RivetKitten Knits

Ah, back to being able to show pictures! Hooray!

I managed to get all but one of my knitted gift projects done before present-time on Christmas morning. I think this qualifies as “epic win” on my part.

First, Dad’s scarf:

The pattern is DNA Scarf (Rav link), the yarn is Cascade Pastaza. This yarn sheds more than any other yarn I have ever knit with. It is loosely plied, splits easily, and left me with a lap opaque with fuzz each time I sat down to knit. On the other hand, it is VERY soft, and the scarf turned out pretty awesome. So I’m not going to complain too much.

Second, Brother’s hat:

Modeled by me, because I didn’t think to get a picture of my gormly brother in it. The pattern is Fish Hat (Dead or Alive?), the yarn is Red Heart in camo and fluorescent orange. My brother is the only person I know who would wear a camo and eye-searing orange fish hat with pride. Also, it’s RHSS, so the multitude of animals in his house will not harm it, and it will be easily washed when that time comes.

Third, Hat Not Appearing In This Blog:

I was going to make Brother’s girlfriend a less retina-burning version of the fish hat, but I totally ran out of time. So I gave her the yarn in a bag with a promise of a hat. One item on my still-to-be-knit list…

Fourth, Scarf Not Appearing In This Blog:

While spelunking in my stash, I found an almost-finished Branching Out, which I was planning on finishing and giving to my mom years ago. Well, it was almost finished! I finished it! And blocked it, and gave it to Mom. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of it, or of her wearing it. It’s really more of an ascot than a scarf, but she appreciated it.

Fifth, SOCKS:

The last time I wore my River Rapids socks, I noticed that the legs were baggy on my. Blast. Took them to Mom & Dad’s, had Mom try them on, and voila! Fitting socks! Another gift for my mommy.

And now, the list of things to-be-knit…

View full article »

This is the time of year when it’s really, really hard for me to write blogs about knitting, because most of my awesome knitting is for my web-savvy family. I have a (something) for my brother and another (something) for his girlfriend; my (something) for my dad is coming along quite nicely; and I managed a (something) for my mom that I found deep in the recesses of my stash, hiding for some reason.

So I present you with socks:

(Also featuring cheap beer from Aldi.)

These socks, made from a yarn I got in a swap this month, are the first socks I’ve knit that actually fit me well. And, OMG, now I know why sock knitters say that once you put on hand-knit socks you will never want to wear store-bought again. Now I understand why Mom’s whipped up so many pairs for herself and for Dad. I need to knit another pair, STAT, because I do not want to take these socks off, ever, unless I have another pair of hand-knit socks to replace them with.

I’m also swatching some gold bamboo yarn I got from Rhinebeck that one time Mom and Dad and I went (2008!). It’s Bonnie’s Bamboo, and before I wound it into cakes it looked like this:

Oh yeah, I never wrote about my birthday haul! Okay, that will be next post. For now I’m off to fondle some shiny yarn.

Today I finished the second of the Pirate Mittens for Heaven’s Anti-Death-Warmness package. They are blocked, and I’m really debating whether or not to do the duplicate stitch fixes for the colorwork. On the one hand, I have a streak of perfectionism which is biting me on the ankles until I decide to do so. On the other, they’re handmade and I STILL have a scarf to finish. And I really hate weaving in ends, and duplicate stitch is more weaving in ends. Grawr.

I’ve only turned in one project for the HPKCHC – the arm warmers I finished were turned in for herbology. I have no clue what I’m going to do for the others. I have various projects that I have to get done (added another one just this week!), and I’m feeling a niggling need to actually design one of the projects myself. It’s a simple design, but I have to wait for the buttons to get here before I’ll be able to finish it. Or start it. Or do more than futz around with the yarn, trying to figure out how to create different elements I haven’t done before, like a picot cast on/cast off. We’ll see how it turns out.

No pictures today – I’m feeling lazy, the light has gone, and the mittens are still soggy and blocking.

I finished the arm warmers on time! More than that, I finished them within 3 days of starting. (I worked the morning shift last weekend, which gives me plenty of knitting time.)

And so I introduce: The Arm Warmers.

