DesigKnit

The Mike sweater is steadily progressing, and I only have about two inches of the body left to knit before I get to the hem ribbing. I’ve used 13.5 ounces now, but the yardage is still looking good, so I’m hopeful that we might squeeze by on just the Harriet yarn.

This is around the point where I really need to start thinking about what’s coming next. Sleeves always go so quickly, and the end of projects always sneaks up on me, leaving me wandering around and listlessly wondering what to do next.

Of course, the waving lace sweater is still in progress.

I’m working my way slowly up the back panel, and am about half a repeat from the waist shaping. A week of solid commute knitting would do a lot for it; let’s hope that this is the week where the knitting and train stars align.

Next on my list is the fall colors sweater. Given that it’s almost August, it seems appropriate to begin working on that so that there is some chance that it will be done in time for (late) fall. I would have started this quite some time ago, except that I need to get size 00 and 000 Addi lace needles, and haven’t found them in a store yet. At this point, I really just need to give in and order some online so that they’ll be here when it’s time to cast on. (Either that, or start visiting a lot more yarn stores…)

The yarn that I spun from the Fiber Optic BFL/Silk and my brown Rambouillet has been sitting on my desk, begging to become a project. I can’t wait to cast on with it, but I am just not sure yet what it wants to be. I have a couple of shawl ideas floating around in my brain, but none of them quite fits this yarn. I think we may need to spend some quality time together to figure out what it will become. Doesn’t it match nicely with my straights case and table runner? Seems like a sure sign that these are the perfect colors.

I really do need to get planning, and soon. There’s only a month left before classes start, and I need enough knitting lined up to cover me through the end of term on autopilot, or it’s likely that nothing will get done. I feel like I’ve been really busy since we got here, but this is nothing compared to what it will be like when the semester is on. I’m guessing that there probably won’t be many spare brain cells between September and December this year.

Then there’s also the spinning. I started spinning the Finn that I dyed for Branden’s next sweater. If I had thought a bit more about it, I’d have spun it a bit coarser. I just sat down and started spinning, though, and it turns out that my comfortable gauge has gotten pretty fine in these past few months. I may end up knitting a Branden sweater on size 0’s, too. If that’s the case, I should definitely be covered through the end of term, and probably well beyond.  It is looking lovely, though.

There are several other things in my to-spin list, but I think we’ll leave those for another day. Need to get some knitting done first!

Blame it on the heat, being tired, or just plain not feeling knitty, but I was surprised to realize the other day that I had gone a whole week without doing any knitting at all. I did a tiny bit of spinning to ply up the next batch of MacGyver for Mike’s sweater, but that’s about all that happened on the fiber front. A whole week!

Instead, I read a bunch of books. They’re a little better at consuming all of my attention (so that I can’t think about all the things I need to do for work and get sucked in when I’m supposed to be enjoying myself), and every once in a while I really just need to sit down and read for a while. That can be a little tough on the book budget, though – between Friday and Saturday I managed to finish one book, start and finish a second, and start a third. It is true what they say about the entertainment cost of knitting being pretty low for the hour.

Fortunately for my blogworthiness, I appear to have snapped out of the reading binge and have begun showing signs of a returning interest in all things wool. (It probably helps that the thermometer has dropped 20 degrees since this time last week.)

I’m now well into the main body section on the Mike sweater, and so far the yarn seems to be holding out. I’m about 10.5 ounces in and have another 14 left to go, so I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll make it without further substitution.

Since I’m keeping track of knitting time on this one, I know that I’m pottering along at a pretty reliable pace of an inch of knitting for every hour, which seems pretty painfully slow until you realize that there are 268 stitches per round and 8.5 rounds per inch.  That works out to 2278 stitches per hour, or 1.6 seconds per stitch. Not bad, really.  (Though nothing on Miriam Tegels, the world’s fastest knitter, who clocks in at about 0.7 seconds per stitch. Her hands are really flying!)

And so I calculate my way along, heading down the main body section of the sweater, and trying not to look at my empty spinning wheel.

