F-F-F-Finishing F-F-F-Frenzy

*

There was a flurry of finished objects shared by various knitters last night at TNK.

First off, Issy finished the first of three (yes, THREE!) shawls she's currently knitting -- a mystery shawl whose pattern name has yet to be revealed. (Issy, I forget which yarn you used -- feel free to leave that info in the comments, if you like.)

Here, Mary Jane and Norma admire Issy's beautiful handiwork:

Lovely edging!
*

Linda recently finished a cotton baby blanket with a lovely feather-and-fan pattern combined with a cable that makes a gorgeous gift for a friend's child. We all got a good laugh when Linda told us that she started this blanket back when the boy was a baby, and he's just now celebrated his Bar Mitsvah! Way to resurrect the long-term UFO, Linda! :-)

Definitely worth the wait!
*

Patsy has also hopped on the feather-and-fan bandwagon with this beautiful scarf:

Knit this with Patsy's own hand-dyed, hand-spun fiber. Well done!
*

Cathy, (sorry I forgot to get your picture, Cath!), brought a fun finished & felted purse she recently made:

I love the matching wallet!
*

In between all her shawl knitting, Issy has also been cranking out some squares for Mosaic's Hokie Healing blankets:

Linda designed this VT logo square,
whose pattern is now available on Jane's blog, here.
*

And speaking of Mosaic Yarn Shop, did you see the article about them in the New York Times? (That's Jane's sister Lawre in the picture, second from right.) Knit on, Blacksburg!

While we were all knitting last night, we also had the honor of watching Tami bind off and finish her "I learned how to purl" bastketweave scarf:

Nice work, Tami! You should be proud!

*

Renny is knitting a beautiful cabled wrap with Rowan Soft Lux:

which has a metallic thread in it that gives the fabric the absolute perfect amount of elegant glint, without being gaudy. (Jane has a better picture of it on her last week's blog post.)

Christina is working on a beautiful beaded Gilda scarf:

So pretty!
*

Katie is knitting a summer-weight Clapotis in Noro Sakura:

Gorgeous!
*

And she's also knitting a pretty scarf in this purpley ribbon yarn (whose name I've forgotten):


And me? I'm working on a log cabin square with the Malabrigo leftovers from my Hokie Hope Hat. The jury is still out on whether I like the log cabin technique -- I'll give my ruling in a future blog post, once the square is finished.

Things might be quiet on the blog for the next few days, as they will contain a flurry of activity for me. Tomorrow is another long-anticipated plant sale, and then Friday I'm driving up to Maryland for the weekend fiber mecca. (I'll probably bring my laptop, though, so there may be a post or two over the weekend). It looks like I'm going by myself, and I'm perfectly fine with that, but if you see me there, entranced in a haze of fibery goodness, please stop me and say hello! :-)

*

Hokie Hope Hat

*

At last, I can show you what I only hinted at on Saturday. It is not a blanket square, as many of you guessed. A few of you saw me cast on for this last Tuesday night, so you had advanced knowledge as to what the final product would be. And anyone who reads this blog regularly should not be surprised that it is, in fact, a hat.

It really doesn't (shouldn't) take me an entire week to knit a hat, but, then, I don't always knit every day, especially when I have things like plant sales and gardening to attend to. Also, on Sunday there was a little scare involving my dad and an emergency room (all is well, now), which sorta messed with that day's knitting mojo.

The hat was actually complete last night, I just needed to make the pom-pom today -- my very first, as a matter of fact, and I think it came out fairly well, if I do say so myself.

