Knitting, with Dogs

Cue the U.S national anthem...

Thanks to Franklin for designing the medal, and to Stephanie for the whole Knitting Olympics idea!

Post-Olympic slump

Anybody else have post-Olympic-project blues?  :(  I really enjoyed that focussed effort.  Hmmm... maybe I need to knit for deadlines more often.

So by way of distraction, here's something I found chez Ann:

You are Haku!  You have a goal, and you will do
whatever it takes to achieve it.  This causes
some people to distrust you.  But when
someone has earned your trust, you
will protect them like a gentle big brother,
or a fearsome dragon.

I do like this, because I was born in the Chinese Year of the Dragon, and I've always thought dragons were pretty nifty.

Which Spirited Away character are you?
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52 hours and 30 minutes

That was my finish time in the Knitting Olympics!  Here's the final product:

And the picture-in-the-bathroom-mirror pose:

One more:

The pictures in the bathroom mirror show the color a little better than the outside picture.

I suck at taking pictures of myself. 

I'm really happy with how the sweater fits--almost as though it were made for me!  Seriously, the beauty of a top-down raglan is that you can try it on as you go and make fit decisions on the fly.  I made the cuffs extra-long, because I wanted to.  I like long cuffs.

So I can stroll leisurely to the podium and collect my gold medal when it's ready, I guess!
I feel a little like the Italian cross-country skier.  I almost feel a little guilty about not having to rush around and have a big last-minute knitting push.  I take that back -- actually it feels GREAT not to be rushing around with a big last-minute push!  :)

Details:
Yarn:  some stash yarn I bought at a mill-end store years ago, no idea what it is
Needles:  size 3 and 5 circulars
Pattern:  top down turtleneck raglan, swatched and made up with number out of my head
Body knitting time:  33 hours and 45 mins
First sleeve knitting time:  10 hours and 45 minutes
Second sleeve knitting time:  8 hours  (Once you know where you're going, you can get there more quickly the second time)
Total number of days when knitting actually occurred:  10
Average knitting time per day:   5 hours and 15 minutes.

Thanks to Stephanie for the inspiration!  I'd been wanting to make another top-down raglan sweater for a while.  I figured out the way I wanted to make raglan increases, how to incorporate a texture pattern into the body of a sweater and sleeves, and that I could knit and complete a sweater in a given period of time.

Now I'm going off to ice my wrist for a bit.  It's a little sore for some reason.

Olympic Knitting Progress

I finished the sample sock.  This may have been the most challenging sock I've knitted!  But it was fun and I learned some nifty stuff from it.

If you haven't seen Charlene Schurch's knitting books, check them out.  She's got some nifty ideas wrt knitting socks.   Highly recommended.

In Olympic Knitting news, I've finished the body of my sweater:

33 hours of knitting right there, folks.  Here's a sort of close-up of the pattern:

It's the Rib and Braid Pattern from Barbara Walker's Second Treasury.  I won't give a page number, because my copy was printed in 1970 (yikes, that's a long time ago!) -- it's not the newer version that most of you probably have.  It's easy and not too fiddly, and I think it makes a nice accent.  Now I just have to do the math for the sleeve decreases and then get the knitting done.  I'm tentatively hoping to have everything done by Wednesday.  But I don't want to anticipate a win.  It's not over till it's over, as Lindsay Jacobellis learned to her sorrow.  Poor kid.  20 years old and competing in a flashy sport -- I'd probably have done the same thing in her boots.

News from the Dog World: 

There has been a dearth of dog pictures here lately.  So I now present Jasper in his favorite spot when my husband's home -- sitting on the rocking ottoman in front of Dear Robert:

Note the zen-like calm and the crossed paws.  He's not often this still!

This morning when I went outside to photograph the sweater, the dogs went out with me.  There's a bit of a den-like hole under the chimney in back of the house.  Sometimes one of the dogs likes to crawl down in there and hang out a little.  This morning it was Jasper.  I was lying on my belly on the wet pine straw to get a good shot of him (the things we do for our blogs!) when Bouncer walked in front of the camera.  Right as the flash went off:

That's Bouncer's belly fur in front of the camera.

Hope all the other Olympic Knitters are making good progress!

Bwahahahah!

Janice in GA -- [adjective]: Like in nature to a train-riding hobo 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

Sounds about right to me.

Thanks, Knotty Mouse!

Some dogs...

enjoy watching dogs on tv. 

Jasper watching the Westminster Kennel Club dog show.

