travel knitting

Woops, it's been a while since I posted.

One of the reasons that I haven't posted in almost a month is that I took a trip home for a couple weeks. I've never been so happy to see my family and friends and I'm truly rejuvenated after some downtime in my hometown. I'm also a little bit heavier - I made every meal count while I was there. While home I picked up a bunch of knitting-related stuff that will surely pop up on this blog soon, as I'm itching to dig into all the goodies.


I definitely got some knitting done during my travels - flying back and forth through twelve time zones without pulling a two-beers-and-a-slide would not be possible for me otherwise.  Two new projects were started specifically for the journey, even though I had plenty of projects on the needles. I had my circs cut at an airport once (kiss my ass, Peru) and since then I don't pack projects that I'm emotionally invested in.

First up is a scarf knit with some alpaca sock yarn.  I'm delighted at how this is turning out.  I had fallen out of love with this yarn, and chose the pattern not because I thought it looked nice but because I could manage it in the zombie-like state I enter during an eleven hour flight.

Pattern: Adia; Yarn: Classic Elite Alpaca Sock

In combination, though, they make for a fun project. The pattern is easily memorized and the yarn incredibly soft.  A gift-worthy item which works up quickly from stash yarn and a free pattern?  I'm a happy girl.

The full-body shot above doesn't do it justice - it's prettier than I thought it would be.

The other project in my carry-on was a pair of stockinette socks, on wood needles to avoid another Peru incident.  I'm using one of the patterns from Wendy's book - Gusset Heel Basic Socks. I picked up this yarn at a craft store in Singapore (Spotlight to be exact). It's not my favorite yarn - it feels plasticky despite the 75% wool content and the dye is sparsely applied. I can't tell if the thinness of the color is a desired effect or if it's the yarn producer being really cheap.  Anyway, bf is getting these socks and he likes the color so it's no big deal.

Pattern: Gusset Heel Basic Socks, Yarn: Moda Vera Noir

This pic was taken while I was still traveling, currently I am almost done with the first sock.  Bf isn't around to model right now, but this heel is fitting him way better than the other heel I knit from this book.  I did add two stitches' worth of gussett but the difference in fit is more than two stitches can explain.  I'll keep this observation in mind when picking sock patterns for bf in the future.

Now that I'm back in Singapore, it's all about WIPs. Most of the projects on my needles are at least half done, which explains why I've finished, like, 1 project this year despite knitting all the time. I think a dedicated effort can knock all my WIPs out by Halloween.

I understand people e.g. the Yarn Harlot who feel like establishing rules for oneself like "no new projects" or "no new stash" takes the fun out of something which we do purely for our own enjoyment. But I'll be tickled when I see an empty knitting basket for the first time since I started knitting.  And for the next couple months I can ooh and aah at all the patterns on ravelry and change my mind a thousand times about what I'm gonna cast on for in November. That's part of the fun too. I think of finishing WIPs like exercise - I hate making myself do it but I feel better afterwards.

I leave you with a photo of unspeakable cuteness from my trip home.  I assure you, no laws were broken and no nephews harmed in the actions portrayed here.

Third time's a charm

It fits! It fits! I want to knit 100 sweaters in exactly the same gauge with exactly the same bust shaping.

Of course I didn't finish in time for the Colourmart contest, but I am happy anyway because the contest forced me to figure it out.

My wraps at the end of the short rows were (as usual) a little wonky, but I found that with a little patience and a slightly smaller needle I could tease the stitches into looking more even and less noticeable.  The photo below is the left side, which wasn't so bad to begin with and the second photo is the ride side short rows, which looked awful before I finessed them.

I did a bit more waist shaping than the pattern called for, and I am at the point now that I need to do some calculations to make sure my shirt isn't going to hit the knees.  I am skipping the eyelets in the pattern but am almost to the lace section at the bottom.

I took copious notes because I have to set this project aside for a few weeks - tonight I am leaving to go home to Cincinnati, Ohio!  I haven't been home since January so I am really looking forward to it.  For so many reasons, but among those reasons are a couple yarny surprises that got shipped to my mom's house recently. ;)

I did finish the other item I entered in the Colourmart contest, my bf's reversible cable scarf:

In the background are my newest acquisitions, both Colourmart fingering weight.  I'm saving them for the fall-winter contest/KAL in the colourmart group, but they'll probably end up being lacy gifts for some people here in SG.

Time to finish up my work so I can finish packing, eat some delicious Indian food, and start my 26 hour journey home.

Boobs are irritating.

In general, you might say that I'm pro-bust. I'm the kind of girl who refuses to buy any bra labelled "minimizer" because I feel that the clothing industry should make clothes to fit my body and I shouldn't make my body fit their clothes. I'm a curvy person, and even living in Asia surrounded by Chinese and people of Chinese descent at work all day, I still prefer my body shape to something slimmer. One of the reasons I got interested in knitting after being a crochet freak for a couple years was the possibility of making flattering clothes for myself that actually fit properly. (I know there are many beautiful tops that can be made with crochet, and I'm not trying to dis a craft dear to my heart, but let's face it crochet doesn't have the stretch of knit fabric and it's hard to get full coverage without stiffness.)