Specs:

• Yarn:
• * Main color: Malabrigo worsted 100% merino in "Velvet Grapes" (#204)
  
• * Stripe & pom-pom: Malabrigo worsted 100% merino in "Sealing Wax" (#102)
  
• Gauge: 5 stitches per inch
• Needles: U.S. size 8 (5mm) Denise circulars & Clover bamboo 7" DPNs
  
• Pattern: cast on 100 stitches, join in the round, knit every round for ~6-7", adding contrasting stripe(s) as desired; switch to DPNs, decrease & finish according to Super Simple Hat Calculator; make pom-pom and attach.
• Size: 20" circumference
  
• Recipient: high school friend Judi, who is now on Virginia Tech faculty

* I can't say enough nice things about Malabrigo. It is incredibly soft, a joy to knit with, creates a beautiful fabric, and I just love the mottled effect of those kettle-dyed colors. Granted, it is single-ply 100% merino, so, pilling is inevitable, but, a small price to pay, in my opinion, for such a lovely end-product.


Pom-poms are a risky design choice, and although the hat was nice as-is, I felt it needed another dash of orange. I will send it to Judi with a note telling her that to remove the pom-pom if it's not her style. Or, if hats in general (or this one in particular) are not her style, perhaps she can give it to a student in need of a little Hokie spirit.

The best part is, I have lots of leftover yarn with which I can now start knitting some squares for Mosaic's Hokie Healing blankets:

(click ^ for mailing address)

If you, too, decide to send in knitted or crocheted blanket squares to Mosaic, don't forget to also enter yourself in Phyl's blog contest!

Or, if blanket squares aren't your thing, and you'd rather knit & donate something else, check out Tanya's Project Hokie Hope or the Knitting for Virginia Tech group blog.

Linda in our knitting group has created a VT logo square for the Mosaic blankets -- I think Jane will be posting the pattern on her blog, but if not, I can post it here and/or email it to folks. And a Blacksburg knit-blogger has created a Hokie-bird intarsia chart that can be incorporated into blanket squares. Leave her a comment and she'll email you the chart.

I'm also attempting to commission a professional yarn dyer to create a custom "Hokie Hope" maroon and orange colorway. Nothing is firm yet, but if this would interest you, let me know, and also what your preferred yarn weight might be. If and when I know more, I will announce it here on this blog.

And of course, for those who'd rather donate cash, there's always the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund.

God Bless knitters who are always willing to jump in and help during times of crisis.

And God Bless Virginia Tech!

*

Red Scarf-age

...or, How to badly knit a scarf for the Red Scarf project.

There are so many things wrong with this scarf, it was almost a crime to mail it in to the Red Scarf Project, but, mail it I did. (I apparently have a high tolerance for shame.) I take 80% of the blame for this monstrosity. I blame one of the yarns used for the other 20% of the problems. But before I get deep into whine mode, let me step you through my process:

This jumbled mess of knitting is actually a scarf, knit lengthwise, in the round, with a steek that will be cut and become fringe, and is shown here prior to finishing or blocking:

*

Here's the 22-stitch steek, knit all in stockinette. All new yarns were joined in the middle of that steek, which is clearly obvious by the indentation in this photo:

*

And even more obvious on the flip-side, where all the tails hang:

*

Extreme close-up of live steek stitches with needle removed:

Eek! Live stitches! The sky is falling!
*

And here's the steek, post-surgery:

Mad woman cuts her knitting. News at 11.
*

The giant circle is now a long rectangle. Here it is with the steek stitches unraveled:

I sorta liked that curly look, but knew it was only temporary

*

Here is the curly fringe all knotted up and ready for a bath:


No bathtub shots. We're a modest blog here at Virgin Wool, after all.

But I will show it blocking:
My porch is the only place where I can block a scarf where it won't be in my way or walked on by cats.

Finally, it was time to even out the fringe. Here's the carnage:



And here's the Red Scarfage, ready for mailing:


Now for the knitty gritty details...

First, the specs:

Pattern: Maia's "Scarf Around" (download pdf file here)
Yarns:
* main color: Lion Cashmere Blend in # 113 (red) - (bought at Ben Franklin's 50% off sale)
* constrasting colors:
** Artyarns supermerino, three different colorways
** unlabeled Sari silk yarn
Needles: U.S. size 8 Denise interchangeable circulars on 40" cable
Gauge: who cares?

