4S: it's not me, it's you

Scarf/shawl/sock Saturday (or Sunday, if I forget to post on Saturday)

The veggie shawl is finished!

Here it is unblocked, about two and a half feet wide and a foot and a bit long:

Here it is on the rack, er, blocking board, now at just under four feet wide and two feet long:

I am rather merciless when I block lace.

The new shawl I started was going along swimmingly until I hit row 15 of the first chart, and then I ended up with an extra stitch where there shouldn't be one. I re-checked my work on the row below, and it was correct. The stitch markers hadn't worked their way under a stitch, which can sometimes happen and cause stitch counts to be off in a section. I re-checked my work on the active row, and that was correct, too.

I re-read the instructions, which mentioned having to move stitch markers around on four rows where there are double decreases. However, the row numbers listed for this in the instructions didn't match what I saw on the chart (ie, the designer made a boo boo when typing the instructions and was a row off, and the tech editor didn't catch it). Working on this late at night didn't help matters.

Funnily enough, while I was calling the project unladylike names, an old episode of Fawlty Towers was on. It was my favorite episode, which contains this scene, which I immediately related to:

Bless you, John Cleese, for showing me the absurdity of yelling at yarn. (And living mere feet away from a patch of woods means I could have run out the front door, found a sturdy tree branch, yanked it off the tree, and run back inside to beat the yarn. However, it was late at night, I was in my jim jams, and whatever would the neighbors think?) Instead, I calmly wrote out a post on Ravelry asking if anyone had encountered this problem while knitting this pattern. Then I went to bed.

Sleep being the great healer it is, I was in a better frame of mind to face the blasted project this morning. I also found a response to my post, which confirmed my suspicion of typing error, and the extra stitch is accounted for since it's on a double decrease row, which requires deliberately moving stitch markers.

There are three other rows on which this spiciness will occur, but I'm ready for them now.

practice with the moon and stars

I had a cello lesson tonight, and it occurred to me that it's been awhile since I posted any cello progress updates.

I'm going to have hour-long lessons starting in September. Looking forward to that.

I'm working on a Bach minuet, an etude, and the E flat major scale. I learn a new scale every few weeks, and I've racked up quite a few. I like scales. Nothing has helped me attack my intonation problems more than scales, and I also use them to practice vibrato, shifts, extensions, and bow direction changes.

Lately, whenever he assigns me a new piece, Ben asks me how I might go about learning it. Since I have two years' worth of study under my belt, I seem to have learned enough about practice approach to have a little more say in it. The layering method is working well for me, and really helps avoid mindless practice that usually results in frustration rather than progress. So when I tell him my plan, it's in that framework.

We've also added the "targeted approach" to the layers - once I'm familiar enough with a layer, it's time to really zero in on the details I might be tripping over. In other words, an even more thorough learning of a layer. For me, this is usually extracting a tiny section in a line to work on in isolation, and then gradually adding in a note before and after that section until the whole line is added back in. It's sounds tedious and laborious, but I don't mind it, and pieces aren't feeling so slippery under my fingers these days.

I also recently encountered an etude (Dotzauer Grant #120) that I got the hang of right away. The note pattern, slur pattern, and fingering pattern all made sense at first glance. This has never happened before. Ever. Even Ben noticed that I wasn't struggling with it.

Which isn't to say that this etude sounds good when I play it, because it doesn't. Playing the right notes at the right time with the right slurs isn't the entirety of making music. But the fact that I could analyze it and figure out the technical aspects and the structure without help is a milestone for me.

It's a nice little confidence boost to know that my usual slowness and stupidity at this cello stuff is absent for a change. It will likely come back with a vengeance, but for now, I'm enjoying the holiday away from it.

4S: knit your vegetables

Scarf/shawl/sock Saturday (or Sunday, if I forget to post on Saturday)

Welcome back to 4S! No socks this week. I bring you a shawl-in-progress instead.

The knit-along Mystery Shawlette was my test drive of one of Wendy Johnson's lace patterns. I liked it enough that I decided my next shawl project would be another of her patterns - the Japanese Garden shawl. All of the money she got from the sale of the pattern went to Japan's earthquake and tsunami relief efforts. She raised more than $6000!

I had some Knit Picks Stroll Tonal in the Springtime colorway that I thought would be good for this pattern. (I seem to be on a Knit Picks yarn kick. I do have other yarn brands to get to this summer. Promise.)

Is it just me, or does this color look like lettuce and other munchy greens?

