I made yarn!

Because I SO need a new hobby right now, with the wedding going on and the dissertation and all.


I took a class through the local Parks board, which was run at the LYS. There was only one other student in the class, and we had a pretty good time. I'm still getting the hang of things, but my yarn so far does not look too hideous. I think I've settled at a mostly-consistent heavy worsted weight, but that's just me eyeballing it.


(Isn't my spindle pretty?)

Dave's afghan is moving shockingly fast. I cast on for the fourth block today. Here's Section C, a neat scale-like motif.


And to continue the "things Liz has made out of natural-colored wool" motif, this week I finally attached my veil to the comb. I had my hair trial yesterday (where we tested out my desired hairdo) and here's how the two look together:




24 days till I get to wear all that stuff again!

Cap Shawl from Victorian Lace Today

I am probably the laziest blogger in the world, but now, two weeks after finishing the shawl, here are the pretty pictures I promised.


Pattern: Cap Shawl from Victorian Lace Today
Yarn: Merino Oro in natural
Needles: US 7s
Modifications: I omitted twelve rows from both chart A and chart B so that I wouldn't run out of yarn.
Finished size: about 60" in diameter, 14" smaller than the pattern says. Too short to be a shawl, but I don't mind: that's not what it's for!


Thoughts: I absolutely loved this project. It stayed entertaining even when there were more than 600 stitches in a row. The thing is just gorgeous, and I can't wait to wear it. You know, partly because it's pretty, and partly because if I'm wearing it that also means I'm marrying Dave. :D


I brought it to knitting night on Thursday and the lovely and talented Katharine took some pictures for me. I am very grateful for her help, as y'all know I can't photograph my way out of a paper bag (unless the way out involves an off-center self portrait). This picture is my absolute favorite:



Lovely!

This post contains another shot of me dressed as a ghost

I'd like to start off by thanking Amanda of K is for Knitter for nominating me for the Rockin' Girl Blogger award!



These awards were started by Roberta Ferguson, and now I am supposed to 1) give her credit, 2) put up the badge and 3) add 5 other rockin' girl bloggers to the list.

Here are my nominees. This is hard!
Auntie Ann, my bestest blogging buddy, and her totally sweet socks.
Sherri, who knits beautiful things and has a beautiful outlook on her faith and family.
Amy of Sea Anemone, because she finds such awesome fabrics and colors and OMG I wish I could sew as well as her (or at all).
Melissa of Indigo Mouse, who has great taste in sweaters and writes about her projects so well.
Heather of Knitting and Reading, because I love reading about fun books when I don't have time to read the books themselves.

Whew, that was a lot of HTML. Ok, well Amanda nominated me because (blush) I "always [have] amazing projects to show off." Lucky for you guys, I plan on living up to that in this post!

I finished the knitting on Wednesday...


...but it still wasn't looking great as a veil.


Before, with yardstick for scale: about 38" across.


And after, about 60" across.


Click to embiggen. The only detail shot I took was a closeup of the thing's one flaw, and I don't really feel the need to show that one around ;-)

In this blog's long tradition of crap photography, that's all I have for you right now. But I should be able to get better pictures next weekend, so stay tuned.

Oh, and you will have to wait until March to see me play ghostie again.

Edging!

1/3 of the edging is done, and it's lookin good!




If I don't run out of yarn I will be cutting it veeerrrry fine. Cross your fingers!

A real veil update

I've finished the center pattern and the first 2 of the 11 "plain stuff before you attach the edging" rows. I just LOVE the way the viney parts look.


Still, there's a long way before this becomes something I can wear to my wedding without everybody being really, really embarrassed for me.


(wow, is that lifeline ugly and obvious or *what*?)

And here's how much yarn I have to get there:


Can you believe that the whole project will (hopefully) only be one skein? That is a whole lot of yarn, guys!

I have been the very fortunate recipient of another great knitting gift! My fellow gamer friend Liz (who is always very nice about my knitting and even wears the socks I made her) brought me these great needles with dice on the ends!


They're sparkly and thus a little hard to catch with my sad little camera. I have to find something to knit with them during DnD games, because how great would that be?

Anklets

I am going to spare you further shots of my veil, which could also currently be identified as "giant fuzzy shower cap". I will be done with the lace pattern for the center in just nine more rows.

The blazer finally got frogged a little, but not as much as it needs to be. I'm just way more interested in the veil right now, which isn't such a bad thing. If you're going to practice project monogamy with any project, wouldn't your wedding veil be the most fitting thing to get such devotion?

But I finished something, amazingly enough. These were actually a half-row and bindoff from being done for nearly a week, but the veil (ok, and Harry Potter) kept me away.



The yarn: Cascade Sassy Stripes, about 2/3 a skein
The pattern: my own invention
The stripes: deliberately asymmetrical
The weird ribbing around the feet: "arch support", or a nice socky hug for your feet.


The heel: my upside-down dutch heel, which I decided I don't actually like that much. It doesn't fit well, and you don't wind up with enough stitches for the sock to go all the way around your upper heel. I had to do the decreases very gradually, and the stitches are still very spread out around the upper heel.
The verdict: very cute, very fun stripes, but not my best work.

In other news, my good buddy Kate brought me yarn from Ireland! It's green, "like Ireland."



