Interim Photo Op!

First, the Baby Surprise Jacket. It's still waiting for buttons, but it's been seamed. This was knit all in one piece of flat knitting on a long circular needle. It was knit with four colors of Cascade 220 Superwash, alternating on every row. The dark blue band is the bind off edge.



Start folding. The start of the dark blue band comes up to form the top edge of the button band. The actual corner on the flat knitting is the lower corner of the button band. The cast on edge is actually the cuffs, the back half of the tops of the sleeves and the back of the neck.



Fold the other side and it looks like a jacket! The only seams in this little miracle are along the tops of the sleeves.



I did my seams in crochet, using the green. I also did a slip stitch crochet edge around the neckline to neaten the edge, but I used the blue to tie in with the button band.



And voila!



My other big completed project was an Alita blanket. (http://www.yarnover.net/patterns/doilies/kunststrik/alita.html) I knit it on US10's in Cascade 220 held double and it used about six skeins to make a 48" blanket. I stopped on row 99, added three rows of plain knit and then used the crochet bind off. I was out of yarn and couldn't knit the entire 130 rows of the pattern. I think it would have covered a king-sized bed if I tried! This has a lot of stockinette in it so it didn't stretch very far with blocking. I really love this texture with the dark green heathered yarn. This was a very methodical pattern to knit and went quickly.







I have yarn for another two Baby Surprise Jackets and I'm starting another blanket. I just can't get enough of both of these projects!

Falling Leaves are still falling..

I can't believe I last wrote about the Falling Leaves scarf a month ago. The yarn is STILL looped over the corner of my recliner and it hasn't suffered a catastrophe. It almost did the other day when my German Shepherd somehow got her head under the strand going from the chair to the scarf and walked away with an ever-lengthening loop around her neck. She's obedient and came right back when I screamed in terror. I have never been so happy to own point protectors!

There's not much to say about the scarf itself. It's barely long enough to hang around my neck. I added another pattern repeat tonight and promise to faithfully work on it. When I'm not knitting dishcloths, that is. Seriously, I have an addiction to those little squares. Maybe it's because I feel like I'm getting somewhere other than miles of lacy little leaves that look like a wrinkled mess until they're blocked. Actually, they may still look like heck when they're blocked but I won't know until I finish.

Dishcloths on the other hand are nice, well-behaved cotton and they only take a few hours. Squidge-cloths take a little longer because of the knit 4-purl 4 pattern. I made one with a garter stitch border, but the second was a basic pattern repeat. For the first row knit 4, purl 4 all the way across. On the second row, knit the knits and purl the purls. On the third row, switch the pattern for two rows. Repeat until you have a square. I think I used 40 stitches, but it's totally flexible if you want a bigger or smaller cloth. The end result is like basketweave, but only two rows high. I've found it's better with a smaller needle than you'd use for straight garter stitch and works well with solid colored yarn.



My other favorite is an anonymous pattern that seems to be everywhere online. It's so simple! Cast on 4. Knit 4 for the first row. Then, simply knit 2, yarn over and knit to the end of the row on every row until the sides are long enough. It's knit on the bias so you'll be making a triangle with a nice eyelet border all the way around the edges. Once you decide you've made half a dishcloth (45-55-ish stitches on the needle), then you start decreasing. Knit 1, knit 2 together, yarn over, knit two together and then keep knitting to the end of the row. Do this on every row until only four stitches are left on the needle. Bind off and go do some dishes. These things have amazing scrubbing abilities! The garter stitch is smooshy, yet abrasive because of the ridges. It looks beautiful with variegated yarns because the colors change on the diagonal.





Tonight I discovered that I can crochet dish-poufs in about an hour. Talk about instant gratification! I barely have to watch what I'm doing since they're made of chain stitch, single crochet and double crochet and nothing else. One ball of cotton and I have this magical little pouf. I sort of used the pattern from http://hometown.aol.com/lffunt/bath.htm but I didn't have the patience to count stitches in the first ring and I left off the third round entirely. Once I got the gist of it, I started crocheting and stopped when my yarn almost ran out. On a 4mm hook, this is a dense but perfect diameter little wad of cotton.

