(knock on wood) We Are All Well!

Can it be? After weeks of moving from one sickness to the next, I believe we are all well at the moment. I ended up getting the tummy bug from the little guy, which was really no fun. But, thankfully, it was rather short-lived.

Tonight, I gave my friend Jim his sweater and got a quick pic of him in it:

It fits him very well. Like it was made for him! Which it was, so there you go. This picture suffered from an overly-zealous flash, which I tried to adjust in Photoshop. Still, the reflection on the glasses is a bit annoying. Jim says we'll get an outdoor pic soon.

Now I'm in the doldrums between big projects. I still have the Mead Scarf on the needles. And I still have the long-standing UFO, Scott's Tweedy Sweater. But I'm in that unsettled stage where I poke around in the stash trying to see what calls out. I think I hit on a plan earlier today. But it'll probably be a stealth project, so maybe I better get a few small things going, too, just to have something to take pictures of.

That's Done! What a Relief!

A couple of years ago, maybe even several years ago, my friend Jim asked me to knit him a sweater. I've mentioned this before. He ordered a couple cones of Bartlett Yarns Fisherman Sport wt. and I launched in with the expectation of finishing in a week or so.

A week? you say. Well, yes, because I intended to whip this thing out on my knitting machine and that seaming would be the hardest, slowest part.

Take a good look:

It looks pretty basic, right. Downright boring, right?

It's a double-sided fisherman's rib, a.k.a. a brioche stitch. Knitting this sucker by hand would have been slow and tedious. In theory, knitting it on the machine should have been a pretty speedy proposition: about 12 hours of actual labor. Ah, but the machine and I had to learn to get along.


Eventually, we did.

I just this evening did the last bit of finishing: darned in the last few ends and stitched up the last few seams.

I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. I hope Jim will be, too. I hope it'll fit him. He's out of town this week, so I won't find out until the weekend. I'll try to get a pic of it on him.

Not sick of blogging, exactly...

Sorry, it's been a while since the last post. Too bloody cold to take pics outside and too darn messy to take them inside. And not a whole lot to report. I've been in Sudoku phase lately, so that kind eats into my time for anything else.

The Morrison Cardigan is coming along. I got the body up to the underarm zone about a week ago and did some math for the sleeves and then ground to a halt. Yesterday I started the sleeve, but I think I need to do it over with a wee bit more ease.

I did spend a bunch of time working on the plan for my new website. My son Owen has been building it for me in Flash, though he's come to the conclusion that we will need some html pages in there. I think he thought it would be the fastest money he ever earned (and I am paying him serious money for an almost-12 year old, but I expect a professional result), but he's come to realize that it'll take a bit more time than he first thought. Meanwhile, I've been getting all the original photos for all my patterns recropped and resized (and sometimes balanced and color adjusted) for this.

For those of you who are reading between the lines about TGB, don't worry. Too much. Wendy W has been mostly unavailable by internet for the better part of 4 months. Because of this and because I don't have access to the site files to upload new stuff, I feel I need to develop my own venue for pattern sales. I love being a member at TGB and I hope this all works itself out soon, but at this point, I just need to know that I have a direct and timely way to put my goods out there.

We are absolutely in the deep freeze up here today. Tomorrow will be worse. The boys are driving us nuts. They've just been released from their respective rooms, after a little spitting fight.

What else has been going on?

I got a great couple of boxes to finish up the Cheap A$$ Secret Pal Round 3. She sent a lot of great little things for the kids and a lot of yarn. If it ever seems possible to take a picture again, I'll post one! (Today's high is 4 degrees F; tomorrow's will be -1F, with -30 windchills! Definitely not a good time to go outside.) Thanks Michelle!

Last Saturday, I went to my knitting group. (See sidebar for details: I hope anyone who lives in my orbit will feel welcome to come.) I got to meet Molly Bee, who was delightful. (P.S. to MollyBee, you've set your blog to keep commenters out. In case you didn't intend that.)

This weekend, I have nothing scheduled, but a mountain of laundry. I do laundry all week and still have 4 loads on weekends. I'm trying to decide if we can forage a dinner from stuff lying around. I really don't want to make a trip out to the supermarket if I can help it.

Finally, I spent an afternoon finishing up the sleeve for Jim's sweater. For those who aren't regulars, it's been a thorn-in-my-side knitting machine project for over two years. I was sure it had all gone very well. But I noticed the raglan sleeve cap was rather large. I hoped it would relax, but after a day or two, I took a closer look at the sleeve I made a year ago. It definitely different. When I counted again, I realized I had decreased every 8th row, not every 12. OOPS. So, yet more frogging ahead. The good news is, I now feel confident that I can make two matching sleeves with relatively few difficulties in a reasonable short time.

So, look for pictures soon. I hope. Stay warm everyone!

