Bodley's Cardigan: The Agony of Defeat

Fessing Up

So, it's been a while. 

Um.

The last evening of November was... disheartening to say the least.  I thought I had plenty of time to finish the collar--it's just a collar, after all! but.  I was wrong.  The collar's beautifully designed--you cast on an extra 35 stitches and then on the way back, you SSK the last collar stitch together with the first yoke stitch on the needle.  And there are... um, a lot... of yoke stitches on the needle at that time.  So.  35XAlot= 35 Alots.  Except it's actually 70XAlot because you knit 35 on the right side, SSK, wrap & turn, and then you knit 35 back to the edge of the collar.  So that's 70 Alots of Stitches.  I won't do the math.

And then... about 2 hours before the deadline... I ran out of yarn.  Ran out! I'd spun an extra skein a week before, just to be safe--but no, not enough.  So, I went upstairs to my stash and dug out a skein of Plymouth Encore Worsted, and kept knitting.  I knew I'd have to rip it out later and replace it, but at least I'd get my sweater finished!

At 2:50am Eastern time--that's 11:50 Princess Onica Standard Time, the time to which all House Cup events are aligned--I looked at the 2 inches I had left and realized it wasn't going to happen.  I attempted to take my defeat picture and post it to the thread, and I didn't even make that--as I was posting, the thread got locked, and so.  

This is where I was when I stopped.

 

Count em: 13 stitches left. 

So, I cried.  Then, because it was the middle of the freakin' night, I went to bed.  I figured I'd finish this sucker in December and turn it in for 10 points to Detention in January.  

I didn't sacrifice all my points on this sweater, mind.  I earned points for the 50% and 75% turn-ins (I have to look it up to figure out how many that is, but it was a couple hundred I think, and I made those both on time).  But, meantime, I'd also sacrificed my Order of the Phoenix mission in order to finish my NEWT... and so, I had 25% or so of a pair of giant socks to finish as well... sigh...  I was tired.  Bed was in order.

House Cup to the Rescue!

To my delight, the House Cup came to the rescue.  In December, they announced that they were bringing back an idea that had been tried once before: The Detention OWL.  The purpose of the Detention OWL is to finish up a bunch of projects that weigh on your mind.  Well, I have all my 12 OWL badges... so I hadn't been planning to do Advanced Studies at all this term except maybe a Phoenix mission (2 pairs of socks FTW!)... but I thought, wow, I could finish my sweater AND the Giant Socks and the mittens I started for my niece in December but didn't finish AND my shipwreck shawl (the need for which is, at long last, fast approaching... no need to say more here).  So, I proposed a Detention OWL at 3:01am on January 1--because, they were only accepting 60 candidates, and over the course of a couple of weeks I realized I must do this project.

The project I proposed is OWL worthy but, for me, fairly modest.  Knitting the rest of the socks... done.

Those are on Size 13 men's feet, by the way... 

Spinning 40 rolags (the brown is wool I bought--all I had left of the Giant Alpaca bag was gross and very hay-filled)...

which I carded during the Super Bowl, by the way, into 200 yards of 2-ply yarn...

 

is done.

Halfway!

That's what I agreed to as my 50%, which got turned in 2 days ago.  I still have to knit the collar, knit the second mitten, and knit the last several rows of the shawl to get my badge.

Today I started knitting again.  I've completed about 2 inches of the collar (I had to rip out all the store-bought yarn, so when I started this morning, I had about 10 inches of collar left).  After the collar comes the button band, and then end weaving and washing and blocking.  And then--the wearing! That's the bit I'm looking most forward to... it seems the heat in my office may not actually get fixed until summer of 2015... I'm glad this cardigan is warm.

And just for a happy thought--here's a Flying Spaghetti Monster wishing you Happy Valentine's Day.

Bodley's Cardigan: The Penultimate Post

Almost there!

I suspect this will be my penultimate Bodley's Cardigan post.  The sweater is coming in to the last little bits.  I've added the sleeves in--and didn't that go swimmingly? Why yes, yes it did!--and I've knit 9 1/2 of the 11 repeats of the yoke section.  Once I'm done with the yoke I do two repeats of the short rows section and then I'm on to the collar--and that's it!  I have till Saturday night to get my NEWT points, and I really think I'm in good shape to get there.

Joining the Sleeves

So, this is the first time I've done a bottom-up sweater where you join in the sleeves and then work the whole thing, decreasing in a raglan style.  I worked 11" of the sleeves before I joined them on--it's a 3/4 sleeves sweater, thank heaven, or I'd never get done in time, honest! and then I had just a minute of ... OMSQ, can I do it?  Does this make sense?

I trusted in the pattern, and because DovieJay is brilliant, it went exactly the way it was meant to do.

