FO: Riddari, with an acceptable amount of buldge

I have spent way too much time on this beast.  

The actual knitting took me no time- maybe two weeks start to finish?- and it looked just dandy until I took the scissors to it.

The idea of it was an Icelandic-style jumper done in 100% British Wools:  it was fascinating to combine these wools, to get a feel for each one.  The Black Welsh was the roughest to work with- it's rustic and full of lanolin, but it will look like new forever.  The grey Suffolk was a bit softer, but I obsessively picked wires of guard hairs out of it.  The moorit Shetland, lovely and lofty, the BFL silky and soft.  Each is their natural color, making a nice sample of the natural variety of colorful sheep.  I dubbed this "the Cod Wars" sweater- the UK had a series of bullying encounters with Iceland over fishing rights in the rich waters around Iceland, and from the 1950's to the late 70's, the UK would send trawlers there under the protection of warships to fish around Iceland.

 Like I said, the problems started when I took the scissors to the front.  See, the pattern was written for a much lighter weight yarn, but I loved the yoke pattern so much that I did the math and followed the instructions for a child's extra small size knit in a rather tight gauge.  The fabric is dense and impenetrable to wind and water, but perhaps a bit to warm for anyplace but Iceland.  A bit of air conditioning was in order and I decided to run a crochet steek up the front, snipped it into a cardigan and installed a vintage brass zipper.  That's when I started having big problems.

The zipper would not lay flat, creating big lumps and bumps up the front.  Huge ones.  After twice hand-picking and trying to ease the lumps out, frantic calls to tailors and friends were made.  I debated trying to sew it back up and save it as a cardigan, but the colorwork would have looked all wrong.  I decided to outsource, and took it to Susan at Sharpworks down in Herne Hill.  Susan wouldn't do it for me, but advised me to take out the crochet steeks, which was adding a tight line of stitches and extra fabric that was distorting things.  She also advised me to stretch the fabric taught along the zipper to minimize the zipper tape bunching.

I went home, took out the crochet steeks, and eased the zipper in one more time, trying to stretch out the lumps without turning it into a dress.

Ta dum!  An acceptable amount of bulges!  Since I had to stretch the fabric, it's a bit longer then I intended- I could have stretched it more and ended up with a dress.  It's not perfectly flat, but it doesn't look like a tumor is growing under there either.  Oh!  and it's warm enough to be outerwear.  And you know, now that I've been struggling with this for more than a month now, I've noticed that a fair amount of commercially made zip-up sweaters have zippers that don't like perfectly flat as well, so instead of drowning in a river of tears of frustration, I said this is good enough and walked away.

The kicker?  No way no how are Icelandic Lopapeysa traditional to Iceland.  They were developed in the 1950's to make use of the abundance of Icelandic wool, and they are based on styles of traditional knitwear from far-off places suck as Turkey, Sweden, South America, and Greenland.  They quickly became a favorite of tourist and locals alike.

 I do need to clean up my edges a little bit more- I don't have a perfectly clean line running up the front.  What's a few more hours with needle and thread?  I promise you I won't un-pick the zipper again.  Part of the raggedness around the edges are due to the fact that I've tinkered with this way too much and edges began to fray at the same rate as my temper.      

 It's not going to get cold enough here in the South of England to ever need something this fantastically wooly.  A trip to Iceland is in order, or perhaps, one day, a Maine winter will be endured.

The pattern is Riddari.  The yarn is Rowan British Sheep Breeds Chunky, a yarn much bulkier than what was called for in the pattern, but I've been determined to knit down my stash instead of reaching for my bank card every time the urge to knit a sweater hits.

FO: Some Knitwear Catch Up

Baby, it's cold outside!  As we use our semi-frozen fingers to fumble with awkward buttons and zippers and walk through toxic clouds of other people's coughs, try to remember the joys of winter.  The sledding and the hot chocolates and what not.  If you don't have someone making you lots of knitwear right now, you need to start making more friends who are crafty.  There is nothing sadder to me than someone under-dressed in winter.  Almost everything I knit now gets gifted, as I am literally drowning in it.  I don't need another scarf, another pair of socks, another mitten, another hat.  I have.  So.  many.  Sweaters, I will still make and make and make for myself as I tend to get bored with my wardrobe easily.  Everything else, bah.  Go, I send you to the four corners of the earth to keep someone else warm.

