Experiments in Textured Knitting

For quite a while I was so taken with knitting lace that anything else just didn't catch my attention. Then last month, when it was colder - not as cold as it could have been - but definitely colder, I kept longing for a snuggly thick and warm wrap. No lace. No holes. But not boring stockinette stitch either. So I cracked open the Treasuries and tried out all the cable patterns that looked good to me, and gave up several attempts at wraps with fiddly cable needles. I wanted something simple and easy and fun to knit, with cable-like texture. And I came up with this.....

Modified version of Twist Stitch lattice with moss stitch and small bobble-like knots at the bottom edge

Border

Summer of 2011

Pictures of what I worked on during the summer....

The Past ~10 Months.....

So what have I been upto the past nearly 10 months.....
Lots of things - too many to actually have time to write about them until now.  Early last May, when it finally warmed up here, I lay down my knitting and other yarn-related obsessions and headed outdoors to not come back in until September when school was in again. During this time I traveled (a lot and to many faraway places involving jetlag), started a vegetable patch (completely organic) and had a bumper crop of tomatoes while the squirrels harveted the rest of the vegetables, ran a lot while training for the October marathon (which I didn't eventually run, sigh), finally got my red roses trained onto a trellis so that they grew (hundreds of them on one huge, tall bush)  by the side of my front door all the way up to the roof,  cleaned out my clothes closet (which seemed to have made no dent as it needs cleaning out again), finalized the design for a kitchen remodel (not started until this week) and sewed a lot (my fabric-related obsession).

And then from September on I've been designing and knitting and designing some more. I  notice that my knitting doesn't keep pace with the design ideas that run through my head. So I have several projects started (to test out new patterns that I thought of) and then left halfway (or even quarterway) either when the concept was proven good or a failure. Usually I do rip the failures out so there is little evidence of all the effort, but....I wish I could design and just hand over the actual test knitting to someone much faster than me at knitting. But everywhere I've looked people expect you to knit the first sample and want to look at a picture before offering to test knit it...maybe I'm wrong, I hope so. This reminds me of when I used to work (for pay) when I could design and leave the actual execution of my design to the programmers. I didn't have to actually write the programs, I envisioned the end result and created the steps to get there. Someone else did the actual coding.

One of these days I'll finish the projects and not just cast off and put them away for finishing later. Then I'll take some pictures and put them up....

Latika lace

Here's what I have been up to since Spring Break.....

Latika

This scarf design is based on a wavy trellis lace from the first Walker treasury. The design from the book has a swirl going up the right side. My scarf has two lace trellises mirror-imaged and swirling away from the center.  So far so good. This is still a work in progress....I am at the center of the scarf where I need to reverse the direction of the trellises so that both ends look the same. And thats where I am stuck.  After several hours swatching, frogging, re-knitting and frogging again, I still don't have a reverse pattern down. It just doesn't look remotely like the swirls on this side. Sigh! I may have to cast off and knit another piece the same as this first and join at the center. I do hate that - to me it is pattern failure. But maybe I could do something decorative in the middle instead of boring Kitchener. Back to some more designing before this can proceed further. I just may have to let this project rest for a while until inspiration strikes and I can finish strong....

Dyeing - the final results....and another shawl

I have been meaning to put up pictures of the dark red skein for weeks ....but Life got in the way. And another knitting project that I've been pottering about for a bit now. So here are the pictures of the final result....


Before the Koolaid dye - just RIT dye. The picture makes it look more orange than it is...more a pinkish red

After 2 step Koolaid - Punch and Orange (step1), Black Cherry (step2)

And here is what I've been working on in the past weeks.  Another lace shawl.....

I have always been drawn to variegated yarn and have quite a lot of it in stash but the more I knit with it the more I  realize that I don't like the final results as much as with plain single colored yarn. I used up some luscious looking Araucania Itata in a blue-green color with spots of mauve and purple, reminiscent of peacock feathers, for this project. I remember being so taken with the colors in the yarn but I am less than happy with the knitted project. The distribution of the colors in the knitted end-product destroys the peacock feather look. Maybe I should just knit socks from multi-colored sock yarn. That would be so boring.

More pictures of this shawl will be up soon. I have to figure out what happened to my trusty Nikon DSLR - I keep getting a card read error. Probably some setting was messed up after we used it to shoot a video of my youngest playing at his violin recital. The other digital camera that we own, while quite good otherwise, is so-so with indoor lighting. Or it needs to get sunny outside and stop raining so I can get some decent pictures in natural light....

Now to dream of other projects to start.....

Experiments with Dyeing

The dyeing and drying happened yesterday. I started with Rit powder dye, one scarlet and one wine together.  The reason for this (vs Koolaid) was that the woman in the store where I bought it recommended Rit for darker richer color and saturation and  Koolaid for a watered down heathered effect.

The color of the Rit dyebath was exactly what I wanted but I ended up with a watered down maroon/pink/wine colored skein.  NOT what I wanted. So after some urgent googling about dyes, which in retrospect I should have done before starting the whole process, and reading up on Koolaid dyes and checking out pictures of actual results, I rushed out to get Tropical Punch and Black Cherry Koolaid. And I re-dyed the damp pale wine/ dark dull pink colored  skein with 2 packets of Tropical Punch and one of  Orange (forget the exact name) to get this.....

The pictures show more orange-ish red/brick but really it looked like the dark red that I wanted when it was wet and I had read that it dries out lighter so I was prepared for that. It did dry out to a bright rich red. But I want it a tad bit darker - so today I put the skein in the Black Cherry Koolaid and see what I get. I know the theory behind it, but the process is so much fun - almost like magic....

Stay tuned for final results on this experiment.... 

Pictures of the Paisley Shawl

Main Body

I like the way the paisleys turned out in this part....just as I imagined....The two paisleys mirror-imaged on the center stitch and radiating away from it.

Here's a picture showing the detail of the right side of the shawl.......

Main Body - Right Side closeup

And here's the left side ......up close...........

Main Body - Left side closeup



Finished and Blocking!

And here's a picture of it blocking.... I hate how the large paisleys in the border look like lopsided diamonds. The two swirls in the extreme tips below the border paisleys don't show up right either.

 Next I'll try and get some pictures of it in use ..... with better lighting .....maybe it'll be fine and I won't need to undo and rework the border and edge.