DesigKnit

When work is endless (and isn’t it always?), it is nice to occasionally have some finishes on the crafting front to make up for it. This weekend, I unexpectedly had quite a few of them. I’ve had a couple of larger projects tottering slowly along in the background, and suddenly got to that point where a small push would send them racing to the finish line.

I wove about 16″ of plain weave fabric, and sewed up my new phone purse.

I wish the strap were just a couple of inches longer, but otherwise this came out just about perfect. I have plans for several more of these in the future, mostly to play with other designs, but also to coordinate with different outfits.

I spent a couple of hours grafting and knitting an inch of ribbing, and now Branden’s sweater is a few rows (and a good blocking/end weaving) from done:

These always drag on forever in the sleeves, and then somehow I’m shocked when it’s suddenly the end. I do believe I like the stripes after all.

Fortunately, I have something else to keep me busy, now that that’s finished. The embroidered shetland sweater is still moving along nicely:

It’s still small enough to be train knitting, so it’s still getting somewhere. The nice thing about knitting in a fine gauge is that it will stay small enough to be train knitting just that much longer, too.

I pulled out the drum carder the other day, fully intending to card up some more of the brown wool that I bought at Rhinebeck last year, in preparation for whatever project comes out of the garter stitch swatch that I am still pondering over. Somewhere between the carder and the wool I got distracted, though, and ended up carding up some of this instead:

I make no defense of my attention span at the moment. I’m lucky if I can hold a thought long enough to put a sentence together, so don’t have much resistance to the “ooh, shiny” syndrome. The fiber is the dyed top that I bought as seconds from Briar Rose Fibers at Rhinebeck. Most of them were pretty sticky for spinning (hence the seconds), but the fibers themselves weren’t felted together. Nothing that a little carding wouldn’t cure.

And cure it did. I split the fibers up according to color, and then carded like colors into groups. I had 5 batts (about 3.5 oz each) in no time flat, all beautifully fluffy and ready for spinning.

The first batt is already on its way to becoming yarn.

I have no idea what this will become in the end, but I needed a little color after working with the natural yarns, and this is a nice break. I’m spinning it fine, so there should be plenty of yardage to go around in the end.

And, now that that short burst of progress is done, I will retire quietly back into my endless stockinette knitting (with audiobooks), and hopefully there will be something else interesting to show soon. It does feel good to finish something once in a while, though!

I’ve been learning a lot about the academic world in my first year of professoring. Along with many other things, I have learned what to do when faced with a decision: decide to defer decision.

In general, this makes me crazy. After the 45th three hour faculty meeting about some miniscule feature of a campus policy, the discussion leader enthusiastically thanks everyone for the wonderful discussion, and then sums up by saying “well, let’s agree to discuss this at X meeting.” And then the whole cycle starts again.

Much to my horror, I must confess to having made a similar move in my knitting recently. After much dithering about the possible garter stitch scarf/sweater, I couldn’t quite figure out what I wanted. And so, in the guise of allowing the design idea to ripen, I decided not to decide.

Instead, I cast on for this:

That’s the baby shetland sweater destined to be embroidered when it’s off the needles. It’s growing surprisingly quickly for a 300-stitch sweater on size 0 needles, but that’s mostly due to my recent “sky knitting” (a new term for knitting on a plane, which I believe was coined by Ellen and Jan in their recent podcast). The flight to the conference got me through the ribbing, the flight back got me a couple of inches into the body, and then I added another few rows today while sitting in my office clicking through our annual campus sexual harassment training. (You have to click through slide by slide, and then listen while the narrator reads each one to you, and at two minutes each, that adds up to a lot of knitting.) Add to that two more days of department retreat this week, and I might have a sweater by Friday!

I am minimizing my concern at this disturbingly catching indecision by telling myself that the shetland project was in the queue first, and so deserved to be cast on first. Really though, we all know that it’s just a cover for the fact that I’m becoming one of them. Lord save us all. Just do me a favor, and take away my needles when I start giving impassioned speeches over whether I should k1 first and then knit 5 more stitches, or just knit 6 stitches in the first place…

Thanks to a rather large amount of train knitting in the past couple of weeks, I am heading down the finish line on Branden’s second sleeve.

…Which means that I am suddenly realizing that I need to cast on for something else, and fast.

…Especially since I’m going to be traveling this week, and have plane time and airport time and evening hotel time (which is kind of a joke, because I’m going to a conference and the only evening hotel time that happens at conferences for me is the stumble to bed and fall dead asleep kind).

