Knitting Lessons

I have learned a number of things while working on this sweater.

1.  If one is knitting the entire body of a sweater at once, use metal needles.  I started with wooden tips and one snapped.  The Addi Turbos I got as a replacement work much better.

2.  If one is doing a big project with many colors, ALL of the yarns must be of the same type from the same manufacturer.  The unintended texture may block out.  I hope so.

3.  If one uses colors as written, it might not be a good idea.  The sweater is from The Vintage Shetland Project.  I wanted to stay true to the vintage colors.  They aren’t exactly my favorites, though.  If I find myself in this position again, I will pick my own colors.

4.  I will use a different manufacturer’s yarn. I won’t identify where most of this came from.   If the reader has been visiting knitting social media recently, you know what it is.   People who want to be hateful can do it with someone else’s money.

Nothing’s Finished Friday

l have some new yarn.

This is Koigu.  It was an impulse buy.  I was checking Wool Watcher on Jimmy Beans Wool.  When I saw Koigu on sale, I promptly lost my mind.

This was a mostly deliberate purchase from Webs.

All but the blue multicolored in back are for a sweater.  It’s the Rose sweater from the Shetland book.  The blue multi is an Arne and Carlos that I just had to have.

Nothing is finished because all three projects are at a boring place.

Sock Arm Sleeves needs 5 more inches of knitknitknit before anything interesting happens.

Tipsy Toes Socks need about 4 more inches of knitknitknit before heel shaping starts.  I started these partly because I was tired of working on the sweater.  Have I mentioned that before?  Heeheehee.

I spent over an hour with the yarn winder to get everything ready for the Rose sweater.  That’s how much I wanted to avoid the other projects.  It had been started and it now needs about 2 inches of k1p1 before anything interesting happens.

Vacuuming is starting to sound really fun.

Finished Object Friday

I finished this weeks ago.  Per usual, I just got a picture of it.

I got the pillow form for this one and finished it up.

It uses a clever technique that was new to me.  It's called jacquard something, feeble brain can't come up with it at the moment.  Instead of wrapping the yarn around to create floats, you do something else.  You cast on an extra stitch for every 5 in the pattern.  If you were knitting a 100 stitch pattern, you'd cast on 120 stitches.  You follow the pattern for 5 stitches.  The 6th stitch is purled in whatever color is being carried and not worked at that point.  Then you do it again all the way across.  The purl stitches disappear on the right side.  On the back side, it looks like columns of knit stitches with plain bits of yarn connecting them.  The woman who designed this pattern said that commercial knitting is done in a similar way.

In the unfinished department, there's only the sweater I've been working on and off for months.  I've over halfway to the point where I get to do something other than knitknitknit.

In the stuff I'm planning, there's yarn on the way for a sweater.  I got Susan Crawford's new book on Shetland knitting.  I knit a hat from the book as a test of my fair isle skills.  The fair isle part came out pretty well, so I decided to give it a go.  I think it has a steek, though.  I'll think about that later.

Stash Enhancement Saturday.

I haven’t wanted to knit socks and my sock yarn stash nearly can be seen from space.  I bought yarn this week and of course, it’s sock yarn.

It came from Fat Girl Sewing which I found on Etsy.

Why?  I was asked to join Team TARDIS for Tour de Sock.  The Tour runs roughly the same time as the Tour de France bike race.  You pay a registration fee which goes to Doctors Without Borders.  You get six sock patterns by established designers.  The first pattern is released, you get the pattern, then you knit like crazy.  You post the picture of your completed socks, which will follow those already completed by several dozen Finns.  People from Finland can knit unbelievably quickly.

But I digress.  You can join a team or do it solo.  There are teams with a wide variety of themes.  There’s no pressure to finish anything unless you apply it to yourself.  The last sock is usually enough to make me want to scream and throw things.  I didn’t finish them in the past 2 years and still finished pretty high in the standings.

There are prizes for those really high in the standings.  There are discounts from sponsoring yarn companies.  I think this is a lot to get back from a modest contribution to a great charity.

Yeah, I know, I’ve gone on about all this before.  I’m avoiding admitting that I didn’t really need more yarn.  I have a little tradition where I use Doctor Who yarn colors when I knit for Team TARDIS.  I’m actually running low on that sort, so I bought Shut Up (pink) and Fantastic! (green).