Stop Motion Knitting - Pre-Knitting.

As you might (or not, I'm not sure if I've mentioned it on the blog before) know, W is working on his thesis.  I'm working as his "Fabricator" - a fancy word for how I'm helping him build his puppets.  He's doing all of the shop work, and I'm making all of the outside parts. 

The plan is to have felted puppets with an underlying wood and wire armature.  I'm trying to make the outsides so that if W needs to change the inside armature, he can just take the knit parts off like clothes and put them on a new armature.

Designing these puppets has been similar to designing toys, but you have to take a few things into consideration.  For one, the covers can limit access to he underlying armature, so if the armature breaks you would have to knit a whole new cover over a new armature (gulp!) or cut the cover.  Another is that these "toys" will get a lot of play time, so seams need to be tight and neat (because they're on camera! :) )

Anyway, I haven't actually knit anything (aside from a felted swatch) but over the weekend W and I sat down, looked at our supplies and my stash and made decisions about what fabrics I'm going to use.

I tried to give him a lot of options, since we didn't have a lot of options in the main color department when we went to JoAnn Fabrics - we noticed that most big box stores that we went to didn't have a very large selection of colors for 100% wool, but JoAnn's had the best. We even found a little bow for the girl puppet!

The monsters' horns are going to be wrapped in yarn - we have 3 options for that.   One is an acrylic, one is the Samba that I bought the other week at the Yarn store, and the last one (our top choice at the moment) is some handspun that I bought at Rhinebeck last year.  I wrapped each option around an index card so we could compare how they looked.

The other choice we had to make was what yarn to use for the monsters' socks.  We could order sock yarn, but without being able to see the color, we were hesitant - and don't get me started on the sock yarn options at the big box stores we went to (almost zero).  So, we looked into my stash and I wound up the possible combinations on this card:

I kind of like the idea of wrapping yarns around cards, especially when planning colorwork.  I think this could be a useful in the future - it's quick to make, and easy to see how colors blend together.

My Random Monday - 10/10

1. OMG FIVE DAYS UNTIL RHINEBECK AND THIS SHAWL IS NO WHERE NEAR DONE HELP WHAT DO I DO?

2. Okay, for some reason I'm not at Defcon 5 on this project.  I am convinced that I can take it with my in the car on the blocking board. So, it will be worn on Saturday!

3.  All of my spare time has been spent playing Glitch this week.  I think my friends have conspired to make me not finish this project.  Glitch is VERY addictive, so if you like online game you really shouldn't click the link!

4. Between school, actual-get-paid work and not-paid-really knitting, I think I am the most miserable person in the world. I have a team project in every class and they are all giving me ulcers. 

5. W has been working on his thesis, and he has a blog, too! It makes me very excited.  I have a post about my work on that... I should post that tomorrow.  A lot of posts that I write get lost in neverland and never published.  I need to work on that.

6. I made Jambalaya completely in the rice cooker yesterday.  I was really proud, but it didn't taste as good as I thought.  It looked good, though!

7.  This week is HUGE, Rochester, HUGE.

My DAL Design (And a little about how I got to it)

Goodness gracious, September went by REALLY fast.  Thankfully, I finally have a design for the DAL, and part of it knit to boot! But I'm going to have to work really fast if I want enough time to have the pattern tested and edited before the November 25th deadline.  I feel like it's going to be down to the wire for me again, but at least I won't be weaseling out of this like last time! :P

This round has been a bit hard for me.  I had a ton of ideas when the theme was announced ("fairytale") - but when I put the mood board together, I got a bit of a blank.  I spent time doodling on this piece of paper that I keep near my desk, and it took a huge beating.  I narrowed it down to three ideas:

There was a Seven Raven's Shawlette, which would have been double knit, reversible, and SO MUCH WORK.  There was the Princess and the Pea socks, which I really liked the idea of, but... they looked oddly familiar to Warren's room mate's socks... which I had never heard of, but am fascinated with! They're called Solmate Socks.  Cool idea, but... why not do something original? 

So, I settled on a gingerbread house inspired cardigan.  Wait.  Freeze.

I've never knit a cardigan before.  In fact, I've never designed a wearable before (unless you count socks, but really... I don't) and, seeing as I've only ever knit one adult-sized article of clothing, maybe I should scale it down in three months?

So, out went the pockets.  Out went the contrasting i-cord trim in white and the multicolored "gumdrop" bobbles that would have transitioned the edging from the stockinette stitch base.  (It looked so good in my head, but the look I got when I explained my idea at Hooks and Needles made me reconsider.  Writing it down now, and reading it, I understand)  I cut it down so that it would seem more like a knit object that babies would wear and less like... well, a gingerbread house costume.  It will have bright red buttons, though! That I will not compromise on.

So, that's where I'm at right now.  I'm not quite sure how I'm going to work the decreases for the yoke (having never worked one before) but I think I can fandangle it! I even did a swatch, although that's been entered into service as a brick... more on that some other time, I think.  I have a lot of projects going on right now, and I feel like I need to finish at least 8 before I can breathe again.

