Bella Knitting

Recipe for a Scarflet

Sarah

As I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago, scarflets appeal to my limited attention span and the common knitterly desire to have at least one easily portable project on the needles at all times. I made a few this winter, and gave a couple away as gifts. This one is probably my favorite -- a little Malabrigo scarflet for my friend CC, who lives in Seattle. A little linen stitch broke up any pooling (this is the Azalea colorway in the worsted weight, if you're wondering), and garter-stitch edges provided a nice finish.

A scarflet is nice because it just covers the bit of your neck that needs covering, without a lot of extra fabric flying around or forming an unsightly lump under your coat. Plus, it's a good way to show off a few pretty buttons. Want to make one? Click to continue through to the rest of the post for my linen-stitch scarflet "recipe" and a photo of this one in action.

Happy Feet

Sarah

Once in a very great while, it occurs to me that planning ahead for the holidays is a good idea. Such was the case with these socks, which were a joint gift to my mom from my sister and I (the link is to her new animal-training blog). I spun the yarn -- if you want to take a trip in the way-back machine, you can see that I blogged about it in July -- and Emily knit the socks. She chose a great stitch pattern, adding textural interest to the self-striping yarn.

The gansey I'm knitting for my dad was not as much of an unqualified success, however -- I had all but three-quarters of a sleeve finished by Christmas morning, but I had him try it on and the first sleeve just didn't fit right. So, I've finished knitting the second sleeve (correctly) and now I just have to rip and reknit the other one. How did everyone else's holiday knitting go? I've heard rumors that someone is going to be starting a project-a-month holiday gift knitalong -- I think I may need to join so that I can be better prepared next year!

Links to the Past

Laura

I have a soft spot in my heart for novelty yarns. No, I don’t knit with them (OK, OK, I don’t knit with them anymore. My pile of FOs do include projects that bling, blink or purr), it’s because novelty yarns had a profound impact on our craft; successfully luring many new knitters into the fold. Hopefully some of them (you?) stuck around. Fortunately, my weakness tends towards yarns that I can blissfully fondle so any eyelash used in my scarves were a light accent  - a touch of mascara vs. a full set of false eyelashes so to speak … but I digress.

Back then (all of five years ago) the yarn shop was filled with newbie knitters, all entering the store with an amazed but slightly dazed look in their eyes and one common thought in their heads; “I want to knit a scarf just like my friend Mary’s.” Some in the store found it annoying to sell garter stitch scarf after garter stitch scarf of brightly-colored sparkly, furry or squiggly yarn. Not me. That’s because I loved talking to the knitters, doing my little part to suck them into the black hole that is knitting obsession. So many of them had a similar story to my own, “I learned how to knit as a girl but haven’t knit in 20 (30, or even 40) years.” I quietly congratulated myself on the wisdom that lead me back to knitting a full decade before these I-want-that-too knitters but mentally scooted over to make sure there was plenty of room on the bandwagon for them too.

I was reminded, as we watched the kids and their cousins play and adapt to their new Christmas presents how quickly these women also relearned their childhood knitting skills. It didn’t seem to matter how I taught them to hold the needles and yarn in their hands. When they picked up their own soon-to-be-first-scarf they reverted to the way their mother or grandmother had taught them so many years ago.

And so I will battle with my I-so-do-not-want-to-knit daughter this vacation to teach her to knit, just so she has something to fall back in twenty, thirty or forty years from now when I will gracefully refrain from saying “I told you so!”

Holiday Travel

Laura

Although we may complain that holiday’s are too commercial, in our hearts we recognize they are really about family – why else would we all spend so many hours fighting traffic or security lines at the airport trying to get to our loved ones?

Those of us with kids are inextricably linked with millions of other families to the school calendar. As soon as that bell rings we will be hectically juggling schedules, secreting gifts into luggage (don’t forget the Christmas stockings), and arranging for pet feedings with a goal of getting everyone and everything piled into an overstuffed car so we can actually pull out of the driveway in time to ride over the hill to grandma’s house for a bit of Christmas Eve cheer and get those kids snuggled into beds so Santa knows where to find them.

In our case, the drive from San Francisco to San Diego (no hope of snow there) can take anywhere from seven to nine hours. That means seven or more hours of uninterrupted butt-in-seat time, a.k.a. knitting time. Long boring roads? No problem. Traffic jams? So what! They just mean more guilt free knitting time. After all, what else could I be doing?

This gives me something to add to my long list of pre-holiday travel to do’s. No bulky projects or complex tables to read (guaranteed to bring on car sickness). Last minute gifts are my usual project of choice but I have joined in on the ‘no knit gifts’ concept so I think I’ll just pick something that interests me – how fun. Maybe I’ll finish up my winter hat so I can tell you about it or play with some new ideas I have for that Venezia wool/silk that’s just so yummy to fondle.

