Sheep! Baby Sheep!

It was my pleasure to test knit this pattern for Knifty Red, a/k/a Kris Carlson, a/k/a designer extraordinaire. The pattern is now live an on sale at ravelry (ravlink to pattern). I had one skein each of Paton's Beehive acrylic in the 4-ply fingering, which seemed more sport than fingering to me. It knit to the right gauge, so it's all good. The yarn is durable acrylic, a little splitty but nicer than your average acrylic. I had a half skein of each color left over, but they're big skeins.

The picot hem was fun, and the added weight of the doubled fabric there makes the woobie drape nicely. The instructions were very easy to follow. I chose to make mine in blue and white because all the other test knitters were using brown and gray, and I wanted to see how it would look in a color. I think the result is cute and playful in a muppety way.

It knit up in no time at all. I spent two weeks on it, but I was also knitting around on other things, and I didn't have a lot of knitting time during those two weeks. If you're one of those people who knits an hour or two a day, I can see this being done in a week. The final bits -- sewing the ears and curly hair to the head, embroidering the face -- took longer than expected, but the rest flew off the needles, so it balanced out.

The head swallowed up a shocking amount of stuffing. But the end result is great -- really, I can't say enough good about how this came together. It's going into the poor box at church for the Christmas toy drive. It will make some baby out there very happy, I hope!

Tofu for Carnivores

This is the tofu dish I make for meat-eaters. Even people who claim they don't like tofu end up raving about this one. (I suppose you could use chicken or fish in place of the tofu, but I've never tried it!) Warning: Not diet friendly!

Ingredients:
1 pkg extra-firm water-packed tofu
1 package Thai-style flat noodles
2 c chopped mixed veggies (pea pods, carrots, broccoli, water chestnuts -- dealer's choice)
3/4 c chunky peanut butter
1 small jar satay sauce (found in Asian food aisle)
2 T peanut oil
2 T toasted sesame oil
2 T soy sauce
2 T rice vinegar
1/2 c packed brown sugar
generous dash of Sriracha chili sauce ("Rooster" sauce) to taste

First, squeeze the tofu of excess water. I do this by layering paper towels on a plate, with the tofu on top, and another plate on top of that. Put something heavy like a can of soup on top of the top plate to weigh it down. Give it ten minutes or so to press -- I usually chop the vegetables and assemble the other ingredients while the tofu presses. After the tofu has pressed, discard the paper towels and cube the tofu into bite-sized pieces.

Boil the noodles in salted water. Drain and set aside.

In a wok or deep skillet, heat both oils, soy sauce, and vinegar. Add the tofu and stir-fry until the cubes take on a golden brown hue from the sauce (about 3-5 minutes). Add the brown sugar and let it melt into the tofu and sauce. The sugar and sauce will begin to bubble and look thick after just a minute or two. Not to worry! This means it's carmelizing, which is what you want. The tofu will begin to take on a crispy look around the edges (about 5-8 minutes), and when it does, add the vegetables, peanut butter, hot sauce, and satay sauce. The peanut butter will take a bit of time to melt into the other ingredients (about 2-3 minutes). That's okay. Just be patient, and stir frequently so that the sugar doesn't burn.

Put the noodles into a large serving bowl, and dump the tofu-veg mixture on top. Toss to coat and blend. Serve immediately with lime wedges to garnish and spritz. It's also good reheated, but it might need a bit of liquid to freshen it up -- a splash of soy and vinegar will do it, or a bit of vegetable stock, if you have it.

Serves: 4 hungry people
Calories: A million billion. But who cares, when it tastes this good?

Goodbye, Gypsy Girls

It would be fair to say I have worn these socks to death. As soon as they came out of the laundry, they were on my feet. And they held up beautifully, but about six months ago, the color began leaching out of the yarn at a shocking rate. After each washing, the former electric blue faded closer to powder blue, until only faint traces of any blue at all remained. The jet black? Jetted far away. I knew it was only a matter of time until the socks were goners.

And when I pulled them on this morning, I ripped an inch-long hole in the back of the heel. Just, pfft, the fabric tore like wet tissue. No point darning them when they're practically disintegrating already, so these got pitched.

