Toothed stripe done and blocked

Now it just needs to dry.  First picture is wet, second is dry and straight off the needles. I think I need to see it on. 

Persian poppies finished

Thanks to my coworker model. 

I feel like the tailor

3 with 1 blow:

Progress

Needed backing and ironing.

Recycling

Yes, another day off so ....
I am not going to finish that ugly stars sweater, and much as I hate it, I can't bring myself to throw it away and unknitting it is pointless. It's intarsia and I'd just spaghetti when I was done.
But I also have leftover blue velveteen from the fish shawl and stuffing from Sack Boy so today I'm making a pillow...

Yarn diet - or what do you do when the romance dies?

So I'm thinking that this yarn/new project diet I've been on is getting me down.  When you get into that space of looking at your knitting in the evening and go "meh" and then watch Mythbusters or something silly all night without knitting a stitch.
But my resolution to use up my yarn is really weighing on me.  All that random yarn that I have and it's hard to get inspired to plan a new Fassett sweater without wanting to buy a ton more stuff to flesh it out.  And that's just counterproductive, now isn't it?  You're really taking it too far when your attempts to use up older yarn results in purchasing almost as much new yarn. 
And I'm me, so I have these issues where I'm prone to creating strange, arbitrary rules for myself - seriously, my family thought I was kind of touched as a kid (they weren't wrong, I just have learned to hide it better in public now).  My excessive devotion to self created games makes me turn this using-up-yarn-exercise into a dare with myself where buying new yarn is NOT ALLOWED - read, failure.  So there's all my old yarn, taunting me with it's boring-ness.
Then last night I saw this.  Vivian Hoxbro, you're really COOL.  I love this sweater!  The shape, the cables, the small amounts of bright color against the stony neutral panels.  And the shape, I really like that.

I've never done modular knitting, but I'm reasonably sure some research and I'd be up and running.  Now I have a fire going to finish my three before I can start something new.
Thanks designer-I've-never-met, you made me excited to knit again.

Happy New Year

I've done a lot of knitting -- both Frost Flowers and the Linen Stitch Tunic are nearly done -- but I don't have pictures of those. Soon, though.
What I do have pictures of is Tallulah Gorge which looks pretty any time of year. We usually hike down to the floor and cross the river to walk along the river, but it was closed this day because of the rain.
I really liked the pink and gray against the pine green and the contrast of the up of the deciduous trees and the down of the pines and the gray of the rocks behind. Sort of making me think about redoing a Fassett sweater. I'm not letting myself start anything new until I finish at least 2 of the things I have currently going on.


And finally, here are the little ones playing.

Sorry, see if this makes sense to you (it did to me at the time)

When I was a kid, my favorite TV show was Get Smart. Hands down, best show ever. I wanted to grow up to be a spy and work with Maxwell Smart and talk into my shoe. Maybe not the shoe part, but maybe you can understand the fascination when I was 7 or so????
I thought Max was hilarious. And tonight, my knitting sort of started speaking to me in his voice.
Me: You think you've got me, but I have this whole intarsia thing under control. Yes, all 600 little strings of it.
Sweater: I don't believe you.
Me: Would you believe I'll be sewing on buttons before I turn 50?
Sweater: No.
Me: How about we call the cat over and see how tough you are then?

You see, I cast on for the sleeves tonight, so I'm now knitting across from cuff to cuff, about 280 stitches, so running about 170 individual pieces of yarn to make the designs (most between 3 and 9 feet long, hence that rat's nest you see in the picture). Weaving in ends as I go, trying to keep the tension correct, attempting to keep the colors random.

Would you believe I fear my own knitting basket?
Yes, Max, I sure would.

