Better Uses for Intarsia

I have had some adventures and some misadventures with our friend intarsia. Most notably, my ever postponed giant intarsia scarf, and my failed experiment with the interlocking trefoil pattern that I eventually decided to do in fair isle. I suppose I now know better, and have used the technique on the manly scarf I've been harping about. Well, here it is, in its *almost* full glory:

Can you tell that it's a heathered grey and a lighter grey in the middle? I swear it's not lavender. Those three balls are all that remain of the Knit Picks Wool of the Andes yarn (Heather Onyx on the outside and Mist in the center). I may need to break into three more skeins before this one is totally done.

The pattern for this scaf is three cable panels, each made with one skein of the WoA. I know it can be hard to see the cables in these photographs. It just looks like a cool texture, I guess, but this is what it's supposed to look like:

OOO
XOX
OOO
OXO
OOO
XOX and so on

So, in a line, its OOOXOOOXOOOX etc., with the center panel "X" lining up with the middle "O" of the outside, heathered panels. The inspiration for thsi scarf came from hello yarn's besotted scarf. I took some liberties, of course, what with making it three-pannelled and changing up the cables a bit. I also worked this scarf in size 10 needles, so the weave is quite open, making the scarf fluffier than it might have been had I used smaller needles.

Happily for me, this scarf already has a home to go to once it's done, so you won't be seeing it at my etsy shop this go around. I will likely make other incarnations of it, with different color combinations.

Next week (hopefully): Acid green fingerless opera length gloves, where I test my ability to make finger holes!

Cozy Cozies

On Tuesday I was really down. Living in NYC is expeeeeeensive, and I realized this week that I'm basically broke. To cheer myself up, or course, I decided to knit. Instead of being responsible and working on the manly scarf order (which I will be blogging about soon!), I needed to knit something up that could be completed quickly. At first, I though of making an iPod cozy. Everyone loves an iPod cozy! I picked a graphite acrylic yarn with a lovely sparkle for my cozy.

After about 30 rows, got annoyed, and decided to turn it into a business card-holder instead. I bound off, folded the fabric in half, and seamed the edges together. I though, "good work," and picked up a stack of business cards to see how successful my handiwork was. Of course, the whole thing was really floppy. In fact, it looked awful!

I needed a flap. Great. I picked up the stitches on the bound-off edge and started making a sloping flap. I figured I would sew on a button in the middle of the body, and just make a button hole in the flap. Of course, I don't have buttons lying around my house, so that completely defeated the purpose of whipping something together in one sitting. I had to make a tab-and-loop construction.

When I had about five stitches left in my sloping flap, I made the center bit a little longer by knitting back and forth a few rows, then bound off. For the loop, I picked up four stitches in the middle front of the pouch, then knit a few rows in stockinette. Of course, now I was faced with the problem of making a graft for the non-picked up edge of the loop. For that, I picked up four more stitches on the opposite side from where I started the loop construction with a dpn and did a three-needle bind-off. now I had four stitches sitting at the front of my work.

I was so close to the end, I would not let myself be defeated. Carefully, I released each stitch from the dpn, and pulled it through to the wrong side of my work using a crochet hook. once that was done, i picked up the stitches from the hook using the dpn. Since I only had four stitches to bind off, I cut off a suitable bit of yarn from the ball I was working with, and pulled it through to the WS of the work. Then, I bound off as I normally would. Here's my cell phone/card holder cozy!


Of course, this is available at my Etsy store. As usual, contact me with any concerns or if you would like a custom order. E-mail me at sweet-avocado@hotmail.com for inquiries about knitting lessons.

Le Scarf...

...is finished! Hooray! I'm done with the green lace scarf I started like two weeks ago. I feel like I can breathe again. Scarves take a kind of mental endurance to complete. Even with something like lace, where every few rows you have to focus, it can get pretty dull very fast. It's painful to sit for hours knitting acre after acre, and feeling like you're not getting anywhere. Talk about mental anguish! At least now I've opened up my horizons again, and taken out a new lease on life. (Am I getting a little dramatic here?).

I love this scarf, don't get me wrong. I will be sad when a lucky guy or gal snaps that up, but it was exhausting to make.

As always, contact me at sweet-avocado@hotmail.com for questions or orders, and check out my etsy store for the latest and greatest!

Kid Mohair is Awesome

I've been working all week on a fan and feather pattern scarf made out of kid mohair (Alchemy Promise), and boy is it a wonderful material to work with. Nevermind that the overdyed yarn is making my fingers blue, this stuff makes the squishiest, softest fabric I've ever had the opportunity to create. Although the yarn is a lace weight, it's really fuzzy and produces a buky fabric. I've been working in 8 size needles, and the scarf is working up faster than I could image lace working up!


