Kiss My Knits!

Like everyone else in the knitting universe right now, I have made a 1×1 ribbed Noro scarf.

Pattern modifications: 36 stitches in 1×1 ribbing until scarf is about as long as the recipient is tall. Slip last stitch of every row.
Needles: #6US/4mm
Yarn: about 1.8 skeins each of two Silk Garden colorways, 201A and 268B.

Ravelry project page.

Notes: The colors aren’t quite as bright as they appear in these broad daylight shots. It’s a bit more subdued and traditionally manly without being monochrome. Also, for my own future reference, once they’re about halfway done, long scarves are no longer good “stuff in the purse” carryalong projects.

This was made for my husband, and I hope it kept him warm on his trek to the train station this morning.

Yesterday was day 100 with the wii fit. I planned this wonderful triumphant post about how I’d lost 10 pounds over 100 days, and how slow and steady won the race, and how I was looking forward to losing another 20 over the next 200 (or so) days. I was at 9+ pounds down when I took that picture. Then I stepped on the scale and I was up one and a half pounds! I was expecting to be down! STUPID HORMONES!!! Day 100 just fell on the wrong day for me. Sigh.

I’m counting it anyway. I’ll be back down in a day or so once my body settles back down.



Currently on the needles: NOT a Jayne hat! That’s right, someone ordered something other than a Jayne hat. Okay, they ordered a Jayne hat for themselves and another item for a friend. Often I’m so glad to be looking at something besides orange that I give a discount. Heh.

This is two strands held together – one of Skacel Posh and one of Crystal Palace Squiggle. Squiggle has a unique texture and is my favorite “novelty” yarn. Posh is much softer than most fuzzy yarns. The weave on this is nice and loose. You can pull it sideways until it’s over a foot wide. I think the client’s friend will like this.

Swatch for Twisted Sisters’ “Eve” scarf. Swatch knitted on size 6 needle in Fleece Artist Woolie Silk 2ply. I’m getting proper gauge, 6 stitches and 8 rows to one inch, but it feels loose. You don’t want it to be tight if you’re going to be doing cables, but still. I may go down to a size 5 needle.

ETA: Correction. I checked again, and I was using a #5. I’m sorry, but I have a psychological barrier to knitting a gigantic scarf on size 4’s, so I’m sticking with the 5.

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Super easy.

Materials:
Long size 11 needles
1 skein Noro Iro

Cast on 150 stitches.
Knit 10 rows.
Bind off all stitches.

Voila! Longways-striped scarf!

This colorway was 60A, but I’ve done it with others to good effect. This pic is from 2004 but this scarf is still Em’s favorite scarf. It’s weathered a lot of use, too, which is testament to the yarn. You want LONG size 11 needles because it’s a lot of stitches to jam on there. Here’s a picture showing how bunched up you have to make the stitches.

Very easy, and a good way to use up that one skein of Iro or Big Kureyon that you shouldn’t have bought but just had to have.

Okay, maybe it’s just me that does that. Heh.

Hey, , I found a shirt for you! Gotta order by August 31st, so act fast!

Only one day of summer left before school starts, so I’ve put Emily to work doing all the house cleaning. After the dishes, she’ll be re-shingling the roof.

The meeting with the teacher went well. I like her, she seems very competent. She’s got a background in special ed, so that’ll be helpful. Several of Emily’s friends from kindergarten and first grade will be in her classroom too, including her very best friend. Her teacher and I talked about strategies, and I think we’re both on the same page. I’m feeling pretty good about this.

Jayne hat orders continue to come in, and seem to have picked up slightly now that the weather’s cooling off. I seem to be getting ahead of my estimated delivery time, which is good. It’ll get better once I’ve got the mornings to knit instead of cramming it all in at night. That’ll give me a chance to make some of the things that I’ve promised other people. Including one item which I’ve decided not to follow a pattern on, but just to wing instead. We’ll see how that goes. Jayne hats on the needles for Illinois, California, and California again.


Likewise, for Fall, DR weddings are picking back up as people go back to school, and Team Wedding has some projects we’ve been able to work on. That’s always good.

Had good fun at the Stitch’n’Bitch at Books a Million last night. I had my first coffee in about a month (I get one raspberry mocha at the weekly Stitch’n’Bitch) and wound up staying up way too late. Well, at least I finished another Jayne hat and another set of repeats on Branching out.

Last night, prostiturtle brought up the post with all the alcohol stories in the comments, and it once again proved a popular topic of conversation. Another popular topic was pet loyalty. To which I will add my story!

Once, before we were married, I stayed the night with my future husband at his house (sorry, Mom and Dad!) when he was living not too far up the street. I got up in the middle of the night and fumbled for my shirt in the dark and started to put it on. I remembered that I didn’t put it on, but my husband reminds me otherwise, and he’s right: I had just gotten it over my head when I noticed it was wet. And smelled funny. What the… Holy crap! The cat had come into the room and peed on my shirt! May I just say: EWWWWWWWW!

