Yarn porn.

Okay, I've been skeining up yarn all day and I've got a few goodies to show.

First, the purple dye experiment. I'm calling it 'purple train wreck', but it might wind up a regularly-made color scheme.


Then there's my first attempt at a fall leaves inspired color. I'm thinking more brown and less orange, but otherwise it's not bad.


Then there's 880 yards of lace-weight merino. The photo doesn't show the pink too well, but the color's fairly accurate if more subtle than the photo.

I'm thinking I may have to charge more for the lace-weights, because winding up 880 freaking yards takes FOREVER. And I desperately want to keep this one because I adore it, but I can always dye myself another one later (I wrote down how I did it).

And, you know, there's nothing like having a cat around for help. This is right before she pounced. Fortunately I grabbed her right away and there was no damage done.


And I've gotten another wild hair: Pattern support.

So another question. Would you guys buy reasonably priced hand-paint yarn for felting? $12 USD or thereabouts for 220 yards worsted weight?

Product endorsement.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the Sunbeam Hot Shot, retailing at around $20 USD:

It will heat a cup full of water to boiling in about the time it takes to put in a tea bag and measure out some sugar and slide the cup in. Fill tea cup with water, flip up lid, pour in, and hit the on button. It shuts off automatically when it boils. Push dispense and the hot water runs into your cup.

I got a new one today. My old one has gone to the great tea-room in the sky. I'd had it for seven years and made approximately 13,000 cups of tea with it (that's about five cups a day, which is less than I often drink but allows for days I wasn't home). The guts were still good - heating coil, thermostat, and switches, but the plastic casing had given up the ghost. The buttons were getting kind of wonky and when the lid fell off last week, I intended to continue using it but the husbeast went out and bought me a replacement. Now I'm good until 2014.

If you drink tea, you want one of these.

How to use up stash.

1. Knit some experimental shapes with wool.

2. Felt them in the washing machine.

3. Pull them out and realize the ideas didn't work.

4. Throw away.

Et voila. Two balls of yarn used up.

Whining and tidings of great joy.

Hunt me down like a rabid dog and put me out of my misery. 'Cause I've got the baby's germs and wanna roll up and die anyway.

That's enough whining, but this is one of those AWFUL colds that makes your throat itch. I'm about to get the bottle brush and stick it down my own throat and scrub it around. That might work. (Sinus infections, no biggie. Pneumonia? Who cares. Sore throat and it's whine whine whine.)


Anyway. We - sort of - have major, just-breaking fiberish news at House O' Samurai.

Well, first a whole lot of back story.

Every year the husbeast and I both take a chunk of 'mad money' out of the tax return and spend it on anything we want. The rest usually goes to bills or, lately, the baby's college fund, but the mad money remains in effect, if a little reduced from our wild pre-baby days. This year I'd been planning on buying myself a laptop (so I can roam around the house after the baby and remain Hooked In) and hoping I could squeak out enough left over for a spinning wheel.

At some point I must have mentioned this buy-a-laptop plan to my father-in-law, because he called last night to tell us he'd gotten one for me for free. (It's my mother-in-law's old one he'd had overhauled.) The trade he demanded for the laptop was us going to Florida on vacation with them, so the in-laws could spend time with us and the baby. They're so mean. (You begin to see why they get handknit sweaters every Christmas.)

So with no laptop to be purchased out of the mad money, that leaves a great whack of cash to spend on anything ELSE my little heart desires, IN ADDITION to the wheel. Like... like.. a loom. Or a dressmaker's dummy. Or a boat load of fiber. Or... or.. ALL OF IT.

The only drawback now is that I don't know if I've got room in my office for everything. I'm to the point of emptying out the baby's closet and using it (she's got two in her room) or if I totally lose my mind, switching rooms with her.

Hmmmm.

One neat turn deserves another.

Remember my post about the Blue Moon Fiber Arts problem with their bank, and how January One tried to help them out by giving away their yarn, so as to create new sock-knitters? Blue Moon has responded.

January One now has her own color scheme.

And THAT is community. And what makes on-line knitters so cool.

Reviews.

I've been meaning to mention various books and TV shows lately, and keep forgetting. So I'm gonna jumble it all together here.


BOOKS:


"Knitting Out of Africa" by Marianne Isager. I want to emphasize first off that I like the book. There are some things I didn't like about it, but overall you are getting what you paid for; African-inspired sweaters. The sizes available vary by sweater but most lurk in the 40-50 inch range. Some go down to 34 (at least, one does), some go up to 52, but that's about it. The sizes would be easy to tweak by knitting at a larger or smaller gauge, though. And speaking of gauge, it's 25 stitches per 4 inches/10cm. For Every. Damn. Sweater. A variety of techniques are used - garter stitch, entrelac, meiters, log-cabin, stranded color, you name it. In that respect the book is very impressive.

Now, the drawbacks. The yarn used is an alpaca/wool blend I've never heard of, for every sweater. Two strands held double. While that can give you great options for color blending, you have to buy twice as much yarn, and it's kind of a pain to work. Plus the alpaca makes all these sweaters really hot. She chooses muted colors reflecting the original textiles that I assume were dyed with assorted vegetable dyes (and mud, in the case of mud cloth), which may be historically valid but some of these sweaters would look fantastic in bright colors - she could have at least included some small swatches to give ideas and examples of the possibilities.

My one big complaint is, there's no INFORMATION in the book. It's supposedly inspired by African textiles, and there are photos of each textile at the start of each pattern, but other than that and the general area the textile came from, that's it. No info on the textiles themselves or the people who produced them. I suppose since it's a knitting book I shouldn't complain, but darn it, part of the reason for buying books about cultures not my own is so I can learn about the culture.

At any rate, all the sweaters are wearable and flattering to an average size and shape figure. The inevitable animal prints (giraffe and zebra) were dealt with with more originality than I'd expected.




"Bags - A Knitter's Dozen" from XRX books. (I'd post a cover photo here, but yet again, Blogger is fucking up.) Twenty-one bags to knit. There's a decent amount of variety here (not on the level of 'Folk Bags', but then I don't think anyone will ever top that one for diversity); felted, non-felted, beaded, traditional wools to ribbon yarns, you name it. The patterns are laid out in classic XRX style, which I like, but they're pretty stingy with schematics. I don't care if it's a damn square, I want to see a square with measurements written on it. And they don't deliver in that respect. They do the usual song-and-dance with techniques, with a bit on needle felting the only unusual thing. The drawback, as always in XRX books, is the photography. I can't see the damn bags. Sure the models look great. I don't CARE. I want to see enough of the bag that I can tell what I'm looking at. In many cases here, you can't. (There's one drawstring-bag type deal I think I want to knit, but there's no schematic and the picture sucks, so I'm still not 100% sure how it's constructed.)

