Getting Back into the Swing of Things

So, I've been a bad knitting blogger.  I haven't been updating my knitting projects.  NaNoWriMo has really kept me busy.  There are a whole list of projects I'm working on or have finished that need to be updated.

For example, the Sailor's Rib Cowl was started, I don't know, sometime in November.  It's knit out of Lion Brand Fishermen's Wool, the request of the recipient.  It's an incredibly simple rib pattern.  I was able to work on it while watching television with no issues.  The effect is lovely too.  Best of all, it looks warm.

Now, personally I wouldn't want to wear it.  That wool is far to itchy for me, but the recipient likes it, and that's what matters.  I actually liked working on this project too.  It whipped up pretty quickly and was thankfully over before it got to the point of being tedious.

As for the recipient, he can't wear it until Christmas.  It's the only Christmas gift I'm making this year, at least to be delivered on Christmas.  He's also going to be getting a hat and gloves, but I'm not too stressed about getting those done in time.  I'm done with holiday knitting, I think.  I don't need another reason to stress out coming into the holidays.  There's plenty of reasons to stress out already.  This is just one more thing I can check off my list of finished projects.

The next project was a bit of an improvisation.  I decided after making a beret for Bear, then the cowl, Bear wanted a cowl too.  I decided to use the extra ball of yarn to make one matching the hat.  It took me a few tries to get the sizing right, but it finally came together.  It's a bit big for Bear, but at least there's room to grow.  It should fit all the way into adulthood, provided it doesn't get lost before then.  I'm kind of betting in it getting lost, but I'm trying to be hopeful.

Let me tell you, Bear loved this cowl.  The only down side was being unable to do any kind of fitting.  I constantly got "Mama, can I wear it?"  I kept having to say no.  Thankfully, it did get finished, so that's something positive.  Now it's a favorite article, even if it's not yet cold enough.

Best of all, this little cowl now makes a matching set.  There will be no doubt who it belongs to because of the matching hat and cowl.  They're only acrylic, so they won't be warm, but they'll definitely be fine underneath the hood of a jacket.  It's just an extra little layer of insulation.

And I finally dragged out the Nutkin socks again!  I kind of rage quit on them after having to take them out a couple times and size them up.  I felt like it meant I had fat legs.  I think it really just means that I knit excessively tight, because I know I have small feet.  I may always need to size my socks up on needles.  I think I'm going to have to check the gauge.  Then again, I know I have a high instep, so that might be my problem.

Aside from the new technique on the cuff, this pair also had a couple of other new techniques.  For example, it used a new way to do a short row heel.  There's also a short row toe on this one.  It's all polished off with a three needle bind off, which I'd heard of but never tried.  Now that I've done it, I actually really like it.  I also like how the short row toe leaves plenty of wiggle room for my toes.  It's definitely got a nicer look in my mind than a traditional toe would on this sock.  It makes for a nice, strong boundary line between the pattern and the toe.  This gives it a nice, sharp look.  It's also unlike any of the other socks I've ever knit.  I'm not sure how I feel about it for a sock, but we'll see how it wears.  Hopefully it'll be as nice as it looks.

Finally, I have a commission!  I've got to knit up another pair of Snuggle Paw Warmers for Sable to give as a gift.  They've got this funky pooling thing going on.  It's not my style, but Sable loves them, so that makes me happy.  It just means I've got to get flying on these things if I want them to be done early enough.  That's the one thing I both love and hate about commissions.  In some ways it's fantastic because it lights a fire under my tail.  In other ways, I hate the time crunch.  I'm a procrastinator for sure!

This one is definitely coming out funky.  The yarn looks really neat, but it does kind of make the pattern disappear.  The good news is the pattern itself is more functional for the fit rather than something decorative (though it certainly is decorative too!  The color pooling on this one seems to be falling on the cables, which really makes them pop, and the ribbing disappears.  I'm not sure I could have managed that if I tried!  We'll see how it all falls out on the second glove.  It shouldn't take me long to get those flying off the needles.  I'm almost halfway done with the first one already!

Knitting with Sleeping Kids and Knitting in the Sunlight

Last week was a week full of disaster.  Pretty much everything I did had to be undone before any progress could be made.  It was a disaster.  I'd done all this work just to have to start all over again!  I thought it was going to be one of those things where I just didn't want to pick it up again and keep going, but I did, and sure enough, I'm back on track.

As I'm sure you can see by the picture, my Nutkins are redone and looking pretty.  I'm back up past the heel, and they actually fit!  They're looking pretty good and I'm happy with the way they've turned out.  I'm not making fantastic progress because I've been working on another project that comes with a lot more of a feeling of instant gratification.  Socks take so much longer to get done and there are two of them.  That means twice the knitting fun, but also twice as long to get the project off the needles.  It's great, unless you want something to bolster your ego after a miserable failure, like the ones I had the week before.  These have kind of been thrown on the back burner for a while and only get a few rows thrown in here and there.

