Light and Momentary

In the spring a young person's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of mittens

That's what all the young people think, right? It's March; I need some new mittens!

Back in December I decided to make some mittens as a Christmas gift for Joe's girlfriend. They went smoothly and reasonably quickly, by knitter standards, and I decided to make some more mittens. Ysolda Teague released a fun fall pattern with a quilt vibe, and I decided to crank out a pair of those for Marie.

Oh my stinking heck, they have been a PROJECT. Fingering weight yarn instead of worsted, garter instead of stockinette -- that wouldn't have been a big deal. But the reason they have a quilt vibe is that you make them with tiny pieces, picking up stitches and decreasing rapidly. One Raveler's project notes observe that the pattern generates 108 yarn ends. 

That is a lot of ends, even if a person tries to exercise prudence and forethought and knit them in as she goes.

They're pretty cute, though, I think. This is the first one before I used the rainbow-y yarn to add a bit of ribbing at the cuff, the thumb, and the top of the hand.

I'm almost done, you guys. I have to add the ribbing to the second one and deal with the remaining ends. I just need a little more coal in the tender of my metaphorical Steam Engine of Knitting Mojo.

In between quilt-flavored mitt #1 and #2, I decided to make Joe a pair of mittens too. I thought a worsted weight project would take the edge off, and I had yarn left over from making him a scarf a few years back. I would crank out some speedy mittens to match his scarf, I told myself, and then I would be ready to tackle the fiddly second mitt for Marie. It didn't quite work that way, though.

Joe's scarf was made from a free pattern that describes itself as a houndstooth check. It makes a pleasant cozy fabric, but the structure is a little tricky to read. I drew myself a chart to convert it to a mitten pattern, and I only realized near the end of the second mitten that I made a mistake with the thumb increases. They shoot out to the side like iguanodon thumbs, even though very few humans have iguanodon thumbs and even fewer iguanodons wear mittens. It should be fine, since knitting is stretchy, but it is mildly vexing nonetheless. 

Joe's mittens are also almost done. I need to make one more thumb and weave in some ends. I could get both projects completely finished in about two episodes of Great British Bakeoff (maybe three, depending on the situation with the ends), and I will feel much better when they are no longer niggling at me.

Then I can turn my attention to the bulky-weight cardigan I haven't been working on because I kept thinking I should finish the mittens first, but that's a story for another day.

Mitten season, knittin' season

When I left for work this morning I pulled out my mittens for the first time this fall. "Hm," I thought to myself, "I'd better get cracking on those elephant mittens." 

I used to think of mittens as a quick and easy project, but my last two pairs of mittens have been slow and painful knits. Pair #1 did have a lot going on: an Estonian braided cast-on, a lining, a flip-top, a button loop, a patterned afterthought thumb, so much finishing that I can't even call it a boatload of finishing; it was more like a QE2-load. They were a pain in my butt, I must say. But they are excellent mittens, it turns out, so I'm glad I persevered.

I told myself the ones I cast on for Stella back in January would be easier. While they are unlined with no flip top, they do have a picot cast-on, a Latvian braid, non-intuitive patterning with long floats, and a patterned afterthought thumb. ALSO they're worsted weight yarn worked on size 3 needles, which is not my favorite; ALSO ALSO they're really long so the hassle just keeps grinding on.

But as you can see, I'm getting closer. 

The palm-side patterning is pretty, isn't it? 

I only have five rounds to go before I start decreasing, and then 13 decrease rounds, and then a thumb. And then the finishing, but it should be more of a paddleboat situation than a QE2 situation this time around.

Maybe I'll even see if I can knock out those last five pre-decrease rounds this evening. To be continued...

Finished

I wanted to show you this project last month but it was a gift.

I signed up for Ysolda Teague's Knitworthy club again and this was the first pattern. Knitworthy is her fun late fall/early winter set of snack-sized patterns, suitable for December gift-giving. Or October gift-giving, if that's what you need.

One of the things I especially like about Ysolda's patterns is the inclusion of techniques that are interesting and useful and uncommon, things that make me say, "I would never have thought of that!" This pattern introduced me to a helpful new technique for carrying long floats. 

When you're working with two colors, you don't want to carry the unused color for more than five stitches. It's hard to keep your tension even when the floats get that long, and it creates a wrong-side fabric that's less likely to lie smooth. But if you'd like a virtually invisible technique for hiding long floats, the ladderback jacquard technique might be what you've been looking for. 