It has occurred to me that bag knitting would use up some of these odd balls too. Heh. Hello, Christmas presents.



"Freeform Knitting and Crochet" by Jenny Dowde. I think I paid $18 USD for this book. The section in the front on color and design was worth the entire cost of the book. Which is good, because the rest of it is kind of eh. Many of the projects look like grandma using up extra scraps, which isn't what I'm shooting for when doing off-road no-pattern projects. And they don't make me go "Holy SHIT, how did she do that??!!?" like "Unexpected Knitting" still does after dozens of readings. (By golly, if I'm going to color outside the lines, I want it to look FANTASTIC. This is a failing of mine that dates back to childhood. At least I've quit crying when my experiments don't turn out just like I wanted them to.)

Still, I always enjoy learning how other people work, what they do for creative inspiration, and how they express it. So no, I don't feel ripped off by the book. But it's not something I would buy for patterns. Think of it more as an art book than a knitting book, and choose accordingly.




TELEVISION:
It's always a challenge around here to find something we agree on to watch. I lean toward general history and science, the husbeast prefers military history and dumb movies, and The Baby always wants cartoons. Add in that I don't like The Baby to see violence on TV (I've given up on profanity, with the way we speak), and the few TV shows we can find, we end up devoted to. Here are a couple we've really enjoyed lately. You may find them boring or uninteresting, but they should be completely inoffensive.

"How it's Made" is a Canadian show (yay, Canukistan!) that essentially does factory tours and shows how, duh, things are made. From hockey gloves to baby chickens to aluminum foil to gummy bears, if it's manufactured, they've either done a segment on it or are planning to. It's usually on in the early evenings when we're all running around doing dinner, playing with the baby, and otherwise doing "Husbeast just got home" stuff. Dinner preparation has been known to halt while I watch how they make plate glass. Or buttons. Or cotton yarn. Or...

"Good Eats" is a cooking show by Alton Brown on the Food Network. Imagine the biggest science geek you know, being trained as a chef, and doing his own TV show. And don't forget to add in the really goofy sense of humor. The guy won a James Beard Award for his book - the one that contained recipes for corn dogs and home-made pop tarts. The man is mad. I love him. Plus you can get all his recipes at foodtv.com. I suggest the Chocolate Lava Muffins.



And lastly, BLOGS:
I normally don't comment on other blogs here because we all kind of know each other from the comments or mentions in other knitting blogs, etc. But these are two that aren't knitting blogs.

Opera Chic is the ongoing tale of an American woman living in Milan who is an opera and classical music fan. I mainly read it for the dish, which is hilarious even if you have no idea who half the people are. She's also got some nice commentaries on classical music if you enjoy that (I do). But it's all about the dish. The latest scandal is a production of Salome in Rome that features the heroine running about naked or scantily clad (g-string) for much of the performance. Click here for one of the most hilariously censored photos I've yet to see on the 'net.

And lastly, a photography blog, Strobist. Or rather, a lighting-for-photography blog. I skim it most days, but he offers a lot of very good advice for anyone whose knitting photos never turn out right (like me?) I've just begun reading, but I forsee a great improvement, soon.

Get the oxygen.

I just figured out that this undyed yarn shipment this morning contains three miles of sock yarn.

THREE.

MILES.

I DON'T EVEN KNIT SOCKS.

I'm now going to go breathe into a paper bag.

Fiber content.

I tried to take the weekend off knitting, because my hand was bothering me, and met with iffy success on the project. To feel like I was doing SOMETHING, I felted all the containers I'd knit recently:

From left to right; "Pueblo Pot" from the 2007 knitting pattern calendar, knit with two strands of Brown Sheep Sport. The Cookie Monster Bowl, from the Second Treasury of Magical Knitting by Cat Bordhi, blue yarn one strand Elann Uros Aran (half llama, half wool) and the pink two strands of Brown Sheep Sport held together. And the former flower pot cosy, now felted down to be a soda can cosy, from the 2007 knitting pattern calendar and also done with two strands of Brown Sheep Sport. (I've got a whole lot of leftover BSS from various projects. I plan to keep knitting containers until it's gone and then haul them all to Ohio next Christmas and give them away.)

By the way, if you ever felt Uros Aran, it sheds like CRAZY. Like little drifts of blue fuzz all over the floor crazy. If you're using a washing machine, stop the cycle before it pumps the water out and swish your arm through and pull out any clumps of fiber you can feel. (Some people use a hand-held kitchen strainer to do this, but it's more trouble than it's worth to me.) Loose fibers can clog the pump and kill your washer. That's bad. If you do a rinse cycle, stop it and do another fiber grab for any more that came loose. But I can't think of a better yarn for felted children's toys, it comes out almost like fur.

If you're doing something like this, same yarn, different containers and patterns and with the final intention of making up some of your own (I've got an experimental on the needles right now), you can do this on the first one:

Those little yellow bits are cotton yarn I tied there BEFORE felting, ten stitches wide and ten rows high. That way I have a fairly accurate gauge idea for anything new I want to knit. However, everything felts a little differently, even the same yarn knit with a different pattern or into a different shape. But at least this way you have a ballpark guess.



Yesterday I also dyed yarn. This was experimental stuff to try some new techniques before I dug into the sock yarn I ordered. The skein of autumn colors turned out fairly nice, but the purple one was a disaster. (I'm calling the color scheme "Purple Train Wreck" and have no intention of repeating it.) I'll take photos of them once they're dry and I've skeined them up properly.

I've identified the problem with purple food coloring. (If you read blogs or articles where people dye with food coloring, there are often comments about purple acting strangely, and it is usually blamed on the vinegar. It's not the vinegar.) The blue and red chemicals that make up the purple food coloring 'take up' (stick to the yarn) at dramatically different speeds, so what really happens is your yarn turns pink and the blue runs off. Yesterday I tried several things, including adding more blue. I'll call it a mixed success. I got a couple shades of purple that don't make me gag, including a nice dark grape shade, but all of them will be hard to repeat on purpose. For the next experiment I'm going to try a two-part process with actual pink and blue and see how THAT works.

Then, this morning, I got twelve skeins of sock yarn and four skeins of laceweight in the mail. I'm heavily drugged and I'm wondering if I can skein the stuff without screwing it all up. But at any rate, the laceweight is 100% merino and REALLY nice. I'm thinking of keeping some of it. (We knew this would happen, didn't we?)

Oh, and just so you know, if the baby falls into the bathtub, don't laugh at her while you pick her up. It pisses her off. Even if she DID look like Chevy Chase doing a Gerald Ford imitation. (There was no water in it and I was right there. She was WAY more angry and surprised, than hurt.)

Baby + cold medicine =

Bamboo vs. Wood.

