eight hands and four brains would be nice

Don't look at me like that. I've been sick with a horrible cold that refused to leave for two weeks. I've been busy working. Not only am I responsible for daily tasks at the library, I also am a crucial part of thinking up strategies and composing posts for their facebook page, so much of my urge to express myself has found a new channel (oh those poor people).

Yes, I'm at work here. It's a picture from one of my facebook campaigns.

And when I'm not at work, I go and play. Sometimes at the movies. Sometimes I just stay at home and have fun talks with my flatmates. Sometimes I go to other people's libraries.

Reading comics at an early Halloween night at a friend's library in another part of Austria.

And when I'm not playing at other people's libraries, I enjoy the return of my cooking and baking mojo (yes, there might be a recipe post coming up). I've acquired some essential ingredients for making Japanese food and have been successful in making not only edible, but actually pretty delicious lunchboxes (or bento) when I can be bothered to get up early.

Onigiri!

My first proper bento - isn't it awesome?

And after all that, there's still my PhD (got my first book for that), my broken camera, the grey weather resulting in lack of light and I had to wait for an opportunity to go yarn shopping to continue my projects.

Raspberry Broadside is one of those projects. I started out not knowing whether I'd add a second skein, but since the yardage of the Zitron Unisono is about a hundred meters shorter than your average sock yarn, I came to the conclusion that I simply had to add another skein. So I had to wait until I could go yarn shopping. But the wait was well worth it, since now I can use this as my commuting knitting again. It's not like I have a very long commute, but every minute I can spend on knitting counts!

Another project that needed a second skein of yarn is my Stripester. I haven't even started it properly yet, because the blue yarn gave me such a tough time and I didn't know what it wanted to be. I had been bitten by the long stretchy sideways triangle scarf bug and I couldn't stop. But Lace wasn't the answer for this one.

Then I thought it could be a Destroyed Cowl, but I just wasn't feeling it. For the Destroyed Cowl, I had to do a provisional cast-on, which I did in some black merino yarn that I had left lying around and looking at it, I noticed what a striking combination the black and blue made. So - a long, stretchy, striped sideways triangle scarf it would be. And yet I had to wait to go buy the black yarn and now that I have it, I need to finish my other scarves first.

But I couldn't *not* knit while waiting for yarn. And while playing around with the yarn that would become Raspberry Broadside, I hit upon a pattern I had always dreamed of. I think you might have noticed my great love of flowers, particularly roses. And maybe you've also picked up on my obsession with dark (or dusky) pink. And then, I really like lace.

I've had a beautiful dark, dusky pink lace yarn since last summer, but other than knowing I wanted to do something with lace and roses with it, I had no clue. I had collected a couple of rose-inspired lace patterns, among them the Travelling Roses scarf and so I simply started knitting a shallow sideways triangle scarf with that lace pattern. The Zitron Unisono wanted to be Raspberry broadside, but the pattern would be perfect for my pink lace yarn. I started knitting and currently it looks like this:

Of course it's called Rose Brocade. Once the main body is done, I will add a gentle ruffle. It will be gorgeous, I'm sure.

I've done something else as well. I started blocking some things. Like ... this:

My Cool Copycat shawlette from last winter - apparently many of my knitted things need at least a year to mature before they get blocked and worn. I've been wearing it a lot recently and even got a compliment on it yesterday. Maybe that will motivate me to block some more of my things ... but recently I've been wondering how many more cowls, scarves, shawlettes and shawls I really need. Maybe I should give away those I never wear or unravel them if I still want to use the yarn ...


Something else that got blocked was my beautiful bunny dragon scarf. Now I just need some backing and then some time to sew it together ... (and you can catch a glimpse of my terrible chaos here).


















Finally as an end to this incredibly long post a little teaser. After all the lovely lace and ruffles, this project will go into a much punkier direction:

the end of waiting

Oh jubilation! The time of lounging around on my couch and knitting baby clothes is at an end. *sniff* Goodbye anime! I guess I'll spend a little less time with you now, but I'll be so much happier.

