Comfort Fade Cardigan Completed

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Deborah Cooke

In moving my posts over and updating their links, I found some gaps. Here’s one: I’d said I would show you my completed Comfort Fade Cardigan in Rowan Colourspun, but never did. Here are the older posts: Comfort Fade Cardigan 1 and Comfort Fade Cardigan 2.

And here’s the finished cardigan: Comfort Fade Cardi by Andrea Mowry knit in Rowan Colourspun by Deborah Cooke I’ve worn this a fair bit. It is odd that it doesn’t have a front fastening, although I’m sure I could add one. I do think I mucked up the sleeve decreases as they’re narrow – fine for wearing but less fine for pushing up to the elbow as I’m inclined to do with my sweaters. They’re also a bit long for me. And I know that I somehow did too many short rows on the collar: it’s quite substantial! That makes it snuggly, though – and is one of the hazards of knitting anything other than plain rows while watching tv.

It is a pretty cardigan, though, and a warm one. It’s a complete bonus that I knit it out of stash yarn! What do you think?

A Second Felix

Posted on February 14, 2020 by Deborah Cooke

A while ago, I showed you a cardigan knit of Rowan Renew in red – the pattern was called Felix, but I made some modifications. Here’s that post, but even better, here’s that sweater:
Felix Cardigan by Amy Christoffers knit in Rowan Renew by Deborah Cooke I knit this in Rowan Renew, which is a yarn made of recycled wool fiber. It has a slight tendency to stripe. (It’s discontinued, so that’s a Ravelry link.) I didn’t have enough red, so I mingled in the grey and changed the edges to be in garter stitch instead of ribbing. I was really pleased with this sweater, so I cast on another. I had more Renew in another colour, enough to actually follow the Felix pattern as it’s written.

Here’s my new Felix: Felix Cardigan by Amy Christoffers knit in Rowan Renew by Deborah Cooke

Felix Cardigan by Amy Christoffers knit in Rowan Renew by Deborah Cooke I think it’s interesting how much difference the ribbing makes instead of the garter stitch edges. I also decreased the sleeves more quickly on the first one because I wanted them narrower. (No ribbing at the cuff meant that there would be nothing to draw them in.) On this one, they’re done as the pattern specifies. I love this one and know I’ll wear it a lot.

What do you think?

Moving Virtual House

Posted on February 3, 2020 by Deborah Cooke

For years, I’ve featured my knitting and sewing projects on my main book website once a week, on Fibre Friday. I thought it offered the readers of my books a bit of a peek into my other interests. It also was convenient to have everything in one place online. But, I’ve realized this is mucking up the SEO for my book website, so the crafty stuff is moving: books there and crafts here.

It’s going to take me a while to get it all moved and organized – moving virtual house has a lot of similarities to moving house in real life! I think it’ll be worth the effort, though.

You can, of course, follow the blog here, subscribe to its RSS feed, or just bookmark the site and check back.

One Block Wonder Quilt…with Toucans

Posted on January 17, 2020 by Deborah Cooke

Last year, I spotted an intriguing quilt online and discovered One Block Wonder quilts. I’m really behind the curve on this – it looks as if the first books on this technique were published around 2010, and it’s similar to Stack and Whack quilts, a technique that’s even older.

The idea is that you organize six layers of fabric so that the repeat of the design lines up, then cut 60 degree triangles (often 3.75″ on a side). The resulting hexagons are a bit like kaleidescopes, and from any given print with a bit of scale, you get many many variations of hexagons. You can play with the arrangement, then piece the hexagons into a quilt top. It can be an easy way to create a striking quilt.

A Google Images search brings up some real gems, like this gorgeous quilt. How inspiring is that? It looks as if there are even more on Pinterest and Flickr, but I’m not going down that rabbit hole. 🙂

The only trick seems to be choosing the right fabric. The print has to be of some scale to allow variation in the blocks. I decided to experiment with a cheaper fabric the first time, until I have a better idea of what works best. I found this discontinued print on the $5/m table at my local fabric store:IRL, the print is a bit brighter. It’s called Toucan Do It, designed by June Bee for Ink and Arrow Fabrics. This shows an 18″ square of the fabric.

