Blocking at Last

It's not easy to take a good picture of a scarf as it blocks. Can't get the whole thing in one frame.


























And why would you want to when the close-up is so gorgeous? Look at that yummy mmmmmmalabrigo. Does it get any better than that?

This is the scarf to match the newsboy/rasta cap. Both in Malabrigo Chunky Whale's Road. I used the neckwarmer slip-stitch pattern that has caught on like a virus at Nana's Knitting Shop, except I made mine both wider and longer than the orginal neckwarmer. It took a skein and a half of yarn, making three skeins total for the hat and scarf together. This will be a good cool-weather combo to wear with a denim jacket next fall.

My Devious Scheme, Foiled

Funny thing about kids and swifts. If they watch me crank my winder, they want a turn. They want to do it faster, make a race out of it. Competitive wool-winding. A most excellent sport.

I encourage them in this because it means I don't have to wind my own cakes. Why do the work myself when I can Tom Sawyer someone else into doing it? Heh.

I don't take the swift and winder out every time the kids are here, maybe every tenth time, so it still feels fresh to them. I can always count on them winding off a half-dozen skeins or so. I wait until they're riding the crest of their high at being together, and then I start innocently setting up the swift. La-di-da, don't mind me, just keep on playing pirates and superheroes while I turn the crank.

Works like a charm every time.

Except for yesterday.

Do you see that hank on the swift? That's 400+ yards of Araucania sock yarn with the most insidious tangle. The only way to deal with something like this is to wind the ball by hand and pass the ball over, through and around the tangles. The yarn actually changed direction several times in the middle of the skein, and each directional change created more tangles.

Takes a long time to wind a tangled skein of sock yarn by hand. The kids saw me set up the swift and start the crank, and they were just starting to tilt into "I want a turn" when we hit the first snarl. I was afraid to take the tangled skein off the swift -- who knows what kind of spaghetti glop would have resulted if I had. So they waited while I hand wound, and they fussed with the winder and argued over which skeins they would wind. (I had several hanks laid out on the table to tempt their competitive little hearts.)

Their patience and enthusiasm for cranking yarn did not outlast my tedious hand-winding. Not even the prospect of the camera to record the fastest yarn-crankers in action could prevent their loss of interest. So I wound by hand, and then I wound with the winder, while they played in the other room and assigned each other superpowers of heat and ice and wind and lightning.

If only one of them had the superpower of detangling! Ah, well. I hope their loss of interest in yarn winding isn't permanent. If there's one lesson learned out of all this, it's that I much prefer supervising their winding to winding it myself!

Better Than a New Box of Crayons

Get a good look at all those colors. This picture is blurry, but of all the snapshots I took tonight, it's the one truest to all the colors in my brand new skein of Noro sock yarn.

I officially joined Nana's Knitting Shop's sock club today -- meaning that if I buy sock yarn to make a dozen pairs of socks in a year, the sock yarn for the thirteenth pair will be free. The way I buy sock yarn, I figure I'll qualify for my freebie in around, oh, June.

Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration. It could possibly take me all summer. Hey, Trish? How many times can I join the sock club?

Anyway, I've been very curious about this new Noro sock yarn. Like many knitters, I find the Noro colorways stunningly gorgeous, but the yarn quality is iffy. My first impression of the sock yarn is that it's Noro. Eye candy all the way, but a little crunchier than you want it to be. And it's a single ply with a thick-and-thin variable strand, which worries me a little, though I have to say that the gauge swatch in the shop yielded a nice even fabric. So the varying thickness of the single ply may not matter much.

The yarn is probably not next-to-the-skin soft. I expect it might soften up after laundering, but maybe not. I intend to use my skein to make a scarf, not socks, so it's not much of an issue except for the wear on my hands during knitting.

How It Looks (Cringe)

I can't believe I'm posting pictures of my crappy mutant crochet for anyone to see. Told you I suck at this.

I finished the first two balls of Encore today and started the next two. Right now, the blanket is about 7" long and my wrist is beginning to protest. There's so much more twisting in crochet than in knitting. I may have to cool it tomorrow. My goal is to get past 8" by the end of the day Thursday, but I won't make that goal if my hand has to go in the splint. That's my big fear with this project. Return of tendonitis.

I have six balls of each color, and the first pair of balls yielded 6.5" of fabric. So that means the existing yarn will make a 39" blanket. I'd like it just a few inches longer than that, so I'll pick up an extra ball of the pink to do a border and edging.

According to the imprecise timing method I've been using, I'm averaging about 40 minutes per full row of color (one row of worms plus one row of shells). Each full row is right around a half inch. That means I'm looking at around 54 hours of crocheting time PLUS the border.

All of which just makes me appreciate my grandmother even more. When I think of all the blankets she made, OMG. Every one of us got a twin sized one to take to college and a full sized one as a wedding shower gift. Plus random surprise afghans when we'd happen to redecorate or something. Thousands of hours, miles and miles of yarn. Tell you what. Her wrists must have been a lot sturdier than mine!

