Sew Distracted

No More Knitting

I have reopened my knitting blog, PurlsandMurmurs.  This combination of knitting and sewing just isn't working for me.  Somehow I feel like I can't babble on as much as I would like with everything in one place. 

Despite the fact that I have just been reading in the new Atlantic Monthly about how the Internet has shortened our attention span so that no one will read more than a couple of paragraphs, I still feel the need to go on an on.  I read a lot.  I love reading long thoughtful blog posts when other people, who actually write well, post them.  I still enjoy throwing out bucket loads full of mindless twaddle.  And so I shall.  Like my library and my books are an extension of my memory, and external hard drive of sorts, so too are these blogs. And I need them to make some sense of the jumble of my thoughts; they accomplish that best when they are separate.

Knitting Update

Typead has upgraded the post-editing features and although everything looks promising for the future, at the moment it is driving me crazy.  I couldn't get links in yesterday.  I haven't mastered getting the pictures the way I want them, and I just don't have the patience right now.

Here's a rather blurry photo of me wearing the binario tee that I finished a few weeks ago.  It is part of a set designed by L'Atelier in Redondo Beach CA, called Compare and Contrast.  I call the tee Compare. As you can see, I am wearing it over a turtleneck rather than a camisole -- although I am generally loving the extended spring we are having, I admit that I would like it even more if it were cool and sunny so that I could bring out a few more spring and summer clothes.

The knitted fabric of this tee is very fragile and easily snagged. As I have been working around the house today, I have folded the ends of my turtleneck sleeves over the end of the binario tee, to help prevent future snags.

We still (at 4 PM) don't have water.  We were told that we were the third in line when I spoke to the pump person this morning.  He really was not convinced he would get here today but he did call me when he went to the second house  on the list at about 12:30 to tell me that if he didn't make it, we would be the first on the list for tomorrow -- so it looks like another night in the hotel.  Luckily we reserved a room this morning "just in case" as it is a busy holiday weekend with an antiques fair and two college graduations.

[ updated to add that the pump repair person will be here at 8 AM tomorrow ]


I did use a little bit of water to wet the pieces of the contrasting vest (Contrast) which is supposed to go with this tee.  After the soak, I heated the water, which had turned pink, to  wash up a few lunch dishes.  It has been a long time since I have washed with hot water from the stove, and I keep forgetting and reaching for the tap.  We are able to get water from one of our neighbors, but it is a long haul up an down the driveway with full two gallon water buckets.

Here is "contrast" on the blocking board:

I have started a new project: I was just too tired and too distracted to do any complicated color work, or to try and figure out where I was in some previous project, or to match yarn to pattern, so I just grabbed some old Missoni yarn and am making a sweater in the round without a pattern.  In fact I am working with out a gauge swatch either, as I started it in the hotel last night and didn't want to wait.  I'll just keep my fingers crossed until I get a little further along and see how I am doing (I have less than an inch so far)

The yarns are Missoni Shanghai, Missoni Caprera, (cream), Gedifra Crocheta (light olive green) and GGH Monsun (dark green).
 
At any rate, although the water issue is a bit of a pain, I am happy to have power and internet service, as well as a phone.  Most of my neighborhood is still without phone service -- there are only two of us who switched our phone and internet service to the local cable company last year.  That came back up within a few hours; the phone company is telling my other neighbors that they will have phone service by tomorrow sometime.  Luckily I also have cell-phone service as the town of Red Hook put a tower in near the Hudson a year or two ago and my house, being close to the river, picks up it's signal.  The people on beyond the ridge behind my house don't pick up that very well either and my town is embroiled in a discussions about when and where to put a cell tower.

Purple Scarf

For some weeks at knitting group I would stare across the sitting area at a grouping of the luscious colors of a display of Road to China wondering what excuse I could use to purchase some.  There wasn't really enough of any one color for a sweater, and I am really more of  a sweater knitter than anything else.  I have oodles of scarves and believed I didn't need another until one day when I was sitting next to that particular pile of yarn and I noticed that one of the colors perfectly matched my favorite purple winter raincoat.  I bought the yarn that night, fully intending to start the scarf right away, but I put the yarn aside while I fretted about what kind of stitch to use and of course, it slipped out of my mind.

I started the scarf just before DH went into the hospital, figuring it was easy enough to remember under stress, but also just interesting enough not to be monotonous.  Last week was warm enough that I believed I might not wear it until next year, but it is plenty cold again today and there is a threat of snow mixed with our rain tonight and tomorrow.

