Christmas in August Stockings

When I worked as a seasonal ranger for the National Park Service, August 25 was a great excuse for a party.  Dubbed “Christmas in August”, we enjoyed more of each other’s company  with a dose of Christmas cooking and perhaps a small present or two. When you live in a transient, isolated small community, hanging out together is a pretty popular activity.  Most of us wouldn’t be together for the winter holiday and the summer season was beginning to wind down. While there might be mulled cider at “Christmas in December,” there never were stockings and Saint Nick wasn’t even discussed.

Crater Lake National Park, OR

Thanks to the NPS for this aerial view.

Now that you know this little tidbit about me, you can understand why debuting a Christmas stocking pattern in late August  isn’t so crazy.  It gives you plenty of time for you to knit up a couple for this Christmas.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to reproduce Christmas stockings for a Stoneham, MA family.  When their girls were small, a neighbor had knit them each a stocking.  Now that the girls are women and building their own families, the parents wanted to add a stocking for the son in laws as well.  The original stocking was typical sock construction, with a seam up the back and an attached loop to hang from the chimney.  I altered the pattern to work the stocking in the round and incorporated the loop into the stocking itself.  For those who hate to seam, this is a simple stocking for you!

I’m planning to riff on this pattern for some color work holiday stockings, but click The Warren Christmas Stockings by Alanna Nelson for your own copy of this classic Christmas stocking to knit in worsted weight yarn.

Skirting detours

Throughout this spring, I wondered why on earth I didn’t have more spring sweaters.  The Lilly pullover was finally finished in mid June.  I even had an opportunity to wear it while working at Sit and Knit one day before it got too hot!  As I knit, I realized that my warm weather projects the last few years included:

Carmine in Berrocco Touche (this yarn was a great buy at the Boston Knitting Guild‘s yearly auction) was my first skirt, finished in 2009.
Afterpartyskirt
In 2010, inspired by those wild and wonderful women at Yarns in the Farms, here’s my “leftover skirt.”Floofy skirt made with leftover yarns in cotton, nylon and tencel
Lily Chin’s crochet dress crowned my spring/summer in 2011, which I wore to my sister’s wedding last year. I am very sorry to say that despite wearing this dress loads, I have yet to properly photograph it. You’ll have to live with this:

Making skirts and dresses has been great and I’ve worn them happily. That doesn’t change the fact that I need some spring sweaters. I retired a lovely cotton zip cardi in 2010. I still miss it. So what did I cast on?

Sasha, a skirt pattern from Louet
Logical.

It was a fantastically wonderfully project for my long haul international flight. I had three skeins of Louet Euroflax in green and a few other skeins in the stash. I decided that the top ruffle was unnecessary enhancement on my short torso, so the idea was a green tier of lace, a yellow tier of lace and finish with blue.  Or at least that was the original idea.  I’ve finished the green and blue tiers.  What do you think?
2012-08-07 17:21:15 +0000

I’m very tempted to pull out the blue ruffle and move it up to the second tier and  have the yellow kick out of the bottom.  There’s a great temptation to  lengthen the skirt as well. Rippit?  Or, is it time to cast on a spring cardi…..

 

Sprouting Projects

Has anyone figured out how to create an additional 6 to 8 hours in a day?  If so, please comment below.  Spring sprouts projects!

I jumped on board for my first sail of the season last Saturday. Alanna Nelson travels the seas with textiles!
There had been no time to choose a new project, so a sleeve to the Lily sweater on dpns came along. No needles were lost overboard!

My other knitting projects include commissioned Christmas stockings and corrections to the Level II of the Master Knitter Program.  Now that I think about it, you could call theses two projects “treat or torture” respectively.  In any case, these projects needed to stay on land.

Perhaps next week there will be time to fondle fiber and choose summer sailing projects.

As promised, here is the top to the “Signature Sunspots” quilt, which is waiting for me to reschedule my long arm quilting appointment.  The back is a hodgepodge of fabrics… let me gently remind quilters to always square after every seam?  I forgot this on one band.  When the pieces get large, there’s a lot to remember.  The signatures are on the vertical light blue bands.
Signature Quilt by Alanna Nelson
As for garments, perhaps I can create them in my sleep, as I’ve heard happens in Hong Kong?  My l’il gymnast has a big school dance in early June. She has requested a dress. We were in New York at the beginning of May and we stopped by Mood. She got to pet the dog made famous by Project Runway, and we chose some great fabric.  Then there’s that skirt I drafted for the Drama Queen.  She’ll be home this weekend and hopefully that will head out the door.

