Just a quick update on how things are going around here! We are receiving new squares all the time. As of yesterday afternoon, we had these two piles of squares (we have had more dropped off today). Things are looking good for these blankets!  Please don’t forget that our first sewing party is this Sunday — come by, bring some snacks (we’ll provide some, too), and settle in to get these blankets put together for the victims of the Oklahoma tornadoes.

Squares piling up for the blankets for Oklahoma!

I also wanted to remind you all that Midsommarfest is this weekend, hosted by the Andersonville Chamber of Commerce.  What does this mean for you?  Well, thankfully, it does not happen right in front of the store, so parking is available and getting in here is still easy, even if you don’t have any plans for going to Midsommarfest.  If you were planning on going to the fest this weekend, though, make sure to take advantage of their offer for a free beer!  If you spend $30 here (or at other locally-owned stores in Andersonville), take your receipt to the fest and you’ll get a free beer!  Get the details here: All Things Andersonville.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Just as I have been writing in the past few posts, what we crafters do when something bad has happened is: try to use our crafting skills to help out those who have been harmed.  Well, here we are in tornado season again and Moore, Oklahoma has been hit hard.  I’m sure I don’t have to go into the details, as the photos and stories have been all over the news.  So, what are we going to do?  We’re going to do the same thing we did almost exactly two years ago for Joplin, MO: we’re going to make blankets.  There is a store in Tulsa, OK that has agreed to accept our donations and see to getting them distributed.  You guys were awesome the last time around and I’d like to see us make even more squares this time.

The details are as follows:

What we are asking for from you is as many washable knitted or crocheted 8″ x 8″ squares as you can spare.  Please have them here by Sunday June 9th, and please include your name with your squares — we want to put everyone’s name on a card with these blankets.

Bring your squares in to the store and we will gather here to sew them together at two different sewing parties.  Our sewing parties will be on Sunday June 9th from 12 – 5 pm and Thursday June 13th from 6pm – 9pm.  We’ll provide some snacks — feel free to bring something to share.

If you have extra washable yarn, please feel free to drop it by the store to be used by someone else to make a square.  As always, you should also feel free to gather here to create these squares.  Windy Knitty will be donating yarn to the project as well.

We know we can count on all of you to help out with this.  Hopefully we can send some comfort and love to people who see devastation everywhere around them.

Thanks,
Your friends at Windy Knitty

There are a couple of things that are causing me a little bit of anxiety about this project, though it’s not enough anxiety to stop me.  The first thing that is on my mind is that I was not able to knit a swatch, because I didn’t have time to do it before leaving.  This means that I have no idea how much this thing is going to grow width-wise once I open up those dropped stitches, and I have no idea if that will also shorten the length a bit.  Happily this is a wrap, so it’s not so precise.  I’ll be sure to document the growth when I do finalize the Ravelry project page.  So far, I have worked through 1 skein of the CashSilk Lace and I have 30″ of project.

This is the Echo Beach after having worked up one skein of Sweetgeorgia’s CashSilk Lace

The second thing is that I happen to think that the current form of this project is rather beautiful and now I’m thinking, “well, what if I don’t like it as well once I’ve dropped the stitch!?!”  I am a sucker for blindly following patterns, so I’ll still drop the stitch, but I’ll be having that niggling question in the back of my mind the whole time that I’m doing it, even though I started this project based entirely on the finished projects that I saw on Ravelry, not on the form that I see right now.

Detail of Echo Beach

Isn’t that beautiful?

Ideally, I will finish this project in time to send to Meredith for Mother’s Day.  Wish me luck.

Well, of course there has been the usual hand wringing, the crying, the holding of the small person in my life, just praying that nothing like this will ever happen to him.  Then I remember to stop thinking about myself and I think of the mother of the son and I go back to feeling helpless.  I cannot take this away from her.  I cannot bring her Henry back.  I don’t even live in the same city, so I can’t bring her warm dishes, or make arrangements for her, or even just help her get daily chores done.  I am a knitter, though.  This means that the first thing that happened to me is that I started thinking: what can I knit her?

I want to send her a hug that she can wear anywhere, at any time, and know that she is loved and know that she and her son have not been forgotten.  The natural progression from this point for me was a stole, preferably something very sumptuous.  Then, I started wondering what I was thinking.  I’m busy!  I don’t know what design to use!  Get over it already!  Over time, though, little details started to creep into my brain.  I could do it in CashSilk Lace from SweetGeorgia, which is lightweight and unbelievably soft.  I would do it in greys or something that was the right color, to be determined at the time I saw it.  But what pattern?  At some point, Echo Beach popped into my head — a pattern that I had queued a long time ago, though I was thinking much more cheerful colors at the time that I first wrote about it.  It all started to work together.  So, last night when I was at knit night, I looked over the yarn and decided that it had to be so, schedule be damned.

