Chiagu

New skeins in the stash

Ivete Tecedor Lester — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:37:40 +0000

Last weekend I drove out to Modern Yarn to visit their shop for the first time. I’d met the ladies there a few times before at Stitches events but I’d never made it out to actually look at the store. When I googled it to get directions I was surprised to find they’d recently moved! I have no idea how the new shop compares to the old one but I was kind of disappointed in it. There wasn’t much stock and it felt sort of cold and uninteresting. I don’t mean the PEOPLE, the woman who was working at the time greeted me immediately and then let me browse in a perfectly welcoming and appropriate way . . . I guess I just was expecting more from the store based on what I had seen from their Stitches booths? Who knows, maybe I’m being too harsh, I can’t tell.

In any case, they did have one thing that excited me: Madelinetosh! I so rarely see this yarn in real life that when I do I get really excited and pretty much have to come home with something. What you see above are the two skeins I ended up with. On the left is Tosh Lace in the color Vermillion and on the right is Tosh Sock in Duchess. They’re both stunning! It wasn’t until I got home that I realized the Lace is kind of similar to the color of the Malabrigo Lace that I made Leila out of not that long ago . . . apparently I can buy laceweight in no other color. Weird, huh?

I’m planning a very geometric shawl design featuring diamonds for the laceweight, but I have no idea what the sock yarn will become. Considering how many other skeins of sock yarn there already are in my sock yarn stash, this should come as no surprise to anyone! For now I’m leaving these beauties sitting out on the table so that I can admire them every time I walk past. They look gorgeous in the sun streaming in through the window, and even though they blew out the picture above, I just had to shoot it that way because that’s the way I’m looking at them in real life right now. So pretty!

Vogue Holiday 2009

Ivete Tecedor Lester — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:37:20 +0000

I just picked up this magazine and while some of the designs in it are downright scary, there are a few that sparked my interest! You can see the whole issue previewed here on Vogue’s site, but here are the projects I’m thinking about:

This pink cowl caught my eye because it reminds me of my new cowl design (which is well on its way to being published! yea!) and because the stitch pattern looks really interesting. I have a few more ideas in my mind for oversized cowls like these and infinity scarves, need to do some more sketching and swatching to weed out the winners from the losers before the trend has come and gone . . .

This little purple vesty thing is probably my favorite piece in the whole issue. I actually went stash-diving for appropriate yarn when I saw it! I remember the designer sweater that (I assume) inspired it and it caused quite the stir at the yarn shop a few years ago when we saw it on the runway. This little sweater changed a few things and in my opinion, is just as good, if not better, than the designer version. The more I look at it the more I want to knit it!

I feel like there was something else in this issue I liked but I don’t see it on that preview page . . . maybe they didn’t put all the patterns up? I don’t have the magazine with me right now so I can’t check either, and a quick look at Ravelry didn’t jog my memory . . . if I remember what it was I’ll update this post!

What about you, what are you considering knitting from the VK Holiday 2009 issue?

Slowly climbing back out

Ivete Tecedor Lester — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:39:05 +0000

It’s been a tough week but I’m not ready to talk about it yet. Yesterday was the first day I felt like cooking in a LONG time, I made biscotti with cranberries and pistachios and they came out SO GOOD! It seems like it might be a sign that I’m starting to feel a bit better, but it’s still too early to know what’s going to happen. I’m sorry to be so cryptic but that’s the way it needs to be right now. Thank you for all your well wishes, I appreciate them!

There has been a bit of knitting, too:

You may recognize this as one of my designs from a while ago. This sample is going to be my 4th attempt at making a pattern-photo-worthy version of this full-sized shawl design. The original shawl was knit in a garish color of Cherry Tree Hill yarn that wouldn’t photograph no matter what, so I overdyed it with red dye and then realized I couldn’t use it as a pattern photo because the yarn had been doctored. Then I decided to knit it in Kureyon Sock, only to find out I can’t knit with that yarn at all because it’s just too stiff . . . it’s as if this little shawl is cursed!

