Sheep On My Stuff

I didn't update with Day 3, but by the end of Day 3, all I had to do was the collar. I got all the knitting finished on his birthday (December 2), and got the sweater wet-blocked over Thursday and Friday.

The kettle-dyed Wool of the Andes wasn't quite colorfast (I am still not sure all the loose dye came out, though it does not appear to have shed onto Grant's shirt), so it took forever, but eventually the sweater was complete. And today (his first day back to work since the blocking was finished), he even wore it. Awwwww. What a sweetheart.

Grant models his birthday sweater!

(Yet another bad cell phone picture, this one from the iPhone. We're just out of luck on cameras lately.)

He appears to like it! We're currently pondering which sweater will be his holiday sweater from me. Now that I've gotten started making sweaters, I don't seem inclined to stop. :)

People sometimes ask me "How long does it take you to knit (x)?" This usually makes me crazy, because I feel like there's an implied sense that if it doesn't take that long, my efforts are less valuable. But some projects just plain don't take long. I once knit a wine cozy in the time it took us to drive to our friend's house, but it was still a cute gift!

It's also hard to say, because some days I work on a project for ten minutes here, half an hour there, and other times I am literally slamming out stitches as quickly as I can for as many hours as my hands will put up with it. That's been the case yesterday and today (although today I had to go run errands as well). And 4.5 st/1" still knits up hella fast. So:

2009 Birthday Sweater, Day 2

It's almost impossible to tell scale and progress here, but the sweater is finished (save for some weaving under the armpits — sixteen stitches per side) up to about 3" above the armpits. The cables on the sleeves are going to go all the way up to the collar, and they're mirror images of each other. (I am very proud of myself for not having screwed them up yet; cables are kinda new for me, but now that I've been working them on this project and they've been turning out so well, I'm hungry for MORE MORE MORE.) All measurements indicate that this should fit, although if it's a bit snug, this particular sort of wool will block a little big.

I've been experiencing so much pattern scatteredness lately — I keep starting projects and starting projects and starting projects, and finishing nothing. It's nice to have something where I've just been able to work it and see it coming together almost instantly under my hands. I just hope it looks as good on Grant as it does on the needles, because it is really looking pretty great on the needles!

Also, I'm sort of envious. Now I want one of these for myself! Except that my version would need side shaping, bust darts, and a V-neck, and I'd probably give it cables up the front, too. Maybe next project… hmm… maybe I should order yarn. >_>

I have holiday projects done, but can't post them until the recipient sees them — so not until after Dec. 25th. ^_^

I do not know how the seed stitch blanket project is going; haven't measured it lately. It is still on the needles, and I am approaching the end of The Largest Single Continuous Ball Of Yarn I Have Ever Had In The House (due to splicing from the project I unraveled to start the seed stitch blanket). It is finally cold enough I'm excited about working on it, though!

I have several (new) pairs of socks on the needles, and am thrilled about them all. :)

However, my whole world is currently being consumed by the following project. (Sorry for the horrible cell phone picture; our camera batteries are all refusing to recharge…)

Grant's birthday sweater, 2009, after one day of work.

This is what's known as "last-minute birthday insanity". My adorable Grant is more than a little hard to shop for, and I had thought I didn't have time to knit him a birthday present. But then this morning I had a flash of inspiration, figured out what I wanted to knit, and knew I had the right yarn in the house for the job. What's more, that yarn knits up at 4.5 st/1", which makes it a quick-knitting project.

I had never really thought of myself as a fast knitter, but it seems that when a deadline is looming and I have a dozen episodes of Enterprise to catch up on, I can really move. ^_^ The sweater currently has half its body (up to the armpits) and 1.25 sleeves (up to the armpits); the worrisome part is that at the armpit point, I will be about halfway done. I still think I can do it, but a.) not secretly (which would require me to stop knitting when Grant is home), and b.) I won't be able to have it washed and blocked by the actual birthday, which is unfortunate, because it will definitely require both (the yarn is not quite colorfast).

On the other hand, he seems quite enthusiastic about it, and the cable on the sleeves is the only complicated thing about it; the rest is so easy I can do it while reading. (I've been reading the World of Warcraft comic — I didn't realize the Varian Wrynn storyline was written by Walter Simonson. o_O And I've been reading Rise of the Lich King by Christie Golden and only haven't been throwing it across the room repeatedly because it's on my Kindle, which wouldn't tolerate such treatment.) I'll still take good-luck wishes, though. XD

Pretend it's March 26th. Okay, it isn't March 26th, but pretend it is for a second. On March 24th, my sweater looked like this:

More or less. What was wrong with it? Well, the thing people say about flat gauge being different from in the round gauge turned out to be really true on this project. I stared at the different yoke and sleeve gauges for a couple of days trying to decide if I could live with it, and eventually the answer was no.

