Tres Chic Veronique

I'm so happy today: it's warm and sunny and my late afternoon/early evening meeting has been cancelled! Yay!
Hopefully my good mood will rub off on you.

Here is: ------drumroll-----

Peanut's EZ Baby Surprise Jacket (I got the pattern from Knitting Workshop). It is indeed a surprise: as I was knitting it, I tried to fold various edges in all sorts of ways and could *not* figure it out. Huh. In fact, I cast on for it saturday (because I was feeling guilty for having ripped it out previously and because I knew that the Gleek family was on its way home from the hospital at about the same time), and I could not put it down. Curiosity kept me going! I finished sunday evening.
Here it is, all unfolded. As EZ mentions in the pattern: it's going to look odd, but press on! And so I did.
But then, you lift up the upper corner and fold it up...
... you lift up another corner...
... you do the same on the other side...
Voila! A baby sweater!
And the back (of which I am particularly proud of, since I could not get those decreases to line up properly):

Now Peanut has 2 Baby Surprise Jackets, the first one, which inspired me, was knitted by Sarah.

Pattern Specs:
Yarn: 1 and a smidge balls of Noro Lily in variegated pink/blue/green (which has been dubbed "Easter Colors" by the Spiders), gifted by Jacqueline, and one and a bigger smidge balls of Noro Lily in Lime Green (actually, what is called "Vert Anis" in France: not quite as neon as Lime, and not as acidic as Chartreuse).
Needles: US 6 Addis, 24" length.
Striping pattern: 5 ridges color A, 5 ridges color B, 2 ridges color A, 2 ridges color B.
Buttons: TBD...
Started: March 24, 2007
Finished: March 25, 2007 (well, except for a teeny bit a seaming, but come on, I consider it done!).

PS: I would totally buy Vesper sock yarn again. I'm a sucker for self striping yarn. And she picks the most amazing colors! In fact, in my stash right now, I have Strange Little Mama, which was kindly purchased for me by my fantastic roommate, Lisa, who knew that I could not be near a computer at the time of the Etsy shop update and therefore hit the re-load button many times until she got the colorway I wanted. And she didn't even buy anything for herself! Anyway, I have to check if I have the new 80% superwash wool/ 20% nylon. But even if it's the "old" 100% merino, I still love it! (Just not with cute little flats).

Labels: baby gleek, EZ

I have good news, and I have bad news.

I'm going to give you the bad news first, ok?
I'd been working merrily along on Blumengruss (which, by the way, is such a harsh name that I'm going to rename it Bloom. Ah, much better).
Bloom is made of 3 parts:
1. You start with a triangle, knit from the bottom up. So the rows get longer and longer and lonnnnnnnger. I decided I'll keep the stitches live at the top.
2. Then, you pick up stitches along the 2 sides and you knit a V shape. (Yay for Vs!) Again, I will leave the stitches live at the end.
3. Finally, you knit a border all the way around, and pick up one live stitch every other row.
Here's a schematic, a la Grumperina:
Here's how far I got after about 3 days:
Cute, right? Well, what you might not be able to tell from this picture is that the yarn is an eye-searing, traffic-cone orange. In order to squelch this overly bright color, I decided to purchase new (neutral colored) yarn for the stripes. Don't look at me like that, buying new yarn is allowed if it's to complete a project! I immediately found this lovely Habu lace weight merino at my LYS:
The colors are called Brick and Whiskey.
So there, I was, chugging along, and then, one person said, in the kindest tone possible, "hm, those colors are very... 70s?". See for yourself.
And that's when it hit me. Those colors are hideous together. Want to see a close up?
I then spent the weekend asking anyone I knew whether these colors were not atrocious together. One friend said to me "I love you, but yes, those colors do not go together". Well then.

On to the good news!
I'm using the yarn I dyed with Marie last week!
And finally, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Gleek will have a first-day-of-Spring baby!

Labels: baby gleek, blumengruss shawl

There are times when it's really nice to know a lot of knitters in the city... Marie, of Brooklyn Handspun fame, is always generous about sharing her dyeing expertise. I emailed her last monday about the 1,500 yds of Habu single ply laceweight that I wanted to dye, and she invited me over to her place on wednesday! First, we wound my center pull ball into a big hank. How big? This big!


Then, we dyed a little swatch that I'd knitted with the yarn.

Here are my top 3 contenders:
Blue Spruce, upper right corner. Meh, too soft. I want a color with more pop. Next: Moss, bottom. Ooh, I like this one! And finally, Mallard Green, upper right. It's a green with a lot of blue in it, very unusual.
And the winner is......

Mallard Green!
I let it dry overnight, and here is my yarn all wound up. My Paper Crane donut included for scale. This ball is huge!

Oooh, nice. Much lighter than I anticipated, but nice!
Now, it hurt my arms to wind 1,500 yds of yarn, but Marie doesn't have that problem... She has an electric skein winder!

She puts the hank on the umbrella swift (in front), and hooks it up to the electric winder (in back). And then she just lets it go!!
Why this additional step of turning a hank into another hank? Well, the final hank is a slightly different size than the original hank, and therefore the colors mix up, giving you a glimpse of what it will look like knitted up. See?


Lest you think that everything is going perfect over here, here is proof that I make mistakes. I've been trucking along on EZ's Baby Surprise Jacket. That is, until I decided to count my stitches between markers.

Oops, looks like the 2 "sides" are not at all the same shape! Start over.
Although baby Gleek will be born soon, I don't think she'll need a jacket this big right away, phew! And when I say soon, I mean Gleek is already on maternity leave, and probably sitting on her couch knitting as I type! She can't possibly be in labor as she *promised* to text me the minute she goes to the hospital. I've had a few scares already where she hasn't responded to emails with her usual promptness and I assume that she's had her baby without telling me... I know, how dare she! :)

Labels: baby gleek, dyeing with Brooklyn Handspun