I have been trying to resist the pull of the Tour de Fleece. I have quite a bit of catching up to do in the knitting department before I’m really ready to start the spinning for another sweater, but the call is becoming irresistible. I also needed to keep my bobbins free for the unplying and replying of MacGyver, but now that that’s done I don’t have any more excuses. So I think tonight may find me beginning the spinning of the first ply of Branden’s next sweater:

Some things are just too good to resist.

Sorry for two posts in one day, but I think it’s finally time for the long-awaited tour of the new house. This was our first unscheduled weekend since the move, so we took the opportunity to finish up the odds and ends, and get everything neat and back into working order.

This is the view of the house from the outside, as I see it on my walk home from work. It was built in the 1740’s, and is in the historic district downtown. We’re about 10 minutes’ walk to the train station, and everything else is similarly close by (including yarn shops coffeehouses).

This is clearly historic New England, complete with wrought iron fences and undulating brick sidewalks that come right up to the house.

The livingroom is at the front of the house on the first floor, overlooking the street. My loom is off on the left hand side of the photo, and the piano is just out of view on the left as well. Then there’s the treadmill, the couch, which is my current spinning and knitting station, and the fireplace that I can’t wait to use in the fall.

The back of the house has the dining room:

See that door there, behind the tea rack? That goes into the landlord’s side of the house (which used to be the servant’s quarters).

The kitchen is also tucked away in the back half of the house, and is very long and narrow, so it’s hard to get in one shot. The stove, dishwasher, and sink are on one side,

and there are cabinets for storage on the other.

Since it is such an old house, it doesn’t really have a place for a refrigerator, so we have two restaurant-style fridges under the counter, the top shelves of which are some kind of hybrid between a refrigerator and a freezer.

And then there’s a freezer in the closet. (Don’t ask me why. It’s one of those oddities of renting old places.) When we first arrived, it was literally just a freezer – in a closet – taking up a lot of open space. Branden added some shelves, and now I have an appliance counter and mini-pantry in there as well. Just to the left of this photo is the second fireplace (you can see the marble mantel on the side there.)

The house has several quirks, but it also has quite a bit of charm. I love the decorative glass windows in the entryway.

Straight across from the door, you’ll find the stairs to the rest of the house. It’s a nice, open stairwell, with lots (and lots) of stairs. Of course our offices ended up on the third floor and contain the bulk of our things, so the stairs saw quite a bit of use on moving day.

At the top of the first flight, you come out on the second floor landing. I have my eye on this spot as a prime knitting/spinning station, once we get around to buying a couple of comfortable chairs.

On the second floor, the back of the house belongs to the landlord (with yet another door into their house), and the front is our bedroom. This room has my favorite floors in the house, as well as a third fireplace. We won’t be short on fireplaces, that’s for sure!

Here’s the bedroom again, from the other direction so you can see the windows.

This side of the house faces southeast, so we have beautiful morning sun. Of all the things we look for in a house, light is the most important, and this house has tons of light.

Up on the third floor, we have my office in the back of the house, with a beautiful built-in cabinet that is just right for holding my cones of weaving yarn.

And then I have a writing desk/worktable facing out over the back yard (you can see the landlord’s roof in the center there). This is where I’ll do most of my grading and other working from home this fall, when it’s a little cooler upstairs.

The last side of my office houses the fiber display that we built for Greencastle, a couple of smaller closets tucked under the eaves, and the shop stock for Etsy. I’m hoping to add another chair here as well, to make this more of a sit-and-knit spot for the cooler months.

Just outside my office we have the guest bathroom,

and down the hall we have Branden’s office and the guest room, which share the front room of the house. The guest bed is in the front, with a little reading corner and a fan by the window.

Artemis would like me to inform you that it is a cat bed, not a guest bed.

This is a war we’ve been waging, but I think I will have to admit defeat and reconcile myself to washing all of the linens and pillows anytime we expect company. Branden lets the cats in the office with him when he’s in there, and there is just no way of keeping them off of the bed once they’re in the room. We all know that it is the unquestionable right of cat to add a layer of fur to anything soft and comfortable…

On the other side of the room is Branden’s office area, with all of his electronics gadgets and tools set up and easy to use.

