Back on Track

Carve Charlie has been on hold after running into some structural weirdness, but I resumed work on it after receiving some new needles from Knit Picks. I purchased another set of sevens since my other ones are currently occupied, and I'm not pulling them off that project. If I do it'll never get done.



Anyway, I bought a pair of nickel plated inter-changeables, a 40 inch cable set and some markers. I've been curious about these for a while now, and with the great support of buyers I was able to get a pair. These feel fantastic. I like the sharp tips, and they screw onto the cable nicely.

What I don't understand is the absence of any kind of marking on the needles to indicate what size they are. I find that odd. What if your sixes and sevens got mixed up? I suspect some kind of marketing strategy. I guess they're entitled to that. I still love these needles.



Despite not knowing what the heck I intend to do with it all, I've amassed a hefty amount of cotton thread weights. I've been experimenting with holding multiple strands together in different colors, and the results are interesting. The fabric is reminiscent of television static, as the lack of plying creates a dithered effect to the colors. I kinda like the effect, but if I were to do this, I'd like a more analogous pairing. Quiet hues would also be great with this. Now I need more colors...

Speaking of thread weights, I got through the silks in my sweater pile. They're really beautiful. The blue and green ones are silk cashmere blends, and the white intarsia is pure silk. They feel downright decadent.




I was particularly impressed by this lamb's wool lace weight. It's a heathered brown two ply that's as soft as you'd expect of a lamb's wool. It's this wonderful natural color that wows me. I may just double this up for Skew Delta.

Carve Delta

Carve Bravo wasn't in my possession very long after it was completed. Someone bought it two days after it was listed, and it was gone. So I made another one for myself. Carve Delta is structurally the same hat as Carve Bravo with an adjustment to the height of the seed stitch band. I wanted that section shorter since the stitch counts per row were increased from 96 to 108. I wanted more slouch. Big surprise, right?



The yarn came from the same sweater (never photographed) which consisted of a medium gray as the main color with a lighter, silver gray stranded into vertical columns. The medium gray was used for Carve Bravo, but I was never sure if I had enough of the silver gray for another. That is until now. I had just enough, and this one is all mine.

January Roundup

What have I been up to? A lot. January was one of those months where I found myself doing more and posting less. But hey, that means I can dump a whole lot of pictures into one post! Yes folks, this is the January Round-Up. It's been an introspective month of explorations and personal projects.



Carve Charlie is almost finished, but I'm really not sure if I'll list it. I worked it on size six needles so the tension is nice and tight. It fits me perfectly, and after blocking will get a little roomier, but I'm starting to think it would be too small to be classified as 'one size.' Rather than indicate this in the item description and risk a potential return, I might just keep it instead. Or maybe I'll frog it and start over. Not sure yet.



One of the sweaters I disassembled recently was a cotton/ramie blend which got me thinking: "What the heck is Ramie anyway?" A quick skim of the wiki indicated that it's a natural fiber native to Asia. It's highly absorbent, much like cotton, so the two are commonly blended. So after frogging down a hefty amount of this cotton/ramie multi-strand, I figured I'd do a dish cloth out of it. The pattern is nothing spectacular, I decided to try moss stitch since I've never done it before. It'll be a gift to my sister since she uses these more than I do (and plus it was her sweater).

That blue thing up there is pretty much a "stitch doodle." I do these once in a while to explore new techniques. Most of the time they get frogged, but I decided to take a picture this time. I've been exploring cables with this one in preparation for a pattern I'll be starting soon, once I decide on which yarn to use.





There have been some great additions to my yarn stash this month. Hover over them for yarn details, or just click over to their respective flickr pages. Now that I have a swift I can get through these much faster, especially the thread weight stuff.

Once I get through these personal projects, I'll be able to focus more on the shop again. For the moment I'm just getting selfish with the 'me' time. Somehow I don't think my work would be as good without it.

Duality Bravo

Duality Bravo is a statistical illustration of the ecological relationship between predators and prey. When a predator is eliminated, prey populations boom, resulting in ecological disaster.

The pattern can be seen in the relationship between wolves and deer, where humans decimated wolf populations resulting in over-grazed river banks. This over-grazing in turn displaced insect populations, so the fish and amphibians dependent on these food sources disappeared too. The absence of plants and grasses lead to erosion, and the whole ecosystem went right out the window. In short: don't mess with biodiversity.



This yarn was interesting to work with. It consists of four strands of thread held together, so initially I thought it would be too splity to work with. It wasn't. In fact it worked up very smoothly. The cotton/nylon blend has a nice sheen with subtle puffs of lighter greens over the darker olive drabs.

The piece starts with garter stitch rows in a single direction chase, then one side terminates while the other side maxes out, then the maxed side spills over into both sides. I wonder if I could take this biodiversity concept further in terms of knitted construction and color. It would be interesting to incorporate disintegration somehow.

Given & Received

A little late as a Christmas gift for my sister, but that's what happens sometimes. The yarn was initially a bulky weight consisting of four strands of lace weight which I split. Pyramid Charlie went smoothly before I noticed some errors about three quarters through. I guess it was understandable given the complex, simultaneous transitions. I love how the diamond turned out on this one, outlined in seed stitch. Fixing the errors tacked on some unexpected overtime, but it turned out really beautiful.



A fitting gift considering she got me one of these babies:

This swift accommodates my six footer skeins rather nicely. It's gonna save me a bunch of time. Up until now I've been using my camera tripod which was a rather slow solution. With a winder and a swift I feel like a real knitter now. Will it be enough to get me off World of Warcraft? Yeah, probably. Okay yeah, definitely.