Easing into the holidays

First of all, thanks to everyone who voted for my mittens! I didn't think my design was so awesome, but you all seem to. Makes me happy. :) I don't know what exactly I've won yet, but there were hints of fiber, fiber tools, and pattern distribution. We'll just have to wait and see together. In the meantime, a few friends are test-knitting the pattern in delicious Malabrigo Chunky, and one of them is finished (Rav link). The color on these is amazing! Apparently, the shop attendant was very helpful in this regard. He said something along these lines: If you pick the red, whoever gets these mittens will say "Wow, you made me mittens!" But if you pick the yellow, whoever gets these mittens will say "Wow, you made me YELLOW mittens!"

I love them either way... one task for this week is to add the pattern into Ravelry. I have the entire week off work for the Thanksgiving holidays, so it's also the perfect time to plan more gift knitting. I think this year is going to be 180 degrees from last year: nearly everyone is going to get a fiber-related gift, if only because finances are tighter this year. I don't think most folks will mind, though. I have some pretty awesome projects lined up. And it's not going to be the stress-fest it could be, because I already have a bunch of items saved up.

Also, the new Twist Collective is up, and they have a few mitten and hat patterns I am very excited about. My plan is to sit down this afternoon, make some potato soup with leeks and carrots, and read through the whole issue.

Those socks I started two weekends ago have been going through some revisions in size. Turns out if you ignore gauge on a sock for four days and just knit straight through, you run a very big risk of getting a sock that's way too big. Oh well. This yarn is lovely, and goes very well with the pattern. Then again, I've knit the jaywalker pattern three times before and I think it's perfect for any variegated yarn.



The one in back is the nearly-finished-but-too-large sock, and the one in front is the correct size. I just haven't had the heart to frog the old one yet. Check out the color of the yarn, though!



Isn't that just awesome? Like a chocolate cherry cheesecake.

I've been fairly good about being project monogamous for the past few weeks, but something arrived in the mail yesterday that may break my streak. It's okay though, because this is a project in the works for at least a year. A teaser:



I think this will keep me busy at least until the New Year.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

I am so scatterbrained right now, I am going to do something I normally do not do: blog in list format.

1. We attended the wedding of some very near and dear friends this weekend. We stayed here. The food was amazing, the weather gorgeous, the lung capacity severely diminished due to tight-fitting bridesmaids dress and altitude. It was gorgeous, woodsy, and a heckuva lot of fun.

2. I might be going through a career transition. If I seem reluctant and/or absent-minded when speaking about my job, know that I am trying to work through some things about what I really want to be when I grow up and how to best accomplish that while still providing for my personal needs.

3. My mittens are up for voting, and the pattern has been proofread and proofknit. I am going to decide how to distribute the pattern after the contest is over. If you think the design from four posts down was nice and have access to the Ravelries, feel free to go here and cast your vote by tomorrow. For the record, here's another shot of the mittens to which I am referring.



4. I started a pair of jaywalker socks on the airplane. There will be photos forthcoming, but they are being knit out of this handspun:



5. I am excited about holiday knitting this year. I may have already begun a box full of items for gifting. I may have purchased this for the plane ride home. This is very strange to me, given my feelings on gift knitting last year. More on that later.

6. I totally thought I had more than 5 things to tell you all. Huh.

Weekend fun times!

I had some pretty good knitting time over the last week. On Friday I finished the knitting for a pair of insanely cute slippers:



I know they don't look like slippers right now, but once they're sewn up and felted they'll hopefully look a little bit like this. The knitting goes super-fast on huge needles, and it's perfect if you have lots of worsted-weight yarn leftovers. These are so cute, I'm making more than one pair. But I can't justify having three pairs of felted slippers... helloooo, more gift knitting!



My knitting group and I all cast on for these together last week, and this week we're going to sew them up. But last weekend I finished Damson earlier than I thought I would. I was able to wear my cute new shawl on Sunday morning, but I'd expected that the project would last me until at least the day before our knit night. So in the meantime, I pulled out an old, sleepy, cobwebby (not really) project:





I think I've given up on the spreadsheet, the one I made about 1/3 of the way through the project as a way to keep track of how to maximize the number of miters I could eke out of each skein of yarn. It's getting down to the wire... at one point I optimistically thought I would make a 6x6 blanket (36 squares with 4 miters to each square), but now I'm thinking I may only get 5x6. If so, then I've done 75% of the knitting.

Oh, and we carved pumpkins on Saturday:



We carved two pumpkins, and saved one for eating. I've never cooked a pumpkin before (except for baking the seeds), so this will be an adventure!

Market Day

Sometimes you just need a nice accessory to wear to the farmer's market.



