Alaska and back

Do you remember the shawl I've been working on for over a year now? Yeah, I'd forgotten about it, too, for a while there. Sometime last year my grandmother mentioned that she'd like another shawl so I kept my eye out for a nice wool/silk blend yarn in a color I thought she'd enjoy and settled on a Romi Hill design. I brought the yarn along on our vacation last year and cast on while sailing somewhere in the north Pacific. After assorted fits and spurts of knitting (including one mad dash when I thought I might have a chance of finishing the shawl before my grandparents came to visit earlier in the summer), I finally had this to show:

It strikes a dramatic pose well, don't you think?

The pattern is Romi Hill's Fiori di Sole, worked in Miss Babs Yasmin (I used approximately 3/4 of the skein) on size 4 needles.

I absolutely love the edging pattern - so much fun to knit! After the clever beginning, you can zoom through the leaf lace body of the shawl while you look forward to the edging chart. The crochet bind-off took forever but was well worth the effort.

I really like how the designer took a basic stitch pattern that many of us have seen and knit several times before and layered on clever details to make the project worthwhile. The petals at the top of the shawl are gorgeous. And I especially appreciate details like having you knit the center stitch through the back of the loop for a nice clean line down the middle of the shawl.

Hopefully my grandmother likes it! (It would probably help if I actually packed up the shawl and mailed it to her, don't you think? That's on my to-do list for this week.)

I had a lot of fun blocking this one - more than I had expected. You see, my helper decided she'd rather play in my office than take a decent nap the morning I decided to block. Of course she woke up after I'd started soaking the shawl so there was no turning back at that point.

At first, she thought we should be spinning instead of playing with finished yarn.

But then she discovered the T-pins -

Discovering this little person was suddenly mobile on a floor with sharp pointy objects was not how I intended to finish this project. Like a good parent, I grabbed my phone and snapped a picture before moving her out of harm's way. Let's just say it was an exciting morning and, thankfully, the only thing that got stabbed was the carpet.

And just in case you thought I was going to be a tease and not share a picture of Alaska, since that is where this all started, here is the Dawes glacier just after dawn:

What a way to kick off the day.

Summer non sequiturs

I'm spinning like a dervish (well, a dervish who sneaks in 20-30 minutes with the wheel after work in the evenings) and having a blast with the Tour de Fleece. So far, I've managed to spin every day of the Tour. Yay! Naturally, my photographic evidence is scant - my only daytime shots are from last weekend and are making their way from my phone onto the computer while I type (along with several hundred other pics of this and that). Tomorrow is a rest day on the Tour and I'll poke around a bit to see if there is some fun way to show off my nighttime snapshots of spinning progress. A gif maybe?

But for now, I thought I'd share a few non-spinning delights. Ok, not too far removed from spinning, at least for this first one.

Pretty much as soon as the yarn was dry, Tadpole and I wound up my new polwarth/silk yarn. And I cast on the next day. Kuura is a delightful pattern to knit - interesting yet intuitive and not too busy. I'm flipping the main body and edging charts to have a lacier body to the shawl. We'll see how it looks in the handspun.

So far, so good. This yarn is just lovely to knit.

And, bit by bit, I'm slowly working the crochet bind off on my Fiori di Sole shawl.

I feel like this is moving at a glacial pace but it's not quite that bad. Maybe more like tortoise speed. It would probably finish up more quickly if I didn't ignore it to play with my new handspun.

And, in non-knitting news, I have pumpkins!

Honest to goodness pumpkins in my backyard garden (ok, expanding onto the driveway, if I'm being really honest). That picture is a day old now and the little pumpkin was almost the size of my fist when I went to check on it this evening.

I've got some handspun calling my name before it's time to turn in for the night so I'll just leave you with this shot of our garden visitor hanging out with the zucchini.

How many rows can I knit before I nod off on the needles?

On the edge

Two blog posts in a week - when was the last time I did that? Someone must be napping in her crib more.

Two of my current WIPs had me thinking about garter stitch edges lately. If you just knit row after row, that first stitch often gets loose and floppy unless you do something to tighten it up. These two designs tackle the problem in clever ways. No simple slipped stitch here!

