Silver Threads

Silver Threads is still an active, updated blog, but it's an active, updated blog on another platform. I have moved this blog over to WordPress. You may find it at silvernthreads.wordpress.com. Hope to see you there!

August is not the best time to keep a crafting blog up-to-date. August is both the month in which state fair entries are due and the month of my family reunion. It's not that I'm not crafting; I just don't have time to write about it. This year, I managed to combine both sources of pressure in my life by hauling state fair entries along with me to the reunion. This was going to be the only way I could finish them in time since I was going to be out of town up until the last 24 hours in which entries could be turned in. Plus, knitting would be a fine way to pass the hours of a six-hour bus ride across the Upper Midwest. So here's all that's been finished in the last month.

The Lexington vest has been in my life since 2008. This is the project that taught me that I have no patience for intarsia. As you can see, the design is simple enough, but I instantly lost interest in wrapping the yarns on each and every row. It ended up being shoved from one place to another in my apartment, and I would work on it in occasional bursts of guilt before dropping it again and gratefully finding something else to work on. I unearthed it again in early August and impulsively vowed to get it done for this year's fair (there was still half of the front left, plus finishing). Chances are, if I hadn't set myself that deadline, it could have languished in my closet for another three years. I was just using the fair as motivation for this project; I didn't seriously expect it to win anything. I probably figured if I didn't like it, no one else would like it either. And then much to my surprise, it took third in its category.

I've called this the Sandy Smoke Ring, mostly to distinguish it from the pink version that I knitted last fall. It didn't place at the fair, but that's all right. I have no idea what I'll wear it with, but I still like it. I am, however, getting increasingly frustrated with Mini Mochi. This was the yarn that had such extreme color variation within the same dye lot when I used the Babyface colorway for the Multidirectional Diagonal Scarf. This time around, the colors were quietly restrained—hallelujah! However, the second ball was wound in the opposite direction of the first. Luckily I realized that before starting to knit with it and having the top third of the cowl with colors going in a reverse sequence. Even ripping out as simple a lace pattern as Feather and Fan would've been a nasty challenge.





The Peaceful Pastels Afghan placed second in the round crocheted afghans division.













What with working in a chilly office, I'm developing quite an appreciation for wraps, throws, afghans, shawls, and anything else that can make work bearable. This is the second time I've made this lap blanket. This time around, I went down a needle size, from 11 to 10½. At this tighter gauge, I was able to knit the entire blanket as the designer intended without running out of yarn, and the blanket just feels better at this gauge. I'm still taken enough with the yarn to want to make another one, so now I'm figuring that this one will stay home (I already gave it a workout at a strongly air-conditioned Starbucks a couple of nights ago) and I'll make another one for the office.

The class was great. The teacher was cool. The mawata was . . . well, not my favorite stuff in the world to work with.

Things started out well. We students sat around, waiting for a few latecomers to show up. We compared our various bags of mawata and tried to decide which of the three colorways was the best (in addition to mine, which I have dubbed "Easter Explosion," there was a hot pink and purple one and a light green and blue one). We learned that we'd all decided to make cowls when we figured out what we were doing. Conversation and laughter flowed.

The teacher, who clearly loved working with mawata, explained it well. The process is pretty easy to describe, although it doesn't really click until you see it done and try it yourself. You separate out a single layer from one of the silk caps. Poking a hole in the center, you then begin to stretch the silk out into a loop, and continue stretching it until it's as thin as you want to knit with. I gather this is like drafting for spinning. Indeed, the teacher assured us that if we got the hang of this, we'd be ready to learn to spin, since silk is one of the more difficult fibers to draft and by comparison, we'd find it easy to draft wool. (Not listening, not listening: really don't want to pick up another all-consuming craft right now!). Then take your newly-crafted yarn and knit with it. The trick seems to be in drafting the silk evenly enough to make a strand that's relatively consistent in its thickness.

