One down, four to go

I've finished the first piece of my $1.50 cardigan!

You can't tell from this photo, but this piece (the back) is actually quite wide, and I'm a little bit concerned. I realize I've voiced this worry before, so instead of belaboring the point I'm going to carry on and hope it works out. I ended up starting the armhole shaping at 15" instead of the 18.5" the pattern recommended, although I made the armhole the same depth (well, maybe 1/4" smaller). I think this length will work out much better for me than that in the original pattern. I was a bit torn about which piece to start next, and I've decided, on Jennifer's advice, to do the striped front next (instead of the cabled one), since it matches the back. I think this is a good plan. I intended to cast on the first front tonight but instead worked on the Purdy Plum socks, the second of which is just in need of about 1/2" of ribbing. They will be a Christmas gift, done very early!

Sock Update, and Project Spectrum Plans

You know, I didn't knit a stitch between Thursday night and today at lunch. Just not feeling the love from any of the knits at the moment I guess. Thursday I made some progress on my Sockapalooza socks, but these babies are going so slowly. The cabling on tiny DPNs is tedious. Not really difficult, just exceedingly awkward, and I have really tiny hands. I can't imagine what it would be like trying to wrangle all of the needles with large hands. Here's a progress shot: I apologize that you can't really see the pattern very well - red is very difficult to photograph. I really need to make some progress on these. As you can see, I've started using a stitch holder as a cable needle. I initially tried an extra DPN, but it was too long and got in the way, and then I tried my smallest cable needle, but it was also awkward, so I went with this plan. One of the women at Weaving Works suggested I try a toothpick, which is not a bad idea. We'll see. I like the way the leafy bit at the top of the sock (bottom of photo) looks, but I'm not sure that the cables are standing out enough. I think I really need to finish the first repeat before doing anything rash, like ripping it out and making my pal some plain stockinette socks!

June finds us at the beginning of a new set of Project Spectrum colors! For June and July the colors are red, black, and metallics. Lucky for me I'm already knitting in those colors! I'm working on the red socks, as well as my red $1.50 cardigan (which I have been working on, just not showing). I think I'll be lucky to finish either or both of those during these two months, since Eunny's Anemoi Mittens are pulling at me (I might swatch tonight, if I get my lab meeting preparations done at a reasonable hour). I have a black hat in the queue as well. We shall see how much is accomplished. Summer is always busy so I suspect the knitting might suffer.

Last night I dyed some yarn - one beautiful turquoise skein and one not-so-lovely burgundy and dark blue-grey skein. The latter I feel might improve greatly upon reskeining, and will be probably be quite nice once knit, but isn't looking overly attractive hanging in my shower. Photos when it's dry, even of the ugly one!

Today I got to play with the following dangerous and exciting goodies:

1. Phenol - Corrosive, extremely poisonous and easily absorbed through the skin

2. Chloroform - Anesthetic, poisonous

3. Acrylamide - Carcinogen, neurotoxin

All so that later in the week I can use these:

1. Formamide - Not good for the reproductive system

2. Formaldehyde - Corrosive, mutagenic, extremely toxic

3. P32 - Radioactive

The science, it's good times I tell ya'!

Major Modifications

Despite the fact that it seems I've been posting a lot of them lately, it's not all finished objects chez Emily. As you might remember, I started a new sweater not long ago, the Dollar and a Half Cardigan (now to be called the $1.50 cardigan) from the Spring 2007 Interweave Knits. I've made quite a bit of progress, especially considering I completely abandoned this for awhile to work on the baby blanket and the Endpaper Mitts (glad you all liked them, thanks!). Here we go:

I've done three full pattern repeats (lace panel + reverse stockinette panel) so far. I discovered the knitalong for this sweater yesterday and noticed that all of the finished sweaters seemed really long, and many had an undesirable puffiness in the reverse stockinette panels. Thankfully I don't have that particular problem, so far. However, the length thing is a real issue. The pattern calls for 18.5" before the armhole shaping begins, which to me seems like an awful lot. The sweater in the magazine is quite long, and hits the model at mid/low hip, which on her looks fine, but on me is likely to be a no-go length, since I actually have hips. So, I thought I'd lay my sweater on top of a sweater that I like the length of, for comparison, and this is what I saw: To be fair, the model sweater is a raglan, so I'm thinking the armholes are likely larger than they'll be on the $1.50 cardigan, which has set-in sleeves. But, do you see how close I am to where the armholes start? My sweater is currently 12" long - I'm thinking of doing one more repeat (about 3") and then doing the decreases. 3.5" shorter should work, I think. I've considered doing just a lace panel, and then starting the decreases in the stockinette portion, which would surely be easier, but I think I'd rather stick with the pattern as much as possible since I'm going to need to get two fronts and two sleeves to line up with the stripes on the back. Then I worried that because I'm making this in the 36.25" size, which is going to be a bit large on me, maybe it would be better if I made it longer, so it didn't look boxy. Thoughts? I also plan to shorten the sleeves, but I think I'll do that by making less ribbing. Could I knit the sleeves from the top down and then stop early? Is it harder to decrease on sleeves than increase? That would be ideal I think, for matching and length purposes...Here's a close-up of the lace pattern, which is quite simple to work and looks really nice:

