wip: i n t h r e e s

Way better at starting projects than finishing them lately: also on the needles is this cute baby sweater for my friends' new baby girl - In Threes, knitted in Lorna's Laces Shepard Worsted.  Oh my god, babies are tiny, and this is going fast. Here's hoping I can finish it this weekend, maybe? 

wips: y e l l o w

Some snapshots of some very early-in-progress works-in-progress and also from last month's whirlwind trip to Vietnam, because, yellow! 

They're not much to look at yet but I have high hopes for these two sweaters, because I love yellow and it goes with everything I own. The first, above, is a cozy Oatmeal Cardigan by Jane Richmond, which I need to finish soon or else it'll be too hot in LA to wear it. 

... and this here will someday be a Cria by Ysolda. 

And, more pictures of Vietnam to come - remember when this blog used to be about knitting AND traveling? Me too! That was awesome! 

nupps on a plane

I was really excited for our ten plus hours worth of flights back to the States, because I love knitting on planes and was hoping to get through my much neglected Swallowtail Shawl, which I started on the plane ride to Peru and then pretty much didn't touch for three months. I was making pretty good time, too, until I hit the dreaded nupp section. I'd never knit nupps before, but figured I could just follow the instructions and everything would be okay - right? Which was fine, until I got to the purl row, which literally took me an hour. I had to pick up the stitches with my fingernails to purl them. 

Fortunately, we landed in Houston for a connection not long after, and I was able to look up nupp techniques on my cell phone. The most useful one I found was, while making your nupps by K1, YO, K1, YO, K1 into the same stitch, just YO twice for each YO; then, on the purl row, you can slip those YOs into one really loose stitch, which makes the purling insanely easier. After that, I was actually looking forward to making nupps, though this shawl is still littered with mistakes - so here's hoping they're not too noticeable in the end? 

lost: knitting mojo

Whenever I don't knit for awhile, it always takes me awhile to regain my knitting mojo, for lack of a better, less dorky term, and my first attempts to pick up the needles again always feel clunky and awkward. Case in point: my tri-country Ishbel, to which I clearly did not pay enough attention during my intermittent attempts to pick it up while traveling through Vietnam and India (though partially this is because I crashed my motorbike directly onto my wrist and was a bit out of commission for a few weeks - though it's OK now!) After two days of dutifully working away at it here in Scotland, I finally had to come to terms with the fact that after three repeats of the charts, it looked nothing like the gorgeous Ishbels populating Ravelry. Not even a tiny bit. I've never been much of a lacy shawl knitter, so it's probably not surprising that I wasn't doing my best while trying to read a faded, crumpled pattern in a Mysore hotel room while deciding if I could justify ordering room service curry while watching reruns of last year's So You Think You Can Dance (I could, it turned out).

I'm too embarrassed to post photos of my terrible Ishbel, but - as much as I'd love to have a lovely knitted shawl I could say I worked on in three countries - I know that it's too far gone and that I'm going to have to just give in and frog the whole thing. My fear of frogging and all the wasted time it represents is one of the reasons I'm probably so willing to accept imperfection in my knitting projects, and though I'm typically fairly laid back about not being perfect, I do think that this time around, for myself, striving to get it right is the only way I'll ever be able to manage lace - otherwise I'll just end up with a closetful of horribly mangled shawls that even I'm embarrassed to wear in public. So a little perfectionism is a good thing, right?

In the meantime, depressed by my total loss of knitting mojo, I cracked open the only other project I had waiting for me in the UK. Months ago, when we were packing up and moving out of our house in Japan, I sent enough yarn for one Snowbird sweater to my boyfriend's Aberdeenshire home. I'm knitting it in Berroco Ultra Alpaca Light, which at the moment feels a bit scratchy, but which has a nice texture, particularly on the reverse stockinette in which most of the sweater is knit. Besides that, though, it just feels nice to be back in my knitting comfort zone, using nice familiar size six needles and being able to knit and watch TV again. Yay, sweater knitting! 

yet more wayfaring (a little bit of knitting)

The last month or so has been lots more living out of a backpack - great fun, but not always conducive to knitting. While I wasn't getting much knitting done, I was riding a moped over roads of various quality in Northern Vietnam:

And then visiting India for the first time! After dreaming of visiting for most of my life, I stumbled across some cheap Air Asia tickets and decided to go for it despite the time constraints, because who knows when I'll be in Asia again. I only had a few days, but I saw a little bit of Kerala...