Updates

Shetland-inspired Faroese-looking cardigan

Here's the progress photo of the Shetland-inspired Faroese cardigan. It's about 10 inches along. When I get to 14 inches, only 24 more rounds, I'll park the body and start the sleeves. This is the easiest colorwork pattern around! It's completely compatible with family life, meaning I don't have to retreat to my lair to work on it. I think I might do another one in lighter weight yarn when this is done.

Jim's Never-ending Sweater

This is a picture of the holey sleeve that frustrated me a few days ago. I used the purple draw cord to encircle the two offending holes. Truth be told, they are barely noticable from the front of the fabric, so I probably could have just caught the loops in with spare yarn and darned in the ends, but I didn't realize that until it was off the machine.

The good news is (and I am definitely knocking on wood!) that I'm am making great strides on the most recent attempt to do this sleeve. I worked about an hour and a half (yes, a sleeve in a couple of hours) and got all the way up to beginning of the raglan shaping when I took a break to write this post and have a little lunch. So far, so good. A few close calls with dropping edge stitches after increases, but I learned to be vigilant and catch them before they become problems. Now, however, I thinking I might need to redo the other sleeve, which I had called "done" because it really wasn't as well-done as the new one is turning out. See? Never ending! I guess I can say it's been a great learning experience. I hope he likes the sweater when it's done.

Edited to add:
Jim's sweater is made from Barlett Yarns Fisherman's Sport Weight yarn. He wanted one with some natural lanolin in it. Jim likes to sail and also builds boats as a hobby. When he gets his next big boat built he's going to sail around the Great Lakes for a while and he wants a sweater to wear then. But mostly he wants it done before his next trip to Alaska in the spring. You can see Jim modeling the Professor Vest at TGB.

Snow Day!

After a very strange December, it's finally looking like winter here in Wiscosin. We had about 5 inches of snow overnight and more is on the way. And it's not too cold out, so playing outside doesn't quickly lead to frostbitten cheeks. Of course, Owen left his winter boots in his locker at school on Friday, because he's a cool middle schooler now, and way too cool to wear his boots home. Now he's regretting it.

I've been puttering away on the Shetland Cardigan. Here's a progress pic, laid out on the hood of my husband's car:

Although I'm loving this sweater, I don't think I'll do really frequent progress pics, because it doesn't photograph well. A lot of sameness, just growing. In this photo, it's about 6.5 inches along.

While I was cropping and choosing a pic for this post, I noticed this:

One of those snowflakes has 5 spokes, not 6. What does it mean?

So about my friend Jim's machine knit sweater... you know, the one I talked myself in to tackling on Friday? Or was that Thursday? I got the machine all limbered up, found my notes which were less than helpful, and spent a while reading the actual knitting to figure out what I had done, which wasn't exactly what my notes said. Then I realized I really was not happy with the appearance of the increases along the selvedges of the sleeve. Since I'm working this in a Fisherman's Rib, it's a bit trickier than a standard fully fashioned increase would be. I spent some time googling for internet tutorials on machine knitting (no luck), ordered a bunch of books from the library, and then decided to try fiddling with my own ideas. Using some cheap acrylic, I was able to figure out a process that keeps the integrity of the pattern, does not lead to dropped edge stitches, and looks pretty good.

Yesterday, with great optimism, I set out to make the final sleeve. It was working really well. Then, I noticed that one strand of the yarn had broken at one point and the strand was not threading through the machine properly, but was instead bunching up in the carriage. Grr. Back up a row. No problem. Move forward. As I was getting up near the area where the raglan shaping starts, I was positivly glowing with anticipation of being done. Then, I looked under the machine at the work in progress and there were two holes in the knitting about halfway up the work. One might have come from the row where I found the broken strand. The other, a few rows below that, might have come from a small knot in the yarn. Back to the drawing board. In stockinette, I could easily fix this with a bit of yarn and a darning needle. In the fisherman's ribbing, it's a bit trickier to repair this invisibly. Still, I had such great luck with the edge stitches and the increases, that I'm optimistic that I reallyl can finish this week. Or I just tell Jim that I can't make the machine work and I hand knit him a bulky sweater in stockinette and call it done.

Later the Same Day

I went to my basement to work on the machine knit sweater for my friend. It had been so long, the last time I worked on it was before I got possession of my lair. I had to excavate the machine in question and then I couldn't find a couple very important pieces of paper: the one that had all my project notes and another that came with the machine that gives suggested settings for different stitches for all the various weights of yarn. As I dug around in all the places that seemed likely, I got more panicked. Eventually, I remembered that I had been sitting over on the other end of the basement when I last worked on it and went to check in the cabinet next to my old spot. I found a stack of papers relating to knitting and the knitting machine, including the ones I need. But, that was 20 mins ago, and not enough time to really do anything before I need to pick up the Little Emperor.

BUT, among the goodies I found several old pattern booklets. I must have about 100 of these stashed around. This stack had about 20 booklets. The cover above caught my eye! That's all I have time to scan and post right now, but more will be forthcoming over the next weeks. I've got some real winners.