The Skein that Wouldn't Die

So once upon a time, my friend Kris was destashing and I bought a bunch of yarn from her. Now it's my turn to destash, and I am trying to do it by knitting! Knitting one thousand baby items out of sock wool, apparently. Because I am insane.

One of the things I bought was a skein of purple Nova Socks yarn by Fleece Artist. One skein of sock yarn, which I usually figure will do for a baby sweater, and I have a friend - well, several, actually - who's about to have a baby. So I cast on for the Ruby version of the Five-Hour Baby Sweater, and made it nice and roomy, I thought. But once the sleeves were indisputably long enough, and I frogged the body to remove the decreases so it would be nice and wide, and then made the body indisputably long enough and had to bind off - lo, there was still a bunch of yarn left.

So I made booties! Simple toe-up, short-row heel baby booties to match the sweater. Only they started heading into knee sock territory, and again I had to bind off.

And now I have this aggravatingly small wad of yarn, too short to do anything with and too long to throw away. Arg.

Also, I really hope this baby likes purple.

starting over

Um. Hi. Sorry.

I managed to do a fair bit of knitting over those lost months since my last post, but there was never really time to document it all. So instead of trying to reconstruct what I did, howbout I just start with what I'm doing now, and we'll figure that all those projects from September-December 2009 are just lost to the ages. I made some "Brainless" mittens, of which I was fairly proud - I started out with Yarnissima's Brainless sock pattern and after 2 or 3 inches I realized that what my kids actually need are mittens. The pattern was really easy to modify.

But that's in the past, eh, what's (not) done is (not) done and all that, and here are the current projects:

This went through several versions before I got exasperated and settled on a fairly classic cable pattern. It's for my husband, a v-neck knitted from the top down, with sleeve-caps. Having found no instructions for such a beast on the intertubes, I am making it up as I go along, and so far it is well; the sleeves aren't quite the same, but I hope the difference will be unnoticeable in the finished garment. A bigger problem is that they are quite, um, spacious. He says that's good, he doesn't like tight sleeves, but if it comes out looking like some kind of early '80s batwing thing, well, that would be bad. Fingers crossed, since 1) this yarn is fairly fuzzy and will not appreciate being frogged and re-knit, and 2) I've already been working on this thing for a year.

Secondborn, aka the Sniglet, has requested a hat like the ones I made for our former neighbor's grandbabies. I suggested waves instead of circles (because I have this blue and green yarn), and he said how about flames. For which I had to order orange yarn from the wonderful Wollmeise, so that took awhile. Double knitting is a bit slower than regular knitting, so it's taking awhile, but he seems excited. Of course, he was excited about the Brainless mittens too, and then he refused to wear them once they were done. Sigh.

And here is yet another Five-Hour Baby Sweater, a wraparound version this time, knitted with giant yarn on giant needles so it'd get done fast. One of the other moms at the Sniglet's school is very nice, and we got to talking during the bad weather when we were both somehow always on the same bus for the school run. The last time I saw her she gave me a shiny hair thing because, she said, she really enjoyed our chats on the bus, limited as they are due to our dodgy Dutch skills. And since she's expecting a baby, soon I think, I made a baby sweater. It's blocking right now, and if it's dry I'll give it to her tomorrow.

And that's it for active projects. I have a ton of other half-knitted stuff lying around, but those'll have to be classed as UFOs until I pick them up again. Which I really should do, at some point...

ravelapse

So between that last post and this one, I've gone and moved to a whole 'nother country! Sort of. I mean, moving from Germany to the Netherlands is probably a bit like moving from Seattle to Vancouver, but you know, it's... kinda different.

Anyway, I packed up all my yarn, started some things, re-started some other things, tabled some other-other things, and kind of, um, misplaced a project or two, oops? And I can't find my camera... well, I haven't actually tried real hard because I don't like it, but I'm sure it's around somewhere. The light's been kinda crappy anyway - all right, scratch that last excuse. Today has been drizzly, but the first 29 days of September were actually pretty nice. Anyhoo. No camera. No internet for a week, and then VERY limited internet for two weeks, uploading photos is a PITA under the best circumstances, which these are not - and the result is that my knitting reality no longer bears much resemblance to my Ravelry project page.