... and also Mysore in Karnataka, where I became obsessed with all the insanely gorgeous colors: 

I wish I'd had more time in India, but I had to hurry to Scotland in time for a friend's wedding: 

Throughout all of this, I did have an increasingly crinkled WIP in my backpack - a very slow-going Ishbel shawl, knit in madtosh prairie in Oxblood, which looks far more luminous in this photo than it does in real life. 

To be fair, living in a crumpled up Citimart shopping bag for six weeks is probably not the ideal condition for any yarn. I finally made it to the lace section in India, and since then it has started to move a lot faster. It was hard to work up enthusiasm for knitting in Asia's 40 degree early summer weather, but Scotland - with it's cold, rainy June - is much better knitting weather, so here's hoping I can finish it before I head back to the States (and to all the yarn I sent home from Japan months ago).

wip: snow white

I'll admit I'm slowing down a bit on the second sleeve of Snow White - why is that 2x2 rib feels more monotonous than plain stockinette? 

However, having finished the body, I figured I'd see if that tubular cast on was indeed too tight, and so - following a helpful comment on an earlier post (thanks, Julie!), I ended up removing the circular tips of my Knitpicks interchangeables, and threading a length of embroidery floss through either of the holes typically used for lifelines so I could extend the existing circle. This way, I can be lazy and only have to replace a fraction of the live stitches back on the needles.

View from the back

The cast on *is* a bit tight, but the body fits perfectly so I'm not fussed. And the yarn is gorgeous! The color is a bit greener than these photos would suggest.

fingers crossed...

Having vowed to get seven sweaters done this year, I figured I should start by doing one that's been in my queue for ages now: Snow White. I bought the yarn for this in April last year but have been quite embarrassingly put off by the tubular cast on. It makes no sense: I love knitting, and so should be happy to do anything knitting related ... except for the provisional cast on required to start a tubular cast on, apparently. I really don't know why it took me so long, because once I got started, the tubular cast on wasn't that bad at all. Only then I took one look at the extremely skinny tube I was knitting, and realized there was no way in hell it would ever fit around my waist, stretchy cast on or no. So I got to do it all over again, one size up. It really does go faster the second time around.

So that's the progress on Snow White so far ...Still a bit small, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed it will fit in the end. And yes, I am photographing the project on our tiny little bookshelf because the rest of the house is just too damn messy to be anywhere near a camera. Sad, but true.

swatch!

I've been randomly busy with a lot of things lately, the most of exciting of which is definitely the Design Your Own Shawl class I'm taking from Stefanie Japel.* The material is self-paced, which is really great for my randomly insanely-busy one day, quiet the next schedule, and while I've been too busy to get as far as I would have liked though the videos and the readings, I still feel like I'm learning a lot. Above is a shot from a proto-swatch - not sure if this will be the stitch pattern I eventually use for the shawl, or not, but it was without a doubt the biggest swatch I've ever knit. I do, grudgingly, knit swatches for other projects, but I rarely make them as big as I'm supposed to - so I appreciate that the class is allowing me to move more slowly, rather than run off too fast, as I am often otherwise prone to doing :-) 

* Which makes me feel a bit star struck, if I'm honest; hers was one of the first knitting blogs I ever read, and I backpacked all over the UK two years ago with a copy of her v-neck sweater pattern in my oversized backpack. I didn't knit it, because the yarn got tangled up in the zipper of the backpack, but I will someday, I swear. 

lazy day knitting

All my other projects require much math or frogging or, horrifyingly, both, so I am ignoring them...

...  and finishing up a Simple Things shawl for my mom's Christmas present. This goes quite fast once you get to the garter stitch eyelet rows.