Picking up the pace

I’m nearly at the finish line for my Tangled Yoke Cardigan. After spending a few evenings knitting the neckband and picking up the stitches for the folded hem, I’m left with just the two button bands to finish. After some measuring and math, I figured out that I’ll have to pick up just under 300 stitches total to account for the changes in length that I made to the cardigan.

Picking up stitches and I do not get along very well. I had to do it for the Tubey that I made last year, and there are some fairly obvious errors, although none that are worth ripping out the entire body of the sweater to fix. Picking up the purl bumps for the neckband was bad enough, and this is in a much more visible location than “the inside of my sweater”. So buoyed by another tutorial from knitty.com, I proceeded to attempt to evenly space my stitches and make sure they’re in the same vertical line. The way the neckband pulls in made all this rather tricky, but after many attempts I got all of the stitches picked up for the left buttonband. Great, right? Except I’m pretty sure I picked up the wrong loop and will have to rip everything out as it’ll look funny. I’m going with it as it is now because I have a feeling that I miscalculated the total number of stitches and will need to do it all over again to get things the right size. I also have a feeling that given how sore my index finger is from being poked with a 2 mm needle repeatedly, if by some miracle the band is the right length, I can live with having picked up the wrong half of the stitch.

This is what I’ve started doing as a way to put off picking up those stitches.

It’s my new traveling project, a slightly narrower version of the My So-Called Scarf from Sheep in the City. I like my scarves on the long and skinny side, so I cast on 26 stitches instead of 30, and it’s amazing how fast it’s been going–I’ve knit 3 feet of it in two nights. I’m using Manos del Uruguay in the Mar colorway that I purchased at Knit-A-Bit in Westfield, NJ. I met one of the owners and several of the knitters from Knit-A-Bit at Stitch ‘n’ Pitch at Shea in August, and they were so nice that I wanted to check their store out whenever I got an opportunity to. I was very impressed–they had a great selection of yarns and books (including many colorways of Manos and Lorna’s, and a wide variety of sock yarns), and were incredibly helpful. I went off my pre-Stitches yarn diet because the yarn I bought was perfect for a scarf to go with my navy peacoat, and I’d definitely go back when I got a chance.

The Manos feels much softer than I remembered it feeling (and than what I already had in the stash feels like), so I hope it’ll still wear decently. As with most handpainted yarns, there’s enough variation between the two skeins that I bought that I decided I ought to wind both skeins into one big ball and alternate between knitting from the center and the outside.

And finally, a splash of color to counteract all the gray we’ve been having the past few days. It may have been in the high 70s earlier this week, but it’s still nice to be reminded of summer.

Yarn Candy Friday

Last Saturday, my mother and I went to Stitches East, in Baltimore. I…may have picked up a few things while we were there.

I got some Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock Mediumweight in Highway 30, most likely to make something out of Cat Bordhi’s new sock architecture book.

I also couldn’t resist the candy cane-like striping of some of the STR Silkie, in Mystic Kelp. The BMFA booth was seriously decimated by Saturday afternoon. I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d even have anything to sell on Sunday, but I was fortunate to find colors that I really liked among what was left. I guess it pays to have “different” taste.

I also stopped by the Lisa Souza booth, and got a skein of Sock! in Wild Thing. . .

And Sock! Merino in Berry Poppins. I’d been admiring this yarn from afar for a while because of all of the pretty colorways, but I like to get to feel the yarn before I’ll order it online, so it was great that they were there.

Another nice thing about Stitches is that you get to meet producers that you might not have heard of before.

I got a skein of Storm Moon Knits’ Twilight Sock in “Rip Her to Shreds”. I figure what better way to break out of my blue/purple rut than with some hot pink (and, uh, blue and purple) yarn, right?

I also got a pair of skeins of Green Mountain Spinnery Maine Organic for the Tyrolean Stockings from the Fall 2007 Interweave Knits.

And then there was my really big purchase: 6 skeins of the Wool/Cotton from Shelridge Farms. I bought it as a kit for a sweater with cable detailing on the sides and sleeves that should be very cute in the light purple color. The people at the Shelridge booth were incredibly nice. I had swapped out the yarn originally in the kit for the size and color that I wanted, and after I had paid, they gave me an extra skein because they weren’t sure if the amount of yarn listed for the smallest size was going to be enough. If I had extra, I could bring the skein back at the next fiber festival we were both at. The yarn was just lovely, though, so after conferring with Mom, we decided to buy the skein outright, and if I have leftovers, I can then make a hat.

I also got some Elsebeth Lavold Classic AL and Kathmandu Tweed on deep clearance from the Webs booth, so I’m going to be in very, very good shape for whatever sweater patterns strike my fancy in the upcoming months. I’m thinking one of those might get turned into a Mr. Greenjeans, but you never know.

Eye Candy Friday: The Fix is In

I was taking pictures of the current progress on my Tangled Yoke Cardigan, all set to use the cable texture as my Eye Candy Friday, when I noticed something. Something bad. Sure, the front of the sweater looks fine, and I’m very happy with that, but when I turned it over to take a photo of the back, something stuck out at me like a sore thumb:

I must have gotten distracted while knitting on the bus, and I had mis-crossed the cables at the center-back of the sweater. Instead of having a cable that was symmetrical, gracefully crossing and swooping to join with the motifs on either side (as on the bottom of the pattern), I had misread the chart and created an odd looking braid that connected with nothing in particular.

I was not looking forward to ripping out two rows of over 280 stitches each and reknitting, but fortunately, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee came to my rescue. By following her directions, I found that I could just drop the stitches involved with the cable, ladder down to the offending row, and re-cross the stitches in the correct direction (her explanation is much more detailed than that, with lots of pictures as well). So that’s what I did, laddering down and knitting back up, first for one side:

And then the other. I got the crossing correct, and my cardigan was saved, all through the magic of the internet.

I’m not sure how much of my readership read me for my rather infrequent recaps of Yankee games, or are baseball fans. I have saved a couple of games to go through during the (too long) offseason, but I have something else that might tide people over. A friend of mine is doing a study of pitch precision by logging where catchers set up to receive a pitch vs. where the pitch actually is caught. If you’re watching the baseball playoffs and you’d like to be a volunteer game logger, check out the site here: Catcher Spotting. Any innings would be much appreciated, and besides–”it’s for science!” is certainly one of the best excuses I can think of to watch a ballgame.

Eye Candy Friday

After all, fruit is like Nature’s candy, right?

In the conservatories at Longwood Gardens, they recreate some of the house gardens that the Du Pont family had to provide them with fresh tropical and out-of-season fruit all year long.  I’m sure that outside of Longwood, strawberry guavas are not that common in Pennsylvania.

In the room called the Orangery, they had a number of planters of grapefruit trees set up, while the other greenhouses had plenty of other citrus varieties, including several different kinds of kumquat.

Of course, when you want the most perfect fruit specimens possible, you resort to some interesting tactics. They had signs posted about how the family employed gardeners to thin out bunches of grapes so the individual grapes didn’t touch one another, and they also had these:

Melon trees that had been trained up the walls of the greenhouse, and whose fruit had to be supported by net bags, so it didn’t touch the ground.

And of course, no tropical greenhouse would be complete without a group of pineapple plants, complete with adorable mini-pineapples.

I’m still making progress on the Tangled Yoke Cardigan. Pictures will follow soon, now that I’ve finally joined the sleeves to the body and have started the cable pattern.