Tag: Noro

Spectra Scarf: Finally Finished and Fabulous

On By happygingerhomeIn knittingLeave a comment

Somewhere up above there’s a pig zooming around in the clouds, and somewhere down below they’re playing ice hockey, because surprise, surprise, I actually finished a knitting project.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Yes, I finally finished the Spectra (designed by Stephen West) that I started way back in August. It’s not that I didn’t love knitting it, I just took my time with it. I cast on during the dog days of summer, and knit from time to time in the cool days of fall. I let it languish during the frigid days of winter–when one needs a warm scarf the most–and picked it up to finish a couple of days before the official start of spring. Since there has been a significant snow storm nearly every week since February, and there’s still a lot of snow on the ground, I don’t feel all that guilty about finishing it in the spring. It’s still cool and gusty out, even though the sun is starting to feel a little warmer on my back.  I may just get a couple of weeks’ wear out of this before retiring it until the fall.

I guess one of the reasons I worked on it so sporadically was due to the weight of yarn I used.  The pattern calls for fingering weight. I chose sport weight yarn. I’m happy with the results, but damn, the more I worked on the scarf, the heavier it got.  The solid color is Filatura Di Crosa sport weight wool; the multi is Noro Silk Garden Lite.  This was my first time knitting with Filatura Di Crosa. The yarn is super warm, very soft, and very, uh, sproingy.  It springs back just a little when touched. I’m a big Noro superfan, but the Silk Garden Lite, as with all Noro yarns, is scratchy and unevenly plied in places.  It goes from thin to thick and back again frequently. I hate the really thick stitches that stand out among the thinner ones, but you can’t beat Noro for astounding color changes.  A little Eucelin should take care of the scratchiness–it’s something Noro knitters know they’re going to encounter.

I wore Spectra today and I received a compliment on it from the cashier at the grocery store. She is also a knitter and appreciated a hand-knit when she saw one. She is a regular customer at Seed Stitch Fine Yarn as well. It proves once again that knitters are everywhere!

I don’t have any photos of me wearing the scarf because today I didn’t have anyone to take a photo of me. I took a few by holding the camera out in front of me but they didn’t turn out well.

I wouldn’t rule out making another Spectra in the future, but I’ll make it in the fingering weight the pattern calls for. So that brings me to my next crossroad: Which UFO should I finish next? I have a Noro sweater almost halfway done, but I’ll pick up something smaller first. In the running are the Cambrian Cowl from Coastal Knits, Lion Brand’s Cloudsong Cowl, and the Jaywalker socks.  I’m leaning heavily towards the Cambrian Cowl.  It takes bulky alpaca yarn, and it’s a  very quick knit.  The only reason I stopped is because the pattern called for blocking it a certain point before continuing so the cowl would lie flat when picking up stitches. I didn’t feel like blocking it.

I can be a real jerk sometimes.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Stephen West’s Spectra

On By happygingerhomeIn knittingLeave a comment

I can’t believe today is the last day of August. It’s the start of the last weekend of summer. Monday is Memorial Day. I don’t know where the summer went, but I for one am always happy to wave goodbye to summer and to embrace fall. I look forward to some good sweater-knitting weather, but in the meantime, a scarf is a nice transition project to bridge summer and fall, don’t you think?

Today I took my knitting to the park for a photo shoot.  It was glad to get out of the house, and cooperated with me fully while I subjected it to a variety of artsy fartsy, yet always dignified, poses. This is Stephen West’s Spectra, a nice unisex scarf that can be so different from one knitter to the next due to the staggering color possibilities! Why, there are over 1500 projects on Ravelry, if one cares to scroll through all of them. I began knitting Spectra on August 12th in a short-row class at one of my LYS’s, Cranberry Fiber Arts in Hamilton, MA.  I had never yet taken a class at this particular shop and I was eager to do so. I was not disappointed.  The class was small, only four of us, but Laurie gave us the benefit of all her wisdom and skill, making sure everyone had at least one wedge of the scarf done so that everyone understood all the steps and could continue at home.  Laurie rocks!

I am so in love with knitting this scarf. Stephen guarantees that knitters won’t be able to resist watching the colors change, and damn it, he’s right! I’ve become addicted to what I call “wedging.” Wedging is fun! Wedging is fabulous! Wedges are handy because they provide a great stopping point when I put the project down. There’s only one little, teensy, rather daunting detail of this scarf: it requires 86 wedges total.  There’s no doubt the results are worth it, judging by all the incredible photos on Ravelry. It just takes time to get to the end. It’s all well and good to count by hand the first few wedges, but once they accumulate, there’ s no way I’m going to run my hands up the scarf, counting each and every wedge once I get to, oh, twenty? Thirty?  I could use a row counter to count each wedge instead of row, but I opted for an even lower-than low-tech solution to my counting conundrum. Behold. —>

Simple (and sticky) yet effective. I was using the sticky note to cover each row as I knit it when I began the pattern, but the progression is easy to memorize once you get the hang of it.