So I ripped back, went down a needle size for the yoke, and voila! It looks great. I just wish it'd looked this great the first time around.

This is the part where I repeat "I'm a process knitter, I'm a process knitter" and that I like the act of knitting every bit as much as the finished project… but I'm awfully glad to be nearing the end of the sleeves/yoke part, I have to say.

…I was lucky enough to get to marry the love of my life. :)

In celebration, today he got a gorgeous sweater and a surprise pair of socks. :D Here are the socks:

Yarn used: Knit Picks Essential Oak Kettle-Dyed. Needle size: 2.5mm.

The pattern's improvised to be ribbed down the leg with ribbing on the top of the foot as well. I finally have his stitch/row count down (75 rounds ribbing, 60 rounds on the foot, 64 stitches), which means I can improvise in the future. I'm curious how the ribbing on the top of the foot will work out for him; I think it'll be a nice way to keep the sock snug.

And of course, the sweater!

My dashingly handsome husband in the sweater:

Yarn used: Swish DK in Merlot Heather. It took just over 13 balls, just under 14. It's knit in the smallest size. Grant normally wears a medium. It blocked just a wee bit longer than anticipated.

and a closeup of JUST the sweater:

and detail on the pattern:

I am pretty absurdly proud of the seams:

It looks great on the inside, though I don't have any pictures of that. But I would show this to any knitter in the world and be perfectly proud of my work, inside and out.

And because he loves me, he was willing to pose with a sheep to fit the theme of my knitting blog:

This is the Wondrous Woven Cabling (by Nancy Marchant) pattern from Arans & Celtics: The Best of Knitter's Magazine, and it was lovely to work! I also want to credit, as always, The Knitter's Book of Finishing Techniques by Nancie Wiseman. For you Ravelers:

I love you, honey! Happy 8th anniversary, and may we have as many years together as life extension technology can possibly provide us! :)

The sleeves are done and blocking and still damp. I keep wanting to go in there with a hair dryer, but I know better! I'm so close to having Grant's sweater done — and he's been going to work in sweaters this week, because it's been so cold! Aaaaaaaa!

I said before I was going to use all that lovely Cobblestone Heather we bought for a sweater for me, but screw that. If he's willing to wear sweaters I make after all this time, I am so knitting him another one.

I originally had — I thought — sixteen balls of Merlot Heather. I have 12 ball bands for sure from used balls, and there's a half-ball left with which I'll be doing the neckline and sewing seams, plus two full balls after that. That makes 15 — which means either one ball has gone entirely missing, or I tossed a ball band before I realized I wanted to hang on to them for easy yarn tracking (which is more than possible). I'm going to assume that I did, in fact, use up that missing ball, which means I have now used 13.5 balls of yarn on this sweater, or nearly 14 balls (nearly 1722 yards) of DK-weight yarn by the time I'm through. Whoa. That's a lot of yarn! Almost a mile! You can imagine I'm pretty thrilled about what this does to my stash totals (using up nearly 700g for a single sweater = WIN).

It does leave me with a little extra yarn, with which I'll probably make a hat of some kind. :) But not until after I finish most of those mystery projects. Man, there are a lot.

After seven years of knitting and nearly eight years of marriage (8 years on October 21), Grant finally decided to let me knit him a sweater. :D

It's not that I haven't tried. Oh, I've tried. However, perhaps part of the problem is that I was trying to knit him sweaters with leftover bits of Wool-Ease. Which is 80% acrylic, and not colors he was really excited by ("Hey, I have 14 balls of Woods print! You like Woods print, right?" "…").

So this time I made him grope my yarn in order to pick out a fiber, and we went to the website to look at colors together, and then I ordered some of the tentative first choice and one ball of the tentative second choice. Of course, that meant the second choice came in first, and so I ordered more of that. :D

Then we needed to find a pattern. And you know something that this whole process has taught me? Don't give people too many choices. Seriously. If I thrust three types of wool at him and say "pick one!", then it's easy for him to make a decision. If I gave him one ball of every kind of fiber in my stash, there's no way he could make a choice. Looking at colors wasn't tough — there were a lot of colors, but only a few were of interest. Then we narrowed it down to two — and again, it was very easy to make a choice between two colors.

As I was saying, then we needed to find a pattern. I suggested a couple different things — plain? Textured? Cables? Grant said that he liked Aran patterns. Armed with the knowledge that too many choices is kinda dangerous, I grabbed up my copy of Arans & Celtics, marked five or so patterns I thought he'd like, and showed them off. They got responses like "No", "No", "No", and "Hey, that's kind of neat", and finally "Oh! I like that — would you like knitting that?"

