Blocking

One of the questions I get a lot from other knitters is how to block. It scares a lot of people - I get questions from non-knitters who don't want to dry clean their knitwear. I don't blame them, I don't go in for dry cleaning if I can help it.
You can block in various ways, Knitty.com has some great tutorials, but I like to full on wet block, or wash my knitting. Fiber content will also factor in, but i find most anything can be washed if you're careful. In addition to blocking and shaping, I like my sweaters to actually be clean.
So, since we're now on our 3rd snow day, I thought I'd do a visual blocking tutorial:
You will need lukewarm water, baby shampoo, 2 sets of towels and a basin large enough to submerge the piece you're washing without smooshing it.





You might also want "help"

Fill your basin with lukewarm water - it should feel neutral to your hand, maybe slightly warm. Imagine you're washing a baby or cat. $$ There are 3 things that will shrink and felt wool (actually once it's a garment you're fulling, rather than felting); heat (not just too much heat, but shocking wool, ie going from hot to cold quickly) detergent and agitation. So, controlling your temperature is important. Keep the water the same temperature for the washing and rinsing. $$
Once you have filled the basin add the shampoo (or wool wash like Euclan, I like baby shampoo because it's cheap and readily available and it's designed to clean something made of protein) between 1-3 teaspoons, depending on the size of what you're washing/blocking and froth the water to disperse the soap throughout. Drop in your knitting.

Prod gently to make the water and soap reach all the fibers. Let it sit for 10-15 minutes. You'll probably notice some dye bleeding out if your piece is new, some grey dirt if it's older. If you're seeing a great deal of either, drain your container and repeat.

Next you need to rinse out your knitting, so repeat the first step (minus the soap) until the water is clear; no soap bubbles, no color.
Now gently press out the water - don't wring, just press against the side of the basin, turn the work and repeat.



Now lay out your first towel flat on a counter or other waterproof surface and lay out you piece on it. Doesn't need to be shaped, just laid flat in a single layer.



Now roll up the towel into a big cigar:

Now press firmly all along the roll the remove water. The towel will wick away water and pad you pressing to keep the piece from stretching. The towel is also insurance against agitation, which can cause felting/pilling. When you unroll the piece you'll see the absorbed water in the towel:
Repeat this process with the second towel. Leaving a little water in your piece helps to shape it but too much will make it stretchy and blocking evenly will be harder. Also, too much water will take a long time dry out and possibly bleed onto your bed/couch/rug which isn't great.
Finally lay the piece out in a warm dry place, shaping gently for a garment, using wires or pins for something like a shawl:
I'd suggest using a towel under your piece on a bed or rug. For small things like socks, the bricks of the fireplace work just fine.

Using a 3 needle bind off to attach a sleeve

Like I've said, I think this is a nice way to attach arms, esp. if you're working with cotton or a cotton blend that seems prone to pulling or sagging and so not looking nice on your finished product.

• First, don't bind off your sleeves, even for the shaping at the edges.  Do this more like short rows, or as you "finish" with the stitches you're supposed to bind off, just place them on a holder of some kind (scrap yarn, safety pins, etc.).  When your sleeve is done, place all stitches back on the needle.
• Next, pick up the stitches along the body where you want to attach the sleeve.  
• One helpful tip is to NOT use the very last stitches, skip over those and pick up outer edge of the second edgemost stitich (I've marked it here with the head of the crochet hook).  This will give you a more stable and much nicer looking seam. You can see this in the second picture where I'm binding the two edges together and you can see the edgemost stitches make a selvage. 
• Second helpful tip is to pick up one half at a time, join that and then pick up the other half - that is start from the should seam and pick up down to the armpit.  Doing this will make it easier to pick up the right number of stitches at the best (most even) ratio.  Obviously, using circular needles for this works best. When I pick up for a perpendicular join I find that picking up 3 of every 4 rows usually gets me within a stitch or two of the right number and keeps the distribution of stitches from one piece to rows of the other piece correct.  You can see this in the third picture.
• Next you hold the two pieces of work right sides facing and just knit them off together - a 3 needle bind off.  I use a crochet hook to do this. See the second picture again for an action shot.

The final picture is of the finished joined seam.
I'll take some more pictures of the finished piece and post them tonight.

Thoughts on technique

I don't have a picture to show - yet - lace weight yarn is making things slow, but . . . .
So I'm working on Putnam's shawl. Cruising along, the edges are a modified rose leaf pattern and the bottom is a diamond pattern with beads at the center. So this morning, I decided it that was going to be a heck of a lot of diamonds - both for me to knit and for anyone else to wear. It needed to be broken up, so I'm in the process of putting a window into the center of it. The frame is the rose leaf pattern again, don't know what I'll do in the middle of that. Maybe more diamonds, maybe something else. But it got me thinking about flexibility and technique. Traditional shawls start with a center rectangle or square and once that's done you pick up around the edges and work an edging or series of them until the shawl is the desired size. There's a really interesting post about different techniques here. Now, these techniques have never appealed to me, but why?
I love picking up sleeve and other edgings and knitting down because the joins look so nice and smooth. I'm not afraid of ratios. or even of mitres and corners. I guess I get freaked out by the sheer number of stitches. 500 plus and that's a HUGE investment before I can see if I like it, and I tend to work on the fly. So now, I'm realizing that I've made up my own, simpler way of having this kind of flexibility by seeing how it looks and dumping in more sort of faux Shetland panels into the middle.
Basically, I seem to be a never ending well of ways to cheat.
I'll post a picture of my big fake once I have more done and it photographs well.

