This little sweater malingered for an inexcusable amount of time, missing only a button to close the modified neck that I opened up to fit my son’s ever expanding head.

This morning, it was reborn!  The combination of a freak snow storm plus a bad laundry situation meant that I was frantically searching for sweaters to dress Mr. Bug in this morning.  When I remembered this sweater, I kicked myself for not having gotten a button for it yet.  Then my dear husband suggested we scavenge the extra button from one of his shirts or pants - which we did, and which I sewed on during breakfast.

Sweater crisis averted, and one item is now knocked off my epic FO to-do list!

There was a bag of unlabeled shetland weight wool.  I scooped it, thinking I would find a perfect use for it soon enough.  I was too excited about getting back into the box to dig around more to ask any questions, and I am still slapping myself for that.

I figured I would knit some cute little sweater for my kid, and it would be awesome and fun.  However, not knowing the exact information about the yarn I have is driving me a little bit batty.

I know it is 100% wool. I know it is some type of shetland wool. It is 2-ply, and is somewhere around a light fingering weight.  I have two full balls that are still in their original form, and they come in the centre-pull balls, 50g each.  I took a look at some shade cards from some different companies (Harrisville, Jamieson’s), but nothing seems to match the colours, weight, and ball shape that I have.

I have nearly equal amounts of the three yarns in the top row on the left, nearly equal amounts of the pink and dark purple (two on the right), and a piddling amount of the lilac (bottom middle). Exact measurements:

75g light grey
66g dark grey
78g purple
34g light pink
37g dark purple
16g lilac

This adds up to a total of 306 grams.  I just finished a fair isle yoked sweater (rav link) sized for a 4-year old, and it topped out around 175g (probably less, as my friend weighed it for me and her scale was only accurate to within +-25g), so I definitely have enough yarn to make a kid’s sweater.

What does that sweater look like? I break into a cold sweat when I picture knitting merrily along in my proposed colourwork pattern, only to run out of yarn with half a sleeve to go.

I suppose I could do something like Kristen Kapur’s Staccato, but that seems kind of a cop-out - I want to do something patterned or stranded.  I had a wild search today to find a pattern that would work for me, and Kim Hargreaves’ Moor (rav link) stood out. I’m not sold on that particular patterning for a little boy’s sweater, but I do like the general balance of the colours.  I might try riffing off this design, trying some different patterns as well as adding sleeves.

I remain undecided.  My mystery yarn and I are going to sit here for a little bit longer, sizing each other up.  If you have any suggestions of a pattern - or, even better, if you think you know what this yarn is - leave me a comment!

You know the type - the projects you stuff away because you’re hoping they’ll finish themselves when you’re not looking.  Frankly, they are starting to haunt me.  They’re getting older than I am comfortable with, some edging over the dreaded one year mark.  I’ve been ignoring them as long as possible, filling in my knitting time with happy little hats, socks, and quick baby projects.  But the time has come - I must kill off these UFOs.

To you, dear public, I confess my sins of neglect.  Behold, The UFO March of Shame.

#1)  THE VEST OF MY DISCONTENT

The pattern is Stephanie Japel’s Back-to-School U-Neck vest, and I was thrilled and excited to have my very own preppy vest.  I was working away on it, only slightly annoyed that the dye from the Cascade 220 I was using kept coming off on my hands.   Then my hands abruptly broke out in hideous eczema, all around my fingers where I tensioned my yarn.  That was the death knell for this project, but I wasn’t ready to let go.  I stuffed it in a bag and ignored it for a while.  And then a while longer.  Every time I looked at it, I started to get itchy again.

I keep thinking I might try and finish it off anyway, but the idea of itchy hands just to have a vest that will probably dye my shirt teal just isn’t doing it for me.  Do I rip, get rid of the yarn and call it a loss? I haven’t been able to bear the idea of calling it a complete failure yet, but I’m still not eager to try again.

