The Christmas FOs...

I'm very lucky in my family, not only because they're lovely people, but because they are, one and all, practitioners of some kind of handcraft- woodworking, sewing, knitting, leatherwork, jewelry...and that's only a few. And not surprisingly, this makes us all very appreciative recipients of handcrafted gifts.

My sister Kate took possession of the Fools Rush socks for her birthday (earlier in the month), and told me she'd worn them through large parts of the big power outage, for their woolly warmth.

My husband was suitably surprised by his sweater...though it wasn't until we got home that he gave me a puzzled look and asked, "When did you find time to knit this, anyway?" Personally, I was thrilled to find that it fit perfectly. Whew!


My dad cuddled his cabled socks possessively- not that he's in any danger of losing them- no one else in the family could wear a men's size 11 wide sock...! (Those socks? More stitches than the sweater above. Same goes for the Fools Rush socks.) These are the Moss Cable pattern from Charlene Schurch's Sensational Knitted Socks. I knit them toe up in a sort of consensus version of all my favorite sock techniques.


And the subject of my last post, a pair of heavily modified Endpaper Mitts also for my sister. These are the mitts that I started, found that I could not get gauge on, and decided to knit anyway, by re-figuring all the stitch counts and just knitting at a much tighter gauge on size 0 needles. I'm still not sure whether the problem was entirely the yarn, or simply that I really prefer a very tight fabric for mitts and socks. At any rate, I was pleased with the result.


And now that this set of deadlines has passed, I can knit anything I want! The colorwork mittens, perhaps, or I can use a hat. Then there's that yarn I bought on sale for a summer top. Except- what's that whooshing sound coming from up ahead? A baby? Well, of course his blanket will be done by February. I'm right on schedule, I've already bought the yarn!

I Have *Got* to Do This More Often...

So yesterday, I did something that I almost never do...I took the day off, and just stayed home. See, like most wage-earning folks, I have a very limited amount of vacation time. And I like to travel, so vacation time tends to be reserved for trips, while routine appointments, local travel and- crucially, appliance deliveries- I tend to deal with by working late a few days to cover the time I'm out of the office.

But not this time. This time, I took an honest-to-goodness day. The pretext was that we were having a new stove delivered. (When bits of the stove fall off? Time to replace it. I think it dated back to the early Pliocene, in any case.) However that happened quite early, which was good, as it forced me to get up. Drinking half a pot of coffee ensured that I stayed up. (Also that I vibrated gently while moving around the house double time.)

And the rest of the day I spent puttering through a series of chores. I grilled a bunch of meat (having pre-cooked meat on hand to speed weeknight dinner preparation is A Good Thing). I cleaned. I did pool maintenance. I checked the wiring of a malfunctioning light, concluded I couldn't fix it, and called the electrician. I swept and cleaned the stairs in preparation for repainting the risers. And for each task I completed? I rewarded myself with a knit break.

Behold:


I have completed the back and started the first sleeve of the gray merino sweater. (Next time I have the bright idea of knitting a surprise Christmas gift for someone I live with, I'm going to do mitts or something...getting enough private knitting time to knit a whole sweater and still keep it a surprise is proving darned tricky.)

And in other news, I turned the heel of the second Manly Red Sock. Yes, that's another Christmas gift, though less surprising (he always gets socks). I'm not going to post a picture because it actually looks rather a lot like the last one. (Very gratifying, that.)

Altogether a lovely day. I really need to do it again sometime.

Hey, Everyone- Swatch This!

So the first pattern idea I had for the gray merino was one that I've wanted to knit for a while. But a quick swatch showed me that no, the worsted wasn't going to work in a pattern written for DK weight without a lot of fiddling. So I set that pattern aside, and found another:



A nice basic traditional sort of pattern. So I commenced the ritual swatching.

Swatch#1- I knit with the needles called for by the pattern. It came out with immensely more stitches than the pattern requires. I went back and scrutinized it carefully. Perhaps the no-longer-available recommended yarn was a bulky, not worsted weight? Impossible to tell. But wait! It says swatch 'in pattern'. I did a block of stockinette. This wasn't an accident- several of the patterns used by the sweater are designs of purl bumps on a stockinette background. But some weren't. So I picked the design that looked like it would pull in the most (a garter rib, if I'm not mistaken), and started over.

Swatch#2 Garter rib, pattern needles. Still way too many stitches.

Swatch#3 Garter rib, smaller needles. Because I was brain-dead probably, and thought that smaller needles would make larger stitches. The laws of physics are unforgiving, however and this was not the case.

Swatch#4 Garter rib, larger needles. Now there are fewer stitches but not enough fewer.

Swatch#5 Even larger needles. By this point the knitted fabric was almost lacy in its looseness- definitely not what I want for the sweater. And there was still half a stitch more than the gauge called for.

I paused and regrouped. Carefully read through the directions. Pulled out a calculator to check the numbers. Found that I was going to need row gauge as well as stitch gauge, because the pattern was written for certain number of repeats. This means that having the right row gauge with many more stitches is A Problem.

So I cast on for the largest size with the needles called for by the pattern. Because at the gauge I was getting, the largest size in the pattern should come out at the size I want in the tighter gauge, so long as I use the number of pattern repeats for the size sweater it will actually be. I think. I'll just have to keep a close eye on the overall dimensions of the piece as I knit.



That's what I love about using off the shelf patterns. The way I can just knit them without all the extra calculation and figuring stuff out.

Spring May Be Coming, But Don't Hold Your Breath

One thing about winter in New England, it really makes you feel justified- even smug- about being a knitter. This is what my street looked like when I got home yesterday:


So perhaps that's why I took some time out from the socks to swatch the wool for the next sweater coming up. (The socks? Are lovely, but I'm really regretting the size of my feet- 96 stitches around in fingering weight wool is not as fast-moving a project as I have come to expect from socks.)

I can't exactly call the wool an impulse buy- not when I read a review of the yarn, heard in the comments to the blog post that the very same wool was on sale, searched online to find out if that was really true and where the nearest store was to my path home. I may never buy yarn without a plan-- but I'm capable of planning on my feet when the occasion calls for it.


The pattern I'd had in mind for this is actually (I think) a Patons pattern- it was long since torn out of a book or magazine, and has been in my 'patterns' file for about fifteen years. It has a few cables and some light texturing, nothing too fussy. However when I looked at it at home, it calls for a DK weight, not a worsted. So I'm now futzing with math and trying to decide if I want to knit this in the smallest size in worsted (assuming the math works out that it will be roughly enough larger), or if I want to rewrite the pattern for worsted (taking out a few pattern blocks so the width comes out where I need it). Or if I should just roll my eyes, put the pattern away until I actually find some DK I like and use a different worsted pattern for this sweater.

One thing is for sure-- as long as I can look out my windows and see snow, I'm going to have warm woolly things on the brain.