The way it works is that in the middle of your long stretch of stitches, you cast on a new stitch with your unused color. When you work your way back around to that stitch, you bring both yarns to the front and purl it. When you don't need it any longer, you work it together with an adjacent stitch. A purled stitch column in between two knit columns will retreat into the background, making the extra stitch virtually invisible. It requires a little more effort than just catching the float, but I think it looks better because the contrasting yarn is less likely to peek through the fabric. Here's the wrong side of the fabric.

Those columns of knit stitches are spots where the pattern told me to use the ladderback jacquard technique. They're undetectable from the right side. Nifty, right?

This project involved the diciest game of yarn chicken I've ever played. I had to switch back to the contrast color for the last round of the crown, because I ran out of yarn about six stitches from the end. But I'm guessing you wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't drawn your attention to it. 

It was a 25th birthday gift for Marie, who tells me it will get plenty of wear this winter. 

99%

I have finished knitting my giant shawl, even though the last step, involving multiple feet of attached I-cord, tested my patience. I showed my husband this picture, in which it is drying on an upstairs bed after its bath.

"It could be a blanket," he said hesitantly.

"It would be a weird and unsatisfying blanket," I told him, because although it's blanket length it's not blanket width.

"I...hope it's not unsatisfying as a... a...." he trailed off. Shawls and wraps and stoles and capes and pelerines are not part of his wardrobe, so I think he was a little vague on the best ending for that sentence. 

The designer released photos of the finished product when she released the finishing instructions, and some of them are very striking. I think you can view this one whether or not you have a Ravelry account; it shows the whole thing draped across the model's shoulders. This one shows it styled less dramatically; mine will probably look something like that when I eventually wear it. But you guys, even in the professionally styled and edited pictures, I still look at the junction of the first two squares in this picture and think, "Huh, that is unexpected."

Well. The designer does not need any advice from me on the appropriate level of mystery for a mystery knit-along.

After it dries I will have to weave in something like 20 ends, which is not bad when you consider the number of color changes in that puppy. Perhaps Stella will be willing to do a fashion shoot. I'll have to practice staring moodily into the middle distance.

My invisibility cloak

This is the current state of my MKAL project:

It's quite something, isn't it? Stella is used to seeing it wadded up, with only the last bit poking out of my knitting bag, and as she watched me take this picture she said, "When you see it all spread out, it's very.. a lot." She's right: it is VERY a lot. I have one more fan wedge to go on the right side, and then probably the finishing instructions will involve a lot of I-cord edging.

I was manipulating the gradient of the self-striping yarn in one of the wedges, and I was fretting about whether I had changed the color too abruptly. "I might have made it look weird," I said plaintively as I surveyed the transition from dark blue-green to lighter blue-green. "Mom," said one of my children, gently and accurately, "you don't have to worry about making this thing look weirder than it already looks." We're pretty much at maximum weirdness here, are we not?

It is bigger than I am. It is vast-- an ocean of weirdness, a sea of strange. I will be able to swathe myself in it on the snowiest of days, as long as I wear sunglasses to protect myself from the blinding brightness of the colors.

I am calling it my invisibility cloak, because look:

(my arm is fully extended over my head in this picture) (but you'd never know that because I'm invisible)

It is so visually unexpected that if you saw it in the wild you wouldn't say, "Hm, is that a person behind that invisibility cloak?" No, you would just say, "Wow, that is a painfully vivid Thing over there and I don't have eye protection. I'd better look away now."

The pictures cannot begin to convey the brightness of the lime green. If I wear it outside, I might be deemed an environmental hazard. Picture me walking along the Gladlyville thoroughfares on a sunny day, blinding its citizens with my invisibility cloak. "Aaaiiieeee," they will shriek, fleeing to save themselves. "Out of my way!" I will thunder. "I spent all summer working on this thing and I'm going to wear it, dern it!"

(Except it is actually pretty itchy. We shall have to see how much wear it gets.)

The very strangest

Do you remember the mystery knit-along that looked like a manta ray with an attached clown collar? Do you remember the part where I said that MKALs need a Goldilocks level of mystery -- not too wacky, not too predictable?

Well. 

It turns out that after knitting a big striped square with a heavy 70s vibe, and attaching it to a ruffly-edged square with a traditional Scottish vibe, we were assigned to pick up stitches along one ruffly edge in order to knit a giant fan in wide solid-colored wedges. I think this wins the prize for "most conspicuously weird thing I've ever made."