I'm going to have to do some serious sock knitting pretty soon. I think I've tossed about six pairs since my last crazed bout of serious sock knitting, and I'm willing to bet a few more pairs are going to be following the Gypsy Girls to sock heaven soon.

Reinforcing Knit Seams and Edges

Long before I became a knitter, I was sewing my own clothes. Here's a dress I just finished made in a two-way stretch fabric. (Bear with me. This does pertain to knitting.)

























It looks much better on me than on the hanger. The wrapped bodice and A-line skirt give it a very sexy shape on the body. I look forward to wearing it to the ballet when the new season starts next month. But for knitting purposes, I wanted to talk about this fabric and some of the finishing techniques we use in sewing knitted fabrics. The fabric is basically stockinette at a super-fine gauge, cotton with a dash of lycra. It would be appropriate for swimsuits or dance costumes because of the high degree of stretch on both the horizontal and vertical grains.

So, knitters know what happens with this kind of fabric along the edges. Curls like whoa damn. This particular pattern didn't call for facings (which would have added bulk and might have interfered with the way the fabric moves) but for rolled hems at cuff and bodice edges. But we know from knitting that these curly edges can be made to lay flat by adding an edge with a slightly different pattern. So I decided to use cross-grain binding pieces at these edges to make them lay smooth. Here's the bodice. You can easily see from the print that the piece was cut at a ninety degree angle to the bodice. This isn't the true cross-grain because the bodice pieces are angled, but they're at right angles. It works.





















And the cuffs, also on the cross-grain, but on the true cross-grain, meaning that the binding pieces are cut with the grain running horizontally. (This is the opposite of the way pattern pieces are usually cut, on the vertical grain. Weavers will be thinking about warp and weft right now.)
















See how nice and flat those edges are? No rolling at all. (By contrast, the skirt hem, which is a narrow rolled hem, tends to flip up along the stitching line because it doesn't have a special finish. Which might be changing in the foreseeable future, because I don't like it.)

Knitwear designers incorporate details like this into sweaters for the same purpose. But one thing they don't always do is stabilize the shoulder and neck edges during finishing. I think this is an important finishing detail with knitted fabrics, which can stretch out of shape along the shoulder and collars if we don't stabilize them. Here, I used a bit of seam tape (purchased at the fabric store in the notions section near buttons and zippers) to stabilize the shoulder seam. (I had to flip the seams inside out to show you -- so it looks funny, but you can see from the first picture at the top of the post that these seams lay very flat and smooth.)



















Well-made ready-to-wear will also have this stabilization along the neck and shoulder seams. Here's a fleece jacket I bought in the late 90s from Lane Bryant, well constructed and still perfectly suitable for wear to the gym. They used a grosgrain ribbon instead of seam tape. Either will do -- the main thing is to find something that doesn't stretch.





















These kinds of finishing details are becoming increasingly rare in ready-to-wear as manufacturers cut corners. One of the benefits of learning to knit and sew is that we know what to look for in quality garments. I doubt I paid more than ten or twenty bucks for this fleece jacket, but because it was made well in the first place, it has held up beautifully to hard wear in the gym. There's some pilling on the fabric's wrong side, which is the only side of wear so far. Without the stabilization ribbon, though, I'm sure this would now be stretched out and shapeless and ill-fitting now. I have knitted shirts far younger that are ready for the rag bag because they weren't as well-constructed.

Moral of this story: Knitters, stabilize your shoulder and back neck seams, and your beautiful garments will last longer.

The Tammi Cowl

So, our friend Tammi cleaned out her stash and gave away some of her yarn, including this gem. Malabrigo Chunky. Mmmmmm-malabrigo!

This pointed cowl knit up in about 3 hours, but it doesn't look like the sample pattern on ravelry. (Kerchief Cowl by Adrienne Krey) It was one of those things. You know, those knitting things where you know something is off, and you count and count and read the pattern over and over, and you can't find the error so you just keep knitting. That kind of thing. In the end, I decided I liked it, even it it's totally wrong. And I'm keeping its wrong self and I'll wear it in a wrongheaded sense of pride.

