Tag: crafting

knitting

Big Sister

LindeyLeave a comment

I don’t often knit a sweater exactly as the pattern says. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some kind of knitting goddess who can make a sweater up as she goes and still have it sized to fit me. It’s just that a pattern will say Japanese short rows, and I go “no thanks, I’ll stick with my German short rows” or it’ll say long sleeves and I don’t want long sleeves. Nothing major, I just change things to fit my knitting and wearing preferences.

This, though, is the Big Sister cardigan by Hinterm Stein, and for the first time in ages, I didn’t find a single thing in the pattern I wanted to change. The start, a rectangle on the back, increasing into the shoulders and then fronts, is cleverly done and intuitive. The notch at the collar is just right, and keeps the faux-ribbing at the edges from pulling in too much and looking like the button band area is a size too small. Knitting on the bottom edging with the 1-2 decrease pattern works perfectly. Also, done in aran yarn (which is undyed donegal aran from wool2dyefor), it’s going to be a super snuggly sweater for the wintertime, which given the local climate, will be able to double as my winter coat. Given the deep pockets, I think it’ll be the perfect winter coat.

knitting

Finished Applesauce Sweater

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Hey! It’s not blocked yet, but my crisscross shirt is done. The edges are rolling a little in the photos, but I’m sure a wash and block will cure that. As is my usual issue with speckled yarn, I think it looks better in person than photos, so I’m sorry they look pretty meh. (the yarn in the skein looks beautiful, obviously, and in person, the sweater looks pretty great in my opinion.)

The pattern is nice and simple, well-written and easy to follow, with a great schematic, and I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on the designer in the future. Love these useful, wearable designs, and think I’ll get a lot of use out of the sweater.

knitting

Socks again!

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Back to those #PridePodMAL socks, they’re done! This is what happens when you make socks for a person with tiny feet, I think, and it’s kind of amazing. They took maybe 12 hours of knitting all together, and they’re done. Again, it’s the Wildwood Socks pattern by Catherine Meyer aka GingerDogKnits. The lace pattern is quite simple, both written and charted, and I love how it turns out.

The color is terribly washed out in the photo, it’s called pistachio, and IRL it’s a beautiful tonal cool green I got from the Etsy shop WhimzeeStitches. I’m really glad I probably have enough left of it to make myself a pair of short socks too.

Since the socks are very small, I didn’t block them on my giant foot sock blockers and stretch them all out of shape; I’m waiting till a pair of smaller blockers I ordered comes in, since I won’t be seeing the recipient for the next few weeks anyway. I know sock blockers aren’t a requirement, but I like the uniform way they make the socks look, so I use them.

This is the first time I’ve finished a pair of socks in . . . a while. But they went well and were fun, so I think I’ll be going back to more of them. Goodness knows I have enough sock yarn waiting to be used.

knitting

Double Agent Double-Cross

Lindey2 Comments

Since I don’t have enough to do in June, or maybe ever, I’ve also decided to take part in Camp Loopy, hosted by The Loopy Ewe every summer. I used to do them early on, and when they emailed this May, I was in the mood for some lovely timed knitting.

The first month’s mission is pretty simple: I’m looking for a double agent. (yes, it’s silly, just go with it.) So I got myself two different colors of Wollmeise Twin to make the Applesauce shirt by Noriko Ho, doubling up all over the place.

Here’s the pattern sample of the sweater, sleeveless as I intend to make it.

I’m going to make it from a beautiful speckled yellow and even more beautiful variegated purple / burgundy:

Shouldn’t be more than a few days of knitting, and I’m looking forward to getting it done!

knitting

Pride Make-a-long

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One of the podcasts I’ve been listening to started talking about a Pride make-along a few months back, and she said that other podcasts were also involved. So the result has been that I started listening to / watching another few podcasts that are also involved, bought some yarn and project bags, and will be getting a pattern to get involved.

Because at this point in life, I’m all about Pride. The very concept is the opposite of shame, which we’ve been trained to feel for too many reasons, and I no longer have any use for that in my life.

Not that a rainbow bag and ace flag wallet is going to change the world, but also . . . in small ways, we can all change the world. One person and one interaction at a time.

So today I’m casting on some Wildwood Socks by Catherine Meyer with Whimzee Stitches yarn, in one of their project bags as well. So LGBTQA+ creators all around, including the knitter, since I’m maybe the acest romance writer out there. Not that it’s a competition.

If you want to join me, they’ve got a group over here: Pride Pod MAL

knitting

A Bralette by any other name . . .

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About four years ago I made a Ripple Bralette by Jessie Maed Designs, who might just be my favorite designer. Okay, one of them. One can never discount Joji Locatelli, and I like them for similar reasons: they design relatively simple sweaters with clever construction, that are thoroughly wearable garments. None of that stuff your great grandmother made with extra bobbles and chevrons and 576 colors.

The initial bralette was a single skein of green yarn, and it made a nice layering piece for the dead of frozen winter in Iowa, but it also got me thinking: wouldn’t this make a great tank top, if I just made it long?