Somehow just thinking about the soft snuggly scarf around my neck makes even the thought of snow seem  tempting in that I hope it is cold enough with just enough snow that I have an excuse to wear the scarf without it becoming a bedraggled mess.  Of course, I don't want it to REALLY snow, nor do I want the snow to stick around, I just want a hint of snow, a warm scarf, and then for the sun to come out and melt it all away.

All in all I am happy with the scarf and happy with how it turned out.  I had 4 skeins and each skein yielded about 10" of scarf so I have enough length for cozy warmth but not much excess.  The only problem is there was a little trouble with the dye on some of the skeins.  I know the yarn is kettle dyed and I expect some variation in the color; that adds to the charm, but there was one section of two skeins where the color seemed more variable than the rest, although all skeins were from the same dye lot.  When I blocked the scarf, and got it wet, the variation became much more noticeable:

It is not quite as visible in this photo as it appears to me, but DH tells me he can't really see it when I am wearing the scarf.  If you look to the left of center in the picture you see sections where the variagation in the yarn is not just lighter and darker shades of the same color, but actually a different shade of red.  I didn't see this when the yarn was in skeins, and actually it didn't look this red until after I got it wet, almost as if some of the color washed out in those places.

It is not a major disaster, but an annoyance nonetheless.  I don't think it is going to stop me from wearing the scarf but that tinge of disappointment remains.

Dreaming of Spring

Dreaming of Spring is what I named the stripy green and purple sweater I am knitting from the mixed bag of Colinette yarns.  It is really a winter sweater but the colors just sing to me of the promise of spring.  I've got the body on the blocking board and the sleeves are almost done (about 1/2 sleeve to go).

I haven't really decided how I am going to finish the neckline yet, or which yarns I am going to use.  I am planning on adding some decorative touch at the bottom of the sleeves as well, but haven't planned that yet either.  It is all kind of a guessing game and I just hope I like the finished sweater, but I love looking at the knitted fabric as I go along.  It is just so pretty it always makes me smile.

Swatch

Last night I suddenly, and yes, blessedly, found myself in possession of a little knitting time, where there had been none since Tuesday.

But there was nothing to knit.  I would have settled for some hand-sewing but there was nothing to sew either, or at least nothing at that level of preparedness where I could just sit down and let my hands do the work.

I can't even say the week was that stressful or that bad, just busy and filled with other things.  Of course there was that lovely Valentine's dinner and bottle of Cotes du Rhone that eliminated the possibility of productive work on Thursday evening.

Rage Management was in limbo:  I finished the sleeves on Tuesday but had not yet managed to get them pinned out for blocking and I had not yet measured and marked the front so that I could un-knit and re-knit the pattern.  The measuring and marking just required too much precision to be done after a long, somewhat stressful day when I really wanted to be watching Monk.

Luckily I remembered that I had a collection of summer tweed sitting in my knitting basket, just waiting for me to make a swatch.

An hour later I had this lovely little treat to contemplate.  I am in love, even though the swatch is not finished and I don't know if I have gauge yet. 

This is always the problem with knitting, once something is started I become obsessed with it and want to do nothing more than spend all my time with that precious bit of fiber.  All other projects flee out of my brain as I concentrate on my current infatuation. 

Well, it took me long enough.  This is the swatch for Maggie:
Which, I believe is from two summers ago.  And here I am dreaming of sweaters from the new Rowan spring book while I still have projects two-year-old projects sitting around.

I suppose this is always the way.  I might be rearranging my knitting schedule.  Oh Maggie has long been in the queue, but now that I have started she has just moved up, besides this looks and feels like it will be a wonderful transition into spring and later back into fall type of cardigan.

But first, I MUST block and reknit Rage Management so that I can wear it while it is still cold.  Of course at the moment it doesn't look like "still cold" is something that is going to disappear soon.

And there is a growing pile of fabric on the cutting table, and a growing list of items that should be sewed, if I want to go out of the house that is.  Of course if I don't have clothes that I can wear in public I might just have to stay indoors in my jammies and knit.  Don't think I haven't considered the possibility,  I have merely reconciled myself to the unfortunate fact that it won't work.

Find the error

Well I have been making great progress on Rage Management.  I finished the body and one sleeve and have started the second sleeve.  Or, more exactly I thought I had finished the body.

I was pinning it to the blocking board today, oh so proud of myself for being almost finished with a sweater and looking forward to starting the next one.  I even thought I could give myself a little bit of a treat and wind up the yarn for the next project tonight.