Car knitting. Check. √

Not a Creature was Stirring

Laura
Winter Hat (Part 4) and still going!

I’m an idea dreamer. Some of my best ideas (all right, some of the strangest too) are born in the middle of the night. They’re usually labors of love, commingling with unrelated thoughts, slowly taking shape in the back of my mind, waiting to cross the barrier into conscious thought and a life of its own come morning.

Sometimes, however, an idea will barrel into my brain like a bull in the proverbial china shop, dominating all available processing power, crashing madly around, demanding that I wake up “now!” regardless of how deeply I am snuggled under my cozy bedding. Like last night.  It was my own fault. After much sketching and swatching in the afternoon the hat design was still elusive; the shaping and colors were not flowing into each other with the grace I had imagined.

The solution, a join and i-cord bind off all at the same time. Perfect!  It’s a combination of the standard 3-needle join with an i-cord bind off.  There it was, the perfect conceptual solution at three in the morning so I gazed at the shadowed ceiling pondering my options:

(a) get up and knit in the middle of the night (not going to happen),
(b) pick the idea apart in my mind, step by step looking for flaws,
(c) simply go back to sleep and see what happens in the morning.

I voted for Option C, certain that a good night’s sleep would help clarify matters of such grave importance. The bull in the china shop had other ideas and continued to rampage through my poor beleaguered brain hopping nimbly from new design ideas back to poking holes in the i-cord join idea.  Slumber proved as elusive as the original design had been and so I settled back to listen to the sounds of the night, the peaceful breathing of my spouse, the not so gentle snoring of the puppy and let my mind play it’s little games hoping it would eventually tire of the repetitive cycle of thoughts. It did and I woke at the much more reasonable (ha) hour of six ten anxious to try a bit of knitting before it was time to pack school lunches.

So did it work? Here’s a peek at the minute little swatch I knit to test it (sorry, I was too impatient to make it bigger);  testing how it looked with a different color on one half (this is what I would need to join the superhero ear flap to my hat).

I am ready to declare this experiment a total success!! The i-cord sits nicely in/on the fabric; it can be subtle or made more dramatic with more stitches and the color change is invisible.

I'll ask Sarah to help put together a picture tutorial with all the little tricks. In the mean time that bull is on the run again coming up with lots of fun, unusual and downright weird  way to use it. If you have some too I'd love to hear them! :)

The Perfect Table

Laura

My family loves the new game table we got. It gives us a nice spot to play some of our favorite games, like Clue, without worrying about clearing it all away so we can eat.  We’d even developed some pre-dinner speed rules to help us get the game going when needed. Forget all that dice rolling – just pop into any adjacent room when it’s your turn and make guess such as, “I think Mrs. White stabbed the victim in the library with her knitting needles.” We encourage a bit of creative story telling with our guesses and the kids know I always replace the knife with a knitting needle.  I’m picturing one of those old aluminum needles, a size 10 or 11 US;  nice and long, pointy, with enough stiffness to get the job done!

Even more important than the table’s convenient size, lovely finish or game readiness is it’s ability to hold my ball winder without it wobbling or falling off. This is not a small thing. It is the only table in my entire house that can perform such an important service for me. All the other tables and desks simply refused to play along (too thick, rounded edge, shallow lip) forcing me to go to unreasonable lengths to create a stable surface on which to wind a ball of yarn.

Even better, the table is the perfect size for this fabulous swift I bought at Stitches last year. There’s not much time to look around when you have your own booth but I had passed on it the year before (a much regretted attempt to stick to my budget after a bit of yarn splurging) and refused to leave without one this time.

Here I've stacked up two fabulous skeins of Cascade Venezia wool and silk. It is simply yummy to the touch and I think this lovely blue and soft white will be fabulous together. I can’t wait to get started.  The yarn hasn’t told me what it wants to be yet, but I’ll happily wind it and swatch it and thus be that much closer to the answer.

Scarflets

Sarah

While I think I'd be bored to tears if I had to knit a bunch of scarves for holiday gifts, I have happily cranked out a couple of scarflets over the past couple of days.

This one is a little keyhole scarflet, and it's probably just about a yard long. I don't have a definite giftee in mind, but I may give this or something like it to the teacher I've been observing, as I've really learned a lot by sitting in on her class, and she's been really generous with her time.

If you're curious, I used a version of brioche stitch called "patent knitting" which Laura described here. To make the keyhole, I knit the center stitches in garter stitch for a couple of rows, bound a few off then cast on the same number in the following row, knit a few more rows with those center stitches in garter stitch, then resumed normal programming over the whole thing. The only reason I changed the center stitches to garter was to keep the area around the keyhole more tidy -- if you're doing a keyhole scarf in a different stitch, this may not be necessary.

