Look Up to the Stars

Look at me....I'm a star. Or rather, I'm wearing stars. The Celestarium shawl I started for the Ravellenic Games in February has been finished!

The basic structure follows the "pi shawl" formula popularized by Elizabeth Zimmermann. Simply put, every time the diameter of the shawl doubles, you double the number of stitches. Since knitting is stretchy and flexible, it works to make a circle.

That is why the shawl looks like it is made of concentric bands. Each time you double the stitches, they are close together and make a dark section. As you knit out to the end of that band, the stitches are more spread out and the shawl looks lighter.

When the knitting was done, I wasn't sure where I was going to have room to layout and block the shawl. I finally moved all the furniture in the living room to the edges and laid the mats in the middle.

Weaving some blocking wires through the eyelets at the edge made it easy to pin the shawl into shape.

I put the wires in and pinned it when it was dry and then drenched it with a spray bottle of water. Apparently you don't want to over-handle silk when it is wet because it is much weaker. But pinning when dry and then soaking it does the trick. The shawl took to the shape beautifully.

As I said previously, I went with a fancier border than the original pattern. Someone had published an alternative edge that they used on their shawl and I went ahead and used her pattern.

I noticed afterward that some people blocked peaks in the edging (giving the shawl a scalloped edge) but I think the round shape works fine. Maybe next time I'll try the scallop edge.

The shawl is knit from the center out, so the rows go around and around the shawl. When the center part is done, you cast on a few stitches for the edge and then work those rows perpendicular to the edge of the shawl. All the shawl stitches are still on the needle and every other row you knit one of those stitches with the last stitch of the edging row. In that way you incorporate all of the live stitches into the edging as you work around the whole edge of the shawl.

In addition to adding interest by changing the direction of the knitting, this also solves the problem of how to bind off the shawl stitches. Most conventional bind offs are not stretchy enough and prevent the shawl from flowing properly.

Here is the star chart from the pattern which marks all the stars included. I have not looked to see how it matches with the picture of  my shawl above so I very much doubt it is in the same orientation.

As you may recall, the shawl was knit in 100% silk. It is very drapey and heavy for how thin it is (compared to wool especially).

It's warm but doesn't have that "cozy" feeling that fuzzy wool gives.

How to wear this thing?

I could fold just a bit of the curve under and then wrap it around my shoulders, securing with a wood shawl pin.

I preferred it worn shifted to one side instead of perfectly centered.

From the back, you can see a good part of the star pattern.

I could also wear it gathered around my neck with the ends wrapped back to the front.

Or gathered around the neck, but with the ends pinned at the back of my neck because the ends are too wide and thick to be able to tie them.

This does run the risk of some discomfort if the pin moves wrong!

A couple places you are unlikely to find this shawl just hanging out:

Project Stats
Started: 10 Feb '18
Finished: 21 Apr '18
Pattern: Celestarium by Audry Nicklin and Stellar Wave Edging by Kimberlee Johnson.
Materials: Dk/worsted weight silk raveled from an Oscar de la Renta sweater, 300 grams. Many size 6 clear silver-lined crystal beads.

Ravellenics Wrap Up

The Olympics finished quite some time ago and so did the concurrent Ravellenic Games. Although I made a list of several projects I could do during the games, I concentrated all my knitting time on one -- the Celestarium shawl by Audry Nicklin.

It was an ambitious project but you can get a lot done in 15 days of focused knitting.

Since my last update, I did more knitting while watching curling:

Row 89 finished (16,659 stitches, 28%)

It wasn't a great year to watch the Canadian teams, but I enjoyed the round robin play.

We took a road trip to Missouri. I found a way to do charted, beaded knitting while riding in a car.

Row 101 finished (20,115 stitches, 34%)

As with almost anything, the key is to be a vigilante of organization. (I'm proud to say I only ever lost one bead.)

I can continue to show progress pictures, but the pictures pretty much all look alike -- big blue blobs.

Row 111 finished (25,875 stitches, 44%)

Alas, I did not get enough done to finish the shawl before the closing ceremonies. I got as far as 132-3/8 rows (38,187 stitches, 65%). That means the only additional recognition I got (besides my one medal in Aerial Unwind) was:

After a brief break, I continued to make progress even without the promise of a Ravellenics medal. And then I received this treat from my sister:

A gold medal cookie! So sweet of her!

This past Monday I completed all 156 rows of the charts (51,795 stitches, 88%):

How can I be done the charts, but only 88% done the shawl? About 10% of the knitting is in the edging! The shawl is written with a plain garter border that circles the outside and finishes off the live stitches.

The designer linked to a different edging that another knitter had adapted to the shawl and I decided to try that instead. It has a pretty wave pattern and is wider than the original edging. My row gauge is smaller than the patterns and I decided I could use the extra width.

