Lintilla shawl tip hack

About a year ago I knitted Lintilla in laceweight yarn. I'm not generally a fan of asymmetrical shawls, but the asymmetry of this one is fairly subtle and I fell in love with the ruffles pretty much at first sight, so I literally grabbed the first skein of yarn I saw in my stash and cast on with the first set of needles that looked about right.

The pattern is well-written and the ruffle construction is pretty easy to do from memory after two or three repeats and knitting the thing was a breeze. I was a very happy camper until I got to the tip, which I really don't like the look of as written. Unlike the first tip, the final one is an oddly blunt shape and doesn't even continue the line of the long side, but veers off at an ungraceful angle. The most positive thing I can say about it is that it's way too much asymmetry for my liking. :)

So I frogged it and started experimenting to see whether I could come up with a closer match for the shape of the starting tip. It took me three tries, but I eventually produced something that's close enough for jazz.
  
The starting tip is on the left and my hack is on the right. It's a little longer than the first tip, but it almost seamlessly continues the line of the shawl's long side. 

Right at the place where I diverge from the written instructions, there's a little blip where an edge stitch got over-stretched, perhaps because of the thinness of the yarn, but I can live with that and in any case it doesn't really show when the shawl is worn:



Today someone messaged me on Ravelry to ask how I did this, so I'm posting it here in case it's of interest to others as well. It's actually very straightforward:

In your final ruffle, work straight part until all body stitches have been worked, then continue as follows:
Row 1: p1, kfb, k to last 2 sts, k2tog
Row 2: p2tog, k to end
Repeat  Rows 1 and 2 until 3 sts rem, k3tog. Done!

Enjoy. :)

A comeback and a knitting needle rant

Some time in spring or early summer last year, I placed a large order for HiyaHiya circulars. This is hands-down my favourite brand and fixed circs are hands-down my favourite needles -- I like things simple and have always found interchangeable tips too annoying to use. Last year I bought a whole bunch of 100cm circs, but while I was about it I also got some of the 9-inch circs that seemed to be trendy at the time for knitting socks.

I never got to use them last year because by the time I arrived I had a lovely case of tendinitis in both thumbs, a combination of work stress and frenetic knitting in the evenings because the work stress was leaving me too brain-dead at night to do anything else. I only started knitting again a couple of weeks or so ago; tendinitis takes its sweet time to heal and after I'd shaken it off I was once again too busy at work to have enough free brain-space to plan a new knitting project. So it wasn't until now that I was able to try out those nine-inch circs.

Bad mistake. Holy cow, those things are the worst idea EVER. My first project after the long knitting hiatus was a simple little pair of Fibonacci-themed running socks:

Which is to say, I designed them to match the colours of my winter running gear and I made the ankles shorter than I usually do because one doesn't necessarily want a very long woollen sock when one's working up a sweat on the roads. And I think the short shaft is the only reason I don't have tendinitis all over again. Or maybe I do have it again, given how my thumbs feel. Those nine-inchers are unbelievably hard on the hands because there's nothing to hold on to! Aside from feeling incredibly awkward even after doing most of a pair of socks, and making it pretty tricky to knit to one's usual tension, they force your fingers into such an un-ergonomic position that using them takes all the fun out of knitting at best and could be a recipe for RSI at worst. I promised myself I'd finish knitting the pair before passing judgement on the nine-inch circs, and I did, but I think I should have packed it in halfway down the first sock and switched to a 100cm set and Magic Loop. My thumb tendons are suspiciously achy again after being *completely* healed for the last nine months or so and I can only hope I haven't set myself up for another half a year of battling tendinitis while trying to work a job that requires lots of typing. Ugh!

One thing's for certain, I'm never using those nine-inchers again to knit as much as a single stitch, it just isn't worth it. From now on I'm using them only to secure held stitches on glove projects when the time comes to knit the fingers. Which is the main reason I bought them in the first place, so that's all right.

