April Design: Blanket

I didn't actually complete any original design projects in April. I spent the first week and a half working on a crochet project (the shawl referenced in my last blogpost, that I gave up due to shoulder pain), and I sprinkled in a few washcloths using patterns for circle designs in Nicky Epstein's book Knitting in Circles. But the only thing I designed I didn't finish until July 1st.

For my birthday I gave my family a GREAT list of suggestions for birthday presents (i.e. mostly yarn). One thing I asked for was yarn for a blanket with a few color suggestions. They got it for me, in a lovely brown. While the family was all over that night my brother-in-law asked me how long the yarn would keep me busy, and joked that it probably wouldn't keep me busy for long. I commented how it goes fast for the first couple of balls, but then gets really cumbersome and slow going.

I then made an off-hand comment about how if I did it in strips it wouldn't be so cumbersome and would knit up more quickly.

And so the wheels started turning. Why do strips unless you are going to make that part of the design appeal? What about stripes? What color could I add?

So, brown. It might be considered boring, but it really opens up the options when it comes to color matching. I love pink with brown, blues with brown, yellow and brown (yikes, listing all the options is almost making me reconsider my final choice), but my favorite (and my final choice) is green with brown.

The website that I bought the yarn from didn't have the exact color I wanted, so I ended up going with a color called Sea Glass.

Original plan: 8 inch stripes of brown in moss stitch, a simple but striking textured pattern, and thin, 2-3 inch wide stripes of green in a type of winding leaf pattern, with a line of green at the top and the bottom and a brown leaf edging past that.

Problem: leaf patterns in knitting require a lot of stitches to make them look detailed, and since I only wanted the green stripes to be 2-3 inches wide (which translates to 8-12 stitches since I was using bulky yarn and big needles), that wasn't going to happen. The pattern had to adjust, and changed to a green vine winding up it instead of leaves.

Fast forward a month and I got to the brown edging. I had a picture in my mind of the how the leaf edging would work, and I thought for sure I had seen an edging like that in my book of edging designs. Alas, it was not so. I tried a pattern I found online, didn't like it, tried making up my own, didn't like it, and then put down the project for a few weeks while I went on vacation.

Eventually I came back to it. I tried something else. Two or three times with different stitch amounts, increases, and decreases, to no avail. Leaves weren't going to happen. Sigh. So I gave up and picked a simpler edging.

Got about six inches into that and didn't like it, so undid it and picked my final one. Super simple, fairly classy, and now it is done.

I love it. The whole blanket. I'm so excited. I've even written up the pattern and plan on presenting it to Knit Picks (where I buy my yarn), to see if they will let me sell it on their website (they attach different pattern to their yarn lines).

Isn't it great? It turned out bigger than I expected, which makes me happy. I'm pretty sure I have my winter bed cover....

March Designs: Tote, Scarf, and Costume

Hopefully no one is surprised that I fell behind. I'm not. Merely disappointed in myself. But that is a feeling I am well used to in conjunction with blogging.

March had several designs, two of them crochet! I don't remember what order I made them in, so I'll start with the crochet projects, then the knit.

First was a simple shopping bag. I realized that I will often go to Walmart and just need 3-5 things, an amount that puts me right in between needing a bag and not needing a bag. I also (since I had made two blankets recently) noticed that I was in need of a bag large enough to tote my blankets around to work on.

Solution to both: create a shopping bag big enough for a blanket-in-progress.

It's huge. Unweildy. Annoying. And I don't like it. Therefore, sometime when I don't have tons of other super exciting projects to work on it will be unmade and redone smaller. I don't need to tote blankets around, I will work on them in my room and take smaller projects other places. Problem solved. Ugh.

My next crochet project was silk, and I love it (but never seem to find a way to wear it. I think I've worn it once in the last three months).

My thought was to make a thin, small scarf that I could wear almost like a necklace.

It turned out okay, but I find it isn't my style. Hence me not wearing it much, I guess. I started making a large shawl out of the rest of the yarn (I bought a few skeins), and it was turning out lovely and luxuriant, but I found that it was really hurting my right shoulder, so it's on hold. I should just do a row a day or something and get it done.

Now to my knit project. Ah, it was my crowning glory for March (maybe I should stick with knitting, I apparently like how it turns out more).

Tracy, Jaired, and I worked together to make this knight costume for my nephew:

Here's another picture with just the part I made:

There were a few design flaws that I will fix next time I make it (I have two other nephews). One was the way the hood/cowl lay across his shoulders, as you can see, it is a bit hexagonal. I have started on the other ones, playing around with how I do my decreases, moving them to different spots so that it turns out more of an even circle instead of a hexagon. 

Another issue was how I decreased at the top of the hood.

Because I did the decreased right next to each other, it created a visible line. I've fixed that by putting a few stitches between them, making the decrease less obvious.

The sleeves are also too long, probably due to stretch as he has worn it, but it's quite possible I just made them too long. With sleeves, there is the issue of length before the shoulder cap, and sometimes it is hard to get the final length exactly as you want it. Sleeves are one of my least favorite things to work on the design for.

February Design: Fingerless Gloves and Blanket/Pillow Set

Fingerless gloves were my first official project of February. Tracy commented on Facebook that she needed another pair, so I decided to make her some in trade for some sewing she will do for me down the line.

