Mining the NaBlogPoMo site for blog fodder worked so well yesterday, let’s try again today. Let’s tweak the prompt for November 14 and look at the question, “Have you faced fears in your knitting and overcome them?”
Honestly… no. I can’t think of any time I’ve been afraid to try something with yarn and needles. Lace doesn’t scare me, obviously. Ditto cables, charts, colorwork – none of it ever gave me pause. Steeks don’t even scare me.
I’m not sure why this is, but I suspect it may have to do in part with being a mostly self-taught knitter. I learned from books. With no other knitters around me, I didn’t pick up others’ fears. I never feared steeks because no-one – in particular, no book – ever implied that I should fear them.
Being a fan of swatching helps too, no doubt. Whenever I’ve been unsure of whether I understood a technique correctly or could execute it to my satisfaction, I’ve worked a swatch. It doesn’t take long. And swatching answers all kinds of questions! Is this yarn really machine-washable? Knit a swatch, throw it in the wash, and see what happens. Is this yarn too slippery for a crocheted steek? Knit a swatch, get out the scissors, and see what happens. Will I enjoy working this lace/cabled/brioche stitch pattern? Knit a swatch, and see what happens.
Have you ever overcome fear in your knitting? Better yet: have you ever sidestepped fear, neatly avoiding it while others stepped right in it? How’d you do it? I’d love to know – I’d love it if we could spread a mentality of fearlessness in the knitting world.
In search of blog fodder today, I checked out the NaBloPoMo writing prompts. The one for November 16 caught my eye: “What is the moment that you leave childhood and enter adulthood?” (Some say it’s when you buy a vacuum cleaner.)
This is a knitting blog, though, so let’s turn the question around: “What is the moment you know you’ve become a knitter?”
I figure it’s when you see a sweater or a hat or some such – while standing in a checkout line, or watching TV, or whatever – and think to yourself, “I could knit that.” Bonus points for mentally tallying how you’d tweak the design: “Oh, but I’d lengthen the sleeves, and pick a couple colors more similar to each other for a subtler effect, and …”
What do you figure marks the point of becoming a knitter?
As promised, a hexipuff photo:
hexipuff #1
Here are the vital stats: Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock mediumweight, using 3.25 mm needles. Started with Judy’s Magic Cast-on, increased via paired M1L and M1R, decreased via paired k2tog and ssk, and finished with grafting.
You can see it’s a little short and squat, no doubt a row gauge issue. And it has very smooth, rounded edges, thanks to the shaping techniques I chose.
As you’d expect from a process knitter like me, knitting this one little sample did not quench my hexipuff curiosity. Rather, it’s only serving to fuel the fire. Now I want to try other shaping techniques. What combination of cast-on, increase, decrease, and bind-off would give me a hexipuff with sharp, clearly delineated edges? Can I get a matching edge around all sides? What’s the best way to get a true hexagon?
I suspect the answer to all these questions is to increase from the center out to the edges, purl one round, then decrease back to the center on the other side. (I know I’ve seen it done on Ravelry, but I can’t find proof at the moment.) But would this make stuffing the hexipuff too fiddly for words? Time will tell.
I’m pleased to report that my last Nuna swatch has finally finished drying, and it measures 23½ sts per 4". I figure that’s close enough to the target of 24: if my Swirl turns out a tad larger than intended, so be it. Now all that stands in the way of diving into the Swirl is finishing the Estonian shawl – I don’t dare start another large project before the current one is done.
BTW, for those of you who may have been wondering, I always think of needle sizes in terms of millimeters, not US sizing. The habit stems from having learned to knit while an exchange student in Chile, and then getting really into knitting several years later while living in Australia – two places where all needles were sized in metric, of course. If someone says “US size 6” or some such to me, I have to mentally translate to the metric sizing. It’s just as well, I figure. Metric sizing makes so much more sense than US sizing – I mean, what genius picked the sequence “10, 10½, 11, 13” over “10, 11, 12, 13”?
After fulfilling my MDKR on my shawl today, what did I do?
- A. Keep going on the shawl.
- B. Start winding skeins for my next Swirl.
- C. Make progress on any other WIP.
- D. None of the above.
Yup, you guessed it: D, none of the above. Instead of turning my attention to any WIP, I succumbed to startitis and cast on for a hexipuff. Chalk it up to curiosity. Expect some pix when I have something more substantial to show you, and better light in which to photograph it.
