Vorsichtige Wiederbelebung

10.000 Jahre später ...

Ich möchte wieder über mein Gestricktes schreiben. In letzter Zeit habe ich so viel entwickelt und ausprobiert und es steht noch so vieles auf dem Programm und manchmal habe ich das Bedürfnis es aufzuschreiben. Besonders nachdem ich das komplette Blog nochmals gelesen habe - es macht schon Spaß. meine eigene Strickgeschichte zu verfolgen.

Allerdings werde ich von heute an auf Deutsch schreiben - nicht, weil ich nicht mehr Englisch schreiben mag, aber die Zusammensetzung meiner Strickblase hat sich verändert und ich mag mehr Menschen den Zugang zu meinen Texten ermöglichen.

In letzter Zeit habe ich wieder ein paar Kinderdinge gestrickt, denn Besuch bei den Niblingen steht auf dem Programm und ich stricke auch gerne Kinderkleidung auf Vorrat. In einem anderen Post möchte ich über meine Lieblingskonstruktionen schreiben, heute soll es um ein besonderes Muster gehen.

Rechts seht ihr ein Bild von Glühwürmchen, einem der Pullunder, aus schwarzer und sehr bunter Wolle mit vielen verschiedenen Farben gestrickt. In der Mitte des Ausschnitts sind drei Knöpfe. Die Träger und der untere Rand sind bunt, in der Mitte wechseln sich dicke schwarze Streifen mit dünnen bunten Streifen ab. Die bunten Streifen sind kraus gestrickt, die schwarzen glatt.

Ich finde den Pullunder so sehr nett, aber als ich das Strickstück umdrehte, um die Enden zu vernähen, fluchte ich ein wenig, weil die Innenseite noch schöner war als die Außenseite! Sie sah nämlich so aus:

Auf der verkehrt gestrickten Seite ergibt sich durch die bunten Maschen auf den schwarzen ein interessantes Muster, wie kleine Bögen oder Reißverschlusszacken, die ineinander greifen. Genau dieser Reißverschlusseffekt interessierte mich. Ich habe ihn nämlich bereits in einem anderen Strickstück erfolgreich angewendet.

Nachdem ich aber den Pullunder nicht umkehren konnte und nicht neu stricken wollte, bleibt die schöne Innenseite erst mal innen. Dafür wollte ich dieses Muster auf ein Jäckchen anwenden.

Als Vorlage verwendete ich den Cubes Pullover aus der Deep Fall Knitty 2014 und nannte mein Jäckchen Gentle cuddle.

Die graubraune Wolle dafür habe ich schon ewig. Ich kann nicht mehr genau sagen, wann sie in meinen Wollvorrat (bzw. Stash) kam, aber definitiv vor 2009. Der Eintrag des Garns, Lana Grossa Cashtweed, wurde 2007 erstellt. Manche Garne liegen bei mir so lange, sie werden ja nicht schlecht. Manche warten auf das perfekte Projekt, manche auf eine Kontrastfarbe. Und für dieses Garn fand sich endlich den perfekten Kontrast in Form von Lana Grossa Royal Tweed in einem rötlichen Hellviolett.

Also habe ich gleich das neue Muster ausprobiert und musste traurig feststellen, dass die Farbkombination dafür absolut ungeeignet war. Bzw. wenn ich geplant hätte, einen subtilen, verschwommenen Farbeffekt zu erzeugen, wäre es perfekt gewesen. Aber ich wollte doch, dass der schöne Reißverschlusseffekt sichtbar wurde.

Tat er aber nicht. Stattdessen gefiel mir die glatte Seite viel, viel besser und das Kontrastgarn leuchtete viel mehr aus der graubraunen Wolle hervor. Nur musste ich jetzt alles bis auf den Halsansatz auftrennen, denn mein Perfektionismus verlangte, dass die Vorderseite des Anschlags zu sehen war und nicht die Rückseite, die bei den glatten Maschen so kleine Knubbel macht, wie ihr links sehen könnt.

Das Reißverschlussmuster eignet sich also am Besten für Garne mit hohem Kontrast, wie ihr rechts bei meiner Katzenfamilie - also der vordersten Katze - sehen könnt. Es entsteht, wenn ihr mit zwei Farben strickt und die Farbe in jeder Reihe abwechselt. Die vorderste Katze ist komplett in der Technik gestrickt, aus dunkelbrauner und wollweißer Wolle.

Zwar habe ich für die Katze diese Technik nicht angewendet, aber für rundgestrickte Projekte im Reißverschlussmuster eignet sich die Helix-Stricktechnik ausgezeichnet. Ich möchte das demnächst in einer Mütze ausprobieren.

