This is a headband they call Panta (Me? I like to call it a tiechel), which I have knit and unknit several times in my two years of knittingship. Boredom, running out of yarn, poor fabric drape...they're all to blame. But now, if it's not a pair of size 13 socks I'll knit it.

Pattern DROPS Headband
Yarn Mystery tweed
Needles Size 7 Susan Bates

This yarn looks exactly like Elsebath Lavold's Silky Tweed but knits up like twine. I hate how it feels, and I never even NOTICE how yarn feels. Between my time burning my hands on hot glassware in the lab, hot pans in the kitchen, hot metal in the metal shop, or a hot iron when I straighten my hair, I don't have a lot of sensation in my fingertips therefore I'm not as tactile as others. I bought three balls at WEBS once because I was seduced by the color which now reminds me a little bit of vomit.

Anyway my camera is broken so here are some photos from Photobooth, which means in every photo I am looking at my screen and not making eye contact and it looks like I have Aspergers.

Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava.

I'm updating my blog to let everyone know that I have just updated my blog.

My second Odessa (Nodessa) which I knit for my grandmother in 2006 was just backadded.

Nodessa!

I consider myself pretty candid about things I make. However, for my first major sewing project in years I think I'd rather pretend that my first time came out totally awesome and hide all the ways I felt challenged or may have screwed up, which, for the purposes of this entry, are all theoretical. I think that when it comes to first times, it's perfectly okay to not try to be perfect, but that's the only time it's okay. Expect more indiscretion the next time I make this bag, which will probably be once a week until I work my way up to Amy Butler's Weekender Bag, which has been in my future since I saw it on craftoholic.

I haven't been able to do a single thing until I made this bag. I go back to school Monday and owe a boy with size 13 feet a pair of socks and I only have one toe. I did this bag all in one night (as in, all night) and there are some definite "lol"s about it. I used all recovered materials which made it easy to not be precious, but then there were some aesthetic compromises I would not ordinarily have made. Canvas was the "interfacing" and clean parts of soiled pajamas made up the lining on the inside. I paint, therefore I soil clothes and happen to have well over 100 square feet of canvas ready. The outer lining was made up of fabric scraps from some fabric I had bought from reprodepot once. I intended to make a mixed-media project from it but I guess it never materialized. :) I bought the zipper months ago in Boston and I have no idea why. My mom's house is still kind of new to me and I can't find anything (also, she hides things) so I used the straightening iron I use for my hair to iron out the fabric. That part was awesome.

I used my late Great Aunt Dorothy's sewing machine. IT IS ACTUALLY VINTAGE. IT IS FROM THE 1960S. IT REMEMBERS A DIFFERENT TYPE OF BRING OUR TROOPS HOME. I don't know anything else about this mystery machine. My mom supplied me with a Singer manual from 1968 but the machine doesn't say Singer on it anywhere and the model number taxonomy doesn't match the Singer convention. I thought it might be a Pfaff because of the way the knobs are styled, plus the old Pfaffs went crazy with the knobs and this has three. I hate that I'm a total genius and yet even with magic Google I cannot identify this machine. It sucked when trying to figure out the freakin Rube Goldberg device that is threading the needle and I'm still not sure why sometimes I get a zig-zag stitch when all I want is not that. There were a lot of knick knacks that my mom gave me along with the sewing machine and so to get near the zipper I used some foot that was just slimmer than the default but I don't know if it was a zipper foot per se. There's so much I need to learn about this machine it's amazing(ly ill-timed with the start of a new semester).

I had to handstitch a lot at the end because the fabric was too thick and I didn't know to handle it, plus I was cranky. I think handstitching is invaluable anyway, and would not mind improving my hand at stitching. I want to make these bags for everybody and put goodies in them and give them as gifts. Actually, when I was done sewing this one, I thought about putting my sewing notions in it but that reminded me of this joke that either belongs to George Carlin or Rusty Ward about buying a garbage can and carrying it home in a bag, then putting the garbage bag inside the can.

References
Parikha
She was the original and she helped me track down some links after they got moved when she changed her blog!

Drago Knit Fly
The tutorial I actually followed.

Japanese Translation
This is one of the links Parikha used to make her bag...I found it among bookmarks! So prudent!!

Hi! These are socks for my roommate's boyfriend, Zach. According to Ruchi (roommate), Zach has sweaty feet, so either the wool content will absorb the sweat or make him sweat more, and then absorb it.

Pattern Thuja by Bobby Zeigler. Knitty, Winter 2005.
Yarn Knitpicks Essential in Grass. 2 balls.
Needles Susan Bates size 2 circulars.

My initial problem with socks wasn't so much heel flap or turning it, it was picking up the stitches after the fact without getting holes. When I saw the holes I'd rip the whole heel flap back because starting over is how I problem solve. So I have a lot of experience turning a heel which is the only not-boring part of a sock. Anyway, Zach's mom is a knitter and I took this opportunity to try out a few techniques:

1. The Classic Weil Gauge Modification
I knew I wanted to knit socks on 2s, whereas the pattern has the socks knit on 6s (WHO KNITS SOCKS ON 6s???) Hilariously, our gauges only difffered by HALF A STITCH PER INCH which would have me casting on 48 stitches ON TWOS instead of the recomended 44 ON SIXES. I cast on 52 for good luck. The mathematics of pattern adjustments aren't difficult for me because it's just a bunch of proportions which you can set up and solve verbosely.