In other news, this morning Patternfish announced the winner of its 10,000th Design Competition. Congrats to Cecily Glowick for winning with her Elizabeth design!
Speaking of never having enough yarn or time to play with it, look what came in the mail yesterday:
more yarn!
Yup, it’s a bag of Mirasol Nuna, destined to become a Swirl. I’ve done enough swatching to know that its blend of wool, silk, and bamboo has just the right balance of bounce, drape, and sheen. The bag of 10 skeins seems awfully small for completing a Swirl… but then again, I have to remind myself that a sweater’s worth of DK-weight doesn’t take up nearly as much room as a sweater’s worth of aran-weight.
The new skeins are a slightly different color than the skein I had been swatching, but that’s okay:
Prussian Blue rather than Myrtle
Not okay is the fact that I’m still swatching to find the right needle size. Swatching Nuna on 3.75 mm needles gave me 22 sts per 4", swatching String Theory Selku on 3.5 mm needles gave me 23 sts per 4"… and swatching Nuna again on 3.25 mm gave me a whopping 26 sts per 4". Go figure. As you can see above, on days when I’ve given my Estonian shawl enough attention, I’m trying Nuna with 3.5 mm needles; we’ll see if that gets me close enough to the target of 24 sts per 4". If it doesn’t… eh, I’ll probably go ahead with 3.5 mm needles anyway, and finagle the final Swirl to desired size via assertive blocking. Am I asking for it, do you think?
The new Knitcircus is out – have you read it yet? Some of my favorite designs include the Confection Hat and the French Roast Cardi: each is a smart blend of texture and construction. And Sandrilene has a sweet cable detail along its neck opening.
Then there are the yarn reviews. I’d like to fondle a skein of the Sun Valley Fiber Farm’s single-ply fingering, and I’m reminded that I have a bit of Sincere Sheep yarn that I’ve been meaning to play with… which is worse, not enough yarn, or not enough time to play with that yarn?
A couple weeks back I talked about the notion that you can get a looser cast-on edge by casting on over larger needles or over two needles held together. Nope, not true, I said, not for a long-tail cast-on: you get big, sloppy stitches but the tail yarn limits the cast-on edge’s ability to spread out:
big, sloppy stitches shown in dark green;
too-tight tail yarn shown in orange
But get rid of the tail yarn, and the picture changes. Casting on over larger needles does give you a looser cast-on edge if you use a single-strand cast-on technique, such as the knitted cast-on or the backward-loop (aka e-wrap or half-hitch) cast-on. Consider the backward-loop cast-on:
needles of normal size...
...produce a reasonable cast-on edge
larger needles...
...produce a looser cast-on edge
Larger needles produce looser loops, but that’s kind of the point here. That extra yarn translates into more “give” along your cast-on edge.
Bottom line: whether using larger needles will give you a looser cast-on edge depends on the type of cast-on. Single-strand cast-ons? Yup. Two-strand, like the long-tail cast-on? Not so much.
XRX has posted the class schedule for Stitches South – and, jeez, it’s jam-packed again. I’m looking forward to teaching some of my favorite classes. Two of ’em are new to Stitches South: Bind-off Bonanza and Socktastic Stitch Patterns.
Registration opens at 9am Central time on the 22nd, so you have a whole week to figure out what classes you want to take. Me? I’m not teaching on Sunday afternoon, so I have that one chance to take a class. Maybe it’ll be Edie’s Join Together class.
Crazed
By JC | November 14, 2011
All last night I kept dreaming* of “hexipuffs,” the little hexagon shaped units of the beekeeper’s quilt. How I’d knit them. How I’d stuff them. How I’d arrange the colors. How I’d connect them together. Apparently, my subconscious really, really wants to knit some hexipuffs.
My conscious, however, really, really rejects the idea of knitting a gazillion little units, stuffing them individually, and sewing them into a quilt. Nuh-uh. Not gonna happen.
But what about a trivet, or a hot pad? Could be fun. Small enough to be sane, big enough to get the hexipuff craze out of my head… hopefully.
Apparently I’m not alone in my aversion to hundreds of hexipuffs. Ravelers have found lots of uses for small numbers of hexipuffs: seat cushions, key fobs, Christmas ornaments, pillow covers, and more. Me, I think I’ll stick with the hot pad.
*I’m not the only person that dreams of knitting, am I?