Flair Finished!

It's all done and I love it! I sewed the buttons on on Thursday and I wore it to class on Saturday. Several people commented on it and told me they liked it--and they didn't even know I knit! So that was pretty cool. :)

Pattern: Flair by Wendy Bernard
Yarn: Blue Sky Alpacas Dyed Cotton
Amount: 5 and a half skeins

The only modification I made was to lengthen the body by a couple inches. I do this on all my knit items because I'm so tall. :)

My project this weekend was to start on my Dashing wristwarmers. I finished one last night and am already halfway through the second one. The new yarn is working great, btw. I will post pics tomorrow or Tuesday.

Gotta get to bed now. Another week starts tomorrow. :( These one-day weekends are killing me!

Life Has Me By A Stranglehold

Ugh. Life. When did it get so busy???

I have been having a busy fall ever since classes and my full-time internship started. My commute takes two hours each way (by car), so by the time I get home I barely have energy to work on my homework and then hardly any time at all to knit. I am having a really good experience at my internship though, so I am thankful for that. And even though my classes also take up a lot of my time, they are absolutely fascinating and I know that I am very fortunate to have the opportunities that I do right now. I have even managed to make some knitting progress over the last month, surprising as it seems to me.

I ripped out my second try at the sleeves for my Tilted Duster and knit new ones a size larger (and 4 inches longer than the pattern calls for). I haven't had a chance to block them yet, but if they don't fit, I give up! Luckily for me I bought 2 skeins too many of the yarn I was using so I just used fresh yarn for the sleeves and will use the other yarn for a hat and scarf set for my little sister.

I also finished up my Flair, except for sewing buttons on. I'm going to try that tonight. I never heard back from Kpixie about getting another skein of yarn and I emailed them three times!!! (I am NOT happy about that and I will not be ordering from them anymore. There are too many other shops out there for me to bother with subpar customer service. But I digress.)

I ended up ordering a 6th skein from WEBS (who have GREAT customer service) and I had to alternate the skeins down the length of one arm. I can't tell the difference between the dyelots and now I have a wonky underarm seam on that side, but that's OK with me.

If I were to knit this again, I would go another size larger. The fronts don't overlap very much at all and I would like a bit more of that. I will take some pictures wearing it once I get the buttons sewn on.


Last night I cast on for some Dashing wristwarmers. I was using Plymouth Boku that I got because I liked the fall colors in the colorway and thought they would look nice. The yarn is slightly cheaper than Noro Kureyon and the colors are a bit more subtle. HOWEVER, the yarn kept pulling apart! I normally knit rather tightly, but trust me: I was hardly putting any pressure on this yarn and it kept disintegrating on my needles. After the third time I quit what I was doing and threw down my needles. What a waste of time and money!

The Brain was really nice and offered to run out to the LYS store with me today since I had a surprise day off and SDSU is closed all this week because of the fires so he hasn't had to go to work. We ran up the coast to Alamitos Bay Yarn Company and got some new yarn. They didn't have anything in a colorway similar to the Boku, but I did pick up some Knit One, Crochet Too Paintbox in a muted purple/blue/black colorway that I liked. Once we got back on the road, I pulled the yarn out of my bag and said, jokingly, "Gee, do you think I should have done a stress test on this yarn while we were in the store?" I pulled on one end of the yarn and...you guessed it: it broke off! I had a 10-inch strand that I kept pulling into smaller and smaller pieces with hardly any effort. So you can guess what happened...

The Brain was kind enough to turn around and drive straight back to the yarn store where the women working there were MORE than kind enough to let me return the yarn (which they whispered that they wouldn't recommend buying) and let me pick out some different stuff. The different stuff ended up being Trendsetter Yarns Tonalita in the Starry Night colorway. The very kind women at the store assured me that it would not break apart. So today, after I finish my homework and sew some buttons on my Flair, I am going to cast on for my wristwarmers...again.