2. Tubular Cast On
This isn't particularly new to me. I've practiced it a ton of times but I always thought it took too long to do for too little payback. Now that I'm a faster knitter and have sworn off the long-tail, it's worth it.

3. Magic Loop or something like it
I always thought this meant something else and I wish I had my facts straight before I went and did surgery on my too-long size 10 circular needles to make them small enough to accomodate my Foliage. And here I thought I was being so clever! I could have magic looped the shit out of it. Anyway I don't think what I'm doing is exactly magic loop, just kind of beating the yarn into submission around any circumference I desire. So I'm just going to call it CHLOE'S MAGIC LOOP OF TERROR

4. *THICK HEELZ* and *COMFY TOEZ*
I doubled the yarn for the heels and the toes. I just thought it would be more thick and comfy!

5. The stitch-markers-as-abacus method of keeping track of rows
If I had to do something five more times I'd just put five more stitch markers at the end of the round and remove one every time I did it. It worked with 100% more efficiency than writing that information down, because when I have to write anything down I don't, making me 0% efficient at writing things down.

I'm wearing my poms underneath these socks for added bulk to my feet so that I can try these on and photograph them. These socks are knit for a man and I have little dainty girly feet.

Some people are pigeon-toed. Some people think it's cute to be pigeon-toed. And some poeple's feet turn toward 3 o'clock when they walk down stairs when feet generally point to 12 o'clock.

Hello! This is the Banana Republic Hat for my friend Chantal's birthday. Chantal looks gorgeous in green. As I was knitting it I felt like I had fiberglass filaments in my eyes and nose. I'm not allergic to anything so I don't know what's up with that. I would hate for this to make my friend uncomfortable but nobody mentioned anything on Ravelry and people were even making stuffed bears out of this - stuffed bears FOR CHILDREN - so I'm hoping it's just me.

I met Chantal on the first day of our summer-long Organic Chemistry intesive. She was my best friend from the first day to the last. Two weeks after I met her, Berroco announced their fall preview and there was a sweater named Chantal. That's my first Chantal knitting story, and this blog post is my second.

I used the three patterns available and just combined them, kind of like making a baby with three parents. I'm not so happy with the unevenness of my stitches (I was using my mutilated 10s) but nowadays manufacturers make machine-knits look like they have character so it's not an issue.

Pattern The Craftster One
The Robin's Egg Blue Hat
The One That is Available as a PDF
Yarn Berrocco Air in green, from the charitable Cirilia
Needles Size 10 Susan Bates circs
Other Materials A suitable button that I got at BUTTONS.

This is the "From Now On" part of the post.
1. I had to thread the "base" of the hat with some leftover yarn to give it some structure because after blocking it just lost all its shape. I blocked this hat to even up the decrease pattern on top because it always bunches up when I do it and I think from now on I'm going to alternate a row of stockinette in with each decrease row.

2. I think I'm going to abandon the long-tail cast on forever and just go for tubular if there's ribbing involved, or provisional in all other cases. With long-tail either I overestimate by like a kilometer or I underestimate by too many stitches to just increase on the first row. It's stretchy but a bind off just looks so much crisper and I have more control over it. The long-tail cast on is the worst part of knitting next to 1x1 twisted rib but without the "it was worth the effort" sensation. So from now on it's so long to the long-tail!

Pretty decreases that happened all too suddenly.

The yarn it shimmers.

Anyway so I spent some time with my friend Joe "AS SEEN ON LAST COMIC STANDING" DeVito the other night and realized that I am incredibly self-conscious (self-deprecatingly proud) about the knitting thing. Like I say "knitting" and then I feel like I have to mention how I do the AARP crossword every day or how I carry Tums with me everywhere because of my bad heartburn. Recently someone asked me what I was doing at the moment and I actually said "knitting my roommate's boyfriend a sock and missing Jeopardy." For all we know, from that statement my roommate is my roommate in a nursing home and the boyfriend is a man she met after her first husband of fifty years died. But I mean all that stuff (the crosswords, the knitting, but not so much the acid reflux)...that STILL makes me cooler than like Hannah Montana and texting to vote in American Idol and watching movies on my telephone right?

No it's not because I had to think REALLY REALLY HARD to come up with just THREE examples of what people are into today. It's like with every stitch I just go back in time a little bit. Wait, and I'm BLOGGING about this, what the HELL am I talking about???

