theraineysisters knitting and so much more

We both have projects we are trying to get finished…slowly progressing stitch by stitch. Then, wham! Something new comes along that blows you off course! We were taken astray by a new design by one of our favorite designers: Suvi Simola. The pattern is for a unique shawlette called Filtering Daylight. Suvi also designed Baby Cables and Big Ones Too, which both of us made a couple of years ago, as well as a gorgeous cabled tunic for Vogue Knitting.

From Sally
Last year I bought a single skein of Kitten in a pale shell pink at the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival. This yarn is an indescribably soft and luscious combination of cashmere and silk. I had been looking for just the right project for it. I thought I had over 400 yards, but as it turned out my skein was mislabeled, and I only had about 325 yards (which I confirmed by checking with Tess Designer Yarns after noticing the difference on Ravelry). With a hundred fewer yards to play with, my options were more limited. This shawlette looked purrrrfect. (With a yarn named Kitten, I couldn’t resist.)

As it turns out, I didn’t have quite enough yarn: I stopped after four repeats of the feather-and-fan pattern at the bottom of the shawl (the pattern calls for five repeats). I could have knit that portion in a cream or other contrast color, but preferred to use up my yarn. I had one gram left over; I cut it close.

This is a smallish shawl, perfect when you don’t have a lot of yarn. It also knits up really quickly, and the center portion is fun and easy to do. Side note: I hadn’t started a shawl from the center out in a little while, and so I googled Emily Ocker cast on and Magic Loop just to remind myself how to get started. A post I wrote on this blog was one of the search results! I blog because I have no brain or memory. The post I found is here if anyone is curious.

From Susan
I did not have a nice yarn for the body section of the shawl on hand, but I did have a beautiful sagey green for the border in alpaca and silk (Miss Babs Tierno in Beach Glass). I bought three skeins of this when I was in DC a while back, but have never found the right project — though I have made many attempts!

I then purchased a skein of Cascade Epiphany in natural, which unfortunately has been discontinued (?). I have always loved this yarn, but it is pricey. This seemed like the perfect small project to test it out on.

The pattern is a deceptively quick knit. I easily finished it in a weekend, and would have been done even faster if I hadn’t made a rookie mistake. The decreases are all done on the top edge…I did a couple on the bottom edge due to lack of attention to my knitting. When I ripped back, I decided to try to rework the short rows and tried out about three different ways. After all the ripping and reknitting, the yarn looked absolutely GRAY. SO, I ripped yet again. If I had just gone forth one time, it would have gone a lot quicker.

On Lettie

Detail of point when blocking:

I wore it already (which is why it looks wrinkled in the “table” shot) and really liked it — very soft in both color and fabric and very pretty.

The results of our bloggiversary survey are in. We had over 800 responses. Woo!! Thank you for taking the time to complete the survey.

The “typical” respondent is a very experienced knitter, clocking in with more than 20 years of knitting time. Our knitter enjoys knitting shawls and wraps more than most other types of projects, and likes our blog just the way it is. (Cue the Bridget Jones music. Or at least cue Colin Firth as Mark Darcy.) Our readers use Ravelry for pattern surfing and checking out other knitters’ projects. They read knitting blogs just as frequently, if not more so, than they did before Ravelry.

Here are the details:

How long have you been knitting?
Quite a while from the looks of it!

Experience level shows a perfect bell curve:

We decided not to constrain the responses by defining the different levels of experience. Respondents defined for themselves, often explaining their choices by what they are “afraid” to do, such as steeks, lace, etc. Many said they are fearless, or will tackle anything, but still have a lot to learn.

What do you REALLY love to knit?

You can see our readers love to knit just about everything! Of course, we forgot some things in our list, so readers added them in their comments — felted items, toys, mittens, scarves — or simply the obsession du jour!

About a Blog
The next few questions related to the blog itself: frequency and content. Most people felt that we were on the right track with 98.5% saying the content balance was right.

We loved reading the comments people wrote about our blog — after all, that is one reason we continue to do this. We love hearing from you. Most people like our finished projects, information about patterns and yarn selection, finishing, repairs, etc. Shop hops and stories about our local knitting stores were less popular because most of our readers do not have access to them.

People were also realistic about the fact that we can’t crank out 5 FOs a week to keep the focus on finished projects! One commenter noted that we start some projects and then never show them finished. Hmmm. That can’t possibly be true 😉 . (Aside from Sally: I am notorious for putting projects aside. I do sometimes go back to them, and you may see one or two of these phantom projects over the next few months.)

Someone else wished that we would use more affordable yarns to make it easier to replicate our projects. We are truly sorry, but we cannot comply! We love really nice yarn!! We do understand how expensive a hobby knitting can be when you use expensive yarns. For us, it’s important to enjoy the process of knitting as much if not more than the finished object; the pleasure of working with beautiful yarns is part of why we love to knit. Moreover, it takes so long to knit certain projects that the investment of time seems to require an equal investment in yarn quality. That said, not all expensive yarns are worth the price and it’s particularly disappointing when an expensive yarn doesn’t live up to its price tag.

Has Ravelry influenced your blog reading?

Only 8% spend less time reading blogs! That was a surprise. And, for the 0.3% who are not familiar with Ravelry, please go join TODAY! You won’t regret it!!

Our readers LOVE Ravelry:

Here again, we forgot to list everything that people look for in Ravelry: stash management, the great library, buying as well as selling patterns, and networking with other knitters. Many of you expressed your love of Ravelry: wonder what I ever did without it, check it multiple times each day, it’s my obsession, etc. We agree with all of the above!

The overall message we received from your comments was to keep on blogging. To be honest, we get a lot out of it ourselves. We often come back and look up projects or techniques — ‘google’ our own blog to get answers. We know we read about it somewhere…maybe at The Rainey Sisters! (Sally will be providing an example of that very soon.)

And, remember — you are all Aran-clad wieners in our eyes! (There’s a reason we didn’t ask you about Susan’s love of puns. . . )

We were surprised and gratified by the number of responses to this year’s survey and contest: over 800 of you took the time to answer. Thank you so very much. We are still sifting through and analyzing the responses, and we’ll share what we learn in a future post.

In the meantime, we want to announce the winners of this year’s Bloggiversary Contest:

1. Buffalo Wool

Our winner is: Emily W.

2. Brooklyn Tweed Loft

Our winner is: Sherry N.

3. Fino Alpaca with a Twist

Our winner is: “The Patricia”

Emails have gone out to each of the winners — we didn’t have a mailing address for each winner, so if you are named please check your mail and get back to us. Congratulations!

If you didn’t win, please know you are winners in our eyes and better luck next year!

In my last post, I mentioned that my orange and gray yarns did not have sufficient contrast to work for the stranded pattern I was doing…when to everyone’s eye, it looked like there was plenty of contrast. SuCar described a technique for checking this out. You take a photo and then change it to black and white to see the actual contrast. I gave it a try:

Color photo on left; same photo in black and white on the right

Amazing, isn’t it? The orange just vanishes. And in the actual colorwork, this really played out. Thanks for the tip, SuCar!!

PS – don’t forget that tomorrow is the last day to submit your survey and to put your name in the running for our prize giveaway!!

Yay! The start of my weekend, since I work 4 days a week. First off, thanks to all of you who have responded ‘in droves’ to our survey — very interesting comments!! We will certainly share our findings and also try to incorporate some of your ideas and suggestions.

I started off the day today with a therapeutic massage for my wrist and things felt “different” — in a good way. I think progress is being made.

Progress or not, I have been doing a little bit of knitting. As Sally mentioned in a previous post, we are both knitting Taiga — a bulky-weight vest with a gorgeous accent of stranded knitting.

As I said, I chose my colors poorly. They went together quite well on the face of things, but the stranding did not show up at all…not enough contrast between the two colors. Unfortunately, I did not take a picture of the original colorwork (doh!) but the colors are below:

You can see that the colors are kind of cute together. I chose the orange because it matched some of the slubs in the grey tweedy yarn. The choice of orange was a bit “out of the box” for me — funky and fun and not like other things I have.

