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...

Meh, some stuff.

Just talking to the Yarnist (who is changing her address, I'll update my sidebar) about intarsia. She asked if I had any ideas about keeping intarsia tension even. Since I typed it all out, I'm control v'ing it here. She's working on a baby blanket, which is sort of perfect for intarsia because it's small(ish), flat, usually in fun colors and with fun designs to keep you interested.

"Getting intarsia to be even, that takes a bit of practice. Unhelpful as this will be on a baby blanket, wool would be your best friend, as it's most forgiving and will lock itself up, assisting your efforts. You need to be sure to twist the stitches every time, and keeping your tails short (at first at least) will help you manage the tension. If the tails are too long, they'll get pulled and then things will get wonky. Try to keep your work just a hair looser than you'd be comfortable with on a "normal" piece, but very even. I don't know if you weave in ends as you go, or do them all at once when your work is complete, but I'd advise method two when starting out, it gives you a way back in to fiddle with tension after the fact - whether you have problems with your work being too tight or too loose. Once done, if the work is a bit loose, wet blocking can solve most minor issues. You can also supplement a complicated, multi-color piece by using Swiss darning after the main knitting is done, fewer colors makes intarsia easier."

What else . . . I've started on Matrix 2, haven't yet made it to the beads, so no snaps yet. Maybe I'll call this one Iron Man. :) Yes, originally I was thinking of the Ozzy Osbourne song, but once I did some reading, I think I like the cartoon character better. And yes, there is no real relationship to knitting at all with that name, it's not a clever reference, I just think the beads look like hematite. Come to think of it, maybe I just have a fascination with cartoons as an adult because I only had 2.5 television stations growing up and one of them was PBS.

Oh, and I have 13 balls of Comfy in Cypress. I want to make a sweater knit from front hem up, increase out for the sleeves, up over the head, down and over. But Comfy is so soft, I fear horrible stretchiness, so I'm on a quest for a nice simple, dense stitch pattern for it.
Prepare for swatches, I guess.

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?

Thanks, Mom

Or, I should probably say "Great Aunt Iris" (You may be wondering "what is she talking about now???").
Okay; here's the story:
My mother was taught sewing and needlework by her Aunt Iris in the 1940's. Iris was a school teacher, botanist, grammarian, gosh knows what else, but also a truly excellent seamstress. And she drilled into my mom that if the back of your work doesn't look just as neat and nice as the front, you're doing it incorrectly. (I'd have said "wrong", but I suspect Iris would say "incorrectly" so there you go, homage to Iris.) So . . .
Here's the stars intarsia, front view. Not bad, I like it. I totally broke form this time and measured the pieces of yarn. Yup, measured how long a stitch was, and I've measured out all the bits to piece together each star (I use 2 pieces for each star and for each lining as I split each star in half to minimize carrying the yarn in the back).
And here it is from the back.
I never got to meet my great Aunt Iris, but I think she'd think this passed the test.
But I bet she'd think my color choices are gaudy beyond all belief.

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.