productive

hello, i’ve missed you! with one thing and another, it’s suddenly almost a whole week since i blogged. not that we didn’t enjoy a guest spot by mister knitspot and an update from erica—we did, right?

and i’ve had very little in the way of public knitting i could show off, so that provided a good opportunity to share this page space.

well, i guess the first thing you’re all waiting to hear about is who won the tanis fiber arts stella collection/yarn giveaway. and that would be: phyllis s

thank you everyone for participating!

as the photo above indicates, one thing keeping us busy is the produce from the garden—managing how, when, and what to bring in, put up, and store away is the big challenge this month. i’m picking three to four pounds of green beans every other day right now and the tomatoes are starting to come in by the basketful, along with healthy quantities of squash, eggplant, and peppers.

yes it will hold for a day or three if i don’t have time to do something with it, but that just means there is double the quantity to take care of next time. on friday evening, for instance, i had over six pounds of green beans in the fridge and that was just from the previous three days.

not that we won’t eat them all—last winter we went through about twenty quart bags. and if we don’t want them i know a certain little someone who loves them, too.

so after we got in from our bike errands friday, i set about preparing them for freezing. i snapped the top off of each and every one, then blanched them briefly in boiling water and iced them down quick. some i cut longer for the table and the thick ones i cut into niblets for soup.

it’s satisfying to see those bags piling up in the freezer alright.

the next day, i spent the afternoon in the kitchen making a pot of ciambotta with tomatoes, eggplant, summer squash, onions, garlic, peppers, carrots, celery, basil, and potatoes—every single thing from our garden, yay.

i got so involved in this project that i totally forgot to take photos, but i promise to get a picture when we dish it up to eat. it’s good to let a dish like this sit for a day to let the flavors meld, which is what we’re doing now.

the other night i was over at helena, jeff, and kris’s house and was able to get a few new shots of the peeps—not so little anymore, are they?

they’re very active now, running all around their little pen and playing a lot more on the roost and . they were both curious and flustered when i stuck the camera in to take their picture

there was an actual pause in the action when they saw the lens staring back.

haha, so cute.

there has been much knitting and while most of it is secret, i am pretty well caught up on non-secret work, so i felt free during the last few days to consider a new project.

and you know what that means . . .

yes, a swatching binge. where most knitters would go off on a startitis bender, i act out by becoming a mad swatch glutton. i’ve actually been thinking about this one for some time, so it was  big and took most of the week to run its course.

and today while i took a nap, the swatches all took a bath to get cleaned up for this blog post.

since last fall, i’ve had this batch of indigodragonfly polwarth/silk DK blend in what i like to think of as “my” colorway—Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal! (Wash). you have to scroll down to find it and it says sold out, but i bet kim would dye some more if you ask sarcastically enough (she likes that). i knew when i got it that i would design a sweater with it—i’ve even know exactly WHAT sweater i would make. i just had to clear my design schedule for the project (and look how long it took, yikes!)

same for this batch of lyra merino/alpaca/silk from jen at spirit trial fiberworks as well as a batch in a colorway she calls toadstool. lovely stuff, fuzzier and with a softer drape than the polwarth blend; it would be so great as a comfy winter sweater.

i wound up some of each and started swatching. i had actually started swatching for this particular design in the lyra back in the fall of 2011, but i needed to do more.

both yarns look great in this stitch pattern, which has enough structure to support a softer yarn like the alpaca blend, but not so much that it becomes stiff in a yarn with more body, like the polwarth blend.

this is a subtle knit/purl stitch pattern that i used in a simple sweater i designed years ago from the old classic elite tapestry wool/mohair blend.

every time i wear it, i get asked about it, so i thought it might be time to rework it and  write it up. i like the pullover well enough, but what i’d REALLY like is the same fabric in a raglan cardigan with nice wide, ribbed bands that maybe also form a collar around the neck.

so i swatched on two needle sizes, 4.5 mm (bottom) and 5.0 mm (top). i got the same gauge in both yarns and i liked the 4.5 mm swatch best in each. fantastic; i’ll have both, please . . . they are different enough in both color and character that each is desirable to me.

with the swatching done, i can now move on to working out a basic pattern.

let’s do another . . .

while we were at TNNA, erica introduced me to twisted sisters terri and martha and we had a nice long chat with them. while we were in their booth, i could hardly take my eyes off of the new brazzle colorway of daktari slubbed cotton sport that was sitting on the desk.

i fell in love with soft cotton yarn recently, while knitting with our may club choice and i was feeling the love while wearing my cotton wandering thyme shawlette at the trade show. when i saw the daktari, i thought it would make a great little summer sweater. martha and teri offered to send me enough to knit one and it arrived last week.

