addicted to yarn spray!

  Yeah, that’s me! I admit it…over the past few years, I’ve developed a yen for yarn spray. It came on gradually – I started off using it on the fine gauge machine – it was almost impossible to get anything done on that machine without yarn spray. I was using it with WCD on the standard gauge...if you’ve never used yarn spray, let me explain – the carriage seems quite stiff and hard to push; you may have ‘floating’  or tucked stitches – where part of the row does not actually complete the stitch, the yarn is only caught by the hook of the needle and looped above the stitch of the previous row – some of this is caused by having the stitch size smaller or tighter than the machine actually wants to perform at. Most times a hard twist yarn - particularly rayon and cotton - is more difficult and troublesome to work with and yarn spray takes the hassle out of it. Also, it will generally sort out any static problems. So the increased use, I hardly noticed, until one day I realized I was putting it on almost everything. It became my secret ingredient, like grainy mustard. 
Now, I was using Lori-Lyn- it had a distinctive vanilla scent that I did enjoy and I thought maybe that was contributing to my incessant p-s-s-s-t-t, p-s-s-s-t-t! Came the day that I used my last little shot of LLYS and found to my dismay that it has been discontinued, out of production, NLA…rats! What will I do? It may be the end of my machine knitting career!
Then one day I called Mike Becker at Distinctive Knits – www.dknits.com – actually, to wish him Happy Birthday – he always wonders how, or more to the point, why, do I remember his birthday? I’ve never told him, but it is the same day as my favourite Granny’s birthday (who has long past but never forgotten) – don’t tell him, let him think whatever – anyway, in the conversation, he told me he had a new product – YARN SPRAY!! OMG Mike, it’s a good thing many miles separate us! ;-))
I got my order from him just before Christmas – 2 bottles of the precious liquid, a couple of new sponge strips for my LK150 and a few other goodies – I could hardly wait to give it a shot – get it? Give it a shot, press the button, a little burst of TLC…
So, the new stuff, called ‘Super Industrial Yarn Spray’(SIYS), is non-aerosol, a good thing. It comes in a nice little 10 oz bottle with a pistol grip trigger spray, with a stop/go control – no odour, stainless, no silicone, washes out easily – it’s all good! The label states: yarn and sewing thread spray lubricant eliminates friction and static…keeps yarn running smoothly! What more could you want? I did want to give it a good testing before I gave it the MAO stamp of approval and here it is, kids! I love this stuff – I even used it on a mercerised cotton on my LK last week – I did a little cardigan for KnS in an all-over tuck with a finer-than-usual-for-me yarn that was misbehaving – I was knitting it  at T3 if that tells you anything (pretty tight, small stitches) – that, combined with the hand-selected tuck was giving me fits until I grabbed Mike’s little bottle of magic – hey, I think he should rename it! – and sh-s-s-s-t, sh-s-s-s-t, problem solved!
I used it on the 4ply wool Geezer remake, sailed through that with no aching shoulders and this week tried it on a slub cotton project that made the knitting a breeze – my little tip: put the yarn in a plastic bag, pull the bag open, give it a quick blast of the trigger on either side of the cone, push the bag back up and knit 40 rows or so – the machine will let you know when it needs another shot!
And I don’t miss the vanilla flavour – light a candle if you want that! Tell Mike I sent you but don’t mention Granny…

KnS - knit'nstyle magazine

LLYS – lori lyn yarn spray
NLA – no longer available
OMG - oh my gosh
TLC - tender loving care
WCD – wool crepe deluxe
MAO – mary anne oger

hybrid knitting?

The practise of cross-breeding knitting patterns - using the shape from one pattern and the yarn, stitch and gauge of another design to make a new model without all the swatching and testing!!!

I love the shape of ‘Geezer Chic’ but how many times can I make it without getting totally bored – it is a long, A-line cardigan in stockinette with full needle rib bands from Knitwords No. 50 and I have remade it same as the original in stockinette in a burgundy cotton which I gave away and then regretted so I remade it again in WCD in a chocolate brown – kept it and love it!! I have used the same shape other times, but experimented and swatched and did ‘Dreamcoat’ and the ‘Tuck Rib Cardi’ (Serial Stuff #2 using green Panama) to name a few.
So, I wanted to mix it up a little without all the trial and error. I have 4 ply wool that I’d like to use so I check out the KNITWORDS index and find some patterns using that yarn – sure enough, ‘Caped Wrapper’ (KW#43) comes up – another garment that I love – the fabric and bands are beautiful! I can take the same stitch pattern (a one-row-tuck), same tension and gauge as in CR - set up my ‘geezer’ shape on the KR11 (my charting device) - it automatically converts the stitches and rows to the new gauge and Bob’s your uncle!
I can use the same stitch size and number of rows from the bands from CW because they were FNR, same as ‘geezer’ but not as deep. When it came to the front band, I checked the index again and sure enough, I had used this yarn in ‘Uptown’ from No 28 and made the front band vertically with FNR, yes! – what a piece of cake!
This is too easy!!

well, the knitting was anyway - for some reason blogger has changed something and I can't get it to load photos here, sorry - check back later to see if I got it fixed...

oh, Valerie, thanks so much - nailed it! - MAO

Sock it to me!

