Flying On One Wing

and typing with one hand.

Reinjured an old injury, so my left arm is now in a sling and my brain on a painkiller (yay! horray! codeine!) The cats have appointed themselves my nurses. Unfortunately, cat nursing tends to involve climbing all over the afflicted human, shoving cat head into human face and purring loudly. This makes typing just a wee bit challenging and knitting nigh onto impossible. Won't know how long I'll be bound up until the X-rays come back (Monday?), so I shall bid y'all adieu for now.

Aloha...

AmbiCrafterous

Being an incredibly graceful creature, one of my problems when knitting is the amazing escaping yarn ball. Of course, the cats are always more than willing to help the yarn misbehave as well. So what to do?

Mostly I've been using onion bags. They make excellent yarn keepers, but they're light and I have a tendency to pull too hard when getting yarn and end up dumping the whole shebang on the floor. Plus they just aren't very... sophisticated... looking.

Fortunately, I like to play with clay too, so I made myself a couple of prototype yarn bowls.

Came out pretty well if I do say so myself.

I think the hook bowl is the more versatile. I've knit half a washrag using it. Just stuck the skein into the bowl and fed the center-pulled yarn through the hook. It draws easily and the yarn seems to sit securely.

The upside down bowl with the hole is more kitty proof, but you can't quickly and easily change yarn like you can with the hook bowl. If you're not going to be changing yarn that shouldn't make a difference.

Analyzing the bowls for this blog entry is giving me further design ideas. I think I'll go play in the mud some more to test them out.

I do enjoy being ambicrafterous.

Girding My Loins For a Marathon Knit

One of my very long-time friends recently found out she's going to become a grandmother. The embryo's parents live in New Orleans, so no wooly wear is needed. Hmmm... I think I'll knit a baby blanket.

First job: Find machine washable and dryable yarn that's soft and has good cotton content. (Don't forget blankets take a lot of yarn, so not too expensive would be nice.)

Ooh, Lion Brand Cotton-Ease comes in some nice colors. Don't know what sex Embryo is yet, so let's get green and blue and purple and cream.

Second job: Select a stitch pattern -- remember to try for something two sided.

Browse through all of my stitch dictionaries and decide I liked "Pucker Pattern" the best. Looks like it should be presentable, if not virtually identical on both sides. Besides, of course, I like the weird name.

Third job: Knit a swatch in pattern and measure.

Knit, knit, knit, purl, purl, purl, cable to the front. Ten inches wide, about four inches long. Four stitches per inch on the suggested size 8 needles. Took somewhat less than a quarter of the skein for 40 square inches.

Fourth job: Do the math.

Need more yarn. Job 4B: Back to the store, get another skein each of blue and green. That makes three blue, three green and one each of purple and cream.

Fifth job: Okay Brainiac, you bought the yarn before you had a firm design in mind, so now design for the yarn you already have.

Draw, draw, draw, calculate, calculate, calculate.



Got it. I'll be cutting the blue and green yarn tight, but if I run too low, I can simply make the blankie a wee bit shorter. (Considering as how I've already spent close to $50 on the yarn.)

Sixth job: Knit the thing.

Now there's the hard part...

The Three Faces of FoamHead

Okay, okay, if you want to get technical, one of them is the back of her head.

Taking Some Lace - and My Mind - 'Round a Möbius Twist

Being more than a little bit of a nerd, I've been fascinated by the Möbius topology since I was a kid. One surface and one edge on a three dimensional object is simply totally cool.

.

So cool in fact, that the first thing I knit 16 months ago (it was my learning project) was a wide, flat scarf for SuziTheFloozy that I twisted and sewed into a Möbius scarf.

Then I discovered that a Möbius cast-on existed.

After trying unsuccessfully to get a Cat Bordhi book at the public library, I found the instructions on YouTube. Yay! Hurray!

My friend GuiGirl is a bigger nerd than I, so I decided to do the next Möbius for her.

It was not one of my more successful projects.

It was intended to be large enough to wear as a shoulder shawl, and GuiGirl is pretty busty, so I did the math and cast on leventybillion stitches hoping to get a forty-five inch functional circumference. That part worked. The sticking point was that I used Lion Brand Suede yarn and put those leventybillion stitches of it on a 40 inch circular needle.

Never again.

Never.

I'm a fairly tight knitter, and trying to move over-packed stitches of that totally nonelastic yarn around the confusing twist of a Möbius needle formation was maddening. Even though it was straight knitting, not a single perl stitch involved until I did a few rows of seed stitch so the edge wouldn't curl, it took me two and a half months. And the end product was not aesthetically pleasing.

But I'm a stubborn critter (either that or it takes me longer than the average bear to learn something.) I am venturing onto the Möbius strip again, knitting a lace cowl as a thank you for a friend who was kind to my Daddy.

I had been given some antique alpaca blend yarn in the perfect color, so I knit up several lace patterns in it to see what would work best. Some I frogged to reuse the yarn -- not an easy task as the yarn is very fuzzy -- a couple I kept.





This one looked nothing at all like the illustration in the stitch dictionary after I knit a short sample. Was it my funky knitting or the big needles and fuzzy yarn?




This one, supposedly a traditional Orenburg lace pattern, looked the same on both sides, so I decided it was the one. I did the math (always), cast on and started knitting.



What's coming off my Möbius needle looks nothing like my swatch.

Why?

Because regular knitting goes back and forth. Knitting on circular needles goes round and round and round. The pattern repeats on this lace are not perfectly symmetrical, thus not the same coming and going. Realizing that was a classic "well, duh!" moment.

Add in a Möbius twist and...

Ah well, I think I like it anyway. And I'm learning a lot. Yep, getting smarter every row.

I hope.

At Long Last...

I knit Kate of High Altitude Gardening a hat and a neck warmer last winter. I've been bugging her ever since to let me have a photo of them being worn. Gotta have a complete rogues gallery.

Finally ended up hauling my camera up the canyon and backing her into a corner.

Tah-dah! (The good lookin' grey and white dude is Buddy.)

As promised, Kate, you have on the top secret sunglasses, thus retaining your Woman of Mystery aura.

BEM Hat on CLB

or, to be a bit more verbose: Bug Eyed Monster Hat on Cute Little Boy.

I do like it when I get photos back of my knitting in use.
Thanks CLB's Mom.