Smitten

For my first post of 2011, here is my last FO of 2010.  Sprig Mittens by Eli Stubenrauch in Lamb's Pride Bulky.  (Details and more photos available on my Ravelry page.)  I finished knitting these just in time for the weather to warm up a bit, but I've been wearing them anyway.  They are really warm, and the LPB yarn is totally snuggly.  Spring is still a long way off, so these will be keeping my hands toasty for awhile.  (If the current forecast is right, I may get to see how well they do in the snow this weekend.)

I had a couple dog product reviews to share but stupid Blogger is not cooperating, so they'll have to wait until next time.

Knits from the WIP pile (!) and why dogs are so cool (not related)

I'm on a mission this summer to get control of my WIPs. A long time ago, I knit several pairs of this Easy Mittern pattern (by Sue Dial and available in Judith Durant's One-Skein Wonders). At the time, I had just discovered the wonderfulness that is Kraemer's Alpaca Yarn, and I was looking for reasons to knit with it. So I tried knitting the smaller size on US 9s. With a few pattern mods, I ended up with a mitten that was only slightly too big, and rather than frog, I decided to set it aside, knit a second slightly bigger mitten later, and either add a lining or felt them. "Later" turned out to be, like, three years later but fortunately I'd kept good notes, and I was able to complete the second mitten. Okay, well maybe not perfect notes, because mitten two was just a teensy bit bigger than mitten one--which confirmed for me that felting (lightly) was the way to downsize. (It also underscored the wisdom of GK's advice to always knit two mittens or socks at once.) I now have two, same-sized mittens for my Christmas 2010 gift stash. I confess that I did have a pang of regret when I tossed these into the washing machine. This yarn (on US 9s at least) knits up into such a lovely, drapey fabric,and it's kind of a shame to felt. But considering that the alternative was frogging both mittens, in the end I think felting was the best option.

Okay, I don't have a good segue here to my next topic, so here's a gratuitous Katie pic. Friends will recognize her are-you-gonna-give-me-that-biscuit face.

So, speaking of dogs, here's a cool thing that happened last week with clients whose dog, let's call him Rex, wasn't responding to "sit" but who, I noticed, was offering me a lovely sit as we were all standing there chatting. I decided to see what would happen if I tossed a treat far enough for him to have to get up to eat it. Would he come back to me and offer another sit? So I tossed a piece of lunch meat and waited. He looked a little surprised, but went for the treat. Then he looked at me again, thought about things for a minute, and went back to his spot in front of me and offered a down. Okay, so not a sit, BUT since Rex needed to learn the down command as well, I reinforced with another treat and then repeated the sequence again. Toss a treat so he has to move, wait to see what he does next. Again, he offered a down. And after a few more repeats, he offered a sit. The point here is that he was offering stuff, and what gets me every time I see this kind of thing is that moment when the dog stops to think about what's going on. Who knows what goes on in their doggie brains, but something clicks and they understand how the game works. And, because Rex's people are smart, they noticed this moment as well and were really impressed with their dog. After a few more reps, they took over, and we started saying "sit" or "down" as he did one or the other and following with a tasty treat. What I also appreciate is that Rex didn't just figure out the game, he also changed up the rules a bit and we ended up playing on his terms. I expected him to offer me a sit after the first toss because (1) that's what most dogs do and (2) that's what he had just been doing. But alternating downs and sits turned out to be more his style. And really, when you think about it, isn't that a more interesting game? Rex learns that offering sits and downs makes good things come his way. And the owners end up having to observe Rex very closely in order to correctly name the behavior as he offers it.

Why.

Sometimes I learn from my knitting mistakes. Sometimes they just make me want to cry. For reasons I don't understand, my second Bird-in-Hand mitten is about a quarter of an inch smaller all the way around. It's the same yarn, same size needles, and same me. WHY is this happening? This is my second try on the second mitten, so I can only assume that the bigness of the first one is a fluke and the second one is more likely my usual gage. So I guess I'll be frogging mitten one.

Nuts!

Kindle Love and Other Things

Last month I treated myself to a Kindle. I blame CMR and some other friends who kept talking about how much they loved theirs. And I have to say, now that I have one, I see what they mean. In case you're admiring my Kindle case, you can buy your own on Etsy from Janine King Designs. In addition to the terrific construction and cool fabric, I'm loving the extra zipper pocket on the front.

I had a bit of a delay with my BIH mittens. As I was working on mitten #2, I broke a fav pair of Knit Picks circs. :( But an email to Customer Service got me a brand new set. Thanks Knit Picks. You rock! :)

New Year, New Mittens (What WIPs?)

I allowed myself to start a new mitten project because, well, I have no will power. I think I'm in denial about my WIP pile... But since the holiday rush is over, I decided to start a pattern I'd been saving for when-I-had-more-time. Which I don't, actually. But I'm pretending. Like I said--my WIPs, denial, like that.

Also, I turned out some really nice Christmas knits (like these gloves and this little piggy), so basically you could argue I pretty much deserve to impulsively start a new project.

I'm just saying.

