Category: Finished Projects

Finally, something finished around Chez Knitting Doctor! This came off the blocking board this morning. We had a bit of a discussion about whether it was acceptable for John to take the photos while he was still in his bathrobe, but once we got past that, it was blog-ready.

What do you think? I even put on lipstick for the event. Per his request, we have no photos of John in his bathrobe.

Project Details:

Started: Um, how to answer that. I started a plain ribbed scarf with this yarn way back in 2008. It sat in UFO-ville for a very long time. I dragged it out earlier this year, didn’t feel the ribbed scarf love, and ripped it all out. I found the Baktus pattern and started over with that in February of this year.

Finished: Officially this morning. I finished the knitting on it last week, and washed and blocked it this weekend.

Pattern: Lacy Baktus. The pattern for the lacy version is on the Flickr page.

Yarn: Butternut Woolens Silk Garden. The color name is Blue Flax. It’s a 50-50 merino silk blend, and you can’t get it any more. I should have bought this stuff by the truckload. It’s a DK weight, and just the softest, squooshiest stuff you can imagine. This was 252 yards per skein, and I used two of them.

Needles: Size 5.00mm straight needles from my faux tortoiseshell collection.

For: Me

What I learned: Sometimes you have to experiment a little to get the right pattern-yarn combo. This yarn would have been totally wasted in a plain ribbed scarf. This is a pretty versatile pattern. You start with one of the corners and four stitches, knit and increase along one side until you’ve used half your yarn, then decrease till you have four stitches. I learned that being cocky, as usual, is a recipe for ripping. I knit till I’d used what I thought was half the yarn, started decreasing, and ran out, had to rip out half the knitting and start over. You can use any weight yarn with this pattern, and it works well with sock yarn, especially in the plain version without the lace holes. If you wanted to make a bigger shawl with this pattern, I’d probably recommend doing the increases and decreases at a more rapid rate. This one measures just a little over 8 feet long, and 22 inches down the center spine. If you did a full size shawl with this, it would have 10 foot tails.

Check out the Ravelry pages for the lacy version and the original to get an idea of what you can do with this pattern.

I’m more than happy with this one. I predict that this will be worn often. I also predict that this will not be the last Baktus around here. This would be a great pattern for those hand spun skeins that are accumulating in the stash!

Whew! I finally finished something.

Project Details:

Started: April 30th, 2009 (hey, at least it was in the same calendar year!)

Finished: December 26th, 2009

Yarn: Zoe Shalimar Sock, color Peonies, purchased from Kris at Sonny & Shear

Needles: Signature dpns, size 2.25mm

For: Me

What I learned: Knitting plain socks is still endlessly amusing. And I love wearing plain socks in every color of the rainbow.

This yarn is quite nice. It’s superwash merino, and I added a bit of pink Wooly Nylon when I knitted the heels and toes, to give it a little more durability. I tend to just wear through my socks at the bottom of the heels, though it’s better if I wear them with real shoes, and not Birkenstocks. For some reason, the open clogs rub more on the sock. If you want to try the Wooly Nylon, here’s where I got mine, though you can find it in fabric shops as well. I have it in a bunch of colors, though it’s fine enough that even if it doesn’t match perfectly, it just disappears. I just try to get in the same general color family and intensity.

I hope everyone’s holiday was lovely. We are still having ours, with the last set of family arriving today for dinner and gift exchanging. Santa will probably be glad, he’s had a busy week. I had the honor of working for the four-day Christmas weekend, and have to go in today as well, but then I have a couple of days off, and I do get the New Year’s weekend off as well. Just as a public service announcement, remember to go buy your black eyed peas for the annual New Year’s Day BEP cook-off. I wouldn’t want you to get caught short without them!

It’s finally done:

Project Details:

Yarn: Knitpicks City Tweed Aran weight, in Snowshoe and Brocade. I used 5 skeins of the former, less than 3 of the latter.

Pattern: Brooklyn Tweed’s Baby Blanket pattern, roughly. I started knitting based on a previous blog post, and then he released the pattern. The original pattern used the DK weight of the same yarn. I just started knitting away, and had finished most of the center before the “real” pattern was available. I just figured out how many pattern repeats would go around the outside and picked up that many stitches.

