Eureka!

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.

Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash and I’m delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever.*

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.

Progress

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.

---

The ribbing on the legwarmers slipped down past my knees eventually, but that was it. The shaping of the calf kept it pretty well in place. The ribbing is very stretched out. I don’t know if increasing the ribbing — stitch-wise, not round-wise, of course — would solve the problem or exacerbate it. I have yet to wash them and see how the yarn holds up. I will do that this weekend.

Double the fun.

Or half? I did a panel of the super secret project with the motifs. I used the intarsia in the round method from Moth Heaven, which at first was awful because I thought my charts were simple enough I didn’t need to keep track. Ha! I know better now. I also knit it way too loose. So I ripped it all out and started over, keeping track of my charts, and it was lovely. I’m not exactly ready to do anything major in intarsia in the round, but for my purposes, this was perfect.

Of course, I wouldn’t be me if I hadn’t come up with something to change before I’d finished the panel. What if I made the motifs half the size? As I was finishing them, I started thinking they might be too big. They’d probably work, but they were kind of a pain to fit in with the shaping.

Thankfully, I did not cast on for a whole new panel. I’ve got brains hidden away somewhere, and occasionally I actually dust them off and use them. I did a a test swatch, which I will felt tonight, and see what I think. If they look okay width-wise, but too stumpy, I can easily lengthen them. If they don’t look good at all, I’ll stick with the originals. If I don’t stick with the originals, I’ll rip out the panel I’ve already done so I can knit it with the new motifs and then rip it out so I can measure it. At least I thought of making the motifs smaller before I ripped out the old one and measured. Not that measuring would take that long, but I need to feel good about something.

In other news, I’ve decided not to do the feathered arrow vest redux with the Wool of the Andes. It was just too heavy. I have to find a different yarn, and I have to find something to do with all the yarn I’ve got.

Also, work continues on the legwarmers. I’m almost done with the increases on the lozenge. I think two more rows, and then I’ll try them on. Changing around the stitches to get them evenly divided again has done wonders, although I really wish I had longer dpns. I think I’ll have to put the stitches on a spare cable before trying them on.

I don’t like the looks of this.

I think I’ve got my “panel” for the super secret project figured out, at least the basics. I felted it last night, and it seems to be a good size. Now, the problem is that I have some motifs I would like to add in another color. And I’m doing it in the round.

Intarsia scares me. I know it shouldn’t. I’ve been knitting for about thirty years. I have done intarsia plenty of times. I just have this irrational fear of creating puckered fabric. I have been telling myself for at least the last year that I need to get over it and just do some. I should probably do some Fair Isle, too. But that’s neither here nor there for this. This is intarsia all the way. I could do duplicate stitch, except that I have never managed to get duplicate stitch to actually work. I don’t know what I do wrong, but the duplicate yarn always slides to the side and gets lost or something. It’s very frustrating. Besides, I went through an awful lot of fussing around with geometry to figure out how to make this work so I could easily do the intarsia, and I would be really annoyed with myself if I wasted all that time. I could rework the pattern so it’s flat, but I really think this is something better done in the round. Plus, my goal is to have no seams.

Each motif is at most five stitches wide, and there isn’t a lot of main color inside the contrast color, so I think I will try out the method described at Moth Heaven. I probably don’t need to mention that I, too, like fiddly stuff. If that doesn’t work for me, there are also a few methods described on let me explaiKnit, so I’ll go there next.

I decided I’m not going to wait to actually get the other yarn. I’m going to substitute something else I already have, and if that works reasonably well, then I will buy more yarn. If it doesn’t, I’ll have saved myself time and money, and I need all of both of those I can get. Can’t everyone?

Before I kill you, Mr. Bond . . .

No, never mind. I’m not going to monologue and tell you all about my dastardly plans for this super secret project which will allow me to completely take over the knitting world.

Well, no, it probably won’t do that, but it is going to be very cool, as long as it works.

I will, however, say that I’ve figured out, I think, how to use the differences in how much the knitted fabric shrinks in length and width during felting to my advantage. I even got to use my mad math skills, which included poking Google until it finally coughed up the formula I needed. I’ve knitted a . . . panel, for lack of a better word and felted it, and it came out looking pretty good, except it’s too small. I kind of knew it would be, but I’m worried if I make it bigger it will be too big and thus unwieldy, but I’ve already started knitting a larger one, so we’ll see. I managed to find some comfort this morning by thinking of other similar things which are much larger, and which seem to work just fine.

I have yet to try dyeing the yarn. I want to make sure my idea will work, at least in general. I have to get more yarn, of a different kind, to make sure that the whole idea will come together as planned, and I should probably wait to do the dyeing until I have it.

Overall, I am very pleased with my progress thus far.

In other words, I love it when a plan comes together. (George Pepard as Hannibal, in The A-Team)