Friday Gauge Check: Starbucks Redux

Friday means it’s time for our Friday rituals, the ceremonies of escorting one week out and preparing the next one. Which, around here, is the Gauge Check, where I take a look at my week and figure out where I’ve come from and where I’m going. Sometimes there are goals, sometimes I just talk about what’s going on in my life and my crafting. You are all welcome to join in in the comments.

It’s a chilly Friday morning, and I’m curled up at my favorite Starbucks with a salted caramel mocha, doing my gauge check before I go to work. Halloween is fast approaching, and it certainly feels like it – most of the leaves have dedicated themselves to producing the most vibrant colors possible, and the temperatures at night are down in the 40s. I didn’t realize that fall had a smell.

You’re probably all tired of me waxing rhapsodic about fall, but to this desert child, it’s an almost-undiscovered season, and the Pacific Northwest seems to me one of the most beautiful places in the world. I’ve heard stories about New England autumns, but I can’t envision it being lovelier than this, really. Driving down the road, there is a gust of wind that sends leaves of yellow and red spiraling through the air, and against the backdrop of downtown Vancouver, which is all historic red-brick buildings and statuesque old trees, it feels more like a movie set than a real place.

Work continues on, set against the backdrop of this lovely place. At the end of the third week, I feel like I’ve been sufficiently prepared to deal with customers, which is good, because we go on the phones part-time on Tuesday. Welcome to November: have a headset. As far as corporate culture goes, though, I can’t really complain about my company. They seem genuinely dedicated to their employees as people, and committed to making sure they are able to do their best. It’s not what I want to do with the rest of my life, but it’s something I can handle doing for a while, at least.

My only real complaint about my workplace is fairly petty: it’s painted in the client’s corporate colors, which… do not attractive interior design make. “Bright and eye-catching” isn’t a good color for a wall, and the background color against which the bright-and-eye-catching color is designed to stand out is definitely not meant to stand alone. It sort of feels like working in a mud bath that’s been striped with neon.

I finished the toe on my second Monkey sock yesterday; the only thing left to do is Kitchener the toes and weave in the ends, and I will have my very own pair of hand-knit socks. (Not a moment too soon, according to Jack.) The BFF socks aren’t doing quite as well, but that was definitely knitter error. I knit the leg and headed into the heel flap without stopping to look at the pattern, which meant I skipped a set-up step for the foot. Fortunately, the heel flap is easy to rip back, and I managed to catch the stitches again without much difficulty.

This morning, I realized again that I committed an error on chart B, but it should be fairly simple to fix that too. Dear self: Cookie A patterns are probably not a good thing to try and fake your way through. At least, not if you want it to turn out correctly.

And then there’s The Challenge. In all caps, natch. You see, when Jack woke up this morning, he turned to me and described a dream in which things were falling out of my knitting bag, and he kept having to pick them up. Among the things he picked up were a pair of socks in progress, that were cabled like the Iyawo Mitts. They were white, but with colorwork done in the Abstract Fibers Deep Lake at the top. The first one was done, and the second one was close, and he was very excited about being able to wear them.

Which means, of course, that I now have a sock design challenge.

I’m fairly comfortable with basic sock construction, and I have enough sock books on my shelf that I’m fairly confident I can design one myself. I’m going to have to examine cabled sock construction in particular, because cables behave in very specific ways that bring the fabric in tighter, so ensuring a good fit with cables will be interesting. Swatching will probably be involved. (If nothing else, I’m not sure that the cables as they stand will fit inside shoes. It may involve some very fine yarn.) Considering how many socks I’ve made, it seems like a no-brainer that I would turn to sock design sooner or later, but I hadn’t really thought about it. There are so many existing patterns out there that I love, why spend time working on something that I’m not sure about?

Now I know why. Sometimes you have a picture in your head, and that thing doesn’t exist. The only thing to do is to create it.

That’s been my week. Check your own gauge in the comments, or let me know about the thing in your head that doesn’t exist yet – or the thing that exists now, because you created it.

Friday Gauge Check: Monkeying Around

This picture is what a successful weekend looks like.

Saturday, Lantern Moon was having a warehouse sale, and I managed to score a pair of gorgeous small project bags for very little money. I’d been looking for project bags at Oregon Flock & Fiber, but hadn’t seen anything I really wanted, so it was a pleasure to come across these. They’re a heavy silk, and tastefully elegant, which seems to be hard to find with knitting project bags – “cute” seems to be much more common.

