So first, comments responses:

Thanks for the compliments on the mittens, guys! Keja asked: "Looking at those mittens makes me think of a pair of socks I want to try, but I've been unsure how much I'd need to modify a basic pattern if I was using 2 colours (I wasn't originally thinking of making them reversable but I might yet). Do you think they would feel substantially thicker in shoes?" The answer is yes, they certainly would. Unless you're using the intarsia technique (which is unlikely if you're doing socks, as socks are usually done in the round and you just can't do intarsia that way), the knitted material is going to be thicker if you're doing colourwork. Besides intarsia, I can think of three techniques off the top of my head that enable colourwork, and they all make a thicker fabric:

• Double knitting (that's the reversible thing): the material is thicker because this technique creates a double layer of knitted fabric.
• Stranded (aka fair isle): the material is thicker because of all the floating strands going along the back of the work.
• Slip-stitch (aka mosaic knitting): the material is thicker because again, you have some floating strands going along the back of the work.

Hope that helps!

Challah cover for DD1's teacher

TracyKM (yep, I'm Canadian and fiercely proud of it!) very kindly offered suggestions for where I could find fingering weight cotton yarn for this project. Thanks so much! I agree that it is very hard to find. However, I got desperate and gave up, finally buying some sportweight(ish) cotton from Michaels. I figured that if the cover turned out to be too big, it would not be a tragedy. In fact, rather the reverse has happened - the darn thing is actually smaller than I thought it would be. Hopefully, this family uses one challah rather than two for their sabbath dinners, and also hopefully, they make the challah small.

Despite my uncertainty about the size, though (and despite the fact that I had to go back to Michaels to get a second ball - I originally misread the pattern and thought it called for just one ball instead of two), the cover at least looks great. Here's a photo I took a few weeks ago when I was still working on the lacy edging:



By this point, though, it's all done and sewn together, and I'm working on the duplicate stitch embroidery. This has given me a fair amount of grief. First, I was determined to avoid using the lettering chart given in the pattern - I find that the Hebrew letters look skinny and ugly and ruin the classy look that the rest of the piece has. This meant that I needed to have bigger letters and less text. I settled on "שבת ויום טוב" and then set about trying to find a lettering chart for it. Fortunately, I had printed charts left over from a challah cover I did as a wedding present for a friend years ago, but unfortunately, although the letters were perfectly sized for this project, the font really didn't have the lovely calligraphic look I had envisioned. So I charted my own letters and I love how they came out.

The next problem was to figure out what to do the duplicate stitch with. At first, I thought I'd use two strands of the same yarn I used to knit the thing, so that the lettering would be visible by virtue of its "poofiness". However, it didn't end up looking as nice as the vision in my head, so, after much waffling, I tried it with white embroidery floss (all six strands together) combined with two strands of a gold metallic embroidery thread. And holy cow, the effect of that is AWESOME. I really lucked out with that choice, it looks amazing. I just know I'm never going to be able to capture its true sparkly beauty with a camera, but once I've embroidered a few letters I'll give it a shot and post the photos here.

(I had two of the letters embroidered already, but there were gaps between columns of stitches that really spoiled the effect. It took me a while to figure out what I was doing wrong - duplicate stitching behind just the embroidered stitches instead of the embroidered and base stitches - and I just couldn't stomach the way the gaps looked so I ripped everything out and started again. The humanity. This project is killing me, I swear.)

Scarf for BIL#1

Carrie K asked about this project. The answer is that it's going absolutely great! At bedtime, I read to DD1 while she knits. She did manage to create a new stitch near the beginning, so we now have 15 stitches instead of the original 14, but she's doing extremely well. I have taken it in hand a few times to make it grow (and will definitely have to do that again soon), but I would guess that she's probably done about six inches of it by her own self. And with hardly any errors, too. She's awesome.

And speaking of the awesomeness of my older daughter, Tanya commented on how big she is. Yes. It's scary, isn't it? Both how grown-up she is now, and how long it's been since we've seen you. I miss you too. :( I've been thinking about trying to get out to one of the Twelfth Night events. Don't know how realistic that is, but I'm going to float it past DH and see how we go.

Oh, and also...I got comment spam. Le sigh.

