Who me? Scattered?

You know that interview question where they ask how other people would describe you? Yeah, that one.

I'm guessing that most people that I know in real life would use words along the lines of "determined" and "focused" in responding to that question. Maybe even a little too focused sometimes.

This has been the source of endless amusement on my part lately.

Because suddenly, I have no focus. None at all. I am starting and forgetting and wandering away from things left and right. The maple leaf pattern? Oh, yeah. I should play with that some more. The sweater that's been on the needles for 6 months? Nope, I need a new one to work on. The shawl that I brought vowing to finish? Ha! Work from a pattern?

I can't even seem to sit down and knit a single round without a million things popping into my head to try next.

Maybe it's just decompression from grad school. Maybe it's that I have a half a notebook full of design ideas that I haven't had time for since I sketched them out a year ago. Maybe it's that I'm in a beautiful place taking pictures of things that inspire me. Maybe it's simply that I have time on my hands.

Whatever it is, "focused" is the last word that I would think to apply to myself at the moment. It's probably a really good thing that there are no comprehensive yarn stores nearby.

I think I'm going to need another notebook...

All spun up

All this designing requires lots of time for thinking. Every time I hit a snag or need to make a big decision, I walk away and work on something else for a while. This leads to lots of time for spindling.

I finished the silk/merino roving the other day.

It's about 4 oz (I think), and comes in at roughly 317 m. I say roughly, because my yardstick is the cat scratching post, and I'm not sure that it's a particularly accurate ruler. So, more accurately, it's 317 wraps around a piece of wood covered in sisal and fake fur.

Ah, niddy noddy. You are sorely missed.

So, 317 m of two-ply, fingering-to-DK weight yarn (at least before setting the twist…it may end up being a full DK weight by the time we're done).

I double plied both to even out my spindling and to help keep the yarn stable. The singles would have been a good weight, but I wanted to make a harder-wearing yarn. I know that hard-wearing silk is a bit of an oxymoron, but you know what I mean. Of course, the singles would have been enough for a shawl…

At this weight, I probably don't have enough for a stole, but I should have enough for a scarf. One more project waiting in the wings, hoping to take form.

(Grey cat added for color comparison. She was appropriately compensated for her assistance with a belly rub.)

This means that I have only about 4 oz of roving left in Germany. I didn't expect to get through it so quickly, and so I didn't bring much spinning fiber. This may necessitate finding a yarn shop soon. And that's just all kinds of trouble.

Not a good team

Note: I wrote this post before reading all of the comments (note within a note: bloggers, this is a very bad idea. Read the comments first so that you can learn from them!).

Now I'm dithering all over again. There has to be a good compromise…

Sometimes things that are perfect don't work well in teams. The one person that polarizes a group. The one, gorgeous color that throws off the rest. The person singing well, but simply singing too loudly. The one sentence that is pure genius, and yet destroys the flow of your writing.

Sometimes the best team is not composed of the best people. We all know this. We've all been in situations where we're working with a bunch of great people, and things just aren't coming together.

Because it's not about the people; it's about the team.

This happens in knitting, too. I was just talking to Jocelyn via email about her Elektra shawl. She has a bunch of great colors, and one is just not fitting in with the rest. It's a beautiful color, but in this combination it's not what she's looking for.

As we had this conversation, I thought back to the times that I have worked with color, usually in quilting. It's very easy for me to walk into a fabric shop and fall desperately in love with a pattern or print. I spend hours finding other patterns that match, building a team around this one player. And then I stand back and look at it. And very often, the team works better alone than it does with my star player. I have built an entire collection just to highlight this one fabric, and then I realize that it no longer belongs.

I try to deny it. I try to find other things that will make it belong. I rail about the injustice of the universe. I make Branden listen to all the reasons that I like the first fabric, and why it should fit.

And then I bite the bullet, and I cut it out.

I whimper and whine, but once I've done it, cutting the one piece lets me begin again and find something that is perfect for the team. Something that makes every member soar.

Teams are about working together, not standing out or showing off. They're about cooperating, working seamlessly in unison.

And if something's not working, then it doesn't belong.

Even if I love it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The rick rib is not playing nicely.

Or rather, it's doing all that it can do to fit in, but it cannot mesh flawlessly with the waving lace.

See there? At the join where the column of rick rib meets the column of faggoting? See how there's a break in the pattern?

Sigh.

There's nothing I can do about it. Or at least there's nothing that I know of that I can do about it.

The problem arises because the rick rib columns are made with yos and slipped stitches, while the faggoting columns are made with yos and k2togs.

Doesn't seem like a big deal, does it? But it means that the threads between the open holes cross without touching in the rick rib, while they wrap around one another in the faggoting.

Here's the rick rib:

 

 

 

 

 

 

And a slightly less blurry, less stretched version:

A zigzag of not-overlapping strands, a beautiful relative of the brioche stitch.

And here's the faggoting:

 

Here, we have rounded triangles, where the yos wrap around and through one another to hold each other open.

