How could I forget!

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I just realised that I forgot to post to say that I finally finished the Henry scarf for my Dad! I don’t have photos yet thanks to almost never being home during daylight hours at the moment but will put some up as soon as I can.

I was beginning to worry that it wasn’t going to be done for Christmas so I’m hugely relieved. It’s come out beautifully and if it hadn’t taken so unbelievably long, I’d definitely make another one. (Sorry, Steven, there’s no way you’re getting one now.)

I made it in Jaeger Matchmaker 4 ply, which was quite nice yarn to work with although it did have a tendency to split at times. If I was going to make another one, I would be tempted to go for something softer (I wonder if Wensleydale Longwool comes in 4 ply?) and I would definitely use a more interesting colour. Charcoal grey is all well and good and my Dad will definitely wear it but it could do with a little more life in it.

Knitting Lace

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Firstly, let me clear up a common misconception: knitting lace is not hard. If you can knit, purl, k2tog and make yarn overs, you can knit lace. A lace pattern might be complicated and difficult to follow but as far as technique is concerned, it’s not hard.

Unless your technique is wrong, as I discovered last night. Apparently, there is a right way and a wrong way to make yarn overs. Now yarn overs are a way of deliberately introducing holes into your knitting. Obviously, holes are very important in lace, so if you’re not making them properly, you’ve got a problem. Having knit several rows of a lace pattern and not getting anything that looked like the pictures accompanying the pattern, I decided to take a closer look at what was supposed to be happening. Clearly, the pattern pictures had holes and, just as clearly, my work didn’t. This suggested a problem with my yarn overs so I thought I’d check that I was making them the way I was supposed to.

Enter Google. The first page I found explained that there is no standard method for yarn overs so if the pattern didn’t explain how to make them, I was probably screwed. Not really what I wanted to hear so I moved right along. The next page said that (and I quote) “the yarn should be wrapped counter-clockwise around the needle looking directly at the point of the right hand needle”. Personally, I’m not terribly keen on the idea of looking directly at the points of my needles even when I’m not knitting with them. Fortunately, I was third time lucky and found a site that explained that I should be bringing the yarn to the front of my work under the needle and then putting it to the back over the needle and not the other way round as I had been doing. This method gets a very loose length of yarn wrapped over the needle (just what you need to introduce a hole) unlike the opposite way which gets you a nice neat stitch and no hole. At last I have holes in my knitting!

The final amusement was the site that explained to me that making a stitch (a yarn over increases the number of stitches by one) in this way was called ‘lace’ when done intentionally and a ‘hole’ otherwise.

A new project

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I have a new favourite yarn! (I’m not sure I had a favourite before but I certainly do now.) Since Henry is very very nearly finished (just 3 rows and then the cast-off to do), I bought some yarn at I Knit last night to make a scarf/wrap for my Mum’s Christmas. The pattern that I’m making specified a slightly fuzzy aran weight and I ended up buying some Wensleydale Longwool from Wensleydale Longwool Sheepshop. This is wool as wool was meant to be! It’s 100% pure wool from Wensleydale Longwool sheep and is just beautiful. It has a lovely natural subtle sheen to it and it’s fabulously soft, unlike some other 100% wools that I’ve worked with. It’s soft and warm and fluffy and it’s definitely what I’m going to make my own scarf out of, when I get back around to making things for me.

It’s not perfect: it sheds considerably and it’s a little “grabby” so ripping back when you’ve gone wrong is not easy. Someone else at I Knit mentioned having wasted an entire ball’s worth of yarn having to rip back a jumper and the yarn being unusable afterwards. Note that I would expect both of these problems with any yarn of this sort so these are not criticisms as such.

I can’t comment on the colourways available either. I bought two balls in cream since I wanted something neutral that could be word in summer as well as winter. Since choosing yarn was standing between me and a bottle of organic cider from the I Knit fridge, I didn’t spend too long admiring things that I wasn’t going to buy! You can see (and order) other colours online at I Knit.

Of course, all this means that I have a barely-started project that I need to finish in the next 11 days. I’m also not sure that I like the pattern that I’ve chosen worked in this yarn; I think I might like something simpler given how beautiful the yarn itself is. I do have another pattern in mind so I’ll choose between them tonight and try and post some pictures over the weekend when there’s daylight.

Making progress

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As can now be seen from the progress bars (currently at the bottom of the blog sidebar) I’ve made real progress on my Henry scarf. It’s now 95% done, thanks to a couple of long-ish train journeys over the weekend. I might get it finished at I Knit this week but if I don’t it certainly won’t need much more done to it. Bizarrely, I’m now starting to feel anxious about what I’m going to knit when it’s done. For all that I’ve been desperate to get it finished, I’m going to miss it when it’s gone!