I figured I would finally get around to blogging about some knits I've finished in the past, oh, five months or so.  Most of them were gifts and kind of secret, but the fits of gift-giving is well behind us now and I can safely reveal things in a public forum.  Also, as I was boxing up and packing and moving out of Paris, everything that hadn't been gifted got donated to the big charity bin down the road, which later I saw not-homeless people ingeniously fishing clothes out of using hooks and wedges.  Sigh.

First up:  the Xenocryst



This went to a warm-climate heritage friend in a cold land.  He appreciates.  It's got this really interesting textured wee cables, and a picot edging that I didn't find too emasculating.


Another ultra-cute owlet hat was crocheted for a new baby:



Good old Cascade 220 and all the scraps it makes.

This was one of my favorite sweaters to make:



It's the Armas.  It's a really brilliant, fun masculine design.  I really thought I could rock it as well, perhaps with a slightly more feminine color so I don't look like I'm a viking warrior out to pillage.





The cables were just so organic and fun to make.  I did fix the collar since I took these pictures though.  I modified it from the original and it didn't quite lay the way I wanted it to as a shawl collar, so it is now a crewneck.

The yarn is Queensland Kathmandu Aran, a tweedy blend of Merino, silk and cashmere.  It's very soft, but a rustically spun 2-ply that I was picking bits of hay stems out of the whole sweater.



This was an easy garter stitch project called the Pinch Hat from Knitscene.  You make a tapered rectangle, then seam it together and pull your stitches tight to pucker the fabric.  I ended up putting a line of tiny rose-bud buttons down the seam, and I gave this to a friend whom it suited perfectly.



The yarn is Madeline Tosh Merino Chunky, a lovely squishy yarn to fall in love with, so I kept on going with it:



A bandana cowl from Purl Soho, which is really simple and it made for a great gift.  I really fell in love with cowls this year, especially since I did so much backpacking.  Having a pack, a coat, and a cross-body bag meant that if I was wearing a scarf, I was usually tangled in something and it made for awkward moments of choking myself while getting on and off trains and planes and ferrys and trying to sit down for a bit to eat.  Cowls are useful in these situations.  Using short rows, you make a big bib like triangle, which fits as a stopgap down the front of most coats.

Here's another chunky cowl that I would make again:



The Burberry-inspired cowl. It's got these big, lovely cables that make it very warm.  Mine is a bit small as I only had the one skein, but this would work nicely a bit bigger, or really huge as an infinity scarf, which I am seeing everywhere now.

Another manly sweater using Kathmandu Aran:



This one was for my grandfather, whom I had never made a sweater for (!?).  It's the Shawl collared sweater by Martin Storey, and it's easy as 3.14.  It's from a book Rowan published that I've had for years, but I was always hesitant to make anything from it again since Rowan puts a whopping 8 inches of ease in their men's sweaters, which just seems like too much to me.  This worked out- I made the smallest size, and I knit it in the round so I took away 8 stitches total from the body to make up for the fact that I didn't need a seam allowance.

Yet another hat, for a friend:



The Quantoid.  It's very warm, double-thick with an interesting rib pattern that you strand.  Cascade 220 FOREVER!



I crocheted this lovely scarf last summer:



The Boteh.  It's lovely, lacy leafy and the best shade or red, "Tart" in Tosh Merino light.  I need to get better pictures of it eventually.  Oh, and PS, I can crochet now.  It took me ages to get around to learning, and then I'd forget as soon as I taught myself, but I found this project and decided to teach myself to make it because I thought it was pretty, and that was the way to go.  It's easy, and if you find something you like, between you tube videos and ravelry, you can probably figure most things out.

A pair of rather awesome socks:



The aptly-named Porthos socks.  It's a fairly mindless rib pattern and it makes for a good guy-sock.  Or a bad-guy sock, if you must.  The yarn is tres vibrant- Sanguine Gryphon bugga in "Cuban Cockroach".

A twinned pair of Merino Chunky hats for a his-and-her gift:





Above is the "Giftie Slouchie Beanie" for her, and the "Chunkieanie" for him.  They are both the same color purple, but the more masculine of the two is much more saturated with dye and appears to be purple-black at times (it photographed a bit lighter than it is in real life).  I thought that was a nice touch.

