Quick Project: Light Blanket

You remember the fabric I bought at Squam?

It was a piece that would fit the top of our bed, but I knew I would need something to make it a little bigger so it would hang over the edge some. Soon after Squam, I went to Joann's to see what they had in knits. Knits that look like knits; not just jersey knits.

They didn't have a lot, but I was open to almost anything. The fabric was pretty wild so it could carry off "quirky" pretty well. I ended up with this bold pattern:

Last Saturday I finally took the time to go to my mother-in-law's to use her serger. I could maybe get this done on a sewing machine, but there was no sense if she had a serger I could use. It's the exact tool needed for working with knits.

She had it all set up for me when I got there so I could dive right in! I don't remember the details, but I didn't have a lot of choice about how much fabric I got at Joann's. I guess I must of finished the bolt. I don't think it was quite as long as what I wanted, but I decided I would make do.

I started by laying it out on the carpet and folding it in fourths the long way (see above). I cut on all the folds and that gave me four strips to work with. Whatever width border I got, I got!

Next I sewed strips to opposite side of the blanket center:

I knew the strips were longer than the center piece, so I didn't pin or anything.

When I went to put on the last two strips, you can see that I didn't quite have enough to take advantage of the full width:

The piece that's "upside right" is where I started and the
edges are even. The "wrong side up" piece is where
I ended the seam and I definitely didn't have enough length.

On the first one (above) I didn't pin and one side matched and it was short on the end. For the second one, I thought I'd better pin to make sure I wasn't too short on the end, and it all worked out (...in the end. Ba-dum-bump.)

There's nothing like a serger to make you really feel like a professional:

After that, I cut off any extra bits so the edges were all straight and set up a rolled hem:

That took the most fussing of the whole project but I got it looking pretty good. It probably would have been better with a stretchy nylon yarn, but we didn't have any and I wasn't going to worry about it. Fussy knitter--maybe. Fussy serger? Apparently not. (Should that be sergerer?)

After miles and miles of rolled hem,

I had a finished blanket:

Here it is on my bed:

Not a bad fit, although I wouldn't have complained if the borders were longer on the sides.

Project Stats
Time: about 2 hours
Materials: knit fabrics, about $25 total
I finished it in time for a couple of warmer nights when i was glad to have our summer quilt off the bed, but I think tonight will be cold enough I will have to add another blanket again. This has been the summer of blanket musical chairs.

All in all, a very satisfying project.

Red Purl Afghan KAL: March

This afternoon was the third meet for the afghan KAL. The crowd was a little thinner this time, perhaps because of the intermittent pouring rain. I did, however, notice there are still some new people signing up, buying their yarns and getting started so they can catch up with the rest of us. It's still a lot of fun to see all the different yarns that people are using, and every month most people are working with a different colour so we have new ones to admire.

Today's design was submitted by Dawn, and it was a very nice Mock Cable. Called, "mock," because although it gives the appearance of a cable, it's not. (Ok, that's obvious.) In a cable, you slip half the stitches onto a spare needle, knit the second half, then knit the first half off of the spare needle. A mock cable is achieved with a series of "twists" arranged to they track up and to the side. A twist is actually a 2 stitch cable, but because there are only 2 stitches you don't need to use a spare needle.

This pattern used a left leaning mock cable, in which you have to do the less handy left twist. Let me show you how that is done:

First you knit into the back of the second stitch on the left needle. [I've labeled it "1" because it's the first stitch you knit.] Insert the right needle into the back from right to left:

Wrap the yarn over the right needle and pull it through, but do not pull the stitch off the left needle:

Now insert the right needle into the first stitch on the left needle [labeled "2"] and knit like normal,

pulling the yarn through,

and then slipping both stitches off of the left needle:
You can see that stitch 1 is now behind stitch 2, leaving a twist to the left (following the arrow). If you continue to do left twists moving one stitch to the left each pattern row, you will get a line flowing up and to the left to make your mock cable.

