Knitster!

Well, I've gone and done it -- set aside a URL to focus specifically on knitting and networking (knitworking?) so that this blog can become more of the general punkrustic bent, although I'm sure that there will be plenty of overlap. But until I get that set up, i'll continue to update here, but add Knitster to your list of things to read if you're interested. I've changed my work situation around so as to give me more time for turning hobbies into profitable enterprises, and we may be launching several punkrustic-themed 'zines in the coming months.

Currently, I'm about halfway up the front of the hoodie, and about 2 dozen rows into the tank top. This is going to be a big catchup weekend, so we'll get some pictures up!

damn sweater!

Although I don't think it's the sweater anymore. It's the fact that whenever I join a new yarn, some massive tragedy seems to hit the sweater. I have no idea where this hole in the 5th row of the ribbing came from. I dropped the stitches down to try and fix it, and it looks better, but it's still not right. I may need to redo it.

But the back is done, at least---this is starting the front!

The tank top is looking really nifty, but knitting up kind of slowly. I do hope that I can get some work done on it this weekend, mandated road trips aside.

One night standing...

So on my last night of class at Knit Happens, I learned a lot--how to ssk, sl1k1psso, yo, k1f&b, CABLE...

Aran, here I come.

I'm into my last inch on the back of the hoodie. The tank top I just pick up and knit from time to time. I'm starting to feel like this hobby is getting somewhere.

Like, addictive...

Updates!

1. Frogged all 21 inches of the back of the sweater when I accidentally short-rowed and didn't catch it til three rows later. The more I looked at the sweater, the more mistakes I saw, and the more I understood the mistakes I had made, and ripped the whole thing up in frustration--so, two weeks later, after knitting two pairs of slippers and handling a bit of a life-crisis, I spent the weekend catching back up to where I was, and it looks much neater. I'm having trouble with the yarn, though, because I joined up the next ball and the colors don't seem to be the same, in spite of both coming from the same dye lot.

2. The second pair of slippers (pictures forthcoming) came out great. I added a fold-down cuff. The only thing that went wrong, aside from my not paying enough attention to the pattern and as such making some strange mistakes that worked out okay in the end but I don't care to repeat, was that the top seam of one slipper didn't hold during the felting process. I think I know what i did wrong there, though. Son wants a pair done in black. They are very easy, though. Yay!

3. My next project, since spring is coming, is going to be the Yarn Girl Tanks pattern featured in the free advertising section of Interweave Knits. I'm probably going to make it in lime green, although hot pink and hot purple are looking pretty good, too. I never in a million years thought I would wear these colors!

Something to show off!

Well, let's see...the dashboard doesn't work in Netscape so well, so I'm going to try to do this..

The successful slippers!




This was super easy. Pattern from Bernat, but I couldn't find Lana anywhere, and Patons Classic Wool worked up just fine.

I'll post pictures tomorrow, I promise...

But the slippers are done. Aside from a seam problem and the fact that one slipper is slightly bigger than the other (perhaps more hot water will do the trick), they are beautiful.

On to the next

I figured out what I did wrong on the sweater. I must have put the thing down in the middle of a row, which I know better than to do, and when I picked it up again I turned around the work, which is an interesting way to do a vertical decrease--but definitely not what I wanted to do. It's still sitting in the corner frogged back to where I changed yarns, and I don't want to look at it. I need to reneedle it, but I don't care. I want to do a few smaller projects before I come back to that one, despite the fact that it looks pretty good on the whole. I need to better understand the yarn, I think.

At any rate, so today I went by AC Moore and found some nifty inexpensive merino and decided to try my hand at felting. I now have a small trivet, and I'm about to embark on some slippers. No, I take that back; I'm five rows into the slippers.

I got some blue and grey and lime green in the wool, and some rose and light grey acrylic... just be fun to just play with knitting for a while and then come back to the hoodie. I swear, pictures soon, if anyone cares..

Dropping entire rows

20.5 inches up the back, I found a weird zig zag in my work. This has happened before, and I've been like, okay, whatever. But in my infinite curiosity to figure out what had happened, I decided to tink back a bit. I had dropped a stitch.

So I pulled the stitch up.

Only to find that by pulling this stitch up, I had another dropped stitch, TWO rows down. WTF?

I try again. Pull up two rows, inspect the threads....Wham. Another stitch slips down. Three rows. As I'm pulling that back into position, one of the threads turns into a gargantuan 2" loop shooting sideways out of the left side of the work.

So now I'm in dropped stitches, a gaping hole in my work that I will never be able to fix with a crochet hook, and about to cry. I had just semi-successfully changed yarns and had maybe an hour's worth of work left to do on the back when this happened. I go to bed.

This morning, I frogged four rows. (But you had only dropped three, you say, right?) The reason I had to frog four rows is that when I got to the dropped stitch, the working yarn did a U-turn in the middle of the row and headed back.

I had dropped half a row. I have no idea how I did that, but I had.