And that pretty much sums it up. Tons of space, lots of light, and a good bit of old-house charm. Want to come and visit?

I finished knitting the lace ribs sweater way back before the move, and had even seamed and blocked it,  too. And there it sat, ends unwoven, for nearly a month waiting for me to get back to it. I finally found a free hour and a needle this week, and am happy to say that the sweater is now done. We took it to the beach last night to get a few photos. We were losing light quickly, so it was a little bit tricky to get a good photo of such a dark fabric. The first is closer to the real color, but the second shows the pattern better.

I wore it to work on Wednesday, and it’s the perfect blend of warm (to compensate for overenthusiastic air conditioning) and ventilated, to let me walk back and forth to the train in the summer heat. I have a feeling that this one will be a staple of my summer wardrobe.

I put the finishing touches on the pattern on Friday and it is ready for test knitting, if you’re interested in a summery sweater knit. I’m hoping for a mid-August publication date. My version is knit in Dream in Color Smooshy with Cashmere, and the small size took a little over 2 skeins. The lace is knit flat and then seamed to give the garment structure.

Unfortunately, the waving lace sweater has not been making much progress. I ripped out the back panel, and have started again, and I’m thinking that I probably will redo the front panel, working two balls at once to even out the color. I almost always do that anyway, but the yarn color looked so similar in the skein that I didn’t bother this time. Lesson learned, I suppose. I’ve been taking a bit of a break from that project this week; the delay is actually kind of a good thing, since it will give me a chance to get caught up on the pattern writing so that the knitting doesn’t get too far ahead.

I’m really looking forward to having another lace sweater soon, though, because the Lace Ribs worked so perfectly for summer office wear. I’m hoping to get back to knitting it this week.

In the meantime, the Mike sweater is growing by leaps and bounds. We got the measurements that I needed last weekend by borrowing a favorite sweatshirt for quick comparison. I’m past the armhole split now, and am about an inch into the main body.

The accent stripe has been fun to knit. I really like stripes that have some kind of asymmetric design to them, but often get myself tangled up in thinking about how to space them just right so that everything balances out. This time, I’m just knitting a stripe here and switching color there, changing back and forth whenever I feel like it. So far, I think it’s working.

The big question now is how far to continue the accent stripe. The sweater weighs 8 oz right now, and I have 13 oz of Harriet yarn left. I am guessing that the arm split is about a third of the way into a Raglan sweater, which means that I’ll be cutting it close. I think I’m going to add another couple of ounces of MacGyver before continuing on, just to help stretch the yarn a bit more. Of course, that means that I’ll have to unspin and then respin another hank of MacGyver, which I’m not looking forward to in this heat. Still, a little insurance is a good idea, and it shouldn’t take too long to get it done (hope, hope). My spinning wheel has been calling to me all week, so maybe this will help to scratch that itch.

Last weekend, we set up my new dye studio in a corner of Mike’s greenhouse.

I brought along some Rambouillet, in case I had time to dye, and snuck off to make color while dinner was in the oven. I didn’t have an exact idea of what I wanted, but the colors from our trip to Campobello Island were stuck in my brain. Look at that sea grass against the blue water!

I started there, mixing in some sandy beige for the rocks.

The green could use a bit more yellow perhaps, but as it is the dyed colors echo the pines as well as the grass. I love the intensity and range of blues in the water colors, juxtaposed against the sand.

Then, I dyed some of that water, lapping up against the whiter sand on the main beach

And the water against the rocks, with all their browns and grays.

Next, I zoomed in on just the rocks and sand, trying to capture all the colors they hold. I don’t have a picture of my own, but found this one online:

I mixed these in with the sand, focusing especially on those purples in the granite.

The purple came out a tiny bit brighter than I’d hoped, and I think I’d add more gray to the colorway next time, but I do love the way the colors look against the beige and brown.

But beach stones are seldom surrounded by sand alone, so I added in some bright green seaweed for a more complex colorway.

