Mele Kalikimaka!

Ladies, I hope ya’ll have a wonderful Christmas and New Year. Mr. Liu and I will be celebrating our Christmas in Maui this year. No, that’s not what we did last year. Last year we went to Oahu. Big difference.

See you in 2010!

Please Explain This

I finished the Alphamitts for Mr. Liu’s nephew. They turned out well, except for this:

 

How is it that I used exactly the same yarn, exactly the same needles and knit exactly the same number of rounds and the mittens came out to be two completely different sizes?!? How does that even work?

So what I do is pick up the same yarn, needles and pattern and knit a  third mitten and pray it doesn’t turn out to be some crazy different size. I managed to get lucky:

 

I got a mitten that matched the bigger of the two mittens. So now I have a pair and a too small spare. I want to knit another to match the little guy, but I’m not quite sure how it happened, so I’m not certain it’s a reproducible result. Maybe if I drop a needle size? What do you think?

Knitting With Wire

I took a class at K2Tog a couple of weeks back called knitting with wire. I’ve seen some knitted wire jewelry in the odd knitting magazine and on etsy, so I was really interested to take the course. We were provided with wire and some stone chips with which to knit.  I made a bracelet and a pair of earrings:

 

Both are done up in garter stitch. The bracelet was pretty easy to work. I basically made a flat piece and added my faux-turquoise bits at pleasing spots. When it got long enough for me to slide over the biggest part of my hand I just kind of wove the end of the wire to connect the ends of the bracelet. No binding off required. The hardest part of this was figuring out how to hold the wire. You can’t tension it like you do wool (or need to, really) and if you unwind too much it gets all bendy and weak in spots. 

The earrings are still missing their fish hooks because I’ve been stuck at work late every night this week  (and will be for every forseeable night for the next three weeks!) and haven’t gotten those little split circles so the earring doesn’t hang all funky. They were difficult for such tiny little things! Decreasing with wire is not for the faint of heart or weak of hand. Especially if you’re having trouble knitting loosely. Knitting loosely seems to be one of the keys when it comes to knitting with wire. Alas, I’ve spent so much time learning to pull my yarn tighter that knitting loosely is really challenging!

One Down, One To Go

Success is almost within reach! I have completed one mitten!

  

Pictured above are both sides of my first completed Alphamitt. This mitten is designed a bit differently from my practice mitten in that the mittens will not be handed. So, much like in sock knitting, I will be knitting two of the exact (hopefully) same mitten. Also, they will be interchangeable, which will be good for a three-year-old. I don’t think he’s quite got left and right down yet. I’m also toying with the notion of knitting a third as a spare, but I think that may strain the pattern’s charm.

I’m so enchanted with stranded knitting in mittens right now I want to do nothing but knit mittens. Particularly these pirate mittens. Or maybe the squirrel ones. I’m not sure. All I know is that I want to add mittens in every shade to my wardrobe.

I worry that this enchantment is tempting fate.

Mittenly Progress

I’m making progress on my mitten. I’m using some super gorgeous yarn to knit these up:

  

It’s Spud & Chloe in Anemone and Popcorn. Originally, I wanted to make the contrasting colors on the mittens blue and yellow (Go Bears!). I’m trying to subconsciously make Mr. Liu’s nephew a Cal fan. However, my plan was thwarted when the store I went to didn’t have yellow. This yarn is a lovely superwash (good for kid’s mittens!) in and 80/20 wool/silk blend. It’s been great to work with. Which is good, since I’ve done  this three times:

 

That’s a mitten cuff. I think this is the second incarnation. People, learn from my mistake: If the pattern is fair isle, SWATCH IN FAIR ISLE! I cannot emphasize that enough. I swatched with just one color and the first cuff was itty-bitty. So I went up a needle. Still too tiny. The third time I had success. Don’t let this happen to you!

I’m really fond of this cast on, though. It’s basically long tail modified for two colors. The Island of Misfit Patterns has a good description on how to do it. My goal for the weekend is to complete both mittens. I have three things going for me that will help me reach that goal: 1) Mr. Liu is about to kick me off this computer to work on his paper so I won’t be otherwise entertained. 2) These mittens are for a 3-year-old. He still has small hands. 3) Tomorrow I’ll be camped out watching football. Perfect knitting time! Wish me luck!

Best Weekend Evah!

No, not this weekend (though this weekend doesn’t suck). Last weekend. My annual Football Extravaganza Weekend. The awesomeness of the weekend can be summed up in two photos:

 

Those, ladies and gentlemen, are the final scores for the 112th Cal/Stanfurd Big Game and that weekend’s Raiders home game against Cincinnati. I went into the weekend expecting both of my teams to lose and just hoping not to get blown out. Lo and behold Cal takes Stanfurd down and the Raiders follow suit taking out the Bengals. I was so full of nachos and happiness I could barely contain myself. Oakland is taking on Dallas on this Thanksgiving Day, and while hoping for a second win is probably too much to ask for, I can’t help but feel good about their chances after last week!

And to make this post even remotely knitting related, I did finish my lovely Cal scarf:

 

Pretty, ain’t it? I added the second picture because it’s been suggested that my Cal scarf is actually a San Jose State scarf. As you can see, that just isn’t the case.

Hope everyone has a Happy Turkey Day and that you get a ton of knitting done over the long holiday!

 

Practice Mitten

Now that I’m pretty comfortable with Fair Isle, I’m moving on to Stage II in my preparation to knit one Christmas gift. I know it’s a lot of work for one little gift, but it’s gonna be soooo cute!