I made 7 pairs of socks yesterday!! I started off just with the idea of being somewhat productive – getting rid of a bunch of leftovers and filling in a few spots on my Christmas list.
Anyway, a few years ago, I had rashly dipped into my sock yarn stash to make ‘Two Left Feet’ and used up about 25g of yarn from several ‘sets’ of socks – just to clarify, sock yarn is usually 50g balls and you need two balls for a regular pair of socks. Some sock yarn is put up in 100g balls – very nice, makes sense to me because if you need 100g for a pair, that’s how it should come, but you can suffer a bit of sticker shock at the cash register. Let me explain –  my sock yarn stash came about from when I would travel and people would take me to their LYS and introduce me to the shop owner, I felt compelled to purchase something and it was an easy way out to just pick up 2 balls of sock yarn – let’s face it, I’m a machine knitter and I’d rather buy machine knitting yarns on cones, but you know, when in Rome…so, here I am in Cocoa Beach this one time and I picked up a couple of balls of ‘Tofutsie’ – without reading or checking the label of course, never mind a price tag, it just looked pretty. At the cash register, expecting this purchase to be less than $20,  when the clerk said, ‘that will be $40’, I almost choked, but to save face, I dug out the cash, thinking what the? When I got home, I realized they were 100g balls and had a list of specialty ingredients, so, no wonder it was so pricey. Socks? to heck with that - for that money, I needed something more!
I decided to see if I could make a summer sweater out of the 2 balls – yes, I could! See Knitwords No 49, ‘TuttiFrutti’.
Now, somewhere along the line, I ended up with 2 more ‘odd’ balls of Tofutsie, one in a pink/grey and the other grey/ivory/black. This is nice stuff and the grey\ivory\black made up beautifully – I made a shorter-cuff version like the summer socks (June 2011) I did last year ( I never did give them to Barbara) and figured I could get TWO PAIRS from one 100g ball with a little mix and match. The first pair has 20 rows of the 2X2 rib and the second pair has 40 rows of rib matching the pink/grey. I had my little postal weigh scale nearby and kept weighing the finished sock and the remaining ball to see how far and what size I could get out of my leftovers. By the end, 52g to 68g of the regular sock yarn, like ‘Regia Cotton’, ‘Schoeller and Stahl Socka Color’ or ‘Regia 4 Jacquard’ will make a pair of 7.5 to 9.5 ladies with 40 rows of cuff.
My circular sock pattern is on my website under FREEBIES – as a free pdf – I call them ‘Warmup Socks’ because I used to make a pair as a warm-up for me on the ribber before tackling a ribber project if I hadn’t done any ribber stuff for a while!

PS - If you put ‘socks’ into the SEARCH at the top of the page, it will bring up a lot of these references, plus others! Just for fun, I put ‘warm’ into the SEARCH – it was fun!!

PPS – I was going to continue and make 2 more pairs today, but my shoulders are killing me!! Back to baking…

Light bulb moment

I’m working on my next Knit’nStyle project. I have Berrroco Linsey, a ‘self-stripping’ DK yarn, a cotton/linen blend that looks real pretty in the skein - it’s a new colorway and there was nothing on their website to show me what it looked like knit up and there are no instructions as to how to use it or anything… It’s for the June/summer issue and I’m doing a summer cardigan with the body portion sideways knit and the yoke knit up and down, in an attempt to use the yarn to its best advantage and control the color placement. First thing I did was to wind the skeins into balls that are useable on the machine – I have an old cone winder that puts the yarn onto a small plastic cone so you can knit some and then take it off the machine without breaking the yarn and rewind it onto the same cone without having to go to the end of the ball…

Looking at the skein itself, there is no way to tell which end you should begin with, but once it’s on the cone you can tell by the outside colour – you have a 50/50 chance of getting the same colour to start…and of course, you can rewind from the outside to change it...notice that random blue one...
I started off knitting one entire ball, experimenting with stitch size to know what tension works best. Then I knit another full ball with my stitch pattern and actual tension swatch and felt like I knew what to expect from this yarn. There seems to be no repeat through the ball. So I made the body back (sideways), beginning with a ball that had red/pink on the outside and  miraculously, one ball took me to the centre of the back, ending with yellow. So, for the other side to match, I used the next ball beginning with yellow. I  got lucky and it looked good. 
Now, for the fronts to match, I thought I should plan a little more. I figured it would be reasonable to make each front from the centre to the side to get them to match. First side done, took about 1.5 hours with the patterning. Second side, reversing direction and flipping patterning, so they would match, another  hour and a half – the pattern matches but the colours don’t… Pick another cone that I’m sure will match the side I want to keep…it’s looking good – an hour and half later I have 2 matching left fronts…arrgghhh!!!

