A Bluestocking Knits

More Squares, and an Oval

Since I don't have to wait a week for the next square for the Granny Square Sampler afghan to come out, it may come as no surprise that my turnout is starting to blend together.  Sometimes a new-to-me square takes a while to work, then by the third one it just zips along and I might start the next one right away.  I think week 3's square is one of my favorites -- something about the simplicity of it, perhaps.  It's fun to have the colors changing on each round, but I really like the nearly-solid ones.

Week 4's squares are a subtle variation on the traditional granny square, with a little "V" shape in the second-color rounds.  I realized that it didn't show up very well with the dark green, so on the second one I used a brighter color.

There are two squares for Week 5, and to revel in that, they are nearly circles!  My Circles in a Square are at upper right and lower left in the photo above, and the other two are "Squircles" -- the first has only sort of embryonic corners, and uses the wonderful blocking properties of wool to mold it into a square shape, but the second, while very similar in the middle, uses further rounds of short single crochets in the middles of the edges, then slightly taller half-doubles on either side, with taller-yet double crochets to fill out the corners.  Simple, yet clever.

As for the oval, well, our bathroom mats are getting a bit ratty after, goodness I don't even know how long, possibly twenty years!  I discovered that I could order some truly gigantic balls of Lily Sugar N Cream yarn, and so I bought three, thinking of their Oval Bath Mat free pattern.  But it isn't really oval, is it, with the increases stacked directly on top of one another -- though I suppose "Elongated-Octagon Bath Mat" doesn't sound as appealing -- so I just sort of improvised for a while, moving the increases here or there, then when it started getting big, I put safety pins around the curved ends in the spots I wanted the increases to go, so that I could see them.  I'm pretty happy with the shape, not so much with the jog where the rounds end, so if I do another one in an oval, I will try a spiral.  Still, it's much more pleasant to look at the floor in the bathroom now!  And the balls of yarn were so huge that I'm pretty sure I have enough for at least one more mat!

Thoughts on a T-shirt Rag Rug

This came together wonderfully quickly!  I stupidly forgot to note how many t-shirts I used -- at least six, I suspect.  This rug weighs 2.5 lbs. -- not quite 1.2 kilos!  It's single crochet (UK double) on a row of foundation single crochet, using an 11.5mm hook, the largest I could find at the time.  (I have to admit that I have tried and tried the FSC, using a number of different tutorials, and am still not sure I'm doing it right.  But this attempt looked tidy and consistent, so I went with it!)

I was actually pretty careful to keep the edges as straight as possible, both by counting the number of stitches on a regular basis, and by sometimes working the last stitch into the side instead of the top (sshhh!), which pulled things in rather nicely -- but the weight of the different shirts really made a big difference in the thickness of the various rows.  It was also certainly a factor -- but this I expected -- that in cutting the shirts I found the picking-out of hems so laborious that after the first two or three shirts I didn't bother, and just cut the first strip a bit narrower to allow for the bulkiness of the hem.  These lengths of the yarn didn't curl up in the same manner as the others, of course, so along with the stitching made those rows behave differently.

This is actually Version 2, as I misjudged my gauge on Version 1 and ended up with a piece that was a bit taller than I really wanted, and so I reworked it starting from the Version 1 end, ripping it out as I went and re-crocheting it in the other direction, a few stitches smaller.  This took far less time than the first, because of course I had already connected the various pieces!  I did take the opportunity to rearrange a grey-heavy stretch at the end of Version 1 -- it is still, but more balanced than it had been!

I simply knotted the pieces of yarn at first, but this of course leaves a big lump in the fabric -- it doesn't show as much as you'd think, but you can certainly feel it under your feet.  Most of the joins in mine are the larks'-head version explained in method 3 at Dollar Store Crafts' tutorial.  When I decided that for the remake I wanted to rearrange some of the colors, I couldn't just pick apart these joins, so I had to cut them apart and reattach, and I just sewed those by hand with some thread and back-stitching.  I don't quite agree with DSC that the larks'-head is the least visible join, as the knot though small does make a lump in the fabric -- less than a square knot does, certainly, but still a lump -- and I found the stitched joins to be not only the least visible, but the easiest to work with, as there is less bulk to have to pull through the various loops of the crochet. 

