Yarnification

I opened Bloglines just now and saw this:

I think I’ve gotten a little behind on things.

A while back, I saw Deneen and Megan—and probably other folks but have lost track—post their high school yearbook photos along with a current photo. I thought that was a pretty cool idea but at the time I was still very much not unpacked from the move and couldn’t tell where anything non-essential was.

I got my computer set up recently—yay! The laptop I was using was driving me nuts. (It overheats. It is a total drama queen.) I also found a box with photos since then, and since I now have a computer that isn’t driving me crazy, I thought I’d go ahead and scan the photo.

(Maybe this way you won’t notice that I have no crafty things to talk about today.)

This was maybe sixteen years ago. I think it will be obvious to anyone who knows me at all that my sister did my hair and the makeup and that my ma forced me to wear that pink sweater. I have never in my entire life willingly worn anything pink.

Not too long ago:

I don’t think I look that much different apart from looking, well, sixteen years older. And a little chubbier than I was back then, though I’ve lost most of the weight I gained in my 20′s. I kinda want my long hair back looking at that photo, but in reality it never looked that good when I fixed it myself and was a nuisance to take care of.

Speaking of socks, look at the UFO I found while unpacking (the colors are washed out by the flash, so you’ll have to use your imagination there—it was sort of a spur of the moment, middle of the night kind of thing):

Ooh, that matches my skirt ever so well, doesn’t it? Kit-Kat is, as always, supervising.

This sock is why I am now so intent making starting second socks immediately after the first sock. I crocheted this sock in, oh, 2005? Somewhere around there. That’s how long I’d had the yarn I made the olive stripe socks with recently—I bought two 100g skeins of it on a trip to Pittsburgh. I have this one sock and most of the cuff ribbing of the second sock. Sometime last year I picked it up again and had major gauge issues with the ribbing to the point where I was no longer sure I was using the same hook I’d originally used, though the hook was tucked in with the unfinished project. I put it away again, unable to face frogging those sixty or so rows of back-loop single crochet and starting again. That is a lot of sc right there.

But one of my Summer of Socks goals, now that I’ve unearthed this project, is to finish these socks. When I first found them today I thought for a while about frogging the whole thing, finished sock and all, and making a new pair of knit socks out of them. But then I put the finished sock on, and I just can’t frog it. It fits perfectly, it’s incredibly comfortable, and I love the contrast between the lengthwise striping on the cuff and the horizontal striping in the rest of the sock. (It’s the In Your Shoes ankle sock pattern at Crochet Me, except that I used hdc for everything except the cuff and changed the cuff sizing to fit me better.)

I’ll have to monkey around with different hooks for a while to get the gauge right to keep going with the ribbing, but I definitely want to finish these rather than frog them.

My current pair of knit socks is moving along at my usual less-than-speedy pace. I keep getting faster at knitting, but I’m still nowhere near as fast at it as I am at crochet. (I’ve also been slowed down this week by emergency oral surgery. I’m on the mend now, but I was in a bit of a fog for a few days what with not eating solid food and all.) I turned the heel of the first sock yesterday and am working on the foot now.

In technobabble-ish news, the email address I used to have on the sidebar (yarnification at daisywreath.net) is now defunct. It was attracting a lot of spam. That was never an address that I gave out much, but if that’s the only email address you have for me, please note that there’s a new one over there in the sidebar. (It forwards to my regular address. I always try to do that with addresses I put on things like this blog so that when the spambots inevitably get hold of it, I can just kill the old address and set up a new one.) I’d also like to point out here that Project Honeypot has a great script that will help obscure your email address to keep it from being harvested by spambots. It’s what I used for the email address over there, though I tinkered with it to make it wrap instead of being on one very long line. For one thing, it’s a very long address and looked silly at first, and for another I just have to tinker with things. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t do that.

Y’know, it occurred to me earlier that I haven’t put any of my finished object photos into the gallery for ages, possibly since I moved the blog to its current home early this year. I’m thinking about setting up a new gallery altogether and starting fresh, just import the photos I like best from the old gallery and then just keep going with new things. There are a lot of slightly bizarre projects in the old gallery.

The beginnings of my first pair of Summer of Socks socks:

The yarn is Marks & Kattens Clown, which is a cotton/wool blend, in colorway #1688, lots of pretty sky blues. Happy happy.

