pepperknit

This weekend was the wedding for which I knit Kiri. We drove down to Lexington, Virginia, super-early on Saturday morning and just returned yesterday afternoon, after a whirlwind of work by us in the wedding party: bridal shower, rehearsal dinner, wedding planning, organizing centerpieces, carting tables, doing hair, seeking the groom’s lost car keys, etc. (The keys were found by a bridesmaid, after hours of concentrated searching all over the property the morning of the wedding day, in a trash bag from the rehearsal dinner. Everyone cheered!) The wedding was atop a mountain in the Blue Ridge mountains and was positively gorgeous—the weather was unparalleled.

I did wear Kiri at the reception, and she provided warmth against the cool mountain air, but it seems no pictures of me with it on were taken with my camera. Of course, I was so sloppy drunk, I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to just ask for a photo. But it turns out when they were helping me down the hill after the reception, my boyfriend grabbed it for me, because I found pictures like this on the camera later. (Did I take this? I do not know, as I have absolutely no recollection of the walk down the hill.)

As for knitting while on the trip, I knit only a little on the way down (I drove the majority of the way). But on the ride back, despite being exhausted, I knit for a few hours. Here’s the progress I made . . .

What is it, you wonder? Why, it’s the third Sunrise Circle Jacket, of course! I couldn’t quite believe it when I made the decision to pack only it. (Wool of the Andes in Chocolate brown.) But it’s my most mindless project these days, and with straight-up stockinette, it couldn’t be beat for car knitting (since I don’t really have to look). I considered knitting the sleeve in the round to avoid that little bit of seaming later, but my needles aren’t big enough for either magic loop or lazy loop. I started it on Saturday, but I’m not sure how keen I am to keep working on it!

And I’m in love. It’s exactly what I wanted.

Pattern: Kiri, from All Tangled Up
Needles: Addi Turbo size 5, 8, and 10
Execution: 14 main pattern repeats; I counted the first leaves too, so I had 15 leaves down the center line and I called it “15 repeats” while I was working on it.
Yarn: Knit Picks’ Alpaca Cloud in peppermint, single strand throughout
Skeins: 1.5. I had to take out the previous, failed Kiri to have enough yarn, and that one used about 3/4 of a skein.
Preblocking size: 19″ from center top to point
Postblocking size: 27″ from center top to point
Started: Saturday, April 8 (I’m not counting the first one)
Finished: Friday, April 14

Notes:
Needles: I used 5s because I don’t have size 6 Addis, and after the first Kiri I made on my ill-purchased Crystal Palace bamboo circs, I knew I needed the smooth join and fast needles of Addis. People warned me that Addis are not sharp enough, but sharpness was a complete nonissue–I had no trouble getting the needle into the stitches. They were soo fast, too, they were worth it. Slipperiness was also not an problem.

Cast off: The first Kiri suffered a far-too-tight cast off, despite using a size 10 needle. To do it this time, I purled the last row (row 12 of the edging) using a size 8 needle, and then I cast off using the 10. I also cast off in what can only be described as full-on sloppy. Not just loose: I was sloppy. It took so much concentration to keep it sloppy, and I was a big ball of tension the entire time. And how long did it take me to cast off? Just to cast off?? It took me at least 50 minutes. When I hit halfway, I joked that it was going to take me an hour, but I wasn’t entirely sure what time I’d started. So I timed how long it took to cast off the second half of the shawl, and it took 25 minutes. Assuming I did perfectly even splits, it took me 50, but it was a while before I got into a good groove for my sloppy cast off, and so I might say that the whole row did take about an hour. Egads. It was exhausting. But! I have pretty scallops, so it’s all worth it. My recommendation for anyone seeking to do this shawl and get the scallops is to do it super slowly, super sloppy, and on gigantic needles. It’s the only way. Reading other peoples’ accounts shows that there are many straight-edged Kiris out there, much to the chagrin of their creators.

