Stash-busting

What joy can compare to using up left-over yarn, or stuff you bought because it was on sale/looked nice/called to some yarn-obsessed part of your soul/wanted to support your Local Yarn Store (LYS)? OK, family, friends, professional success - I grant you these things have their pleasures, but I am here to extol the joys of turning left-over stuff that's clogging up your house into wonderful hand-crafted items of beauty. Some of them could even serve as Christmas presents.

Case in point: there was quite a lot of lovely wool/silk mix yarn left over from a seriously cabled sweater I designed a year or two back. There was also a pattern for a hat I wanted to try using that weight of yarn. Next thing you know I had my first Utopia hat done. (I say first because they're so much fun I am already on my third and am looking at more stuff designed by the wonderful Smariek.)




Another case: I wanted to make a lace hat and saw someone wearing a very nice one. Despite stalking following her as she walked from the train to the car park I couldn't be sure whether or not it was machine-made and felt impelled to look at patterns on ravelry as soon as I could get to a computer. Having found something along the right lines I cast on using left-over Rowan Cashcotton from the Après Surf Hoodie. Not many days later I had a nice, if not very stretchy hat, although it made it over the medicine ball I use to model hats, so it's at least big enough for even a pretty large head. (It wasn't quite the pattern I'd seen on the train though, so the search continues ...)

Big Bloke Sweater Part II

Finally finished it last weekend. One sleeve had been too long - more frogging. The second sleeve's decreases didn't look right - frogging. The ribbing at the neck - you guessed it.

However, it is done. Perhaps it needs a few canny stitches to fill in gaps and to make parts hang right, but it fits 'Im Indoors pretty well. I may or may not block it. Since it was knitted in the round blocking may not be too simple. Now I just have to persuade him to be photographed in it.

New techniques tried out during this project:

Top-down knitting
Magic loop (on lower part of sleeves)

Big Bloke Sweater

In a moment of weakness some time ago 'im Indoors expressed a liking for some yarn we saw in Yarn LLC's New Haven branch (Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Super chunky in a lovely deep red). I grabbed up every ball of it they had while he was still enthused, without telling him it wasn't enough for the sweater he wanted it to magically turn in to, and rushed home to e-Bay where I found more of it. The dye lot was different but when the batch arrived it was clearly good enough if worked in carefully.

Since I am trying to try something new with each project this one was to be knitted from the top down. I tracked down a top down raglan calculator online and starting doing gauges in the round, which took far longer than the more usual square, but since the pattern would be knitted in the round was necessary. Having settled on 6.5 mm needles (my gorgeous Harmony circular set came in to use) I did the required sums and cast on.


Things went well at first. The yarn is a pleasure to work with, despite every single ball having a knot in it, and with the size of needles things went quickly. Having got some inches past joining up below the V of the V-neck I finally compared it to a favourite sweater of the big lad's, rather than trying it on him, and confirmed it was far too big. Major frogging.




After a big drink, got knitting again and it was definitely worth all that ripping. I've got to end of body and have left it with the ball of yarn attached for the moment - don't want to commit to a length yet. It's pretty heavy and I think the whole thing may well stretch once it's in use, so the top-down technique's ability to be shortened may well come in handy.

The first attempt at a sleeve was slightly wrong. My initial decrease at both ends of every third row was making it too narrow too quickly. More frogging. Alternating between fourth and third seems to be working well. At this rate he'll get a hugely warm sweater just in time for the height of summer.

Beaded Hat From Hell

Lovely idea, pain in the posterior to do. Can't wait to finish this and try it again sans beads.

I'm getting some grief from 'im Indoors about the total lack of sweater for him. I have the top-down pattern, I've done the gauge/swatch three times, in the round no less, and have got the exact tension as given on the yarn's wrapper. All that's left is to amalgamate the two, since the pattern calls for far finer yarn and consequently more stitches and rows per 10 cm square than this chunky stuff will do. I hope to just use the pattern as a rough guide to how to make something top-down and get it right by constantly trying it on my big lad. I suspect his enthusiasm, such as it is, for the whole thing will fade when he has to try it on over and over again.