knitting – Page 13

>H1N1

November 5, 2009 | 9 Comments

In the last 10 days of October I was on quite a roll, getting a lot of things done…weaving off a 16S network twill scarf, making progress on my current tapestry, knitting various things, and even spinning. I felt unstoppable!….

“Shadow Baby” by Joan Somerville, using 2 shades of Tofutsies yarn. Check out the cute Gita Maria buttons! This sweater is for my new niece who will arrive in Dec!

My biggest accomplishment this month was tackling the details on Rob’s face! I’m at the halfway point of the cartoon, but have completed more than 50% of the difficult areas now. (Lots of ‘hand-holding’ from Soyoo Park to choose skin colors and to work three interlocking sections on five warps for Rob’s mouth!)

A few other things with no photos: a pair of jaywalker socks where I tried to get the pattern part out of one ball of Regia Color Effekt, by using a solid color yarn for the cuff, heel, and toe. Didn’t work! I ran out of the Regia before I got to the toe, so part of the foot is done in solid color. Bummer. At least that won’t show when I have shoes on!

I’m also brewing another avocado pit dye. This time I’m attempting patience, how novel! Each time we eat an avocado I finely chop the pit and add it to the brew. Every second or third day I heat the dyepot to a simmer for 30 minutes as per Carol Lee’s instructions. She says this goes on for months before actually dyeing. It’s a luscious red!

Then, on the penultimate day of the month I began to malfunction…and by the end of the day I was in bed with the flu! Seven days later I can barely get out of my own way. I’ve lost momentum…. and I”m in a funk….

The last time I had the flu (12 years ago), I ran to my LYS and bought some lace weight merino (Grignasco?) and got in bed with a Eugene Buehler pattern from Knitter’s Magazine. This time I’d been eyeing the recently arrived box of Icelandic unspun yarn in six colors from Schoolhouse Press. So I went to bed with my little laptop tuned in on Schoolhouse Press’s current shawl KAL by Maria Von Keppel.

Sleep, knit, drink tea…..sleep, knit, drink tea…. 4 days later:

I was able to get out of bed on the day I did the crochet loops. I graduated to sitting in a chair!

>Safflower and Cochineal Shibori

October 20, 2009 | 2 Comments

I may not get things done in a timely fashion, but it seems to me that I’m always juggling too many diverse things. In the midst of my shibori ideas, I went sailing with my husband for five days over the Columbus holiday down in the Chesapeake. I also got quite a bad cold which slowed me down…

So…back to shibori!

My safflower dyed sock blank pleated and bound with four rubber bands, ready for the cochineal bath!

The safflower dyed silk scarf ‘scrunched and wrapped around a soda bottle, ready for the cochineal bath…

sock blank and wool/mohair skein after the cochineal bath.

The finished items. The silk scarf did not take the cochineal well. It was not mordanted, which did not matter for the safflower, but certain must have for the cochineal.

Sock blank wound onto niddy-noddy, with silk scarf in background.

skein of doubled sock blank yarn! I can’t wait to knit with this, but it might have to wait ‘til the near year, after all the holiday knitting is done!

Next step (someday!) will be to mordant the scarf, then stitch some designs, and re-dye it! I don’t think I’ll hold my breath waiting to get it done!

>Safflower Update

October 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment

I finished the yellow dyeing of wool in the safflower bath. Here is the sock blank and another small skein (50 gr) that I added later to hopefully use up the yellow pigment in this bath.

Kathy asked me if, after dyeing, I would knit directly from the unraveled, ‘kinky’ yarn, or if I would re-wet the yarn to make it smooth again. I have to admit that I hadn’t thought about this! Now, since she’s brought it up, I believe I will try steaming the yarn after it has been skeined. Before I get to knitting, this sock blank will get folded and clamped and over-dyed for a shibori effect.

Unfortunately this photo does not do justice to the colors! The sock blank is truly a complex blend of colors ranging from a creamy golden color, to soft oranges. I love it! The skein is a pale, creamy yellow, a delicate, soft color.