HOWEVER, all that boob love has gone out the window as I have been working on the bust portion of this silk sweater. I had ripped out all the short rows and re-knit them, adding in vertical bust darts, as found here. The problem, as I found at knit group yesterday, was that the bust shaping is now too much and too low. Observe:

 

Anyway, I'm glad I brought something else to work on at knit group because once I tried the sweater on I didn't have the heart to even look at it. I hunkered down with that blue sock I've been working on for an age.

I want to speak my mind about knit groups, and I hope if anyone from any of the knit groups I have attended ever reads this they don't get offended. I've experienced knit-outs with three different groups. Two of the knitting circles were awful for me and one was great.

I think the one knit group was awesome because I was friends with the core members outside of knitting and nobody in the group considered themself to be a knitting expert.  So it was just a bunch of girls gossiping and doing our best to tackle whatever pattern we were working on.

The other groups just didn't work. One, which I attended a couple times a couple years ago, was more like an expensive-knitting-stuff fan group than anything else. When I went, I felt like I was not sufficiently in awe of whatever new yarn or book was being raved about on ravelry and blogs. Furthermore I felt like I was completely not cool enough to be in the group - my clothes matched and were clean, I don't have piercings and tattoos and I'm missing that hipster factor so highly prized around college campuses. I kinda got the feeling that the core members of the group didn't appreciate strangers coming to their knit group, and I wondered why the hell they posted about it on ravelry if they didn't want people to come.  I think I went twice and never went back.

The third group group is here in Singapore. I must admit that the main problem for me is quite personal, my hearing is bad and I absolutely cannot hear what anyone else is saying because the meeting place is always a coffee shop near an MRT station - cramped, full, and LOUD. (There is no such thing as a quiet cozy coffee shop in Singapore.) So it's really hard for me to follow any conversations that are going on. But the other thing is that most of the people I've met there seem convinced that they are expert knitters. For me it doesn't matter if one is a master knitter or not, it's just the attitude that comes along with judging oneself to be an expert. Also, it usually feels like there are two knit groups happening simultaneously - the Singaporean one and the expat one with very little interaction between the two.  Knit group is the only place that I've seen another American here, and I really wanted to make friends but I just can't find any common ground with the ladies I've met there.

I left the knit-out yesterday feeling down and wondering why I bother to go to those things. It's really hard for me to understand how I can be so anti-social and unable to make friends here when I have never had these problems before. I used to be painfully shy, but people actually enjoyed my company; here the problem is that people don't seem to like having me around. After six months of trying to make friends at work and through my hobbies, I gave up a while ago.  It's been great for getting reading done but not so great for my well-being.

Perhaps this is just a clue that it's time for a trip home to bring my spirits up.

Anyway I am almost ready to rip the sweater - I plan to rip back about half of the bust shaping, since the apex of my boob is just over halfway down the line of the vertical dart - but for some moral support I went out and got my new favorite coffee:

It's the best local-style coffee I've found. The branch by my bf's house is at the Pasir Ris MRT station, and I love going there because the staff is actually friendly. The man who is usually making the coffee there just brightens my day. It's not that he chats with me or does anything beyond his job description, but he somehow manages to be friendly just by saying "Kopi take-away, ah?" with a smile.

Time to start ripping.  Come hell or high water I WILL get to the waist shaping this week!

Ugh again

My unfortunate houseguest finally left, but not before a trip to Hong Kong and another night in the emergency room.  I'm just glad to finally have my home back.

Anyway, the Knitting Gods are not done messing with me yet, because the first thing I did when I had some time alone to relax was get back to the silk sweater I'm working on.  I got to the join for working in the round, when I reached a paragraph in the pattern that I couldn't quite figure out.  Like some others (as I saw later on ravelry) I didn't quite get the instructions for the neckline.  In hindsight I realize that the pattern is written correctly, it's completely my bad.  Anyway, I had to rip the 4 longest rows in the entire project.

Then came the bust shaping.  Actually I did most of the short rows on the train (I realized that knitting a sweater on a train near the equator isn't actually the weirdest thing I've done, and there's a deadline coming up so why not?), thus I know it took me a little over an hour. 

Everything was going great, until I had to knit the wraps.  Something inexplicable happened and I ended up with a single stitch dropped off the needles but a holy dumpload of yarn flying around.  And for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to get everything back in order - the yarn is dark, it was late at night, and there were wrapped stitched involved.  After about half an hour of fiddling and cussing this is the best I can do:

I really really don't want to rip and redo those short rows but that gaping hole looks terrible and I'll never wear a top with some weird WTF going on right on one of the boobs.  So, I've resigned myself to ripping out for a second time within like 2 inches of knitting.  On the bright side, I don't think the short rows are going to give enough space in the bust area, so I'm thinking to make some increases as well as doing the short rows.  Of course I need to do a little research first. What did knitters do before the existence of the online knitting community?