It's 100g pure wool and feels great, with a cool thick-and-thin texture. What should I do with it? It would make a really cute hat with plenty left over, but I'm not sure if there's enough for a scarf. It also looks like it would felt really well, so maybe a bag? Or I could use it as the thick yarn in some scribble knitting... (example)

hmmm...

Heart-stopping lace moments

Based on my limited experience, I think there are two kinds of heart-stopping lace moments. The *good* kind is when it's blocked and it looks amazing. The bad kind is when you have a Lace Knitting Accident and you nearly pass out from shock.

We're fine now, of course.



I wanted to see how big the thing was getting and how it looks so far, so I devised a complicated plan involving 4 knitpicks cables (only 2 40-inchers, one short one and one middle-length one. note to self: get more 40-inch cables for stretching out lace pieces) to hold all the stitches with enough room to actually lay the thing flat. I am just over the halfway mark if you count by rows (sadly, only about 1/4 the total area) and have started the second (interesting) lace chart.

I have a handy tip for everybody. When using multiple knitpicks cables to hold your stitches and using those plastic caps to make sure they don't fall off, if you have an odd number of caps left over then you probably have an end that is not capped. Each cable has two ends, and so each cable needs two caps. Not one. Check several times.

Fortunately only about 1/2 of a repeat fell off the needle, and few stitches were dropped. The ones that were dropped were only yarnovers and with careful reference to the chart I made sure I had all my stitches where I needed them. But damn, was that scary.



I am hoping this starts to look more interesting soon.

Loony?

Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw,
If you've a steady mind,
Where those of wit and learning,
Will always find their kind...

(Sorting Hat song, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

Though some have questioned the wisdom of knitting oneself a doubly-thick wool scarf (it's done in stockinette in the round) to wear while standing in line for a movie, outside, in Texas, in July. But I wouldn't put it past my favorite Ravenclaw, Luna Lovegood--especially if it was supposed to protect against Nargles or Crumple-Horned Snorkacks.

I finished the first Twisted Flower sock, but I'll take a picture later. That thing is so hard to capture! I can't start the second because I need to wind the yarn, and my ball winder is currently holding the laceweight merino for my veil. I'm worried about tangles, so I'm putting off taking it off the ballwinder core until I have an empty paper towel roll I can use instead.

I wish you could feel how soft and squishy this is.



And because I can't wind the yarn for the second Twisted Flower, I started another sock.



This is in Cascade Sassy Stripes Superwash--the same yarn Mom used for her sock-in-a-day sock. One of the stores downtown that sells cool "sundries" has started selling yarn recently, and a lot of it is really gorgeous. Also among their stock are beads, purses, funny books, tiny catapults that launch tiny pigs or ninjas, fake cockroaches, antique ribbons, nativity scenes... it's a great store. And they were hiring, so my little brother has his first job working there. Dave and I made a trip down to look at wedding places (omg) and stopped in the store, where he bought a nice pair of chopsticks, a hackey-sack, some little tin soldiers, and a skein of purple sock yarn for me. Yay!

These are going to be little anklets, and I think I'm going to go for that sporty arch-support style, with ribbing around the middle of the foot. I can't decide if I should do plan 1x1 ribbing or a 1x1 twisted rib. If I go plain, I'll probably have to transfer to 0's. Any thoughts? And should I do slip stitch all over the heel to make it extra cushy and sporty, or just go for sleek? It's not like I'll be running in these, of course.

Math Problem

I hated math until I finished high school and no longer had to do it on a regular basis. When I do math now, it is on my own terms, no teacher is looking over my shoulder and making me feel self-conscious. I was never *that* bad at math, but I was generally pretty slow about it. Now that I'm not timed anymore, it doesn't even matter. So these days math and I get along pretty well.

This is especially good when it comes to knitting, as we often deal with math. I do all sorts of division and multiplication these days. This weekend I ran into a particularly cool math problem, and I thought I'd share it with you.


A knitter wants to make the Cap Shawl from Victorian Lace Today. This shawl calls for 1700 yds of yarn to make a shawl 74" across (radius: 37"). The knitter finds a skein of Merino Oro laceweight with just 1375 yards. How big a shawl can she make?

To solve: the first step is to figure out the area of the pattern shawl, so we know how far 1700 yards gets us. (we are rounding for sanity's sake)

A=πr^2
r=37
A=π * 37^2
A=π * 1367
A=4300 in^2

Ok, so 1700 yards makes 4300 square inches of lace. Now we need to find out how many square inches of lace (x) we can make with 1375 yards of yarn. My algebra here gets kind of ugly, but bear with me.

(4300 in^2)/(1700yds)= x/(1375 yds)

Remember your algebra steps! Multiply across...

1700x = 4300 * 1375
1700x = 5,912,500
x = 5,912,500/1700
x = 3478 in^2

So the new shawl will have an area of 3478 square inches. What's the radius of our new shawl?

A = πr^2
3478 = πr^2
r^2 = 3478/π
r^2 = 1108
(Not even gonna attempt the square root sign)
r = 33 in

So the new shawl will be 66" across, which I think is perfectly acceptable, as I am 66" tall.

Once I've made a swatch of the pattern I'll figure out how many rows I need to leave off in order to reduce the radius by 4". I'll edit the lace pattern from there (more math!)

So, wasn't that fun? Here's something even more fun, for those of you who've made it this far: this yarn ($16.50) was my first wedding-related purchase. 3478 square inches of knitting from now, I'll have my veil done!