Slow and steady

Haven't been away, or anything, really. I've just been plugging along on some stuff that's fun, but not real photogenic in terms of progress reports.
(We have been going biking on the Silver Comet and Chief Ladiga trails every day we can get away with it. AWESOME. The small one got his birthday present early, because, let's face it, biking 15-20 miles per day on only one gear just isn't as much fun as it could be. If you live in the area and like biking, I highly recommend these trails.)
Funnily, everything I'm working on is blue, or blue/purple/green. Summer I guess. Here's Soryu - I've finished about 600-plus yards (I measured them out tonight) and have about half the fleece left to spin. Nice, soft, good balance once I set it, but no spring -- but I want to swatch it, I think it would have a nice drape as a fabric. Maybe on 6's.
And here are the stars - slow and steady wins the race on this one. It's pretty fiddly intarsia, so about half an hour a night is all I want to do. I think I need to start the fisherman's shirt design -- I need some straight knitting.

More stars

Almost done with the second row of stars.
Piplup and Turtwig didn't like the loud thunderstorm we were having, so they (along with the little one, Panda and Riolu) got up to help me take this picture.
Knitting looks better with friends, doesn't it?

Starting something with stars

I started work on the stars jacket. Not very much work, clearly. But I did do a some swatching, very messy and scattered (swatching intarsia is heavy going, I find so I usually do just enough to be sure my gauge won't be too far off) but that's been ripped out and I'm jumping in. Background will be handpainted, the star outlines purples, the star bodies teal and black. I'll take a picture once I have enough done to show how it looks. I'm still in this stop and go place with spinning. What is it with these weird stall outs I keep having?

Not actually shielding her identity . . .

With the small purple ball of yarn. Yup.
Still not happy with my idea for the hand painted.
Need to swatch it (is swatch actually a verb?) but I'm thinking hand painted background, purple outlines, dark teal stars.

Sounds workable to me, but I need to see it to see if the balance works as I imagine. The thing about this Fassett pattern is that this one is intarsia, which makes it very labor intensive - I guess in the best-of-all-possible-worlds, one would measure from the pulled out swatch what each pattern component requires, then pre-cut all the yarn pieces to the right length.

I'm just not that, um, careful (be polite). Nope, I do intarsia with each part of the pattern attached to a nearly full sized ball, and just shove the shaggy thing in a pillowcase when I'm not actually working on. Maybe I'll have a sample in a day or 2 to share.

Some ideas

So I'm working a pair of entrelac socks, but I'm still trying to sort out needles sizes so the patches work up at the same gauge as the rest of the sock ribbing and foot, so no pictures of that yet (gah, it's so ugly so far, like no one wants to see this sausage being made). The socks are washed, and dried, but I"m trying to lay off my natural nagging tendencies and let him try them when he wants to. (He just saw this as I was writing and found them to go try them on.) So here are some pictures from a walk today. I grew up for almost 32 years in the same part of the country and I really knew the birds, plants, trees, how the clouds looked before rain, or snow, and then we moved and everything is new. Here's what's new and nice (for me).
These trees are everywhere and I love the way they look like they're holding snow.
This bark is awesome - browns and grays (there are loads of layers in each chunk of bark, you can take chunks off the ground and peel away layer after layer) and green lichen in the valleys between the bark islands, too. The islands remind me of Fassett's patterns, and the colors have a lot of the Jack's Back seaside colorway (I have another colorway photographed here).

And finally, violets. The grow almost everywhere - we had loads of them in our lawn and gardens when I was a kid. I love the contrast of the bright green, heart-shaped leaf and the delicate dark purple flowers that sort of looks like a little lion's face.
Someone I look at has a great sock with these colors, but I'll have to find it tomorrow . . . .

Attack of the fleece of the meatsheep

Sounds like an exercise in German class, doesn't it? ("Angriff des Vlieses der Fleischschafe, the recently discovered opera by Wagner" or something, think I stayed up too late mourning the Pats loosing).

But here it is. A friend of my mom's, a painter, is very interested in dying fleece and spinning. The color sense is excellent (not that you can tell from my photos) but the yarn is, well, kind of like beautifully colored rope. Anyway, he's made up enough yarn for 10 sweaters and is now trying to find 10 people to knit them. All the color ways are different and I believe they are all based on places outdoors in NH/NE.