Ecologically speaking, bamboo grows way faster than trees, so the obvious choice for renewable lumber is bamboo. But on the other hand, trees are better for the soil (generally speaking) and do amazingly good things for the water cycle, plus put off more oxygen than grasses (again, generally speaking). So to grow trees for lumber is actually a good thing for the environment. In this case I'd say it's six of one and half-dozen of the other, in terms of which is better.

But that's not what I was thinking when I said there were botanical reasons bamboo is better than wood for knitting needles. Take a gander at our lovely illustration.
It's too small to read the details, but really, all I wanted to show was how plant and animal cells are different. See how the plant cell has walls? It's square-ish? Plants build walls between each cell, which gives everything structure, like a wall of bricks. Animal cells, on the other hand, have no walls and are watery blobs that need skeletons or else they ooze around like octopuses. (Octopii? Squids. Like squids.) Cell photo from here.

All rightie. So plants have a skeleton, so to speak, at the cellular level. For some plants, like grasses, that's the only structure they have. Other plants, like trees, produce what science types call "secondary growth" or "woody growth" which is, yes, wood and acts as a skeleton for honkin' big trees. (To some degree, that is where tree rings come from.) Grasses rely entirely on their little cell walls for structure, wood has cell walls and woody growth.

This means, to a knitter, that the material bamboo knitting needles are made out of is much finer, smoother, and more flexible than wooden needles. I guess it's really a matter of opinion which one of them is better, depending on what you're looking for in your needles. I think bamboo is better due to the slight flex, but then that's just my opinion.

But at any rate, that's what makes wood and bamboo needles different. I have left out a bunch of stuff involving primary, secondary, and apical meristems, and have totally left out the intercalary meristems which have no relevance but which I think are cool. Hope it wasn't too painful.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a small war to fight with some purple food coloring.

ALL RIGHT!

Who came into my house and took my fifth Brittany Birch size five double-point? I KNOW it was one of you. Who was it?

Some photos.

Since the last couple posts were really text-heavy, here are some photos to balance things out.


First, this is my mother-in-law in her 2005 Christmas sweater. I worked on it while I was in the hospital having The Baby, and unlike the last sweater I discussed, this one has only good memories attatched to it. It's an E. Lavold pattern from one of her first couple books.

This is one of those "I really should knit a copy for me" kinds of sweaters.



And a baby photo, just because. She was reaching for the dangly hang-on strap of the camera.




And last, so you may all envy me, a shot of the husbeast fixing his work coveralls this morning.

Yup, that's right, HE DOES HIS OWN SEWING. He claims that since it's a machine, he's able to do it. I don't care how he does it, I'm just glad he does.

Get the ink blots.

This kind of has to do with knitting, in that it was a knitting issue that started it and knitting blogs that are making me boggle.

Specifically, it's about the Blue Moon Fiber Arts mess they had with their bank (if you heaven't heard yet, click and read, it's been all over the 'net and I'm not doing another recitation). And for a bit of background, I was a bookkeeper for many, many years before I busted up my hand and couldn't hold a pencil for forty hours a week any longer. So I know a good bit about small-business banking and related crap. Plus I'm related to an accountant if I need advice.

Long story short, their bank totally fucked up. I suspect their behavior was legal, strictly speaking, but it was horribly bad business practice. The Blue Moon ladies dealt with it calmly and professionally and to my knowledge are up and running again with a new bank less than a week later. What's interesting, though, is how other knitters are responding to the situation.

First, of course, were the calls for retribution. I was thinking 'give us their e-mail address and let us crash their mainframe' - computer geek that I am, but most of it was a desire to know the bank's name so that complaint letters could be issued. That's a fairly average response, I would say. Someone suggested that everyone should knit a sock and mail it to the bank, which was rather inspired; peaceful and to the point. Ultimately cooler heads prevailed, pointing out that nothing would help the deeds already done, and it was all moot anyway, what with Blue Moon keeping their council. (I don't blame them for not wanting to be responsible for a flood of hate mail, deserved or not. That's just more bad business practice, and right now they're golden, best to keep it that way.)

Then there were the other comments. Somehow the commenter's views got tied to the issue. (Isn't that always the way?) A lot was said about how women in business get treated like shit and this was just another example of it. It got expanded, at least in one case I will not link to, into a huge riff on how this is further trampling on the rights of women, and yadda yadda yadda. How did this get to be women's rights? It's not about women. It's about dumbasses at a bank who can't be bothered to investigate before they make (stupid) policy. I'm sure psychologists would have some term for this, but I call it "Oh, geez, get a grip." (Having done small business accounting stuff in three states, I'm here to tell you, ALL small businesses get treated like shit. Gender doesn't enter in, except in the eye of the beholder.)

THEN, in one case that I know of, there was the "Let's get a laugh out of this" response. January One decided that the best way to help Blue Moon was to get more people addicted to their sock yarn. (Sort of like drug pushers creating addicts, but different.) So she put out a call for "Socks that Rock virgins" on her blog, promising to do a drawing and give away ten hanks of the stuff from her own stash, thereby - according to her - creating ten more customers for Blue Moon. Soon the comments filled up with almost EIGHT HUNDRED often hilarious stories of why people were sock knitting virgins and why they needed that yarn. Blue Moon got wind, read the comments, and had such a laugh that they donated more yarn to give away, and, long story short, THIRTY hanks of Socks That Rock were given away on her blog. Even if she doesn't create thirty sock-knitting addicts, giving the Blue Moon ladies a good laugh was the best possible thing to have done in this situation.

It is fascinating, to me, how different people deal with the same issue.

Community.

That was my primary goal when I started this blog, to meet people on line and develop some kind of friendship with people. Specifically, knitters. I'd joined the local Stitch and Bitch (Summerville chapter) when we moved here, and had an extremely bad experience with them (they meet at private homes and un-invited me after I skipped a couple meets due to being eight months pregnant - among other things they kicked me off their PUBLIC Yahoo e-mail loop). My experiences with Knitty had been almost entirely positive, and so I figured the on-line knitting community HAD to be friendlier. I was right. (I got one or two snarly e-mails after the history of knitting article, that was about it. And even then, they stuck to the subject and didn't make it a personal attack.)

I kept telling myself that I needed to get out and meet people here in Charleston, but that voice in the back of my head (you know the one) kept saying, we're only going to live here four years, so what's the damn point? (Yes, I'm aware that's a really unhealthy attitude. Like you've never had one?) So, I started up the blog, and between occasional Knitty articles and blog searches and the like, I now know more knitters in Australia than I do in my home town. I am goofy enough to think this is cool. Regardless of where I move to, if I've got an internet connection, I'm in touch with my community. No more losing my entire life when I move, like happened when we left Hawaii.