It does make a satisfyingly solid fabric, with, amusingly, here and there just a small reminder of its former life --

So the conclusions seem to be that the economical way of cutting the t-shirts, which will give you one considerable length of fairly-smooth yarn and a number of smaller lengths that zig-zag, with lots of pointy bits sticking out, doesn't look as sloppy as you'd think (!) once it's worked up.  I thought that I would end up having to trim off a lot of the more rustic bits, but most of them slipped pretty easily under the next row of stitches (or were pushed!).  It doesn't look as smooth as the purchased "t-shirt yarn" -- and I have to put that in "scare quotes" because, really, I can hardly believe that you can buy this stuff ready-made instead of doing it yourself, where's the frugality and eco-friendliness in that?? -- but although a number of the sticking-out bits will probably pop out in the first wash, it doesn't look sloppy, either.

And this was only about a third of the stash of old t-shirts I've accumulated.  So I'm planning another rug, and since there are a lot of plain or mostly-plain white shirts and I still have a stash of powdered dye left from tie-dying at day camp some years ago -- waste not, want not! --

Playing Around

I'm still laughing at myself not a little, looking down my nose at crochet for so long and now here I am rather fascinated.  There it is.  My first and deepest love is for knitting, but crochet does have a few things going for it, not least being the speed with which you can finish a project!

Here is a knitted Hurdle Stitch dishcloth from Tricots et Créations Isabelle on the left, in Lily Sugar 'N Cream "Swimming Pool," and a crocheted cloth in Suzette stitch in "Rose" pink.  The latter took some fussing, as the first version I came across gave instructions that never did come out quite right for me, and so I found a different one that worked quite well -- it's a very pretty stitch, and the same on both sides, which is handy.

I crocheted a 1:12-ish afghan to the "Open Squares" free pattern by Butterfly Dreams Miniatures.  It's a good beginner pattern -- beginner to crochet and/or miniature needlework, I mean! -- as it is fairly simple and repetitive.  I know my scale is off, but I'm still practicing! this was was a US9 hook, what is recommended for the thread.  I added two rounds of single crochet for an edging all around -- actually, twice all around except for the very last quarter, which was I think the top edge, as that looked too wide with the second round!  This is in no.8 perle cotton, which now I'm pretty sure isn't the best for something you will want to drape nicely -- for amigurumi or other projects where you want a lot of body to the fabric it would be ideal, but it is fairly stiff at anything other than a loose gauge, and doesn't soften up much at all with blocking, so for dollhouse items perhaps it would best suit things like bedspreads meant to lie flat -- or carpets!  I might try this pattern later with embroidery floss, as I think the drapability would improve.

When we were on the narrowboat last summer, being me I couldn't help noticing the charming crocheted doilies serving as curtains-of-sorts on the portholes of many of the privately-owned boats.  This is a "traditional" craft for narrowboaters, though I qualify it a little not having found out yet if it is older than, say, the Victorians -- but then, I suppose a hundred and thirty years or so is certainly still "traditional"!  Much like Romany caravans, the boatwives would decorate sometimes every inch of their living spaces, and because of the cramped quarters in a narrowboat, it is said now that crochet -- taking up less space than most needlecrafts! -- was the medium of choice.  I don't know if porthole covers are a newer invention, but certainly photos can be found of wartime barges with lace hung along the edges of shelves -- most of these look like filet crochet to my inexperienced eye.