No picture (yet); the new addiction

On the topic of 2 great tastes that go great together? Silk and wool!
Yarn or Death went to SAFF and had a great time. I'm jealous, because I miss going to things like the NH Sheep and Wool Festival. Raising sheep and other woolly things this far south seems, well, kind of mean to me as it's so hot. But anyway . . .
Before she was leaving she asked if I ever spun with non-animal fibers. I explained my spinning is really good enough for me to have ventured into cotton, hemp, stuff like that. But I'm not as dense as I look, so I said "if you see anything at SAFF that you really like, feel free to buy it and I'll spin it for you - unless you want to do it yourself." YoD isn't ready to start spinning, but I now have 8oz. each of silk/merino blend in summer sky blue (2 oz. of which I spun last night while watching the Colts and Titans) and some chocolate brown alpaca.
Before (15 years ago - that's scary, when did I get so old?) I'd worked with silk, but it was in brick form, and I got very frustrated and decided I hated silk.
I was wrong.
I'll post pictures of that silk/merino tonight. Maybe I can haul the wheel out onto the porch before the light goes away.
The pre-drafting is different than straight wool - the silk gets really smooshed down sort of locked together, so after pulling the roving into quarters, I then find it works best to fluff it out from the side, turn it 90 degrees and fluff it again. The roving goes from hard, squeaky and dense (do you know what I mean about silk fibers being squeaky?) to soft and cloudy and suddenly very shiny.
So, what's worse that suddenly discovering your taste for something wickedly expensive like silk and wool roving? Finding someone else insane enough to fund your problem. Even YoD saw the danger here.

Finally some pictures

So, here's the tunic - if you click on this to get the larger image, you should be able to get a sense of the design.


Poor Yarn or Death (formerly the Mad Crocheter) - she's fighting the good fight with linen. I told her she might not be ready to work with such a non-cooperative fiber as linen, because despite all the needle changes the gauge is still wonky. I told her maybe to try a different stitch, like linen stitch (it must have that name for a reason, right?). I think that if she plays with the linen and does some swatching, she might get the final piece of understanding hand (fiber content + gauge + stitch pattern). I've promised to show her how to do linen stitch in person, because as she pointed out "I've seen it described and it STILL doesn't make sense to me". Like knitting with beads; I get that.
And this spinning - it's the super soft black alpaca. I only have 8 oz. so it should be spun and plied by the weekend.
And for final fun - I get to go to Jo-Anne's this weekend to start putting together this year's Halloween costume. Yup, you guessed it, Ash Ketchem. My wonderful spouse managed to talk him out of wanting to go as Pikachu, and man, that would have been a tough costume to make!

More about linen stitch

I'm in like with my linen stitch.
It works really nicely on cotton, makes just the fabric I've been searching for - dense but flat, with a nice drape, not stretchy. I have about an inch done, tried to take a picture, it looked like crud so I scrapped it. Maybe tomorrow I'll a.) have more to take a snap of b.) be able to go outside (huge rainstorm right now).
So I was tooling about to see other people's pictures of linen stitch, and found some really nice ones. The stitch looks quite different in wool, lighter and more textured and look what it can do with color! Here's another one. Sort of has bohus feel to it, doesn't it?
Sometimes the simplest things can just knock your socks off. I'd never have thought something so simple could be so cool.
Silly me.

Meh, some stuff.

Just talking to the Yarnist (who is changing her address, I'll update my sidebar) about intarsia. She asked if I had any ideas about keeping intarsia tension even. Since I typed it all out, I'm control v'ing it here. She's working on a baby blanket, which is sort of perfect for intarsia because it's small(ish), flat, usually in fun colors and with fun designs to keep you interested.

"Getting intarsia to be even, that takes a bit of practice. Unhelpful as this will be on a baby blanket, wool would be your best friend, as it's most forgiving and will lock itself up, assisting your efforts. You need to be sure to twist the stitches every time, and keeping your tails short (at first at least) will help you manage the tension. If the tails are too long, they'll get pulled and then things will get wonky. Try to keep your work just a hair looser than you'd be comfortable with on a "normal" piece, but very even. I don't know if you weave in ends as you go, or do them all at once when your work is complete, but I'd advise method two when starting out, it gives you a way back in to fiddle with tension after the fact - whether you have problems with your work being too tight or too loose. Once done, if the work is a bit loose, wet blocking can solve most minor issues. You can also supplement a complicated, multi-color piece by using Swiss darning after the main knitting is done, fewer colors makes intarsia easier."