First up, Martina Behm's Hitchhiker - that addictive little scarf pattern - grows into a toothy swirl of garter stitch. The teeth have a stockinette edge and the curve is formed by a k1f&b on every row (beginning the RS rows and ending the WS ones). The result is a tidy, yet extremely elastic, edge. No need to pick up and knit a border to hide imperfections on the edge.

(This is my new midnight knitting project, now that I've finished the girls' latest knits. The decadence of the cashmere silk blend I'm using more than makes up for any boredom my fingers might feel with the garter stitch.)

Romi Hill's Fiori di Sole has the cleverest garter stitch edge treatment that I've seen on a lace shawl. Instead of the typical basic garter edging, she has you work a garter eyelet band with a decrease on the very edges of the shawl to balance the yo eyelets (ssk, k1, yo, k2 on the right edge and k2, yo, k1, k2tog on the left). The decreases tighten up any looseness from the previous plain WS row and give a lovely (yet sturdy!) edge which I expect will come in very handy for blocking.

If you're working a sweater or similar garment with a garter stitch edge, I'm a big fan of slipping the first stitch of the row knitwise, with the yarn in back. It makes for a neat and tidy edge without disrupting the garter ridges. That's what I used on Sprout's latest sweater and it worked like a charm.

FO: Girasole

This has been a good week for me in terms of turning WIPs in my knitting basket into FOs. First, there was the hap blanket that I made for tadpole and finished a week ago. And this past weekend I finished up Girasole, which I had started while on vacation in Texas last December.

Five months is actually a pretty respectable WIP time for a piece like this. Sometime last week I realized that the end was in sight on this project. Between a day of watching training webinars for work and some extra time at home thanks to the NATO summit this past weekend, I was able to finish up the last repeat of the lace charts and work the border. For the record, that's a really long border.

Specs:
Pattern: Girasole by Jared Flood
Yarn: 1 skein of Briar Rose Legend (this was a 1400 yard skein - I'm pretty sure Legend is now available only in 700 yard skeins)
Needles: assorted size 6 circular needles
Mods: I didn't change the pattern at all (unusual for me, I know) but I did use magic loop for the center of the blanket as opposed to the DPNs suggested by the pattern.

In terms of knitting experience, this was a really fun knit. The different lace patterns were all interesting to work and never went on so long that I got tired of any particular design. Ok, the last rows are really, really long but the pattern repeats themselves were pretty short. And the border itself was enjoyable to knit (a very important attribute when I probably spent 6-8 hours on the knitted on border alone).

It's funny, I really expected that I would have more to say about this one. I spent five months working pretty steadily on this blanket (if you define "pretty steadily" as picking it up at least once a week, or thereabouts). It's a lovely finished product. The hand painted yarn was a great fit for this lace - the color changes don't overshadow the stitches at all. And tadpole likes it, too.

So what's my problem? I think my shoulders still carry the knots from blocking the blanket (I pinned each and every point on the edging). Plus, I didn't make the blanket into a perfect circle (yes, I know I'm being picky on this one). And I think secretly wished that blocking would turn the yarn into a woolen-spun heather. Like this.

But I love seeing the blanket thrown casually over the arm of the couch, waiting for someone to curl up underneath it. Or two someones. Perhaps even three.

Is it an example of the perfect blanket? No. But it is a blanket that will be used and loved for that. Function trumps form here. And the form is pretty good, too.

That's a lot of garter stitch

This project had been on the needles for a while but I finally finished it and gave it to Tadpole as a mother's day gift (hobbit style) last weekend. A quick check of my ravelry notes revealed that I cast on for this blanket in October of last year. I know I worked on this one for a while but I didn't realize quite how long!

It's a little tough to see in these photos (since I opted to unpin the blanket and get it off the island before breakfast and completely forgot to snap a blocking shot) but this is a square hap blanket.

Specs:
Yarn: 3 skeins of Knitting Notions Classic Merino Lace in ironstone and 1 skein of Knitting Notions Classic Merino Lace in thyme. I used just about every yard of the yarn. I was so close on the darker blue/green, in fact, that I had to frog the bind-off halfway through the second side when I realized that I didn't have enough yardage left to complete the edging. In other words, the light piping along the edge was not planned.
Needles: a 32" circular needle for the entire thing, including the i-cord bind-off.
Time to knit: seven months, off and on.
Pattern: . . . does "winging it" count?