I recently found some some of the history behind the craft at Crochet and Cabin Lace, as well as porthole cover patterns and some booklets with traditional cabin lace patterns available for purchase.  Mine is the Cobweb Lace one from the website, in Aunt Lydia's no.10 cotton --

The finished piece is only a smidge bigger than it is supposed to be (7 1/2 in.) but looks a bit  more open than the original, not sure why, unless it's just because I really biffed the UK-to-US-crochet-terms translation!  Maybe the no.10 is actually finer than the Lesur Empress cotton (which I have never seen)?

Clearly I have no need for porthole covers at this point -- a narrowboat is still only a when-we-win-the-lottery fantasy! -- but of course I'm fascinated by traditional handcrafts of many kinds, and it is very pleasing to combine two interests, as it were.  I might starch this one and just hang it in the window!

Mother Knows the Best Crocheted Potholders

Since I have a cone of eternity of that Lily Sugar 'n Cream in "Autumn Leaves", I made some more potholders for my mother-in-law, also hoping to get my crocheting smooth enough to eventually scale down to dollhouse size.  I discovered this crochet stitch recently and was intrigued by the fact that it is extra-thick -- hence the name thermal stitch.  You basically grab not only the usual bit of chain but part of the chain from a preceding row at the same time, which compresses the rows together, making the finished fabric thicker than it would ordinarily be.

On the left in the top photo, is the Best Crocheted Potholder from Mama's Stitchery Projects, and on the right is the Favorite Crocheted Hot Pad (aka "Grandma Leona's Hotpad") from Kathleen at Miss Abigail's Hope Chest.  Clearly, they are fraternal twins, even to the same number of chain stitches cast on -- the difference lies in the very beginning, where the Best has the hanging loop worked as part of the initial chain, and in the very end, where the (twice-worked) hanging loop of the Favorite is worked, and the fact that the Favorite has a finishing row where the Best does not.

I'm sure it isn't a coincidence that both of these potholder patterns are from mothers, either!  Both of the patterns have very clear photos of how to work the thermal stitch, so I can recommend either as your fancy takes you.

My potholders used 36g and 37g of the cotton respectively, but I used a size F hook because that is in fact the only middling size I have.  The fabric is a bit stiff as a result, I'm sure, but that's not so bad when it will be used just as often as a trivet!

And yes, anyone searching this blog through the categories will come across crocheted potholders in the "Knitting for the Home" category....

Thoughts on a Classic Fluted Tea Cozy

I happened on the November/December issue of Piecework not long ago, and quite fell in love with their colorwork tea cozy.  Alas, after much poking through my stash, and realizing that the most suitable wool I have -- as it happens, the green and purple Queensland Rustic Merino Sport I was only recently using -- was not at all the right gauge, and that my 4-cup Brown Betty would clearly get lost in a cozy some 3+ inches bigger all over, I resigned myself to adding the colorwork cozy to my perpetual To-Do list.  But I kept thinking about the skein each of Lamb's Pride Worsted and Brown Sheep Handpaint Originals I've had for yonks -- made a rather pretty pair of mittens out of them, worked alternated in a simple all-over check, but the mohair in the Handpaint especially was so scratchy, even on my fairly-durable hands, that I ripped them out and rewound the wool and put it away.  Well, all of that wool and fuzz knitted together would be very well-insulating, though, wouldn't it ....

My cozy is a mash-up of a pattern by Keren from Tea by the Sea, which she worked up from an existing cozy knitted by her granny, and Paton's "classic cozy", which produces a very similar result. (If you have a slightly different gauge of yarn, or a different-sized pot, here is yet another version, also modeled on her grandmother's cozy, by Yasmin of Knit, Shear Bliss!.)

The stitch is theoretically easy, but a bit of a pain to work -- okay, it's a real pain -- you simply pull the floats snugly, to get the "pleated" effect.  Paton's suggest drawing up each float to about an inch, but I found that after a few rows, everything relaxed so much that it just looked bumpy, not pleated, so I ended up pulling the floats quite tightly, and that combined with a tighter-than-usual gauge made the knitting a bit onerous.  Luckily, there isn't really much of it, size-wise, so even feeling like I was working hard, it came together quickly.

