Celebrations

I am marking my progress

and celebrating it.  One inch.  

But more than that.  I am now at five inches from the underarm.  Since my plan is to knit to ten inches from the underarm and then do a bit more of the Socks That Rock yarn, before winding the top all up with more teal, I consider myself half done.

Of course I am not taking into account the neckline and sleeve ribbing.  They appear to be relatively wide on the pattern photos, but everyone's mileage seems to vary, as will mine.  

In other brilliant news, I bought the Piennar top pattern.  I can't wait to swatch.

Markers and Keepers

I am now at the point where the top feels as if it is taking forever.  This was on Tuesday.

This was yesterday.

Looks like not much for 2 days of knitting.  You have to look at the tail of the cat to see that there is any progress at all.

Time for a progress keeper.  I only have a couple standard keepers but I do have several crochet markers that I use.  The crochet markers usually come with earring hoops that open and close.  I find myself using a progress keeper more often.  Maybe it's time to invest in a few more.  

I have also noticed that, with all my on going projects, I run low on the best stitch markers.  I like a stitch markers that are a bit heavier.  The stay put nicer than thin lightweight ones do.  This cat

was sent to me by Wet Coast Wools with my last yarn purchase.  It's lovely but it is very lightweight and thin.  I'm glad to have it but for my perfect stitch marker, it would need to be just a bit heavier.  Most of mine are the ordinary bulb kind or little circles.  The fancy ones are some little bead drops and some very fine silver markers Brian gave me from River City Yarns.   They all have the weightier feel I am looking for.

I've been spending some time looking at stitch markers and progress keepers.  It's sort of fun venturing where I haven't been for a long time.  I have not made a decision yet.  Maybe today. 

There is Geddy Tee knitting to do.  I may yet decide to knit on my blanket.  I might pull out something completely different.  Maybe some socks?  I'm not quite sure what I will work on today.  Whatever it is, it is going to be good.

  

Working at a Larger Gauge

One of the very interesting things I have learned over the last couple of years is about gauge. I did experience some of it with laceweight on the Elton sweater by Joji Locatelli.  The lesson was deeply reinforced by Rebecca Clow..  

Until now, my worsted and Dk weight knits have been pretty much to their standard gauge.  I love doing that, don't get me wrong, but knitting your yarn at a bit larger gauge than is usual, makes a completely magnificent fabric.  

The Tolsta Tee and Lusk are great examples of that.  They have a gauge of 17 stitches per 4 inches for a DK weight yarn.  A standard gauge is 22 stitches per 4 inches.  That larger gauge gives you this extraordinary drape and reveals a completely different character of the yarn.  The tops I have made from these two patterns are wonderful to wear.  They flow and drape and breathe.  

When I made the Plieone tee I knew that I was going to follow that gauge experience.  The Remix yarn I used is a worsted weight and usually is knit to a gauge of 18 to 20 stitches per 4 inches.  I decided to go up and knit the top at a gauge of 15 stitches per 4 inches.  It has made THE most fantastic garment.  I have already worn it a dozen times because it is so comfortable.   This top makes me want to dig into the stash and pull out some other worsted weight cotton I have and knit it up.  It also makes me want to pull out more of the DK weight cottons I have.  Not at the moment though.  I must resist.

I have other great things happening on the needles and I want to focus on that.  I can't wait for the Geddy Tee to be done and I am really looking forward to working on my Hiraeth pullover.  That's the yellow Arcane Fibre Works yarn.  And so many good projects wsiting.  The Piennar top, the Staffin, that lovely Kauni sweater.  So many good things.  

It will all come in good time.  Today it's the Geddy Tee.  On to tea and knitting.

Onwards ho.

That's better.  I knit for much of the day and it was so good. 

I'm not far along but it felt so good to simply knit.

 

I am just about to join ball 5 and 6.  It seems like a lot of yarn is being used but I made this top with quite a bit of ease and good width on the drop shoulders.  It makes for comfortable wear on hot days and it will give me the option to wear it over a shirt to extend the seasons I can wear it.  

All the ease makes it feel like it takes a long time to do a round but it really doesn't.  It's a head game.  There seems to be a lot of that in knitting.  

