Leftie and Socks

Here are more projects I failed to write about contemporaneously.  My mom's birthday is on Christmas day.  It sucks having a birthday on a holiday.  Woe to person who gives a joint birthday/Christmas present or wraps a birthday present in Christmas paper.  So I knit two presents for my mom this year.

The first was Leftie by Martha Behm.

Isn't my mom cute?

This is a cool one because you actually start with just three stitches and add more each row.  It gives the shawl a slanted look.

Every tenth row, you make a leaf on the left edge.

I used fingering weight KnitPicks Chroma, which has a slow color shift.  I'm not sure this color way exists anymore, but you can see it goes from a dark pink all the way to bright orange.

The other thing I knit for my mom was a pair of socks.  The first pair I made was a little too small.  This pair I knit from the toe up (no pattern), so I knew they were going to fit perfectly.

The yarn was something on the fancier side, a merino/nylon blend I believe.  I can't for the life of me remember the brand.

Her feet seem happy, though.

Rainbow Shawl

A while back, the Yarn Harlot blogged about a shelf-striping yarn made especially for triangle shawls.  And I HAD. to. have. it!

The crazy-brilliant people at Caterpillar Green Yarns have dyed a yarn specifically for triangular shawls.  When you make a top down shawl, you start in the middle and work your way out to the longest edge.

Diagram from here.

That means that rows get longer and longer as you go.  You need more and more yarn to complete each row.  A stripe at the start of the shawl would take much less yarn than a stripe at the end of the shawl.  The stripes in typical self-striping yarn has equal length color repeats.  The stripes would get narrower and narrower.

Caterpillar Green has done the math to make each of the stripes the same width.

The purple stripe is the same width as the blue one at the bottom even though the blue stripe takes a lot more yarn to knit.

The colorway is Concrete and Tulips.  Pretty, right?  And so soft....

The pattern isn't really a pattern at all.

I just added increases at either edge and on both sides of the center stitch.  Nothing fancy.

Now if I can just figure out how to put it on.

Swants!

Swants = Sweater + Pants

From Urban Dictionary: "Swants occur when you transform a sweater, turn it upside down and seam it into a pair of pants. A Swants tutorial was posted and popularized by knitting designer Westknits."

Stephen West also made a video wearing his swants.

I got a crazy 80's sweater from Goodwill, and my friend and I set out to make a pair of swants.

They look a lot better than I thought they would.

And they are very comfy.  Thinking about adding elastic to the waistband.  

Everyone gets swants for Christmas this year?

What I've Been Up To

The Georgia Bar Exam was at the end of February.  And now I have a whole month of vacation before the next things begin.  So what have I been up to.

Reading "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing."  This woman is a little bonkers (she started studying the art of tidying at the age of 5).  Also, there are a few things that don't translate well into American culture (I know very few people who collect tea ceremony sets).  But I've become obsessed with cleaning the house in this 2-step process.  First, you get rid of anything that doesn't bring you happiness.  Then you organize everything.  My house is in no way cluttered or full of stuff, and yet I've gotten rid of soooooo much stuff.  Bags of clothing off to the consignment shop or Dress for Success!

I've also been lifting at Atlanta Barbell.  Yup, I'm a gym rat.

And knitting hats.  Lots of them.

This is the Wavy Moss Hat by Cedar Box Knits.  It's a cool pattern because you knit the first part in one direction and then pick up stitches along the edge of the cables for the rest of it.

The yarn in this first one is Misti Alpaca Hand Paint Chunky in color Pico.  The alpaca yarn got really drapey after I washed and blocked it.

I made another one out of Erika Knight Maxi in the color Geranium.  I had significantly less yarn than I really needed.

 It's 100% wool...you can see it doesn't have the drape.  And I knitted all of these on much bigger needles than the pattern called for.  That means I had to cast on fewer stitches and do fewer of the cable repeats.

What should I knit next?

Backdated Knitting

Looking at the blog archives, I realize I didn't post a single thing in 2013. I was knitting that whole time, I just never updated you all.

 One of the things I made was Funchal Moebius by Kate Davies.  Go ahead and click that link.  You will notice that it is a long, double-sided, two-color fair isle moebius scarf.  You can wrap it twice around your neck.

Mine doesn't look like that.

I did a few repeats of the pattern, said, "well that was fun" and decided it was a cowl.

I just put a little i-cord bind-off on both ends.

You can see how it was supposed to be a double-sided scarf instead of a cowl.  The colors are inverted on the opposite sides.

Wouldn't that be a pretty sweater pattern?  But if I get this tired of color-work this quickly I can't imagine doing a whole sweater like this. 

The Orchid Thief Shawl

What happens when you let a girl who is bad at taking pictures use a nice camera?  She still takes bad pictures.

But she feels fancy.

 

This is Orchid Thief by Ysolda Teague in a mystery hand-dyed yarn from Austin, Texas (I lost the ball band immediately after I got it).  Super well-written pattern like everything by Ysolda.

It was supposed to be a Christmas present for one of the mother-in-laws (yes, I am about to have two mother-in-laws), but I clearly didn't finish it in time.  Then she was out of town so I procrastinated until last night, when we were picking her up at the airport to finish it up and weave in the ends.

It is not nearly as long as I thought it would be.  But I still love the leaf motif (heh, that rhymes).  The edges ruffle.

They would probably ruffle more, but I ran out of yarn half way through my bind off (yikes!).  Because it was mystery yarn, had no idea what yardage I was working with.  I had to unpick my bound off stitches and do a yarnless bindoff instead.  It isn't a very stretchy edge, but I still think it makes for a pretty little scarf all the same....

...if you ignore the bad photography....

Shawls

I haven't shown a lot of finished items on here lately, but I swear they have been happening.  I've been thinking a lot about shawls the last couple weeks because I like to knit them for other people's special events.