I have not given up on the candle flame shawl, which is in time-out at the moment, or the Seraphina.

I still haven’t decided just what to do about the Seraphina, though. I got lots of great advice in the comments to the last post. The two main trains of thought there were:

• keep going till I ran out of yarn (which I did very shortly after finishing the row I was on when I posted that photo) and then either block it to see how big it ended up or finish it off with black

or

• frog it while consoling myself with alcoholic beverages and possibly having a good cry while I’m at it, then redo the shawl using one strand of the red and purple and a second strand of black

I’m torn. On the one hand, I think it would look pretty cool finished off with black, and Knitpicks has some fingering weight black yarn that’s exactly double the weight of the laceweight at 220yd/50g and which is very inexpensive (budget being a major consideration here).

But for slightly more money and aggravation (okay, well, a lot more aggravation) I could frog what I’ve done so far, get some black laceweight for not very much more money than the fingering weight would cost, and be more sure of getting a result I’d be happy with. I’m still thinking it over.

Another project I have in mind, now that I’m unpacked enough that in the foreseeable future I might be able to dig out the sewing machine, involves the background to that photo up there. The only problem about losing fifty pounds, it turns out, is that clothes you love don’t fit you anymore. I sent a lot of things to Goodwill before I moved that were in good shape but just too big for me, but I kept some things that I really loved with an eye toward doing something or other with them. That B-52′s t-shirt that I cut up and refashioned recently was one of them, and another was a whole pile of peasant skirts. The sock is lying on one of those skirts, which I’m wearing today while everything else is in the wash. I can’t really wear it out of the house, though, because it looks a bit silly. It’s very big, and I have the waist pinned with safety pins to make it stay up because I can’t pull the drawstring tight enough otherwise.

These skirts—I really love these skirts. Now, most of them came from thrift shops and I didn’t pay more than a couple of dollars apiece for them, but they have all this great fabric in them. I keep thinking over what I want to do. I could, say, take the waistband off this skirt, remove an entire gore from it, and make a new waistband, and it would probably fit perfectly after that, with enough material taken out to line a bag or something clever like that. Or I could just use it as raw fabric and make a cute top (or two) or a completely different skirt out if it. I don’t know. But I want to do something with it and the other skirts I’ve saved.

I’m starting to have a few concerns about the Seraphina, mainly that I’m going to run out of yarn any time now and it still isn’t as big as I’d like it to be, about 17″ from the center top to the bottom point and something like 38″ or 39″ across the top edge.

There’s also, for lack of a better word, a thing going on where the yarn flashes in places. Mostly the two separate strands mellow out the intensity of the colors, but in places there will be a stretch where the red lines up with the red and the dark purple lines up with the dark purple, and I can’t decide whether I like that or not. It’s happened once so far, for about four rows, and is starting again on the row I’m working on. I think I’m okay with it as long as it ends up looking as though I meant it to look like that, but I’m not sure.

Anyway, see for yourself before I babble about it some more. See how little yarn I have left?

I am of two minds here. I could:

• Keep going and see what happens. It might just turn out to be big enough after blocking, and though I probably will not have anywhere near enough yarn to edge across the top, it will probably look okay without edging. The flashing might look like I meant for that to happen. Qué sera, sera. I do not have to exercise obsessive perfectionism over everything I make.

or

• Frog it. Untangle and re-ball all that yarn (440 yards in each ball, folks), find some inexpensive black laceweight and start over again, using one strand of this yarn and one strand of black. This would fix both the running out of yarn and the flashing color problem.

Either way, this yarn is going to be a Seraphina. I love the colors, I love this pattern, and one way or the other I’ll get it to work. I’ll be sitting over here thinking on it for a while. I might crochet till I run out of yarn before I make a decision—if I frog, it’ll be a nightmare to get it all untangled and balled up, but that’s true whether I start from where I am right now or wait until the yarn runs out.

Do you still love me even though I talk about knitting all the time and haven’t crocheted anything in months? How about if I quit talking about the knitting for a bit and show you this swatch?

