zipper shut

Sylivi is finished !!!! I'm so happy

I sewed in a zipper with the help of some lovely tutorials I found on the net, like the one of the talented Grumperina, who also links to Claudia and her great zipper how to. You may also find the tutorial of knitpics very helpful, they have a pdf.

cough'n'sneeze

so I'm ill and in bed. No knitting but a little crocheting.
I made one more of my "little animals". It started as a fox and now I have something that is going to be a mouse, I think there will be one or two other little animals as well, like a monkey or a giraffe.


to talk a little about Sylvi, I'm about to start neckline shaping at the fronts, but the numbers make my head blur at the moment, also I think I will need to add some rows and also decreases at the arms and back, because the pattern is written for a hood and I want to go with a tighter ribbed collar.


oh, and I made cookies two days ago:


I call them cristmas pillows, they were inspired by the vampire cookies from baking bites. I used the dough, only with 1/2 cup more flour. The filling is a ganache made from cream and the double amount of chocolate with roasted and chopped almonds and cinnamon and coriander.

put all remaining sts on holder

I finished the back of my Sylvi! and already started the fronts =)


yesterday I also sew a nose to a little new amigurumi I started on the train to Hannover: a fox, isn't it adorable? still blind and no legs but sniffing it looks cute!



and I have holidays!!!, four full weeks filled with nothing else but knitting, crocheting, cooking and eating and sleeping late. It's also winter and I could tell that even clearer after I read some of the blogs I subscribed to. Snowflakes everywhere!

I also made one - a virtual one. (while waiting for the dye process to finish on my hair)

snowdays is a cool site to create greating cards with a selfmade snowflake on it.

This is mine:


If you want to put it to paper it's also a good way of testing your cuts before making them / before it's too late. (btw. instructables posted a nice tutorial on paper snowflakes)

gauging Sylvi cardigan

Just a quick note if you like the idea of a Sylvi cardigan just as much as I do. I noticed this while knitting and am very happy that my gauge is off and I didn't try too hard to get gauge.
I'm not completely done with the back yet but since the main pattern is the back and I realized this I feel I should keep this in mind and note somewhere.

It's a really good idea to have more stitches per inch than the original pattern calls for (a cardigan normally isn't as wide as a coat). The pattern calls for 12 sts / 10 cm and I have 14. I needed to make changes to the pattern (like starting the bobbles for the flowers two rows earlier) to keep them from hiding themselves within the sideseams. And now having made some more rows I find that next time I knit this I would try for 16 sts per 10 cm. Just to have more scope for the flowers and leaves.

expedition hamburg

spent the day on the hamburg christmas market, very nice, I had an awesome apple punch, with cinnamon and cream and caramel topping

but now it's picture time:





I also wanted to show you the progress on the back of Sylvi, I followed the pattern for the first 20 rows and added decreases at both sides of the main pattern to have a waist shaping, then I followed for some more rows and started to increase again ignoring the decreases of the pattern, and knitting front and back directly left and right to the leafy section, sometimes before, sometimes after the bordering purl stitch. Now I'm about to start the arm decreases. The first flower is two rows lower than the original pattern, otherwise it wouldn't have fitted onto the jacket any longer and the bubbles would have been directly on the side seam. Now the flower is directly at the waist and I think two of the petals will be sewn 'around' to the front.


In Hamburg we first went to the Hamburger Wollfarbik, I was about to get my birthday present there: 250gramm of the finest 2ply 100% merino lace yarn, see the gorgious color?




edit to say that the lovely blue yarn will turn into the South Seas Stole by Laura Patterson (ravelry link)
and to share this fantastic hamburg christmas market Santa Frog:

calculating

I've finished the sleeves and started the back, whoop whoop!

but to get there needed some math. I wanted to stick to the original shaping of the armholes for the sleeves and also for the back, the only problem: gauge.
My gauge is off and so I needed to calculate everything up to my gauge, so seven sts BO under the arms turned into eight sts in my version. The "real" hard nut to crack was the raglan decreases. I never made raglan before so I didn't had any experience to profit from, and the fact that the pattern calls for decreases every second row for so and so many times and every other row for x number of stitches made me worry. Until I realized that in my gauge, thanks to my enormous row gauge, I could simply decrease two stitches (one left one right) every third row. Nothing more nothing less.

