Monthly Archives: October 2012

around here

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There is a little delay in my “around here” this week, since I just got back from a long weekend in Italy! It’s olive-picking time, and my family’s estate cabin has an olive grove that warrants a yearly small gathering of people willing to rake olives out of the trees. It happens with a net underneath, and little rakes on sticks that you use to comb the branches of olives so they fall into the net. Then you gather the net and dump the fruits into baskets, which you finally take to an olive pressing place, that presses the oils out of the pits and gives you jugs of peppery green olive oil. And then you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor! Good fun, and good work.

We were lucky to have some really lovely weather while we were there, as you can see from my bare-armed (wool!) olive picking-outfit. That’s my dad in the background, for a contemporary and alternative spin on American Gothic. Other activities included knitting of course, fires in fireplaces in the cool evenings, and loads of cheese and bread and wine. And now we’re back to the daily life, which for me includes hopefully soon finishing that dress I was cutting and prepping last week.

is it time for wool hats yet?

Yes it is. I took these pictures yesterday in beautiful, chilly sunset  light, and this morning, looking at the sun rising on my city, there are big snowflurries in the air, settling on the mountaintops right across the valley. We’re on the brink of winter, and I’m finding the need to get my woolens in order – taking them out of storage, washing them, and mending them.

knitted wool cable hat

This hat should look pretty familiar. I made one, almost identical, last winter. It ended up a little too big, so I cast on fewer stitches this time, and went to it. I love the pattern for this hat, with the perfect rhythm of cables in different sizes. The yarn came from a merino wool sweater that I took apart, and the yarn is so thin I had to knit with 4 strands at once! (The pattern is Kristen of KristenMakes’s Cabled Watch-cap, and my ravelry notes are here)

The picture is a little blown out, but I’m pleased with how the cables merged for the decreasing at the crown.

I am really intrigued by decreases at the crown of hats. The best ones are little fantastic little design-puzzles, where the pattern melds perfectly with shaping the crown, and ends up in a circle, or swirling lines, or cables integral to the pattern itself. Working with this hat, I thought of a fun challenge – making a top down hat to really make the shaping of the crown and the pattern there the star of the show. I’ll just add that to the other 7 projects I’m currently working on and planning. (meaning, maybe in two years I’ll get around it!)

I was left to my own devices to take these photos, and it involved a lot of running back and forth, crouching, trying to be in focus, and in frame! I missed a couple, as you can see, but I did want to share a side picture of the hat and all the cables.

Now, what is happening to the other hat? I don’t need two almost identical hats around, especially with one being too big, so the first hat is being sent off to live with a friend with a bigger head! I know it fits her, and I’m happy that the hat can go be useful somewhere else. Win win all around!

around here

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It is very much so fall. It’s a season that can be breathtakingly beautiful, but it can also be mushy brown leaves in a puddle of rain and discarded trash. I’ve been trying to find the charming pieces of fall this week, in between a couple of sick days and a whole lot of knitting. Knitting equals fall, right? Especially cables and tweed and woolens.

I’ve been clued in to a farmer’s market that happens every Thursday in the university area of town. It’s hugely popular – to the point of people sitting and waiting before the guy even arrives! – which is funny, since it’s just one farmer with his goods. But the carrots and the cauliflower are the best I’ve tasted, and this week I even scored tomatoes and broccoli (it’s usually pretty picked over if you don’t show up right at the start). I feel so good about buying and eating things that were pulled out of the ground a few days ago, a few miles away.

This week I’ve even worked on a sewing project, which has been a while since. Of course, I’m complicating things by thinking about changing the construction and cutting things on the bias, but I’m happy to finally be working on this dress, and the fabric is dreamy (and a little crazily patterned for my usual self, but comfort zones needs to be challenged!). And the yarn for my Geithus lace knit top sample arrived! It is gorgeous, and fantastically soft.

my uniform

Studying in Chicago, I had a uniform of sorts. Most days I would wear some variation of skirt + top + cardigan + belt. It made dressing easy, having a sort of formula to vary on, and in the winter especially it was good for layering tights and fleeces and anything else I could pile on. I grew up in Norway, which isn’t exactly known for being a warm place, but I’m telling you… Chicago winters are about the most brutal I’ve experienced.

