Snippets

If I could get pictures from the good camera straight into twitter, I would have been tempted to tweet these musings over the last couple of weeks. In no particular order, here's a bit of catch-up:

First up, my travel knitting of choice: Dovetail Cowl by Carina Spencer. It's a lovely little piece that I would definitely knit again (the larger version the second time).

LOVE the yarn! I used Swans Island merino/alpaca blend in oatmeal. It feels like butter. Remember when we all thought malabrigo worsted was the softest merino you could find? Try the Swans Island. Trust me.

There was not quite enough of it for my mod to extend the pattern chart. So I stole from the rolled stockinette edge at the bottom to finish the upper ribbing. I wasn't that fond of the rolled edge anyway. Maybe on the bigger cowl.

My one-week trip for work got extended to two. That's a long time. So I did what any respectable knitter with available funds would do: I bought yarn. Rocky Coast will be mine!

I may have also bought a mitten kit from Tanis Fiber Arts. In my defense, the last time I saw a mitten kit that I liked from Tanis, I told myself to be good and wait until I was ready to knit the pattern. But when I was finally ready, the kit had been discontinued. Lesson learned: just buy it.

These are for summer. Because I just can't knit mittens in winter. Mittens are the epitome of delayed gratification and when I'm walking home from work and the wind is in my face, I want the new mittens now. 

Shoot, I saw this while grabbing the link for the mitten kit. It's really tempting. Please remind me that I do not need more yarn now. 

Last weekend I took scissors to my rams and yowes. It went from this

to this:

I'm now three colors into the garter stitch edging. That's a lot of garter stitch. This may take a little while.

(And note to self: the next time you do a steeking project, re-read Eunny's Steek Chronicles before starting. I used a checkerboard steek where vertical lines would have been easier to see when doing the crochet reinforcement. And I really should have spit spliced at the color changes rather than just leaving the ends to be cut with the steek. There are a few little hanging floats that got inadvertently snipped. I don't think they'll be a problem. I hope.)

Finally, my two favorite people have new handknits. Or rather, the smaller one has a finished handknit jumper that she didn't want to wear this morning (but it's done!). And the larger one has another promise of a sweater as one of his b-day gifts. But this is better than my promise-of-a-sweater from two years ago: this time I have the yarn and I even swatched!

That's it, the new sign of true love: swatching. I don't do it for just anyone.

This and that

I would be in the midst of a truly terrible case of startitis now if I actually cast on for each of the patterns I've been eyeing lately. But instead I've been daydreaming about future projects while running into dead ends on current ones. Take Wurm, for example. This was a quick, easy knit (addictive even) in a lovely yarn (Sundara sport merino two). But the finished project just isn't for me. The slouchy hat style that looks good on so many people just looks odd on me. You'd really see that if I showed you one of the head-on photos that Mr. Tinks and Frogs took last weekend, but there's a good reason that I'm not sharing those shots.

Tadpole looks fetching in everything but even she can't quite pull this hat off.

So if you'd like a hand-knit green Wurm in the medium size, shoot me an email at tinksandfrogs AT gmail DOT com and I'll happily pop it in the mail and send it your way. (If there's a lot of interest I'll use a random number generator and post the winner on the blog.)

I've been really excited by Rams and Yowes lately. You see, I'm in the last row of sheep on the center section of the blanket. It's just so much fun to watch the pattern grow and I absolutely love this one.

Can you blame me? There's just one small problem: this is by no stretch of the imagination a travel project. And I have a fair amount of travel to do for work this month. Last weekend - right before my first trip - I procrastinated my way through the weekend knitting along on the sheep while putting off the decision of what to bring with me for the plane. (Come to think of it, I'm doing the exact same thing this weekend, too.)

In that case, I'd better get cracking and figure out what to bring when I have to get back on a plane tomorrow. Last week I brought this:

The bodice of tadpole's jumper is several inches longer now - I divided the front and back at the armholes while flying home on Friday. But despite the fact that I was able to knit quite a bit on the plane, I didn't make that much forward progress. I'd get half a row and realize that I really didn't want to do something that way (or, more often than I care to admit, I noticed that I had crossed the cables the wrong way for an entire row) and had to undo what I had just knit. I'll do my designing at home for this next bit, I think.