Now, the idea of moving still pisses me off, but it doesn't fill me with dread like it did. What's particularly nice is, the people I've met IN Charleston, I've met through the internet, so I know that even if I move, odds are good we'll stay in touch. There is a point.


So, anyway. Blogging and community. The way knit-bloggers interact seems to be completely different than any other blog type; I do read a few other blogs (mostly cooking blogs) and generally, the dynamic isn't the same. No swapping, no hooking up in real life, no meeting at festivals or whatever, no private e-mail conversations, just a blog and some friendly (usually) comments. Which is FINE, but in comparison knit-blogging is amazing.

I've always thought that when you expect good of people, they usually rise to the occasion. The on-line knitting community is a shining example of that. I do not envy the Yarn Harlot her blog (300+ comments per day? Does she have time to DO anything else?? She can't possibly keep all her regular commenters straight in her head), but I am impressed by how she manages it and what she uses it for - mostly networking, education, and of course charity fund-raising. A quarter of a million dollars for Doctors Without Borders. That is unreal. Particularly when you consider that the majority of that was probably raised in donations of $100 or less at a time.

I've seen a little of that here, too, the determination to be positive and kind. While I refuse to discuss religion and politics as a nod to community spirit (I'm a moderate in both areas, and somehow manage to offend BOTH sides of every issue), I've still produced some major rants and of course the language is not what you'd call polite. And yet everybody is cool. I've never had a negative comment. Disagreeing opinions are expressed politely and reasonably, and can be discussed. When you consider I've posted about once a day for an entire year, blasting it out to anyone with an internet connection, that's quite a record.


I think I've rambled on long enough. At any rate, I'm going to start adding links to blogs I read regularly over in the side bar. (If you've ever left a comment here that I could track back to your blog, I put you in my regular read folder. Community, dudes.) Give me about a week to get the whole thing together. If, after that, you're a regular reader with a blog and I don't have you linked, drop me a line and I'll put you up.

Hats off to all of us, and yay for community.

Good. Gods.

Um, llama wool yarn? Like "Uros Aran" from Elann.com? It felts. A lot. And it gets fuzzy.

This bowl looks like I hunted down the Cookie Monster, shot him, skinned him, and made a bowl of his pelt.

Pictures coming when it's dry.

Hey, lookit.

The Baby finally wore out an article of clothing!

See the holes in the knees? I'm so proud. (They're 12 month size. If I had quit squeezing her into them after they were too short, they wouldn't have worn out, but screw it, we finally have worn out clothing.)

Of course, the reason the knees are worn out is because the little shit still won't walk:

We call it 'knee walking' and obviously it's not worth a whole lot outside the house, so she still gets carried or put in a stroller everywhere. She's got a little rocker in the living room, and the other day I noticed she would sit in the rocker, then STAND UP, balanced perfectly, and do a little booty shake, and then sit down again. Like a game. BUT SHE STILL WON'T WALK. She crawls over to the kitchen counter or the dining room table or my desk, stands up, gets up on her TIP TOES to drag stuff off, but she still won't walk. Argh.




Oh, and an opinion poll. (I keep asking questions and demanding answers... this isn't a deliberate attempt to get comments out of you guys, honest. Though it's not breaking my heart or anything.)

Do the projects you knit wind up kind of intertwined with whatever events were going on in your life, when you knit it? "Oh, that's the sweater I was working on when ---" ? Because I've realized one of the reasons I'm so indifferent to the blue and black Ganser when I should be thrilled is, I started it the last months in Hawaii, worked on it as we were moving around between houses, literally was knitting on it on our last flight out of the islands... It's all tangled up with all that and so I look at it and kind of go "feh". Anybody else have that kind of thing going on?

And if you do get that kind of thing going on, here's the million dollar question: how do I get rid of it? Because I don't want to be indifferent to a sweater I've spent, geez, like a hundred hours knitting.




At any rate, I did about five rounds of the sleeve last night while watching a movie, and today want to finish the moebius bowl and felt it and another pot I knit last week. I'm going to have to cut back on my knitting for a couple days because my hand is bothering me. Damned hand.

Gulp.

I hope you guys are serious about wanting Samurai Dyer yarns (oh, like I could name it anything else). Because if not, I'm now stuck with a dozen balls of sock yarn and 3200 yards of laceweight merino.

I'm trying to figure out how to do a special for regular readers. Any ideas on that?

And while I'm asking questions... Lace weight yarn. Nobody seems to be dyeing it in bright colors. Is that because no one will KNIT bright-colored lace, or because the dyers THINK that? I wasn't thinking neon yellow, particularly, but some dip-dyes of aqua, bright leaf green, maybe peach/orange or pink/rose/PINK.

Anyone?

Anyone?

Bueller?

Vigo, babysweetiehoneydarling

Joy!

I found it on a Norwegian (I think) web site, here. Check out the patch on the cuff of the sweater. That baby is Dale of Norway. I could probably look up the pattern if I were so inclined, but I'm not.

Just a little something to inspire our Norwegian knitting.

Excuse me while I wipe the drool off the keyboard.

Musings.

I just spent fifteen minutes trying to do a screen capture of Vigo Mortensen in a Dale of Norway jacket. I don't know if it's some anti-piracy BS or my own ineptitude, but I can't get the damn thing to paste to Paint properly. At any rate, the image can be found in "The Passing of an Age" on disc four of the director's cut of Return of the King. It's in with all the discussion of the different world wide premieres of the movie; the one he wore the sweater for was the Oslo premiere, of course.

Stupid programmers.

Anyway.

I'm thinking anything remotely Scandinavian for a Strikke-Along in the fall. "Norse Strikkedesign" is of course the obvious go-to place for patterns. "Poetry in Stitches" is also nice. "Traditional Scandinavian Knitting" by Sheila McGregor contains enough information to design your own norgi. "Knitting in the Nordic Tradition" by Vibke Lind is also great, if you can find it (I think it's out of print, but I first saw it in a library, so you never know). "Two-Ended Knitting" by Anne-Maj Ling contains all the info you need to knit a two-ended sweater, a technique that might be Swedish, but I'm sure it's Scandinavian of some kind.

"Knitting in the Old Way" by Gibson-Roberts and Robson contains the information you need to knit any traditional sweater, from anywhere, to any gauge, with any yarn, if you are so inclined. It uses the EPS (Elizabeth's Percentage System, developed by Elizabeth Zimmerman, which we are using on the steeked jackets), and breaks it down into, I think, fourteen different styles (eighteen?) including yoked sweaters, raglans, drop-shoulders, and five or six other sleeve/shoulder treatments. This book, and the EPS in general, is my starting place for any design I develop myself. So if you're of a mind to make your own norgi, it's for you.

We'll start it up sometime in September or October and give us all a long time to find a book, find a pattern, budget in the yarn, and otherwise pull ourselves together.

How's that for a whole post with no real details in it? Hah.

