Ravelry really is wonderful. I never would have thought of getting my Boye points re-tooled to accept KnitPicks cables. But Ravelrist achrisvet had seen this and pointed me to it. w00t!

(Crossposted from my LiveJournal.)

I am designing a dress for Thing One. She really liked the sundresses I made for Little Cat Z this summer, and kept saying things like, “I wish I had a dress like that.” Subtlety isn’t her strong suit.

The dress will have a knitted bodice and a woven fabric skirt. My original plan was to have the bodice close in the back with buttons. Now I’m thinking that might not be the best way to go. I’m thinking a zipper on the side would be better. I’m not very trusting when it comes to knitted buttonholes actually holding the buttons. This isn’t so bad when it’s on a four-year-old who’s home most of the time, but if sixth grader is wearing a dress that won’t stay shut . . . that’s a problem. Also, if it’s on the side, it would be easier for her to get on and off by herself. I think buttons on the side would be worse than on the back, because she’d be brushing against them all the time, making it more likely they’d come undone, and also it could be pretty annoying to feel the lumps from the buttons there.

Of course, I’m kind of thinking this might not be a bad pattern to try to sell, too, if it works. So while I would have little problem putting in a double-lapped zipper on the skirt and bodice (I’ve been sewing about as long as I’ve been knitting), I don’t know how other knitters would feel about that. And I’d have to be really good at explaining it in my directions, too.

To top it all off, I’m at least a third of the way done knitting the bodice, with the back buttons in mind, and I’d have to rip out most of it to do it with the zipper in the side.

So, what’d y’all think?

I can’t decide which is better: keeping detailed project notes in Ravelry, or putting them here. I keep going back and forth.

Anyway, I got through the ten rows of ribbing on the Hallowig, and started the setup for decreasing. I think the pattern is a little unclear on a couple things. Are you supposed to do the first decrease before the second marker on the bangs side? I’m pretty sure that’s what it says to do, and it pretty much makes sense, since the second marker on the bangs side is actually right at the beginning of the round, but the way it’s worded makes it sound like the round should be starting in the middle of the bangs . . . I had to read it several times to make sense of it. Maybe it’s just me, though, since no one on Ravelry seemed to have that problem.

Then, reading ahead in the instructions, trying to figure out if I was right or not, I saw the line, “Work this round every round until 6 sts rem between markers.” This, to me, sounds like there should be twenty-four stitches on the needles at that point (there are four markers). Except, you only decrease between markers one and two, not between two and one (really, it makes sense, go look at the diagram). When I copied the pattern to print it out, I didn’t include the actual photos, just the text and diagrams, so I had to wait until our computer was not being used to check, and yes, you only decrease between one and two. It’s very obvious when you look at the aerial-view picture of the actual wig. So, just a little thing I would have worded differently. Or maybe I shouldn’t have read ahead (isn’t that what they tell you in school?) and then when I actually got to that point, I would have known what was meant. Or maybe this should be a signal to me to stop being so cheap about my printer ink and copy the photos, too.

I swear I had never heard of the problem of ladders in ribbing until I made those legwarmers last year and was looking for tricks to keep them from laddering. A lot of the stuff I found was specifically about ribbing, and how a lot of people apparently have a problem with ladders appearing when they go from a knit stitch to a purl stitch. It was one of those things that I filed away as interesting, but not really relevant to me or my problem at the time.

So today, while I was working on the Hallowig for bibliogrrl, I noticed that I was having a bit of a ladder problem in switching between knit and purl stitches. I’m sure if I’d never found that information, it never would have happened to me. Never.