And here's a closeup of the eyelets:

Watch for this item coming up in my Etsy store! As always, contact me at sweet-avocado@hotmail.com if you have questions, concerns, or would like to make a custom order. If you are in the New York metropolitan area, I can do a pick up for you. Remember that I also teach knitting lessons around the city. Please contact me if you are interested. Rates start at $30/hour.

A Week's Worth of Updates

So yes, it has been a whole week now since I last updated, so there are a lot of new things to talk about. First of all, there has been progress in the intarsia scarf mega project from hell. It's about twice as long as it was when I last posted an image. This is very slow going, and recently I haven't had a huge amount of time at my disposal, so I've basically been neglecting it in favor of other projects.

I've also been working on another scarf project. This one is made with Knit Picks Twirl alpaca yarn. This yarn feels like cream in my hands, it's so soft. I love the pattern, too. It's an interlocking trefoil in maroon and green. I actually really like the color combination. I started out in intarsia, but when I had eight (!!!) balls of yarn going, I decided it would be wisest to work this in fair isle. That means floating yarn on the back of a scarf. I'll probably either felt the back of it (experiment!), or just double it up, using the green yarn to make the back. Something I thought of as well, but may use in another incarnation of this scarf, is to double strand the main color so that the thickness of the material matches on both sides. Because the pattern only appears on one half of the scarf, the plain green side is thinner than the pattern side.

There are a couple more projects I have in the pipeline right now, but don't have any pictures for. I'll be updating again soon. Please check out my Etsy store, or e-mail me at sweet-avocado@hotmail.com. I do lots of custom orders, so please contact me!

Tiny Cables

My newest project is, what else, armwarmers. I had to put ye olde giant intarsia scarf down (see Adventures in Intarsia) because the constant twisting of yarns was getting on my nerves, as was the whole having three balls of yarn hanging off my needles thing. It's coming along. I think its about twice the size it was when I posted that photograph! The drape on that fabric is really amazing. The yarn itself behaves sort of like a boucle (although the thick/thin frequency is regular), and the needles I'm using are on the large end of the gauge. I'll post a picture later, since this post is about something entirely different...

Cables! This yarn is a bit dark, but I think you can see the bumps in this photograph. This is a beautiful wool, in variegated purples. I'm working on armwarmer number two right now. I made up six colums of cable "o"'s. There are ten rows of them in all, with an "x" between the fifth and sixth "o" pattern (does anyone know if there is a technical name for this?). I only used four stitches for each cable, so to form the pattern, I had to split individual stitches, which was kind of a pain. But now that it's almost over, I can pretend like it never happened. Only nine more o's to go!

Watch for this item on etsy.com! Check my gallery on the right sidebar of this blog for the newest offerings at my store. If you have any questions, concerns, or live in NYC and would like to make an order directly with me, e-mail me at sweet-avocado@hotmail.com.

Swashbucklin' Swatchery

Does anyone get Knitting Daily in their mailboxes? Well, I do, for what it's worth, and there has been a lot of talk about swatching lately. I hate making swatches. My precious yarn goes into my finished item, thank you very much. I do say that tongue in cheek, however, because it has been the lack of swatching that's caused many a ripping of acres of stockinette that I will never get back. Never! This swatch was actually not created in the spirit of knowing how the hell my yarn would behave on those needles, but as a sample for one of my lovely customers. This is another variation on the corkscrew scarf I talked about in a previous post.

The pink and the green look really lovely together, and the green eyelash yarn really spices it up. I love it!

Adventures in Intarsia

Now that people have actually started giving me money for the items I make (I am just as shocked as you!), I've been able to experiment more with interesting textures, yarns and patterns. My newest project is a completely improvised intarsia design using (what else?) Knit Picks yarn (this time Vacation in Sunshine and Get Away in Rafting). Both of these yarns are going or are already out of stock over at Knit Picks (it's my habit of getting yarn on sale...) so once my stash is gone that's it. I decided to make this scarf really wide and long, so that it would be nice and bulky. The material is an acrylic/nylon/tactel/cotton blend. It's really soft and bulky to the touch.



The intarsia also produces a magnificent amount of ends I'll need to weave in at the end. I've been trying to do most of them as I go along, since not only are the ends annoying, but they get tangled with the three balls of yarn I happen to have attached to my needles. It's all very exciting.

Speaking of exciting, I discovered a great web service today, and I vow to sign up for it soon! It's called Etsy (http://www.etsy.com/) and it's basically the Ebay of the D.I.Y. folks (I like to include myself under that rubric). Not only will it help with my visibility, but it will enable me to ship all over the county without panicking. Hooray! I've kept away from Ebay because I feel that people go there to find the best price. I just didn't think my items would fetch a fair price there. But with a service like Etsy, people go there for the quality and not the cost, so I'd be much more likely to get the price I want for my stuff. I'll make sure to post a link to any Etsy listings I make for my knitting.