Japanophile

Sakura in Bonn - you already saw those

That's me. Not an entirely uncritical one (#not a weeabo), but there are many things I like about Japan and Japanese culture. And what do you get when you mix pink cotton yarn, summer weather and a Japanophile knitter? Something called Sakura - after the cherry blossoms that are revered and celebrated every spring in Japan.

See, Austria is currently experiencing a draught and the weather is too warm to knit with wool. 250 and Quittez are languishing. The Rose-Colored Edge shawl is waiting for a different yarn for its edging. I also have about a bazillion summer scarves, but no summer shawl. And when it gets drafty, a scarf protects the neck, but not the upper back.

What to do? A stash crawl revealed some pink cotton lace yarn (Lang yarns Marisa, to be exact). Five balls of it, a little more than 1000 meters. Great! Its color is quite reminiscent of cherry blossoms, so why not design a lace shawl that looks like cherry blossoms?

Most common depiction of sakura petals

But that's easier said than done. The first obstacle is the fact that cherry blossoms and their stylized appearance are difficult to translate into knitting.

Cherries belong to the genus of Prunus and their blossoms have five petals like almond, apricot, peach and plum blossoms. While the blossom as a whole is still symmetrical and an image of the outline can definitely be expressed in knits and purls as in this washcloth, in lace it's much harder.

To get an accurate sakura blossom in the easiest way, you'd either need to start at the center or from the outside in, that way, the five petals can be expressed accurately. But even then, the shape of the petals is tricky, since the most common depiction of the petals shows them as having a dent at the top.

Unblocked Hanami

Crochet actually manages to replicate flowers of all kinds much better than knitting (see crocheted sakura here and here), but I didn't want to crochet a shawl.

There are quite a few sakura-themed knitting patterns out there. There's the beautiful Hanami Stole by Melanie Gibbons, the first knitting pattern I ever bought. I had to wait for years before I could lay my hands on proper lace yarn for this (got it from KarlaA).

Some more patterns: Grace Mcewen designed a Sakura scarf by focusing on the twigs, rather than the blossoms. And then there's always the possibility of knitting something, making little blossoms and attaching them like in this pattern by Sara Parelhoff. But I wanted lace sakura blossoms!

 

So far, I've tried two different approaches. The first one was inspired by the Vinca shawl by Miriam Felton. Starting the shawl at the center with a sakura blossom - why not? I used the wrong needles (4mm is too large) but it turned out pretty well, I thought.

The finished shawl was supposed to look something like the incredibly crappy drawing on the left. But the blossom at the center of my shawl isn't that large.

To make the blossom larger, I'd need to figure out the increases, but all the math in my brain has been replaced by anime history. How to fill in the rest? More petals? The petals and their increase and decrease ratio are also tricky and I haven't found a pleasing solution for further petals yet. You can see that I tried, but it just didn't work out that well.

So I started a second try. Conventional shawl architecture, triangle shawl, top down, garter stitch. And I discovered that the violet pattern (at right) that I put to good use in my Tegami Bachi cowl looks quite nice when it's done in garter stitch. By virtue of the shawl construction, it becomes tilted and so more like sakura blossoms than violets (see below).

Well, *I* think they kinda look like sakura ...

Ultimately, I think a combination of these two patterns might do the trick. Starting out at the center with my sakura blossom, I could then do garter stitch or actually stockinette and use the violet pattern and random lace-overs to add random blossoms and petals.

Once the shawl is done (I'm already afraid of the decrease count for those two triangle bits), I'd add a garter stitch border on the top and a lacy border on the bottom (leaves, I think). That way I'll get the Sakura Shawl I wanted, unless the part of me that is thinking "pink ... lace ... flowers = frill overload" wins and I chuck the whole thing.

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 ...

out in the snow

The mittens for Finland are finished, all ends are tucked away and right now they're blocking. I took them for a little outing to get a more interesting background than my windowsill and they fit right in with the weather.

For Finland!

Mittens are my true love. I love mittens. I wear them more often than the socks I've knitted, that's for sure. Mittens to me are like tiny canvases on which to try things I'd never try in a sweater. Also, buy two balls of yarn (or even just one) and a pair of mittens or fingerless gloves at least is always a possibility. And if something goes wrong, ripping it all out won't be such a drama. What's hard to fit on mittens? Big fat cables, intarsia and well, lace mittens ... maybe not the best idea. Besides mittens, I also love fingerless gloves and wristwarmers, but that's for another post.

Today I'd like to introduce a mitten fresh from the brain. A friend of mine who was among the first people I met when I went online back in April 1999 a very long time ago recently complained about the cold (on facebook, where else). We used to send little things to each other ages ago, so I thought - mittens, why not? After much back and forth about his hand measurements and the color of yarn he'd prefer, I went to my favorite yarn store to search for dark red yarn. In my brain, a devilish idea was already lurking.