#2) THE PURPLE MENACE

This is a gift for a friend, though I’m sure by this point she thinks I’ve forgotten about it.  I don’t even know what stopped me, but I ran out of steam around the time I was supposed to divide for the front and back, and knit to the shoulders.  Something about bust shaping just completely freaks me out - why, I cannot explain.  This is the Twist Collective pattern Bernhardt by Alison Green Will, and I was adjusting the pattern as I went to account for the aran weight yarn.  Things were working out nicely.  But as I let it sit for a few months, I became tired just thinking about the idea of digging out my gauge notes, figuring out where I’d left off, and trying to continue.

#3) THE “I’LL JUST DESIGN A SWEATER AND KNIT IT IN A WEEK” SWEATER

Ok, I feel legitimately bad about this one.  It seemed like such a good idea at the time, and things were going so well through knitting the body (in 3 days!), that I was absolutely confident I would finish it within 7 days.  I mean, the gauge on this thing is 11sts over 4 inches.  How could I not finish it in a week?  I designed my colourwork pattern, I figured out everything to fit me, and then I hit the bust shaping.  OH GLORY ME, NOT THE BUST SHAPING AGAIN.  After ripping out the front four times, I stuffed it in a bag and set it sit.

Then about a month ago, I thought this was silly and tried to pick it up again.  I powered through my notes and redid the front and back.  A small victory dance was done, and I decided to carry my enthusiasm straight into the arms.

Unfortunately, I stumbled on the colourwork bands on the arms.  I kept mucking up the length of my floats, ending up with both loose and puckered stitches.  I did a little reading and decided to try knitting the sleeves inside out, but then just ended up with saggy loose stitches every row instead of haphazardly spread throughout.   So I stuffed it back in the Bad Sweater Bag.

#4) MITTENS TO MATCH A HAT I WEAR ALL THE TIME

In October, I went to the Vermont Sheep and Wool festival with some friends.  I bought a kit from the lovely folks at Green Mountain Spinnery, and made myself Melissa’s Hat, a pattern by Melissa Lumley.  I had a ton of wool left over from the kit, and being pleased with the way the hat turned out, decided to make myself some matching mittens.

However, gauge issues (and that pesky float-length issue) forced this project into early retirement.  In fact, I pulled the needles out of the cuff completely and decided to scrap it.  As with the hat, I have decided to knit them up two needle sizes and then felt them down a bit.  Naturally, I haven’t gotten around to it yet and winter is half over.  (I keep wanting to say ‘almost over,’ but this is Eastern Canada and I’m not going to get my hopes up like that.)

#5) DABBLING IN COLOURWORK MITTENS

I came up with this pattern idea over a year ago, and just got around to casting on and experimenting with it recently.  I was determined to knit up at least one sample mitten as a proof of concept, but several things stood in my way.  First off, I got the gauge too small - hardly a problem.  However, no matter how I fiddled, wherever I secured my green floats behind the long sections of white, the green showed through.  I need to do a bit of reading and asking around to see what I’m doing wrong, and then it’s back to the beginning again with these.  I really want to try and make a pair of these, as they would be a great gift for a friend of mine.

#6, 7, and 8.) FINISHING IS NOT MY STRONG SUIT

These three items only need buttons to attain functionality.  Seriously.  That’s it.  I even own the buttons required for all three.  OH THE SHAME!  (Oh yes, and that mysterious not-quite rectangle in the middle is supposed to be a cowl.  Ugly it may be, but warm it is.  The top is the February Baby Sweater, and the bottom is a standard raglan sweater, both by Elizabeth Zimmerman)

#9) BLORPY AND MINI-BLORP

These were a trial pair to see if my toddler son would put up with thrummed mittens.  The first one was too small, and the second one was too stuffed.  Then he started playing with them as though they were toys, and I kept losing them, only to find them stuffed into unexpected places.  I haven’t yet found the energy to tear them apart and extend them, and the idea of trimming the stuffing seems kind of wrong.  Perhaps it is time to toss the blorpy duo and just start again fresh.

*****

Ah.  My.  Well, I feel slightly lighter for having this confession off my chest.  I would say some such bold statement as, “I aim to have all these completed within two months!” or some such thing, but in truth my innards writhe and recoil at the very thought of picking up any of these projects.

