I am so lucky to be part of a knitting group with such very talented knitters — I have been exposed to so many great projects that have inspired me to pick up my needles. Kathy (beloved friend and sidekick to Decorah, IA) brought in a set of the cutest felted bunnies you have ever seen. Inspiring, yes, but I did not feel like making a bunny. So, I made her an offer that she couldn’t chose not to refuse: I would knit her something and she would knit me a bunny. The item she chose from me will be revealed later this year (stealth knitting as it were), but I ended up with the original bunny o’ my dreams!!
Lil Bunny Foo Foo
You can see how cute he is, but you cannot tell how soft: butter soft out of wonderful alpaca. The pattern is Wooly Bunnies by Marie Mayhew — a local designer we are proud to call our own!
There is still time to make one of these lil cuties before the real Easter Bunny makes his appearance!!
I feel as if I have been doing lots of knitting with little to show for it, so I am very pleased to have finished my Asterope shawl. I use the word “my” loosely because I knit this for a friend. Come to think of it, once I give it away I won’t have anything to show for this knitting, either. Oh, well! As I said in an earlier post, Asterope was designed by Romi Hill, and is one of the shawls in her 7 Small Shawls to Knit book. I made mine my friend’s out of Madelinetosh Merino Light (420 yards to 100 grams) in the Tart colorway. It took about one and a half skeins for the larger of the two sizes.
I find it difficult to photograph shawls, and it is especially difficult to capture the rich red/black of this color. But here are a couple of photographs to give you an idea of what it looks like before it is sent on its merry way.
It is the weekend of the Annual [Yarn Store] Shop Hop here in Minnesota. Yay! Explore, shop, eat…repeat!
Some of my knitting friends and I decided rather spur of the moment to veer off the beaten path and come up with our own list of shops to visit. We’ve done the Shop Hop thing in the past (obtain passports, get them stamped, collect charms, etc.), but this year we decided to focus on shops that not all of us had been to rather than going to old favorites. The Final Four:
I did not buy much: just one skein of gorgeous Madelinetosh Merino Light in color Flashdance at Yarn Garage:
We dined at The Dock in Stillwater and had GREAT food! I became an embarassment to the group while trying to get something sticky off my hands, so Kathy (former friend 😉 ) said, “I wish WE could post pictures on Susan’s blog!” Thanks…
Flood season is upon us and Stillwater is located on the St. Croix River, so we got to see the levy they built to try to keep the town from flooding:
That’s a street sign in the water!
What a fun day. If you get a chance to do something like this in your area, DO IT. It is such a nice way to meet up with other knitters and share our passion!
PS: The weather was spectacular! We revelled in the warm spring breezes and relished the sun on our faces. We also realized how much we love the four seasons, and pity the people who have perfect weather all of the time and therefore cannot truly experience the joy of a beautiful spring day. Okay, we know we are rationalizing, but give us our small victory!!
I make my share of mistakes while knitting. Sometimes I misunderstand directions. Sometimes I miscount. Sometimes I think I’m smarter than I really am. And sometimes I get caught up watching Jeremy Irons in The Borgias and just don’t pay attention.
For example, the other day I randomly threw a p2tog into my pink Japanese cardigan. (I can’t even blame Jeremy for that one.) I figured it out four or five rows later when my stitch count was off. I came to the end of a section of traveling stitches and instead of two purl stitches remaining, I only had one. It wasn’t difficult to fix that mistake — the hard part was finding it. I looked and looked at both sides of my knitting until I realized it wasn’t a dropped stitch, but a “gee what was I thinking” decrease. I dropped down a few rows, undid the p2tog, and laddered back up, adjusting the tension of the surrounding stitches to have enough yarn for the stitch that had been decreased on the rows above the mistake. Here are a couple photographs of the fix.
That wasn’t so hard, now was it?
I’m also working on a lace shawl — a gift for a dear friend. It’s a beautiful but relatively simple pattern (more on it at the end of this post). That’s where Jeremy Irons comes in. I was working on the shawl the other night. I glanced down at the pattern repeat, memorized it, knit that row, and kept going while Jeremy did things modern Popes just.do.not.do. In the light of day, I noticed something wrong. The pattern has lines of stitches that converge. Left leaning decreases (sk2p — slip 1, k2tog, pass the slipped stitch over) are paired with right leaning decreases (k3tog). I know this. I had already done these decreases on other rows. This time, however, I did the left leaning decrease across the entire row, and by the time I noticed I was five rows along in the pattern. Rut roh. The mistake is shown below.