Just had another go at screen-capturing Vigo. No joy. But I'm sure that's a Dale sweater - the tag is on the sleeve.

Dude, this is MESSED. UP.

I lost my head a little.

The Cat Bordhi book was just sitting there, with the yarn and the Denise set, and when I finished the Steeked Jacket body it was kind of crying out, and, well...

That's a moebius band (with three twists) in the middle of an applied I-cord bindoff. I meant to take photos of the cast-on and the knitting process, but I was too busy going "Dude. This is just so messed up." The cast-on is related to the figure-eight seamless cast-on for toe-up socks, if you've ever done that. You coil the circular needle around twice and knit from the center of the band, outward toward the edges:

The cast-on was where the stockinette an the reverse-stockinette bits meet. (Apparently I was supposed to knit and purl alternately on the rounds, and I just knit. Too busy going "Dude..." to read the directions.)

The husbeast took a look at it and asked 'When was the last time you knit a plain old square?' and I've been thinking about it, and, honestly, I can't remember.

Here's what I've got as of today:

Next, I pick up around the outside edge, keeping the three folds intact, and knit a bowl. The one in the book is VERY cool, I'm hoping this prototype will lead to some neat-looking yarn-user-uppers that I can unload as gifts next Christmas. (It's never too soon to think about Christmas.)

The Baby has begun a career in modern art.

She calls this installation "Alone" and explained to me it is supposed to echo with the primal one-ness of the juice cup, all alone in the midst of the shoes. I'm thinking maybe she needs more time with her Play-Doh. (If only she'd quit eating it.)



I am brooding over the Strikke-along idea and I think we should allow anything remotely Scandinavian (Dale of Norway, anyone? Latvian mittens?), not just sweaters from "Norsk Strikkedesign". (Considering this current Ganser is knit with American wool using Scottish steeks and modern hems, I am in no position to sneer about validity of tradition.) We could do it in the fall. I'll brood over it some more and maybe offer up a suggested reading list one of these days soon.

Bugs.

We've had bugs of all kinds around here at House O' Samurai. The Baby's at that stage of life where she catches every germ imaginable while her immune system figures out what to do with them. Half the time I catch them from her, and her runny nose and sniffle turns into a full-on chest cold for me - you know how it goes.

Computer bugs and sleeping off germ bugs have thus far kept me from posting the baby video over on You Tube, but I'll get to it soon, I swear.

Then there are the knitting bugs:

I had hoped to have the body of the steeked jacket done today, but I discovered a HUGE mistake in the pattern (committed while knitting and reading again - you'd think I would learn) and ripped back two rows and put it all back on the needles. I've got four rows to go and it's done - maybe tonight during Mythbusters.

I was also plotting how to do some crazy Cat Bordhi felted moebius-cast-on bowl thingie (it's all about felted containers at the moment), and had picked the yarn out of the odd balls in the stash: two balls of llama yarn leftover from the watery llama scarf, and one ball of purple/pink left over from the chainmail sweater (from "Knitter's Almanac" by EZ) that I knit in, uh, like 1999 or something.

And I realized, as usual, I was arranging it so that everything I worked on was the same color. Again. Bugger that. So I'm hitting my fallback plan.


I think it's about time "Innsvinget Ganser" had a second sleeve, don't you?

EDITED TO ADD: "Innsvinget Ganser", aka Princess-line Gansey, is from the book "Norsk Strikkedesign" from Unicorn Books, page 50. I've considered, for 2008, declaring it the year of this book and knitting my way from cover to cover, since I want 90% of the sweaters shown in the book. If anyone else has a copy or is interested, perhaps we could do a single-sweater "Strikke-along" one of these days and we could all knit something, knitters choice. Maybe in the fall?

Scheduled Outrage.

When Blogger went down (still is, according to bloglines, the fuckers) I was in the middle of posting this. So here you go.

Sorry about the blur; not my camera.


And I've been flipping through Cat Bordhi's second Magical Knitting treasury, plotting what to knit with odd balls of yarn and my Denise needle set. Priority one is a cat bed. Not that it'll stop the beast from sleeping on top of me.

Some photos.

The in-laws came through last night, stayed over, and have gone on this morning. On their way through, they dropped off the scarf photos and picked up the martini shaker for possible return. (Yes- my in-laws gave me yarn and a martini shaker for Christmas. Are they great gift-givers, or what?) Among other things, we got video of The Baby. Now I'm trying to figure out how to post it to You-Tube and host it here. Or something.

Anyway.

Everyone else posting 'Where I Knit' photos seems to have included somewhere in front of the TV, and I do knit there too, so here are two more 'where I knit' photos for your pleasure: my spot on the couch, and the view from the couch.



Looking at these photos, I am reminded that The Baby has more toys than she'll play with in three lifetimes. Do any of my Charleston readers (I know I've got two or three) know of a local women's shelter? Otherwise I'll just pick one out of the phone book for a toy and baby gear drop-off.

Thanks again, everyone participating in the 'Where I Knit' deal. If you've posted a photo and I haven't left a comment, that means I haven't seen it. Drop me a link or an e-mail so I can check it out.

And finally, a photo of 'the aunties'. These are my mother-in-law's sisters (and my mother-in-law) wearing the scarves I knit for them. Apparently they were all impressed that I had somehow discovered their favorite colors.

All I did was pay attention to how they dressed and match colors to personalities. Hah. (Most people dress in a family of colors. If you pay attention and get in the groove, gift-giving is easy. Also, pick out the flamboyant personalities and knit them bright purple scarves.)

Now I'm gonna go slug back caffeine and try to figure out You-Tube.

Oh. And wrestle The Baby.

Two odd balls used up.

Brown Sheep Nature Spun sport, about a half ball each of "Antique Turquoise" and "Ash". Both were leftovers from the Starry Night Ruana Thingie. I used both strands at once, on size 10/6mm needles. At first I didn't like the fabric, but now it kind of reminds me of cloud patterns on Asian textiles. The pattern is supposed to be an aluminum can cozy from the 2007 knit pattern a day calendar, but I put a lip around the top, and it didn't felt right so it's too big, and... hell, it's a felted container. Maybe I'll try felting it again one of these days. It's too flimsy to really use right now, even to hold pencils or whatever.

In the mean time, I've got a bowl pattern and a whole pile of leftover lopi from the first steeked jacket. Hmmm.

The in-laws are due in any minute now for an overnight on their way from one spot to another; my father-in-law has video capability on his digital camera and we have high hopes of getting some video of The Baby dancing. Brace yourselves.

And how is everyone doing with their steeked jackets? Any troubles? E-mail me and let me know.

Hey, readers!

This means you!

