Sewing up Blues

I know I've mentioned before that I despise sewing up knitted garments. For the record, I still despise it. I'm quite excited and impatient to finish (and wear) the Bustaroony cardi. None-the-less, I'm still not motivated to sew my fingers to the bone to see it done. It's been sitting on my couch for about a week now, and I sit and stitch up bits at a time. I haven't been allowing myself to knit at home, because if I did, I would never get it done. So it's heaped up on my couch, and whenever I sit there, I sew.

I've sewn in all the ends, which took literally hours, but wasn't particularly hard. I've sewn the shoulder seams. Piece of cake. But now, I'm attaching the sleeves to the body of the garment. This is where things are getting a bit tricky. When attaching sleeves, of course, you are attaching the top cast off edge (assuming you knit the sleeves from the cuff up) to the side edge of the garment. Normally, I do this using an amalgamation of mattress stitch (on the body) and fake grafting (on the sleeve), which makes a nice smooth seam. However, the textured patterning in this garment, when working on it from this angle, seems to go every which way, and there are few nice neat easy bits to stitch.

Terrible picture, but here is the sleeve lined up to the body for stitching. Maybe you will see what I mean.

As you stitch along, because of the patterning, particularly in the tree patterned bits, stitches are heading in diagnal directions right up to the edge of the fabric. I'm doing ok, a bit of wobbling around but nothing I can't live with. It's just a bit slow and tedious. The first sleeve is attached, and the seam looks fairly good. I just passed the halfway point on the second sleeve so I'm getting there. Just very slowly. Then come the long side seams, which will at least be fairly uniform for mattress stitch. I will finish this thing someday, I promise.

Im making another one of these as a gift, and when I do, I'm leaving a couple of stiches for seam allowance, no matter what the pattern says, or doesn't say.

Moving on, I've gotten a bit of knitterly things lately. I added a bit to my knitting library, getting the book "Knit Fix: Problem Solving for Knitters" by Lisa Kartus. To be perfectly honest, it hasn't told me much that I didn't already know, but does have a section on altering finished knitting which I might find helpful down the track. It would be a great book for a reasonably new knitter, and as problems arise, even as a more experienced knitter, I might find it more helpful than I did on the general read through. It's written with humour and, for a technical type book, is actually fairly entertaining.




I also bought the April09 issue of "Knit and Style" magazine, purely because I hadn't bought it before and liked some of the patterns at a glace through. It IS a very nice magazine, with very wearable patterns. You know, things normal people would wear. I think what I liked best was the photos of the finished items. They were great photos, and allowed you to see detail well. Which lead me to my favorite thing about the magazine. The modeled garments look like real knitters knitted them. I found the ever so slight imperfections very refreshing.

I dropped by Needlenook a while back to get some more of the plastic yarn sewing needles I like using (and breaking) and they happened to have their 5ply Heirloom easycare wool on sale, so I bought a couple of 50g skeins. The color is sort of a goldeny brown, and the final intention is to make some thick socks with them, probably for a gift. Hence the "Easy Care", as I've found many gift recipients don't appreciate the special washing handling regular wool often needs.



As mentioned earlier, I haven't allowed myself to knit at home in a few days so I could concentrate on the seaming. But I have gotten quite a bit finished on the Saloongirl stockings at work, and only like a half a dozen or so pattern repeats finishing the second sock. I have cast on the second glove, but have gotten no further than that. As soon as I finish the stocking, I'll dedicate my time to the glove. It will knit up fairly quickly at any rate.

I've been meaning to mention what I've been listening to lately. After running thru most of the books on Librovox that I was interested in, I decided for a change to check out some knitting podcasts. Of course, I'd done this before, but I must have picked the wrong two to try out. The sound quality was miserable, scratchy and rather more irritating than entertaining, so I hadn't really bothered with them in awhile, but not having anything interesting to listen to on my Ipod was getting a bit old. My trip to and from work seemed to be getting longer and longer every day. So I went on a search, looking specifically for Australian knitting podcasts this time, and ran across Sticks and Strings. It's done by a fellow named David Reidy who lives in the mountains outside of Sydney. The sound quality is great, his voice is perfect for "radio" and his topics, on the whole, are very interesting. Even better, he talks at least some of the time about Australian yarns and Australian events. I went back to show number 1, and I'm now at show number 63, which was recorded sometime last year. I'm really getting a kick out of listening, and would recommend the podcast highly.