Geek Power

Sarah

Hooray for being a geek! My love of The X-Files paid off recently by helping me to win a contest on Miss Scarlett's blog (and what a fabulous prize it is -- Yarn Love "Scarlett O'Hara" sock yarn in the Armour colorway, a bit of Soak, an adorable sheepy tape measure, and a pattern from Wool Girl!)

It's funny how the meaning of the word "geek" has changed since I was a kid. If I were called a geek when I was ten (and I'm sure I was), the word would have been nearly synonymous with "dork" or "dweeb." All those words conjured up the image of someone with thick glasses, a faceful of braces, and a pocket protector. Now, being a geek, and even a nerd, has a certain cachet -- often, the implication is that someone is passionate and knowledgeable, and I guess those qualities have become "cool." I'm sure there are a lot of complicated sociological reasons for this, but I think the main thing is to just enjoy it while it lasts.

So, other than knitting, how do you get your geek on?

The "Big Game"

Laura

As I have mentioned before, there's an entire list of pros and cons when it comes to moving your family around the country. Missing family and friends is obviously the biggie con but we do love getting to know the attractions and traditions of new states, cities and even just neighborhoods since not every move has been a big one.

Out here in the San Francisco Bay area the big rivalry in college football is between Stanford and UC California at Berkley and yes, they call it “The Big Game”.  I love the long tradition, 110 years this last weekend, that both school have high academic standards even for their football teams, and that the whole area gets completely caught up in the hoopla. Since we have adopted Stanford as our hometown team, got season tickets, and have been enjoying some fabulous tail gating this season I thought it was about time that I knit a Stanford scarf that my daughter and I could fight over.  We didn't score tickets for The Big Game and so we planned our day around the watching the game at home. While most football fans plan for food and drink, I pulled out some brand new balls of yarn to start my (Get that Jaclyn?  It's mommy's scarf!) new scarf. I just love a new project even if it’s simple. We've been knitting the Peasant Lace Sports scarf with 2 rows of each color; this time I want to try 4 rows of a primary color and just 2 of the contrast. There are a lot of times when one of a team's colors are not as strong or likable as the other and in this case I was hoping for less of a candy cane look.

It’s not much to look at yet but that was because the game was just so darn exciting. The perfect rivalry game. I kept jumping up and down and not knitting. Stanford won for the first time in 6 years and now I have until opening day next year to finish the scarf. Does it count as a UFO if it has a planned finish date?

Optimistic Knitting

Laura

Am I a glass-half-full kind of gal or simply delusional? I pondered that question multiple times while knitting my impromptu ski hat.

I kind of disregarded all rational knitting guidelines in my eagerness to get yarn in hand and stitches flowing. I had the basic concept sketched on the back of one my daughters algebra papers (it seemed appropriate) and knew I wanted a true winter hat, super warm and dense, so my gauge would be tighter than recommended. Four stitches per inch sounded reasonable, so I dropped a needle size and knit a super small stockinette flat swatch again disregarding the fact I would be knitting in the round with cables. All in all it would be hard to think of additional ways to guarantee a screwed up a project.

The first test to my optimism came as I stuck to my plan for the decreases at the top of the hat. I knew just how I wanted the cables to flow together, so I methodically decreased various parts of the cable design with confidence that the end result would also somewhat resemble the shape of my head. The slight similarity to the top of a volcano didn’t trouble me at first, I was sure my newly planned bind off methodology would flatten out beautifully when worn.

The next bit of questionable thinking came as I fell into a common knitting trap … can I finish this piece or project without starting a new ball of yarn? I was so close, I could visualize that nice 6” tail waiting for me at the end of my last stitch but in my heart of hearts I knew I wouldn’t make it especially with an i-cord bind off.  I even declared out loud to my kids, “Mommy’s going to be pretty mad at herself in a few minutes!” but on I went with the tedium of the i-cord bind off only to miss by a mile.

I could have also used my daughter’s help with the stitch calculations; "if x equals the circumference of the head and y equals the percent of gauge reduction due to cabling what are the number of stitches required for the hat to actually fit on mommy’s head?"

So here’s a picture of my Mt. Vesuvius hat on it’s way to being frogged. Do I consider this project a failure? Absolutely not!  It was the perfect prototype. Now I know not only my gauge and cable issues but remembered that I knit looser in the round (duh), have a better idea for the types of decreases I want to use and have even more nifty ideas for the i-cord bind off. I’m off to frog with a smile on my face. Really.

What about you? Are you optimistic or not in touch with reality? How long will you go before crying uncle and what's your worst "I should have known better" story?

p.s. My poor snowman nutcracker looks a bit scary from this angle. It's hard to get into the holiday spirit in California after all those years in cold weather climates. Mowing the lawn before you put out the lights is still a bit bizarre to us!