Finally, it is with some pride that I announce that I've just donated $94.81 to Médecins Sans Frontières. This represents this year's profits from the sales of my KWB/TSF Hat pattern. Want to help boost that total for 2010? Buy your own copy of the pattern now!

Labels: bilscarf, challahcover

But I'm back. Today: Christmas knitting! Which is pretty much all I've been doing lately.

Double-knitted mittens for BIL#2

I ended up not using Cascade 220 after all. I just wasn't happy with the colour combinations I was able to come up with. I should hasten to add that this doesn't mean my LYS doesn't have a good selection of Cascade 220 colours - quite the contrary - it's just that no two of them put together were quite what I was looking for. So instead I went with some Diamond Tempo. It's still worsted weight, still with wool content, and the shop had two colours that were perfect for what I wanted, and it's machine washable and dryable to boot, so that's a bonus.

These ended up taking way longer than I thought they would because, frankly, I kept screwing up. Especially on the 2x2 ribbing. Normally, with stocking stitch double knitting, it doesn't matter if the strands twist a bit as you go. But when you're doing double-knitted ribbing (which incidentally I was really proud of myself for figuring out how to do), any twisting shows up in the work - which I discovered, again and again and frickin' AGAIN, to my great displeasure. I lost count of the number of times I had to rip my work out.

However, knitting frustration aside, it all worked out quite well. Here's the first mitten just started:


Here's the first mitten completed with all the ends still hanging out:


And here's the finished product, from both sides:




I'm quite happy. I think they're very handsome.

However, if you're looking at these shots and thinking maybe one mitten looks larger than the other? Sadly, you're right. Most of the first mitten was done with both yarns being worked continentally. But I was having such a devil of a time with yarns twisting at the cuff of the second mitten, so I finally switched to one-yarn-in-each-hand to eliminate the problem, and never looked back. Unfortunately, this had a side effect of a tighter gauge on the second mitten, and it's slightly smaller. Oh, well. It's not hugely noticeable, especially once they're being worn.

And speaking of being worn...they're freakin' huge. Even the smaller one. However, my reasoning is that the guy lives in Ottawa, where winters are very, very cold. Big mittens will be an advantage, as he can wear them over other mittens. Yes. That was the plan all along, doncha know.

(Oh, crap. I just noticed a pattern error on the right-hand mitt on the black-cuff side. #$@*@(#!%.)

Scarf for BIL#1

A few weeks ago, BIL#1 started hinting very strongly that he lost his long scarf last winter, and he loved that scarf, and wouldn't it be nice if he had another one, nudge, nudge.

Now, I knit for people when the spirit moves me, and don't generally appreciate or respond to such overt "gimme" requests. However, it occurred to me that DD1 has recently gotten very enthusiastic about knitting, and to have an actual project to do would probably really help her out and give her a great sense of accomplishment. So I asked her if she was keen on knitting her uncle a scarf. She was indeed, as long as I was willing to help (I am), so I picked up three balls of Bernat Roving (which in hindsight was an incredibly dumb move since a loosely spun yarn is not an easy task for any new knitter, let alone a six-year-old) in a really nice cobalt colour, and right now we're working on the cast-on.

I suspect I'll be doing most of the work here. But with 7mm needles and a bulky weight yarn, I probably won't mind too much.

I've also nixed some of the projects I was thinking about for this Christmas:

• Barbie wardrobe for DD1: DH ended up really wanting to get her something particular for Christmas, which means I will be giving her the present he was going to give her, which means this planned gift is now unnecessary. Given my workload between now and Christmas, it's also kind of nice that I don't have to worry about this. I'll probably save it for her birthday.
  
  
• Ragna sweater for my brother: I'm never going to get this finished in time anyway, and we found some really awesome gifts for him this year, so the pressure's off to make the sweater.

Next task: Find purple cotton fingering weight yarn for DD1's teacher's challah cover! So far I've had no luck at my LYS or Zellers, so I might try Michaels. Failing that, I'll see what I can find at Lettuce Knit, which I'm hoping to get to this Wednesday evening.

Labels: bilscarf, dkmitts

This year I sewed my daughter a cloak as part of her Hallowe'en costume. Combining it with stuff we already had around the house and a few choice Value Village finds, I really liked how it came out, so I thought I'd share here.

Full hood

With hood thrown back

Without the cloak

Labels: halloween cloak