Sheep On My Stuff

...the Many Happy Returns shawl is done, and tomorrow I will block it! (I'll take pictures then.)

...work continues on the Obama socks; one sock down, one leg in progress!

...I started working on the Powers of Two blanket again!

...and the Meditation Knitting project continues, too!

Also, I frogged the Anya scarf; I could not deal with lace on every row and not just the odd-numbered rows. C'est la vie; I'll find another project for that orange laceweight, I'm sure!

So it's been a productive weekend/beginning of week, just not so much with the camera. Pictures to come on Thursday!

Like many knitters, I like to knit at the movies. However, I have very few "no-pattern-no-increases-no-decreases" projects right now (I usually do scarves or something), so I hauled one of the few balls of dishcloth cotton I've got left off to the movies with me. After two hours-ish of "21", I had the following:

Yarn used: Lily Sugar 'n' Cream. Needles: 4mm.

The three sheep pictured are the Sheeplinglings. Um... maybe I should have had Sheepling (their father) pose first! They are Precious Moments sheep. Precious Moments makes some weird-looking, but strangely adorable, sheep.

Lately I've been having an urge for complicated projects, probably because my daily 1.5 hours of guaranteed knitting time has been devoted to less complicated projects (things I can knit on the bus). At first, I thought I could satisfy this urge by picking up a languishing WIP:

Yarn used: Gossamer, Rose Garden, Knit Picks. Needles: 3.75mm.

The sheep modeling this scarf-in-progress is a Sleepy Sheep we got in New Zealand. She squeaks if you squeeze her. AWWW!

(Incidentally, if my mom or my mother-in-law are reading this, my nightstand totally looks like that all the time and I did not have to move any chocolate wrappers off it to take this picture.)

This is the Candle Flame scarf. And it turns out there's something to be said for putting a pattern away for a month or two several months close to a year, because you might start off working with a chart that looks like this:

and, when you pick it up again, discover that there is a NEW PRINTING of the chart that looks like this:

(This, btw, is a free pattern from Knit Picks -- don't squint at the pictures, download the thing yourself! See how nice the new chart is?)

Seriously, that first printing was the worst chart I've ever worked from, bar none -- I'm really glad they reprinted it.

After a couple of days of trying to work on this, though, I realized that what I really wanted was to cast on new lace. Okay. I tried three different patterns before settling on Anya:

Yarn used: Shadow, Campfire, Knit Picks. Needles: 3.75mm... I think.

The sheep in this picture is another of our New Zealand sheep. Look how cute! I don't think this sheep gets enough attention.

Naturally, after I cast on Anya, Interweave Press released The Top 5: The Best of Interweave Knits Readers' Choice Awards as a free download (until May 15th -- if it is after 5/15/2008, you're out of luck, guys, so hurry!), and I was overcome with the urge to cast on a Cable-Down Raglan. Only in grey, because everything I knit (that I plan to wear) is grey. Okay, it's not, but I love grey.

Yarn used: Zitron Polo, Grey. Needles: 3.75mm.

This would be Ovistine again (I'm reasonably sure she's modeled on the blog before). I'm 14 rows into the first repeat on the center (and sleeves) cable, and so far so good. It is just possible that I didn't swatch as thoroughly as I should have, but if it's coming out oddly, I can rip back and restart. I have a ton of this yarn, so I'm glad I finally found something to do with it!

Other things on the needles now: Baby Surprise Jacket #2 (bus knitting), Obama socks (I keep not posting a picture of those -- it's okay, they're boring navy socks, nothing to see here, move along), and a few hibernating projects (like the Powers of Two blanket). But I'm happy; I got my post in on time today. ^_^

I'm back with three projects to show off! Here we go:

Yarn used: Sugar 'n' Cream cotton in purple. Hook used: I (5mm) by Susan Bates/Boyes).

I like loofas. I use a loofa daily. When I saw the crocheted, cotton bath puff, I thought it was kind of a neat idea. And it was indeed fun to crochet! It also used most of a ball of cotton yarn, which was handy -- I have tons of that put away in various places. But in terms of usability, not so much. It's heavy, doesn't absorb water well, and doesn't lather much. I'll stick with washcloths. Well, really, I'll stick with my loofa, but sometimes I use washcloths when traveling.

The sheep loofa is decorative only. I wouldn't want to risk destroying a SHEEP! by showering with it too often! And no... that isn't the only sheep loofa in my collection.

Yarn used: Wool-Ease Sprinkles in Burgundy Heather. Needles used: 5mm.

