Project Updates

The beginning of the first sleeve for the long-dormant Kauni cardigan. I hope to have this pattern available in the next Knitcircus, release date around Feb 1, 2009


The other current project is the wine-colored merino blob you see here. I gave it the working title of "Bourgeois Swing Coat". It's a long story, but one without much substance. Not sure I could do it justice here if I tried. But this will be a nice swingy cardigan jacket that a fashion-forward foodie could wear on a fall trip to the farmers market. Most of my favorite clothes are decidedly proletarian in their lineage. But this one might help me take it up a notch or two.


And wrapping up some old business... Mr. SABLE proudly models the (already dirty) soles of his slippers. He loves these. Those bits of crud embedded in the leather are probably sawdust from his basement workshop area. He cut out the leather (which is very thick!) and punched the holes, then I sewed on the soles using six strands of sewing thread.

The Little Emperor would like a pair too. At first I thought I'd need to go buy the children's size version of the pattern. But then I realized that his feet are already as big as a woman with small feet, so I'll just make the women's small.

Updates and Acquisitions

The Kauni Comeback

I haven't given this a lot of attention lately, so little to show you.

As you've probably noticed, I've been working on getting my patterns reformatted and available through the blog. Sorry to dump so much on at once, but the end is in sight. I have a couple more old patterns to get up here and then I'll be focusing on new stuff.

The Next Spinning Project

This merino/tencel fiber was very densely compacted. I was a little dismayed when I took the band off the bundle and started tugging at it a bit. It took real muscle to get it to budge. I worked my way down the entire rope of roving predrafting, breaking it a few times because I needed so much force to get it to loosen that it was hard to control when it began to slide apart. Under the pink stuff on the bobbin is a lot of the blue. I think I'll make a nice fine two ply out of it.

Playing with ideas

Here's little idea for what to do with the Mossy Merino. I have enough of this to make a rather substantial shawl kind of thing. Trouble is, I'm just not the shawl type. I can't see myself putting in all that effort just for the art of it, when I know it'll never see any action in my life. Hmmm.

Acquisitions

I went on a mini thrift shop crawl today. I have a plan for something crafty, not knitting, that I'll have to wait to reveal, and it needed Cheap-A$$ supplies as can be best had from thrift shops. One of our local St. Vincent's shops has a pattern file cabinet with three large drawers full of patterns. They are completely unsorted by size, type of garment, or anything. I went through all of them and found these six which I thought maybe I can use. Total cost for the six: 60 cents!

I'm working on a big new plan, which is pretty exciting for me. I'll let you know more about that next week.

Updates

More of the same


The Blue Faced Leicester from Sandy's Palette continues. I'm really really really loving the results I'm getting. Two 70 gram skeins so far, the first has about 205 yards; the second, about 220. This makes a nice sport weight kind of yarn. I'm a bit over half way through the batch.

More of the same, again


The basic garter stitch scarf from early handspun. It's about 45 inches long at this point. I think I'll be able to make a smallish hat out of the same yarn when the scarf is a good length. Either that, or keep on with the scarf until ridiculous proportions, a là Tom Baker/Dr. Who. Well, not quite. Getting a 20 ft scarf out of 7 ounces of fingering weight yarn would be a feat worthy of the TARDIS, which I don't possess.

A Problem

I'm cruising along last night, thinking I'm making such great progress. And I count stitches on one half of the front, to see how many more neckline decreases until the shoulder.

Hmm, seems a bit off.

Count the other side.

Uh Oh! I have a couple extra repeats of the design on one side than the other. Which means I've placed one of the steeks for the armholes in the wrong place.

Having pondered the Fix-It options, I know I have to frog.

I think I'll just let that project be for a few days. The weather is nice. The weeds are over-taking all the flowerbeds. The lawn is getting long. More baby buckthorns are springing up under shrubs. (I do like the thrill of pulling the small ones. It's nice knowing that's one less pain-in-the-butt weed tree in the world.)

And my family needs me to go to the supermarket today.

Here are two recent pictures of my cats enjoying the spring!

Project Reports

Kauni Cardigan

It's just about up to the bottom of the armholes.


I was delayed a bit on this because I was working on other stuff: some gifts and some chores that aren't related to fiber at all.