This pattern is sparking some mutiny. I don't think I've ever seen this many participants saying "nope, too weird for me." Right there in the discussion thread with the designer's name on it, they are dropping out grumpily. I am hanging in there, but I keep asking my kids if it seems as weird to them as it does to me, and they keep assuring me that it does.

Here, I will show you a picture. (The green wedge on the right-hand side will be joined by four neighbors, one in each color.)

I should mention that the pattern told me to make a solid-colored square in the center of the second block, and I decided to take the opportunity to rebalance my yarn quantities instead. I am not persuaded that a solid center would make that block any less odd.

I am enjoying the process, because short-row garter wedges are particularly pleasing to make. I still like the colors, and the weirdness will be less conspicuous when the eventual piece is slung around my neck. No one ever asks me to stretch out my big shawl/stole/wrap thingies so they can admire the details; it seems probable that this...thing will fulfill its intended purpose in my wardrobe.

And in the interim, it is definitely making me laugh. I can't begin to guess what part 4 will involve. I'll be sure to keep you posted.

The knitter who forgot about The Mittens That Never Forget

When I did more knitting I was more active on Ravelry, and I was careful about recording the details of my projects. Last weekend I decided to update my Ravelry notebook for the first time in a while, and I thought I was all caught up. Only later did I remember the project I started in January and never logged: a pair of mittens for Stella. 

I finished the body of the first mitten back in the winter and stuffed it into a bag, where it sat neglected for a long time. I finally pulled it out again this week and closed up the top.

The pattern calls for an afterthought thumb with more small elephants, and I hadn't been looking forward to knitting it. But I pulled my socks up and got down to it, and now the left mitten has a thumb and everything.

As always with colorwork, it will look neater after I give it a bath.

Whenever I knit big motifs, it feels like a paint-by-numbers project. This is true even of patterns that I created myself, back in the days when my kids asked me for dragon knitwear. The fun part of stranded colorwork is getting into a groove, and cranking out rounds with a easy-to-memorize flow. There's nothing easy to memorize about this pattern. 

The finished mitten has a pleasing weight to it, because it's worsted yarn on size 3 needles. This means they will keep Stella's hands warmer next winter, but it's kind of annoying to knit this yarn at this gauge. All in all, it's one of those projects where I think I will enjoy the product much more than the process.

I cast on the right mitten this morning, and got halfway through the picot cuff before I stopped to go climbing with Pete. We shall how long it takes me to finish mitten #2. 

I'm not sure I really want to learn this lesson

Today we drove over to the town where Marie lives because she was speaking at a church service, and I was knitting in the car on the way there. I hadn't looked at the manta ray shawl in the sunshine before, and you guys, it is VIVID. A person might need some sunglasses to avoid being blinded by that chartreuse in the sunlight. It's billed as a pop color but it's more like an EXPANSE color or a VISTA color or a VERY PLENTIFUL color.

My chevrons are taking shape and the 70s afghan vibe is building. I was thinking about the structure of the piece, with the hole in the center just right for poking one's head through, combined with the wild colors and the zigzag structure. "It's like an Easter-egg-colored clown collar," I said to Elwood. I thought back to the most recent pattern release, which is constructed in a nifty way but which has a definite circus tent feel, if you ask me. (If you don't have a Ravelry account, this link might work better for you.) "Huh," I said, "clown collars and circus tents. Maybe the designer is pranking us all."

It's a tricky thing, running a mystery knit-along. I once did one where we just made a big triangle, and people in the MKAL discussion group were annoyed about it. But then there was the MKAL where we started by knitting a giant trilobite and then added wedges plus a ruffle, and people in the MKAL discussion group were annoyed that they were making giant trilobites. It should be a little bit mysterious or else people will grumble, but only a little bit mysterious or else people will grumble. 

I was lamenting a little to Marie after the church service. "Hm," she said, "that is a pretty bold color choice. But Mom, you do this every time with mystery knit-alongs. You get into the middle and you declare that the designer is writing the pattern specifically to yank your chain." As soon as she said that I remembered posting about it in 2016. (In fairness, that Stephen West shawl wound up being so weird that I gave it away; I also gave away the shawl I made in the next Stephen West MKAL because it was also too big and too dramatic for me. Maybe I am too boring for Stephen West MKALs.) I had forgotten that I said the same thing in 2018 about a shawl that I love and wear frequently, and I wrote pretty much the same post in 2014 about an Ysolda Teague MKAL: things looked too weird in the middle for me to be quite content, and then it all worked out. Marie even remembered my response to my very first MKAL in 2012. "You were NOT happy about knitting that ruffle," she reminded me -- but then I wound up loving both the process and the ruffle.