Of course, it’s always fun to combine colors, and so I went looking for pairs in the stock left from the show in Greencastle this spring. My favorites were these:

That first one is the Beach Rocks colorway mixed with a Caramel Semisolid, Semisolid Brown, and Silver Rose.

The second pairing photo shows Surf on the Rocks with Sea and Sky and Blue Sky.

All of the colors are available on Etsy.

With the Mike sweater on hold waiting for sizing, the waving lace sweater has been growing by leaps and bounds. I am almost to the armhole shaping in the back panel, and finally sat down tonight to compare it to the two front pieces that I have knit.

Remember how I said it looked too big?

Yeah.

I cast on for the sweater back while we were in Florida, and since then have really only knit about two rows of it at home. That little voice in the back of my brain kept saying that it was too wide, but I double-checked my written instructions and remeasured the final width, and everything seemed fine. Of course, that was the unblocked width, but I wasn’t expecting it to stretch much with blocking. Also, I have changed sizes a lot in the past few years, and so my internal sense of what size I am is often miscalibrated. Add to that the fact that I’m trying to achieve a very different fit than usual, and all in all I wasn’t too terribly bothered about the fact that it seemed too wide. (Except when I laid the piece out in between rows and noticed again that it really was quite wide. This was usually fixed by another inspection with the measuring tape.)

Today, I realized that I was almost to the armhole and needed to compare with the front panels to double-check the decrease location. When I got home, I finally assembled all of the parts in the same place in the house, and laid the front panel on top of the back.

The back panel is one repeat too wide.

Never mind that it matches what I wrote down, what I drew,  and the number of stitches I calculated for the cast on. Never mind that the measurements work out if you don’t expect much stretching with blocking. Despite all of the checking and double-checking, there is just no escaping the inherent rightness of that (terribly annoying) still small voice.

(It doesn’t help that it is now gloating in smug satisfaction at my expense, either.)

Good thing I have a whole week of train rides to catch up.

So now here’s something to ponder while I rip…does that front panel on the right look like it’s a different color to you?

We spent last weekend on Campobello Island, just over the Canadian border on the Atlantic coast.

The weather was picture perfect for the whole weekend, though it rained buckets on us for both the drive up and the drive back down. Couldn’t have had better timing, really, and it’s hard to top that view.

This weekend, we will be heading down to Plymouth to see Mike (and hopefully set up my new dye studio in his garage). It’s about time, too…I have run out of knitting that I can do without knowing the size of the sweater I’m making.

Fortunately, the top-down raglan construction starts out the same for pretty much all sizes; you cast on for the neck, do a little shaping, and then knit until you reach the underarms. The size that you want to knit determines where you split. On me, I would split for the arms at about 10 inches. For Branden, I usually do 12-13 inches. Last weekend I made it to about 12 inches on the Mike sweater, which meant I had to stop and wait for size information (to be gained by surreptitious methods this weekend…we don’t really have a plan, except probably to steal a sweatshirt from his closet for a few minutes’ meeting with a measuring tape).

In the meantime, I have MacGyvered some more MacGyver yarn, to use Ellen’s apt description from the comments last week. I can’t believe how perfectly the 2-ply MacGyver matches the gauge of the 3-ply Harriet yarn. A stroke of pure luck, methinks.

Since MacGyver knitting was verboten this week, I focused my commute time on the waving lace sweater instead.

It’s a little harder to find space to spread out a lace chart when riding on the train, but it’s making good progress nonetheless. I’m up to the waist shaping now, and the whole thing is looking far, far too big to me. Still, the measurements are spot on and I am going for a looser fit, so I’m sticking with the current plan and hoping against all hope that I don’t end up reknitting in a smaller size.

It looks like we will be heading down to visit Mike (of the Mike sweater) this weekend, and I will be setting up my new dye studio in his garage. I’m not absolutely sure that there will be time enough to both create the dye studio in his garage/workshop and dye new colorways, but if there’s a color you’ve been hankering after this would be a good time to speak up. (Use the fancy color suggestion link at the top of the page, or just send me an email at erica.gunn at gmail dot com.) More dye adventures coming soon!