Vegan Knitting

I have a very good friend named Jack who is also a very angry vegan. In my efforts to cover all of my loved ones in hand knits, I decided to knit him a hat. Well, actually I decided that Andrew would knit him a hat. We went to the yarn store and Andrew picked out the yarn and began knitting. The yarn is Classic Elite Premiere, which is a 60/40 cotton/tencel blend. After about 10 hours of knitting, He had about 1 1/2". With only the mildest patronizing tone in my voice, I offered to finish it for him.

Let me just say that I hate knitting with cotton. I know all of the properties that make cotton the wonderful fiber that it is, such as it's ability to keep one cool and supa crisp stitch definition, but these very qualities make it an incredibly bad choice for a hat.

The first problem I came across is the blown out ribbing. The more I attempted to maintain even tension, the more it prolapsed into some unmentionable blob of stringy entrails. Whatever. I figured that once I got to the stockinette, all would be gravy. Like any good knitter, I used a jogless join for the stripes. With wool, this would result in beautifully even stitches. On cotton, it makes a really gross ladder of gaping stitches 100x more fugly than a little jog in the stripes.

In the end it came out okay. A hat was made using no animal products and therefore another vegan is kept warm.



Note: Next year he gets a juicer.

Happy New Year!

It's been a pretty big year for me. I moved cross country, started school, and subsequently lost any glimmer of my former care-free nature. All in all, it's been a good year. Our power went out last night so we spent the night huddled under seven blankets, praying that we would have all of our toes in the morning. Thankfully our heat came back on about 20 minutes ago and we can take our parkas off.
I was going through my yearly New Year's knitting roll call of FOs and realized that the list is pretty short. I've been knitting constantly, and yet my stack of woolen goods is light. I planned on knitting four sweaters this year. How many sweaters did I start? Three. How many finished sweaters do I have? Zero. Not a damn one. Eek. That's okay. I managed to finish some other stuff.

This is what my mom's cowl ended up looking like:



She really liked it, so I guess that's a success. Oh and by the way, LMKG times this one at 6-8 hours. It took me about twelve. Go fig.

Andrew had the flu on Christmas eve so I stayed home with him while my family was busy merry-making. I used the extra hour or so to finish my dad's scarf. Here's my dad. He likes it.



I spent Suday night knitting the Army Earflap cap for my friend Atom:



Due to the lack of heat and the densly knit bulky wool, this fucker has had a hell of a time drying. I don't have to give it to Atom until Saturday, so hopefully it will dry by then.

One last thing I knitted way back in February for our first trip to Chicago:



Blurry mittens! Actually, these are about 30% less blurry in person. They're knit out of Plymouth Galway with D.B. Cashmerino stripes. The left mitten is about 1/2 an inch longer than the right. Would you believe that I have a grotesquely misproportate left flipper? I don't, but it's awful to admit that I can't hold an unfinished mitten to it's partner and think "Hey, one of these is not like the other!" Alas.

I started something for Andrew last night before the power went out. Let me preface this by saying he picked out the colors.



Andrew has a unique sense of color that clicks about 70% of the time. I have knit him some truely horrendous creations over the years from yarn he picked out. I'm trying to both forget everything I know about color theory as well as save this hat from being able to be used as a method of torture akin to water boarding. Wish me luck.

Have a fantastic 2008, my friends.

'Tis The Season

Isn't it weird how you forget you haven't blogged in a week or so because you're knitting constantly? Am I alone on this one? Anyone? Bueller? I normally start my Christmas knitting in January but somehow this year it snuck up on me. I've started three projects in the past week in preparation for the most wonderful time of the year.

I went through my stash and found a ball of Knitpicks Elegance in Fog so I started a cowl for my mom.



I used the pattern from Last Minuted Knitted Gifts for the Pashmina Cowl. My mom loves cowls. It's weird. It's even a weird word to say. Cowl. It sounds like a eugenics experiment gone wrong. "It hoots and flies but you can milk it too!"
I really love knitting it though because it's just round after round of plain stockinette. Unfortunately this project isn't a genuine stash buster 'cause I ordered 2 additional balls of yarn and I'm probably going to have one left over. So if we do our math, that leaves me with exactly what I started with. Oh well.

I'm also knitting a scarf for my dad.



The yarn is Cascade Pastaza from my stash, bought specifically for this purpose. I chose the color (Antique Gold) as a nod to his Alma Mater, Georgia Tech, which just coincedentally happens to be the rival of my Alma Mater, UGA.
I am a good son.

I added a last minute present to my list. My friend Atom is a good friend indeed, and I figured he needed a warm hat to battle the bitter Chicago winter on his bike. Enter the Army Earflap Cap.



I really like this pattern. I substituted Brown Sheep Lambs Pride Bulky for the Misty Alpaca to make a sturdy man-version of the Interweave Knits pattern. While knitting, I discovered that the increases on the center back create a lace-like eyelet pattern. I'm into it. Dudes need more eyelets. Thankfully this hat doesn't have to be done until after the New Year.

We leave for our holiday travels tomorrow so I'm going to be busting it in order to finish these projects by next week. I wish you all luck with your gift knitting and I hope you all have a fantastic holiday!

That's How We Do

I've been so busy with school lately that all of my knitting time comes in 20 minute spurts. After that, I'm overcome with guilt and must get back to my death grip on the semester. Couple that with the miles of brown ribbing I'm churning out and my knitting life seems to be rather lack luster. However, now that the semester is almost over, I allowed myself to sit and knit a project from start to finish.



I needed a gift for an exchange at work, so I decided to knit a hat. Unlike my usual M.O., this hat has color, stripes and the illest reindeer you've ever seen.



