Winding Down, Gearing Up

I'm tired, you guys...
today I weeded 20% of our front yard with a dinner fork.

The ongoing saga of Project Needles has been trucking along during HPKCHC break month and I've been hatching plans for the next three months (including thoughts about Knitting & Crochet Blog Week).  For the past five "terms" (a year.5 in real life), I've been on blog staff for Ravenclaw House; this term marks a break for the blog and brings a new staff position, for myself and for Ravenclaw:  
Spreadsheet Sorceress!!  I am indeed a nerd among nerds, folks.

April's hearts are finished a couple of days early:

Sweetie❤KNIT❤Heart [Rav] designed by Jackie Loewen

and I've been messing around with some more yarn dyeing... more on that soon!  It's officially spring for realsies, you guys!

Project Needles: Classification

or, How I Assigned Call Numbers to My Knitting Needles

A Librarian's Tale

If the titles did not trigger red flags,
you have now been officially warned: NERD ALERT.

After completing a survey of priorities for the user population (in this case, just me), portability will factor into the storage of the collection, with a minimum of repackaging and an option for decentralization (AKA I will continue to keep my needles in two specific locations for convenience, and relabeling all my needles would be super insane).

Crafting equipment comes with its own controlled vocabulary, so it's a natural step to use this vocabulary when creating an organization hierarchy for knitting needles... things like:

• Needle size: US sizes for user comfort
• Needle type: circular, double pointed, straight
• Needle length: 6", 8", 16", etc.
• Needle material: metal, wood, bamboo, plastic, etc.

can translate to a call number for relatively easy recognition of the object:

In my opinion (and I may be the only one hanging out in this paragraph -- hello, brave souls who are still reading!), this structure can be easily extended, so that no matter how large this specific collection gets, the chances of running out of unique identifiers is slim.  I will not be assigning Cutter numbers! (cataloging humor, stop me plz)

How a user population can use these assigned call numbers for search and retrieval is its own issue.  I may need to get a whiteboard...

**This post is dedicated to my husband; he met me before grad school and he's stayed with me, even though I talk like this now.**

Project Needles: Inventory

We have reached The Reckoning.

Step 1: print out handy-dandy list of knitting needles and crochet hooks already input in Ravelry.
Step 2: resist urge to procrastinate with data (SCATTER PLOT!)
Step 3: profit  fail miserably at Step 2.
Step 4: attempt to find the listed equipment anywhere in my house.

for funsies wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

After the first pass, there are four pairs of needles that I have no idea where they are AND four pairs of needles that I actually need to add to Ravelry for a full account of the facts.

The labelled resealable bags are leftovers from my old system of organization.  Notice that there are no bags for needles sized smaller than US5 -- at that time, I didn't own any AND I didn't anticipate falling in love with finer yarn and lace knitting!

All the straight needles in my collection were added prior to 2006, I believe.  Why stop buying straight needles?  Several reasons:

• they only work for flat knitting, which limits their reuse
• projects get heavier as they go along, and it's easier on the joints to keep the bulk of a project centralized (on a cable, for example) rather than side-to-side shifting
• I drop things.  A lot.  Drop a needle attached to a cable, it goes nowhere! Drop a straight needle--
  CLANG clink clink click-click-click roll.

Now to track down those missing needles... time to comb through the long-term Works In Progress.

Mot-less Monday: A Touch of Sparkle

Merrily We Roll Along

The sun is so bright this morning, I had to stand in its way just to get a clear shot of April's hearts so far.

I've got lots of non-knitting plans this weekend, but I realized that you haven't seen much (any?) of the progress I've made on the second Maple Leaf shawl:

It's about 80% done and I'm trying to weave in the ends as I go.  With all the breaking and reattaching involved in creating the corners, there are so. many. ends and it gets a little tricky with laceweight at this ethereal gauge.

Okay, yay then!  Off to sing now, bye!

Project Needles: This Title's a Little Corny

Yesterday Eskimimi, creator of Knit & Crochet Blog Week, announced the dates for 2014 and it was just the kick in the pants I needed to start talking again.  Last year I set some goals for myself (even followed through with some) and now we're back to it: Project Needles!

It's been 11-ish months since the last time I talked about Project Needles on the blog, but don't think I've been lazy since that time.  There has been a whole lot of thinking, let me tell you.  Such thinking, you guys.  About storage and whatnot.  Really!

Behold, some 1-gallon Garrett's Popcorn tins, left from the winter holidays, now empty of their original contents:

Before you judge me, they were gifts, okay?  And yes, there are more of them, thank you so much for pointing that out I thought we were friends gosh.

They look like paint cans, only super classy, and more importantly: popcorn cans often come with dividers to separate different flavors of deliciousness in one tin.  These did not (Chicago mix FTW!), but the idea was still planted in this brain of mine.  So the thought is: the dividers I make would be movable for additions etc., I could store each needle size separately while keeping like sizes near each other (oh yeah, I decided that was a priority, keeping all size US7s together regardless of needle type), and the handles make them infinitely portable.