Instead of finishing my socks, I decided it was time to work on my Leaving Cowl.  This has been quite the project.  After tearing it out three times, I finally decided the needles it was on were intolerable to work with, so I had to start over, this time on smaller needles.  It went up much quicker this time, and because the pattern was so easy and familiar, I didn't even need the pattern as a reference.  I just worked the whole thing up from memory.  I suppose that's a good thing, because now Little Bear wants one too!

The thing I loved most about this project was working on it with the sunlight spilling over my shoulder.  It's not the traditional fall leaf color, being more brown and gold than reds and oranges, but I think it's a beautiful yarn.  It's not really the feeling of fall that most people think, but it does remind me of Thanksgiving, which at this rate is going to be the earliest I can bust this thing out!  It hasn't been as cold as I feared it would be, so I haven't had much want for a cowl to this point, save for a few days, but I suppose that's soon enough to change.

The hardest part about knitting this week is knitting with Little Bear.  It's been a while since Little Bear has wanted Mommy Lap Naps, but we've been back to that.  The benefit to this is that it means I have to sit down and do nothing else until the Bear wakes.  Unfortunately, knitting isn't always easy this way, and my feet fall asleep so easily!

It's not as simple as it once was.  It's easy enough to let a baby sleep on your chest while your arms wrap around and knit, or sleep draped across your arms leaving your hands free.  Toddlers tuck well enough in laps, allowing someone to knit over them, or twist around to get a good angle without too much effort.  Again, sleeping on one arm is an option.  Once you hit preschool age, even with a preschooler as bitty as mine, it's really tough to make sure there's enough room to knit.  Enough twisting and turning can add to the degree of challenge.  It's almost like a knitting obstacle course.  Eve with the challenges, it's worth it.  It's something I've missed lately, in spite of how difficult it can be to work that way.

The best part about having Little Bear with me is always having a model to show off my projects.  This one couldn't even wait until it was finished.  Little Bear was very insistent that it had to be tried on right then.  Now I have to make another one.  The order came down, "Just like yours, but, blue, blue, blue!"  Can you guess what Little Bear's favorite color is?

Yeah, it's a proud mama moment, look how cute Little Bear is in that cowl!  I think I may need to pattern hunt for the perfect cowl for Bear.  Maybe I'll do something with an ice blue and white, or maybe I can find one with snowflakes.  Frozen is still a favorite in this house.  I also might do something pink and/or purple, because that's what Princess Rapunzel would wear.  Tangled is also a frequent watch around here.  Little Bear even insisted on getting a "short hair Rapunzel" hair cut, which could stand to be updated again soon.  It's just as much fun to knit for my kids, especially Little Bear, as it is to knit for myself.  Little Bear's the only one of the kids that really appreciates the hand-knits like I do.

So the cowl is finally finished, and I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out!  I went all crazy and decided to do a fancy bind off that I'd never heard of before, but decided would be easy.  I got the idea from the Nutkin socks.  They have this way of knitting in the cast on edge to create a folded over cuff.  I did that for the picot hem on the bottom, so I figured I would make it match by doing something similar on top.  That may not have been the best of ideas.

Here's what I did for this insanity.  I took the concept of the Elizabeth Zimmerman sewn bind off, but instead of just binding off the edge, I picked up and stitched in the coordinating stitches from the folded over fabric.  I know it sounds complicated.  Maybe some day I'll do a video of what I did, but it was a hassle and time consuming.  I swore I would never do it again, especially after taking the whole binding out twice because it wasn't working out right and everything looked twisted, but grim determination (and people liking the photo of what I was doing on Instagram) kept me going.

Once I figured out where I'd been going wrong, it wasn't all that bad.  It looks nice and neat, and fell into a pretty decent rhythm, so in the end it didn't take all that long to work up.  It was just the first few tries that looked a little wonky.  I honestly don't even think you can tell what I did on that bind off just by looking at it.  It looks pretty sharp.

I'm pretty proud of myself for this one.  I don't take many bold steps with knitting, at least not without the confidence that everything will turn out just fine.  I tend to leave things be and follow the instructions, or to do an alternative that I'm confident will work.  It's not common to see me just whack away at something like this with reckless abandon, just diving in and doing something that I don't know will work, and no one's given me any instructions on how to complete.  It's terrifying, but at the same time, it was a lot of fun.  It gave me confidence as a knitter, and that's something that's always fun.  It's a new technique that I think I want to practice and perfect.  I've really learned something with this, and I didn't expect to.  It was a lot of fun.