But then, I realized that something was amiss.  In fact there is something terribly wrong with this sweater, wrong enough that it was quite obvious even through my self-congratulatory fog.  It was obvious even though my mental faculties are somewhat crippled by a head cold and a two-day old sinus headache. 

If you haven't noticed yet, it will be quite obvious in the next photo:

Notice the lovely garter ridges made by the pattern stitches on the back?  Look at how plain the front appears in comparison.  I was supposed to do the same pattern stitches and continue the garter ridges. 

Somehow I forgot.

It is not that it is not that much knitting.  The pieces are really quite small, it is more that I would have rather not made such a silly mistake, and then, I would have rather realized the extent of my error before I washed and blocked the sweater.  I see that it really does help to pay attention to what one is doing.

Bummer.

Well, I have already started the last sleeve and there are no garter ridges on the sleeves.  Besides the pieces have to dry now.

Sunday Progress

I had a bit of car-knitting time this weekend as we drove down to New Jersey to do a little shopping.  I have done most of the driving on longer trips lately so I had almost forgotten how much I enjoy just sitting in the car, watching the scenery go by, chatting and knitting. 

As a result I finished the back of Rage Management:

For the most part I really like the way this is turning out.

I am not fond of the rolled hem at the bottom.  Oh I know it is unblocked and unfinished now, but I find rolled hems are often somehow uneven and annoying.  I  "should" have thought about this before I started knitting, but now I am almost glad I didn't.  I can see that the rolled hem echoes the garter ridges at the top of the sweater and is therefore a nice design feature.  But I find it difficult to get rolled hems to lie just so and they always seem to be curling up or down or just looking unfinished, no matter what I do to anchor them in place. 

I started the front and I intentionally knit it the same way, so at the moment it rolls.  But I think when I am done I am going to unravel the bottom of both the front and back pieces and use the same pattern stitch that makes the ridged pattern at the top, knitting down from the body of the sweater, to finish the hem. 

At this point I think I will modify it slightly, making the final two or three rows seed stitch instead of stockinette, to combat that tendency to roll, but the actual technique will probably not be decided until I a actually knitting.

If had started the sweater differently, or changed the hem pattern before I started, I don't think this solution would have occurred to me.  Sometimes mistakes seem to lead to the best outcomes.

Easy knitting ahead

I apparently worry too much. 

The sweater is coming along just fine.  My gauge is consistent and right on target.  It just looks bigger slipping along on those circular needles that I tend to use.  I should know this by now.

The actual kntited fabric has a good bit more stretch than this piece of fleece and I don't think the fit will be a problem.  I did rewrite the instructions for the front of the pattern to add that extra inch on the right side, which makes the center front opening appear balanced on my body.  Any other tightness should be accommodated by the stretch of the sweater.  The sleeves also fit perfect.y.  I did increase the depth of the armhole in the front of the sweater by half an inch, but I did not change the sleeve shaping, easing that extra half inch around the front pulls the excess in around the sleeves, compensating for some of the forward roll of my shoulders. 

The fleece looks pretty good now.  I am happy I did this.  I have a good idea of how this will look on and I think the process of making a rough muslin like this is good when I am not sure about the fit of the sweater.  Perhaps sometimes I worry too much, such as in the case of this sweater, but I would still rather spend an hour or so at the beginning of the project working out the details than spend many hours knitting only to rip later.

Now I can move on to other things.

New Knitting

It is time for a new knitting project:

This pattern was purchased as a kit from L'Atelier yarns in Redondo Beach, CA in October 2007. The yarn is Highlander  from Alpaca With A Twist in color Dark Thistle. 

I wanted to start this so that I could have it to knit on the train to NYC on Friday night, although I was actually torn between whether I should knit or read, as I am really wrapped up in my current book at the moment. 

I really like the look of this sweater in the drawing, but I don't look at all like the illustration and I have some concerns about how this sweater will look on my own curvier body.  I don't want to spend a lot of time knitting it only to discover that it is a disaster.  So I had an idea, not an original idea, I am sure I read about this somewhere but I don't recall where at the moment.

I went to my local JoAnn Fabrics and picked up some plain simple cheap fleece -- whatever was on sale.

Then, using the pattern directions as a guide, and drawing directly on the fleece with a marker, I drew the shapes of the sweater pieces directly onto the fleece and cut them out.

Then I stitched them up quicky with my machine.  I used 1/4" seams.  I did not add a seam allowance to this pattern because the sweater is knit at 4 stitches to the inch with 1 stitch at each side as a selvedge stitch, which is the equivalent of a 1/4" seam.  If the seam had been much smaller I would have added a seam allowance to make it easier to sew.