For my Bestie's wedding a couple years ago, I made her a Euphrosyne shawl by Kirsten Kapur for her rehearsal dinner. She had told me she was going to carry lilies for her wedding. I thought if she was going to wear a white dress that a green shawl, the color of the stems, would be pretty.

I started with a skein of lace weight from A Verb For Keeping Warm. It's silk and merino, so light and squishy but a little bit shiny and very warm.  They hand-dye their yarn with natural ingredients, so the color really was "stem colored."

After about eighty million hours of knitting (and watching Bones on Netflix), I ended up with this.




I allowed it to block.  And I ended up with this:

These pictures were taken ages ago.  Sorry they are so dark!  Also, my blocking is lop-sided, isn't it?

 Yum!  Fun, easy to follow pattern, but lots of repeats of the same pattern over and over again.  Not sure if I will ever make another one of these.  But Bestie looked so happy trying it on!

So, now I am thinking about what kind of shawl I should make myself.  And should I make it in white or in a pretty color?  What weight of yarn?  What type of fiber?  Oh, the choices!

My Greatest Masterpiece So Far

I spent the last week working for the law school.  300 second-year students were learning how to put on trials in a week long program.  Lawyers came from around the country to teach them.  The first years, like me, worked the event as videographers, baliffs, and escorts to the several hundred high schoolers that served as jurors.   Throughout the week, I had LOTS of knitting time during cross examinations and closing arguments to finish my purple sweater.

While I've made other cool things in the past, sometimes they didn't fit perfectly, some didn't need to fit, and some where downright disastrous.  This time, I think I've made something to be proud of.

Awesome, right?  It fits like a glove (or rather, like a well-fitting sweater).  The only problem I can see is that the left sleeve appears to be slightly longer than the right.  Or my right arm is longer than the left...it is unclear. 

Both sleeves grew quite a bit in the washing anyway, so I think I will just redo the sleeve on the left one to make it the same length as the right.  Or I will just leave it as proof that it is handmade when people don't believe it isn't store bought.

Me celebrating the fact that everything I own is purple.

Booty shot.  Look at that fit!

One of my co-workers told me, "It looks like you bought it at a store."  I told him to bite me.  My million-hours-to-make sweater looked way better than store-bought.

Why I Haven't Been Doing My Homework

So, you're like, JoAnna hasn't been here for a while, so she must just be studying a lot lately, right?

You would be incorrect.  Instead I have been watching all of Downton Abbey and knitting this:

Wippoorwill Shawl by Carina Spencer

I would just like to say that, if for no other reason, I am pleased I went to law school just so that when Downton Abbey talks for an entire season about how terrible a fee entail is, I can turn smugly to the person sitting next to me on the bus and say, "let me drop a hot piece of info on you I learned in my property class" and give them the explanation of inheritability of estates they have been craving for the last week (because, you see, they were like me and hadn't discovered Downton Abbey on Netflix until last week and then spent ALL of their free time since catching up).

But I digress.

You really can't see how nice this shawl looks from so far away.  But I am including these pictures anyway because who doesn't want a solid picture of their booty up on the internet? 

Am I right?

For the knitters out there, the shawl really is symmetrical, it is just inexplicably.  off center in this pic.  This is a size medium.  There are way too many "make ones" in the pattern to make it a total joy to knit, but overall, pretty fun.  The yarn is all from local yarn shops from two different sides of the country.  The black is Star Castle Fiber Mill Alpaca Sock Yarn from So Much Yarn in Seattle, Washington.  Apparently the alpacas that donated their fleece to this skein were named Jengo and Gabrietta.  I am very grateful to them for making this shawl possible.  The orange is Starcroft Nash Island Fog Yarn in Lobster Bake colorway brought to me from Maine by someone who knows what kind of souvenirs I like best.

Ok, back to "How I Met Your Mother."

FO: An Annoying Hat

You should not take the following as complaint.  The pattern was easy enough (TBL's Lotus Hat: clear instructions, nice charts), I like the color of the yarn, Cascade 220 is nice to knit with.  Should have been a snap.

But no matter how closely I followed the pattern, I kept ending up with the wrong number of stitches.  No matter how many times I counted my stitches, I kept ending up with two or three extra little buggers at the end of every row (not that I let that stop me....I just fudged it and pretended like the pattern covered my laziness).  Not only that, I did an extra repeat of the pattern and it STILL ended up looking like an itty-bitty elf hat.

So instead of trekking to the North Pole to find a potential wearer, I ripped it back and tried again.

Success!

A hat.  This is right when I finished, before blocking.

This is after I gave it a bath.  Isn't it cool how different it looks?  How much prettier and well-organized?

Sent it off to its new owner last week.  Hopefully she likes the color blue...

Holiday Recap: Part 2

Almost everyone got knitted items for their gifts this year.  Mostly hats.

My mom, her friend, my sister, and Nate.

Nate's and my mom's friend's were my own basic hat pattern.  Nate's is from the same wool as My First Sweater.  My sister's hat was the best, I think.

The hat is Simpatico! by Grace Mrowicki...nice cables.  Cascade EcoWool in Black.  I added the tassels without knowing how so they are my own design

Janey is nuts.  My understanding is that this look (as well as words like "wicked" and "sick") means she likes the hat.

My mom has big hair, so I gave her a big hat to fit on top.

It's a Shroom hat like the other million I've made this year.

My mom's birthday is on the 25th, too.  I gave her My First Sweater.  She looks a heck of a lot better in it than I did.  I'm glad she will wear it more often than I would have.  The weather in Atlanta wasn't quite cold enough.

I was wearing my Never-Ending Sweater.  All kinds of wool happening this holiday.

Happy New Year!