Trish Knits.com

Tag: sweater

  • …And Then the Tears Came

    I was having a great day today. I went shopping with my mom, who bought me some really gorgeous amethyst earrings for my new earholes. It’s been a while since we’ve been able to go shopping together but I think she finally feels well enough and that feels really great to me.

    Then I took Diana to the pool where she met up with a friend and I settled in for an evening of knitting.

    That’s when I saw it. a dropped stitch, right at the cable cross of my baby sweater. I managed to rip back to the row with the dropped stitch:

    closeup of cable after ripping out
    closeup of cable after ripping out

    But am doubting my fortitude for picking up ladder by ladder and re-knitting. This yarn is so splitty and hard to do cables with. But tonight, I got some encouragement, of a very high order.

    I did a search on Ravelry for fixing cables and up popped a message by Janet Szabo, the Queen of Cables, in my book, where she stated that she’s about to have a DVD come out on cables. In the DVD are techniques for fixing them She invited folks to drop her a line and say if they wanted to be informed when the DVD is released, which of course I did. I mentioned that I am in the middle of trying to fix my first cable. She must have been online because she replied within minutes and offered to look at a photo of my poor cable if I had one. (I had taken the photo for this blog post not 10 minutes before… LOVE my macro photography settings on my camera!)

    So I sent her the photo, and basically she suggested that I do what I had been planning to do, that is, re-knit, ladder by ladder, but she also suggested that I use some straight cable needles, like the Brittany cable needles, so I ordered some. Hopefully they should be here soon. In the meantime, I’m stepping back from the sweater.

    Thanks, Janet!

    Just When I Thought my Birthday Was Over…

    My DH told me before that something he got for my birthday didn’t come in time. Well that was two weeks ago, so I was starting to think it was becoming a non-issue. But then, today, this came:

    Namaste Newport bag in the peacock colorway
    Namaste Newport bag in the peacock colorway

    It’s the Namaste Newport bag in the Peacock colorway. I know folks are simply rabid for this bag in this color so it must have been backordered. I’m going to love it… it’s smaller than my others but it does have a firm bottom. Great for knitting in the car, which is where most of mine gets done.

    It does, however, have an imperfection:

    closeup of bag handles showing excess threads
    closeup of bag handles showing excess threads

    It looks like it got caught in the sewing machine! It has several places where it is stitched with several layers of thread and there are extra strings. I’m going to try snipping them and see if it holds up. If it doesn’t, I’ll send it back… but I think this bag and I are going to be fast friends. Thanks, hubby!

  • Knittin’ on Some Stuff

    me, knitting a purple sock
    me, knitting a purple sock

    Just a Monday night at Trish’s place. I’m tired tonight, so we all had something simple for dinner, then I sat down to do some knitting… and then blog about it! I frogged my purple sock last week, and restarted it on size 0 needles. This time, on smaller needles, 56 stitches around seems to fit me just right. I forget sometimes that my feet are so smal, because I tend to wear shoes two sizes bigger because of my brace.

    I kinda gave up on the idea of doing toe-up monkey socks for now, too, because the stitch repeat is so long that getting the right amount of stitches for my size is a bit of a challenge. So for now, I’m doing Wendy Johnson’s sock pattern that she designed for Summer of Socks, 2008. Well, sort of. I’m doing her stitch pattern, but my own heel and my own toe.

    And here’s a shot of the baby sweater:

    baby sweater in progress
    baby sweater in progress

    Half an inch til I put the sleeve stitches on holders. I’m finally starting to feel the progress. Yay!

  • Baby Sweater Update

    baby sweater in progress, yoke almost finished
    Baby sweater in progress, yoke almost finished.

    I just upgraded to WordPress 2.6 tonight so we’ll see if this post goes ok!

    Above is this week’s progress on the baby sweater. Before you roll your eyes at me about how little progress there has actually been from Monday’s post, I’d like to point out that there are 183 stitches in a row, which is more stitches than my brown ripple afghan. Also I messed up on a cable. The yarn is really splitty because of the way it’s loosely plied (I’m not a spinner, but I think that’s what I’m seeing), so the cable stitches got all hung up on each other and I didn’t grab all the strands for all the stitches and they just looked terrible. It wasn’t too long ago that such a thing would have scared the b’jesus outta me, but a few months ago I remembered seeing a tutorial on Kelley Petkun’s blog about fixing cable mistakes. So, I took a deep breath and said to myself I can do it, because Kelley’s cables were a much bigger mess than mine and she lived. So did I. I unpicked a couple rows of the cable stitches, reknit them from the strands and crossed the cable stitches and reknit them from their strands. Done. I should have taken pictures of the process but it really wasn’t that bad. I figure each time I have a major screw up in knitting I will learn something new by fixing it.

