Sheep On My Stuff

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. ^_^

Going to class every weekday has meant a lot of bus knitting time. I get through about 3 half-hour podcasts a day -- it's not quite 90 minutes of knitting time, because I don't always knit while I'm not actually on a bus. (It's Seattle; sometimes it's raining.)

So in addition to the This Is A Triumph wrap sweater, I have completed a baby surprise jacket that I'm calling the Hobbes Jacket:

Yarn used: Microspun leftovers! Black, white, and mango. Needles used: 4mm.

I hate sewing on buttons, but for this project I was willing. ^_^ (I have another one coming, too, for which I'll need to sew on another five buttons. Someday I will do frog enclosures instead.) Back in the '80s there used to be a device that would automagically attach buttons for you. I wonder if that still exists (and how it would work on yarncrafted projects).

The sheep posed near the Hobbes Jacket is Meredith Rodney McSheep, named for Rodney McKay of Stargate: Atlantis. I'm not sure he really likes being so near something so orange, but perhaps the fact that it's mango (really!) and not citrus will appease him. What do you think, Rodney?

This Is A Triumph: Done!
Obama socks: Turning the heel on the first one!
Baby Surprise Jacket: In the works!
Candle Flame Scarf: Resurrected from the WIP chest!

There will be pictures, but I seriously forgot about posting today in the wake of finishing a work project yesterday and getting my epic flying mount in World of Warcraft. Oops! Thursday!

ETA:

Here's the This Is A Triumph wrap sweater!

Yarn used: Microspun, Royal Blue and Mango. Needle size: 4mm.

I was actually told by one person that those are Denver Bronco colors -- so I guess this could be a Denver Bronco sweater as well as a Portal Sweater. Makes no difference to me! I'm happy it's finished. :)

Well, it will be when it's done.

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Yarn used: Lion Brand Microspun in Royal Blue and Mango. Needles: 4mm.

The Mango I bought doesn't quite match, and the color change is suspect:

But it's the best I can do, and it's good enough, and it's actually fairly hard to notice in person unless you're under some really awful florescent light.

I forgot to introduce the sheep on Tuesday, though I think you've seen these two before. These are the official traveling sheep -- PicoÃœber and Reclining Sheep. They've been to England, New Zealand, Canada, Las Vegas, and Indiana. :) They're sized appropriately for carryon bags, and never complain about having the hotel rooms to themselves.

I have, at this point, done all the seaming (and let me tell you how proud I am of it -- it's fantastic) -- all that's left is an I-cord border for the back neck and little I-cord ties. I'm going to be putting the dual-orange side inside, so that it won't show when the baby's wearing it. Um, no, I still don't know what baby! Ah well. It's been fun to knit.

That said, bleh, stockinette! I won't be doing another baby project in stockinette anytime soon. I can see why Elizabeth Zimmermann favors garter stich so much -- I think I'll probably do a Baby Surprise jacket in garter in the near future.

I lied! I actually did quite a bit of knitting in Las Vegas.

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Yarn used: Lion Brand Microspun in Royal Blue and Mango. Needles: 4mm.

In fact, there's a bit more than that, but I've now run out of orange yarn, and that means this project is stalled until I get more. It shouldn't be difficult. But then, of course, I'll be left with more scraps of orange to get rid of! Maybe I can put an orange collar and cuffs on another baby sweater or somesuch.

Short post today, because I have a Cold of Doom and I'm not really full of energy. Hopefully I'll be feeling better Thursday!

It always makes me so happy to finish a project.

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease (worsted) in Black and Pines. Needles: 5mm.

As expected, I didn't have enough Pines to finish this project. Also as expected, I was able to use black to cover the shortfall. The black yarn is on the shoulders in back and front, stopping 13 stitches short of the edge of the garment (thus maintaining a Pines-colored shawl collar all the way up). I had no trouble grafting the garter-stitch at the top of the collar, thanks to all that practice with my Bog Jacket. :)

Dorset Horn approves of my colorwork! She's obviously a very discerning sheep. ^_^

After all this, I get to start Cherie Amour (and I'm very excited, because it's getting toward the time in the year where it'd be too warm to wear it). I just need to wind up some yarn and then swatch. :)

I never thought this day would come.

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

Total yarn for this project: say 4 balls of Sportweight to be safe, which is maybe 1500 yards. Beautiful Sheep, I couldn't have done it without you!

Of course, this project is not without its flaws. For one thing, I did not realize that all those short rows were not just tapering the sleeves (and I have to say, they did a great job of that), but also turning the sweater into a V-neck. The original plan calls for a straight high collar, and if you look at what I did to disguise that, you'll see it right away:

As you can see, what I did was just to pick up stitches at the appropriate V-neck place. It came out looking pretty good. I think I should probably sew a couple lines of thread through the fake inner plackets and then cut them off -- if I'm going to do more work on this thing, that is.

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Yeah, it's sort of mutated, and when I put it on, one side's longer than the other (and I have no idea how that's even possible, because it's the same number of rows exactly). But it's mine, and it's finished. I did it. :) And, hey, I think it fits quite well -- it's the right length on body and sleeves, it buttons over the breasts, it has waist shaping. I can only go up from there.

