2015 - The Year of the Shawl

I finished my final shawl for the year about a week ago. I was so incredibly happy for it to be done since I had started it in August and interrupted it numerous times with other projects. I was determined I would get it finished and posted to the appropriate Ravelry thread before year’s end. This was my friend Joanna’s Oroya shawl from her Yarn Crush August box. I wrote about her subscription service sometime ago, putting in a plug for her beautiful presentations, materials, patterns and value. That first box contained a pattern for a shawl designed by Joanna, plus the yarn and beads needed to make it, and a few other goodies. I decided against using the beads supplied as I felt they didn’t contrast enough with the yarn and opted for some that my daughter had hanging around.

The yarn was Sweet Georgia Merino Silk Lace, an absolutely delightful blend of half-and-half in a slightly tonal variegation. There were three possible colourways I could have gotten, and it was the Berry Tart which ended up in my hands. This is interesting, because I have a couple of skeins of Sweet Georgia’s Tough Love sock yarn in the same colourway in my stash! Here is my finished shawl:

Here’s a closeup of the beads:

It has a lovely drape and the ladies at my knitting group all oohed and ahhed over it, as they should.

That, however, is my most recent shawl. In October, just before going to Rhinebeck, I bound off a test knit at my daughter’s place. It’s another of Heather Anderson’s turtle-inspired garments, which she calls Turtle Beach. The suggested yarn was DK; I ended up using a worsted and it came out very nice. I love the turtle. Seriously, could anything be so cute?

At Rhinebeck, I was working away on yet another test knit, this one for Mary-Anne Mace. She had designed a free shawl that would bring attention to the plight of the world’s oceans. She calls it Biophilia, and is meant to represent seaweed and water and I think she succeeded quite well. I made it in Punta 100% merino lace.

Immediately following this one, I embarked on another Mary-Anne Mace creation, Southern Blue. I used KnitPicks Diadem and threw in some beads, which weren’t called for in the original pattern. It came out incredibly soft and cuddly and beautiful and I promptly gave it to a friend who is undergoing treatments for cancer. I felt she needed it more than I.

But no, we weren’t yet done with Mary-Anne. As soon as I’d finished her Southern Blue, I cast on yet another test knit, this time for a commercial pattern called High Country Crescent, representing the braided rivers and vegetation of her beautiful New Zealand. Again I went with Punta lace, different colour, and added beads, even though they weren’t called for. They were my interpretation of starlight twinkling on those braided rivers at night.

See why I love her designs?

And that brings us to the end of the shawls for this year. There were 15 in total, which is hardly anything when I see the output of some of my Ravelry colleagues. But it’s still a lot, and I still need to find homes for some of them. My friend in England wept when she unwrapped the Mûrier Noir Shawl I sent her. If I can bring some joy to people through my knitting, then I have done my part to make the world a better place.

Wishing all my readers a merry solstice season and a happy new year. May your needles be busy and your stash overflowing.

Running with the Gauntlet

Fingerless mitts: the perfect quick knit for a gift. Seriously. I can whip a pair off in a couple of days or less, depending on my attention span. There was a stretch there where fingerless mitts were my favourite project. Then I sort of fell off that wagon in favour of shawls, and 2015 has definitely been the year of the shawl.

However, I was in Ottawa not too long ago for the world premiere of my husband’s saxophone concerto at the NAC and I knew I would be seeing a young friend and wanted to bring him something. What else but a pair of fingerless mitts? I had also been drooling over the 2014 Men in Knitwear calendar (serious eye candy - both the men and the knitwear) and fell in love with the Gladiator fingerless mitts.

Aren’t those incredibly cool? Now you understand all the drool.

Anyway, to get on with the tale, if you can pull your eyes away from the photo for long enough, the mitts call for worsted yarn and 4 mm. needles. Since it was important for me that my friend be able to throw his in the washing machine and dryer (i.e. that a university student be able to look after them and not destroy them), I decided to use up some of the Patons Decor I have left over from another project. (I seriously overbought on that one.)