I also found it in a second colourway that coordinates. The background is pale green:

Again, the colour is a bit dark in this screenshot compared to real life.

The second colourway is my insurance plan, in case the print itself doesn’t create enough variation.

There is a really nifty online tool to help visualize results before you cut. Here’s the One Block Wonder Design Helper. You upload a scan of your fabric, set the scale and generate hexagons. Here’s the cutting plan it generated – this isn’t how I cut my strips, since this is crosswise. That left edge is the selvedge, so I cut my strips lengthwise. I’m not sure why anyone would cut without using the lengthwise (stable) grain for one edge of the triangles. (Hmm. I probably could rotate the image before uploading it. Hmm.)I uploaded the screen shot of the turquoise toucans and here was the result: I had to take the screenshot in two images, but it gives you a good idea of the possibilities. You can rearrange them, rotate the triangles, change the block size, and have all sorts of fun without sewing a thing.

I bought 2m of each colour – the repeat in the repeat is about 60cm. I assumed the pattern would repeat twice across the width, but this was a bad assumption on my part. The pattern repeats about 3/4 across the width. Hmm. So, I cut off the repeat, which was just over 11″ wide, and lined it up with the pattern against the first selvedge. Then I cut a 3.75″ wide strip from the selvedge through the two layers, trimming at the end of the first repeat. I did this three times and stacked them up. Then I cut triangles out of the strip – I got nine sets. Rather than cutting the next two strips out of that 11″ repeat, I started to sew.

This is kind of addictive piecing. Have you ever made a one-block wonder quilt? What do you think of my toucans?

Felix, A New Sweater

Posted on January 3, 2020 by Deborah Cooke

I recently finished a new cardigan with yarn from my stash. Now that it’s blocked and finished, let’s have a look.

The pattern is Felix, (that’s a Ravelry link) a boxy top-down raglan cardigan with a nice detail on the raglan increases. It knits up pretty quickly and, since it’s knit top-down, you can try it on as you go to check the fit. I used Rowan Renew, a discontinued yarn with a tweedy fleck. (That’s a Ravelry link for the yarn, since it’s not on Rowan’s website anymore.) The yarn is made of recycled wool – hence the name – which is pretty cool.

I really like that raglan detail and I love this yarn. It has a subtle stripe as well as the tweedy fleck.

The red colourway is called Pick-up, but I didn’t have enough of it for the whole sweater. I added the dark grey, also Renew, in the colourway Lorry, and modified the pattern to have striped edges in garter stitch. It turned out that I used 1.4 balls of grey and had 1 ball of red left over, so I could have almost made it all red. The buttons came from my stash, too. I like the leaves on them for this sweater, since the red reminds me of autumn colours.

Here’s my Ravelry project page for this sweater.

In addition to modifying the ribbed hems and button band to be garter stripes, I made the sleeves narrower at the cuff. I like the narrower sleeves on my Koigu Lunenberg cardigan. This was all good until I washed the sweater to block it. It stretched like mad! I put it flat to dry but knew all that extra length wasn’t going to just disappear – so I tossed it into the dryer when it was still damp. This meant that the wool fulled as the sweater shrank back to its original length. It’s thicker and softer than it was, which is good, but it’s also a little bit narrower. The sleeves still fit, but I can’t push them up as much as I like to. (Maybe this will break my bad habit…) I’m curious about this stretching and wonder whether it had something to do with the wool having been recycled. (?)

Either way, I’ve cast on another Felix in Rowan Renew in a green colourway called Digger. I have twelve balls of this colour and the sweater takes 11.5 so it can all be one colour. I’ll make the sleeves a few stitches wider at the cuff on this one, in case the same thing happens when it’s washed. I haven’t decided whether to rib the cuffs and button band, like the pattern, or do them in moss stitch. Here’s that Ravelry project page.

What do you think?

