Have I mentioned that it’s too hot to knit? Or the humidity? Knitting mojo is low, so I busted out the ancient Kenmore 8 for some fun sewing time. Where fun involves lots of tension issues and ill fitting clothing.

A skirt! Not without a fight, but still, it’s wearable and I’m wearing it! I got the Sew What! Skirts book for a gift last year, and I finally busted it open and attempted, wait for it, a skirt!

I had all sorts of issues with using this book to create a skirt that fit well. My main complaint is that the book oversimplifies things a ton. There’s a spread of two pages that tells you how to draft a skirt pattern to your own measurements, and the rest of the book is devoted to example skirts that use the basic formula. I feel that the drafting portion could use more details. For example, the book tells you to add 2 to 4 inches of ease to your measurements for the pattern. Well, which is it, two or four inches? I ended up sewing a muslin that was too small, then I made this skirt too large, cutting it down until it fit.

I realized that this skirt was too large after I inserted the zipper. Speaking of the zipper - looking for instructions on inserting an invisible zipper? Don’t look in Sew What! Skirts for the answer, as they don’t cover it. The sew? i knit blog has an awesome tutorial on invisibly zippering, and I finally figured out how to use my plastic invisible zipper foot!

Back to the cutting down part. I really didn’t want to rip out my wonderfully invisible zipper, so I started cutting down the other side of the skirt, a half-inch at a time, until the skirt fit. Back at step one, I painstakingly lined up the fabric pattern so that it would be perfectly centered. However, cutting down the size of the skirt on one side made the pattern off center. It’s not terribly noticeable in these photos, but I cut enough to make it look like a big, two inch mistake.

Trimming fabric from the edge of the skirt wasn’t enough - the waist was too large and the zipper stuck out, making me look larger in the hips than I already am. So I ended up adding darts to the back of the skirt, which mostly fixed the fit issues. I also dropped the front of the waistband about an inch more than the pattern called for.

For the waistband, I followed the book’s directions for the facing and understitching. The facing instructions are great, but I didn’t feel that the understitching was enough to hold the facing down. I think that understitching would work perfectly if you had the weight of a full lining to keep things in place. Speaking of linings, you better look elsewhere on instructions on lining your skirt, the book doesn’t even mention it. I can’t remember when was last time I purchased a non-denim skirt that wasn’t lined.

I wouldn’t say that this is the most flattering skirt that I own, but it’s definitely wearable. If I were starting from scratch, I would just buy a skirt pattern, make a muslin, and modify the pattern for my short waisted torso.

Jumping for joy that this skirt is done!

What do knitters do when one of their kind is pregnant? Well, they knit! Last month, I decided to organize a little square-along for a fellow stitch and bitch-er, Sharron.

These are my squares! We knit everything in Berroco Comfort in the Lavendar Frost colorway. The full-blanket photos show the color best. The good: Soft and machine washable and dryable. The bad: it’s splitty as hell. So, so splitty.

Then my two lonely squares were then joined by 14 others. Square party! In alphabetical order, the hip to be square knitters were: Amy, Esther, Jenny, Katharine, Laura, Liz, Maya, Mo, Meredith, Sarah, and Susan. A few of these fine ladies knit two squares so that the blanket could be a beautiful 4×4 square.

There were a few requirements - the squares had to be 9 inches square, it had to be bordered by one stockinette stitch on all sides, and the ends were to be unwoven for seaming. After that, anything goes. Isn’t this a pretty awesome mix of textures? Yes!

The disadvantage of organizing something like this is that the organizer is in charge of seaming. First, I arranged the squares into columns based on width, seamed them into strips, and then mattress stitched the strips together. The biggest challenge was that each square was a different gauge, so I had to get the maths involved for perfect seaming. Lastly, I picked up stitches around the blanket and did a single crochet border.

Fin! The crochet border curled when I first worked it, but eventually flattened out after the blanket was washed. Sharron is very allergic to cats, so the blanket went into the washing machine and directly into a gift bag, without passing Go or returning into the fur-infested house.

I think she liked it!

Sorry about the whole abandonment thing, blog. I took a bit of a break to do some secret knitting, and then I wasn’t working on anything for a while, and then I became lazy. I blame summer. It’s do damn hot to do anything but sit around, drink margaritas, and bitch about humidity. Ugh, humidity. But! Now I can blog about the unbloggables, and I’ve even been knitting a bit. I started a sock.

Then abandoned it for another sock, which is still unphotographed.