Today I signed my contract to work at the Chamber of Worker's library for a year, starting this Thursday. I interned there last summer and loved it, so I am extremely happy to be back and to be able to mix things up there. I'll be partly responsible for their facebook feed, so it will get really interesting, I'm sure. And since I love bringing cakes to work, I'll be baking a lot more ... lucky colleagues!

But I said baby clothes in my last post, didn't I? Yes, sometimes I knit clothes for a non-specified child. No, not to give away. Or maybe yes, after I have stopped being capable of bearing children. But for now, some of the baby clothes I knit are for my own still non-existant children. (Note to self: good first step in that direction? Get a boyfriend.)

Most baby clothes for the Child of the Future happen like this: I go to my favorite yarn shop, see some yarn, note that the color combination is gorgeous and I'll have an idea of what to make. Sometimes I won't have an exact idea, but often I will. .And then I either start knitting right away or the yarn waits. And waits. And waits. Until I am struck with the need to knit something small but not too involved ...

Something not too involved? This little baby kimono? Oh ... whatever. I had the pink and black Lana Grossa Cool Wool 2000 for a while and wanted to do something with it ... something cool. What's cooler than a kimono? I looked up some of my favorite flowers and a fun fairisle pattern in my hand-drawn book of patterns where I keep everything I copy from somewhere else (occasionally, I design my own patterns, too).

For the actual kimono pattern, I used the Latte Macchiato pattern I found on Ravelry. I called mine Pink Punk but maybe Fluorescent Sakura would have been good, too. My camera can't handle this shade of pink ...

The back features this lovely rose you can hardly see and on each shoulder there's a little flower as well. It is very punky, but now there's thousands of ends to weave in, blocking and all that to do. I guess I'll institute a knitting morning in my work week. I can do this because I'll be working from noon to 8pm.

This is another creation for the Child of the Future. This time I thought up my own pattern and constructed this very randomly. I used a provisional cast-on and knit the fairisle band. Then I undid the cast-on and knit the orange part at the bottom.

After that, I started on the top part but unraveled it about four times to get the neck placement right, I wasn't sure whether to have more buttons on one shoulder to have more space for the head, I noticed I had enough yarn to make the sleeves a little longer and so I kept knitting and unraveling until I was quite annoyed with myself. In the end, I decided to only allow one button in the neck band and made the whole neck opening larger than before.

This one is called Arrow, knit in Lana Grossa Bingo and I must say, I am very happy with it. I just wish I could try it on an actual human child to see how it fits.

I do have a lot of Lana Grossa Bingo slotted for children's clothing. There's some purple and green waiting for something stripey, some pea green waiting for a pea jacket ... but this dark blue and light blue combination (inspired, I must add, by my Classic Baby Shirt, which I also knit for the Child of the Future) made it to the knitting process this time. It's actually pretty big, 80 stitches, if I recall correctly, maybe even 88. And I still have a bit of yarn left over, so I could have made it bigger.

But then I couldn't have added this incredibly twee collar. Yes, this piece of knitwear is called Sailor. Sue me for crimes against ... commonsense taste (or whatever the opposite of twee is called - the internets suggest unrefined, but that isn't correct, really), but I had to make this when I noticed that I really had lots of yarn left over.

A few more details: the front straps will be buttoned to the back as soon as I have proper buttons (must find something nautical). On the left, you can see some of the traveling jogless stripes in the round as taken from the excellent TECHknitting blog (link goes directly to the post on jogless stripes).

 

Finally I made this little number for the baby girl of an ex-boyfriend, but I'm starting to fear that she won't be able to fit in it anymore.

The Spirit of Lutin - the yarn was supposed to be a fairy doll - was made to fit a number of sizes, but I probably didn't make it wide enough.

After all, the main thing that makes all my baby knitting a somewhat risky investment is that I have no access to a real live child I could force to dress in the things I make. I bet if I ever have children they'll hate me for making them wear handknits all the time. Or they will always be the right size for all these pieces when it's summer ...



And with this the baby clothing streak is over for now. I've started two scarves for myself ... but the camera is still broken, because while I did buy superglue, I lost the piece of plastic I was supposed to reattach to the camera. Maybe I'll find it. Until then, a piece of tape will have to suffice. Let's see if they'll let me knit during work - maybe in the evening hours!

how about some socks?