Also thanks to my "enormous" row gauge I can use most of the orignal pattern for the back. I can start with the pattern as it starts, only I'm mirroring rows 1 to 60. I will continue with row 103 and knit until the end. The 'pattern crossing' needed little manipulations for a leaf and one cable was eliminated. The drawn pattern looks pretty. I can't wait to see it knitted.


BTW: my gauge is 14 sts and 22 rows per 4 inches, so my cardigan should have a final lenght of nearly 50 cm.

colorful

I don't think to show you some more 60 rows of seed stitch on sleeves are very interesting so I'll share some photoshop trials I made when I needed to decide on a color for my second try on Sylvi:

when you click on the image it'll be huge

btw. I'm ten rows away from starting the raglan shaping of the armholes

musketeer sleeves

I don't really know what to post about since I found knitting in the round pretty non-spectacular lately and making sleeves is knitting in the round. But nevertheless I made some nice progress: started the sleeves with my new green yarn and it feels absolulty gorgeous, but it's knitting not so nice, the yarn is not plied so it's more or less like holding 12 strands of yarn together, but it works out pretty nice, it slows me down but knitted it looks beautiful.


So what did I do this time? I changed from 2*2 ribbing to 1*1 ribbing on the new yarn, I think it matches better with the seed stitch. Also I changed needle size to 7mm needles to get close to gauge. And, maybe the most important thing, I increased to the full width fo the sleeve right at the beginning. This way I could do all the increases within the ribbing and not within the seed stitch (I found it looks weird, maybe because of the biiiig stitches, but I don't really know). So now I have these musketeer-like sleeves, you know tight cuff and wide sleeve. I also made some rows of seed stitch before I added a leave motif, this way it will show off at the back of the sleeve and won't hide itself in the bending of the beginning of the sleeve. The leave motif is one I found on the hood of the pattern. I only changed the increases to cabling and cabled instead of decreasing (I could have just made purl and knit stitches to create a leave but I found the shaping of it very adorable) and due to the fact that I don't increase, which means I don't have yarn overs in the middle of the leave I added 4 single purl stitches to give some texture to the motif, pure stockinette looked a bit boring.

it's green

the yarn for my new Sylvi arrived today, yeah =) and it's lovely, have a look


it's a very warm shade of green, dark, woodlike but still friendly, and it feels good, it has a great touch. Just made a swatch


it's still sitting in the sink right now, and after the meassurements I made before it went to take a bath I think I will go up a needle size, but let's see what it behaves like after the bathtub. . .

gauge, swatching and no yarn

I've been expecting to come home today and a find a supreme packaging with the finest yarn, for the Sylvi (a dark fernlike green - 100% merino - yummi), but NO yarn package

instead I spent the day to research a little on ease, positive and negative, it's actually very simple, negative ease = tight fitting, positive ease = loose fitting. You can read some more on knitting daily or TECHknitter. I also found out that measuring your clothes is a good idea to find out about your true size. (please also read on TECHknitter)

and coming back to swatches I started a forum post on ravelry asking how to treat your swatch to have a nice fitting garment. I wonder on blocking in particular, not IF to block but HOW block it, I'll keep you informed.

sketch for sylvi

instead of sitting down and start crying now that I frogged my Sylvi I decided to distract myself, but what to do? no yarn to start Sylvi again, enough yarn to start another wip, but another wip means to have one more wip and one more wip is having less time for the other wips, and I really plan on finishing Sylvi as soon as possible. So I sat down and was thinking a little more on the cardigan idea, read some rav entries on it and made a sketch on what I plan my cardigan to look like.



I changed the sleeves again to be more airy (I remembered on the beautiful sleeves of my cleaves) and also made some sketches on the neck, high victorian collar.