Opinions?  I'm still looking for the proper way to fully clean out cheese-ish residue.

Auf Wiedersehen, März

Sweetie❤KNIT❤Heart [Rav] designed by Jackie Loewen

Sometimes I have a lot to say and sometimes I barely have enough to say to the people who share a house with me.
It's been a high-stress, low-words couple of weeks --
time to rock out and get in a different groove for April.

Quelle reprise!

Mot-less Monday: Sneak Peek

FO Friday: Mossy Annis

Quick, under the wire, it's still Friday!

A Mossy Glen by John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1864, public domain

Annis [Rav] by Susanna IC; knit with less than half a skein of madelinetosh tosh lace in colorway Filigree

MODS: I used size 8/0 “rainbow green” seed beads instead of nupps + above every row 5 S2KP, plus some short row mods

This is my second Annis (first blogged here), knit because I needed an emergency herbology-themed shawl for a medium-term project for imaginary points.  If you didn't get it the first time, don't bother re-reading, it's perfectly fine to think that sentence is insane.

Also it's really pretty.  And it makes my apartment smell mossay (points to anyone who can get that movie reference!).

Just a Quarter Green

It's hard to tell from the name Cyprienne, but I'm one-quarter Irish and have an extremely proud Irish-American grandmother...

bad lighting -- it's late

...so tonight I'm knitting on a mostly-kelly green shawl and watching Waking Ned Devine.  No beer, though.  It's Monday.  Red wine, obvi.

I must also take this opportunity to admit defeat -- finally and without regret -- with regard to the Big Orange Beaded Beast.  Because life's too short, y'all:

Giant Alpaca Monster at 41.13%

It is out of my house! It has moved to a better home! It will no longer lurk at me! My friend is doing me such a favor!  If I use exclamation points, I'll seem happy about it.

No but seriously, I'm going to knit this pattern again.  But with superwash.  Because it's the bomb.

Mot-less Monday: for Mini Toeshoes

 

 

FO: There Wulf. There Castle.

There are more shawls off the needles!  Do you want more shawls? TOO BAD here's a sweater:

Barnegenseren Ikke helt ribba [Rav] by Pinneguri; knit with 1.5 skeins of Knit Picks Stroll Tonal in Deep Waters and Canopy

I want to wear it, but I'm not four years old.

This is my first foray into bottom-up raglan sweaters and it was a learning experience to understand the basics of construction, so of course I decided to use a pattern written completely in Norwegian.  Here are some in-process shots:

 

I think my favorite part is the short-row purposely-long back section.  Kids move, you guys, and there's just no time to fiddle with a riding-up sweater.  NO TIME.

Also, the sleeves have thumb holes, because fun.  It's pretty great.

FO Friday: Mapocalypse

The sun-dappled leaf has grown into my second shawl for 2014!

Maple Leaf Knit Shawl [Rav] by Natalia @ Elfmoda; knit with half a skein of madelinetosh tosh lace in colorway Filigree

This is a new (paid) (non-charted) pattern with some kinks to work out, but I love love love the final result.  It's a leaf!  Made of yarn!

Forewarning: the pattern page lists the required yardage as 700-900 yards -- but my final shawl uses just under 500 yards and is blocked within an inch of its life.  So do with that what you will.

Thank you so much to my parents for my Christmas present yarn!!  There's enough left to make a-whole-nother shawl, so that's what I'm a-doin because it's gorgeous and I luff it.

Beads > Nupps

Nupps are not fun.  Nupps are like crazy elongated bobble stitches that require a lot of paying attention and having manual dexterity:

detail of Mariquita

And they are, as previously stated, not fun for me.  They are so not fun, I have basically stated "No New Nupps" as a rule for myself in all future knitting.  So what happens when Estonian lace comes a-knockin at your door?

Enter beads!  Beads are shiny!  Shiny = fun!

The act of beading is not as fun as having beads magically appear in your shawl, but it's a necessary evil.  The beads-instead-of-nupps for the Big Orange Beaded Beast are itsy-bitsy and I've been using a cut-up dental floss threader to add beads.  My newest WIP (pictured above) has slightly larger beads-instead-of-nupps, so I'm able to use the beading gadget method devised by my very clever friend.

Shawl #3 is on its way...  Shawl #2 will be on the blog tomorrow!

WIP Wednesday: Spinning My Wheels

So the Big Orange Beaded Beast: let's talk about it.

Here it sits, in excellent lighting, fibbing about its potential.  It's looked like this for a couple of weeks now, as I cannot bring myself to pick it back up.  There are so many other things to knit!  Things that don't have several beading rows looming large in my future!