Huh, this makes twelve years of Jamie saying, "WAIT, THIS EXERCISE IN RELINQUISHING CONTROL IS KIND OF PAINFUL AND I MIGHT REGRET IT." Perhaps I should get back to grousing about the (knitting) pattern so I don't have to contemplate that (behavioral) pattern for very long.

Knitting along, mysteriously

The manta ray shawl got bigger and bigger and stripier and stripier, and then it sprouted a frilly conjoined twin.

This is what it looked like at the end of clue 1:

Clue 2 was initially perplexing. (Perplexity is both a bug and a feature of mystery knit-alongs.) It requires the knitter to knit halfway across the existing work and then cast on 345 additional stitches. At first I thought we were knitting a giant ruffly edge for the existing square, but then it dawned on me: we are knitting an attached adjacent square, building it from the outside in. 

I'm still repeating my mantra: you buy the MKAL ticket, you take the MKAL ride. The first chunk of the square is chevron-patterned; the designer likes chevrons more than I do. I think they have a pretty strong 70s afghan vibe. "Knitters have been using chevrons for generations," I am telling myself. "Be open-minded." 

Another thing that's distinctive about MKALs is that you get the pattern in pieces, so you may need to look at more than one file if you're searching for a particular detail. I did not review the introduction to the first clue before I started the second one. "Color A," I said to myself. "That's the light one." Three thousand stitches later, I realized that color A is actually the dark one. My chevrons have a bit of an Easter egg feel:

But you know, I'm not going to fret. I like all of these colors, and an MKAL is always an exercise in relinquishing control and accepting surprises, and no one will ever say, "Huh, I think you were supposed to put the deep blue-green on the outside of your big square and the aqua in the middle, but you did it backwards."

I knit much less than I used to, and I am really enjoying the hands-busy-mind-free contemplative facet of this project. It is going to take me a long time to knit a 20-inch square in fingering-weight yarn, but I'm looking forward to it. I'll post a picture of the two squares side by side when this second one is a little less scrunched up on the needles.

The Manta Ray Shawl

Kate Davies is hosting a summer knitting community: a mystery knit-along, a series of book discussions, and a bunch of new pattern releases, all with a Margery Allingham theme. I had never heard of Margery Allingham, but I am a fan of Golden Age detective fiction and I do love a good summer MKAL. So I jumped in.

I've read and enjoyed the first two books and KD's essays on the books. I made a hat for Joe's girlfriend from one of the new patterns. (There's an announcement tucked into that last sentence: Joe's girlfriend has been deemed knit-worthy.) But I am fretting a bit about my yarn selections for the MKAL shawl. 

Mostly I think it will be fine. I'm making a big stripy diamond in colors I like. Stella thinks it looks pleasingly like a stingray.

As always, the devil is in the details. I was instructed to choose five colors. I was supposed to have a hundred grams each of a light color, a dark color, and a pop color, and 75 grams each of two medium colors that would play nicely with the others.

I chose a pretty aqua for my light color and a deep deep blue-green for my dark color. It probably looks black in the picture, but imagine if navy blue and the deepest forest green had a baby. That's my dark color. I chose a vivid lime green for my pop color. For the medium toned colors I chose a pretty mossy grassy green and a skein of self-striping sock yarn in blues and greens. 

But two things are niggling at me. One is the yarn quantities, which I did exactly backward: I have 100g of the medium colors, and <100g of all three of the dominant colors. Before I cast on I thought to myself, "Oh, I only used a little of my dark color in the Princess Bride shawl. It will be fine." Now I am tearing through it an alarming rate. I knew that I had used a little of the lime green color in my pandemic hat, but I only remembered today that I had used the aqua as the contrast color in Alex's Space Invaders socks. 

This seems like a setup for an un-fun game of yarn chicken later in the summer.

The second niggly thing is that there is a whole lot of lime green. I read "pop color" and thought "occasional accent," but no-- there's a reason I was instructed to acquire >400 yards of it. I am not wild about big blocks of lime green, but big blocks of lime green are about to happen.

Well, that's how it goes, I guess: you buy the MKAL ticket, you take the MKAL ride.

The Lunacy Report

On the 19th of December I began to make a pair of socks for an adult man, with the goal of giving them to him for Christmas. If you are not a knitter, you probably didn't gasp at my audacity. It warrants a gasp or two, though.