Afterward, I went back to Twisted to try and find a yarn that would work to complete the Gretel tam. What I ended up with was a skein of Knitted Wit superwash in the colorway Shades of Grey, which is actually mostly blue and purple. It proved to look too different to just knit the crown, so what I decided to do was to knit the ribbing in the Knitted Wit, the body in the Knit Picks, and possibly the top of the crown in the Knitted Wit, to make it look like a deliberate decision rather than “Hey, I ran out of yarn!”

Since the Gretel tam requires concentration, however, I haven’t really done more than a few rows – I did finish the ribbing, and I started the body, but that’s all. Working with the Knitted Wit yarn, though, was lovely, and I totally intend to make myself a pair of socks out of the remainder. (Probably toe-up, two-at-a-time, to prevent running out of yarn again. Ahem.)

Speaking of socks for myself, I’d like to show all of you something.

On your left, ladies and gentlemen, is a completed sock and the cuff of a second. (“Completed,” in this instance, does not involve blocking. Or weaving the ends in. Or… Kitchnering the toe. Because I can’t find my yarn needle. So completed actually just means that I finished knitting it.) It is, in fact, my first Cookie A. sock, the much-knitted Monkey from her second book.

I am making this sock (and its mate, because that’s how I roll) for myself.

Hey, my feet are cold. This is a serious motivator. A surprisingly serious one. In fact, I took this picture before work this morning, and I’m now more than halfway down the leg of the second sock. With luck, I should have the second one finished by early next week. (And then my feet will be warm!)

The thing about knitting socks, though, is that occasionally you have to do something that requires actual thought. Turning a heel, for example. While I decided to go with the afterthought heel for the Approaching Autumn socks, I really do enjoy turning the heel, and I feel sort of gypped every time I knit a sock with an alternate construction that avoids it. Of course, when you’re knitting while you’re doing something else (listening to your trainer, for example), and you hit the Thought Required point of a sock, you kind of have to put it down until you can give it your undivided attention.

So I cast on another sock, as you do. I had planned for this, even – cleverly tucking the ball of Abstract Fiber Mighty Sock and my favorite sock needles in my project bag alongside my Monkey. 72 stitches and a few inches of 2×2 ribbing – I’ve started enough of Jack’s socks that I can do that much without thinking. I’d been planning on doing a pair of vanilla socks this week, and knitting the Monkey socks before and after work, until I realized that the pattern had such a logical progression that I had the whole thing memorized after a single repeat. The plan for the alternate socks was vanilla, but I finished the ribbing right about the point where I got a break, so I cracked open Knit. Sock. Love. When he looked through it, he’d specifically mentioned liking Sake and the BFF Socks. Now, Sake has an incredibly elaborate chart of the type I associate with Cookie A, but the BFF Socks have an incredibly simple five-row repeat. (By “incredibly simple” I mean four rows are exactly the same.) Plus? The second-largest size starts with 72 cast-on stitches and a 2×2 ribbing. It seemed fated.

Now, variegated yarn is sneaky. It’s almost universally gorgeous in the skein, where all you see is waves of color. I’m a sucker for variegated yarn, and Jack is worse.

The trouble is, once you apply needles, the result is rather hit-and-miss. If you dye it exactly right, it stripes! If you don’t, it pools or flashes or comes and goes in weird illogical progressions. The stuff I picked up from Knitted Wit sort of… spots. Not in a bad way, just… kind of erratically. The wrong yarn selection can mean that your hard-won pattern absolutely disappears behind how magically colorful the yarn is. There’s at least one book on knitting socks with handpainted yarn, which tends to be the worst offender (and yes, I own it). I’ve frogged more than one thing because it just didn’t work with the yarn.

And then there’s this. Abstract Fiber’s Mighty Sock in Deep Lake. It doesn’t do anything nearly as mundane as striping, or as vulgar as pooling. It glimmers, it shines, it’s a rich green with bright blue peeking through – it really does look like the deep mountain lake it claims to. If you get a chance to pick up a skein of this, do it. Give yourself a treat. Totally worth it.