So what to knit? It doesn't help that I'm distracted by this lovely sweater in the new Wool People or this blanket and this scarf by Stephen West. I frogged my Nanook sweater last weekend so that the yarn can become this sweater instead, but even I acknowledge that I really should swatch before starting an adult size sweater. Kristen's new pattern is especially tempting but I'm not sure I have the right yarn in the stash. Perhaps a toddler sized sweater instead? Possibly this or this? I'd also toyed with the idea of colorwork mittens - that wouldn't be too fiddly for travel, right? Oh, I'd better go sit and knit some more sheep while I think about this some more.

Distractions

I got a new toy over the weekend: IntwinedStudio. It's a lovely (and very reasonably priced) little chart maker program that works on a Mac. I've usually just sketched my charts on graph paper but that's pretty time-consuming and, in the event that I would actually want to publish a design, hard to reproduce. So I've been on the lookout for a basic tool to play with and this one seems pretty great. Unfortunately, it can't solve the problem of my stitch count. I have to do that myself. I keep hoping that inspiration will hit and my fabulous cable idea will magically center itself on my 68-stitch wide 2x2 garter ribbed piece. Since it hasn't happened yet, I'm going to let things percolate in my head for a bit and see if I come up with a brilliant solution (or a new cable design). In lieu of my terribly clever cable, you get this post.

Sometime last spring, I whipped up this quick sketch:

I really love the idea of a ribbed skirt flowing into a knotted cable. The basic design concept seemed perfect for this skein of Briar Rose Legend (sadly, it looks like this yarn is no longer available on Chris's website) that I had picked up at the Michigan Sheep & Wool festival the summer before.

Fast forward to this month when I finally realized that the purple sweater I had been knitting for Tadpole just wasn't working out.

(Yes, that's the cable pattern from Guilder. No, it's not the same purple yarn - this is Miss Babs Yowza. And I know, I do buy a lot of purple yarn for Tadpole Knits).

So I frogged the Guilder dress and quickly sketched out this idea:

Look familiar? Oddly enough, the sketch with sleeves goes with the yarn with significantly less yardage. I seriously doubt there will be sleeves on this one.

Well, maybe tiny little cap sleeves. But a sleeveless jumper is much more likely. If I can ever make this chart work. Maybe I should go back to the basket-weave/smocking idea. That could be a better fit for my stitch count. I'll just have to go play with the chart and see.

And what about the Briar Rose skein? Lately I've been thinking that it would look lovely in this.

Zipper!

My tomten has a zipper! I'm so delighted by this, I can hardly contain myself. It took two weekends to sew in - one to baste the zipper into place and the other to actually do the backstitch seams to secure the zipper to the sweater. But it's done! And, I didn't give in and use buttons when my initial installation attempts were less than successful.

I must have looked at five or six different zipper tutorials before diving in. First, I thought the stitch marker idea sounded best: you attach the fronts with stitch markers, then pin the zipper in place, then sew it. The stitch markers (i.e., paperclips, since that's what I use) didn't hold particularly well and pinning the zipper to garter stitch was an exercise in poking tiny holes in my fingers, not attaching a zipper. Then I realized that I really should baste the fronts together. It took a while but seemed to work swimmingly.

Then came time to attach the zipper to the sweater prior to sewing it in. Pins were clearly out at this point and I was very tempted by Brenda's suggestion to use a glue stick. But somehow I couldn't quite bring myself to touch glue to fabric. So I ended up whipstitching the edge of the zipper to the garment, eyeballing the placement and pushing here and there to make sure everything lined up just right. It was the perfect technique for this project. At that point, it was really just a matter of sewing the seams.

I certainly can't complain about the result! This Tomten gets the tadpole seal of approval - she wore it pretty much all day long. Even the hood (and that is saying something).