Blocking (yet another) Aeolian

I wasn't expecting to knit another full-sized Aeolian, let alone another in the same colour as my very first one... but then I found myself participating in an impromptu craft exchange. So, at the end of a few weeks of knitting (and what feels like several million nupps) I found myself with Aeolian No. 4 off the needles and needing blocking.

As I haven't actually seen any instructions online on how to block an Aeolian for maximum symmetry and minimum effort (I have no doubt that such instructions are actually out there, but I haven't gone looking for them), and as the recipient of this shawl is not a knitter and was interested in the process, I created a little photo record of the exercise.

The main point to note -- which I neglected to take into account when blocking my own first Aeolian -- is that this shawl doesn't have a single straight edge in it and even the central spine actually curves in the third dimension. As a result, the shawl will actually refuse to lie completely flat, and if one tries to block it as though it could lie flat, there will be distortion in the edge motif with some of the flowers being cramped and others over-stretched. After mishandling the blocking of my first shawl (which I'm planning to soak and re-block correctly as soon as I can find the time), I blocked my subsequent models by folding them over along the central spine. As a result, the shawl looks like nothing remotely resembling a wearable shape while it's pinned out, but once it's dry and unpinned, it has its proper, lovely, wing-like shape, drapes beautifully over the shoulders when worn, and tends to stay in place without needing shawl pins because the long edge curves gently forward on both sides rather than being a straight line.

Anyway, here goes.

Amoeba!


Bath time:

(I was planning to soak it for half an hour or so, just to make sure the yarn was well saturated. I then got distracted by the Internet and it stayed in the water for a whole hour. I don't think it minded.)

Ready to be pulled into shape after being rolled up in a towel and gently squeezed to get most of the excess moisture out:

Getting started:
I do this freehand, because there's no point working with a straight edge when the piece I'm blocking has no straight edges, so the first pins that go in are subject to a lot of repositioning and tweaking as the work progresses. The long edge of the shawl is on the left in this shot (look at the unpinned section and you can see it's two thicknesses of fabric on top of each other). The right edge is the central spine. I put a played-out guitar string -- carbon fibre or nylon, NOT metal-wound! -- down the spine to make blocking easier and require fewer pins at that edge.

Here it is at this stage from a different angle:

More of the final shape roughed out in this next shot. You can also see the yarn tails, which one does not weave in before blocking unless one's actually trying to make a mess of the finishing:
The shape of the long side isn't right yet and will be fixed down the line. The central points of a few of the flowers have been pinned out just to see whether the dimensions are basically right and nothing's been overstretched during blocking so far.

Getting started on the detail of the flowers now:

There are about twice or three times as many pins in the long side now, to prevent involuntary scalloping as the tension on the edges increases:

Mostly done now (shape of long side still needs some cleaning up):

And here, after much crawling around on the floor, it's all done at last and ready to dry overnight under the watchful eye of Leppy the plush leopard, who promised to make sure nobody interfered with the pins while the shawl dried:

Fast-forward to today. Leppy was as good as his word, and once the pins were removed, the piece looked like this:

...and after being unfolded and laid out to show off its full size, it looked like this:

Here's a detail of the stitch patterns:


And here, because it's a sunny day and I had a photographer available, are a few modelled action shots.

Back view:

Front(ish) view. Because of the shape of the shawl, it stays on amazingly well if you just flip each end over the opposite shoulder. Unless you're being quite active and moving around and bending/straightening up a lot, it'll pretty much stay put without needing a shawl pin to keep it in place:

And here it is spread out in all its glory:

Spirals & Nupps beret

Late last winter, just about barely in time to be able to wear it before the weather turned too warm for hats, I knitted this:



There has been a request on Ravelry for a pattern. Unfortunately, I can't provide one. I made up the hat as I went along, and it didn't all turn out quite as I'd intended as the ribbing band proved to be much too loose when it was done and I persuaded the hat to fit properly by folding the band up and sewing it down on the inside of the hat. To put out anything resembling a coherent pattern, I'd have to re-knit the thing and adjust the stitch counts to come up with a band that actually fits, and I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future.

