Ruthless Knitting Archive

I’m armed with a bevy of excuses regarding why I haven’t posted for a while, but instead I will tell you why I am posting today: I have a head cold. A seven-months-pregnant woman with a head cold is a frightfully uncomfortable woman, I must say, and I didn’t get very much sleep last night. Consequently, I cut myself some slack today and spent a good portion of my time sleeping and laying about. And then I thought, jeez, if I can’t get a blog post up today, when can I do it? So here we are.

First, an announcement: i have been busily reincarnating this website in a new location. From now on, all Ruthless Knitting posts will appear at http://ruthlessknitting.com, rather than here at the rather more awkward http://ruthlessknitting.ruthlessediting.com. Meanwhile, all the old posts and such will remain in place. Please update your RSS feeds and bookmarks and check out the site in its new location! i’ve done my best to get everything running smoothly over there; do let me know if you find any bugs. There will be new content over there quite shortly.

Okay, on to the good stuff. I have finished a baby kimono, and lo, it is cute. (Apologies for the rather sub-par pictures: I had to send my good camera in for repairs, and I didn’t have the skills to take non-blurry pictures with my brother’s camera, which I borrowed for these photos.) 

Pattern: One-Piece Baby Kimono by Cristina Shiffman for Mason-Dixon Knitting

Size: Newborn-ish (16" chest, 4" to underarm, 5" sleeve to underarm)

Yarn: Blackberry Ridge Wool/Silk Laceweight (25 percent silk, 75 percent wool; 350 yds per 2 oz. skein) in Deep Red for body, held double; leftover Kona Superwash sock yarn for I-cord

Yardage: 1 skein, slightly over 2 oz.

Source: Yarns by Design, Neenah, WI

Needles: US 5 (3.75 mm) bamboo straights for body, US 3 (3.25 mm) bamboo double-points for I-cord

Gauge: About 21 sts and 26 rows = 4" in St st

Notes: When I had about two inches left of knitting to do on the teensy sleeve of the orange-and-white-striped baby cardigan, I was struck by a strong urge to knit something — anything — else. So I whipped up this little baby kimono as a gift for my friend Martha’s baby, who was born preterm and therefore can be expected to be small enough to wear it for much of the winter.

I modified the pattern slightly because I thought the garter-stitch version would be too thick for my taste. Instead, I used garter stitch only for an edging and kept the rest of the sweater in Stockinette. I followed the directions for yarnover increases because I like the little line of holes this makes along the front, and I omitted sewing on two ribbons, choosing instead to do a single I-cord tie in a contrasting color.

It wasn’t until I had knit about two-thirds of the sweater that it occurred to me that one skein of laceweight yarn might not actually be enough to get the job done. As it happens, I had enough yarn to finish the body — just — but not enough to seam the sweater or to make the I-cord ties. Thankfully, I had some nice deep red leftover Kona yarn in my stash that I used for the ties, which I think gives the sweater a little something extra special.

(Interestingly, when I made a Baby Norgi sweater for Martha’s firstborn, I came so close to running out of yarn that I had to use the little leftover bits from weaving in the ends to finish the second sleeve. Something about knitting for Martha makes me improvident, it seems.)

All in all, this was a fun and simple pattern, and I can see why so many hundreds of these kimonos have been made. 

Despite the fact that I seem to be posting a good deal less frequently than I would like, I hasten to assure you that I am still knitting. My productivity has slowed, to be sure, but then everything in the land of knit blogging seems to have slowed down of late. Though I’m not one for navel gazing (except that this week, the 27th of my pregnancy, my navel is starting the process of turning itself inside out, which does indeed prompt some curious gazing, plus a good bit of poking), I do wonder why it seems that I’m not the only one whose knitting productivity has slowed.

At any rate, I am managing to crank out the baby knits, which has the enjoyable advantage of allowing me to use up odd skeins of things from my stash. I finished the second Carseat Blanket a few weeks ago but had yet to post about it because I wanted to do a photoshoot that involved a real baby, possibly in an actual carseat. When I went to babysit for my friend Rebecca this week, however, I forgot my camera and missed my opportunity. Thus, this picture is the best I’ve managed so far:

It would be a lot more interesting with a baby in it, no?

