Hooded Duck Blanket FINALLY Done!

Yes, I'm happy to report I'm finally done with the Hooded Duck Blanket. I used the pattern by Susan Backus Starr.

I initially had a bit of difficulty with this, as the pattern says to knit until you have 150 stitches and then decrease. If you do that, you don't end up with a 35" square. I got gauge, so that wasn't the issue. I ended up adding some extra rows to get the blanket up to 35" - I had enough yarn. I also decided to frog what I'd done so far at that point, as I wasn't wild about how the blanket was looking, doing bar increases. It was causing the sides to tighten up too much. I just did the backyard yarnovers (a la Elizabeth Zimmerman) instead, which worked out beautifully.

I'm happy to report the recipient was thrilled with the final product. I've been telling a fib for months now...I led her to believe that I was knitting this for a coworker. It worked, because she had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA until she opened her present at the shower this past weekend!

Knitting in Technicolor

...or why does my right eye keep twitching???

I've just completed the cuffs of the sleeves for my Rune Sweater. I always like to do the sleeves together, as it makes it easier to keep track of increases and to keep them the same size and gauge.

My morning gripe, though, is about the process of two-color knitting. Some call it "fair isle," although I don't think my pattern quite ascends to that exalted level. I'm actually working with three colors here (navy blue, gold, and silver), but I made sure that I only used two for each row. I decided to keep the sleeves somewhat sedate, and to save the more complicated pattern for the yoke. I just wanted a small bit of accent near the cuff. The whole idea was to make tiny little Thor hammers, but you can't really see that in the design. That's okay...I figure I can refine this a bit more once I get to the yoke.

We have a woman in our SnB group who's just fantastic at two-color knitting. She knits the most beautiful things, and makes the process look effortless. I can never quite master holding a strand of yarn in each hand and knitting with both. I also always screw up and knit either too tightly and end up with a puckered finished product; or too loosely, and end up with weird, baggy stitches that have to be tightened up after the fact. Our expert at the SnB insists that all you have to do is to just make sure you stretch out the stitches on the needle to keep a steady gauge. Well, I'll admit it works for her, anyway...my method this morning consisted of me taking a spare DPN and cursing under my breath as I re-threaded and tightened up each stitch. In my defense, I've never attempted "fair isle" knitting on DPNs before.

Thankfully, I finally got the sleeves to look presentable. The question I'm now asking myself is: Do I REALLY want to go through this for the 26-row yoke pattern??? Actually, 28 rows, once I correct for the mutant Thor hammers and what are probably going to be the anemic Goddess figures, if the hammers are any indication. I'm almost tempted to try duplicate stitch for the entire yoke, but I don't know...

Will my twitching eye then require a trip to the local walk-in clinic???

New Afghans for Afghans Campaign!

Afghans for Afghans has just announced their new Youth Campaign! See link:

http://www.afghansforafghans.org/youthcampaign2010-11.html

The due date is December 2010 - January 2011.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

The Creep of the Yarn Stash

I know...countless knitting and crocheting aficionados over eons of time have raved about their yarn stash. One must be very careful about telling people one has a “stash.” Tell the wrong person, and you may end up on the wrong side of a police raid. People who are not familiar with the ways of the yarn look extremely taken aback when I talk about my stash, especially when I go on about its size, where it’s hidden, the variety, the quality, etc.

My stash resides in those plastic bins you slide under beds. You’ll notice here I say “beds” – plural. I have some yarn in enough quantities for a project, but a lot of it is in random skeins of ones and twos, which is a little tougher to use, as they tend to all be different textures and thicknesses. I’ve searched through those “one-skein” type books, hunting for suitable projects, but I can’t get excited about making fingerless mitts or tea cozies. I also don’t get the cowls that seem to be all the rage lately. NO...when I put something around my neck in the dead of winter, I want something that I can wind around and around my neck several times and with which I can also cover my chest, because it’s DAMN COLD up in these here parts.

Anyway, I digress... my stash has started to grow again. I’ve been trying to (no pun intended) keep a lid on it by my membership in the Crochetville Forum “Stashbusting” group. This is a group where we make a searching and fearless moral inventory of our weekly yarn usage, and confess our yarn transgressions. For a while there, I was doing pretty well, going through a few skeins a week, or at the very least holding steady. I’m not sure what’s been going on lately. I strongly suspect my skeins are having wild yarn orgies overnight in the bins, because they have started to reproduce – I’m sure of it. All of a sudden, my stash has busted out of the confines of the bed bins and is now residing in random project bags or in plastic bags by the bed.

I also find that I’m frequently a victim of stowaway yarn. I’ll be in Michaels, Wal-Mart, or the LYS, innocently minding my own business. One might say this is like going to the cathouse to hear the piano player, but I convince myself every time that I’m only going there to a) get a pattern book, b) search for the pattern freebies, or c) browse. Sure enough, I’ll go by the skeins and before I know it, they’ve leapt off the shelves and into my cart. You’re going to ask why, if I’m only getting a few things, I have a cart – and you can just hush up right now. This isn’t just limited to the usual haunts, either. I’ve been known to find yarn just about ANYWHERE. I’ve discovered they have yarn at Ocean State Job Lot, of all places (again, it just leapt out at me, before I could defend myself). I’ve even found yarn at True Value stores on Cape Cod.

I feel it’s just only a matter of time until I find yarn at Stop & Shop...

Going for the GOLD!

...yarn, that is.

I’ve done all the heavy lifting for my Pagan sweater. Using Excel, I reduced the cells down to little squares and mapped out the entire yoke design. I’m going with Runes in a circle around the yoke and some decorative stitches around those. I’m aiming for tiny Thor’s hammers and little Goddess symbols, but am not entirely sure how well those are going to come out in “fair isle” type knitting. I’m probably going to do some swatches and experiment before I attempt anything on the actual sweater.