Blocking: I read through the directions and realized that they’re written wrong: It says to pin out the sk2p (slip one, k2tog, pass slipped stitch over) stitches out to make the scallops. That would look like this, which I only did in order to take the photo in order to tell you all about this error:

Everyone, and I mean everyone (every finished photo I can find does it this way, except maybe one in the yahoo knitalong (sorry, must be a member to see anything)), pins out the yo, k1, yo combo instead, like this:

It’s obvious why no one does it the way the pattern says (not even the pattern writer! look at the pictures in the pattern!). It’s because the piece naturally falls into scallops the other way, and the effect is a whole lot prettier. The other key reason is this:

The very bottom of the shawl comes naturally to a point. Why screw with that and create two points on either side of the center? It seems unnatural, and it’s not the way anyone chooses to execute the pattern. So if you’re reading the pattern and can’t make sense of the blocking directions, well, that’s probably a big reason why.All in all, it was a pleasure to make this. Probably because I’d never done lace before and it is so fun, and because the yarn is so delightful. For the photo shoot, I’m wearing the bridesmaid dress I picked out (that needs a wee bit of alteration, to make the straps a bit shorter). You can’t see it in the photos, but the lining of the dress is baby pink—a perfect match to the “peppermint” colorway. I made this shawl to go with the dress and for the event, which will be Memorial Day weekend in the mountains of Virginia, which I assume get chilly in the evening (outdoor wedding). Of course, today it’s 80 degrees out and I was boiling with the shawl wrapped around! Alpaca is so nice and warm, despite the openness of the pattern.

I also got my hair chopped off on Thursday, so I’m in those first few days of really great hair. I ordered new glasses yesterday; they should be here next week! It’s going to be a whole new Minty.

I’ve hit 13 pattern repeats done, and now a single row of Kiri is taking what feels like an eternity. It’s not that I’m moving any slower, it’s just that my progress appears to be so much slower! Just . . . two . . . more . . . repeats!!! I can do it! I haven’t had the concentration to count all the stitches in a single row, or even to time it. I think in some way that I’m afraid to count and find out just how many are there–I don’t want to know!

A special note to Kara, my new reader who’s also a new knitter: Welcome to the world of knitting! I hope you start a blog so that we can all see your progress from novice to expert. I get so much enjoyment out of knitting, I’m always thrilled when people learn. Enjoy!

Don’t fret about me! I’m coping well with my Kiri “disaster.” I decided to start over, and I’m incredibly happy I did. I’m using size 5 Addi Turbos (the compromise size, Rachel!) and they are like working with butter–and not in a bad way. I’m having no trouble with pointiness or lack thereof (k2togs aren’t a struggle at all), and the join is completely nonexistent. I’m racing through, and I’m well over halfway finished. I’ve got 10 pattern repeats done; I’m planning on doing 15. (Previously, on size 6s, I did 11 repeats, so I’m going to assess at 15 and not a repeat sooner.) I’ll be working away on it this week and expect to have it finished by the weekend.

This past weekend I did a lot of knitting while watching some of our Netflix acquisitions: The Station Agent, which was short not long but delightful, and March of the Penguins, which amazingly did not make me cry. A friend says I’m clearly frozen inside, but last night The West Wing made me cry, at the very end (”Thanks, boss”), and so did the PBS American Experience about Bobby Kennedy, so I think I still have my soul intact.

This is one of those quirks that I’ve picked up recently, and I suspect I got it mostly from TWOP; it’s taken over the office as well. When your hatred bubbles up so violently, you merely say: “Haaaate!” And that’s how I’m feeling about my technically finished Kiri.

Sigh.

I cast off too tight. But I used a size 10 needle! Apparently my tension was unaffected by needle size.

It’s too short! I misjudged how long I would want it to be. I was correct in estimating that it would come right to the bottom of my back, and I thought that’s what I wanted, but now that I’m seeing it in practice it is too too short.

Excuse the sloppy yoga clothes; class is in 45 minutes.

My god, I hate it. The bottom edge is a complete wreck. Up close on the work, the stitch is so damn pretty my insides ache, but when looked at as one piece, it’s atrocious.

I had dinner last night with a knitter, who warned me that there’s no frogging of lace. Must tink or start over. I was thinking I could just try frogging. I’m an experienced knitter! No johnny come latley. Not afraid of knitting! But, helloooo, Minty, you have never knit lace before. And if you manage to take it out to before the edging successfully, you will have to put it back on those dreaded Crystal Palace bamboo circulars, the ones that forced you to manually push each stitch over the join. Don’t do this to yourself.

So what am I considering doing? Starting over from scratch. On Addi circulars. Heck, it should take about a week (though since it’s the second one, I’m far more likely to get irritated and/or bored). Due date is late May! Pshaw, plenty of time.

Am I totally delusional? I like to think “No.” I like to think that my perfectionism is not a sign of my demented nature but rather a person knowing when there’s more that she can do, better she can do.

And away we go!

I’m apparently a faster knitter than even I thought, because, um:

I finished knitting my Kiri tonight. (Still have to block it, obviously.) I started knitting it a week ago today.