Anyway, I watched myself knitting for a while, trying to figure out how to correct it. It had only started in the last few rounds, so it’s not a huge problem, but I still wanted to stop. I discovered that for some reason — maybe I did a particularly sloppy row when I was taking the stairs down yesterday in my new high heels — I was still knitting as usual, barely dipping the tip of the needle through the loop to pick up more yarn, but when I purled the next stitch, I really went fishing. I probably put the needle through the loop by an inch. Maybe more. This pushed the loop further onto the left-hand needle, which meant there was more yarn between the last stitch and the next stitch, and also meant that I was wrapping more yarn around the needle than when I just dip the tip. That sounds like perfect ladder conditions to me. With the second purl stitch (it’s in 2×2 rib), for whatever reason, I didn’t go quite as far.

I don’t think it shows, looking at the fabric as a whole, but I certainly noticed it when I was knitting. The next couple of rounds, I took special care to not do that with the purl stitches, and now it all seems to look much better. I don’t know that this is what causes it for everyone who gets ladders in ribs, but I think it’s interesting, nonetheless.

Of course, I’m at work and don’t have my camera, so I can’t take pictures to show what I mean, and by the time I get home I’ll hopefully have knitted enough that I won’t really be able to find the laddery bits.

The forementioned pile of projects on my plate:

The Purse
Hallowig for bibliogrrl, who is shaving her head for Gilda’s Closet in Chicago.
Shirt for Thing Two (almost finished, just needs buttonholes and buttons)
“Chain mail” tunic for Thing One’s Hallowe’en costume
Swordfish fin for Thing Two’s Hallowe’en costume
Trick-or-treat bag for Little Cat Z (thinking about doing a tutorial on how to make one, too)
Dress for Thing One (designing it for her)
Dress for Little Cat Z (based on dress for Thing One, but with different yarn and a much smaller size, seeing how well the pattern can be altered)
Cropped cardigan for me (heavily modifying Ravelry pattern Sweet Little Nothing)
Ripping out first Sweet Little Nothing and finding something else I can make with that yarn (maybe The Amanda Hat)
A skirt for Grace
A skirt for me
A skirt pattern I came up with the other day that may or may not work (although I don’t even have fabric for this, so it probably shouldn’t be listed here)
Finish the super secret felting project (needs I-cord still) and figure out what the heck I’m doing with it

I think that’s far more projects than I really need to have going all at once. Hopefully by the end of this weekend, I’ll have the first three done (although if the first Hallowig works well, I might make more, but we’ll see).

. . . Strike that. Reverse it. (Thank you, Willy Wonka.)

I have far too many projects on my plate right now. I probably wouldn’t if I wasn’t running into stumbling blocks every other day.

I’ve knitted and felted The Little Coco Bag. I used the KnitPicks Wool of the Andes in Pigeon Twist that I already had, instead of doing two colors, and I did 3-stitch I-cord instead of 2-stitch. Everything was going really well until it came time to get the grommets. My mom had some, but the largest she had were 1/4″ (which is what the pattern calls for, but my larger I-cord would have fit too snugly), so I had to go buy some 3/8″ grommets. They had the grommets at JoAnn’s, but not the setting tool. My good spouse was going to try to make one up for me, but before he got a round tuit, we found the setting tool at Michael’s. Of course, I didn’t have enough cash on me for all the other neat stuff I found there, so I wanted to write a check. Unfortunately, I was a bad girl and am driving on a ticket (I should have my license back this week, I think), and Michael’s won’t take a check without a picture ID. So we had to wait another week or so before we could go back (it’s a thirty mile drive, I wasn’t going back until I had more reasons to go than just the grommet tool).

I finally have both the grommets and the grommet tool, all in one place, and I can start working on getting the grommets into the bag. Poking holes into heavy felted fabric is not as easy as it sounds. I couldn’t get my size 13 needles (which is what they say to use in the pattern) through the fabric at all. (I don’t believe they actually used those dpns in the picture on the pattern to make the holes. They’d have punctured their hands. I think they made the holes then put the dpns in because they looked nicer.) I decided to start with smaller needles (10 1/2s), get the holes in there, then stretch them out with the 13s. This worked, but as soon as I took the 13s out, the holes shrank. So I decided to leave them for a day. That seemed to work better. But my troubles weren’t over yet.

