Finished: Endpaper Mitts

Pattern: Endpaper Mitts by Eunny Jang
Yarn: Baby Alpaca by Lang, 170 m/50 g, 100 % alpaca, recommended needle size 3 mm, gauge 26 stitches x 34 rows = 10 x 10 cm
Color: red and orange
Price: € 6,.per ball
Amount: less than a ball in each color
Needles: 2 mm for the ribbing, 2,5 mm for the body
Gauge: I'm counting 18 stitches in 5 cm (much tighter than is recommended)
Dimensions: fit my hand like a glove
Modifications: I exchanged the colors on the second mitt, because not only do I suffer from second-sock-syndrome, but also from second-anything-syndrome. I'm so glad that when you do fair isle, you can exchange the colors. I'll probably have to introduce that when knitting fair isle sleeves (just kidding <- I had to add this, I'm sure some people would really believe that I was capable of doing something like that... :D)

Tubular cast-on: I'm trying to gather my diffuse memories... I started like here, but used a thinner cotton yarn to wrap the loops with my working yarn around. I also started with 2.5 mm needles. The first row was purl, *slip purlwise with yarn in front, ktbl, repeat from * until last stitch. Knit that one. Next row: P, then *slip purlwise with yarn in front, ktbl, repeat from * until last stitch. Knit that one. Join in the round. Take the last stitch (a knit stitch) and pull it over the first stitch (purl stitch), so that the first stitch is inside the last stitch, held by the right hand needle and the last stitch is on the left-hand needle. Knit the last stitch. I'm not sure if I continued with two more rows of alternating slip purlwise with yarn in the front and k, respectively slip purlwise with the yarn in the back and p or if I just continued with the regular 1x1 ribbing. When you change to normal ribbing, also change to 2.0 mm needle.

I started doing my tubular cast-ons like this, because for one project I once would have needed 1.5 mm needles, which are not in the standard range of the yarn shops here, you have to order them. If you want your tubular cast-on to look good, you really have to go down with the needle size and then it's still not great, at least that's my experience. If I knit through the backloop it tightens the tubular cast-on a bit, making the whole thing a little neater. Since it makes the whole thing too tight, I have to use bigger needles than I would for the rest of the ribbing. If I do the tubular cast-on this way, the stitches are not too loose, it's still stretchy, I can use bigger needles instead of fumbling with small ones, and the edge is still nice.

Comments: I recommend the mitts as a first time project for anybody who has never done fair isle before. They are supereasy to make and the fair isle pattern is also not too difficult.

The mitts are quite tight. As you can see the false purled seam is not staying on the side, but is moving upward. I like them tight though.

The mitts keep my wrists warm, which is nice, but my fingers still suffer. If it's cold enough to wear handwarmers, then my fingers will also want protection, especially, since I nearly always have cold fingers. Anyway, I think they are really really cute. I especially like the color combination. I'm very happy with this project. :)

By the way, I complained about Alpaca from Drops, that ripping back was difficult, because the yarn had a tendency to felt. I thought that this was due to the quality of the yarn, but the Baby Alpaca from Lang is the same. It's more expensive and the yarn still has a tendency to felt.

Finished: Anemoi Mittens

Pattern: Anemoi Mittens by Eunny Jang (who unfortunately stopped blogging, but her patterns are still available on her old blog or via Ravelry)
Yarn: Drops Alpaca, 100 % alpaca, recommended gauge: 23 stitches x 30 cm = 10 cm x 10 cm
Color: green (a nice pea green) and white (natural)
Price: was in my stash, but I think it's about 3-4 Euros
Amount: less than one ball in each color
Needles: 2.00 mm and 2.25 mm
Gauge: they fit, but I think for mittens they should have more ease to be warm
Dimensions: Small
Modifications: None
Comments:

The yarn:
The yarn does not strike me as of great quality. I used the same yarn once to crochet a small shrug/vest. After blocking I realized that it was too small and so frogged it. I then realized that the yarn had become really sticky and you had to tear at it in order to undo the stitches. It was the same thing with the mittens, once you knit it, you better not rip back. This is one of the few yarns I have worked with that seem to felt just by looking at them. It also became very fuzzy after washing.