Olympics Progress Report

My Olympic knitting got off to a bit of a slow start.  I didn't cast on till about 4:00 pm local time, but I still managed to get about 5 hours of knitting in.  But I think I had a touch of food poisoning or something.  I got sick Friday night, and was up much of the night.  I spent Saturday shivering in bed with a touch of fever and a bad tummy.

But thankfully, I woke up today feeling MUCH better.  I got about 9 hours of knitting done today.  Here's my progress on my top-down turtleneck raglan sweater:

I'm almost to the point where I'll put the sleeve stitches on holders and join the front and back.  I'm going on for at least another inch, maybe an inch and a half.  The joy of doing a sweater like this is that you can try it on as you go, and make decision on how it fits as you go.  Sweet.

I'd thought about making the detail panel in the center (which you can't see very well in this photo, I know) a little wider, but I think I'm liking this just fine.  The knot and braid will continue down the arm as well. 

Anybody else feeling any inspiration from watching the Olympics on tv?  In a small, silly way, I kinda feel like I'm one of the athletes.  I just hope I don't crash due to injury.  My right hand was pretty sore Friday night.  Today I took more frequent breaks, and I held the yarn in my left hand on pattern rows, and in my right hand on non-pattern rows, just to spread the wear around.  My right hand's not as sore today, so that's A Good Thing.

Best wishes to my fellow Olympic Knitters!!

This, I like

And I'm not even normally a fan of stuffed animals.  But how can you not love John Murphy's Stupid Sock Creatures?  His tagline is "Cheaper than taxidermy, and nothing has to die."

Here's Estelle:

Awww....

Best of luck to everyone casting on at 2:00 local time (or whenever) today!  I haven't finished the swatching I was planning to do, but I'm out of time, so I'm wingin' it!  I think of it as skiing down that slope that's just a little too steep for you.   You hold on and do the best you can.

At least with knitting, I'm not liable to end up with a broken leg.  There's always a bright side to these things.

Tick...tick...tic...

Yeah, the last tic = twitchy, nervous knitter.

I'm working on my test sock.  After I got home from the SnB meeting last night (where we got shushed in the library like teenagers, jeezopete), I pulled out the cuff I'd knitted and re-did it.  I found a better way to control my tension in the fair isle section, and I wanted to whole thing to look as good as the bottom part did.  Then I pulled out the heel I'd knitted and added one more pattern repeat.  Now it's heel time again, and then the foot, and the pinstriped spiral toe...  cripes.

Anyway, I'm stalling right now because I'm stressed.  But I found something pretty cute on eBay:  a knitted border collie!  Aw man, how CUTE is that???

This seller has other animal patterns too.  They look like they're knit at a VERY tight gauge, but I think they're adorable.  I could probably adapt this one to look like Jasper.

Spinning soft, fat yarn #1

Remember the colorful roving I wrote about a couple of days ago? 

(Hand shown for scale.)
I've spent some time working with it.   Here's what I did.

Based on an idea I got from Katie when she was in the shop last week, I decided to try teasing or fanning out the roving horizontally first:

One hand on the yarn, one hand on the camera, alas.  Just imagine holding the roving in both hands.  I start from the right side as I'm looking at it, and just start teasing the fibers apart.  I ended up with this:

The unteased roving is on the left, the teased is on the right.  So you can see how much it opens up.  Then I divided that batt-like fiber in half -- just tore the strip down the middle, thus:

Then I started at one end of the batt-like fiber and started gently tugging on it lengthwise.  This also loosens the fibers and lets them slide against each other more easily.  Finished product of that process looks like roving again, except it's now much less dense and much more open.

If you do a bunch of fiber at a time, you can roll your strips into little balls like this, ready to pick up and spin:

Here it is being spun.  Notice how far back I'm holding the roving from where the twist is entering the fiber.  I'm holding the fiber 6-7 inches back.

There's still an issue with barberpolling, though:

I think this may be partly because the color changes on this roving are pretty close together.

The finished skein looks like this:

It's about 10 wraps per inch.  It still has a little more twist than I want in my soft fat yarn.  If I can find my protractor, I'll make a twist angle gauge.  This is one of those things I've wanted to do for a while and never got around to.  If I know what the angle of the twist in my singles yarn is, I'll be able to keep some records and know more exactly how much twist I can use before I get biasing fabric knitted from the yarn.

This stuff is fun, y'all.  I've still got a couple of ounces of that roving left.  I may try to do something different with the rest of it.  Stay tuned!