Wednesday, November 28, 2012

I have PROJECTS!

Since finishing Queen Susan, I've been drifting from small project to small project.  While the weather was warm, there was lots of biking and so the small projects took a few days to get done.  Now the weather is cold, and the small projects are taking me less time to do than to decide on.  Remember, I generally work from a stash of leftovers or hand-me-downs, so picking a project isn't as easy as walking into a store, pointing at something, and buying the necessary materials. 

It gets annoying, never knowing where one's next project is coming from.  On Saturday, I got to the whiney point.  (And settled on making Rikke out of some second-hand yarn which came from Wisconsin.  Hi, friend in Wisconsin!)  I also decided to make another pair of fine-gauge mittens.  And on Sunday, I dropped a note to another knitter to ask if a) she had any knitting that had my name on it, and b) had she seen any gorgeous motifs that would normally take up a whole afghan, which I could use for my mittens?  (Remember ... if it's 20" across in a worsted gauge, it's 5" across in my tiny gauge.  Or if it's 2" across in real life, it's less than a half-inch in my little world.  I could put a hornbook on one of my mittens. Maybe.)

Her reply to my e-mail started a deluge!  I am now happily settled with
  1. A Christmas project for my son.  The last skein I needed to get started had been backordered since September.  It came in Monday.
  2. Motifs for a mitten pattern (13.5 spi, not 20 ... but still fun!)
  3. An article to write
  4. A sweater to turn into multiple sizes and write a publishable pattern for (and knit a New and Improved version)
  5. Ideas for my second pair of fine-gauge mittens.  
And, never one to let grass grow under my feet, I have written to some yarn companies to ask about samples for 4 and 5.

Ahhhh.  It's good to have knitting.

On the 'this could be a disaster' front, I'm skipping a swatch for #1.  Yes, it's Fair Isle and requires close gradation of yarn colors, and yes I did change yarn companies and every single color -- but there is simply NOT another gray that I can use to shade one spot more, and the other colors will work (I may even drop some, as they're so close I can't tell the 4 apart in the project).  I already know my gauge... we'll see if the project gets relegated to swatch status at some point.  I hope not!  

Now, if I can just get my Kindle to behave without too many problems.  Yesterday, the text-to-speech developed a personality quirk in which the use of the 'pause' button actually meant 'no more text-to-speech until you restart the Kindle.'  That got fixed by a hard reset, which also depopulates the entire thing.  It's doable.  Now the 'go to' application is not working, which means if I'm reading a book that is a compilation of 70 books which are each 300-400 pages long, and I'm in the 275th book, the only way to get to my location (which I wrote down - 324211) is to go One Page At A Time.  It's worth another phone call.  Because I have LOTS Of knitting that will require good books to listen to. 

And I want to know if Harry and Bertie ever found the Golden Sands of the Incas so Harry could get wealthy and marry the gorgeous Miss Prendergast, who had a crotchety guardian. 

4 comments:

Yarn Changer said...

When it rains it pours. I understand the feeling when you don't know what the next project is and then you have tons. Can't wait to see your fair isle.

Jean said...

I've not finished the toe in my sock, even though I made the whole sock in one day...because I don't know what to make next. LOLOL!

:-) Jean

Kelly Bell said...

Hi Carolyn,

I just read your comment on Fleegle's post on honeycomb brioche in the round. It seems you and I share a preference for the yarnover method, and I am wondering if you could tell me how to convert between slipped / k1b and yarnover?

More specifically (as a teaching example), could you convert the honeycomb brioche in the round stitch to yo method for me, so I can see how it's done?

I've been struggling, trying to convert patterns in brioche, no with the double challenge of k1b or slipped AND flatto in-the-round, my brain just emits a giant flashing FAIL sign when I try this.

Thank you in advance for any help, and for your cool blog as well!

Warmest regards and many thanks,
Kelly

Carolyn said...

Hi, Kelly! I see I need to dust off my blog and get back to updating.

But, about the honeycomb brioche. Rather than convert the stitch, I would just head over to a pattern for honeycomb brioche that uses yarnovers. Like http://briochestitch.com/brioche/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=38&Itemid=33 To see the correspondence, I'd need to put on my Brioche brain and figure out the correspondence. (And, for a pattern in the round, see http://recycleknit.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/some-stitch-pattern-training/)

In a little nutshell, K1b does the same thing that a BRK does - working both a knit stitch and the strand from the row below together. So, in the spot below a K1b, you'd have needed to work a slip/yo in converted pattern.