The basket

I did cast on for the Lamb's Pride Bulky basket last week.  With the green skein the bottom turned out a few cms shorter than the width, and that is fine.  I thought it was small, though.  Using all the yarn would mean a tall narrow basket, so I picked up stitches around the edges, increasing at each corner, to make a basket with rounded bottom.  I knitted this in plain blue garter stitch.  How do you knit garter stitch in the round?  You purl every other row.  The sides will have moss stitch stripes that create a nice dotted effect, even nicer when felted, I hope.

This morning I put the stitches on a second circular needle, to see how it looks.  I'm sure it will be too large, a low wide basket.  I did two rows with increases, so I have decided that I will unpick to the second increase.  This will make it smaller.  A good decision to take now, rather than several inches later, I think.

I started on blanket #139 too, and this is what it looks like.  I often wonder why I continue to put effort into these blankets, and then I look at this and I really like it.  I was going to say dark is my favourite, but they are all my favourites.

Starting something new

From reading knitting blogs I gather that quite a few knitters suffer from startitis - the tendency to start new projects before finishing current ones.  I seem to suffer from the opposite - a reluctance to start something new.  I have mountains of yarn in my yarn store, there are hundreds of patterns I'd like to knit, but I find it difficult to get the yarn out, do the calculations and cast on.

There is quite a bit of chunky yarn in the store, and it is too thick for my regular blankets.  To my delight I found the first Mason-Dixon book in a charity shop (in Belgravia of all places and the male assistant started telling me about the Herne Hill wool shop that I already knew about), and it has a pattern for three nested boxes.  I have read the Mason-Dixon blog ever since I first saw their column in the Knitter magazine.  Their fascination for miles of simple garter stitch mirrors mine for stocking stitch blankets, and it makes me want to knit log cabin blankets.  And I will, once I have finished the chunky yarns.  Their box pattern uses Lamb's Pride Bulky yarn, and luckily I had already found five skeins of it in another charity shop.  A box seemed to me excellent use of this yarn.  I only wanted one, slightly larger than the largest in the pattern.  This uses three skeins, so my five should be enough.

The skeins have been sitting on my coffee table for several weeks, and it was not until yesterday that I found the needles, 6.5 mm as per the band.  I see mine as a basket rather than a box, and the sides will be striped, so I wanted to do the bottom in the darkest colour.  True to my thorough nature I weighed the skeins first, and there is only half the weight in burgundy, the darkest.  I cast on anyway, but it turned out too small, so I put it away.  That is what I should have done in the first place.  When I hit a problem I should give myself time to think about it before I decide what to do.  That would save me a lot of effort.

Thinking about it overnight I decided to do the bottom in a different colour, green, my least favourite, and I cast on again with more stitches, and now it looks OK.  I have knitted 10 cms, and with my calculations there will be enough green yarn for a nearly square bottom, just what I wanted.  The corners will be rounded so I did two increases either side.  I call this a basket because I see it as a knitting basket. 

Now, this should of course be felted, my first venture into felting.  Naturally I abhor felting, for the obvious reason that once something is felted you can't unpick it and knit it into something else.  Because my reason for knitting chunky yarn is to get rid of it finally it does not matter that it can't be reused.  I am still apprehensive that it will turn out a failure and totally useless.

I have been knitting blanket #138 while I've been looking at the Lamb's Pride yarn, and enjoying it.  It is nearly done, but the last week I've been unravelling the sweater to go into the next one, and it is taking a lot longer than I thought.  This is what the sweater looks like.

It is finished

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Noro Transitions jacket

Yarn:  Noro Transitions, wool 55% silk 10% cashmere 7% alpaca 7% angora 7% camel 7% kidmohair 7%, colour no 5, 720 gr

Needles: 6.5 mm

Tension: 14 st per 10 cm

Size: small

Pattern: Own, from Wendy Barnard's Lettuce coat (Custom knits)

Knitted: 8 October 2010 to 12 January 2011

 

The jacket is finished, and it has taken me several weeks to find the time to write about it.

 

When I last wrote about it I was about to start the ribbing at the bottom.  Only I decided against ribbing because I thought it would pull it together too much.  Instead I found this seeded rib in a pattern in the Falll issue of Interweave Knits, and it worked fine.  The same ribbing was perfect for the button bands too and the collar.  I thought I would try the one row button holes from the same issue.  Once I stopped doing what I thought the instructions should say and actually followed them it worked fine, and the method produced sturdy good looking button holes.  I found the buttons in my button store.  The shape and size is fine but the colour is solemn.

 

 

I started by picking up stitches for the collar and knitting it straight.  I didn't like it at all.  I had wanted to knit short rows to give it shaping at the back, but I couldn't find a suitable pattern quickly.  So I looked a bit further and found something, with a different shape and tension, but I used it as a guide anyway.  I redid it with short rows, and now it sits much better.  It worked first time round, too.

