I had a revelation the other day, one that probably isn’t quite a revelation to a lot of people but then my keen sense of the obvious does escape me now and again.

I always knew that “white” wool could be dyed at home but it just never occurred to me to try dying “brown” wool. Inspired by the great colour chart and even better directions on this website, I had a go at it today.

The wool in my plan was a skein of sport-weight handspun I’d bought at the Highland Games held in Woodland earlier this year:

Just add water (and some vinegar and four packets of Berry Blue Kool-Aid):

After a trip through the microwave, I ended up with a skein of beautiful blue-green wool!

This is a colour I’ll enjoy a lot more; I can’t wait to knit with it!

This pattern combines the ease of the seamless yoked sweater, a traditional netting stitch, and cool cotton to create a beach or pool-side wardrobe must. Cabana is knit bottom up in one piece with a single eyelet row at the neck through which you can thread a pretty ribbon or even a length of I-cord if you wish.

Note: The pattern for Cabana contains two sets of directions; one for sizes XS through L and one for sizes L through 3X.

Sizes
XS (S, M, L)

Finished Size
Bust: 35″ (40″, 44″, 49″)
To fit bust: 30″ (34″, 38″, 42″)

Yarn
Patons Grace (100% mercerized cotton; 50g = approx. 125m/136 yards); Colour: natural: 4 (4, 4, 5) balls

Sizes
L (1X, 2X, 3X)
Finished Size
Bust: 49″ (54″, 58″, 63″)
To fit bust: 42″ (46″, 50″, 54″)
Yarn
Patons Grace (100% mercerized cotton; 50g = approx. 125m/136 yards); Colour: natural: 5 (5, 6, 6) balls

Needles and Other Supplies
“    32″ circular needle in size US 6
“    Stitch markers
“    Tapestry needle
“    Satin ribbon

Gauge
12 stitches = 4 inches or 3st/in. in Cat’s Eye Netting stitch.

$2.00

Casting On for the Armhole

Cabana uses a slightly novel cast on for the armhole section. If you’re having trouble visualising it, here is a little photo essay that might help…

First you bind off the stitches. The working yarn is on the right-hand needle:

Transfer the last stitch on the RH needle to the LH needle. Knit on 1 stitch. Cable cast on specified number of stitches.

The work now looks like this:

Knit across the new stitches.

The new stitches are not joined to the original body stitches until the next row, when you just work across them.

Now that it’s all over, I feel safe in blogging about my Christmas knitting this year. Of course, I completely forgot to take photos of things but links to the patterns would still be nice to share, don’t you think?

The Spouse’s knitted gift was a big-ass afghan, knitted from Plymouth Encore. I used ten balls of wool but no pattern per se; it’s just a big rectangle knit in my thatched bamboo stitch and with a garter stitch border.

That was the only family knitted gift of the year as I felt like I bombarded them with knitwear throughout the year. Besides, it’s hard to knit a Glee DVD…

For friends, I knit up two Mineco market bags (Rav link) using KnitPick’s CotLin. For the one of those two recipients who uses dishcloths in her kitchen, I also knit two dishcloths in a nice reversible stitch, the name of which completely escapes me (if I ever knew it to begin with!). It’s k1, p1 across and then knit back.

This was the first time I’d used CotLin and I really liked it. Very easy to work with and it looks fantastic. The leftovers of all that cotton blend will be knit into facecloths which will then be tucked away with some handmade soaps. I reckon they’d make fantastic “emergency” gifts.

One other (female) friend received a pair of socks and a fourth received a Wavy Orange Scarf (Rav link or web link) and a matching Calorimetry (Rav link or web link).

The three male friends I knit for each received A Hat Fit for a Boyfriend (Rav link or web link). These were great to knit up using leftover worsted weight yarns held double with leftover sock yarns. Quick quick quick! (And apparently desirable too as the Spouse has specifically requested one for himself!)

Now that I see the list all written out, I’m wondering why it took me so long to knit all of that! I started in August with the afghan and finished at the end of November. I guess I did knit other things at the same time…socks, a lace shawl, slippers, a cardigan.

Next year, I’ll take pictures…

This story has its roots in my early knitting days–those crisp autumn days of yore (AKA last year). My very first knitting project was, not surprisingly, a scarf. Even less surprising was the fact that I didn’t like the pattern and so just did my own thing. For my second project, I made a felted handbag. It didn’t matter to me that I’d never knitted anything in the round or that I’d hadn’t needed to increase or decrease stitches while making that first scarf. I figured if I could read the pattern, I could knit the pattern. Turns out, I was right and I soon found myself the proud owner of a lovely little felted handbag.

