Block Party

No loops-through-loops action this week. Just a weekend long “block party”. Four projects finally got blocked, at least one which had been waiting for more than a year.

First arrival at the party was Surf. Yes, I know I said this project would be done last weekend, but it turns out that I had some good reasons to jump back into the waves. For starters I’d forgotten to crochet the edging around the cuffs. Oops. The second discovery was that the back edge didn’t really block flat, observed when I picked the cardigan up from the blocking towel. So I tied the button bands together with spare yarn and flipped the cardigan face down on the towel. I shaped it without pins and then the offending seams were steamed.

Now I have an excuse to show you the back of the sweater laid out flat! It’s my favorite part. Check this out:

The buttons went on after blocking to avoid thermal shocking the glass. Of course I have to show them to you. The picture’s below. I’d stashed these lovelies quite a while ago. They were a Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Fest purchase that I put aside for just the right project. The creator is called Moving Mud and consistently has one of my favorite booths. I was thrilled to pieces to see how perfectly they matched the Surf Cardigan. Plus here’s a nice symmetry… Anyone who’s stood in the ocean surf on sand has felt “moving mud”.
I won’t bore your with going into yet more detail about this project. The details are in other places on the blog. Feel free to comment with questions, but beware that I could type about this adventure for pages and pages!

One point worth noting... I’m going to try to post a project on Ravelry for the first time next weekend and this project will be my guinea pig. I’ve decided to give it a fancier name. If you search for it there look for “Rhythm of Surf”. Seems more elegant than my lazy nickname based solely on the yarn colorway name, (Fiesta Boomerang Surf.)

Looking back to the first picture you’ll see a single sock lurking in the corner. This is finally the completion of an experiment that I mentioned in a post in January ‘08. I wanted to see if these top-down Rocking Sock Club Summer Sock cuffs could be blocked after the foot was knit. The big trick was to turn the socks inside out. Then the cuff was steam blocked without pins and wires. I steamed, shaped by hand, and then steamed again. It worked out fine and the set matched. Here’s a finished cuff close up.
The next arrival at the party was this Cashmere Koigu scarf, also knit over a year ago. (Cashmere Koigu is available exclusively from String in New York City.) You can check it out as a WIP on my posting on December 14, ‘07. I’ve actually worn this scarf for two winters in its tightly rolled form, almost like a 1.5 inch diameter boa. The yarn’s feel and color were irresistible.

This muscular length of rope fought me all through the blocking process. (Seems there’s a trouble-maker at every party!) The only way to lay the scarf out flat enough to pin it was to switch to a wet block approach. Hours after blocking it still seemed springy when I tugged on it, so I steam blocked it as well. Here’s a shot of the neatly folded, well behaved results:

Fashionably late at the block party was this amazing lace scarf, the diva of the group. The pattern is “Hydrangea” from Fiber Trends and the yarn is called “Dawn”, a 50% merino / 50% silk blend, from Naturally New Zealand yarns. I ordered both from the Yarn Barn in Kansas. (Their catalogue was just irresistible.) This celebrity is shy of paparazzi so this picture is not that good.

Hydrangea was knit sometime in the window of silence that happened while I was recovering from my stem cell transplant, so I don’t think there are any other blog posts about it. I did enjoy knitting it, and it was certainly the project I needed at that time.

You can breathe a sigh of relief. I have no other projects queued for blocking. Next posting will have to be good old fashioned, loops-through-loops knitting.

Hot Hot Hot

After spending so much time in the windowless cave I call an office I usually like to spend my weekends outside. It doesn’t matter much what task I turn my hand to as long as it’s under the sky instead of a roof. But for the last two weekends it’s just been too crazy hot.

So last weekend I finally finished up with the crocheted edge on my Surf cardigan. It was tough to stay indoors in the AC, but every time I stuck my nose outside it nearly melted off my face. (Some will say, “It’s not the heat. It’s the humidity.” Well we’ve got that too! I’m fortunate to have the AC, but nothing beats getting outside.) This weekend I’ve blocked Surf and plan to put on the fancy handmade glass buttons I’ve selected for it… indoor tasks all.

It will truly be amazing to be done with this project. The creative effort goes back to before I started working on PaintKnits TM. I originally wrote the software specifically to create something truly different with this Fiesta Boomerang yarn in the colorway Surf. Things have dragged badly in all of my knitting projects thanks to the chemo drugs. I was actually getting close to wondering if I’d ever finish anything. Now this one will be finished for me to wear to Rhinebeck in October.