I did not find drafting the mawata to be much fun. I was mostly prepared for the silk to catch on my hands. But pulling the cap open seemed to require a lot more muscle than it should. By the end of the class, not only did my hands ache, but they were itching—was I suddenly allergic to silk? (Or perhaps to the super-bright dyes or the chemicals that had dissolved the original silkworm cocoon.) Meanwhile, the other students were zooming along. Their gauge swatches grew and looked relatively even; mine, made from a yarn that went from bulky to fingering within inches, looked dreadful. It was interesting to see how the near-fluorescent colorways became softer pastels as the silk was drafted, however. This will be something to keep in mind if I find myself shopping for mawata or roving, that I'll need to buy brighter stuff than common sense says I'll ever use.

And so we headed home, to see what we could draft and knit by next week's class. Me, I headed home to coat my hands in lotion. It's amazing that something so soft can be so harsh.

Despite never being sure what my gauge was, despite not having the right crochet hook on hand, and despite having to rip the entire afghan out when I was only four rounds from the end and start over, I have finished the Peaceful Pastels Afghan:



I love how the colors blend together. You start with seven "pure" colors: white, yellow, peach, pink, lavender, blue, and green. Holding two strands together throughout, you blend the colors by working rounds of two different colors in between the rounds of two strands of the same color.

I'd been admiring this kit for about four years before I finally broke down and bought it this spring. I kept telling myself that I had no need for a baby blanket. But I couldn't forget the colors, and every time a new Mary Maxim catalog came, I found myself quickly skimming through the baby section to look at the photo again and reassure myself they hadn't discontinued it. After a while, it did sink it that maybe I should just make the afghan and stop obsessing over it.

I was also hesitant to take on this project because of the yarn. I'd been able to touch it in local stores, and it felt more artificial than many unnatural fibers do. I've also learned it's not all that much fun to work with. It split constantly, even though the 8.00 mm crochet hook I finally ended up using could hardly be described as sharp. Now that it's done, it snags on the band to my wristwatch. On the bright side, the colors really do blend nicely, it survived its first trip through the washer and dryer without incident, and the slightly bouclé texture does an excellent job of hiding those little snags.

This pattern does make a baby blanket to be taken seriously. Although the stated diameter on the pattern is 50", mine comes in at 52". Since those two strands of yarn you use are each DK-weight, the finished afghan is thick and doesn't have as much drape as many baby blankets do. But since I'm planning on using this as an adult blanket on the couch, it's probably good that it's not all that delicate.

Signs that you might be off-gauge with your current project:

• The kit you're making it from came with two skeins of blue yarn. You've used somewhat more than half of one skein.
• Although it's a baby blanket, the fabric has the drape of a throw rug.
• The pattern swears that the diameter of the finished blanket is 50 inches. Remember that you have decided that there's an error somewhere and the finished diameter will be closer to 44 inches. Still, the fact that the four remaining rounds of the blanket cannot possibly bring it up to even 44 inches should give you pause.

Looks like my 8.00 mm hook will be getting a workout after all.

 I went to Yarnover 2011 today and had a good time. Okay, that's a bit brief for a blog post. Here's a bit more detail:

The weather was wretched for much of the day: cold rain, nonstop. In other words, perfect weather for staying inside and knitting. We got there pretty early (Yarnover starts at 7:45 AM, and we were ahead of schedule). No bags as giveaway prizes this year, for a change, but I'm now the happy owner of a sterling silver needle sizer necklace. I'm likely to actually wear this; I wonder if any knitters will recognize it or if any nonknitters will ask about it.

Yarnover 2011 started off with a brief history of the event from Peg Torgerson, who got the whole thing going 25 years ago. Next, Merike Saarniit gave the keynote address. Kudos to anyone who manages a speech when recovering from laryngitis, and Saarniit's talk about Estonian knitting traditions and the emphasis on invention and originality was interesting, although it may have been cut short to preserve her voice for the classes she was due to teach.

Off to the classes. I was able to get into my first-choice classes this year, "Knit to Flatter and Fit" with Sally Melville and "Reversible Twined Knit Scarf" with Laura Farson. I'm happy when I can find some half-day classes to attend. I've really enjoyed the all-day classes I've attended in the past, and I've learned some majorly important things from them, but they need stamina, and I can't always come up with enough for them. My attention span is better suited to half-day classes.

