Geez! The grief I got for displaying non-handknit socks 🙂
So, here we are again — with socks
handknit from Fleece Artist SeaWool that I bought at Cricket Cove,
St.
Andrews, NB, when we visited this part of the world last
year. (Yes — yarn does occasionally get used within the year it
was purchased… 🙂 ).
Still — my feet, my socks,
my window, my view…!
It is that time of year again! Hard to believe it’s been a full
year since the
last time.
Goodness knows, I haven’t knit up everything I bought last year, but
that didn’t stop me from exploring more work of some of the same fibre
artists (Spirit Trail Fiberworks; Ellen’s 1/2 Pint Farm), as well as
some new ones (Koenig Farms, Tess).
No, don’t worry — that’s not roving in the background; I have not
taken up spinning! That’s some really thick mohair that should be
fun to play with (and, I’d tell you where it was from, if there was a
label on it, or the company name had come through on sales slip!
Sigh 🙁 ).
My one big takeaway from the day: I need to knit more. A
lot more. It’s not just because my stash is growing at a
frightening rate (although it is). Seeing all the knitting ideas
and possibilities around the festival brought home that there’s a lot
more to do and play with, if I’d just get on with it!
I will note that, although the blog has been quiet, I’ve been posting
knitting progress to my knitting
gallery.
Finally, it is the *sheep* and wool festival, so we actually did go and
watch one sheep competition…
Comments Off on Maryland Sheep & Wool 2008
Posted in Knitting
That is, for anyone not up on their “l33tspeak” for knitting: a
Knitting Machine — Finished Object!
It’s posted
in my drafty gallery.
Yes, I have had that knitting machine for just about a year. Yes,
this is the first completed project from that knitting machine — since
swatches don’t count as completed projects :^) . The two
major challenges have been:
For this sweater, I eventually wound up using 2 different yarns at once
— each one is really thread-like. You can see them in this
detailed photo:
You can also see the effect I got from knitting the two together — a
bit more stripey than variegated, but still interesting. You can
also see that, even though I was working with 2 strands together, the
stitches are still NOT BIG AT ALL. This machine makes a very fine
fabric.
The edging, of which you can see some detail above, is a crochet trim I
added after assembling the sweater.
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Yes, well, about the cat… See, I know that some cats are attracted to
knitting. Guiness largely ignores mine, for which I’m thankful
(though she has certainly been known to hunt-and-capture dangling ends
when near-completed items are tried on…). But, the blocking
sweater was *wet*! And, she wasn’t anywhere near that room!
And I wanted more air circulation to speed the drying! So I left
the door open and wandered off to do something else. I think some
little kitty alarm must have gone off in the house, somewhere, because
as soon as I came back: wham, plonk in the middle of this drying
sweater, one very pleased-with-herself cat!
A bit more about the sweater/project history… A long time ago, with
a plastic bed (toy) knitting machine and a very different yarn (Dale
“Svale”), I made up the pieces for this jacket. And
then discovered that plastic (toy) knitting machines are very finicky
about producing anything like even gauge throughout the course of a
project. Different sweater pieces were wildly different
proportions than the ones they were meant to line up with.
It was, in fact, that experience, that finally drove me to commit to buying
a metal-bed knitting machine.
So, there is the sense of completing the circle with this project
— I had to change the yarn and the machine, but I did manage to
complete it, by gar!
I decided I had so much fun with that — I made another one, this
weekend!
This baby blanket is a finished object from (much 🙂 ) earlier this
year…
The story is that I started out by thinking of making something
interesting with the knitting machine (and, at the time, I only had the
standard gauge machine — which meant I had to use very fine
yarn). So, I settled on a mess of Dale Baby Ull yarn in these,
umm, vibrant colours.
Time passed, and the baby for which it was intended became more
imminent. At some point, it became clear to me that I and my
knitting machine were not going to be in the same place for long enough
for me to do anything (interesting or otherwise) with it for this
project. So, the question was — what to do with it by hand?
Two key facts drove my pre-design thinking:
I might have thought of doing something lacy with it, but for the fact
that my imagination was not coming up with anything that didn’t
emphasize the colours to the point of baby-frightening garishness.
So, I let the yarn lounge in my office for a while, hoping that it
would tell me a thing or two about what it wanted to become.
Presently, the notion of “dragon hide” wafted out of the bag of
yarn. Dragons are naturallly colourful creatures and the scale
texture could add a lot of interest.