And meanwhile, I have some more work on the Powers of Two blanket:

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease, worsted weight. Needle size: 4.25mm.

Pretty spiffy! The squares just above the big green square on the left mark the upper left-hand corner. I'll be expanding to the right to fill it out and define the upper edge. When it's wide enough, it'll be time to start it growing down.

It turns out that I have a TON of the "white" (actually natural), light brown, dark grey, and red yarns in my stash, so I'll be using those fast and furious as I go. I'm hoping I won't run into problems with having nothing but those colors by the end of the blanket.

Last but not least, I've dragged something out of the UFO (unfinished objects) pile:

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Yarn used: Wool-Ease, worsted weight, "Pines". Needle size: 5mm.

The adorable sheep modeling this vest is Dorset Horn. She (yes, she -- in the Dorset Horn breed of sheep, both rams and ewes have large, impressive horns) comes all the way from New Zealand! One of my many sheep from the New Zealand flock. In New Zealand, the tourist shops are full of sheep. It is nothing short of a woolly paradise.

The vest looks like a whole lot of nothing right now, for which I can only apologize and say: It is a lot of nothing right now. It's simple garter up to the armpits, which is about one inch further than I've got it at the moment. Sorry! It'll look more interesting next time, especially if I run out of yarn and have to substitute in some black. Most importantly, this comes from the UFO pile. I have no idea how long it's been sitting around unknit, but it's no short amount of time. It definitely predates the beginning of the year. Not only will knitting this up net me a vest, it'll get my ratio up.

Current stats for the year:
15 projects started up new
22 completed/tossed/frogged projects
11 completed for the year to date (yay!)

WIPs:
7 have been on needles since before the beginning of the year
14 currently in progress/hibernating

And the vast majority of this year's projects have been from stashed yarn (almost a 5:1 ratio of stash:new), which is also making me pretty happy. (Of course, that doesn't count the yarn that came into the house for projects but hasn't been used yet... which bumps that ratio down some. But I'll take my victories where I can get 'em!)

I never thought I'd say it, but the end of my Bog Jacket is in sight!

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

I've got one half done completely, except for edging and perhaps notions, and the other half is nearly there, too. Strangely enough, all those short rows are leading to a V-neck -- which I don't mind, but it's a surprise, I'll say that!

I'm not sure what I'll do for fastening. I may do a zipper. Buttons are probably out, although I might be able to create buttonholes if I do an I-cord edging. The fit looks good so far, but I'm sure a second edition of this sweater would look even nicer. I'm pretty happy with the sleeve length and the waist shaping, though!

Meanwhile, the Powers of Two blanket is going along, as is the second project from Mindful Knitting. I've got a few more squares done on PoT, but nothing really worth taking pictures of. And as per the last time around on Mindful Knitting, I'm waiting until I have a finished project to post any pictures.

Tuesday! Will I have a finished sweater, or will weekend mean spending all my time with the adored SheepLad? I'm betting on the husband, but I think I'll get the knitting -- if not the edging or the fastenings -- done. :)

The Bog Jacket continues apace, but I am too lazy to take more in-progress pictures of it. I have, however, passed the 75% mark, and if I can make myself work on more boring garter, perhaps I will finish it this month! (And to think I wanted to have 12 sweaters knit this year. HA. HA HA HA.)

Instead of knitting sweaters, I have been knitting scarves. Let me point you at the following:

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Yarn used: For the Meditation Scarf (red/orange/yellow), Shepherd Multi in Flames by Lorna's Laces, needles 7mm. For the Triple Rib scarf (grey), Wool-Ease in Oxford Grey, needles 5mm.

The sheep modeling the Meditation scarf (on the left, red/orange/yellow) are a pair of wooden sheep with a wool outer coat. Are they doorstops? Footrests? Outdoor sheep? Honestly, I have no clue, but they've been around for years. For a while there, they were my circular needle holders, but that looked messy. And for a while, they lived in the bathtub upstairs, startling both me and SheepLad when we would open the shower curtain to find... SHEEP! (It was the middle bathroom; we don't shower there very often.) Now they live in the library, because we really cannot think of anywhere to put them, but neither do we want to release them into the wild. They have been part of our flock since we lived in Indiana. :)

I have been working on the Meditation scarf since January. I've decided to try meditative knitting, based primarily on the book Mindful Knitting by Tara Jon Manning. The first project is a garter stitch scarf, and the suggested yarn is variegated. I decided to splurge and buy myself some nice new yarn for the project, since all my variegated yarn is acrylic. When I saw the Shepherd yarn from Lorna's Laces (which, by the way, is superwash -- not that I can really imagine machine washing this thing, but you could), I thought "ah ha! An excuse to try this yarn out!"

Well, it turns out the Shepherd yarn is gorgeous, glorious, beautiful, fantastic, and lovely to work with. I couldn't be happier about it. :) I took a ton of pictures (one per day's work -- I did not successfully get to the meditation knitting every day or it would've been done far sooner), and have linked you to their album. Click on the image to see!