Here is the result, without the sleeves:

Drawing the pattern on the fleece actually took longer than stitching up the pieces.  The pattern calls for 3 inches to be taken up at the upper back below the armhole openings.  In the pattern the decreases are spread evenly across the width of the sweater but I just took 3 tucks, which are actually kind of nice looking.  It is not exactly the pattern, but it gets the basic fitting issues across.

This pattern is not written so that the back and front are the same size.   In my sample, the back fits pretty well, as far as I can determine without the sleeves, but the front is too small, as you can see from this photo:

Actually, it is not too small through the shoulders, or at the hip, although I could get away with a little extra at the hip.  I think the knitted fabric is actually a little stretchier than this fleece, but not so much that I think it will compensate for this much pulling across the bust. 

It is difficult to see in this photo, and I was working under pretty tight time constraints so this photo will have to suffice, the front is actually much smaller on the right than on the left, and more snug at the right hip than at the left. 

So I need to draft a new front.  I seem to need about another inch at the left bust, and 2 inches on the right, tapering down to 1 additional inch at the right hip with nothing added at the left hip.  The shoulders should probably be left the same.

Once I have done this, I will need to alter the sleeve as the current sleeve draft will not fit the sweater once I am done altering the front pieces.  When I look at the sleeve pattern, as I have drawn it from the directions, I think it was going to need alterations anyway:

I don't think I like the really short, sharply angled sleeve cap, and the sleeve as written is both too narrow and too long for me.

But first, a new front.  And I haven't gotten back to the cutting table yet today.

I did start knitting last night although I spent more time reading than knitting.

I don't yet have enough length on the needles to actually reflect how this is going to hang but at the moment it looks a little big.  It is definitely stretchier than the fleece. So I might not need to add as much to the front as I originally thought.

First I need to knit another couple of inches and see if my gauge is the same as the swatch.  I must be tense when I knit gauge watches because my tension is often tighter than it is when I am actually relaxed and knitting.  Luckily I have the fleece pattern to use for comparison purposes.  Once I compare the knitted piece to the fleece, I will move on with redrafting the front piece, and perhaps ripping and restarting the back.

 

And so, despite all my good intentions I now have three projects sitting on the cutting table waiting for something to happen before they can progress. 

Tiny Steps

When I was quite young, definitely under the age of 10, I remember my mother chastising me for starting more projects than I could reasonably finish and exhorting me, for once at least, to stick to something long enough to get it finished.   Obviously, 40 some-odd years later, this is a lesson I have yet to learn.  There remain piles of projects yet unfinished and ideas teaming around in my brain all just waiting for the opportunity to give birth to the next project.

Although I refuse to make lists of promises at the beginning of each new year, I remain determined to whittle down the project pile, and they are not all fiber-related projects. And actually, I feel like I have a good grip on the situation.  But still I am torn.  It is not that discipline is completely foreign, but that there is no pressure from outside forcing me to stick to some strict regime of one-project-at-a-time. And the biggest hurdle, for me at least, is actual mindfulness, at least where my projects are concerned.  The idea that I should have a plan, and approach my projects in some kind of orderly and informed fashion, rather than just dropping everything and running breathless after each pretty idea that flits through my brain, remains a struggle. My thoughts get ahead of my hands, and truthfully even my words, or my ability to express my ideas.  More times than I care to think about this year, I am working on one thing while my brain has moved on by leaps and bounds and I have no idea what I am working on, or even, awkwardly, what I am speaking of or writing about, and the ideas become all jumbled into some incoherent tangle which wasn't at all my original intention.  I become a fool,  an exuberant enthusiastic fool, but still a fool:  this is not the desired goal.

And so perhaps the best course remains to take baby steps and work slowly, finishing small things, and working in manageable bits. 

I have not progressed on to the cutting or sewing stage of my gray and yellow tee project. 

I am nearly done with a pair of socks to wear with my heavy work boots, a project that was supposed to have been started and finished last fall.  Had I not seen fit to rip a half-done sock and start over due to a silly mistake, these might be done.  But mindfulness seems to be an ongoing problem.  I have been out tramping in the garden and the woods several times this year already so the call of the mud and grass and trees is strong. A pair of thick cushy socks that actually fill in the gaps in my boots becomes an increasingly urgent need.

At least I have made a small dent in the stash, a little appetizer before the bigger projects that must come.