I try to keep up with everyone reading my blog, and if I can track you back to YOUR blog, I put you in my bloglines list and read you. It's, like, community, dude. But I can't build a community if y'all lurk. Especially in the case of this "Where I Knit" deal, I WANT to see the photos, so make sure I know where they are, huh? Drop me a line!

And FYI, consider putting your e-mail addy in your profile. Odds are good I'll e-mail back if I have anything to say, and can track you down. (I always leave my e-mail on blogs, and you'd be AMAZED at who I hear back from. Many published authors I'd think have no time for lil' old me. But they answer.) The e-mail never shows in the blog comments, just on your profile, which I can track to from the comments. I've gotten a couple really cool penpals this way; you could be next. IF I KNEW WHAT YOUR E-MAIL ADDY WAS.

I've never gotten spammed for having my e-mail in my profile, or even on my blog, right there at the bottom of the page. No, I don't have any special spam filters on my computer.

And if you don't have a profile or a blog, e-mail me and say hello. I'm not gonna get mad. Honest. Several readers here have done so, and I've been downright pleasant. (Okay, so I teased Bells a little bit about her math skills. But in a nice way. Really.)

So. Contacts, people, contacts.

This concludes my drugged ramblings for today. Thank you, and good night. Pass the damn painkillers.

Where I knit.

This isn't quite a meme sort of thing, but I'd LOVE it if all my readers and every one else on the 'net who knits would do this: snap a photo of where you do most of your knitting, and post it. Here's mine. It's a corner of my office.

I also snapped a photo of one of The Baby's toys (box of Legos) in relation to my little space, so you can get an idea of both of us kicked back in my office with our respective toys.

I keep meaning to put up a cork board over the table, so I can hang up swatches of things in progress and photos and state fair ribbons and other knitting-related stuff.

Your turn. Where do you knit?






And while I'm posting photos, does anyone else's cat mash their face like this while they're sleeping?

For Bells.

And anyone else trying to learn stranded color. Here's how I carry the yarn:

Ignore the damned cat cluttering up the photo.

As you can see, I run the yarns between my fingers. I use whichever one I need at the time (with thumb and index finger) and simply drop the other one, running it along the back when not in use. By keeping the yarns in the same order (always dark on top, regardless of project, just because it's easy to remember that way), I avoid twisting them and keep the knitting uniform. There's even room for a third color between ring and pinkie fingers, but after that it gets tricky.

I suspect that even if you knit some way other than Continental, you could use a variation of this method. Using one yarn in each hand seems kind of nuts to me.

But ultimately, if it doesn't unravel, you're doing it right. Whatever works.

I'm gonna do it.

With a few rule adjustments. I'm not going to quit buying yarn, because for starters I've got to get that Esty shop up and running, and I think buying yarn for resale should be exempt anyway.

However, I've got FIVE sweaters' worth of yarn in that closet now, thanks to Netter's wonderful contribution. So I'm going to knit that up before looking around for other projects to work on. Which should take me on through to spring, at least. I've gotta get moving - I think Netter's yarn is going to turn into my very first pattern submission for Knitty.

After that, buying yarn for projects listed in the 'Year of Me' goal list is okay, and sock yarn, but NOTHING ELSE. For the rest of the year, not just until September. And during the year I'm going to actively seek out ways to use up everything I've got piled up in there; felted containers and a oddball rug for my kitchen are at the top of my list.

If, through some miracle, I use up all the odd balls in the closet (figure the odds), I will still stick to only buying yarn for 'Year of Me' projects. Heaven knows there are enough of them.

Ideally, I will work on one 'Year of Me' project and one 'use up oddballs' project at the same time; those will be my two ongoings. I'm doing that right now, coincidentally, since the crochet cotton for the Bubble Curtain came out of the infamous box.

Using up the box of crochet cotton is not a priority for this or any other year. It'll take me more than 365 days to knit up nine miles of the stuff. But I will use contents from The Box to make this year's state fair entry.

Of course, this just means I'll spend my yarn budget on knitting books.

A quick note.

Here at House O' Samurai we're having a spot of trouble involving routers, wireless networks, babies pulling out USB plugs, and the like. If I happen to go incommunicado for a day or two and don't answer e-mail or comments or whatever, don't worry. Likely our biggest problem is the cat accidentally knocking out a power cord. (AGAIN.) Just so ya know. There was a moment tonight when it looked like we weren't going to have internet connection for a week, and the husbeast and I both broke out in a cold sweat.

The Baby, of course, said, "Good, you can play with me all day!"

Martinis, et. al.

All right, here's my mango-tini recipe, but it's seriously half-assed and not what you would call a Good Quality Drink. It's like the Diet Pepsi of martinis. The husbeast and I are notorious for mixing up drinks out of whatever we've got laying around the house. (And if it's got vodka in it, I shake it with ice, pour it in a martini glass, and pretend I'm a Bond Girl.) Sometimes we turn out something good. Occasionally I write it down. I should dig out the recipe for new year's eve punch we came up with about ten years ago... it's barely legible, since I'd had a couple before one of us said "Hey, maybe we should write this down."

Uh, anyway. Mangotinis. Ideally they are made with pure mango juice. Yeah.

SAMURAI MANGOTINI:
-Two parts Snapple "Mango Madness". (You could make a real drink with real mango juice.)
-One part Grand Mariner and vodka, about half and half.
-Shake over ice.
-Pour into a martini glass, sip, and try to look sophisticated while picking graham-cracker-baby-spit paste off your oldest tee shirt.

As for my poor, already lamented martini shaker, at least I've still got the glasses that came with it (yes, a photo of drink glasses - nothing but wholesome fun here at Samurai Knitter):

The new glass is on the right. My old ones, example on the left, have stems of a lovely cobalt blue (doesn't show too well in the photo), but over the years I'd had complaints about how the twisty stem made them hard to manage after a few refills. And so, the new ones; the stem/base is solid, heavy glass, and sort of sit themselves down with no twisting or figuring out just where the stem is in relation to the bowl and base.

Still pissed about the shaker, though.



So, knitting. I am doing some.

The other night I noticed this interesting variation on my steeked jacket:

There were no martinis involved in the making of this mistake; it was READING (J D Robb, if you must know) that caused this lovely little, uh, fuckup. If this happens to you, just duplicate stitch over the mistakes with the proper color. If you miss an entire row, well, there's nothing for it but to tear back down and add the row. (Or you could cut it apart and graft in the row, though in two colors, grafting is a real pain in the ass. But it is physically possible.)

For all steekers (not just the ones currently knitting on steeked jackets), join your yarn in the center of the steek. Knit the center stitch with both the old and new yarn, and then keep going. If you're doing a checkerboard steek and the center stitch is supposed to be the opposite color, knit the center stitch with all three yarns - proper color, and old and new joins. Then keep on going. Later, when the steek is stabilized and cut, you'll stabilize those ends along with the rest and won't have to worry about darning them in. It's a nice shortcut. (It works with sleeve/armhole steeks too, but we won't be doing those.)