Having three big projects on the needles is sometimes a little boring. I want to knit socks ...

Project 250 is going slow, but ok so far. After figuring out the armscye problem (and I finally remembered that the "skirt" is called a "peplum"), I wondered whether a diamond shape wouldn't solve the problem, giving me space and yet smaller armholes. So I completely unraveled the top and went to work. As you can see below, instead of a giant v, there's a somewhat diamond- or leaf-shaped section now. But!

But when I tried it on after knitting a good bit, I noticed that there was another problem. Instead of right below my armpit, the diamonds were placed further to the front. No wonder, since I don't have boobs on my back! But undoing all that knitting again? Instead, I chose to drop down the diamond section and reknit it 10 stitches further back.

The herringbone pattern is a bit complicated to knit back up, though, because the increases are unusual. Every row needs undivided attention, the only thing I could do was listen to a little music while reknitting. Still, the second section is almost done.

 To the right, you can see how far back I put the diamond section now - it's well into the back of the garment. I'm curious to see how it will all work out. But once the reknitting is done, I'll have to figure out a new problem: the new neckline. In accordance with the new look, my 250 cardi needs a new neckline to make it more Jane Austen than Jane Eyre. So I'll have to look at different patterns with the sort of neckline that I want and incorporate that into the cardi.

 
Sounds like a lot of work, no? Well, when I'm not working on 250, I'm working on my entrelac stole, called Quittez vos habits roses. When I can't think of a good enough name for a project (Why do they have to have such great names, anyway? Maybe I should start numbering them all.) I use snippets from folk songs (because I'm crazy about folk) and since I recently discovered a good channel for French folk songs, the titles of my projects are getting more and more incomprehensible. Quittez vos habits roses is from the song below, called "Marlborough s'en va t'en Guerre" from the beginning of the 18th century. 

If that song reminds you of "For he's a jolly good fellow", that's because the Brits stole the melody of this song and added their own text, a common and fun occurrence in folk. Most tunes for folksongs were actually dance tunes before they became song tunes. It's rare for melodies to cross borders, though, so this was a great find for me.

Anyway, back to knitting. On the left you can see my Quittez, it's made of Lana Grossa Qui and is soft and gorgeous, but due to my tendency to tighten my gauge once I'm comfortable with a pattern, the beginning of the stole is much looser than the section I'm currently knitting. Maybe in the future I should switch needles when this happens. But I'm hoping that it will even out in the blocking. Sadly, I've always found that the great texture of entrelac gets lost in the blocking, but maybe scrunching it up a little will help.

The other thing about Quittez is that I need daylight to knit it. Once one row of squares is done, I need to go back to every square and adjust the stitches. I still haven't managed to neaten up my edge stitches, not even with tugging and knitting some stitches tighter and some looser and whatever else - they remain uneven. So adjusting is required and for that I need daylight or at least good light in my room and ... anyway.


 
Third project on the needles is the Malagash Square Shawl that I'm calling Rose-colored Edges (because I didn't want to name it after yet another French folk song, frickin' a). It starts in the middle and is knit in the round and the pattern wants it to be garter stitch. But no way am I purling so much in a shawl that is knit in the round! And I also only have 600 meters of the main color, so I have to make it last.

So the main section has garter ridges every third row and three garter ridges every 7th ridge. I also wanted to do something with twisted stitches but decided against it. Maybe in a future project. But as this shawl gets bigger, it needs needles with a longer cable. Unfortunately, my best 3,5mm needles are occupied with the 250 cardigan, so I need to finish 250 first before I knit much more on this.

I want to knit socks ... I only have about 74 sock patterns in my queue ...

sneaky March - musings on baby shirts

The sun is shining right in my window, so I can't watch anime - right now I'm on the Deathnote bandwagon and it's a little disappointing. I guess if you haven't seen much anime, this might strike you as the awesomest anime ever, but it's rather plotholey, shark-jumpey and too shounen (male-targeted) by half. Interesting that they've made the evil guy so good-looking and the good guy so strangely bird-like. Also, the one smart female character is treated like shit by her fiance and is killed off in one episode right at the beginning, while the annoying fanservice female character stays on and on and on ... gah. It is still an interesting thought experiment, though, which is always the best thing about anime.