Needle size: Denise 10 1/2. Though when I got to the I-cord edging, I pitched them and used a large Addi instead. The Denise needle tips kept unscrewing as I was doing the edging, though I have never had them do that before. I suppose there was some twisting action of the I-cord that caused this.

Started: June 1, 2009

Finished: August 29, 2009

For: My first grand-nephew, Jacoby!

What I Learned: Start baby projects early. Seriously. They come faster than you think. Also, I love this yarn to pieces. We’ll see how it holds up. It’s softer than soft, so I’m thinking it might pill, but you could wrap it around a barenaked baby without any qualms. It’s not superwash, so those of you thinking this would make great baby clothes might think about that a bit.

I also learned that I’m not so fond of doing I-cord edging, though it is mighty pretty once it’s done.

Credits: Sweetpea, the stand-in baby model.

Finally, it’s finished! This wasn’t the greatest day to take photos, but I was anxious to get it done and up. You’ll have to excuse the number of photos, it’s not every day I finish a huge lace shawl.

Project Details:

Yarn: Blue Heron Egyptian Mercerized Cotton, color Bluegrass, from Sonny & Shear
Pattern: Peacock Feathers Shawl, by Dorothy Siemens
Needles: Knit Picks Harmony circular, size 3.5mm
Started: August 3, 2008
Finished: May 8, 2009
For: Me

What I Learned: I just love knitting lace. I also love Dorothy Siemens. Her patterns are very well written. Though this looks like a complicated piece, it really isn’t. All the wrong side rows are purled, and the charts and instructions are thorough and detailed. The pattern calls for 1260 yards of laceweight. The Blue Heron is in 1000 yard skeins, so I had to buy two of them*. This yarn is on the heavier side of laceweight, almost a fingering, making this a very large shawl. Since I’m nearly 6 feet tall (I have always been pissed off that I never hit 6 feet!), it fits me well.

I also like the yarn. I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy knitting with cotton for lace, but it turned out nicely. It also blocked like a dream. The color is just barely variegated, enough to give some interest but not so much as to detract from the lovely lace patterns. I predict that I’ll get a lot of wear out of this.

*Yes, there’s quite a bit of this leftover. Stay tuned to see what I’m going to do with it!

I finished John’s socks while we were in Arizona a few weeks ago, and just haven’t gotten around to posting them. Here they are:

Project Details:

Yarn: Mountain Colors Weavers Wool Quarters, color Red Tail Hawk.

Needles: Ivore double points, size 2.75 mm.

Pattern: My own jerry-rigged sock pattern, on 60 stitches.

Started: February 7th, 2009

Finished: March 5th, 2009

For: John, to replace the first pair of socks I ever knit.

What I learned: Sportweight yarn knits up into socks faster than “sock” weight (duh!). I like knitting socks with nice yarn better than I like mending socks made from crappy yarn.

He loves them, and I think he’s finally given up on the old holey pair.
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Portland was a fun trip, even though we were there for just a short time. The train ride there is really the way to go. If you figure in the cost of parking a car once you get there, it’s much cheaper to take Amtrak, especially since Portland is such a walkable city. My sweetie surprised me with tickets to Wicked one night, which was fabulous. And I got to shop at Powell’s, and at Knit/Purl, so the whole trip was a success.

On the remodeling front, the floors are done, and now we are just waiting for the cabinets to be finished. Once those are installed, the guys can measure to cut the granite for the counter tops. We’re figuring about another three or four weeks before it’s back in usable condition. We’re already starting to plan what our first meal in the new kitchen will be!

I’m not far enough into Version 4 of the True Blue sweater to tell for sure if the size is good this time, but I’m happy to report that the Beaverslide yarn is holding up well to all that ripping and reknitting. And I’ve decided to think of the whole thing as my economy knitting plan. I’m really getting my money’s worth out of that yarn.

And I’ve finished something else!

New Socks! How Exciting!

Project Details:

Yarn: Three Irish Girls, Beckon Super Merino, from the Sock Yarnista Sock Club. The color is Arctic Circle, with plain black for toes, heels and cuffs.

Pattern: Monkey Socks, from Knitty, by Cookie A.

Needles: Celtic Swan Forge sterling silver needles, size 1.