Fingerless gloves are generally rather simple. You pick a stitch pattern you like, figure out your length, and then go at it leaving a hole for the thumb. Unless you want them to look a bit more tidy, in which case you add a thumb gusset. I went with a thumb gusset.

Easy as these are in general, I ended up having to make these twice to get them right. I usually make fingerless gloves very tight, as I prefer them that way, so in an effort to not do too tight, I went with too loose. This also ended up making the cable not be centered in the final product. I had actually given them to Tracy, but it kept bugging me throughout the day so I offered a remake. I'm glad I did.

My other project for February (since fingerless gloves take comparatively little time) was a blanket and pillow set. Blankets don't take too much "designing" you just pick a stitch pattern and then do a gauge so you get the width right. 

I went with a fairly simple stitch pattern because the yarn I used fluctuated a lot in width, and any lace pattern would be lost. (In this picture the blanket wasn't actually done, hence it not being entirely in the frame. I didn't really finish it until March...)

The pillows, on the other hand, had some interesting design qualities. I used the provisional cast on method which creates live stitches on both sides of your cast on. This enabled me to pick those stitches up and work in the round, creating seamless edges at the bottom and sides of my pillows.

See? You can't even tell that that is my cast on, can you? Ah, I love it. The top though wasn't as seamless. There is a weaving bind-off method that is invisible, but I forgot about it when I was working on this. 

Ah well.

Over all, I was pleased with the pillows. The blanket didn't end up as large as I wanted (maybe I do need to spend more design time on it...), but overall success. And this yarn is so deliciously soft!

January Design: Tunic

My first project of the year was the one I started dreaming of in December: an ankle-length cardigan sweater, with a gradual color change as it went up. However, assessing my yarn (it was a stash-bust project, I had no intention of buying more yarn) I realized that ankle-length wasn't reasonable. I ended with an almost knee-length sweater instead.

The first thing I did was the cuff on the sleeve. I wanted the sweater to be long, and I didn't want to worry about saving each color as I went to make sure that I had enough for the sleeves, so I did them first. In the original plan a cable panel like the cuff was supposed to go up the front as well. When I did the sleeve though, I realized that it would be constantly folding in. Also, since I was using a contrasting color on top, it was slowing me down to deal with all the separate balls of yarn. Plan change number two!

Two things here: I had considered using a zipper on the front for my connection, but figured that sewing a zipper on would mess with the yarn. I went with hooks and eyes (main thing I'm not happy about with this sweater, they gap open. Ugh.), and only went down to the waist instead of all the way to the bottom (at the suggestion of other females in the family). The other thing to mention is how noticeable the stripes were. I didn't take the time to more gradually change from one yarn color to the next by doing a few stitches of the new color, and then back to the old, etc. to help it fade in. Not exactly what I wanted, but it works.

You also might notice the pink up on top. I knew I was running out of yarn, and as I mentioned, I had no intention of buying more. I had this lovely color in the same family as the contrasting yarn I used for the edgings, so it was my best compromise.

And the back. You can't really see in the pictures (at least I can't) but to get the waist shaping without decreasing stitches, I changed the stitch pattern from ribbing to cable stitch, as it has a tighter gauge. Twas super convenient! I think I also changed needle size to get a second level of decrease and then increase, but honestly I can't remember. I'll have to look at it eventually and find out.

Overall, I like it well enough, I wear it (which by the time I finished it I thought it might be too bulky for my liking), and it's nice and toasty. Didn't reach the goal in my head. Ugh. Still have to work on that.

The Year of Design

Hello folks! I might be blogging a smidgeon more this year than last (hahaha, I wrote one blogpost last year, not a hard goal to reach), because I have some stuff I want to share with the people, and blogging will work better for this than Facebook.

As any of you who know me knows, I'm an avid knitter. A few years ago I put on my Christmas list a book called "Design it, Knit it". Ellie bought it for me, happy, I think, that I was planning on taking my knitting to the next level. Little did she know, I wanted the book because it had a pattern in it that I really wanted to make.

Months later she mentioned her expectations, and I think that's what encouraged me to design my first vest (which I gave to her). It had some aspects that I real liked, but was a little too short. It has been relegated to my "will fix this eventually" pile to be undone and redesigned... eventually. A few years later I designed another vest. Hated it, ended up giving it to Goodwill. Then I designed another vest (seeing a pattern here?), again, for Ellie, and finally had a moderate success on my hands. I was now ready for the next step: sleeves. You might think that sleeves are an odd thing to get caught up on, but the shaping at the top takes careful balance to fit correctly into the armholes (which are bad enough).

Summer 2017 I designed my first sleeved sweater. Half-way through sewing the sleeves into the armholes, I turned back, undid the sleeves for about 9 inches, and redid the shaping. That sweater turned out a moderate success (I still own it, have worn it several times, and have received a few compliments on it). Sadly, it didn't fit the picture in my head, which is something I'm still working on.

So onto this year. At the very end of December I started sketching out my next project: an ankle length cardigan sweater, in a fading, monochromatic color scheme. Plans changed a lot as it went, but I really enjoyed the process, and wanted to keep doing it. I decided to stretch myself, and set a goal of designing and knitting at least one project a month. I hope to post pictures and descriptions of each project. I have not written the patterns for any of them (so far) and probably won't unless any other knitters request them. I hate writing patterns, it takes away from the time I could be knitting!