The sweater saga continues

Argh argh argh argh.

Yes, a sweater shouldn't be your second project, even if it's an easy beginner pattern.

About 18 inches up the back, I glanced at the RS of the sweater and found about 20 stitches of BUMP. Which made an interesting line, should I ever want to design something with interesting lines, but not now. So I ripped out two inches of stitches, capturing the row onto a smaller needle, and tried to knit over.

It looks even worse now. Blast it. Going to rerip tonight. Maybe I'll just tink this row and make sure everything is turned round the right way.

Aside from that it's going fine. Homespun is as aggravating as they say, but I seem to have gotten the hang of it, mechanics of actual knitting aside.

Was so on a roll and then...

I found a crazy ass mistake in the hoodie. I'm about six inches up the back having not accidentally gained or dropped anything; and a third of the way through a knit row I find a weirdass circle of yarn creating a hole.

I'm not sure whether I twisted a stitch or whether I knit when I should have purled, and thus accidentally yarned over, but at least I caught it in the next row and think I can fix it. The question, of course, is whether I have to unknit about 75 stitches or can simply drop the stitch and pull it back up again.

All this happened right when Boo came home last night, so of course I parked the errant stitch on a crochet hook and left the other two needles as they were.

Should be entertaining to try and fix, but at this rate, by the time I get to my beginning knitting class, I'll be able to teach it.

DIY recipes

I've had a butternut squash staring me down for weeks. And I picked up some shiitake mushrooms earlier this week. I kept looking at one or the other and thought, instinctively, those two would go good together. In a risotto. I have no idea where this brain noise came from, but I found recipes for it. Unfortunately, I didn't have more than half the ingredients. So I improvised, which is totally punk.rustic.

1 medium butternut squash
2 c. water
2 chicken boullion cubes
3 T. butter
1/2 of a vidalia onion, chopped
1 package shiitake mushrooms, chopped
good sprinking of thyme
salt and pepper
1 cup rice (preferably arborio, but I only had jasmine on hand)
1 tbsp honey
1 can cream of chicken soup
parmesan cheese


Halve and roast the butternut squash for 40 or so minutes at 400˚. Meanwhile, chop the onion, and clean, stem, and chop the mushrooms. Dissolve the boullion cubes in hot water. Melt the butter over medium heat; add onions and cook a couple of minutes, or til they start to soften. Add mushrooms and thyme; stir around a couple more minutes until the mushrooms have taken on the butter and darkened a bit. Add the salt, pepper, and uncooked rice. Saute for a few more minutes; put boullion on to boil. Add rice mixture to boiling boullion mixture. Add about half the squash to cook down and a tsp. of honey. Cover and let cook, but give it a stir now and then. You may have to add more water.

Add the cream chicken soup once it's close to done and uncover it. Add the rest of the squash. Heat through. Add parmesan to taste. You're done!

This is totally vegetarianable by using a veggie stock and a real cream mixture. And it would definitely gain from some wine being added. But *someone* I know had... thirds! and the picky eater in the house gobbled it right up!

Frogging!

So the scarf is finished. It's about five feet long, and I darned all the wholes from my accidental yarn overs. It was a good learning project.

And, feeling ambitious, I've already started a second project. I was thinking it would be a hat, or a bag, or something. But no... I decided to knit myself a hoodie.

It's a lion brand pattern, and it uses homespun yarn, which has a really strange texture. My first attempt at ribbing looked horrible, so I frogged the whole thing, and... realized that frogged homespun is exactly like regular homespun. that's how loopy the yarn is.

At any rate, I've now re-knit the first 18 rows, and while it still looks kinda drunken, it's a vast improvement. I've figured out how to tell whether the next stitch is a knit or a purl, and I've caught three major mistakes in enough time to only have to un-knit ten or fifteen stitches. I've picked up a dropped stitch, and caught all my accidental yarn overs this time. It's a lot easier to spot accidental yarn overs in stockinette than it is in garter. I've also managed to not accidentally increase, yet!

So i'm feeling optimistic that my first sweater won't look like chicken skin. It's got lots of pretty colors in it, but we'll see if I can get the colors to match up when it comes time to knit the front.

On the cooking front, we had lots of good food this weekend. Roast chicken. Beef stroganoff. And Blueberry Buckle. I need to reconfigure the recipe box!

Weird energy in the home front right now, but it will pass. Another transition at hand, and it will be a painful one.

boston

i have had two naps tonight, and again I head to bed to wake up in four hours.

tomorrow I should have some time to chat, and my livejournal active again.

thanks for checking in.

punky, if you're out there, i miss you, liebling.

I wonder how this would look in an eyelash yarn.

Bristol Centre for Applied Nonlinear Mathematics Publications 2004 Abstract of preprint 2004.3

I'm not sure that most crafty folks will appreciate this, but just in case you're really into crocheting and chaos theory (and not as it applies to balls of yarn and earnest kittens), here are the instructions for crocheting your very own Lorenz manifold.