It’s done! My second Rosalie is all blocked and ready to wear.
(I’d love to show you a pretty garden photo with daffodils in the background. But it’s raining in Oregon now, and expected to rain all this coming week. So excuse the simple indoor photos.)
This Rosalie is a bit bigger than the original, with an extra lace stripe – but that just makes for more wrap-around fun when wearing it. And in Sun Valley Fibers MCS Fingering? It feels simply wonderful.
Deets: Sun Valley Fibers MCS Fingering, roughly 53g in 009 and 91g in Bentley. 3.75mm needles. Four stripes each garter in 009, and Fleurette in Bentley. |
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Finally! Months after getting Selbuvotter by Anne Bårdsgård and years after getting Selbuvotter by Terri Shea, I’m taking some time to play with Selbu-style mittens.
That said, what you see here clearly isn’t actually a mitten. It’s just a glorified swatch, with next to nothing for a cuff and an open top – but it’s letting me explore the way the patterning on this style of mitten blends in so beautifully with the shaping, especially around the thumbs. (I admit to a fascination for thumb-shaping methods – as you might guess, since I teach a class called All Thumbs.)
Normally, after setting thumb gusset stitches aside, I’d cast on new hand stitches provisionally, with the idea of a seamless join between hand and thumb. But in her book, Terri suggests casting on with backward loops instead. Why? So you can then pick up thumb stitches in pattern, thus extending the patterning from the palm through the inner thumb. As it turns out... this trick works brilliantly. So far, other things I’ve learned from the swatch include:
- Cascade 220 Sport is a really nice yarn for this sort of project. But at the gauge I’m getting, I couldn’t fit much patterning into a pair of mittens, unless they were sized for a giant. Finer patterning would require finer yarn. (Fortunately, I just might have some in the stash.)
- Given that I don’t do stranded colorwork very often, my tension is better than I would’ve expected – except at the needle joins, where I’m too tight, especially with the contrast color. More practice is required.
- Within the gussets, backward-loop increases are the typical way to go. But I found it a tad less fiddly to just throw yarn overs into place, being sure to twist them on the following round. Your mileage may vary.
- Traditionally, long floats weren’t trapped with this sort of mitten. Instead, knitters relied on the stickiness of the yarn to hold the floats to the interior of the fabric, thus avoiding the problem of trapped floats peeking through and being visible on the exterior of the fabric. But just for yuks, when the pattern had 7 or 9 stitches of one color in a row, I trapped the other color behind three consecutive stitches. This worked well: no long floats, and no peek-through either.
What next? Well, I suppose I have to get started on a real pair of mittens. But perhaps some more swatching first.
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Each of its 25 chapters covers a specific textile tradition. Some I’d heard of before – like the shisha embroidery of northwestern India, and the piña cloth of the Philippines – but many I’d not. Either way, each of the chapters was eye-opening. Brandon describes each textile tradition with great care, giving fascinating details and making clear the textile's importance to its home culture.
The book got its start as a series of articles for the WARP (Weave a Real Peace) newsletter. This was the first I’d heard of WARP, though I’d previously heard of some related projects. If you’re not familiar with WARP, I recommend checking out their website – you’ll be glad you did. |
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In case you hadn’t heard, early-bird registration is now open for Stitches Midwest.
I’m scheduled to teach five classes, including two sessions of Patterned Brioche – the original session sold out so fast, XRX added a second! (It’s going to be weird to teach the same class twice in one day. No doubt in the afternoon I’ll have trouble remembering what I did and did not say.) |
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Class spotlight: Stretchy Bind-offs
At Stitches Midwest – as at Stitches United – one of the classes I’m teaching is Stretchy Bind-offs. It’s like Bind-off Bonanza, just condensed to 90 minutes long and focussed on bind-offs that have plenty of “give.”
In class, we practice a variety of bind-offs. Each is looser than your basic, everyday bind-off, in one of three ways:
- bigger bind-off loops (simple, but effective)
- more convoluted loops (oh, the fun to be had here!)
- more bind-off loops (you’ll wonder, “Why didn’t I think of this before?”)
And, of course, we get to talk about other bind-offs tricks. One of my faves is Elizabeth Zimmermann’s sewn bind-off that perfectly matches garter stitch.
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Slow progress is still progress, right?
I know it doesn’t seem like I'm doing much with the translation project at Stitch-Maps.com, but I’m busy chugging away behind the scenes:
- Divvying the message catalog into sections – like “Knitspeak errors” and “Accounts and subscriptions” – so translators have the option of working on a specific section.
- Preparing the site to send multipart emails – that is, emails with HTML parts for the best possible viewing, and with text parts for use as a fallback. The idea is that the HTML parts ought to make it easier for people to click on the links within those emails, such as links for setting passwords.
- Making it possible to include links in translated messages without opening security holes. This task has, unfortunately, proven to be more time-consuming than I’d expected, hence the slow progress. Oh, well.
Naturally, I want to make sure the site’s security is top-notch before releasing any changes. But with any luck y’all will see significant changes in another week or so.
As always, if you want to help with translations into German or Russian, be my guest! Or if you have your eye on another language, just say the word and I’ll make it so. |
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