How It Should Look

These are close-ups of an afghan my grandmother made circa 1976. We can date it because it was made to match a gold velvet sofa my mother bought during her bicentennial redecorating mania. Everything in our family room then had eagles on it. The adjoining bathroom was papered in stars and stripes -- even the ceiling. Ah, the 70s. The entire decade suffered from an excess of bad taste.

So the afghan was made in two shades of gold, a yellowish gold and a burnished orangey gold. It's big enough to lay flat on top of a double bed without any overhang, so we have periodically used it as a bed blanket.

Some of you have asked for an explanation of how to make this pattern. (For the rest of you, feel free to stop reading here. This is about to get really confusing and crochet-y.) It's basically just interlocking shells with these wormy things holding the two sides together. Each shell is made from five double crochets into the center stitch of the 5-dc shell below it. But you don't just crochet into that center stitch -- you have to catch the wormy thing over your hook and bind the old shell and the wormy thing together while making the new shell. I don't know if I'm explaining it in a way that makes sense. It's one of those "you get it when you see it" things. Also, chain one between each of the shells--that chain one will be the place where you anchor the worms with single crochet stitches.

The worms are made by chaining 6 and then single crocheting into the chain one between the shells in the row below. So the pattern goes something like this:

Cast on 4 stitches per shell, plus one at the end. Make this chain as long as you want the blanket to be wide. We'll call this Color A.

With Color A, make a 5-dc shell into every third stitch, then chain one. So it's like this: *skip two, 5-dc shell into third stitch, chain one*, repeat between *. You'll have one stitch left on the cast on chain at the end of the row. (Except somehow, I always have two leftover. That's the magic of me and crochet.) Do not turn the work.

Then you drop that yarn and switch colors. Attach Color B into the leftover stitch on the Color A base chain with a single crochet. Chain 6, single crochet into the chain stitch at the end of the Color A shell below. And so on, all the way across to the end. At the very end, chain two or three -- I'm totally not sure which, so end up changing my number from row to row. Then turn the work.

Still using Color B, make a 5-dc shell into the center dc of each shell below. This is where you have to lay the wormy thing on top of your hook to bind the two colors together. Don't forget the chain one between the shells. (That reminder is mostly for my own benefit. I tend to forget that part.)

Go all the way across and drop Color B. Pick up color A and repeat until you have a blanket.

Or something like that. God help any of you who try to follow my instructions. I'm sure it would make more sense if I could show you. Or maybe not, all things considered.

Buckle Up!

It's going to be a bumpy ride!

This is the start of the crocheted crib blanket using my grandma's pattern which she called, simply, the double afghan. She crocheted thousands of miles of yarn into this pattern during her lifetime. Every night for at least an hour or two, she'd sit in her chair with a pack of L&Ms and a bag of Jay's to keep her company while she worked on blankets for the entire family.

She taught me to crochet. If you can call what I do crocheting, that is. I'm not good at it, and that's not false modesty. My loops are never the same size. My shells lean as if they've all been italicized. This would bother me more if I cared about the craft, but I don't. I'm a knitter. Crochet just happens sometimes. You know, sort of like droughts and plagues and other disasters.

My grandmother passed away almost fifteen years ago, and I'm the only one in the vast clan to know her pattern. All those people -- seriously, at least fifty people in that branch of the family -- and not one of them picked it up from her besides me. That has always mystified me.

In any event, when my uncle found out his wife was pregnant (thanks to some help from a fertility clinic), I immediately resolved to make them a crib blanket in grandma's pattern. She would have done it for them, had she lived long enough to celebrate this miracle with us. And I hate the thought that all the rest of us got one of her blankets, but this baby, this miracle child of her adored youngest son, will never know her or her blankets. I'm a little choked up now thinking about that.

I bought the green yarn right away and used it, with a spare skein of white, to practice the stitch. (It didn't help.) And then I waited to learn the baby's gender. It's a girl!

The pink yarn arrived today, and I picked it up and brought it home. It has taken me almost two hours to work that little bit in the picture -- basically the cast on chain, plus a row of "right side" shells and a row of interwoven pink "worms" which will serve as the base chain for the "wrong side" color.

Trish asked me today how long it would take me to make this blanket. I'm already panicking about the June 1 shower date. And given that it took me two hours to work that pathetic little strip, thanks to my complete inability to count to three, five, or six, I think we're in for a race against the clock.

My mantra for the next fifty days: It will be worth it, it will be worth it, it will be worth it....

Catherine Partial

Woo hoo! I made it to the armscyes on Catherine Parr today. This piece measures 15.875" in length. So this will now go onto holders as I knit the sleeves. When the sleeves are done, I will knit the armscyes to fit the sleeve caps. (I'm modifying the drop on the sleeve caps to take out some of the underarm bulk.)

I just cast on the sleeves for Fulmar, too! So. Looks like I'll be a sleeve knitting machine this spring.

By the way, Catherine Parr is an incredibly easy knit. If you're looking for an easy Starmore to get your feet wet, this might be a good choice. The mix of stranded knitting and cabled knitting means there's enough variety for knitterly interest, too. And it goes pretty quickly for a sweater with this much detail. All in all, a happy project.