Enter: Bird in Hand Mittens. Ahhhhh. These are just as lovely as the other 644 Ravelers who've knit them say they are. I knitted the cuff of the first mitten and a couple rows of the hand. I'm knitting with stash yarn (points for that, no?): the blue is Lamb's Pride Nature Spun and the white is some Cascade 220. The dark blue with the bright white turns out to be really striking.

And after I finish these, and maybe a WIP or two, I can maybe try these mittens, which a very nice friend gifted to me on Ravelry. :)

Hand Warm-y Thoughts

I've been preoccupied lately with knitting mittens (and other hand warm-y type projects). This is a photo of some things in my gift stash. Clockwise from the top right are Sue Coffin's Fingerless Mittens (from 101 OS Wonders), Eli Stubenrach's Herringbone Mittens (on Ravelry),
Robin Melanson's Jack-in-the-Box Mittens (from Knitting New Mittens and Gloves), Diane Soucy's Super Fast, Super Bulky Mittens, and creativeyarn's Mohair Handwarmers.

And then this week I've been working on Welig, another pattern from Knitting New Mittens.

Like the other pattern I tried from Melanson's book (Jack-in-the-Box), this one is really well written and the yarn (Nashua Handknits Julia) is a perfect match for the project. It's warm and soft and if I'm going to gift these as planned, someone may need to pry them out of my hands.

Knitting!

I haven't done much knitting lately, but we've had had two days of rainy, unseasonably cool weather, and (after a day of writing) knitting some mittens seemed like the right thing to do. So I pulled out these flip-top mittens that I'd started at the beginning of the summer, and this morning I completed the first one (except for the sewing up), and then CO for the second (to avoid SMS). This is SUCH a nice pattern, and I love working with Lamb's Pride Worsted. These were planned for my gift stash but I may keep them for myself. Their mohair, cable-y goodness is hard to resist.

Weekend Gardening

Yesterday we gave our hedge a haircut. The hedge came with the house, and it's a pain to maintain, but when it's all trimmed, it does make a nice backdrop for flowers. And of course it provides some privacy. Because I can't ever seem to keep a straight line, A. did the trimming, and I picked up the clippings, about a third of which I shreddred in our new chipper and composted. But there was such a huge pile (you can sort of see it in the photo above, in the upper right corner), we'll be taking a bunch to the city compost center too.

For ordinary backyard jobs, though, this little machine does the job. Yesterday it turned a wheelbarrow full of sticks and leaves into this (which I added to the compost bin to balance out the grass and hedge clippings):

May 15 was the predicted date for a final frost, so this week, in between grading and other end-of-term chores I'll start putting things in the ground. (Additional garden photos, as always, are posted in my garden notebook on my Flickr page.)

In the meantime, I'm posting some knitting for GK. My first Selbu pattern. TaDA!


It's a dog! On a mitten! Although I'm not completely new to colorwork, I did have to rip and reknit because the fabric was looking (as Chawne puts it) all puckery and weird. As you can see from these photos, the knitting still isn't perfect, but hopefully I'll improve with practice. Here's the palm side:

Deep Freeze

Like much of the country, here in eastern PA it's pretty darn cold. This morning we woke up to a light dusting of snow (which, it turns out, is a nice break from all the ice we've had lately). A good day to stay home and knit. I've been working on another pair of Newfoundland mittens, mostly because I like how these two yarns looked together.

The white is Lion Brand Wool Ease which I had in my stash from a long-abandoned learning-to-crochet project. The blue is some gorgeous (but itchy!) Rowan Scottish Tweed that I'd been trying to find a good use for. As I was trying out colors for another project, these two landed next to one another, and I liked the combo.


I made another pair of these mittens (Ravelry link) about a year ago, and since then I've been wanting to try the pattern again with some other colors and yarns. Plus, this weather is making me want to knit things to keep my hands warm. And the RST yarn is REALLY warm. The warm outweighs the itch.

But this morning as I was working on the second thumb, I noticed that it was a little different than the first. Here's a closer look:


See how the thumb on the left has that nice row of white purl bumps underneath and the right one doesn't? I'm pretty sure the one on the right is wrong, and even though it's not a huge mistake, it's going to bug me, so I think I'm going to frog.

Ribbit.

ETA 1/16/09. Turns out? the one on the LEFT is wrong. Should have read the pattern again BEFORE I frogged. Oh well. I don't think it much matters in the end. At least now the two thumbs will look the same.

Addicted

Finished one pair of Mosaic Mitts...

...and started another.

Love. This. Pattern.

Lined Mittens

At the end of 2007, I was itching to try some stranded colorwork. With patterns like Kate Gilbert's Bird in Hand Mittens available, who wouldn't be? And I've long admired Stacey's beautiful colorwork. (I started reading her blog around the time she finished her fabulous Turret Socks.) And then my friend Chawne was working on these lovely Chocqua socks.

My first colorwork project wasn't actually stranded knitting (at least I think not in the technical sense) but these Newfoundland Mitts, which gave me practice maintaining gage with more than one color. (Pattern is from Creative Whimsy.)