Sprechen Sie Deutsches?

I have a bunch of things in progress, but no good finished photos yet. My Egeblad blanket has been keeping me warm, but I need to get some good photos in sunlight to really show it off. It's very lightweight and full of lacy holes, but it's SO warm. I can feel it heating up on my legs like something alive.

I have nearly finished my first Baby Surprise Jacket (http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/baby-surprise-jacket on Ravelry) from Elizabeth Zimmerman's "Knitting Workshop". It's a crazy garter stitch jacket that has two seams, one on the top of each arm. It's only missing buttons because I am still hunting for the perfect set.

I'm busily knitting Alita http://www.yarnover.net/patterns/doilies/kunststrik/alita.html in dark green heather Cascade 220.



I am the happy owner of all three volumes of Christine Duchrow's Knitted Lace Patterns. Volume III contains the pattern for Egeblad, although it isn't called that in the book. I originally found the pattern I used on Ravelry and it linked to a free download online. That was a happy accident because her books are all in German. I just spent part of the evening printing German-English knitting vocabulary lists and using Babelfish to translate the pattern from her book. Let's just say Babelfish isn't really designed to translate knitting terminology. The term for scalloped border came out as "the serrated conclusion."

Once I could figure out her instructions, I converted her early 20th century charts into modern symbols. Then I compared my translated chart to the chart for my Egeblad blanket and noted only one error and one change. The modern version had single yarn overs instead of doubles, which is good for a blanket because the holes are smaller.

It was a great learning exercise and it helped to do a translation where I was able to check my work. I'm not used to working from charts and her books are reprints of pamphlets. The pamphlets show a handful of similar doilies that can be knitted from a single chart, or by mixing, matching or omitting parts of charts to make them smaller or larger. Each whole "pamphlet" is maybe five pages with minimal notes and no line-by-line instructions at all. It's good practice for when I try knitting a Niebling pattern, because those are all German and charted too.

Last but not least, I have new yarn! Mom and I went to my first Shepherd's Market yesterday. I was well behaved and managed to get out with one hank of hand-dyed sport weight and some soap. We watched a very educational felting demonstration and I plan to try that sometime soon. I need to be frugal for a little while, but I think I found a good source of colored merino roving samplers for future use.

So this yarn.. it's destined to be another Baby Surprise Jacket. I wanted something unisex and slightly lighter than worsted, with enough colors to be interesting, but not overwhelming. Look how beautiful!

Blood, Sweat and Tears - Blocking Egeblad

I knitted another doily blanket - Egeblad by Christine Duchrow (http://www.yarnover.net/patterns/doilies/kunststrik/egeblad.html). It is a fantastic pattern with a swirling flower in the center and concentric, yet slightly offset, radiating leaves. I knit this one with Beaverslide McTaggart Tweeds in the color "Prairie Sandreed" on US10's.

This was interesting to block, so I decided to document my way of doing it, from start to finish.

Since I fell in love with knitting doily blankets, I wanted a good way to wash them. I went out and shopped in the home storage section of a local store. I found two plastic totes - one clear one and one white one with holes like you'd use to store kid's toys or cleaning supplies. The one with holes fits nicely inside the clear one. I chose clear so I could see if dye was leaching out of yarn as I washed it.

I filled the clear one half-full with tepid water and a squirt of Ivory soap. Then I put my blanket it the white one and submerged it. With a little swishing, I saturated the blanket and left it to soak for a little while. Beaverslide is great yarn, but it has the occasional piece of Montana prairie in it and it still has some lanolin. This yarn wasn't as greasy as the Prairie Aster Fisherman Weight, but it was still sheepy enough to want a good soak.



Next, the white tote lifted right out and let the blanket drain while I refilled the clear tote with fresh tepid water. This is where the totes pay for themselves because wet wool should never be lifted without supporting its weight. I can squeeze the fabric against one side to get excess water out, but mostly gravity does its thing. You also never want to run water directly on wool because that can contribute to felting.