As a palette-cleanser, take a look at the yarn I picked up last month in Germany and forgot to blog about.  Nothing special but I am happy about the cotton sock yarn - I can make the bf a pair of socks he can actually wear.

Ugh

I have a friend in town and the whole thing turned into a disaster - he broke his leg on the first day of a trip that was longer than I would have liked anyway.  He isn't exactly a gracious or easy houseguest and with his injuries, he's taken over my room (ie my home) so life has been stressful to the extreme. Sounds like a perfect time for knitting, right? Except I haven't had a moment to myself, or even a quiet moment, since he got here ten days ago. Ugh.

Perhaps it seems rude to be talking negatively about an injured friend, but believe me if you knew him you would understand. I think most of us have a friend like that, somebody about whom others always tell us, I don't know how you can be friends with that person, he/she is so ______. But whether it's logical or not we stay close with them. And he is one of the few people I have knit for, which is saying something. It's just that he's best ingested in doses of not more than two hours and I've been in near-constant contact for ten days.

Anyway, the Colourmart contest projects are too big to take on the train now so I got back to work on some socks lying around.

Everything was going great until I noticed I was one purl stitch short, and found the problem when I looked on the inside of the sock. A dropped stitch!

 

Usually I wouldn't fuss about a dropped stitch, I do it all the time, catch the mistakes and fix them no problem. But I don't think it's possible to correct this one without ripping because I dropped it as I was doing a cable - there's no spare yarn in the next row and furthermore I think I've got all the twisted knit stitches in the wrong place now.

 

Anyway, (knock on wood) at least I had some time waiting at the doctor's office to get some inches in on the Palindrome Scarf without any mistakes.

 

I'm thinking about hiding in the library tomorrow for "research" and knitting a bit on my lunch because I need a serious injection of sanity so I don't abandon my friend at the airport.

Colourmart Contest Cast-On

(that's a lot of C's!)
All my WIPs are on hold right now so I can start two new projects for a contest. Yay!  The Colourmart group in Ravelry is having a contest, and guess what the prizes are: yarn.  Cashmere yarn.  I just bought a bunch of Colourmart yarn so of course I'm in!

This 100% silk is going to be a top for myself.  After a bunch of hemming and hawing and negotiating with my swatch, I realized that this yarn was not going to be the top I wanted it to be and went searching for a better partner.  Finally I stumbled upon the Shirley pattern.  It's written for a mohair blend, but I'm thinking this is going to look great in the silk and get a lot of use for work.  There are already short rows and waist shaping incorporated into the pattern, so I don't plan to modify it very much.

This merino (with 5% cashmere) is becoming a ribbed scarf with reversible cables.  I'm following the Palindrome pattern.   It's fun and untroublesome knitting, but I find it fiddly to do the ribbed cables without a cable needle even though I am no stranger to cables.  I just use one of the needle tips from the interchangeable needle set I have and it's just fine.

Colourmart yarns come oiled so swatching is very important - the yarn changes a lot after the oil is washed out of it.  So yes, I swatched for this scarf, silly as it may sound.  I left my photo evidence of this fact at home though.  (I'm in Germany this week for work.)

The odds are long that I will finish both of these in the time frame, but I'm going to have a little fun with it anyway.  The Ravelympics came at an awful time personally and I got about 25% of my project (a measly pair of socks) done, so this is my time to have a cinderella story when it comes to knitting events.

woo hoo!

Grafting on a heel

Last night I decided to put in the heel of the plain stockinette socks I've been working on.

So far I'd just knit a tube of stockinette. I planned to do an afterthought heel, I remember seeing the technique sometime in the last couple years either in a knitting book or a blog or something. Anyway, it didn't seem like it would be too hard to figure out so I threw caution to the wind and hunkered down to do it last night. (Throwing caution to the wind, because with no internet at home I couldn't get any hints once I started.)

So, I knit the heel to be added in, exactly the same way as I knit the toe.

With the length of the heel staring me in the face I had a better time guessing how long to make the foot (these won't be for me, so I made them a little longer than I would for myself). I took two spare circs and picked up the stitches on either side of my chosen row,

held my breath and snipped the row in between.

At this point I am using 6 circular needles - finally justifying the ridiculous number of 2 mm needles I have!

After that, I grafted the heel on and voila!

The grafting took a lot longer than I expected, and dealing with the corners of the heel was a PITA, as usual for me. Regardless of the method of construction, I always get a hole on one side of the heel. Anyway, the hole in this case is no better or worse than usual for me, so I suppose it could be hole-free in the hands of a more careful knitter.

Anyway I am pretty pleased with the result, the socks are going to be the right length and I can use every last drop of this yarn. I'm so sick of seeing it in my stash I don't want any leftovers hehehe.

In preparation of this post, I checked around and it seems that "afterthought heel" technique is done slightly differently by different folks, though the others that I saw in my quick search picked up the stitches from the tube and knit the heel off of it rather than grafting it on. Oh well, since I kinda like grafting I don't mind the extra work I made for myself. Perhaps I'll try it the more usual way for the second sock.