Of course, I guess she was right to be jealous, I did wind up stealin’ her man! Ha! Take that, you stupid possessive cat!

Have you ever had a pet act possessive, jealous, or just plain weird toward someone in your life?

We went out of town this weekend for the kiddo’s birthday celebrations. After last year’s disaster, we opted to keep it low-key, so it was just grandparents and us.

Finished up a couple of Jayne hats, but there’s a hitch. I’ve only got enough orange on-hand to complete a few more, and the mill won’t be winding any more gigantic cones for another week and a half. So tomorrow I canvas the state for loose skeins. This shortage won’t put anybody off schedule, since I’ve got enough to go through Jan 24th or so, but I get antsy when I can see the end of the yarn in sight. Note that the pic below shows the yarn I got in February for Jayne hats. The orange cone had 2000 yards on it.

Consider that the UK release of Serenity debuted at number one on the bestseller charts there, and the resulting uptick in UK requests over the weekend, and you can see why I am antsy about needing more yarn.

, you’re at #6.

When travelling to the in-laws, I like to take a few other projects with me to work on. So ‘s scarf is about 3/4 of the way done. Old pic, sorry. Also, I was working on something with Berroco Chinchilla. It is soft and lovely, but I had forgotten how much the dark blue stains. If ever you want to realize just exactly how you hold your yarn when you knit, just work up a little bit of this stuff and all will become clear. Maybe I’ll just give the finished garment a little rinse before passing it along, lest the wearer turn Smurfy blue without realizing it.

Speaking of Berroco yarns, I got to go to a Berroco trunk show premiering their new yarns for Spring. A few were nice, but many were fugly with a capital F. I also got to see, in person, some of the horrific things from the Berroco site featured in You Knit What? Talk about abuse of granny squares. Also, this poor woman apparently has moths the size of Volkswagens.

And now, I’m totally beat, and will actually turn in at a semi-reasonable hour. Mark this day in the record books!

The color joins on the Jayne scarf are working out much better now. Every morning I knit another section on the scarf, then work on a hat so I don’t fall too far behind on other orders. I offered this one for $60, because I didn’t want to charge too much without knowing exactly how much yarn and time it would take. Next time, I’ll charge more.

The end is flipped up so you can see it’s stockinette on both sides. Ah, the magic of double-knitting. It’s a great technique for reversible fabrics. In this case, I’m using it because she wanted it to be little v-stitches all the way around, and I a) didn’t want to tie up my circular needle for as long as it would take to knit the scarf, and b) knew that by the time I had knit all those rows on a circular needle, I would have strangled myself with orange yarn from sheer boredom.

Actually, there’s really not much of a reason to post this, since it’s not done and I’ll probably post pics again once it’s done and has fringe attached. However, I’m feeling pretty satisfied with it and what’s the point of a ‘blog if you can’t preen a little?

Side note: I think I want a mannequin/dressform display for showing off scarves. Sadie’s great and all, but she doesn’t exactly scream “class.” Especially since she was used as a dartboard by a bunch of college boys in the 90’s. My husband, ladies and gentlemen.

I posted this as a reply to a question over in the knitting community, then realized it said more about my life than I thought, so I wanted to post it here so I’d have a record.

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Here’s a seed stitch scarf. Never mind the slit, it’s just the chunkiest seed stitch one I had.

I didn’t write down the pattern, but I’m pretty sure it’s just CO 11, *k1, p1* across. Repeat until the scarf is as long as you want. The key is that on each subsequent row, you knit the knits and purl the purls, so it has to be an odd number for that particular pattern to work.

If you want to do a slit like that, it’s pretty easy. About a third of the way up, start knitting with a separate ball halfway through the row. Continue knitting from the separate balls (or just the other end of the same ball if you’ve only got one) until the slit is as long as you need, then rejoin it with the original ball. Weave in the ends when you’re all done.

I gave that scarf to my kid’s kindergarten teacher’s assistant last year. Did she thank me? Nooooo. Of course, later she quit, apparently because they were expecting more of her than she had to do at last year’s school. I didn’t like her anyway – she was impatient, and unintentionally (I hope) belittling to the kids. I meant the scarf as something to try to show her were were all in this together and thus to improve her attitude. Yeah, that didn’t work.

It just goes to show why you shouldn’t give hand-knit things out of a sense of obligation, only out of a genuine desire to please the recipient. Too bad – it looked better on me than I’m sure it did on her.

So, I’m trying to choose which to sell for Katrina. Any opinions?

ETA: I decided to do all three. In for a penny, in for a pound, eh?

It was a productive long weekend! Not as productive as I thought it’d be, since I wound up having to drive instead of the hubby, and he has this wacky insistence on me not knitting while I drive. Sheesh.

How I spent my Independence Day weekend.