I just want to say to anyone who still bothers to read my blog after my long absences: thank you. And to anyone who has a blog of their own: thank you for writing! I do take the time to read through the blogs during the day and even though I don't have much time at this point in my life, it is nice to see what others are doing and blogging about. It's knitting voyeurism at its best! :)

Blogs: The Great Enablers

I really need to stay away from knitting blogs. They mean nothing but bad things...if by "bad things" I mean that they bring the wide world of beautiful yarn and knits into my home and make me covet them so badly find myself in a trance, reaching for my credit card.

Today, for instance, I was minding my own business, reading through my (really too long) list of blogs and I clicked on a link in the Yarn Harlot's blog. This link showed me a rainbow of beautiful yarn and patterns, but unfortunately this site only sells them wholesale to other stores. Not easily dissuaded, I quickly Googled "strickwear yarn" and came up with several sites that will either sell the patterns alone, or the whole kit. YUM! Sadly for me, I just came back from an afternoon of sale shopping for appropriate work clothes so I won't be buying any new yarn for a while.

In regular knitting news, I still haven't had the courage to take a crack at those Tilted Duster sleeves. They are blocked and waiting for me, but I will have to seam one up to see if they fit now and I dread having to seam it up and take it back out...because that will mean I have to rip the entire sleeves out and start them over. I know I will feel better if I just DO IT but...I'm still in denial.

Instead, I have been making quick progress on my Flair. I would probably knit this again, but not in cotton. Blue Sky Alpacas' cotton is very soft to the touch, but I just don't like knitting with it. There is no give or springyness to it and I really miss that. On the other hand, I love how it looks, and it is a bit more stiff than I think wool would be and that does look nice with the boxy concept...*sigh*...we'll see. I always think I'll knit things in multiple colors but when all is said and done, I figure that there are too many other patterns I would love to knit to bother doing one twice. I am also a tad annoyed because I ordered the kit from Kpixie, but quickly realized that I would want to make a larger size than normal and I will need another skein of yarn. I emailed them several days ago and still haven't heard back yet. :( That's the problem with living in an internet age: we're all so used to getting instantaneous results that a 4-day wait seems like an eternity!

One FO, One Cast-On, and One Bad Project

I finally finished my Mystery Stole!!! As a way to avoid dealing with my Tilted Duster, I told myself I couldn't knit anything else until I finished one (or preferably both) project(s). So determined was I to knit anything BUT my Duster, I stayed up until 2:00 AM the other night and finished up the stole. I have no pictures because a) it's lace, which means it has to be pinned out in order to see anything, and I'm just too lazy to do that right now, and b) I was just making it to have something to do this summer and I'm not too jazzed about it anyway.

As for the Duster, I removed the one completed sleeve and pulled out the seams on both of them. (*sniff!* those seams were PERFECT!) In a last-ditch effort to avoid having to re-knit the sleeves, I soaked and re-blocked them and now I am just waiting for them to dry completely before I check to see if they can be used. If not, it's RRRRRIIIIIPPPPPP!!! Hmm...I never noticed before that 'rip' is the same as R.I.P. How appropriate.

Last but not least, I did cast on for a new project. This one is another sweater I'm really excited about: Flair, by Wendy Bernard. Kpixie has the kit on sale so I ordered it a few weeks ago and cast on yesterday. I'm using Blue Sky Alpacas Dyed Cotton, and it's really soft, but like most cotton it just doesn't have any give and my hands are very sore already. Oh well, I really like what I'm seeing so far so I'll just have to get over it. :)

Sorry for the lack of photos today. Half of my classmates came to the center last week with killer colds, and they were kind enough to share. I have been doing pretty much nothing but knitting and watching DVDs for the past few days. I had my second interview for an internship today and I swear I was this close to stuffing kleenex up my nostrils just to get through the meeting. I didn't, and I got the internship anyway. YAY! And now I have until Monday before I have to start working there.