    For all my hard work you can barely see the cable pattern starting to emerge. They’re between the green markers in the picture. Soon, I’ll be ready to put the sleeve stitches on holders. It’s supposed to be bloody hot here this weekend so I plan to stay mostly indoors. We’re having a dinner party at my mom’s tomorrow night because it’s too hot for the outdoor picnic we had planned at the pool. Oh well. It’s another summer in Maryland. I was wondering when the hot weather was going to get here. Turns out I needn’t have bothered worrying.

    Ciao for now…

  • Happy Knit-Day to ME!

    At least it feels that way to me. It’s my birthday! But it has been a really nice day filled with good friends and lots of knitting goodness. And I thought I was just going to have another boring Monday at work. Ha! The day started with me being able to make what I felt was good progress on this:

    Sweater in progress

    Ok, it might not seem like a lot, but this teeny little baby sweater has 183 stitches in a row, which is about as many as my brown ripple afghan! You can see the cable pattern just getting started on what will be the two fronts for the sweater. I am really crossing my fingers on this one, because it seems like I’m totally winging it! But, it seems like so far, so good. I’ll update from time to time.

    A good friend from work then took me to Clyde’s for lunch, where I wouldn’t be overstating it if I said I had the best crab cakes I ever ate! It was a wonderful break from the office to go out for such a nice lunch.

    Then after work I got home and my Mom and Tony were over, and the inlaws, Bill and Linda, arrived soon after. We had Tony’s homemade pasta sauce and meatballs, and Linda brought the salad, bread, and cake. It was all so YUMMY!

    Then it was time for presents. My DH gave me these:

    Lucy Neatby Sock Videos

    The Lucy Neatby sock videos! I figure I’m going to learn just about everything I ever wanted to know about sock knitting watching these. I can’t wait!

    My in-laws gave me a check, but as it turns out, yesterday, I bought this:

    mini video camera on tripod

    It’s an Aiptek video camera on a flexible tripod. Our primary video camera is too heavy for me to hold, plus I wanted something small that I could keep in my purse. But the main reason I got this camera? I’ve been wanting to add some video demos to my knitting site. It’s going to take me a while to learn how to use the camera well enough to film my knitting, but I’m looking forward to it.

    Then, when I got home tonight, this was waiting for me in the mail:

    tulip baby sweater kit, jewel colorway

    It’s the Tulip Baby Sweater kit in the “Jewel” colorway. I got enough yarn that I could probably make a couple of teeny sweaters or one in size 4. I’m thinking I have a niece who is just the right size. I’m actually so in love with the yarn for this project that maybe I will make it and put it up as art! Haha!

    The last yarny thing for today was that my friend Carrie gave me a gift certificate to YarnMarket. That store has so many things I want that it will be hard to decide what to get right away. I might sit on this gift… but probably only a day or two! Thanks, Carrie!

    Wishing everyone would get to have a fun day like I had today. I’m crashing. Night-night!

  • Knitting Roulette

    baby sweater in progress

    Today I had an unexpected day off, caring for a sick, toothless 6-year-old, who, it turns out, has the strep buggers. So we had a Spongebob marathon, and watched Cars, I got some progress done on my purple sock. Not enough to show you though, so I thought I would talk tonight about my baby sweater. Again.

    I played around with a couple of stitch patterns for the front panels, and I think I’m going with a simple plaited cable with vertical eyelets on either side. The entire rest of the sweater will be done in stockinete stitch, but I haven’t yet decided whether to do a garter stitch border at the bottom and cuffs, or some sort of ribbing. I’ll decide when I get there. I also have inserted one eyelet button hole, but it is so tiny you can’t even really see it in the photo. So I need to decide quick how to do the buttons. Maybe I’ll skip the whole thing and just do an i-cord tie. We’ll see.

    I also decided to put the sleeve stitches on holders when I get to them and do them in the round at the end. That is what makes the most sense to me at the moment. I’m already wondering if this sweater is ever going to get done. The stitches are so tiny! Next time I use this yarn for such things I think I am going to double it.

    Note to self: I stopped on the sock tonight ready to do round 5 of the second pattern repeat. But before I do any more work on it I want to put it on my foot again and make sure I wasn’t kidding myself about the size. It’s small. But I have a teeny foot (size 5, narrow). I often get away with wearing 6’s but I never wear open toe-d shoes so I forget how ridiculously big they really are.

    All for now…

  • The Yoke’s on Me!

    sweater yoke in progress

    So I’ve never really done major baby knitting. A couple of blankets, but this is my first time attempting a sweater. I’ve never made a sweater of any kind, so I figured I’d better start small. I’m basing the method of construction for this sweater on the February Baby Sweater, except that my gauge is different, and my yarn is different, and, in the end, I don’t like the stitch pattern that was used. Well, ok, I do like the stitch pattern, but what if the baby is a boy? In that case, then not so much.

    So I will use the concept of the sweater, in the use of the percentage system and the overall design. But I am still uncommitted as to which stitch pattern to use. Something that says, “Yeah, I’m a boy and I can still wear this sweater, even though it has pink in it,” but that would be ok for a girl, too.

    Any ideas? I’d love to hear them. I’m stumped. 🙂