Here's another of my "use up the Wool-Ease" projects. This one's a farrow-rib scarf, and I have to say, farrow-rib is becoming one of my favorite stitch patterns. This is probably kid-sized. The knitting part was finished ages ago; it took me about a month to bother sewing in the one remaining yarn end. Oops.

Not-A-Blanket-Either Lamb is happy to be featured on the blog; her twin brother showed up to model the March of Dimes Blanket, but she hadn't gotten a turn in the spotlight lately. :)

Yarn used: Wool-Ease Sportweight in Wheat. Needles used: 3.75mm.

The second Bog Jacket is working up a lot faster than I'd expected! Given that there's an extra 70 stitches on the needle due to the gauge change, I was expecting it to take forever to get to this point. Instead, I've nearly gotten it done up to the armpits, where I then get to do interesting stuff again. The garter's not so bad, though! It gives me something to do while I read, watch movies, and so on.

Beautiful Sheep is happy to be returning, and bleats that she will volunteer to keep modeling Bog Jackets for as long as I keep making them. I'm not sure if that's a vote of confidence or not. *eyes sheep suspiciously*

So I've decided to modify my stashbusting/WIP-completing goal for the year (seen here).

• Old goal: "work or throw out one in-progress project for every two new projects I start"
• New goal: Complete, frog, or throw out 1.5 projects for every 1 project I start.

1.5? Well, it's a ratio, and the point is merely to finish more than I start (rather than to finish only half as much as I start, as was the previous goal, or to finish as many as I start, which is only keeping even). So far, my ratio is 10:13 (or 0.8:1), which is not so great. But I did toss or frog four projects I was never going to complete over the weekend, which bumped up my stats and cleared out one of the secret caches in which I store my stash. Ideally, by the time we hit the midway point for the year, I will have cleared the yarn caches out of every room except the yarn room (which is where the yarn stash belongs), and the yarn room will be clean instead of having yarn piled on the futon.

Don't get me wrong; I love having a stash. But my stash contains a lot of yarn I don't love, and I'd like to be able to rotate out yarn I don't love in favor of yarn I do love. I'd also like it more organized. And, oh yeah, on Ravelry. But a smaller yarn footprint is one step towards all of that (or so I hope), and thus I am going to try to keep completing projects just a little faster than I start them.

Oh, baby. Sometimes when we miss a target, we miss it by not just a little but a lot.

The end of a bog jacket, as modeled by Beautiful Sheep.

Now, I know I should listen to Elizabeth Zimmermann when she says things like "12-13% of [k]". I know this! But I looked at my knitting and I looked at my arms and I thought, Oh, geez, 16 stitches won't be nearly enough to make full-length sleeves! So I cast on 40.

A rough estimate about how many stitches I am over the mark? 24. *facepalms*

Well, there was that. There was running out of yarn. All these, oh yes, I was prepared to deal with. But then... take a look at the picture.

Take a look at where the tan waste yarn is on the left, and at the beautiful grafting job I did on the right.

*&@$*&@$!!! I grafted the wrong *&*&*&%#% part! TWICE!!! (Because I had to rip out the first grafting due to doing it wrong.)

OMG, y'all. There are times it's worth struggling with a project to make it come out right, and times when it's not. When you've got sleeves that are about a foot too long, that's not a time to struggle the rest of the project into shape.

Now, I do want to make another Bog Jacket. I really, really do. The side shaping was fantastic, and the garter actually looks good draped against my body. Seriously, this has potential, it does.

But not this time. And this is why I decided to make my test sweater projects out of stash yarn -- so I wouldn't feel bad when I threw it the hell away.

I'll be swatching and casting on again today, but this version of the bog jacket is toast.

I am not what you'd call an experienced sweater-knitter. I've made a few, but nothing I'd wear, embarrassing as that is. So this year I decided, okay, look -- I'm not going to get good at making sweaters unless I make some crappy ones first. And so when I ran into Elizabeth Zimmermann's Bog Jacket sweater, I thought, "Wow, how cool is that? I should make one!" This time, instead of wussing out, I went for it. So here I am, well into the arms:

*
Yarn used: The now-discontinued Merino Light in maroon (#8 on the color card), Lion Brand Wool-Ease (worsted and sport-weight doubled) in Black. Needles used: US10.5 -- 6.5mm.