If you're using lopi, you can always do a spit-splice instead, anywhere in the garment. (That's what I'm doing.) This method's great because you knit up every last damn inch of your yarn. But it only works on loosely spun icelandic wool. (The big drawback.)

I've got a couple pay checks coming in soon for some writing, and will be buying a heap (a positive HEAP, I tell you) of undyed wool, heavy on the sock yarn, to dye and post on Esty. The husbeast is supportive, with only minimal muttering about vinegar smell in the house (he hates vinegar, and it can reek if you keep the crock-pot going all day). I've gotta be stocked by March 1, because I just sent an article to Knitty that mentions I have an Esty shop. The article will come out at the beginning of March. It would be good to have a shop by then. Haha.

So. What color socks do you like to wear, my little target audience?

My friends find the best stuff.

Monty Python with legos.

Well, that's done.

The last of the articles (twice as long as requested, with about 10MB worth of photos attatched) are winging their electronic way to Canada, and I am back to having no deadlines and being able to knit whatever I want. Whee!

These are the current projects:

On the left, the steeked jacket (you can see I'm not much further than anyone else), and on the right, the very beginnings of the lace curtain. I'm not pushing on the lace, it's just there as something to knit on when the heavy stuff makes my hands hurt and I still feel like knitting. It'll be lucky to get done by summer.

I am attempting to exhibit some kind of project monogamy, so I'm not starting anything else major until the steeked jacket is done. It has suddenly clicked in my brain that the next sweater after this is the Geometric Star, so I'm knitting like a fiend. (Inspiration is where you find it.) Plus the weather's been chilly (hah - below 70, barely) and it'd be nice to have the jacket to wear.


Otherwise, yesterday sucked. As evidenced by this lovely photo:

That's my brand-new martini shaker. See the big, jagged gaping hole in the side of it? On it's SECOND DAMN USE, it shattered. Fortunately I'd had a towel wrapped around it, or the glass would have wound up in my hand. As it was, it destroyed a mangotini that had to be poured down the drain. I just got the thing for Christmas, and it's toast. This really pisses me off. And it's not like I was using it to hammer nails, for crying out loud. I was making a martini in a martini shaker, and it BROKE. What the fuck is up with that??!!??

At least I still have the cool glasses I got to go with it. I went back to mixing my martinis in tupperwear. No style. It's the year of Bond (007, get it?) and I'm shaking martinis in a plastic container. No style whatsoever. Yes, this really pissed me off.

Anyway. The baby is asleep, the cat is asleep, I don't have any more looming deadlines... I think I'm gonna go knit something. Cheers!

Whew.

All articles are either finished or at least have their first draft done and await fine-tuning tomorrow. Plus I've got the steek-along under control (uh, I do, don't I, guys? You'd let me know if you were struggling, right?), so that's cool. All there is left to do is... well, knit.

FOR ME!! MEMEMEME!!

Ahem.


Tonight while I was hunched over my computer, writing (conveniently my network connection that hooks me to the internet was crapped out all afternoon, forcing me to actually work instead of hanging about reading blogs and e-mailing people), I tried to shoo everyone out of my office. So what do they do when told to leave?

Plop down in the hallway, directly on the other side of the baby gate in my office door, and tickle and giggle. Any mom yelling at giggling children is officially the antiChrist, so I had to suck it up and deal. (Because, you know, it's so depressing to listening to a giggling, squealing baby.)

The Baby has decided that speaking is for people who can't express themselves properly. Last night at 1:30 she woke up, fussing. As I was walking her to calm her down, the husbeast stopped me and we had one of those classic "WTF??" discussions parents have: "Do you think she's teething?" "No... Fever maybe?" "I don't think so...Diaper?" and in the middle of our systems check, The Baby swatted her father on the chest and pointed imperiously to the kitchen. She wanted a bottle, damn it!

...so we gave her the damn bottle, changed her, and she went right back to sleep for another six hours.

I'm raising a diva.

All but one.

I've completed two of the articles due (with a day to spare), and all that is left is the Knitty article on dyeing yarn for beginners:

Anybody got any ideas for a title? All I'm coming up with are puns from James Bond movie titles; "Dye Another Day", etc. Or the descriptive but lameass 'beginner's guide to handpainting your own yarn'.

Anyway, the article's due the 5th and I hope to have the bulk of it written today and then let it stew in the back of my mind for 24 hours, do corrections tomorrow, and fire it off.

Then I will have nothing left to do but knit. And chase the baby around the house.

I took this photo yesterday, to give everyone an idea what it's like when I sit down on the couch to knit. Instant lay-on-mumum lovefest from every critter in the house (except the husbeast, who would also be there except he has a job).


Never a dull moment around here.

Baby photo by request.

For your amusement.

I couldn't leave all that technical mumbo up as my last post... just couldn't.

While I was taking photos yesterday, I stepped into the Yarn Closet and snapped a few. After, I looked at them and decided I need to knit up some of this unholy mess this year. (Well, first I need to clean it up and get organized.)

I've got some ideas on projects to use up yarn. But in the mean time:

Steek along: Casting on, hem, and body.

Remember your pattern chart? How there were black squares and white squares in it? From here on out I'm going to refer to 'dark' and 'light' colors. The dark color is whatever you used to knit the black squares on your chart. The light colors are, duh, whatever you used to knit the white squares.


HEM:
Using whatever provisional (or otherwise removeable) cast-on you like, and the light color, USE A NEEDLE TWO SIZES SMALLER THAN WHAT YOU KNIT THE GAUGE SWATCH WITH, and cast on your stitches. Knit BACK AND FORTH, in stockinette, for about 1 3/4 inches, or about 4 cm. The shorter your hem, the higher the odds that it will flip up and look dorky when you wear the sweater. But you don't need a hem up to your arm pits.

Here's mine. Lavender cotton yarn for the cast-on (it was laying around), and pink for the hem. I put in my initials and the year because I always do that when I knit hems. You don't have to. Or you can write anything you want, or put in flowers, or whatever. Since the hem will be folded up and stitched down later, I don't worry about ends; as I go back and forth, I let the dark color dangle until I need it, pick it up and use it, then drop it again. Not the most perfect of techniques, but it works for a couple letters on a hem. Here's the back so you can see what I did:


End your hem on a wrong-side (purl) row. Using the dark color, STILL WORKING FLAT, knit the next three rows. This will give you a purl row that will function as a fold like when you sew down the hem.

