Stashdown!

Original Dunegrass Socks with
short-row heel

Dunegrass Socks with

gusset-and-flap heel

So Portugal was fun and relaxing and had lots of knitting, but all on the same project: the Sniglet says the socks I knit him fall down a lot, and I think it's because my favorite short-row heel (favorite because it's so simple) isn't right for his foot. And I've been meaning to update my Dunegrass Socks pattern for lo, these several years, so I'm redesigning that with a gusset-and-flap heel (the republished pattern will include both options). Snig will get the prototypes when they're done, but I've been doing a lot of knitting, ripping, re-knitting and scribbling. I really do need to start the pattern re-write soon, but I'm very not looking forward to unscrambling my notes, so having a bit of drempelvrees (Dutch: sort of a fear of getting started). Which is probably why it took so long to get back on the blog, right? Just didn't feel like writing, and the longer you don't do it, the more you don't feel like it.

Anyway. Yesterday the brilliant Jonna organized what she called a Textielruil (Textile Trade), wherein we all went to her house with old clothes and yarn and swapped it all around - AND! The stuff that had no takers, she's going to donate to... something. And you know I'm moving, and I just organized my stash, so I know exactly what I have. There's so much that I can't throw away because it's good stuff, I just don't have a plan for it, and I'd be fine with not having it, as long as it went to someone who could use it. 

This is one of the ways I let my inner control freak out to play - throwing stuff away? Is a SCIENCE. I don't just chuck stuff in the trash can, ever. There's this whole process...I should make a flow-chart. Nothing like a visualization of the crazy. But I digress.

Where was I? Oh. Jonna's. I took many yarns, and returned with none. I did get some clothes (but didn't take any, because I buy really, really simple stuff and then wear it to death (and beyond!) before donating it to charity even though it's no longer wearable, because I know that they know fabric shredder/recyclers and the clothes will end up shredded and stuffed in couch cushions and therefore still useful and not in a landfill, see above re garbage science).

So anyway. Successful stashdown weekend. Yay.

In Lisbon there is yarn.

Bom dia! We're headed up the coast today, but we did get one day in Lisbon, so of course I had to check out the yarn shop, right? I had to, it's right around the corner from the AirBnB flat Mr Husband found without any help from me and that's too big a coincidence not to be fate, right? The universe wanted me to go there.

Kismet notwithstanding, it was a tad tricky to find. #61 is not an imposing doorway, and the shop is in fact in an apartment up two flights of stairs and you have to ring the doorbell. But once you get inside, it's so pretty, all wood and light and fabric and yarn and books! Plus there's a little playroom to park the kids in while you look around. Too bad they didn't have one for husbands...

I didn't buy yarn, because I really am trying to use up what I have and only buy new yarn if I have a specific project in mind, but they did have some super local yarn and a lot of Schoppel Wolle. I did buy 5 alfinetes de peito, knitting pins for Portuguese-style knitting, which I learned how to do from a YouTube video before I left Utrecht - when I travel I really get into it, what can I say. Actually, I can say that sometimes I get pain in my right elbow when I knit a lot, but I haven't had that since I started knitting this way, so it's quite useful for giving certain muscles a break without giving up knitting altogether. Because we all know that's out of the question.

So. The shop is called Retrosaria, do check it out if you're ever in Lisbon, you won't be sorry. Wish I'd had time for a workshop...

a follow-up on the Dutch Wool (Wol) story

 So, if you read my post on the search for wool from Dutch sheep, you know that they don't tend to use it for knitting wool, so much. The Saturday before last, Andrea (from Chestnut Cabin) brought along some fleece to Stitch n Bitch to show me. The Dutch fleece, dyed yellow with chamomile (looks like a cheese, doesn't it!) was quite scratchy, and she also brought a fleece from a German sheep which was much softer and finer. It was really interesting and neato to see the contrast in person.

So then I went to The Fat Squirrel's Ravelry group to report on the results of my research, and someone else had posted on Ravelry's Events feature, which of course I immediately had to try out and the first thing I found? A Wool-Day at an Alpaca-Farm in South Holland! It's called Alpaca Milestones, and ZOMG! Look at their little FACES! So now I can totally join Amy Beth's Lo-KAL, or I could, if I had time.

