Moving!

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Where has my knitting time gone??

My knitting time has evaporated of late. I'm not sure how it happened. I'm not that busy at work, and my social schedule hasn't exactly exploded. I have been devoting time to some other hobbies (photography, setting up my new blog) and to non-hobby necessities (yardwork, gardening), and I guess that has been cutting into my knitting time more than I realized. I have been knitting a couple rows here and there on the Crayon baby blanket, which is coming out wonderfully (easy pattern, but the yarn is knitting a perfect baby-blanket fabric), and I'll try to post a picture of that soon.

My photography class ends a week from today, and the next one doesn't start until the end of June, plus work switches to summer hours (8-4) after Memorial Day, which should all add up to increased knitting time. I hope I hope I hope. I miss it!

Oh, speaking of my new blog, I expect to be moving Lickety Knit to a new cyberlocation within the next couple weeks. I have also started a less knitting-specific blog, www.shinygreenapple.com, which will eventually encorporate all my many interests (including knitting) into one spot. The new Lickety Knit will still be pure, unadulterated knitting, though! I'll keep you posted.

New yarn, new projects

I received a shipment from Knitpicks today, and while the price is right, I'm not in love with the colors. Here is the yarn I will be using for my next baby blanket project (I hope to have one Project Linus project going all the time). It is really, really pink. But some people genuinely love pink, so I have to imagine someone will get use out of it. The yarn is machine wash and dryable, which is nice.

UPDATE: Turns out this yarn is great. It knits up in to a wonderfully soft fabric, perfect for baby stuff. Very light, too. And I decided that althought he pink is a bit brighter than I might have chosen, it's very cheery -- and it's likely that the kiddo who winds up with this blanket won't be in the cheeriest place in life. So I've gone from uncertain to very happy with it in the course of one evening and 2 inches of knitting..


I also got some Wool of the Andes (standard 100% Peruvian wool) that seems to be nice quality, but the off-white color I ordered has so much yellow in it that it's frankly ugly and therefore not usable for my project (Chicknit's Ribby Cardi). I bought the off-white as the main body color and then ordered two options for the sleeve color. I like the colors of the two sleeve options, but they don't go well at all with the sickly yellow main color. I'm sure I'll find some other use for it, but it's rather disappointing.

Finished Object: Basketweave Baby Blanket

Pattern: Basketweave baby blanket from Knitting for Baby
Yarn: Berrocco Lullaby in Little Boy Blue
Notes: This is my first project for Project Linus, and overall I'm pleased with it. I wound up not loving the yarn, but it is nice and soft, and not bad at all for containing no natural fibers.

Introducing my photoblog

I have started a photoblog so that I won't keep cluttering up this blog with non-knitting-related photos. Each hobby deserves its own corner of cyberspace, I say. Its (pretty stupid) temporary name is Clickety, and you can visit it here.

Finished Object: Opera Scarf

Pattern: Opera Scarf from Blue Sky Alpacas
Yarn: GGH Mystik in salmon
Notes: You get an attractive, interesting fabric given how easy the pattern is. I was frustrated by my inability to keep the edges neat, though. Next time I would probably try to give the yarn a little tug after the first stitch of each row. I did that sometimes but wasn't consistent about it.

I may never wear it, so if anyone sees the picture and loves it, let me know and I'll mail it to you.

Watermelon baby sundress

Well, let's start with the positive. I love these colors, and I love the ribbon yarn for baby clothing. It's knitting quickly and cutely.

However, my sizing fears have have been realized. It is now evident that no human baby could wear this. A human-shaped doll, perhaps, but I definitely didn't take up this hobby to make doll clothes. Clothes for hypothetical babies, sure, but not doll clothes.

But all is not lost. I think if I frogged back to the second-to-last skirt decrease and began the bodice there, it would make the skirt shorter and the bodice wider, allowing it to fit, you know, a preemie during her first week of life. Snugly. I'm going to give it a try. Here's a more straighforward photo so you can see what I mean about the proportions. I would frog back about 6 or 7 rows and start the bodice again.


A nice look at the texture of the ribbon yarn:

Secret pal gifties!

I arrived home today knowing I was in for a treat (my secret pal tipped me off -- she has tracking information and saw that the package had been delivered), but I didn't realize how much of a treat. The unassuming manilla envelope I found on my doorstep contained:

1) A funny card with a nice long message
2) Two delectable-looking chocolate bars from her (approximate) home city of Seattle (cool!) that I will devour the minute Passover is over
3) A fantastic book of knitting patterns for children -- every pattern is adorable and classic and not at all cheesy (my typical complaint with kid pattern books). It has a sort of New England beachy theme, I'd say, which is perfect! I love it and want to knit about 20 things from it.
4) Two balls of Debbie Bliss alpaca silk. That's what the label says, anyway. I actually have a hard time believing that it's anything other than a cumulus cloud that has been spun into yarn and died a rich, luscious purple. This stuff is unbelievable. I am thrilled. She also very considerately included a scarf pattern I might want to use the yarn on. However, I think I shall just slowly accumulate a huge stash of this stuff and then sleep in a big pile of it.