Last night, after posting my progress, while my boyfriend and I were watching the Final Four, he asked me how much longer the shawl was going to take me. I’d timed some rows, and purl rows were taking about 10 minutes and knit rows were taking 8. I estimated I’d need to do 4 more pattern repeats, at 10 rows a repeat, and approximately 10 minutes a row, with each row getting increasingly longer, and thus I’d have about 400+ more minutes of knitting, at least. That would have meant at least 7 more hours of knitting, but who knew how long the last pattern repeat and the edging would take!

I estimated I’d be finished by next weekend. How naive I was. I completely neglected the few hours while watching basketball last night, and any hours I might spend on it today. And I spent quite a few hours on it today; the boy had some work to do so I knit before and after yoga, and while we did laundry, etc.

I decided, in the end, to do only 11 pattern repeats. It looks as if, when blocked, it will come just down to my waist, which is the length I want–no longer.

I cast off using a size 10 needle, hoping that it would be more than loose enough, and I don’t know that it was the best I could have done–it seems a bit taut. I’ll make do; if it has to, the scalloped edge won’t be all that scalloped. I’m not going to take that out and try it again.

My only pins for blocking aren’t going to be sturdy enough, I don’t think, so tomorrow I’ll head to Sophie’s to see what’s available there. Hopefully I’ll be able to take finished, modeled photos this weekend! More details when it’s all said and done.

See previous post about Kiri.

How do I love thee, Kiri? Let me count the ways.

1. The yarn.
This KnitPicks Alpaca Cloud (in peppermint) is soft, light, perfectly mottled in color, and rather delicious to work with.

2. The pattern.
What a cinch! Honestly, this pattern has taken no time flat to memorize and execute. I am not using stitch markers or lifelines–neither seems necessary. Of course, I’m going to f*ck up royally on the next row, now that I’ve gone and bragged so shamelessly.

But really–I think of this as a 5-row pattern, and I can see which row I’m on just by working the first few stitches. Though it’s not very consistent nor very logical, I think of it as rows 0 (zero), 1, 2, 3, and 4/6. So on the 0 row, I have no stitches between the first skp and the yok1yo combination. So that means I have the highest number of stitches between the regular skps and k2togs (i.e., 7). On the “1″ row, there’s 1 stitch after the first skp and the yok1yo combo, so I drop the 7 by one pair, to 5. the “2″ and “3″ rows follow suit. In the “4/6″ row you have to knit 6 initially, with no skp, but you have 4 stitches before and after the yok1yos. (Obviously, every row is separated by a purl row. Those are neutral in my book, and don’t require being counted.) This likely only makes sense to people who’ve done the pattern, but maybe, just maybe, someone who’s going to start on this shawl will find this logical as well. Or not, in which case we’ve firmly established my own brain’s wacked-out way of viewing the world and systematizing my knitting. But I can see the whole thing as I go; it’s very crisp for me. I’m apparently very lucid in my madness!

3. The unblocked blumpiness.
I don’t know why, but this makes me smile all the time. It’s textured, it’s blumpy, it’s organic. Stitches are pulling in all directions, it’s kind of an ordered mess. It’s so pretty.

4. The dainty little leaves.
I like how the first yos come out looking bigger than the others, through no real effort of mine.

What I’m not liking so much:
1. The needles.
Damn these Crystal Palace bamboo circs, with their shitty join. After the neutralizing purl row, the stitches move freely, but after a pattern row, the yos stretch out and make the associated k1 tiny around the cable, and because the join is so prominent, the little k1s get caught, and I have to manually push every few k1s over it. This is every other row that I have to do this, people, and the rows only get longer. I will gut it out and not change needles (because, really, what if the new ones weren’t exactly the same size as these, and the whole work started to look different?! Horrors!) but after this, well, ain’t no way I’m doing no more lace on these needles.

2. The time to do one row!
I have nearly 8 rows of leaves (i.e., pattern repeats), and I’m aiming to hit at least 12. (Then I’ll decide if I want any more.) Each row just gets longer and longer. When I had 6 rows of leaves I started to say “I’m halfway done!” but then I realized how very wrong I was. I wonder if I’d prefer a pattern that started with casting on a zillion stitches, but each row got progressively smaller. That’s always so satisfying. Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m enjoying knitting this so much that the ever-increasing time is in some ways a good thing; it prolongs the whole process. But sometimes I’m about 5 minutes from needing to do something–leave for work, check on a baked good, what have you–and I can’t squeeze one more row in there, so I have to just stop for the duration.

I can’t wait to have this as a finished object. Much as I love the unblocked look, I can’t wait to flatten it all out and wrap it all around me!