A little something to keep the chill off your shoulders while picking out produce,



and in a lovely green color that reminds you of winter squash and carrot tops and flower stems



I was amazed when I looked back at my notes on Ravelry and realized that this shawl only took me about 8 days to knit. The yarn is Dream in Color Smooshy, in the Happy Forest colorway. Also, I came really close to not having enough yarn, I was sweating a little while doing the bind-off row. The sock yarn blocks very nicely, and I love the contrast in texture between the garter and stockinette portions of the shawl. Anyway, Damson and I had a great time this morning. I got up early, trying to get to the market within an hour of opening time, knowing I'd be rewarded by $5 bouquets of dahlias. I snagged one several weeks ago but haven't seen them since, probably because they are A) gorgeous B) a steal and C) the significant other and I are rarely out and about before 11AM on a Sunday morning. My plan worked:





I also succumbed to the color on this guy:



It now feels like fall in our apartment.

Another FO to share

It's starting to feel like fall, and we got our first real rainfall of the year two days ago. Now everything is kind of gently steaming and humid, so it doesn't really feel autumnal, but I can pretend:



Another handspun hand-warming device, these are Eunny Jang's Endpaper Mitts, done in two colors of handspun Verb for Keeping Warm fiber. One is the green half of the Hollyhocks falklands, and the other is left over grey finn from these mittens I knit almost a year ago. I was very pleased to ultimately have used up all but a few yards of the grey, so much so that I might combine the pinks from both club shipments and do a second pair for spring. Here's a better shot of the color:



I really enjoy how the green fades in and out of being intensely vibrant, and the handspun is surprisingly dense. I've heard other knitters comment on how this is a good introduction to fair isle knitting, and I have to agree. I'd recommend this project to anyone who wants to try two-color knitting but has felt intimidated. It's a lovely return on a relatively small effort.

In the back of my head, I keep wondering how it is that I'm knitting all these little projects so quickly. I'm daydreaming about another sweater (especially with the frogged remains I recently acquired), but I will most likely wait until the temperatures drop a little more.

A Journey

That's what this has been.



So, right before Sock Summit my favorite enabler and fiber guru Kristine announced a contest on Ravelry. The challenge was to enter a mitten (or, later, a fingerless mitten) knit out of Verb yarn (at least 50%). This could either be a published pattern, or you could make up your own pattern.

I needed a challenge during the second part of summer before the semester began, so I jumped into the deep end of the pool without so much as a backwards glance. I was SO sure I knew EXACTLY what I would do! Two-color mittens, handspun fingering-weight yarn, reminiscent of an arts and crafts tile. It would be a small, practical piece of art.

First came several 8-hour days wasted on internet image research. Picture after picture after picture, flower after leaf after tree all flashed before me. Finally, I found something I loved, and that (seemingly) matched the color palette I had in mind: either Hollyhocks (scroll down a bit) or Lilies. Images bookmarked, it seemed a simple next step in my mind to transcribe the colors onto a multicolor mitten chart. When I sat down to actually do this, I realized that I wouldn't really be able to pull off the kind of design I had set my heart on with only two colors. Dark brown or black outlines and multiple shades of pink and green meant that, at best, I would be knitting five-color mittens, not two-color. Frustrating me further was the insistence of the pattern to use more than two colors on any one round.

The design languished, August ran away, and the end of September crept closer. The deadline for knitting the mittens is November 1, so I needed to get the design down on paper if I wanted to leave myself enough time to knit the darn things. After three weeks of not even looking at my mitten charts, I decided to chuck the whole idea and start fresh. In the meantime, I spun up my Hollyhocks fiber (Falklands wool):



And some corriedale in the colorway The Candle's Nimble Flame:



I didn't really have any intention of using the corriedale for the mittens. In my head, I was starting to doubt that it had been a good idea to sign myself up for yet another commitment at this time of the year. So I brought the handspun to my knitting circle, and we all talked about it.





I asked about what people liked in a mitten. Did they prefer a thumb that protrudes from inside the palm, or on the side? With or without a thumb gusset? And there, surrounded by like-minded fibery friends, the idea hit me. I needed a mitten I could knit pretty fast if I wanted (because at this rate, I'd probably have about 48 hours to do the actual knitting after figuring out the pattern). I had some chunky yarn spun so it would make subtle stripes, in a colorway with little variation in contrast and saturation. Cables would pop, but they also couldn't be too complex or they'd get lost in the color. On top of all this, I was keen to make my design something that I perceived as unique. I'd seen lots of cabled mittens where there's an awesome intricate pattern going up the back of the hand, leaving the palm smooth. I said: what about cables on the side?