Ok, digressing. This past year I’ve noticed a shift in my uniform, to dresses + cardigans + sometimes belts. It’s really quite insignificant, besides the subtle shift to one less piece of clothing to take into the equation, and minimizing the chance that the belt doesn’t sit at the waist of the skirt. My current uniform it is, none the less.

There is one detail about this outfit I want to point out, which is the lack of a belt. I don’t remember where I first saw it (I’m quite sure the clever ladies of acidemichic do this too), but using the wrap belt that is attached to this jersey dress to belt the cardigan as well, is a trick I’ve used for years. You bring the belt to the front of the dress (if it isn’t there already), cross and wrap it around the cardigan, and tie it either in front or in back. Instant color-cordinated belt!

Anyone else have a uniform of sorts?

around here

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This week has been all about knitting, and my new job (one of them at least!). My mom came to visit last weekend, and on the one day it was sort of nice, we went to a ship-christening and ate ice cream. On the three days where it rained non-stop, we sat inside and played with yarn. I have not been able to put down knitting since! I have been swatching, and planning, and plotting for lots of different projects, just bouncing around between hats, and sweaters, and cardigans, and tops, and mittens.

At my new work the sunrises are pretty amazing, they have fruit every Wednesday, and I can knit whenever there is some downtime (yeah!). The weekend was rounded out by some nice weather, and the only sensible thing to do in this rainy city, is to drop everything and go outside. On Friday I sat in the sun and knitted (of course), and on Sunday we hiked the tallest mountain in town. Wearing knitted stuff of course. Knitting, work, and pretty skies.

designing knits

I’ve already mentioned in a couple of posts that I’m working on another Geithus lace knit top, which is this thing, if you’ll remember:

I’ve decided to tweak it and publish it, and thought it might be interesting to tag along and see the process!

I bought this absolutely gorgeous Manos del Uruguay yarn while in the US last month to make my sample with, but then I knit up a swatch in the honeycomb pattern that is the main part of the lace knit top, and… it’s completely wrong. Wrong for this project at least! Let’s compare the swatches, shall we?

Making the second swatch in a new yarn was quite an interesting experience. After I realized the yarn was wrong for this project, I started thinking about *why* it didn’t work. Going through those things and deciding the reasons they didn’t work with my project was a reminder of the design process itself. It’s full of decisions you make based on the vision you have for your end product!

The green yarn is a smooth 2-ply lace yarn, and I decided I need a yarn with more give for this garment. The slippery, silky Manos also produced a fabric (color aside) that just didn’t feel right. It was less plum, and less dense than the original swatch, which was something that was important to me in designing the top originally. I didn’t want it see through!

The gauge was way off, and while I could have made another swatch with a smaller needle size, I believe a needle size of somewhere around US 0 or 2mm would just be enjoyable for the detail work involved in this! I decided that a single ply yarn that will somewhat stick to itself was the right yarn for the type of fabric and drape and opacity I wanted to achieve. A last thing I realized about the single ply, was that it would offer a clearer stitch definition. In the green sample it’s hard to see that there is a pattern at all!

So with the swatch telling me I had the wrong yarn, I’ve ordered 3 skeins of Malabrigo in a colorway I’m a little anxious and a lot excited to see if the color will make sense. It should be on its way to my mailbox right now! In the meanwhile, I’ve been crunching numbers. I’ve got some changes I want to make from the original pattern, such as proper cap sleeves instead of an extended shoulder; a more defined side rib to tackle the decreases; and a better way of finishing the armholes and the collar. I’ll come back to those later, when the yarn has arrived and hopefully I’ve started knitting the sample!

I hope this peek into the process of designing knits was interesting!