So, in the most traumatic knitting experience of my life, in May I dilligently knit the two center panels of Eunny Jang's Print O' The Wave Stole in Malabrigo lace. Malabrigo, by the way, is NOT VERY ELASTIC (foreshadowing!). It didn't have a single mistake. In July, I grafted hundreds of stitches to unite the two panels, and upon mock-blocking it upon my bed (stretching it out to see how it looked, you know, to appreciate all my hard work), my inelastic, too-tight sewing job snapped and the thing ripped down the center. I put it in a bag and threw it into the back of a closet. It wasn't until the end of August that I picked out the ripped yarn and unraveled a few rows of each panel and then threw it BACK INTO THE BAG and into the back of an even deeper closet until like, last week.

I didn't like the idea that my only set of size 2 needles were like, BABYSITTING this unfinished object and I didn't like the idea that I bought Malabrigo just to be ashamed of it and keep it in a bag. Even though my feelings were still hurt I tried picking up where I left off, but because the pattern was no longer in my immediate consciousness, because I didn't know how far I ripped back on each panel, because stitches got dropped or bars-that-could-be-yarnovers got picked up instead, but most importantly, BECAUSE I HAVE A BALLWINDER, I decided to unravel the whole thing. Unfortuantely, because Malabrigo is so sticky and it had been inert for about six months, I kind of killed the yarn. In the end I had two not-continuous balls of Malabrigo lace to contemplate THE FUTURE with.

Above is Branching Out, which utilizes the Malabrigo yarn doubled with leftover Knitpicks Shadow from my first Kiri. It seemed that pairing these two yarns is an obvious, if not inadventurous choice as they're both dark blue merino laceweight yarns. But then I got all analytical.

The two yarns are actually quite disparate. The Shadow (right) is not exactly blue, it has a chromatic range from blue to blue-green to a very pronounced violet. The Malabrigo (left), which is solidly blue, has qualities relating to value, as in light and dark, but all the shades are still the same tone of blue. These are all technical things that I relate to painting or drawing, so for those who never took studio art in high school, I made some swatches:

In color, it is easier to see that the Shadow (right) has more of a chromatic variety than the Malabrigo (left). If we were convert these colors to grayscale so we can observe value only, it is easier to see that Malabrigo has a richer tonal scale than the Shadow:

When working these two yarns into the same garment, the result is more successful than I would have imagined, as each yarn makes up for what the other lacks. The Malabrigo provides richness and depth, and the Shadow gives visual interest and variety. On a tactile level, the resulting fabric is spongy and soft. (In fact, my brother is walking around with it around his neck right now flapping the ends in my face and, in a Mick Jagger accent, saying It's so fluffy it's so fluffy. Okay he's gone.) I chose to knit Branching Out because I was horrified to learn that I have been slip-slip-knitting improperly and I wanted a simple project to remind me how to do it right again because it's so fundamental. Branching Out was actually one of the first things I ever knit because I wanted to work on my decreases. I had been slip-slip-knitting improperly then too. It's amazing how many ways there are to be wrong!

Pattern Branching Out By Susan Pierce Lawrence. Knitty, Spring 2005.
Yarn Malabrigo Lace in Marine, Knitpicks Shadow in Jewels. ~ 1 ball each.
Needles Size 7 Susan Bates

Yeah clearly someone needs to enroll in Photography for Non Majors.

Hi you guys how is everybody. I'm feeling much better thank you. This entry has a lot of parentheses (I have a lot of interjections.) My first finished object of the year is (ugh, yes) a Clapotis.

This is not my first or second Clapotis, but it's my first clapotis scarf. I feel like this absolves me somewhat. I only did one repeat of the increase section and intended to knit until I ran out of yarn. Well I have about a fifth of a ball left and this thing is longer than most basketball players are tall. It can be wrapped around the neck no less than twice, which is good because it's so drapey that two neck wraps would provide a nice amount of neck shielding for the intended wearer, Jay's mom. Jay's mom is a native of Quebec province, and since the Clapotis is hella French, I can bring this over on my bicycle, in addition to the baguette I baked, sporting my moustache (which, incidentally, is not me of trying to be French, but an innate property of me being a dark-haired Jew. A tiger can't change its stripes, but I suppose it can have them waxed every six weeks.)

The yarn, a donation from Cirilia, beguiled the HELL out of me. It was wound like Noro is wound, and it looked to me like Silk Garden, however, it was clearly a fingering weight. So it may be Silk Garden Fine or Silk Garden Lite or whatever, which I didn't know was even manufactured because I never heard about it. Nonetheless, it was perfect for this project in the way it draped and the way the colors coexisted with one another (not sure what this property is called). It makes a lovely finished garment.

Knitting it kind of sucked though because about a third of the way into the project I ate some smoked lox with my hands and so for the rest of the project the Clapotis smelled like Nova Scotia.

Pattern Clapotis, by Kate Gilbert. Fall 2004 Knitty.
Yarn Noro Silk Garden Fingering. Maybe. Brooks Farms Acero. Definitely.
Needles Size 7, Susan bates

Did I block it? YEAH I blocked it. I also purled through the back on each side of the dropped stitches for x-tra structure.

Clapotis in three parts.

This is the length.

Double wrap around the neck. Xmas is RIBS!