I should do something about that.

love knitting, not sure about the other stuff

I used to think tucking in the ends was the most tedious part of a knitting project. Well, a successful one - frogging and fixing whatever you did wrong on an unsuccessful project would be the übertedious part, but in general, end-tucking used to seem like the most annoying use of my knitting time. I did that last night. Today I photographed, measured, washed, blocked, edited the photographs, uploaded them to Flickr, emailed them to the beta-knitters group, and then added them to the Ravelry project page. I mean, I did other things too, today, but documenting the finished-ness of the project has turned into a really involved process, hasn't it? And of course, mustn't forget the final step: BLOG IT!!

Laris's Cheesehead pattern, resized for teeny tiny babies at my request, double-knit in Wollmeise 100% on Knitpicks 2.25mm circs. Currently drying outside on the laundry rack, I sure hope no birds poop on them. (Yeah, you laugh, but guess why I had to re-wash the sheets last week.)

destashmania

Well, now I know that one skein of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted Multi is enough for a baby sweater, size newborn (probably). You never know, with babies. Lo, another 5-hour baby sweater, knitted in, um, a little over a week because I kept frogging and refining. And I had an annoying amount of yarn left over, too small to do anything useful with, too big to throw away.

But it's done, and sent off to a friend who has another friend who'll be having a baby in November, which is a good time for a wool sweater.

Next project: matching teeny-tiny sweaters and meathead hats in BMFA Socks that Rock, Mediumweight, for the twins next door, due in October. No photos yet. I'll get right on that.

Oh, and another test-knit for Laris, hopefully to make some real progress after several false starts. Here's false start #2:

Miss Sophie's Hands

This was a test-knit for the inimitable Laris (seriously, HOW does she do it?), sorry I couldn't get better color in the photos. But these are fancy princess-gloves, knit in Wollmeise Twin, colorway Merlot, two at a time on magic loop. They were very fun to make, even the bobbles, until I was done and had 20 (twenty! two-zero!) little ends to tuck in. And now I am giving them to my mother-in-law so that I have to make more for myself. Hee.

what I did yesterday

I bought a double CD case at Aldi for €2.99 (they were only available in gray, can you believe it?) and stuck all my circular needles in it. They're all sorted, first by size and then by cable length, with little labels so I don't have to keep measuring things to be sure I've got the right one.

I've been looking for a good way to store circs since - well, pretty much since I started knitting. The first thing I did was stick them all through a stitch marker and hang it from the ceiling, but then I had to measure to find the right one every time, and that was kind of annoying. It did make a very nice wind-chimey sound, but it didn't look very nice.

I saw recipes for a circular-needle-holding wall hangy-thing made out of old jeans, but that's not really the sort of thing I tend to hang on my wall. This is a prettier version, but still, it has all these needles hanging out of it.

Then I tried this linen silverware holder we have for the nice silver (which lives in a drawer right now, and so doesn't need its holder). The premise is good, but this is made for knives and forks, not for knitting needles, so it rolled up clunkily and there was no reasonable way to sort them by length. I also couldn't label the sizes, because I knew I'd want to use it as a silverware holder again.

So then I had this smaller square CD case, but the needle points stuck out too far. So I cut out all the little envelope-things, labeled them by size and length with a Sharpie, and stored them in a flat plastic box so I could flip through them, like we used to flip through records, back in the olden days. I ran out of envelopes before I ran out of sizes, though, and kept getting them out of order and being too lazy to put the needles back when I was done.

Here's an idea I love - but I tend to work with whatever materials I have to hand, and the binders I have have only two rings and the plastic sheet protectors are kind of baggy. The weight of the needles makes them sag, and the two rings that hold them are not enough to prevent that. If I ever do get the materials (there's a Muji in Munich), I probably will make one, but, you know. That could take forever.

It's a bit squeezy to shut it, and of course I don't have all my needles in it because I have 8 or 9 WIPs lying around, but there was also room in the back of the case for my DPNs - there sure are a lot of them! Some I bought, some were given to me, most of the sets are incomplete, and since I really only use them occasionally, as a cable needle or a pointer to help me count chart-squares, I probably don't need to organize them. If I ever do need a set, there's my needle gauge, voilà.

So. We'll see if the latest of my many systems works.

Also, I have now organized maybe 30 square centimeters of space. In my 140-square-meter house. Talk about your baby steps.