I've taken to calling it my veggie shawl because the green reminds me of celery and cabbage. Nearly finished with chart B. Just chart C and the bind off to do, and then a soak and block.

I had the sudden urge to cast on another shawl since I'm so near the end of this one. I have some lovely blue gray Cascade yarn (see!), and I figure a three-fer is as good as a rest, so I went for Wendy's Vernal Equinox shawl, which I'm calling my late-for-spring shawl. I'll probably have it finished by the time her book comes out at the end of August. 

Yes, I admit it. I'm now a lace knitting addict, but it's all her fault.

4S: and again with the socks

Scarf/shawl/sock Saturday (or Sunday, if I forget to post on Saturday)


Hello friends! We are back up and running after last week's techno-hiccough.


So, I finished these:

And I gave them to my sister, who is a handmade socks convert. She wore out the previous pair I'd made for her last Christmas. That's the best thing you can ever do for knitters - wear out what they knit for you. They don't spend all that time and all those thousands of stitches to have the finished object just sit on a shelf or in a drawer because "it's too pretty to use." I look forward to hearing that the blanket I made recently for the making-her-appearance-any-day-now owlet has had food spilled on it, and has been spit up on and drooled on and dragged around, and gets washed so many times that it pills, and the colors fade. That's what knitting is for.


I started another pair out of TOFUtsies yarn, which I also got from the yarn swap. It's superwash wool, soysilk (get it?), cotton, and chitin. I avoid knitting with pure cotton yarn because it's so hard on the hands, but blended in with other fibers, it isn't too bad. Still a bit squeaky though. 


More bright colors, although my camera isn't doing them justice:

I also have more of this yarn brand in a strange shade of pink. I have enough of it to make several pairs of socks. I'll see if my sister likes the feel of the yarn, and if she does, I'll make a pair for her and a pair for me. It's handy that my sister, my mom, and I all wear the same shoe size. If I make a pair of socks to fit me, they'll fit either of them.


I have quite a bit of veggie shawl to show you next week.

4S: not wounded, sire, but dead

Scarf/shawl/sock Saturday (or Sunday, if I forget to post on Saturday)

There's been a slight hitch in the proceedings. Namely, my laptop gave up the ghost last night. (I'm writing this on my iTouch.)

I made several attempts to save the old girl, but to no avail. The new laptop isn't arriving until late next week.

I have photos of the socks I showed you last week. They turned out well. I finished them and gave them to my sister. I also have photos of the shawl I'm working on. All the photos are on my camera, and I can't download them until I re-install the software on the new laptop.

Hopefully next week we'll return to regularly scheduled knitting progress reports.

4S: lace socks

Scarf/Shawl/Sock Saturday (or Sunday if I forget to post on Saturday)

My first sock post for 4S.

I've been knitting socks for a few years now, and I've refined my recipe quite a bit. Lately, this involves starting with a size 1 needle for the toe section, switching to a 2 for the foot and heel depending on how stretchy the design for the instep is, and then to the next largest needle for the leg, and maybe even one more size up for the cuff. I do this because the first pair of socks I made for myself were a little too tight in places.

One thing that hasn't changed is that I knit both socks at once toe-up on a long circular needle - ie, the "magic loop" technique. (I can't wait until Signature comes out with sock needle sizes in their circular line.) I love this method of sock knitting, and it works for sleeves as well. My knitting method is cobbled from Melissa Morgan Oakes' Toe-up Two-at-a-Time Socks and Wendy Johnson's Socks From the Toe Up (particularly the pattern for the gusset heel - no more picking up stitches!)

My latest pair are knit from yarn I got at a yarn swap.

Rather bright, aren't they? I pulled this yarn from my stash when I was working on my mom's scarf, which was white, and my stepdad's socks, which were brown. We were also having quite a lot of rain on a near-daily basis for what seemed like weeks on end, so days were often dull gray. I suppose I needed something colorful to work on to brighten things up.

The label is skimpy on details, but I can tell you that it's 75% wool/25% nylon, and there's no official colorway name other than 528. The brand is called Vinca, which I've never heard of. The two skeins I got were from the same dye lot, but the color repeats start and end in different places. Trying to make them match up is more trouble than it's worth, so the socks will be somewhat mis-matched, which is fine by me.

The pattern is Wendy Johnson's "Dead Simple Lace Socks" from the Socks From the Toe Up book. It is indeed a dead simple pattern - a two-row repeat, easily memorized. Good TV or sociable knitting.