I may start small, and sew on some buttons.  Then maybe knit a sleeve or two.  I might even (*cringe*) shape the bust of the Purple Menace.  But at least I have brought my problems to lights, and can be held accountable for them.  If you see me knitting away on some delightful little hat project, feel free to ask me how my sweaters are going.

And hey, with house guests for 2 weeks, I now have no place to hide my shameful knitting secrets.  All these UFOs are going to be sitting in my bedroom, staring at me balefully as I try to sleep.  Perhaps that will help.

As a treat, I picked myself up some koigu in a happy rainbow colourway.  My feet are now warm and luxuriating in colourful comfort:

Knitternaut’s Rainbow Socks (rav link)
Pattern: Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s Sock Recipe (rav link)
Yarn:  Koigu Painter’s Palette Premium Merino, colourway P136

I’m kind of late to the whole koigu sock party, having just discovered how awesome this yarn is this year after hearing so many people go on and on about it.  Late or not, I am enjoying the party mightily - this is my second pair of koigu socks in as many months, and I can’t get over how freakin’ comfortable they are. And there are so many beautiful colours are stuffed into the colourways - there is a red and blue in there that I wish I could get whole skeins in. I was a little bit disappointed at how the yellows and greens pooled in these socks, but it’s not so bad.

Next up:  NaKniSweMo!

In early July, I got it in my head that what my husband needed was a vest.  Every mathematician needs a professorly vest, right? He was only vaguely enthused, but I decided to push ahead anyway.  I spent quite some time searching for the perfect vest project - something with colourwork, possibly with argyle, so as to teach myself some steeking technique.  I liked pieces of different patterns, but I never quite found what I was looking for.

After a lot of reading, I decided to cobble together my own pattern and came up with this:

Ben’s Argyle Vest (Ravelry Project Link)
Yarn: Reynolds Whiskey in Charcoal and Pearl

I used the chart from Eunny Jang’s Deep-V Argyle vest (rav link), and made heavy use of her steeking tutorials.  The rest of it was just things I liked from other patterns all mashed together to make a fairly straight-forward garment.

Not only did I have a fantastic time making it, but it was extremely well-received.  Colourwork is most definitely my thing, and steeking is better than sliced bread, my friends.  It was a hell of a lot of finishing work, but it was so much fun!  And I was so very pleased with the result that I instantly forgave all the time I spent cursing it.

I had one major setback with this project, and that was that the shoulders were far too wide for the look I was going for.  I hadn’t decreased enough on the front and back.  To fix it, I picked up the ribbing along the line where I would have preferred it to be.  Once that was done, I reinforced the stitches three away from the new picked-up line, and cut off the excess.  To keep it from fraying out, I blanket-stitched down the excess fabric on the inside.  It was a fairly successful fix, if perhaps not the most elegant one.

The Reynolds Whiskey was great.  This was my first time working with a nice airy yarn intended for colourworking, and it has really turned me on to the more scratchy, sheepy yarns out there.  Up until now, I have been a sucker for the softer decadent luxury yarns, but this was really nice to work with.  And this particular yarn has a lot of lovely and unusual colours running through it, making it have quite a lot of depth and texture to the colour.  The pearl colourway has a pink and blue undertone, while the charcoal has some yellows and blues in it.  The consequence is that this vest goes with just about every single shirt that my husband owns.  Oh yes, project win!

We took the vest out for a photo shoot one fall afternoon.  Here are a few more shots from our afternoon in the park:

Somewhere along the line in my knitting, I gained both the skill and attention span for larger projects.  Sweaters, blankets, hat-mitten-scarf sets - I just wanted something a little bit more than a one-skein wonder tossed out over a few days.

This was impossible with the random assortment of yarn bits I had in my tiny bucket-o-stash.  Assorted weights, assorted fibres, assorted colours, but nothing more than 400yds in anything that went together. So I had to buy some new yarn for a sweater, and then started collecting yarn for the sweater I wanted to knit after that.  And the one after that.  And the three sweaters after that.