I repeated this until the water was clear and the soap suds were gone. Prairie Aster made the water fairly purple, but this Prairie Sandreed really held the dye well through washing. The last soak was tepid water with Eucalan. Eucalan is great stuff because it smells really good and it protects the yarn from moths. There is no need to rinse and the wool comes out deliciously soft.

I block on my bed and wet, soggy wool would be an unmitigated disaster. My washing machine does not have an easily programmed spin cycle, so I use towels to get the wool mostly dry. I grabbed three or four thirsty towels in colors that wouldn't show any last dye residue. I spread one out flat on the bathroom floor, carefully spread the wet blanket in as near to a single layer as possible and rolled it up like a jelly roll.



Next, I stomped all over the roll in my bare feet. This really gets the water out of the blanket and into the towels. Your socks will get soaked if you don't take them off. This is the therapeutic part of blocking. Stomp. Stomp.



Now comes the blood, sweat and tears part of blocking. I laid the blanket out on my bed, using a spare comforter to protect the mattress.

1. Pin the center.
2. Pin the tips of all of the flower petals. Stretch the fabric out so they lay flat. I pin through the decreases because the stitches are thicker and hold the pins better. If the fabric is puckering or looking stressed, use more pins. Any stressed areas will show in your finished blanket, but you want to stretch this enough to make it lay flat and open the stitch patterns. The whole thing needs to spread out, but don't put all of that work on one poor little stitch.

See how the two petals look different before and after pinning?



3. Move out to the next layer and pin the tips of those points too.




4. Now work systematically around the blanket, stretching it and pinning the points of the leaves. Grab big handfuls of fabric and hold it down with the flat of your hand. Again, don't stress individual stitches here. Pull out and sideways to make the pattern open up. Use LOTS of pins.



5. When you get to the border, pin the stitches at the very tips of the leaves to anchor the edges.



6. Evenly spread out the scallops and pin through the stitches. Egeblad blocks into a perfect circle, without the ruffled edges of the Hemlock Ring. If you try to do this step first, it's really difficult to get the middle to open up. Point of note, I crocheted five chains on these scallops instead of eight per the pattern. They're still quite open so I possibly could have done three.



At this point, my back and neck are aching, I've poked myself with a multitude of pins and I think it's never going to end. Remember when I said use a lot of pins? I started with 500 and ended with..



After 45 minutes or so, I was done pinning. It was so worth it though. Look at this:

Getting intimate with blocking

A few months ago, I barely knew what blocking was. Now I am becoming very familiar because of the Hemlock Ring Blankets. They won't lay flat without it, but how do I do it?

The first one was easy. Cascade 220 is very clean, fluffy, well-groomed wool. It has nice stitch definition and feels lofty without a lot of messing about. I steam-blocked to get my stitches to relax and take on the shape of a finished blanket.

The second is not so easy. Beaverslide already smells a little sheepy, which I personally like. I will not like it so much if it is hot and damp all over my bed. Even Cascade gets a little sheepy when steamed but this would be intense. Also, it has a lot of lanolin that seems to be holding the fibers together like.. pomade. I can't describe it properly, but it feels a little crisp and a little greasy, although the yarn is lofty and looks good. Lanolin keeps the sheep warm and dry and they don't look unkempt in their natural state, but it does do something to the yarn. In a blanket that will hopefully be cuddled, I'd like to reduce the waterproofing and increase the smooshy love.

So, before throwing my hard work into a tub of water and ruining it somehow, I swatched. I made a nice rectangle and soaked it in tepid water with a little Ivory soap. I thought this might help break up the fatty lanolin and help remove vegetable matter. I rinsed and rinsed until it was clear and then soaked it again in a tepid bath of Eucalan. Then I gently squeezed it out, rolled it in a towel and pinned it overnight.

The results are amazing. Photos don't capture it as well as I'd like, but it bloomed. The left half of the photo is the washed swatch. It's soft, supple, fluffy and smooth. The right side is the unblocked blanket. It has very crisp stitch definition, but it's almost too crisp. With this tweedy wool, I think a smoother finish will actually show the texture better because the bloom plumps up the stitches and fills in the gaps.



And now for something completely different..

With all of this rain, we have some unusual first-time visitors to the yard. Two days in a row, they've been hanging out in the lawn.