These two yarns do not really go together, being a clearly-different gauge, but they were together in a bag I inherited fifth- or sixth-hand from a local yarn shop that had closed, and the colors are really made for each other (M23 Fuchsia and HP-50 English Garden respectively).  With this particular stitch and at this gauge, you'd hardly know they are really like this! --

-- and it's a tea cozy, gauge schmage, eh?!

The texture on the back is really fascinating with those long, regular floats, and the color shifts are very pretty.  The fabric is I kid you not about an inch thick (2.5 cm), so I expect my tea to stay quite warm.

Instead of a pompom, I knitted a piece of i-cord and made a sort of flower for the top.

So all in all, I'm quite pleased, and looking forward to a nice cup of tea!

Potholders (Not Dishcloths)

Some years ago, I made a set of dishcloths for my mother-in-law, on the occasion of her newly-remodeled kitchen.  I found out, a long time afterward, that she hasn't been using them as dishcloths, because she doesn't want to get them dirty, but as potholders instead.  Now, I've never been convinced of cotton's efficacy in keeping one's hands from getting burned, but I like my mother-in-law very much, and if she wants to use them as potholders, let her! say I.  But I decided I would just make her some that are thicker.  When I happened to see on the shelf at Jo-Ann's a cone of Lily Sugar 'n Cream in the reds/oranges/yellows she prefers over pretty much anything else, well, the time was right -- and so these are what I have been working on in odd moments over the last few months. 

Plain old Quaker stitch (though obviously not very "plain" in multicolored ombre!) --

Thickish, since the ribs pull the cloth in (especially as it shrinks in the laundry), but it still has some thin spots, of course.

Double knit with a garter stitch border, short-rowed every few rows per Elizabeth Zimmermann --

Better!

An experiment in double knitting with one side knit-side-out and the other purl-side-out, to see if the purl bumps will give it a little more "grip" when used as a potholder --

Very strange, working this stitch with one side inside-out!

Ribbed crochet following the admirably clear tutorial from Anneliese of Aesthetic Nest, with the idea of stitching two pieces together from Kathleen here --

 This one was an adventure, as I am not a good crocheter, so I made a few attempts at other stitches which didn't turn out good enough to give away (!), but the photos in this tutorial are very helpful, and the ribbed crochet gave good results even for me.  I made it a little longer than in the instructions, since I find that the cloths always shrink heighth-wise.  Stitching the two pieces together wasn't quite as tidy as I'd hoped but -- oh, well.  It is nevertheless quite the thickest of the lot so far.

This and That

I had this old sleeveless pullover in a drawer that I'd knitted up from some of that lovely red Araucania Nature Wool, but it pilled so much from the moment I first put it on, that I dreaded wearing it -- except for the color, of course.  So the other day I remembered that I only have five of the felted placemats I made from the rest of the Nature Wool, and I want to have at least six -- and so I spent a day ripping out the pullover, another day winding it all into skeins (wh. wasn't easy as I'd knitted it double), another few days waiting for it to dry after I washed it, another day winding it all into balls -- and now I am knitting with it.  I don't know yet how far it will go -- we'll see.  I didn't notice how much of a color variation there is in the latest stretch of knitting -- luckily it is a little less obvious in real life than in the camera, for some reason!

Yes, another petit point miniature carpet!  Couldn't resist.  This is another one from Frank Cooper's book, one he identifies as a Bergama.  The chart is much more reliable than the Shirvan I worked this past spring and summer -- but this time, because I converted it from Paternayan wools to Appleton's (with a reduction in canvas gauge as well), I really had no idea of how much wool to buy, and I have just run out of the golden-brown.  You can see that I'm nowhere near being finished with golden-brown, either.  I'm going to hobble along for a while without it, and see if anything else looks like running short ...

