Category Archives: not knitting

And THIS IS WHY YOU SWATCH

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So after finishing my nice vanilla socks, I decided that I wanted to stretch my legs a bit, metaphorically speaking. I posted a while ago about this sweater (shirt? top? Not sure what to call it).

It’s the Calad Shirt by Jenny Tsung and I just think it’s super cute. Is it something that I’ll wear? Maybe. Have I ever actually, successfully crocheted a garment for myself? No. Do I find crochet patterns above “beginner” basically unreadable? Yes.

Is any of that going to stop me? Absolutely not.

Certainly nothing will go wrong.

Anyway, I dug into my stash and found a couple balls of lace-weight yarn that, honestly, I’m probably never going to use. (I had a big “lace” phase maybe 10 years back, but I don’t have the time or attention to make fancy lace shawls anymore. Maybe when the kids go off to college.) I pulled out a surprisingly tiny crochet hook and went ahead and got swatching. And man, I’m glad I did.

Here’s the swatch. Can you spot what went wrong?

That’s right. It’s supposed to be a rectangle. Not a trapezoid.

I honestly don’t know what I did. I definitely lost stitches somewhere along the line, but where? No idea. And maybe my tension changed, too? Who knows. I’m just glad I didn’t jump right in on the sweater before I got my sea legs. It’s definitely going to take a couple tries to get this pattern figured out. Cross your fingers for me!

Have you ever messed up a swatch as badly as mine?

Hello!

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I’m in-between projects right now, so I decided to take this opportunity to break out a toy that I got for my birthday: my Hello Loom!

It’s so cute- it’s a laser-cut wooden loom. Actually, it’s two looms! One is about the size of a credit card and the other is the size of a paperback book. It reminds me of the cardboard looms I’d make from cereal boxes when I was a kid. (I don’t think I ever actually finished a woven piece when I was a kid. Much like grown-up Allison, kid Allison was good at starting projects, but not great at finishing them.)

Anyway, I pulled out a big box of yarn leftovers and started playing around. It was super easy to set up, and before I knew it, I was halfway through. Then, after an evening of Star Trek, I was finished. So fun! It’s certainly not perfect, but I enjoyed playing with my loom.

Now, I only have two questions:

  1. What am I supposed to do with my little piece(s) of weaving? Or am I just making a bunch of coasters? And,
  2. How am I supposed to get it off the loom without messing it up?

Any of you weavers that can help me?

True Colors

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So you guys remember when I finally bought some yarn a few weeks ago? Well, it came.

To refresh your memory, I’ve decided to finally buy myself some new yarn for the first time in… years. I’ve been just stashbusting left and right since the pandemic began, and to be honest, my stash was never that impressive to begin with. Needless to say, I’ve been feeling less than inspired by my knitting of late.

Anyway, I ordered 3 skeins of Berroco Vintage (a favorite of mine for soft, cozy, easy-ish care garments) in the colorway Okra. A cute, fresh green that I thought would look good on my red-headed 2-year-old. Here it is:

Well, you can imagine how excited I was when I saw the package in the mail- new yarn for a new project that I’m actually excited about? What could go wrong?

Well, look at it:

It’s fully a different color! And this isn’t a case of “Allison doesn’t know how to take pictures!” It’s truly this gray-green sage color, not the cute, chipper Okra color I thought I was ordering. (And, yes, I’ve checked the label- they didn’t send me the wrong color by mistake.)

I guess this is just a great reminder of two things:

  1. Dyelots matter- a lot. There’s a ton of variation in colors, even with a big industrial dyer like Berroco.
  2. Buying yarn online is always a bit of a crap shoot.

Is this the color I picked out? No. Was I bummed when I opened the package? A little bit. Am I still going to use this yarn to make an adorable sweater for my kid? Absolutely.

What’s the wildest color mismatch you’ve come across?

Buying yarn

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I have been thinking about why I’ve been so uninspired by my knitting recently, and what I can do to help turn that around in the new year. And I realized something. I haven’t bought any new yarn since Covid started- almost 3 years ago. I bought a little new yarn when I made the stocking for my little kid (before he was born, 2 years ago). And I bought an extra skein to add to my big kid’s stashbusting sweater this summer. But that’s it. And I ordered them online.

