Archives for August 2010

Or should that be wispier?

I am plugging away on the second half of the “shrug” portion of the Wispy Cardi. I’m hoping to finish this half tonight, so I can join the two halves and get going on picking up the stitches for the ribbed portion.

Or I may wind yarn for another project. You never know.

It seems as though I will have plenty of yarn left over after completing Wispy, so Lucy will get something knitted from it. I’m leaning towards knitting her a toy from it, something around the size of her beloved fuzzy rat that she can carry around. A little blanket is a nice idea, but I have my doubts that she would actually use it.

Knitgirllls on the Road!

Those of you in the DC area, a heads up. Leslie and Laura, the Knitgirllls are coming to visit me this weekend. I can’t wait! We have lots of fun stuff planned, and they will likely record a video cast while they are with me. Lucy will be the special guest star. 😉

And on Monday, Labor Day, we plan to hang out for a spell at fibre space in Old Town Alexandria. We will likely get there late morning and be there til early afternoon. Leslie and Laura are going home Monday evening, so we need to leave in time for me to take them to the airport.

So if you want to meet the Knitgirllls and hang out and knit, stop by!

Lucy can’t wait til this weekend — more people to cater to her every whim!

I did finish my Shetland Pi yesterday, and I blocked it. I won’t be posting pictures for a while — but I will post some after the last part goes live next Sunday.

My pi took just about 1400 yards of fingering weight yarn. Unblocked it measured 50″ across and after blocking it grew to a whopping 72″ across. I actually could have blocked it out a little bigger if I had the floor space. As it was, I had to move some furniture to block it to 72″.

So I spent some time knitting on my Wispy Cardi. Here is half of the “shrug” portion of it.

Well, try to picture what it looks like. You may recall that I have reported about Lucy’s love for this yarn. Clearly, she is still enamored.

Rather than do the whole thing in one piece as the pattern directs, I left the first half on a needle and cast on again for the second half. I’ll join them using a three-needle bind-off. One of my issues with designs that are knit sideways is that one cuff edge is cast-on and the other one is bound-off, and they will look a little different. And of course on one side the knitting goes up and the other side it goes down.

Lucy sez:

“That green thing is for me, right?”

It is time for Part Four of the Shetland Pi Shawl! Get your copy here (pdf format).

ETA: I uploaded a revised pattern as of 3:30pm on Sunday — there was an error in the written out instructions. The chart was correct. This is why I prefer writing patterns with charts only!

This is a really, really big helping of Pi: on the first round you increase to 576 stitches, and then work 51 rounds (48 of them in the lace pattern).

If you think you may run out of yarn, you can do 1 or 2 fewer repeats in this section. Each pattern repeat is 8 rounds.

There is a funky little maneuver in this pattern: in Round 5 you decrease 2 stitches in each of the 9-stitch pattern repeats, so you number of stitches changes in that round. But on Round 6 of each repeat you increase 2 stitches by knitting in the front and back of the 2 yarn-overs you worked in Round 5, so you will go back to the “normal” stitch count then.

Several of you have asked me why I am calling this a “Shetland” shawl. It is because most of the stitch patterns I am using are either traditional Shetland lace or based on traditional Shetland lace. I say “based on” because I didn’t look any of these up in a stitch dictionary before charting them. I just did it out of my head, depending on my memory. So some of them might be slightly different from a traditional Shetland stitch pattern.

And a couple of you have expressed concern that you might not be keeping up with the group with your knitting. Worry not — there is no time limit on this KAL, you can start it any time and finish it any time you like. As it happens, I have finished my pi apart from the bind-off, but of course I’ve had access to all the parts before you did. I wanted to be a little ahead so I could troubleshoot any problems.

Thanks for all your good wishes on the completion of my manuscript. I’ll talk again about this project when it is a bit further along in the process of turning it into a book. At this time I do not have a publication date but based on past experience, I’d say about a year from now.

And I did celebrate in the right order — I purchased these shoes before I had a margarita.

These are Mephisto shoes, the style is called “Raika.” I love Mephisto shoes — they are one of a very few brands that don’t hurt my feet. I got them from Zappos.com, my favorite shoe source.

Several of you thought I needed a new purse, but I just got one at the beginning of the month. 😉

Lucy sez:

“What the heck are you watching?”

My Shetland Pi is at the point where it is pretty freaking huge. On my 32″ needle it hangs down and forms a large bag. This is nice because I can keep my working yarn inside the pi-bag. Heck, I could put my lunch and a change of clothes in there. Seriously, a small child could get lost in there.

This, of course, makes it unsuitable as a commuter project. I just finished a stealth project I have been working on, so needed to cast on for a new commuter project. I did so this morning before leaving for work.

This is the start of the Wispy Cardi by Hannah Fettig. The yarn is Tempted Lovely Grrl, in the “Renewal” colorway.

This is the yarn that Lucy helped herself to last week. I noticed this morning that she is still loving it. As I was casting on before I left for work this morning, she was rubbing up against and loving on the ball of yarn. At one point she tried to pick it up and carry it off, but it was fortunately too heavy for her to manage.

But I can see I’m going to have to put this project away when I am not working on it. No leaving it lying around on the couch, unguarded. I am thinking Miss Lucy needs a toy knit from the leftovers, though.

The pattern calls for a size 6 needle. I got gauge with a size 5, not surprisingly, because I’m using a heavier yarn. My cardi won’t be quite as wispy, but that’s fine with me. 🙂

Back to Pi

Your next serving of Pi, Part Four, will be available on Sunday. And it is a huge honking slice of pi, let me tell you! See you all then.

Lucy can’t hardly wait!

And here is the highlight of my day today:

Done and sent to my publisher. I think I deserve a celebratory margarita. Or possibly a celebratory pair of shoes.

As I think I mentioned, I am a bit ahead of you all in the Shetland Pi KAL — I just started Part five last night.

Part five is the edging pattern and it can be easily modifed to add or subtract rounds depending on how your yarn is holding out. But as written, there are 20 rounds of lace. At the point I started Part five, I was well into my third skein of Madelinetosh Merino Light — like three-quarters the way through the skein. I will be dipping into my fourth skein.

This yarn has 440 yards per skein, so 1320 yards in three skeins. I estimated 1400 yards for the fingering weight version of the pi so I am right on track here.

If you have less than 1400 yards of fingering weight yarn, don’t worry.  You can do one less repeat of Part Four, and fewer rounds in Part five and you’ll be just fine and the shawl will be plenty big.

Joining Yarn

Linda M. commented:

I was wondering how you are going to join your yarn.  I am using the same yarn and am not sure what to do since it is single ply and superwash.

What I do — and did for this yarn — is to hold both the old and new yarn together for a few stitches and knit them with both yarns. It works great and is not noticeable after you knit those double-yarn stitches. And you don’t have to worry about your join coming undone.

Lucy is resting up for another attack on her fuzzy rat.