In the meantime, contact me at sweet-avocado@hotmail.com for orders.

Armwarmers: An Addiction

Did I ever mention I'm addicted to making armwarmers? These little guys are an absolute crowd-pleaser, and I love to make them. They're fun because I get to play around with all kinds of designs and textures. Here are the latest additions to my array!


I was thinking of taking the norse design and doubling it, so that there would be two mirror-image designs facing each other in a wicked long armwarmer. I know I would dig it. Here are some production shots for your viewing pleasure.


I really like the color combinations for both of these items. The green really pops out beautifully from the black wool, and the silver really works well with the viking design. I know I was thinking of Breton metalwork when I chose what color to use!

For questions and ordering information, contact me at sweet-avocado@hotmail.com.

Cheers!

Research and Development

Although I am already backlogged into kingdom come, I can't resist doing some design development. Right now I've been working primarily with accessories, and scarves and armwarmers have been flying off the proverbial shelf! Thank you to all my customers for keeping me in business!

I feel awful that I can't credit my source of inspiration, but yesterday I was surfing the blogosphere and came across a woman who was knitting a scarf for her favorite band, Tyr (yeah viking metal!). The whole viking/norse thing stuck in my mind, and I decided I wanted to do a folk motif for my next project development, and what I came up with was a pair of armwarmers donning this heart-shaped motif (you can find these in Brittany metalwork as well, sometimes made from horse-shoe nails).

...and the guts. I'm working on the second one of the pair right now, and then I promise I'll come running back to all the orders I've got backlogged! I'll also post a pretty hand-model image when I'm done knitting the second one.

For questions or order information, contact me at sweet-avocado@hotmail.com.

Thanks!

Filling an Order

I have finally finished an order on a corkscrew scarf for one of my clients! For this project, I used Knit Picks Spinnaker yarn (100% pima cotton) in Pink Quartz, and Knit Picks Butterfly Kisses in Plum, double stranded for the fuzzy effect. Sadly, Knit Picks is selling off the last of the Spinnaker, so I won't be able to get more of this material.

I went in a couple different directions for the production of my corkscrew scarves. First, I started with the Potato Chip Scarf pattern on KnitPicks.com. Working on size 11 circular needles, I cast on 100 stitches. I knit into the front and back of every other stitch every other row, starting with a knitted row and ending in two rows of garter stitch for a grand total of eight rows (those last couple of rows feel like a lifetime...). I also worked the scarf in this same way, but starting with 60 stitches for a slightly shorter result. I found that the shorter version works well for me (I'm sort of small and thin). The longer version works well for those taller than myself (I guess most people!).

The second approach I had to this scarf was similar to the first in terms of the increase pattern, but instead of using a make one increase, I used a yarn over. The result is a light fabric that drapes nicely. Here it is in the Spinnaker Oasis. I've included a detail image of the yarn over increase for your viewing pleasure.

And finally, here it is, wrapped snugly around my freezing neck (it finally feels cold here in NYC! What a weird fall it has been...). As I mentioned above, Spinnaker is going out of stock over at Knit Picks, but I will still be working with this pattern in other yarns. Contact me at sweet-avocado@hotmail.com for any questions or ordering information.

Cheers!

Provisional Cast-On

This is my first official post as a knitting blogger! This will hopefully be my launch pad for experiments and development experiences. I am an obsessive knitter, and I wish I could do it full-time. Alas, there are bills to pay, and my knitting brings in little revenue. I do make items for sale. Generally I'll produce a knitted piece, show it to my customers, and collect orders. Sometimes, a client will want a modification of some kind, and I'm happy to accomodate!

A few facts about how I run my little mini-business (after all, it's just me, myself and I!):

- I'm located in Brooklyn, New York. I have no safe-guards against money-wire fraud, so I deal locally (think Craigslist)
- I buy yarn in small quantities, so once I run out of a particular yarn chances are I won't be able to replenish my stock
- Keeping the above in mind, once an item is gone, it's gone!
- All my items are made by hand, by me
- I give beginner knitting lessons for the very reasonable rate of $30 an hour in the metropolitan area of New York or in my home. Contact me for group sessions.

Most items I post on this blog are available for sale. If they are not, I will try to make a note of it. If I am working from a design by another knitter, for example, it will not be for sale. I ask that you extend the same courtesy to me. I will try to make patterns available when I can, and note my references as faithfully as possible.

For questions and ordering information, contact me at sweet-avocado@hotmail.com.