A pair of Pyroclastic Socks from knitty.com:



I kind of screwed up the lace pattern, but it ended up working for me, so they look different from the originals.  I loved the unusual arch and gusset shaping, although it took me a while to figure out what exactly was going on in the pattern once the heel was turned.  These went to a friend with perpetual cold feet and a drafty old Parisian apartment.  The yarn is Plucky Knitter superwash fingering merino.

A pattern I chose to show off some really amazing yarn:



The Garden Grove hat in the Verdant Gryphon Codex in the "Beowolf"  colorway.  The yarn is silk and BFL wool, and it has a lovely sheen to it that just shows color so nicely.  I kept this hat.  I loved it so.

I actually have a few more things lying around needing to be photographed, and right now I'm putting a sweater in time-out after I realized that I made two left fronts to the cardigan.  Sigh.  But I'm busy doing all sorts of other good stuff that I will get around to telling you about very soon.   Cheers!

FO: Utopia Hat

A quick, simple gift hat for a friend that's been pestering asking for one for quite some time.

It's the Utopia Cable hat. Quick, simple beanie with nice results. It's a free pattern (and written in the style that fee patterns tend to be) but it's not difficult. It's perfectly unisex to downright manly, depending on your color choice.

I love meandering cables. I used a skein of Cascade 220 tweed in a very dark coffee brown shade. I actually like the tweedy bits in this shade- no more rainbows, just subtle flecks of lighter colors.

Spring has not made itself so known that this won't get worn a couple times before it's put away.

FO: Knotty But Nice Hat

I've been cranking out hats pretty regularly this winter. I'm finding, as always, they make great gifts, especially when I'm out making new-ish friends and don't want to commit to something crazy, like socks. You suffer for me, you cook for me or bring me ultra amazing chocolates, you bring me good booze. Then we will discuss socks. Until then, I am only devoting a couple hours of my time to keep your ears warm.

Hence, the Knotty But Nice hat from knitty.com. It's a simple, straightforward, very little brainpower knit that takes no time at all to whip up. I do love cables, especially when the pattern is intricate or woven-looking. Added bonus that the bunched up fabric makes any garment extra-thick and warm.

It's made for a man with a bigger, more oval head than myself, so it's a bit large one me. It would be much less pointy on the intended recipient.

I will vouch for its warmth. Any day that the sun is out, I will be out, walking around the city, exploring with my camera in tow. This day was windy and freezing cold and I totally got wind burned on my face, but it was lovely having a part of the city to myself that is normally packed with tourist and almost always unnavigable.

I made it from a single skein of Cascade 220 Tweed.

FO: Beagle Pullover

I have waxed on previous years about my obsession to knit men's sweaters. I love them so. And you have to love them, as you will be working on them for a really long time.

This one was another design from the Norah Gaughan Men collection. It's the second one I've made from this booklet- the first one being the Devon pullover- and I really love the designs. Rustic, not too fussy, totally wearable.

I knit the sleeves on this first, and then put it down to knit a couple of hats for friends. When I picked it back up to do the body, I was able to finish it in two weeks without bloodying my hands too much. That's a lot of stitches! Give me a deadline, and I will give you a sweater. The only modification I made was that I knit the body in the round and then split at the pits.

The yarn I choose was a discontinued bag of Cascade 220 Tweed in Stone color. It's good workhorse yarn like anything else 220. I was a bit sick of the tweedy bits by the end though. I don't often knit with tweed yarns but I now know that I much prefer a subtle, heathery tweed instead of flecks of ground-up crayola bits in the yarn.

It's warm. It fits. I love the textured stitches. It's pretty much perfect. While drop-sleeves aren't my favorite fit, they are the simplest, especially if you are working around a stitch pattern.

I used 6 skeins of yarn on this- 1320 yards. My trick to getting it done was to try to force myself to get through one skein every two days. A great strategy for getting through the dark days of winter as well. This is the 44" size, which gives the wearer a couple inches of ease without it being too bulky.

My only gripe is that the sleeves are a bit long and the cuffs need to be rolled. I want to fix it, he says he doesn't mind. Still. I might fix it.