Ok, enough of that. On to knitting. Lately, I've kind of been inspired to knit a few more baby things. I think the intended recipient must have been born already, I'm just waiting for the email. I wanted to use up some of the cotton yarn I had bought and so at first, I thought about making a knitted dress with large block stripes in turquoise and red, but it didn't look so hot (different yarns) and it would have fit a five-year-old.

I've actually already made a baby shirt a while ago, in summer 2008, as part of a set of playclothes, to try and use up cotton yarn leftovers (Lana Grossa Toccata, to be precise). I never got around to the pants, though. I had to reknit this because I wasn't careful enough about carrying the yarn between the stripes and there were large gaps and it looked awful. So, reknitting. And reknitting. And reknitting. I hate reknitting with cotton yarn. But I really love these colors together:

This was knit from the top down, following the construction I had put to use on an unfinished project that needs a lot of rethinking. I decided to end it with a rolled brim, because nothing else looked good. Consequently, I've been using the rolled brim in all my other baby shirts, too.

Leftovers can provide a lot of inspiration. As I repeatedly mentioned when writing about the Snow Bunny, I love the Lana Grossa Latte yarn - they also make rather a nice blue. So when I ended up with over half (too lazy to measure) a ball of the white Latte, I decided to buy a ball of blue latte and give in to this year's fashion. Yes, the French blue and white stripes have returned in force (from doing a turn in the 80s and again in the mid-90s). I love that look. Can't wear it, but I love it. So, why not make small children wear it, they can't defend themselves and look cute in it. (Muahahaha). I give you the Classic Baby Shirt. Done bottom-up, because ... no reason. I love it, it's soft and beautiful.

After this, I was on a roll. Having decided to abandon the block stripes, I thought about how little texture I had been using for the baby clothes I had made so far (with a few exceptions, but still) and how little lace! That had to be remedied. I wanted some sort of smocking effect, but not too much. And something lacy and textured. Well, one of those stitches that is really, really easy and never leaves my brain is the Trinity Stitch. Makes little cluster balls that look like berries.

I gave it the rather stark name of One Texture, I guess a cuter name would be Summer Raspberry, but let's not get too twee here. The yarn is Lana Grossa Bingo and it has been in my stash for a long time, so yay! More space for new yarn. I wanted to do a different top construction and ended up with this kimono-like thing - I just hope it actually fits. As usual, worries about arm and head size abounded, since I don't actually have a real life baby to put this on.

From One Texture to Texture Two (aka Pie Crust Shirt or something). This time, I chose the Classic Baby Shirt construction again, but decided to do a twisted stitch rib on the straps so they wouldn't grow so much. The yarn is Lana Grossa Linea Pura Organico, which has plenty of beautiful colors. Originally it should have been a summer hat - yeah, just what a baby needs, a heavy cotton summer hat. Design fail.

I think I could go on and on knitting baby shirts. But actually, I've gone back to hats, since I decided to make a few more things that can be used immediately. It's rather boring having to wait to use all the handknitted stuff, no? A bit of instant gratification never hurt. So, because there must be some cutesy things, here's a cutesy Litte Flower Hat, knit using Lana Grossa Linea Pura Flora.

And that's it. Knitting a slightly larger hat with a bit of a lace pattern in the pink Flora and watching Deathnote. Maybe to get in the mood for the next baby thing (not for the same baby), which involves hot pink and black yarn and skulls ...

yarn candy

My favorite yarn store is tiny, just a small room. If it isn't raining or snowing, they put all their on-sale yarn outside in big baskets and they have some rolling shelves they put outside, too. If it is raining or snowing, you can't move around in the shop, because all the yarn outside needs to be stored inside. If there are too many customers (and I always seem to attract them when I go in there), you can't move around either, but that's good for their business. One advantage of the small size is that they really have to do a sale when they change over from summer to winter yarns or from winter to summer yarns, because they simply don't have the storage. And I love sales there, although I definitely pick up enough yarn during the non-sale time, too.