Sally Melville's fit class takes a small act of courage to participate in. There's no knitting homework for this class, but you have to come up with a silhouette of your body to study. (Many thanks to suncat , who kindly did my entire silhouette for me and had the necessary experience to do it right the first time.) It's going to take me a while to digest everything I learned in this class. I'd done some reading on fitting clothing prior to this class, but unlike what I'd read, Sally emphasized clothing length (where do your sweaters end on your body?) and width (what sweater shapes set off straight pants vs. an A-line skirt?). I'm not going to rework any of my current sweaters in progress, but I'll be putting plenty of thought into the next sweater I start. 

Okay, the auditorium this morning had been crowded, but I really got a feel for the large attendance at lunch. While we're in no danger of outgrowing Hopkins High School anytime soon, we did overrun the cafeteria. The line to pick up boxed lunches stretched out the door and well back into the vendors' area, and Suncat and I were lucky to find anywhere to sit. Of course, sitting with perfect strangers is a great way to hear other people's takes on Yarnover and learn about classes you didn't take.

I wasn't sure what to expect in Laura Farson's class. I'd gotten so worked up about getting that silhouette made that this class sort of slipped to the back of my mind. So I'm pleased to report that I now know what twined knitting is and can produce very simple forms of it. I'm sure it's warm, but I think the way the yarn wraps around itself as you knit it might drive me crazy if I were trying any project larger than a short scarf. Well, we'll see what I think of the technique by the end of the scarf. The scarf itself is only about 4 inches long right now, but it's turning out prettier than I expected and is nicely soft. It's always a good sign when you want to finish the sample project you start in a class. (Photos to follow when I finish it.)

Perhaps you've noticed I've barely mentioned the vendors. They were there and they were plentiful. Beautiful yarns of all sorts of fibers abounded. One vendor even brought along an angora rabbit which was adorable, although I was worried that I would stress it out if I petted it (I settled for petting the angora yarn near its basket). I managed to get away from the vendors unscathed, however. I wasn't actively looking for yarn for a project, and on top of that, as Suncat has pointed out, vendors at shows tend to bring lots of different kinds of yarn, but not much of any one yarn or color. I like to knit larger projects, like sweaters or afghans, so there's often just not enough yarn available for the things I'd want to make. But if you're a sock or shawl knitter, you'd probably have to save room in your car for all the yarn you could haul home.

And that was that for this year. But with Sally Melville at the Minnesota Knitters Guild meeting next week and Shepherds' Harvest/Llama Magic next weekend, might I be in danger of overdosing on knitting goodness?

 

And here we are at the last day of Knitting and Crochet Blog Week 2011.

Day seven: 3rd April. Your knitting and crochet time.
I'd say there are roughly four sets of circumstances in which I knit or crochet. (I do crochet. There's just no evidence of it on this blog yet.)

1. First thing in the morning, before going to work. I have never taken well to rolling out of bed, racing through the morning preparations, gulping down breakfast, and flinging myself out the door to the bus. Really, there should be time each morning for your brain and body to come to terms with being awake. For that purpose, I wake up earlier than I actually need to in order to fit some knitting time in. I usually can't manage more than a row or two in the time I have, but it suffices. Since my knitting pretty much lives permanently on the sofa, all I need do is move from bedroom to living room, and there it is, waiting for me and ready to go. It's just me and the knitting: no TV, no radio, no music. The drawback, of course, is that knitting is addictive. I tend to tell myself I can squeeze in just one more row before getting ready for work. So what happens is that I peacefully knit too long, then race, gulp, and fling.


2. With friends. I figure, crafting people, regardless of the specific crafts involved, attract each other. At least in my case, if my friends were gathered together, and each had brought her preferred craft, probably no one would be standing off to the side with empty hands. So not surprisingly, I end up knitting and crocheting in the company of friends a lot. When we're together at my place, it's very cozy. Fit two people on the sofa (it's a loveseat with delusions of sofa-hood: I'm not squeezing a third person on it), put one in the glider, and after that, it's a challenge to figure out what chairs will be suitable for prolonged sitting and crafting. Of course there's food involved. I like to bake (crafting with ingredients!), so this is an opportunity to try new recipes out without having to eat sixteen servings of whatever I make myself. Others bring whatever catches their eye at the grocery store. General good feelings prevail.
   