If you want to know the wrong way to knit this pattern, it all starts with deciding it doesn't need to be knit in two pieces. Cast on at the lower point (2 stitches) and work the pattern for that section backward until the triangle part is done. Then cast on enough stitches to match the pattern requirements for the cowl part, join, and knit in pattern -- well, actually, not in pattern, because I decided to spread out the decreases over the sections instead of working them every other section. Then, when the cowl is long enough -- well, I can't rightly (or wrongly) explain what happened at the top there. It's short row shaping, sure enough, but it ends up in the wrong location, and flipped backwards to boot. To cowl. Whatever.

I don't care. I like it, and I'll be wearing it this winter. The end. And thank you, Tamalama, for a gorgeous skein of yarn.

Momma's Got a Brand New Bag

There's been very little activity on this blog because there's been very little knitting activity in general. That's been changing lately. The knitting is picking up a little steam, and I'm getting ready to do some sewing, too. And while I have kept my ravelry project page updated, it recently occurred to me that websites go down, servers crash, accounts vanish, and, you know, shit happens. So maybe I should start using this blog for some record-keeping again, such as it is.

I officially finished this bag last night, except for weaving the ends, which happened today. So it took about a month from start to finish, which isn't bad for one skein of Euroflax sport weight when a person's wrist will only tolerate knitting linen for so long before the cramps set in.

I started with a free pattern, the Ilene bag by Hannah Ingalls, from ravelry. (ravlink) However, being the headstrong domiknitrix that I can be, I changed the pattern. Basically, my gauge through the mesh was much denser than the pattern called for, and so the recommended number of pattern repeats gave me a 6" bag (unstretched) instead of the 8" bag the pattern indicated. I didn't want a shallow string bag, so I changed things. I continued knitting in pattern until it was about 7.5" unstretched. That was the first modification.

Second, see the ribbing along the opening of the bag? The pattern recommends sticking to the same stitch count but dropping down two needle sizes to make that ribbing a little tighter than the lace mesh body of the bag. By this time, I was worried about the amount of yarn I had remaining, so I stuck with the same size needles but cut the stitch count.

I did this by identifying and marking the four "corners" of the bag. (The bottom of the bag was knit as a square, so I used that as my base.) I placed a stitch marker at each corner, and on alternating rounds, I decreased two stitches on either side of the stitch marker. I knit 8 rounds of ribbing (four of which were decrease rounds) and the resulting shape seems to work pretty well. My only regret is that I didn't use a stretchy cast-off, because that linen is rather unforgiving.

I also narrowed the shoulder strap (from 25 stitches on small needles to 10 stitches on bigger needles) and knit it longer than the pattern recommended.

The bag is roomy but not huge. If you look closely at the picture, you can see four large summer tomatoes (each about the size of a small grapefruit) in the bottom of the bag. It's the perfect size for the farmer's market. And the pattern is so nice and easy that I'm already contemplating making it again. (Hence my desire to preserve the pattern mods so I won't forget them later.)

Simplicity at its Finest

One scarf.
One skein of yarn.
One 4-row garter-based lace pattern.
One enormous mess.


















Look at all those ends. It takes real talent, I tell you, to knit a one-skein scarf and end up with TWENTY MOTHERFUCKING TWO ends to weave in. But it's my own fault for trying to be clever. I was innocently knitting this Crazy Zauerball through the color changes -- sky, green, violet, navy, all very charming and rustic -- when I came to a large block of solid, flat black. I mean, a large run of black, so much so that I would have ended up with a good 4" of scarf in dense, dead black.

So I clipped it out. I figured I could find a spot in the ball where the color more or less matched the piece before the yarn transitioned to black. And I did, too. In the middle of the ball.

So I clipped it in the middle and started knitting, and next thing you know, I'm clipping again to avoid a lifeless bit of gray. And again to match the colors pre- and post-gray. But that becomes a problem because following the post-gray is a color that duplicates the pre-pre-gray. If you follow.

Well, even if you don't follow -- the upshot is that I had that entire Crazy ball reeled out through my living room and I basically repatterned the color changes through the last 14" of scarf. Crazy ball, you so crazy-making! I had to rip and reknit the end of this scarf four times to get it right.


In other news, The Foxy Redhead would like it to be known that there are chipmunks on the back patio. Or, there were chipmunks a day or two ago. She'll continue to keep vigil in case they return. This means she'll be unable to mind the fireplace a/k/a the Magical Bird-Producing Box for more pigeons. Please inform her at once if any birds should appear there. She would really, really hate to miss them.