The construction is interesting for this pattern. You knit the wrist band first flat, pick up and knit the stitches for the hand, then make an applied edging binding off the hand in the same braided wrist pattern. Sew the whole thing together leaving an opening for the thumb, which is made by picking up stitches and shaping with short rows. The only problem I have with this is that I hate sewing knitted edges together because they generally look terrible. I suck at mattress stitch and the cables on the wrist and finger border do not match up at the ends, making it hard to get a nice join. Be that as it may, I decided to follow the directions because sometimes it’s good to do that.

I cast on with my Decor and 4 mm. needles. I knit the wristband as directed. It ended up being HUGE! Right. I have mentioned that I’m a loose knitter, but this was enormous! So I ripped it out and went down a needle size. Still too big. Another decrease in needle size. Still too big. I could not knit this to gauge on any needle size, it seemed, and I was already down to 3.25 mm. For worsted? You’ve got to be kidding! So I wrote the designer.

Rhiannon McCulloch was super nice about my problem, even though she said it was the first time she was hearing it. She suggested that I just adjust the number of repeats etc. to fit the hand instead of killing myself trying to make gauge. I guess I should have figured that out myself, but I wanted the designer’s okay. So that’s what I did. Instead of knitting nine of the cable pattern for the wrist, I did seven. This left me a little short, so I knit four rows of wicker stitch to bring it to the right length. Then I picked up 42 stitches instead of the specified 54 and shortened the hand by one repeat of the 4-row pattern. The size came out perfect. After sewing it together I followed the directions for the thumb but found it really should be rewritten for the short rows. I finished it off with a round of knit, a round of purl, and a knitted bind-off. I think the pattern calls for a couple more rounds of garter. And this is what I ended up with.

That’s my husband acting all “Brave Heart” on me. Here’s a pre-blocking photo.

My friend was super happy to get them, saying they were just what he needed, and that made me happy. Which is what it’s all about, n’est-ce pas?

However, the story doesn’t end there. We were invited to a 50th birthday party for the luthier who made my husband an electric guitar and, since I made his girlfriend a pair of fingerless mitts a while back, I thought it would be nice to make him a pair, too; and, since there aren’t that many masculine patterns around, I thought I’d give Rhiannon’s Gladiator another shot.

This time I opted for Patons Classic, a 100% wool worsted, having most of a ball left over from a garment I’d made for my son a couple of years back. I quickly discovered that the composition, not the thickness, of the yarn has a lot of influence on gauge. Whereas with the Decor I ended up using 3.5 mm needles, that size almost brought me to gauge with the Classic. I say “almost”, but I decided to increase my needle size to 4 mm because I found I preferred the looser knit. So my gauge for the second pair was similar to the first and I used the same number of stitches and pattern repeats. However, I decided that, since I hate sewing seams, I would try something different.

I cast on the 29 stitches specified for the wristband, but did it over two needles: the one I was going to knit with and a 2.5 mm. short circ I had lying around, using a figure-eight CO as I would for making toe-up socks. I left the second needle where it was and treated that bit like a provisional CO, then proceeded to knit the pattern as I had the first time. When I got to the end of the wicker stitch rows, I put RSs together and performed a three-needle BO, then picked up my hand stitches in the round, reducing the number by two since I wouldn’t be sewing the edges together.

When I got to the point where I had to leave an opening for the thumb, I started knitting back and forth again, adding a purl stitch to each edge for later. When I reached the point where I’d sewn together the top of the hole in the first pair of mitts, I rejoined in the round, getting rid of the extra stitches, and continued until I’d knit the specified length. Then the applied BO was done as before, except that I made another provisional CO as I had for the wrist band and performed a second three-needle BO when I had used up all the hand stitches. This left me with a small hole between the finger band and the hand, but I was able to sew it up with the tail. Then I added the thumb as before.

Voilà!

Once more, my husband modelling the washed and blocked version:

While the guitar in the picture was custom made for him, it is not the one made by the birthday boy. I should have thought about that before I took the picture.

The birthday boy was very happy to get his mitts, with which I included washing instructions since I’m informed by a reliable source that Classic felts beautifully if machine washed. I hope he gets many years of wear from them.