Charlotte's Web

Pattern: from Koigu (get it here)
Materials: Chasing Rainbows Dyeworks 2ply wool (100% wool in 150 yd or 600 yd skeins). 300 yards of blue heather and ~300 yards of pink heather. Size US6 Denise
Gauge: I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t check (bad girl!)
Finished size: 70” across neck edge, 32” from neck edge to center point

Started: August 20, 2005
Finished: September 23, 2005

Notes:
Obviously, I only used 2 colors instead of the five colors suggested in the pattern. I also omitted the last 3 rows of the pattern and the fringe due to a yarn shortage.

Discussion:
My first large scale lace project I think was a success. Or at least I’m happy enough with it and I think that my great grandmother will really enjoy it this Christmas. I would recommend this pattern to people as their first lace project as it was really quite easy once you understood what they wanted you to do. The only problem I ran into was what to do in the end with the bind off as this was never mentioned in the pattern.

I found that stitch markers to mark off pattern repeats was the key here. Because of it, I never had to count all the stitches on my needles. I never counted rows because the lace pattern was so simple that I could always tell where I was in the repeat. I’m really not that smart. Every even row was an all purl row and the last two rows of the pattern were the same as the two before it.

On my next go at this pattern, I’ll probably do nothing at all different except use the color that I have more of as color 1, 3, and 5 (the “outside” colors I like to think of it as) so that I can finish all of the rows. I’ll also cast off on larger needles, and I may even try the picot cast off suggested by one of the ladies in the Charlotte KAL.

Previous posts about this project:
I’m not the only one… on 8/19/2005
A good weekend on 8/22/2005
Eek! IN damn spot… on 8/25/2005
Confessions of a lazy knitter on 9/15/2005
Weekend knitting on 9/19/2005
Back in the Saddle on 9/23/2005

Back in the Saddle

After yesterday’s rant about spazzing by not swatching beforehand so I wouldn’t make things too big, I think I may have spazzed again. So you know in high school where they were telling you about designing an experiment and they told you to have a control and only vary one item at a time against the control so you could see the effects of that one variant? Yeah, well despite majoring in Chemistry in college, I decided to completely ignore my education and just spaz.

How so? Well, I decided that the nature of the fabric was not stretchy, so I’d size the whole garment to zero ease to get the sleek look envisioned by the designer and achieved by more than a few knitters out there who are apparently less of a spaz than I am. Oh yeah, and then on top of that, I’d downsize a needle and block to the correct dimensions. That would be not one, but two modifications affecting size at once.

I’m wondering if that was a good idea after all because now I’m looking at my progress through the waist decrease section and wondering what small child is going to fit into this t-shirt. I do still think it’ll block to my body measurements (wishful thinking?), but I’m sort of wondering whether I’ll have to wear a corset and refuse to eat in order to wear this shirt.

You should be proud of me however. I didn’t spaz in the middle of my spazzing today. I was having second thoughts about making a garment to my exact measurements. So I started to tink back. Then I thought, to hell with it. If I’m going to overcompensate, I might as well go overboard and drown in it.

On other project news, I pinned Charlotte out last night to block. I learned a great lesson about blocking as this is my first lace blocking project. In case you need to block out a lace triangular shawl, it’s a bad idea to block one side and then the other. Better to block from the middle out. In this case, I’ll probably block from the middle neck and then open up the lace in triangular sections towards the edges.

Something else I learned from this, I should have bumped up a couple of needle sizes to bind off extra loosely. I thought I had bound off loosely, but apparently not enough. As I tried to block out my triangular shawl last night, I noted that the not loose enough bind off was preventing me from getting a nice point at the middle. Oh well, next time.

Weekend knitting

I hate blogger. I was just about ready to publish a post, and it ate my post. Sounds like the dog ate my homework excuse, but really, it did!

Anyway, here's what I think I wrote...

DF and I road tripped again this weekend, so this was the perfect opportunity to finish off CW completely under the guise of keeping DF company. On the drive up of course, DF wondered, what does DF stand for? I told him, Dear Fiancee of course! What did you think it meant? Well, Dumb F*** was what came to mind. Well, let's see if this works. On one hand, it can mean, Oh isn't my DF fabulous! He paints my toes, feeds me ice cream in bed, and is just absolutely dreamy! On the other hand, it can totally mean, I can't believe DF left 20 piles of last week's mail on every horizontal surface in the house, AGAIN! What an absolutely perfect acronym. Different meanings, but absolutley clear in context!