But I may finally have found a way to get this pattern finished and released. I’m knitting a new full-sized shawl out of this new-to-me yarn, Skacel’s Schoppel Wooles Zauberball in color 1536, which reminds me of the tropical sunset colors that inspired my Tramonto shawl. The colors in this yarn are a bit too bright for my taste and the shawl may end up being too bright to wear, but I’m confident it will photograph beautifully! The yarn itself is quite nice, too, it’s easy to knit with and has a very interesting texture. It’s single-ply, which is unusual for sock yarn, but it feels very strong and yet soft at the same time. It’ll probably make awesome socks, too!

I’m spending a bunch of time today trying to catch up on my patterns. I’d love to release the cowl pattern sometime this month . . . we’ll see how I do on that deadline. The pattern’s pretty easy, but I’m stuck no the photography at the moment . . .

Knitting and silence

Ivete Tecedor Lester — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:37:41 +0000

Sorry for being MIA but I’ve been going through some rough stuff the last few weeks and I just didn’t feel like talking about knitting. I did finish the cabled cowl and will be offering the pattern up for sale as soon as I have the energy to do the work and have a photoshoot. It came out gorgeous and I’ve been wearing it every time the weather warrants it! I say it that way because today it’s supposed to get up to 72 . . . and just a few days ago it was in the 30s! This sure is some crazy weather, but we should be used to it by now considering the summer we had.

I’ve been making progress on the Koigu scraps project too, see how long it is now!

I think it’s about 4 feet long at the moment, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the yarn pile! I haven’t even gone through HALF the stash. It’s amazing how far Koigu goes! Whatever this turns out to be, when it’s done I’m going to weigh it on my scale to figure out how many balls went into it. It’ll be really interesting to know how much all those scraps added up to!

I didn’t mean to take that picture in the windowsill, but this is what happened the second I put the project on the couch. Arnold loooooves the knitting, which is kind of cute and all, but makes me really nervous! He’s been known to chew up knitting needles and I’ve lost 2 pairs of size 5 circs already. Anytime he’s near the knitting I have to watch him like a hawk because he goes from laying peacefully one second to attacking the next! It’s really sweet when he snuggles in for a nap though, sometimes I’ll find that he’s pulled one of my sweaters off the table and is asleep on top of it. I guess he inherited the love of wool from his momma!

Last but not least, I also started another pair of socks. I know I shouldn’t because I have so many partially-completed pairs, but I couldn’t help myself. Seems like if there’s a set of size 1 dpns empty, I just have to fill them up! This yarn is Jojoland’s Kaleidoscope in a sort of depressingly-dark shade of purple and brown (it’s way darker than the picture, which is blown out by the flash of course). I’m knitting these toe-up on 60 sts around and am doing a rib starting after the toe. These are just mindless knitting to have on hand when I need it . . . which has been often lately.

With winter coming (at least I think it is! Judging on today, it’s hard to know for sure) I’m starting to think about socks more and more. It may be time to dig into those almost-finished socks and get a few pairs done before I actually need them!

Cleaning out those Koigu scraps

Ivete Tecedor Lester — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:08:13 +0000

A long time ago I mentioned wanting to use my odd Koigu scraps to make something . . . at the time I was imagining making lots of mis-matched socks in crazy stripes of handpainted colors and wearing them interchangeably with each other. While that still seems like a good idea and I may end up doing that also, over the weekend I was reading a book and found myself with no simple projects in stockinette to work on while I read. When I’m reading I like to knit stockinette on circulars (either in the round or flat works well), but it has to be a completely mindless project. Enter the scraps bag:

This bag actually has more than just Koigu leftovers in it, it has all sorts of fingering-weight sock yarn scraps and leftovers. All the baby skeins of Koigu I got years ago at TNNA are in there, too. I’m sure there are even scraps of Koigu collected from my days at the knitting store! Apparently I hoard Koigu like it’s a precious metal. I’ve been adding to this bag for years (literally!), always with the intention of turning it all into something one day.

