A Bluestocking Knits

We-ell....

Now, I knew when I chose Shepherd Sock for the Nether Garments that things would happen, that with the shaping of the piece the color shifts would go in different, even unexpected directions.  It's the nature of hand-painted wool, of course.  I figured that I would just be kind of zen about it, and let the colors go where they would.

Along the ankle and calf, I like this.  It's pleasing and fairly regular.

This, at the knee, I can live with -- it has a little jolt where the calf shaping begins, but it sorts itself out.

This is getting weird --

And this, above the thigh shaping, is just bizarre.

I'd been thinking that I'd use the tights for yoga, being warm and close-fitting, you know, but I don't find anything about these flashes the least bit meditative.  Want to see the full effect? --

The moral is, you never know.

Now, that said, the garment itself is very comfortable so far.  It looks a bit bulgy at the top, but that's from the circular needles pulling it in; the above picture is a view of the front, with the thigh shaping at the inseam.  It fits my leg perfectly, of course, being made to measure, and with Elizabeth's careful planning and simple formulas it all went together without a hitch.

Here is a photo of the shaping, the back of the knee at the right and the beginning of the inseam at the left.

And I like the Shepherd Sock, too.  It's a bit splitty on the fine needles, but it feels nice in my hands.  I was thinking, even as late as when I turned on the computer this morning, that I might keep up with it, finish it anyway, not wanting to give up on my Almanac project for this month (and I have eight skeins of the wool!).  But the colors are just not working for me this way -- lightning bolts on the thighs! I don't think so -- and I don't see how I could reknit it -- maybe working with alternate balls, it could work! -- and still finish by the end of the month.  These Nether Garments didn't have much appeal to me at first, but now after actually trying on at least a part of it, it is not uninteresting.  (This may seem a little like Westley's remark in the Fire Swamp, something along the lines of "It's not too bad, really," but I'll leave it there.)  Mary at The Knitting Zone very kindly calculated the yardage for the Shepherd Sock for me, and it looks like eight would be plenty, as I've only just added the third one -- I was going to acknowledge her help in the final post on this project, but I think that for now this is it.  For those who might pass this pattern over, it's worth another look.  In a lighter wool like Shepherd Sock, they would make excellent yoga wear or ballet leg warmers, for those in less Wisconsin-like climates, or something warm and cozy in a thicker wool for those long winters in the North.  Like with the Chainmail Sweater in the March Chapter, yarn selection can make the world of difference!  I would only suggest a solid color....

Eva, thanks for the link to Zimmermania, a new knitalong dedicated to Elizabeth's patterns and wisdom.  I'll join when I feel a little less incompetent!

I needed a bit of a confidence-booster last night, and this came off the needles only an hour or so past my bedtime -- another Odessa, with beads this time.  The blue is the color Julia chose for her hat, and Laura's will be the lilac-pink.

"Knit on"!

Lakeview

Marie was curious about how the Lakeview Shepherd Sock looks when knitted up.  The colors have shifted now that I'm doing the increases, but this is probably how it would look on a sock leg.  Pretty, isn't it?

Thoughts on the Pi Shawl

Well, I don't know if it was the effect of the Addi Turbos,

but I have taken to calling them the Nickel-Plated Beauties.  I finished the shawl on Tuesday, and worked the border Wednesday morning.

It's about 62 in./1.5 m. across, which around my shoulders is just slightly small, so if anyone wants to make this with Koigu and US6 needles, I would recommend 10 skeins just to be safe.  I did want a rather warm everyday shawl, and so of course a looser gauge would take less wool.  (Another option might be to increase the needle size at the increase rows, thereby making a shawl that is actually more than a circle, sort of crescent-shaped when folded in half, which would make it sit on the shoulders better.)

David came upon it stretched out to dry on the floor, and stared at it for a few minutes, mesmerized by the rather psychedelic sensation of falling into the center, both from the increasing/decreasing eyelet rows and the color smudges.  (The curious funnel shapes in some of the larger plain circles are actually a result of resizing the photos, one of the downsides of my camera's phobia about straight lines, and are not in the actual shawl.)

