Tag: travel knitting

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Cast-on Monday: Mindless Knitting

Posted on by Laura Kate

Here I am, in a new year dedicated to stash-busting. Opening my yarn closet doors, I see that there are now only two bags of stash yarn projects. That’s good. But it makes me want to get more projects queued up. I’m looking at you, cheap acrylic skeins purchased five years ago! You were rejected by my student knitters.

I pulled out all acrylics that appear to be worsted or bulky weight and assessed their total volume. Hm, looks like it’s enough to knit a lap blanket. Searching through my knitting patterns folder, I found this image plucked off the internet some time ago.

Garn Studio Drops Design offers it patterns for free on Ravelry. Unfortunately, I didn’t download the pattern or the pattern name. Conducting an advanced search on the Ravelry database using all possible combinations of search terms, I failed to find it.

My notes say that the design reminds me of a log cabin quilt block. So, I will improvise a knit pattern, using the log cabin technique of sewing strips around a center block. In this case, the starting block is in the lower corner, not the middle.

I cast on while watching All Creatures Great and Small on PBS. Here is my progress after the first session of mindless knitting. It is a good start.

This mindless project will be ideal for taking on a late winter car trip that Bill and I have planned. It’s impossible to screw it up, even while barreling down the interstate at maximum speed.

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Orphan Skeins: A Plan

Posted on by Laura Kate

This year I am determined to shrink down my stash of yarn. While my stash isn’t as large as those of many of my peers (you know who you are!) there are far too many orphan skeins to suit me. So, I came up with a system.

I start with one orphan skein. Next, I pull any partial skeins with the same label. These yarns generally were used together in a previous project. The next step is to grab partial skeins that are the same fiber and weight (fingering, dk, worsted, etc.) and compatible colors. Once I am happy that the yarns can be combined, they get tossed into a project bag. As of today, I have four bags.

To find a suitable pattern, I start by adding up the total yardage in each bag (a digital scale helps with this step.) This number will tell me what kind of garment or accessory is possible. For example, a pair of socks requires about 400 yards, a shawl around 800 and a sweater 1200 or more.

Now the tricky part: finding a pattern. I am a big fan of Ravelry’s advanced search tool. Using the tool, I can build a search using the parameters of the yarns in the project bag. One additional parameter I choose is number of colors. I search for a project with two or more colors. No matter how many different colors of yarn I have, I can always alter the pattern to accommodate more colors.

As of today, I have four stash-busting projects, bagged up and in the queue.

A hood for Laura Lu
A shawl for gifting to someone
A scarf knit in garter ridge striped triangles.
A light-weight shrug in cotton yarn. (I’m always cold during the summer
in air-conditioned rooms.)

What’s in your yarn stash, and what can you make of it? I challenge you to come up with something unexpected.

Posted in knitting

Cast-on Monday (and hopefully cast-off too)

Posted on by Laura Kate

Spring is in the air and on the ground! Although we had frost on the roof this morning, it is warming rapidly. I was in St. Louis for the spring equinox. When I got home last Thursday, there were hundreds of grape hyacinths blooming in the yard and the flower bed.

While in St. Louis, we visited a LYS located in a suburb. We had promised Lu that she could pick out the yarn for her next sweater. Many thanks to the tolerant staff at Yarn Com while the little one whirled through the shop, looking at and picking up every skein that attracted her attention. She carried this on while talking softly to herself. Finally, she triumphently presented me with this hand-painted merino wool skein in her favorite shades of purple and pink.

Alas, the label was torn off and lost, so I don’t know the maker.

I paired it with some lavender Cascade 220 and a soft pink blended wool in Elysion by Cascade, quickly and quietly moving to the register before she added to the stack.

The washed swatch is very soft.

On Friday I searched Ravelry and chose a pattern that fit this yarn quite well.

https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/sweet–simple-cardigan

C2013 Coats & Clark http://www.redheart.co.uk

The other item I’m working is a scarf. It has many attributes, including travel knitting, mindless knitting, stashbuster and quick knit.

The brown yarn is a wool-acrylic blend leftover from Christmas sock making. The gray and white yarns are 100% alpaca. I was given the multi-hued natural colored skein from knitting buddy Kathy. The source of the white is forgotten and unknown.

To keep from being too bored I played around with different striping patterns. To achieve the diagonal stripe, you decrease at the end of the right-side rows and increase at the end of the wrong-side rows. I’ll knit until I run out of the shortest yarn. That could happen today.

Do you have a project in process that is inspired by Springtime?

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Friday – Out of Order

Posted on by Laura Kate

Those expecting to see a Finished Object today will be disappointed. No, I am out of sorts and out of sequence in writing this post. Instead, I will start with the above photo and move on to share a little design process for a knitted garment in progress.

During our travels over Thanksgiving week, I visited a new-to-me yarn store. It was little but crammed full of beautiful yarns. I was surprised and delighted to find a yarn from West Yorkshire Spinners. It is their Signature 4-ply fingering yarn spun with 35% Bluefaced Leicester wool. I had read about this British yarn maker in posts by my knitterly on-line friends. To find a source of this well-crafted fiber in the heart of the U S of A was unexpected. Even more so because of the price – only $13 US for a 100g ball. As you can see, I wasted no time in getting a swatch made.

The yarn will be made into a pair of socks for my husband. He highly approves of the color, which corresponds to one of his team’s colors. (He supports Westham United, “the Hammers,” who play in claret and blue.)

The design work I refer to is for the little green vest I started on October 17th.

Notice the stranded colorwork on the shoulders. The chart provided by the designer is perfectly fine, but I was not in the mood for snowflakes. Instead, I wanted something a little bit floral and seized on this opportunity to design my own chart.

The yarns I pulled from my stash were cream, lavender and deep pink. These will show up well against the dark cool green main color. My new design starts with a pattern called Michaelmas, which somewhat resembles a purple coneflower. This motif went into the center of the design. Next I needed a border. Working in the same number of rows as the one in the pattern, I drew a sort-of zig zag, worked in a few more flowers and then added some sprinkled stitches of cream.

Reasonably satisfied with my chart, I proceeded to swatch it. Ultimately there were a few modifications made to the design as I knitted along. Here is what I came up with:

The design was tweaked slightly as I worked it into the left shoulder.

You will see it soon. With that bit of knitting done, finishing the body of the vest won’t take long.

Posted in knitting

Finished Object Friday: Socks!

Posted on by Laura Kate

It’s been a while, but I finished a knitted garment this week. These socks were started as a travel project to fill the long drive to and from Ohio.

I picked up the yarn on sale last summer. It’s a typical superwash wool + nylon sock yarn, but one new to me: Static by Knitpicks. The colorway is Paradise.

I rarely make socks with self-striping yarn, but now I truly understand why it is so popular. It’s weird how many people that see these socks think they are Really Good!

Using a very basic sock stitch pattern, one can achieve a sock of great interest.

To me, the only skill I demonstrated was matching up the stripe pattern on each foot.

Yep. They match while I’m standing up in them too.