Sketches

I'm always amazed by people who can create fashion sketches. I really admire their ability to capture the essence of a design with just a few strokes. I am not one of those people, but I have a lovely little iPad app that lets me pretend that I am. For example, I saw this pattern on ravelry several months ago and was taken by the subtle cable pattern on the body. I had a single skein of pale blue Dream in Color Smooshy - a gift from a good friend - that would look lovely in that pattern. So I jotted down this little sketch:

There was, indeed, not enough yarn for sleeves. If I remember correctly, I bound off the edging with inches to spare. A vest it is!

Little buttons at one shoulder help to ease the piece over disproportionately large toddler heads.

And the stretchiness of the knitted fabric allows for room to grow. That was June, this is early September:

And late September:

They really are a fetching pair, aren't they?

Sadly, the little vest had a close encounter with some red pasta sauce (and is likely too small now anyway). But I have another sketch - and the knitting to go with it - still to share.

Un-resolutions

Happy New Year!

It's been a little while (ok, a long while) since I've blogged here and I really meant to kick off the new year with a post outlining my goals and resolutions for the new year. I still intend to do that, just not today. Life happened and somehow my goal from last weekend of "finally come up with actual goals for 2013 and blog about them to hold yourself accountable" stretched to be this weekend's goal and then morphed into "write a blog post because you've been meaning to do that for a month."

Blog post it is.

In honor of the season, here are the last FO of 2012 and the first FO of 2013:

(Yes, I did hand my daughter an iPhone to see if that would help her sit still long enough for me to snap a non-action shot. We haven't quite gotten the hang of modeling for the camera yet.)

The last FO from 2012 is Rossbeg from Carol Feller's book Contemporary Irish Knits. The pattern is clear and well written and, most importantly, the book is available as a Kindle edition! This is great for me since I rarely use paper patterns anymore but usually have a device with a Kindle app nearby.

I had some gauge issues but that's not the fault of the designer or the yarn (Malabrigo Twist - lovely, lovely stuff). I (cough, cough) didn't bother swatching (the pattern is quite forgiving and lets you get away with this as long as you are shooting for the general ballpark of small ambulatory person). But tadpole is much bigger than I think she is so what I thought would be an enormous tent of a sweater actually fit reasonably well - not too big. And it fits even better now since we're pretty sure she had another growth spurt over Christmas.

And the first FO from 2013 is Aviatrix v.4 (yarn, etc. details on my Rav page). I can't express how much I love this pattern. Quick and fun to knit, fits like a dream, and it stays on! Yes, she can pull it off by herself now but she has to work at it. A bit. But still, this was by far the best baby hat pattern I tried and I highly recommend it.

Short rows shape each of the hat sections for a fabulous fit.

And crayons keep my model occupied.

(Look, Daddy, a hat!)

Right now I'm trying to finish up a Tomten Jacket for tadpole. I'm especially excited about this project since it's going to involve my first zipper! I'm planning to hand sew it because, frankly, I'm a bit scared about using a sewing machine on knitted fabric. And, if we're being perfectly honest, hand sewing is my only option right now since my sewing machine broke this afternoon.

The sewing bug bit me over Christmas when I whipped up several project bags for my various knitting projects. Things were going swimmingly as I put the finishing touches on a couple of the bags until the needle clamp fell right off the machine. Google tells me this is a repair shop job and, much to my surprise, there doesn't appear to be a good repair shop option in the city. More googling later, I'm eyeing this. And wondering how easy it would be for me to make it to a 6-10pm sewing class a week from Wednesday. Not very, I'm guessing, but a girl can hope.

Hoot

Did you know that Tadpole can say "hoot"? Actually, it's more like "hooowa." And, come to think of it, she may actually be saying "owl." Either way, when my favorite toddler needs new mittens, it seems only fitting that it should be this pattern:

That's Horatio and Oren by Barbara Gregory in the Fall 2012 Twist Collective (pattern also available on Rav). I have mixed feelings about this pattern (more on that later) but there's no denying that the finished product is adorable.

Wait, did I say mittens? As in mittens, plural? You mean Tadpole has two hands? Please excuse me, I have some work to do . . .