A Bluestocking Knits

  • ,

    Next!

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    Now, on to the "Ostrich Plume Lace Throw" from "Vogue Knitting Baby Blankets".  This pattern is really charming.  I want to make something for the end of our bed, or for the armchair that I hope to get (soon!) for our bedroom at home.

    I have a great many balls of Rowan "Calmer", a lovely springy cotton/microfiber blend, in #462 Chiffon, a soft mauve.  I don’t know how far this will go in the ostrich plume pattern, so I have to work a kind of sacrificial swatch — knit to the end of a ball and calculate the area of the swatch, so that I know how big I can make the throw.  (I brought this yarn from home.)

    Swatching_ostrich_plume_1

    What do you know, that high school math does come in handy sometimes!

  • , ,

    Thoughts on “Ene’s Scarf”

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    Enes_scarf_1

    Finished "Ene’s Scarf" yesterday morning.  All things considered, it is a fairly easy knit, for lace.  The main pattern is easy to memorize, thus I found myself daydreaming and adding a yo where I wasn’t supposed to, but the mistakes are easy to catch (the pattern will be obviously out of sync at the exact point of the mistake) and easy to fix.

    It’s a little difficult to visualize how the scarf will come together at first, but when you understand that the garter stitch "edging" is actually the top edge of the shawl (the hypotenuse, if you will), it becomes clear.

    Ene_blocking_1 

    The Merinogold is very pleasant to work with, very soft and springy.  It splits occasionally, but not enough to be annoying — it doesn’t splice very well, but I was just working with Silk Garden, which makes a really sturdy, practically invisible join (the clingy mohair or the silk?), so the merino had a hard act to follow.  It does have a strange mothbally smell when wet, but that shouldn’t be a problem once it is dry.

    I like the cast-on, the knitted method (as opposed to the usual cable cast-on) used with yarn doubled.  This cast-on usually looks a bit limp, but with the doubled yarn it has an interesting almost braided twist look.  I wasn’t terribly impressed with the sl 1 knitwise, K2 tog, psso combination — my psso stitches always look a bit straggly — and would recommend trying sl next 3 knitwise, K3 tog tbl as a possible alternative.  I would also recommend swatching on the lace pattern instead of st st, as I tend to knit a lot looser in lace (why did I forget this?), and my scarf came out a bit bigger than the original.

    Ene_stitchdetail_1

    One of the most fun things about this pattern is that even though it starts off with a rather appalling 375 sts, the decreases come thick and fast, so by the time of the second repeat of Chart 3, it felt like I was really sailing along.  It was amazing, how much quicker the chart repeats became!

  • ,

    “Ene” Half Way

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    Went to Cheer Wool this afternoon, to get more of the merino for "Ene’s Scarf" — don’t know what happened with my math, as 125m x 6 = 750m, which should have been plenty for the 320m x 2 = 640m of the lace weight silk blend in the original, but it was not, by far.  Anyway, there were four balls left on the shelf, so I hope that it’s enough.  The girls were absolute terrors — I keep hoping despite all evidence that they will be calm and well-behaved enough to let me browse in a yarn shop for ten or fifteen minutes.  Luckily there were at least three salesladies there, and they whisked me through buying and bagging in about a minute.  I don’t know if they were sympathetic or just worried about their shop, but the end result was much the same!

    Hard to believe that these little sweethearts were the same screaming monsters of less than an hour before!

    [This photo has been removed.  Sorry.]

    So this is where "Ene" is, nearing the end of the second repeat of Chart 3.  It is a bit of a slog at the beginning, with so many stitches to get through just to finish one row, but it’s much faster now, not only with the lacier pattern in the main section, but also with the advancing decreases.

    Ene_halfway

  • Blog Stuff

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    Finally got the banner picture added last night, David doing the work and me directing over his shoulder.  We couldn’t figure out why the picture didn’t want to load.  Maybe it had something to do with the fact that this is our second blog, and TypePad was a bit confused?  Who knows.  It works now, and I’m pretty happy with the results — although the perfectionist in me wishes that the margins in the text box could be improved a bit….

    The painting is "Virginia Woolf Knitting" by her sister Vanessa Bell, circa 1912.  I can’t seem to make two "About" pages, so I won’t be able to credit the picture properly until we come home from Hong Kong, and aren’t using the page for our family blog any more.  (The copyright of this image is held by the National Portrait Gallery (London), and its reproduction here is in no way intended to profit from said copyright.)

    This from Julia, age three, home sick from school with a cold this morning: "Mommy, are you doing enealogy [genealogy]?"  "No, I’m blogging.  That’s a funny word, isn’t it."  "It is a funny word."

  • Saturday Morning

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    Swatched "Ene’s Scarf" this morning —

    Swatching_ene

    listening to English madrigals.  A very strange sensation — sitting in a company flat in Hong Kong, knitting with Italian wool, listening to English renaissance music.  Pleasant, nonetheless, I must say!

