A Year Later…

A year ago, almost exactly, I started making a pair of thrummed mittens.

I didn’t get very far. There is one rather overstuffed pink thrummed mittens floating somewhere in my spare room. I’m not sure what needle size I was using or where the rest of the yarn went.

I may use that mitten to clean out my freezer.

not the most flattering picture of me.

Escape (Thrummed Mittens)

Pattern- Thrummed Mitten Pattern by Rachel James (on Ravelry)

Yarn- Loupgarou, roving- Phoenix polworth by Top Ply Fibers on Etsy

I stayed pretty close to pattern for this project. I shortened the cuff, since I knit all of my cuffs shorter than normal. I also wasn’t sure how much yardage I had. I never actually skeined up the yarn.

I feel like my thrumms were smaller than intended but the yarn also is greased, so I don’t think that it should be an issue for usage.

6 months- Older Than America

Linked up here (scroll down, please)

Frost

I was all ready to have a progress photo of my new project, along with my feelings on fiber photography via this article I found on Pintrest.

I think that it will suffice to say that I’m not completely won over by the idea that the only ‘good’ fiber photo for a blog or for ravelry is a good fiber photo. If it’s clear and interesting, I feel like it should be good enough- I don’t expect every blogger or raveler to be a photographer, it’s a skill and a talent as much as knitting, blah blah blah.

But then I went to take my carefully framed shot on my knitting project photo chair (there’s a reason all of my projects are taken on the same chair, it’s the only place where they come out even remotely decent) and discovered that not only am I out of batteries, I don’t know where the rechargable ones are.

So it’s all a moot point. And you get a morgue file stock photo.

I have started my first project of 2012. I’m working on the same pattern I used for Snigna, the norwegian star mittens. You know, the ones I keep calling norwegian snowflake mittens. Confession time, I’m using red heart. I have it and I can actually tear out this project unlike Snigna (if you weren’t around for the Snigna fight, read my thoughts on knitting with unspun roving).

I’m using duotoned red and black this time around. I like how the tricolor looks on this one and I saw some interesting variations on tricolor in one of my books and on ravelry but I’m still not all that confident in my colorwork skills.

Snigna!

Not the best finished project photo ever, but Mid took the photo himself to share on facebook.

My last finished object of 2011! I finished them at 745 New Year’s Eve. They took much, much longer than I thought they would take to knit up, otherwise they would have been done in time for Christmas- I would have started them a week earlier.

I wanted to try to knit with unspun roving. I know that once upon a time they sold a yarn called White Buffalo that was essentially a ball of roving that they acted like was some sort of miracle yarn. I had some pencil roving put aside for my faux gradient, but I’m also not picky about what white yarn I use for that.

My thoughts on using pencil roving to knit with:

-gauge was easy. The roving adjusts to the size of the needle almost automatically.

-Obviously, this is a less than durable fiber to knit with. The first mitt is full of places where the roving drifted apart.

-Knitting with it was easier than I expected it to be, regardless of that fact-I was afraid that actually knitting with it would cause the stitches themselves to disintegrate. But that never happened.

-Each mitt has at least one major flaw (one cuff is row too short, and one thumb went on weird) because frankly, I was afraid to try to rip out the roving (I kept hearing strains of that meme, I’m a special snowflake, so delicate and unique…)

I’m not sure why these mitts aren’t knit more often. The colorwork isn’t that bad- and I hate colorwork. In fact, now I want to make stranded mitts for everyone I know. Or at least everyone I can stand talking to for more than 15 minutes at a time.

I will say that there’s a lot of…vagueness to the pattern. For the thumbs, as a starting point, you have to watch the pattern as it knits up- you place markers for the gussets and end up with 9 stitches between the gussets. You place 14 stitches on waste yarn for the thumb. So…where exactly does the other 5 come from? The 5 around the gusset who’s pattern never shifts.

The pattern also comments that the cuff could be knit in two colors. So I did. And thought that striped cuffs on these mitts look dopey (back to that I don’t want to mess with ripping out the roving bit). It then hit me that it meant corrugated ribbing- which creates a more attractive duotoned cuff.