That’s really been my week. Lots of sock knitting, lots of fairly dull training, coming home too tired to do much else. Hopefully next week will be better, because I want to do a review of the Kollage Square Needles, and a overview of Portland yarn shops, including the one in Gresham I visited today, Andersen Fiber Works. (I bought fiber. It was on sale!)

Check your gauge in the comments, or tell me the wonderful thing you found this week!

Friday Gauge Check: …and then I ran out of yarn.

Because that’s been the story of my week, guys. Knitting on the Gretel tam… ran out of yarn. In a discontinued colorway no one seems to have any more of. Knitting on the second Conwy sock… ran out of yarn. Knit four and a fraction dishcloths… ran out of yarn.

The only real tragedy, though, is the Gretel tam. Discontinued colorway, nothing in my stash matches, no one on Ravelry’s willing to sell any of it. In fact, I had one person tell me that she was just about to knit a pair of birthday socks for her son (her son? out of purple yarn?), so sorry. Jack has promised me that we’ll go hunting for a suitably coordinating yarn this weekend; wish me luck.

Running out of yarn on the Conwy sock wasn’t really a surprise, exactly. I was watching the ball get smaller halfway down the first leg, which is why I opted to do the afterthought heel and toe. Jack rooted through my stash and found a second ball of Felici in the colorway Matador, which is a red-orange, for the heel and toe, and knitting down the first foot, I thought that I would have to do one sock in Veggie with a Matador heel and toe, and the other sock in Matador with a Veggie heel and toe. At this point, the socks got redubbed the Approaching Autumn socks, because what else are you going to call a green sock with a red-orange heel and toe? When I finished the first sock, though, I had a surprising amount of yarn left; enough, I thought, to do the leg.

Guess who has two thumbs and was wrong?

Yeah, this girl. So what I ended up with was about 3/4 of the leg in Veggie, and the rest of it in Matador. Autumn’s coming a little bit faster on the right foot, I guess. Fortunately, Jack loved it. We’ll call it a design feature and move on.

The reason I was able to knit the entire second sock in two days was because I started work on Tuesday, and, despite what the paperwork said when I was hired, I’m able to knit in class. The trick to knitting in class is that you have to show the instructor that you’re paying attention – participate actively in the discussion, do well on the quizzes, and so on. Having done that, I proceeded to knit the leg the first day, the foot the second day, and then I came home that night and finished the afterthought heel.

Which left me without a good class knitting project – the February Baby Blanket is too big, and the other small projects I had on the needles were too complicated. Thursday morning, I grabbed a partial ball of Sugar & Cream and a set of size 8 needles, and knit a couple of dishcloths. At the beginning of the day, I started with three stitches, increased to about 25, decreased back again, and bound off right before lunch. I cleverly forgot to slip the first stitches, so it curls a lot, but it’s not too bad for an off-the cuff dishcloth, at least. After lunch I cast on 30 stitches or so and produced one in garter stitch, basically knitting until I was nearly out of yarn and then binding off. Friday morning I grabbed some of the leftover CotLin from the Squeaky Clean Kitchen set, and tried to create one with color work, mostly slip-stitch but some meager attempts at Fair Isle near the end. Lesson for the day: my first attempts at Fair Isle should probably not be without a pattern or a book or anything.

At lunch, I went onto Ravelry and looked up dishcloth patterns, picking the Double Bump dishcloth entirely on a whim. It proved to be a quite engaging four-row repeat that was easy to memorize and easier to do, and I turned out an entire cloth and the beginnings of a second before I ~~ran out of yarn~~ had to go home for the day. (I also am about to run out of yarn, but I knew that was going to happen, and I have more yarn in that brand, if not necessarily in that color. It’s a dishcloth; it doesn’t have to match.) If you’re looking for housewarming/new baby/Christmas knits, this is a great one.

Work would probably be a lot more boring if I wasn’t allowed to knit for most of it, but I enjoyed it greatly. A few of my co-workers were inspired by my knitting in the break room, and now we’re discussing a possible lunchtime Stitch & Bitch. My life, ladies and gentlemen: I apparently inspire knitting in others.

There are far worse things than being the girl who knits, though.

My goals for the weekend include finding some easy class projects, whether I download some more dishcloth patterns, or a simple hat pattern, or maybe some vanilla socks. Maybe all of the above! What I really ought to do, though, is pick up a set of the square Kollage needles in size 9, because 8 hours of knitting with a size-8 needle is really taking its toll on my hands, and I should be nicer to them. I need them! You know, for knitting.