I started the edging and have finished a few inches. Although it was hard to break the rhythm and stop, I made myself do it so I could block or steam what I have so far and see how it behaves. (This is why I should do a swatch, but I just foolheartedly experiment with my actual project.)

I have some concerns about how the silk is going to behave. Wool will take to blocking wonderfully and I can be confident the lace pattern will open up and show, but I'm not sure about the silk.

I'm still deciding whether to steam or wet block and how to do it, so for now the shawl is on hold.

No Time Now, Gotta Knit

Have you noticed the Olympics are going on? I haven't caught any prime time network coverage, but I have been bingeing on events through the CBC website. It's been fantastic to just watch the event, in its entirety, without it being edited and packaged for prime time. And much less annoying commentary. :)

Anyway, that is all secondary to the real event -- the Ravellenic Games. If you've been reading this blog for a while, then you know that the knitters and crafters on Ravelry hold a huge event each time the Olympics Games are on. There are multiple events you can enter (like Cowl Curling, Aerial Unwind, Hat Halfpipe, Sock Hockey, and more) and you get virtual medals when you finish projects. The only one you're competing against is yourself.

I warmed up with an easy project I've already mentioned -- I raveled this sweater

 to harvest this yarn

and earned myself a medal in the Aerial Unwind event:

I made a list of projects I could work on as I had time or interest, but I really have one main project, the Celestarium shawl by Audry Nicklin. If you follow the link, you'll see that it is a round shawl that makes a map of the night sky as seen from the north pole. I have been fascinated with it for quite a while and had planned to make it from the yarn of this blue silk sweater:

I raveled the sweater in December and got 669 grams / 2,273 metres. The pattern calls for 1,097 metres so it looks like there's no trouble there.

I mentioned I started the project last weekend and had decided that I needed to start over. I ordered beads and they arrived on Wednesday already. I re-started on Wednesday night but didn't really start knitting until Thursday. I watched a lot of curling and got to row 62, which is 8,307 stitches out of a total of 58,707 sts. That's about 14%, which I think sounds better.

On Friday I got in a lot more good knitting while watching snowboard cross, ski aerials, and more curling. By the end of the day I had finished row 80 -- 14,067 stitches or 24%.

And now the sooner I can stop typing here, the more knitting I can get done tonight (while watching some short track).

Ravellenic Games 2014 Report: Day 13

Last time I summarized my Ravellenic projects progress, there was only one left to do: the woven band. I was eager to weave.

I was not so eager to figure out the font. I was surprised to find nothing online. (I did find some embroidery fonts I tried to convert, but it wasn't very successful.) I thought I found a book of woven fonts to order which would solve it for me, but the book only included capital letters in the font I liked. So I realized I would have to draft my own. :sigh: :work:

Neither was I eager to wrap the warp threads on the loom. I only had one ball of one colour so I knew I would have to either cut and wrap the threads for each card separately (yuck) or figure out how much I needed and pull that much off the one ball to make a second ball. Plus I had to consider how to deal with the twisting threads. When you do fonts, it seems to always work out that some warp threads twist in one direction more than another and a lot of twist builds up. You can use fishing swivels to solve this (none of which I own yet) or you can just warp extra length and just "push" the twist out of the way. :sigh: :decisions: :work: (These are the types of decisions that can put me into complete project paralysis.)

I bought some time by asking Troy to complete the loom he made for me by gluing the pegs. When I used the loom in the summer, the pegs stayed in place. Now that it's winter and much drier, the pegs were loose enough in the holes that they weren't sitting perpendicular to the frame (which will cause uneven tension on the band) and slipping out of the holes completely (hopefully why that is a problem is obvious enough I don't have to explain it). While he cheerfully took care of it, I was off the hook for a couple days.

I used the time to graph out the letters in Excel. My first version was very blocky, working off the alphabet provided by my teacher (John Mullarkey) at Squam. His were all capitals, however, so I made up lower case letters. Then I edited them so that they were more rounded and I was happier with the result.

Wednesday evening I decided it was time to bite the bullet, make the decisions for better or worse, and get started. I made some guesstimates about length so I could figure out what path to warp my loom and pull off enough string from the one ball to do a continuous warp. The second colour was some cotton I had purchased in a big bag at the last Red Purl "Green Sale." I had two balls of it so I was set there. One had less on it than the other, but it had enough to finish this project without cutting it so close I had to worry about it.

When it came to the actual weaving, it was very uneventful and I was surprised to have it half done the first evening and finished in the second! I can't decide if weaving is more agonizing than a knitting project for me because there actually are more decisions to be made, or if I'm just used to making the knitting decisions and so they're easier. (Hopefully the latter so I can have the hope that weaving will become easier too.)

It's double faced weaving so you can see the letters on the "right side" (light letters on a burgundy background) and you can see reversed letters on the "wrong side" below.

Here is just some of the twist that builds up on the warp threads.

