Saturday Mist

We've had quite a bit of rain here lately, & this morning I woke up to mist.

Saturday Sky & Sleeves

Here is the Saturday Sky picture for this week.



And here is the current status of the Mirage sleeves:


I ended up deciding to go with three quarter length sleeves. That meant adjusting where on the design the sleeves would begin, which entailed starting the sleeves over yet again. The longer sleeve in the picture is complete. One advantage to switching to 3/4 length sleeves is that they don't take as long to do, even if I'll have done enough knitting for 3 complete long sleeves by the time I'm done with them.

The full-length sleeve pattern calls for there to be no stockinette at the beginning of the wrist. The arm increases are built into the addition of an increasing stockinette panel between the charted sections of design. Because I don't want full length sleeves, I increased the starting number of sleeve stitches by 8. That effectively leaves out the last tightest/lowest two sections of mock-cable, permitting the sleeve to be wide enough to be comfortable around elbow length.

Size Matters

Have you ever had a nagging feeling in the back of your mind? I'm talking about when you see something & think, "Hm, that's interesting" & go back about your business, but that something isn't really forgotten? Then later, while in the middle of an unrelated event, it all of a sudden hits you. ARGH!

That happened to me this week, after my previous post. I went into Ravelry to check/correct my needle size I had listed for the Green Mirage project & found I had it listed as "8". I corrected it to the size 6 that I had actually used so far, & went about my day.

All of a sudden, apparently out of nowhere, BAM! All of a sudden the sleeves made sense & the body, which was more than halfway complete, did NOT. I had used size 6 needles to knit the garter stitch edge at the bottom of the body, originally intending to go up to a size 7 or 8 once the garter stitch was complete. However, I forgot to change needle sizes when I started the main pattern. Clearly I was distracted -- lots of other stuff going on that is completely non-knitting related to cause the distraction.

I had thought the garter edge looked floppy compared to the sweater, but was a couple inches into the sweater at that point. In a moment of complete forgetfulness, I chalked that up to having forgotten to go DOWN a size for the garter. At the time I was oblivious to the fact that I had, in fact, actually started correctly, but was continuing in error. ARGH!

Once the realization hit, I really was pretty distracted from everything until I had a chance to shift half the body of sweater onto other needles & check the fit. It does still fit fine through the waist. Whew!

Trying it on made me realize that I do want one more pattern repeat before joining the sleeves to the body. I had been contemplating stopping there, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I was able to switch to larger needles, so that the top section of the sweater will give me the extra inch or two that I'd prefer to have at that point. Whew! again.

After all of this mulling over of things, I also ended up deciding to start over on the sleeves yet AGAIN. That's a story for another day.

Two Steps Back

Or, in my case, two sleeves back. Sigh... At least I'm not alone in having to rip back recently. Yesterday was a classic case of one step forward, two steps back.


I spent yesterday afternoon figuring out the sleeve instructions for my Mirage sweater. I was glad that I already had the mock-cable pattern most of the way memorized. Even with the advantage of familiarity with the chart, I realized very quickly that I didn't want to be messing with DPNs any longer than I had to on these sleeves. So I made a special Sunday afternoon trip to Kirkwood Knittery for 16 inch size 7 needles. I worked into the evening & knit both sleeves up past the point of being able to switch onto circular needles. I was very pleased with my progress & feeling pretty proud of myself until I took a look at the body of the sweater. Something didn't look right. The needles looked smaller. ARGH! The needle for the body of the sweater is a size 6. I'd been using the wrong size. No way to fix it except ripping out, unfortunately.

Because I'd gone down a size (I thought) on the garter stitch cuffs, & knit them with size 6 DPNs, I did manage to salvage one cuff. The other one had a funky twisted part in one section of the cast on, which I discovered Sunday evening after that sleeve was off the DPNs & onto a size 7 circular needle. I was just going to leave it until I realized that my issue was much bigger than a small glitch in the cast on. Once my mistake was evident, however, I decided to go ahead & start that sleeve over completely since I was ripping back anyway.

Fortunately I already had a size 6 circular needle, but unfortunately, not enough DPNs. So I ended up making a trip to Chris' Needlecraft on my lunch hour for even more needles. Hopefully by I'll manage to have the sleeves back onto circular needles in time for knit night this week.

More Details

One of my knitting goals this year is to knit from my stash. I've joined the Stashdown 2008 group on Ravelry, but haven't been participating in their official challenges. (I haven't any desire to take the time to track yardage used -- or miles of yarn knit, for that matter.) However, my stash has been big part of the inspiration for the majority of the large projects that I've started so far this year.

Now that I finally have a bit more time, here are the details & some of the earlier pictures for a couple of the projects in my previous knitting post.

The grey lace is the vest from the Quiviut Twinset by Linda Romens, from The Natural Knitter. I started it on June 4 2008 -- got to love Ravelry for being able to go back & look up details. The yarn is Louet KidLin Lace Weight, which used to be called Kidlin Pixie. (No Quiviut in it at all, despite the pattern name. That's a bit beyond my budget right now.)

The color is called "Smokey Grape", though the purple in it is very subtle & doesn't show much. I have two sets of this yarn in my stash, from two different dyelots. For the vest, I'm using 3 skeins I purchased at Kirkwood Knittery in Kirkwood, Missouri. I have 6 skeins of the other dyelot, purchased at a big discount when a different Kirkwood LYS decided to sell off their yarn inventory & focus exclusively on wool rug-hooking. I'm planning on using those skeins to make the matching cardigan sometime later.


It isn't a very good Knit-In-Public type project, though the pattern is very well done. Most of the work on it so far has been done during quieter times at home, usually while trying to stay caught up on my favorite podcasts. At first I had a little bit of trouble understanding the instructions for the bottom edging. The first half of the first lace pattern repeat calls for several sets of short rows to create the scalloped effect at the bottom of the vest. That part took complete concentration even after I figured out what the pattern actually meant.


The green sweater is the Mirage Pullover by Lisa S. Rowe, from More Big Girl Knits. I'm using Cascade Sierra, which is a nice cotton/wool blend. I purchased the yarn on sale last year at Hearthstone Knits in St. Louis, Missouri. According to Ravelry, I started this one on June 10 2008. I love this pattern so far. It's very well designed, so that there is a natural shirt-tail hem effect without the need for any extra complicated knitting -- I especially appreciated that after the difficulty I had with the other pattern.

Even though the side details look complicated, the pattern is fairly easy to memorize. It's knit in the round, which I love, with plenty of interesting knitting to break up the boring stockinette. I'll probably end up making this one again, in a different yarn & color.

Sky But Not Saturday's

These sky pictures weren't taken on a Saturday, but are too pretty not to share.

Distraction

Life has been busy around here. I haven't been able to post, for various reasons, but fortunately have managed to knit enough to stay sane. The longer it is between posts, the more behind I feel. In the interests of not getting any further behind, & following the theory that a picture is worth a thousand words, here is some of my recent knitting.

A Tale of Two Sweaters, Part 1

I finished the black sweater & also the red one that I started for Stitch N Pitch. I'm much happier with the red one though. I only have time for a quick post right now, so there will be more about that later. For now, the pictures will have to do the talking.