\o/ \o/ \o/

And so I have begun! I have completed the back piece and started on the front piece. At that point, it's two sleeves and a lot of seaming. In the interest of making the seaming really easy on myself, I have added two knit stitches of selvage per side on each piece. (In retrospect, I could have knit this in the round, but I was being cautious.) I'll want to block the pieces before trying to seam them. (I may end up blocking the back piece today, since it's done and I want to see what it'll look like blocked.)

The only alteration (besides the selvage stitches) is that I've done the shoulders in short-rows, and rather than binding them off, I plan on doing a three-needle bind-off. However, instead of just picking up stitches for the collar, I really did bind them off. I'm trying to remember who it was that pointed out that a bind-off at the collar is done for a reason, to add stability to a sweater. Ah ha! It was the Yarn Harlot. I have been there and done that with neck bind-offs, and I will not repeat that mistake this time!

So far so good. The sheep are helping.

I finished a sweater!

I'm really happy with it. It's made with Sierra Pacific Glenisla, a 100% wool, feltable yarn which happened to be the Yarn of the Month at my favorite LYS. The pattern, worked from the top down, was really easy to follow and involved no (!) seaming. And, most importantly for me, it fits properly! (I made the 40" version; there's a smaller one at 36", and it goes up to 56".) I was a little worried about that, because I'm short, and knitting it for the first time, I had no idea how I would go about shortening the thing — it's not constructed in a simple manner, as you can see.

The yarn could be nicer. It's just a little on the scratchy side, and I'm going to try washing it to see if that helps any. As for the pattern itself, I'd like more waist shaping — another thing that I didn't have any idea how to implement the first time through. It looks kinda bulky from behind on me.

But ultimately, it makes me really happy. :) I'm really pleased with the way it came out, and I might be tempted to make it again at some point — but there are so many things out there I'd like to knit that repeating a project seems silly until I've gotten through some others. My Ravelry queue is 117 items long, for heck's sake! And I have three projects on needles, and two I haven't started that have early December deadlines.

I also have a bit of leftover yarn from this sweater project, and an idea in my head for a felted bag to make with it. I'm looking forward to seeing if I can make it come out the way it looks in my head. :)

I have nothing of interest! I've done a few more rounds on the Cable-Down Raglan since yesterday, but nothing else. In an attempt to make up for the boringness ("Look, more cables!"), I thought I'd offer a more candid view of my nightstand. This is my nightstand in its normal state of being:

Clockwise from bottom left, you can see a stack of books I'm currently reading ("Communicating In Sign" is on top — I've been taking an ASL class at my local community college, and have been reading as much ASL/Deaf culture stuff as I can get my hands on). This is not all the books I'm reading. This is just the two books I am reading that are stashed in the bedroom. There are three books I'm reading in the study, two in the middle bathroom, three in the back bathroom, and a pile downstairs waiting to be tackled. It's kind of like a sickness, a ravenous appetite. Unfortunately, reading this many books at once results in not finishing anything at all. I need to buckle down and start finishing things!

Piled between the books and the alarm clock are my abacus bracelets and a couple of stitch markers.

Next is my alarm clock, with lamp on top. Yep, the lamp lives on top of the alarm clock. Why not — it fits! The clock is one of those things that will play CDs (that's why it's big and flat like a sandwich) and has two wake-up times, though right now we're only using one. It also has different settings for weekday and weekend, so we don't have to remember to turn it off over the weekend and turn it back on during the week. I usually wake up about five minutes before the alarm goes off.

Hand lotion in the back; useful when you're knitting and have dry skin.

Black object is a rear speaker. Yes. It lives on my nightstand. I suppose we could put them on the floor… or something… but the nightstand is where they have always lived.

Far back corner is a Kleenex box. All hail Puffs Plus With Lotion. It saves my nose every time I get a cold.

Foreground, in front of speakers: three sheep. There may be a fourth sheep hidden under the knitting project. They're sneaky, sheep.

Foreground, right: knitting project and its chart. I recently switched it to a 32" needle instead of a 24" needle. I may need to switch it right back when the sleeve stitches get put on holders. I also just tried it on (it's top-down and the stitches get put on thread) to see if I could make myself a sweater one size smaller than I was thinking, and the answer was a resounding "Hell, no". Sigh. I really wanted to be on to the next part of this sucker. But no. I've got another eight-ish rounds to go, and then I should be ready to divide sleeves. Yay!

The trouble with being monogamous (in terms of knitting) is that you don't always have very interesting pictures the next time around.

On the bright side, I have another diamond finished (well, nearly!), and will be dividing off for sleeves soon. It'll be so much faster when I'm no longer doing so much increasing — not to mention how much less bulk there'll be on the needles, at least for the time being.

I'm still really enjoying both the project and my abacus bracelets (I've got one for the larger cable and one for the smaller cables), and lately SheepLad has been watching Lord of the Rings, which has given me an unexpected bonus knitting time with the husband. And talking of which, I hear hobbits from the next room. Off I go!