The photoshoot was in the town of Amiens in Picardy. I'll have more about our outing there tomorrow, but it is home to the most massive cathedral in all of France, and it's cold and a good place to wear a good wool sweater.

FO: Angler's Loop Socks

Now that the wind has a chill to it, a fresh pair of socks are in order.

These are a gift for someone with bigger feet than me, but I happen to be the only foot model around today. I had to do some real awesome yoga poses to get these pictures as well.

The foot is plain, but the back of the leg has a pretty and complex cable.

It's based on the Angler's Loop pattern, with a few modifications. I did them toe-up, and left out the ribbing on the foot. Easy and straightforward, they are a good guy sock, but they could totally be a woman's sock as well. They are socks.

The yarn is a skein I picked up at Rhinebeck a few years ago from the March Hare. It's a superwash merino blended with nylon, and it comes in big 455 yard skeins. It seems like a good, solid sock yarn but I'm not sure if the indie dyer is still producing. The color is "Fiddlehead Fern", which is dear to my heart and stomach. Oh, how I love fiddleheads. I haven't found them in Paris, but maybe I arrived too late in the spring to find them.

FO: Shawl-Collared Lattice Sweater, Pour mon Mari

I am always on the prowl for the perfect guy sweater. Men are very particular- they usually have a well-defined comfort zone when it comes to fashion, and anything teetering on the edge of normal will not get worn. It has to have unique details, but not too complicated or fussy or delicate. Color is important as well- the more drab and boring the color, the more loved it will be. Think of dirt, of UPS Brown, or the color you get when you mix all your watercolors together. That's what we're aiming for.



Cables are okay, but he says, "nothing too Irish". So no crazy cabled fisherman sweater, which aside from the basic plain sweater, seems to be the most popular men's pattern.

I found a pattern in Knitscene the fit the bill. It's called "The Lattice Sweater". I dug around in my stash and found some appropriately drab Cascade 220 Heathers in the color "Sparrow". I got to work on it- I knocked out the sleeves first and then did the body up to the 'pits when I was in Orlando on a business trip.



Everything gets joined at the yolk with raglan decreases, and the neck is split and the lattice cable gave me something interesting to do, finally. Except that I mis-read the instructions and ended up doing half the amount of decreases necessary and realized pretty late in the game that this would fit off-the-shoulder. Sigh.

I tinked back to the armpits, joined everything again, and did the correct amount of decreases. Much better now. Funny fact- when I realized my error in decreases, I denied it at first and continued to knit another few rows before I ripped it back. What the hell is wrong with me? In the end, knitting the yoke a second time didn't kill me as much as I thought it would.

I am going to re-knit the shawl collar though. As it is now, it's not big enough, and it's always teetering on wanting to stand up on its own. I want it to be bigger and drapier. He agrees. A little drama is okay once in a while.




Despite the fact that half the sweaters I've made haven't gotten any use at all this year due to the fact that it rarely hits a temperature cold enough, I keep slogging on with woolie knitwear with the plan of moving to someplace very cold one day. Maybe I should start taking classes in Scandinavian languages and brush up on my reindeer-herding skills.





At the suggestion of a friend, I think there should be some short-rows in the back to give it more shape. The front wouldn't ride up if there was more space for the shoulders. When I fix the collar, I might as well just keep going and rip back a few inches into the sweater as well.



Aside from the minor fit issue, he loves it. It was finished in time for his birthday, but since I fitted it to him multiple times it wasn't a surprise. Surprises when it comes to fit = not a good surprise at all.

I used a full six skeins of Cascade 220 and size 6 needles (size 5 for the ribbing and the collar) to get 19 stitches per 4 inches. I made the 44 3/4" size- his chest with a t-shirt on is 42". It's fitted, but it still gives him a good amount of ease. He loves it (and if he didn't, he wouldn't have the heart to tell me, but since he's already worn it a bunch I'm just going to stick with "he loves it") and I'm happy with it as well. Viva winter!

FO: Turn a Square for Jerry

For the most part, I like my co-workers. Some of them have the uncanny ability to drive me to drink, but I can honestly step back from the situation and view it as almost entirely positive as far as a corporate job goes. I get paid well, I get a stack of gift certificates and bottles of Scotch for Xmas, and every once in a while, they let me take the group someplace nice so they can golf and get enough alcohol in their systems to stop thinking about work.