Next, the positives:

I loved knitting with that Lion Cashmere Blend (72% merino, 14% cashmere, 14% nylon) -- it is incredibly soft and sproingy, delightful to knit with, delightful to touch. It retails for about $9 for an 84 yard ball, which is more than I am willing to pay for any Lion Brand yarn, cashmere content not withstanding, but I got it at a 50% off sale, and snapped up all they had. I'd definitely knit with it again, but again, probably wouldn't buy it unless it's on sale. I'm a brand snob that way, I guess.

I also loved Maia's pattern and the idea of knitting a lengthwise scarf in the round. In practice, however, I struggled. Which leads us right into...

...the negatives:

Knitting a lengthwise scarf in the round, in actuality, is somewhat of a pain. 274 stitches on a 40" cord requires a lot of stopping & starting to allow for sliding the stitches around that giant loop. I feel like I spent more time sliding stitches around than actually knitting them, which added to the time it took to knit this scarf, refuting my original assumption that knitting it in the round would be faster. For anyone who doesn't like the Magic Loop method of knitting socks because of the sliding-stitches factor, you would HATE this method of knitting a scarf, because the sliding is magnified ten-fold.

In all fairness, however, I think that many of my problems were due to the tools I was using. Perhaps if I used a shorter cable (?), a smoother/skinnier cable (like an Addi Turbo), skinnier yarns (not the Sari silk) and larger needles, it would have been less of a struggle. Hard to say, at this point, though.

Knitting with the Lion Cashmere Blend and the Artyarns Supermerino yarns wasn't as difficult as knitting with the sari silk. That yarn can be quite bulky in places, making the stitches tighter and therefore harder to slide around the cable. In hindsight, I should have switched to larger needles while knitting that yarn. Now I know.

One of the yarns I used, and I'm not sure which, bled terribly in the scarf's Eucalan bath. So much so that, instead of a rinse-free wash promised by Eucalan, I had to rinse about three times before the water ran clear. The color that bled was red, so I'm thinking the Lion Brand yarn was the culprit, but there's no way of knowing, I suppose. If anyone else has used this yarn and knows if it bleeds or not, I'd love to hear it. I still have about six balls of this yarn left for some future project.

The pattern, as written, has you alternate rows of a solid red yarn with rows of sari silk yarn, which is what I planned on doing, but changed my mind after that first section of sari silk became such a chore to knit. I then decided to use different yarns (the ArtYarns supermerino) for the stripes in the middle, with one more stripe of sari silk on the end, before finishing with the solid red again.

One final negative, which is 100% my fault. I made the rookie mistake of binding off too tightly. I'd read (and promptly forgot, apparently), that when knitting a scarf lengthwise, you should bind off really loosely (with a needle at least one size larger), otherwise, you have one side that's very tight and one that's very loose, and the scarf then has a natural arc in it, so when stretched out, it has a dorky rainbow shape, instead of the expected long rectangle required of a scarf. You can sorta see it in the blocking picture, above, although I did not post the more rainbow-y pictures, I suppose out of shame. (See, I do have a sense of shame, apparently!)

Anyway, because of the weird final shape of the scarf, the ends were not nice neat horizontal edges, but rather, somewhat diagonal, and so my next dilemma was, how do I cut the fringe? Do I cut it straight across to form a horizontal bottom edge on the fringe, or on the diagonal, to match the scarf edge? I decided to cut it straight across, which turned out to look pretty stupid. The shame just continues....

After all was said and done, I was so ready to be rid of this scarf, I immediately folded it up, packaged it and put it in the mailbox, and it was picked up by the mailman within five minutes, gone from my sight forever. Foisted upon some poor orphaned college kid. That's adding insult to injury, is it not? Probably a good thing I don't have kids.

My apologies to orphans everywhere. Next year I'll try to do better.

*

A Week's Worth of Knit Happenings

***

This is becoming quite the knitterly week for me.