I’ve had a color combination tickling at the back of my mind all through this sweater, though. It came about as a chance association of yarns, piled together next to my chair because I hadn’t yet gotten around to putting them away. (There! A vote for untidiness! If only it made me less twitchy about the state of my office…) The yarns were all piled together by accident, and I made an offhand remark about how they kind of all “went” together. They’ve kind of group-haunted me ever since. But what to do with them?

I have no great ideas. I desperately want to make something complicated, and stylish, and infinitely wearable. Oh, and also? It should require no thought or planning. Dreaming much?

Sometimes, though, the best ideas come to me by way of a blind adventure. I had a vague idea about stripes. And I kind of need some more scarves. (They are daily, year-round wear at work for me, where I huddle over my space heater and curse the air conditioning. Yes, I do need to get a metabolism.)

At first, I wanted lengthwise, wavy stripes. But I couldn’t make it work in my head. So I thought maybe diagonal stripes.

Maybe even going in different directions.

Then I thought about how that could make for interesting sweater geometry.

Then, I cursed myself for being back at sweaters again when what I need is a scarf.

But I like sweaters better. And I like knitting sweaters better. I agonized. And then, I swatched.

I cast on at a corner and just kind of knit as the whim struck me until I had a swatch of a pretty reasonable size (about 10×10″). And now, I have many thoughts.

1) I love the colors together. This will be perfect for something, somehow. And, it uses up leftovers and two deep-stash skeins, which is a bonus.

2) I don’t love garter stitch. Not the knitting of it, nor the wearing of it. Don’t know why; love it on other people, just not usually my thing. But did I mention the colors? And how the garter stitch melds them all together?

3) But garter stitch has no drape (at least not in this fabric), and I don’t want a baggy, unfitted sweater. I know that this is mostly my prejudice speaking, but there it is. I have seen some really beautiful garments in garter stitch, but we just don’t get along. I drew in some ambitious little increases/decreases in the sweater sketch, but have no real idea of how I’d carry those off in the kind of stripes I have drawn. Creative short rows? Black magic? Dunno.

4) Would I even have enough yarn? The answer is no, but I could in theory spin some more. Would have to, in fact, as the dark brown yarn is just a teensy bit too heavy to play nicely with the other yarns, and yet it really must be in there.

5) I love, love, love the swatch. But I also can’t help thinking of it as a dishrag. (I think that’s the garter stitch talking.) I do not wish to wear a dishrag, either as a sweater or as a scarf.

6) The motif is rather modern, and could perhaps be stylish if done well. It could also be a complete train wreck with a billion ends to weave in (26 in the swatch alone). Big, bold, geometric motifs are also not usually my thing, though I do admit to occasionally loving them from afar.

7) I am far more intrigued by the idea of knitting this as a sweater, but I really do need a scarf.

In the end, I am no closer to arriving at a decision and a plane knitting project than when I started. But I do have a rather lovely dishrag swatch.

What do you think should become of it?

This has been a good week for crafts. Two day-long “faculty retreats” meant that I got to spend some time at work knitting. Usually I don’t knit in meetings at work, but when it’s two 8 hour days back to back with much talk and few results, knitting just makes me a better person to be around. I finished a sock that’s been languishing in my UFO pile for 2 years now:

This is the second sock, so I now have a new pair ready for next fall. It’s just a very simple foot with a twist stitch rib at the cuff, which is thick and cushy and very elastic.

I also knit away on a sweater sleeve for Branden’s Blue Eyes sweater. I’m about 10 inches into the first sleeve now…only 15 left to go!

In the evenings, I’ve been playing with band weaving, using my new tablet loom. I started out with a very simple, narrow band, just to get a feel for the technique.

It’s about the width of a shoelace, and was mostly just me fidgeting around with making different patterns and figuring out how to use the tablets.

Once that was off the loom, it was on to more challenging things.

This is the band that I’ll actually use for my phone purse. It was much more difficult to warp because of the way the colors were arranged, but it’s still pretty easy to weave, and it’s something that I simply could not do with my 4-shaft loom. The band has 88 threads in it, and is about an inch wide and very thick, perfect for use as a strap. The tablet weaving makes a completely different structure than a regular shaft loom, which I will need to remember to write about sometime when I have closeup pictures to show.

These are a couple of the other patterns possible with this warp threading; there is always so much variation to play with in weaving.

The weaving goes pretty fast once I get into the rhythm of it, so my phone should have a much fancier home to live in soon.