 

So now the jacket is ready.  I am happy with it.  The size is fine, it is not too big.  It is not at all small either.  It is the yarn and the stripes that bother me.  The first is that the colours are not arranged symmetrically, so you have to make sure that you start from the same end of each hank.  Otherwise the colours appear in the opposite sequence.  I got it wrong at the back before I worked it out.  Then I spent a lot of time rewinding balls so that I could get it right.

 

The other thing is that the fibres seem to go with the colours, ie the cream is angora and the green silk.  I do prefer yarn that is the same fibre, or mix of fibres, throughout.

 

And a picture of blanket #138 which is progressing very nicely.  I haven't started any other projects so I'm spending a lot of time on it.

 

New blanket, new year

I started blanket #138 several weeks ago.  Progress has been slow because I didn't finish unravelling the two projects before I cast on.  Sometimes it works out like that.  This blanket is blue and brown with green and grey and a little rust for contrast.  The bright blue is a difficult colour and one that needs to be used up.  I like teaming it with brown, and something prompted me to add the rust.  It is fun knitting it, but it turns out a little bit too stripey.

I unravelled this charity shop find for it, a cowl neck sweater from Hoss.  The yarn is alpaca, two thin strands knitted together.  It will work as 4 ply.  This was easy to unravel, and the yarn is nice although too pale for this blanket.

The second project is a throw, 95 cms square, knitted from a lovely angora yarn.  It is knitted as a garter stitich square bordered by a garterstitch edging with points. This was slow to unravel.  The throw had been used and it had felted in the middle.  Starting it was not as difficult as I feared.  The edging was sewn on and I happened to come across an end that had not been fastened properly.  Unravelling was slow though; every stitch had to be torn apart.  The edging was even more difficult, with the cast off stitches in the point.  It is the kind of work I enjoy anyway, and now I have finished it.  The yarn is lovely and soft after washing, but most of the fluffiness has disappeared.

With the new year I have also done the sums for my 2010 knitting.  I used up 12.4 kg wool, less wool than in the previous two years.  Even so, that works out at 237gr per week or 34 gr per day.  In 2008 I used 13.0 kg and in 2009 13.8 kg.  There are two reasons why I knitted less wool in 2010.  The first is that I did not knit anything in chunky wool, and I did the two previous years.  The second reason is because of the timing of the blankets.  A blanket takes on average seven weeks to knit, so it depends on when in the year the blanket cycle starts, or ends.  Last year I finished seven blankets and I will finish the eighth by the end of January, I hope.  The previous two years I finished eight.  (There seems to be something odd with my maths here.  It looks as if I were lucky to complete eight in those two years, or the average has increased.)

And wool again, and Noro wool again

I didn't make it until the end of December without buying more wool, despite my birthday resolution.

On Monday 27th I went to the John Lewis knitting wool sale, both at Oxford Street and at Peter Jones.  There was nice wool there but nothing that I could not resist.  In previous sales the wool has been discounted by 50%, this time it was more like 25 - 30% - difficult to calculate exactly in my head, so it helped that it was not ultracheap.  I did like the discontinued shades of Felted Tweed though, and Wool cotton and especially the Cocoa shade of Kidsilk Haze.  I looked at Kaffe Fassett's Colourscape, but I could not see myself knitting anything with it.  The most difficult thing to resist was Noro Yuzen with great colours.  But I went away without buying anything.

On New Year's Eve I found myself unexpectedly going past John Lewis so I had to go in again to check how the sale was going.  The nicest yarns had gone, but there was still plenty covetable left.  I studied the laminated price list and noticed that it included Noro Sock Yarn.  I was surprised because I had not noticed any in the sales baskets.  So I memorized the four shade numbers and went off to the Noro shelves to check if any of them were there.  My heart sank - there were about a dozen different shades, so I thought I could not possibly go through all of them.  I looked at my favourite shade anyway, the black brown beige one, and it was one of the four sale shades!  So I took it to the assistant who promptly said 'That's not in the sale'.  I showed her the shade number, she checked it against the computer and it was reduced.

After that it was impossible to put it back.  I found two more balls of the same shade on the Noro shelves, enough for a sweater for me, possibly with short sleeves, and I bought them.  Now the three balls sit on my coffee table, looking at me reproachfully.  I know the pattern I want to knit with them, but now is not the right time.  I look towards the summer after the New Year.

I have noticed it in charity shops as well.  Once you start talking to an assistant it gets very difficult not to buy.  If I see wool, even if it is something that I have no intention of buying, I need to know how much it is before I leave it.  Often wool in unpriced so I have to ask, and then I end up buying.

So I bought 300 gr of wool on December 31.  I could say that I used my January allowance (and a little of February's) early.  But I think the whole project is unrealistic.  I will have to see how it goes.