So, to fix it I was going to have to drop back, and then recreate the intervening rows. (Did I mention there were fifteen repeats of this mistake?) The key part of the five rows (from where I was down to the mistake):
1. Current row (RS): yo, k3tog, yo
2. (WS): purl back
3. (RS): yo, k2tog
4. (WS): purl back
5. Mistake row (RS): yo, k3tog, yo (instead of yo, sk2p, yo)
I chose to work the next wrong side row and correct as I went along. I worked to each mistake, turned the knitting so that the right side was facing, and dropped down to the mistake. I only dropped down those stitches that I absolutely had to. Because I was correcting just a few stitches, I didn’t pin out the running threads to keep track of them — instead, I used a different wooden (non-slippery) needle for each row. After fixing the mistake a dozen times, I had it down to a science. It suddenly occurred to me that I should try to demonstrate what I was doing for the blog. That was harder than I thought it would be, even with a tripod. But here it is. (Disclaimer: I hate my voice, and I know this is not going to win for best documentary short at next year’s Oscars.)
Here is a close up of the repair.
Whew! That was one of those mistakes that I could have left — it didn’t change the stitch count. I obviously kept going without noticing it. I am making it for someone who doesn’t knit, and so I doubt she would have noticed. But the overall effect of the pattern would have been diminished.
As for the shawl pattern, it is Romi Hill’s Asterope, from her book Seven Small Shawls to Knit. The photograph below is from the book (I hope Romi doesn’t mind!).
The Asterope pattern is very clear, as are the charts. I cannot blame Romi for my mistake. I blame you, Jeremy.
Another garter stitch set below — I would wear the jacket!
There are many more darling outfits in this book, with many for boys, too, but I tend to gravitate to the girlie stuff! I have no one in mind for the projects in this book, so I may have to go on the hunt for babies…no, darling daughters — no grandbabies yet!
Old FO: This has been done for a while, but I have not gotten around to posting about it. I thought of it today because I bought yarn for yet another ruffle scarf — what is my problem? I will have a flirty ascot for every outfit I own ;).
This is the Cha Cha scarf in the rusty colorway. Love it of course, but do I need a third? Doubtful. Very doubtful…
The Minnesota Knitters Guild Shawl Exhibition at the Textile Center of Minnesota is running through April 8. I stopped in to visit two of my shawls that are on display. I got a few photos, but not all of them turned out. My Aeolian Shawl was displayed very nicely, right by the main sign.
When it was at the state fair last summer, it was draped over a table and you could not see the edging, which of course is the “raison d’être.” There were a number of beautiful shawls on display. This one caught my eye:
The beads are meant to look like icicles melting — perfectly executed! I have only to peek out the window to confirm it!
My Peacock was kind of tucked in a hallway, so I couldn’t get a great shot of it.
If you are in the area, try to visit — it’s kind of inspiring!
In comments to my post the other day about my Spring Snow cardigan (see below), several readers have asked where they can buy Japanese pattern books. Although not available everywhere, they are getting easier to find.
I have seen (and occasionally purchased) Japanese patterns at various local yarn stores. For example, I have seen them at Knit Purl (in Portland, Oregon); the Yarnery (St. Paul, Minnesota); and Skeins, Shuttles, and Spindles (Boulder, Colorado). So when in doubt, check your local yarn store — you might be surprised.
Another great online source is The Needle Arts Book Shop. Needle Arts carries books of both Japanese patterns and stitch collections, as well as guides on interpreting Japanese symbols. They also provide a free downloadable PDF on how to read Japanese patterns. I confess I just ordered two more Japanese pattern collections from them a few days ago!
As for the particular book that the cardigan I’m working on appeared in — I’m not sure whether that issue is still available.
Spring in Washington means cherry blossoms. A few days ago, it was in the seventies here in Washington, DC. My bulbs began to poke timidly out of the ground, and one of my cherry trees blossomed open, even while the buds on its more cautious yard mates stayed firmly closed.
Sadly, caution may have been wiser — our temperatures dipped down into the thirties last night and we could have snow this weekend. Cherry blossoms are fragile, and I’m afraid our intrepid early blooms won’t last.
Washington’s most famous cherry trees — those that line the Tidal Basin — were a gift from Japan, and this spring my thoughts have turned frequently to Japan for many reasons. Just a day or two before the horrible earthquake and tsunami, I started working on another Japanese sweater pattern. I love Japanese patterns because they are so beautiful and unusual. And I love how even the most complex patterns are reduced to a few charts that experienced knitters can follow without speaking a word of Japanese.
The cardigan I’m knitting is by Hitomi Shida, and was published in the Let’s Knit Series (Couture Knit 12: Adult Luxury Knits).
I’m knitting it in Blue Sky Alpaca’s Royal Alpaca in the color Cameo. I’m working it in one piece to the armholes. It’s not a difficult pattern, but there is patterning on the wrong and right sides so I have to pay some attention. I started with a provisional cast on in waste yarn, which is why there is a white “border.” The collar, button bands, and hem are knit at the end in one piece. At least I think they are. I’ll worry about that after I finish the body and sleeves.
The other object in the photo is a pair of Japanese scissors that I bought when I was in Minneapolis visiting Susan. (They came from Bella Lana.) They are a wonderful marriage of beauty and function: very pretty, but also very sharp.