The gist of the sweater is that (shaping aside) you're knitting a square, and where the tan waste yarn is, I'll separate sleeves from body and later weave things together. (I'll take more pictures of the process when I get there.) I did discover that I'm running out of maroon yarn faster than the project is reaching completion, so I've dug some black Wool-Ease out of the stash and started using that as a stripe on the top. Hopefully it'll look good... and I won't run out of that before I'm done. I suppose I could dig out ivory Wool-Ease at that point, but I do hope it won't come to that.

I'm not really a big fan of knitting with Wool-Ease (though I don't mind crocheting with it) due to the high acrylic content. It just hurts my hands to work with it, since there's no give. However, this should flush a bit more of it out of my stash!

It's Trisia again -- and she's back with a finished epic elekk!

Smile for the camera, girls!

Yarn used: Lion Brand Microspun in Lily White, Royal Blue, and (now discontinued) Silver Grey. Hook used: G (4.25mm).

The pattern (as noted last time) is from Lion Brand (registration required), but now that you can see the finished elekk, you can see all my modifications. It's the legs, the tusks, the helmet, saddle, and banners that make her an elekk, and I left off a lot of the detail. Still -- very cute, no?

 Also in the works: a new scarf (same as the old scarf):

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Yarn used: SWS [Soy Wool] from Patons. Needle size: Supposedly 4mm, from Boyes, but it is a LIE. They're closer to 4.25mm.

Last time I posed ÜnterSchëpenfloppen with the scarf; now I'm posing the scarf with FloppenCousin, a close (but larger) relative. The pattern is the same (Farrow Rib), and the colorway is the same (Natural Earth). This scarf is being done by request, and unless someone else I really love wants something made out of this fabric, that's it for me -- it splits even more than Microspun, which is saying something! Still, it's very soft and looks really nice.

Yarn used: The now-discontinued Merino Light in maroon (#8 on the color card). Needles used: US10.5 -- 6.5mm.

Beautiful Sheep bleats hello!  Here's our check-in to see how I'm doing on the Bog Jacket. Answer: Quite well; I'm nearly up to the bit where I split off the arms and add some more stitches to the arms. It stopped being mindless garter when I had to do waist shaping (waist shaping is my friend, since I have a quite large bustline and quite small waist), and I'm sort of sorry for that, as I was enjoying having something I didn't have to look at at all. But it seems to be working out nicely, and the yarn is much, much nicer-looking on 6.5mm needles than it was on 4.5mm needles.

Thursday I hope to have a finished SWS plus a bit of progress on that Bog Jacket.  Maybe something exciting like the arm-dividing bit?  We'll see.

First, the part of a scarf:

Yarn used: Lion Brand Wool in Blue and Orange. Needles: 4mm.

This sheep hails from the mall. She comes from a baby store, and is actually the third of her family to join the flock. There's another one who looks just like her but happens to be twice her size, and there's the original, who has been in the flock just over a year, and is holiday-themed. She has earmuffs (though, strangely, they are not on her ears) and a nice red-and-white scarf. I may need to knit scarves for the other sheep sometime soon.

The pattern... well, it's being improvised, and it's double knitting, which is new to me. I'm not sure how it's going, but at least I haven't ripped it out yet.

Yarn used: Essential in Shale Multi, KnitPicks. Needles: 2.5mm.

I cannot for the life of me remember where this sheep came from, which makes me think it was probably a present from my parents. :) I just keep looking at this picture and going "AWWWW!" So. Cute.

I wish I had even the faintest clue what I was doing with the socks. So far I got nothin'. I'm sure I'll figure it out once I'm done with the ribbing section.

Yarn used: Lion Brand Microspun in Silver Grey. Needles: 4.5mm.

This sheep plays music, much like Twinkle Sheep, but I can't remember what song. I know it's not "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." It might be "Mary Had A Little Lamb." (A not-very-surprising number of musical sheep play that one.

So this project has a bit more story than most. A friend of mine recently had a baby -- two months early! While in the midst of reading about her adventures as the brand-new mom of a preemie, I got a knitting newsletter whose charity of the month happens to be a knitting program for premature babies. I'm not knitting for that specific charity -- it's in Iowa and I was hoping for something more local -- but I did a bit of research and found that the local chapter of the March of Dimes collects blankets and other knitted items for preemies, and that Microspun is one of the preferred fibers, as it's very soft and machine-washable.