Which just left me with the small question of how to implement said
scale effect… My first inclination was to try various shell
effects in crochet, but all I could produce was something akin to angry
granny squares:
Back to knitting… doing intarsia lozenges would have worked, but
would have been fiddly and, I thought, too “flat”. Not so much
hide of dragon as sock of argyle. I knew “entrelac”
would produce a basket weave effect.
Of course, this meant I had to look up how to do entrelac (never having
done it). And very shortly thereafter, I was educating myself on
how to knit/purl backwards, so as to avoid having to flip the work for
each row of 6 stitches or less. Cool! Two new techniques in
one project!
Here is the test piece, in progress:
Essentially — you knit each set of one colour rectangles across a row,
and then fill in the slots with the next colour, coming back the other
way in the next colour. Each rectangle is knitted as its own
unit, and is attached to the adjoining rectangles (working live
stitches or picking up edges) as you go. Pretty funky!
This project travelled — it had at least one trip to Europe, and
probably more than one cross-continent trip. And I wasn’t
entirely sure I was liking the progress as I went: still too
garish? I’m not afraid to knit in public. But I wasn’t sure
I was ready to show anyone this particular project…!
To clinch the dragon motif, I wanted to do the edging in triangles,
like the ridge down a dragon’s back:
No, that is not a logo.
Finally, done, I tried it on my local dragon to see if I thought it had
achieved the desired dragon hide effect:
I’ve posted
this in my drafty gallery.
I know, I know — there are so many sweater patterns and possibilities
under the sun, why would you remake one you’d already done? I
made the original out of some generic acrylic stuff (I
might even still have a ball band somewhere…), and loved the sweater
to death. It was fast & easy to make. It fit
well. It looked reasonably well-crafted (which was particularly a
bonus, that early in my knitting efforts!). And then one day it
just gave up — stretched out and didn’t stretch back. The
sleeves dangled. The collar fell off my shoulders. You know
what I mean.
The recollection of the easy/fun knit and rewarding result lead me to
cast on for this as my mindless/road trip project, and that was pretty
successful. Except that I finished it just at the very extreme
reaches of anything that can be called sweater weather in this part of
the world 😉 Wear reports will have to wait.
If you’ve been adventurous and clicked on the image above, you’ll have
also discovered something else I’ve been slowly working on — the knitbot
FO Gallery. Obviously, I’m just beginning to populate it, but
I figured I’d test drive it on a few items and get it posted.
I’ll probably be filling it in from both ends and the middle for a
while yet, from accumulated photographs.
I guess there were sheep. There was definitely wool 🙂 And some
other interesting fibres, too.
If you want to understand more about what the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival
is like, have a look at these pictures
to get a sense of what happens when an estimated 70,000 people (and
some number of sheep, alpaca, angora rabbits…) descend on the Howard
County Fairgrounds for each of 2 days of the annual festival.
For myself, I thoroughly enjoyed a 2-day pre-festival workshop on Aran
Sweater Design, lead by Janet Szabo. There’s something to
be said for spending 2 days with fibre-fiends of a similar level and
interest, focusing on fibre and design. On day 1, sensing that we
were all a little twitchy after 3 hours of data about cables and ropes,
Janet lead us through the ultimate infinite cable — the circle:
It’s magic! (It’s in Janet’s
book, and also in Barbara Walker’s Charted book). On Day
2, there was a certain amount of swatching, and a dive into a
sample project sweater:
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We arrived at the fairgrounds around 11am on Saturday — a little late,
by most standards. But, there was still room in the fields for a
few more cars, so we got to enjoy a few hours of wandering through the
throngs of fibre and sheep enthusiasts. Truly, it was
overwhelming. In the end, I focused (if “focus” was possible!) on
stuff from small-scale outfits that I’m just not likely to encounter in
the fibre anywhere else. And, yes, a touch is worth a thousand
words when it comes to yarn!
In there, there’s a crochet (!) kit from Shelridge Farm, some wool/bamboo
sock yarn and some silk/merino from Ellen’s 1/2 Pint Farm,
as well as some laceweight silk and some silk/wool blend from Spirit Trail. Oooh, and
some Koigu KPPPM leapt into my hands, as well.
Oh, and there might have been T-Shirts, books, and a few other
oddments, too 😉
So, apart from enough yarn for 2 sweaters, a top, 3 pairs of socks and
a shawl, what did I get out of the experience?
