Fall tree-peeping, knitter-style

I only live about an hour and a half's drive from Bloomington, Indiana. It's an easy day trip. It's a wonderful "real" college town (as opposed to an ordinary town which happens to have a college in it), with great shopping, dining, entertainment, and an attractive campus. If I could live anywhere in Indiana, it'd be Bloomington.

The problem with day tripping, though, is that at the end of the day, you have to drive home, so somebody has to forgo the wine at dinner. There's nowhere to grab an afternoon nap, and you always get tired before you've done all the things you want to do. So this year for my spouse's fall break, we booked a couple of nights in a hotel right off the town square. (Don't worry, this isn't going to turn into a Diary of my Vacation post.)

As we approached the hotel, I was supposed to be navigating, but I got distracted by the fabulous lace-covered tree at right. In fact, the downtown Bloomington Entertainment and Arts District (BEAD) was full of tree sweaters! A little Googling turned up the reason: it's a fundraising project for domestic violence victims. You can see all the trees and read about the Knitting to Heal project here.

Another of my favorite trees was, unsurprisingly, sponsored by a local yarn store, Yarns Unlimited. I wish I had a 360-degree draggable panorama to show you all the charming knitted and crocheted sea creatures!

Oh, and here's the obligatory photo of my yarny souvenir shopping from Yarns Unlimited and In A Yarn Basket (all sock yarn, except for the shawl pin. Let's pretend to be surprised). I've recently learned from Twitter that souvenir yarn doesn't count as stash. ;)

Intermediate gratification

My mom phoned me the other day for advice about her current project. It was a supposedly flat-topped hat, worked from the top down; she was dubious about it because it wasn't lying flat. So I recommended she block the WIP to see if that would make it lie flat, before investing any more time in it.

I actually block WIPs all the time. This has become easier since I bought some very long cables for my laminated wood interchangeables; I can just replace the needle tips with the plastic endcaps, and the cables function as flexible blocking wires. (Compared to knitting, blocking crochet in progress is so easy it feels like cheating: just replace the hook with a plastic coilless pin-style marker.)

Here are a few of the reasons I'm frequently pinning something out just before bed:

If I've found a mistake in lace several rows down (or, as happened to me earlier this week, a hundred! rows down), and it's the sort that can be fixed by dropping a stitch column or two, I know the repair will be a lot easier if I block it first to set the shapes of the stitches.

For a shawl, or some other garment where gauge isn't critical, I probably didn't swatch. So, I just want to see how the fabric is going to look after blocking, to make sure I like it. Again, this is particularly true with lace, which always looks a well-used dishrag before blocking; sometimes I just want a little reassurance that it'll be fine in the end. Compare the two pictures at right of the same project: the first was taken before blocking, and the second was taken afterwards. (The pattern, by the way, is Corrina Ferguson's Yeats.)

If I'm using a sleeve or some other small part of a garment as my gauge swatch, I need to block it as soon it's big enough to measure. (I may actually have finally outgrown the folly of measuring gauge without blocking!)

With a really challenging project, I might want to block gently before binding off, to reveal any mistakes I've missed while they're still accessible from above. I really don't ever want to repeat the occasion where I discovered a mis-crossed cable on the back of a sweater-- after I'd bound off the neck, joined the shoulders, and picked up stitches for the hood.

And sometimes, I have more than one project going at a time. (I know, you're shocked!) Usually one of them is The Thing I Am Currently in Love With, and another is The Thing I Need to Get Done. Sometimes the only way I can force myself to stop working on the first is by blocking it in the morning. That way, I only have to be virtuous for the thirty seconds it takes to shove the object of enchantment into the sink; then for the rest of the day, I'll have to work on the object of drudgery until my beloved dries.

(Or, uh, cast on something else entirely...)

To have and to hold

So, the thing about knitting lots of shawls is, you end up with lots of shawls. Sure, you can give some away. But if you (like me) tend to make shawls requiring occasional handwashing and fidgety blocking, it's a little like giving someone a pet: it comes with an implied obligation, so you don't want to impose a handknitted shawl on just anyone.

(Yes, Mom, I made a shawl with your name on it. You don't have to call me and hint.)

Here's my favorite way to store all those fabulous shawls. It's part of the elfa brand modular closet system sold by The Container Store. This piece is actually marketed as a pants rack, but I have a lot more shawls than pants. There are little clear rubber rings on each metal bar that help keep the shawls from sliding off.

And look! The rack slides out, so it's easy to hang and retrieve shawls neatly from the top, without disturbing their neighbors.

As you can see, this rack is full. And what you can't see is that there are more shawls folded on the shelf above the rack. It's definitely time to order a second rack. Pants are overrated, anyhow.

A literature survey

Let me remind you that I am an expert on graduate school, having dropped out of two of them...

In many academic fields, when one is starting to investigate a research topic, the literature survey is an essential stage. It involves hunting down journal papers related to the topic, reading or skimming them for important results, and studying any potentially-useful techniques the author has developed. A researcher who doesn't do this thoroughly risks the frustration of having a paper rejected because her results were already published by someone else, or because a known technique would make her results trivial. Basically, you have to become really familiar with what's been done before in order to confidently contribute something valuable and original.

For the last several weeks, I've been doing something similar with knitted shawls.

I got it in my head that I'd like to design some knitted shawls and shawlettes, but I've made (read: finished) surprisingly few of them, notably Haruni, Traveling Woman, and Sunbird. I'd already done a good job of filling my Ravelry favorites with interesting candidates, but I hadn't studied how they were constructed, or how the stitch patterns interacted.

Late last week, I finished Melissa Lemmons' Fountain of Diamonds. (I'm not going to branch off into a pattern review, but I will say that I knit this pattern exactly as written, right down to the placement of stitch markers.)

The three-triangular-panel construction gives better front converage than the common triangle or semi-circular shapes, yet doesn't overpower a short person like a long triangle can.

I also tried a beading method I hadn't previously used, at least not with success (there's an Evenstar shawl shoved in a bag in my nightstand, with only the beaded edging unworked). Be warned: the Clover steel crochet hooks with the comfy handles are sized much differently than the Susan Bates hooks. The Clover size 13/14 I had on hand was .50 mm, compared to the .75 mm Bates size 14. Beading went a lot better once I got the correct-size hook for my size 8 beads.

Beads are notoriously hard to photograph, and I like subtle combinations of beads with yarn, but you can probably make them out along the upper edges of the diamonds. They sparkle when the shawl moves, and they make those otherwise-interminable purl rows more interesting to work. The center of the flower at the bottom of the diamond, by the way, is created with a 3-to-7 increase. That wasn't a new technique to me, but it's a favorite (I used something similar in the flowers on my Betony socks).

I also worked my first-ever nupps (pronounced "noop!s"; the exclamation point is optional). They're the little knobs outlining this leaf motif. If you're unfamiliar with these, they're made by working (k1, yo) a lot of times into the same stitch and ending with a final k1; then all strands are purled together on the following row. For the love of all that's holey, do not attempt these without needles with sharp, long tips!

So if anybody asks, it's not recreational knitting, it's a literature survey.

Vanity

I just have one quick little thing to show you today:

That's right, it's now a Skewbaru.