Oh, back to the knitting story. I did finish CW finally. If you've been watching the progress bars, you'll see that I made it 100%, but why not just take the progress bar off entirely? Well, neither BO or CW have been blocked, and I refuse to take a FO picture and write up a summary unless they're blocked. So the progress bars remain until I get around to blocking. Hopefully, that will be soon. Anyway, here it is in its full UNBLOCKED glory!


I did wrestle with binding off CW last night. I ran out of yarn before I could finish the last 3 rows of the last lace repeat. So I actually bound off early. Here's the closeup of the bound off edge. Hopefully it'll still look okay with blocking... Anyway, lesson to be learned here is that if you know that the pattern takes 600 yards of yarn and you have 300 yards of one color and many yards more of another, it's probably wise to use the color that you have more of for the sections that you expect will take more yarn. You know, apply common sense for once, right?

So you know how I argued about the logic of starting Spirit of Blaze (Thanks Chris for the apt name!) Well, that was before I started making mods again to the design. I decided that the all-over rib and cable pattern would be difficult to work into the raglan decreases neatly without the cables coming "undone" or rather unworked. I thought it looked okay, but not great. So I'm thinking about some other desgin.

But what that DOES mean is that I needed to start something that I already had the pattern and the yarn for. Since my Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool ($45 on ebay for a whole pack!) came in late last week, I could start on Hopeful! I did manage to cast on, but that was about it. Wow, 160 sts of DK weight yarn in labelled gauge looks tiny! I did get to knit a few rounds at the doctor's office this morning. What fun! Specula and stirrups! Why can't I start every week this way?

Anyway, you can see that I've already included a modification to this pattern. Marnie MacLean on the Hopeful Knitalong (which I swear I'm joining soon!) posted her finished Hopeful a few days ago. She even posted a how-to on the picot hem modification on her blog. Since hers was so beautiful and I didn't really like the ribbed hem on the original, I decided to give the easy mod a go. That eyelet round in the picture above is the turning row for the hem, and below is the closeup of what the picot edge will look like when it's turned.


Oh and back to the original road trip story. DF and I took the 4 hour car ride up to Bishop despite gas prices topping $3 the entire way for our inaugural bouldering trip together for this season . Yet again, I didn't manage to send anything, but I do have hopes of making progress on Action Figure (V6) and finishing Serengeti (V5), both problems at the Happy Boulders, this year. If we ever remember to take pictures while we're on these trips, I'll post some here. But this picture on Serengeti from last year will have to suffice until we get more!

Confessions of a Lazy Knitter

So I ran into some issues yesterday. The DF was casting on his 3rd project (French Market Bag) last night, so I was intermittently giving him tips, telling him he does it all wrong, and otherwise scrutinizing his every move.

Side note: DF finished knitting his second project earlier this week and it's just waiting to be felted. I'm still impressed with his quick progress: on that project he learned to provisionally cast on, cast off and cast on in the middle of the round, graft together with Kitchener Stitch, pick up stitches, and decrease in new ways (SSK, K3Tog, and Slip 1, K2Tog, PSSO). I feel like a soccer mom talking about her kids' school projects.

Back to the story. As I was heckling him, I decided to work in my fifth color on Charlotte. Karma's a bitch. Laughing at other people will come back to bite you in the butt. I finished the row and turned the work around to purl back. Lo and behold, after the half-way mark I noticed something wasn't right. Careful inspection showed I had shifted everything over by one stitch. For those not intimate with the Charlotte pattern, the knit stitch between the two decreases should be centered exactly over the point you see a couple of rows down. But it's not. It's one stitch to the left. I realized that I had added in one knit stitch in this pattern repeat at the beginning of the repeat instead of at the end. Doh!

Which wouldn't be so bad, and perhaps I could live with it if it were just one repeat. But it was more like 8. It was the entire section up to the white stitch marker. Sigh. I think that would definitely show up. But I really didn't want to rip back a whole row to fix it. Yes, I'm THAT lazy. Then I slapped my head and realized it was just the row beneath where I was currently, and I could just tink from there.

I dropped the working yarn and turned the work around. I started tinking back the section as if I had just knit it placing the tinked stitches on my left needle and creating a large loop of unworked yarn. The yarn I was using to purl back is coming out the left side of the picture. The last stitch I had purled on my current row is the blue one just to the right of the stitch marker. The pink stitches on the left needle are therefore stitches from 2 rows below the purl row I'm supposed to be working.

At any rate, I held the big loop of yarn as if it were my working yarn (see left) and knit back in the correct pattern until I got to my last purled stitch. I think it worked just fine. I guess I could have tinked all 8 sections that I screwed up and then use the large loop to knit back to where I left off, but somehow, I felt better tinking and correcting in sections.

Anyway, here's a close up of the fixed section.