The color range is amazing though. I really like the green, it has all kinds of light and dark speckles of green in it. Not a boring yarn to look at. And it's also soft and nice to touch.

There's some bleeding when you wash it.



The gauge:
I just measured and I get 20 stitches over 5 cm, which means I managed to press a lot more stitches into a cm than what the band said. This is a bit weird, but the mittens look ok to me. I expected them to be a bit wider though since I didn't swatch. They fit, but I read that mittens are supposed to have a bit of ease to give the best insulation against the cold. I think next time I would use bigger needles.

Fair isle and yarn dominance:
If you want to do fair isle you need to know what yarn dominance means. The first time I heard about it was on Nona's blog. I didn't have any intention of doing fair isle at that time, but kept this piece of information in the back of my mind. I learned that:

1. One color will dominate and pop out more than the other (take a look at her two swatches that she shows for comparison).
2. It is the yarn that is carried below the other that will pop out more.

If you didn't get point 2, neither did I... But I like that I'm so smart and remember things that I initially didn't need, because when I did want to do fair isle, I remembered this thing about yarn dominance. Since I didn't get it completely then (not so smart maybe? :D), I had to investigate this issue further.

Reading Tia Judy and Très Chic Veronique helped me understand what was going on a bit more.

Then I saw a commentator at meangirl's blog say that she was an English knitter (like me!) holding the contrast yarn in her left hand and the main color in the right hand. I thought that as I had no clue what to do I should follow her like a good lemming and do what she did. I also learned from the blog post that you are not supposed to change the hand that carries the colors at your whim.

3. One hand, one color. Don't change. (We're talking about two color knitting and I use both hands instead of one hand to carry the yarn.)

I also consulted my favorite knitting blog, TECHknitter, that never fails me when I'm in dire need of a thorough and detailed explanation of a knitting technique. She explained in one of her comments that in her opinion it didn't really matter that much if the yarn was carried from below or above unless you have can achieve an even tension with both hands (of course, we all can), but that a color would pop out more when the hand that carries the color is your unfamiliar knitting hand. The tension will be looser and the yarn will be more prominent to see.

4. Carry the contrast color (=foreground color, pattern color, the color that you want to pop out) in the hand that you usually don't use for knitting.

If I understood it right, when you're an English knitter, you're on the safe side twice, because when you carry the contrast color with your weaker hand, the left hand, the yarn will also automatically ride below the other color.

Meangirl also has a nice picture tutorial for weaving in the background color (=main color, the color that predominates and is used most often) yarn when you have to carry it over a longer stretch of stitches. When you want to to weave in the contrast color, you have to wrap the contrast color anticlockwise and then the background color and then unwrap the contrast color. The background color stitch will be mounted with the back leg first, but in the next row simply knit into the backloop.

Useful video from Knitpicks that shows how to carry yarn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2L4Fo82zwk

After knitting the first mitten went so smoothly I thought I didn't need to pay that much attention to the tension with the second mitten and that if problems did occur blocking would resolve them all. The somewhat crappy looking mitten on the left side (I stole the idea with the reversed colors from Très Chic Veronique. Second-sock-syndrome has a cousin - second-mitten-syndrome) is proof of my sloppiness. You might notice that the cuff seems to look shorter and smaller. That's because it is. :( I had to reknit the cuff of the right mitten a couple of time and at that time I still tugged and checked that I wasn't knitting too tightly, etc. The cuff of the left mitten I knit once.




The blocked mitten looks a bit bigger, but usually knitted items shrink a bit after blocking. They are both the same size now.


After blocking:


Well, blocking did resolve nearly everything, except for the very very very tight cuff and the very prominent green. It seems the tension on my left hand was a lot looser than when I knit the right mitten.

