm sure he hasn't caught on at all. In any case, I'm time-stamping this to post later, so that it might not ruin the surprise, if there is one left.

Also, I'm not that ubber-skinny, I swear. But apparently a big bulky hat can make you look half your size in no time! It's going to be the latest dieting trend, for sure.

UFO-busting

leg warmers, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

pattern: yoga socks/leg warmers (leg warmer version, obv) by Drops Studio. yarn: starry by dream in color.

These have been long-languishing in the UFO pile (started July 9, while still in Spain, these were finished up on a plane this past Friday, with the ends woven in and photographed this morning), and now they're finally done! As part of the stash-bust, I'm including the need-to-finish-UFO-bust.

My UFO pile isn't that big... but my need-to-knit pile is starting to be... next up on the need-to-do list is to finish up the wedding-gloves: groom edition, and then start on the blanket for another wedding present-owed. (yes, that means the wedding has come and gone... whoops.) Also: wedding sweater: my groom's edition and the shawlette that I plan on wearing myself on the special day.

Oh, and that pesky dissertation... I handed in my first chapter a little over a week ago though, so that's good, right?!

after!

after, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

I finally got around to felting the slippers for my partner's birthday yesterday. He loves them and says they are keeping his feet very warm. In fact, I had to rip them off his feet to get a decent photo:



But I'm glad he's enjoying them!

Pattern is Felted Slippers from Midnattsol (rav link ).
Yarn is bits and pieces of left over malabrigo... first my own and then some sent to me from a fellow raveler after an impassioned plea... which is why they don't exactly match... but I kind of think that makes them all the more charming.

I highly recommend this as a first felting project (it was mine!). It's such a simple design (remember the mishappen scarf), so it takes very little time to knit up and it doesn't seem like it would be such a horrible disaster if it didn't work out. In fact, at one point I was convinced I had let them stay in the washing machine too long, and that they were too small, but they worked out perfectly!



Original ravelry post.

February SIAC

cascade heritage redux, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

For the February Self-Imposed-Accessory-Club I will be making some toe-up socks (possibly in my Socks for a Winter's Night pattern or possibly plain) as a class example, in some cascade heritage that was almost a different pair of socks... but then wasn't. It has been around, in one form or another for well over a year now, so it's high-time it got used! Only problem: class doesn't start until Feb 12... which will just impose my no-yarn-before-SIAC-is-complete yarn diet for most of the month of February. Which will be hard, but probably not such a bad thing.

The 3rd International Sock Swap is underway, this time I am not participating (I just have TOO MUCH other stuff on my plate right now), but I am still moderating. I hope all the swappers have a great time!

before...

before, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

stay tuned for "after"...

the perfect spit splice

no ends, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

Look ma, no ends!

Thanks to a trade on ravelry, I received a whole bunch of green and brown leftovers in order to make a second slipper. They won't match exactly... but they're slippers, right? No one will see them and they can be whimsical (which I can't say without thinking of regretsy (potentially NSFW)), right?

Anywho... I wanted to show you all how I made the perfect spit splice. No, I don't mean that I'm going to give you the right spit to yarn ratio, I mean that I'm going to show you how to line up your yarns so that there are no ends to weave in and it transitions perfectly from one colour to another at the beginning of a new row. Note: this will, of course, only work on feltable yarns. Since this project is going to be felted anyway, it only makes sense that I'm using a feltable yarn. What is a feltable yarn? One that is made 100% of animal fiber, which has not been treated to be washable (aka, it should NOT say superwash on the label). Malabrigo, used here, is a perfect example of a great feltable yarn.

So: when you get to the last row of your old colour, knit until there are 3 stitches left. Wrap the yarn around your needle (like a yarn over) 4 times, like so:



Cut the yarn.

Next, pick up your new colour and pull the ends of both yarns apart, like so:



Now, spit splice the yarns together. (No, I am not going to show you a picture of me spitting in my hand... you'll just have to use your imagination.) If you've never done this before, basically just lay the two ends that you have pulled apart over each other in your hand. Place a little spit over the two yarns and rub your hands together quickly until the two yarns stick together and won't pull apart when you tug on them.