Sorry it's a bit blurry - the red yarn isn't the easiest thing to photograph. I haven't just been working on this (of course). I'm still plugging away on some simple stockinette socks, following Wendy's new toe-up pattern (It's the toe-up gusset heel pattern.):

The yarn is Monarch, colorway Purdy Plum. I'm getting to the point where I want to weigh the sock and the yarn to see how far up I can go. I accidently made these a tad too big (the heel was longer than anticipated) so I might be gifting them to someone with slightly larger feet. One Christmas gift in progress already! Wendy's pattern is great - simple and easy to follow. I believe Daisy is making some socks with this pattern as well, so I wanted to post these so she could see how the heel came out...

I went to my first Seattle Stitch & Bitch gathering in over a year tonight, and it was really fun! There were 10 of us I think, coming and going, and everyone was really nice. I hope to start going more often, since it's fairly close to my house and it's nice to get together to knit with other people, instead of on the couch with Dave and Oliver (Not that there's anything wrong with them, of course, but it's good to get out a bit.). Anyway, it was nice to meet all of you!

A package, and, as promised, a new sweater

Today I got another early birthday surprise, this time from my secret pal! I had a premonition there might be a package waiting for me today, so I made sure to get home before the building office closed, and there it was, a package!

The wrapping was so nice I had to take a photo - inside the box each item was individually wrapped with little tags describing each item. For instance, the note with the hand cream said "For your hard-working hands."In the box were all the goodies you see above. A nice journal (one can never have too many notebooks and journals), a pen, birthday candles (so cool!), chocolate, the aforementioned hand cream (lemongrass and cedar), a cool ring (Which fits! This is amazing because I have really small hands.), and Knitting Without Tears, by Elizabeth Zimmermann. And, check out the cute card! Now, I must admit that despite the widespread adoration of EZ, I've never read any of her books, nor even really looked at them. So, I'm really happy to have this one, and I must say that I read about half of it as soon as I opened it! The writing is great - very witty and quite to the point, which I really enjoy. I've seen some lovely examples of her Seamless Hybrid sweater, and I bet there is one in my future sometime. The lotion is great, I used some this evening and I really like the scent - lemongrass is one of my favorites. My secret pal is very shifty - I know she lives in Raleigh, NC, but I've noticed (because I watch way too much Columbo) that she's mailed my two packages from different addresses! And she has really neat handwriting, the kind I'm always jealous of, because although I have neat handwriting, it pales in comparison to some people's. Alas...Anyway, thank you secret pal! I love my package and I can't wait to find out who you are! The suspense is killing me!!!

In my last post I eluded to having started a new sweater, so without further ado, I present the humble beginnings of my Dollar and a Half Cardigan, from the Spring 2007 Interweave Knits. I'm knitting this using Cascade Sierra, which is a 80% cotton/20% wool blend. This is a new yarn for me, and basically I think it's the Cascade version of Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece, although I've never used that before either so I can't make any sort of informed comparison. I think my photo is a bit dark, but if you click here, you can see the red I'm using, which is the dark one on the lower left. I sense this is going to be a tough project to photograph, due to the color and the fact that the lace bits want to pull in and the reverse stockinette panel wants to puff out. We'll see. I'm a bit concerned about my gauge, but I took a good stab at getting it right. The reason I'm worried is that the gauge was measured over the lace pattern, not the stockinette portion, which made it a bit tough to measure. If anything I think my gauge is a bit small, just a tad, and that would be okay because I'm making the 36.5" size, which gives me some wiggle room. We'll see. I mostly suspect that my row gauge may be off, just looking at the height of that first lace panel to the stockinette bit above it, but it's really too early to tell. When I block it the lace will stretch more than the stockinette (I suspect), so I imagine it might even itself out. Fingers crossed!

Oh, and how beautiful is this Hanami stole? I really really really want to make one of these! I found this pattern a few weeks ago and kept forgetting to mention it...I especially like the cherry blossom part (bottom in the photo). Simply stunning!