At the transition, we switch from a two-stitch pattern to a four-stitch pattern, and from crossing to wrapping.

I can line them up, but I can't make them perfect. Maybe this isn't the best team.

I've been fighting with myself about this all week. It goes something like this:

Rational self: "It's not perfect. I'm sorry, but it has to go."

But-It-Was-a-Great-Idea Self: "But I like it, and it's fast and easy to knit."

Rational self: "Yes, but a faggoting stitch would be just as easy, and would have a better join."

But-It-Was-a-Great-Idea Self: "But I like the rick rib. See the herringbone? It's all tilty and zigzaggy and I love it."

Rational self: "I know. But it's not working well here. It will work somewhere else, but it doesn't work here."

But-It-Was-a-Great-Idea Self: "But, but…."

Sigh.

I'm not going to rip back. I don't mind the imperfection so much, and it would probably damage the yarn to rip it back again. And, I'd have to rip all the way back to the cast on.

But, when I knit this again (and I will), I think the rick rib has to go. I really really love it, but it's just not perfect in this team.

And after all, that's what matters.

Two posts in one = twice the fun

As I was knitting on the edging for the first half of the alpaca stole, I noticed a slightly green color in the yarn.

There was also a slightly green color on my fingers.

And then I remembered noticing this once before, when I was knitting a stole last year on these needles. The yarn was dark, and I didn't think much of it. But now, the yarn is creamy white, and the grayish-green of tarnished brass does not add to the finished piece.

Anyone else had this problem with Addi needles?

I'm still knitting with them, because I love my addi lace needles and Inox are just not the same. I'm just trying to minimize contact between the needles and the yarn while storing them. I rub the needles down when I start, and I'm hoping that the color will just wash out at the end.

If it doesn't, it won't be the end of the world, as I was thinking of dyeing the final product anyway. I'm still not terribly pleased.

In other news, I am horribly behind in telling you what's going on with this project. This processy-blogging works great on a daily schedule, but on a non-daily schedule it kinda drags things out a bit. So, despite the fact that I haven't knit in four days (don't know what came over me), I am still ahead of the blog posting.

This is kind of a new thing for me. I can't say that I hate it.

So today, you get two posts in one. Tarnished fingers, and awkward joins.

Part of the reason that I am playing with the maple leaf stitch pattern is that I wanted to see how lace patterns worked, from the inside out. I wanted to know this so that I could figure out how to put them together seamlessly.

I didn't really think about the join between the rick rib and the waving lace when I first knit the join in the alpaca stole. Or rather, I thought about it, decided that it was hard and I was tired, and just kept going.

That gave me this:

It's not horrible, but there's a definite join between those two patterns. They don't flow into one another; they collide.

And so, I pulled back. Stitch by stitch, very carefully.

Have I mentioned that alpaca handspun felts to itself while you knit? Very soft yarn, very fuzzy. I think understand why people complain about knitting with mohair.

Every single stitch was tinked. No pulling. (Because pulling leads to felted knots, run stitches, and broken yarn. Ask me how I know.)

But, I made it back. This time, I put some thought into the join. A lot of thought, actually.

I removed a half repeat of the waving lace panel, partly to center it and partly because it was stretching more than my swatch said it would.

I took care to make sure that the vertical columns in the rick rib continued into the faggoting columns in the waving lace without awkward jogs.

It's not perfect, but it's a lot better.

I'll show you what's wrong with it (and why) next time.

But for now? Look at that join!

 

Falling down the Rabbit hole

I have a confession. I've never really "understood" Ravelry.

I know.

I'm just not a hang around online and chat in forums kind of person. I log into Facebook once every few months (if that). I've never found anything to make me stay. And Ravelry seemed a lot like Facebook.

I'm also the kind of person that prefers to go and look in my stash and fondle yarn rather than to look at pictures in my profile. The blog is as close as I get to a photo-enriched log book, and it's good enough for me.

Seeing how I never use patterns, it's kind of hard to get into the KALs or to spend hours looking through other people's version of a pattern. (They're great, and it's fun to see them all, but if I know I won't knit the pattern, why?)

And so, I have had a Ravelry account for well over a year, and have barely used it. I wasn't in any groups, didn't follow any forums, and didn't tend to leave messages anywhere. (I know that this may also be why its value was not all that apparent...)

Now, I know that this is inconceivable to many modern knitters. I know that Ravelry has lots of great things to offer, and I think it's a wonderful tool, for those that are interested in using it. But I've never been one of those people.

When I came to Germany, I discovered that my LYS is closed for the summer (!). There is no way to plug into knitters in Bretten, because there is no access to the yarn shop that I had hoped would help to connect us. Hmmph.

Of course, I wasn't all that connected to local knitters in Seattle, either. I'd tried two different knitting groups, both of which kind of unraveled and fell apart at the end. People were busy. They never developed the kind of dynamic that would keep them going. After the second, I didn't bother to find a third. I just hung out in the blogosphere.