I'm off to post on the Knittyboard secret pal thread, but in case my SP sees this first, thank you thank you thank you thank you! You have wonderful taste and I am blown away by your generosity.

By the way, I'm coming to Seattle in August...perhaps we could meet up if I guess your identity by then! (Or I'll have to wander through the streets calling "Secret paaaaaal? Secret PAAAAAALLLLL!!!" until you are so mortified that you identify yourself so I'll shut up.)

Here, by the way, is a more straightforward picture of my loot:

My first foray into designing

I am designing a baby sundress. I don't really like to accumulate a stash, so when I finish projects I look for something to do with the leftover yarn right away (my recent opera scarf is a good example). For some reason I decided that a cute little infant tank sundress would be a good way to use up the ribbon yarn. This is the approximate extent of my planning for this garment:

96 st --> 48 st / dec 6 st. 8 times ev. 6 rows?

Then I just launched in. I don't yet have enough done to know whether I'm setting myself up for severe disillusionment.

My main problem is that I don't have a good sense of the approximate size and shape of babies, and I don't know ANYONE with a baby girl. (It disappoints me that society is still at a point where the moms I know, progressive as they are, would probably be hesitant to let me try my sundress on their sons just for sizing purposes.) The secondary problem is that even if I did have a way to obtain baby measurements, recent evidence has demonstrated that gauge on Deco Ribbon yarn is not a straightforward size indicator. So, I resort to guessing. The nice thing about babies is that they are sort of blob shaped and pretty much anything will fit them at one point or another.

Pictures this weekend of my progress (with my new digital camera, due to arrive today!).

X-back (take two) is finished!

I X-pected not to have any time this weekend to work on the X-back, so you can imagine my X-citement when I found some X-tra time and X-pediently went to work it. When it was finished, I tried it on, not knowing quite what to X-pect. I looked in the mirror. "It fits!" I X-claimed.

Turned out I was correct -- negative ease was key with the Deco Ribbon. In fact, when I was knitting it I was sure it would wind up WAY too small, but it seems to have worked out well. If you can forgive the (X-traordinarily) crappy quality of these pictures, you can see how it fits.




From the back. The rolls of shoulder fat are mostly the unfortunate result of the lighting.

Massive frogging

For those non-knitter readers of my blog who aren't familiar with the term "frogging," a quick explanation: it means ripping out massive amounts - sometimes all - of your knitting project. The reason? "Rip it, rip it," is reminiscent of the sound we assign to the croak of a frog. (This is distinct from tinking, which is undoing one stitch at a time by knitting backwards -- "tink" is "knit" backwards.) "Frogging" usage examples: "I had to frog all the way back to the waist decreases," "I frogged the whole thing because it turned out too big."

That last one is what I did last night with the Ribbon X-Back. Although I knit to gauge and the measurements seemed technically correct, apparently some yarn needs "negative ease" -- that is, it has to be stretched out (by the wearer's body) to fit correctly, so you knit it smaller than your actual measurements. That seems to be the case with the Crystal Palace Deco Ribbon. So now I'm knitting it much, much smaller, sort of on a wing and a prayer, and hoping it comes out a lot better. Stay tuned.

P.S. I was impressed by how maturely I handled the frogging of an entire project. The silver lining is that it's rather cathartic to rip out knitting. There's something vaguely satisfying about it.

More random stuff

Look, laptops with transparent screens!







Okay, not really. Just my most recent assignment for my photo class. Actually, the assignment was to make some sort of complicated representational alternate reality blah blah blah I couldn't really follow, so instead I used photoshop to make it look kind of like my laptop has a transparent screen. Why not? I would have preferred to have been knitting, though.

Note: There are people who do this much better and much more impressively than I do here, because they don't use photoshop -- they take a photo, make it their background, and then photograph that. I tried to do that, but gave up quickly. Haaaaard!

Opera scarf

This is the "opera scarf" that I'm making with the leftover Honeymoon Cami yarn. It's really easy to make (sl 1, yo, k2tog over and over again on both sides), but I'm disappointed by how uneven my edges are. I know blocking will help with that a little, but still, I wish they weren't such a mess.

A good mindless project to use up extra yarn.

Fun stuff

A post over on Peatbogfaery's blog led me to this enjoyable time waster: www.typogenerator.com. You enter text and then it searches the internet for images based on that text, applies all sorts of weird effects to them, and then randomly lays out both images and text. Rather addictive. Here are some of my favorites based on - what else? - Lickety Knit.