First off, the sheep are Suffolk (I think) so the fleece is hard, but it also appears to have been plied in the same direction it was spun, which makes it very hard. Here is a picture of a couple of the colors knit up on 9's. I knit very loosely, but with this stuff, I can't do pinky tension because the stuff is so kinky it locks itself to the finger every third stitch.

So, I think the trick here is to find a way to use all the colors but in big blocks. Stranding is out, as is any fine technique that would require lots of ends to be woven in. I'm thinking about adapting something from Fassett's earlier stuff - but it will have to be simple. The gauge is 20 sts./9 inches - that's 2.22 sts. to the inch, which means the whole front or back will only be about 51 sts. wide and the top of the sleeves will be about 44 sts. wide.
Maybe next time I can convince him to dye some Knitpicks Bare

I'm finished with the blues

However, I'm really not musical, so that's a pretty lame joke on my part. However, I have been finishing things all over the place, which is really fun. And a good thing, as more yarn just arrived in the mail yesterday. :)
So, here's the blue Fassett sweater:

Blues, part 3, or why did this take me so long????

The cool thing about doing Fassett sweaters is once you get on a roll, the gauge is nice and big and you have all these beautiful colors to play with and suddenly it's like eating popcorn - YOU CAN'T STOP YOURSELF.
Which, in this case, is a wonderful thing.
Six years to finish the back (maybe closer to 7, since I think I started it before getting pregnant) and 3 weeks to knit the front and both sleeves. I'm almost done with shoulder saddle on the second sleeve, here's the whole thing laid out to be pieced:

The things you can do when you get inspired

Or, the third installment about this third take on Ellen Minard's blues mohair.
I finished the back of the Fassett blue Toothed Stripe (wow - I ought to give this sweater to someone in I.T., oughtn't I? Except bluetooth seems on it's way out? Oh well.) and started on the front - I can get one set of pattern repeats done in a sitting - so on good weekend days, I can get 2 repeats done, one in the morning and one at night.
I usually find that once I put a project down, I'm done forever. I just hate going back to things. How nice to be wrong.
Here it is, basking on our back porch in daylight, which does more for the colors. It's more muddy, or glassy somehow when you see it in person. How the heck to they get sweaters to look so great in books and magazines?
So, if I stay inspired, I should have this puppy done for the holidays.

Blues - part 2

So at first, I thought I wanted to rip out this 2/3 of a back I'd started. Bear in mind, this was started nearly 6 years ago after our son was born, and I was still going through new mom denial that I could still do everything I had before he was born (and that nothing would take much longer than it ever had, ha!)
Now, of course, that would be dumb (it's been knit for 6 years, it ain't comin' apart) and now I realize, I don't really want to. Oh, and it's 50 percent mohair, and that stuff doesn't rip out at all.

I've had this sack of assorted blues, grays, purples, and blacks for years, and have already made 2 sweaters out of it (all of these are from Fassett's Glorious Knits) the first was the outlined stars pattern (here's the picture from the book - I made this for my mom who gave it my cousin [it took me 2 years to do because I was working and going to school at the time] - in fairness, it was way too big)
... and the second one was jack's back pattern - again from the book because I don't have the sweater anymore, I gave that one to my other mom (she's not related at all, I just like her so I adopted her - she taught me to spin) and as far as I know, she still has hers.
So, what I had thought I wanted to do was this:

and I still want to try it, in a normal size sweater, rather than a coat, but maybe in earth tones, rather than as blues and grays.
So I think my new project is to finish that 6 year old pillowcase full of loveliness.

Blues - to be written in installments

So, here we have a very unpromising looking sac of yarn - it's an old pillowcase:









And here's what lives in it.
The whole mess of yarns started off with a huge skein of Ellen Minard's spaced-dyed mohair, which comes in a 1 lb. skein. I don't know what the color way was called at the time, something blue, purple and black.
Over time I assembled a bunch of Green Mountain Spinnery Mountain Mohair, Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride, cotton chenille which I have long since lost the labels to, and other odds and ends of wool, mohair, cotton and blends.