Tuesday, I went and knit with my TNK peeps, as usual, at Barnes & Noble. And although there were several beautiful FO's displayed that evening, I took no photos whatsoever. Jane took quite a few, however, so she may post those to her blog in the near future. (I decided that it's sorta silly for both of us to blog about the same thing, so I'll probably step back a little bit on blogging about TNK, unless I'm the sole blogger in attendance that evening.)

And speaking of TNK and blogging....

Ahem. I know there are several of you TNKers who read this blog on occasion. And yet not one of you delurked the other day.... What's up with that? Why the withholding of the comment love? Was it something I said?

Seriously, though, I continue to work on my Scarf Around for the Red Scarf Project, and the clock is ticking. It should be finished and ready to mail out early next week. I will post pictures after it's all done.

Wednesday, I decided to go knit with the Richmond Knitters that meet at Panera at Willow Lawn. It was probably my last chance to say goodbye to Mira and meet her new baby Drake, before they pack up and move to San Antonio. I've been reading Mira's blog for maybe a year now, and got to meet her, along with several other Richmond knit-bloggers, last spring at Maryland Sheep & Wool. I've since gone to knit with the Wednesday night group a couple of times, although not as often as I'd like.

Anyway, I brought Mira a little sumthin-sumthin I made for baby Drake:

Specs:

• Yarn: Tahki Cotton Classic 100% mercerized cotton
• Pattern: Knitting Knonsense's Baby Feet Cloth
• Needles: US size 8 wooden straights

Here's Mira holding baby Drake, with fellow knitter Beth looking on:

Such a cute boy!

***

Today, I went on a yarn trek with another local knit-blogger, Suzanne, out to Holly Spring Homespun. We live relatively near each other, and she was gracious enough to drive. (It's a 45-minute drive for us, each way, so that's no small favor.) I was restrained and bought just a few patterns, a couple hanks of Art Yarns Supermerino and a ball of that newfangled Tofutsies sock yarn, [a blend of wool, soysilk, cotton and chitin (which comes from shrimp and crab shells)]. It's incredibly soft yarn -- the softest sock yarn I've ever felt. I'm such a sucker for novelties.... Kathy threw in a free pattern that goes with the sock yarn, so I may try that one of these days....

This weekend, (Friday through Sunday), our knitting group is having a retreat at a hotel down on Buggs Island Lake in Clarksville, VA. The very organized and crafty Robin H. pulled this entire thing together, and there will be about 25 people attending. There will even be vendors! (W00t! Knitting! Yarn! Shopping! Bliss!) Should be a good time, I think. I was a little iffy on attending, worried that business travel might interfere, but that's not an issue at the moment. So, off to Clarksville I go! I will be bringing my laptop and will try to post pictures each day.

Happy Knitting!

***

Tuesday Night Knitters Greet the New Year

***

Well, hello there. Pardon my extended absence. It really wasn't my intention to fall off the face of the earth, but apparently that's what happened. For a little over a week I've withdrawn from the knit-blogging world, where I neither read nor wrote any blog posts, nor did much of any knitting. So I now have lots of catch-up reading to do on others' blogs, and lots of catch-up posts to write for my own. Seems I went through this same withdrawal last year around the same time. Something about the holidays turns my mind and spirit in a completely different direction, mostly inward, I guess. But the holidays are over, it's a new year, and it's time to stop navel-gazing and instead look in a forwardly direction to all that lies ahead.

I have a large enough back-log of fodder for at least a week's worth of blog posts, and today's topic will be our most recent knit night, this past Tuesday.

A loyal contingent of Tuesday Night Knitters met last Tuesday, the day after Christmas, but I did not attend, since I was still wrapping and cooking for the following day's extended family-palooza. But I was able to make it to this week's gathering, the day after New Year's, and it was so good to see and sit and knit and chat with everyone! I've missed my peeps!