So, that brings me to my current dilemma—the colors for the yoke design. One would think it would be easy to find gold and silver toned (slightly metallic) yarns, to nicely offset the navy blue of the rest of the sweater. Well...one would be wrong. I had last week off, and I spend most of it combing our LYS, Michaels, Wal-Mart, JoAnn Fabrics, and AC Moore, frantically searching for the perfect shades of gold and silver (well, okay, this wasn’t such a hardship...it was yarn shopping, after all).

The good news: as you see from my picture, I finally managed to find the perfect shade of gold at AC Moore. The bad news: it’s only available as EMBROIDERY FLOSS!!! I stood in AC Moore for about 15 minutes staring at the display, trying to decide how many tiny floss skeins I’d have to buy to create my yoke pattern and exactly how many strands I’d need to combine to equal worsted weight yarn. I took a skein and walked up and down the aisles of the store, trying to find THAT exact color, only in actual yarn. No dice. Even Red Heart, that company that has perfected every known color under the sun, including neon traffic cone orange, didn’t have anything.

I bought the tiny skein and performed the same exercise at a ton of different stores, but no match.

Yesterday, I finally decided to just skip attempting to be Monet with the colors and just suck it up, buy some Lion Brand Glitterspun online, and get on with it...

Yeah, you guessed it—Glitterspun has been DISCONTINUED! I found a kind soul on Ravelry who can sell me two gold skeins, but now I’m going to have to find two silver skeins...

Must get on eBay...must not appear too desperate...

Too many pattern books, or…

…the Library of Congress and the Ancient Library of Alexandria—combined—have nothing on me.

A few nights ago, the kind fellow yarn enthusiasts at my SnB group turned me onto a new thing…the “Library” section on Ravelry. Okay, Ravelry has probably had this feature forever–I’m just slow and never noticed it before. They showed me just how easy it is to add in all your books, booklets, pamphlets, magazines, etc. From there, you can search if you’re looking for a particular pattern or type of pattern, without flipping through every book you have by hand (for some of us, this could take years).

Excited, yesterday I embarked on this new endeavor. I began adding books off the top of my head, as I could remember them. I was so excited to see each book pop up on my Ravelry Library page. Soon, it became painfully obvious to me that I was missing a few. After all, I have almost a whole bookcase filled with yarn-related literature…surely there were more books than what I had added so far…

Thank heavens for wireless laptops. I brought my computer into the bedroom and started painstakingly going through my books. I added each one, trying to determine which could be considered “booklets” and which could be considered “books.” Ravelry, for some reason, considers a lot of what I thought were booklets to be actual books. I tried to go through the magazines, but frankly, I need to do what they call in IT-land a “deep-dive” into those to figure out if I want to keep them all–I mean, really, am I ever going to make the baby jacket in Crochet World that calls for some odd, obscure yarn and looks sort of bulky and uncomfortable for the baby??? Even if your kid couldn’t sit up for himself yet, I guarantee he probably could, with no problem, wearing this jacket.

In total, I managed to rack up 75 books, 1 magazine (before I gave up), 17 booklets, and 3 pdf files on my Ravelry Library page. Sound like an impressive number? Sure…and it’s even more impressive (or frightening) if you consider that I only got as far as THE TOP TWO SHELVES of my bookcase! There are three more to go through, plus all the magazines. I also have reams of printed-out patterns that should be documented somewhere and scads of other pdfs.

Not sure, but I think I need some Advil…

Yarn Identity Crisis

Once again, the yarn is speaking to me...this happens often, usually when skeins of yarn have been sitting in my stash entirely too long. They get restless and demand satisfaction. Before you call the happy hatch, yes, I am aware that I probably need professional help...

Getting back to the clamoring yarn in question...This particular yarn has been sitting in a plastic bag in our spare room, waiting to be worked. It started out life last Christmas as a Herrschners kit, specifically the Bright Squares Blanket from the Patons Home Front booklet. However, I’ve been dawdling for months on this project, due to it not being exactly what I had in mind when I put it on my wish list last year. Specifically, it is really sort of a knockoff of the Babette Blanket by Kathy Merrick. I don’t know...there’s nothing wrong with the Babette Blanket, but somehow the yarn just doesn’t seem to be satisfied with its predetermined fate. Also, I feel funny about crocheting a knockoff, and I’m really surprised Kathy Merrick hasn’t sued Patons by now.

So, for months, the yarn has sat in the spare room, playing with all the possibilities. It has thought of perhaps a knitted afghan instead, but dismissed this, on the basis that I’ve done too many knitted things lately – it’s time to employ the sister craft crochet. It has pondered a hexagon granny afghan, but I really hate sewing hexagon shapes together (actually, I can’t stand sewing, period, but that’s another story). It has considered a striped crocheted sweater; but really, I’ve done more than my share of sweaters.

Lately, the yarn has hit upon another possibility – namely the Granny Stripe afghan, by Lucy of Attic24 (here is the pattern on her blog: http://attic24.typepad.com/weblog/2010/05/granny-striping.html). It strikes a nice balance – an interesting pattern that is easy to do. It could probably work as a great take-along project (until, like any afghan, it starts taking up its own zip code).

The sick, pathetic thing is that I’m actually feeling GUILTY about even THINKING of using the yarn for something other than its original purpose. I’m not sure what my problem is. I think I’m afraid that the minute I start a different project other than the Bright Squares Blanket the Herrschners police are going to break down the door and haul me off. I’m also afraid that I’m going to be kept out of Yarn Heaven for transgressions against the expressed order of things, and instead be relegated to Yarn Hell, where you can see the yarn, smell the yarn, but can’t touch the yarn...NOOOOO!

I know, shut up and crochet already...