All that’s to say, I was looking at my dwindling stash and I found what I thought was enough yarn for a sweater for my little kid- 1 whole and 2 half-skeins of Berroco Vintage, which made me decide to make a Ben sweater for my little guy. It’s one of my favorite sweaters- I made one for my husband right after we got married years ago, and since then it’s “mysteriously” ended up in my wardrobe. Funny how that happens.

I did a little swatch on smaller-than-called-for needles and measured a bit of the gauge, then ripped it out- I knew I was going to need every last inch if I wanted to make my 2-year-old an entire sweater. I did a bunch of math, and sketched out a simplified, toddler-sized version of the Ben sweater.

I was just about ready to cast on, when I realized two things: 1. There’s no way I have enough yarn for even a toddler sweater- it’s less than 200g, with both colors combined. Maybe enough for a newborn sweater, but not enough for my “robust” 2-year-old. And 2. I want to buy some new yarn!

So I called over my little guy and asked him what color he wanted, to which he of course said “Geen!” (Green is literally the only color he knows, luckily he looks great in green.) And I ordered myself some new yarn! I picked out “Okra,” this cheerful heathered “geen” colorway.

Now I get to wait impatiently for the yarn to come in the mail and I get to start working on my little guy’s sweater. I’m so excited!

What’s the last yarn that you’ve bought for yourself?

A Christmas Wish

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I usually try to make a little printable gift or a funny card or something for you all at Christmas, but this year, I just don’t have the energy or brain cells required for something like that (not to mention my Photoshop skills are dicey at on a good day, when I’ve had plenty of sleep and more than 5 minutes to myself at any one time).

So instead, this year, I just want to wish you guys a merry Christmas (or a happy/joyous/festive whatever-it-is-you-celebrate). If there are gifts involved in your holiday, I hope you get exactly what you want and that the recipients of your gifts are grateful for the effort you put into finding the perfect gift. If there is food involved in your holiday, I hope it is delicious and that you get to take seconds of your favorite dish. I hope you have time with the people that mean the most to you, and that you get to relax and spend time by yourself. I hope your decorations are festive and that you get exactly the right amount of snow for whatever you want to do. I hope you get time to knit with a hot drink by your side, and your favorite music on the radio. I hope the next couple weeks are calm and restorative and get the next year off on the right foot.

And most of all, I hope you don’t get so tipsy while you’re knitting that you have to frog that dang sleeve again.

Happy Holidays!

-Allison

When it rains

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You guys, we must be having bad luck lately. Or maybe a mouse, or worse yet, moths. *Shudder.* Now my husband has a hole right in the middle of his sweater!

(I don’t really think we have mice or moths… I think we just have two very active children and we’re always hauling them (and their stuff) all over the place, so we’re not as gentle on our things as maybe we should be.)

If I didn’t know better, I’d say this sweater got snipped by scissors. It’s not in a thinned-out patch, it’s just right on the belly. And there’s no obvious pull in the knitting, so I don’t think it got caught on a loose nail or anything. It’s a mystery!

But, luckily for me, that makes it pretty easy to fix, especially because I found some almost-identical garnet-red yarn in my stash. It’s not the original yarn (that’s long gone), but it’s close enough to not matter.

A little duplicate stitch and voila! Picture perfect. (It’s even less noticeable in person!)

Fingers crossed that this mend actually works.

What have you mended lately?

A little more mending

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You know how I was so proud of the visible mending I did the other day on my favorite sweater?

I was totally patting myself on the back, pleased with how well it turned out and how much I liked the little red patch. I even was thinking that I should add some decorative bits of visible mending on parts of the sweater that don’t strictly need mending yet. You know, for aesthetic reasons.

Well, in a real Icarus moment, I went to further admire my handiwork yesterday, and I realized that… I hadn’t actually fixed the cuff. It turns out that I had only patched up part of the thinned-out section. Sigh.

Oh well, I guess it’s an opportunity for me to get a little more color introduced to the sweater, albeit not for “aesthetic” reasons. Ah well.

I picked up the dropped stitches with a little sapphire-blue wool, reinforced the cuff edge with some fairly random stitches and then locked the whole thing down with a little blanket stitch.

