Yarnification

Specifications: This is the outerwear corset pattern from StitchDiva. I used Paton’s Katrina in noir, probably about two or so skeins (I’m pretty sure I bought three skeins, and I have two partial/half-ish skeins left). K hooks for both the regular and Tunisian crochet. The pattern calls for I hooks and a yarn that works up at 19 sts to 4 inches, and I crochet tight and got a yarn that works up at 18 sts to 4 inches. It’s laced up with 3/8″ grosgrain ribbon with beads tied onto the ends.

I think this is the 30″ size, though it might be 32″. I don’t have the pattern with me today, so I’m not for sure which size I made. I know I made it small, though (I have something like a 33″ waist, or did when I measured last spring) because that Katrina is pretty stretchy, and the pattern warns about the corset stretching after it’s been worn anyhow. So I think that’s the 30″ size.

I know I always say this, but this isn’t a great photo. First off, you can see a bit of the boning—I missed that the first time around with the sewing (did lots of reinforcement after, too, just in case), and anyway I want to get a better photo, one that’s not in my living room and where I don’t look so glazed over, and submit it for the StitchDiva gallery, because I gather you get something nifty if she decides to use your photo, and this one isn’t going to cut it. It was well after midnight when I finally finished, and you can kinda tell, can’t you? (Thumbnail is clickable for full-size version.)

It occurred to me today that I have this craft blog thing that I sometimes write in. Go figure.

So…what I’ve been up to in the month-plus since I updated this thing:

I finished the wristwarmers. They are functional and not too awful looking. I got much better at knitting while I did them. They do not match, though. I suffered a recurrence of Inability To Follow Directions Syndrome, and the first one I did, the one in the photo in the last entry, has five rows of ribbing at the top, while the second one has the eight rows the pattern calls for. (I would’ve made them match had I only noticed earlier that I’d done the first one wrong.)

Then a few weeks ago I started up on the Irish hiking scarf pattern, and it’s going pretty well. I’m getting faster at this knitting thing. I dropped a stitch, it laddered its way down, and I fixed it with a crochet hook. You can’t even see where I messed up. There are mistakes, things I couldn’t bring myself to rip out twenty rows to fix, but I think it’s going to make a nice-looking scarf. It’s the same color as those wristwarmers, that autumn red, and I think I’m about 2/3 of the way through what I expect will be about a seven-foot scarf. I like long scarves.

And I finally spent my Knitpicks gift certificate! After having gotten this far into a halfway decent-looking scarf in worsted weight yarn, I went off my nut completely and decided that this means I can now knit lace. (You can laugh now. Go ahead.) I ordered their Janet lace shawl pattern and the yarn to make it, figuring that would be a good way to start since it uses a double strand and bigger needles. I also ordered yarn to make the candle flame shawl pattern, which is free, and which uses itty-bitty needles, so let’s hope I learn a thing or two while I’m making the Janet lace wrap.

And, with any luck, I will finish—finally!—that crochet corset thing. It is so close, but the remaining work to be done on it involves a needle and thread, and I am experiencing Major Dread. But I very much want to wear it on New Year’s Eve, so I’m trying to get over myself and get on with it.

I finished the first one of the pair and thus had to post a (blurry, and the yarn is a much darker red than it looks like) photo, but I’m inclined to pick that seam apart and have another go at it because I did not properly grok the mattress stitch.

It’s one repeat shorter than the pattern calls for—I didn’t really want something that would come halfway to my elbows, just something to keep my hands warm while I’m working at the ’puter. Single crochet cast-off because I have a fear of casting off the regular way (I remember what happened last time, and I didn’t have any needles that are a size or two bigger than these to keep it from happening again).

I downloaded the Irish hiker scarf pattern, too, and I think I’m going to make it with some more of this color. Red is my new favorite color.

After you all were so encouraging, I went and cast on for the Irish hiker pattern. I got through the first repeat and a half, decided it was a mess, and started again. I’m on the third repeat now:

Note that I made a major screwup on the last cable row. I was working merrily along when suddenly the needle holding the stitches materialized six inches to the left of my project, leaving me scrambling to get the stitches back on the needle before it all came apart. I was a little uncertain as to which direction the stitches go back on, and I think I guessed wrong.

Other than that? There are mistakes and messes here and there, but it’s coming along a lot better than I could have hoped for.

Well, I looked at those knitting videos. Guess what? I’ve been wrapping the yarn the wrong way ’round on purl stitches. So I’ve been doing something like combined knitting with the purls (you can go on ahead and read “something like combined knitting” to mean “doing it wrong”) while still using English knitting on the knits, and voilà! A giant mess!