It's cold in Finland, very cold (otherwise he wouldn't have complained). So I couldn't knit just a simple mitten - anyone can do that. No, I would knit a superwarm mitten! But how? Simply doubling the yarn would make for warm mittens, but bigger stitches mean colder hands when it's windy. Enter a very simple solution, if you like fairisle, that is.

I bought four balls of yarn of the same color, a fluffy, muted dark red. The yarn is Lana Grossa Linea Pura Verde, a mixture of merino and alpaca. Then I doubled the yarn and knit the cuffs in a simple but pleasing pattern of k1tbl, p2. After 12 rows, I switched back to single yarn and knit one stitch with one ball, the next with the other, etc. So, stranded knitting with the same color. I increased periodically from 30 stitches to 72, then set aside 20 for the thumb, but didn't cast on any further stitches. I knit knit knit until the glove was too long (I still have to fix that), then I started decreasing and did a three-needle bindoff at the top, it just looked better. Add the thumb and - voila - a superwarm dark red mitten, that just needs its top ripped out a little ... for Finland!

falling in love with short rows

For a long time, I've successfully managed to avoid short rows. If they were in a pattern, I clung tightly to that pattern and hated how they looked. I understood the principle of the short rows and had used them in freeform crochet without problems, but in knitting, I didn't really know what to do with them.

Looking for a way to make short rows look nicer, I read about Japanese short rows done with pins, but found that to be kind of material intensive, a big minus for me, since I like to knit with as few accessories as possible. Using accessories like cable needles, pins or stitch markers, and doing things like knitting stuff in pieces and seaming them up later takes a lot longer than making stitch markers out of left-over yarn on the fly, cabling without cable needles and knitting seamlessly whenever possible.

Still, I wanted to learn how to deal with short rows since I hated being afraid of them. With all this baby knitting, I found the perfect opportunity to get over my fears: the Aviatrix baby hat by Justine Turner. I love the look of it and just had to make it for my friend's baby. But how? How could I get over the short rows?

Solution: the internets. TECHknitting is an excellent blog with lots of how-tos, tricks and tips and really clear explanations and pictures and there I came across the method that cured me. At the end of this article on short row methods is my new method of choice: Japanese short rows done with yarnovers and slipped stitches, no pins, no wraps, just knitting. Once you get used to slipping the first stitch, everything becomes a cinch!

Now I can proudly present my two Aviatrix baby hats. The first one was modded a little, according to the instructions of a fellow Raveler, but with the second one, I stuck to the pattern. Funnily, the hats turned out roughly the same size. I just hope the straps aren't too short or too long. They were both made using Lana Grossa Superlana, which is rougher and not as tightly plied as the Cool Wool 2000, but soft and durable all the same (also, cheaper and the right weight for these hats).

Yes, I had gotten over my short row anxiety. Now how to put the new knowledge into practice? Why, by modifying a pattern, of course! Enter my love of pixie caps. I bought the first Knitty book only because there was a pixie cap in it. It turned out to be not very cute, even though I travelled to the US to get the exact yarn specified (ok, there were other reasons for travelling there, as well). But if I can't wear them, I know who can - babies.

 
Yes, babies can wear pixie caps. And I found the perfect pattern: the Vintage Pixie Cap by Hadley Fierlinger. To make the pointy end more pointy, stitches are bound off at the beginning of rows, which always leads to ugly stepped edges and ugly seams. I used Japanese short rows and could do a comfortable three-needle-bind off in the end, saving myself from having to do a seam. Jubilation! I used Lana Grossa Cool Wool 2000 yet again, since it's superwash, supersoft and superdurable.

The last baby hat I knit doesn't have short rows. But the Norwegian Sweet Baby Hat by Gro is cute all the same. I picked up a ball of dark blue-green Lana Grossa Cool Wool 2000 (what else, by now), but when the time came to cast on, I was a little split. It's lovely yarn, slightly heathered, but the color was maybe somewhat austere for a baby that wasn't mine. After much wrangling with how many stitches to cast on (gosh, is it ever hard to settle on a size when there aren't any babies around you that you can test things on), I decided to add a little more color.

I had recently finished a headband for my mother (no picture yet), because the first one I made for her got stolen. Looking at the leftovers, I discovered that the color suited my dark green-blue perfectly - and since the pattern called for stripes, I put the yarns together and got something much more beautiful than if I had used either yarn on its own.

In fact, I love this color combination so much that I'm going to make myself some fingerless gloves with the same yarn and a zigzag pattern. At first I thought about making the same baby hat and saving it for my own future babies (yes, I am a little crazy), but in this case, rational thought (and selfishness) won.

So that's it on baby hats. I have a few more baby items in my queue, but my baby knitting elan is petering out. After all, I have to weave in all the ends on all the things I already made, there are seams to sew, there's blocking and finally sending everything off. In the meantime I'll be working on the 200th project I recorded on Ravelry - and it will benefit heavily from my short row craze.