I really enjoy the Gull Stitch, as it's both very simple to work and very pretty.  I can see, though, why Elizabeth didn't care much for the crocheted-loop finish -- she starts off by saying that it's "good," and goes on to describe the method, but then adds, "I no longer finish shawls in this fashion, so have not much of an opinion to offer" -- it seems a bit anti-climactic here, although in other situations I think it is quite effective.  I didn't want to do the sideways knitted-in border though, as it made the Koigu's color smudges go in a different direction all of a sudden, which I found rather jarring.

Laura is quite taken with this shawl -- purple is her favorite color!

Becalmed

To be honest, I've had the knitting doldrums for a while.  I like the Pi Shawl, am fairly happy with the Koigu (not as nice to knit with as Supersock, though not unpleasant, by any means), but -- well, I've been busy with the start of school and all the little things that need to be done, with reading, sometimes with just sitting.  The join on the circular needles that I was using is a bit tetchy, and I got increasingly frustrated with having to stop and pull the stitches up to the needle-end, to the point where I put the whole thing right away for a while, convinced that there was only one thing that would make it go faster --

Knitting the "Knitter's Almanac": Nether Garments

I found it difficult to whip up any enthusiasm for this month's Knitter's Almanac project, what Elizabeth rather Englishly calls "nether garments," wondering what on earth I would do with full-length woollen stockings in what we naively call "winter" here in Southern California.  I thought that things would go the way of the Difficult Sweater (Not Really).  Until, that is, one day a few months ago, when I was reading Anne's post about her socks, it suddenly came to me in a kind of whisper ... Shepherd Sock.

This is the "Lakeview" colorway -- I was somewhat limited in the choice of colors, to those that had at least eight skeins on hand, and so I got this one, a rather serene and pretty blend of blue, teal, and purple.

This month's project came about from Elizabeth's frustration at not being able to find a pattern for "truly organically designed" tights, not the ones that are knitted flat and sewn together.  "Wouldn't you think that such a very circular piece of work would bring the term 'circular needle" to the designer's minds?" she asks rhetorically.  "Let us be the first on the block, then, yea, the first in the town, the county, the State, to make these useful garments the way I'm sure Providence intended them to be made, on circular needles"!  I don't know quite when I will be able to actually wear them, but I'm interested in the process, and certain in the possibilities, as well as the opportunity to try Lorna's Laces for the first time.  Let's look at it this way -- (stands on head) -- if I ever make it to Scotland for that ancestor-hunting, hill-walking, probably-in-the-off-season-because-that's-the-only-way-we'll-be-able-to-afford-it holiday, I will want Nether Garments!

"I have been known to pull them on under a housedress, add boots, my warm coat, and woolly cap and mittens, and trot comfortably to the A&P, looking (almost) like everybody else."

Much of this chapter is taken up in calculations for the Nether Garments, which require a good amount of shaping -- but fear not, Elizabeth includes a kind of template into which you plug your measurements and multiply by your gauge.

Some excellent advice about first projects for children -- "M and F" -- learning to knit: garter-stitch pot-holders, in variegated wool.  "Then hang the pot-holder up behind the stove, and use it, and use it, and use it.  It won't be your most efficient pot-holder -- it will give you many a burned hand -- but use it.  It won't even be necessary to comment on its excellence or beauty every time you use it; you will be noticed, and the fact that it will soon become shabby, worn, and beat-up will be the best thanks and encouragement you can give.  Soon its successor will be cast on."

I'm also collecting Elizabeth Zimmermann appreciations -- here is a lovely one from Grumperina (the button is hers), and here is one from Knitting Universe.

Thoughts on Christmas Fiddle-Faddle

These little things are pretty clever.  You take a bit of knitting, fold it in half,

and you've got a knitted Christmas ornament -- or decoration, gift tag, whatever!

I'm not much of a person for fiddle-faddle, to be honest (yes, I'm passing on the angel), but even as these little things were coming together -- in well under an hour apiece, less if I hadn't stopped to take photos -- I found myself thinking of variations, the endless possibilities.  Colors! textures! variegated wools, or stripes! bigger, even ... a dishcloth!