Today I have the silk scarf and a small piece of muslin in the bath which I’ve shifted to alkaline with the addition of soda ash.

>More Thrills

September 13, 2009 | 4 Comments

This one is a bit embarrassing to tell. I was zipping along knitting one day near the end of our sailing trip, and I accidentally stabbed myself with my Signature stilletto-pointed needle. You’d think I’d never held a needle before! It was a fluke! As I finished a row, the empty left hand needle slipped out of my grip. For some irrational reason, I did not want to drop the needle…. it would only hit the cockpit sole, but I think subconsciously I must have thought I would lose it overboard! I grabbed for it as quickly as I could. The needle managed to hit the cockpit bench on end with its tip standing straight up. My hand came straight down, and that stilletto tip went into my palm, dead center. It actually hung there for a second or so before falling out, so I was impaled on my knitting needle! It hurt, but my laughter definitely took the edge off! I thought about taking a photo of my bleeding palm, but then thought better of it!

After 45 years of knitting I’ve had my first knitting accident. Beware….

>Some thrills

September 12, 2009 | 8 Comments

There are many people who find knitters and knitting so boring they cannot possibly imagine what thrills we have. I spent a lot of time knitting my kimono cardigan on our recent sailing trip, and it seemed a good time to analyze my technique and see what I might do if I wanted to knit faster!

I am a picker (meaning I knit by holding the working yarn in my left hand and making the right hand needle do the work of catching it to create the new loop). I am left handed but knit in the right handed direction since I’m pretty fast at it. I knit about 60 stitches per minute, which would be a poor showing for knitting speed competitions, but seems faster than most knitters I have spent time with..

To be fair, I should say that I have tried many ways of knitting and still use them all on occasion. I was taught to knit ‘throwing’ (the traditional English way which involves having the working yarn in your right hand and using your right hand to ‘throw’ the yarn around the left needle), and over the years I’ve tired both ‘picking’ and ‘throwing’ in the opposite direction (with the knitted work on the right needle moving to the left needle) just because I’m left handed and felt I should give it a whirl! It comes in handy when I don’t want to keep turning my work around, but I am still faster at right handed picking than other methods. Other methods will get mentioned later…maybe!

So, faster… knowing that efficiency of motion is a vital key to speed I have also made efforts to keep my knitting right at the tips of my needles, and now, for years now actually, I’ve managed no movement at all in my left hand…my right needle does a little flick to get that needle to pick up a loop from the yarn in my left hand. When I switch from knit to purl, involving moving that working yarn from the back of the needle to the front, I barely move my finger, making ribbing quite fast to work.

What else could I do to get faster?? I realized that while my knitting stays right at the tips of the needles, my right needle which gets inserted into the loop on the left needle was going into the loop a bit further than just the tip before catching the working yarn. Could this be minimized?? A little practice showed me it could! Since I was knitting my kimono cardi on brand new Signature needles (another thrill!) I could keep track of how much I was inserting that right needle by keeping the movement completely on the silver tips. Those silver tips sure come in handy for checking movement! Although I love my Addi Turbos and my wooden Knit Picks, and in general prefer circular needles to straight, these Signature needles gave me a visual marker to how little movement I needed to make with the right needle. Almost immediately I noticed that the tiniest change with the inserting needle made a noticeable difference in speed! In a couple of hours I was knitting faster than ever before!

What is fast now? I think I’m knitting in the range of 75 stitches per minute now, and it happened with only about an hour of practice. Pretty exciting for me! Here’s my plan for checking my accuracy. I tried knitting to my metronome, but I got so uptight I became completely clumsy! Since I have a natural memory for 60 beats per minute (try it, many people do!) I will listen to my metronome at other speeds until I feel that rhythm is well established in my head, then I will try knitting at that speed!

I have some piano works that I’ve played at certain speeds for so many years that they come naturally to me now (like Bach inventions that I had to practice ad nauseam to work up to speed). I will hum those pieces at speed and see if I can knit to them! 75 stitches per inch is pretty satisfying, but if I can get closer to 100 I’m going to go for it! I’ll let you know how I get on! Wish me luck!