That’s really been most of my week, though – work, and knitting, and knitting while I work. Hopefully next week will be more interesting and I will be less tired. We did go to Happy Knits over the weekend (recommended!) and I picked up a copy of Ysolda Teague’s Little Red in the City, which (despite the misleading title) is about the theories of sweater knitting. Bonus: if you buy the paper version, it comes with a code you can redeem to download the PDF version too. I’ll probably do a more in-depth review of it later, when I’m done reading it, but it comes with a preliminary recommendat ion if you’re looking to knit sweaters.

How about you guys? Do anything more interesting than me? I sincerely hope so, please share in the comments. Also, if you have any good dishcloth patterns, let me know.

Friday Gauge Check: Autumn Afternoons

Happy Friday, everybody!

I’ve had one of those weeks that feels generally very successful. Not one major thing, but lots of little ones, and the failures are minimal enough to make the successes even sweeter.

The whole week has been chilly and rainy, and I’ve unpacked my sweaters and started to get serious use out of my handknits. The December Little Shawl has been blocked, and so have the Codename: Wintergreen gloves. You know how I mentioned that one was shorter than the other, but I hoped to fix it in blocking? Well, it worked! They’re now both the same length. Blocking: knitting magic.

Goals for this winter include a sweater and some handknit socks for me. While I’ve knit a lot of socks, only one pair has been for me. The first pair I ever made was a twisted rib in a bright pink acrylic, and they’re really too thick to wear with shoes, though I’ve been getting plenty of wear out of them at night. However, when it’s damp out, the store-bought cotton socks I tend to wear myself are just not warm enough, and it’s just going to get colder as winter comes along. Jack, on the other hand, keeps bragging about how warm his feet are in the socks I’ve made him, so I think I need to get some of that warm handknit action going on my own feet. I do have this Cookie A sock book lurking on my shelf that I picked up at the Knit Picks warehouse sale, after all, and some lovely fingering-weight yarn in colors that Jack just wouldn’t wear. Admittedly I was thinking about shawls when I bought it, but socks would also be a lovely choice.

And then there are my sweater daydreams. Living in Arizona, I didn’t feel the urge to knit sweaters. Not only are they something you don’t get to wear very often, the idea of having a wool sweater sitting in my lap in an Arizona October is fairly off-putting. Here in the Pacific Northwest, though, sweater weather is much more significant, and I feel like kind of a fraud wearing store-bought sweaters along with my hand-knit accessories. So: sweater. This will require some research and a not-insignificant yarn investment, because at present I don’t have a sweater’s worth of yarn. I tend to buy one or two skeins, on par with the sorts of small projects I tend to knit. I’m open to recommendations, particularly since I’ve never knit a sweater for myself, I’m not entirely sure about what sorts of decisions to make. There is a copy of Big Girl Knits on my shelf, so that’s likely where I’ll start.

I’m in a good place with my knitting, too. The first iteration of the Iyawo Mitts are complete. I’d no sooner got the first one off the needles then I was already making mental notes to alter the design. It turns out that a design that works well on my tiny little hands doesn’t look as good on other people. (Modeled, at left, on my tiny little hand. On broader hands, the cable looks seriously off-center.) So, there will be several versions of these mitts with different cuff lengths and cables.

Did I mention that I was going to do an afterthought heel on the Conwy Socks? I’ve placed the waste yarn and started knitting the foot. It feels kind of strange to be working on a foot without having turned the heel, but it’s something I can get used to, I think.

The Pine Forest Blanket also got some love this week. Now that I’ve learned that it’s the same lace as the February Baby Sweater, I’m kind of inclined to think of it as the February Baby Blanket. I’m making decent progress on it. When I actually pick it up, it goes fairly quickly (benefit of large needles and worsted weight yarn), and I’m familiar enough with the lace repeat to be able to talk while knitting it. That said, a four-row repeat where half the rows are straight purling aside from the garter-stitch edge? Not the most engrossing thing in the world. I will persevere, though.

The Gretel Tam is making good progress; I’m up to round 27 and still have the correct number of stitches. Still adoring the yarn (Knit Picks Felici in Sorcery), both in texture and color. Incredibly soft, and the striping is fantastic. That’s the progress shot up at the top of the post – isn’t it cute?