Completely overwhelmed. And I realized that yes, possibly, there
is a point at which one does not want any more yarn (this may be a
passing condition 😉 ). One of the things that really
struck me was the quantity of yarns in a multitude of colourways.
That is, unlike a typical LYS setup, each booth at the fair was pretty
focused, and it stocked several skeins of any given
colourway. This is a *major* win, as far as I’m
concerned.
It was pretty neat to be wandering around that many people with similar
(and yet, clearly, wildly divergent) interests. I managed to
resist the lure of all the spinning paraphernalia, though I am told I
would be a better knitter if I did spinning as well. With 2
knitting machines craving attention in the basement, I really can’t say
I have time for spinning. No, not even with a drop spindle!
Though, this resistance, too, might be a passing condition.
To round out the weekend, I just about finished up a sweater project
I’ve been working on for some time. (Pictures, soon!). I
have a few more things to clear off the decks and then I’ll let myself
dive into some of these new finds…
I haven’t had a lot of time for machine knitting over the last few
months (something to do with having to be in the same place as the
knitting machine for a chunk of time?!), and when I have sat down at
the machine, it hasn’t been a uniformly positive experience.
For example, I sat down the other day and cast on 166 stitches for the
back of a cardigan/jacket I started making last fall. I’ve done
the left & right front pieces and “just” need to do the back and
sleeves. I really didn’t get very far with it: the carriage
practically jammed on the first knit row, and by the second, all kinds
of stitches were leaping off the needles. Taking a closer look, I
realized that a number of needles had bent latches: they needed
to be replaced.
How many needles? Well, this many…
How does that happen? Well, I guess it’s sort of like learning to
drive standard — if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re bound to
cause some wear and tear on the parts. Every time the carriage
jams or is very stiff to run across the needle bed, it’s likely that
needles are getting bent. I’m certainly hopeful that I’ll be
replacing fewer as time goes by and I get more experienced!
What do you do if you don’t have enough spare needles? Well, I
finally broke down and ordered a serious whack of spare needles (50 for
each bed). In the meantime, I pulled some of the needles
from the left and right edges of the machine to replace the bent ones
in the middle 166.
How bent is bent? I guess I’d ignored/been in denial about the
problem for a while. But, finally, the seven I pulled suffered
primarily from bent latches — they would not open fully, as is the
case for the needle in the background in this next picture — the latch
is as open as it will go, but it should flatten all the way down to the
stem. Another failure mode is that the needle gets bent sideways,
as you can see in the foreground needle below (it’s not lying flat on
the table).
After replacing the 7 needles, with some trepidation I cast on my 166
stitches once more, and passed the carriage cautiously (and
smoothly!) across the needle bed…
Hurray! That’s 2324 happy little stitches a-hanging from the main
bed! And, if ever you *doubted* the fun of machine knitting,
completing a couple thousand stitches in a matter of moments will
convince you!
Probably one of the reasons for the bent needles on the machine is that
I’ve been struggling to find the right yarns to use with the standard
gauge machine. It was (is) hard to get used to just how fine a
yarn the standard gauge machine uses. Essentially, it’s happy
with laceweight yarn. But, I kept doggedly trying yarns that I,
as a hand knitter, considered “fine”, and they just were too thick for
the machine.
Well, too thick for *that* machine. Not too thick for *this* one
🙂
A while back, I found this Studio SK890 on eBay. It’s a *chunky*
gauge machine. That means the needle pitch is 9.0mm (to the
standard machine’s 4.5mm needle pitch), and it has 110 needles on the
bed (to the standard machine’s 200).
As I observed a while ago — knitters fall into exactly one of the
following categories:
At two machines, I really am just a beginner…
At long last, some knitting content!
Some time ago, I bought some Schaefer Yarn “Anne”. I’ve now knit
up a pair of socks using the the black and tan colourway.
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I used just under half the skein to make these (small foot!).
Unfortunately, I think I’ve decided they are about an inch too short;
survivable, but not going to be my favourite pair of socks. I may
have to see if there’s just enough more-than-half left in the skein to
do another pair a bit longer 🙂
Knit on 2mm needles, these are fairly fine socks — fine enough to wear
in leather lace-ups, which means they’ll be part of regular office wear.
Oh, and there was the question of whether I was attracted to the
colourway because of the resemblance to our cat:
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