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)

sock yarn, like nail polish, is pretty serious business

I’ve sort of been spinning my wheels, knitting-wise, since finishing my Featherweight last week. I made a deal with myself in early August that I couldn’t start the fall sweater I want to make – an adult-sized version of EZ’s Tomten Jacket – until I’d finished that cardigan. And on the one hand, now that Featherweight is done, I’m excited to be “allowed” to start working on that sweater. It’s knit in worsted weight, and the entire thing is garter stitch, and I’m very very excited for being on autopilot for a month while I make that happen.

On the other, I can’t actually start until I’ve done some swatching and sketching and a fair bit of math, which I just haven’t been in the mood for lately. (It’s very high-stakes math. If I make a mistake, I don’t find out until a month later when I’ve knit a disaster.)

So I’ve been working on smaller, less thought-and-labour-intensive projects until then. I finished my Daybreak:

And I bought some more sock yarn. As you do. This is Tanis Fiber Arts, in Midnight (bright blue) and Shadow (grey). I’ve completely butchered the colours of the yarn by taking photos of it inside my apartment before the sun is up, but they’re lovely and go wonderfully together and neither of them is weirdly yellow-green like the light is telling you.

It’s possible they’ll actually be socks (I’m thinking stripey) although it’s equally possible they’ll end up as more triangular shawls, because they really are addicting. (And they can also be stripey.) I’ve got my eye on Ulmus.

Maybe if I made my shawl really tiny, I could get away with both?

Song of the Entry: Meese – The Start Of It (Listen)