I've made socks with short deadlines before, but only for women. There is considerably more acreage in a man's size 11 foot than in a woman's size 7 foot. And in the past I had the good sense to stick to a straightforward pattern, in a window when there wasn't much else going on. If you're undertaking a 7-hour drive, you might as well knit like fury while you're in the passenger seat. It doesn't work if you're busy. It doesn't make any sense to knit a pair of men's socks with less than a week to go until Christmas.

Back in 2012 my oldest son asked me for a pair of Space Invaders socks. They were slow and painful: the leg has 91 stitches per round, on size 0 needles. The charts are not intuitive, since most of us don't spend much time knitting pictures of aliens, and the colorwork sections are technically challenging because of all the long floats. They were a total pain in my butt. But he loved them. Over the years he made a special point of wearing them when we were together. They had acquired the status of special occasion socks as they grew more weathered, and I had made noises about replacing them, but when I thought about the time required to knit another pair my heart would sink.

But I love that boy, and he is the hardest person in my orbit to buy for, and so I said to myself, "This is the year, self!" On a dark and windy Tuesday evening, six days before Christmas, I went out and bought yarn. That night I dove in. 

Handknit items are a gift of time even when all goes smoothly. If a person mashes up two aliens accidentally and then rips back because her firstborn deserves CORRECT aliens, even more time is required. If a person needs three cracks at the fiddly short-row heel, she will notice that Christmas is GALLOPING closer at a speed that does not leave room for any more mistakes. If she painstakingly knits her firstborn's birthdate into the high score portion of the second sock's leg and only realizes afterward that the 6 in the pattern is actually backward, she might need to do some deep breathing. (Seriously, Knitty, that error has been sitting there on your site since 2007! Fix it already!)

My goal was to get down to beginning of the toe before I gave them to him, so I could check the fit. I put the live stitches on scrap yarn and wrapped them up just like that. I'm glad I did, because I had been asking Joe to try them on for me and Alex's feet are a little longer. On Christmas night I finished the first sock, with its fiddly short-row toe and its long whack of Kitchener stitch and its eleventy-zillion ends to weave in.

On December 26 we were driving to the Chicago 'burbs to meet my in-laws for lunch at a restaurant, and Alex was leaving in the late afternoon to catch his flight back to NYC. I worked steadily at the second toe as we headed their way, but I made a mistake because I was trying to play B is for Botticelli at the same time. I ripped it back and did it again correctly. I started the second long whack of grafting and discovered that car grafting makes me carsick in a way that car knitting never has. We were early for lunch, so I held my sock discreetly under the table and finished it off. Grafting, check. Ends woven in, also check. I laid them in my lap to take a picture.

I handed them over with a modest smile of triumph. If someone wanted to buy a pair of these socks from me, I would charge them a thousand dollars. Wear them in good health, Alex, and never doubt that your mother loves you.

Progress!

Three years and seven months after I started them, I have finished knitting my flip-top Broughton mittens. They spent the afternoon and evening taking a bath, which I hope will smooth out the colorwork and magically enlarge them. (One of those outcomes is likelier than the other.)

I still have to do the finishing, which will require me to sew the linings in place, find or purchase correctly sized buttons, tighten up some gaps around the thumb openings, and weave in a whole bunch of ends. It's at least one GBBO episode, and that's if I have the right buttons in the house.

But still! Let's hear it for progress!
 

Socks for beginners

Last night I was texting with my friend Shelley about making socks, and then Heather left a comment on yesterday's post about getting started with socks, so I am going to write a post about knitting socks.

Knitting socks = the best! They are such happy little projects: portable, colorful, varied, and easy to give to your knitworthy friends and loved ones, because just about everybody needs socks.

Choose good yarn -- I love the Schoppel sock yarns myself. You want mostly superwash wool mixed with something tougher for durability, like 25% nylon. Good sock yarn is more expensive than you might expect it to be, because a lot of us are used to buying socks at Target. You are going to spend a lot of hours staring at this sock yarn as it runs through your fingers, so tell yourself that the price per hour of enjoyment is low, not that the price per sock is high.

I recommend knitting socks on two circular needles, or using the magic loop technique on one circular needle with a 40-inch cable. YouTube will show you how to get started with either of those techniques for knitting in the round if you haven't tried them yet. You can also use double-points, but they make your project less portable and you are going to find yourself grumbling about chasing after the one that rolled under the coffee table again. Start with US size 2, which is 2.75mm in non-US locales.