Last night, a friend let me pick a few things from her stash (she is leaving town for the West Coast, and was trimming down for the trip), and I snapped up two different worsted weight yarns that would make two great sweaters.  This morning I went to store it in the Ikea dresser that is my stash location, but it became immediately apparent that this was not going to fly.

Every single bloody drawer is stuffed with yarn.

Now, I know that some people out there will say, “bah, one dresser? That’s it?”  and scoff at my meagre supplies.  But seriously, this is bewildering and amazing to me.  When I moved to Montreal in September 2008, I had one half-full Rubbermaid bin of yarn.  That has ballooned to at least four bins worth.  There are several factors that have led to my downfall:

• Having an LYS be the epicentre of my social life in Montreal (they have mom and baby knit groups!  What more can I say!)
• Attending a fibre festival for the first time ever
• Having friends and family who actually wear the things I make
• Having a husband who also knits, and encourages yarn purchases

But in truth, this leads me to some stash anxiety.  I feel the weight of all these un-made projects hanging over my head.  I look at each ball of yarn, and all I see is time.  Days and months and years of knitting in my future, all mapped out.  Most of them big projects, like colourwork sweaters and things I want to design.

It is time to get serious, my friends. I move again in August, and I have got to whittle down this badass pile of yarn.  So, I have some goals, mostly picked by how much space that particular yarn is taking up:

1.  At least four sweaters this winter

• One of my own design for me with Cascade Eco-Wool (that stuff is HUGE)
• Bernhardt for a friend, in O-Wool Classic
• Two toddler-sized sweaters for my little boy, either in Knit Picks wool of the Andes, or the Marra Inca Gold merino/alpaca.

2.  At least four pairs of socks this winter (I’m going for speed, so just plain vanilla socks for me)

• Two pair in assorted Schoeller and Stahl yarns
• One pair in Briggs and Little Tuffy
• One pair in SR Kertzer On Your Toes

3.  HATS HATS HATS BABY HATS MORE HATS SO MANY HATS

• Let’s just leave this one open-ended, shall we?  Got to maintain a little spontaneity in my life.

Well.  There it is, some resolutions for the knitting season to come.  I’ve already got one of the Sockina socks on the needles and the first cuff complete, and I’ve swatched for the sweater I am designing, and just need to dive in and start knitting it.  If I can get all that Eco-Yarn knit up, that’s going to free up a lot of space. I think this is the first time in my life I have ever prioritized my knitting projects by how much space the materials take up.

Oh yes - and feel free to slap me if you see me buying more yarn.

Being the clever knitter I am, I thought I would get my baby boy to try it on and pose for some FO pictures.  After all, what are family members for if not to pose prettily with your finished knitted items? Unfortunately, along with mobility and a charming personality, my young man has also developed a mind of his own:

PHOTOSHOOT FAIL.  Yes, that is me being mauled by cuteness in the last photo.  He knocked me down, and I managed to snap a photo while keeping my camera out of his drooly clutches.

Anyway, trust me. The sweater looks cute.

1. Burly Timber Cruiser socks, 2. Medallion, 3. Travelling Fern lace scarf, 4. Stocking ornament, 5. Baby hat for C&A, 6. V’s grey socks, 7. Baby socks for C&A, 8. Wreath Ornament, 9. Amanda’s Pfeiffer Falls scarf, 10. Star stitch baby blanket, 11. Armoured Fruit Cosy, 12. Amanda’s Pfeiffer Falls scarf, 13. Simple Bag

Full disclosure, the Star Stitch baby blanket is actually an old project from 2007, but I just had an opportunity to photograph it recently.  That, and I was running out of things to put in the 13 mosaic spaces…

By far, I had the most fun making the Pfeiffer Falls Hooded Scarf for my friend Amanda.  It was my first big cable project, and the pattern was easily memorized and cranked out.  Also, I either completely misinterpreted the yardage for the pattern or something else odd, but I ended up buying twice as much yarn as I need for it.  I have enough left over to make another one, should I so desire it!  And after getting a chance to try it on and seeing how snuggly Susan Andrew’s Inca Gold Marra yarn is, I am tempted to make one for me.