If you have read much D.E. Stevenson, you will know somehow that her 1953 book Five Windows is for some reason extremely difficult to find.  There are rarely many copies available, and those few are priced well into the hundreds of dollars.  Why?  I have no idea -- she was already a well-established and popular author by the early 1950s, so I'd be surprised if her publishers didn't issue a large run.  But for those of us who, not for lack of trying, have never seen a copy, Greyladies recently reissued Five Windows in paperback.  The story has one of her fairly rare first-person narratives, and one of her even-more-rare male main characters, but for all that it is a charming story in which nothing terribly dramatic happens, but you like the characters and you want them to be happy.  I suppose David Kirke's mother might have knitted him a jumper or a scarf before he went off to London from his little home in the Scottish Borders, though there was no mention of it, but I thought I would look for something that reminded me of young Janet Lorimer, and I was rather surprised, in Googling "1950s misses knitting pattern" to find that most of the things that came up were either matronly or with models more suited to Parisian scenes with their bent wrists and their lipstick -- not fresh-faced Scottish lasses at all!  So I was delighted when this one came up to see not only a girl one wouldn't mind sitting next to on a train but one with a Fair Isle jersey as well!  This booklet is from the 1940s, and the pattern itself is available for free at The Vintage Pattern Files.  Enjoy!

Felted Dryer Balls

Somewhere in a late-night rambling on the internet, I came across mention of felted-wool dryer balls.  You toss a few in the tumble-dryer and they help to move the drying clothes around, decreasing drying time -- they also help to remove static and to soften clothes without chemical fabric softeners.  I'd heard of using tennis balls for this, but when I was having a bit of a late spring clean the other day and came across some decades-old knitting wool that I really have no knitting use for but couldn't bear to throw away, I thought, "well, felted dryer balls, of course!"

This is New Zealand Wool "Wellington", 100% Perendale wool in a handsome heathered green.  I had eight skeins -- it's a doughty wool, to be sure, but not really something I'd want to wear near the skin, which is why I haven't done anything with it in the last, oh, twenty-five years.  I remember how unusual it was to come across real wool at Super Yarn Mart, which is why I was so susceptible to it when I did -- doubtless the reason that I bought this, plus that it was from exotic New Zealand.

I used the dryer-ball tutorials from Good Mama and DIY Natural, which could hardly have been easier.  I wound up golf-ball sized balls, one from each skein (about 4 grams' worth of wool), tied them into a "caterpillar" in the leg of an old stocking, with a tie between each ball, then ran them through a couple of cycles with our regular laundry yesterday, and this morning wound the rest of each skein onto the resulting felted centers. 

To continue the sports analogies, the fully-wound balls -- 2 oz. of wool, though generously five or six more grams than the 56.5 indicated on the label -- were about the size of softballs, which felted down to about the size of baseballs.

The only warning I'd give is not to attempt to felt two "caterpillars" in one load of laundry!  It took a good twenty minutes to get them untangled and I had this song stuck in my head for hours afterwards.  Some of the balls also came out a bit wonky from being smashed up against each other in the stocking, and some of the fibers got enmeshed in the nylon, though only giving it a sort of aura that didn't last through the dryer cycle.

But the wool felted beautifully, with almost no visible lines at all from the strands of yarn, and I expect that after a few loads of laundry, they will be fully felted and quite round.

 

Place-mats and Fuzzyfeet

I finished the last random-stripe place-mat yesterday!  I've been working on these for at least two years -- put them aside when it was pretty clear that I would run out of some of the colors much sooner than others, and I got a little discouraged.  It seemed silly, though, not to carry on and finish, especially when I had only four mats, and I wanted at least five, and six would be better, when I certainly had enough wool by weight.

These are Araucania Nature Wool, in blue, lilac, red, and green, worked in garter stitch on US7 needles, then fulled in the washing machine.  They shrank rather more than I had anticipated, so they look a bit stingy even under the smaller plates that we use for regular meals, but they are wonderfully thick, and the colors are so beautiful that I must accept that -- and I do have six, there is that!