Over the next few months, I would occasionally ask the Spouse if he’d like me to knit him anything. He always said no until one day when he told me that he’d like a pair of slippers. Fantastic!

I bustled myself off to the yarn shop and, after taking some advice from the shop owners, I purchased a pattern and yarn for a pair of mens’ slippers. They knit up quickly and soon the Spouse’s tootsies were snug in them:

The Spouse was grateful for the slippers but, apparently, they weren’t quite what he had had in mind. You see, he’d seen my lovely little felted handbag and had been coveting felted slippers.

No problem! Now I knew what to make him for Christmas!

I worked on those slippers in quiet moments, confident that he wouldn’t recognise what they were while they were on the needles. When they were all finished, I tied them into a pillowcase and tossed them in the washer. Wheeee! another Christmas prezzie out of the way and not a day too soon…Christmas was just days away!

They look sort of normal, don’t they?

Well, they’re not. His special-for-him-felted-slippers-prezzie turned out to be the most misshapen, distorted freakazoid footwear imaginable. I immediately ran out to the nearest shopping mall and picked through all the mens’ slippers I could locate, searching for his size. (Just imagine how many dads and granddads get slippers for Christmas and just how many of those dads and granddads have average-sized feet and you get some sense of how arduous the task of locating slippers three days before Christmas really was!)

The Spawn and I decided to wrap up FrankenFeet anyway…you know, as a gag gift.

How much of a gag? Well, here they are with my foot alongside for scale:

As it turned out, the Spouse figured out that if he wore his ribby slippers INSIDE the FrankenFeet slippers, they kept his feet toasty and weren’t too too ginormous. (You can see the ribby slippers inside the FrankenFeet).

As for me, well, those slippers put me off felting entirely and I have studiously ignored anything felted, no matter how cute, ever since.

Right up until a couple of weeks ago when the Spouse broached the subject of slippers…

Remarkably and inexplicably, he asked if I could make him a new pair of felted slippers.  (I can’t imagine why he didn’t want to keep wearing FrankenFeet!) He had faith in me and my abilities and was confident that I could make him another pair, one that would fit.

I tell you what…he had more faith in me than I did but, I set my fears and trepidation aside and embarked on another pair of felted slippers. This time, I didn’t need no steenking pattern. I’d just make a pair of big ass socks and felt the hell out of them. I’d swatch and measure and felt and do everything to make sure that these felted slippers were the felted slippers of his dreams. I wouldn’t disappoint him again!

And so, that’s what I did. I knit a swatch, pinned it out, and measured it like I’d never measured a swatch before. I wrote notes on number of stitches, number of rows, width, length…you name, I measured it. Then came time to felt it. I knew I had to run a load through the washing machine on HOT that contained nothing but that swatch and an old pair of jeans.

This was perhaps the hardest part for me, namely because I’m cheap. Really cheap. The thought of running a HOT load in the washer makes me break out in a cold sweat. The thought of running a hot load in the washer for a single swatch practically rendered me unconscious. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of any other way to achieve the felting needed nor could I think of any way I might mitigate the costs of that one small load of hot water. I couldn’t combine it with any of my laundry as nothing I own has ever been washed in hot water. What if it shrank?! Then where would I be? (Out buying new clothes, that’s where. And that brings up a whole ‘nuther set of issues for me…like why doesn’t a pair of name jeans cost $12 any more?)

So I gritted my teeth, girded my loins, and set the water temperature to hot.

Once the swatch was felted, I took more measurements and not just of the swatch. I measured the Spouse’s feet from every angle I could imagine might come into play. Then I broke out the calculator…I needed to calculate just how big these big ass socks needed to be.

And then I knit.

After one BA sock was finished, the Spouse looked like his faith in me was wavering.

“Is that smaller than the last pair you made?”

Well, not really but I wasn’t going to tell him that. I pointed out that the first pair had been knit on bigger needles: 11s whereas these ones were knit on 10.5s. And the first pair had been knit double-stranded which I’m sure had some effect on how they felted. Maybe. I think.

“Maybe you should felt that one before starting on the next one. You know…just in case.”

Good idea!

My internal struggle with the water temperature was more quickly resolved this time around and, in no time, I had one felted slipper to show the Spouse:

It’s very hard to tell scale when it’s just sitting there on its own, isn’t it? Here’s a photo of the normal felted slipper alongside one of the FrankenFeet:

I am redeemed!

(And as soon as I get the other big ass sock finished, the Spouse will have a pair of normal felted slippers!)

Or what the well-dressed whippet will be wearing this winter!