Working into the back of a stitch is very awkward though. (Ask any of the newbies at Red Purl today: they were not taking to it well!) I can knit into the back of a stitch very well, thank you; please do not question my skills, but I decided to take the easier way out. (Hey, if I had to learn or practise the skill, I would have done it, but decided to enjoy myself a little more instead.)

Here is my solution which leads to a right leaning mock cable formed with some right twists instead.

First, insert the right needle as if to knit 2 together:

Wrap yarn around right needle and pull through (like you normally would), but again do not remove the stitches from the left needle.

Now insert the right needle into just the first stitch:

Wrap yarn around right needle and pull through:

Now slide both stitches off the left needle.
This will lead to a right leaning twist. Now you continue to do right twists moving one stitch to the right each pattern row and then you will get a line flowing up and to the right to make your mock cable.

So I reveal my [mirror imaged] block:

that I find more natural to do than the "assigned" one. If this whole process sounds vaguely familiar, perhaps you read my post on the Birthday Cowl in which I made a similar modification to change some left decreases to right decreases, once again, just to make life easier.

I did not get the block done this afternoon but certainly got a good start. I do have a whole month, I guess, and don't have to get them all done the same day....I guess. [Fight the compulsion, fight the compulsion]

But speaking of number of rows completed, at the end of the afternoon, I found out that a few people there have taken to calling me, "Clickity-clack," because of my speed. (Amy told on them.) It's not like I'm trying to be fast; it's just how I knit.

You may also notice that this is a new colour in my afghan. "Simply Taupe" has joined the Glazed Carrot and Blue Surf. The taupe is a wonderful neutral shade, darker than a cream, but warmer than a beige. I love working with it and think it's perfect for a cable pattern (mock or otherwise), sort of like an Aran sweater.

All for now...have a good night from,

Clickity-clack!

May I Introduce...?

...the Snowflake Illusion blanket started many moons ago, and finished with a flourish of Kitchener stitching this afternoon:

I first saw illusion patterns last summer...about 10 minutes before starting this blanket. Really. It's not often I see something really new to me in knitting, and this was just fascinating. I had to try it.

So with a clever stitch pattern you can make a design show up when viewed from the side, but disappear when viewed straight on:

The reverse side is not as good looking, but you can still sort of see the snowflake design so that's pretty neat anyway.
I am so relieved to have this done. It's been a real "back-burner" project, always lowest in priority, just to be pulled out when I needed something easy or that could travel and had nothing else. But slowly progress was made, and finally this afternoon I took the time to do the last couple rows and do the finishing which had to be done at home.

I took this design from Emily Byrd's Snowflake Illusion Scarf that I found through Ravelry. (Where else?) I just knit two very short scarves, then knit the blue strip to be sewn between them. The outside garter stitch border was knit directly on by passing the last stitch over a stitch knit up from the edge of the blanket. The corners were done with short rows. The border was started in the middle of one of the sides with a provisional crochet cast on, and when I had gone all around the blanket and got back to the beginning, I stitched the two ends together with the Kitchener stitch. I know many people dread it, but I love to Kitchener. It's so sneaky!

The final size is about 25" x 30"; not big enough for a crib, but probably nice over a car seat. I have no idea where or with whom it will end up. Maybe some baby I don't know yet, or maybe some charity drive that will come along. I just made it to try out this illusion technique.

Keep exploring,

christina

[ETA: The blanket won a 2nd place ribbon at the 2009 County Fair (knitted baby afghan).]

Afghan KAL Snafu

Yes, I ran into a snafu while knitting my latest block for this year's afghan. And by snafu, I mean mistake, of course. Do you see it?

Maybe this will help:
As I used to sing with Sesame Street, "One of these bobbles is not like the others / One of these bobbles just isn't the same." Apparently this taught kids to be racist and quick to find fault with those unlike themselves, but in knitting it just won't do to have a "unique" bobble. No individuality here, thank you very much.

I still don't know what went wrong; I just know that when I paused to examine my work (ok, let's be honest: admire) I was appalled to find something that didn't look right. I showed the entire square to my husband (who's no knitter but has an eye for detail) to see if he could spot the mistake. I let him know there was a mistake, but not what or where it might be. Well, he spotted it right away and said it must be fixed. Yes, it must.