i swatched first on size 3.75 mm needles and while i liked the softness of this stockinette fabric, i wasn’t as enamored of the patterned fabric. so i swatched a little more on size 3.5 mm needles. though the tighter stockinette swatch feels a little stiffer and weightier, it also has much more stability. and better stitch definition, which is good because the fabric will be patterned only minimally and i want what there is to stand out.

one thing i noticed right away is that the simpler, the better with this yarn. i’m not sure if it’s a function of the slubs or the cotton, but anything complicated just ends up looking messy.

i’m thinking that this will be mostly stockinette with simple panels, something like this up the front and back. who knows?

i do like knitting with this yarn though; it’s a little stiffer than our may yarn was, but still really nice. and i like this color a lot. i usually rely on one go-to summer sweater and this is a great neutral for a piece like that. i just have to decide if i want a pullover or a cardigan . . . my first thought was cardigan, but then i had this great pullover that gave up the ghost last year; i wore it ALL the time, so maybe i should replace it.

the swatches are all still drying, so i don’t know yet if i’m going to like the final fabric better on size 5 or size 4 needles.

i had one more sweater project i wanted to swatch for, this time in silk—another yarn choice inspired by our barenaked club. this is treenway carmela, wild muga silk in a heavy laceweight that we shipped out in july for the closing installment, in its natural gold color.

the yarn has a bit of overspin on it so it doesn’t look that great when it’s coming off the needles, but it you have faith and will stick it out, it pays off big time once its blocked, by developing a luxurious hand with a wonderful surface, like old linen. i just love it. into the bath they went.

the fabric straightens right out with a good soak and a little shaping—see, i’m not even using pins; i like to block my sweater swatches the way i would block my actual finished sweater, without pinning.

it’s mandatory to swatch thoroughly with this yarn, as it does change in all sorts of interesting ways. witness the pair of swatches above, each with 35 stitches. the top one is smaller, at least in width right? well that’s the one i knit on the bigger needle. go figure; i will definitely check my needle sizes again to be sure.

i definitely want this one to be a cardigan, though this yarn will probably perform better as a pullover, which has more structure. i’m torn . . . but leaning still toward the cardigan.

i think that even if the garment doesn’t keep its shape the way wool would, this could be an actual feature of the piece, shaping changes that would develop over time. i have store bought silk sweaters that have gone through this same evolution and i love them much more as older pieces, with their stretched-out hems and fronts that have grown longer and pointier near the button bands.

anyway, i think i have enough of this yarn set aside to knit both if i want to.

since the cotton and silk sweaters would be for spring and summer, i’m going to start the heavier cardigan first. this week i’ll sit down and figure up a skeleton pattern to begin with, so i can cast on and start knitting. i thought about doing this top down, or at least in one piece, but i gotta be honest, i just hate how bulky those projects get—i eventually feel like they will eat me alive. and with so much travel coming up in september and october, the last thing i need is another project that has to stay home because it’s too big to travel.

so that’s my swatching adventure; something to do in between secret knitting. one of my bigger secret projects is almost finished, so i’m thinking that the timing will be perfect to bind that one off and cast on the sweater right away.

meanwhile, since so many of you have asked,  i’ve been reacquainting myself with an old favorite, knitting a row or two here an there.

honestly, i never meant to put this project down for so long, but that’s just the way things went. i guess when the yarn company, fibre isle, went out of business when i was halfway done with it, i sorta mourned over that.

i do like it very much in fact, though it is hard to see the tiny yarn sometimes in the wrong light. i’m going to work on it as much as i can for the next month; i’ll even be able to bring it along when we visit my mom in a couple weeks, since the lighting at her house is really good.

it is awfully pretty; it’s a shame to let it languish any longer. i have at least been thinking about it in the meantime and i believe i have solved the issue i was having over the hem structure, which i had not finalized. i’ll be able to pull that part of the design together now and actually write a pattern, i think. it would be great to complete this for fall.

of course this is just one of a whole array of projects that are patiently waiting to be finished—some of them have barely been started, in fact. this wall of shame is the result of what i thought was a brilliant idea, but which in actuality, was probably ill-fated from the start.

the plan was to cast on a bunch of projects and pack them in “go bags” so that they’d be ready and waiting for me to grab on the way out the door during my heavy travel periods. everything i need for each project is in each bag. these are second samples of pieces that i want on hand for various reasons—not new designs.

where the plan fell apart is that during heavy travel periods, i am frantically trying to keep up knitting on new releases so i have things to stock the store with and to send out with our club shipments. haha, i don’t have time to knit spares, really and heaven only knows where i got the idea that i did.

sometimes, i just crack myself up.