Syringa Tank

Today, Issue 10 of Knit Now hits the newstands, and I can share with you my excitement at having one of my patterns included in the magazine.

Photo credit: Tim Bradley for Practical Publishing

Syringa is a girl's A-line tank knit in Rowan Amy Butler Belle Organic DK, a cotton-wool blend yarn with great elasticity. The tank is sized from 2-8 years old, and is worked at a gauge of 21 stitches/36 rows per 4 inches/10 cm. Worked from the bottom up, the hem has a graduated lace pattern before working the body in stockinette (or stocking stitch, if you prefer).

That's a photo of my original swatch, worked in Rowan Calmer which has sadly been discontinued. I hope you enjoy the pattern, and anyone who has any questions should please contact me (email on About Me page).

I'm thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with the staff of Knit Now - the process was smooth and stress-free from beginning to end. The whole issue is packed full of great patterns, so if you have the opportunity to grab a copy, I recommend it!

A long neglected FO

So, there's a number of unblogged and neglected projects lying around. Sometime in the last few months I managed to finish up one of these unloved things and got it into wearable shape.

I did blog about this project a few times last summer...I started it on June 4th of last year and finished it on August 30. And then put it on and screamed in agony. Behold, the disaster that was the Aran Necklace Camisole:

Not so bad from the front, right? But look.

Ooops! For a summer sweater, that's a bit low in the armholes I'd say. So...the above pictures were actually taken in March of this year. It ended up being an easy fix when I finally got down to it. I started by just using some matching weight yarn and mattress stitching the armholes closed a few inches, but it looked terrible. Out came the yarn, in came a needle and thread. Ta da!

Not the best look up close, but it works in the wearing.

Sorry for the craptastic photo, but I'm on Day 5 of 10 of single parenthood - my photographer is gallivanting around northern China for the week, courtesy of his employer, so I'm stuck with the self-photo.

Pattern: Aran Necklace Camisole (Rav link) by Caroline Bautista
Yarn: Jo Sharp Soho Summer DK Cotton, 6 skeins (approximately 650 yds)
Needles: US 4/3.5 mm
Start/finish: 4 June - 30 August 2010, finally finished in March 2011
Comments/mods: loved knitting the neckline section with the cabley bits, even though I seem to have messed it up a bit so that it's off center. Picking up the stitches around the neckline and then knitting down in stockinette was, um, boring. And the yarn? Let's just say I'm glad that it is out of the stash and into a sweater that I can actually wear. Cotton and I do not get along well, particularly splitty harsh-to-knit-with cotton...

Note: this does not count for my August sweater, since the knitting was finished last year. But it will go in the FO win column for the year.

Summertime, and the blogging is absent

Sorry about my unplanned hiatus. I've spent the last two weeks in the US with family, and the last two days trying to shake the jetlag before I get on yet another plane (this time for work). But I do have lots of finished objets to share with you.

First off: I did manage to spin up my yarn in those few days at home between trips. I ended up with 96 yds of bulky/superbulky superwash merino,

and about 175 yds of somewhat overplied Targhee.

About 91 yards of the merino became this,

and 170 yards of the Targhee became this,

which still needs the ribbing redone on smaller needles so it doesn't fall off quite so easily. The patterns are written and off to my wonderful test knitters, and I hope to have them available for release soon. Along with some better pictures!

I also managed to finish 99.9% of the mind-numbing stockinette on the Aran Necklace camisole. And then I ran out of yarn. Thankfully I was in the hidden section of the hem, and I had some DK weight random cotton lying around.

Last night's bout of jet lag-induced insomnia meant that this baby has it's hem sewn down and is blocked and drying on the guest bed as we speak. Hooray! Of course, autumn has arrived here in the UK (unlike in New England where it was ludicrously hot) (ok, it wasn't Texas hot, but it was hotter then England!), and it's not likely that it will be warm enough to wear on it's own, but that's ok. Especially since the armholes dip down below bra line on the side. Hmmm...

Finally, I finished my first pair of socks in a couple of months. I kind of lost my sock mojo at the start of the summer holidays in July, but 7 hour plane rides do allow for some concentrated sock time. I can only show part of these, since they're a design that I'm submitting, but they were great fun to knit. I liked the yarn alot too - Cherry Tree Hill Supersock merino. I think the colorway was "Blueberry Hill", which I liked. US 1.5/2.5 mm needles, 8.5 stitches per inch.