So I had a choice: I could tink(1) or frog(2) back 6 or 8 rows, or I could just undo the stitches that would lead me down to the mistake. The second option involved less reknitting and didn't preclude resorting to the first option if it didn't work. I've done enough of this type of repair to feel confident, but I've never done it for such a complicated pattern. We've got purl 3 togethers in here and (K1, P1, K1) into one stitch, so this was not just a straight up and down march. I would be making three stitches into one and one stitch into three as I went.

Step 1. Knit across the row until you get just before the stitches which are above the mistake. In this case, the "column" above the mistake was alternating between 3 stitches and 1. At this particular row, it was only 1, and I let that stitch fall off the left needle.

[right side facing]

Step 2. Gently pull out the stitches one row at a time until you get to the row just below the mistake. You have just undone your mistake: congratulations. Catch the stitch(es) onto a crochet hook approximately the size of your needles.  All the long "rungs" of yarn you see below are the pieces that will be needed to make new correct stitches, row by row.

[right side facing]

Step 3. Start knitting the rows back up, keeping in pattern, using the crochet hooks. This is, of course, the tricky part. You just have to remember that knitting and purling are the same thing but reversed. (A knit stitch on one side is a purl stitch on the other.) This will tell you which way to pull the new stitch through the old on the hook. In this pic, you see I have just (K1, P1, K1) into the stitch below. Hence the three crochet hooks.

[right side facing]

Here I have slipped all three stitches onto one hook and am about to "purl" them all back onto one stitch.

[wrong side facing]

Now I'm half way through the purl 3 together. I've hooked the yarn for the next row and have pulled it through two of the stitches on the hook. I'm about to pull it through the last one.

[wrong side facing]

Step 4. After working through all the rungs/rows, slip the final stitch(es) back onto the knitting needle. 

[wrong side facing]

And then check your work. After looking at mine for a few minutes, I figured out that I had knit 3 together instead of purling. So I took it all out and did it again. It's still less than 10 minutes and I figure that's way less than frogging and reknitting all those rows. (And it's better for your wool, too. Less wear and tear.) It is also an opportunity to see your knitting in a new way: you may learn something about how it all works together!

Now can you find it?
Well, I think I can too. But I think it's because the wool got a little fuzzy and tension hasn't quite evened out. I have studied it carefully and am sure that it is technically identical to the other bobbles even if it doesn't look quite even. I believe some blocking will make just about all of that go away.

In the context of a larger afghan made of 12 of these blocks, I'm really not concerned about it showing. I just wanted to make it right. I made the repairs on Wednesday night, and got the rest of the block knit and cast off last night.

Tonight is the long-anticipated hat exchange at Red Purl: wish me luck!

-christina

__________________________________

(1) tink: a technique of undoing stitches one at a time from right needle to left needle. The term is the word "knit" spelled backwards. (Good for complicated stitches or a small number of stitches to be undone)

(2) frog: to rip out your knitting by removing the needle from the stitches and pulling on the working yarn. When you're as far back as you want to be, you reinsert the needle and continue from there. The term seems to come from either the sound the stitches make as they're being unravelled or the words, "rip it, rip it" that you say as you go along. (Good when large areas of knitting need to be undone)

Red Purl Afghan KAL: February

Today was the second meetup of the afghan KAL. Attendance, if anything, was even higher than last month. There were some new faces, but mostly repeat knitters. I am getting to know a few names, and faces, and even matching some of them up.

Amy did not use my design this month. I had signed up for February just because it looked like no one else was. (It did mean you had to move pretty fast as the design was due the first of the month.) Although Amy said she liked the design, she thought it was too hard. Or more accurately, her words were, "too technical." I guess I'm not a good judge of hard and easy because it's all knit and purls to me.

Anyway, this month's design was very nice. And let me add, it gave me yet another opportunity to put my foot in my mouth. You see, on Thursday I was in the shop to order some colours for the rest of the afghan (and just to visit) and said quite firmly that I do not like bobbles. "I am not a bobble person!" I believe was my bald-faced declaration. Well, I walk into the shop this afternoon and get my pattern off of the counter and see that it is solid bobbles from east to west and north to south. Amy just gave me a "whatcha-gonna-do?" look and laughed. But the all-over pattern is very lovely. And it's perfect in the "Blue Surf" colour I'm using for it. I really like it.