The star obviously requires some firm blocking, but it is definitely a star -- and can be made with pretty much as many points as you like.  I did this one on 65 stitches, instead of the 55 in the basic version.  (I think that the Old Norwegian cast-on was the best choice for these, being almost-reversible and blending in well with the garter stitch.)

She's not kidding about the "knitted firmly" part -- even though it can get a bit tough towards the end, especially on the star, you need the body for the piece to hold its shape after blocking.  Finer wools could of course be doubled.

I see no reason why beads couldn't be added, either.  This would be a great project for those Christmas fund-raisers, as a dozen or so could be turned out in a weekend, for next to nothing (now, so it doesn't take up valuable December time) -- and use up scraps in the process.  How about all of those golf-ball-sized bits left over from socks?

Knitting the "Knitter's Almanac": Christmas Fiddle-Faddle

The August chapter of the Knitter's Almanac describes some "fiddle-faddle" that Elizabeth came up with while camping, Christmas ornaments "based on the principle that knitting will hump itself up when it is consistently decreased at the same spot."

This will, in fact, be a knitted Christmas tree!  All of this chapter's projects -- a tree, a star, and an angel -- are indeed small and portable enough to take on an outing, whether camping or merely picnicking.  Very economical, too -- bits and bobs of wool left over from another project, just about anything, really, because who says that your Christmas tree has to be green?!

"The more you do a thing, the more ways you find of doing it -- if you keep an open mind, that is.  Quite often the new ways are improvements."  Elizabeth found that the usual slip-knot at the beginning of a cast-on was just niggly enough for her to look for a different way of doing it: "Simply lay the wool over the righthand needle where it will form the first stitch.  Grasp the wool-ends with the left hand, spread thumb and forefinger between them, and proceed as usual.  The knot is done away with and the join much neater."  A while ago, not long after I started using the long-tail cast-on instead of the cable cast-on I'd used for years, I modified this to something that was a bit easier for me to work with: make a U-shape at the point where the tail end is long enough, hold this in your left hand, stick the needle down through the loop, and twist the end of the needle upwards.  This will cross the yarn around the needle, holding it firmly enough to start the cast-on stitches.

And a nice little bit of August, for these last few days of summer before school starts next week: "Last night, the moon -- three-quarters full -- reflected herself in the water behind the triple twisted cedar as in a Japanese print.  This morning, the print has changed; all the further shores have disappeared, the sun is seen only as a pale radiance, and sky and water have merged and mingled.  Tall rushes next to the fireplace mirror themselves unwaveringly in the glassy lake, making one perfect circle, some pointed eggs, and some funny triangles.  Slowly, to the scent of coffee, the radiance turns to a silver sun doubled by its own reflection, and the opposite shore appears through the haze.  Clearly, another perfect day is coming up."

Kind of a Drag

I was hoping to have finished the Pi Shawl by now.  I kept thinking, though, that it didn't quite speak to me.   I guess that in the laceweight wool of Elizabeth's original, the "bumps" made by the K2tog, yo flatten out considerably with blocking, or that they just didn't get on Elizabeth's nerves as much as they did on mine.  The Koigu is much stiffer than laceweight, has more body, so that the bumps are quite pronounced..  And even though I like the effect of the concentric circles, I missed the pi-ness (pi-ety?) of the ever-doubling radius, which to me seems a lot of the point of the thing.  I also had so wanted to use my rosewood circular needles that even though the gauge was pleasant (they are 3.25mm), I was already on the sixth ball before I'd gotten to the "last" increase, and was starting to worry about running out of wool.

This is the first version on one of its few "travels" -- to the park --

Here, by the way, is one of the posies that Laura and her enterprising friend made from dandelions and scraps of popped balloons, that day at the park.  Laura's friend is the daughter of a businesswoman, and I had to smile to myself when she went up to someone else's mom and said, "Do you want to buy this? it's a quarter."  The other mom was so startled at this enterprise in a six-year-old that she handed her twenty-five cents without a word.