Well. I crawled back into my box!! After seeing Sally’s DARLING version with the pale green and dark purple, I had to jump on board. The purple is fantastic and I am very pleased. It killed me to rip out my colorwork because my knitting time is so limited and RE-knitting is absurd, but it had to be done.

The pattern has you do the stranding back and forth, which I did the first time around. Annoying but okay. But, no way was I going through that again, so I added a steek for the new color. To add the steek I ended at the end of a RS row, cast on 8 sts and then knit around again. I then added the purple and started the chart. When I finished the chart, I cast off the steek and kept going with the purple. Easy peasy.

Some knitters suffer from “steek anxiety.” I never suffered this ailment. Cutting my knitting never bothered me — even Alice St@rmore told me she had never seen anyone cut their first steek with such glee! I think the reason I am not bothered by cutting the steek is that it marks the next stage in the project — if you don’t cut it, you can’t finish it.

For the steek averse among you, I chronicled my steek surgery in photos (the color is very true in these photos):

Steek Close Up

At the machine

Starting to Cut

More…

All done!!

I often place something hard, like a book or cutting board, underneath the steek so I don’t cut the wrong thing (like strands from the other side of the knitting!). I didn’t really need it here because of how short the steek was and easy to see, etc. The book is Starmore’s Book of Fair Isle Knitting — a true classic!!

I kept going and finished the front pockets and am now doing the bottom half of the vest. This is supposed to be a quick knit in bulky yarn, but it doesn’t FEEL quick! It is not as easy for me to knit with bulky, chunky, tweedy yarn and large needles.

This project is really cute, though, and actually fits so far. I know people thought they couldn’t wear the bulky knits, calling themselves too “fluffy,” but I am not the smallest cherub in the choir by a long shot and it looks okay. I don’t feel like it makes me look any bigger than other knits.

Progress so far…

I still have to take it slow on the knitting, but should get this done soon. Maybe I can find a vest that knits itself!

Enjoy your weekend and your knitting!!

PS to Renee who said, “The skein of orange yarn looks like there should have been enough contrast next to the gray.” I agree! It looked like it should work. It just didn’t. I think the super tweediness of the gray overwhelmed the orange. It needed a solid, dark color.

HAPPY BLOGGIVERSARY!!!!

It’s hard to believe, but we’ve been writing this blog for six years. As we often do when our bloggiversary approaches, we’ve spent time reflecting on our knitting and blogging. There have been interesting changes in the knitting world over the past six years: Ravelry (which didn’t exist when we started and now has over 2 million members), a big shift to downloadable patterns, more online resources, and of course new yarns and tools.

We’d like to understand a little bit more about how our blog fits into your knitting world as we go forward. To that end, we’ve written a (brief) survey that we invite our readers to fill out. Responses will be anonymous. We’ll share any interesting findings and comments in a later post.

To reward you for responding, we’ll give out three prizes. Details on how to fill out the survey follow the descriptions of the bribes prizes.

Prize #1

Buffalo Wool. One reader will receive 120 grams (approximately 440 yards) of this luscious yarn (90% Bison, 10% nylon).

Prize #2

Brooklyn Tweed’s Loft. One reader will receive two skeins in the color “Longjohns” (100% wool; 275 yards per 50 gram skein).

Prize #3

Fino Alpaca with a Twist. One reader will receive two skeins in the color “Champagne” (70% Baby Alpaca, 30% silk; 875 yards per 100 gram skein). That’s enough yarn to make a shawl identical to Sally’s Forest Path Stole.

How to Fill Out the Survey and Enter the Contest

It’s easy. Just click here and fill out the survey. Instructions on how to enter are at the very end of the survey. The survey and contest are open through midnight Monday, March 26th. Prize winners will be announced on Tuesday, March 27th. (You have the option to enter for any or all of the prizes.)

Thank you for participating and, as always, thank you for reading!