I also started a new, non-crafty project - the 365 days, self-portrait one. I think it’s an interesting idea, and I’ve been at it for a little over a month. I’ve been maybe spending all of my blogging time on flickr these days. I’m planning on peppering this space with some of the 365 photos, so that we don’t have another of these long breaks apart.

I may be back, but I’m leaving again for a couple of weeks. Rob has a conference in Zurich and I’m going with him! I’m very excited to go far, far away, to a land that has (hopefully!) less humidity than Houston. However, I’m not leaving you out in the cold, blog! Time permitting, I’m going to write a couple of crafty posts that will magically appear while I’m away.

All of my knits have been in the unbloggable category these days, but I managed to create some bloggable drama.

Drama! I was happily knitting along on this pair of socks when I decided to change the rib pattern after starting the second sock. I made the executive decision to chop off the almost-completed first sock’s cuff, reknit the cuff in the new pattern, then graft the first sock back together again.

This was a bad idea on two counts. First, chopping off the cuff (well, snipping a stitch and unraveling a row to separate the two halves) was a pain in itself, because I ended up with way too few stitches on the needles! I was way off, by three or four stitches per DPN. I had to slowly unpick stitches for a couple of rows in order to get the correct stitch count. Then, I was left with the prospect of grafting in rib. The book I have gives instructions for 1×1 rib, and it was pretty difficult for me to extrapolate the instructions to my 2×2 rib.

I ended up knitting a rib swatch with a one-row stripe of a contrast color, and then figuring out the sequence of steps by following the path of the contrast strand. Hopefully these instructions will help someone in the same predicament!

Here’s how to graft 2×2 rib, where you chopped up your knitting so that one of the pieces is shifted by a half-stitch (ETA - this will also work if you provisionally cast one of the pieces). The normal 2×2 portion is the Lower instructions and the 1/2 stitch shifted portion is on the Upper. Start with the K2 part of the rib.

The stitch in parenthesis is the type of stitch on the needle. K-p denotes one of the half-shifted stitches in the Upper portion, although I wasn’t very consistent in labelling them in my notes. Always drop the first stitch in a pair.

(k) Lower - draw yarn through as if to K
(k) Lower - as if to P

(k) Upper - as if to P
(k) Upper - as if to K

(k) Lower - as if to K
(p) Lower - as if to K

(k) Upper - as if to K
(k-p) Upper - as if to P

(p) Lower - as if to P
(p) Lower - as if to K

(p) Upper - as if to K
(k) Upper - as if to P

(p) Lower - as if to P
(k) Lower - as if to P

(p-k) Upper - as if to P
(k) Upper - as if to K

I think I’ve figured out the reason why I’ve been such a lax blogger lately. I absolutely and totally procrastinate on writing the posts. Photos hang out on flickr for weeks before I can muster the motivation to sit down and write a couple of paragraphs. So! I’m going to try to post more and write less. Photos are the fun part, right?

Here’s my trip to Maryland last weekend in a series of pictures and minimal of pesky words. I managed to convince my friend Allison to accompany me, and it was mucho fun!

People! I’m the silly looking one in the green shirt. Everyone else is: Olga; Cristi; Lolly, Isel, and Jenna; Jess; Jody and Christy; and Christa (who recognized me from my mascot, Tissue-San!). We went to the Ravelry meetup in the afternoon, but didn’t stay terribly long. And go figure, I don’t have any photos of the people that we spent the most time with - Chris and NanC, fellow Texan fiber enthusiasts.

Sheepdogs! I want to get a sheepdog and watch it herd the cats. The sheep were hilarious. They were such sheep, all huddled together and generally clueless.

Baaaaaa! Heh.

DC! We skipped the Rav party to meet up another friend of mine in DC. Next year I will party with the knitters, next year. We did some touristy things on Sunday, including the adventure of finding street parking near the National Mall. Fun!

Of course, you want to see what I bought, right? I was quite restrained and spent a little over half my budget (where my budget was what I spent last year).

The last thing that I need is worsted-weight, scarf yarn, but the Brooks Farm Solana was irresistible. It’s a bit more purpley than it looks here, and I’m going to call the other color orange rather than brown, so that I can wear my future worsted-weight scarf with my black jacket.

Tess Super Sock and Baby. I heart this stuff, and I know I’ll use it. At this rate, I’ll never knit through all of my sock yarn.