And to top it off, gold work embroidery haunts moments carved from the to do list.  Oh, yes, more garments on my horizon…. my summer travels include a wedding in Beirut in July.

It’s all I can do to stop daydreaming about knitted sofa covers, punch needle trims, tassels I want to try and the possible.

So yes, anyone with ideas about how to create those extra hours…

My Favorite Lines

No, not pick up lines!  My favorite lines are found in textiles and on sailboats.  In New England, the sailing season is six months long if you belong to a club.  Now that the merry month of May has arrived, I am ready to combine my favorite lines.

Alanna Nelson enjoys sailing and knitting

This requires not only pulling out the foul weather gear, but lining up the appropriate knitting projects to go with sailing.  My requirements:

  • on circular needles
  • able to fit in the front pouch pocket of wind breaker
  • not too difficult of a stitch pattern
  • no more than 2 colors

Anyone have any recommendations for this season’s projects?

We all need a lifeline!

Perfection is a goal to which one can always aspire. We could probably debate the merits of perfection; is anything less acceptable, or when and why perfection should be our objective.  Mistakes are inevitable.  The real question: what we do once we’ve made the mistakes?

Help is always around us if we ask.  And that’s why I’ve always been happy to share lifelines for your knitted work.  Perhaps I just hang around people who hold a high bar for themselves.  They aim for perfection and making mistakes is not just inefficient, but frustrating.  And in knitting, ripping back just opens a world of possibilities for more mistakes.  But adding a knitted lifeline makes it easy to rip back before the mistake.

I trawled through all of the videos on YouTube for the best description of how to create a lifeline in your knitting, and Staci from VeryPink wins my vote.

In complex knitting patterns, it wouldn’t hurt to add them as you go.  Why wait for a mistake?  You can build the protection along the way and it can also serve as a row counter.  Raise the lifeline every four or six rows, depending on the pattern repeat.

Push up bobbles

Early in the winter, I deviated to  Webs.  I was not being devious, nor deviant, really.  A friend had mentioned that Rowan’s recently discontinued yarn, “Calmer” was on sale at the Northampton, MA yarn mecca. Staying focused, I crossed that entire store of temptation, quickly identifying the proper warehouse aisle. My favorite colors are rarely the first choice of other knitters, so the leftovers were still very tempting (why doesn’t it ever work like that for shoes?). I chose a bag of kelly green and six skeins of light apple green and managed to escape without falling into a tactile abyss.  Then it was back to my normally scheduled road trip. See?  I can resist!

Of course, this yarn did not knit up for me in the gauge suggested on the ball band.  After trawling Ravelry, I saw that several people used this yarn to make Marnie MacLean‘s Lily sweater from the Twist Collective. Oh, yes, this I could wear.  So I immediately downloaded the pattern and started swatching, despite the fact that I wasn’t quite sure how they managed to get the gauge listed with Calmer.

Fortunately, Twist patterns come in a large range of sizes.  After practicing the bobble and lace panel along the sides, I realized that my gauge was completely different.  I would need to rewrite the pattern.  A bit of math and I found I could basically use the instructions for the 2XL instead of the size medium.  I just needed to pay attention to the waistline increases and decreases.  And off, I went, casting on this sweater in the round from the bottom edge.

My original swatch piece brought two other issues to the forefront:

  • Pay attention to the pattern!  The bobbles travel in a V shape, not parallel lines
  • Make those bobbles pop!

Paying attention to the pattern is easier said than done.  We all make mistakes.  swatching a knitwear project
Looking at the swatch, you can also notice that the first few bobbles aren’t nearly as distinct as the last ones. I took a cue from one of the many tips Annie Modesitt shared with people on the Tactile Travel tour in 2010.  She has her own method of creating defined bobbles.  I just used one part of her toolbox.

This bobble is created by knitting, purling, knitting, purling, knitting in one stitch.  The second, third, fourth and fifth stitches are passed over the first, creating a little ball.  The instructions then sent you on your merry way.  I, however, moved the yarn to the front of the work and slipped the new bobble back onto the left hand needle.

Push up bobble

I then wrapped the yarn underneath the bobble and snugly pulled the yarn to the back of the work. Then I slipped the bobble stitch back to the right hand needle and continued in pattern.

It looks pretty good, but I’m always open to new techniques… anyone else have a way to make bobbles “POP!”?