Amanda’s Hooded Scarf (Ravelry project link)
Pattern: Pfeiffer Falls Hooded Scarf by Anne Kuo Lukito
Published in Interweave Knits Winter 2008
Yarn: Susan Andrews Collection Inca Gold Marra

I’ve also managed to throw in a few lace projects these past few months, another first for me.  I have found that lace is not exactly my thing. I know there are people who crank out shawls and stoles in amazing time, who can’t get enough of the lacy goodness, but I just didn’t feel it.

I made a gift for my friend bitchnstitches which she blogged about here.  While I was tickled with the satisfied glow of a knitted gift well received, I could not have been happier to see that goddamned project DONE.  Holy crap, did I hate it by the time I got to the end.   However, doing a lace project taught me all about the true virtues of blocking, and I can’t say that’s a bad lesson to learn.

And, in a moment of whimsy, I made a fruit cosy:

The Fruit Armour (Ravelry Project Link)
Pattern: Pear-Apple cosy by Susan B. Anderson
Yarn: acrylic scraps from yarn I bought at Safeway (yes, seriously)

I was lacking inspiration one day, and we have a serious stash problem at our house all of a sudden.  We have been looking up little project which we can do to use up all this yarn, and fruit cosies are one of the solutions.  I added some eyelets and an i-cord to the pattern.  My yarn was a damn sight heavier than what was called for, so it’s more of a grapefruit cosy than an apple or pear cosy.  Un-fruited, it has a sack-of-gold-like appearance.

There are about five or six things on the needles right now, though I am lacking for inspiration to knit these days.  Mr. Bug’s naptimes are about the only free time in the day, and various things are vying for those precious few hours.  I suspect that as the weather gets nicer, my knitting time will wane once again until fall.  We shall see…

A Mathematician Designs a Pattern - by Mr. K

I decided that I wanted to design a pattern for a knitted globe — I figured I’d start with a two-color one (just green and blue) and see how that goes; later on, I’d add in white for the ice caps.  The trouble is, I am not really an artist.  Rather, I am a mathematician who knows a few things about computers.  So I decided to start with some sort of satellite map of the earth, and attack it with computer programs until it was a knitting pattern.  This, however, presented a series of problems.

Problem 1: Find a map.

It turns out that such maps of the earth are rather easy to find on the internet.  They are used in movies, video games, astronomy simulation programs etc… basically whenever somebody wants to use computer graphics to render the earth in 3D, they start with a blank sphere and then wrap an image of the earth around it.  This image is called a “texture map”, and it is usually a 2×1 rectangular map in latitude-longitude coordinates.  The vertical edge of the map is latitude, running from 90 degrees south to 90 degrees north, and the horizontal edge is longitude, running from 0 to 360 degrees.  Here’s a particularly nice texture map from NASA’s “blue marble” earth imaging project (which I didn’t wind up using) as an example.

It turns out that most of these Earth images are licensed for noncommercial use only, so I guess it’s going to be a free pattern.  Sadly, my dreams of early retirement are now dust.

Problem 2: The map has way too many colors!

I wound up using a different map — a two-color version, which computer graphics people use to distinguish land from water — which is essentially a very similar map but with only black and white.  Downside: no arctic ice cap, because there’s no land under it

Problem 3: Too big!

I basically want to turn each pixel on the map into a stitch. However, the map is way too big — it’s 2048 x 1024 pixels.  Moreover, stitches aren’t square.  For example, for a certain weight of wool, you get about 20 stitches x 32 rows = 4 inches– so stitches are usually about 3 units wide and 2 units high.  I solved both problems with the amazing ImageMagick suite of Unix command-line image manipulation programs: I think I did something like

convert -filter point -affine 2,0,0,3,0,0 -transform texturemap.jpg pattern.png
mogrify -filter point -resize 96×72 pattern.png

The first command “stretches” the map, to deal with the unequal dimensions of the stitches, using an affine transformation.  The second one scales the map down, giving me a map 96 stitches wide at the equator.  The “filter point” part means that I don’t want the computer to do any antialiasing (putting in some grey pixels to make the edges appear less jagged).  Remember, I want my final image to still have only two colors: blue and green, land and water.