For: Me

Started: September 4, 2008

Finished: December 1, 2008

Modifications: I changed the heel flap to a standard slip stitch flap, and the contrasting heel/toe/cuff option, otherwise, it’s as written.

What I learned: I can too knit something besides plain socks. The pattern was fun to knit, though I still love that plain sock. And I love the Sock Yarnista. Her yarn is just fabulous. Go buy some!

OK. This is very embarrassing. I joined the Summer of Socks over on Ravelry at the beginning of summer. The whole point was to see how many pairs of socks you can knit during the summer. While I knew I wouldn’t win by a long shot, I had high hopes of at least not humiliating myself publicly. Oh well. Here they are, my first, and likely only, completed socks of the summer.

Project Details:

Yarn: Opal Hundertwasser sock yarn, color number 637A. The name is Wartende Häuser, or “Waiting House”.

Needles: Knit Picks Harmony dpns, size 2.25mm.

Pattern: Um, the same old sock pattern. Look over there to the right in the menu bar, you’ll find it.

Started: June 24th, 2008

Finished: August 26th, 2008

For: Me

What I learned: Opal is still one of my favorite sock yarns. It’s not as soft and squishy as some of the new kids on the block, but it is just a fabulous yarn. I also learned to let my matchy-matchy tendencies go on this one. The color repeat is really a long one for this colorway, so I’d have had to pull out close to a quarter of a sock’s worth of yarn in order to start the second sock at exactly the same place. I just decided to make them different. I like ’em!

Oh, and those socks are actually the same length, they just don’t look like it.

I also learned about the German artist, Friedensreich Regentag Dunkebunt Hundertwasser, who was the inspiration for this line of yarn. Check out my previous post for details. Here’s that photo again that inspired this color:

Next time, a Project Roundup! And while you’re at it, go vote in today’s Hunk contest. Rickman is having a hard time of it, again. These young whippersnappers seem to think they are going to take the title away from him.

Project Details:

Yarn: Alpaca With A Twist Fino, 70% baby alpaca, 30% silk, 1 hank, 100grams, 875 yards. And I used all but 1.2 grams of the hank.

Pattern: I put this together using Evelyn Clark’s Knitting Lace Triangles book. It’s 16 repeats of the Medallion pattern, then 3 repeats of the Ripple pattern, then the edging. The Whitewater name came from our river raft trip in June of this year. I knit part of the shawl on that trip.

Needles: Holz & Stein ebony circulars, size 3.25mm.

Started: February 2008. I took a class from Evelyn Clark using her triangular lace shawl techniques at the Madrona fiber festival in Tacoma. As I was working on the Langsjal Jóhönnu shawl at the time, this sat in hibernation until April.

Finished: August 1, 2008.

For: ?? Maybe me, maybe a gift. Who knows.

Modifications: Well, it’s all a modification, really. I didn’t deviate from Ms. Clark’s plan, though, except for leaving off one plain row at the end. I was running out of yarn, and just left it out.

What I learned: The cast on used in this book is rather clever. Basically, you provisionally cast on 2 stitches and knit a little 2-stitch garter strip for several rows, then pick up stitches on one long side, then those first 2 stitches. This gives you a garter “tab” that flows better into the top border.

I also learned a lot about how triangular lace shawls are constructed. Ms. Clark’s book makes the whole process very simple, and takes all the guess work out of it. The book has a lot of instructional material, then pattern charts (also written out, for you chart-o-phobic types) for four different laces. There are instructions on how to knit the transition sections between one lace type and the next, then one edging stitch chart. You basically pick which laces you want in your shawl, decide the order and how many repeats, then put in the appropriate transitions to make it work. This works whether you are making a small neck scarf or a ginormous shawl.

The book is by no means comprehensive as far as lace shawl construction. I would have liked to see more information on how to take this method and run with it. She doesn’t really explain the process of taking stitch patterns with varying stitch counts and making them work together. I think that after one or two of these shawls, you’d get tired of the four stitch patterns and want to branch out. I love the finished project though. And the yarn is divine. It has enough silk to really glow, and the alpaca has just a bit of a halo.

And a few more photos, because it’s my blog, and I don’t finish something every day:

The stole came off the blocking board this morning, and was finally seen out in the wild (in between rain showers!).