This past weekend, I went through the bag and separated out all the Koigu scraps from the rest of the sock yarn riffraff (as if, everything in there is awesome!). Here’s what I have to work with:

As I pulled out those partial balls and tiny butterflies of yarn, I kept remembering the projects that each scrap belonged to. It was like going through my jewelry box! The gray in the bottom right-hand was from the first Charlotte’s Web I ever made . . . the very bright orange-pink on top of it became a pair of ruffly socks . . . and on and on. It’s amazing how well I can remember working with each of these colors! Although not surprising, given how much I love Koigu and how the color is the whole point of Koigu . . .

I pulled out a set of size 4 circulars and cast on a bunch of stitches and just started knitting. Here’s what I had after one day’s worth of reading:

I’m trying not to worry about what color comes next, but I did decide on two rules:

Colors next to each other should be different enough to stripe
Adjacent stripes should be of varied widths

So basically what I’m doing when I finish a section is reaching blindly for another bit of yarn and then seeing if the amount is OK and if the color isn’t too similar. I was shocked to see how much medium blue is in this pile! It’ll be a challenge to make sure all that blue doesn’t end up overwhelming everything else.

So far I have about 10″ of fabric knit and it’s about 20″ wide. I was initially thinking of making a stole, but now that it looks like I have way more yarn than I realized, I’m thinking of turning it into a small throw. This may end up being a perpetual project that I add on to as I finish other Koigu projects, but that’s completely fine with me. Using up my scraps this way makes me think of old-fashioned patchwork quilts and the idea just fills me up with warm fuzzies. And knitting with all these Koigu colors isn’t half-bad, either!

New Cabled Cowl Design

Ivete Tecedor Lester — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:34:46 +0000

Here’s what I’ve been knitting pretty much exclusively for the last 2 weeks: a new cowl design with that Handmaiden Casbah 5 that I posted about when it arrived. I was so inspired by the cowls on the Fall 2009 Burberry RTW runway show that I just knew I was going to have to make some new cowls this year. These cowls are different from the ones we saw last year in the handknit world, they’re way more dramatic and generally more oversized. This one is inspired by this cowl from the show, but I’m knitting it in more knitterly cables and in much heavier yarn (at least that’s what I assume, I haven’t seen the thing in person).

It’s about 3/4 done right now and by the end will have used all 4 skeins of the Casbah 5 . . . so about the same amount as it takes to make a small to medium sweater. That should give you some idea of the dimension! It’ll be about 34″ around and at least 20″ long by the time it’s done. The weather’s definitely taken a turn towards fall in the last week or so, which is no surprise given that it’s almost October (how the heck did that happen!?!?), so I’m starting to think about fall knitwear. I wore my first sweater last week in fact! This cowl should definitely come in handy this winter . . .

The complicated cable you see is a variation of a cable I found in one of my pattern books. This was my first time knitting a whole project with wrapped cables, until now I’d only just swatched/learned them but never knit anything using them. It took a while to get the hang of it! I’m toying with the idea of doing a quick video how-to on wrapped cables, what do you think of the idea?

Eight years people. EIGHT!

Ivete Tecedor Lester — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:55:26 +0000

On this day 8 years ago, I started blogging about knitting. Almost nothing in my life is the same as it was then, when I was a senior in college and living in PA working minimum-wage jobs.

There have been a few constants: knitting, of course, and dachshunds. I had a dachshund, Pepper, then, and I have Arnold now!

Here’s my favorite picture of Pepper, taken in 2001 when he was only a few months old:

And here’s Arnold, taken a few days ago:

They look pretty similar, don’t they!? They have the same coloring, but Arnold’s much bigger than Pepper was.