It was worst on the center cards where every letter has a brush stroke (so to speak).

When it was done, I had a band about 1-1/8" wide and 28" long.

I was particularly happy with my curvy "s"

and fancy "a."

In both cases I smoothed out the curves by borrowing cards from the block above and below. Next time I'll do that on more of the letters with curves. (But one lesson at a time...reminding myself that I'm just starting out.)

And what does it actually say?

These were the admonitions heard from my Oma (grandmother) the most often. They were used as a good-bye and almost any other time she was searching for what to say or how to end a conversation. They summarize her basic philosophy of how one ought to live and it was her hope for all of her grandchildren. And I still hear them often in my mind in her strong Dutch accent.

I am planning to use this band in a "Dream Catcher" like these ones I saw on the Squam website. I think they are beautiful and when I looked closer, I realized they used a doily for the center. The dream catchers I've seen before are woven and look like spider webs (to me). But when I saw doilies I got excited. I have a few that my Oma made and I was never sure what to do with them. I wanted to keep them, but I don't really decorate with them, putting them out on side tables or the backs of recliners. But I thought this was a project I could work with. So this woven ribbon is the first piece I've put together to hang off the bottom. I thought capturing Oma's perennial advice would be fitting.

She was a brave woman. Not courageous, because I think she was afraid or nervous all the time. But she braved her way through what needed to be done. For example, she had a terrible sense of direction and once got off a Greyhound bus in the town she had been living in for decades and got turned around and couldn't find her way to the person meeting her. (Fortunately it was a small town and they found her before too long.) But this is the same woman who emigrated from her war-torn country after WWII to Canada (a land where she didn't even know the language) with her husband, five young boys and my mother (aged 9 to 0). It's crazy if you think about it.

She was never mean, but she could be "direct." Comments that might confront you, but never belittle. But she once told my sister that she really didn't like saying things to confront people and was shy to say them, but they would be important things on her mind and she knew if she didn't say them, she would regret it and feel like she had not fulfilled her duty of helping to raise us kids. So she swallowed her fear and said them. Conviction.

These are some of the reasons I chose her words to weave into a band.

Once the band itself was done, I cut it off of the loom and had all these lovely twisted ends.

I kind of wanted to keep them, but I had to straighten them all out in order to get the cards off. But it planted an idea and so I braided or twisted the strands once the cards were removed. Here are a few examples:

From left, three-strand braid, two-ply twist of
four strands each, two-ply of two strands each,
and four-strand braid.

Then I started to think of beads and looked through my bead box. I found these wooden ones I had picked up who knows where:

The colours, weight, and size were perfect. I have loved them, but never knew what to do with them. I added them to some of the strands:

Then I found a few other beads:

I had a lot of fun working on these ends. At Squam, John Mullarkey summarized weaving as "string management" as a funny punchline, but it has stuck in my brain. I do really like string management. Whether it's knitting, weaving, braiding, or undoing knots! I spent a happy time working on simple braids and twisted strands. If they didn't come out the way I liked, I just undid them and tried another option. I should consider this on some evenings when I'm not up to a capital P, Project. Some people doodle; I could braid. It's not like I don't have the string for it! :)

In the end, it came out a bit of a jumbled mess, but I like it.

The longer strings on the sides are from the selvedge warp threads. I cut them quite a bit longer and weighted them instead of including them with the continuous warp. The selvedge cards are twisted the same way all the time to give a neater edge, but it means a lot of twist builds up. Warping them separately means I can get rid of the twist. And on my last band, the selvedge warp threads were "used up" a lot quicker than the rest of the warp so I thought I would need to make them longer to start. Apparently not in this case! Anyway, I decided to leave those strands long and have just knotted the beads in place. When the whole project is done and I have more bands/ribbons/whatever hanging from the dream catcher, I can always decide to cut them.

And to the left you see the entire band. The fringe is 27" so that gives a total length of 55".

That means medals in Alpine Abode Enhancement (since it will hang on a wall), Labyrinth Weaving, Nordic Colourwork Combined, and Stash Skeleton.

Games Update, Thursday, Feb 20:
1. Rainbow Cowl DONE!
2. Rainbow Hat DONE!
3. & 4. Ravel Sweater 1 and Sweater 2 DONE! DONE!
5. Dye Green Yarn DONE!
6. Spinning DONE!
7. Woven Band DONE!
8. Baby Bib DONE!

And that is the end of my Ravellenics projects. Maybe not as ambitious as my Whistler sweater in 2010, but I really can't believe I got all of them done. In part because knitting is easy (for me) so the only challenge in the Whistler project was the sheer volume of knitting it represented.

This year there were different projects and the weaving and dyeing especially present "mental paralysis" problems for me. But I pushed and got them done. And they were, by and large, successful. And I had fun. I hope you enjoyed reading along.