I have issues with acrylic yarn. It hurts my hands to work with it, and I'm not fond of it. However, like most knitters, I cut my teeth on it, and so I still have some left in my stash here and there. I happen to have just enough of this to make a nice blanket (and, honestly, might have enough left over to make some tiny preemie caps), and I'm very happy to be able to get it out of my stash. (At some point, I may break down and collect all my leftover acrylic and take it to Goodwill, where knitters who are looking for a bargain and don't mind acrylic will hopefully find it and take it home.)

At any rate, the pattern is a very simple k10/p10 (repeat for a total of 160 stitches), 14 rows per square. I eyeballed the height, but that should be about right -- they may be just a little long. I plan to do a couple of rows of single crochet around the edge when I'm done with the knitting; it curls just a teeny tiny bit, since the squares are stockinette, and that should even it out some.

Musical Sheep is in fact sitting on a crocheted project of mine. I can take a picture if anyone's interested in an ancient crocheted blanket. It is really very cool-looking. :)

There are still three projects hiding around my house that I haven't gotten onto the blog, so if I don't make significant progress on my current WIPs by Tuesday, that's what you'll be seeing. >_> With any luck, I'll finish up the blanket, at least, and maybe pick up another one of my languishing WIPs.

I've been busy!

Last time I mentioned I was working on a mystery project. It's not that much of a mystery if you link right to it, though, and now that the project is done and in the mail, I feel good about posting about it. So:

Helmet Liners, for Operation: Helmetliner. Yarn used: Brown is Chestnut, Wool of the Andes, KnitPicks; Olive is Deep Olive, Classic Wool Merino, Patons; Grey is Pearl Grey, Lion Wool, Lion Brand.

The sheep so nicely modeling the helmet liner is Bridal Sheep, who spent several years wearing a "Bride-to-Be" veil that I had somehow gotten when I was engaged to SheepLad. The veil eventually got passed to another of my friends, and the sheep... you know, I'm not sure if she ever did get married. She's a very heavy, sturdy sheep, and so she spends a lot of time in the summer sitting in the doorway, making sure our door doesn't slam shut.

This was an awesome project. It's quick, it used up some stash yarn (okay, I went out and sampled two kinds of yarn that weren't in the stash because I was curious how they were to work with!), and it's for a good cause. The pattern took a little bit of fussing at the very end, but for the most part it was very easy. I ended up doing the decreases with a combination of the two-circulars method and the magic loop method, as it turns out, and oh man, I might not want to do the magic loop for socks (too much work), but I love it. I might have to keep it in mind for small things like hats and such in the future.

After the helmetliners -- five of them! -- I wanted to start up the Sea Turtle project from Kath Dalmeny's World of Knitted Toys. But the truth is, I wanted a tortoise, not a sea turtle, so I decided to start improvising my own pattern:

Yarn used: Essential sock yarn from KnitPicks in tan, brown, and black.

The sheep there on my desk is a tiny little plastic sheep, possibly related to Pokemon in some way. It was a gift from my dad! It lives on the desk full-time, near one or the other of the monitors.

I suppose you can't really see the scale on this project, but that's sock yarn being knit on 2mm needles. As a result, it was hurting my hands a bit, and I was improvising the pattern, and it was making me slightly nuts, so in a fit of desire to do something that didn't require a pattern...

Yarn used: Trekking XXL, as if you can't see that!

I started socks. I like ankle socks, so I can get several pairs of socks out of one large ball, or one pair of socks for sure out of a smaller ball.

The sheep so happily modeling the sock and the sock yarn is a little black-faced Suffolk ewe named Douglas. Why is a ewe named Douglas? I don't know. I'm sure she's a girl, but her tag proclaims her name to be "Douglas", and unlike the sheep I have named "Muttons" and "Jiggles", I don't think that name's objectionable, even for a ewe. So she's named Douglas. That's all right; my favorite fictional astrophysicist genius is really named Meredith.

But the socks, the socks. You know, strangely enough, I don't have second sock syndrome. It's the first sock that trips me up. If I finish the first, I'm very, very motivated to finish the second, because then I'll have a pair. Until the first is done, though, I just have yet another knitting WIP.

In this case, thwarting my own desire to do something pattern-free, I decided to experiment with a different kind of heel shaping. I'm doing an afterthought heel on this one, which I've done only a couple of other times before, ever, and I'm not sure how I'll like it. What I really want to try out is a short row heel, which I think would be terrific, but I haven't found good instructions for that yet, and I'm not ready to strike out on my own!

Hopefully next time I'll have a finished pair of socks and some more progress on either the Flower Basket Shawl or the Tortoise. Happy bleatings!