When I got home that night, I decided I’d wait until the kids went to bed to set the grommets. In case you’re wondering, this is not a good idea. “Quietly hammering” is an oxymoron. I managed, with the help of my good spouse, to get one in place, but decided not to do any more until another evening, before the kids went to bed.

One thing my good spouse noticed was that there was a 1/4″ snap part in with my grommets. We joked about how they call the grommet parts male and female, so ha-ha, neither of us had to actually finish the thought. This continued to be funny, in my mind at least, until last night, when I finally went to set the last of the grommets.

I was still having trouble getting the grommets into the holes. I could have stretched them out further with 15s, but I didn’t feel like waiting any longer. Then the lightbulb in my brain came on. The size 13 needles are just the right size for the 3/8″ grommets to fit around. I slid a male-part grommet onto a needle, pushed the needle through the hole, and then, with a modicum of effort, pushed the grommet into the hole. It worked perfectly. The perfection continued as I worked my way around, all the way up to the seventh grommet, when I realized that I didn’t still have two male-parts that were just stacked tightly together. I had one, plus the little “baby” snap.

Of course, I don’t have the receipt from JoAnn’s anymore. I’m going to call before going out there (thirty mile drive, remember) and see if they will, without the receipt, take the baby snap part and give me a daddy grommet part, and then they can send the opened package back to Dritz as a faulty set.

I’m really looking forward to finishing this. I’m going to line it with a lighter shade of matching purple fabric that I happily found in my fabric stash (it is just the right amount), and then I’m going to try it out and see if it might actually be The Purse. You know, The Purse for which I have been searching for years. The Purse which will be the perfect size to hold everything I need, plus maybe a paperback book and a few other things I just want to carry.

Hopefully, once I get the correct grommet part (if JoAnn’s can’t do the little exchange I have in mind, I’ll just buy more grommets, seeing as how the package of eight was less than three bucks, anyway), that will be the end of my troubles with this project, and I can move on to solving the problems I’m having with others.

1. I am almost finished with a gargantuan scarf I’m making for my friend Grace. I’ll be out of yarn sometime real soon now, and then I’ll have to find a stretch of floor long enough to lay it out and measure it. It’s got to be close to nine feet long (it’s long enough if I hold one end in my hand and stretch my arm way up, it still pools on the floor). And she keeps saying, “I knew we should have gotten another skein!”

2. I made Grace a womb. I’d teach her how to knit for herself, but she’s tried it and not done well, and has decided it’s not for her.

3. I made Little Cat Z a Summerlin dress. It’s very cute, even if I did run out of yarn and have to do the last row and bind off in a different yarn (and a different color). It turned out very big, especially the straps, and I’m not sure if that’s because of the yarn I used (KnitPicks Shine Worsted), but I think it might be. I was going to make one for my niece, but my sister-in-law has not sent me her chest measurement yet. I could always guess, but I think my SIL might be pissed at me, in which case, I’ll just make another one for Little Cat Z instead.

4. I started a Storm Cloud Shawlette for myself. I’m using the whole ball of KnitPicks Palette I had leftover from my Shetland Shorty. I had to figure out (yes, it was imperative) what rows would put me at 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 of the way done. I did a spreadsheet (I know, I’m a geek) to find the total number of stitches it would have after I do my last row (I’m doing the blue version with the ruffly bit, and I’m taking a cue from Ravelry member akabori and I’ll bind off on the wrong side with all stitches and yarnovers, to keep it really ruffly), and then see which rows would be the quarter-marks. I came up with 7227 stitches total, and row 43 is about 1/4, row 62 about 1/2, and row 76 will be about 3/4. I’m on row 48, so I’m over a quarter of the way done. (ETA: Yes, I probably could have used the formula for the area of a circle to figure it out, but I imagine this was faster.)

