MYOKB: “Lacy Scarf” Finished!

March 11, 2012January 2, 2014 KateLeave a comment

I don’t have any “in progress” photos this week, but I have (somehow) managed to finish this week’s project, “Lacy Scarf” (page 62 of Debbie Bliss’s The Knitter’s Year), from My Year of Knitting Blissfully (MYOKB).

Although it came out quite well, in my humble opinion, I must admit that this was not my favorite project to work. In part, this was due to the repetitive nature of the pattern (the same four rows over and over again), but this was mostly due to interference from my new kitten, Tuppence, who decided to make this scarf her personal plaything. She chewed the heck out of my nice size 5 bamboo circulars, causing the yarn to snag repeatedly until I could find time to replace them. She also attacked the two balls of Classic Elite Silky Alpaca Lace (colors 2416, off-white, and 2420, aqua blue) I was knitting with.

Since I was using two strands of the Silky Alpaca Lace, I was using the “trick” of pulling one strand from the center of the skein and one from the outer edge. I also trailed the alternating colors of yarn up the side and intertwined the resting yarn with the working yarn to “hook” it into place. All of this twisting of multiple strands of yarn, combined with kitten shenanigans, led to a very frustrating knitting experience.

"Lacy Scarf" Close-up — “Lacy Scarf” Close-up

And just how long is Debbie Bliss’s week anyway? I mean, I know she runs a worldwide knitting empire, but seriously, this scarf took awhile to knit (even taking into account the problems I mentioned above).

The pattern calls for working half the scarf in one direction, placing it on a stitch holder, and then working another half of the scarf and grafting the two halves together. Instead, I worked the entire scarf in one piece and one direction. This caused the two ends to look slightly different from each other, but I’m OK with that. You can judge for yourself from the photo at the top of this post.

All that said, the resulting scarf is quite nice and the chevron effect is beautiful.

MYOKB: “Striped Baby Hat” Finished!

March 4, 2012January 2, 2014 KateLeave a comment

Debbie Bliss "Striped Baby Hat" Finished — Debbie Bliss “Striped Baby Hat” Finished

After last week’s endless seed stitch adventure, this week’s foray into My Year of Knitting Blissfully (MYOKB) has been a piece of cake. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, as they say.

This week’s project (finished in one evening, as predicted) is the “Striped Baby Hat” on page 68, which I worked using GGH Goa in white and Suss Snuggle in a lovely shade of French blue. Although the labels describe these yarns as having slightly different fiber contents (slightly different percentages of cotton and acrylic), I strongly suspect, actually, that these two yarns are identical to each other and are just marketed under different names and brands. This is a common practice in the yarn world. Anyway, they worked together swimmingly and the gauge match was perfect. Gauge isn’t super-important with a project like this one, of course. My philosophy is that, eventually, the baby’s head will fit the hat.

"Striped Baby Hat" with seam and jogless jog showing, sort of — “Striped Baby Hat” with seam and jogless jog showing, sort of

I’ve made many baby hats similar to this one in the past, so the only real trick I remastered was the “jogless jog,” a technique to help you avoid unsightly “hitches in your stitches” (which is waaaay better than hitches in your britches, trust me) when you work stripes in the round. Basically the technique involves knitting the first round of any new color change as usual, and then knitting the first stitch of the previous round together with the first stitch of the second round. You can see it more eloquently described by the inimitable Meg Swanson here.

And you can (kind of) see the “jogless jog” in action if you look at the right side of this second picture of the “Striped Baby Hat” ; follow the seam up from the little “bump” in the bottom hem on the far right. Apologies for not taking a better picture.

MYOKB: Baby Cardigan Finished!

March 2, 2012January 8, 2014 KateLeave a comment

A three-needle bind-off here. A chocolate grosgrain ribbon there. A little seaming. And the Baby Cardigan is finished at last! Phew! It looks beautiful and since my little niece, Lauren Amelia, was born the week before last, I’m glad that I will have an even more beautiful baby to give it to.

This bright fuchsia pink is not my usual color choice, but when I imagined this cardigan, the only ribbon choice I could envision was chocolate grosgrain (1/4″ wide). If I was one of those people who got paid to think of names for color combinations, I would call this one “Raspberry Truffle.”