Frazzled Knits

Fuzzy FO

It feels like ages since I've finished anything, but I have a small FO to show:

 

This little scarf is called Ethereal Dream, from the recent Creative Knitting Make It This Weekend magazine.  It is quick to knit and soft and lovely to wear.  As a bonus, you could knit three of them from one ball of Kidsilk Haze, so they have excellent gift-giving potential. 

This first attempt was exactly to pattern.  I like it a lot, but I might try to do a neater selvedge stitch at the edges next time - they look a little ratty to my eye.

Here's the scoop:

• Pattern: Ethereal Dream, from Creative Knitting Spring 2012
• Needles: 3.75 mm
• Yarn: 8 grams of Rowan Kidsilk Haze in 592 "Heavenly"
• Modifications:  None

Other than this tiny project, I have been thinking about knitting and spending lots of time on Ravelry browsing patterns, but haven't been up to much actual knitting.  Life is busy and I find I just want to veg out at the end of the day and NOT knit or spin.  Hopefully I'll come out of my funk once summer hits and we have a little more free time.

 

Mother's Day

These wonderful gifts were delivered to me as I ate my yummy pancake breakfast on Mother's Day morning:

A fast flyer for my Lendrum spinning wheel

Amusing cartoon to accompany the fast flyer (done by my older son).

47 Colours of Corriedale Roving!

Happiness is...

... an armful of Icelandic laceweight:

My Einband order finally arrived!  The colours are much brighter than I was expecting.  The ones that I had at home already are all heathery and subtle, but these...  these are all very, very vivid!  I am not entirely sure what I'm going to do with them.  My only plan was a dress for my Icelandic doll, but that will take a fraction of one ball.  I may stripe them all up into a sweater for myself.  I've been wondering what a sweater out of Einband would be like.

Back on track

I repaired the baby sweater, but then decided that it was too short and wide.  No wanting to rip the whole thing out again, I thought I'd try adding an extension to the bottom instead.  Miracle of miracles, I really like the way it turned out, particularly in the striping yarn! 

Now that I'm back on track with the jacket and not mad at the pattern any more, I will reveal all the details:

• Pattern:  Snug by Hinke
• Yarn:  1 ball James C. Brett Marble Chunky (had some left over)
• Needles:  6 mm
• Modifications & Notes:
  • Woe to the person who discovers a major mistake on the other side of a provisional cast on. Oh wait, that would be me! Had to rip out a major portion to re-do. Will think twice about doing a project with this many provisional cast-ons in future!
  • I was skeptical about the sewn bind-off used in the project, especially after having to undo it once, but after trying a couple of others which were either too tight, or caused the bind-off edge to bow out, I agree that sewn bind-off is ideal for this project: stretchy without causing any distortion. It is time consuming though.
  • I am a terrible crocheter, but I did make the crochet edging and buttonholes as the pattern describes. They don’t look quite as polished as the rest of the sweater but I hope they’re acceptable. I chose to use three buttons, quite high up on the sweater, since this sweater will fit at an age when the baby is still mostly sitting.
  • To make the extension:
    1. Count number of garter ridges along bottom edge of jacket. In my case, this was 84.
    2. Cast on that number of stitches and knit back and forth for 5 cm (2 inches) or however long you like.
    3. Bind off with sewn bind off.
    4. Sew extension to bottom of jacket.
    5. Alternatively, you could pick up one stitch for each ridge at the bottom of the jacket and simply knit downwards to desired length. The only reason I didn’t do this was because I didn’t want to distort the bottom edge in case the extension didn’t look good.

A change of subject

To keep my mind from the confounded baby jacket of yesterday (see post below about that if you haven't already), I decided to take a spinning batt that I've had for a while, and try spinning it into a chunky, crazy, warts-and-all, thick & thin yarn:

This turned out to be very easy - my skills aren't that developed and I  still have a lot of beginner-spinner in me - and as a bonus it's also a very fast way to process fibre! 

The batt is one I ordered from KnitPicks last year, and it turned out to be much darker than I'd hoped and not terribly pretty or inspiring.  Not being very attached to it, it was an easy pick for this kind of experiment.  I will let you know what the final yarn looks like.  I think I'll just do a 2 ply.  Will have to use my big plying head for sure as some of those slubs are monstrous!

And to further distract myself from that baby jacket (ugh)... Look!  A bunny!

I took this photo out of my kitchen window yesterday.  The fact that the hare is mostly brown is very significant - it's one of our first visible signs of spring!

P.S. I want to thank the baby for not being born over the weekend - it gives me more time to get used to the idea of even beginning to pick up that jacket again.  Sigh.

UGH

I spent two hours last night ripping out an unfixable project, after spending the previous two hours trying to fix it. 

There are no photos because I couldn't bear to document the stupidity.

It's a baby jacket that makes copious use of provisional cast-ons and I didn't find the mistake until after I'd bound off one section (with sewn bind-off no less, which can't be just ripped out), unzipped my provisional cast on and was already well into knitting in the opposite direction.  And it was a glaring mistake - one that I couldn't live with.  It had to be fixed.

I am pretty fearless about fixing errors (I've had a lot of practice).  I've got no problem laddering down to fix wrongly crossed cables or missed yarn overs or forgotten slipped stitches on a selvedge.  But this one stymied me completely (I'm still not sure what caused it - the stitches involved were strangely befuddled and it may have been a change in direction after putting down my knitting and picking up back up again).  In disgust I eventually decided it would be faster to just start over.  

So I had to rip out all my knitting back to the provisional stitches, put those provisional cast-on stitches back on a spare needle, go to the other side of the knitting and painstakingly pick out the sewn bind-off, and then rip back everything to the previous provisional cast-on (this thing is insanely full of provisional cast-ons). 

Really I just wanted to chop it all to pieces with scissors but I couldn't bear to waste the yarn, and I'd promised the jacket to my best friend who is about to give birth to her third child and I knew in my heart that all of this was still a picnic compared to childbirth and I should just suck it up.

I do now feel that maybe this jacket pattern should be banned.  I chose it because it was cute and the construction was kind of intriguing.  Intriguing has now become infuriating!  Not sure if I can bear to pick it back up again, but babies don't wait, do they.  I'm hoping this blog entry will be healing enough that I can get back to it tomorrow!