Today's sweater, take 2

Subtitle to post: Yes Gertrude, gauge does matter.



What you see above is my Today's Sweater for P3, so-called because I cast on the day of the Today's Sweater presentation. I dutifully knit my way through half of the colorwork chart for the bottom hem before I got home, and was very pleased with how things were turning out.

But when I got home, I put the sweater down for  a few days, and when I picked it up again, I began to have the sneaking suspicion that all was not well in River City. I knit a few more rows, all the while knowing, without a doubt, that I was going to have to rip out the entire thing and start over again.

Why was I going to have to rip out? I hear you asking. Well, dear readers, the answer is: swatches lie.

Now, perhaps they don't lie if you do a proper swatch, aka cast on 40 stitches, work in pattern for 6 inches and cast off, block the swatch, and then allow it to hang from one side for a few days so that the weight of the piece can work whatever voo doo it will do on your knitting. However, if, in a fit of wool fever, you knit a swatch that is approximately 2 inches by 3 inches while on the train to a knitting retreat, then block it by hastily wetting in from a bottle of water in a deserted Welsh train station while waiting for your connection and then have a complete and utter brain fart regarding the actual required gauge of the pattern of interest (note: 6 stitches per inch is in no way the same as 6.5 stitches per inch, just for the record), you may have problems such as the one I encountered.

My supposed-to-be 42 inch sweater was actually closer to 48 inches around, giving me approximately 8 inches of ease. And even for a comfy, oversized sweater that is destined to be worn as outerwear, 8 inches of ease is too much. Waaaay to much. So, with much muttered obscenity and a few tears, my 4 inches of Today's Sweater became piles of loose yarn, and I retreated to the comfort of Open Office spreadsheets to figure out what to do. I'm already knitting on US 2 needles, and I have absolutely no desire to go down a needle size, so I plugged in my gauge and the stitch counts, and have figured out that I can knit the next size down and get something that will fit. Hooray!

You may also notice that I've changed from a ribbed bottom edge to garter stitch. It just seemed better that way. Onward to rustic wooly goodness!

Leaf Peeper Cowl

Some of you may know this already (ha-bloody-ha!), but I really, really like knitting with handspun yarn. I mean really, really like it. If given my druthers, I'd probably never knit with commercial yarn again. So it seems only reasonable that I might start designing some patterns for handspun yarn, right?



Meet the Leaf Peeper Cowl (attractive posed amongst the dead ferns in Richmond Park). Knit from side to side out of just under 100 yds/92 m of bulky weight handspun yarn for a cowl that is about 18 inches in circumference unstretched. If you want a longer cowl, simply keep going until it's the desired size. When it's long enough, graft the ends together and voila! Instant neck cuddles.

The sample was knit out of 3-ply BFL from my shop, in the Leaf Peepers colorway. The fiber was split into three equal lengths before spinning, and then two of the pieces were split further lengthwise. Final yarn was 95 yds/3.5 oz, or approximately 450 ypp.

This is the perfect quick cowl for holiday presents - I think mine took me a couple of nights to whip up, and the stitch pattern, while it may look complicated, is pretty easy to follow once you get going.

Pattern can be found on Ravelry in my store, or you can get it here for $5.00.

Leaf Peeper Cowl

I've designed a little cowl with some of the Leaf Peepers BFL I spun up this summer.

If you are on Ravelry, you can purchase the pattern here, or buy now

Happy spinning (and knitting!),

Rachel

Lemme explain...no, no, is too much, lemme sum up.

Well. When last we spoke, I had just taken delivery of a copious amount of fiber and was preparing to abandon ship for the wildness of Pembrokeshire for the weekend. Having now come out the other side, I have many things to say.

I started my day here, which seemed to be appropriate in the sense that I was embarking on an unknown voyage...sadly, I had no marmelade in my luggage for sustenance.


My train was filled with a disturbing number of men in kilts who were really interested in starting the day with a beer at 10:30 am.

I chose a capuccino...I think I missed a memo or something.

I started a hat, thinking that I would manage to finish it well before the end of the weekend.

I was wrong (although it did get finished in the end!). The kilts seemed to clear off at Cardiff Central, and I continued westward. Next stop Swansea,

and then Whitland, where mostly everyone else had stopped and gotten picked up for the hotel.

Sadly, the necessity of my getting kids to school meant that I arrived last, and had to continue onward on my own to the train station with a taxi rank.