I tried to dig up some photos of circa-2001 knitting to do another compare-and-contrast like the dachshund one above, but I found that I don’t have that many pictures of items I knit way back when. Here’s the second pair of socks I ever made:

It used two strands of Woolease held double on a size 8 (I think) needle and a free pattern I found online. The heels are much too deep because I mis-read the “slip 1, k1″ instructions and just slipped the first stitch, not every other stitch in the flap. They fit OK, but there is definitely tons of extra room in the back heel. These socks have survived to this day and I still wear them! Acrylic really just never breaks down, does it? These may actually end up outliving me . . .

Compare them to this pair of socks that I just finished:

Single-stranded Koigu on size 1’s using my own design, which I’ve published and have available for sale from my own website. Funnily-enough, these use the same slipped-stitch heel as the socks above, only I do it correctly now after figuring out my mistake back in 2002 . . .

I’ve come pretty far, huh?

A big THANK YOU! to all of you out there who’ve been reading my knitting ramblings, whether you’ve been with me since the beginning or we’re just getting to know each other. I’m more energized about my knitting and designing than I have been in years and I hope to bring you lots of new exciting designs in the next few months!

Here’s to another 8 years of knitblogging!

FO: Saffron Cables

Ivete Tecedor Lester — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:04:28 +0000

When my best friend Anne announced her engagement almost 2 years ago, I immediately started planning what to knit as their wedding present. I knew it had to be something really special, something I couldn’t knit in just a weekend. I wanted the item to be something they could both use, and hopefully pass down to future generations. A blanket came immediately to mind of course!

This pattern is from an older Interweave Knits, from the Fall 2006 issue, and I’d had it bookmarked since the first time I saw it. In the magazine it’s shown in a gorgeous spice orange and just looks so cozy and timeless, I knew I was going to knit it eventually. When I started looking around for inspiration for what to make for Anne, I checked out the Ravelry page for this pattern (link) and fell back in love with the design as I browsed through the 70 other blankets knitters have posted on Ravelry. I momentarily considered designing my own cabled blanket to make the present even more personal, but then I remembered that I was getting married only 2 months before Anne and had to knock some sense into myself! I knew that I had enough on my plate just knitting a big blanket, let alone designing it first . . . and when I realized how perfectly the design goes with Anne’s preppy style (hello, nautical cabled blanket goes perfectly with Nantucket style, doesn’t it??), I knew I’d found a winner.

Even though I’d found the perfect pattern, I had NO IDEA what to knit it out of. Initially I wanted to find the kiwi green that she was featuring in her wedding colors, but that search proved completely fruitless after scouring webstores, Ravelry, and two LYS’s. I knew that if I was going to go with green, it had to be THE green she used, not just something kind of similar . . .

In the end I decided to go with white for two reasons: 1, they didn’t own a couch yet so I had no idea whether kiwi green would go with it, and 2, if I chose the wrong green it really wouldn’t have any meaning at all, it’d just be some weird green blanket. I figured white went nicely with the whole “wedding” thing and that it would go with any decor they might end up with in the future. Plus, I know Anne’s a real clean freak (don’t hate me for saying it Anne!) so I knew she wouldn’t have the usual objections to a not-very-practical white blanket!

Once I settled on white I had to find THE yarn. If I were still working at String and still had access to my employee discount, I probably would have made it in cashmere. But without that discount, I knew that I was going to be looking at cashmere blends, not 100% cashmere! I ended up choosing Classic Elite Princess, a yarn I’d worked with before and really loved. I like how soft the yarn is and how good the yardage is per ball — it meant I could knit a huge blanket that didn’t weigh very much at all! The yarn also washes beautifully so I’m comfortable giving something knit out of it as a gift (I think shrinking a gift has to be the biggest downside to giving handknits!).

As I read through the pattern I realized that for some reason, Kathy Zimmerman didn’t include increases after the beginning seed stitch border. If you look through the Ravelry projects, you can see that some of the borders came out VERY ruffled, and that makes perfect sense when you compare the stitch gauge of seed stitch with that of cables. Considering how prolific a cable designer Kathy Zimmerman is, I can’t explain why increases weren’t used, it’s such an established technique! I decided to add them myself but should have added even more, as it turns out my blanket still had a wavy border (but not as much as some of the others on Ravelry). The other design change I made was to increase the side borders to make them wider, so that the whole blanket would be wider. Princess is a bit thinner than the yarn called for in the pattern, so I added to the border to make a wider blanket.