I’m going to keep on with designing the ones in crochet, but I’m going to try the Irish Hiker pattern, too. I just got back from Joann’s, and they do not have cable needles (I’m sure such a thing exists; I’ve seen them before) but I vaguely recall that you can do cables with a spare needle—it sounds awkward to me, but then everything about knitting still feels awkward to me so it probably doesn’t matter—so I picked up a second, shorter set of the size needles I needed with my 40% off coupon. ($2! Woo! Not that I shoud be spending money on anything extra right now, but for $2 that was pretty cheap retail therapy.)

Now, someone please tell me that you really can do cables with an extra straight needle?

…and therefore I am making those fingerless gloves in crochet. I don’t have a pattern; I figure it can’t be that hard. I have two skeins of this fantastic mohair blend yarn, not sure what weight, maybe sock/fingering weight, maybe sport but I don’t think it’s that thick, and I’m working it up with a G hook (that would be an E or an F to the rest of you) in spiral rounds of hdc. Will figure out the parts that aren’t just a tube when I get to them. If I can do socks, then I can do this, right? I needed to do something, anyway. My hands hurt.

I’m still tempted to take my 40% off one item coupon and go to Joann’s and get a cable needle because the Irish Hiker wrist warmer pattern is calling to me.

But now, see, the problem here? Is that I can’t purl to save my life. Everything goes great till I start trying to purl, and suddenly the stitches are all squidged up together and twisted all around and everything’s getting way too tight and there are holes—holes!—appearing out of nowhere and I become filled with despair and frog the whole thing. I have downloaded a bunch of videos from knittinghelp.com but have not yet had the time to stare at them to figure out what I’m doing wrong.

Maybe this will make me feel better about knitting. It’s terribly cute, and it’s done on a circular needle with no purls to be found anywhere.

1) What is wrong with me that I think it’ll work out if I start a project on dpns at 1:00 AM? I need to stop doing this. It doesn’t matter that this is the only time when I have enough peace and quiet to get it started. It will not work.

2) Slipping knitwise is not the same thing as slipping purlwise. Perhaps if it weren’t for #1 above, I would’ve noticed that in the instructions first time through.

3) With regard to the car meme that’s popping up on everyone’s blogs (and which I am too lazy to fill out and post), has anyone actually had sex in a car since the age of seventeen or so? (The back seat of a Chevette = the most uncomfortable place I ever had sex. Hands down.)

Oh, wait, to answer my own question: I have. Oops. Almost forgot about that.

I’ve been using this for a while now for patterns I get online that I don’t want to either print right away or save in Word format (inevitably, if I save a pattern in Word, I will mess it up when I go to reopen it later and then spend ten minutes trying to get the formatting back the way it’s supposed to be). And I know I’ve seen a few people here and there wondering if there’s cheap PDF software for publishing patterns, too.

Anyway: PDFCreator. It’s free, and it works great. You can use it from any windows program—it gets installed as a printer driver, so you just go to print and pick the PDFCreator as your printer, and it’ll save whatever file you’ve got as a PDF file. It’s been working out really well for me. This is the first free one I’ve ever run across; everything else I’d seen that would do this was shareware and I am all about the free software, so I jumped on this when I saw the link in one of my newsletters…

Swiped from Deneen.

I’m a little puzzled about how this came out. I have never lived in the South, though I have lived with Southerners so maybe it rubbed off some. I don’t know anymore what sort of accent I have, really, but I’m pretty sure it’s not southern much.

(Kari? Marvie? What kind of accent do I really have?)

I don’t know why the little barzamathingies are not showing up–I’m pretty sure I pasted the right thing–but it was south 69%, midland 65%, and gradually getting smaller from there till it hit boston 25%, which is funny because that’s where I, y’know, learned to talk.

(Oh, I came back to add that the creepy house in the photo in the previous post? I do not live in that house. It is actually both condemned and abandoned. It’s next door to my house. Très scenic.)

I have some thread projects and other things that I keep meaning to finish up, but in the meantime all I seem to want to do is keep people warm.

Last week I was seized with an urge to find that gigantor ball of Joann’s rainbow bouclé that I bought for 40% off back in June with the intention of making a throw to keep in the car after freezing my ass off while stranded with a flat tire on a rainy night. (Turned out those shorts that seemed like such a good idea during the daytime were not so appropriate after nightfall and a thunderstorm. Also turned out that camo and black is in general not a good color scheme to be wearing in the dark when you are trying to get the attention of a tow truck driver who knows only that you are located somewhere within about five acres of parking lot.)

Anyway. Rainbow bouclé. 40% off. $5 blanket, woohoo! But I was distracted on the way by finding a few balls of leftover Wool-ease. They sang to me. They told me that they would make a lovely, warm scarf, and didn’t Vicki look like she could use a nice scarf? So I set off on a mission.

I really like the sedge stitch from that Harmony crochet book. It’s sorta bumply, like making half-shells or something. It works up really fast.

Clickable…It’s folded in quarters; all told it’s probably six feet or so.

Close up:

Now I’m working on that throw. Maybe that will satisfy my compulsion to keep people warm so I can finish my unfinished projects…