The best part of the whole project, of course, is the finished product.  There's something so uplifting about being able to put on the finished piece and show it off.  I mean, look at this, it's beautiful!  The picot edge (which no one else seems to have done, even though it's listed as "option 1") gives it a unique style compared to the other projects just like it.  The dark, warm color goes well with just about everything, not to mention my hair.  (Speaking of my hair, it looks so incredibly good in this picture!  Why doesn't it always look this way?)  The fit is just perfect.  This is exactly what I needed.

For being a project that I wasn't at all in love with, and was just doing so I could have a little KAL with Sable, this has turned into a favorite.  I won't lie, I wasn't inspired to knit this at all after the Seasons Fall/Winter Shawl and the Tuscan Sunflower Shawl kits I got from KnitPicks, both with the same leaf shaped pattern.  I couldn't help but feel like this was just another leaf, but it looks really nice and will serve me well this fall and winter.  It had enough unexpected and challenge to make it something I'm proud to show off.

Nutkins and Knitting Disasters

There has been no update for a while.  Why?  Because every knitting project seemed destined to be an ill-fated disaster.  I made absolutely zero progress.  My Nutkin sock was too small, which really sucked, so I had to rethink that.  Then my Leaving Cowl just turned out to be a series of issues all it's own, which had me scrapping them both and starting over.

So, let's start with the Leaving Cowl.  I started this project because Sable suggested we do a KAL, though she started and finished hers long before I even cast on.  I think it's more like a matching project kind of thing.  She offered to get me the needles and insisted I'd need the 29" cable.  Well, it was too long, and by a lot.  I probably would have knit it on a 16", to be honest, and that's what I'm going to make it on when I finally get the right needles.  That was one big frustration, though I kind of fudged it with doing kind of a modified, one-sided magic loop.  It was super frustrating and I eventually got to the point where I just gave up.  Besides, I wasn't sure I liked the way it looked.  It was almost too snug.  It's too bad because it was starting to look pretty good too!

I was thinking the whole thing would have a lot more drape to it, given the way it turned out on Sable's project, but as you can see, it really doesn't drape much at all.  It would be a pretty snug little collar.  I wasn't sure I liked it and considered going with one more chart repeat, but after having seen it on other people's project pages, I think I might go back to the five I used across.  It looks pretty good and fits close enough to the same as everyone else's.  It makes it more like a turtle neck that way.  Of course, I'm not sure.  I'm never sure on these kinds of things.  I might just go with the six and see how it goes.  Of course, I do keep being reminded that a lot of people barely have the yarn to complete the project, and using a much more yarn consuming edge on the whole thing, I might want to take that into consideration as well.  If I don't have the yarn to finish, it would be a shame to have to rip it all out and start all over again, even if I could whip it up real easy in a few hours.  It didn't take me long to get where I got, but those needles were intolerable to work with.  It was much too fiddly.  I'm just going to get a new set of needles and work from there.

Then there were my Nutkin socks.  Let me tell you, that was a disappointment!  When I couldn't fit them on I decided I would just bump everything up to the next needle size.  At first I hated it.  The yarn wasn't knit as tightly as I wanted it   The color pooling got a little weird too (not that you can tell from the side shown in the picture).  I didn't think I was going to like it and I fought the urge to rip the whole thing out and start over, yet again, this time with the smaller needle and a larger stitch count.  I really didn't want to do it.  It didn't require much changing to add a higher stitch count, but it's more work, and then there's figuring the numbers on the short row heel.  It's a lot of work that I really wasn't interested in doing.  For once I just wanted a project to go smoothly.  With all of the things going on in my life right now, something easy that I can knit while watching television sounded ideal.  Of course, the pattern is simple enough that I could just fall right into the routine, but the heel wouldn't be something I could do rather simply while I sat in front of the television.  That was going to require more attention as I tried to remember to use my math, not the math in the pattern.  I decided to keep going and see how it turned out.

It's not the tight gauge I prefer with knit goods, but I'm pretty happy with the results.  So far the fit looks amazing, and since I'm working on circulars instead of DPNs, I'm able to keep fitting it as I go.  I guess I have a high instep because I keep having problems with the heel and the top of my foot.  It happens with shoes all the time too.  However, this is working out just the way I wanted it to!

At this angle you can see a little more of what I mean about the color pooling though.  One side across is really bright stripes, the other is a slow spiral up of darker colors.  I wasn't sure I was going to like it, but it started to grow on me.  I wasn't thrilled with the way the fabric was knit, not tight enough, until I tried it on and saw it stretched over my leg.  Now I'm pretty happy with it, so we're going to see how it goes up through the foot.  Keep your fingers crossed.  I may have a finished sock to go on display before too long.  It usually takes me a couple days to make a single sock, so hopefully by next week's update I'll have more to report!