This is of course a life lesson for me; something about being open to new things you think you don't like. Or maybe I just had never seen a good bobble pattern. (The very observant of you will point out that there are bobbles on the super bulky yellow sweater I wanted to do, and you would be right. But I wasn't crazy about them there either; just willing to go along with them.)

The back of the design even looks good, although completely different. If I had to do a matching test, I would have never put these two together.

And I think the blue and orange play well together. (The orange really isn't as bright as it looks in this picture.)

This square will have to be blocked to the 12 inch size. It wants to pull in to 11 inches, and this is even after I increased the number of pattern repeats by two. (Amy's sample really pulled in so it was a good indication of how much to add.) But a little blocking will fix that right up. Unlike last month, I will not finish the block tonight, but I did get it to about 10 inches. Pretty good for a day's work.

Going to bed where I'll dream of finding a way to knit while sleeping,

christina

Steps to a Design: Drop Stitch

So while I have been confined to the little area in front of my woodstove (it's frigid cold), I have used my time to work on my Red Purl KAL afghan design. First I mapped out a design using drop stitches which stepped up and to the right from the bottom of the square to the top, with alternating sections of knit and purl. Very good in theory: simple stitches, very graph-able (to teach new skills), fun and "easy." In practice, however, it didn't work out at all. So rip, rip and I'm back to the beginning and started designing with the needles and wool instead of the computer and chart.

First thing I did was simplify even more. Instead of trying to move the drop stitch row around, I kept it running up and down. That helped. And I worked out how many stitches to decrease from the border so the square would be square. And I gave up on the alternating purl rows because a dropped stitch between knit and purl stitches just doesn't seem to work.

Once I had a basic pattern I thought was good then I addressed the details. For one, the dropped stitches were getting lost because the stitches bordering the dropped stitches were stretching out. Remembering overhearing a comment Amy [Red Purl owner] made to someone in the shop about a drop stitch scarf sample doing the same thing, and with some online research, I found my solution.

Take a look at the following picture (ignore the arrows for now; they're not yet relevant):

In the bottom third (under the lowest red line) is the first attempt. You can see the dropped stitches (the long horizontal lines forming a sort of ladder), and you can notice how the stitches on either side of the ladder are stretched out and cause the ladder to narrow. In time these stitches will kind of all even out and just look like some big loose sloppy stitches. (And that is not good, in case that's not clear.)

In the middle third, you can see where I twisted the border stitch on every other row. It's a little easier to do on the right side when you're knitting the stitch rather than on the wrong side when you're purling. I was hoping that would be enough to neaten things up. But it's really not. The stitches keep their shape a little better and we haven't lost so much of the dropped stitch ladder, but the border stitches are uneven from one row to the next and still look pretty messy.

So we had to take it one step further and twist the border stitches on every row. You can see in the top third the stitches are firm and even, and the dropped stitch ladder is wide and even. This is the best method to keep the pattern stable through wear and use.

Are you curious enough about this stitch to ask how it's done? (Hint: if not, just skip the rest of this post.)

You have to set up the drop stitch ladder by doing a K2tog, YO [knit 2 together, yarn over] in the first row. This will be the base of the ladder and will keep the dropped stitch from running all the way down to the cast on edge.

After you have that base, you can just knit above the YO until you want to let the stitch go. This pic shows some stitches that have already been "dropped" and form the ladder we're looking for. The circled stitches have been knit above them and are ready to be dropped.

And what about the twisted stitches? Well, each row, at the stitch just before the dropped stitch ladder, you insert your right needle into the back of the next stitch and then knit (or purl) like normal. It's as easy as that.
Then you get the the stitch right over the dropped stitch ladder. And guess what you do with it: (...wait for it...) you drop it! (Don't you feel smart for getting the right answer on that one.) Yup, you just lift it off the left needle and let it go. So liberating. (And yes, it feels a little naughty too.)