5. I took pictures of the patchwork afghan I made for my good spouse. I also took pictures of something else, I’m pretty sure. Yarn, maybe (which my good spouse thinks is hilarious). Now I need to finish that roll and take it and the one that’s sitting in the fridge to get them developed so I can post the pictures.

I’ve picked up the Super Secret Project again. After the day where I played Baron Munchausen, I realized that the last piece of yarn I attached to finish off the last panel was not, in fact, wool. The room I was in when I was doing the hunt-and-splice bit doesn’t have the best light, and I pulled this fairly long bit of yarn out of my scraps bag, and it looked like the right color (natural), and I don’t have any other natural-colored scraps of the same weight, so I just figured it must be the right thing, right? And it seemed to felt together nicely, so it must have been wool!

The next time I took it out of the bag, it was pretty obvious I was wrong. The very last bit was actually white, not natural, and the last bit of the wool had kind of felted around the white (which must be the cheap acrylic stuff I used to make Thing One’s Hallowe’en costume a couple years ago). Ooops. So, I took that out and added on some of my WOTA. It’s a prototype. It doesn’t have to be pretty.

Now I’ve got my panels all put together, but I have some more work I need to do with something non-felting, and I’ve been agonizing over how to go about attaching it, and how to get it to work right, and I just couldn’t figure anything out. This morning, when I should have been getting ready to go to work, I pulled out the project, cut out a piece of scrap fabric and pinned it where the non-felted knitting is supposed to go, and just looked at it for a while. Then I did some measuring and hemming and hawing, until I finally just thought, “Short rows!” Seriously, with the exclamation point and everything.

I’m sure I’d considered short rows already, but discarded the idea as unworkable. Probably because however I was thinking of using them then would have been unworkable. But I think I’ve got it now. I’m doing a sample piece, not attached to the project, to make sure I’ve got the idea right, but once I have my numbers correct and it all looks good, it shouldn’t take long to do these last little bits and then throw it some hot water and see what happens.

You know that scene from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen where they’re coming back from the moon, and they’ve run out of rope at the bottom, so the Baron ties on a new length, and Berthold (I think it’s Berthold) asks where he got it, and the Baron explains, rather huffily, that he cut it off the top, of course? (Insert a similar scene from a Warner Brothers cartoon if you haven’t seen Munchausen, and then go rent the movie.)

I kind of feel like I’ve been doing that.

I was almost finished with the last panel on the Super Secret project, and I ran out of the Bare yarn. So . . . I fished some cut off ends out of my scrap yarn bag, and did spit splices. (My good spouse was in the shower, so he didn’t have to be witness to me “doing something gross.”) Then I ran out of yarn. I cut off the long tails left from casting on and did some more spit splices. I’m finally finished, and I have two little pieces left I could have spliced on if I’d become terribly desperate. They’re about two inches and two and a half inches long. And it was a near thing, too.

I’m going to use the Wool of the Andes I have to join the panels and do whatever else I decide I need to do with wool. It’s a prototype. It doesn’t have to look pretty. Although I think it still will look nice, just not quite how I picture the actual finished project.

I’m pretty sure that a single hank of the Bare will be enough to do the whole project. I have four gauge-type swatches that were necessary for designing, but someone doing the project by itself will probably only need one. We’ll see. I like the idea that it could be a single-ball project. Even though it won’t quite, because it’ll need a ball of non-feltable yarn, too, but it’ll be close.

*From The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

I’ve just finished the second panel of the Super Secret Project. Well, finished knitting. It needs to have ends woven in yet. That leaves two panels, and putting them all together, and adding the other part. Then I can felt it and see if it all works. Then, assuming it does, I need to get more of the Bare yarn and actually dye it and make a new one. So far, it seems to be going according to plan. I just hope it continues to do so.

I did use the smaller motifs. They work better in so many ways I don’t want to list them all. And I did remember to rip the first panel out and measure the yarn. It really made me wish I had a scale, because figuring total grams would have been a lot easier, I’m sure.