That sounded interesting to enough people, and after a few really really bad ideas about mitten construction (hint: there is such a thing as too unique), I settled on a basic game plan. I'd knit one mitten and make it up as I went along, keeping notes. The first test of the pattern would occur while I knit the second mitten, using the notes as a guide and trying very sincerely to not just make the second one up as I went along too. Here's what that looked like:



It was EXCRUCIATING to knit so slowly! So tough to stop myself every few rounds and update the notes. You can't hold a pen and keep your yarn tensioned at the same time, did you know that? Well, at least I can't. And when knitting the second mitten, I went into a mini panic every time something didn't come out the way it should. This time, I couldn't just knit 2 together and forget about the extra stitch that popped up out of nowhere. I knew in the back of my head that I wanted to write up the pattern, and other people who knit these mittens would obsess over that extra stitch. Incidentally, I also learned how to correctly count rows/rounds. I still had plans for the Hollyhocks yarn, but it went on the back burner.

And now they're done. After getting washed, it took me another two weeks to get out on a sunny day for a photo shoot. This morning I had some fun in the park with my mittens and the timer on my camera. Here they are, my Snow Chains mittens.









It's a good thing I waited a while to take the photos, because I was pretty sick of the design when I first finished knitting the mittens. We needed a break from each other. I am now working on writing up the pattern, but I'm gonna be honest here, because it's my blog and I can. If you hate them, don't tell me. I won't force anyone else to knit them, I promise.

Stash Toss (and some old photos)

After getting through all the post-Tour de Fleece spinning, I realized that my stash had kind of grown in an odd way. I didn't anticipate it, but in retrospect I probably should have seen this coming. The growth necessitated some repotting, splitting what had become one huge plant into several smaller, more organized and easily tendable specimens. But in doing all this gardening-type work, I discovered is that the root structure of my stash is drastically different from what it looked like two years ago, let alone five years ago.

I first started knitting while in college (and thus while perpetually broke). A stash was not a luxury I could afford, and it wasn't until I started making projects that produced leftovers of more than a yard that my stash began. But even so, when I moved out of my college dorm room for the last time, my stash fit into one large wicker basket, along with all my needles and swatches and my drop spindle.

Grad school was a sort of back-and-forth with the stash. I starved it periodically, but thanks to my new teaching assistant income I was able to buy yarn for projects that would not go on the needles immediately. Here's a few pictures summing up my stash as of August '07, at the start of my final semester of grad school:



This is the main stash, and the basket it all lived in (sorry for the blurry picture, this was also my first foray into digital photography). It's still about 85% leftovers, along with these two little stashlets:



The ever-present mitered squares blanket stash. At this stage, I had about half the yarn and maybe a quarter of the squared knit.



And finally, my handspun stash. All four skeins of it, all done on drop spindles. The pink skein was actually also leftovers (I'll never know why I didn't just knit a longer scarf that time).

Having a real (i.e., non-student) income was what finally did it. I had real money to spend, and spend it I certainly did. My stash outgrew the basket, even after I moved all my knitting tools to another part of the apartment. The stash wasn't changing though, not really. It was just budding, sprouting little paper shopping bags with a sweater's worth or a few skeins of sock yarn. But I had begun to buy yarn with no project in mind or even a tentative idea of when I'd get around to knitting it. I managed to snag one of Mrs. B's fabulous Taste of Germany yarn packages. But it was still all yarn, and it mostly ended up in the same little stashlet bags, next to the big basket in the closet. Six months after I took those stash photos, everything changed.



With the arrival of my wheel (and subsequent ability to eat through spinning stash about a kajillion times faster than on my drop spindle), the stash began to evolve. It found a new light source, and started to move its tendril-y bits in the direction of that source. I should have seen it coming, because about a year ago I reorganized the living room so I could have a dedicated spinning corner, surrounded by my books, tools, fiber, and handspun yarn. Last week, I dug everything out for an overhaul and realized that my handspun stash now rivals what I used to think of as the "main" stash, the yarn in the basket. I don't have any pictures because it was a little embarrassing, but you can just about double the stash in the previous photos for the yarn & blanket bags, and then add one basket's worth of handspun as well. I have enough handspun to separate it into categories (dyer, project, leftovers vs. fresh)! I guess this was just another way for the universe to remind me of the law of stash conservation:

Spinning does not use up stash, it merely changes fiber stash into yarn stash.

13 out of my last 15 projects have been of handspun. What I'm curious about is whether I'm thick or if this is normal, the way the stash snuck up on me. Has anyone else (spinners or not) experienced a dramatic shift in their crafting habits, and not noticed until 18 months later? Inquiring minds would love to know.