It’s not as tidy as the red patch was, but I was pressed for time and this should hold well enough. Fingers crossed that I’ve got all the loose ends this time around. But, if I don’t, well, then I guess I’ll just keep adding colors.

Have you ever had to go back and re-mend something right after you thought you fixed it?

Dying Sheep and Wool

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My 4-year-old and I have been playing a lot of Minecraft lately. It’s something that I’ve really enjoyed sharing with them, and it’s fun seeing them learn about how to do something as complicated as playing a whole video game. It’s pretty cool.

What does this have to do with knitting?

Minecraft is basically “Homesteading: the Game,” so there’s more overlap than you’d think. For example, you could dig up iron ore, smelt it, make shears, find a sheep, shear the sheep, pick flowers, dye the wool, and make things with the wool- carpets, beds etc. (I swear it’s more fun than I’m making it sound.)

My kid’s favorite thing to do is to dye the wool while it’s still on the sheep. We have lots of purple, blue and yellow sheep running around the woods near our house. It’s pretty funny.

So, when we were digging through my stash the other day and they saw a bag of white yarn, they immediately asked me if we could dye it. I swear I’m telling the truth, but I totally understand if you don’t believe me. What 4-year-old asks to dye wool as a fun, after-school activity? Mine, apparently.

Anyway, I didn’t have any reason to say no, and I have plenty of old food coloring in the cabinet, so I figured, “Why not?”

I let the kids pick out the colors they liked, and let them pour in the vinegar and mix in the food coloring. Then I boiled the kettle, added hot water into the dye, and poured the mixture onto the yarn where they told me to do it.

Is it the most beautiful yarn? No. Would I have picked those colors? Probably not. But was it a fun way to spend the afternoon with my kids? Heck yes!

And now I have a plan for Christmas gifts for them- can I make two kid-sized hats in the next 2 months? Cross your fingers for me!

Have you done any crafting with kids lately?

A little mending

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Just a quick little project today, and it’s one of those one that I’ve been meaning to do for… a year?

This is my favorite winter sweater. It’s super cozy wool that’s been worn in just the right amount so it’s not too scratchy. I love the cables, and the fit is perfect. The sleeves are just the right length. You get it. It’s the holy grail of sweaters (in my opinion, anyway).

But the problem with having a favorite sweater is that you wear it all the time, and eventually, it starts to fall apart a bit. Which is exactly what happened here. I must have caught my cuff on something, because it’s started to slowly unravel just a bit. I fully intended to fix it when I put it away for the winter, but, clearly that didn’t happen.

It’s also been several years since I knit up this sweater, so I have no idea where the matching yarn could be (assuming there was even any leftover). So, we’re going with visible mending. I pulled out some bright red yarn, knit up a little square and got to work.

I folded it over the edge of the cuff, covering both sides of the pull, after making sure that the “active stitches” were held in place by a stitch or two. I carefully sewed around the patch, and it’s good as new! Well, maybe not new, but it’s got plenty more life in it now.

What’s the last thing you mended?

Re-Arranging

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It’s starting to get a bit cooler, and I’m starting to feel the itch to pull out my yarn again. But I’m not going to push it yet. The last thing I want to do is get myself burned out on knitting. Which seems a wild thing to be worried about after 20 years of near-daily knitting. But, here we are…

Anyway, I haven’t been too creative lately. Life’s been wild- the big kid is back to school (Pre-K), which has been a wild transition- mostly good, but just a lot of getting used to, and weirdly less time for “me time.”

But one thing I have been able to do (that’s kind of craft-adjacent), is rearrange our craft area.

I didn’t plan to blog about it, so I forgot to take a “before” picture, but trust me when I say this is an improvement. I had my yarn in a half-broken dresser I got from Buy Nothing a few years ago. The kids’ art supplies on an avocado-green cart that I literally pulled off a street corner about a decade ago. And the books were on their own bookshelf, which was nice enough but fairly tip-y and probably not safe to have in a house with an almost-2-year-old who likes to climb.

Anyway, I got 3 big shelf/cabinet combos from Ikea that my 4-year-old helped me put together, and spent a couple evenings organizing everything in bins. And it looks great!

Now I just have to figure out how to get rid of this eyesore… Anyone in Seattle interested in a broken dresser?

How do you have your craft supplies organized?