I ended up choosing Cashsilk Lace in the color Mist.  It has some lavender to it, but is subtle and close to grey.  It is every bit as dreamy feel-wise as I had hoped.  Here’s a shot of it:

So, that’s the story of what I’m knitting for someone who is grieving.  Now I would love to figure out what to make for her living son, who is devastated at the loss of his brother, whom he calls his “hero.”  He’s in high school.  Any ideas?

It does seem that this phenomenon happens more at the changing of seasons, and right now in Chicago seems to be one of those times.  So, assuming that you’re like me, and the many other people trying to work through this now, I wanted to share with you some of the things that I do for inspiration.  One of the easiest things to do for knitting and crocheting is to go to Ravelry’s Patterns page and click on what’s hot right now.  You can even limit this search to crochet or knitting (rather than both), if you’d like.  It lets you know what everyone else out there on Ravelry is thinking about working on right now.  The other thing that is really, really good to do, though, is to get outside or at least to somewhere that isn’t the same place that you find yourself all. the. time.  For me that moment came when I was recently lucky enough to get out of town for a few days.

One of the most interesting things that I’ve discovered is that taking a camera along to these places can lead to new inspiration.  I think that this comes from the fact that what you see through the camera is limited, so it causes the viewer to reconsider what they are looking at.  I learned to look this way after coming home with waaaaay too many bad photos that just didn’t capture what I was looking at.  I don’t have a super fancy camera lens, so I am not able to photograph an entire field, mountain, or building in all its glory.  I also don’t know how to use photoshop, so I can’t manipulate an image after I get it home to make it look more impressive.  This means that I have to try hard to see just the thing that I am looking at, rather than what I think I am looking at.  Check this out for example (it looks better and less warped if you click on it):

Rifle Bored Canon @ Stones River Battlefield, TN

This is the inside of a rifle bored canon (I sure do hope that I’ve called it the right thing!) that we saw at a Civil War battlefield that we visited.  Can’t you just imagine using some of that texture in a shawl?  It could be done literally through texture, or it could be done by changing colors.  I didn’t realize at the time how cool the shadows were, but there’s a lot there to work with as well.  If I had not told you what this was, I’m guessing that most of you would not have known (I certainly wouldn’t have).  Changing perspective is everything — often I find that getting closer is key.

If there isn’t something that easy to work with, then consider surveying your entire environs to see if there’s something that might work.

Survey Your Surroundings

If it’s not working to just look around, put the camera to your eye.  Can you capture the beauty of the field?

Look Differently

Maybe not.  What if you change your perspective?  Does it change the composition?

Look Differently Again

I’m not suggesting that everyone become a designer or an artist here, or that you have to go on long, picturesque walks to find all the beauty in the world.  I’m simply saying that when you start looking differently, you might start to see things that were not so obvious initially — even in your local park, museum, library, mall, anywhere!  Just take yourself somewhere and act as if you’ve never been there before, even if you have.  Fresh eyes help us to get new inspiration, and I think that it’s the stuck-inside-ness that we have all been experiencing for just a little too long that is causing some of this rut.  If this does not work, then visit your favorite LYS immediately and hopefully you can find some inspiration there!

I hope that some of this has helped.  It helped me to get out, that’s for sure.  Now the problem is that I want to do EVERYTHING!  Oh, being human is so challenging sometimes.

Truthfully, I am also beyond excited that I am finally doing a project in something other than fingering or lace-weight right now.  It was something I had to force myself to do, but about which I am happy.  For some reason, I am continually drawn to much finer gauge yarn projects.  I think it’s my inner masochist, but maybe (hopefully?) there’s a different, and better, reason for it!

There will be photographic evidence forthcoming, but for now, you’ll have to take my word for it.  Heck, it’s posted on Ravelry: http://www.ravelry.com/projects/mandyp/beach-comber.  Now you know I’m telling the truth, right?

Vitamin D Sweater on Blocking Board

Back of Vitamin D Sweater

Front view of Vitamin D

Front Panel of Vitamin D Expanded

Pretty awesome, no?  I think here is a good time to admit that I got fairly lucky with this.  I did not wet block my swatch before starting my sweater.  The yarn (and sweater) definitely grew a little post-washing.  It just so happens that it grew to an excellent length . . . .  It could have been otherwise.

Thanks for sharing this journey with me!  Next time I will share with you the Color Affection Shawl that I’ve been working on.  If you’ve been trawling most popular patterns on Ravelry much over the past few months, this shawl is probably familiar to you.  If you read the Yarn Harlot’s blog, though, it will be especially familiar to you now (and will, no doubt, stay atop that list for a while longer as a result).  If you look at either of those links, let me just say that I wish you luck in not getting hooked.

Where to measure the arm

The problem I had was whether I should measure the arm from up by where my shoulder joins my body (the true top of my arm), or whether I should measure from where I had started the portion of the sweater that is specifically for working the arms.  The answer is the latter.  I measured my arm from a few points first to see where the tape would hit at 35 cm on my arm from different parts and determined that the measurement is to be taken from where you begin working the arms separately from the body.

