February Who?

So yeah, February is all gone, with nary a single word from me. I'd say people wondered where I went, but for that to happen, you have to show up regularly first. To that end, I am going to attempt to start updating on a regular basis. I am notoriously unreliable on the intrawebz, though, so we shall see how this works out.

Anyway, you remember the wondrous shawl I was working on? Can you guess where it is right now? If you said on my shoulders, you're dead wrong. Yep, it's still right here:

"Why is this?", an interested party might ask confusedly. Well, the truth is that I sort of hit a wall. I'm near the end of the third chart, which is really pretty good. But then I made a stupid mistake, and was faced with the prospect of tinking an entire row. So it sat, unloved for nearly a month before inspiration struck. Leslie of the Knit Girllls has started her own Evenstar as a wedding shawl for a friend. She has been powering through it, unlike me, and I stopped by their forum to whine about my pathetic issues. Pretty quickly, they had me back on track.

Leslie suggested that I tink a few stitches at a time, while interspersing it with simpler knitting that kept me from going bonkers. (Ok, this isn't exactly what she said, but it's the essence of the matter.)

So the row is tinked, and hopefully, more will be finished in the near future.

In the meantime, I've become hopelessly addicted to spinning. It seems to take up more and more of what was once my knitting time, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I tend to burn out on everything, so moving back and forth will help keep me focused. Even if it doesn't, spinning has given me such gems as this:

A Fiber Fancy BFL/Silk mix that spun through my hands as fluidly as the ocean waves its colors represent. It is almost 600 yards of two ply laceweight from 4oz of fiber. I think it deserves for me to make it its own shawl pattern.

A small note: as of the time of this posting, Etsy seems to have lost Fiber Fancy's shop. I'm sure it'll be back posthaste, though, as she has years of good feedback, and is a wonderful seller. In fact, I just finished her Beatles Fiber club, and am now signed up for the next year of her 80's fiber club - thank you, IRS.

And my favorite thing I've spun yet:

That's 550 yards of navajo plied fingering weight yarn, spun up from a Loop batt. If you don't know of Loop from Round the Twist or The Knit Girlls, your probably don't spin or knit, so I don't know why you're here. But in all seriousness, if you haven't checked out Steph's shop, do it. I know the bullseye bumps seem a little expensive, but they're well worth the price. I'm just waiting for the 15th to re subscribe to her bullseye bump club.

I've started a Pogona from this, and so far, it's knitting up very well. This is my first Stephen West pattern, but I'm enjoying it so far. I usually try to avoid knitting the same thing as everyone else, but the shape of this shawl just sucked me in. The yarn is the softest thing I've ever spun by hand, so I'm excessively proud of it. I suspect this shawl is going to get worn to death.

Okay, that's all for now. Hope everyone is having a lovely spring!

It's a good thing elves are immortal...

At this rate, my Evenstar Shawl might get finished before the entire species becomes extinct. Wait, maybe not.

I started strong, what with the choosing and buying of items to make the shawl. Then waiting for them to arrive is always convenient for me, since it involves me doing nothing but whining about how I can't start the project yet. Then, when all had arrived and the time came, I pounced! I pulled out my size 4 DPNs and made the called-for swatch. Yeah, I jumped up a needle size from the recommendation right away. That's how this tight knitter rolls. Oddly, the swatch came out a teeeeny bit smaller than guage. So this left me with a choice. Do I knit it on the 4's, and end up with a slightly smaller Evenstar? Or do I go up a size, and risk making a very expensive mess?

This, as always, is where things always go ugly for me. Technically, both answers are right. According to my math, making them on a size 4 would make the shawl something like 58" in diameter instead of 60". Using a size 5 will make it a little bit more than 60". Is either bad? No. Can I make this very simple decision that makes no difference to anything at all? Nope.

So here's what I have, and have had for about a month now:

More than 100$ in yarn and beads, a lovely swatch, and a beautiful project bag that is languishing with no knitting being done.

For anyone who knows that they could do better than this given the same lovely items, here's where to get them:
Evenstar pattern, by Susan Pandorf
Silk Thread II in the colorway Ravenscroft, by Blue Moon Fiber Arts
Metallic Teal Green Iris 8/0 beads from Earth Faire
and last but most definitely not least,
Gorgeous black and toile project bag from Buttermilk Cottage on Etsy

No, you can't have mine. I am getting out the size 5 needles, and I am casting on for the actual shawl tomorrow. Then I'm going to stamp my little (shuh, size 10) feet and complain that I should have used the 4's, and it still won't make a difference.

As a side note, Susan's bags are AMAZING. I have two bags and a matching case for my DPNs, and one of the bags has been used as my everyday purse for a few months now. Also, Susan the person and business owner is a lovely human being to deal with. She made my first bag as a custom order with exactly the fabrics I wanted, and in this era of nonexistant customer service, she has been accomodating, kind, and all around wonderful to do business with.