Still, it's time to dig it out of the 'yarn bowl'

And get to work.  Coffee is hot and precious and tea awaits the rest of the day.  

Too tired to knit

I'm beat.  There was no time for knitting till I was too tired to knit.  On the upside, the living room looks like this.  

It is more or less usable but all the fun stuff is shifted out.  What is left can easily be moved in the space of an evening.  We are as ready as we can be for the floor guys.  

Today, I will move all but the projects in the WIPs bin.  It isn't really the the overflow is active projects but more, that they are projects ready to go.  There are four bags and the Sweet Shop Blanket I am working on.  There is a needle case and a table with stuff I use regularly.  They can all be moved to my room for the duration.  The WIPs bin itself can be moved the night before.  

I will take my tea cup and tea kettle into my room for the duration and then, my world will be much smaller.  Keith and I were joking about setting up a fishing rod out my large window to play fish pond for food, bahahaha.  We did talk about me going to a hotel for a couple of days but that would be far more difficult than sorting out staying here.  It wouldn't normally be that way, but hey, I am more or less stay at home and I have things set up so it's manageable.  And for a good part of the time I will be able to roam  Once the floor is laid it will be two days till it is cured enough to use.  So it really only a  couple days and I can manage that.  

It really become a mental game of deciding not to feel stuck.  This is where I feel really lucky.  I knit and therefore, any time where some people would feel stuck, will be really good knitting time.  I am hoping to finish up the Geddy Tee before all this is over so that when I am free from my cocoon, I can start Piennar or Lunan.  Or both.  

No knitting? !!!

I did not get any knitting done yesterday.  Not one stitch.  I finished that cleaning I was avoiding and then, found some more of that to do.   There is always more of that to do.  Why is this taking up so much time?  For one, I am slow.  For a second thing, I we are having our floors replaced.  Again.  

We did it two years ago but the click flooring was a bad choice.  Every joint in heavy wear areas failed and it looks awful and feels awful.  The material actually has lifted and ripped out.  Away from the joins/cracks, the plank flooring has been great.  In low wear areas, it looks impeccable.  But overall, it has been a big no.  So we are getting new floors again.  

This means everything off bookshelves and out of all the main rooms.  All the furniture needs to be compressed into my room and the sewing room.  Last time we shifted things as sections were completed.  This time it all needs to be out because Keith is getting someone to do it.  It will be over quickly and will be done in a couple days instead of the week it took Keith last time.  So cleaning, packing, moving stuff.  Sigh.

I did one other big job yesterday.  I depilling one of my favourite sweaters.

This has been worn and used and loved.  It's BFL 2/8 and is so wonderfully soft.  However that softness leads to a lot of pilling.  Not excessive but it does pill.  I haven't depilled in far to long and after the job was done, the full ball was the size of a baseball.  The lovely thing is it looks almost new.  Till I looked at this.

Inside needs depilling today.  I realized how bad it was after I put it on after I did the outside and found I was still absent mindedly pulling off pills.  It's pretty bad, even on the back which comes under less friction during wear.  Still, it's a job the needs doing.  

There will be knitting today.  No big chores today.  I am resting up for tomorrow when we have some help coming to shift and move and do the heavy lifting.  

The best days

I did it!  

Joined to knit in the round.  I really like the way this looks and I am so happy to be at the knitting in the round point.  The back, as I have interpreted the pattern is wide and it was oddly tedious  to knit.  It's not wider than my usual tops, it just felt tedious.  The fronts were fun.

I am pretty pleased with the vneck too.  When you mangle a pattern, things like necks and sleeves can sometimes not get the right look.  That right look all comes down to how often I did the increases.  I picked the right ratio for the gauge first time and the neck was ready to join at the same place that the pattern does.  Perfect.

I have no idea what I did yesterday other than this visible evidence.  It is what it is.  Maybe I was planning again and I know how that can defeat me.  The best days, just like the best knitting, just happen.  

Time to get ready and get a move on it.

It was another good day of knitting.  

The right front is ready to go.  I got about an inch past the short rows on the left front too.  There would have been more but I had to have a stunning realization first.

I picked up my linen swatching first thing in the morning.