I’m even making some progress on my double knit vest, although I’ve discovered yet another challenge in the technique. Once I started incorporating color changes into my swatch I realized that it’s extremely difficult to keep track of whether a stitch is paired with the one before it or after it. Yikes! Turns out that that’s really important to the color work. This poor swatch is turning into quite a mess! Here are my latest mistakes.

I’m having trouble accepting that the dark side can be right while the light side is wrong. Each block, dark and light, should have four stitches. See how the middle block has switched to five light and three dark in the top photo, but in the bottom photo all’s well? Double knitting is definitely very freaky!

My only idea for dealing with this trouble is to populate the knitting with a ton of stitch markers so that I’m never far from figuring out whether a stitch is even or odd. I’ll try it on my next swatch. I’m pretty close to being ready to knit a swatch in my pooling stitch count to confirm that the gage matches my PaintKnits model. Let’s hope I can do a better job on this next swatch. That’ll clear the way for casting on the actual project.

Beyond the swatching I’ve continued sketching color patterns and think I’ve finally got one that I like. It has large color areas that will show off pooling, no diagonals to conflict with the pooling, and enough color area size variation that I hope it won’t be mistaken for intarsia or Fair Isle. In my rough sketch it actually has sort of a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass feel too it, (IMHO). I still have to work out stitch counts and shaping details to match up with the pooling I want, but suddenly the project is starting to feel real.

There’s even been progress on PaintKnits LLC. This weekend I finished the last LLC activities having to do with New York State. There are still a bunch of not so fun things that have to be taken care of, but the creative parts of this effort are coming back to the top. I’m thinking about a logo and also about what I want the website to be like. I’ve even started learning some html for fun at the W3Schools website. (Some may question my idea of fun, but I really have no trouble admitting that I’m a geek at heart.)

Overall that’s an amazing amount of progress for me. And look! I’ve even managed to blog about it!

Double Knitting – Fun and Frustration

Right now the fun is mostly on the virtual side and the frustration is with reality. Isn’t that so often the case?

I’m knitting a 50 stitch-pair swatch, currently with no color pattern, in order to learn the double knitting technique and get my gage consistent and solid. There are really four stitch motions, right hand knit and purl, and left hand knit and purl. The book that I’m using to learn is Double Knitting, Reversible Two-Color Designs by M’Lou Baber. Aside from liking the clear instructions, I’m also finding that the lovely and unusual designs are inspiring me to learn. I really want to be knitting one of those patterns!

So I swatch away. Originally my left and right hand each wanted to have their own unique tensions, with the right hand knitting up much looser. I worked at that until it was just the right hand purl stitches torturing me. Now I’m finally getting pretty close to even tension throughout. Of course pretty close probably won’t cut it for the ambitious project I’ve got in mind.

Here’s my swatch. (Vanity kept me from photographing the multiple swatches that came before this one! Please don’t think that I learned this technique in these few stitches.) The yarns are Blue Moon Fiber Arts heavyweight Socks That Rock in Rolling Stone and Rook-y colorways. My needle size is US#7.
It may be hard to see in these pictures but the dark side becomes less ridgy as the swatch progresses. Those ridges are the right hand purl rows.

That brings us to the virtual and totally fun side…

I’m planning a double knit vest using PaintKnits TM to take control of the way the multiple colors in the yarns flow onto the fabric. As I mentioned in my previous post, the concept is to have controlled pooling across an arbitrary two-yarn color pattern. I picked a near black Raven to contrast with a multi, and hope to see Raven silhouettes with pooling in the foreground against a pooled background color when I’m done. The critical factors are 1) the selection of two yarns with the same loop length, (easy… two STR heavyweights) 2) nearly dead-on consistent gage (yikes!), and 3) planning the design around stitch counts that will give me the color effects I’m looking for.

After I’d characterized one of my early swatches for yarn usage I dug in on some PaintKnits analysis. I scanned through a bunch of widths searching for those that would give me the most blatant pooling. Here’s a highlight of what I came up with:
The first and third widths I thought were ok. I really liked the second and last.