  • True to its Name

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    Went out this morning while the girls were in school, and found Cheer Wool in Wan Chai, at Hennessy Road and Landale Street.  I saw it a few weeks ago from the top of a tram, and it seemed to disappear ever since, like Brigadoon.  (I’m afraid the yellow pages were very little help.)  I found it eventually, by walking east from the bus stop at the Pacific Place mall until I saw it again, which actually took much longer than it should have, as I’d gotten there far too early and it was locked and shuttered.  But time passed, and I walked around and back again until it was, as the name promised, bright and cheerfully open.

    Cheer_wool_1

    The saleslady was very helpful, and through sign language and halting English (hers, as my Cantonese, to my shame, extends only to "ni hao" and "mm-goy") we browsed through the stock.  She admired the patterns in my copy of "Scarf Style" and I picked out some Grignasco Merinogold, in a lovely murrey color, six balls at HK$35 each — a steal at about US$5 — for "Ene’s Scarf".  I also got one ball of Anny Blatt Adélie in Glacier — HK$68 — have no idea what to do with this, really.  The colors appealed to me — perhaps a simple scarf, nothing fancy so as to enjoy the colors and texture.  I’ll swatch it and see how it goes before making up my mind.  The colors don’t seem to show up very well in this photo — it’s a multi-textured yarn of one smooth ply alternating between ice blue and green, twisted with a bouclé-type strand that alternates between ice blue, yellow, a slightly darker blue, and green.  The mohair gives it a bit of a halo, and the viscose makes it shimmer.  I also picked up a pair of Aero circular needles for HK$28 for the merino.

    I had to laugh when I came out of the shop with the bag of wool in my arms, as the morning had been grey and hazy, but was suddenly bright and sunny, and I could have sworn that I even heard birds singing!

    Merinogold

  • ,

    Reworking

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    Well, I discovered that the Rosedale cardigan was turning out to be far bigger than I’d expected, so I was faced with a decision.  I debated for a day or so, reluctant as usual to rip out weeks of work, especially something that really was pretty, but in the end, out it came yesterday.  I had at that point four balls of wool going, for the intarsia blocks up near the shoulders, so it was quite annoying to pull out a few stitches, stop and untwist, wind, pull, untwist, wind, pull, untwist, wind, endlessly, and I got impatient — which turned out to be quite a mistake, as I ended up with a wodge of strands the size of a volleyball.  It took me most of the morning and afternoon to sort it all out, and I had the dubious satisfaction of telling myself "I told you so."

    But at last it was done, everything wound up neatly, and by this morning I had this to show —

    Clapotis_39_1

    Sure enough, the beginnings of another Clapotis.  I so loved this pattern, made up in less than a week this past March, from Silk Garden #88, and I so love wearing it, that as I ripped out the Rosedale, I couldn’t keep the Clapotis out of my mind.  Since the Silk Garden makes the finished piece much less scrunchable that the Lorna’s Lace (I’m guessing from the photograph), I usually wear it more as a shawl, which made me wonder how it would work sewn together at one end, in the way of the Union Square Shawl from "Weekend Knitting".  So, in order to be a little different this time, I’ll try it.  I may have to square the end off a bit, instead of the parallelogram ….

  • The Peak

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    Went to Victoria Peak yesterday — found something that should make a lovely knitting bag —

    New_knitting_bag

    Nice and roomy, although not much in the way of pockets for organizing — but the colors are wonderful!

  • , , ,

    What is a Bluestocking? and Rosedale

    Published by

    Bluestocking

    on

    After reading knitting blogs a bit obsessively over the past few months, I’ve decided to try my hand at it.  I’ve been impressed enough with the Yarn Harlot, the Knitting Wench, Atropos, and others to have finished a Clapotis in record time, and the urge to record my knitting in words and pictures as well is by now insatiable.  And yes, "blog envy," as the Knitting Wench says, is a pretty good way of putting it!

    When I can get past the basics of TypePad, I will post a brief "About Me," but for now I will write that I am a married at-home mother of two pre-school daughters, an English major and former library cataloger, located for the next six months or so in Hong Kong, but otherwise from Southern California.  I have been knitting off and on for about 25 years, I think, partly self-taught from the old "Golden Hands" series and partly learning from my mother, an experienced and dedicated knitter. 

    ("Former" cataloger — is there such a thing?  Once a cataloger, always….)

    "Bluestocking" is an 18th-century word, even now usually derogatory, for a bookish woman (see a longer explanation at Bartleby).  The "stocking" part is, of course, a nice little pun that probably needs no explanation on a knitting blog….

    Here is the first picture of my current work-in-progress, a Rosedale cardigan by Amy Swenson, in Noro Silk Garden #39 —

    Rosedale_2

    I started it here in Hong Kong last Tuesday, on the back first, as I had brought only one pair of needles, size 7 straights (the sleeves are to be worked in the round), and it has quickly managed to fill those almost to bursting.

    Needles_muitong_1

    We found a yarn shop this afternoon, Mui Tong Co., at 28 Bonham Strand in Central, near the Sheung Wan MTR station.  All I bought this time was needles — this set me back a mere HK$199, about US$25.  The shop is definitely worth another trip, when the Rosedale is finished, and I will be thinking about projects for Filatura di Crosa wools, as that seems to be Mui Tong’s specialty.

Knitting, reading, other stuff.

Let’s connect

Recent posts