No one is a baby and calls HR on me when they get thrown in the pool, and I don't call HR on them when they end up getting hospitalized for dehydration while they are at a strip club.

It's good to have co-workers who are willing to talk about something other than work. Jerry is the source of good office gossip, the fixer of the Web-exes that I tend to screw up, installer of big heavy servers that I can't rack myself, and the bearer of cute kids that he'll bring to the office so I can feed them Sour Patch kids until there is a sticky mess of vibrating children to be rounded up for the long ride home at the end of the day.



Oh, that's a terrible picture of him. Here's a hatless one that I like better. I took that for his linked-in picture. I think he has the same problem as I do with those corporate website pictures as almost every picture I have I'm either wearing sunglasses and/or have a drink in my hand.



There. Just imagine him with a hat now.



I felt like it was overdue that he gets some knitwear. He's been begging for socks for years, but I have put on a sinister squint and asked him if he and his wife was ready for the commitment of handwash only. So he gets a hat instead.

It's my go-to guy hat, the Turn a Square. I used leftover scraps of Noro Silk Garden from a few different projects and the last bit of Shelter in "Nest". I tried doing it from memory and realized when I was done that the pattern calls for stripes every 3 and 2 rows. I just did every 2 rows but I don't think that's wrong in any way.

I told him he could wear it on his foot if he wanted to.

Some Works in Progress

Two weeks in to 2012 and I've not cast on for a pair of socks. This means, despite having limited knitting time, I've gotten some real progress done on sweaters. Multiple sweaters.

First up is the Pas de Valse from Twist Collective.

It calls for fingering weight yarn but it works up pretty quickly at a loose gauge. I'm using Sanguine Gryphon Bugga in the Adonis Butterfly colorway. I can't wait for this sweater to be done and it's not because I'm sick of knitting it- I just love the way it drapes and I can't wait to wear it. It's almost like putting something on layaway. I keep plugging away at it, and one day it will be mine, all mine!



Because it is hand-dyed yarn and there are variations that can't be helped, I'm alternating every couple rows with another skein. That way, when I change skeins there won't be an obvious color change striping its way across my sweater.

Next up is a manly man sweater. It's the Lattice Sweater from Interweave Knits.

These are the sleeves and they only have a few more inches to go. You can't tell from the sample photo, but the sleeves have a line of rib in the center. The whole sweater is kind of boring to knit, but comforting on the commute. It seems really exciting at this point to do that cable detail around the collar. That's going to be like Christmas and my Birthday all wrapped into one when I finally get there. I am on the road for a business trip next week (that I'm seriously dreading) and I'm going to work on the body then. Flights and late nights mean that there is a chance I'll get a great deal of this knocked out without much effort. I'm using Cascade 220 Heathers in the color "Sparrow". We can't really make a man's sweater in an exciting flashy color now, can we? I'd rather it be brown or gray or a combination of the two and have the sweater get a lot of use. Maybe it can be dark green or navy if we're feeling particularly adventurous.

I actually finished this sweater a couple days ago but I haven't had a chance to get pictures yet. So here is what it looked like a couple weeks ago:



It's the Leyfi pullover by Romi Hill. It's a top-down seamless sweater with a great lace collar and a pretty leafy lace pattern that continues down the sleeves. I'll have more on it later, but I love it and it fits and it's flattering. The yarn is Cascade Eco, which knit up in no time at all once I got over the intricate lace.

An Amazon giftcard from a co-worker went to good use:

Squeeee! My quest to find comfy pumps that don't look frump resulted in these cute Mary Janes from John Fluevog. They have a nice round toe and a sturdy heel, so I've had no complaints at all. I walk quite a bit during my day- not only am I on my feet a great deal at work (well, not a waitress amount, but quite a bit) and then I'll usually have to qualms about walking a mile or so after work to run errands or avoid taking the subway at rush hour. I don't like to carry an extra pair of shoes around, so I'd rather just get something I can walk all day in without crippling myself.

I'll be out of commission for a bit as I go rah rah rah for corporate life and put on my serious face and powerpoint present my ass off. Let us all hope that it does not permanently steal my soul.