The sheep modeling the scarf on the right -- the Triple Rib (grey) scarf -- is named Ultra Soft Lamb. That's what F.A.O. Schwartz (in partnership, I can only gather, with Russ Berrie, for there is a smaller sheep that looks just like her made by Russ directly) named her, and that's what we call her. She is, in fact, ultra soft, and she's one of the few sheep who really isn't very anthropomorphized at all. She's got hooves, four legs... lamb shanks, so to speak. But don't worry! She is not on the menu. (Lamb is never on the menu around here. Would you eat kitten? How about puppy? This is how I feel about eating lamb.)

The Triple Rib scarf is based on a pattern from a stitch dictionary (k3 p3 on the right side, p1 k1 on the wrong side), and while I love the pattern to little bits, I'm just becoming less and less fond of Wool-Ease as time goes by. I know the sheep are giving it their best! I know they're contributing all the sheepy glory they can! But, alas, there's not much that can be done. It's still mostly acrylic, and I still don't care for the stuff!

But I care enough about it to try to use up the rest of it in another blanket project. Behold, the Powers of Two blanket:

Yarn used: So far, five different colors of Wool-Ease by Lion Brand. Needles: 4.25mm, subject to change without warning.

You may look at that sheep and think, "Oh, another sheep." But no! That's a special, glorious sheep. That's Pink Pads Sheep (ignore the tag, which reads "Muttons" -- what an undignified name for such a wondrous sheep). Pink Pads has the distinction of being the sheep with the largest ego in the entire flock. In my flock, that's one hell of an achievement. All my sheep are awesome, and all of them know how great they are, but Pink Pads sort of takes it to a whole new level. When you hug her? She knows it's because she's the best sheep in all the world. When she sits upon the shelf, she tends to climb to the highest vantage point (on top of the other sheep, don't you know) and survey all the bedroom around her, thinking to herself And they got all this just to impress me! How excellent of them.

Pink Pads claims that she is the only sheep cool enough, fashionable enough, to model such an awesome project as the Powers of Two blanket, and thus I have acceded to her wishes and given her the modeling job.

The Powers of Two blanket is a mitered square project. It's a scrap blanket, all in all. My self-imposed restraint is that each square must have a number of rows/ridges equal to a power of two. So 2² (4), 2³ (8), 2⁴ (16), 2⁵ (32), and so on. (So far the largest squares have 32 ridges, and the smallest have 8. I will probably go as high as 64 or 128, and as low as 4.) The fact that I can work on this project away from home as well as at home is great -- I can seam or work in squares as I progress. There will never be trouble finding a place to put them, because each square can fit perfectly in other squares. If all else fails, all I need to do is make tiny squares to fill in room. :) I look forward to seeing how this shapes up; I have a lot of Wool-Ease I can put into this blanket.

The Bog Jacket 2 is the sweater that wouldn't end. I'm tempted to cheat on it just so it knows it had better put out. Here's a picture.

Yarn used... you know this already, right? Wool-Ease sportweight in Wheat, size 4mm needles.

Even Beautiful Sheep is having trouble making it look interesting. I've finally cast on the extra sleeve stitches, though (I did short rows first). Hopefully next week I'll have pictures of a sweater to show you.

To make up for that, here are two completed dishcloths that have been sitting in a box in my yarn closet for months.

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Yarn used: Sugar 'n' Cream solids, size 4.25mm needles.

Finally, finally, finally. Say hello to Little Ty Sheep, returning to model the dishcloths. Awww.

The yarn closet is looking better now! Well, actually, it's looking much the same (full of yarn). However, I have found the rest of the craft room, and I am delighted. The unfinished objects now have a place. The finished objects that may or may not find their way to Etsy have found a place. And I got rid of another couple of projects in the bargain -- one frogged, several tossed. This delights me -- and bumps my completed/frogged/tossed-to-new ratio all the way up to 1.6 for the year. Yay!

Here's a picture of all the Wool-Ease I have left. Some people stash Homespun and then try to get rid of it; for some it's Red Heart. For me, it's Wool-Ease:

Yarn exhibited: A shit-ton of Wool-Ease in every imaginable color. Most of it is Worsted, a little bit of it is Sport.

Exhibited along with the yarn is the cutest Kleenex box cover ever made. I could try to make something out of crochet or plastic canvas, but I couldn't beat that, and I don't think I can be bothered to try. That Kleenex box cover comes from New Zealand (you can't really see it, but there is a New Zealand logo on its front). Those are two of the sixteen to eighteen sheep that came back with us from New Zealand in 2005. :) Yes, I brought home a flock. (Also some souvenir yarn. Most of it is still in the stash. I almost don't want to knit with it! Some of it is gorgeous, though -- hand spun, even -- so someday I'm sure I will.)

What am I gonna do with all that Wool-Ease?, you may be wondering. I'm going to make practice sweaters. I would like to make sweaters that look like they belong on a human body, and this is where I'm gonna start. The Bog Jacket 2 is actually part of this project, being made out of (so far) two balls of Wool-Ease sportweight. (It will take about three by my current estimations... maybe a little more, maybe a little less.)