I finished spinning up the merino I've been working on:



and finally got around to plying it:



I'm very happy with the result. I named it "Navidad" because it has a definate Christmassy look to it.



Sorry, the closeup is a bit blurry...



No plans for it yet. I'm just enjoying admiring it right now. It came out quite thin, and would be thin enough for some thickish socks I reckon, which was my original intention. One can never have to many socks.

That's it for today. Until next time when, hopefully, the Bustaroony cardi will be ready for display!

What to do? What to do?

Gosh, it seems I have so MUCH I want to do these days, and time is always my enemy. I feel like I flit from task to task and never seem to get anything actually finished, but I know my day will come, and eventually, I'll be able to click "completed" in the box and move on to another project.

First for the good news, about Kaitlyn's jumper, finished a few weeks ago. Some lovely Raveler nominated the jumper in the "handspun/handdyed" competition on OTF, and the jumper actually won! I was very proud of that, as my life has not been one big winning streak, lol. Plus, I get a lovely gift from Woolywombat as my prize. I can't wait to see what she has in store for me!

The other good news about the jumper is that my son, Kaitlyn's father, made a picture of Kaitlyn in the kalidoscope jumper, at my request, because I wanted to share my beautiful granddaughter with you all:



I have been spending alot of my knitting time working on the Kauni shawl. I'm a bit behind the others on the Ravelry KAL, but I don't really mind. I was finding it a bit frustrating trying to do lace on the rather dull tipped Denise needles, and so finally ordered me a pair of Addi Lace needles, which are very nice and have sped up the process. But I did put the project down over the last weekend, partly because I wanted to wait for the other needles, and partly because I just wanted a bit of a change knitting wise. Anyway, I picked it back up day before yesterday. I'm at the end of chart 2, and moving on to chart 3 sometime today (I hope). So far, the results look like this:



While waiting on the lace needles for the shawl, I managed to get some more done on the Bustaroony cardi. The back is now finished, and I finished the bottom tree section of the left front and have knit on the pocket, but that's about as far as I've gotten. Still, it's looking great, and I have the feeling it's going to be just perfect when finished. I'm really enjoying the patterns these days. I'm getting used to them I guess, and am now finding them rather enjoyable.




I've also decided to make another cardi just like it for my girl, who is a small size. She picked out the colours off of the Cleckheaton website, and I ordered them a while back. The shipment came in at my LYS this week, so I went to pick it up.




20 balls of Cleckheaton in a darker brown with tan flecks. Very pretty, but I'm sure the pattern stitches won't show up as well on the dark fabric as they do on the tan yarn I've gotten for my project. Still, it's the colour she thinks will suit her best, and I aim to please.

On the spinning side of things, I had a wonderful day yesterday when a mate I met on Ravelry came over. She brought her guilds drum carder, and I actually got to use one, following her instructions. We chatted, and she expressed an interest in sock knitting, so I showed her a few websites and tidbits on magic loop and two socks on one needle and some other "tricks of the trade". We showed each other our interesting yarns, rovings, gadgets and such. Then we sat in the living room for a while and chatted and spun.

I had started spinning the merino I got from Jane at Moseley Park ages ago a few days before. It's the roving that I dyed back in the spring to try and match the colours on my apple tree when it was just blossoming. I'm spinning the green shaded roving right now, and that's what I worked on as we talked.

I'm not quite finished with the bobbin of green, but here it is on the bobbin, still in progress:




My plans for the immediate future is to finish the shawl first and foremost, and then work more on the "Bustaroony cardi", and my poor neglected "croc socks". I'm not starting any more major projects until I get those finished, or at least, close to the finishing stages. Both have been WIP's for far too long. I would also like to pull the "Peace in the Hood" jumper out of hibernation soon, and there could be a small project somewhere in the mix. We'll just have to see how things go. That's the thing about knitting and spinning. I never know where my fancy will lead me next.

Spinning, Spinning, Spun

There's much to catch up on, as I've been rather neglectful to this poor blog once again, but much goes on in life, and sometimes such a small job as updating this page takes on gigantic proportions and I just can't seem to face it on the day. But today is special, and I'm quite pleased with myself, so I was actually looking forward to making a post today, although I will still be taking pictures as I write. That's how unprepared I am!

Worklife has settled back to normal, more or less. I had alot of holiday time off scheduled for this winter, a day here and two days there, so I've hardly worked a full fortnight in the past couple of months. But the party is over, and work is back on the agenda full time agian. I've been taking both the second sleeve for the "Peace in the Hood" cardi and the first sock in the "Thank God it's not Black" sock set, but I have hardly picked up the cardi at all outside of the house. About a forth of the second sleeve is done.



The sock has seen the majority of knitting done "on the fly", and I managed last night to finish it, or at least the knitting part. I need to cast it off (using Zimmerman's sewn bind off) today, and cast the other one on at some point, but probably not today.



I've been commissioned by mom to make a quick hat for her stepdaughter's son, who is in LeBonner Childrens hospital in Memphis and has to wear a hat at all times. He's a pretty sick little fellow, and recently had fluid drawn off of his brain. I'm searching for a pattern now, and plan to cast on this afternoon. I have a meeting tonight, so I know I'll have time to work on it there. Work is not so good for knitting these days, at least not on the floor I'm working on tonight, but maybe I'll get a few stitches in, in between those infernal call bells.

I also did some reorginizing, using those vacuum sucky storage bags I bought. I got two of the large ones filled, and the air sucked out of them, and stored them under the bed.



I also filled the two travel sizes, squished the air out, and stored those in the chest, to make more room in there. Everytime I go through my "stash" I'm a bit amazed by the sheer size of it all. I did this over my two days off, last Tuesday and Wednesday, but there's still a couple of bags of yarn sitting in the guest room waiting for me to find it a home.



Also on my two days off, I pulled out the koolaid, and pinched off about 1/2 yard of my corridale rovings and tried some experimental dyeing. I really wanted to get a nice soft brown color, but I cant say I had much success. Everything looks a bit too orangy. But I got frustrated with measuring everything perfectly so that I could repeat it later if needed. So I put the project away for another day (or not..I might just go for a natural dye for my browns).




Last weekend, my hubby wanted to take the boat out on the river, as the water is the highest it's been all year and this was the first time in a long time we could safely get the boat out of the marina, as the channel leading out is getting low. So Saturday morning, shortly after I got home from work, we took the boat out. The water, as I mentioned, was higher than it has been in a year. This is the time of the year, at the end of winter, when it's expected to be at it's highest. It isn't likely to get any better, barring some flooding of biblical perportions, and in fact will likely do nothing but drop over the hot dry summer. What's sad is, the water was still well below it's AVERAGE level. Here's a picture I took of someones boat jetty:



The average depth of the river should have the water up to about midway along those tires. It's nowhere close, and this, at it's highest point in a year, with nowhere, realistically, to go but down. It makes me want to cry. We have a natural disater going on here, and noone seems to notice much, much less care. The environmental do-gooders are off saving whales so they can get on TV I reckon. Bahhhh!

I've gotten alot of spinning done over the past couple of weeks. I spun up the light blue and the pink wool, although I had to sort of prepare it for spinning, as it was dyed, but not in nice pretty rovings like I'm used to.

Then I actually got the blue silk and the blue wool out yesterday and made my second ever attempt at plying, which seemed to turn out ok, so I wound it onto the Niddy noddy:



and tied the little figure 8 tie thingys on the skein.

So far so good. I think I took this time to breathe. I then slowly, carefully and with a good deal of fear in my heart, took the skein slowly off the Niddy Noddy. I was half expecting the whole thing to go into a riotous batch of curly cues like my previous "poodle" attempt did at this stage, but it just came off and lay there, looking for all the world like YARN!



Quickly, before the skein changed it's mind and morphed into a poodle, I filled the utility room sink full of warm water and before I could change my mind, or the yarn could change it's shape, I threw it in.



I still have issues with throwing wool into warm or hot water, fearing felt almost as much as I fear moths, but all was well, and 30 minutes later I drained the tub of soapy water and put it into a water/vinegar mixture for another half hour or so, then last a soak in some clear water to rinse out the salady smell.

Then I hung up my masterpeice to dry.



Ok, the "blue" wool now looks sort of white, and there are a few "waves" (I prefer to call it that...kinks sounds so harsh), but it is the first real yarn I've made, and I'm delighted with the outcome. I can actually KNIT with this stuff, and that alone, as far as I'm concerned, is a miracle.

The yarn has, while I was writing this, finally managed to get dry. So I wound it up into a skein. Here it is! My first successful skein of handspun yarn:



I'm STOKED!