Unlike the first Carseat Blanket, which is done in a bulky alpaca/merino blend, I knit this with Nature’s Palette Fingering by Hand Jive Knits, a sock-weight 100 percent wool yarn. I double-stranded walnut and chocolate, using two skeins of each color, and I threw in some leftover mallard to make one row in the border. I’m very pleased with the outcome, which strikes me as sort of antique-y and understated, as well as gender-neutral. I’m hoping to write up the pattern soon and to offer it for sale on Ravelry. I plan to include directions for both weights of yarn.

I’ve also been cranking out a little stripey baby cardigan using New England Shetland from Harrisville Designs in white and poppy. I picked up these two skeins at half-price in the spring, and I think I’ll have just enough to do a cardigan to fit a six-month-old baby. It will probably have a deep band of white at the bottom to match the orange at the top, plus white button bands and collar. If there’s enough yarn, I’d like to do a pocket, too. But since I only have the two skeins, it will be a bit of an adventure trying to figure out such details as when to stop knitting the body and start the sleeves, as well as how much yarn I’ll have to save out for the button bands.

Oh, and if you haven’t already heard, Mel of Pipe Dreams and Purling Plans will be participating again this year in the Breast Cancer 3-Day walk, which will entail her traveling to Washington, D.C., with her husband, Tad, and then walking sixty miles in three days to raise money for breast cancer research. You can read about her personal reasons for participating in the walk here. Anyone who donates to sponsor her walk gets a shot at some of the fabulous prizes in her contest, which you can see here and here, with more to come. I hope you’ll join me in supporting Mel and this important cause.

Leona would like you to know that she has a new hat.

I keep telling her that the hat is for the baby, but she counters with, "Only if the baby is a girl. If it’s a boy, I get to keep it."

I have to admit, she does look awfully fetching in it.

Pattern: My own (made up as I went along)

Size: Newborn-ish

Yarn: Froelich Wolle Special Blauband (80 percent wool, 20 percent nylon; 210 m per 50 g), 2021 (off-white); Interlacements Tiny Toes (100 percent superwash merino; 185 yds per 50 g), reds plus

Yardage: 1 skein Froelich Wolle; about half a skein of Tiny Toes

Source: Yarn swap with my friend Alison, who got it from a thrift shop; Interlacements

Needles: US 4 (3.5 mm) bamboo double-points

Gauge: About 6.5 stitches and 8 rows = 1"

Notes: This hat was one of those spur-of-the-moment projects that nonetheless had a long gestation. I’ve been thinking about ways to incorporate the Swedish Weave technique into projects for quite some time, but while I have produced a swatch and an inch and a half of an elaborate adult hat (temporarily abandoned), this is the first actual project I have knit that uses the stitch.

I encountered Swedish Weave in one of the first two Barbara Walker treasuries (can’t recall which one). It is actually not even a stitch so much as it’s a technique, and even calling it a technique is a bit of a stretch, since it is dead simple. To work Swedish Weave, you knit your background color in stockinette stitch, and you float your contrast color alternately in front of and behind the knit stitch, creating a dashed line across the front of the knit fabric (and across the back, too, for that matter). If you follow the same front-and-back sequence on every row, you can line the floats up in columns, but Walker suggests that you stagger them, which is what I’ve done here in sets of three rows.

My goal for this hat was to show off the pretty colors of my Interlacements yarn on a plain white backdrop, and I feel that I’ve succeeded: Swedish Weave is a great technique for making it look like you’ve done something complicated with a handpainted yarn when in fact all that you’ve done is flicked it back and forth in front of your working needle as you went around.

I achieved the somewhat puffy shape of the hat by knitting a garter-stitch band, increasing by about 10 percent in the first row above the band, increasing again a few rows later, and increasing a third time, at which point I thought I had enough stitches on the needles. Then I knit straight up for a while until I started to run out of white yarn, finally decreasing on the same stitch every other row until I had just a few stitches left to pull into the inside. To tell the truth, I put all those increases in because I was afraid the hat would be too small without them. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that the outcome would be a lovely onion-shaped hat with a vaguely Continental air about it.

I figure that even if the baby is a girl, she’ll only be able to wear this hat for a single winter, and then I will return it to Leona, who really deserves something rakish after all her years of faithful, bald service.