How 'bout we see that one more time.


That's right. Can you say dope?

I love this hat so much, I didn't even mind weaving in the mounds of ends.



I asked Andrew to model it for me:






The hat fits perfectly, which kind of sucks because it grew substantially after blocking. We'll see what it looks like when it dries. If it's still huge, I'm bringing the world's most bad ass tea cozy to the company holiday party.

Whew!

I spent about 30 hours silkscreening this weekend in order to get ready for my semester critique. A responsible blogger would have photographed the process so they could share it with the fiber-obsessed of the world. This blogger on the other hand, has failed you. I apologize. I was spending so much time trying to line up my screens, mixing colors that would transfer well and cleaning up gallons of spilled ink that my camera did not make it into the equation.

I do have more pictures of this, though:



It's snow. 'Bout six inches of the stuff. I'm still amused by it, but slightly intimidated by what six inches of snow before the start of winter could mean.



This is the corner of my house. I don't think I've ever seen an icicle that big before. It's practically a weapon!

Thankfully, my winter reading has started to arrive in the mail:



I think you all recognize Zimmerman's Knitter's Almanac which is filled with awesome patterns and prose for the snowed in, and what's the holiday season without
Critical Art Ensemble's Flesh Machine:Cyborgs, Designer Babies and New Eugenic Consciousness? It's practically the new The Night Before Christmas.

As far as knitting goes, there's not much exciting progress here. I was able to knit on the second sleeve of the Zipped Raglan for a few hours last night and was pleased with how much knitting gets done when you actually, well, knit. I've been looking at other patterns and I'm afraid I may have to detatch the first sleeve from the body in order to knit a few more inches on the fronts and back of the sweater. I knit it to the length of the XL size, but it still seems like it may be about 3-4 inches too short.

I told you about the scarves my mom knit me:



They're knit in Debbie Bliss Cashmerino and I think they are the most wonderful things I own. Funny how that works sometimes.

I knit a swatch for the army earflap hat using a double strand of malabrigo:



The origional pattern calls for chunky weight yarn whereas malabrigo is definately a standard worsted weight. The versions of this hat I've seen using a single strand makes a hat that looks almost unwearable, it's so small. Trouble is, a double strand works up to 3.75 sts/inch. it would be easy to adjust the pattern to make up for this if it told you at any point how many stitches around it is. i think i may just knit the hat as is and revel in the wooly gigantic-ness of it. if nothing else, it'll be amusing disastor which is always good blog fodder.

Anyway, keep warm and fed wherever you are and have a swell day.

First Signs of Encroaching Winter

I hope you all had a fantastic holiday, I certainly did. My family came up and we sat around for almost a week straight, knitting, eating and playing cards. I traded my mom the pastel ball of mountain goat for a few additions to my sportweight alpaca stockpile and I received not one, but TWO handknit scarves for my birthday (which is in march, but she made up for it by doubling the bounty).

I made progress on my zipped raglan. Even though it's nowhere near finished, I'm okay with it. Unfortunately I spent all morning writing a paper, so the light outside kind of sucks for taking pictures, so we'll just have to look at a picture from Thanksgiving morning:



That, my friends, is real live snow. Now, many of you who live in colder climates could give a damn about a few flakes of snow, but I, a transplanted southerner, was enamoured with the powdery stuff. Yes, it snows in the south sometimes, but it's much more like lumpy rain than bonafide snow. I'm sure that in my eighth month of winter I'll be less impressed with snow, but for now it sure is pretty. Well, it would be if it hadn't melted the next day.

And look! Jill likes it:



Likes/ Hates; Terror/ Tomato.

I bought the new Son of a Stitch n Bitch this weekend and I am absolutely enthused! Who would have guessed that non-ugly/tacky/dorky men's knitwear patterns existed? I really did find like twelve things I want to make.

Oh by the way, Thumbs down to interweave knits for leaving out even the perfunctory men's pattern in the winter issue. Yes we get it. Women knit. Men can check back in 6 months to see if there's something available then.

Oh well. At least Debbie Stoller's got my back.

I've been on a crash course, heading straight into the end of the semester for the past few weeks. Crit week is 13 days away and I've been in the studio cranking out as much work as possible. I still have a long way to go, but I'll get there.



The sleeve for the zipped raglan is just about done. I want to knit it a few inches longer so it will cover my long monkey arms, but that won't take any time at all. I was really hoping to get this sweater finished by Thanksgiving, but that may not be entirely possible. My entire family is coming from Hotlanta to visit us next week, so hopefully I'll be able to get all of the knitting on the sweater done before school starts the next Monday.

I bought some yarn for my winter hat today to replace the Mountain Goat of easter egg brilliance.



It's malabrigo and the shade is called Autumn forest (224). While yes, it's varigated, the colors are so muddy one would be hardpressed to call it unmanly. I need to find a good pattern for it. I'm thinking the Army Girl Earflap Hat from Interweave knits. (I really tried to get the link to work and it was ugly. Trust me.) Mine, however will just be the Army Earflap Hat, 'cause that's how I roll. I need to knit a swatch to see if I should double my yarn or not. I really don't want to have to buy new needles, but I may just have to bite the bullet.

What will happen with the Mountain Goat, you ask? I think it'll end up being a pair of socks for my mom. We'll see if I can knit a pair in the 8 days between the end of the semester and Christmas. Oh the joys of holiday knitting.

Speaking of the holidays, I bought some ornaments for our first Christmas in Chicago.



They're made out of what I assume to be tiny gourds. The owl belongs to Andrew and this one is mine:



That is a wild-eyed panda if I ever saw one.