And then I knit...

And I knit knit knit knit.  There are short rows in the yoke.  German short rows, yay! They're easy and cool, and it makes it so I don't have to worry that the sticky alpaca will prevent me from knitting in the wrap.  And I knit and knit and knit, and suddenly it started looking like a sweater!

More Yarn, anyone?

I spun an extra skein of yarn a week ago.  I had to buy more roving--and of course I couldn't get the same kind of roving I bought before, and this is silkier and harder to make rolags with, but I did it.  And I'm glad I did.  I haven't added it in to the project yet, because I was thinking if I didn't use it I would use it for a class project instead.  But I think I will use it, even though I don't really need it.  I'm not going to run out of yarn, I don't think.  But Skein SadieLou, the last of the skeins I spun for this project, is a little rough.  I think it'll be okay when I wash the sweater, but I'm still not sure I want it on the collar. I'm going to use the softer yarn for the collar.

I'll just be traveling on...

We're heading to Pennsylvania on Sunday for Thanksgiving.  I probably can't work on this in the car, but on Thursday night, Friday, and Saturday morning I should have ample time.  I might even have time for a third class project, you never know... I've already got 2, and 25% on my Phoenix socks which didn't go quite as planned...

I'll have to bring something with me to work on if the sweater gets finished.

I'll see you all on the other side of a finished sweater!

Bodley's Cardigan: into uncharted territory

First, I must gripe.  The new iOS lets you 'multitask' by shifting among open applications (but, sadly, does not let you actually close any without shutting the iPad all the way down, but that's another story).  However, the Blogger app seems to have missed the memo and I just lost a whole post while I was looking for something online.  I'll attempt to recreate now, but it's past my bedtime so I don't promise I'll be witty.

Beyond the Charts

I finished the charts last night just before switching over from Once Upon a Time to the baseball game (Go Red Sox!).  I've got a bit over 7 inches now--just 8.5 to go, in pattern, until the arm-hole decreases!  It might take a while.  I'm about halfway through my second skein and I need to get to the middle of the fourth skein by the end of October.  You may commence prayer, candle lighting (just not near the wool, please), smudging to cleanse evil spirits, whatever you think might help get me there.  I shall do my part by knitting.  I may have overstepped myself attempting to do this sweater while, you know, living my life.  And knitting a Phoenix (socks! They helped the Red Sox win, I swear!) and I also spun for a class, but I think it might be my only. I'm quite swamped.  NEWT first, other stuff later.  Prioritites.  I must get my first wand.

Anyway, progress:

The ribbing is a bit looser than I'd like, and it's a little hard to see the 'stained glass windows' pattern...

but it's coming out well enough and it will certainly be the warmest sweater I've ever knit.  It's very tight--I'm on size 2 needles! and I think it'll be a little less stiff once I wash it.  When I washed the swatch, dirt came out in amazingly larger proportions than when I washed the skeins, and everything softened up a lot.  And got tighter.  But softer.

Keeping the brain occupied

So, I spend a lot of time watching TV -- mostly Netflix except for the odd foray into ABC-land for Once Upon a Time.  I've watched several whole series since I started this project: Beauty and the Beast from the late 1980s (I learned 2 things: George RR Martin hasn't changed much in 25 years, and Ron Perlman must have been Benedict Cumberbatch's smoldering professor); Alphas, Continuum, and I've just begun Arrow.  

But there are other things to do while you knit or spin! I've been listening to audio books--I just went through all the Circle of Magic books by Tamora Pierce, a re-listen for me--and I'm currently listening to The Alchemyst which is happily also a Fantasia workshop this term.  And I'm also reading.  According to Elizabeth Zimmermann, knitting master and creator of the February Lady Surprise Jacket among other awesome patterns, 

Some may gasp and stretch their eyes, but knitting and reading at the same time is just a matter of practice.  Of course you must love knitting and you must enjoy reading; if you don't love them equally, one at a time is sufficient.

--Elizabeth Zimmermann, The Knitter's Almanac, April (found at location 835 of my Kindle edition... I can probably reference a page at a later time).

So, reading and knitting.  This week the final ETA: sorry, penultimate book of the Heroes of Olympus: House of Hades by Rick Riordan was released.  Having required 3 years to mostly exise the unpleasant narration of the first book from my head (splutter splutter don't pronounce "Hera" like SheRa! splutter splutter), I simply refuse to listen to these, so reading it is! On my iPad, I can access my Kindle app, and it stands up on its little standy thing, and a page turn is just a matter of a quick swipe, and I can make the text large enough that I can sit back in my chair and knit and read and knit and read.  I mostly knit for a bit, then finish the page, turn it, and knit more... I'm not so much doing them at the same time as alternating them.  Still, I'm getting through this book... Annabeth and Percy are in dire straits, and of course Hazel and Jason are too... I'm going to guess it all gets resolved somehow by the end of the book since this is the last one, but Riordan can be tricky, so we'll see.

Okay, bed now.  Have a lovely night!

Bodley's Cardigan: Casting on at Last

There really wasn't much to say last month.  I spun, I plied, I got covered in bits of hay and dust, my poor wheel needs a good cleaning, and I finally got most of the grit and fluff out of my hand cards after washing them twice.

But finally! Lo! and behold! I have Spun All The Yarn!

Seven skeins of... varying length.  The shortest is 172 yards and the longest 246, with most of them averaging 200-220 yards.  Well.  Here's a screen shot of my Ravelry handspun project page (new to Rav: handspun as a project! and fiber as a stash option! I think it's still in beta but I've been using it since Tour de Fleece and it is quite lovely!)

 

As you can see I have named all the skeins for my dear Rav friends or their Merry Beasts (I thought Foxy and Ember would like their own skeins even better than their Persons would) and if I run out of yarn and have to do one more, another dormmate will get her own skein.

The grand total if I did my Mathings right is 1,520 yards, which was enough to declare I'd reached All The Yarn for NEWT 50% points purposes.  

I then proceeded to cast on... with the wrong size needles, bless me.  I knit 4 rows with size US 4 needles before realizing my mistake and switching to the 2s.  I'm just *not* ripping this stuff back.  It's very clingy and I'm afraid it wouldn't do well coming out.

what I have is currently right around 45" long (perfect: it's supposed to be 44.5" and it will tighten with washing if my swatch is any indication), 314 stitches, takes about 20 minutes to do a row.  I'm just adoring the Broken Rib stitch at the beginning and end of the rows.  I shall hereby admit that I'm afraid this yarn has too much halo to do DovieJay's stitch definition justice.  But we shall see... and if nothing else, this will be the warmest sweater I've ever owned.  And since it'll be one more winter without heat in my office (they'll be putting in a new furnace next summer while the preschool is on hiatus, but this winter we'll be keeping the space heater running!) I'll be glad to have this finished.

There's not much to see, really, but let's give the iPad camera a try, shall we?

Bodley's Cardigan: Alot of Spinning!

Wanted: Alot of Spinning

The other day I posted on Facebook that I have done more scary mathings, and I basically have to spin a single every 3 days from now until the end of September in order to get where I need to be.  I'm at 30% of the spinning for this project--my second skein is officially finished (Skein Isisonearth weighs in at 233 yards and 5.4 ounces, which means my consistency is in the ballpark: Skein DovieJay was 220 yards and 5.2 ounces).  

And my dear friend eightlegedDJ, AKA Eight Leggy Meggy, pointed out that she reads my blog! and that as this is Alot of Spinning, maybe I just need to hire an Alot.  Apologies to Hyperbole and A Half for my inept rendering.  Hers is Alot Better (and if you haven't read her blog post, now is the time! What are you waiting for? And then go read the one about cake.  You'll be glad you did).

The Alot, after all, is better than you at everything, even spinning.

Good Mathing News

So, the really good news is, once I had washed and blocked my swatch, I discovered that the swatch tightened up just a teeny bit--and now, I have gauge!  whee!  Those sticky alpaca fibers love each other! So I won't have to do the scary going down a size thing and then end up with a sweater that fits a teenager.

Fiber Factor Awesome

I don't have a whole lot to say about progress.  I make a lot of rolags and then I spin them into yarn, and I have to do it faster.

DovieJay (aka Jennette Cross) on the other hand is having an interesting couple of weeks.  She's a contestant on The Fiber Factor.  Now, I'm not a big huge fan of reality TV shows, and I'm not a big Fashion person, so even things like Project Runway are, eh.  But The Fiber Factor is awesomely cool.  They're coming out with really nifty patterns (ask me how many I totally want to knit, like, tomorrow!) and to set these fiber artists apart from the Project Runway people--there are no freakouts, no drama. The judges are awesome fiber artists too--Stephen West and Ysolda Teague have both been on (and if I were DovieJay I would probably be putting those pieces of clothing away saying, "Ysolda touched this!" in the manner of "I'll never wash this cheek again!"

So, the current challenge is challenge 4, Express Yourself, which is a knitting machine challenge and they get to choose a solid yarn and then are sent a variegated yarn to go with it.  You can see Jennette here... again, something in Blogger detests me so I can only post a link, not the actual video, but really, even if you just watch her introducing herself, you'll enjoy it!  and poking around among the other contestants is awesome too.

Skein Isisonearth

Named for my friend Isis, former Head of my House Cup House and mother of another Boy Who Is Eleven, Skein Isisonearth is just as lovely as its predecessor and feels just as soft.  Can't wait to make a sweater from all this yarn!

