Almost done with the second tail, then to separate at the waste thread for the square down the back. I like how the stripe of add-in yarn seems very purposeful. |
15 September 2024
Socks and Shawl and Star Trek®
08 September 2024
A week early.
As I told a friend of mine, Friday the 13th arrived a week early because work suddenly "went blooie" around 5:00pm my time - and not, as usually happens, because of something in California. Usually I have some heads-up about those, but this was something that simmered for a while, and all of a sudden the business spun an escalation. So I was in line at a food truck, picking up supper for my parents and myself, when both my boss and his boss were emailing and texting. I got the food, apologized to my parents for eating and running (luckily they understand these things happen), and went home.
Around 9:00pm it was under control enough to shut down for the night. I've done some minor bits of work since, and scheduled a meeting for everybody on Monday morning. It's going to be an interesting week - and likely longer.
Despite this I was able to get this week's questions written for an exam-writing workshop in which I am participating, and watched the films for my cinema class, and helped my parents on Saturday with another round of bookcase-clearing.
Not as much progress as I wanted on the DFW Fiber Fest make-along shawl, but I'm on the second tail, which is decrease rows:
There is a lighter stripe partway through because there is less yardage of the blue yarn than the multicoloured, and it might not be enough for the size I chose. So I worked in a scrap of light gold that I think blends with the multi.
02 September 2024
Rainbow and Emergency Yarn Hats
In theory, I've been on a yarn diet this year. It does have a number of exceptions, such as finishing a yarn series I began purchasing last year, and yarn purchased while traveling or at festivals because these are really souvenirs.
Of course, I have added to the stash otherwise, such as at the fiber group swap (which I decided doesn't entirely count because I swapped out more yarn than I brought home) and because a friend has been giving me her leftover bits to pass along to another friend who does a lot of charity knitting. Some of which I decided would be transmitted in the form of hats, and since much of the yarn is wool and wool-blend sock yarn, which is quite fine, I've made most of the hats by holding two or three strands together. I did do one with the yarn just singly:
I liked the neon-splash yarn enough to make this hat with the sock yarn singly, but it's a very plain basic beanie. |
When I found several balls of rainbow-y yarn I decided to figure out a way to highlight the colour changes instead of working the threads together. This means using very fine needles, and lots of stitches, because I had to use the yarn singly because otherwise the colours would mingle. The problem is that most of the yarns will make stripes if you knit at the number of stitches in a sock, but hats use many more because heads are bigger around than feet.
How to emphasize the rainbow for the ribbing? Usually this is worked as part of the hat and thus with a large number of stitches around. I decided to use a ribbing taught in a class many years ago at a historic home, where we learned to make ribbed mitts in a 18th-Century style. This ribbing, instead of being done longways, was worked shortways.
Thus I made a long, skinny piece working one row knit, one row purl, one row knit, and repeating these three rows until it was long enough. Luckily this happened in an orange bit so the stripes came out fairly evenly around.Next I grafted the starting row to the final row, and picked up stitches around. I decided to use four balls, two that appeared to be rainbow sequence, and two that alternated the rainbow rows with grey, alternating the balls. So I used safety pins to mark each quarter, counting the ribs, and two to mark the start of the round:
Having the two pins was helpful because I had to switch back and forth from a knit row to a purl row at that point because I wanted to use stockinette stitch to keep the stripes most clear. So I needed to know where to switch and not accidentally continue. I wouldn't need to do this if the hat were all of a single yarn, as the one at the top of this post is, but to keep the four panels clear I had to work intarsia, which means switching from one yarn to another at a seam:
Above are the inside and outside of one of the three regular seams. However, the fourth seam is where I had to switch from knit to purl, and because there was only one strand of yarn I had to do a pick-up-and-knit/purl-together maneuver, which left a less pretty seam: