February » 2011 » Untangling Knots

Put A Bird On It!

I did some scary bad knitting after I finished my sweater. I was going to share that today, but it is Monday and I am sick so sharing nice looking seemed a bit more pleasant to me. Long story short, I knit a really ugly coffee cup sleeve and the next day I was bit horrified by it so I wanted to knit a more attractive one.

Living in Lancaster has caused me to seriously cut back on my coffee consumption because there aren’t elventy billion places with amazing coffee within walking distance like there is in Tacoma. There are actually zero places that I have found on campus that have good coffee. For that reason my poor sleeve will have to go unmodeled.

I just doodled up a chart on Illustrator with birds on tree branches. I knit it using leftovers from my sweater. I quite like it, but the entire time I was working on it I kept thinking of this:

Alice in Wonderland

It’s done! And it now occurs to me that I never really explained what it was for other than that it was for school. I’m taking Literature and Film and we predominately are looking at adaptations. Since the course critiques and discusses adaptations, my Prof. said it was good for us to try it for ourselves and see what it is like. We have to adapt one of the texts that we have read in the course. We are allowed to use whatever medium we want to do the project and I went with knitting. Someone baked a layer cake as their adaptation one year so I don’t think my sweater is too crazy. We also have to write an essay that accompanies our piece that explains what we did and says a little something about adaptation.

Anyways, it’s pretty much done. I still have to weave in the blue ends on the sleeves and seams, but I wanted to get some pictures while there was light. I think I’m going to end up turning it in as is. I’m a bit afraid to block it because it has been so damp that I’m worried that it won’t be completely dry by Monday morning when it is due. I’d rather have some wonky stitches than turn in something damp. I don’t think anyone who is marking it will really notice. I also am skipping a detail that I wanted to add because of time. I had wanted to embroider “eat” on all the little cakes, but I haven’t started the essay portion so I don’t think it the embroidery is going to happen. Then there’s the fact that I have zero embroidery skills… It probably would look pretty terrible.

If I did it again there are a ton of things that I would change. I’d use less positive ease. I’d move the intarsia down a few inches so it looked a bit more balanced. I’d make Alice’s skirt a different shade of blue so it doesn’t look like her legs just magically appear out of a weird squiggly white line. If I had a ton of time to do this again, I’d dye my own colors so I could get her legs right. I’d also use a finer weight yarn so I could make the intarsia more refined.

It’s not my favorite project ever, but it didn’t turn out completely ugly either. I think that if I wasn’t working on a deadline I would like it better. There is something about deadline knitting that makes me hate whatever I’m working on towards the end.

ETA: I forgot to talk about the yarn! I used Knit Picks Wool of the Andes on 5mm needles. Knit Picks was really the only way I could do this project. I looked into using Cascade 220 because they have a nice range of colors, but the cost of buying 220 yards of every single color I needed (around $150) made the project go out of my price range. Since Knit Picks Wool of the Andes comes in 110 yard balls (and because it was Knit Picks), it was much cheaper (under $70) and I have a lot less excess yarn leftover. It’s not the softest yarn in the world and I’m not confident that it will wear amazingly, but it was pleasant to work with. In case you wear wondering, I had to plan ahead and coordinate my order with my Christmas break so it got to my parents’ house in California at the same time I did. I brought it back to England with me.

Yarn

The yarn for my next knitting project came in the mail today. It’s taunting me because I still have to finish my Alice sweater. It’s due next Monday and I only have 1/4 of the second sleeve done. There is something about deadline knitting that makes me lose all interest in a project. I really just want to play with the new stuff.

It’s alright that I can’t dive right into it in this case. I’ve read that this yarn bleeds badly so I need to unwind the red into hanks and give it a wash to get out some of the excess dye. I’ve had decent luck doing this with Cascade 220. It is a sort of obnoxious step, but it is worth it to prevent bleeding when I have a red and white combo.

Some Quick DIY

Back in the days before Ravelry, I got my crafty socialization via LiveJournal communities. A particular favorite of mine was called Tshirt Surgery. It was place to share modified shirts and I loved it so much. That was my craft of choice for a really long time. I used to buy shirts from the thrift store, cut them up, and sew them into something completely different. I got good at it and the shirts were pretty unrecognizable once I was done with them.