Since I failed to buy my Mum a Christmas present while shopping at the weekend, it’s looking more likely that my next knitting project is going to be a present for her, despite the fact that there are now only 10 knitting days till Christmas. I think there should be laws against people having birthdays in December and January. Mum’s difficult enough to find presents for without having to find two within a fortnight.

So don’t be surprised if another progress bar appears with something for my Mum that will knit up quickly and easily and preferably with little or no seaming so that I can finish it in the car as Steven and I are driving home.

The girl’s still got IT

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Having been out of IT for the grand total of three months now, I had an opportunity to stretch my technical muscles again recently. Nothing too complicated; I just tweaked the template for this blog so that the number of posts per month was displayed (to make it easier to track my NaBloPoMo progress) and added some Ravelry progress bars. The progress bars weren’t much of a challenge since they just involved copying the code that Ravelry provided to the right place (although working out what the right place was took a little brain power). However, at that magical point in the future “when-I-have-some-spare-time”, I plan to customise them at least a little to match the rest of the template better. It was also reasonably straightforward to add the code to display the number of posts per month but still strangely satisfying. It’s nice to know that my skills in that area haven’t disappeared completely already and that I can still find uses for them.

My current employer asked me last week would I like to go on a course to learn to program in VB. I think they thought I was kidding when I said “Not this year.” I think changing career, sitting 5 exams, buying and renovating a house, and getting married, all within the space of 15 months is enough to be going on with. The idea of being taught a programming language does appeal somewhat, having worked with them for seven years without much by way of formal teaching. Part of me wonders though if it wouldn’t just be better to persuade them to let me buy an O’Reilly book and spend a couple of days teaching myself. Of course, I’m still having to restrain the urge to tell them that writing VB macros to manipulate data held in Excel spreadsheets is a really bad way to handle the amount of data that we’re trying to work with. That might be a good reason for not doing the course. I can just see a VB instructor cursing me under his breath as I put my hand to ask once again “Would it not be better to do that using (insert name of almost any other language here)?”

Knitty – Winter 2007 issue

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Something amazing happened today. I looked at the new issue of Knitty and didn’t want to make anything in it! This almost never happens. Usually, Knitty comes out and I immediately want to run out and buy lots of wool and knit and knit and knit but not today.

I have added the kilt hose to my Ravelry queue, just in case the pattern comes in handy at a later date but that’s it.

Or, at least, that’s it for the current issue. Just to prove that there’s usually a lot more that I want to make, I trawled through the back issues and added whole bunch of earlier patterns instead. Guess you can’t win ‘em all.

Uh oh! We just bought a house!

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So after 4 and a half days of cursing the estate agent’s name, they finally phoned to say that the vendor had accepted our offer.

Steven’s in a state of advanced panic and I’m resisting the urge to phone the estate agent back to check that I didn’t imagine the whole conversation.

I had planned on a long, well-thought out post today discussing my success with NaBloPoMo and what’s it taught me about blogging and my particular approach to blogging. I’m afraid that, given the news, it’s amazing that I’ve managed to post actual words at all and not just complete gibberish.

There will undoubtedly be more to follow on this subject but right now I need to go tend to my shattered nerves.

The Text, The Whole Text and Nothing but The Text

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Since I’ve recently updated my other blog and added a link to it from here, I thought I’d post a brief description of what it is and why people might be interested in it.

I should explain that it’s not a ‘chatty’ blog like this one. Its purpose is to help me keep track of books that I’ve bought to process through the Distributed Proofreaders site. Each book gets a post that provides some publishing information and any other interesting snippets about the book or the author that I’ve come across. An example would be the publisher’s advert for the Concise Dictionary of National Biography that I found in another book.

The bit that might be of interest to people is the “Posted!” category. These are the books that have made it all the way through the Distributed Proofreaders system and are now available for downloading from Project Gutenberg. There’s a link directly to the Project Gutenberg catalogue entry for each book in its post. (If there isn’t, let me know!) In the future, I plan to post here from time to time about most of these books, explaining why I chose them and what’s interesting about them (if anything).

The ‘Cleared’ and ‘In Progress’ sections will be of less interest. ‘Cleared’ just means that Project Gutenberg have confirmed that the book is public domain in the US and so they’ll accept it into their collection. ‘In Progress’ means that the book is currently working its way through the Distributed Proofreaders site. If you think you’d be interested in proofreading a particular text, you could always sign up at DP and help.