Bodley's Cardigan: Swatchity Swatch Swatch!

Skein the First goes to the ball.

Today I balled up the first skein (aka Skein DovieJay).  I figured it would be a very good idea if I knit a swatch to make sure I can get something like gauge, in a fabric I don't hate.

So I hauled out my ball winder, because you can't knit from a skein (believe me, I've tried!).

Swatching, swatching, swatching...

Okay, I'm going to say it: swatches lie.  We all know it, we knitters.  But many of us do it without regret.  Finding out what the fabric will feel like, what needles to use, etc., is not a waste of time, even if sometimes it feels like a waste of yarn.  I've learned a lot swatching in the past.  I've learned whole stitch patterns--the swatch for Catkin had its own chart, for pete's sake.

And the NEWT does not require a swatch.  But.  I am not going to spin 1500 yards of 2-ply yarn only to find out it's not going to work at all for the sweater.  So.  I swatched.

The pattern calls for size 4 needles, so I got those.  I cast on 28 stitches (the pattern says gauge=26 sts=4 inches in stockinette, and I don't exactly ignore the rows but I don't worry too much about them either, and I've never had this backfire.  I'm probably just stupid, or lucky, or both, but after 4 years of intense knitting I'm not going to change something that's working).

The size 4 needles gave me a loose knit, soft and smooshy.  And 26 sts=5 inches.  Okay, way too loose.  So I went and got some size 3 needles, which I had decided would be as low as I'd go.

Oooh, much better.  (In the picture you see #4 needles on the bottom and #3 on the top.  Neat and clean and still supple enough to be happy.  

But now 4 inches = 24 stitches, not 26.  Dang.  Okay, so it's time to do the Mathings, precious!

The sweater size I was planning on is the 44.5" sweater.  The next size down is the 41" sweater.  The mathings I did were this:

Wow, those numbers are awesome.  Or at least, they're really close to *the same number.*  Which is a really good thing, because I *think* (and I am not really particularly good at math) that this means that if I do the 41-inch sweater with a 6 sts/inch gauge I should get a 44.5" sweater.

Somebody check that for me, please.  Math scares me.

Bodley's Cardigan: Skein The First!

Correction!

It has been pointed out to me that Bodley's Cardigan is bottom-up, not top-down as I said in yesterday's post.  It is still all one piece, though, not sewn-in sleeves like on my Faerie Ring sweater.

Catching up with myself

So at some point I'll actually be able to write about what I did today on my NEWT, not about what happened days or weeks ago.  That time is not yet come, however.

The Long Draw

I am not using a real long draw because my fibers--especially the brown ones--are just plain too short most of the time.  But usually working with rolags you get to do the long draw.  What's that, you ask? Well, let me tell you.  No, better yet, let me show you this lovely YouTube video, made by the same talented spinner whose video I showed yesterday.

Link to YouTube Video.

See how awesome that is?  Usually when I spin I am pushing tiny bits of fiber out into the spin, and a lot of the time the resulting yarn is 'worsted' rather than 'woolen.'  For yarnies, this can be a strange concept because 'worsted' is also the name of a weight of yarn, the kind you might use for a heavy sweater or blanket.  If you go to the yarn section of your local craft store and pick up a skein of Red Heart SuperSaver Solid yarn (and then put it down quick! you do not want to be touching such icky yarn long-term), that thickness of yarn is called 'worsted-weight'.  But a worsted spin is different.  In a worsted spin, you're only pulling out a small amount of yarn at a time.  It's the way I usually spin.  

Here, I'll let the KnitGirllls show you.

There've been times I've managed a real long draw with this fiber, pulling out 4-5 inches at once (not quite what the nice lady in the video manages, sadly, but still, pretty good.  But mainly I've been spinning a sort of worsted-woolen combination, which is still squishier and softer than the worsted I usually spin.  I think the yarn is still going to be a bit itchy--I may eventually line this sweater--but the first skein came out pretty!

A skein! a skein!

And yes! I am almost caught up with myself.  I finished that first skein just two days ago, and I washed it and set the twist yesterday.  On Rav's new (still in beta test!) handspun feature you can name your skeins, so this one is named DovieJay.  The other six skeins will be named after my dorm mates in the Elder Dorm in Ravenclaw Tower.

Also, SarahtheEntwife kindly loaned me a niddy noddy, which made a big difference in relieving my frustration around skeining this sucker up.  Usually I use my swift for that--but I get so many more bits of yarn that pop back on themselves and get all curly-crazy that way than with the niddy noddy.  I'm going to have to bite the bullet and buy one.

And a lazy kate.

And at least 3 more bobbins.

I know what I'll be asking for this Christmas, I guess.