I really don't have time for a KAL.

when two minor annoyances come together

You know how, sometimes when you're knitting a sock you get about halfway up the foot and you don't like the gauge or you didn't start increasing soon enough, and you don't feel like frogging for whatever reason so you just break the yarn and start over so you have this half-sock lying around?

And you know how, sometimes on a hot day you want some ice water but the glass sweats and you're afraid of getting a ring on your cheap wooden IKEA desk because even though it's cheap it's still wood and you have traumatic early childhood memories of leaving a glass on a more important furniture, so the sweating glass causes a sort of minor niggling anxiety that makes it hard to concentrate on your Lego Mars Rover YouTube video?

Behold.

Empty nest = closet space!

So hi! I've been storing my yarn in the attic (in my luggage) since we moved here, but now that the kids have fled  ahem, launched, I find I have lots of storage space! So I thought I'd immortalize this moment (because y'all know it's not gonna last): Behold, the organized stash. (Cue choirs of angels)

Can I get a squee?

Here is my most recent FO, a shawl called Laminaria which appeared in Knitty in 2008 and has been in my Ravelry queue since then. Yes, it only takes me four years to go from inspiration to bind-off. I have to say, there's not a lot to report since the pattern worked just like it said it would. So let's get right to the pictures!

(click to embiggen)

The Fyberspates Scrumptious laceweight was fantastic to work with, so nice that I'm already planning my next project with it.

And, I finished it in time for my trip to Portugal! I am going to look so snazzy on the beach...

a Lo-Kal (<- ha!)

So here in the Netherlands - wait, gotta back up.

So there's this KAL - no wait, gotta back up more.

So there's this video podcast, called The Fat Squirrel Speaks, that I stumbled across a little over a month ago. I generally don't like video podcasts, because I want to look at my knitting while I listen, at least that's nominally the reason although now that I think of it, the real problem is that I'm incredibly picky and there are only two podcasts that I've stuck with for more than a few months, and those both happened to be audio podcasts. And lo, a prejudice is born without me even noticing. And is hereby discarded, poof!

So anyway, Cast On and Sticks and String are fab, but somewhat infrequent of update, which I totally understand (not quite understanding why S&S's latest is only available in iTunes, grr, because I hate iTunes and therefore do not have it), which is why I was superduper happy to stumble across this podcast which I love so much that I'm now going through back episodes. She makes me laugh, and talk to the screen, and want to know more about lots and lots of things! Love it!

Sheep with water

Sheep with windmill

Sheep with tulips

Amy Beth, aka the Fat Squirrel, is running a KAL soon wherein you knit something with locally sourced yarn. And I'm all, hey my friend has a yarn shop but no that's not what she means. No, it should be from local animals (or, um, plants, I guess), spun, processed and dyed at a place near you. And I was all, easy-peasey, the Netherlands is all over grass, and you see sheep everywhere, and they are so cute which is perhaps not relevant here. But Google searches, even in Dutch, turned up useless information like "how to say 'wool' in Dutch" (it's wol, if you're interested). So of course I asked my knitting group (breigroep - don't try to pronounce that unless you have a degree in Klingon) and of course they had the answer!

Andrea said that in a colder climate you tend to get sheep with coarser wool, which is not suitable for clothing. So it's used for carpets and duvet covers said Hilde, which I would think would need to be soft but maybe I'm wrong. And that wool production is not big here, the sheep are mainly for meat (ew!) and milk, they even make hand cream from sheep's milk, Vera told me! And those fleecy slippers. And probably a lot of cheese because this country is BIG on cheese - there were whole lessons about cheese in both of my Dutch language courses. Isn't that interesting! I think it's awesome. Also Andrea and Patricia have offered to bring actual wool from actual real Dutch-speaking sheep* to our Saturday group so that'll be yayfun.

*I'm pretty sure they say "BAAAGGHKXKGXH."

Another interesting Dutch factoid: breeding is "fokken," so sheep breeders are "schapen fokkers."

miss me?

Right, y'all, I'm going to clean this space up too, and start using it. It seems Ravelry has replaced this blog, and Facebook has replaced my other blog, and I'm barely able to keep up with them, so I don't know why I'm doing this, but whatever. It's awesome that so many other bloggers are still going strong and I feel like a hosebag for giving up, not that I really, formally, you know, officially abdicated from my blogs or anything, I just sort of saw something shiny and wandered off. For two years.

Anyway.