I became frustrated with the lace shawl—okay, I know I was going to talk about crochet, but this is how I got to the crocheting. This knitting project is kicking my ass. I’ve never had any real trouble following complex crochet patterns, but I can’t seem to follow the instructions for this knitting pattern. I broke it down into knitting-for-dummies, putting individual line instructions on their own index cards, no more than three things to a line and each in a different color of ink to make it easier to keep track of where I was. That made me feel ten different kinds of stupid, but it worked. For a while. Right now I’m having difficulty figuring out what went wrong in the last row I did, and it has been put aside until I can return to it with a more Zen-like approach. Or at least without breaking out in hives.

In the meantime, I need something to do here. While I caught up reading blogs, I saw Sara say the magic word: Seraphina. I’ve made a Seraphina shawl before, and I absolutely love it. It is not summer-weight, though. It’s made out of very warm and somewhat heavy yarn.

I immediately co-opted the red-and-purple laceweight that was intended for the Janet lace shawl. (I’m thinking the Janet shawl will be done in the a solid-color laceweight that doesn’t have a project intended for it yet. And yes, that is an awful lot of laceweight yarn lying around the house for someone who has not successfully managed to knit any lace yet.) I started swatching with an F hook but came up with something so stiff I could probably have sided a house with it—I’m using two strands held together so the colors blend better, but didn’t take that into account when I first started swatching. I kept going up until I got to a K hook, and the bit up there is the beginnings of the shawl.

Y’know, I think my knitting problem is at least 50% due to my listening to that voice in my head that keeps suggesting that maybe this is a bit more than I can handle. Every time I screw up that shawl and start over again, I start to believe it a little bit more. But you know what? The directions for the first several rows on the Seraphina shawl, the part before you get the pattern repeat memorized, are just as complicated as this knitting pattern, and I’m not having problems with that. So it can’t be that I just can’t follow the directions.

The other 50% of the problem? A combination of things. I never noticed this until fairly recently, but I tend to mix up the directions in my head. I keep reading certain sections of the Seraphina pattern, for example, as “ch2, dc, ch2″ when it’s actually “dc, ch2, dc”. I’m good enough at crochet that I don’t generally mix up the stitches even though I’m reading the pattern wrong and tend to notice and fix things right away when I do screw it up, but I’m not at that point yet with knitting. I’m also not yet as good at fixing knitting mistakes as I am at crochet mistakes.

So. Crocheting this shawl because I need a relaxing project, but planning to get back on the horse after I’m done with this.

As a side note, that little voice also suggests that this color combination might possibly look like technicolor barf, but I am steadfastly ignoring it. I like red and purple, and I’m trying not to be such a wimp about color.

It’s WIP Wednesday: The Wish-Me-Luck (’cause I sure need it!) Edition

This is the latest attempt at the candle flame shawl. One more row of garter stitch before I get to the lace pattern. Doesn’t look like much yet, but I have hopes. I’m using a much nicer needle than the aluminum straights I used for the previous attempts, and I’m hoping that’ll make it easier when the lace starts up.

I haven’t yet worked out how to get around all the other problems I was having before, like my microscopic attention span and tendency to lose track of what I’m supposed to be doing, but we’ll see what happens.

As seen around various blogs, though I can’t recall who exactly I stole it from:
Go to Google and write “your name looks like” and pick the best result from the first page to post.

The first two I get are:
Oxeye daisy looks like the typical daisy.
and
daisy looks like she is just crammed full of personality.
(That sounds almost painful, doesn’t it?)

First a note: I am way behind on reading email and blogs and things of that nature. If I was supposed to write you back about something and haven’t, it’s because of that.

This morning I’m suffering from severe caffeine deprivation. I’m wandering around in a fog over here. After I post this I need to go to the grocery store and buy something that contains caffeine. (I may need an IV drip at this point. I dunno.)

I finished the current pair of socks yesterday. I opted not to obsess over making them match. Well, that’s not precisely true. I started the second sock, got halfway through the cuff, and decided to start over with a different section of yarn because I thought they might match if I tried over. They ended up not really matching, but I like ’em.

The colors aren’t quite what they look like in the photo, or maybe it’s my monitor. The olive stripes seem to look brown in photos.

Before I flit off for the weekend, I thought I’d show you what I did last night. (Otherwise known as crafting under the influence/flitting around the house in my bra because this is the t-shirt I was wearing yesterday when I got inspired.) I got this idea out of a book whose name escapes me at the moment—I’ll come back and post the title when I get a chance to look it up.