Fiber roll call, from top to bottom (the links to go individual flickr photos):

Camel fiber from the Fold (we stopped by after all the crazy STR junkies left).
60/20/20 Angora/merino/silk batts from Wild Meadow Farms.
50/50 Merino/silk from Cloverleaf Farm.
BFL from Cloverleaf Farm.
70/30 Merino/tussah from Cloverleaf Farm.

As you can maybe tell, I really liked the Cloverleaf Farm booth. They had pretty awesome prices - the BFL was $10! I should have bought more. Now to get spinning!

Things that are dull:

1. Endless stockinette in black fingering-weight cotton.

2. Blogging about endless stockinette in black fingering-weight cotton.

I’m slowly phylloing my way to a completed sweater, but ugh! So much stockinette! I’m really trying to finish this one before I leave for Baltimore on Friday. There is one sleeve remaining, then the sweater gets a bath and a date with our dryer. My fingers will be crossed the whole time as I hope and pray that my row gauge really does shrink from 9 sts/inch to 11, as my swatch said it would. I’ve been doubting this the entire time I’ve knit the sweater, but swatches don’t lie, right? A side affect of the change in row gauge is that I get to knit the sweater 20% more than my desired length, which adds to the fun of endless, black, soul-sucking stockinette.

I did get a ton of knitting done over the weekend in the car to and from Austin! Our goal was to hit the Texas wine trail for some wine tasting, which was surprisingly tasty. We also celebrated Staci’s milestone birthday, had a tasty gospel brunch with Sarah (praise jesus for migas!), and visited with an old friend of Rob’s. Fun!

I’m endlessly amused by Texas’ love for, well, Texas, so I had to snap a photo of this as we left our hotel:

Um, maybe I kind of sort of want a Texas wafflemaker now. We’ll see how much money I end up spending on yarn this weekend.

I’ve been spinning like crazy lately! Knitting: meh. Spinning: whee! I’ve been practicing making a smooshy two ply yarn, with varied results.

I love Krista’s yarns and fiber. I have two more braids of her fiber in the stash, and they’re the prettiest things around!

I became very used to spinning really thin yarn when I made the Funky Carolina sock yarn, so this is practice in spinning something thicker. I did pretty well with this - it’s worsted weightish. And pretty. That paw is Silver, making her entrance. I can’t take photos of yarn without the kittehs getting involved.

So when I spin, I have a 50/50 chance of producing crap. This is crap. The fiber is great, more Pigeonroof Studios, but the spinning is awful. I tried to spin the singles tightly so that it would look extra smooshy when I plied it, and the singles had little corkscrews in them. I figured the coils would go away when I plied it (when some twist is removed from the singles), but they did not. Yuck.

This is the February shipment of the Hello Yarn fiber club. BFL is like buttah. I heart it greatly.

I think I’ve mastered the art of two plies, and I’m ready to move on to something else. Maybe adding a ply? Spinning a soft single? I bought a Spin Off magazine last week, and it’s full of cool techniques!

There’s also been some knitting - I picked up the Phyllo Yoked Pullover again. I’m going to MDSW in a couple of weeks (yay!), and I thought I could maybe finish this in time to wear in the cool MD weather. When Blackie isn’t sleeping on it, of course. I’m about halfway finished with the waist increases and then I’ve got both sleeves to knit. Can our brave knitter conquer miles of stockinette in fingering weight yarn? Stay tuned!

Blog, I’ve been neglecting you again. I blame freaking Lost - Rob and I are working our way through seasons 1-3, which always trumps internet time. I’m about four projects behind on updates (if you count handspun), so here’s a little two-for-one sock action.

Pattern: Leyburn Socks
Yarn: Lisa Souza Sock!, the wool/nylon blend one

I’m in a bit of a knitting funk these days, and the only thing I can manage to finish is socks. So socks it is! I’ve had this yarn in my stash forever, because I’ve been stumped as to what to make with it. I really believe that slip-stitch patterns are the perfect thing for variegated yarn. I’ve wanted to knit the Leyburn pattern for a while, too (I swatched it in some Koigu last year), and this is the perfect marriage of yarn and pattern!

I followed the pattern very loosely, as I paired the stitch pattern with a Widdershins-esque toe-up heel flap. My heel turn is a bit different from the Widdershins one, though - for some reason Widdershins heel turn is half the depth of a normal top-down heel flap. I also worked a Magic Cast On for the first time, and it was like magic! Much better than dealing with a short-row toe.

I changed around the Leyburn stitch counts, too - the foot is 34 instep stitches and 31 sole stitches, and leg was 64 stitches. I should have increased some stitches around the heel flap (or worked a longer flap), since the floats are a bit stretched out there.