   I'd count knitting gatherings here too. My LYS hosts a Knit Night twice a month, and I go more often than not. Pack up the knitting, head down the street, knit and converse for a couple of hours surrounded by yarn (!), and head home: there are certainly worse ways to spend a Friday night.
   
   In both these cases, simple to medium-difficulty knitting is a must. If I ever tackle that Fair Isle sweater I described yesterday, it is unlikely to make an appearance at either of these gatherings save to show off my progress.


3. During conferences and webinars. Really, how can you get through these things without something to keep your hands busy? And I'm not a doodler, so yarn it is. Depending on the conference, there may be several other knitters present and it's a natural lead-in for networking ("What are you working on?"). As for webinars, well, on the Internet, no one can tell you're knitting if there's no webcam involved. Again, simple knitting is a must.


4. While watching TV. Grad school has pretty much eliminated #4 for the time being, although I do occasionally squeeze in a DVD and knit while watching it. This is like first-thing-in-the-morning knitting, except, obviously, with the TV going. It just doesn't work with subtitled programs; I end up having to replay scenes because I start looking at the knitting too much and miss entire passages of dialogue.

A time I will not knit: while on the bus. For the amount of time I spend on the bus, I'd love to knit there, but it hasn't worked out for me. I now have an incomplete set of DPNs because a severely bouncing bus caused me to break one when I was knitting a sock. Plus, I loathe stopping in the middle of a row. So I either have to do so anyway when I reach my stop (bleah) or gauge how long it takes me to do a row and quit knitting when there isn't enough time before my stop to complete one, leaving me possibly with blocks of ride and nothing to do (eek!). In winter, most of my coats have Velcro at the wrists and down the front. I leave it to your imaginations to picture just what happens when I try to knit while wearing one of these coats.

Oddly, crochet works pretty well on the bus. I don't have nearly the same middle-of-row anxiety with crochet that I do with knitting, probably because it's lots harder to drop stitches. Crochet hooks are more durable than fine DPNs. It still can't be exposed to Velcro any more than knitting can, but it works for summer projects.

 

The Day 5 topic was more than I could deal with this evening. However, the organizer was nice enough to provide a wildcard topic that could be used instead.

Wildcard – Embellish the story
I confess to being downright boring when it comes to embellishments. In the same way that I tend to knit in monochrome, I just don't feel called to combine materials or techniques with my knitting.

Knitters are famous, at least among themselves, for not liking to sew. Now many embellishments require some sewing, and for a moment, I hoped there'd be a connection. See? I don't do the fancy stuff because it would involve sewing, I would say sadly, and my listener would nod in sympathetic understanding. However, my dislike of many embellishments is a dislike of the finished effect, not the effort required to apply it. As many of us say about certain disliked foods, it's a texture thing. Don't be looking to me to add bits of woven fabric to my knitted sweaters—it's just too radical.

Embellishments are becoming a bit of a challenge to find, much less use. For my local situation, I blame this on one of the national chains, which about a year ago moved to the suburbs, giving up their store in my part of town. I hardly ever used their fabrics, but I would start there when looking for buttons for a new sweater. i still have options, but those options have become more upscale: yarn stores, high-end fabric stores. The buttons are lovelier, and the staff far more helpful, but unfortunately the prices are correspondingly higher. With one sweater, I could have bought almost two more balls of yarn for that sweater with the money I spent to buy its buttons—eek!

I'm tempted to only make pullovers from now on. If I don't make cardigans, I don't have to find buttons, zippers, or anything else to close them. But as my skills have matured, cardigans are less forbidding as projects than they used to be. Surely one should be trying to challenge oneself with one's skills, not stay simple just to avoid having to shop for buttons?

Whoa. It's Knitting and Crocheting Blog Week. In fact, it's the Second Annual Knitting and Crocheting Blog Week. Which, yes, I learned about three days into said week. On the theory of better late than never—and I'm not saying I'm even going to do the next post, much less catch up on the ones I missed—I thought I'd try today's topic and see what happens.

Day Three: 30th March. Tidy mind, tidy stitches.