For the record and as always, I am receiving no kind of compensation for shilling talking about any item or business. But go buy a bag from Susan anyway.

Anyway, I did promise last week that there would be an update that included a Loopy Ewe order. And the order was made, sent, and received. Why am I late? I am a klutz who tried to kill myself by doing a faceplant on the ground in the garage. Fortunately, I am again walking and no longer dizzy and lacking in focus... well, no more than usual.

So here are the lovelies from the Loopy Ewe:

Handmaiden Sea Sock in Topaz, Malabrigo in Aguas, and String Theory Caper in Periwinkle. They are all lovely and will make beautiful socks. Yes, I am going to make socks out of them. Yes, I think that would be considered a crime in some countries. In this house, though, we call it 'YAY, SOCKS!'

What about torture?

Okay, I'd like to preface this entry by saying that I love this knitted item, I'm sure some people would enjoy knitting it, and I have nothing but respect for the designer. The pattern is pure elegance in its simplicity.

Here's my finished project:

Beautiful, no? Not to toot my own horn at all; I honestly don't think it took any effort on my part to make it lovely. The yarn is Madelinetosh Merino Light from The Loopy Ewe, for their 4th quarter project. The pattern is the Stripe Study Shawl by Veera Välimäki. The yarn is a stunningly dyed multi-dimensional single-ply, but quite sturdy - case in point is that it was supposed to be a Catkin. When I got to row seventy of said Catkin, I realized that I'd made a mistake early on and would have to start over. Needless to say, I was not keen on starting the same pattern over. I'll go back and make a Catkin someday, but I think not too soon. So I frogged the whole thing. I decided that since I was going into finals week, I needed something simple to take my mind off tests. This pattern fit the bill and then some. During finals week, it was amazing and meditative. Afterward, I quickly lost patience with garter stitch over and over and over and over and... you get the point.

It turns out that eight hundred yards of garter stitch is not for me. So much for my plans to make a log cabin blanket. (disclaimer: I love Mason Dixon, but I honestly never had plans to make one of these after watching Carin from Round the Twist working on the same project forever. I am so impressed that she just keeps going on it. I'd be in a fetal position crying about how my brain has abandoned me in rebellion.)

I don't know why the Yvaine I'm currently working on isn't making my brain melt, but I really want to get back to it now. Hopefully, there will be a long post in the near future about the adventure it has been.

Shipwreck!

OMG, look, it' me! It's a good thing I don't blog for a living, I'd be broke. School has been nutty as ever, but I have no complaints. Amazing, no?

What I have is knitting. Yes, knitting. Since my last blog post, I recieved my first gradience set from the Unique Sheep:

It's the Eos base, colorway Jack's Beach. It took about three weeks between order and receiving it, so order early, but it's well worth a little wait if it isn't available in your local LYS. Eos is 50% Merino, 50% tussah silk, and it's absolutely wonderful. Given the color options, I think the prices are quite reasonable. It's definitely a luxury, though.

I proceeded to knit it into a shipwreck shawl, complete with eight thousand beads pre-strung onto the yarn.

Yes, I'm three-giant-pictures proud of it. Those beads took hours of stringing, and hours of sliding beads further down the yarn, and slowed the actual knitting quite a bit. I'm OCD enough that I did not string the beads in a random way, I put a bead on every third YO in the netting. I'm very pleased with how it turned out. For the edge, I put a bead on every single YO in the next-to-last row, to add some extra weight. These beads rolled up nicely in the edge, and I love every single thing about them.

For the actual knitting, I started out on size three (3.25 mm) DPNs, mostly because I did not have size fours (3.75 mm). Before starting the madeira lace, I switched to my circular, and at every needle switch, I used one needle size smaller than called for. This turned out quite well for me, because I was using lace yarn, and only had about 1250 yards of it; I knitted one less row of the netting than the pattern called for, and only have a few extra yards. This taught me something very important about this pattern. I was using a lace bind off, and that combined with the fact that the next to last row increases to 1100-ish stitches meant that the last two rows took a TON of yarn. I was convinced I had enough to finish the called for 58th row of netting, but didn't want to take ny chances that I would be frustrated. In the end, I was so relieved that I hadn't done that last row, I could have cried. Also, I was that sick of k2tog, yo netting that I could have cried anyway.

The madeira lace was an enormous pain, and there are a few issues with the madeira lace pattern, so before you go knitting this pattern, look up the fixes!

Curlycat's explanation for the beginning of row 16
Nurse Ratchknit's fix for rows 30 and 31

It's all over but the waiting

Finally, my interminable summer term has come to a close. It's not that I haven't been knitting for the last month, it's just that the choice was knitting time or computer time. When you think about it, it's not really a choice. If I'm not knitting, then what do I blog about?