If that’s unclear, here is a close-up that might help:

Vitamin D KAL arm measurement close up

If you click on this photo to enlarge, you can see that the 0 cm mark lines up with the beginning of the arm.

So, what was the amazingly exciting moment after finishing the sleeves?  Well, I started to sew them up, of course!  My favorite method is the mattress stitch for these kinds of projects (and most projects, really).  It is extremely time consuming, but well worth it if you want a nearly invisible seam.  Witness:

This is a shot of the sleeve’s seam.  Most of the irregularity that you see is the decreases along the seam, not the seam itself.

If you don’t know how to do the mattress stitch, here is a great place to start.  I wish I had taken pictures as I went along, but Knitty’s tutorial is pretty good.
That’s all for now (and how much more can you really want to know about my sleeves anyway, right?).  Happy knitting!

Interestingly, this is something that our customers often ask about pretty often.  As with so many things, this is also something that always seems worse than it actually is.  I think that part of the difficulty with this step in top-down sweaters is that you have to be able to visualize what you’re doing when reading the instructions in order for them to make sense.  Unfortunately, if you’ve never done it before, it is extremely difficult to do this visualizing.  To make things a little hairier, I decided to do two sleeves at a time.  More on that later.

Because of the popularity of this question, I’ve decided to show you photos of how I did this part of the process.  The first thing I did, after finishing a wrong side row, was to set aside the stitches of the left front panel.  I put them onto extra yarn, which I pulled through the stitches I was setting aside by passing the yarn through the loops of the stitches that I wanted to take off the needle.  I did this with a darning needle, rather tediously, a few at a time.  I did this until I came to the first marker that indicated the placement of the first (left) sleeve.

Detail Windy Knitty Vitamin D KAL (click to enlarge)

The red yarn is the waste yarn — those are the stitches from the left front panel that I’m not doing anything with at this time.  As you can see, the sleeve stitches remained on the needle, as per the instructions.

This is all pretty straightforward.  So, here’s the part where I do something weird: I decided to knit both sleeves at a time.  Why?  Because nothing makes my OCD kick into overdrive more than trying to get two supposedly matching things to match.  I can’t stand having two socks that don’t match size-wise (I’m actually fine with them being slightly fraternal twins, color-wise, if they are hand dyes, but that’s a different issue for me, apparently).  I’m excellent at keeping gauge consistent in one thing, and then changing it in another.  So, in an effort to save my sanity, I decided to do two at a time.

Once I had decided to do two at a time, I had to make another decision: do them in the round, or do them flat, as the instructions describe?  Heck, I was already changing the directions a little, why not go crazy with it and omit two seams?  Alas, I decided to do them flat.  The reason for this was also an attempt at saving my questionable sanity.  I know that when I knit in the round, my gauge gets tighter.  If you are not aware of this phenomenon, you are probably a newer knitter; you knit English style; or you’re just a gauge rock star and I bow to you in your perfection!  I am a Continental knitter (hold yarn in my left hand), so my purls tend to loosen things up a bit.  When you omit the purl row for me (if knitting in the round — let’s not even talk about garter stitch), my knitting will tighten up.  This would mean another gauge swatch for me — in the round — so I decided not to go that route.

Changing over to two sleeves done flat makes things a little messy.  First of all, you have to modify the directions a little bit.  Here is what I did: I set the left front panel stitches aside, cast on the 5 extra stitches for the left sleeve, knit the stitches from the left needle, cast on the remaining extra five for that left sleeve (just like the directions), then I set aside the back panel stitches by sewing the red yarn through those stitches to take them off the needle, with a new ball of yarn, cast on 5 stitches for the right sleeve, knit the stitches for that sleeve, cast on the remaining 5 more, and set aside the right front panel stitches with the red yarn.  Here’s a picture:

Stitches set aside on Windy Knitty Vitamin D KAL (click to enlarge)

The purple thing in the middle there is the cable for my circular needle.  The red yarn goes through the set aside stitches.  I decided, after looking at this potential mess, to cut the red yarn between panels, so that it would be less tangled.  Even with that, as you can see in this photo, this is going to get a little messy:

Juggling Balls for Windy Knitty Vitamin D KAL (click to enlarge)

Those (ignore the un-caked skein on the left) are the three balls I’m going to be juggling as I do these sleeves.  The flattened one on the right is the one that is remaining from the body (you were supposed to leave the yarn attached at the end of the wrong side row that preceded the sleeves).  The middle two are attached to my two brand-new sleeves, so there’s going to be a lot of tangled yarn.  Even so, for me, it will be better than trying to do two matching sleeves.  Everyone is different, though, so take my decision-making process with a grain of salt.

Phew!  Hopefully I’m past the stuck part.  It is my goal to get the sleeves done by next week.  That might be a little ambitious…..  Wish me luck.