My Random Monday - October 3rd

1.  I have bronchitis.  This explains a lot of how I've been doing these past 10 days.  The health center thinks that I got a cold, then it's developed into bronchitis because I haven't been "taking care of myself."

2.  Considering that I've been sleeping for twelve hours at a time, forcing myself to eat, and still managing to do the chores around the house and "most" of my homework, I seriously wish someone at the health center would define "taking care of myself!"

3.  Also, my lost camera has not turned up.  I only assume that it's living a happy life taking photos for someone else's blog (though, if my camera benefactor ever reads this, if you could send me the touristy photos I took I'd really appreciate it, since all W really took were  artsy photos of birds.)

4.  Speaking of W, he is letting me use his camera but it's a Nikon D300 and it's really, really fancy.  It took me 20 minutes to take photos of the yarn I bought on Saturday.

5.  Oh, I bought yarn Saturday.

Plymouth Encore in bright colors for an upcoming craft table that Hooks and Needles is going to do as a fundraiser.  I'm going to un-vent some flowers, and make little Inkly's, and maybe some hedgehogs if I can find the yarn.

Mini Mochi to go with the Mini Mochi I already have in my stash to make a Mini Mochi striped scarf (like a Noro striped scarf, but without the Noro because... I'm still not convinced I want to try Noro) for myself.

Some cotton that was in the sale bin that will make good fingerless gloves.  It's organic, naturally dyed cotton and it only cost $3.90 for the two skeins! Who says yarn stores are pricey? :P

6.  I ended up finding another mistake on my shawlette last night (besides the surprise stitches) - I had messed up the lace pattern beyond tinking back, so I just frogged back to the lifeline.  Stitch count for the entire weekend: -15. 

Progressing Steadily Towards a Rhinebeck Project!

So, despite a mountain of work, 800 pages of reading (between all my classes combined) and a massive cold (when I cough, it sounds like the swamp-mobile in "The Rescuers") I've knit almost 2 inches on my Blackbird Shawlette! I'm really excited, because I feel like I may actually get to wear this at Rhinebeck.

But, tonight, I noticed a problem.

(Please pretend my iPhone photos are clear.  I lost my camera in Canada, still hoping someone will mail it to me.)

I have 3 stitches more than I'm supposed to.

Three.  Meaning I did just mess up, I had to have perpetrated a number of mess ups to end up with this number, since the pattern decreases by 4 stitches every other row.  So, I don't know.  I had just cast a lifeline so I had two options.

1.) Frog back to the lifeline (1 row) and re-knit another repeat of the plain section, but only decrease by 3 stitches instead of 4.

2.) Forget it ever happened, keep the 3 stitches and just knit them together later in the lace pattern.

Typically, I would be the #1 type of person, but today I just don't feel like fighting it.  They say that the Amish always make a mistake in their quilts, on purpose, to show that no human is perfect (only God.)  So this is what I'm calling it.  My "I'm not perfect" feature. 

Viva La Canada!

This past weekend I had the joy of going to the Ottawa International Animation Festival with W. Ottawa is the most beautiful city I've ever visited. Aside from seeing a lot of really gorgeous buildings, foods, and (of course) animations, I got a good portion of my blackbird shawlette done.

We DID visit a yarn shop, but it was a little small and not so impressive - I told myself we'd have to stop at some of the others I saw on knitmap, but by the end of the weekend we had run out of money.  I DID buy this:

It's a little owl whose head spins back and forth. 

And there was hot cocoa in a bowl and beautiful pastries at the Byward Market.

There were so many beautiful things, I can't decide what to put up, so here's a mishmash:

Anyway, I'm off to catch up on the 100+ blog posts that piled up in my google reader over the weekend... oy! 

Busy As A Bee

I've been busy, mostly because I don't have any assignments for work, so I've been doing homework - and the best pair to reading is knitting! I managed to finish my baby cardi last night at Hooks and Needles!

I'm so proud! The pattern is Cascade, from Petite Purls, and the buttons are from Jo Ann's...  I'm really happy with the pairing.  The yarn is Cascade Pacifica, in colorway 507.  I made the 6 month old size and used pretty much exactly one skein.  I'm going to make an elephant to go with it (her theme is "jungle") and hopefully I'll get to send it off!

I also sat down with some Sculpey yesterday and made a ton of little stitch markers.  I just wanted to Do something and have it pay off instantaneously.  Well, faster than knitting does. It still took time to sculpt the tiny figurines, bake them, then add the fixtures, but compared to a sweater... not long at all!

I made three hedgehogs,

An owl whose eye fell off

Two markers whose jump rings were too small - I'm going to dub these the sock yarn markers.

And a sort of set.  The flowers are supposed to be hydrangea's... but they're still pretty.

I also wound yarn for a super secret Hooks and Needles project... hee hee.

You know I would divulge it, but we need approval from the school to do it, and once that happens we'll be knitting our butts off...

I'm really bummed out about things, like this horrible cold I have, but I'm trying to keep busy and do everything I'm supposed to because tonight is the season start of Glee, and this weekend is OTTOWA with W and his friends! Something big is happening every day this week, really, so I don't have time to slow down.