Now, I learned several very important lessons during the making of these arm warmers, most of which relate to gauge.

First, it is important to pick a yarn that is within the gauge recommendations of the pattern, or else alter the pattern for fit.

Second, reducing the size of your needle will not significantly change the stitches per inch portion of gauge, and if you don’t alter the pattern for fit, the garment will be too big.

Third, knitting Noro Kureyon on size 2 needles results in a very nice, thick, squishy fabric that could probably scrub years-old rust off of a car. Also, it can break your wooden needles. AMHIK.

Finally, when you knit wool tightly to end up with a very nice, thick, squishy fabric, fulling the garment down to size Does Not Work. At least, it does not work the way I intended it to work, especially since I (1) have never felted/fulled anything before, and (2) lack a washing machine and was just kinda winging it by hand.

I don’t have any “after” pictures, but the yarn fuzzed up and softened up, and one arm warmer wound up about 3/4 inch shorter and 1/2 inch narrower than the other. Sigh.

Anyway, I passed them off to my friend’s boyfriend yesterday, and today she called me to let me know how much she loved them. And they fit.

There is, in fact, joy in Mudville.

Do I have a lot of knitting on my plate for the next couple of months!

First, I promised one of my friends that I’d knit a pair of Twisted Armwarmers (Rav link) for his girlfriend for her birthday, which is October 7th.

Then, I have to finish the second mitten and the scarf for my friend’s Welcome To Ohio Please Don’t Freeze To Death care package.

After that, I have to get started on Dad’s Christmas present (not telling, in case he’s snooping!), and presents for my brother and his girlfriend (same- I SEE YOU, SNOOPERS!), and then a little something for Mom. Not necessarily in that order.

Okay, so maybe I have more time to work on these than I thought, but at least the arm warmers need to be done relatively soon. The problem is that I feel like I need to wait two days to start (two days fewer to knit!) because of the HPKCHC, which I might be able to squeeze them into somehow.

Oh well, I can always get crackin’ on that second mitten and/or the scarf. I need to start plotting…

Well, to be honest, I modified an already-existing box to create a knitting box.

I started with this:

I thought it would be awesome as a luchbox or as a knitting box. Guess which I chose?

First, I spray painted it black:

Then I made a stencil:

Then I borrowed some red spray paint:

And it fits the mittens perfectly:

To which I say: Hooray!

So I finished the first of the Pirate mittens. I think the pattern itself is pretty awesome; halfway through the first mitten I’d decided to knit a pair for myself at some point.

It still needs the duplicate stitch fix for the top skull. Also, I need to sew up the gaps around the thumb gusset:

There’s a matching one on the opposite side. Sigh.

So, alterations to make if I do make a pair for myself:

• Go down a needle size for the cuffs. My wrists are significantly smaller than this mitten. I can fit my first three fingers sideways through the cuff – that’s about two and a half inches of ease that will allow snow in!
• Go up a needle size for the mitten body. I keep forgetting that I knit pretty tightly. On the one hand, awesome dense fabric! On the other hand, mitten BARELY fits my hand. The thumb is almost uncomfortable. Now for these mittens I can stretch them a bit in blocking, but for ones for myself I doubt I’d bother with blocking anyway.
• Pick up an extra stitch on either side of the thumb gusset to avoid gaping holes that need to be sewn up later. It is a complete PITA to try & turn that thumb inside out!

On the other hand, while the pattern is awesome, my hand is not shaped in the way that Norwegian mittens think hands are shaped. The thumb placement would be awesome if I were planning on punching someone or riding my bike across the tundra of Ohio in February, but not so much for everyday wanderings in the snow.

I need to motivate myself to cast on the other mitten. (Is there such thing as Second Mitten Syndrome?) I picked up the scarf to work on while I’m working up the energy to get back to stranded knitting and wound up kicking myself for leaving all those draping ends to weave in later. (For an example of how awesome my end-weaving is, see previous post.) Why, oh why did I not then know the joys of knitting ends in as I go??? Alas.