What happened this week is I got yarn! Not a lot, because I already had enough to last longer than I am expecting to live before a close friend opened a yarn shop, and since that happened I've had to get rid of my kids to make more space for yarn. But Wollmeise was having a SALE! And it started the day after I left Germany so I sent the superbificent Adriana on my behalf (and that of a few friends), so even though four skeins showed up on my doorstep the other day, I only get to keep one of them. But I got to pet and hug and smell the others before I had to give them to their new owners, so that's okay. And I will get to go to the Wollmeise shop in September. And soon after that we will move into a bigger house. You see how neatly things work out?

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.

Pfaffenhofen and the Wollmeise Shop

Saturday I went to Pfaffenhofen! My friend Yasmin drove, she lives in a nearby town so we're practically neighbors. And we (she) found a parking place right in front of the shop and we saw lots and lots of people and hugged lots and lots of yarn and sat on couches and knitted and it was fun. And now some pictures. My photos here, Elemm's photos here, Goldbek's photos here, and here is Maria's post.

And I really wasn't going to buy any yarn. I just wanted to say hi to people and see the shop, and um, well, I didn't buy a lot, not really. I mean, compared to what I already have, it was actually quite a small amount.

Eh. Maybe that's not the best argument.

I got mail!

Today I went to Pfaffenhofen, but that post will have to wait till tomorrow, because before that, on Thursday, a box came in the mail. It looked like this:


When I opened it, there was newspaper.







Under the newspaper, there was this!
I almost stopped right there, because oo! Shiny! But eventually I remembered I was sort of a grown-up, and peered under the shiny. There was happy!

It's a swap, I'm sending some of my blue-and-green yarn in return.


Here's the not-yarn: Chocolate! Stitch markers! A teeny-tiny sock and a very nice note!

And here's the yarn:
Merlot.
Buxkranzl.
Der letzte Versuch.













And roter Himbeermund.

Ooooo.

a handy tip that is also a very bad tip

So I picked up this habit, when I knit socks, of jotting notes on the back of the ball band about gauge, cast-on, things to remember about the heel turn, etc. I suppose it would also work for hats and gloves.

You know what it doesn't work for? A sweater for a largish man. I'm making a sweater for DrBob, designing it myself because I have a problem with authority am wholly incapable of following directions am creative like that, and the bottom of my knitting bag now holds a salad of pointy, slippery, pencilled gibberish. There's a design that will never get published.

Hm. Perhaps I should learn from this experience...

...nah.

Sindelfingen photos

Not that I took any pictures of Sindelfingen itself, though I should have because it was all half-timbered medieval fabulousness of the sort that makes American tourists squee. But I didn't think to take my camera because the battery's only good for five minutes or so, and anyway it takes sucky photos. Have I mentioned lately that I hate my camera?

But it was sunny today, and really, what is the point of buying superfabulous yarn if you can't photograph it, post it to your blog and try not to feel smug about it? So without further ado, my Wollmeise haul. Click to embiggen.

Ooo, the laceweight - we were told there wouldn't be any at the market, something about the supplier running out. I'm not sure if that meant permanently or what. Anyway, around lunchtime they brought out the last two bags of dyed laceweight, and I managed to snag one for me and one for a friend (not photographed, because I sent it off on Tuesday, though you can see it in the previous entry's group photo).

I also got some Twin sock yarn in Farn, which is my favorite non-busy colorway. (I couldn't possibly choose a favorite busy colorway - as my stash will attest, I have about 25 favorites.) I've never actually knit with Twin, though I do have a skein of Boboli Twin that I really should do something with...

Aaaaand the old faithful, 100% Superwash Sockenwolle, the yarn I have more of than any other kind. I hardly ever use it because I love it too much to waste on something that isn't truly fantastic. Yes, yes I am insane. What, you're only just noticing?


Anyway, none of these photos really capture the color of the yarn, but they're as close as I could get them. From left to right: a versuchskaninchen that is almost like Neptun, a bit more green in real life; Vergißmeinnicht (forget-me-not), my other favorite semi-solid colorway; sündig & verrucht (sinful and wicked), a bit less blue in real life; and herzblut (heart's blood). There are so many other colors I would have loved to get, but ten skeins seemed like enough to buy for one day. Eleven, with the laceweight. Fourteen, with the laceweight and sock yarn that I picked up for a friend.

So there you have it. Sindelfingen. A very good weekend.