Like many of you, I love looking through the BrooklynTweed patterns and I particularly liked the hap blanket design that Jared wrote up over a year ago. Gudrun and Ysolda have published similar patterns.  I found an outline of the basic design in one of my knitting books and decided that I'd try to whip up a working pattern myself (at the very least, the exercise would keep my from caving and buying some Shelter for the project).

Here's the bare bones version (assuming four skeins of yarn, two for the center square and two for the border): Cast on one stitch and, working in garter stitch, *k1f&b, knit to the end of the row, repeating from * until you run out of yarn in the first skein. Join the second skein and *k2tog, knit to the end of the row, repeating from * until you have one stitch left (and presumably are almost out of yarn). Bind off that last stitch. Then pick up and knit along the edges of the garter stitch square you just made, using a ratio of 3 stitches for every 2 garter ridges (in other words: k1f&b in the first garter ridge and k1 in the second, and repeat all the way around).

Now is the one tricky part: figure out what lace pattern you want to use for the border. I used Old Shale, but anything will work. Then calculate the number of stitches you will need for the lace pattern and corner stitches (per side, to make things easy). Subtract from that figure the number of stitches you have on any particular side to determine how many stitches you will need to increase in order to work the lace. Then work a few rows in garter stitch or some other filler pattern and work the necessary increases into those rows. And if you realize (like I did) that you didn't drink enough coffee to count or add correctly when you did that initial calculation, you can always fudge things at the corners on the first few lace rows and it all works out.

Work the lace pattern until you are nearly out of yarn (don't forget to save enough to cast off!) and then bind off using a 2-stitch i-cord.

I made this blanket so that tadpole would have something light to use at night now that spring is here and the nights are getting warmer. That's all well and good in theory, but how did it work out in practice?

Let's compare the new blanket with her current favorite: the Bear Claw:

Getting all dreamy-eyed - she loves this blanket.

Seriously, she really loves this blanket.

What? What's this new thing?

No, really, give me back my Bear Claw!

Here, you take it.

It only took one day and now the new blanket is a big hit. So much so that we can't leave it out during play time since all she wants to do is snuggle with it. Score one for mom on the knitting front.

FO: Simmer Dim

You may have noticed last time that I said I finished two projects last week but only showed you one. The other was Simmer Dim, a fabulous design by Gudrun Johnson. All of the techniques involved are simple but the finished piece is intricate and elegant. I'll definitely be knitting this one again. This version used malabrigo lace yarn (olive colorway) and size 6 and 10 circular needles.

The knitting itself was easy and I sped right through. Blocking was another story.

Well, the blocking itself wasn't particularly difficult.

But there is a pin in every single yarn over on the last row. And there is a yarn over every other stitch on that 500+ stitch row. That's a lot of pins. I think it might be time to find some flexible blocking wires.

I knit this one as written and only have one little note to make. I used a 3-stitch i-cord bind-off on the center triangle. I wanted a sturdy yet elastic edge and the i-cord seemed to do the trick. It's a bit thick so next time I'll try a 2-stitch i-cord and see how that turns out.

Simmer Dim is another very wearable shawl. The curved shape makes for easy draping. And the simple texture goes well with just about everything in my wardrobe. Of course, the green goes pretty well, too.

I love how unassuming Gudrun's designs are. Simple and understated. And perfect every time.

Besides, who can go wrong with malabrigo lace yarn? I'll have to try this pattern in handspun (and maybe a few other things in my stash). I don't think I can stop at just one.

FO: Whipporrwill

Saturday was blocking day here at chez Tinks and Frogs. Because I did the unthinkable: I finished two projects last week. And for a brief bit of time, I didn't have any active projects on the needles. It felt very odd.

First up, Whippoorwill.

This is a lovely, simple pattern by Carina Spencer. The original calls for two contrasting colors but I think it looks great in handspun. I knit the small size on size 6 needles and it's a great scarf/neck warmer piece.

Blocking this one was pretty straightforward.