Dragon Scale Fingerless Mitts

Posted on November 29, 2019 by Deborah Cooke

Although I have many (many!) projects on the go, sometimes I like to take a break and make something quick. This week, I was tempted by this Dragon Scale Fingerless Mitts pattern. You can find it on Ravelry as a free download, right here.

It’s a crochet pattern, which is unusual for me, but I’ve been intrigued by the Crocodile Stitch for a long time. That’s the bit that looks like scales. I really like Crocodile Stitch done in a yarn with long colour changes – check out this backpack in Kauni Effektgarn.

I bought Red Heart Unforgettable in the colourway Rainforest, because I thought the colour gradations would be long enough. The first glove didn’t come out quite as I expected – longer colour changes would have been better. This stitch eats yarn.

Here’s the first one:You can see that the colour was changing within the row, so the effect is less striped. The mitt is a bit smaller than I’d expected and it extends further over the fingers.

Here’s the other side:The pattern suggests 8 chain stitches for the thumb opening but that seemed small. I did 12, then added another cluster of DCs. That improved the fit of the mitt – it would have been too snug for me otherwise. This first mitt took 31g of yarn. There are knots in the ball (grrr) which interrupt the colour progression. I’ll try to match the second one but we’ll see.

Because there are scales on the inside of the palm, this isn’t a mitt to wear when actually doing anything. I also think it would be cool if the scales went up the back of the mitt further. I’m going to think about it while making the match to this one. I bought a second ball of this yarn in another colourway and will try an experiment with that.

What do you think?

Harriet’s Hat

Posted on November 8, 2019 by Deborah Cooke

It’s Fibre Friday again and I have a pair of hats to show you.

This pattern is part of a fundraiser to raise money for an MRI for Shetland. A local knitter there – Harriet – created a pattern for a fair isle hand and a local yarn producer there – Jamieson and Shetland – put together yarn kits for knitting the hat. I thought this was a pretty cool and creative way to raise funds, so I bought the yarn kit and the pattern.

Learn more about the MRI Maakers Shetland MRI Scanner Appeal.

I ended up making two hats from the supplied yarn. The first one is on the right: Harriet's Hat knit in Jameson's Shetland by Deborah Cooke

I washed both hats and they fulled a bit, which made them softer and probably warmer. Harriet's Hat knit in Jameson's Shetland by Deborah Cooke

There was quite a bit of yarn left over, so I moved the colours around the charts and knit the second one. I also made it a bit shorter, since Mr. Math thought the first was too deep. It’s more blue, too, and he prefers it.

If you’re interested in the details of how I switched the colours, you can read about that on my Ravelry project page.

Harriet's Hat knit in Jameson's Shetland by Deborah Cooke

I still have some yarn left and could make another hat. It would be mostly yellow, though, and since the darkest blue is all used up, I’m going to stop now.

Navelli in Koigu

Posted on October 4, 2019 by Deborah Cooke

I’ve been knitting a sweater, too, and even though it’s not done, I wanted to show it to you. The pattern is called Navelli (that’s a Ravelry link) and it’s designed by Caitlin Hunter. I’ve never knit a cropped wide sweater before (or worn one) but I really like this design. I’ve also been admiring sweaters lately that use a variegated or gradient dyed yarn along with solids in fair isle work. When I found several skeins of a really pretty colourway at the Koigu tent sale, I wanted to work with that.

The colourway that started me off is P528, a mix of teal and pink and blues, even with a bit of purple.

I found one contrast colour at Koigu: a teal in KPM, 5513. It looks kettle dyed, in that there’s variation in the tone, but not additional colours. There was only one skein so it had to take the place of the light pink in the original pattern.

When I got home and checked the stash, I discovered that I had three skeins of Shibui Knits Sock in purple. It was a perfect match, so that became my “brown”. The variegated colourway is my main colour for the body of the sweater. (This yarn is discontinued. I’d bought it originally to knit these opera gloves from Vogue Knitting Winter 2008/2009. Since then, I’ve realized that I’m unlikely to ever wear long knitted gloves, so the yarn has aged in the stash. It’s good to see it being put to work.)