I changed to a 3.75 mm needle from the 4 mm I had started with.  I hoped that would give me a nicer fabric.  It did but I really wasn't enjoying it.  I thought I'd see if crocheting was the right thing.  It wasn't.  I feel bad but I think this is going back in the bin. It simply did not feel right and life is too short for work that is not fun.  Oh well.  

I am going to work on the Geddy Tee again today.  It's is just so much fun to knit.  Then I will get to work on Veera Valimaki's  Piennar sweater.  Swatch first.  I am about 100 meters short for the amount of the main yarn, but I have plenty of the cc colour.  I think I know what I am going to do if I end up short of the main.  

First off, I'm thinking I will make the solid sections a row or two shorter.  I'm also going to use only cuffs instead of making the very short sleevelets and if needed, I will use a section of the multi colour in the bottom ribbing as well as the sleeve ribbing.  With a tiny bit of luck, doing these things will help me finish the top as close to the original look as possible.  

There is still a bit of cleaning to do and if I am really quick about that I will get to finish my current pants over in the sewing room.  If I am not quick with the cleaning, sewing will happen tomorrow.  I realized on the weekend why it feels like I am short of pants.  I have two pairs made in a sweatshirt fabric.  They are a bit warm for summer wear and I have not been reaching for them very often.  So I have pants but not seasonally adapted pants.  Still, I need pants.  And I want skirts for the ultimate summer cool.  I also want something from my red and black flannel and my rose fine whale corduroy  and so many other fabrics I have at hand.  

I have stacks of things to do so it's time to get moving.  

A Full Weekend

Heat one week, very cool the next.  That is the story of the last few weeks.  Somewhere in there big heavy days long rain.  What was looking like a great cherry crop is done.  My poor tree lost all its blossoms.  Oh well.  It is what it is.  That is how it goes with a single, short flowering crop. Overall, the rain was lovely though.  As is the cooler air.

It was a very good knitting weekend.  My hands and my heart were on the same wavelength.  

The back and part of the right front are done on my Geddy Tee.

Work will happen on that today.

By Sunday morning, I needed to do something else.  It wasn't a "I'm sick of you" feeling.  It was to prevent that kind of feeling.  

This does it every time.  I thought about working on some socks but these brilliant colours called my name.  It should be noted that the orange and hot pink photographed to look exactly the same.  I tried to get some variation but nope.  This is what the camera saw even if the top square is part pink and the bottom one is orange.  

Last weekend was the Monaco Grand Prix.  The racing was great in every way, but it absolutely highlights how I am not the same as the average Joe.  They kept doing these long scenic shots of the bay and the mountains and the tiny principality of Monaco at the edge of the sea.  Every time they did, I felt nauseous.  Seriously nauseous.  They kept talking about how beautiful it was but that overly packed humanity, that feeling you could walk across the bay without touching water made me ill.  The city with an emptier bay would have been better, but that mass of human engineered stuff...

If I traveled I would go to far places, empty places, not cities but places where you could see and hear the earth breathe.  I would go where you could see far.  But that is me.  I just want to be.

And that is enough of that for the day.  Time to sew and knit and clean.  I like the first two.  The last, not so much.  Oh well.  At least the laundry is caught up.  

  

Up to Many Things

So much to do the last few days.  I did knit.  I need just 2 more inches on the back of the Geddy Tee till I can start the fronts.  

 It's moving along well though I am looking forward to getting to knitting in the round.  

I also spent some time sewing.  I don't get to do as much as I used to in a day.  It gets too hard to focus closely for long days of sewing.  Still, the two pairs of pants are almost done and there will be more sewing today. 

Because my miniature stuff is all over the sewing room, I pulled out a couple small projects that could easily be done instead of playing games on my phone.  

Many moons ago I found these pendant findings and I felt they would be perfect for old fashioned pictures for my mini house.  And they are.  The three smaller ones are people pictures.  Not my family, just generic, already scaled down photos.  I wanted a floral picture for the bigger one but found a perfectly sized bird instead.  I am really pleased with these and can't wait to get them in my mini house.

Then I played around with some other accoutrements.  

Newspapers and maps and under those, some tiny decorative plate pictures.  Those need work, but it's a start.  

And then what?  Each day I had a " and now what" period where I still had time on my hands.  I went to the yarn closet and pulled out some more yarns for summer tops.  

This is some linen laceweight that I wanted to knit a big beautiful linen lace shawl with a multi colored border lace.  I can't knit that very fine yarn anymore but I do love linen.  I doubled stranded it and did a gauge swatch a while ago, but it was still too fine for my hands.  I knew that somewhere in my stash I had a couple of tubes of cotton that I could use with the linen.  However, when I dug out the tubes, I found they were a cotton linen blend.  Even better.  

I started a swatch with two strands of cotton linen and two of the pure linen but that was too heavy.  I am now working with just one strand of the blend with two of the pure linen and find that is a much better weight.  Swatching will continue today.  

Later in the afternoon I found time to wind up another yarn I want to work with.  One skein fell off the swift three times before I gave up and wound by hand.  You can see which one misbehaved.

This is some long held stash of Louet Linen in a soft grey purple and a mess of balls of Mykonos, a multi colored lavender grey taupe blend of viscose and linen.  The colour is much more greyed tone here than in real life.  I know what I want from this yarn.  

I saw Veera Valimaki's Piennar top months ago and just fell in love.  I knew immediately which of my yarns I would use.  The grey lavender solid and the gentle Mykonos multi are just meant for this.  I might be a wee bit short of the solid, but we shall see.  I have a backup pattern in case I need a slightly different fit that might be more economical in yarn terms.  The spirit will still be the lovely Piennar.  

I think that was everything I got up to.  Who knows what today will hold.  

  

And the next day...

Funny how days go.  You sort of plan and then your plans go out the window.

By mentioning the Geddy Tee, I set the way the day would go.  Plans out the window.  Geddy  Tee it was.

And no sewing.  I was having a dry eye day.  Sewing was not possible so I knit.  

 

Looking Like a Day

I sewed yesterday.  I sewed till lunchtime and that was enough.  One pair of pants is ready for elastic.  Today I will do the other pair.  Tomorrow is for elastic and cutting out a couple more things to sew.  Very probably skirts.  

I have a beautiful set of fabrics, a plain sand linen for a skirt and a coordinating linen striped fabric for a shirt.  I have had them out to sew for the last two years and not got them done.  This year, I am going to do it and make them up. No maybe about it.

After lunch, I picked up my knitting.  

I was surprised that I chose this Mashup top.  It was nice knitting.  I made a big step forward yesterday.  I have only three full length rows left to go before it's time to knit the front and back sides.  Since they are only from underarm to hem, they don't take long.  

I am hoping to work on that again today but you never know.  The Geddy Tee is calling my name too.  

So sewing, knitting and sipping tea.  That is looking like the day ahead.

Incredible to wear

The purple top is complete.  I am really glad it is done.

I finished it on Saturday wove ends on on Sunday and wore it a bit too.  I am wearing it today as well.  If I was not emotionally connected to the yarn, I may be to the top.  It is so comfortable.  Incredibly pleased with it.  

Finishing on Saturday left me with a whole day to figure out what to knit next.  With all the projects in my WIPs bin, this really ought not to need to ask this.  However, the summer yarns bucket I pulled out, has one more yarn in it and it would be nice to knit it up.  

The yarn

Is a 50/50 woll cotton blend and I already know how it performs.  I made a top years ago with a griege green and it is one of the yarns in my first Tolsta tee.   It's comfortable and the perfect yarn for between weather.  Perfect for spring.  It also wears like iron.  

I had this in mind for Rebecca Clow's Lunan top or sweater.  It will be a Lunan in the body, but the pattern has a double knit collar.  I don't want to knit a double knit collar though I know it is a lovely finish.  I am lazy.  Or not.  The body will be Rebecca's great fit with a different collar.  I have now bought 3 different patterns for this sweater.  I bought Lunan.  I  bought the Stripe Overload Cardi pattern by Mie Ferring and this morning, I bought Sari Nordlund's North Wind Polo.  Somewhere that will help me get to the collar I want.  I hope.  Or I might just go with Sari Nordlunds pattern and call it good. I have no idea where I will end up or what I am making.  I only know it will be fun and incredible to wear.

Today is a sewing day.  Starting right now.  I must.  I am hoping to get the 2 already cut our pairs finished or mostly finished today.  My what big eyes I have.