Thank God they only got into some acrylic. The rest of my stash has been carefully gone over and it looks like just a few skeins that were in a box on the floor had our little friends in them. Still threw those away lest the rest of the lot get contaminated.
This is my fault for not thinking of the fact that we’d had the damned things in the past…like several years ago past. Assumed they were gone. Forgot them entirely. Sigh.
Making a pair of house socks for my daughter with obnoxiously bright acrylic. They’re coming out great, though the color sequence left the heel black and seeing that is difficult as hell seeing as how I’m fifty and all lol. So I’ve got to pick a nice sunny day and get that heel turned!
So I have some of the pieces to Jewelled Star sitting here…I finished all the hexagons then ran out of steam:
For one, they aren’t overly hexagonal, which I thought might be a problem, and two, they are slightly different sizes which makes joining them miserable, and three I really, really don’t want to make the stars and have been putting it off for something like a year and a half. So I decided I’d just make something with the hexagons and immediately ran up against the problem of their irregularity. I have no idea at all what I’m going to do with the damned things.
I suppose it’s time to put them back in the naughty corner until I have a burst of inspiration. Hopefully I’ll figure out what to do with them, but it’s a relief to declare the blanket a failure. Some projects just never come together they way you think they will, and that’s ok.
I’ve got a few things on the needles/hook right now and I’m struggling a bit with not wanting to work on one of them. It’s funny, there are things that you just don’t know about a project until you’re well into it. There’s no substitute for experience I suppose.
So I went like gangbusters through the first foot or so of Grain. I somehow managed to make mistakes even in garter stitch, even with yarn overs for increases. This should have been excellent TV knitting and yet I was managing to make a mess. That bit eventually smoothed out, but then I learned something truly problematic:
Each row getting longer drives me insane. This is not a good thing if you want to knit shawls. And I don’t know why I want to knit a shawl. I have no use for one. My daughter says she loves them but doesn’t ever wear them. I certainly won’t. I don’t know any shawl-people.
So what do I do with this growing beast? Do you frog just because a project isn’t speaking to you anymore? Do you hide it in the closet? Do you power through?
This week has been all about Jewelled Star. I got obsessed with it and went from this:
To this:
Not too far to go until I start the star motifs. I’m so excited to see how this turns out!
And…that is absolutely all I’ve worked on this week. Sometimes it’s good to just work and work and work on something. And it’s always good to go where the work leads you.
I’ve been switching back and forth between knit and crochet recently and it seems to be doing funny things to my tension. I really noticed it when I finally went back to Jewelled Star—I had to drop down a hook size to get the same gauge because my crocheting had become so much looser. It’s a problem I’ve never had before but it was remedied easily enough. I’m thankful that that is all it took to fix the problem; it would have been a pain to start over.
I’m seeing it in my knitting, too. I made this pair of ugly worsted weight acrylic socks just to prove that I could indeed still make a sock (thank you Silver’s Sock Classes!) The bumps and distortions from changes in tension didn’t even wash out. I think I was so stressed about keeping everything on the needles that I was knitting way too tight (the challenge of the gusset decreases proves this out) and every time I started to loosen up I’d tighten up again. This left some unattractive ridges, but I got a lesson and two socks out of the deal, so it wasn’t so bad.
The other factor I’ve noticed is just life. A bad day will leave me gripping my yarn for dear life, until I remember that even the toughest project should be one that brings me some form of happiness. I’m going to resist the urge to turn this into a big ol’ metaphor, but you can easily see how life outside of the fiber arts and life within them can sometimes do a delicate dance and how tension affects tension.
May all your projects be tensioned just as you want them, and all your crafting be calm. 🙂
1. Grain: I’ve developed a love-hate relationship with the simplicity of this knit. It’s great TV knitting and I’ve gotten faster and smoother at cranking out knit stitch as a result of working on it, but there’s just so very far to go and I’m just so very bored. I don’t know what’s going to happen to this one.
2. Al’s Mitts: I’ve been having trouble getting these fingerless gloves done since I first started them. I’m not quite finished with one and making the second one seems daunting even though I think I’ve figured it out now. These are simple moss stitch crochet worked so the stretchiness encircles the and and wrist. They’re worked as a rectangle and will be seamed up the side. I don’t know why I’ve had trouble with them, but it’s like that sometimes I suppose.
3.Jewelled Star: Talk about love-hate relationships! From trying to get a reasonable assortment of colors to how much I don’t like making one of the motifs it’s fought me back the whole way. This one I plan to win, though. I’ve just got too much invested and too much love for the finished project. Not to mention that the process of deciding what colors to put together is an absolute joy.
There are a couple more but those are the big ones. They’re all driving me nuts in one way or another and probably need to be put in time out lol. Or maybe I need a smaller project or two that can be finished quickly to get my mojo back. We’ll see. But for now I’m chugging along and making some progress and is something that I’m really happy with.
So having returned to knitting with issues in my left hand I’m finding it super awkward to purl continental. I figured I could try knitting English and see if it was any smoother. The jury’s still out at this point, but it’s a possibility.
I did some random swatching to see if I could at least improve my purls when working them continental and that met with some success.
The biggest reason behind this is ribbing (which I haven’t practiced yet). I’m about to attempt socks again and I’m worried about getting them off to a good start (yes, I’ve settled on going cuff-down again). Tomorrow when I’m fresh I’m going to 2×2 my little heart out, assuming I can pull myself away from the day for a little while. It’s going to be a busy one.
I didn’t get a picture of the third skein, which was done as a sock blank. It was a purple gradient that turned out just lovely. She painted it instead of dipping/soaking/immersing it and it turned out that there were places the dye couldn’t reach. It also turned out that the white enhanced the whole thing. Happy accidents, right?
The orange was dyed by my oldest the sock knitter, and the tomato-y red was me. It’s going to be socks, because that’s what feels right. Talk about a long term project though.
I’ve been noodling around with this yarn for a day and I found what I want to do with it. It wants to be a bag. It needs to be a bag.
I’m working it up like this: with a 10 mm hook I chained until it was the right size for what I want to do with it. Sc in 2nd ch from hook, sc in each ch across, in last st 3 sc then sc in the other side of the chain back to the start. 2 sc in last ch. (3rd sc is what you started with). Work in a spiral with a sc in each sc around.
I haven’t decided on the strap construction yet.
Working with this yarn and hook combination is challenging my hands, but the yarn’s so bulky that it’s working up really fast. I’ve needed a smaller bag for a while so I’m excited to finish it.
I don’t know what to make of–or out of–this yarn! I got an order today and have been noodling around with it ever since. My 10 mm hook seems smaller than I might want, the inelastic nature tells me that something structural might be a good use, but it’s so pretty I just want to make something warm.