This sort of project ennui doesn't usually hit me, especially with shawls.  Even with fake imaginary awesome points-based deadline-knitting goals set in stone, I just can't stay engaged with it.  The actual knitting on the object is fine (thanks to modern technology dust masks), it's what comes before that: the decision that, yes, I will pick this up and knit for at least three hours.  Because that's what it takes to make a dent in this thing.  It's not you, Orange Beast, it's me.  Confession: all last month, I actively mehhed in its general direction while gallivanting off with younger, sexier knits.

If you have had a similar experience with a project, please talk about it in the comments so I don't feel so much like an insensitive crafting philanderer.  There's rationalization in numbers.  :)

FO: The Cold Never Bothered Me Anyway

First shawl for 2014!

Light and Up [Rav] by Caroline Wiens; knit with a skein of Alina Shea Creations Frost Moon in colorway Glacier's Dreams

I won the yarn as a prize for my Dru Flies shawl!  It was hand dyed by a fellow member of the HPKCHC (so cool!); the yarn is also highly variegated and sparkly, so it took a good 6 months to figure out what to do with it.  A mainly-stockinette shawl with eyelets seems to be my go-to for a yarn with high-contrast variegation.

The design is supposed to have three tassels, BUT I'm not sure if I'll keep this shawl or make it a present AND I doubt my tassel-making ability right at this second, so I still have a bit of yarn for just-in-case... you know, if the universe demands tassels.

Mot-less Monday: Status of the Shawls

 

Dyeing to Show You More

More yarn dyeing happened and there was much rejoicing.  I was so intrigued by the results of the faux-gradient transitioning experiment that I decided to expand and do more SCIENCE!, creating a rainbow using overdyeing techniques with Red Heart Heart & Sole.

Fun SCIENCE! thing that happened: I was so anxious about making sure the yellow adhered to the yarn, I turned it gold... you know, for the Olympics.  Or something.

OPERATION RAINBOW GRADIENT

• four 5g miniskeins (fingering weight, 70% Wool, 30% Nylon); each miniskein is wound into a loose ball and soaked in hot water 20 min before dyeing
• each dye prep is 3 cups dye solution (3 parts water/1 part white vinegar) brought to boiling in a saucepan
• each dyed yarn is simmered until dye bath is exhausted, removed from heat and allowed sit 5 minutes, rinsed in hot water, draped into skein loops without burning hands or tangling (!), and allowed to dry overnight before skeining OR rewinding loosely in the opposite direction for overdyeing

step 1: yellow (2 plain): 2g lemonade Kool-Aid + an eensy pinch of orange + 1 bag of peach-flavored black tea steeped for 10 min; simmered for 30 minutes (gold!)
step 2: orange (1 plain, 1 half yellow): 1.5g orange Kool-Aid; simmered for 14 minutes (results are patchy... maybe do it for longer next time)
step 3: red (1 half orange): 1g tropical punch Kool-Aid + apple cider vinegar substituted in dye solution; simmered for 23 min (dye bath exhausted at 15 minutes, left longer for better adherence)
step 4: green (1 plain, 1 half yellow): rest of lemonade Kool-Aid + .5g ice blue raspberry lemonade + 1 bag of lemon & ginger herbal tea steeped for 6 min (this is obviously less than scientific - I would have used lemon-lime Kool-Aid if it had been stocked in any of the 4 stores I checked); simmered for 25 min (dye bath exhausted at 10 minutes, left longer for better adherence)
step 5: blue (1 half green): 1g ice blue raspberry lemonade Kool-Aid; simmered for 25 min (dye bath exhausted at 17 minutes, left longer for better adherence)

Now I just have to figure out something to knit with it.  Another beer bottle cozy, mayhaps?

Forget You, February

Sweetie❤KNIT❤Heart [Rav] designed by Jackie Loewen

I've been trying to be positive this year, but HOLY SCHMOLY February has been such a bad month for so many people I care about.

This sweater has buttons, but right now it's in an emotional time-out.  For reasons.

Baby Sophisticate [Rav] by Linden Down; knit with 2ish skeins of Knit Picks Merino Style (discontinued) in colorway Hawk

This beer bottle cozy was great for learning traveling jogless stripes:

 

Garter Coaster Beer Cozy [Rav] by Jessica Landers; knit with Red Heart Heart & Sole, self-dyed with Kool-Aid and paprika

More jogless striping on this goofy hat for Ms. Punkin Q. Pie + learning some new-to-me crochet stitches:

Troll [Rav] by Gabriela Widmer-Hanke; knit with half-skeins of Debbie Bliss Pure Cotton (discontinued) in colorways 39013 Pale Green and 39014 Spruce

And I made a tiny bunny for absolutely no reason.

Tiny Baby Bunnies [Rav] by Anna Hrachovec

More February FOs to be had... shawls and a sweater to follow...
but March, you better be good to us.