Here's a few pictures of our goings-on:

Remember the pink bowl that Jo was knitting a few weeks ago? She has since felted it:

Isn't it cool? I love that pink!
***

Tammi determined that it might also make a good Jackie Kennedy pillbox hat:

Jane suggested that if someone was feeling particularly ambitious, they could knit the entire Jackie Kennedy assassination day outfit, complete with intarsia bloodstains. (It could then perhaps be submitted to this website.) Yes, we are easily amused by sick humor.

But I digress.

On to more high-minded finished objects. Here's a beautiful scarf:

knit by Patsy with her very own handspun, hand-dyed yarn. Can't get much more handmade than that, can she, unless she raises & shears the sheep herself! Nice job, Patsy!


Issy knit a beautiful shawl from her own design:


We're encouraging Issy to write down her pattern and sell it!

And here's another item recently finished by Issy:


I forget the name of that pattern, (leave it in the comments if you know it), but Jane also recently knit it with red yarn. It's a 2x2 ribbed stole with a ruffle on each end, made with alpaca, and is just lovely.

And speaking of Jane, she dazzled us with the brilliant colors of some scarves she's been knitting. Here's a current work-in-progress, knit with Noro Kureyon, alternating colors from different balls every two rows:


(Does this pattern have a name? Again, if you know it, please leave it in the comments.) Apparently it's been all over blogland, but this is the first I've seen it. Gorgeous! Here's another, similar one she recently finished, made with Noro Silk Garden, again, alternating colors every two rows:

Isn't this stunning?
I couldn't take my eyes off of it.
***

Here are a few more knitting folks, (although not the entire crowd):

-There were a few new faces knitting with us Tuesday night, which is always good -- the more, the merrier! I didn't meet everyone, so here's hoping they'll come back again soon.

And if you're wondering what I was working on Tuesday evening, even though I have at least ten other projects on the needles, I cast on for something new -- Maia's "Scarf Around", (pdf file here), for the Red Scarf Project. It just so happened that I had all the appropriate yarn already in my stash, so that pattern was the logical choice. I should be able to get this finished and mailed before the end-of-January deadline. I may even have enough yarn left over to make another one, (but won't 'til next year). I'll post an in-progress or finished-object picture later, as it's not terribly exciting at this early stage.

And thus ends my report on how TNK'ers greeted the New Year.

Happy New Year everyone!

***

Tuesday Night Knitters play Santa

***

Last night was the official hand-off of all of the Tuesday Night Knitters' knitted Christmas gifts for the Barnes & Noble employees that graciously put up with us all year long. I think the final count of hats, scarves and fingerless gloves was something like 25, and Issy & Jane kindly wrapped them, and then put them in two giant Santa bags to give to the B&N manager who will be distributing them to the full-timers. Here she is receiving our good will:


Before Issy & Jane wrapped the gifts, Jane was good enough to photograph almost everything that we knitted up and post them on her blog here and here. I think she got a picture of everything except one last-minute hat that Amy whipped up and brought last night. It was incredibly cute, but, as usual, I fell down on the job and didn't get a picture of it. (Someone needs to fire me!) I'm hoping that maybe in upcoming weeks we'll see various B&N employees wearing knitted items. That would give us all a little thrill, I think.

Here's a few more pictures of last night's knit night:

Issy, Linda, Norma, Jo, Christina & Amy
***

Susan, Linda & Issy

***

Here's Jo knitting an i-cord edging on a basket she'll be felting:

Love that hot pink!
***

She gave us all a little tuturial on how to do that technique, which she'd just learned from Linda. Very cool! Jo should have a finished felted basket to share at an upcoming TNK meeting -- I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Christina & Norma
***

Robin C. is knitting a pretty washcloth
***

Sherry is knitting herself a Christmas wrap. Pretty yarn!
***

Patsy & Joanna share a laugh
***

Here's a beautiful sock Patsy finished -- she's currently working on the second:

That's Holly Spring Homespun yarn
***

And me? I'm still knitting hats. Hats, hats, hats. Ho-hum. They don't make for exciting blog fodder, but I sure love knitting them. Speaking of which, it's time to get back to it. Later!

***