Here is my Navelli before I split for the underarms:

The variegated yarn is a bit more emphatic than I’d expected. The tips of the fair isle in the purple kind of disappear into the pattern of the yarn, but what really surprised me was the pooling—and the big swirl. It looks a bit like the way hard candy swirls – like this image to the right. (That’s a stock image with its watermark intact.) The left lollipop really looks like this sweater to me!

The strange thing is that I am knitting from alternate skeins (two rows from one, then two rows from the other) which should (theoretically) break up any pooling. This yarn, though, is determined to pool. I wondered what would happen when I split the sweater for the underarms – with half as many stitches being worked, I thought maybe the swirl would break up. It did, but it’s worse:

It’s actually making vertical blobs now. Ugh. That decided it. The patterning in the yarn is distracting from the fair isle – and I think it’s ugly. I’m going to frog back to the fair isle and reknit the stockinette with the colour that’s in the skeins at the top. It’s closer to a semi-solid than a variegated yarn, so should pattern like my Koigu Lunenberg. There’s purple in this colourway, too, but the blue in the fair isle might end up looking a bit off. I think it’s in there, but it’s not the dominant blue. This gives me a chance to make another measure of my gauge – it looks like I might need to stay on the smaller needles for the plain stockinette as well as the fair isle.

R-r-r-r-r-r-r-rip it! I’m sad to do this, especially as I bought this variegated colourway specifically for this sweater, but that’s the way it goes.

Here’s my project page on Ravelry.

Navelli, Nightshift and Audrey

Posted on September 25, 2019 by Deborah Cooke

I didn’t post about my knitting last week, because I didn’t have anything finished to show you. I’m knitting along on some projects that are taking a while. So, let’s have a progress report today.

You might remember that I was going to frog the stockinette of my Navelli because I didn’t like the way the variegated colourway was pooling. Well, I have a sweater-quantity of a semi-solid Koigu in my stash, and since it’s a generous sweater quantity, I borrowed four skeins from that to use for my Navelli. This colour is working out much better – here it is:

The trick is that now I don’t love the blue in the fair isle section. It matched perfectly with the variegated colourway and is okay with this one. I’m not frogging back again. Que sera sera.

I’ve also been knitting away on my Nightshift shawl in Koigu KPPPM. I showed you the beginning of it here. My plan is to include the red – leftover from my Lunenberg cardigan – as one colour in each stripe. Here’s where I am now:

At this point, I’ve started the sixth repeat of the 20-row pattern sequence. (I’m calling a 20-row repeat a stripe.) The first one has a red background and the lightest purple as contrast. The second repeat has the lightest purple as the background and the red as the contrast colour. The third repeat has the darkest purple as the background and the red as the contrast. The fourth repeat has the middle purple as background with the red as the contrast. The fifth repeat has the red in the background again, and the first purple as the contrast. The sixth repeat (which I’ve just started) has the red in the background and the darkest purple as contrast. It is interesting how the purples, which look so different from each other, are difficult to distinguish from each other once they’re knitted up with the red.

I like this pattern a lot. It’s clever (it has i-cord binding on both edges that is knitted as you go_ and the pattern is easy to memorize. It’s a great way to use up different colourways in the same yarn, which means I’ll probably knit another one (or two).

I’ve also started to spend some time on my Audrey cardigan, which has been waiting on its sleeves for a while. Not only is it a cable pattern, but the dark purple means I need to knit it in daylight to see what the heck I’m doing. I have to have an hour in the afternoon of a sunny day, which doesn’t happen that often. The yarn is fuzzy and sheds – I keep it wrapped in a teatowel, which I spread on my lap when I’m working on it – and it makes my nose tickle a little. (It’s an angora blend, called Rowan Angora Haze. It’s also discontinued.) Here are the sleeves so far:

This yarn is so fuzzy that the camera didn’t know where to focus! The stitch pattern was reasonably easy to memorize but it’s not TV knitting. I put it aside because I thought the sleeves were too wide. I still think they are, even though I’m knitting a smaller size of sleeve. I’ll make them bracelet length and hope that does the trick.

I never showed you the body finished and assembled. Here it is, although I’m not convinced about the buttons yet. They’re a bit sparkly for me – that one is still on the button card.