I also have some custom orders to finish so maybe this whole thing of not being "able" to knit is sort of good, enough time to crochet turtle legs and shells.

frogged

not yet . . . but I'm about to frog my Sylvi, the yarn is just not working for seed stitch. I choose a 100% acrylic yarn and I learned it will never ever "learn" to stretch/hold the stitches like wool would.
There are a few other things that I would like to change about me sleeves so I would have frogged anyway, like the increases look weird and could have been positionend a little more centered, so that they would have been directly under the arms, now they lean to the back but that's just a minor issue. The other big thing is I wouldn't know if the yarn would have been enough.
So now I can just order new yummi yarn, 100% wool/merino, and enjoy it. But before enjoying the new yarn there's the hard question of choosing a color. I want to order from the "Hamburger Wollfabrik". They offer to put together your yarn exactly as you want it, how many plies, how much and all onto one skein, so there will be no yarn ends to weave in (happy face) but they also offer about 100 thousand different colors.

sylvi sleeves

Sleeves half done =) and one ball (the gauge ball) used.

I started with a tubular cast on even though I wasn't sure on my gauge. I still am a little concerned about it I just counted rows again. The main spectrum of differences is within the rows (21 to 28). The stitches seem stuck between 14 and 16 so I went for 15 and casted on 32 sts for a 2*2 ribbing. I made the ribbing for nearly 7", since I like long and tight sleeves for a cardigan. After that I changed to seed stitch and increased 8 stitches in the first row to have 40sts. I added one panel of the back pattern, a leave, which I mirrored to be equal on both sleeves and due to the first increase of the stem of the leave and the fact that I didn't decreased sts at the top of the leave but made cable work here I now have 42 sts (this was irritating for me at first, I was sure I had only 40sts).

The yarn is very soft and feels good to the hand. I love this dark red color, very warm. But my main concern is to run out of yarn, I already make plans on "minimized" fronts to save yarn. I have 10 balls, 500g total and a yardage of about XXmeters and I really, really hope it will be enough but still fright it won't. I calculated to use 2 balls on each sleeve, 3 more on the back and tha last 3 on the front, but it still feels unsure :/

FO and a swatch

another Chubby Fish is finished, I added a little star, I think it looks cute =)
You can find the pattern at the sidebar.

Also I finished a swatch for my new Sylvi, I look at it and like the color and also like the stitches (it's off gauge but that doesn't matter, need to change it anyway) but I can't figure out how to count with the seed stitch. It stretches enormously, in both directions. I measured when it was still wet and pinned to the couch and I had 14 sts and 21 rows, when it was dry it had 15 sts and 25 rows now that I played with it the whole day it has 15.5 sts and 28 rows, but when I stretch it I can give it whatever sts and rows I want.

I think this is what is called "ease". I happen to read it alot lately. Alot of patterns have positive or negative ease. I haven't made a little research on it so I'm not sure what this knitting term really relates to but I think I don't like patterns to stretch or shrink, what do you think?

And to confuse me even more I'm starting with the sleeves. Over at ravelry Tikru the designer of Sylvi made the great suggestion to begin with the sleeves to see if your gauge is correct (not as much to frog and you have the sleeve cuffs done!)

selfish knitting

I just read this article in the new issue of twist collective. It's about how some knitters (I don't say knitters in general, although the article does, cause I never did) only seem to knit for their relatives and friends and never for themselves. Well I never did, don't know why cause I wanted to, I often see a pattern and think it would be perfect for my friend Anne or this is the most gorgious mittens, perfect for my mom, but I never happened to actually start knitting for others. Maybe I'm selfish and early realized my time schedule doesn't have enough hours to knit and crochet for me and for others, so I never did or maybe I'm just selfish and think people will not appreciate my hard work, I dunno. But this year is sorta different: I already made bookmarks as xmas gifts.
And to not get tooo non-selfish and generous I will start this beautiful coat of the winter issue of tc: Sylvi


Isn't it just a masterpiece of knitting? Yesterday I spent the afternoon in re-designing the back so I can wear it as a cardigan. I only need a swatch and therefore I'm buying new needles this afternoon.