Stage II is knitting mittens. As some of you may have noticed, I am, at heart, a sock knitter. Also, I live in California and it’s never really occurred to me to knit mittens before this. At any rate, the gift I’m planning will need both stranded knitting and a mitten-y shape. Having never knit a mitten before, I went to Knitty.com and found this Training Mitt pattern. Since Knitty’s Training Sock is where I got my sock knitting start (and now look at me!), I was pretty confident going into this.

The main bit I never really understood when reading mitten patterns was how the thumb worked. Well, this is how the thumb works. When you get to where you want it to go, you knit on some waste yarn like so:

 

After you finish up the finger parts of the mitten, you pull the yarn out voila, live stitches. At this point in the practice I was going “Ooooh, duh!” to myself. It seems pretty obvious now.

The side of the mitten you put the waste yarn on decides what hand it’s for (mine’s a righty). You pick up the stitches, knit the thumb in the round and you’ve got yourself a mitten!

   

My tiny mitten goes well with my tiny sock. I’ll probably keep them both around for a while. They make me kind of proud.

Kali, however, doesn’t understand why she, as a kitten, does not yet have mittens.

Fair Isle Mania!

I haven’t been posting much lately, but I have been knitting. Mostly, I’ve been practicing for a Christmas gift I want to knit for Mr. Liu’s nephew. A lot of that has been practicing fair isle. I finished off the purple hat:

Not bad, huh? Well, at least this view of it looked nice. I did mess up in two spots, but I think I was able to save the finished product. My first mistake was in the middle of one of the chart repeats:

I wish I could blame it on… well, anything really. But I just wasn’t paying attention. Worse, I didn’t notice until I was decreasing for the crown. By that point there was no way I was ripping it back. I made a somewhat successful attempt at duplicate stitching it out:

It’s not as obvious. Well, that might be wishful thinking.

The other bit I messed up was at the end. Since the hat was knit in the round the rows are more like spirals and the ends don’t really match up with each other.  The chart was designed so that the ends should match up to make little diamonds. So I was supposed to move that bit of the chart repeat either up or down a round to make the pattern line up. I missed part of one and moved the other in the wrong direction:

 

You can see that center diamond on the bottom doesn’t look quite right.  And the center diamond on top is merging with the large diamond to the right. So I worked some duplicate stitch over that as well:

 

I think this go at the correction was more successful.

I didn’t stop practicing my fair isle with the purple hat, though. I used the same pattern and swapped the colors to knit up this:

   

That’s a skiing-type head band, wide enough to cover your ears. Going into it I hadn’t intended to knit a headband, but the pink yarn kind of made the decision for me. I didn’t even quite have enough to make the ribbing the same length. This go was much more successful. I paid more attention to the chart while I was going and moved the round end repeats in the right direction. It’s a pity I didn’t have more yarn. It would have been a lovely hat!

Darkness and Kali don’t find fair isle interesting, though. Not enough yarn ends. They’d rather watch a tiny spider:

A Halloween Tribute

I know it’s been a while, but I haven’t forgotten about this blog much less my knitting. Be on the look out of a few FO’s in the near future, but for now, let’s do a little photographic tribute to Halloween!

 

The orange Boo now has a little purple girlfriend and I have a kitty hat with ear flaps!

We carved pumpkins. Mr. Liu’s is on the left, mine is on the right.

 

Kali was a pretty, pretty princess and Darkness was a very handsome prince.

 

I was (classic) Lt. Uhrua and Mr. Liu was (classic) Capt. Kirk. We took turns sitting in the big chair. (The exhibit is at the Tech Museum in San Jose. It was awesome and I highly recommend it. Hell, if you need company I’ll go again!)

How was your Halloween?

Look What I Can Do!

Check out my new skill. All the cool knitters are doing it!

Two handed knitting! I picked that up at the Fair Isle class I went to at K2Tog on Tuesday. I’ve been trying to teach myself to knit with my left (or “dumb”, as I like to call it) hand for some time now with little success. I still have no real rhythm when I’m knitting with my left hand, but the stitches come off the needle right, which is more than I could say on Monday. I’ve made quite a bit of progress on my little Fair Isle hat:

 

The class on Tuesday was great! I learned a ton. The bit I was most interested in after learning to knit with my dumb hand, was how the hell do people knit mittens with floats small enough that their fingers don’t get stuck in them. That was near the top of the list because it directly relates to a project I want to knit for xmas. There is a really clever way to trap the floats down so they’re shorter on the wrong side of the work. I haven’t used it much on the hat, as you can see, partly because the repeats are pretty short, but mostly because it’s a hat and hair isn’t that prone to getting stuck in yarn. At least non-cat hair isn’t.

Probably the nifftiest piece of information I walked away with was the idea of “yarn dominance.” Apparently, whichever yarn you hold in your left hand will be the color that pops the most. The teacher had some swatches where she switched which yarn was in which hand halfway through and you could absolutely see there was something different about it. One swatch just looked a little off, kind of like someone had used a different dye lot part of the way through it. You couldn’t quite put your finger on it. With the other swatch was more obvious. Half looked like blue dots on a pink background, the other half looked like pink dots on a blue background. She was saying that the phenomenon also happens with machine knit items, so it’s totally a mechanics thing, not a human error thing. The lesson here, don’t switch hands and put your pattern color in your left hand.

All in all, I totally recommend this class. Actually, all the classes I’ve taken at K2Tog have been great. If you’re in the area, you should go!