Mea Culpa

 Morning blog!

I know, it's been a few weeks since my last confession err, blog post.  Things are happening around here.

By that I mean, I've been lazing about with Zac the last few weeks that he's had off of work and I've done almost no knitting done at all.

I blame August.

And I decided to replay final fantasy nine again.  I'm about to send them through the Shimmering Island to Terra.  I have to level up my chocobo first.

Last I left you all, I was contemplating casting on a sweater for Hazel.  I had two other WIPs happening and I know I mentioned thinking about casting on a sock.

Well, I did cast on a sweater for Hazel:

It's the Campside pullover that I've modified into a cardigan.  And as you may be able to tell, the yarn is a little warbly.  It's yarn that was frogged remains of a sweater I knit for myself last year that was ill-fitting.  I think I talked about it here, but I never shared a finished object picture because I wore it a few times and realized the shoulder area was massive, the sleeves had to be rolled up a ridiculous amount and the color was a little... loud for my tastes.

Anyway, I didn't wash the yarn before I started knitting with it again, and I kind of regret that?  It can be tricky dealing with ramen noodle yarn, keeping the knitting consistent.  Ah well.  I don't know if you can tell from the photo, but it's not completely all warbly, there are some yarn overs (that is, intentional holes) as a design element on the body of the sweater.  Has a neat effect.  The whole thing will look much better upon blocking.

Another new WIP is a new fox sweater for Toby.  And you may ask, three sweaters on the needles, are you nuts!  And I plead the fifth.  But I ordered the yarn and it came in like 2 days.  So I had to.  It's the rules.

This was one night's progress, I'm actually well past this.  But I am lazy.  And I put everything down, completely abandoning all of my other WIPs to work on my Tiffany Lamp Shawl (that is the Painting Bricks Shawl by Stephen West).  And I worked on it and worked on it, mostly in the evenings when the video games get put away and in the early afternoons when I drive a few minutes early to pick the kids up from school and I sit under a tree and work on it.

 

It's been a minor slog, but I'm enjoying it. I got to the point where I can see the end, and even though usually that would be abandoning even house work to finish it, I'm only managing an hour or so of knitting on it a day. It is impossible to photograph while still on the needles because of how many stitches it is. I got to the bind off last night, which felt incredible.  But it's an i-cord bind off, which if you don't know why that is a big deal or even what that is I'll explain.

I-cords are tiny tubes of knitting.  Say, three or four stitches wide.  You can knit one all on it's own by knitting the stitches, slipping them back to the working needle and knitting them again, ad nauseum.  It's a clever way to knit a tube without dealing with double points or magic looping (and with only three or four stitches worked, it's pretty much a sanity saver).

People have devised some clever uses for i-cords, including making a bit wider i-cords and turning them into fingers for gloves!

You can also put in an icord as an edging on things, as you knit.  All you do is slip those three stitches and knit them every other row.  Ok, it can get a bit more complicated than that, and there are endless applications.  They can go on the edge, in the middle, anywhere you want.  And they can be a neat design element.

Well, an icord bind off is a special applied knitting technique.  I don't know if you recall the handspun evenstar shawl I knit late last year.  It had an applied border, that is, I knit the border perpendicularly to the shawl and every other row knit the last stitch together with one of the still-live shawl stitches.

the i-cord is like that, except it's only three stitches.  You cast on your icord stitches and every pass, you knit two together with one of the live stitches.  Essentially you have to knit three stitches to bind off one.  So, considering I have 700 stitches to bind off, this is going to take awhile.

And I don't have a good photo, because it was night when I got to that part and the knitting is all the way over there, and I am a horrible knitting blogger.

I do have another tip though, one that comes with a photo!  go me.

The border of the shawl has a neat chevron shape, which is caused by only decreasing along every other column, and only increasing on the others:

 

I had a heck of a time getting this pattern established because when I knit and knit and knit for hundreds of stitches, my brain wanders.  So, I added an extra dangling stitch marker (the removable orange one from the picture) as a visual cue to increase on those columns.  Then, to make it even easier for me, I moved the markers so the three-stitch columns which have increases on either side of those stitches has markers on the edge, so I *can't* decrease with those stitches at all.

It might be tricky to visualize if you aren't a knitter, and if you aren't knitting this particular shawl, but I did pass on the "wisdom" to another knitter of this pattern and she was thrilled with the idea.

There isn't a lot of other knitting going on in my world.  Ever since I picked this shawl back up it's been monogamous.  I did cast on socks with some alegria yarn I got from my big brother for christmas.  But that's (again) all the way over there.

But, I did get a few better pictures of my own new sweater, which due to the flex power hours where we live, I've been able to wear it in the mornings and early afternoon:

fits great!

(if you're curious about the flex power hours, essentially we chose the hours where we pay more for power, so it is actually more cost effective to cool the house during the day, keeping it probably warmer than most people like it in general, but cool enough for a sweater, and then turning the A/C completely off from 4-9pm. so, the house heats up a bit in that time, but not enough that we're completely sweltering, and we saved quite a bit of money this month compared to last. go us!)

Cool story bro.

Pun intended.

Till next time!