Anyway, all there is to do now is wait for my last teacher to stop posting on facebook for long enough to turn in our grades... but knitting blog is not for school drama, so we'll leave that there.

In the last month, I have:

-frogged the Stalagmites. I dislike them with an intensity heretofore reserved for knots in my yarn, and patterns that are incorrect. I had him try them on after finishing the heel, and not only did it not fit him, it barely fit me. I'm giving them another try because I am just that stubborn, and my OCD will not allow me to continue on to the next pattern in the book before finishing those darned socks. I'm doing them in KP palette now, though, since I don't want to waste good yarn on annoying socks.

-started and finished my second 'Camp Loopy' project, a pair of Wendy Johnson's Wrought Iron socks, in Handmaiden Swiss Mountain Sea Sock. Both the pattern and the yarn made me exceptionally happy. I suspect that the frogged cashmere from the Stalagmites will go into a pair of the Aran socks for men in the same book. I had doubts about the Wrought Iron pattern as I was making it, but followed it as written, and was not disappointed. I will forevermore trust Wendy. On the yarn, it's some of the loveliest, most luxurious yarn I've ever managed to spend quality time with. I take points away on the fact that it can be a bit splitty, and it's not as easy to pick up dropped stitches as most yarns, but I'm already using more of it, so those issues obviously didn't bother me much.

-Finished a new shawl, Dragon's Blood from Goddess Knits. The pattern was blessedly simple and got me through finals week without being forced to stab anyone with my lovely knitting needles. (That would have been a shame, I'd hate to dirty my lovely needles with blood.) I did have to go up four needle sizes to get gauge, so if you want to do the pattern, keep an eye out for that. Even going up all those needle sizes, though, I didn't use the full 880 yards of wool I had. I don't know for sure, but I would estimate having about 50 yards remaining. I would think if you went down a needle size or two, you could easily get it in under 800 yards.

-A few other projects for Hogwarts at Ravelry that I don't feel are impressive enough to post here. I confess, I actually used acrylic for some of them. *blush*

Finally up to the present, I'm starting my third and final Camp Loopy project as soon as I finish this, a Pi Shawl in yet more Handmaiden Sea Silk. Yes, even with the Camp Loopy discount Sheri was offering, I did spend WAY too much money on this yarn. It's going to be gorgeous, though. I thought the 'camping' theme of the shawl was perfect for Camp Loopy, and then more generally, I've been dying to try a Pi shawl for a while now.

Since I have the week off school, it is possible that I will inundate you with random updates on the shawl in question, since it's the only thing I plan to work on this week. I hope.

Hope everyone had a lovely summer, and that we're all knitting instead of committing assault on annoying people!

Lace - easier than cables?

So since my last post, I finished one pair of socks. And no, it wasn't the cabled Stalagmites, it was the super lacy, complicated-looking Marilinda. Why? Because they were just incredibly easier than the stalagmites. The pattern is more intuitive for me, and frankly, the travelling cables on the stalagmites are making me tired just thinking about them. Considering the fact that the yarn I'm using for them makes me want to knit with it forever and ever, this tells me something about the pattern.

Anyway, here are my pretties:

I suggest that anyone who wants to try the Marilinda pattern use a nice slippery yarn, since the lace pattern would get old if you were using something with mohair (why would you use that for socks anyway?) or other 'sticky' options. The eyelets were so easy that it shocked me, and the whole set took me less than nine days of very-not-continuous knitting to finish.

I'm not expecting to finish much more for the next six weeks, since the head of my program threw us a curveball, and I'm now going to class pretty much every day of the week for the rest of the summer. I will be taking my knitting with me, in the hopes that I both get something done and refrain from stabbing anyone with my pen. I wouldn't want to hurt my lovely Raden Vanishing Point, and be forced to have to replace the feed on it. (For the record, no I did not spend that much on it. The site is quite reputable if anyone wants to buy anything from him, though; I highly recommend it.)

June, the month of the KAL

So new am I to online knitting that I have never before participated in a KAL, or knitalong for any non-knitter reading this. (What's wrong with you? Why are you here, other than to mock... oh. Nevermind.) So when a Ravelry group I'm in, Pen Fetish Crafters, decided to knit a shawl that was already in my "OMG, I need one of those" list, I jumped onboard.

The shawl in question is the Fountain Pen Shawl, available at the entirely reasonable price of 5.50$US. Given my rather limited funds, being a full-time student who likes to eat and stuff, I opted to use some Knit Picks gloss lace yarn in Sterling that I had in the stash. I'd link Knit Picks, but seriously, if you can't find them on your own there's something seriously wrong. Since I somehow magically already owned a size 6 (4.0 mm for you metric peeps) addi lace circular and a little packet of silver colored jump rings, I was in business.