I haven’t stopped knitting, but this post isn’t really going to be about much knitting. I just thought I ought to follow up on yesterday’s post a bit and show you some fun pictures I’ve taken in the last two days.

Sunday we’d planned to continue our day-trip adventures, but we were both, uh, suffering hangovers from too much imbibing and dancing Saturday night, so we instead chose to take a nap directly after going out to brunch. (I even skipped yoga, that’s how rotten I felt. I’d had so much fun the night before, though! Isn’t that always the way.)

Today’s weather was too beautiful to pass up, so we walked over to Rittenhouse Square to get lunch. Along the way I took some photos. The difference between the sky of yesterday and the sky of today is striking.

In the top row, we have the Ben Franklin Bridge and the Society Hill Towers, in photos taken yesterday. The bottom row features shots taken today of the Drake and the Kimmel Center and some red buds on a tree.
(Click to see each photo up-close.)

The sky was an intense, brilliant shade of blue today, and I simply had to share it with others by posting these photos.

Here’s another cool shot I took. I just randomly snapped it—it’s me and the sky. I didn’t quite realize the sun was so high, and I certainly couldn’t have aligned it with those wires if I’d tried.

Click to see it HUGE!

In actual knitting news, I’ve been working on Goldie’s scarf today. It wasn’t coming out the width I’d hoped, and I was unsatisfied with the bottom edge’s shape (a deliberate taper that was looking more like a mistake), so I took it all out and started over. Yesterday I started Kiri for real (on 6s), and I’m itching to get back to it. I’ve done two pattern repeats (after the first chart–does that count as a pattern repeat? I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it creates one leaf, and so I would think it does, but that section of the pattern is written a little differently, so I’m not entirely sure how people describe it. I have 3 leaves from the center down, if that makes any sense), and it’s so delightfully simple to memorize and work on; I’m loving it. I just have to finish this scarf, and I can get back to it!

First off, a big thank you to everyone for the praise and kind words you had for my Sunrise Circle Jacket! Random funny: The cost of the buttons came to about 1/3 the cost of the yarn. Seriously.

Next, more thanks to all who weighed in on the needle size for Kiri. 6 seems to be the resounding favorite–tho I was happy to see that the 4s got at least some votes (via email & on the Knitty board), since I did like the look on 4s a lot too. Going with 6s will, as Candsmom pointed out, mean the whole thing will go faster! Never a bad thing. I need to get my brain in gear to go at the lace again; I’ve been happily Pomatomus-ing in the meantime.

Random bummer: The pretty stitch markers I bought are too small to be used comfortably on size 6s! It’s so not a big deal, but still. :)

Let me start my first real post about knitting Kiri with a little “uh, wow, harder than I thought” plug for lace. Despite all the warnings about not using Addi Turbos for lace, they’re all I have on hand, so I sat down and gave it a whirl. No. That will not work. It was beyond frustrating. I dug around and found some Clover size 4 circulars (16″ tho; not large enough), so I decided to try them. Not sharp enough.

So yesterday I traveled up to Loop, and found they have Crystal Palace bamboo needles. These points seem sharper than Clover, but the join between the cord and the needle leaves something to be desired. Still, it’s what they’ve got, and it works better than anything I have in the house already. Unsure as to whether I wanted size 4 or 6, I got both sizes.*

And now I’m stuck. The top swatch, on size 6s, has a nice openness. The lace feels airy, but it all might be too big. The bottom swatch, on size 4s, has a delicacy due to the smaller leaves. But the lace might be starting to feel too dense. Which should I do? Please help! (I don’t think size 5s would solve the problem, either–I like the tininess of the 4s and I like the openness of the 6s. I like them both for different reasons.)

Please ignore how badly I pinned it out and the errors I made. It’s my first real lace! Both swatches have errors, so I’ll be starting from square 1 either way.

Beacuse I can’t decide, I’m paralyzed. (Seriously: HELP!) I’ve started another pair of Pomatomus, these for my boyfriend’s mother for Christmas. (I’m never this ahead of the game for Xmas! But usually I don’t knit people gifts, either.) It’s in Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock yarn, in navy. I thought the color was very bluefishy.

*The cords were so tightly coiled I had to do something to relax them. I used the method I’ve seen people mention on the Knitty boards: I boiled some water, poured it into a bowl, and carefully dipped the cord into the water. It takes just one dip for the thing to uncoil itself, then just a few more dips to get a perfectly straight, even cord. After each dip I pulled it out and held the cord taut to help it straighten. Yay!