Knitting tips – keeping track mid-row

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This thought came as a revelation to me so apologies if it’s already occurred to everyone else: “you can use stitch markers even when the pattern doesn’t say you have to!”

I’m used to using stitch markers to mark specific points on jumpers, e.g. where the seams will be joined later, but it only recently occurred to me that I can also use them to keep track of simple repeating stitch patterns mid-row.

I’ve been working on a pattern with an extremely simple stitch pattern. How hard could it be to keep track of knit 2, slip 2 or purl 2, slip 2, even for a row with more than 400 stitches? In my case, nearly impossible! (For someone who works almost exclusively with numbers, having to admit that I was having trouble counting to two was embarassing, to say the least.)

Stitch markers to the rescue! I’ve now got stitch markers every 40 stitches and just work out at the start of every row which stitch (of the four stitch pattern) I should be at when I get to a marker. If I’m not at the right stitch, I never have to work back more than 40 stitches, which is a huge improvement over having to rip back the entire row!

This technique will work for any repeated stitch pattern. Just make sure that your markers are placed at appropriate multiples of stitches. For example, for a pattern with a repeat of 5 stitches, place markers at any multiples of 5 (5, 10, 15, 20, etc.) and, in each row, you should always be at the same stitch in the pattern when you get to a marker. Obviously, if your pattern shifts slightly from row to row, you’ll be at a different point in the pattern on different rows, but you should always be at the same point for every marker in a single row.

Knitting Tips – keeping track during pattern repeats

Susan4 Comments

A really simple method of keeping track of which row of a pattern repeat you’re working on (if, for whatever reason, you don’t want to use a row counter) is to write the row numbers, e.g. 1 to 24 down the side of a piece of paper. You can then attach a paperclip to the paper that can be moved down as you work through the rows and then back to the top for the start of the next repeat.

This is fine if you know what you should be doing on each of the rows, e.g. if all the even rows are to be worked in the same way and similarly for the odd rows. What I find this most useful for though is when a pattern consists of, say, four differently worked rows that are combined in a 24 row repeat. This may result in the original pattern being written something like:

Row 1 [RS]: Stitch details for row 1.
Row 2 [WS]: Stitch details for row 2.
Row 3 [RS]: Stitch details for row 3.
Row 4 [WS]: Stitch details for row 4.
Rows 5-12: Repeat Rows 1-4 twice more.
Row 13 [RS]: Work as for Row 3.
Row 14 [WS]: Work as for Row 2.
Row 15 [RS]: Work as for Row 1.
Row 16 [WS]: Work as for Row 4.
Rows 17-24: Repeat Rows 13-16 twice more.
Repeat Rows 1-24 six times more.

So, if I’m on row 20, I need to work out which of rows 13-16 that corresponds to, then I need to look back again to find out what that actually means I should be knitting. No, thank you!

However, by copying and pasting the details for rows 1-4 into a text editor and then working through the instructions, copying the details from the appropriate row, I ended up with something like:

Row 1 [RS]: Stitch details for row 1.
Row 2 [WS]: Stitch details for row 2.
Row 3 [RS]: Stitch details for row 3.
Row 4 [WS]: Stitch details for row 4.
Row 5 [RS]: Stitch details for row 1.
Row 6 [WS]: Stitch details for row 2.
Row 7 [RS]: Stitch details for row 3.
Row 8 [WS]: Stitch details for row 4.
Row 9 [RS]: Stitch details for row 1.
Row 10 [WS]: Stitch details for row 2.
Row 11 [RS]: Stitch details for row 3.
Row 12 [WS]: Stitch details for row 4.
Row 13 [RS]: Stitch details for row 3.
Row 14 [WS]: Stitch details for row 2.
Row 15 [RS]: Stitch details for row 1.
Row 16 [WS]: Stitch details for row 4.
Row 17[RS]: Stitch details for row 3.
Row 18 [WS]: Stitch details for row 2.
Row 19 [RS]: Stitch details for row 1.
Row 20 [WS]: Stitch details for row 4.
Row 21[RS]: Stitch details for row 3.
Row 22 [WS]: Stitch details for row 2.
Row 23 [RS]: Stitch details for row 1.
Row 24 [WS]: Stitch details for row 4.
Repeat Rows 1-24 six times more.

I then printed this off and attached my handy paperclip. Now, at a single glance, I can see exactly where I am in the repeat and what I should be knitting on that row.