To me, it's like a small, but full to the brim candy shop and since I suffer from the "single ball/hank/skein" affliction common among knitters, it's a dangerous place for me. It isn't so bad with the summer yarns, but when the new winter yarn comes in, I feel the need to get just one ball of every yarn I like. Not a sweater's worth, no, just one ball or maybe two (for mittens, so many mittens on my queue ...). Even worse is the end of winter sale, which starts in January. Single balls aplenty, just waiting for me, sometimes for weeks. All the good intentions and resolutions go right out the window and yarn follows me home.

So when I went to my favorite yarn store to pick up that ball of Latte for my snow bunny, some of the yarns that I've been eyeing since they came in pounced on me. I always rejected them because while they were pretty, they weren't really my colors or I didn't know what to do with them. But how could I say no to this:

No, I don't ever wear orange. It doesn't suit me. But I love the heatheriness of this yarn and its thickness and its bright, beautiful orange orange orange color. What will I knit with it? Pfffff, that's not so important, is it? Maybe a big version of a baby ball ...

I can blame the following on the snow bunny, at least, since the colors are clearly snow bunny-inspired. But apart from that, Nuvola from Lana Grossa is a lovely yarn, soft and squishy and again it has lovely heathery colors, which is a definite improvement as well. For a long time, Lana Grossa yarns were either one single color (lovely colors, I love them) or variegated.

With this yarn I'm definitely thinking mittens. Fairisle mittens with a delicate plant pattern on a white background. They just won't get knitted until next winter I guess.

And the last ball of yarn that followed me home was this one:

This poor bedraggled ball of Dieci had been waiting for me in the single balls sale basket ever since they put out that basket. I had to finally taken pity on it and bring it home. Since it's machine washable, I'm thinking ball for my friend's baby - that way I can test for my orange ball.

I still have a lot of single balls of yarn waiting to be turned into something pretty. I guess I just love the challenge of finding or designing the exact right pattern for them all.

there's no end in sight

I have amazing projects in my (Ravelry) queue.

There's these, this, this one, this, and finally, this. I have the yarn and needles and pattern for every project. I have had the yarn for some of those projects for a long time. I've even swatched for some of those projects. But am I making any of these? No.

My main projects (those I'm supposed to be working on ... besides the thesis) are all for other people. There's the Tachikoma for my brother that requires undivided attention (as crochet always does)((Rav link), there's the headband for my mother (now finished), because the other one I knit got stolen - also needs almost undivided attention or at least a movie I know by heart and then there's the second one of the Aviatrix baby hats, just in case the first one doesn't fit. There are fifteen more baby things on my queue. Some of those won't be knit, others will be knit multiple times.

But I just want to knit this one again:

This is the Little Luxury Kimono, Rav link here. I love it. It can be made completely seamlessly, if you don't count kitchenering the shoulder seams (and I don't). You start at the bottom and oh, how many patterns I want to try out to make the bottom look all obi-like. For this one, I used one of my favorites, double moss stich aka broken rib stitch. Then you could use a cable or other cast-on for the ties, but I didn't because ... well, next time. Don't forget to make a hole for one tie to go through. Then separate the whole thing for the armholes, finish it, kitchener the shoulders and pick up stitches for the sleeves. Reverse the sleeve directions and ta-daa! Seamless kimono!

The yarn for this sweater is Lana Grossa Bingo, 100% merino and my favorite bulky workhorse yarn. This yarn has also been in my possession for ages. When I bought it, I had just come across Knitty, so it was 2005 and in Knitty's 2005 spring edition there was this pattern: Cleaves. I wanted it. I coveted it. But I didn't knit it, because I was busy knitting other things. I still wanted it. Then Ravelry came around and convinced me not to knit it. So what to do with the lovely yarn? I made a Springtime Bandit, which looked like nice enough, but ... I didn't like it all that much (Rav link). So, I decided to frog it and reuse the yarn for my vicarious my friend's baby. And am I ever glad I did.