I did a little bit of t-shirt surgery the other night, but it wasn’t nearly as elaborate as what I used to do. I’m doing a 15 hour bar crawl tomorrow that my college puts on and we have t-shirts to go with it. It needed a bit of a jazzing up, but my supplies are pretty limited here. I have no sewing machine. I have no black thread. I have no white thread. Luckily I managed to scrounge up some stuff to work with.

The first thing I did was to cut out the neckline so it was a bit more flattering. After that I needed to reinforce it. If you’ve ever cut a t-shirt, you’ll know that they stretch like mad if you don’t reinforce them. So I went digging through my craft supplies only to discover that I didn’t have any white or black thread to reinforce the edge with. All I could find was some off white thread and that would have looked a bit weird. I also found my a black DK weight swatch that I had knit out of a finely plied alpaca/silk blend. I decided to frog that and divide the plies up in half. I got out a sewing needle that had a big enough eye and used the black yarn to whip stitch around the neckline. That actually looked decent on its own, but I had a bunch of yarn left so I used a 4 mm crochet hook to slip stitch and chain around the whip stitched neckline. On that foundation I worked the scallops. I think they’re pretty cute.

When I was done with the neckline, I just cuffed the sleeves and used a few tiny stitches with the off white thread to keep them in place. I like wearing my shirt sleeves cuffed like this. I’m not sure why I’ve never sewn them in place before.

It was a pretty quick project and it just made my shirt a little more attractive. Doing this made me want to do some more complex modifications again. My collection of band tees are in luck, though. They’re all in a different country than I am.

My New Friends

I went for a walk last Saturday and these guys were quite friendly. They were looking so photogenic and kept staring at me. To be honest, I actually think they were more interested in the noise my shutter made than me.

My New Friends

Sleeve #1

I finally have a sleeve!!!!!!! I had to knit the sleeve cap four or fives times. The first time I wanted to try making puffy sleeves because I had been thinking about how one might go about doing seamless puffy sleeves. They turned out MASSIVE. They were ridiculously puffy. After that I tried to do just normal sleeve caps, but my math was lying to me (or I did it wrong) and I was picking up too many stitches so they kept turning out big and loose and ugly. I finally got it right and started to get some progress on my sleeves.

I measured the length wrong so I ended up having to rip back and shorten it a bit. I had underestimated how deep my armpit was when I measured. That wasn’t too horrible of a mistake. Now that I have made all of my mistakes on the first sleeve, the second should go pretty quickly without me having to rip back a million times.

The only thing that is bugging me is that I don’t think I like worsted weight wool sleeves with a little positive ease like this. I probably should have figured this out by now. I just don’t especially like the way it wrinkles when I move because the folds are so bulky. I need to remember that my sleeves need to be over the top large like on my Veronica, made of something that drapes better like finer weight wool or an alpaca blend, or they need to have zero or negative ease.

Apologies for having to use my flash. The pictures were just too dark without it.

Spring Fever

Yesterday was so bright and sunny and nice that I found myself craving bright colors. I got some flowers for my room to make it feel a bit more like spring.

I had to buy some sunglasses when I was out because I didn’t bring any to England with me. I love when it is sunny, but I’m pretty wimpy about it. I always cake on the sunscreen and I have to wear sunglasses or I’m constantly squinting.

Today was back to the usual gloom (which I also really enjoy), but I’m stuck in spring mode. All I can think about are bright colors and lightweight knits. I have materials for another worsted weight long sleeve sweater here with me, but I keep thinking of spring knits instead. I’ve already ordered some yarn for a rather mad warm weather project that I’ve been plotting. The odds of it turning out wearable are low, but I can’t get it out of my head so I’m going to go for it.

Progress has been slow on my Alice sweater hence the lack of updates. I’ve been averaging three novels a week for my courses and that just eats into my knitting (and blogging) time. I’ve only knit half a sleeve in the past week. Ugh. I’m going to try to at least finish that sleeve this weekend. I’ve got about two weeks left to finish this sweater and write a paper on it. I’m hoping to not be up late weaving ends in the night before it is due.

A Video!

I was going through old pictures and I found some frighteningly embarrassing videos of me and my friends being cool 17 year olds. I completely forgot that my point and shoot could do video. It was then that I remembered that my DSLR also can do video. I had to Google “Nikon D90 How to Record Video”, but I figured out how to do it!

So I present to you the update on my intarsia sweater as a video! Exciting, right?

Vlog 1 from Andi Satterlund on Vimeo.

Summary for people who can’t watch: I talk about the colors, how this version is less lumpy, and that I forgot to do shoulder shaping.