This was the first time that I’ve used Lisa Souza yarns. I love the non-pooling dye job, but the yarn felt very nylony when I was knitting with it. She also sells a 100% merino sock yarn, which my pampered fingers demand, apparently. I also love the generous 4 ounce put up - I have a sizeable ball of yarn leftover.

I wrote this entire post without mentioning the obvious fraternal nature of the socks, which is really a testament to my diminishing anal retentiveness. It’s part of the beauty of handpainted yarns, right?

I’m in the minority here, but I really prefer knitting socks top-down! I hate, hate, hate working the sewn bindoff for toe-up socks, and I hate even more undoing the sewn bindoff because it’s too tight. Knitting socks toe-up also requires a bit more math before you start, since you need to know your heel depth and the number of stitches before the heel turn to figure out how many gusset increases that must be worked. I probably won’t be working any more toe-up socks, unless I’m really, really afraid of running out of yarn.

In keeping with the sock-a-month theme, the socks above were March’s pair, and these are April’s.

Pattern: None - just a 64 stitch top-down stockinette sock with an afterthought heel
Yarn: My handspun! 3 ply (navajo plied) from some Funky Carolina superwash merino in the Missed colorway

Handspun socks! There’s not much to say about these, except that I spun the yarn! I can’t believe that these turned out so well. The handspun was mostly fingering weight (I used a US 1.5 needle and got 8 stitches/inch), but was a bit thicker for the second sock’s cuff. I think that the thick portion was where I started out spinning, and the uber thin portion was toward the end. I can say that spinning worsted weight yarn goes much, much faster than a 3 ply sock yarn!

My first afterthought heel! I chose the afterthought heel so that the stripes wouldn’t be interrupted, and I heart it. Normal short-row heels don’t fit my massive instep very well, so I worked a few even rounds before decreases to give me some extra ease in that area. The instep stitches are still stretched out, so I’ll try more even rounds next time.

The right sock has very short stripes, so I ended up cutting the yarn in a couple of places on the left sock to keep the stripes from getting too out of control. I also knit the first sock on the short side, since I was afraid of running out of yarn, and I extended it an inch after the second sock was complete. I must have missed this lesson in Knitting 101, but if you pick out the cast on edge to frog the top ribbing, you’ll have to pick out every. single. stitch. No frogging from the cast on edge. I ended up snipping a stitch and cutting off the ribbing, knitting an extra inch, and then grafting the sock back together. I can’t even tell where the graft is, so yay!

Pattern: The charts are a modified version of the Intricate Stag Bag, the general size is sort of based on the We Call Them Pirates hat.
Yarn: Cherry Tree Hill Supersock in Tangerine, Dale of Norway Baby Ull in a charcoal grey

Every Thanksgiving, we visit Rob’s parents in a rural area of Pennsylvania. That’s right before hunting season begins, so we usually don hunter’s orange if we walk around outdoors. I’ve been wanting to make Rob’s dad a stranded hat with a deer motif for years, and when I saw the Intricate Stag Hat pattern, I was sold!

Rob’s parents were in town a couple of weeks ago, so the hat was quickly finished and gifted. It’s a bit large on Rob’s head, but it fits his dad’s 24" melon perfectly.

I modified the chart a bit by moving the trees away from the deer by a few stitches, creating some treetops, and adding a third tree. The pattern repeats on the back of the hat.

I used fingering weight yarns so that I could cram the whole scene onto the hat. I’ve used Dale of Norway Baby Ull before, and I’d use it again in a heartbeat, it’s soft like buttah. This was my first time using Cherry Tree Hill sock yarn - it’s quite tightly plied, but it blocked into a beautifully cohesive fabric.

The biggest challenge with this hat was tensioning the very long floats in the chart. The floats were extremely long at the very top of the hat, so I stopped the stranded knitting and duplicate stitched the top of the trees. I’ve never been much of a duplicate stitch fan, but it’s fairly invisible. It’s difficult for me to tell visually where the stranded knitting ends and the duplicate stitch begins, although the texture of the fabric changes at the duplicate stitch area.

A lining knit with the Baby Ull finished off the hat. Knitting the lining was the same amount of knitting as a sock, what a slog. I’ve offered Rob’s dad a liner replacement if the hat isn’t warm enough - it seemed fine when I was knitting it, but the hat is pretty thin. Overall, I’m happy with the hat, but I’m not yearning to struggle with any super long floats in the near future!