Next, I tried these lined mittens from Marcia Lewandowski's Folk Mittens. My first mitten, pictured below on the left, turned out to be kind of skinny because, well, I was holding the yarn too tight. But I did gradually get the hang of holding the yarn in two hands--which, I'll just say, feels very cool. (I'm a continental knitter--never even tried it the other way before this project--so it took a while to get used to managing yarn in my right hand.) I left the first mitten as is for the sake of comparison and then cast on for a second mitten making a conscious effort to hold the yarn more loosely. And--yay--it worked! Check out the mitten on the right there. Notice that it's a little wider? (It's also not all curled up on the bottom which might be the result of using a long-tail rather than a knitted cast on?)

Also for the second mitten, I reversed the yarn so that the grey was dominant. But I decided I didn't like that as well, so I frogged and started again aiming again for a nice even gage but with the blue dominant. And, after about a week, I had completed...GIGANTOR mitten! Here it is next to ordinary sized mittens--that's one of A's there on the left and one of mine on the right.
Now, it's true that eventually these mittens will have a lining (hence the pattern name), and so they can afford to be somewhat large--but this one was WAY bigger than it needed to be. So, I frogged the top two sections (which included all the decrease rows) and then 6 more rows. This meant I was starting my decs on row 5 of the 5th section from the bottom. That modification got me a more reasonably sized mittenbut now I'm not happy with the way the decs look.
I think they're more obvious because they start in the middle of a section. In the original version, they started closer to the border rows that separate the sections. So... back to the drawing board. One possibility is to just start the decs sooner, closer to the border and, if the length is looking short, add extra rows between the dec rows. Or, I could try casting on for a new mitten (leaving Gigantor as is for the moment) and try fewer rows in each section. The original pattern calls for 10 stripey rows between border rows--if I tried, say, 8 instead, I think I'd get something close to the right length.

* * *

And now for a complete change of topic--if you need a lift (if, say, you've been knitting and re-knitting the same mitten pattern and your head is about to explode), check out these wonderful pics of the newest additions to Bella Vita Farm & Fiber. They will make you smile.

Weekend FOs and a Change of Heart

I made these little mittens for our youngest neice, who celebrated her second birthday last week and whose birthday party we attended yesterday. There were so many presents that our little package was nearly lost in the shuffle--but the mittens captured her attention anyway. She put them on immediately, and began wheeling around her baby and carriage (another gift). Completely adorable.I used the "Classic Mitten" pattern in Folk Mittens and then Ann Budd's Handy Book of Patterns for help with sizing. Yarn is Lion Brand Wool-Ease, not one of my favs, but I figured these will probably need to be washed after a bit of wear. Because these are teensy and because I've made quite a few mittens in the past year, this was a fast project until I got to the finger-knitted cord, which I had to practice a few times in order to get the hang of the technique. Not that it's hard--once you understand, it goes fast--probably faster with two colors since it's obvious where to go for the next loop--but initially for whatever reason, my brain wasn't processing the instructions.
Also finished--well, nearly finished--this weekend was Ela's Favorite Hat from OS Wonders. I've been looking at patterns for a while now in search of something I could wear for early morning dog walks. I queued a bunch of things on Ravelry, and then remembered there were some patterns in OS Wonders that I'd liked. I also had a skein of Malabrigo (Vaa) left over from Christmas knitting that I thought would be good for a hat. I love LOVE how this turned out. I still need to add the i-cord decoration at the top. But this hat is warm and totally cute and, if I can say, the Malabrigo was an excellent choice for this pattern. I was a little worried that the pattern wouldn't look as good in such a soft yarn, but that didn't turn out to be an issue. Plus, the pearl rows nicely bring out the subtle color changes of the yarn. I did have to CO an extra 10 stitches to accomodate my huge head, and consequenty I was a little worried the extra stitches would ruin the proportions. But in the end, these mods didn't seem to matter.

And, last but not least, I've been working on a pair of garter rib socks (based on the 4-stitch pattern in Sensational Knitted Socks), on and off, since mid-January.

I started this project because I needed portable travel-knitting and because I wanted to try a Magic Loop sock. Since it was my first ML effort, I decided to use a yarn I wasn't that fond of (like, in case I made mistakes and had to rip, I didn't want to be doing that with an expensive hand-dyed yarn). So I CO in this Knit Picks Essential tweed (Flint), which I'd purchased last year shortly after I learned to knit socks and before I was confident enough in my sock knitting abilities to be spending a lot of money on yarn. Unknit, this yarn looks kind of... well... blah. And a little fuzzy--like it's going to pill easily. But the more I knit with it, the more I'm liking it. I've used KP Essential before, but on 2.75mm, and the results were okay, but nothing special. But on smaller needles (2.5mm), the yarn looks a lot better, and the little tweedy bits? Very hand-made-y looking. In a good way. I knit down to the toe on the sock pictured above. Its mate is knit to the bottom of the leg. (I usually knit two socks at once--i.e., cuff/cuff, leg/leg, etc.) There are nothing fancy--just your basic sock--but as basic socks go, I'm thinking these will be among my favs.