The contrast yarn is Pisces, which I spun up this spring.

(Ravelry project link is here)

(For the record, Snigna is the Slavic god of snow).

mittens and knives

i am almost done with the first newfoundland mitten. i messed up the top shaping  but i’m not going to rip it out. the shaping is fairly easy. i think that the issue is that the shaping is too easy and i didn’t notice that the stitch marker had fallen out last night. i can’t bear the thought of ripping out all of those thrums. i’m not knitting these as a gift, for judging, or as a show of any sort of great knitting prowness so i’m just going to leave them alone. (i come from the school of thought that unless the mistake is going to bother me forever, like a miscrossed cable, or is going to effect the functioning of the garment i’m going to leave it alone).

i have fairly short fingers so i ended up finishing the body of the mitten an inch shorter than the pattern, and once the shaping starts getting really tight i’ll stop with the thrums.

knife edge

there is a subgenre of horror that i sometimes think of as ‘when bad things happen to pretty people.’

this is quite definitely one of those films. the movie follows a very well established, almost trope, formula-high power family decides to move to the country and start anew (there’s even an announcement of a new pregnancy!) and then all hell, almost literally, breaks loose.

the movie relies quite heavily on pre-established tropes and conventions as i’ve already stated. however, the heavy gothic atmosphere isn’t all together overused in modern horror- i’d rather have a turn of the screw style movie than another scream/i know what you did last summer/slasher flick. the movie does brood a lot, but in the end it seems to distract from the overall effect. for me, the characters came across as slightly spoiled (the brother who is upset because his inheritance isn’t large enough, the fashion photographer husband who wears perfect clothes all the time, etc) and the setting is a little too perfect for me to be able to really connect with the film in any meaningful way.

in short, the storyline doesn’t give me a reason to care about all the horrible things that are going on.

lastly, the movie gives you everything you need to know about the storyline in a 5 minute sequence near the beginning of the film, and not even subtly. one of the characters (the stereotypical mysterious nanny) flat out tells you the main plot twist, and the brother gives away the second main twist. however, there are some decent shout outs to classic horror and thriller directors that hickrox does pull off fairly well- there’s a scene straight of the birds and the train scenes are very, very hitchcock as well.

i think that this is a movie where i could have looked past the formula if the characters were slightly more flawed. this film isn’t a sibling to the others, but it’s a fairly close cousin in that it relies on a female main character in a massive house who’s perceiving something, but it’s not what she thinks she’s seeing. the others relies on perfectly pretty people as well, but the difference here is that the others depends on characters who are truly flawed and therefore are relatable, while knife edge relies on a character list that’s perfect even in their flaws and therefore are hard to connect with.

mitten viewing- the lost tales of babylon 5

not a picture of babylon 5

june’s dye theme is nature. it was initially intended to be nature but not animals, but apparently the theme got extended to all nature. either way, i had a couple of skeins of white sparkle woolease that i wanted to play with. it’s hard to get a decent saturation on acrylic blends, but i thought it would be a challenge. i want(ed) to make mittens in a garden theme, with green woolease as main color and then dye up some of the white for some of the contrast colors (the mittens aren’t going to have a flower theme, just the colors). i wanted to make tonal dyed, creamy pastels. i didn’t really make it. these are much more intense than what the picture makes them look and are much more saturated than i was expecting. it’s not a total loss though since they are much brighter than i thought would be possible with a blend that high in acrylic. colors are listed on the koolaide page of this blog.

i grew up watching babylon 5. it was one of my mom’s favorite shows for awhile. my mom would go through phases where she wanted to watch a show, beginning to end. when tnt played highlander reruns we went through a highlander phase (which led to this amazing nostalgia night a couple of months back with one of my friends) and my dog ended up learning the stargate theme song.

the lost tales: voices in the dark was one of the episodes that stuck out the most in my memory. i do remember bits and pieces of other episodes but this episode (movie? it’s unclear to me if it’s an extended episode or a made for tv movie) (apparently it was the pilot for a show that never got off the ground; it was released to dvd on 2007 and JMS refused to do another after the writers strike due to budgeting issues). the arc in question relates to what happens when people of science and technology are forced to make decisions of faith. (and it was released on television on tnt because my parents didn’t buy this disk so i must have seen it on television).