Some of you know that I taught myself to knit last summer and have been busy over the past year, knitting up a storm. Most of you know that I have a problem with authority so it should come as no surprise that I don’t really like knitting patterns as they are written (”Don’t tell me what to do, dammit!”). So I find myself knitting a lot of “custom” items…things that I just knit with no pattern.

I’m still working on different dog sweater designs, in the hopes that I can come up with the perfect cardigan for Streaka, Queen of the Gimps. As Streaka does have a pullover and all of the others’ sweaters and jackets reek of skunk (remember the Great Skunk War of January 2009?), I decided to try making Rogie a sweater as a prototype. That way he’d get a skunk-free sweater and, if it worked out, I could knit another one for Streaka.

And so I got some cheap blue yarn and started knitting Rogie’s sweater. Since he is my Roges and I do like to spoil him, I decided to knit him a special sweater…one with cables and seed stitch and stocking stitch and reverse stocking stitch. I’d give it an asymmetric closure, just like the ganseys from the Breton coast of France. He’d look like a little fisherman.

I worked on that sweater through the heat of the summer, picturing Rogie wearing it out on the North Sea. He’d have his feet firmly planted on the gunwhales of his fishing boat and a Gauloise clenched in his teeth. Maybe I could knit him a little matching beret and he could talk with a French accent.

I was so excited about that sweater.

Finally the day came when I could put it on the Little Dude and see how it looked. It fit like a glove…like it had been made for him!

But what’s this? Where’s his penis?

I poked and prodded. Oh, there it is! It was tucked up inside the sweater…

Yes, Rogie’s beautiful blue gansey would be a beautiful blue diaper if he ever wore it. I’d forgotten to take into account “that certain part of the male anatomy” when measuring the chest piece for the sweater.

Even though it had been made especially for Rogie, I decided to try it on the beautiful (and penis-free) Streaka. Maybe she could wear it and pretend she was Joan of Arc or something. (I’d just have to keep her away from the fireplace because, after all, I’d knit the sweater out of acrylic and we all know that acrylic and the auto-de-fe don’t mix!)

Alas, Rogie is built quite differently from Streaka and so the sweater doesn’t really fit her that well. It’s a bit too short in length but too big in the chest. I suppose she could wear it in a pinch but it’s been my experience that, if you put a slightly too large sweater on a whippet, you usually end up with that sweater lying in a heap somewhere in the garden.

Damn that penis!

This past weekend was the National Alpaca Ranch Tour Fiesta and Bake Sale weekend…

Okay, it was really just the local ranch tour event put on by the Alpaca Gold Association but it was part of a larger, national sort of thing. At any rate, friend Marge (she who “inherited” two llamas when she bought her new house) wanted to investigate alpaca housing options and I went along for the ride (and fiber purchasing opportunities).

From the thirteen local alpaca ranches participating in the ranch tour event, we made a short list of three ranches to visit. Criteria for making the short list included geographical proximity to one another (in other words, we weren’t going to drive to hell and gone) and the availability of “products” (i.e., YARN!).

Our first stop was at  A Star Alpacas. Really, they should be called “Five Star” or something as it was like the Ritz-Carlton of alpaca accommodation. Perhaps it had had a previous life as a horse ranch … the alpacas were housed in lovely stables with an “Alpaca Motel” sign on the side. Not too practical for Marge’s needs but the fiber shop was great…lots and lots of alpaca and alpaca blend yarns in beautiful colours. People were also on hand giving spinning demonstrations:

Next up was the Opus Two ranch. Marge is signed up for an introductory alpaca husbandry course here later in the fall so it gave her a chance to meet the rancher, Joan, and to have a bit of a chat with her.

As for the rest of us, we got to learn some stuff about alpacas (like they each have unique hairstyles and they rarely need haircuts!) and, of course, oooh and aaah over their cuteness.

Check out his ‘do!

Like all the ranches we visited, Opus Two has guard llamas:

(The big white one is the llama.)

Alpaca housing at Opus Two consists of two-sided shelters oriented to block “weather”. Another fiber shop, where I was talked into buying the Spawn a knitted beret but no yarn purchases for me.

No pictures from the third ranch visited, Fairwinds, but it was here that we got tons of information on alpacas and their needs. These ranchers were fantastic (even though we showed up with less than ten minutes to spare in the “open house” hours) and willing to share all sorts of tidbits with Marge.

They had a small selection of yarn, all in natural colours, and I picked out two skeins for a pair of mittens. Alas, they weren’t set up to take cards, I didn’t bring my purse (and therefore no cheque book), and between the Spawn and the Spouse, I wasn’t able to rustle up the necessary amount of cash.