Oh, and I made it down to the truly lovely Twisted on a dark and rainy night to pick up another needle. The Kollage square needles advised that you swatch before you use them, as you may need to go up a needle size to get the same gauge. This seemed like a bad idea for a project that was already on the needles, so I grabbed a set of HiyaHiya Bamboo Circulars and a set of the same in DPNs to complete the hat. For curiosity’s sake, I also grabbed a set of Kollage in a size up from my favorite sock-needle size, just to try out.

One of the things that Kollage advertises is that their square needles are good for people with hand issues, including RSI and arthritis. I have tendonitis in my right arm, but I don’t generally suffer from hand pain when I knit – except when I knit with larger needles. Since I don’t often do this, I had forgotten this particular detail, until I had to put down the Gretel Tam the other night because my hands were hurting. Also, when I say “larger,” I’ve had pain from knitting too long with size 5 needles and worsted weight yarn. This may be the real reason why I like socks and mitts, though the idea of knitting a sweater with fingering-weight yarn on size 4 needles makes me want to cry a little. However, if the Kollage needles really do help with hand pain, this may be a solution for my sweater knitting dilemma.

The HiyaHiyas, if you haven’t tried them, are quite nice, though I wouldn’t recommend them for lace knitting (at least not in this size). They’re not as pointy as I like, but the polish is enough to make sliding the stitches easy, the join is smooth, and the cable (at least in the 16″ length) is usable right out of the package. I’m definitely willing to pick up another set if I were to have another needle emergency. I hear rumors that they’re coming out with some pointy circulars, too, so we’ll see how that works.

One charming little thing about the HiyaHiyas, though, is they come with a free gift. The circular needle came with a stitch marker (of the coilless safety-pin variety) and the DPNs came with a… pointy thing. It resembles nothing so much as a cocktail toothpick, as if it had lived an earlier life stabbed through some fruit on the edge of your glass, but it’s great for catching stitches when you’re cabling without a needle, and it’s saved me a lot of headaches on this hat. I’m not entirely sure what it’s actually designed to be used for – maybe this! – but it works wonderfully.

My Gratitude Job (because I’m grateful to have it, even if I’m not sure if I want it) starts on Tuesday. It was supposed to start Monday, but I got a call this afternoon saying that it was postponed – maybe because of Columbus Day? I’m not sure, but I’m not going to argue with a surprise holiday, certainly. In the meantime, I’m applying for other positions that will hopefully require less gratitude.

Jack had an interview on Tuesday for a position he’s really interested in. It was one of those postings that he wasn’t on-paper qualified for, but he knew he could do, so he crossed his fingers and applied. He’s been through a phone interview and an in-person interview, and now he’s been called back to do a second in-person interview with them. If you guys could send good vibes/prayers/well-wishes his way, we’d really appreciate it.

That’s been my week. Next week: the job! Goals include enjoying the week as much as possible, knitting every day, and posting at least twice. Wish me luck.

Check your own gauge in the comments, or let me know what you’re feeling grateful for.

If at first you don’t succeed, frog, frog again

So it’s full-on autumn in Portland. Jack and I went downtown last weekend, to Powell’s and the library. We had lunch at the aptly named Yumm! Cafe, and as we sat by the window eating delicious rice and bean bowls and enjoying the rain and the passers-by, I kept noticing peoples’ hats. On the streetcar, there was a girl wearing an utterly charming slouchy hat; there was a guy in a fantastic ribbed beanie outside of Powell’s. This is one of those things, I suppose: since I’ve become a knitter, I’ve started to notice knitwear all over the place.

As we wandered downtown, I said to myself, “Self,” which is what I call myself, “Self, what I really need is another hat.”

Admittedly, I have a lot of hats. I have fedoras and berets and a cute hand-knit cloche that Becca made me; I have a leather cowboy hat and a hat with ostrich feathers that I wear to the Renaissance Faire. I even have a hat that I designed myself. But what I don’t have is a warm wool hat that I made myself, which means I am clearly lacking in hats.

By Monday afternoon, this had turned into a full-fledged need, so I went stash-diving. What I came up with was an unlabeled ball of very soft variegated purple yarn that came from the Knit Picks warehouse sale. A few minutes with my trusty WPI tool and a little bit of research suggests that it’s a ball of Felici Sport in the colorway Sorcery.