And the second version of the Pi Shawl, which I started the other day --

This is on US5 and US6 needles -- my largest dpns and my handiest circs.  Much bigger gauge, of course, and so it's going fairly quickly, although I'm sure that it won't be finished by the end of the month!

The color in the bottom photo is more accurate, as the camera tends to pull the reds out of purple in natural light, although the inside light, even if it leaves more of the purple, rather flattens things out here.  It looks a bit drab in the new photo, whereas in reality it is quite vivid, for purple and grey.  Almost intense, and luminous, yet in a very subtle way.

Knitting the "Knitter's Almanac": A Shawl, Good Travel Knitting

July is not, I'm afraid, Travel-Month for us -- but I can see, as Elizabeth makes a point of telling us in this month's Knitter's Almanac chapter, that shawls make good travel knitting.  "First of all, fine wool takes up little space, but affords plenty of actual knitting.  Secondly, a circular needle can hardly get lost unless you pull it out by main force and cast if from you."  You can even store the current ball of yarn in the little "bag" made by the growing shawl on a circular needle!

The Pi Shawl is possibly Elizabeth Zimmermann's most well-known design -- a quick internet search yields 47,500 hits, from projects on individual knitting blogs to knitalongs to kits from dozens of vendors.  Based, of course, on the geometric relationship of the circumference of a circle to its radius, the Pi Shawl is one of those things that seems so obvious that you wonder why no-one had ever done it before.  The circumference of a circle doubles as its radius doubles -- thus, doubling both the number of stitches and the number of rows between increase rounds will get you a shawl that shapes itself neatly and efficiently into an ever-larger circle.  Brilliant, and brilliantly simple.

"Need it be said that the first and most important step is to choose the best material available?"

Mine is Koigu KPPPM in shade P305, a rather sedate (for Koigu) blend of lavendars, purples, and greys.  It was a coincidence that it matches this month's Project Spectrum palette, but a happy one, to be sure!  I ordered it late last summer, when I first thought of doing the Almanac -- it's the month I've most looked forward to, in fact.  I like both of Elizabeth's versions, but although the one in the top picture is pretty (for those, like me, to whom it would matter, there is a slightly different version in Knitter's Magazine Shawls and Scarves, in which the diamond and petal patterns are straightened out to align symmetrically), I thought that the concentric-circles would be more interesting with this Koigu colorway.

One of the nice things about working from the center outwards is that in gratifyingly short order, you've really gotten somewhere!

Thoughts on the Three-Cornered Hat

Well, this is a fast project -- I was finished with it before the ink was even dry on the last post!

Interestingly, it took more wool to do the bottom half than it did on the top, despite the rather large opening for one's head.  I added the second ball in the middle of the turning, and had a fair bit left over.  It was also curious how the spacing of the decreases affected their shape -- on every other row, the SSK and K2tog pairing lies smoothly, but working them every row (about halfway along the top) makes them stand up a bit, even tending to fold away from each other.

I did make a rather embarrassing gaffe at first, reading "Gauge: 5 1/2" and realizing after a few inches that the hat coming off the needles would barely have fit a baby doll -- the gauge is "5 1/2 sts to 2 in.," which I can only murmur weakly is an unusual way of writing it.  I did have to adjust the pattern then to fit the gauge of the Cleckheaton, which was in fact 5 1/2 sts per inch, so I merely doubled the cast-on.  The "pithy directions" are especially pithy here, and I found the longer explanation in the text of the chapter much easier to follow, especially as Elizabeth gives measurements here instead of row counts, and I could use those for my readjustments.

I was happy to take Elizabeth's advice -- "Do not feel that you are in any way obliged to possess perfect sets of four needles.  Emergency and experiment have taught me that a very motley quartet will finish off a hat quite adequately"! -- since I have at the moment only a US6 small circular and 3.75mm (US5) double-pointeds.  I used the circulars for the majority of the hat, and finished it off with the smaller dpns when it got towards the end.

It has a rather beret-like languor -- which would be lessened with a firmer gauge, of course -- and the corners make it not a little jaunty.

"Wear it down or up, with the point to the front or the back, or with all points tucked in -- it has as many lives as a cat"!