Now I needed to plan a vest using rectangular areas that would show off this pooling. At first I was stymied by the sizing. The pooling I wanted would only show up on fabric widths that simply would not go together in a vest that would fit me. Not in panels and not going around the body. The project wanted either too much width or too little.

Finally the answer came to me… I needed to knit the vest from side to side to get the flexibility on length! (Ok, so I also considered gaining a whole lot of weight, but that seemed to be a bad idea somehow.) Here’s a very rough first pass at what the pooling might do on the vest: I’m calling this a rough pass because my gage is still all over the map. To make this work I’ve got to get that under control. Then I’ll re-measure my yarn usage, tune up my computer model, and re-do the computer modeling as needed to plan the vest.

I suppose I’m still a long way off, but those colors on the computer screen sure are exciting. And that’s without any superimposed pattern from the Raven yarn yet. I’m psyched! Now if only my reality would match my virtual world of computer models! Maybe soon…

PaintKnits LLC is Born!

It really exists! PaintKnits LLC is a real business as of May 29. I decided in the interest of controlling costs that I would do the LLC work myself instead of getting a lawyer or accountant to do it. Total cost to do the LLC myself so far is roughly a third of what the lawyer quoted. Mostly it’s been easy, but with my energy kind of low, it taken up a significant bit of my free, conscious time. Still it’s very, very exciting.

The big expense and scariest step will be getting a website set up, but with everything else falling into place I’m starting to think I might be able to share my color control software before the end of this year. Wouldn’t that be outrageous?!

That’s my big news. I’m sorry there are no pictures to go with it.

My new knitting project, which unfortunately is moving along ever so slowly, is to learn double knitting. I want to learn it holding a yarn in each hand, but I’m not getting enough tension from my right hand, so the technique needs a lot of work. (Any suggestions?)

The brilliant idea that led me to try this new skill is the idea that I should be able to get pooling going in both colors so that shaded silhouettes show up in the knit fabric. Pretty exciting possibility, isn’t it? No results yet, so no pictures there either.

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Anyways, I guess this is where I admit that I was nudged into posting because of a new question that came up on the Mermaid Fingerless Gloves.

“Anonymous” asked me about my reference to a “migrating stitch”. Wow. It’s been a long time since I knit these, but I read through the pattern carefully and that brought back some memories. Go back to the Pomatomus sock pattern by Cookie A, (linked in the post that has your question). In the section labeled “Leg” she’s got some text that gets applied after row 22. It starts with “Rearrange stitches as follows:” If you go through those steps you’ll realize that you’ve migrated a stitch in order to keep the pattern flowing correctly. Please let me know how you make out.

Now a suggestion... I’m happy to answer questions, but posting answers is really a pain. When you send me a comment there’s a setting that allows you to show your email address so that only I can see it. I guaranty you’ll get a much quicker answer if I can email you!

That’s all for now. Next time some pictures!

Time

It does fly, doesn’t it? The last time I posted I was just back from Rockin’ Sock Camp ‘08. It’s a year later and I’m feeling hugely jealous of the knitters who went this year. Obviously I’m not one of them. I hope I’ll hear from some of the people I met last year and missed seeing at this event, but I also hope they’ll lie to me and tell me it just wasn’t as good. (Fat chance!!!)

Looking back, the year gone by has really been a mixed bag. I put a huge effort into getting my knitting program translated into Open Office software and adding the features that I knew it needed to make me happy. That even pushed aside most of my actual knitting.

It was all coming together last September when my world caved in. Only a year and a half after my stem cell transplant the cancer was back in force. My annual bone marrow biopsy revealed that the multiple myeloma had taken back a third of my bone marrow.

Time. Thought I’d have more before having to deal with the chemo drugs again. I’d actually hoped there might even be as much as five years. And of course there was the huge stress of wondering whether this next chemo drug was going to work at all. Good news there... It’s working great. It did a better job of knocking down my numbers close to normal than the stem cell transplant did. What a relief!

Unfortunately this particular chemo has an insidious side effect not mentioned in any of the literature. It didn’t make my hair fall out. It didn’t make me anemic, (well not too badly anyways). It didn’t even make me nauseous. It just drained away every ounce of the motivation and focus that normally powers my life. I was able to keep my job mostly on track, but outside of work I became a true zombie, staring blankly at the TV or the insides of my eyelids and not remembering what I saw or might have been thinking. Knitting stopped. Programming stopped. Yarn purchasing stopped. (Yes, even that!)