Top-down socks are easier to start with than toe-up socks (or any of the weirder offerings, like this goofy pattern that tells you to start in the middle). Use a long-tail cast-on to set yourself up for working 64 stitches in the round. Make yourself a nice K2P2 cuff. I like to rib all the way down my sock leg to minimize sag, but you can switch over to stockinette after an inch of ribbing if it's easier for you to find a groove with stockinette.

When your sock leg is the length you want it to be, you'll switch for a bit from knitting in the round to knitting back and forth. I found this Wayback Machine link that's very much like my go-to pattern for top-down socks. It will walk you through the heel flap, heel turn, and gusset. Once you're back to 64 stitches, you just cruise down the foot in happy rounds of stockinette until you reach the toe-zone.

Heather asked specifically about socks for Fred Flintstone, and LO, I have a post in my archives called Fred Flintstone's New Socks! (What are the odds? I wonder if I am the internet's leading Fred Flintstone sock blogger in addition to being the internet's leading kraken/bunyip blogger?) Most sock patterns tell you to taper the toe at a 45-degree angle for 1.5-2 inches before grafting the front and back together, but you can just do fewer rounds of toe decreases to get a squarer sock. Heather, you might think about grafting your first toe in a contrasting color so it's easy to unpick it if you want to take another crack at the toe shaping.

If you think you want to try toe-up socks, which are my default these days, here's a post with my sock recipe. The beginning is more fiddly and there's more math and/or guessing involved in deciding when to start the gusset increases, so I suggest top-down for your first pair or two.

90% of a mitten is not enough of a mitten

It was chilly over the weekend and as I was heading out to walk the dog I thought to myself, "I wish I had a pair of flip-top mittens, so my fingertips could mostly be warm but I could have easy access when I needed to do something requiring some dexterity."

"Oh," I said back to myself, "you mean like the flip-top mittens you started making in APRIL 2020?"

I rarely knit these days and I'm not sure exactly why. It used to be that every time I read a book to a kid I'd pick up my knitting, and it used to be that I read a lot of books to a lot of kids. Knitting took the edge off when I was reading the same book for the 427th time, but these days all the people in my household read their own books to themselves. Knitting was something I always reached for if I was watching a TV show, but I hardly ever watch TV shows these days.

Another thing that's changed: I used to enjoy the knitting community. I'm not active on Ravelry these days, and the knitting bloggers I used to follow have all stopped blogging. It's pleasant to talk about progress and frustrations with people who are excited about knitting. It's motivating to see other people's projects and riff on their ideas.

And here's another thing: I can't seem to combine very much knitting with lifting, because it makes my elbow hurt. I'd rather get strong than make socks. But probably I can make a few socks and keep lifting pain-free, right? 

After I wrote the post I linked above, I finished the first two remaining tasks and then I just could not bring myself to pick up stitches for the lining of the second mitten. But you know, it won't actually be that hard. I need bright light and 20 minutes, and then I'll say to myself, "Why did I put this off for so long?"

What's something Stella and I could watch together in the evenings while I ease myself back into the knitting groove? It needs to be something I can catch most of by listening (i.e., no subtitles), and it can't be too creepy or violent because I don't do well with creepy/violent shows. 

Feast or Famine

I did manage to blog every day in July, and then vanished -- poof! We were traveling, visiting my family and going to the single nerdiest place I have ever been, and the two options felt equally weird: either to tell you that my house was empty, or to blog about unrelated stuff when I was mostly thinking about traveling.

But we are back, and thinking about what comes next. 

Part of what comes next is that Pete is leaving for college on Thursday, which I cannot think about without getting a little weepy. You'd think it would get easier to send them off by the time you got to the fourth sendoff, but you'd be wrong about that.

After a long stretch of not-knitting, I took a knitting bag with me on our trip and cranked out some socks. Check out the pair I finished this morning. (I am calling them a pair, but they are fraternal twins, not identical.) 

These are made from a Zauberball: spun from high-quality materials, dyed in gorgeous saturated colors. The yarn is a delight to knit. I am not 100% sold on their degree of matchiness, though. If you see the whole pair you can tell that one sock is approximately the inverse of the other, but when I wear them with pants it will just look like I am wearing mismatched socks. 

It had been so long since I had done much knitting that my enjoyment of the process took me by surprise: the pleasure of cranking out tidy rows of even stitches, the magic of a heel turn, the satisfaction of a perfect fit.