[Edit: It's Generation T: 108 Ways to Transform a T-Shirt, though I probably didn't do it the same way as the project in there that looks like this one because I don't actually have a copy of the book. There's a website for the book that has a couple projects, too.]

I love this t-shirt, but it was way too big for me and had shrunk weirdly so that the printing was off-center and it was really, really wide compared to how long it was. It fit like a potato sack. I was complaining about how it fit, and around 11:00 last night I decided I was going to do something about it once and for all.

Before:

A few snips and some pins, then I tried it on to make sure I wasn’t making it too small:

I cut some fabric off the sides, made strips from the piece I cut off the bottom, stretched them out to make them curl, snipped holes in the edges, and laced it up. The raw edges will curl up in the wash—t-shirt fabric is forgiving that way—so I’m not to worried that the collar and the bottom edge aren’t quite straight.

After. I could’ve made it a tad smaller, but much better than before:

I’m knitting the second sock after arriving at a compromise between perfectionist and reasonable: I cast on, knit ribbing for a while, saw that I might possibly be just one stripe off from having matching socks, and started over in hopes that it would match. We’ll see—I think the color that comes up next will be the wrong color, but I’m not frogging again. It will be okay.

I desperately want to restart the candle flame shawl but haven’t gotten around to it yet. I’m still trying not to irritate that shoulder with too much repetitive motion. It’s just about better now, but there’s still a twinge here and there if I move it wrong or lift something too heavy or work at the computer for too long. This shoulder has a history already—I had to see a physical therapist for a somewhat different problem several years ago—so I’m trying to be good to it. Physical therapy is expensive. Though as it turns out I do still have the dorky stretchy band and the list of exercises from when I had to go before, and likely most of that would be helpful again now that I’m mostly better.

My current crafting dilemma has nothing to do with the non-matching socks or the shawl that I keep starting over, though. It’s this: I have a number of balls of Plymouth Encore, DK weight, black. This is the yarn I’ve been using for the several failed attemtps at this tank top.

Now, I love this top. I love this top so much that I want to marry it and have children with it and grow old with it and spend our twilight years sitting on the front porch drinking iced tea and kvetching about these kids today. As such, I’d really like it if I could work out my gauge problem and have it come out in a size and shape that more or less resembles me.

I’m pretty sure the yarn called for in the pattern is DK weight. The yarn I’ve been making it with is also ostensibly DK weight. The pattern calls for a yarn that has 109 yards per 50g ball and a gauge of 5 sts/7 rows per inch on size 6 needles.

The ball band for the yarn I’m using says it should work up at 5½ sts/inch on size 6 needles. The band also says the yarn is 150 yards per 50g ball.

I am having massive gauge issues with this project. To begin with, it boggles my mind that, although it has 41 more yards per 50g ball in my yarn than the recommended yarn, the band claims that it works up only a half stitch per inch smaller on the same size needles.

Next problem: On size 6 needles, I was getting about 7½ stitches per inch. On size 7 needles? Also about 7½ stitches per inch. Both sets of needles are cheap aluminum straights.

I gave up on the aluminum needles and started swatching on a Knitpicks circular that I got for my birthday with size 5 tips. Size 5. Smaller than what the pattern recommends. Two sizes smaller than the largest size I’d tried.

I’m getting 6 stitches per inch.

I think my head is going to explode. Granted, the knitting is much easier and more pleasant on the Knitpicks needles. They’re smoother (and as an aside, I have actually worn the paint of part of the tips on the cheap aluminum needles, which was probably not helping matters any) and I seem to knit more loosely with them. But still. This is beyond weird.

Do I just go with it and do a bunch of math to figure out what size I should make on this needle? One st/in difference times 19 inches = 19 sts more to cast on, which would have me making the 46″ size rather than the 38″ size, and if either my math or my gauge swatch is wrong I will have a potato sack, albeit a potato sack with lovely short-row shaping at the bust and hip, and I will be forced to take to my bed in despair.

There’s also the fact that my first two gauge swatches relaxed a bit in washing, so maybe this one will, too, and maybe, just maybe I’ll have 5 stitches per inch after washing the swatch and can cast on the 38″ size.

Pertinent fact: I need the same size 5 circular for the lace shawl, so it’s got to be one or the other if I’m going to do the tank top on that size needle, though maybe I can use the longer cable for the shawl and the shorter one for the tank and just swap the tips back and forth.

Head. Exploding.