I wrote this up and sent it off to Sock Madness for next year, so the picture is deliberately obscured. Just in case you thought I was doing some drunken knitware photography.

So, two weeks vacation and no blogging means three completed original designs, and one summer tank I can't wear until next June. But there's a lot going on this fall - the iKnit Weekender is in a couple of weeks, and yesterday on my bike ride I hatched out a great and completely insane plan to knit sweaters for six people in my family (including me to be fair), four handspun, one cabled, one colorwork, by next March. Methinks that any Christmas knitting to be gifted has already been knit this year...

Travel knitting

So, tomorrow we go haring off to the Continent for ten days, and I'm trying to figure out what to take to knit. The plane trip isn't all that long, but I'll be in a car touring Bavaria and Austria for a while, so I need some small projects to work on.

Thankfully, I've got a couple of design ideas that need some work, so I'm packing up bits of yarn and lots of different needle sizes, a bunch of Xeroxed pages from Barbara Walker Vol I and II, and I'm hoping for the best. Here's what's on the docket:

A new sock pattern, (maybe) for Sock Madness 2011.

Some swatching for the 4! Ounce! Challenge!.

My Aran Necklace Tank (wait, that's not my design...). This baby is now joined for the body, and it's just mindless knitting in the round from now until I run out of yarn. So I'm packing the last of the splittier-then-all-get-out Jo Sharp Soho DK and hoping for the best.

I'm afraid blogging will be spotty for the next little while - I've got one post in reserve that I'll schedule for next week, but other then that, things will be quiet. And since the Wollmeise shop is closed when we'll be in Munich, I don't even have the lure of serious yarn pr0n to tease you with. And no one is sorrier then me, believe me...

Fiber Friday: Yarn #1

Well, clearly the Tour de Fleece coupled with summer vacation is enough to completely wipe out any motivation I have for blogging. Sorry about that! But rest assured that I have a) enough new handspun yarn to last for at least three weeks of Fibery Fridays, with more to come, b) some knitting progress and c) lots and lots of berries.

The first of my finished TdF yarns.
Fiber: Wensleydale, dyed by Adrian in the Mollusc colorway, a fiber club offering from August or September of 2007
Spun: I was going for laceweight singles, so I used the regular flyer for my Lendrum at 7.5:1.
Stats: two skeins, coming in at 467 yds/4.7 oz and 465 yds/4.1 oz - 1590 and 1815 ypp respectively. ANywhere from 35-50 wpi.

This top was an extra batch I ordered when I received my original fiber club offering, and I had visions of spinning it all up for a BSJ for some lucky baby. However, I'd never spun a longwool before, so it sat in the stash for a long time. I decided that part of my challenge was going to be spinning up the earliest fibers from my stash, and this is definitely one of those. This time around though, the colors spoke to me more for a big lacy shawl, so laceweight singles were on the menu.

The fiber was actually really easy to spin, once I stopped being scared of it. The top was much narrower then I've seen before with other wools (merino, shetland, etc), and needed a bit of predrafting after it's long hibernation, but after that it spun easily. I did notice my hands were a lot farther apart then they are for shorter fibers, but it wasn't too hard to adapt to the staple length.

I finished the skeins with a fulling bath. I was really worried that I'd added to much twist because the yarn before finishing was waaaaaaay overtwisted. However, three times through a hot/cold bath tamed that, and they ended up balanced. Yippee! The finished yarn has an absolutely gorgeous halo, and is super soft. The colors blended in the singles in such a way so that there's really nice transitions between the colors. I can't wait to knit this up, but I need to find a good 950 yd shawl pattern. Anyone have any suggestions?

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Now for knitting (and keeping with the color theme): I've been working a bit on my Aran Necklace Camisole in the past couple of days as my spinning mojo has gotten a bit burnt out.

It's coming along, and I'm now working on the front gussets, and should be getting the front done over the weekend. The yarn (Jo Sharp Soho DK) is still pissing the crap out of me - umpteen-plied splitty cotton yarn is not my friend - and I'm pretty sure I'm going to run out before the top is really finished, but I like the color, and I'm hoping it will be long enough not to show off my oh-so-lovely mom midriff. Stay tuned.