Bad Blogger

Yes, I know I have been a bad blogger lately. But classes started last Thursday (a day earlier than scheduled) and the instructors haven't been shy about giving us a ton of homework. I don't have an internship yet, although I have been on three interviews so far and have another one tomorrow. I turned down two offers because they only had openings for 2 days a week, and I need 4. Today's interview was promising and I'm going back for a second round next week.

Why am I telling you this? Because in the last week, all I have managed to do is knit the collar for my sweater and attach one sleeve, and it will only get worse once I actually start working full-time.





I absolutely love this sweater, but I am at a bit of a crossroads with it. All I have to do is sew in the other sleeve and block it, but when I tried it on again, it became pretty clear to me that the sleeves really are too tight.

We're talking so tight that they bunch up inside my elbows when I bend my arms. These sleeves are so tight that the stockinette is straining to hold together! I'm afraid they will cut off my circulation and I'll end up armless and have to learn how to knit with my toes. (But come to think of it, I could skip knitting sleeves entirely!)



So now I'm faced with having to find a solution to this problem, and I really dread admitting it to myself. I know what I have to do. I have to rip out the sleeves and knit them in a larger size than the pattern calls for. (And I am quite unhappy about this. I knit them and blocked them to spec, and it's not like I have big arms! What gives?!?) So...facing this prospect has left me stranded, knitwise...for the moment. But I am determined not to cast on for anything else until I get this project and the Mystery Stole finished.

In other news, I was out getting my hair cut after my interview today and on a whim I stopped by Barnes and Noble. They had a whole table of knitting books for 50% off! I nabbed The Best of Vogue Knitting: 25 Years, and the Vogue Knitting Stitchionary, Volume 2. All is not horrible in the knitting world, after all. :)

Smokin'

Wow...this Tilted Duster knits up really fast! That, or I just really like it so I'm spending more time on it than I normally would. Either way, I like this sweater so much that I have been more than happy to have this giant pile of wool sitting on my lap all weekend, even though it was in the mid-90s the whole time. But this is what I have to show for it:

I'm completely done with the body of the sweater. Now all I have to do is pick up and knit the collar and sew the sleeves in, and I'm done! I tried it on and it fits beautifully (well, except for the skinny sleeves) so I'm very excited. I'll have to make an etsy stop to find the perfect buttons too. :)



I am really quite proud of myself because of the way the skirt is picked up and knit around the bottom of the sweater. I have always been horrible at picking up stitches, but these ones look rather seamless. Yay me!











So now the question is what to knit next? I really do have to finish up that Mystery Stole. But I have the materials for 3 different sweaters that I want to do and I don't know which one to pick! It's really not a huge problem, and I'm sure that when I'm actually ready to cast on for something new I will know exactly what I want to do.

Long Time, No Blog

Yes, I know I have been gone for quite some time, but I started a new semester and my days were busy with orientation trips and interviews and receptions, etc. I have a few days off before things start up again so I have been taking advantage of that fact by working on my sweater.

Progress pic:

I finished the back, the front panels, and the sleeves. I blocked everything and did all the seaming up (much easier after the pieces have been blocked). Now it is waiting for me to pick up stitches from around the bottom and knit the "skirt" of the sweater.

I have just one problem so far: I blocked the sleeves to the exact dimensions given and after I seamed them up I tried them on. The problem? They are very tight. We're talking skinsuit tight. And I have skinny arms! This worries me because I'm not really sure how to stretch sleeves out after they're all seamed up so I'm not sure if I can make them wider when I block the entire sweater again. If not, I'll just have skin-tight wool sleeves, which I'm sure are oh so comfortable in a California winter! :-P

Other than that though, I really like this project and I am very excited for it to be finished. I'm hoping that I will finally have a wearable sweater that I really like! I am seriously considering making it in another color too.

I am also excited to finish up so I can cast on for something new. Itchy fingers! But after the sweater is done I really need to get back to my Mystery Stole and finish that up before I move on to something else. I really can't stand to have it sit there staring at me while I work on a sweater night after night. UFOs just bug me. Can't stand it!