More thoughts on leisure activities that require persistence

Today I came home from work and plunked myself down in the armchair. I picked up a project I started knitting almost 3 years ago, and I said to myself, "I am tired of knitting this thing." It reminded me of my post from earlier this week about books that I have to make myself read: I spend a not-inconsiderable proportion of my leisure time doing things that are more annoying than pleasant in the moment.

This project is a design by Ysolda Teague, a pair of colorwork mittens with some bells and whistles. They have a flip top, they have a lining (pulled out in the picture below), they have a fancypants braided cast-on. Unfortunately, they also have a gauge issue.

This is not my first go-round with Ysolda's mitt patterns and gauge issues. Gauge has bitten me in the butt on two other Ysolda projects, actually.. The last time I made a pair of Ysolda mitts, I started over THREE TIMES in an effort to get them right. But! Alas! I used to have the problem that my knitting was looser than expected, and the finished product would be too big. These mittens, though, are too snug.

I don't get it, actually. My gauge is spot on and I have average-sized hands. Did the pattern get rushed to print because she was trying to wrap up the Colourwork Club? Is there some other weird alchemy where the size can be right and the gauge can be right and the finished item can still be too small? It's a mystery.

Maybe if I tell you what the steps are, I will talk myself into completing them. Maybe they will grow when I block them, or maybe I have a friend with Lilliputian hands who would love them. We shall see. Anyway, here are the tasks standing between me and a pair of completed mittens.

• There are only ten rounds left in the main mitten chart, plus a little I-cord button loop. Painful level: yellow; definitely fiddly.
• Next up: flip-top openings (top and bottom) and thumb. Painful level: orange shading to red.
• After that, the lining. Painful level: yellow shading to green.
• Finally, the finishing-- tidying up, weaving ends, adding buttons. Painful level: fiery flame-bright red. Not my favorite part of any project and this one is extra-complicated.

It's really rare for me not to finish a knitting project, even if it marinates for a while. Which is a little funny, given that in this space I tend to grouse about my knitting more often than I say happy things about my knitting. I grumbled about this selfsame project nine months ago today, as a matter of fact. I wonder if I'd be happier if my leisure time included more purely leisurely things and fewer things that feel like work. Or maybe I am just wired this way. How about you? How much of your leisure time do you spend doing things that you enjoy more in the rearview mirror? Do tell -- I'm very curious.

FO #1

I have been nibbling away at the Princess Bride-inspired stole that I told you about back in November, and yesterday I bound it off and blocked it. (It is not actually trapezoidal, just asymmetrically positioned.)

This morning I trimmed off all the knitted-in ends and wove in the others. Marie was admiring it before she went to work this morning. "I've always loved purple and green together," I told her, "ever since I was young. Not a popular combo, but I love it anyway."

"Yes," she said, "I think most people associate purple and green with the Joker and Green Goblin and characters of that ilk."

So maybe it will read as a supervillain cape to the Gen Z-ers in my world, but I am pleased with it anyway. The pattern is clearly written and nicely structured, with a pleasant mix of easy and intermediate sections. It's a great choice for harmoniously colored fingering-weight leftovers, if you have a collection of your own awaiting their destiny.

Your questions answered, part 1

I am keeping notes on the things you've asked me to blog about this month, and starting with an easy question: Giddy asked me to explain blocking.

When a knitter finishes a project, she will usually block it.This just means giving it a good soak in cool or lukewarm water, and then letting it dry. The details vary with the type of project.

If you are knitting with two colors, they will often look a little lumpy or puckery or uneven during the knitting. I took an in-progress picture of this cowl in February 2020*, and even though I'm very comfortable with stranded knitting you'll notice that it doesn't look its best in this first picture.

Once I bound it off (which required me to figure out that the pattern booklet was upside down in that picture, SIGH), I gave it a bath. A useful tip: when your FO (finished object) sinks to the bottom of the water, you can be confident that the fibers are saturated. Wool naturally repels water, so don't rush it. Once it's well and truly soaked, squeeze it gently and then bundle it up in a towel that can absorb most of the remaining water.

If you're blocking colorwork, find a quiet place for it to dry flat. Just smooth it out gently and leave it alone for a while. Above is an "after" picture for that cowl. To my eye it looks much smoother and neater.

Blocking is especially important for lace, which always looks like a crumply pile of nothing when you are knitting it. When you block lace, you pin it out while it's wet and leave it to dry. This will usually give you a substantially larger FO. Here's an in-progress photo from my last lace project. 