I almost could have skipped the pins entirely. After giving the piece a bath, I just gently pressed it into shape with my fingers and used T-pins to help maintain the scalloped edging.

Did I mention I really like this pattern in handspun?

It's very wearable, too.

Mr. Tinks and Frogs took a bunch of lovely FO shots for me and the shawl comes off very well. His model . . . well, let's just say that I'm still working on an alternative to a cheesy grin. Perhaps a second cup of tea would help things along. Note to self for next time.

Back to the shawl, I love how the horseshoe shape of the piece curls around the neck. It just lies naturally with no fuss at all.

I think this may be my go-to piece for fall.

FO: Leaflets

That's right, Leaflets. Plural.

When I saw the Leaflet pattern in the latest edition of Knitty, I thought it was a nifty adult cardi that could be turned into a really nifty baby sweater. So I set out to make a new sweater for Tadpole and I started by making a swatch, er, sweater for me.

Why? Well, I wanted to try out the Quince & Co. Osprey yarn and (more importantly) I wanted to see how the sweater was constructed before I started making any modifications. Sure, I could have just studied the pattern but that would have required more sleep than I was getting at the time.

Mama Leaflet Specs - 

Pattern: Leaflet by Cecily Glowik MacDonald

Yarn: Quince & Co. Osprey, Cypress colorway, 4 skeins 

Needles: size 9 addi lace circulars

Size: 34.75"

Mods: I made the bottom ribbing 13 rows long to match the length of the neck/front ribbing

What you should know: knit a swatch and wash it! My swatch grew by 1/4 stitch per inch after washing. 

Baby Leaflet Specs - 

Yarn: Quince & Co. Chickadee, Parsley colorway, 2 skeins 

Needles: size 4 addi lace circulars

Size: 34.75"

Actual Size: 21.25"

Mods: I only changed two things (other than gauge) for the baby version. First, I worked the body without any waist shaping. Second, I only worked 10 rows of neck/front ribbing but that was because I was worried about running out of yarn. I might have made it but I couldn't be sure and I didn't want to have to rip back in order to be able to finish the sleeves.

Tadpole is 6 months old (exactly!) in these shots and you can see she has plenty of room to grow in this sweater. It should definitely fit her through the winter and into spring. But it fits reasonably well now, too.

It also makes a great chew toy. She was munching on the shoulder the entire time we were taking pictures.

As for my Leaflet, it's comfy and cozy. And it holds up tolerably well to baby drool. She spent plenty of time gnawing on my shoulder, too. Now we'll just have to see if I'll wear it. 

FO: Rock Island

That's right, I finally finished Rock Island. Knitting this shawl took a while and then it sat in my knitting basket for a couple of weeks waiting to be blocked. And it took a few more days beyond that to get a chance to snap pictures. But it's done! (Ravelry project page)

I'm sure you've seen shots of the full shawl so I'm just going to show modeled and detail shots that I like best.

This is actually a rather tricky piece to wear because it is so big. I've never been a huge fan of the traditional drape: triangle centered across the back with the tips falling down over your shoulders in the front. The look is a bit tough for me to pull off. Instead, I've opted for the hopefully-artful drape around neck and shoulders. And this piece is great for that.

The body of the shawl is just garter stitch and it feels wonderful scrunched up around the neck. For all it's size, this is one very light and airy shawl.

I love the simplicity of the lace stitches - clean geometric lines. And a semi-solid yarn is definitely the way to go with this one. I used Madelinetosh tosh lace, a really lovely 2-ply superwash merino lace weight yarn. It's very elastic and that suits this piece nicely.

Ready for some detail shots?

I thought so.

This is definitely not a beginner lace project. Don't get me wrong, none of the techniques are difficult. But there's some fiddly work in tiny yarn. And it's not fast, even if the last section does speed by quite pleasantly. You work the edging first. Probably a good thing since I'm sure it would have taken me much longer to finish this shawl if I had to work all 71 repeats at the end of the project. That said, it's a lovely edging and Jared worked the turn very nicely, See?

As much as I love the lace bits, I think my favorite part of the piece is the froth of garter stitch in the center. Can you blame me?

This one's a keeper!