What else . . . I've started on Matrix 2, haven't yet made it to the beads, so no snaps yet. Maybe I'll call this one Iron Man. :) Yes, originally I was thinking of the Ozzy Osbourne song, but once I did some reading, I think I like the cartoon character better. And yes, there is no real relationship to knitting at all with that name, it's not a clever reference, I just think the beads look like hematite. Come to think of it, maybe I just have a fascination with cartoons as an adult because I only had 2.5 television stations growing up and one of them was PBS.

Oh, and I have 13 balls of Comfy in Cypress. I want to make a sweater knit from front hem up, increase out for the sleeves, up over the head, down and over. But Comfy is so soft, I fear horrible stretchiness, so I'm on a quest for a nice simple, dense stitch pattern for it.
Prepare for swatches, I guess.

Thanks, Mom

Or, I should probably say "Great Aunt Iris" (You may be wondering "what is she talking about now???").
Okay; here's the story:
My mother was taught sewing and needlework by her Aunt Iris in the 1940's. Iris was a school teacher, botanist, grammarian, gosh knows what else, but also a truly excellent seamstress. And she drilled into my mom that if the back of your work doesn't look just as neat and nice as the front, you're doing it incorrectly. (I'd have said "wrong", but I suspect Iris would say "incorrectly" so there you go, homage to Iris.) So . . .
Here's the stars intarsia, front view. Not bad, I like it. I totally broke form this time and measured the pieces of yarn. Yup, measured how long a stitch was, and I've measured out all the bits to piece together each star (I use 2 pieces for each star and for each lining as I split each star in half to minimize carrying the yarn in the back).
And here it is from the back.
I never got to meet my great Aunt Iris, but I think she'd think this passed the test.
But I bet she'd think my color choices are gaudy beyond all belief.

Another project done

I finally finished big blue. I love everything about this one. I love the yarn, the color, the pattern (this is the 4th time I've done it - here's my original post that gives all the details should you want to take this one for a spin). I love it so much, I got grass all over taking this picture of it.
I would have been done about 4 days ago, but I messed up on the sleeves, didn't make them wide enough, so ripped them back more than halfway and reknit them.
My wonderful and brilliant spouse once mentioned that I should be more in depth, technical I guess, when I post. Since he's right about pretty much everything else, I thought I'd include some close ups of my sleeve attaching method. I grew up sewing my knitting together and maybe I'm just bad at it, but I always ended up with weak, gap-y seems that looked like, well, crud. Whatever you were wearing underneath would peak though at the shoulders and neck, ugh, a nightmare. Ever heard of That Dorky Homemade Look?
So, whenever I can manage it, I pick up sleeves and knit down using an alternating 3/4 times two and 4/5 ratio (pick up 3 stitches of the first 4 rows two times, then 4 stitches of the next 5 rows, repeat this set of three and no matter the gauge, I find I always get a perfectly flat join). I never cast off for necks, either, I put all my decreased stitches on holders or scrap and knit my necks up.
But, competing with my love of pick up and knit sleeves is my love of working anything that has to match at the same time. I must be a lazy slob because I have a real hard time getting sleeves to match when I knit them one at a time. So . . . for this one, I combined my favorite techniques. I knit my two sleeves at once (twice, but never mind that right now) having double checked the math of stitches to rows, then once the sleeves were complete, I knitted up the stitches along my armholes and knit the two together.
Best of all possible worlds. The middle picture is the outside of my sleeve join, this last one is the inside.
Now I just need some weather that's not hitting the 90 degree mark . . . .

Replacing one blue thing with another blue thing

Okay, remember the Harry Potter sweater? I ripped it out. I liked the pattern, but it wasn't quite right and that would have been too much of a very bright blue on the little one. Plus, as the husband points out - he won't be able to wear it for months and it doesn't make sense to do anything too early, since he grows like a weed. I'll think about it and see what appeals in the fall, I think.

In the meantime, I've started one of my favorite sweaters for the 4th time. It's the Barnyard Guernsey (pg. 45 in Knitting the New Classics by Kristin Nicholas, ISBN 0806931701) in Lamb's Pride Worsted sapphire. The first time I made one in blue blood red and one in charcoal. I gave both away when we moved south. Then I made one for my mom in medieval red a couple years ago. Now I want it in this lovely indigo-blue color. This time around I'm not making a front and back, I'm doing it in the round. Which is inspiring me to work continental, rather than throwing. I think this is largely in sympathy with the beleaguered Mad Crocheter. She's been laboring to learn to knit and I've been somewhat inexpertly teaching her Continental knitting, so I guess I'm trying to brush up so I can do a better job. I learned to knit (throwing style) at 4 from my grandmother (red acrylic place mats on size 10 wooden needles that had dog tooth marks in them, lord it took me months and I made 4 of the horrible things) and then learned continental in high school. It was mainly a learning exercise; I've never been truly ambidextrous (ambitechnic?), but I'd like to be. And, even though I'm pretty fast when I throw (and for Fassett color work would never switch), you just can't argue with the speed of continental when you work in the round. Especially on a knit and purl pattern, which is what this is.