Problem 4: Distorion

This type of map seriously distorts the scale of objects near the poles (because every circle of latitude, even the tiny ones near the poles, get stretched out to be the whole width of the map).  I have to “undo” that distortion so that Antarctica, Greenland, etc. are the proper size. At the same time, I have to make the pattern generate a sphere rather than a rectangle, so I need to add lines of decrease.

How big around should each circle of latitude be?  This is an easy exercise in Grade 10 trigonometry.  If theta is the angle from the north pole down to a latitude circle, then the radius of the circle should be sin(theta), and the circumference is proportional to the radius.  I want to leave the circumference of the equator unchanged.  So if my image now has 72 rows and 96 columns, the nth row should have about

96 * sin((n/72) * pi)

stitches.  I decided that I wanted my globe to have 6 lines of decrease, basically because the Knitternaut knitted me a fine winter hat (Ravelry link) with six decreases in it. So I round off the above number to be divisible by 6, rescale each row independently to be that wide, and divide the stitches into 6 blocks.  I wrote a little perl script to do this.  At this point, I was growing weary of dealing with a 72×96 image (rather tiny!) so I got it to output text instead.

Because the resolution of this image was so low, there were a few geographical problems:  the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf and Hudson’s Bay became closed up, while South America became completely disconnected from North America.  Etc.  I fixed those things manually.

Note also that I’m cheating a little bit: knitting in the round makes a big long spiral, rather than distinct latitude circles.  So really I should have rotated the map slightly before doing any of this… but I couldn’t be bothered.

Problem 5:  It turns out it’s actually kind of hard to read that.

…so I wrote another little perl program to translate it into postscript (using a white box for ocean, and a grey box for land, sized like a stitch).  It also added horizontal and vertical lines every 5 stitches and numbered the rows for me.  Finally I used another Unix command-line utility (ps2pdf) to change that into a pdf document.

Problem 6:  Ummmm…

Now all I have to do is figure out what my pattern actually means (i.e. how to interpret the increases and decreases) and to learn to do colourwork!  No problem, right?

-Mr. K.

Mr. Bug (somewhere along the way, he morphed from Grub to Bug - must have been that baby skill-set he developed) has figured out how to grab, and his first order of business was to prevent everything and anything from going over his head.  Shirts, sweaters, jackets, all rejected.  This is, on good mornings, amusing.  On bad ones, intolerable.

We were lucky enough to receive a ton of hand-me-downs from friends and family, including a number of items that my mother-in-law saved from Mr. K’s babyhood.  Consequently, Bug gets dressed in a number of random, funky 70’s baby outfits that are ridiculously cool and silly, and always draw a comment.

One of my favourites is a little sweater:

How clever is that? A zipper down the back.

While this is probably not insanely uncommon, it was certainly the first time I’d ever seen it.  I was so pleased to be able to shove Bug’s arms in, and zip it down the back without nary a fuss or struggle.  In fact, he didn’t seem to mind at all having something over his head.

And also? Very cute.

This has put in my mind some sweater designs, and I have a yen to do a little playing around to see if I can come up with something similar with the zipper down the back.  Does anyone know of any designs like this already out there?  I had a bit of scan on Ravelry, but didn’t find anything - then again, it wasn’t the most rigorous search.

There are quite a few features I like about this design.  The hood attachment is great, meeting under the chin but doubling back right away so that it’s not bothering the baby’s face.  It’s mostly garter stitch, so would be quick work.  The colourwork on the body is fine, but the matching work on the sleeves just leaves loops for tiny fingers to get caught in.  No matter how careful I am, there always seems to be a pinky-finger getting caught in the floats.

It is possible that most of my desire to remake this sweater in my own design is the fact that Mr. Bug is rapidly outgrowing it, and its days are numbered.  Jury is out on that one.