How do you keep your yarn wrangling organised? It seems like an easy to answer question at first, but in fact organisation exists on many levels. Maybe you are truly not organised at all, in which case I am personally daring you to try and photograph your stash in whatever locations you can find the individual skeins. However, if you are organised, blog about an aspect of that organisation process, whether that be a particularly neat and tidy knitting bag, a decorative display of your crochet hooks, your organised stash or your project and stash pages on Ravelry.

Tips: Many people use their blogs partly as an organisational tool – logging and cataloguing projects and newly attained skills, projects and modifications. Did you bare this in mind when you began blogging?

Oh, let me talk about organizing my stash. Actually, there are two kinds of organization involved here: organization of the yarn itself and organization of information about the yarn. My yarn organization is fairly minimal. I've piled most of my stash into six large plastic tubs and shoved them into the closet. There is absolutely no organization within the tubs themselves. I crammed yarn into each tub until it threatened to keep the lid from closing, at which point I moved to the next tub. The tubs are translucent, allowing me a rough guess as to what hides within, but usually I have to haul the tubs out of the closet to even see all their sides, much less open one to see what I packed at its heart. Luckily yarn is light. And the tubs fit so nicely into the closet, it's almost as if they were designed for each other.

That said, I miss my old "system." The tubs came into my life with my current apartment. My last apartment had some unusual architecture in the bedroom that favored yarn stashing. Imagine two narrow closets that are next to each other, but are separated by a three-foot gap. A previous tenant had hung one of those coated wire shelves between the two closets about six feet off the ground. I slid my chest of drawers in between the closets—it was a great little nook for it—but I wasn't sure what to do with the shelf itself. With too much weight on it, it would tear free, so even if I could keep books from falling between the wires, they'd be too heavy. (Yes, my first instinct upon seeing a shelf is to put books on it.) I can't remember what prompted me to put a bit of yarn up there, but there's no such thing as putting a bit of yarn up anywhere; soon my stash filled the shelf all the way to the ceiling. The sides of the closets kept the yarn from falling to either side, and as long as I was careful not to leave an empty space in the center, it didn't often fall forward either. And all of this meant that I could just lie in bed and admire my stash in comfort—and see just about every yarn I owned. But then I moved to a far more conventional apartment, and while I appreciate many things about it, including a closet I can hide the stash in, it just doesn't have the quirkiness or charm of the previous system.

Since the yarn itself is barely organized, organizing the information about it is crucial. Alas, I still haven't found the perfect system. Right now, I use Ravelry's database—not quite perfect, but pretty darn good. I think I've got every one of my yarns listed, and I love how once you match your yarn to something in the database, most of the information is filled in for you. Where Ravelry falls through for me is the visual aspect. I don't have the patience to photograph most of my yarn, and without visuals, the names of the yarns mean almost nothing to me.

Prior to Ravelry, the best system I'd managed was a three-ring binder system marketed by G'Ann Zieger. Here you wrote key details of each yarn on a small card and inserted the card in a clear vinyl pocket along with a snippet of the yarn. Sure, if you had a variegated yarn you were only getting a bit of its color, but on the other hand, you had quick access to texture without having to hunt through your stash for the original balls, and it was a fairly compact system. But as you may guess, a woman who can't make herself take a bunch of pictures and upload them isn't going to be all that consistent about updating little cards, and so that binder was getting out of date even before I joined Ravelry.

So there I am, still trying to find the perfect system on both ends of the problem. But it's fun experimenting with new systems or figuring out new ways to use old systems.

This has not been a month of vast knitting progress. Of course, if I commit to a project the size of an afghan, even a small afghan, this really shouldn't be much of a surprise. And I'm back in school, and I'm caught in a proficiency exam, and I've been distracted by several non-knitting projects, and yes, after a while, there just isn't much time for knitting. Even so, I do fit in a few rows every now and then.

This is one motif for my current project. At this writing, I'm about a third of the way through the afghan, but haven't felt like taking a more up-to-date photo of the project. Just imagine it surrounded by 178 siblings and you'll get the idea. The yarn is Boku, one of the variegated yarns, so some of those other motifs are in completely different colors. By this point, the fraction of the afghan is big enough to keep the tops of my legs warm while knitting on it, which is good given that it's still chilly at this time of year.