I think my next project needs to be with thicker yarn!

I also went to the Woodstock Fleece Festival last weekend with a friend, which was a nice yarny fix. It was a beautiful fall day and there were so many vendors with wonderful yarn and fleece. Temptation was everywhere! In the end, I only bought two skeins of yarn – some sock yarn from an indie dyer and a skein of Spin Cycle Yarns Dream State, which I’ve been wanting to squish for a while. It’s actually the specified yarn for Nightshift. I’ll use this skein as the contrast colour on the yoke of a sweater I’m planning – the pattern is Fern & Feather (that’s a Ravelry link) and that ball of purple on the right will be the background colour.

Phew! Lots of purple on my needles. What have you been knitting lately?

Nightshift in Koigu KPPPM

Posted on August 27, 2019 by Deborah Cooke

Nightshift is a shawl pattern by Andrea Mowry, designed to be knit with six colours of a gradient yarn. Two colourways are used at any time, resulting in bands of colour with dots and dashes in the contrasting colour. It’s a striking piece, and quite substantial since the yarn is worsted weight. I cast on with worsted weight yarn but felt that the result was too thick for me to actually wear. I dove into the stash and came up with an alternative – Koigu KPPPM.

Here are my colours: Nightshift shawl by Andrea Mowry knit in Koigu KPPPM by Deborah Cooke

This photo was taken in bright sunlight. The colours are a little deeper than they appear here, and a little less pinky. The red is the leftover from my Koigu Lunenberg cardigan – there are almost four balls (just over 600 yards) of 329P left. This will use it up. (This is one colourway I bought the first year I went to the Koigu tent sale in 2016: the second was the grey mix I’m using in my Juicy Gloss cardigan. If I ever knit the sleeves on that, there probably won’t be much of that colour left.)

Charlotte's Web Shawl by Maie Landra knit in Koigu KPPPM by Deborah Cooke For my contrast for the Nightshift shawl, I chose four purple colourways. In 2017 at the Koigu tent sale, I bought a pack of ten different shades of purple. I knit Charlotte’s Web with five of them – there it is, in progress above, but still have the other five. You can see all of the colours in this photo: two are already knit up in the shawl, with the three balls that I planned to use (and did) lined up on the right. The five skeins below are the ones I have left now. One of them – the far right one – doesn’t go as well with the others, to my thinking, especially when combined with the red. I chose the other four to use with the red for my Nightshift.

This (inevitably) reminds me of the Jenny Joseph poem:
“When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple,
with a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.”

I’ve never understood why anyone had to wait to wear red and purple together.

This stash-dive gives me (4 x 160) 640 yards of purples and about 610 yards of red. I’ll knit until it’s gone. The pattern calls for 6 skeins that are 150 yards each, so I have more yardage. This yarn is thinner, though, so I’m hoping the shawl still comes out a good size.

Because Koigu KPPPM is fingering weight, not worsted, as specified in the pattern, I also cast on with smaller needles than specified in the pattern. I’m using 3.75mm. It’s a bit loose, which gives the yarn room to bloom, but I could have used 3.5mm.

Also, the red will appear in every band of colour in my shawl, although it will switch from being the main colour to being the contrast.

Here’s a close-up of my progress so far. Nightshift shawl by Andrea Mowry knit in Koigu KPPPM by Deborah Cooke

The first repeat had a red background and contrast in the lightest purple. The second repeat was inverted – lightest purple background with red contrast. The third repeat, which is almost half done in this picture, has the darkest purple as background and the red as the contrast colour. My project page on Ravelry for this shawl is right here.

How do you like the beginning of my red and purple Nightshift?

Alive & Knitting

Knitting and other tangled webs we weave

Comfort Fade Cardigan Completed

A Second Felix

Moving Virtual House

One Block Wonder Quilt…with Toucans

Felix, A New Sweater

Dragon Scale Fingerless Mitts

Harriet’s Hat

Navelli in Koigu

Navelli, Nightshift and Audrey

Nightshift in Koigu KPPPM