Feb

27

Unaccomplishments

Knitting

organizing my swatches

Organizing my swatches

It’s been a swatching frenzy for weeks. All these ideas in my head: stitches, construction techniques, colors… but I don’t seem to hit the right combination of idea and execution. Either the idea falls apart after a few tests or it looks good but either the yarn or the color is not a good fit. I’ve been slightly obsessed with Latvian braids and various incarnations of herringbone stitch, and in the past two days brioche stitch — the current name for what used to go by fisherman’s rib. Brioche stitch is particularly frustrating right now because it deflates completely after washing. While waiting for yarn to arrive from the UK and Denmark, I explored a few techniques. Nothing new to most of you, but new to me: Norwegian glove construction — I was really looking forward to knitting my first Selbu

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mittens. Instead, I practiced enough to knit almost one glove and as soon as I had the base of the thumb in place and could try it on, realized that it’s uncomfortable and I will forever stick to the less elegant side thumbs, or whatever they are called. If I knit a Selbu glove, it’ll be a bastard version with a side thumb.

Selbut est

Test to learn the Norwegian glove construction

Norwegian thumb construction

Norwegian thumb

Knitting with DPN — My friend Betta has been urging me to try them. I’ve been resisiting DPN since I tried them years ago and got nowhere, and I would never have learned to knit socks if it hadn’t been for Cat Bhordi’s “Socks Soar on Two Circular Needles”. But DPN have their uses and you never know when a technique is going to save the day. So, yes, I am practising and, no, I am not enjoying it. DPN are not going to replace two circulars for me any time soon.
Learning to knit with DPN

Learning to knit with DPN

Portuguese purling — This one is brilliant. I am still slow with it and I only practice when I have whole rows of purls, but purling Portuguese style is definitely something I want to become proficient at, for two reasons: to purl faster and to reduce stress to my right hand and arm, which are already showing signs of wear after just three months of knitting. Herringbone stitch — The two main versions I found produce quite different results, both on the right and wrong side of the fabric. You can see for yourself below.
Two kinds of Herringbone stitch

Two kinds of Herringbone stitch (front)

Two kinds of Herringbone stitch

Two kinds of Herringbone stitch (back)

Intarsia in the round — If I had to save my life by either knitting intarsia in the round or learning Basque, I’d probably try to learn Basque.

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Feb

20

Foraging for yarn

Knitting

The 2-ply Hebridean I ordered from Virtual Yarns got here yesterday; it only took 39 days. Apparently the US government have imposed new regulations that cause shipments over a certain weight to undergo extra checks, so now parcels by Air Mail from the UK to California take about six weeks to be delivered. Curses.

Hebridean 2-ply

2-ply Hebridean (Virtual Yarns)

That was the yarn I had meant to use to knit Caller Herrin for me and Ben, plus extra colors for tests. Now of course I

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lost the urge to knit hats given that spring is upon us in Los Angeles and Ben already got his hat in a different yarn. In the meantime, I found some yarns I’d never tried and bought a skein of Madelinetosh, two skeins of Spinni (Isager Strik) and one Lace Ball. The beauty of the yarn blinded me to the fact that they are all singles and I should have known better because I hate knitting with singles. Spinni is absolutely gorgeous and I have to find a way to use it, diagonal bias or not. This is not a yarn I want to hide in the closet and forget about.

Isager Spinni

Isager Spinni

Spinni worked single and double

The larger swatch was worked with two strands and the diagonal bias is much more pronounced.

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Feb

15

Valentine butterflies

Nature

For Valentine’s Day we went butterfly watching. From his college days at

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UCSB, Ben knew of a butterfly reserve just outside Santa Barbara, a two-hour drive from Los Angeles, half of it coasting the ocean. Even if we didn’t get lucky with the butterflies, it would be a good day out. When we got to the reserve, the sky was overcast and the temperature quite colder than in LA — Santa Barbara seems to have a microclimate of its own. As a result, the luscious greens of the ground cover were more saturated and walking around was more enjoyable. None of that southern Californian sun that washes out everything. The downside was that the butterflies were not very active. After walking around a path that took us through a beech grove, a few vernal pools and a wide field covered in wild flowers in view of the ocean, we reached the

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eucalyptus grove that is the local roosting spot for thousand of Monarch butterflies who migrate to California to overwinter. The butterflies gather in clusters hanging from the eucalyptus trees and from a distance resemble branches of dead leaves, then when the sun warms them up, they start fluttering around and you see that those dried brown leaves are not leaves after all. They detach form the clusters and reveal their bright orange inner wings. We didn’t see that many flying around, but it was a lovely way to spend the day. And if you wonder why Ben has his eyes closed in that picture, it’s because he was listening to the birds.

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Feb

07

I need to learn Swedish

Knitting / Language

Most of the things I am currently intrigued by originate either in Scandinavia, the Baltic countries, or other subarctic areas such as Iceland and the Shetland islands. Considering the smörgåsbord of languages spoken across those areas, Swedish seems my best starting point to attempt a language attack, as it has the largest number of native speakers and is widely understood throughout Norway, Denmark, and even Finland. In the past year I have read many books by Henning Mankell (all the Kurt Wallander novels available in English) and the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson. Not that I plan to read novels in Swedish any time soon, but I often wish that I could read Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish blogs and last

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year, when Julekuler came out and all the Scandinavians on Ravelry were knitting those cute Christmas tree decorations, I was left salivating. They tell me that Julekuler is being translated into English and will be published in the US in July of this year. Guess what I’ll be knitting this summer? And every time a new Marianne Isager book is published, it takes at least a couple of years for the English version to follow. For Strik a la carte it took a lot longer than that. What’s an Italian/English speaking knitter to do?