Cast-on:
For the cast-on I did a tubular cast-on. I followed Ysolda's instruction for a long-tail tubular cast-on, but I'm not sure if in the end I did the same thing as she did... She said that it differed from the Italian method where you can pull out the yarn, while here the strand that creates the stitches would alternate. Well, my impression was that there was only one strand that created the loops, in the front and in the back and I have been able to pull out the yarn. I also didn't start with a slip knot (I used the needle to pull at the yarn between my fingers and then started making the stitches).

Edit: I was researching how to do a better tubular cast-on for a different project and just found this post by TECHknitter. I thought I had been following Ysolda's instruction, but actually what I did resembles more what TECHknitter did.

Overall I like the mittens. Nice quick project and I learned a couple of new things.

It's raining and I'm blocking

It's raining, raining, raining... :( But thanks to that you can enjoy a new blog entry. Instead of going to my yoga class I'm sitting here and putting something together just for your entertainment. :D

Pattern: Rebecca no. 36, originally in yellow
Yarn: ggh yarn "Tara", 72 % cotton, 28 % polyamid, 100 m/ 50 g (that's the orignal yarn, I seldom use the original yarn, but I happened to see the dress in the yarn shop and the owner convinced me that it would look good on me, so my resistance melted like icecream in the sun.)
Price: not sure, less than 50 € but since I have two balls of the orange yarn left, I should look for the receipt so I can return it. In the magazine the retail price is stated as 44.55 € for the kit.
Amount: theoretically 400 g of the orange yarn and 50 g of the white yarn, but like I said, I have two balls left and my gauge is correct.
Needle size: 5 mm
Size: 34/36

Comment: I would recommend that you use 60 cm and 80 cm, instead of 60 cm and 100 cm long circular needles. And start with the short circular needle and not the long one.

There is one minor mistake in the instructions (sorry, I just checked them, but I can't find it now), but it's not that important. I think the stitch count somewhere was wrong.

The dress is tight, not like in one of the pictures in the magazine where it seems to have more ease around the waist (the one I'm thinking of is not on the website, only in the magazine). I had to include some short rows around the bust.

Not sure why I had gone for a knitted dress. Knit with 5 mm (!) needles. And as we all know the line between uniqute and plain weird is thin! I'm not afraid of wearing knitted stuff, but I do not want to look like an esoteric-Birkenstock-wearing-eco-sociologist (I'm pissed off with a certain sociologist, so I felt like including an over-simplifying insult against sociologists. :D Even in high school I was convinced that the majority of sociologists talk too much and are weird. I also bet they don't shower very often. Some people seem to confuse eco and natural with smelly). I also don't really like tie-dye. Now, go and hate me. :D

It looked nice in the window though and it seemed to be a quick knit (it definitely is). I wanted a very mindless project and this one suits the purpose. Good ol' stockinette in the round (not much of a fan of knitting in the round though, you never get to an end, it goes on and on and on...) That was also one reason why I bought the original yarn, I simply didn't want to go hunting for the right yarn and then recalculate everything, because my gauge would be off. I think, I have a reluctance to knitting sweaters, because when substituting yarn I never get the right gauge, which means I have to do many calculations to adapt the yarn to the pattern.

The yarn is ok. I usually prefer 100 % natural yarns, but cotton is a very heavy fiber, it probably wouldn't have been a good idea to use a 100 % cotton yarn for a dress. Recently I have developed a fondness for orange and this one is a quite nice shade. The original yellow is a bit bland in reality. The yarn is also available in a couple of other colors, but in my opinion they are all a bit too bland for a summer dress.



This is another Swallotail Shawl. Follow the link for more details about the pattern. This one is quite old, but I never posted a picture of it. Having been in use for a quite a while it had shrunk a bit and needed re-stretching, so I reblocked it yesterday. It's one of my favorite knitted items.

Yarn: Misti Alpaca lace
Color: natural white
Needle size: 3.5 mm



Still on the needles: Feather and Fan Shawl by Eugen Beugler from A Gathering of Lace. Same yarn as I had used here.




That one is actually finished and I was about to block it this morning, but I didn't have enough of the jigsaw pieces that I use instead of a blocking board. At the moment it's drying outside on our balcony.

Pattern: Lilly's Leaf Shawl

More details when it's blocked.