But in Germany, the social connection with real people is a little more important than it was in the States. I'm not working, I don't have many friends (and no friendships that are more than a few weeks old), and sometimes I get a little tired of talking to myself and the cats. The friends that I do have here don't really understand the knitter thing, though they put up with me knitting around them with only a few sideways glances.

The time was ripe to find the potential in Ravelry. So, I joined a bunch of groups on the forums, and started plugging into the knitting community in Germany. Last Saturday, we went up to Heidelberg for a meetup. We ended up staying for about 6 hours, and it was kinda hard to leave at the end.

There was Geollyn from England and DondaLonda from Australia, both here on exchange programs. Julester is from Boston and here with her military husband. Liakno is from New Orleans, but married a German and is now living near Heidelberg. Leseratte is a native German, and one of the few bloggers in the group. She was working on a mystery shawl KAL project. I am not that brave...I need to see where the pattern is going before I cast on! There was another woman there whose name I don't recall that had a beautiful Horus shawl that she'd just completed, and who was working on a cabled sweater. And there was SnowberryLime, a knitter from Switzerland who is about to move to Wales. She's a knitter and spinner, and has a great shop on Etsy. You should go look at her fun art yarns. (I love the one with the bees, and the wire core just seems like it has so many interesting possibilities...)

DondaLonda, Geollyn, and Julester are all relatively new knitters (ranging from about a year to about 2 days of experience). It was really fun to see new people getting started, and it even inspired Branden to knit one whole round of a sock that I cast on for him. He hasn't touched it since, so I don't think it will stick this time, either, but he did pick it up again.

So maybe I can see the usefulness of Ravelry. Had to come out of my cave sometime, I guess.

A matter of perspective

The swatch I showed you in the last post had errors in it. Actually, there were originally a lot more errors, but I tinked back several times, trying to make it a good swatch. At the end of one pattern repeat, I was pretty ready to give up on knitting anything sizeable in this stitch pattern.

And then I sat back and thought about it. It's not a difficult pattern, but the chart was (to me) just unreadable. I being able to see how my knitting lines up with the chart is absolutely crucial for me, and I just couldn't see it.

And so, I would make a mistake without realizing it, knit blithely on for 4 rows or so, realize that something looked funny, spend 20 minutes figuring out where the problem was, and then have to tink all the way back. Not fun.

Why was it such a big deal, you ask? The charts.

Here is the chart, compared to the knitting*:

They look nothing alike. To me, that chart looks like so much chicken scratch (no offense intended to the author; the pattern is clear and can be followed. I just don't see the order in it). But this is a simple pattern, and there's no reason that the chart should look so complicated. And I really wanted to use the stitch pattern.

To use the pattern, I would also have to figure out how to knit half a repeat so that the edges of the piece would be straight. So, I sat down to figure out just exactly what was going on with this chart.

There's a column of faggoting stitches that separates the two half-dropped patterns from one another, and so I started there, using the yo/decrease pairs as my signposts.

This at least looked a little more like the knitting, but I thought I could do better. The problem is that the chart is written in solid rows with a stitch in every position. Generally I like them this way, but this pattern has lots of increases and decreases that change the stitch counts for each motif every four rows, effectively shifting the chart rows relative to one another. If you keep the stitches constant in the chart, then it can't look like the knitting. Since I rely on being able to "read" my knitting to figure out what to do next and to catch errors, I'd rather have empty chart boxes where there are no knit stitches.

Since the faggoting stitches are always worked directly above one another, I shifted them into vertical columns and centered the motif stitches, leaving "no stitch" areas to take up the extra space.

This chart looks like my actual knitting, and it's very easy to figure out where to cut the design motif to get a half-pattern to even out the edges. After half an hour of re-charting, I can use the stitch pattern that I like, and I can see where I'm going.

When I sat down to figure this out, I was sure it would be a real pain in the neck, and it simply wasn't. I wonder how many times we avoid a pattern that looks complicated, when a small change in perspective is all it takes to make it simple?

*I'm only showing partial charts where they are copied directly from the book, to avoid giving away BW's published material. It goes without saying that you should own her books anyway. =)

A little edgy

Every piece needs an edge. Really, that's an obvious thing, but sometimes it's not as straightforward as it seems.

I started swatching thinking that I might just use the edge of the Rick Rib for the finished edge of the alpaca shawl.

Not quite what I was looking for.

Then, I tried padding it with one row of k2, k3tog, hoping for a scalloped edge. But it still wasn't quite enough.

Clearly, I needed a real edging. I had settled on the Bold Faggoted Edging from BW #2 for the sides, and I decided to use the same edging on the ends. That left me wondering how to turn the corner.

Eventually, I used short-rows to make half a mitered corner.

Then, I picked up the stitches from the provisional cast-on, and worked the same short row series in the other direction. When the corner has been turned, it looks like this:

So, now I have two stitch patterns, and an edge. Almost a complete design.