Down below is the blocking photo. It grew at least 25% longer and has retained the length. You might be able to see my blocking wires in the picture -- those allow me to shape an edge or a curve with fewer pins. I did not intend to knit an 8-foot scarf, but -- whoops! -- that's what I did.

Blocking will open out the lace and allow any decorative edgings to look their best.

Does anyone remember the totally bonkers turtle sweater that was two years in the making? It got a very aggressive blocking. If I'm going to knit bell sleeves with scalloped edges, then by golly I want bell sleeves with scalloped edges. The sleeves initially looked like little tiny sleevelets, suitable for Smurfs or house elves but not for a grownup human.

Here you can see the aggressive blocking in progress:

The finished project looks like this. Note that I do not have little tiny Smurf arms, and yet the sleeves fit me just fine. This is the magic of blocking alpaca. If you don't know about this feature of alpaca yarn up front, it may feel less magical and more diabolical.

Giddy asked if crocheted projects required blocking and I'm not sure. Crochet is much less elastic than knitting, and so I would expect blocking to have a much smaller effect. I have only a rudimentary knowledge of crochet, though, so I could be wrong about that. Yarn choices also have an effect on blocking. Animal fibers pretty much always benefit from blocking, but I have heard that it doesn't do much for acrylic yarn.

*Do you find yourself looking back on Jan/Feb 2020 as if you were watching a horror movie, shouting at the screen, "Run away! He's hiding under the bed! Run away!" I don't know where I could have run to avoid COVID, exactly, but I look back at that particular picture and think, Hoo boy, self, you had NO idea what was heading your way.

In progress

Back in the summer I bought a knitting pattern called As You Wish, from a mystery knit-along that had happened in the winter/spring. I have been plugging along, using up odds and ends of fingering-weight yarn. It was a five-week MKAL and I am in the middle of the week 4 clue. Currently it looks like this: 

The pattern is nicely constructed. You alternate half-width blocks of lightly embellished garter stitch with fancier full-width blocks, so that you get a bit of a break between each of the sections where you have to think about the pattern and count your stitches. In the full-width blocks it's mostly slip-stitch patterning, with a little bit of cabling and bobbling. (I hate bobbles. Have I told you this before? My least favorite knitting maneuver. Just one more strip of them, though.)

I appreciate the variety: different colors, but interspersed in a way that makes it easy to knit in the ends; different patterns, with a pleasant balance of plain and fancy; different textures, with enough garter that the finished product shouldn't curl. Here's a close-up (with all those slipped stitches, it will definitely benefit from a good blocking):

I have a boatload of pretty fingering-weight scraps and this has been a fun way to use some of them up. I am even thinking about doing another one in brown yarns after I finish this one. I am finding the unrelenting Princess Bride references a little wearying, even as a hardcore Princess Bride enthusiast, so perhaps I'll need a little palate-cleansing sock-knitting in between. The pattern is 33 pages long, every one of them reeaaaching to make Princess Bride connections. That's a minor quibble with a solid pattern, though. 

For Madame Maxime

When I unpinned my freshly blocked just-finished stole I discovered that I underestimated its length. It is huge. Vast. In this picture I am thinking, "Ah, yes, a shin-length stole -- so practical."

If I were friends with Madame Maxime I might offer it to her. All the half-giantesses are wearing lace stoles this season, I hear.

The pattern says that the finished product is supposed to be six feet long, which seems a little mystifying. I used less yarn than expected, but somehow my scarf is 30% longer than planned? The pattern specs sound just about perfect: 6 feet by 17 inches. If I am making something in the stole/scarf/shawl family, I like it to be a wee bit longer than my wingspan, and I'm 5'6".

I told myself it would go faster if I could just get in the groove and knit the thing -- stop counting down rows, stop grumbling about how I wasn't delighted with the project. And now instead of a stole I am not thrilled with, I have a...curtain I am not thrilled with. Or a carpet? Or perhaps a yurt? It is a lot of fabric, you guys.

Maybe if Madam Pomfrey slips me some Skele-Gro potion in the night and I wake up with arms that are suddenly four feet long, it will be just the thing.

On the plus side, it is very soft, and cloud-light but also warm. Since our temps will be in the 90s for the next several days, warm is more of a bug than a feature at this point. But perhaps by the time it's cool enough to wear it again, I will have figured out what to do with it.