Instead of blocking Lilly's Leaf Shawl I'm now blocking the Mystery Stole. Yeah, I'm fast, faster than a ray of light. :D I did block it already, but since I did it the lazy way, I wasn't happy with the result, so I decided to do it again. But since I somehow got less and less convinced of its wearability I put it off until now.

Finished: Flower Basket Shawl 3

Pattern: Flower Basket Shawl by Evelyn A. Clark, from Interweave Fall 2004
Yarn: Alpaca Fashion by Schachenmayr Nomotta
Color: #122
Price: around 5 €/50 g
Amount: 3
Needles: 5 mm
Gauge: MIA :D
Dimensions: It's 118 cm wide and from the top center to the tip it measures 59 cm.
Modifications: I knit the second chart only 4 times instead of 10. I also did not start with the recommended provisional crochet cast-on. I tried another cast-on that does not require waste yarn (good, very good :)) You start with a circular needle and a slip knot. Then you take your working yarn and wind it around the two needles. Every loop will become a stitch. In the picture you can count three loop on each needle. Pull the second (lower) needle, the one with the slip knot, through all the loops till they rest on the cord. Start knitting the stitches on the first (upper) needle. I found my edge looked a bit nicer, but that might also be due to the thicker yarn. But in any case, you do not have to have to use waste yarn, which means you do not have to look for it (waste yarn is not always there when you need it, in my case at least).

Comments: What can I say, I have already knit two other Flower Basket Shawls, I just like the pattern. When I saw the yarn, I immediately thought it would look beautiful in this pattern. It's also easy to memorize and I wanted something that would knit up quickly (my aunt saw the Hydrangea Lace Scarf and mentioned that she also wanted to have something to wear around her neck). I also love the color. It's a very warm deep yellow with slight variations in color. And of course, nothing beats the soft cozy feeling of alpaca.

P.S. I think this cast-on only works well if you use thicker yarn. I did another Shetland Triangle with Misti Alpaca in laceweight and tried to do the cast-on with this method and it was a very fiddly thing. The crochet cast-on is probably preferable if you use thin yarn.

Finished: Esther Williams Hat

Pattern: Esther Williams Hat by Laura from Poor Miss Finch
Yarn: Lang Yarns Baby Alpaca, 170 m/50 g
Color: Grey
Price: around 5 € per ball I think
Amount: 2 (I used the yarn doubled)
Needles: 3.5 mm
Gauge: A very good question... Let me think... :D I cast on 114 stitches instead of 96 to make the hat fit
Size: There is just one size. My hat fits like a glove. :)
Modifications: Cast on 114 stitches and had to adapt the decreases. No biggie.
Comments: Nice pattern, although as alala said that with the short hair I might run risk that it looks like a chemo cap. I think it looks like a bathing cap. Surprise, surprise, afterall the hat is named after a swimming star. To my defense, the hat does not look like a bathing cap if your hair is longer. A girl with long curly hair from my stitch 'n' bitch meeting tried my hat and she immediately got compliments. Some hats look good with short hair and some look better with longer hair. That one probably belongs to the latter.

I like the hat a lot, not so much because I want to look as if I was wearing bathing caps, but the yarn is so wonderful soft. If you have ever worn a hat made of alpaca, you'll never go back to letting anything else touch your head. It's warm and it feels so incredibly nice. So, I wear it, but I try to hide it under a hood. Yeah, lately I've been favoring comfort and warmth over vanity, but still. The hat really does not look good with anything I'm wearing at the moment, but I can't resist its softness. Maybe I should get more of this yarn and knit a matching scarf, but I actually like the red scarf.

I got told that my face looks slack in my pictures and that a good trick is to act an expression.

Trying to look like I'm this harmless friendly person that you would like to meet. (Hahaha :D)

My skeptical look, full with expectations that you are surely going to wreck.

Spot. on. :D

*sulking* You have disappointed me. *booohooo*

Ok, now give me my Oscar. :D

For a profile view:

And although I'm a bit late - Merry Christmas to everybody! :)