I grasped one last straw before slipping into the chasm completely. I called Tina from Blue Moon Fiber Arts to see if she was still interested in PaintKnits TM. Her answer was “yes” and she was kind enough to talk me through the steps I should consider in getting the thing available to my fellow knitters. I sketched out a plan and immediately became a bullet from the movie “The Matrix”, screaming along at bullet speeds while my target moved away infinitely faster. It’s the passage of time. It’s just freaky.

Pulling myself together to get to Camp didn’t happen, and finishing up PaintKnits didn’t look like it was going to happen either. I went back to my doctors and begged and grovelled and whined for dosage reduction on the chemo. Amazingly my numbers cooperated and all of a sudden one evening in February I realized I was knitting again. Next I was finishing up PaintKnits and even had gotten a license agreement set up. I set my sights on sending Tina a copy before camp. I guessed she’d be too busy to deal with it but I wasn’t going to let the cancer win. That was my mission and I was gonna make it happen!

So Tina, on the long shot that you’re reading this, I apologize again about the timing. It was just one of those weird little battles that cancer sets you to fighting. We celebrate smalll victories in my world. I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you when the dust settles in your world.

Now let’s talk some knitting!!

As I mentioned, my knitting’s picked up again and I’ve made some really good progress on my beloved Surf cardigan. I’ll flatter myself that some of you might remember that I started writing PaintKnits because I fell madly in love with a particular yarn, Fiesta Boomerang in the colorway Surf. (No one remembers? Oh well.) I refused to knit a splotchy, random sweater out of this amazing fiber. My goal was control. I needed an analysis tool that would allow me to bend the play of colors to my will. Hence PaintKnits.

This project isn’t finished yet, but here’s the back as planned in PaintKnits TM …

And this is the back of the cardigan. The center panel is done as intarsia, so the back is knit in one piece from three skeins. I've added a purl motiffe to help the center panel stand out.And here the analysis for the sleeve center panel...

The sleeve was also created using intarsia, same technique as the back. The shaped sides were designed in PaintKnits TM to minimize pooling while otherwise looking random.
I’m so excited about the look! Next I want to do something with STR yarn and the ideas are making my head want to explode. If only there were more time…

Vacations Rule!

First things first. I want to send thanks out to the anonymous reader who left a comment on my Mermaid Fingerless Gloves, Part 1 post. At the time you were getting ready to attack the thumb gusset one more time. Any news on how it worked out? I really hope you had success.

Thanks also to Curlytoot who left such a nice comment back in January about my program PaintKnits (Copywrite 2008). Yes, I did write the code. It's a crazy hobby that sometimes competes with my knitting. In this case at least it's complementing my fiber habit.

I was really surprised by the excitement PaintKnits caused at Camp Crow's Feet, with the Yarn Harlot herself even writing about it on her blog! (I feel totally famous! Thank you so much Stephanie! And thank you to Tina for your offer to help me with this project!) With all that enthusiasm for it, I know I'll have to find a way to get the thing out there. I've only started to think about it, since catch-up at home and work are still getting in the way.

My big concern with the program is that it's written for Excel, so there could be Microsoft issues with selling my toy. That's on top of the fact that anyone who wants to run it would have to invest in Microsoft Excel. As much as I deeply love Excel, it's not cheap and it's not for everyone. I think the answer is to rewrite the code for Open Office, which is open source code. Of course I have no idea yet how to write macros for Open Office or whether I'll be able to make it jump through flaming hoops the way my beloved Excel does for me, but on an initial look it does look doable.

I'll post my progress here for those who really are interested. Feel free to send encouraging words… Learning a new programming language is going to compete big time with my actual knitting!

Anyways, I've been missing from my blog and missing from knitting for some months. I think my resolutions overwhelmed me. Plus I've been stressing over whether I was physically ready to take on this trip to my favorite part of the world. My commitment had been made however, and it turned out that the Blue Moon Fiber Arts Rocking Sock Club Camp was exactly what I needed.

Since the camp is held where I'd choose to vacation anyways, I went out a few days early and came home a couple of days late. I'm sure lots of campers are already posting camp details and photos, so I'll be different and just post a few pictures from my sightseeing adventures. (Glad you asked Linda!)

Here's Seattle. Well kept secret that the sun does shine!
Scary encounter with wildlife in Hoh Rain Forest.