Now you need to make up for that dropped stitch so that you're not decreasing stitches as you go. So what you do is another YO. A simple solution that continues the dropped stitch ladder for you too. In the next pic you can see that the yarn has been brought to the front before knitting the next stitch (see arrow) and this will create the YO. And now that we've mentioned the next stitch, don't forget to knit it through the back loop (see circle) so that it will also be twisted.

After you've completed the row, you can observe your YO (red circle) and your dropped stitch starting to work its way down (white circle). Of course, if you're impatient like me, you pull at the stitches to make them unravel quicker but in general they will do that by themselves.
Really, you can drop the stitch whenever you want. If you're knitting with slippery yarn you could probably knit a whole piece and drop the stitch at the top. With just a little pulling at the edges the stitch will easily run all the way down. However, if you have a more sticky yarn (like most wools) you may want to drop the stitch more often. I love to do it more often (usually every 6 to 8 rows) because it breaks up the tedium of knitting in stocking stitch.

Another thing I've done to break up the tedium in this particular project is adding a seed stitch column in between the drop stitch ladders. (That's what the white arrows are pointing out.) I think it adds a little needed texture and emphasizes the vertical nature of the overall pattern.

In general I'm happy with the design and hope that Amy and the other knitters like it. I haven't signed up for a month yet (sign ups don't actually open til this Sunday), so I don't know when we will be doing it. I have done this half block sample in some leftover Malabrigo I had around. I will be doing an entire block in some other colour yet to be determined. (And that way I have something to knit the month that we get together to do my block!)

I have one more idea for a block that I want to do, but I am going to keep it to myself for now. I will not submit it as a group block but am thinking that I may substitute it in for some block on a month that maybe I don't like quite as much. If it works out it will be a fun little surprise for Amy too.

Ok, enough reading--now start designing something of your own!

-christina

Afghan KAL 2009

I've joined a knitting class (club). Yes it's true. Amy has set up a KAL where you get together once a month on a Sunday afternoon, get a new pattern to try out on a square which after 12 months will turn into an afghan.

I spent way too much time choosing yarn on Saturday for my afghan. I wanted to use Lorna's Laces Fisherman Worsted because it was sooo soft and not Malabrigo again! But most of the Lorna's had been sold out and there were only a few variegated colours left. (Apparently everyone else does not wait until the day before to buy their materials!) The colours were gorgeous in themselves but not what I wanted. Variegated colours do not showcase stitches or patterns, and if I'm going to do an afghan where the whole point is to have different stitches in every block, why would I use a yarn where I can't see the stitch??

And so I was seduced by the colours of Malabrigo. I started with a luscious orange that is neither too bright nor too drab. I keep calling it Burnt Carrot, but it's actually Glazed Carrot. (Almost as good.) I'll buy the other colours as I go, although there is a beautiful sky blue I already have my eye on in the shop. I'll have to move fast if I see the supply dwindling...

The pattern is a Reverse Stockinette Chevrons that Amy wrote up. I got about half way done the square while sitting at the shop and got almost done at home while watching the NFL playoffs.

There was a huge crowd at the shop, easily 20 people. Many more than I expected, I must confess. It was a big mix up of people that knew each other well, not at all, and a little bit but just through Red Purl. I stayed the whole time and enjoyed it, but it was fun when the crowd thinned out for the last hour and we had fun with just a few of us. And then I managed to snag a seat on the couch by the faux woodstove heater too.

Almost all were working on the afghan and those that weren't were waiting to get yarn and would join in later. It will be fun to see how the same pattern will be interpreted by so many people and how it will turn out in all the different yarn choices. Many are not doing Malabrigo this year, but only because they did one (or two!) last year. And it will also be interesting to see how many stick it out for the full year and get it done! (There was someone there who admitted that she hasn't gotten past July last year, but is starting another one this year anyway!)

The best part?? This year Amy is opening up the design work. If she picks your design then you get a free skein for the project the next month. Oh yes! I am in! I'm thinking of something with dropped stitches: they're so fun and feel so naughty!!

Off to design a winner...

christina