People seem to love to knit blankets for babies. I myself have knit one baby blanket, and I more or less enjoyed the process. But it is a long process, and it’s hard for me to imagine taking on another baby blanket any time soon, especially as a baby shower gift.

Perhaps others agree with me that the baby blanket is a rather large commitment for a gift, since knitters always seem to be looking for the next big thing in baby shower gifts.

I may have found it. I present to you the Carseat Blanket.

The idea for the Carseat Blanket came to me when my friend Rebecca was kind enough to tote her newborn infant to my house along with gobs of maternity clothes that she no longer needed and had carefully selected to suit my personal taste. (Thanks, Rebecca!) While her daughter Madelyn was lounging on the floor in her carseat –

(perhaps you wish to see a picture of Madelyn wearing the dress I knit for her? yes?) 

– while this specimen of chubby baby cuteness was lounging in her carseat on the floor, I noticed how very small the infant carseat is, and I thought, "Man, you don’t really need much of a blanket to cover up such a little baby!" Indeed, the bigger the blanket is, the more you have to fold it and tuck it out of the way so it doesn’t drag on the floor while you carry that stupid behemoth carseat around.

What the parents of a newborn really need, I decided, is an itty-bitty blanket. A blanket just big enough, say, for Leona. A blanket about two feet square. Voila!

The Carseat Blanket is the perfect project for the overworked knitting enthusiast and/or slightly weary pregnant knitter, since it can be knocked out in four or five hours of knitting time, tops, on biggish needles. It is also a good project for the lazy knitter, since you can cast on as many stitches as it seems might be appropriate, knit the middle part, and then just keep cranking out that edging until you run out of yarn. If you cast on too few stitches, so what? Your edging will just be wider and therefore cuter. Too many stitches? You’ll have a narrower edging, but it won’t matter, because rose stitch doesn’t require a border to lay flat in any event.

Can you tell that I’m inordinately pleased with myself?

Pattern: My own.

Size: 22.5 x 23.5 inches

Yarn: Aslan Trends Guanaco (60 percent alpaca, 40 percent merino wool; 145 yds per 100 g skein) in blue jeans and papaya

Source: Loopy Yarns, Chicago, IL

Needles: US 11 (8.0 mm) circular needles

Gauge: About 11 stitches over 4" in both rose and garter stitch

Notes: Rose stitch is one of my very favorite stitches. It’s much simpler than it looks: on the front side, you knit one into the stitch below, then purl one, and repeat these two actions all the way across. On the back side, you knit all the stitches. Then on the next right-side row, you offset by one stitch. If you want striped rose stitch, you change colors every other row. Through some bit of knitting alchemy, it ends up looking like this. Easy peasy, and it spreads like all get-out. The body of this blanket only has 40 stitches across (for about 18 inches of the width) and is about 90 rows tall, so it didn’t take much longer to knit than a little 40-stitch swatch would have.

On a negative note, I feel obliged to say that I only sort of liked the Guanaco yarn that I used for this project. I really enjoyed the colors (which David picked out), but the texture is a little problematic. According to the Ravelry page for the yarn, it is billed as "snuggly bulky soft Alpaca wool." "Just touch it and you will love it forever," the company urges, since it is "specially designed for softness and comfort."

I hate to rain on Aslan Trends’ parade, but if you want alpaca/merino yarn to be soft, you have to remove the guard hairs from the alpaca. Otherwise, you will have a very soft base yarn that is bristling with, well, bristles. It’s acceptable for an outer layer, but I wouldn’t want it against my skin, and I sure as heck wouldn’t put it directly on a baby’s skin. Maybe I just got a bad batch?

At any rate, this was such a simple and fun project that I’m thinking of making another in a solid color. I have two skeins of red cotton yarn that need a purpose. Anyone interested in the pattern for this? I could probably refine it in the next go-round and write it up for public consumption without too much difficulty.

Glass art, as I mentioned earlier this year, is my father’s hobby. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a website yet, but I will show you his most recent bowl (without permission — sorry Dad!) so you can be wowed by his skills. He made this with leftovers, folks. This is a scrap bowl.