Yarn: Lodband Einband, Icelandic laceweight wool, purchased at Schoolhouse Press. The color number is 9808, and I used all but 1 gram of 5 skeins of yarn (225m each).

Pattern: Langsjal Jóhönnu, from Three Cornered and Long Shawls, by Sigridur Halldórsdóttir. I also purchased this from Schoolhouse Press.

Needles: Knitpicks Options circular, size 3.75mm

For: Me

Started: May 2006, for the Amazing Lace knitalong. It went into an extended timeout in September of that year, when I got sidetracked by other stuff. I did a row here and there just so the poor thing wouldn’t feel abandoned, but started back in earnest on it over this winter.

Finished: April 5, 2008 (Thanks, Chris, for noticing the “2007” typo!)

Modifications: None, except for my possibly creative interpretation of the charts. I also used way more yarn than what the pattern called for, which was 500 yards of laceweight. I used 1230 yards of the Lodband Einband. I did use a larger needle than called for in the pattern, as I liked the look of the pattern stitches better at that gauge, so that accounts for some of the difference. The finished shawl measurements given in the book are 25″ by 75″. Mine is 26″ by 84″, so that accounts for some of the rest. I think if you only went with the 500 yards, you’d have a really short stole. I wanted something that I can really wrap up in.

What I Learned: Where to start? This is easily the most difficult thing I’ve finished. The original book is in Icelandic, and the included translation is somewhat terse, at only 15 pages to the original book’s 77 pages. This shawl is one of the more challenging in the book, as it is patterned on both sides, meaning no long purled or knitted row on the return row. If you make a mistake, there’s no “easy” row to rip back to where you can get your bearings and get the thing back on the needles. I did a lot of painstaking “tinking” to fix mistakes. I used lifelines, and stitch markers to separate the horizontal repeats.

The chart in the book also doesn’t have the horizontal repeats marked, so that required a whole lot of fiddling in the beginning that I probably made much more difficult than it really should have been.

There’s a really looooong grafting row at the end; 125 stitches to be exact. It’s done on a plain knit row, though, so it works just like grafting a really big sock toe, and if you think of it that way it’s much less daunting. I also learned the hard way to make my grafting much looser than I would think necessary. A lot of ripping and swearing ensued, then re-grafting.

While I would not necessarily recommend this to a complete beginner, any knitter with patience and an ability to read a chart can do this one. After I first started this, I wasn’t thrilled with the yarn, as it’s fairly rustic and plain, but it has grown on me. It goes with the pattern perfectly, and will be a warm, yet stylish stole. It also blocked out beautifully.

While this book is fairly expensive at $45, it has several other lovely patterns that I want to make someday.

Here’s a close up of the stitch pattern:

And me, all wrapped up and warm.

The only thing I’m not happy about? It doesn’t make me look like this woman from the pattern book:

I finally finished something! After months of knitting, John’s Big Grey sweater is done, and he loves it. And it fits. Here’s a photo:

Project Specs:

Yarn: Peace Fleece worsted, color Negotiation Grey.
Pattern: Father/Son Pullover, from Peace Fleece
Needles: Knit Picks Options circulars, size 6&7
For: John, my sweetie pie
Started: September 2007
Finished: Yesterday
Modifications: None, really. Oh yeah, I picked up fewer stitches around the collar than the pattern recommended.
What I learned: I still like knitting plain stuff. Both of us tend to dress like the Lands End Poster Child, and our wardrobe is, um, rather plain. A plain grey sweater was just what the boy wanted, and it’s just what he got. This is one of the few sweater patterns I’ve seen that actually uses short row shaping for the shoulders, so you don’t have to convert it yourself. The neckline also uses short rows, and instead of binding off the neck and then picking up stitches for the collar, it leaves them live. It’s a well-written pattern, with no glitches that I discovered.

Now, I just need to get it away from him so I can do a little post-sewing blocking.

Here are a couple of post-Hawaii photos to show you what we came back to last week.

Ick, ick, ick. The snow didn’t last long, but we had ice on the streets for several days, and the forecast is just rain and more rain. And I have had the cold from hell the past few days. I rarely get sick, but this one really knocked me out. I was pretty sure it was Ebola for a few days there.

And I have one more Hawaii photo to show you.

Sweet Pea liked Hawaii, too.