(hello blurry cell phone photo out of the window of a moving car)

There seems to be a generalized assumption that knitters are really just very nice people. Sort of like Minnesotans or Canadians... Nothing I experienced this past weekend at Plug and Play Pembrokeshire (P3) 2012 would argue with that assumption. I have to admit to a bit of trepidation as my cab pulled up to the hotel on Friday afternoon*, particularly as I was about to meet two people who have (unbeknownst to them) played a large role in my knitting life/obsession over the past seven years. However, I walked in just as tea and biscuits were arriving, and was warmly welcomed into the fold. And once I got over the fact that I was listening to Brenda Dayne's voice come out of an actual person instead of from my iPod, the weekend swept me up and away for the next three days.

For the summing up: there was yarn. Lots and lots of yarn. Lots of gorgeous beyond belief yarn.



There was gorgeous, glorious scenery, which I completely failed to photograph because I'm an asshole. Then there were the classes. Classes on shawl design, on top-down raglans, on how to fit small blocks of stitch patterns onto variously shaped canveses. Classes on embracing randomness in your knitting**, classes on knitting with unspun roving pulled from silk hankies. Class after class after class...

There were overwhelming amounts of really good food. And beer. And cider. And (apparantly) Scotch. There were people from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Canadia, the US, and from as far away as New Zealand (I think). There were 29 women and one very, very brave man ("There's always one man..."). There was a completely delicious three month old baby. There were Today's Sweater stories that made me laugh so hard I cried. There was a double barreled ukelele singalong before twenty five people in their PJs gathered around the telly in the hotel pub to knit while watching yelling at Downton Abbey***.

All in all, I'd have to say that the weekend was made of win in every possible way. I'm thrilled to have met so many truly wonderful people. It was amazing to have three days to myself to basically sit around and knit the entire time****. It's taken me a couple of days to come back from that mindset, and it's been rough: the ability to hang out with a group of people who are all interested in the thing that you are interested in and have really cool ideas and projects and plans and suchlike is intoxicating. Strangely enough, my family does not seem to be as enthralled by a debate on the proper kind of increase to use in a top-down triangular shawl or how to keep even tension while grafting. Wierdos...

If anyone reading this evey has a chance to go to West Wales to hang out with Amy and Brenda (and presumably a hotel-full of other amazing fibery people), you should absolutely positively go. It was absolutely fantastic, and I can't wait to go back next year!

* Derek, my cab driver from the train station in Haverfordwest, was vehement in his belief that this whole "knitting retreat weekend" was a cover up for something much more diabolical. I told him we were actually planning on taking over the world. He thought I was kidding.

** My inner scientist is still curled up in a ball in the corner whimpering from that one...

*** The bartender was so far out of his element as to perhaps be the proverbial Anthropologist on Mars.

**** I may or may not have arrived home depleted of any urge to knit one more row.

Jackpot!

On Wednesday, I spent most of the morning waiting for the dishwasher repair man - the extremely helpful time slot they gave me was 7:00 am - 3:00 pm. Once he arrived, deduced the fact that the motor on the dishwasher is broken, and managed to rebook an appointment to fix it for a week and a half from now (making it three weeks I will have been washing dishes by hand - grrrr....), I had pretty much written off the rest of the day as a complete loss.

Royal Mail to the rescue! (And belive me, those are not words that I every thought I'd say!) Not 5 minutes after he left, the doorbell rang - there were two big squooshy packages for me.

Package number 1:

What's inside?

Some undyed fiber from The Wool Gathering: 100 grams of lovely, soft, white Suffolk.

And a kilo of Romney - I have been searching for UK-sourced Romney for months, and am so thrilled to have finally found some! I love the bags the fiber is packed in too: I think I will be ordering from them again, maybe some of their British alpaca...

Package number 2: I must first preface this by saying that I always miss Adrian's updates. But on two occasions now, I've gotten lucky and happened to be over at her site when there were Fiber Club extras on sale. A couple weeks ago I fell off the metaphorical wagon in a major way, and ended up with this arriving at my door.

The September fiber club, Critter on Falkland (yum!),

And another 1.5 lb of fiber: 3 bags of Splendid Romney and 3 bags of Silt Portuguese Merino.



Swoon-tastic. Now my dilemma is how to combine them. I was originally going to spin up the Splendid by itself and knit myself another Romney sweater, but looking at the two of them together makes me think that maybe they want to make little yarn babies?


The other possibility is pairing Silt with my two bags of Minerals Shetland (and who knows what else might jump into the mix? There's a lot of Hello Yarn-dyed fiber in my attic....) and knitting a swoopy wrappy cardigan type thing. Or a Larch like Caro's. Or a Spoked Cardigan like Rose's. So many sweaters, so little time...guess I'd better start spinning!

Sadly, sweater-lot spinning will have to wait until after this weekend, because by the time this posts, I will be happily ensconced BY MYSELF on a train on my way to West Wales for Plug-and-Play Pembrokeshire, round deux. Expect much yarn/swatch/knitters-being-wacky evidence next week. Cheers!