Knit the last 3 stitches and voila:



If you look very closely you will see that the new colour (brown) is hanging out just under the last stitch, ready to start a new row. There might be a little bit of overlap in that first stitch, but you'll never see it in the final product. (Especially since these are going to be felted anyway... but even if it were just a stripy scarf, I don't think you'd ever know.)

Happy spit splicing! (Bet you never thought anyone would say that to you...)

inspired by the Harlot, and boredom

even snowmen need to take a break once in a while...

So, if you haven't heard, it snowed quite a bit on the east coast last night! We have a snow day today, which will afford me some time to work on wedding stuff guilt-free! Ok, less than guilt-free... but maybe I'll also do some dissertation reading this afternoon... right?

If you don't know the Yarn Harlot, and you read me, I'm flattered... but dude, you are missing out. I have a feeling that 99.9% of knitters out there will not fall into that category, so you'll know what I'm talking about when I say that I've been inspired by the Harlot's Self-Imposed Sock Club. So, in the middle of a thunder-snow-storm last night, I pulled all the skeins of sock yarn that I had... and realized it was surprisingly fewer than expected. Five, to be exact. Seven, if you count a couple of skeins of fingering that are quite definitely not-for-socks.

So I looked around the stash some more and pulled a couple more skeins of things that have been languishing in the stash for far too long. Things like my Alchemy Sanctuary and Mirasol Tupa, which are too pretty to go unused for any longer. So I revised the plan a little, making it a Self-Imposed Accessory Club.

What does this mean? Well, every month for the rest of the year, I have an accessory pattern matched to a skein of yarn in my stash. That's 11 accessories, in 11 months.

There's one more catch. I'm going to also use this as a chance to impose a yarn diet on myself: Every month, on the first of the month, I will pull one skein and one pattern, and until I have completed that project I will not bring any more yarn home. That doesn't mean that I won't work on other projects... I have lots more yarn that I'm not including in the SIAC. And once that project is done, if there is something I need/want... well, you know.

How about you all? Anyone on a yarn diet, or challenging yourself to use up some long-suffering stash?

wedding toque - groom edition

wedding toque - groom edition, originally uploaded by gradschoolknitter.

Why, yes, that is more crochet!

The groom's hat in my wedding set for my friends is complete. And if these sets have taught me anything it is that crochet is not wholly evil. I'm still not going to be granny-squaring myself a cardigan anytime soon, but it makes for a nice embellishment once in a while... and, in the case of this hat, can add just enough extra length that you don't have to rip back the crown on a slightly short hat.

Hat pattern is my own, if you can even call it that... 3x2 rib over 80 stitches with a half-treble/half-double 2 round trim. (And it looks even better when you don't wear the join in the middle of your forehead... sigh.)

Yarn is Cascade 220, about 1/2 a skein, on size 7 needles.

4 years

I just realized that my 4 year blogiversary (as opposed to blogaversary, which I just wrote, and sounds like I have a blog-adversary) was just a few days ago, Jan 18. I forget sometimes, as I tend to do contests to celebrate posting milestones... but perhaps next year this time I'll remember and do a 5-year-celebration. I mean, that's a lot, in blog years, right? It's funny to look back and see what I was working on and how I wrote about it and how much things have changed (in my knitting, writing, and just life in general, really).

Some things, however, have withstood the test of time. From my first year of blogging:

These mittens, for instance, are still standard (in part because I only have these and one other, much thinner pair) in my winter outfit. If it's cold, these are the mitts that won't let anything in. They're also, I believe, the first design I came up with myself. Eventually I may have to give them up, though... one of the thumbs is starting to unravel from a broken stitch. :(

My first real socks, which were also my first monkeys, starting my seemingly undying love for sock knitting (and that pattern, which I've made... 3 times, I believe? And I only want more...), in spite of my protests to the contrary. Yes, I still have those socks by the way, and although the schaefer anne tries to pill and get fuzzy, the bamboo I paired it with has made them practically indestructible.

And finally: My first mother bear. I'm so sad that I don't have a completed picture of him, as I'm pretty sure he was the cutest one I've ever made. I haven't made one in a while, but I still think the Mother Bear Project is a great organization. I'll have to make another one asap.

What about you... have any knits that have stuck with you all these years?