These were about 21 x 16 inches (136g) before fulling, and about 14 x 9 inches afterwards -- a whopping 35% loss in height!

I ran out of blue wool first, long before any of the other colors looked dangerously low, so I ripped out the mittens I made for Julia many moons ago, which she wore once or twice then left in the corner of her closet floor until they were ratty and moth-eaten.  (Long-ago-grown-out-of, anyway -- I'm using Laura's as pockets for my reading glasses.)  But the extra wool got me quite a few more blue stripes -- you can see how wretched the wool looks in the "before" photos of the mats, but after fulling they're quite indistinguishable from the others.

It's really a shame that the Nature Wool is discontinued -- it's really gorgeous stuff, a pleasure to knit with, and the colors are just sumptuous, the red and green especially.

As it turned out, I ended up with at least two skeins of green left after the last mat, so I thought I'd whip up a pair of Fuzzyfeet for what I hope will be winter this year.  I made a pair years ago that ended up too small, so I thought I'd err on the side of generosity, and estimated a stitch count based on the shrinkage of the place-mats.

Another reason to make them über-gigantic is that my Easy House Slippers, which I wore for a couple of years, kept shrinking with every wash, and eventually my big toe poked a hole at the end of each sock.

These are worked on US7 needles with one US8 because the set was only four needles, so the gauge is rather smaller than you usually do for fulling, but I already had a reference point from the mats, which after a couple of washes are tight and thick.  David and Julia both mocked me for making them so big, but I erred on the side of caution, in fact.  They are just comfy now, so I will have to wash them by hand, I guess.

(I'm using "Henry V" for scale as I am doing the FutureLearn "Shakespeare and His World" online course again, and it's this week's play ...)

Thoughts on the Muriwai Bathmat, and a Mini-Muriwai

A few episodes -- well, quite a few -- of "Poirot" and I have a Muriwai Bath Mat, a pattern by Mel Clark, in her book (with Tracey Ullmann) Knit 2 Together.  I started this around the middle of 2008, I'm sorry to say -- my advice to anyone who wants to knit it is to have lots of circular needles on hand!

This is my usual Sugar 'n Cream dishcloth cotton from Michael's, here in Icing Sugar (white) and Strawberry (pinks and white), knitted together.  I had one of the mega-balls (400g/14 oz) in white, of which I had a good deal left, and numerous regular (2 oz) balls of the pinks, so I calculate this as most of 6 balls of the latter -- the whole thing weighs 630g.

It's an easy pattern, but a bit tedious, and obviously I had a bit of a problem with this, as one of the corners is quite wonky -- an attention error, I suspect.  Since I didn't have the same gauge as in the pattern, I worked the center section roughly as indicated, then just kept knitting until I thought it was about the right size (with a little extra to allow for shrinkage, wh. I'm sure it will do), so the center section on mine is a little "smaller" scale-wise than the original -- oh well.

It seemed more and more obvious as I went that this pattern would scale down to dolls-house size very easily, and indeed it did! --

The Mini-Muriwai is in crochet thread from Michael's -- Aunt Lydia's, I suppose, but I don't know which blue, though it is very pretty.  I worked this mat on US000 needles (1.5mm) in a couple of hours, just dividing the full-sized dimensions by 12, and estimating the gauge.  The increases are, curiously, a little awkward on the miniature version as well -- I thought I was doing the increases the same on either side of the corner sts, but I guess that one being enclosed, as it were, by the corner st on the right needle, and the other exposed at the beginning of the left needle, made a difference somehow, either in how I laid them on the needle or how I worked them on the next round.  Oh well!

I was aiming for about 2 1/3 x 3 in., and got 2 3/4 x 3 1/4, so a little off, but not too bad.

The picot edging is worked here by binding off 5 sts in every repeat, instead of 6 as on the full-sized mat, which reduction I thought would be better for scale, though I suppose looking at the final mat, it wouldn't really matter one way or the other.