The good news is: not only did I get the Gryffindor mittens as far as I wanted to in time for Adam, but it was a very good thing I didn’t entirely finish them: I had to rip back the tips and add almost 2 cm to each hand to make them fit. I can’t even imagine the pain of unpicking the woven-in ends and splicing new yarn to the whole shebang.

It’s really hard to find a flattering pose for both gloves and the recipient’s face. I managed to fail on both counts.

The best news is: within two hours of arriving in Leipzig in the middle of the night (i.e. 6.42 am) last Friday, Adam had learned the knit stitch, and over the next days proceeded to knit like a madman, first on a little green garter stitch practice swatch, then on a project that made not only me go ‘holy shit, now that’s one hell of a first project!’: Susie’s Reading Mitts. Even with substituting the picot edge for a more manly straight edge, those mitts have it all: working in the round on DPNs, knit, purl, increase, decrease, yarn over, counting rows, fixing mistakes, casting on and binding off, sewing a hem down on the wrong side… and probably a couple of other things.

When knitters will have taken over the world, I’ll have done my part. Nobody spends more than a couple of hours here without at least trying a couple of knit stitches, but to say that he took to it like a fish to water is sort of an understatement.

I remain suitably impressed, as I wistfully glance in the vague direction of my abomination of a holey, green cotton garter stitch first-time scarf…

But yeah. Apart from showing him around the city (and boy, did I go all-out on that. I think the walking tour around the city center took a good three hours), I tried imparting as much knitting wisdom as I could: from how to use stitch markers to the brilliance that is the Yarn Harlot, from medieval knitting guilds to the boyfriend sweater curse, from how to wind yarn cocoons to washing your woolens, from the story behind the Spanish Armada shawl to how to spend more time on Ravelry looking at patterns instead of actually getting any knitting done. Although come to think of it, he didn’t need all that much instruction for that last bit…

I also took him for an afternoon at Annelie’s, where I quickly plied my yarn and then proceeded to coo over the baby and tell her the story of Bilbo and the thirteen dwarves, switching between English and German every time I was distracted or needed for some light interpreting, because I could never remember which language I’d started off with. My sanity didn’t take too well to the constant language mix – it’s a good thing I’m not becoming an interpreter after all. But spinning always makes the confusion a bit better. (Also, shininess.)

Anyway. I had a wonderful time, and I hope he did as well. There’s a slightly upsetting lack of photos, since he doesn’t have a camera and I seem to have very localized dementia when it comes to gadgets, but I made sure to get at least a couple of us, over the roofs of Leipzig.

And let me just say: I’ve never had quite as much alcohol in as short a time period as the last week. Holy moly.

Anyway, the point being, I’m using Cascade Ecological Wool and Eco+ (which is the same thing, only dyed), and they come in these HUGE 250 g skeins. Good lord. As I’ve discovered when I split some 400 g sock yarn cones into thirds, 130 g of yarn is really all I can comfortably wind, after that, the ball gets too bulky for me to hold without putting some considerable strain on my hands.

This discovery was only validated and expanded upon when I wound two of my five Eco skeins into balls, and I figured: there’s gotta be a better way of doing that.

As it turns out, there is. Jacqueline Fee’s yarn cocoon is something I’d tried before with disastrous results in cobweb-weight yarn, but it seems perfect for these big, thick skeins where the yarn sticks together a bit instead of just becoming a big tangled mess of slip-slidey thread. And winding them is really quite relaxing.

Also, I love the look of them. They really do look like cocoons, don’t they? They are, admittedly, a bit bigger than the balls/ yarn cakes I wind – they end up being around the size of the original skein – but they don’t tend to roll around quite as much, which is always a relief.

I’ll report back when I’ve knitted up more of them, i.e. how much they collapse when a bit more of the center is gone, and how well they hold up under the stress of being hauled around, but as of right now, I’m thoroughly charmed. Also, my hands hurt way less.

In the course of this, I recently finished a pair of Gryffindor mittens, nothing fancy: I did some corrugated ribbing for the wrist, took the chart from the House Bag pattern, and continued the checkerboard pattern on the palm. They’re awesome and I can’t wait to wear them, but I also learned a couple of things from them, and when my roomie and a good friend of mine both asked for a pair of House Mittens, I figured this might be a good opportunity to document my designing process, on the off-chance that others might be able to learn from my mistakes.

So, I present you with the first installment of:

A Tale of Two Mittens

Part One: Gathering wool. And books, and some more ideas, and general information.

Whenever I pull together a pattern from bits and bobs, I try to model it on something I own that fits. In the case of the initial pair of Gryffindor Mittens, this was last year’s pair of Vespergyle Mittens (which are still up among my favorite things I’ve made), and from the many failed attempts on that front I knew that on 2.25 mm needles, nothing below 18 sts/needle (that’s a total of 72 stitches) would fit my giant man-hands. From Vespergyle, I also learned that a couple more rows of cuff would have been very nice indeed, and that thumbs should rather have two rows too much than too few.

So for the new mittens, the first thing I did was taking a look at my brand-new Gryffindor ones. Here’s a picture of them, and one of what’s wrong with them. (I’ll occasionally stick with smaller pictures for the sake of layout, but as always, bigger versions are just a click away)

If you look at the second picture, you’ll see that the upper palm is all wavy and weird, thanks to my evidently being rather tense for a couple of days and not leaving floats that are long enough. The second mitten turned out alright, since I wove in the floats obsessively – but really, you don’t want to do that with mittens, since the loose floats trap more air, making the mittens warmer. (This is the reason Latvian and Estonian mittens are usually in fingering-weight yarn, yet still warm enough for their extremely chilly temperatures.) And if last winter is any indication, warm mittens are the way to go this year as well.

So I formulated my basic concept based on the two things I’d learned from these mittens: that I needed another pattern for the palm, and that if I had to do any more corrugated ribbing, I’d rip somebody’s head off.

***

Mittens are generally constructed of a couple of basic elements that can, if you’re so inclined, be knit in different patterns. There’s the cuff, which is often either ribbed or decorated with ornamental bands; this is also the place where braids go on Latvian mittens. Then there’s the top, where the elaborate patterns typically happen; the thumb gusset (if you’re doing one) and thumb, usually done in fairly small patterns or stripes; and the palm, which with small patterns is often the same as the top, making reversible mittens (see Vespergyle), or have a small-to-medium pattern. When working a stranded pattern, the palm and the back of the hand are usually divided by a solid-colored 2-stitch column on each side, which provide a convenient place for placing the thumb gusset and the tip decreases. When the cuff is just corrugated 2×2 ribbing, continuing these columns from knit columns looks nice and tidy; when you’re doing a patterned cuff, these columns typically start when you start the palm/top patterns.

While one of the mittens I’m making is for my roomie, who I can just call over to try her damn mittens on whenever I like, the other pair is for a dear friend on the other side of the Atlantic, so I developed this handy cheat sheet. As you can see, it’s a not exactly a fantastic feat of industrial design, etc etc, but it also gives you all the information you need to remote-tailor mittens. For measurements a, b and e, it’s best to trace your hand (stretched out all the way!) on a piece of paper and measure, c and d are the circumferences of wrist and palm, respectively. Speaking of b, you’ll need to add about 25% of ease to that measurement in the actual mitten. I unfortunately don’t have any fancy math to back this up, but I’ve empirically tested this on several mittens and hands, and it seems about right. If you’re off by a tiny bit, don’t sweat it too much. As EZ said: wool stretches.

However, mittens shouldn’t be too tight, for several reasons: first, it distorts the fair isle pattern by pulling the stitches apart. Then, mittens that cut off the blood flow to your hands aren’t particularly practical, plus a bit more air within the glove means more warmth. On the other hand, they shouldn’t be so loose as to be impractical. Hence the measuring.

(please excuse the wonky mitten, this photo was taken when it was fresh off the needles)

Now, I love Ravelry, but at heart I’m still someone who believes in the power of books, which is why I splurge for knitting books whenever I can. Lizbeth Upitis’ ‘Latvian Mittens’ is one of the most recent additions to my library, and truly a godsent both on construction notes and patterns. I sadly haven’t gotten around to really trying out her charts, but I have plans for my Jamieson and Smith, and the pictures are an endless source of inspiration. EZ’s ‘Knitting Without Tears’ is lovely, although in retrospect I’m not entirely sure whether I used this book or ‘Knitter’s Almanac’; either way, both are worth buying. The book in the right corner is a super-cheap, generic stitch dictionary – a friend of mine picked it up for me at his supermarket, for something like €3. It’s not comprehensive by far, and it doesn’t rival the Vogue or Walker stitch dictionaries, but it’s still got a surprising amount of nice stitch patterns. Alison Hansel’s ‘Charmed Knits’ was my very first knitting books way back when, and the source of my disastrous first pair of socks. However, when you actually know what you’re doing, it’s entirely charming and fairly useful, as you will see.

I looked through these books mostly for palm and cuff patterns. I have a bit of a magpie attitude towards knitting, i.e. I take what’s shiny, and I don’t care where it comes from. The cuffs were pretty easy: ‘Charmed Knits’ has patterns for the broomstick and snitch socks Dobby gives to Harry in ‘Goblet of Fire’ which are 8 stitches wide and 17 high, which, combined with a couple of plain edging rows and some Latvian braids would make perfect width for a cuff. (I like mine to be about 25 rows deep; that way, you don’t have to do any arm shaping. Remember, stranded knitting isn’t very stretchy!)

The palm patterns were a bit more of an effort, and I spent a couple of hours doodling and flicking through books, just sort of collecting different things that weren’t checkerboards.

The crosses towards the bottom are from EZ, the small one with THUMB next to it is what I used in the first mittens and liked very much, and I did think about using it for the palm, but it was sort of too small. Also, I like to pack as many patterns into a mitten as I can. I think the wide crosses (that look more like circles when they’re knit up, which I’ve rationalized symbolize the snitch, sue me) might be from ‘Latvian Mittens’, I’m not entirely sure, but the checkerboard-like thing definitely is (and it fell through because a) there are a lot of single-color rows, and b) oh god, checkerboard). The red one is from the cheap little stitch dictionary, and Saskia likes it, so she’s getting that one. I knew I’d have about 33 stitches available, that’s the width of the center crest chart and a good number for mittens in fingering-weight yarn.

One important thing about the palm pattern is that it should at least sort-of match the top pattern, if only to make it easier to remember. One repeat of the checkerboard background is 8 stitches high, so I went looking for anything that was either 4 or 8 high, so as to not break my brain entirely. I also like things to line up nicely, so in addition to the repeat itself I like beginning and end sections that center the pattern; in many cases it’s a bit more elegant than just sticking half a repeat on one end to bolster the stitch count. Theoretically you could just do one-stitch vertical stripes, lots of patterns do, but, well. I like to be complicated.

***

A word on yarn: As Lizbeth Upitis and, I’m sure, countless others have reiterated, thicker yarn doesn’t necessarily make mittens warmer. Fingering weight yarn, when knit up in a stranded pattern, is more than warm enough for most climates except maybe Siberia and the Arctic, since the stranding traps at least as much air as thicker yarn. Bulkier yarn also means bigger holes in the fabric, and less mobility of the fingers. If you’re really, really worried that mittens that are warm enough for the Baltic aren’t suited for your climate, you can make them a little bigger and add silk, cashmere or alpaca lining. You can also go down a needle size to make them warmer, as the fabric density will skyrocket on 2 mm needles.

I usually make my mittens out of superwash sock yarn. A high animal fiber content is essential for warmth, but I like the durability, smoothness and wide availability of sock yarn for mittens. Especially the non-fuzziness, really; I wouldn’t wear angora mittens cause I hate fluff in my mouth, luxury fiber or no. You’ll need less than a skein of each color for a pair – the first Gryffindor mittens took 30 grams of gold and 35 of scarlet, and my hands are not small. I guess that’s part of the reason for their popularity, that you can really splurge on yarn if you want to, cause you’ll need so little of it.

I haven’t used non-superwash for mittens; I do have Jamieson & Smith lined up and will report back. The fact that non-superwash was used for hundreds of years, with fantastic results, is probably an indicator in favor of its use, and since they full (slightly felt) with wear means they’re only going to get warmer the more you use them.

I’m using Zitron Trekking HandArt Flamé for the gold, and some plant-dyed scarlet yarn I bought at the Wollefest two years ago, for the Gryffindor mittens; also a bit of the brown Zitron Trekking HandArt left over from Vespergyle for the broomstick shafts. I’ve made socks from flamé yarn that have felted terribly, so I’m hoping for a similar effect in these mittens. Saskia’s Slytherin mittens are made with Regia sock yarn in green and grey; the broomstick shafts are made with bits of the gold flamé yarn.

***

So, that’s yarn, the different patterns, sizing info. Next time: cuffs, thumbs, and stranded knitting.

But either way, oh yes.

Skein to shawl in a week, baby!

This is the Gingko Shoulderette, in Wollmeise Frosch, 4mm bamboo needles.

Since Wollmeise skeins are 150g, I made the stockinette part a little bigger and subsequently added one lace repeat to each side, but otherwise, no mods.

It’s funny how much I hate the process of pinning out lace, but the results are worth it every. single. time.

The sun shines brightly in the clear blue sky, I spend my time having extensive breakfast in cafés and lounging in the sun down by the canal instead of doing homework, Leipzig is overrun by black masses of the Goth persuasion, and I feel an acute case of startitis coming my way.

Last night I cast on Rock Island last night, I started swatching for my sweater project ‘Phony King of England’ this morning around 7.30, and after an entirely perfect afternoon at Annelie’s, which we spent eating, knitting, talking and cooing over the baby, I’m caving to peer pressure.

After struggling (for some unfathomable reason) with the technically easy lace for Rock Island and being bored to death by an entirely unexciting sock that I don’t want to finish lest I have to cast on its twin, and after a day of watching my friends zoom happily through the stockinette portion of Gingko… I give up. You hear that, the two of you?  Besides, you’ll need my ~expertise  once our KAL gets to the lace part. Possibly.

Blog, I have a confession to make: there’s a secret I’ve kept from you. Well, I’ve dropped the odd reference to a super secret project here and there, but fact is: the downside of knowing that people actually read your blog is that people actually read your blog, and if you want to keep a secret it’d be counterproductive, to say the least, to put it in your blog.

The thing is, I’m usually a terrible secret keeper. I guess I’d rank only marginally lower on the Most Inept Secret Keepers than Peter Pettigrew, because I love hinting and making other people anticipate whatever it is I’m planning that they can never know about. But this time, I kept my trap shut all the way; I’m seriously proud of myself. Neither I, nor Saskia with whom I collaborated on this, lost a syllable of what was going on. And it was really, really hard, because as the astute among you might have noticed, I’m slightly obsessed with knitting, and yarn, and when I love a project all I want to do is to post photos every other row to document my progress. I usually rein myself in just in time to spare you that painstakingly boring ordeal, but if you can’t tell anyone, the temptation becomes almost unbearable. But I persevered!

And now, you may wonder, what was this secret project?

It was a baby blanket. And it’s one of the most gorgeous things I have ever knit. Which is only fair, considering it’s going to the most adorable baby I have ever seen.

I started knitting on April 21, but the plan to make a baby blanket is a bit older, and developed somewhere around the time we came back from Berlin. I’d found this gorgeous two-color geometric border in a Greek mosaic in a museum, and I kind of wanted to make this double-knit blanket with the border chart I’d created from the photos. This project, ultimately, fell through for two reasons: a) making the blanket in the 6-ply sock yarn I’d planned to use would’ve cost me well over €60, and b) I realized the baby was due the end of May, and the last thing it was going to need was a double-knit wool blanket.

So I put my blanket plans on the back burner and started on BSJs and hats and bootees like a madwoman, and it was all well until after our road trip to the Hamburger Wollfabrik, when Saskia purchased a cone of gorgeous, cream-colored cashmere/merino/silk yarn. And two weeks later, when she was on vacations with her parents, I found the perfect pattern: Quilt (Square Counterpane with Leaves) (or here for non-Ravelry folks), a gorgeous Victorian lace blanket knit in fingering-weight yarn, made in separate squares and sewn together, with a border that was picked up around the edge. This meant short rows and portability (at least for the middle section), and also that Saskia and I would be able to knit at the same time.

So I, and I’m not particularly proud to admit this, snuck over into Saskia’s room, grabbed the cone, slithered back into my room humming the ‘Mission Impossible’ theme, and cast on the first square. And finished that in about a day, then, without breaking the yarn and with every intention of ripping the thing back if she didn’t want to go along with it, I wrote Saskia an email with a photo attached and an explanation of what the hell I was doing with her yarn, and spent about a day agonizing about having to wait for her reply.

Fortunately, she loved it, and contributed not only the yarn and ribbon, but also a couple of squares and a row or two of the border. And even better for her, there’s enough yarn left over for her to make the shawl she’d planned for the yarn as well.

I was a bit anxious that we wouldn’t get done in time – what if the child came before the due date? – but my worries proved to be unfounded, to say the least: instead of two weeks too early, little Anna was overdue by more than a week.

And today, we got to meet her, coo over her, and finally give a still slightly groggy and sore but glowing-with-pride-and-happiness Annelie two bags filled to the brims with two jackets, three hats, a large blanket-pal rabbit with a truly enormous red bow tie (that one’s Saskia’s), several pairs of bootees, a bundle of mini-skeins of back-up yarn in case of accidents, and last but definitely not least, the blanket.

(approx. 300 g of Hamburger Wollfabrik 50% cashmere, 35% wool, 15% silk 3-ply yarn, on 3 mm needles. Final measurements, approx. 1.20 m x 1.20 m. One square weighs about 22 g.)

I’d originally intended it to be something to wrap the baby in, or a pram cover, but somehow it turned out to be this huge, enormous thing that comfortably covers mother and child from shoulder to toes while nursing, which is, you know. Not the worst use for a blanket.

Although I have a feeling I’ll regret my offer to wash and block it much sooner this way. Ah, the miracle of life.

Now, I have extensive notes on the miracles you can achieve with some yarn and an array of 3 mm needles, but I’ll put it behind a cut to spare those who aren’t prepared for 700 words of tips and annotations. That’s the kind of benevolent dictator I am.

Now, about the pattern: this is a fully updated antique pattern to which I only made one slight alteration, and that was changing some of the k2tog into ssk. Patterns as old as this don’t usually have systematically leaning decreases, and I like my triangles a little more well-defined, so that’s mostly a cultural/ personal preference than a problem. Ssk-ing also helped me commit the pattern to memory, since you kind of see where the pattern’s going with that.

My only nagging point was that it isn’t charted, but that was the first thing I remedied; if you’re interested, you can find my rather rough, but entirely serviceable chart here. (Note: I am not affiliated with the author of the pattern. However, I’d appreciate it if someone else didn’t claim this as their own.)

However, what I’m glad to be able to say is this: Trust the pattern. It struck me as weird to increase the stitch count by twelve stitches per side or something on the last couple of rows, and yes, the seams are going to look wonky and wavy unblocked. But once you do block it, it turns out that the seams really need those extra stitches for the whole thing to lay flat. So yes, take a leap of faith. Trust the pattern.

I left rather long tails after binding off and used them to sew the squares together. I know you’re not supposed to do this, but it really cuts down on the number of ends you have to weave in. (Note: it also cuts down on frustration if you sew the squares together as you go, and don’t wait for all of them to be finished. That way, all you have left to do is pick up a gazillion stitches and knit the border!)

Following Marianne Kinzel’s advice from the ‘Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting’ and encouraged by my previous experience with my rectangular Swallowtail Stole, I used the overcast stitch to carefully piece them together stitch for stitch; the ssk-bind-off (k2, * insert left needle into the front of the stitches and complete the ‘k’ portion of the ssk, k1, rep from *) produces a nice, clean edge that’s ideal for sewing. This method is not invisible, but produces an interesting effect that I quite liked. Like I said before, the seams are going to be wavy pre-blocking due to the increased stitch count, but blocking will make them lie straight. Although the pre-blocked thing is not entirely without merit.

By the way, if you compare the pictures above and below, you’ll notice that a lot of the sculptural/ textural quality of the center leaves is lost in the blocking. I’m happy to say that after about half an hour of handling and careful use by the recipient, the leaves were starting to ‘pop’ again.

I did the border as follows:

• pick up stitches along the outer edge, picking up 2 in each seam between panels. It’s easiest to use one circular needle for each side.
• k 1 rnd
• one rnd [k2tog, yo] except for corner ‘axis’ stitches which are knit plain
• k 1 rnd
• p3 rnds, yo’ing every other round around the corner stitches which are, once again, knit
• repeat the following two rows 10x:

Row 1: k1, yo, (in later rows: k to 3-st garter stitch panel), p3, k2tog, [k3, sl 1, k2tog, psso, k3, yo, k1, yo] to 8 sts to corner (in later rows, 5 sts to gs panel), k3, ssk, p3, (in later rows: k to corner) yo.

Row 2: k

• p 3 rnds w/o YO
• k 1 rnd
• BO
• block with pins in the stitch between the yarn overs.

I added the garter stitch panels with a crochet hook before binding off – don’t repeat my mistakes, it took forever! I found that without them, the corners had a tendency to curl, and I really didn’t want that.

After blocking, I sat down with a large safety pin and 5 m of dark green satin ribbon attached to it and threaded the ribbon through the faggoted row at the beginning of the border, and tied the ends into a big bow. The sides measured about 1.1o m each where the faggoting was, and I added another meter for safety. Which turned out to be good, I cut about 10 cm off the one end and that was it; although granted, the bow is rather big and ridiculous.

Overall, this was a thoroughly enjoyable knit, made even more so by the obvious delight by the recipient and the fact that I didn’t have to do it all alone. What’s slightly depressing is that this post is longer than what I currently have of my Bachelor’s thesis.

I spent an awesome Saturday in the truly packed garden behind the Strickcafé. It was kind of insane – when we got there at 11am, the line to get in went all the way to the street. So many people. Even more yarn.

Oh, and what yarn! I think apart from Wollmeise, all the major players on the German handdyer scene were there, and honestly, even the Wollmeise couldn’t have improved the yarn selection available. (Also, let’s face it: as breathtaking as her colors are, she isn’t exactly adventurous with her fiber selection. So, yeah.) (I don’t mean to snub her, really, but having Wollmeise available to me on a regular basis has sort of taken the edge off the hysteric fangirling.)

I swear, the Dibadu stand was crowded all day. I have no idea how I managed to get this photo, but it had probably something to do with it being fairly late.

I was especially delighted to see the gals from DyeForYarn/DyeForWool, whom I’d discovered a couple of days before on Etsy, and one of which, as it turns out, wrote the pattern for the stole I’ve been planning for one of the yarns I bought in Berlin. Go check them out; they’re two separate stores, but they work together and they’re absolutely equally amazing. Both the yarns and the women. One of them was wearing a gorgeous blue shawl, and Saskia and I spent a good half hour debating which pattern it was. It was a good thing the Wollefest is one of those rare places where you can just go up to someone and ask about their clothes, and people are delighted instead of confused or freaked out. It also turns out that Saskia was entirely correct in her ‘Aeolian shawl with narrow edging’ analysis. I’d say that the student has surpassed the master, but I’m too petty for that. Also I’m still the better knitter. Neener-neener.

Anyway, my haul this year, overall a slight departure from my usual color scheme (i.e. no green this time):

from top to bottom: dibadu BFL roving; DyeForYarn fingering-weight BFL; some dreamy orange alpaca/merino/silk lace yarn (from Kreativmitwolle) that was my first and most impulsive purchase of the day; blue/maroon/rust-colored merino lace yarn from DyeForYarn (again, I left a lot of money there); a gorgeous merino lace yarn from dibadu; four and a half cakes of Jamieson and Smith; and the breathtaking purchase of the day: a 70% cashmere/ 30% silk lace yarn from DyeForWool that I’ve been fondling to a point where I find myself creepy. It’s gorgeous, and smooshy, and most of all DISCONTINUED, which is the most magical quality a yarn can have. (They still have a single skein in a chocolatey brown in their shop. Act fast if you want it!)

What I like about the DfY/DfW crowd is that they give their yarns awesome names: they had an ‘Ex-Peacock’ that was named for the Dead Parrot Sketch (I asked); the merino lace is called Trauriger Harlekin (sad harlequin) and there’s a Death of a Harlequin colorway too; the cashmere’s called ‘fading lichen on a graveyard’ (I had to pull it out to verify. Excuse me while I go fondle my yarn. Again. Did I mention it’s discontinued?) and the BFL’s name is ‘Shadowstorm at dusk.’

(in the background: Saskia’s Malabrigo shawl. It’s really soft. How I know? Well, let’s just say she does this thing where she comes up to you and very subtly announces ‘oh wow, this shawl I’m knitting is really, really soft TOUCH IT.’)

That one, by the way, was one of the two skeins Saskia and I wound to balls right there and then, chilling out next to the spinning wheels while Annelie was producing some wacky art yarn or other. People seemed to be confused by the fact that we were winding manually instead of using one of the winder/swift combos that were set up all over the place, but I like winding by hand. Although in retrospect it might have been advisable to wind at least some of my yarn with some mechanical support instead of insisting on winding three skeins of very, very thin lace yarn by hand. I kind of went on a lace rage there. Saskia also went crazy, albeit not quite as crazy as I did.

But still fairly crazy. Wollum is never far away, no, he isn’t, my precioussssss…

Speaking of crazy. They had this awesome friendship spinning wheel there which I kind of want? Except let’s not kid ourselves, what would I ever do with it. Except brag about it to everyone I know, and some people I don’t, and land myself in a mental institution two months later. So, uh… maybe next year.

It’s this ingenious contraption where one person treadles, but three people can spin at the same time. I don’t know how that would work out in reality – my passing acquaintance with a wheel has shown that regular stopping and seeing what the hell you’re doing is of utmost importance at least for a beginner – but apparently there are also wedding wheels, where the spinners sit next to each other, and that’s just too adorable for words.

But yes. I got to show off my Armada…

… Annelie got to show off her mad spinning skillz and baby belly due to an evidently miscalculated due date…

… and it turns out that as opposed to the Wollefest two years ago, where I had to cajole and threaten Saskia into going there to bring me more money, and she was bored out of her mind, this year she got to show off some lace knitting of her own and also do wacky yarn stuff with me.

It turns out that if you don’t have any knitting friends, a little yarny bribery goes a long way in creating some brand new ones. In your own home! With items commonly found around the house! Go try it today.

It isn’t every day you get to say that, and this absolutely instant gratification is one of the reasons I’ve been bitten by the baby bug big time. Apart from alliterations, this induces major squee from all sides and even more frantic work that’s resulted in two jacket-hat-bootees outfits that are both as heartbreakingly cute as they are quickly knit. Also, being able to squeeze a whole matching set out of one ball of yarn? Is pretty fantastic, not to mention frugal.

However, before I start showing off my super-cute baby knits at length, I’d like to say a word about casting off. (Not a tutorial though; there are people who do that far better than I ever could, e.g. TECHknitting.)

Now, I’m a relatively loose knitter, which is why it always comes as a surprise to me that I’m a fairly tight binder-offer. This surprise is usually coupled with a tedious undoing of the cast-off edge, which is why I switched to the ssk-bind-off as a standard bind-off, i.e. [k2, * insert left needle into stitches on the right needle, perform the 'k' part of ssk, k1, repeat from *], and I’ve never had to worry about a too-tight cast-off ever since. But last night, I came across something I didn’t think I’d ever see in my life.

A cast-off that was too loose.

I was making Saartje’s Booties, which, by the way, are the manifestation of cute – except that the first one didn’t come out quite as cute as the ones in the pictures. Which was a shame, really, because we’re after all talking about bootees that are supposed to look like this:

Anyway, in a rare moment of maturity I decided not to blame the pattern, but instead wondered whether it was maybe my fault. And also, because these things take two hours at most to whip up, I decided that I could always make three. And it turns out that what I got was this:

That’s the first bootee on the bottom and the second one on the top. They’re identical except for the cast-off method. It doesn’t look like that big a difference, doesn’t it? Those couple of millimeters the cast-off was looser (and looser is better, right? Right?!) should barely be visible.

Well, let me show you the two of them side-by-side.

So, what do we learn from this, I wonder? Well, first, trust your instincts. If it looks too loose, it probably is too loose. Second, sometimes the simplest approach is the right one. And third, for  future reference: If a pattern goes to the length to specify a cast-on or cast-off, by god, listen.

***

Anyway, so this is what the rest of the outfit looks like:

That’s the BSJ I made back in March, then a Heartbreakingly Cute Pilot Cap from Knitting Outside The Lines (to keep in lines with the origami theme, albeit not with the garter stitch), and to finish it off, Saartje’s Booties (sans buttons). It’s all very plain, cute in its simplicity and clean lines (or so I like to think), and in a rather dreamy Scottish wool/linen blend I got in Berlin. I still have what feels like 25 g or so left, which is always nice.

And that’s the other one! I’m not usually one to mix crafts – mostly because I hate crochet with a fiery passion that hasn’t abated much with work on this set, but it was totally worth it. This set’s even tri-craftual, with a bit of (very basic) embroidery thrown in just for kicks.

Or tetra-craftual, if you count making Dorset buttons. Which, by the way, are super-fun, dirt-cheap, easy to make, always a perfect match for your yarn, and very well explained in this tutorial.

I might have mentioned the Heart Hat that gave me so much trouble – mostly because I’m a dolt who can’t read patterns – but it turned out rather well in the end, and I’m quite enchanted by it. It’s hopelessly anachronistic in its bonnet-style, but at least I didn’t make the one with the hilariously padded ruffle. (Now that I think about it, I might have to make that one though. I already pity the kids I might have someday.)

And, of course, the wee shoesies. Those are rather ingenious, if I may say so myself – they’re mostly regular socks, except they’re knit flat (because I hate garter stitch in the round) and near- invisibly seamed up along the side.

So, yeah. It’s all slightly ridiculous and probably much too warm for the coming summer months, and by the time the weather will be appropriate, the kid will have almost certainly grown out of them. But I’ve had the pleasure of making them, and oh, what a pleasure it’s been.

Now excuse me, I have some booties I’d like to cast on like a madwoman.

I’m sure everybody’s had that phase where all their knitting motivation was being sucked down into a black hole, and where their knitting progress was taking similar dark and dingy roads into nowheresville.

It’s the time where you open your stash cupboards and discover that despite several kilos of yarn lurking behind the harmless wooden façade, you have a big pile of nothing to knit.

Then you look through your pattern books and Ravelry and discover that every pattern in the world is too something: too fussy, too boring, too big, too small, too frumpy, too modern, too intricate, too plain, too triangular, too this-doesn’t-go-with-any-yarn-I-have or worst, too I-have-a-yarn-that-would-go-with-that-but-I-really-don’t-want-to-waste-it-on-that-because-it’s-not-the-perfectest-pattern-I-have-ever-seen-in-my-life.

And so I cast on a sock or two and trudged through my super-secret project – which was technically fun, but to someone who’s usually so meticulous about keeping their Ravelry project page updated, it’s just plain depressing to do so much work without being able to share it. (Because, well, that’s sort of the definition of super-secret.)

But then I finished the SSP on Tuesday morning and went to the pub with Saskia on Tuesday night, and since I didn’t have any pub knitting (because ugggggh, socks), I cast on Multnomah with my ocean-colored handdyed sock yarn. Which was technically not the best idea, because knitting with dark yarn and dark needles in a dark pub produced garter stitch that was positively riddled with mistakes, but on the other hand, I feel like this yarn must have magic properties. No, really.

Magic. I’m almost done with what has to be the most entertaining garter stitch portion of a shawl in the history of the universe – I’m so charmed by the colors emerging and mingling and I know I’m blowing my own horn to the point where everyone around me (including myself) is starting to turn deaf, but, but… it’s just gorgeous. I’m in love. I have no idea how I did it, except that I dumped a lot (and I mean a LOT) of color on that poor skein of sock yarn, and that the amount of time it spent in the microwave would’ve probably roasted a whole turkey. (Well, almost.) And I can barely wait to start the feather-and-fan section.

So here I am, chilling on my floor since the SSP is currently occupying the sunny spot on my bed, ogling my pretty handdyed, and considering reprising this morning’s Best Breakfast Ever.

(SpongeBob Squarepants bowl? check. Delicious oatmeal? check. Enough fruit to cover the whole bowl of delicious oatmeal, plus some chocolate? oh, you bet!)

Do you know like we were saying, about the earth revolving? It’s like when you’re a kid, the first time they tell you that the world is turning and you just can’t quite believe it ’cause everything looks like it’s standing still. I can feel it – the turn of the earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour. The entire planet is hurtling around the sun at sixty seven thousand miles an hour. And I can feel it. We’re falling through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world. And, if we let go… That’s who I am.

These days I barely realize how fast time flies by, until another week has gone by and I’m going square dancing and barbecuing and doing yarny stuff over at Annelie’s and taking guided tours around my neighborhood and having business lunch with my friends and climbing up church towers and saving our little grill from the sudden downpour. My Ravelry project page certainly reflects that – I just updated it with a shawl I finished on April 4th, but other than that I just have a ton of half-finished projects flying around. I did finish the socks I started when I needed something to knit for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I back in, uh, November, and I’m almost done with a precious little baby set in red and yellow – it’s funny how Elizabeth Zimmerman’s patterns totally work if you actually follow them.

Also, this week Annelie and I finally got around to dyeing some yarn, with easter egg dyes, Kool-Aid and onion skins. There was a whole rainbow of little skeins of wool that she’d inherited from her great-grandmother, and then five big skeins that we met up to untangle and wind into balls just yesterday.

(from top to bottom: kool-aid, easter egg dye, onion skins first skein, onion skins second skein. yes, I am aware of the fact that these are only four skeins; Annelie had already started winding one)

I love winding yarn into balls, or in my case flat yarn cakes that don’t roll around quite so absurdly. It’s a very social thing, absolute teamwork, with one holding the skein and the other one winding the ball, and while you’re connected to thousands of years of history, you have tons and tons of time on your hands to just talk. And with five 130 g skeins of fingering-weight yarn, that’s quite a lot of time. Good times. We split the onion skeins fraternally (or sororically) and are planning on a glove KAL; the blue-and-green skein is mine and mine alone, yes yes my precioussss, and Annelie promptly cast on another Baby Surprise Jacket with the Kool-Aid skein.

I cannot stress how heartbreakingly gorgeous the first onion yarn is. The second, paler one is still quite pretty, but the first one… It’s like spun gold. Which quite frankly I hadn’t expected from onions. Of all things, really.

And so, life goes on and on. Down from the road where it began. (speaking of which, today is the first day of Sherlock shooting in Cardiff. I can’t wait for the second season!) There are two weeks left until the Wollefest, two months minus one day until I have to hand in my Bachelor’s thesis. And before I’ll know it, summer will be over and done with, and the leaves will turn to gold, and nothing gold can stay. I feel the earth move under my feet…