As you can imagine, I would be remiss as a daughter if I didn’t take advantage of his skills to make something out of glass pretty much whenever I go to visit. (Also, he spent much of his free time for a year making me a totally amazing and perfect lamp for my kitchen. The scrap bowl above is made of scraps from one of the failed lamps.) So while I was out in Oregon in June, I made this drop-ring vase:

This is a fused glass project, meaning that it was melted into this shape in a kiln. The process involved layering three rectangles of glass — clear on the bottom, then light gray, then blue — and using long, skinny rods of glass called "stringer" on the top to make a grid pattern. I superglued the stringer onto the blue glass; superglue burns off in the kiln. Between the bottom clear layer and the gray layer, I placed white and mint green stringer in an abstract pattern and then, on the spur of the moment, sprinkled on some little pieces of red stringer that I had left over from the top.

With that done, I stacked my pile of glass rectangles inside the kiln on top of a clay form that my father had made with a hole in the middle of it. I programmed the kiln according to his instructions, pressed "start," and went inside to have lunch.

By dinnertime, the glass had heated up enough that it had started to melt. Since it was stacked on top of something with a hole in the middle of it, it melted down through the hole toward the bottom of the kiln. (This is the "drop" in any "drop-ring vase.") At this stage, we opened the kiln door pretty regularly to have a look at the glass’s progress. Once the dropping glass reached the floor of the kiln and began to pool, we let it form a nice foot and then kept the door open long enough to rapidly cool the kiln down to a temperature below the melting point. Then we closed the door and let the glass "anneal" (which has something to do with all the molecules lining up into their new configuration — I’m a bit fuzzy on this) and cool down overnight. By the morning, it was ready for inspection.

You can see in this last picture and the one above how the stringer that dropped through the hole elongated and made pretty vertical lines on the inside of the vase. On the outside, the gray glass turned silvery in the foot, and the red bits of stringer that I threw in on a whim made an interesting, confetti-like pattern. The stringer that I used on the underside was not as successful, as the color contrast wasn’t really sufficient for it to show up much.

Once the vase had cooled down, there was a lot of "cold working" to do, which basically entails endless grinding and polishing of the glass edge so that it looks shiny and smooth, as if it had been born that way. I learned that I have very little patience for cold working.

People tend to talk about knitting as if it is complicated and fraught with the potential for failure. While it is true that there are plenty of things one can get wrong while knitting, particularly when knitting a garment, it is also usually the case that, in the face of such a failure, one can rip it all out and start over without losing anything but one’s time. Fused glass is not nearly so forgiving a medium. I cannot tell you how many times my dad has spent hours and hours cutting glass and otherwise sweating over a project, only to have it bubble disastrously or crack or just somehow go to hell in the kiln. Glass is a harsh mistress. But it also, like knitting, has the potential to reward your careful planning with results that are lovely in ways that realize your mind’s eye vision at the same time that they surprise you completely.

What I’m trying to say is that I suspect my dad likes working with glass for many of the same reasons that I like working with yarn. Huh. Go figure.

So, while this piece looks a little more like something Spiderman would use to decorate his home than I had intended it to, I am nonetheless rather taken with it. Thanks, Dad, for letting me dabble in your craft.

Pattern: Just your basic toe-up sock
Size: Women’s medium/large
Yarn: Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock Multi (80 percent superwash wool, 20 percent nylon; 215 yds per 2 oz skein)
Yardage: About 1.25 skeins
Source: Iris Fine Yarns 
Needles: US 0 (2.0 mm) double-pointed metal needles
Gauge: No idea — I forgot to check.
Notes: By the skin of my teeth, I managed to finish my mom’s socks before our vacation ended on Saturday morning, and she agreed to model them for your viewing pleasure.

These were pretty straightforward socks. They have what I think Charlotte Schurch calls an "easy toe" in her book Sensational Knitted Socks: I began with a simple little stockinette rectangle 18 stitches wide by 8 rows long, then picked up stitches along the three sides and increased at each corner on every other row until I had 18 stitches on each needle. After that, it was just round and round to the heel.

Because I reached the heel of the first sock on the day I was taking Lucy Neatby’s sock class, I used her directions to create a simple garter-stitch short-row heel. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this heel is that it uses more than 50 percent of the stitches on the sock, which Lucy says creates a more comfortable heel. For the second sock, which I didn’t knit for a few months after the first was completed, I didn’t have her directions with me, and I’m not entirely confident that I used the same method of wrapping. Still, the two socks seem passably similar. Mom seems to like them, so I call the project a success!