i find the arc satisfying on two levels: first, i just love a good excorsism/faith based horror arc.  as much as i love babylon 5 i don’t really like space operas and i did enjoy the shout out to movies like the omen and the excorsist (why do i feel like i’m not spelling that right?) second, i almost fell off my chair when i realized that the piece was quoting weber and durkheim almost wor for word- fear drives men to religion, because there is no way of proving that the threats of punishment during the afterlife aren’t true. therefore, we use religion to shape our actions to ensure that we are good people so we gain our reward and society is a better place for it. and yes, we do find comfort in the rites and passages of religious thought.

as it turns out Straczynski actually does hold a BA in sociology so there’s no great surprise that his religious discussion, of which this is only one of several in the series, is handled with a greater depth of analysis than normal. and even without allowing me to get overly excited at hearing social theory in sci fi–which i do intend to use to teach religious theory if i ever get that far–it’s just an enjoyable arc all the way around. Straczynski was unhappy with his effects budget and it does show, but it’s not enough to really distract away from this particular story arc.

the entire arc is on youtube, and the dvd is still in circulation i believe. if not, it’s probably available from places like half.com.

 

(i did finish spinning sunset/level 1. it came out at 104 yards at 14 wpi pre wash but i’m expecting it to bloom).

 

newfoundland thrummed mittens

i was saying at knitcore today that i’ve become mildly obsessed with the idea of knitting mittens.

i’m not sure why i’m so hung up on mitten knitting in the beginning of june, other than the fact that i went all of last winter with my hands shoved in my pockets thinking that i should really knit myself more mittens. mid was even worse, at least i owned mittens. somewhere. he didn’t have any, period.

we took another load of stuff out of his grandmother’s house last week and in a box of random knitting stuff i found the rest of the ostara roving that i got a couple of years back. the color’s really nice (it’s pink and purple and a clear teal) but the roving was compacted when i bought it and the passage of time hasn’t helped it any. so i apparently had shoved it in a bag in disgust and shoved it out of my sight. i threw it in the freezer last week and figured i would card it and see what happened.

i went to rescue the rest of my stash tonight and found 3 skeins of pink cascade 220 superwash that was no worse for wear, so i cast on a pair of newfoundland thrummed mittens using the roving for the thrums.

things i’ve modified (or noticed) about the pattern so far:

i’ve always knit shorter than suggested cuffs on mittens, so i shortened the cuffs down to 2 inches.

somewhere along the way, my second row of thrums shifted so that some of them are the offset specks they should be and some of them line up over the first row of thrums. this is a dry run on thrumming so i don’t really care, and if people are staring at my mittens that much they need to find a more interesting hobby. if i was entering these into a show or giving them as a gift then i would be much more concerned.

the thrums. make sure that you make relatively short thrums. i was sort of hapzard with my first row of thrums, making them way too long and way too thick than required, and now i may end up having to trim them (i started a thread on ravelry about it, and the response i’ve gotten so far has been either of course you can trim them, or, why would you trim a thrum?). it may be fine once i have somewhere to put the thrums other than into the cuff.

i don’t really care for the colors, they’re really girlish to me. but i’m using stash and they’ll still be warm.

Pisces

pisces

just under 75 yards of unmarked wool that i got from a swap. i spun stripes until i ran out of the first color (the green) and the chained plied it. this was my first attemt at a heavier yarn- and i got it. i weighted a spindle with a washer and then drafted out more fiber than i normally do. i normally average around 16 to 20 wpi and this one came in at 13 to 14.

i need 110 yards of colored wool for a small colorwork project that i want to work on, and i have the teal and blue rovings left that i’ll spin and chain ply by themselves. that should get me the rest of the yarn.

75 yards at just under 1.5 oz (yay i bought a cheap kitchen scale today!)

290/500 june total

75/110 project total