Knitting the blanket was a LOT of fun and I really loved watching those cables weave into and out of each other. It did get a bit boring after the second repeat, and I did make a few mistakes along the way, but all in all I enjoyed this project. Unfortunately I blew the deadline of gifting it to her at the wedding, and then multiple other things go in the way of finally finishing it off . . . so they didn’t get it until their 1 year anniversary earlier this month.

Better late than never though, right?

Congratulations Anne and Eric, hope you get many years of cuddling out of this blanket!

Project specs:
Pattern: Saffron Cables by Kathy Zimmerman, Interweave Knits Fall 2006
Yarn: 20 skeins Classic Elite Princess in white (#3416)
Needles: US size 7
Started: August 16, 2008
Finished: March 22, 2009 (knitting), September 12, 2009 (finishing)

Soneca finished!

Ivete Tecedor Lester — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:37:07 +0000

I finished the boy version of the Soneca baby blanket on Sunday! I like how it came out and it turned out that I did have enough blue to crochet a sc border after the bind off. I think that little touch of blue in spots looks kind of nice, what do you guys think?

I’ve given up on the idea of trying to lighten the color of this blanket, I decided I’ll just wait until someone “alternative” has a baby and gift it to them. Knitting this design twice in such drastically different yarn really showed me how much the finished item is affected by the yarn content. The Dream in Color Classy versions is soft, light, and drape-y. The All Season’s Cotton feels much heftier and sturdier, even though it doesn’t actually weigh very much more (in terms of pounds, the ASC version is maybe 3 oz heavier). While the ASC is not as soft as the Classy, it’s definitely soft enough, and I know it’ll get softer with washing and wearing. I think either yarn is a wonderful choice for a baby item!

That said, knitting with the Classy is exponentially more fun than knitting with the ASC. The Classy bounces as you knit and slides right off the needles. The ASC on the other hand feels a lot like knitting with fleece and it sticks to the needles! I used the same pair of Addi’s for both blankets so I know for sure that it was only the yarn that changed. I also found that knitting with the ASC for extended periods of time hurt my hands, while I was able to knit with the Classy for days on end with no problem . . . but that makes sense given how springy and wonderful Merino is to knit with! There’s a reason it’s my favorite fiber after all . . .

And speaking of blankets, here’s a sneak peek of something else I wrapped up on Sunday:

Full details later, that opus deserves its own post!

Purple shawl is off the needles!

Ivete Tecedor Lester — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:12:05 +0000

Here’s a pretty terrible picture of the finished leaf-edged shawlette:

I bound off the last few stitches this morning before leaving for work and I’m very please with how it turned out! It definitely needs a good blocking but other than that I’m calling this one a success. It does still need a name though . . . I was thinking of naming it something related to garden structures but not using any of the names that have already been used. Since that means I can’t use the words “leaf,” “trellis,” or “garden,” I’m kind of stuck on coming up with a name! Do any of you garden and therefore know some obscure garden structure name that might relate?

This shawl may well the most feminine design I’ve ever come up with — and what’s funny is that when I pictured it in my head, it wasn’t feminine at all! I pictured some pretty strong diagonal lines and significant negative space, but when it got knitted up somehow that translated into these soft textured stripes you’re seeing. It’s amazing how a design can look so different in the flesh compared to in your mind’s eye!

During my commute today I started swatching the dollar sign cable but it isn’t even close to right yet. I met some nice people on my train ride home who started to ask me about the knitting and when I told them I was knitting “recession-proof socks” featuring a cable shaped like a dollar sign, they got really into it! They threw out all sorts of ideas for what to name the socks, most of which were hysterical (”credit swap socks,” anyone?!?). The positive reaction from complete strangers on the train has me thinking this idea may not be so odd after all . . .