Strik a la carte, y Marianne Isager

Strik a la carte (2004), by Marianne Isager. Republished in English as Classic Knits in 2009.

While I consider the likelihood of learning enough Swedish to decipher knitting instructions, I savor a few Swedish blogs written in English (Tack, Asplund!) and keep myself entertained with Google Translate for the rest.

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Feb

05

Old shawl, new hat

Knitting

Ene scarf

Ene's scarf knit with 2-ply Jade Sapphire Mongolian Cashmere, colour Deep Denim.

After the gloves I cast on for Ene’s scarf, a shawl I had knit three years ago and loved. I had forgotten the brutal cast-on, though, and being rusty I made a mistake and had to frog and start again. Funny thing is, the same happened with the first shawl, and at the time I was knitting lace like a possessed woman, so perhaps there is something about that cast-on that doesn’t agree with my brain. I had also forgotten how hard it is for me to knit with dark yarn and picked a beautiful blue that made things quite difficult. Still, the shawl came out well and now lives in northern California with Ben’s mom. At this point I started to reconnect — slowly — with some of my old knitting buddies and went back to Ravelry where I found many patterns by designers I didn’t know. See, I get distracted for a couple of years and when I look again the knitting blogosphere is a different place. Some of the old blogs have disappeared, some haven’t been updated in months. I am not quite sure why I am picking up this blog

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again and even less sure about why others would want to read it. For now I’ll set aside the introspection and document the knitting.

Out of so many new patterns I picked Caller Herrin, a beautiful hat inspired by the colors of Britain’s North-Sea coast. Not having any 2-ply Hebridean handy, I used some KnitPicks Palette. Not quite the same, but if you want to do something NOW, you don’t want to wait

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around for your yarn to arrive form the Isle of Lewis. My order shipped promptly on Jan 11, but no matter how much I stalk the mailman, there is still no sign of it and unfortunately no tracking number. In the meantime, Ben is wearing his hat knit with non-Scottish colors. I am not loving the Palette yarn, but I’ve been using it a lot for swatches and the hat is not bad. When my 2-ply Hebridean gets here (when, oh when?) I’ll probably do something different with it than I had originally in mind.

a hat for Ben

Caller Herrin for Ben

For the past few weeks I’ve been spending all my knitting time making swatches, trying out colors, stitches, and construction techniques. I have all these design ideas in my head and I am trying things out to convert them into 3D objects. My design background isn’t helping as much as I expected. My training was in graphic design and interactive media and I quickly specialized in web design, so everything I did was on the screen for the screen. Now I find that design elements work quite differently outside a digital environment. When I chose colors for a Fair Isle pattern thinking that they will work well together, I discover that there isn’t enough contrast between them when they are knit. My sense of color has to adjust to the new medium. Have I mentioned that I love swatching? I hear often of knitters that hate it and it’s the opposite for me. I have to watch myself or I could end up swatching forever and never casting on for a real project.
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Feb

03

Back!

Knitting

Holst Garn Supersoft

I am playing with Holst Garn Supersoft, a Danish yarn that comes in beautiful heather hues and fingering weight.

My midlife crisis hit me like a ton of bricks and I handled it poorly. In retrospect isolation was probably not the best strategy, but that’s what I did so shoot me. And don’t go looking for me on Flickr, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. because I committed virtual suicide and deleted all those accounts and reduced Facebook interactions to nihl even though I couldn’t bring myself to delete it. I’ll do everybody a favor and gloss over the past two years. Fast forward to November 2010 when Ben mentioned that he was shopping for fingerless gloves and couldn’t find anything that fit. I can knit you a pair, I said. It had been over

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two years since I had knit anything, and a lot longer since I’d made a pair of gloves, but after seeing what he bought online I figured I could do a better job. So I rummaged through my stash, found some tweedy cashmere from Colourmart, took measurements and cast on. And I kept taking measurements of Ben’s hand and fingers as I went along, just to be on the safe side. What’s the point of custom knitting if it’s not perfect? The result was a pair of fingerless gloves that fit perfectly. Until I washed them. In my enthusiasm I forgot that cashmere doesn’t act like wool so now Ben has oversized gloves. I’ll do better next time. At least the little finger starts lower than the other fingers, unlike the pair he got on Amazon.com. The other unforeseen consequence of this quick project is that I got the knitting bug again, big time. I had stopped knitting because of repetitive stress injuries when things got so bad that I couldn’t knit for more than five minutes at a time. Not being able to knit was depressing and along the way I stopped checking my friends’ knitting blogs, Ravelry, and anything knitting altogether. But those gloves brought me back and this time I’ll watch out for signs of injury to my arm and do my best to prevent problems because I don’t want to quit again. Knitting is relaxing and beautiful and energizing and even the cats are excited that we have yarn around the house once more. More posts about knitting in the next couple of days. Right now I am trying out WordPress and hope it doesn’t mess up with the old posts, which were created in Movable Type and then archived as a static site when I stopped blogging. Back to swatching.

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