I am knitting.  I finished knitting blanket #137, and here is a close up.  Blanket #138 is underway.  On the Noro Transitions jacket I am doing the collar, but without a pattern it takes time.

Birthday resolution

Over the last few years I have managed to keep my yarn buying in check by doing a strict monthly account of how much I have reduced my yarn store by and how much I have added to it.  This was helped by having a financial limit on my spending.

Last year I realised that I could easily spend more on wool, so the financial reasons were removed.  As a result I bought everything I that I wanted in charity shops, and my yarn store grew so quickly that the monthly account became embarrassing, and I stopped doing it.  But I still woke some mornings panicking over the amount of yarn in the store and how I was ever going to use it all up.

I had a birthday a few weeks again, entering a new decade.  A few days later I woke with the idea that I could simply stop buying yarn.  As this coincided with a period of two weeks when I not bought any wool, because I had not seen any I fancied, it seemed a really good idea and a good place to start.  And I would not buy any yarn for the next decade.  A very fitting, a very severe birthday resolution.  A decade of no more yarn buying would reduce my yarn store considerably.  I would possibly get it down to the level where I would buy yarn for specific projects and start knitting straight away.

I could not of course stop buying yarn altogether, so I have given myself an allowance of 250 gr per month.  That does not sound a lot, but it becomes 3 kg per year and 30 kg over the decade.  There are also rules for what I can buy.  I will continue to buy Kaffe Fassett garments, at least if they are knitted with the kind of wool I like reusing.  I will buy pure wool DK in balls with ball bands, all Rowan and Jaeger and probably other brands if I like them.  The same with 4 ply pure wool, but to a lesser extent.  It should be colours that I like using.  Then there are the other Rowan yarns that I collect:  Tapestry, Felted Tweed, Big Wool, Kidsilk Haze.

This went well for another week.  I bypassed some wool that I would otherwise have bought, but nothing that caused me heartache.  Then I found something that fitted within the rules.  A pack of Jaeger Matchmaker Merino 4 ply in a nice pale grey - such a useful colour.  So I bought it, and the 500 gr took care of my monthly allowance for November and December.  Any purchases from the January sales will have to wait until January.

It will be interesting to see how long I can keep this going.  For now it feels fine.  I have got to the point where I have started to reduce my yarn store.  Anything that I knit has to come from the yarn store; it can't be supplemented by purchases.

I'm knitting Noro

I bought this Noro yarn, Noro Transitions, half price in the July sales four and a half years ago.  It was an impulse buy because I liked the yarn so much.  Since then I have been looking for a pattern to knit with it, without success.  It is a chunky yarn, and patterns for chunky yarns tend to produce big, oversized, garments.  I'm small, and I will drown in anything too big.  This autumn I got tired of waiting to find something, so I took ideas from two patterns and added some of my own and made it into something that I call my own pattern.

I wanted a cardigan or jacket with buttons down the front, with a collar, close fitting over chest and arms and tulip shape below.  The shape came from the Autumn dress pattern in the Knitting October 2010 issue, but with buttons in front and long sleeves and with the skirt made narrower and shorter but with the same aran cables on the yoke.  I followed the top down method in Wendy Barnard's Lettuce coat in her Custom knits book.  My stitch count is nearly the same as both.

It has all gone quite well.  All my knitted garments end up too small, and this one is no exception.  The top down pattern was easy to follow.  It started with provisional cast on for the back yoke.  I used my crochet cast on, and I did it in three sections, so that I could do the shoulders and back neck separately.  Then I knitted the back yoke downwards - the pattern had no shaping for the shoulders or neck.  I have taken few pictures and this is the only one I've got until the ones I took today.  Then I undid the cast on and put the stitches one by one on a needle for the fronts, one at a time.  The exciting part was picking up the stitches for the sleeves, and it worked out OK.  The short rows for shaping the top of the sleeve went fine too.  This is a method I will try again.  And now that I have done it once I will be able to do it without a pattern next time.

Joining front and back and working downwards was easy.  The cables on the yokes don't match perfectly.  I started the diamond in the wrong place on the back so it extends further down than the cables.  Personally I like cables on stocking stitch rather than reverse stocking stitch, so that's how I did it.  At this point I went back to doing the sleeves to see how much yarn they would take.  I know now that there is plenty left, so there was no need to worry.

The bit I enjoyed most was knitting the long rows of stocking stitch, although I find it tiring to knit with large needles.  Now I long for 4 ply knitting!  Overall I'm not very happy with my coat though.  I think the yarn looked better in hanks than knitted.  The stripes are too colourful for my liking.  As I remember it there were other shades available but all of them bright, and I picked this one as my favourite.

Now I only have the bottom ribbing to do, and finishing the right sleeve.  Then I have to devise a collar and pick up and knit the button bands.  And then it will be ready, with no sewing except for a few buttons.  I'm in no hurry now.