Rialto Beach, my favorite beach in the whole world.

Cape Flattery, most northwestern point of contiguous states.


A yarn shop! The Artful Ewe in Port Gamble. What a wonderful surprise! And lovely yarn!! Wish I could take it all home... And yes, it is housed in an old firehouse.

The top of Mt. Constitution on Orcas Island.

Tulip Festival. Beautiful flowers, but cold snowy weather.

The Mukilteo Lighthouse, also a favorite.

The Olympic Sculpture Garden in Seattle. Breath-taking.

And I still didn't get to see everything I wanted to. Next year...

Can this Year be Different?

I've never been big on formal New Year's resolutions, but there's a part of me that can't resist the urge to effect change in my existence starting with the change over to a new year. This year I'm going to admit that there are definitely changes that need to be made and I will risk public failure by admitting them here. You can be witness to how well I do.

1. I want to pick up the fight again to improve my daily existence. Even though I feel much better than I did in the months following my stem cell transplant for multiple myeloma, I definitely do not feel good. The doctors I'm working with aren't interested in my current problems. (In their defense their area of concern is cancer. They're satisfied with my blood work and expect me to talk to someone else about my new problems.) I need to find a doctor who'll help me live a more comfortable life and I need to take better care of myself.

2. I need to pull myself together as far as the tasks that we must do to survive in this world. That means getting work done on the house as needed, taking care of nasty paperwork (flex spending forms and medical billing problems), finding someone to do my taxes professionally, and even making time to enjoy my social relationships. I haven't always been good at getting all of that done, but working through it while feeling unwell all the time has been a hike up Mt. Everest barefoot.

3. I want to enjoy more of the technology of the on-line knitting world. My Ravelry account languishes with the only visible proof of my existence being the list of blog entries. I haven't gotten things going with Flickr either, which has to precede Ravelry. Susan's help has allowed me to add the buttons that you see to the right, but I'd like to add more and would like to personalize the blog with a logo. I'd like to learn more about html and maybe even set up a website to play with, but that might really be setting sights too high.

4. In addition to growth in software competency, I know that I must replace and upgrade my computer. My ancient machine and Windows 98 just don't cut it anymore, plus I need to be able to do mechanical design work at home with my employer's new 3D CAD program. (Maybe I should resolve to do less work at home, but we won't even go there!) Anyways, I've already bought a new camera and am in the process of learning to use it. Can I be a techno-wizard by the end of '08? Doubtful, but I might be able to have more fun with tech tools.

That's a pretty intimidating set of goals for someone who doesn't do New Year's resolutions, isn't it? No guts, no glory.

Here's my new camera. I absolutely love it, by the way. It's a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX55. It requires a little more interaction to get some of the weirder shots my Olympus would take easily, but it also takes some pictures that the Olympus refused to. Overall a very satisfactory trade-off.

I've got it snapped onto a Joby Gorillapod stand from Best Buy for these pictures. The Gorillapod's been a blast to play with as well. My Dad got this same camera for Christmas and says that the addition of the Gorillapod also helps him hold and steady the camera.

Check out the generous size of the LCD!
Here's where I have to admit that none of the pictures you see here come from this wonderful camera yet. My tried and true Olympus D-450 captured all those presented here. I still haven't figured out how to download the pics from my new FX55! (See item 4 above!)

My immediate knitting goals are fortunately much more modest; finish up my 2007 RSC socks and plan the most amazing sweater ever for my Fiesta Boomerang Surf yarn. Last night I finished the RSC Summer Socks except for blocking. (These require that the lace cuff be blocked, and yes, it is needed.) The right hand sock has its cuff blocked.

I also swatched one of the amazing color effects that my PaintKnits spreadsheet discovered. Here's the PaintKnits patterning.
Here's my swatch.
Pretty cool, huh? I still need to swatch and measure the other stitches I want to use in this project so I can model them too, but the design is firming up. I want to set up this sweater design so that the color effect that comes from the multi yarn serves as a design element, not just a random, fun, let's-see-what-happens afterthought.

My Knit Nest sofa continues to be inhabited by the C & G cardigan and Pyramids. I guess my resolutions should include finishing those up. Unfortunately neither one is inspiring enthusiasm right now, so they'll probably wait for a bit. This month the Rockin' Socks are on a roll!