The next step was eyeing my knitting shelf. “Self,” I said to myself, “I have a lot of sock books.” A lot. Most of my physical knitting books have something to do with socks. Which is great – until you want to knit a hat, that is. I do have several technique books, however, and one of those is the rather useful Stitch ‘N Bitch sequel, Superstar Knitting. The hat that caught my eye was in the cable section, Ysolda Teague’s Gretel Tam.

With all the enthusiasm in the world, I went to cast it on… and was thwarted. It called for a “tubular cast-on,” which I wasn’t familiar with. The diagrams in the book didn’t make any sense, either. To YouTube! Where I discovered that Ysolda herself had put up a tutorial for this particular cast-on, which wasn’t nearly as difficult as the diagram suggested. It was a variant on the long-tail I usually used, in fact.

I got the hang of it, but I didn’t like the way it turned out. So I ripped it back and tried again. This time I got three rows in before I figured out the stitch count was wrong. I have issues with counting, guys. This is why I usually use a lot of stitch markers. Could I be bothered to get up and dig my stitch markers out for this? Of course not. Which is why my counts were off. I say “counts” because I managed to screw the count up at least twice. The thing is, I kept fiddling with the numbers and they never came out right. The third cast-on I got all the way out of the ribbing, onto the larger needle, and onto the first serious cable row before I admitted that I had a problem with my counts that I couldn’t quite figure out how to fix. Also, the larger needle that I was using was the Knit Picks Zephyr, which is an acrylic that came with the interchangeable needle testing kit that I picked up a while back. Now, ordinarily I like the Zephyr. It’s smooth and flexible and fairly pointy – but I tell you, it’s worthless for cabling. The pointy tip kept splitting the yarn, and the acrylic was too grabby to allow for cabling without a needle – or even with one, really. And let me tell you, when I call that row a “serious” cable row, I mean it. Normally, when you’re working on something that’s cabled, it’s a knit-and-purl pattern that includes cables. You knit a few stitches, you purl a few stitches, you do a cable, etc. This row? Is nothing but two different cables, back and forth, all the way around. And they’re not drastically different, which means that you really have to pay attention… and hope that your stitch count is correct. Which, as you may remember, mine was not.

Out came the needle, all the way back to the frog pond. I shook my head. “This is not meant to be,” I told Jack, winding yarn. “I need to find a different pattern; I can’t imagine doing this again.”

Off to Ravelry I went. I dug through the patterns, I found one that looked good with self-striping yarn, I cast on. Same number of cast-on stitches, though I used the long-tail cast on this time. I knit a row of 1×1 ribbing. I looked at that pattern, and I looked at Gretel, still open on the bed in front of me. I thought about the two-cable row, and the difficulty it was causing me. I looked at the other pattern, where the first difference was. It called for joining in the round, and knitting an inch of 1×1 ribbing.

I hate 1×1 ribbing.

I blame 1×1 ribbing for my choice to turn and knit a second row of 1×1 ribbing, instead of joining in the round. Because with the Gretel tam, on the third row you do a little two-stitch cable that magically transforms it into 2×2 ribbing. This time, I found it delightful. This afternoon I’m heading down into Portland to a yarn shop I haven’t been to yet (thanks to a mention on the always-lovely Playful Day podcast) to grab a new needle of an appropriate size. They carry the square Kollage needles, which I admit I find intriguing. They’re supposed to be easier on your hands than traditional round needles.

If there’s a lesson in this, I suppose that it’s to keep trying. I have limited patience when it comes to being frustrated with my knitting, and if I have problems early in a project, I’m much more likely to just rip it out and do something else than to keep trying it until I get it right. I don’t know if I’m finished with frustration on the Gretel tam, but now that I’ve told you guys (and the whole internets) about the project, I’m much more likely to push through and persevere with it. My guilty secret: I don’t put new projects up on Ravelry immediately. I wait until I make a little bit of headway, so I can have that “will-I-won’t-I” trial period before I share them with the whole world.

What’s your guilty secret? Do you have an opinion about square needles? Share with me in the comments, kids.

Ripping Back

A blog about emotional honesty, effective communication, and yarn.

Monthly Archives: October 2011