fo: holding hands, feeding ducks cowl

My entire Halloween weekend was, unfortunately, pretty unremarkable. I had other things that needed to get prioritized over dressing up and acting like an idiot (which is a shame, because that is my favourite). I did, however, cast on and cast off for something new.

IT’S AN UGLY TUBE!

Just kidding. Okay, well – it is a tube. But it’s not anywhere near as boring as it looks in that picture. If you arrange it right, it can look like this:

Or like this.

Which I think is much, much nicer. This cowl is based on the stitch pattern from the Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks scarf, one of those patterns that I’ve always loved but never found time to knit. It’s also dead easy to turn into a cowl, and leaves a fabric that’s really springy and dense, but doesn’t curl (even though it looks very stockinette-y).

Pattern: Cowl modified from Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks
Yarn: Nearly a skein of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Worsted, in Pewter.
Needles: 5.5mm

Directions: The pattern calls for a multiple of 4 sts plus one, so I cast on 41 stitches using the long-tail cast-on and leaving a VERY long tail, on purpose. This made my scarf about 8″ wide, unblocked.

Then I worked in the star stitch pattern established in HH,FD for 25 inches, give or take. I was going for a big, floppy cowl, not a nice, tight neckwarmer. If you wanted to make one of those, though, you could just knit for fewer inches.

Then, I stopped (ending on a knit row), but did not bind off – I left my work on a holder. Using the tail from my cast on, I picked up 41 sitches at the cast-on edge of my work, and then I believe I had to knit a row so that the working yarn was on the same side of the work when I held them both together. Finally, using the tail from my cast-on (but you could also break the working yarn if your tail wasn’t long enough) I grafted the two ends together.

This left me with a big, floppy tube. I blocked it out a little, so that the finished dimensions ended up being closer to 9 inches wide and 23 inches long (11.5 inches with the ends grafted together). It’s so, so squishy, and perfect for throwing on when it’s chilly out, but I don’t want to carry a scarf around indoors all day.

my heart is melting ’cause you’re hot like the summer heat

OMG THRUMMED MITTENS.

One of the things I really enjoyed about this project was getting to play with fiber. I am almost ashamed to admit this, but I have never actually touched unspun fiber before. Like, ever. I feel that, as someone who has knit for the last five years, this is something I should have got around to doing at some point, but – apparently not.

Anyway. I’ve been playing with some lovely blue and green Fleece Artist. . .something? Roving? that I bought from my local yarn shop after knit night. I sat down with it at home, took a look at it, took a look at the pattern, and was suddenly very, very glad for Google. Google meant I could find this post, and this one, and figure out how, exactly, to turn my nice braid of fiber into something that could go into my mittens.

I also had this idea in my head, once I figured out that I could make thrums by working with three or four inch sections of fiber, regarding the colour changes I’d like to see: I wanted to work out a way to take the gradual blue-to-green colour changes I saw in the fiber, and translate them into the finished mitts. What I ended up doing was dividing the fiber in half (one half for each mitten) and then sitting down with a lot of episodes of Bones, making all of the thrums for one mitten ahead of time, and separating them by colour. When I say it out loud like that, it sounds really crazy, but it seemed like the best way to go about things and it was actually very satisfying. Playing with fiber is really really fun. I am very concerned that I am going to want to take up spinning.

(Playing with fiber, as an aside, was also kind of instructive. I now feel like I understand the way fibers go together and why merino is so versatile and why spinning, like, works, in a way that I did not when people said “spinning works and wool is pretty great.”)

Anyway. The mittens are going pretty quickly, now.

Song of the Entry: Stereos – Summer Girl (Acoustic) (Listen)

a thousand hugs from ten thousand lightning bugs

Well, it’s that time of year again. The time when I stock up on coffee, retreat into my apartment, and start a very serious battle of wills with a stack of paper that looks a lot like this. (Fun-size box of Smarties for scale, obviously.)

Now that school’s back in session, I’m back to having to write a major exam once a month (give or take). Unfortunately, this month I’ve also been struck down with a pretty fierce cold, which is doing terrible things to my ability to concentrate on my notes, so my knitting progress has taken a nose-dive.

However, the past few days have been a sudden, bracing leap into autumn, and it’s too cold for me to not be knitting something. So I finally sat down, did some math, and started my fall sweater, which is basically the knitting equivalent of autopilot. Garter stitch on 5.5mm needles, which feel ginormous after knitting with teeny yarn on 4mm needles for most of the last year. It’s extraordinarily comforting.

Song of the Entry: Owl City – Fireflies (Listen)