I did however take some information on the Alpaca Holiday Boutique and I will have that yarn some day!

Last month, I had it in my head that I MUST KNIT LACE. I tried charting up a design but didn’t do anything about it. Then, as luck would have it, my local yarn shop (Babetta’s Yarn Cafe) advertised a lace knitting class!

One of my book club buds and I signed up for it and, on August 4th, I cast on my first ever lace shawl. I opted to go with Jatta Saukko’s Zetor shawl. I wasn’t so concerned with the actual lace pattern but was really eager to learn the construction techniques behind triangular shawl.

(It still amazes me that you can start off with TWO stitches and end up with a beautiful garment!)

Thanks to our intrepid instructor, Gustine, we learned how to do a provisional cast on WITHOUT the use of crochet (v. good as I don’t know how to crochet!) and, after that first class, I was off and running.

I finished up the shawl last night and blocked it this morning.

Isn’t it purty?

I’m still very excited about lace possibilities. What to make next?

Pattern is from JL Yarnworks; my modifications are listed on my Ravelry project page (Rav link).

(Note: a PDF version of this pattern is also available.)

Finished Size

To fit a woman’s medium foot

Materials

v 1 skein Knit One Crochet Too Soxx Appeal, 50g/190m (See note!)

v Set of 5 US 1/2.25mm double-pointed needles

v Set of US 2/2.75mm double-pointed needles

v Tapestry needle

Gauge

16 stitches and 23 rows = 2 inches in thatched bamboo stitch before blocking

Notes

v I highly recommend trying these socks on as you go, especially if you are not used to knitting with elasticized yarn. It took me several goes at the pattern before feeling comfortable with my tension.

v Stitches should be increased in increments of 4 if adjustments are needed in order to get a well-fitting sock.

v After finishing the pair, I had about five yards of yarn left over. If you think your foot or ankle is larger than a woman’s size 8-8.5 with a medium width, you might like to buy two skeins of yarn. As they say, better safe than sorry!

Abbreviations

CO cast on
K knit
k2tog knit two stitches together as one
P purl

RHN right-hand needle
Sl slip stitch
SSK slip 1 stitch knit-wise, slip next stitch purl-wise, knit the two stitches together through the back loop
YO yarn over
* starting point of repeat

Stitch Guide

Thatched Bamboo

Eye of Partridge Stitch

Gusset Decrease

Toe Decrease

Instructions

Using larger needles, CO 48 stitches and join in round, being careful not to twist. Distribute stitches evenly between needles.

Cuff

Switch to smaller needles as you begin cuff stitches. Work in k1-p1 rib for 1 inch.

Leg

There is no leg! But you will need to divide for the heel flap by placing 24 stitches on each of two needles.

Heel Flap

Work in Eye of Partridge stitch for 24 rows.

Turn Heel

Row 1 Sl1, p12, p2tog, p1, turn.
Row 2 Sl1, k4, k2tog, k1, turn.
Row 3 Purl to first st before gap formed on previous row, p2tog, p1, turn. Row 4 Knit to first st before gap formed on previous row, k2tog, k1, turn.
Repeat rows 3 and 4 until all stitches have been worked. Fourteen stitches remain on your needle.

Gusset

Using a new needle, pick up and knit stitches along edge of gusset. Knit across instep needle in pattern. Using another new needle, pick up and knit stitches along other edge of gusset. Knit across half of the remaining heel stitches. Transfer remaining stitches to the first gusset needle; you now have three needles.

Begin your gusset decrease rounds; continue to decrease until 48 st remain (24 on instep needle and 12 each on needles 1 & 3).

Foot

Ndl 1: knit in stocking stitch; Ndl 2: knit in pattern; Ndl 3: knit in stocking stitch. Continue in this manner until you reach your desired foot length less 1 inch, ending with Row 4 of the Thatched Bamboo stitch pattern. (Note: this is where you’ll want to try on the sock for size; elasticized yarn can be very stretchy!)

Toe

Divide instep stitches onto two needles.

Knit two rounds even. Work one toe dec round every other row until 32 st remain.

Work toe dec rnd every row for three more rounds (20 st rem).

Knit across Ndl 1 with Ndl 4. Combine stitches on Ndls 2 & 3 onto a single ndl (10 st on each of two needles).

Finishing

Graft st together using Kitchener stitch. (Tip: Knitting Daily’s Sandi Wisehart has a fantastic blog post for those who hate the Kitchener stitch!)

Weave in ends and block.

Finally, I finished it!

Pattern can be found here: Waves of Grain