Frustration averted, I called it quits. Yes, indeed, I managed to get a whopping TWO rows of knitting done. Since I haven't posted any progress pics on this project in a while, here it is. It's getting to the size where I can't photograph it on my desk anymore. I have to put it on the floor and stand over it to get the whole thing in frame. You can't tell, but it measures about 20" from the center of the neck edge to the current row.

Eek! IN damn spot...

So I ran into my first major issue with the Charlotte's Web shawl last night. Unfortunately, I didn't notice it until I got to the end of a 16 row repeat of lace and couldn't figure out why I was 1 stitch short. Then I saw it. Or rather, lack of it. There's no hole. Can you see it? It's RIGHT THERE! Anyway, I debated about ripping back some 9 rows of lace, but then decided that I wouldn't be comfortable letting the yarn fly and just ripping back with the assortment of YO, K2Tog, SSK, and SK2TogPSSO in there. I knew I'd never recover. And tinking back 9 rows when there's something like 150 sts per row on right now didn't sound terribly appealing. So the slacker in my over-rode the anal perfectionist in me. I just added a backwards loop increase and called it a day. What do you think?

Oh, and since I'm taking pictures, here's my progress. I'm just getting to the change to solid color C (or in my case, since I'm only doing 2 colors instead of 5, I'm going back to color 1).

A good weekend

Yesterday we went to the Santa Monica Fiber Arts Festival. I didn't get all that into it, but I did manage to get away from the whole thing with only a minor enhancement to my stash: Enough sock weight yarn for 2 charlotte's web shawls + 2 pairs of socks and some sari silk for a shoulder bag.




After that, we went and picked up more yarn for Ryan's second project, an organizer for his climbing accessories. I guess he's picturing a much larger version of those zippered manicure sets, but in addition to nail clippers and skin nippers, this will hold things like climbing tape, NuSkin, and ClimbOn. This will hopefully slide easily into the man bag and he's hoping it will coordinate with his chalk pot. I cannot do justice to the sheer ridiculousness of the appearance of the finished project, so I'll just show you the yarn he picked out for it.

I decided that the Charlotte's Web shawl I had started was just too ugly to even give away to Goodwill, so I frogged the whole thing and started over. Hence the new yarn from the Santa Monica Arts Festival. I made pretty good progress so far as the shawl is a pretty easy lace pattern. The colors definitely blend much better this time.

In other non-knitting news, I got engaged on Saturday night. Hmmm, I wonder if that should have come first? So quite typical of the couple that we were, a few moments afterwards...


This went on until we turned the radio on and heard:
"This is KCRW: 89.9 FM Santa Monica. It's 4:40 AM..."

I think we're addicted.

I'm not the only one...

I just breathed a sigh of relief. Apparently I'm not the only one who should be riding the short bus. When I told people of my backwards purling issues at SNB, they all looked at me like I was crazy. Like, who would have thought of doing it that way. Karen apparently just found out this week that she does the same. I think we need to found a Twisted Purlers therapy club to help out all of those people out there who purl clockwise and don't even know it...

Word of advice: Don't wind yarn without a swift while mad. It's just bad. Haphazardly pulling yarn out of the middle of a spaghetti pile in fits of rage is not productive. I sometimes wonder if I am the only one out there who can turn a perfectly innocuous looking, neatly stacked rounds of yarn (or a 60m rope, for that matter) into a tangled mess with two pulls. I think my similar rope mismanagement skills were what drove me to practically giving up sport climbing altogether. Now if only they made Rope Swifts for climbers...

In other updates, I finished knittng my Tivoli last night! YAY! I'm pretty happy with the results, though it doesn't have a negative ease at all. I'm gauge retarded. I swear... I swatched, I counted out 4 inches worth of stitches, I did my calculations. In the end, I checked my gauge on the finished product, and while it's still the same, the finished measurements are nowhere near what my calculations predict. What's going on here? Oh well, I think it still fits fine... as long as there's no cotton expansion. So now I just have to block it, then I'll do the official post-mortem.

I also started a Charlotte's Web last night using some Knitpicks Sock Memories. I wasn't confident in my abilities to actually get a project of this size completed in time for Christmas (or ever), so I decided to use a much cheaper yarn than Koigu KPPPM. It's still merino in the same weight, but the effect is completely different. I think it's downright UGLY in comparison to so many other people's. Perhaps a bad yarn substitution. I swear though, I'm going to push through with it. My great-grandmother will be pleased to just get something that I thought made with my own hands. And who knows, maybe 95 year old color sensibilities are different from a 30 year old's.

Alright... because I have no shame, here it is: