Addictions and their many forms

I have often read about people who are addicted to sock knitting.
Some are hooked on crocheting blankets. (See what I did there; hooked, crochet... why are you covering your eyes?)

I think I might have an addiction. Well, one besides collecting yarn and making scarves. I do so love the ease and adventure of scarves.

Now, I think I might be a bit caught up on lace shawls.

I have several books on the subject. My queue is heavy with them and my yarn collection has an obvious leaning toward lace weight and such.

In fact, while I am currently working on one shawl, waiting for blocking wires for another shawl, I have already started sorting out shawl patterns for some stashed yarn.
Currently, I am leaning toward the North Roë Shawl or the Aeolian Shawl (both are listed in Ravelry).

We shall see if this last through the part on my current project where I have over two hundred stitches and more for each row. (The next to the last row is 323 stitches across).

Starting over, at least on some things

A mere five days ago, I took some beautiful Malabrigo Sock yarn and settled down with a pattern for it.

I had completed the cast on and the 9 setup rows, as well as 4 repeats of Chart 1 of 4 (I do not count the setup row chart, I don't think it needs a chart number).

Then I dropped a stitch. A stitch that was actually part of a decrease and may have taken out another stitch with it.

I did try to pick it up, but it was no good. The stitches got away from me and I had to start over.
So I did what any sane woman would do.

I reset the project start date in Ravelry, bullied through to the first of fourteen repeats of the main pattern chart and then walked away from it.

Tomorrow it will look smaller but not terrible much different from before the accident. I am glad I was only so many repeats in. Had I been farther along, some nearby bystander might have been injured.

Dusting off and restarting

Well, hasn't this been another long silence.
Here it is only hours away from August.

The good news: I have started knitting again and have even finished a couple of items!

The promising news: I have become away of a lack of photographs or decent upkeep on the tracking of my yarn stash on Ravelry, and there for in life, and I have a desire to correct this.

The it-could-go-either-way news: I finally ordered my first ever set of blocking mats and blocking wires (and the Knitted Lace of Estonia book, but that was because I was only $5 away from free shipping and it was on sale). So far only the book and the blocks have arrived. The eventual blocking of my first full size lace shawl is still a future thing.

The not-exactly-bad news: I have no idea where I am going to start from to pick back up on the blogging, or really the writing in general. Currently I am undergoing 'blank white page' syndrome. Hey, at least I got this post out, right?

So now I will write up a few teaser points.

1) I am on the third part of a matching three piece set. That is a hat, a scarf and gloves (the gloves are the part I am working on casting on currently).

2) I got some new yarn. Always a bonus!

3) The writing up of patterns is going to happen. Some free, some not. Interested?

4) I will be studying up on and doing some beading work soon. Technically, the project is very much past due, but the technical skills have not been actually acquired yet.

Ok, so that was more than a few points. Not bad for someone working on getting back in the knitting-and-blogging saddle, eh?

The heat is on

Here it is, just past the middle of July and not a post made.

Currently, my roomie is knitting more than I do.

I am working on a new scarf pattern which I will be teaching at KnitWits Knitting and Yarn Specialty Store in Virginia Beach.
I will be teaching Entrelac, Multi-Directional Knitting and Knitting without Turning in two part classes. The first class is August 4th, 6 p.m. and then the second part and finishing will be August 18th at 6 p.m.

Once I finish blocking my demo, I will be putting it on display at the store (where my Mini Mochi Rainbow Shawl is already on display). After the first class is over I will be posting more information about the new pattern.

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Other than preparing for my first knitting class, I have been working on a hat for a friend's child. I knit this hat once, but that one didn't work. So this time I am taking a teddy bear head pattern and adapting it to be a kid's hat. My roomie says I need to knit the ears too.
Ear issue aside I should have the hat done today.
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I finished knitting a box.
I made it so I would have a place to put my female necessities that was not just a plastic bag or the manufacturers container. The picture isn't the best, but I wanted to get my projects page updated so it will do.

It worked up pretty easy, but not too boring.

Could have been made a bit shorter.
I added a simple crochet edging to the top, to make it cover the box more, after it was done.
Next time I might simply cast on an additional 5 stitches on each side.

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I suppose I have been a bit productive, if you don't look at the surprise stuffed toy or the blanket or the airy scarf or the drop stitch scarf which is awaiting a decision about the stitch pattern and the possibility of frogging for a different pattern.

With warm weather comes slower progress.
The heat and the humidity make working on the blanket out of the question.
The stuff toy is at the larger body section and besides being unwieldy, I am puzzling out shaping again. I don't want to end up tearing back, so I wait for inspiration to come along and provide a solution.
I will be tearing back the scarf, I am not happy with what I have so far. I want it more airy. I want more negative space. The kidsilk needs this.

Thus, if I can finish untangling the lace weight merino yarn I will be casting on for a lace shawl.
Perhaps I will find the lace I am looking for and will get it done too.

Who me?

Yes, I feel bad. I have so let the blog slide into silence again, but I have good reasons this time. Really!

I finished the Windmill bag. It is quite lovely and modern and I can only think of two changes I would make to the pattern. The first is the handles, I would have made them shorter. The second is the gauge of my yarn, it could have been more consistent between panels.

Immediately following the cast off for the Windmill bag, I decided to cast on for a box.

Yes, I am knitting a box.
It is a Rose and Espresso colored box for feminine items to be stored in. I did it in four parts. There were two sides and a front piece. The bottom, back and lid were done as a single piece. The lid boasts some stranding work of a rose.
I finished the box, but I am going to tweak it by adding some crochet edging to the lid. Perhaps the box could have been a bit shorter, but it seems to be doing fairly well.

Before I could finish the box, my Roomie who now knits, decided to start the Debbie Bliss Teddy Bear. I suggested a knit-a-long. Then I explained what a KAL was and grabbed some yarn. The next week of knitting was the bear (and since I knit faster than he does, when I caught up I would do a bit of work on the box).

What about my other projects? Like the blankie that has gotten a couple of pattern rows in the last month? Or the custom lace scarf? Perhaps I could do a bit on the socks that I want to knit for myself? Maybe I could get some progress in on the Surprise gift?
Ha!

Serious knitters know that if you don't have a deadline, you don't have to work on UFO's!

Now that I have done those, I am going to work on my first lace shawl.
Yep. I am already on the second chart of three!

If I don't look at the UFO's I won't feel bad for them. Right?

Tying up the ends, the conclusion of my trip

On Wednesday, September 3rd, I finally got my chance to visit The Yarnery.
Remember in the last post I said it came highly recommended?
I can easily understand why.

Admittedly I did not get a chance to visit any of the other stores in the Twin Cities, but I figure there will just have to be another trip in the future. St. Paul was lovely and the people were wonderful.

My traveling companions were trying not to visibly drag their feet when we got to The Yarnery, but were failing miserably at hiding their reluctance. I found the solution before started looking for parking. Right across the street is a bar that Bill used to visit often when he lived in St. Paul. He even told us the story about how a drawing of him ended up on the walls.
I directed the boys to stay at the bar while I merrily jaunted across the street for fiber. They were thrilled!

I was as well.

Now, don't get me wrong. They are good boys and they try to be supportive of my yarn addiction, but having them in a yarn shop without the promise of receiving a custom made item is uncomfortable. They stand around and try to fake smiles. They know nothing of yarn and seem uninterested in learning much of anything on the subject. It was decided that, in the event of global economic collapse, I would be in charge of spinning and knitting all sorts of things for the home and for trade. Thus, they don't have to burden themselves with the information.

Now, I admit, I failed to take a single picture of the store. I am not sure how I would have remembered to, since the first thing to be seen walking into the store was a wall of lace weight yarn.

Seriously, they put a whole wall of it opposite the front door. Your eyes are forced to rest upon gorgeous skeins of skinny yarn in all colors and textures immediately.
I probably stood with the door and my mouth open, drooling slightly, for more than five minutes.

Then I was rescued by a most wonderful lady, who will hopefully forgive me for forgetting her name. I explained, while letting my eyes wander briefly from the lace to other yarns, that I was from out of state and how I came to hear about the store.
We chatted a bit and she provided me with a tour of the marvelous store, explaining how each section was arranged by yarn weight. She saved the best for last, that being the wall of yarn on sale.

Before long I had an arm load of yarn. I did try to be careful, truly. After all, my stash at home had already surpassed a hundred different yarns, some of which I do not even know what they are.

I picked two skeins from the lace weight wall, Malabrigo Lace in two colors and from the sale wall I got two skeins of Debbie Bliss Pure Silk (at an absolute steal of a price) and two skeins of Rowan Lurex Shimmer (I could not resist the shiny purple yarn at such a great price).

I made my purchases and, floating on a fiber high, drifted back across the street to check on the boys who were left at the bar.

They were smiling and having a great time even though the pictures had been taken down from the walls and Bill was unable to show us the one of him.
We had reservations for dinner down the road and so had to head out fairly quickly. I took a moment to show off the yarn, even they can appreciate silk and shiny things, and mentioned how very little all that yarn and a large circular knitting needle cost.

Piller looked at Bill and said he was wrong.
Wrong about what, I asked.
He said that he had been telling Bill it was the best yarn shopping trip ever since he was able to spend it in a bar but, now that he knew how much I had spent, he no longer thought that.

I withheld from pointing out how many times he has spent more that I had on comic books, figuring it would only confuse the issue.
Silly boys.

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There is one last thing to mention about my trip, and that would be what I was knitting while on vacation.
You didn't believe that I went a whole week without moving yarn across needles, did you?

Before we left I had started on the My Favorite Shawl pattern, which I had picked up at the local yarn shop Ewe Knit Kits & Yarn. It is a fairly easy pattern that involves knitting a shawl sideways.

The pattern calls for 500 yards of DK or Worsted weight yarn. I used The Purled Llama's Sol, a worsted weight yarn with rather bright colors of orange and green. The yarn puts me to mind of crayons and kid drawings, which is a bit more colorful than most of my yarn. I love color, but have rarely knit with anything very bright. This was my attempt to get past that.

The yarn is, accordingly, 550 yards.
Which should be more than enough for the shawl.

While we were in St. Paul, I would knit more rows on it every morning. By the time we were to pack for our drive back, I had reached the halfway point. This is decided by measuring the shawl from the middle of your back and then draped forward to verify the desired length has been reached.
I knew we had a longer drive back that we did up, because we were not going to take the toll roads. So I took my knitting with me into the car and knitted nearly non-stop, only pausing when there was no sunlight to see by. For some crazy reason, it took almost twice as long to get back as the trip up. I had two whole days to knit. I reached the end at dusk the second day.

That end was not the finish of the shawl, but rather the end of the yarn.

This yarn is not the kind that has dye lot numbers. Each hank is individually dyed and therefore unmatchable to any other skein. Add to that the purchase time was many months back, so there would certainly be no match, I could not finish the shawl through adding on yarn.
Nor was I going to take some random other yarn (which my stash is mostly darker or more muted colors) and finish it that way. Nope, wouldn't work.
The boys tried all these suggestions and more. I think they were worried about being trapped in a car with a disgruntled knitter who had a cache of pointy sticks at her feet. One suggestion was to cast off there and call it an artistic interpretation.
It was not a bad idea, but I wanted a warm shawl. A blanky that I could get away with carrying around in public. I was more than twenty rows from the end. It would have looked like it had been amputated.

With a deep breath I put the project aside.
No tears, no screaming. I even managed to minimize the twitching.
A master of calm, that is me.

When I got home, I frogged the whole thing back.
Marked the midway point, in case I decided to try again.
And rewound it into a ball.

It will now sit in a basket and think about what it wants to be. Until it has a clear answer, that yarn will not be touched. It is officially grounded until further notice.

I know, it was probably my error. I should have marked the middle of the skein before I started knitting it. I probably made it too big, or perhaps my needles should have been another size up from what I was using.
But if you just push such arguments aside, if only for a moment, then we come to the real point.
My vacation knitting project failed. Really, all of my stitches were perfect and well developed.

I have had many successes, that was the first project to not end well at all. I have removed the evidence of this, and now all that remains of it is this post which I will bravely place on the internet.

Eventually the yarn will be something and it will work out better. In the meantime, I shall focus on other things. It is such a minor thing really.
Thus I will not document the things I said to the yarn as I was ripping out all those stitches. Most of them weren't fit for human consumption anyway.

This ends my vacation posts.
Coming soon: "Quick knits for cold ankles"
Or "Projects that do as they are told"