FO: Featherweight

Pattern: Featherweight Cardigan by Hannah Fettig
Yarn: 80 gr. of Zephyr wool/silk in Sable
Needles: 3mm

It's finished, dry and I'm wearing it right now. Although I'm not completely convinced by the colour (a rusty, coppery brown), I absolutely love everything else about it. It's soft, light, drapy and warm and I never want to take it off!

Apart from knitting the sleeves flat, I made another minor modification: I knit the edges in seed stitch so they wouldn't curl. I was a bit afraid that the grafted edges would show, but after blocking I can only tell if I look at it from less than 5 cm.

I'm glad this one is finally out of the way, because now I can finally justify starting on one of the other three (or was it four?) sweaters I have the yarn for!

Battle of the Sleeves

Tonight I finally finished my Featherweight Cardigan. I've had the body finished since the summer, but somehow the sleeves wouldn't come along. I started off on magic loop, my favourite way of working small things in the round. Unfortunately it's not so much a favourite with tiny yarn on bigger needles. There was horrible laddering and it was altogether to fiddly. Knitting the sleeves flat on circulars was no better.

Next up were the DPNs. Again, not so much of a problem if the needles aren't a little big for the yarn. I got about a centimeter further than with the circular and gave up, this time for a month or two. As a last resort I got a tiny (30 cm) circular needle. This was even more fiddly and annoying than either of the other options. The cardigan went back into time-out and by this time I was afraid it would never come out again, until I found a way to get them done.

I was going to knit the sleeves flat, bottom up. Then, I'd graft them to the live stitches at the shoulder and seam them closed. It might be the most inefficient way to knit the sleeves on a top down raglan, but it was the only way it'd get done. And I was right, from the moment I cast on the first sleeve, it took less than a week to have the whole thing seamed and ready to go.

It's around midnight now, so the pictures will have to wait until daylight.

Sneak Preview

Just a short update to let you all know that I (finally) have a new pattern in the works! Luckily the student presentations were uninteresting and general enough that I could write up the draft during class. I knitted the first version of this over a year ago, but never bothered to write up the pattern or make notes. Luckily, I've managed to reverse engineer the stitch pattern and the decreases. I still need to make a new, final version for photographing because this one already looks old and worn.

Hopefully I'll get it finished and tested soon, because I think it'd make a lovely gift or selfish winter accessory.

Don't you just love the buttons?

Books, Books, Books

Oh my, it's been over a month already.
Unfortunately the daunting pile of books I need to read for my courses (American Literature before 1900 and Kaleidoscope of Western Literature - You get the idea) has left me with way too little time to knit & design. I have three finished things that need photographing, writing up and testing, but I'm afraid it won't be done just jet.

These classes finish in the first week of November, and I hope next quarter will be beter.

100 x Percy

See that, there on the right? 100 people on Ravelry have made or are making Percy! I had never expected it to be such a succes. After the KAL at the Beginning Lace Knitters group on Ravelry, a lovely group of German knitters have started a Percy KAL too. I am definitely planning to release more patterns in the (near) future. There's one coming up to facilitate people like me, who love sock yarn but aren't that much into knitting socks. I'm not showing it just yet, but it won't be long.

Because I can

It has taken me a long time to get the hang of crochet. I just couldn't get the yarn through more than one loop on my hook, which prevented me to to anything more than a double crochet. Now I have finally found out what I was doing wrong, it's easy as anything. What I was doing wrong? I wrapped the yarn around my hook in the opposite direction. Being a continental knitter, I simply grabbed the yarn with my hook as I would when knitting, whereas I should have wrapped it the other way.

Now this simple problem has been solved, I'm addicted. I just want to crochet everything, which is kind of unfortunate because I like the look of finished knitwear better most of the time. As a compromise (and as a way to use up some of the cotton thread I inherited from my grandmother) I decided to crochet this doily (Ravelry link). I'm thrilled that it is charted, because written instructions confuse the hell out of me. It's so much easier to keep track of what you're supposed to do through a drawing than through lines and lines of written abbreviations.

I have no idea what I shall do with the finished thing, because my BF has forbidden that it shall serve as decoration. Personally, I don't see the problem, but I'll probably find someone whose interior is more forgiving of doilies. For now, I'm just enjoying making it.

A Day of Knitting

Yesterday:
8:00 - On my way to an exhibition in Limburg to knit socks. I usually don't really knit socks... but today I was planning to make an exception. During the two hour train ride I worked on a super secret shawl and listened to a few episodes of The Moth podcast. There truly are few things better than sitting in the train, knitting while listening to all these wonderful stories.

10:30 - Knitting socks in Roermond.

A table full of sock yarn and a few wonderful knitters made for a lovely afternoon. The only downside of knitting here was that all my illusions of being a fast knitter were shattered when sitting next to Miriam, the world's fastest knitter. I started a pair of toe up socks in a funky self-striping yarn, but wasn't too happy with it. I ripped it out, and restarted the socks in an improvised stranded pattern with black to downplay the yellow and orange of the other yarn. I got to about half-way through the foot, but am still not satisfied. I'm afraid try number two will find its way to the frog pond quite soon...

17:00 - On the train again, to Amsterdam. About the same as the trip to Limburg, apart from the fact that I actually managed to read a few chapters of Jane Eyre.

19:30 - Famous knitters at the ABC Treehouse!
Nancy Bush (on the picture) and Beth Brown-Reinsel were in Holland and were kind enough to drop by the Treehouse, tell us about their passion for traditional knitting techniques and sign books. It was so interesting to hear how they managed to make their passion their job and I hope that one day people will get excited to hear me talk about knitting ;)
It's such a pity I was too broke to buy books, because especially Nancy Bush has written a few that are high on my wishlist...