JOINING TO KNIT IN THE ROUND:
At this point, make sure your hem is straight and untwisted on the needle. INSTEAD OF TURNING, cast on your steek stitches (if you are using a crochet steek, I suggest five stitches with the backward-loop method), then immediately begin your stranded color pattern. AFTER THE FIRST ROW OF STRANDED COLOR, CHANGE TO YOUR REGULAR NEEDLE. The one you used to knit the gauge swatch with. You will wind up with something that should look like this:


I suggest using stitch markers to mark out the steek and any underarm 'extra' stitches, at least until you've got enough pattern done that you can see what you're doing. I left mine in permanently because I was reading while knitting and stitch markers simplify that.

Knit the rest of the way up the body to the arm pits, ending on the last row of the chart (knit the last row and stop at the steek in the front center).

I'll wait on you guys to decide when I need to post the next steps; let me know when you're at the arm pits, and when I know a couple of you are, I'll start you on the sleeves next.

As always, e-mail me with any questions.

Steek along: Figuring 100% and centering pattern motifs.

It's that time, gang. Time to figure out how many stitches to cast on. I've broken this down into two parts: The easy part everyone has to do, and the more troublesome (I'm not going to say hard - it's basic plus-and-minus math, it's just a pain in the ass) part. If anyone needs any help, they are free to e-mail me; if they need help with the easy part, I may tease a little bit, but I'll still help.

If you're checking in from Metric Land, read 'centimeters' wherever I say inches and you should be okay. Again, e-mail me with questions.

EASY PART:
All right, you need to measure your gauge swatch, twice: You need to know what the stitches per inch/cm figure is, and you need to know how big the motif is. If you want help on exactly how to do that, hit "Knitting gauge for math geeks" on my sidebar for basic gauge, and "Gauge part two" for how to measure the motif. You also need to know how big around you want the body of your sweater - for that I suggest measuring something similar that you like the fit of. I measured an oversized shirt I wear as a jacket.

Next, get your stitches per inch figure (we'll say five stitches per inch) and your measurement for how big you want the body of your sweater (we'll say thirty-six inches, though if you really wear a 36 inch jacket you're skinny and I hate you because I'm dieting again). Multiply your stitches per inch times the body measurement in inches (or cm per inch and the body in cm) to get your tentative body figure:

5 sts per inch x 36 inches = 180 stitches.

Again, this is tentative until we figure out how many stitch patterns will fit into it. To do that, divide your final stitch count - in this case 180 - by how many stitches are in the motif - 18.

180 divided by 18 = 10

You're in luck. You've got ten motif repeats fitting in very neatly, and YOU NEED AN EVEN NUMBER OF REPEATS, so you can go with this number. DON'T FORGET THE +1 PART. Remember? The pattern repeat is 18 stitches plus one? So add in your one.

And you would cast on 181 stitches.

Write down the 181 figure somewhere you won't lose it (I keep all information like this on the paper I printed out the chart on), because you'll need it later. It is officially the 100% figure, or the Key Number if you've read Elizabeth Zimmerman.

If you're only off by a few stitches - you need to add or subtract less than a half-inch's/1 cm worth of stitches to make the motif fit into the figure you came up with, do it. It's knitting; it stretches. Not to mention, it's a jacket, so a half inch of fit isn't going to be very noticeable. Ah, but what if you're totally off and nothing will fit?

THE HARD PART:
This is for anyone whose motif repeats will not fit neatly into their body measurement number. Like me.

I wanted a jacket 46 inches around. My gauge swatch was knit at 4.9 stitches per inch.

46 x 4.9 = 225 So I needed my jacket to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 225 stitches around. And remember, we need AN EVEN NUMBER OF REPEATS.

12 pattern repeats at 18 stitches = 216 Not big enough; it would be off by two inches, which was way too much to fudge.

14 pattern repeats at 18 stitches = 252 Way too big, like 51 inches around, again too much to fudge.

So I needed 12 pattern repeats plus some extra stitches. I drew a map.



The black line is a bird's eye view of the jacket body, with the opening of the cardigan at the bottom center. The figures in red are pattern repeats. I decided on twelve pattern repeats, which is three for each front, and six for the back. I wrote them in. Those are the red numbers inside the jacket.

Then I figured how many stitches each GROUP of motifs was. WITH EACH GROUP YOU HAVE TO ADD THE +1 STITCH. So for three pattern repeats, it was (3x18)+1=55 stitches. I wrote that on the outside of the jacket map - those are the purple numbers. 55 on each front, and then 109 on the back (six pattern repeats + 1 is 109).

Adding those up, I got 219 stitches. Close, but not close enough. I decided to add four stitches at each arm pit, between the front and back motifs, to make up the rest of the needed stitches. Those are the blue numbers on the jacket map.

55 + 4 + 109 + 4 + 55 = 227.

My original stitch figure was 225. I decided to keep the two extra stitches for luck. I worked them as stripes. You can also work checkers, flowers, zig-zags, or anything else you can think of that fits into the number of stitches you add. (I wanted to show you a photo of the stripes here but BLOGGER SUCKS.)

So that was my 100% figure: 227. I've got "100% = 227" written on my chart, and circled.

**100% IS THE ACTUAL NUMBER OF STITCHES YOU CAST ON, NOT ANY EARLIER ESTIMATE.**

Feel free to e-mail me for help on this, but I will need stitches per inch or cm, measurement of the motif, and how big you want your jacket body to help you out.

On to the hem!

Year of me! Year of me! Woot woot woot!

I know I started on the Year of Me early, as soon as the Christmas knitting was done, but with the dawn of today, I feel that I'm really DOING it now. First thing I'm going to do is start a second project, most likely the 'bubbly curtain' from Mason*Dixon Knitting. I've been in project monogamy with the steeked jacket for a week now, and am forcibly reminded that lopi and I have a few problems with each other; my fingers keep going numb. I need another project to shift to when things get rough with the jacket. Lace knitting would do it; it's nice and light. I will be using crochet cotton out of The Box to make the curtain, and it will be going in my kitchen window, which faces east. On mornings when I wake up with a migraine, like today, the sun in my eyes nearly kills me when I stagger out to get some tea and Excedrin.

That was a lovely stream of consciousness, wasn't it?

Incidentally, anyone wanting to do a Year of Me is welcome to swipe the button on the sidebar and link it to their own goal list.

I've got big dents made in two of the three articles due and hope to send them off late today or tomorrow; the Knitty article is all done but the writing (yarn dyeing and photography is harder than blathering about it later). So here I am on the internet again.

Upcoming posts will include a tutorial on how to add length to a finished sweater (the husbeast gansey being the victim - he's made pitiful requests that it be finished by tomorrow so he can wear it to work), and how to do the math and cast-on and hem for the steeked jacket.

But first I've gotta finish these damn articles. Why don't I go do that?

One of my few resolutions for the year was to cut back on junk food. (That and exercise, and get back to work on a novel.) I'm eating french fries. That resolution made it, uh, twelve whole hours.