The pattern calls for fingering weight yarn. Laurie knit a sample for her shop in sport weight, so I picked out similar yarn for my Spectra because her sampled used Noro Silk Garden Lite, and I loved the colors. The solid color is Filatura Di Crosa’s Sportwool in medium gray. The variegated yarn is Noro Silk Garden Lite in color 2o38.

I’ve been knitting this for the better part of the past two weeks. I’ve had to put it down a couple of times when the yarn started sticking to the needles because it grew too hot in my sad, air conditioner-less little house.  Autumn can’t come soon enough.

Spectra wasn’t the only one enjoying the last days of summer.

I’m beginning to see wedges everywhere.

I’m Afraid To Stop My Washing Machine Mid-Cycle. Is That Weird?

On By happygingerhomeIn knitting2 Comments

It’s irrational, I know.  Am I the only person who feels this way?  The fear of interfering with the natural progression of my washing machine has prevented me from trying felting for years.  To be honest, I’ve never had that much interest in felting, so my reluctance never really bothered me.  There have been a lot of cute felted bag patterns that I’ve admired over the years but nothing moved me enough to try it for myself.  For one thing, it seemed like too much trouble to run the washing machine, stop it mid-cycle, and then let it run through the rest of the cycles.  I suppose if I had some jeans or some towels to wash I could have thrown those in and let them finish after removing the felted item.  The rational part of my brain knows that when you open the top of a washing machine, it simply stops running.  You can stick your hands in there and everything. But the irrational part convinced me that sticking my hands in a dormant but technically “on” washing machine was a bad idea.  So merrily I knit on, convinced that I wasn’t really missing out on anything by not wanting to felt.

Until I met this scarf.  This is Cheryl Kubat’s Chevron Scarf from Knit Noro. Cheryl is a local designer, so when this book came out I made a point of driving up to Newburyport so I could buy it from A Loom With A View,  the wonderful fiber arts shop that caters to knitters, crocheters, spinners and weavers.  I bought the book as well as all the Noro Kureyon needed to knit the scarf.  The knitting was fun and easy; I finished the scarf in a week last June.  It was the final two words of the pattern that sent chills down my spine: felt slightly.

I wasn’t ready to felt, not even slightly.  I thought about felting it by hand but that would have been impractical. The scarf is over seven feet long and I didn’t relish the prospect of felting it section by section in the bathtub. So my scarf sat in a project bag for six months. It was only when the weather grew colder that my desire to wear the scarf won out over my fear of the washing machine.  Finally, in December, I took the scarf down to the basement along with an old pair of jeans and some towels I wanted to wash. I was ready to felt–slightly.

Slightly seemed like a good place to start. I wasn’t going to end up with a completely stiff item, and I could always throw it back in if I wanted it a little more felted as I went along. As you can see, the process was a success–and I didn’t break the washing machine, or lose a hand, or flood the basement.  A whole new world of felted possibilities is now open to me.  There’s a felted hat pattern in Knit Noro that’s also knit in Noro Kureyon that I want to make.  I have everything I need: the needles, the yarn, and the washing machine. By the way, can you spot the error in the scarf? I forgot to switch colors after two rows so there is a larger patch of blue on one side of the scarf.  Nobody’s perfect.

My LYS Seed Stitch Fine Yarn is holding their annual sale this week.  They offer yarn by the bag, patterns, books and project bags at discounted prices.  Every year eager yarncrafters mob the giant sales table in the middle of the floor and grab their bargains.  I  went looking for books and patterns, since I really do need to knit all the yarn in the house before buying any more.  I picked up some back issues of The Knitter, a British magazine, as well as a really cool project bag.  I already have too many bags around the house but this one was too good to pass up.  There was a stack of five of these bags on the table.  Personally, I can’t imagine why there were so many of them sitting around. Sure, skulls aren’t everyone’s thing, but this is Salem; the skull and crossbones is a very popular motif both with tourists as well as locals. Maybe the original price of $32 put people off.  The bag is a little lightweight; I wouldn’t cart books around in it but I can easily put a decent-sized project in it.  It was a good deal at 50-percent off.  It’s made by a women’s co-op in India.  I hope Seed Stitch sells the other bags this week.

Another Christmas has come and gone, and all the build-up and anticipation leading up to it have faded into memory.  As time goes on and available space in my house shrinks, the question “What do you want for Christmas?” becomes more difficult.  Things for the house are always appreciated: kitchenware, a nice set of towels, a nice warm blanket. This year, what I really wanted from Santa was the gift of storage.  Santa, in the form of my favorite aunt, came through and on New Years Eve a new bookcase was delivered to my house.  I could finally take all my books out of the boxes they’ve been sitting in for over a year and give them a new home.  I have space for all my craft books with room to spare! So now I can buy more…