So I grabbed two hanks of Ella Rae lace merino (which is, ironically, actually a light fingering weight yarn) both in the same lovely blue-green colorway—the brand unfortunately doesn’t give them fun names, but numbers, and I don’t remember this boring number. I wound them both and stuck them in a project bag in my car. At the time, because of an issue with the car, I was spending a lot of time sitting in the car doing nothing, so I figured I could instead spend that time working 3×3 ribbing on tiny needles forever.

The problem was that when we moved to North Carolina, I wasn’t doing that anymore, so what had been a project moving slowly but steadily forward became entirely stagnant. When I took it out of my car and brought it in to work on last week, I thought I’d continue to take forever to finish it, but it turns out I didn’t have that much left. I finished it, one of the few patterns I knit precisely to pattern, no major changes to what the designer wrote, other than knitting the body for about 14″ instead of 4″.

Since I started it years ago, that also meant it was made two or three sizes larger than necessary, but in the end, I think that doesn’t show at all, since it’s knit in ribbing, and is still 100% fitted.

I’ll definitely, always, be making more of Jessie’s patterns. Fabulous construction and easy to wear, love it.

dyeing

Everything’s Coming Up . . .

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So this is right near my front door. It was planted . . . last year, before they put the house up for sale, and when I first saw it, it was just a wee tiny rose bush, not even hip high.

This year, it inspired me to pull out my old dyeing equipment (and buy a new dyepot, since we didn’t move the old one) and try to replicate the shade on some DK weight yarn I had in my stash. I’m way out of practice at dyeing, and had to resort to using white vinegar to set the dye since I couldn’t find my citric acid, but I think it turned out well.

I used pretty much every shade of red dye I have in combination to give the color more depth, and then my particular dyeing style is soaking the yarn in plain water first, then adding it to the dyepot with the color in it, and then when the color is about half taken up, I add the acid to set it, so it still has sections of tonality, and doesn’t come out one uniform shade.

The photo is pretty washed out, and doesn’t show the tones all that well, but red never photographs all that well, and I gave up my lightbox when I stopped dyeing for a shop. The actual shade of the yarn is a little darker than the flowers, but it did come out a lovely deep tonal burgundy-red that’s going to make a great sweater at some point. I just haven’t decided which one yet. I have about 1600 yards of it, so that’s enough for a lot of options!

If you’ve got a suggestion, let me know.

Next up: trying to replicate the color of the hydrangeas in the back, that lovely blue-purple they come in in our acidic local soil.

knitting

The Rainbow Connection

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The Rainbow Connection V-neck Boxy sweater, that is. This:

Once again bathroom mirror pic, but it’s not the worst picture. Partially because of the happenings of the previous post and my rift sweater, I decided to knit it in a size that wasn’t overly large on me. In this case, since the sweater is supposed to be quite large, that meant knitting it about 4 sizes too small. I knit the body in the smallest size available, the neck in my own size, and then, because bringing the body in that drastically meant the sweater hit my upper arms, not my elbow or so, I made the arms deeper, just by knitting the top of the sweater to 8-9″ before joining under the arms.

The yarn I have left:

Between the size change and the 3″ sleeves, since I don’t especially like sleeves that come past my elbow, I used all but a few yards of every color, for something like 1500 yards of Miss Babs fingering weight yarn. I’d been planning on making the Muppet shawl by Lyrical Knits with this, and even bought it as a kit, but when I started to see the spoiler pictures of it, I realized it was in a shape I don’t really wear much. Plus I just forced my poor co-writer and PA to take a whole bunch of knitted shawls earlier this month. Knitting a bunch more isn’t the answer, even if I do love a good lace knit.

Now I guess I should go work on finishing that Tiong Bahru that’s been on my needles for . . . (checks notes) almost eleven years. Oops.

knitting · spinning

The Passport Blanket

LindeyLeave a comment

So, some time ago, I was on etsy, breaker of bank accounts and destroyer of lives, and I saw some CVM for sale. That’s California Variegated Mutant for anyone who doesn’t spin, and it’s a lofty, bouncy medium wool, which is also the first thing I ever handspun—on a drop spindle, no less. So I was taken by a moment of fancy, and decided to get some more.

The clever person who owned the farm asked me . . . do you need a SE2SE passport sticker?

And I fell right down the rabbit hole. Apparently, it’s a program to try to preserve rare and threatened sheep breeds, sending collectible stickers to put in a “passport” when you purchase wool of the breeds in question from farms taking part in the program. Included are breeds from Shetland, which has long been a favorite of mine, to things I’d never heard of before, some of which sound downright made up. Florida Cracker? Barbados Blackbelly?

There are a total of 20+ breeds, and while I doubt I’ll ever find them all, I thought . . . wouldn’t it be interesting to put them all together in one project? So I started buying the wool in question, in small 4oz lots, with the intention of spinning them all to a similar weight, and block by block, building an afghan out of all these rare sheep breeds. Because that’s the kind of nerd I am. The fun kind.

So here it is, my passport, in which I’ve collected a whole bunch of stickers, but only just started the immense undertaking of the spinning, with this, that first Lendrum bobbin, 1/3 of the CVM I bought at the beginning of the month:

Wish me luck with what’s almost certainly a bigger bite than I’ll ever manage to chew!