What I can do, though, is provide a chart of the stitch pattern for people to use with their own favourite basic beret recipe, and here it is for your enjoyment:

For those who haven't done nupps before, the k1 (yo k1) 4x is all worked into the same stitch, giving you nine stitches on the right needle all growing out of one foundation stitch. In the next row, you knit all nine together again. This can be difficult if you're a tight knitter. One solution is to knit, say, the first three nupp stitches together in one go, then slip the resultant stitch back to the left needle and pass the remaining nupp stitches over (either all in one go, in groups, or individually) before slipping the same stitch back to the right needle. Alternatively, you can reduce the number of loops that make up the nupp by doing k1 (yo k1) 3x, giving you a seven-stitch nupp.

Work the decreases on the crown of the beret in every second row. Decrease one stitch per horizontal pattern repeat, purling together two of the purl stitches in the first decrease row and knitting together the two knit stitches adjacent to the nupp in the second decrease row.

Owl stitch markers!

I've been waiting for some wirework supplies to arrive. They turned up in dribs and drabs, and when the crucial parts turned up today, I couldn't resist getting the pliers out immediately and whipping up a few owl-themed stitch markers:


Sterling silver bead caps, end pins, and soldered jump rings. The beads are strawberry quartz.

I'm so chuffed with these little fellows, I can't wait to get a project on the needles that calls for lots of markers!

Very Small Gloves

A friend sent me a photo of some seriously tiny mittens. That was all it took to get me wondering whether it was possible to make really small fully-fingered gloves. In my mind's eye it seemed feasible, so I just had to give it a try.

I made a single prototype last night in which the dimensions seemed about right, so today I got started on a proper pair. After about two-and-a-half hours' of total knitting time, I have this to show for my trouble:


Each glove is 4.5cm long and 2.2cm wide across the hand, not including the thumb. There is actually a proper thumb gusset, and the cuffs are k1p1 ribbing.

The pair is rather larger than the mittens that inspired them, which are all of 12mm wide, but given the constraint of having to have enough stitches across the hand to make up four fingers, and given that the smallest needles I currently own are 1.5mm, I doubt I could have made them any smaller.


I'm tempted to scout around for some 1mm needles, though, and to have another go with laceweight yarn.

Aeolian reloaded

Well, I did say I was going to make another. I only had one skein of Malabrigo sockyarn in Violeta Africana to use for this one, so I stuck to the pattern as written for the shoulderette shawl. I did toy with the idea of adding two extra Yucca repeats, but balked at the last minute (or rather, I actually knitted them and then pulled them back) because I didn't know how that would affect yarn use further down the line.

Here is the result, with gorgeously glamorous Toho seed beads purchased from Perlengalaxie.de:

The amoeboid mass that came off the needles

The Stuck Pig Effect (for more on which see below)

During blocking, on a beach towel lest the yarn stain the carpet

Gothy glamour...

Detail of the Yucca and Agave patterns...

...and a detail of the edge

In the event, I needn't have worried about running out of yarn with the extra Yucca repeats, as I still have 23g left over. But the shawl came out a decent size anyway; it measures 110cm from tip to tip along the top edge, and 48cm from top centre to the bottom. Quite adequate for a shoulderette.

I love the way it looks; the colour is so lush and the beads add an extra touch of glamour. Unfortunately, the yarn doesn't seem to be at all colourfast. The colour actually came off on my hands while I was knitting, and the picture of the shawl soaking in water actually makes the bleeding look less serious than it was. In real life the water was much more purple than the camera chose to see, and the shawl didn't stop shedding colour even after many rinses. I've never had this problem with Malabrigo yarn before, not even with their black laceweight and certainly not with their Dusty Olive laceweight, which is pretty dark as well. But after this experience I'm going to think twice before taking a risk on their darker shades again. It certainly doesn't seem safe to try to wear this shawl over light-coloured clothing; I'd be afraid that it would stain anything that isn't black.