Knit What You Spin Scarf

On Knittyboard, Sarah challenged us all to use some of that hand-spun yarn instead of just letting it hang around like a Finished Object in its own right. This is yarn I made in summer/fall '06. I was starting to get fairly even and thin in my singles, but still with progress to be made. My plying left a lot to be desired. I'm making a totally boring garter stitch scarf out of it. Roughly fingering weight 2 ply yarn, #4 needles. Easy to pick up and put down between domestic demands.

Weekend Update

Unnamed Kauni Cardigan

Click to see bigger view.

This is moving along very quickly. Amazing how fast sweaters go in smaller sizes. I took out a section of the beige yarn to get to the pink part while the darkest part of the browns was coming along. I think the dark brown and rosy pink looks like a chocolate bon bon with a raspberry cream center. Now, I'm just hoping the pink finishes up before I get back to the caramel section of the browns. I'm prepared to delete a section of the pink if I have to to make it work.

Social Knitting
I've had a great week for socializing with knitters. My friends Kathy and Sue came over from the Milwaukee area on Thursday. I took them around to some of my favorite Madison sites: The Sow's Ear, The Digger's Outlet, Cargo Coffee, Lakeside Fibers, Willy Street St. Vincent's shop. And I off-loaded a bunch of stash to Kathy who has a knitting club for kids at her school in Milwaukee. (Although I still occasionally cave in to the urge to buy yarn, I feel like my out-flow has been exceeding my in-flow lately and this is good.) We had a wonderful time! I even let them see my lair.

Today was Last Saturday Knitting. Although a couple of regulars couldn't make it (we missed you Molly Bee and Dale!) we did manage to attract the attention of a woman who saw us knitting and is in great need of a knitting group. All in all, a good time was had by everyone.

Mr. SABLE is going to San Diego for work tomorrow, so I'll have a few days of the single mom thing to work out. The biggest sticking point comes in the morning, trying to get both kids to their schools at the appropriate time. We got through this one other time, so I know we can make it work again. It's just the idea of morning complications that I don't like.

The Next Project

This is such a tantalizingly fun knit so far. The main stitch pattern, from The Swedish Mitten Book (which was republished under a different name about a decade ago), really involves only two different stitch sequences. Honest. I find it very hard to stop even when my muscles are aching and my nerves are twitching because I want to get to the next color section and see how they'll line up. I'm fervently hoping that the pink in my lighter colorway will line up with the dark rusty brown section. Of course, I could have been a diligent designer and started my skeins at the perfect spots to insure this, but I didn't. You know, I didn't even swatch this.

GASP! Did I just say that?

Well, yeah. Here's the deal. I made a swatch from this yarn in another chart (one that was all my own original work) and washed that one. And sent it off to a magazine a while back. The magazine must be planning to reject my submission, because the deadline for completed work for that issue is tomorrow. BUT they haven't yet sent me back my stuff, including my swatch. So, I'm kind of working from memory about what gauge I got and on what needles. No matter. I figure this sweater will fit someone and since it doesn't have to fit me, I just went with some plausible numbers. But, I didn't swatch this particular chart, or the border one (from Anatolian Knitting Designs), so I really didn't know how they would look together until I started. Well, I saw it in my mind, but that's not exactly the same, right?

Anyway. Bezzie, I did wind that great big round ball by hand. It took the better part of an evening back in the fall. Do you know how hard it is to wind a cone shape onto a cone by hand?

Hey! It's November!

This is one of the two squirrels who have been feasting on our jack-o-lanterns in the front yard. They are very forward.

Thank goodness we got through Halloween. Both kids are still alive and, although they are living on candy, they are calming down because the anticipation is behind them for now. Until December...

I got a wonderful package in the mail today. Well, they attempted delivery yesterday, but I went off on errands and wasn't home to sign for it. Today I trotted off to the P.O. and retrieved it.

Both of these pics get bigger if you click, for that total yarn pr0n experience.

Feel the Kauni love!




Don't they look happy together? I have plans for these two. I also have a cone that turned out to be camera-shy, of mixed dark blues and purples, very lovely stuff. When I was ordering, I couldn't decide from the online photos if the pale yarn would want to marry the browns or the midnight blues. I think she wants the browns.

Today I finished the front of the long-running WIP, Scott's Tweedy Sweater.

This photo is strange looking because I was standing on a bench and at a weird angle. Front and back are joined at shoulder seams. I must be more than half-way there if there's just the sleeves and finishing to go. Let's see, look for the FO pic in about 2009. This is really an easy-peasy knit. I just need to be in the right space to work on it. It frees my brain to write essays in my head while the hands do their thing.