I am nothing if not OCD, though, so even though I didn't have a project on the needles as of the 29th of May, I could not start this until the suggested date on the group. I helped suggest it, it would be rude not to follow my own suggestions, wouldn't it?

Ironically, I'm also planning to take part in a Pride KAL for LSG (I'll warn anyone who doesn't know this already, no LSG link will ever be work/innocence/anything else safe. If you're easily offended, very right-wing, religious, or under 18, DO NOT CLICK!) I'd write something about that KAL, but while I know the yarn I'm going to use, I have no idea what I'm going to make yet.

So anyway, for anyone who's had the patience to stay this long, here it is, the beginnings of my Fountain Pen Shawl KAL:

Given how terrible I usually am on a deadline, I suppose we'll see how much of it I have finished at the end of June, particularly considering the fact that I'm taking full time classes +50% during the summer term. I did get win NaNoWriMo while doing school full time, but writing is easier.

Test knitting, not for the faint of heart... or weak of reading skills.

So right after my Spring term of school ended, I was wandering in the testing pool group on Ravelry and found a call for sock test-knitters. Now I've never done test knitting for anyone before, but I had the next week off and I've been looking for a nice meaty pattern to try my hand at.

In this, I found it.

The pattern isn't incredibly complicated, but it does take a bit of attention, and some time. Also, I chose the tangliest yarn I've ever knitted with to make them. I ended up cutting about 30 yards off in order to get an untangled ball of yarn. Incredibly, this worked just fine. The 30 yards went into my swatch, and the rest made both socks with exactly 13 yards to spare. I am never this lucky.

For anyone who is unaware of this, Alice Yu, aka Socktpus has a book of her sock patterns coming out this fall, including this lovely. The patterns run toward the intermediate level knitter, and are beautifully designed, down to the heel and gussets. Even the toe on this baby isn't from your average sock pattern.

It took me three days to finish the first, and after sending her information on my final product I set the second one aside for a few weeks. Finally, tonight, I finished it. This finishing taught me a few lessons.

1. READ THE INSTRUCTIONS! I struggled more with the second than the first because my eyes kept skipping one critical piece of information.

2. Don't leave more than a week between knitting a first and second sock, unless you want to have to relearn a pattern. This may not qualify for any younguns out there who have amazing memories, but I had completely forgotten the heel setup round and how it worked to flow into the rest of the pattern.

3. I love orange. Not useful information for anyone other than me, but there it is.

and finally,

4. I will put up with any kind of bad behavior, if the finished product is worthy. I made these socks with Ella Rae laceweight (which is more like a light fingering, for anyone who hasn't used it) and it had the aforementioned tangling issue. It took me almost two hours to get it into the ball that I ended up using. It knit up so soft and squishy, though, and the socks are just so perfect... I'll definitely be knitting with it again. Maybe next time I'll ask my LYS to ball it up for me, though. See, I'm not just a masochist, I'm a sadist too.

I strongly suggest anyone interested in sock knitting keep an eye out for Alice's book this fall; I know I will be.

Okay folks, it's finally bedtime for me. It's my birthday today, I am officially old-ish, and am also not supposed to eat cake, thanks to my diet.

My self-control is incredible.

So after giving it no thought whatsoever, and mostly because I was up really late one night and I'm the most curious being ever born, who can also write run-on sentences like nobody's business, I found myself stalking for the Wollmeise update. So many knitters couldn't possibly be wrong, right?

So, the update happened, and before I knew what I had done, I was checking out with a skein of twin in my cart, colorway Aquarius. Then, I went to bed. For a few weeks, other than the momentary, "what the heck did I spend Euros on through paypal?", I completely forgot about this late-night yarn binge.

Then, I got a notice in the mail. I had a piece of registered mail at the post office, and I could pick it up the next day. Registered mail for me? What the heck could that be?

Oh yeah....


So naturally, upon seeing that the package was from Germany, I ripped it open the second I got back to my car, where the nosey people at the post office couldn't watch me have a seizure over yarn.

Okay, maybe not a seizure, but... well, it is confirmed. There is a reason that knitters stay up to ridiculous hours of the night and stare blankly at a grey screen hitting the refresh button over and over again. And believe it or not, it isn't drugs or alcohol.



It's this.







And for good measure, the ridiculously close-up shot that my camera can't really handle...



It's a tight little skein, but full of saturated goodness, and I already have visions of what it needs to be dancing through my brain. Socks make the most sense, both because I like to knit socks, and because it's an 80/20 blend that would be perfect for socks. On the other hand, I'm open to ideas, if anyone is willing to share. (I am not, however, open to sharing, regardless of any ideas about that...)