On the other hand, at least the yarn of the scarf (KnitPicks Andean Silk in navy) and the blue yarn of the mittens/hat (FrogTree Alpaca) are pretty darned close to exactly the same shade. It’s close enough that even if you hold the two up next to each other, you would think that they’re just different  dye lots of the same yarn. I doubt the untrained, non-knitterly eye will even be able to tell. Insert evil cackle here.

Back in February or so, I learned that my good friends/neighbors were expecting. Hooray! Baby knits!

In April, I searched for a decent bootie pattern on Ravelry, and wound up with Seamless Baby Booties. Sweet! Because my friends chose not to know the sex of the baby, and because I’m all about crushing the gender binary and all that, I cast on in Schoeller & Stahl Limbo in a nifty rainbow variegated colorway.

Et voila:

Booties! And pretty spiffy looking booties, if I do say so myself. Note the ties – that’s an alteration to the pattern that I improvised. I know loose whatnots are a bad idea when babies (and babies’ mouths) are involved, so I managed to crochet (!) a cord up the back of the booties, then out away from the booties until they were long enough to tie securely in front, and ran them through the loops made in the pattern. Very secure, very unlikely to come off in baby’s mouth.

(Supporting role played by my mini bottle of hand lotion.)

My friends spent the summer in Montreal, the hometown of mama. They did email to let me know that they LOVED the booties, and to ask if I’d made them. I’ll admit, I was kinda beaming. When they came back, they brought the booties. Only…

Apparently I need to work on my finishing techniques, or more specifically my end-weaving. The yarn I used was superwash wool, so I told my friends that they could machine wash with cold water, & lay the booties out to dry and they’d be fine. Well, the first time baby peed on them, they followed my instructions and the darned things dissolved. So, they brought them back in the hope that I would be able to mend the booties. Well, I don’t know if I can mend them – but maybe I can knit another pair. Probably a bigger size, since by the time they’re done baby will be larger than he was.

Sigh.

Right now, I’m working on some gifties for a friend who just moved to Ohio from SoCal. She’s never seen snow before (!), so she’s in for a surprise come January. Ha.

Even before then, though, I’m sure that she’s going to have cold ears.

As a gift, I’m working on a hat/mitten/scarf set. They won’t match completely and utterly, but the scarf at least I already had in my arsenal:

This is a reversible cable scarf (Rav link) in KnitPicks Andean Silk (soooo nummy) that I originally was knitting for my ex’s dad as a Christmas present. Of course, that fell apart when the ex dumped me a few months before. Ah well. Repurposed! Going to a good cause! Huzzah!

The hat is We Call Them Pirates in Frog Tree Worsted Alpaca:

(Pardon the crappy PhotoBooth picture.)

This hat had a few issues. Apparently when I was running the yarn through the loops at the top to finish the hat, I missed a loop. Which meant that I was dropping stitches like they were covered in lard. Luckily I managed to pick them all up, but currently they’re being held in place by a well-placed crochet hook. I’ll have to connect them in at some point before I send off the hat. In the meantime, it’s looking quite dashing with its additional appendages!

Finally, the mittens:

I’m actually slightly farther than this picture indicates. I just started the decreases on the first mitten. However, the mitten ALSO has issues – I messed up on the pattern for the third repeat, and didn’t notice it until 4 rows past the mistake. There was no way in HELL I was going to tink back all that way for something that could very easily be fixed with… duplicate stitch! So that’s something I have to remember to fix, too.

My friend is very, very into pirates, so I figured that these particular patterns would be well appreciated. The one thing I’m worrying about is whether or not the hat will fit… It’s a little snug over my ears, and my friend described her head as “huge” and “pumpkin-shaped”. Words to strike confidence in the heart of a knitter, let me tell you. Ah well, maybe it’ll block bigger…?

I figured I needed a knitting-specific blog as well as some content on this webpage I’ve been squatting for a few years now. So, an introduction, I guess.

My name is Rachael, I’ve been knitting for… a few years, and my stash is not yet overwhelming. (At least, not by my standards.) I live with my boyfriend and occasionally his daughter. Soon I will be applying to graduate school. My life right now consists of work, reading, knitting, and plotting the overthrow of pretty much everything. Also, cooking when the kitchen isn’t a disaster area.

This is really my second attempt at keeping a knitting blog – here’s hoping it’ll continue on!