The light bulb goes on! Oh, gosh, golly, why didn’t I think of this before?  It only takes 10 minutes to knit the ball in stockinette same width as the piece I’m going to knit and I could tell if the colours are working out before having to put all the work into the patterning. Bang my head on the wall, knit each ball in stockinette and  pick the correct one for the next piece – get them all made and life’s good, I'll make that deadline  – somehow I don’t feel like Einstein though! Hope this saves you some time!

Parallels...

Knit’nStyle #183 is out – I haven’t received my copy yet so I’m not sure how my garment faired in the photo shoot – I’ve only seen the snippet on their website. I shipped it off to them in late July, but I did get to re-make it in my size, to check the pattern, and because I liked it so much and I had enough of the same yarn which is luscious, BTW (Rowan felted tweed aran DK). We photo-ed  when I did my mini-shoot for the Fall Pattern of the Month.

The garment is A-line shaped. The fronts are sideways knit from centre front to side and the A-line is accomplished with shortrowing. The back is just a rectangle, knit from top to bottom so the ribbed shawl collar matches with the front edges. It is a bit of a different shape and I thought it was fun to make – looks like lots going on because it is made on the LK150 (as are all my KnS designs) so all the garter ridges, the cabling, and the ribs are all hand transferred. The weather here finally turned cooler (it’s inevitable, believe me) and I did design this as an outdoor weight jacket, so I was able to wear it a couple of times last week and got surprising compliments (all good) from non-knitters, noticing that it looked good and it looked unique!!  See ‘blame it on the weather’ Jul 20, ’12, for a close up swatch and some other fun details! 
I want to give a shout out to Michael Hale of Toronto, who's design in KNITWORDS No 48 was my inspiration for this garment - his was a large rectangle poncho that he had made on his tricked out Ultimate Sweater Machine - he had 2 machines put together along with a 30 needle extension kit, so his poncho was 228 stitches by 220 rows - I had always wanted to make a smaller, more fitted version.

Nipigon nylons...

Ever heard of them? Back in the day,  girls/women/ladies wore nylon stockings with a garter belt to hold them up – what a pain…anyway, pantyhose came out and we put that garter belt stuff behind us. Yeah, I know,  I’m showing my age, but it’s all good… The point is, the ‘nylons’ thing…during my high school days, I lived in a rural area and took the school bus. We were referred to as farmer kids or country bumpkins and as a real insult, on cold days, other kids would say things like, ‘oh, you wearing your Nipigon Nylons today?’ Nipigon is a small community about 100 km north of Thunder Bay and it was like the ultimate hick town and the NN’s were referring to old men’s work socks that were grey, ribbed, with a red stripe on the top and maybe a band of ivory between the stripes. Well, later, someone in Nipigon decided to lay claim to the fame of the socks and you can buy tee shirts with a NN slogan on it and I’m sure they  sell the socks too. It may be just a regional thing, but you can google it and see what they say…

So, back to boot cuffs - I do have this lovely ragg wool (like standard gauge weight, perfect for ribbed socks) on my shelf,  in several colours, red/ivory, black/ivory, plum/ivory and teal/ivory, but no grey…I wanted to make Nipigon Nylon boot cuffs. So, I do have a freebie sock pattern on my website – just use the cuff and put some stripes in it…It’s 2X2 rib in the 2X1 needle arrangement to make it nice and stretchy, you’ll need it bigger that the ankle cuff size, so I tried 50-0-50 n’s at T8/8, 70 rows total – I love ‘em and don’t they just look perfect with my red John Fluevog Operettas?

Boot cuffs

Last week, my daughter-in-law asked me if I could make some legwarmers that weren’t really legwarmers, just the top of legwarmers... She had this idea that her new boots needed some dressing up and, a knitted, cable-y thing might just be what she wanted. I said sure, if you have any more info, send it to me and I’ll see what I can come up with.

Well, who knew? Call ‘em fake legwarmers, boot toppers, boot cuffs, whatever, they are all over the internet! I did a few googles and whatever, to see what they were all about and then sat down with her with some yarns and old swatches to see what she really had in mind. The swatches were mostly from some of my KnS projects because I thought she was looking for the mid gauge weight of yarn and she really liked the look of the ‘Cable Gal’ (#176 Dec 2011), colour, fibre, thickness and stitch.  We determined that she wanted to tuck the bottom portion into her boot and have 2-3 inches above, so I settled on planning it to be 13-14 inches in circumference and at least 6 inches long.
I got the first pair made and she loved them!! She has 2 pairs of boots and this set looked good with boots!

Then, in true MAO fashion, I went on to quickly dash off a few more sets, based on recent KnS designs.
On this pair, I used some of the cables from KnS #183 ( I just checked their website and it’s out – more on that later) 'Parallels' - the various cables are outlined with a tuck rib and the top/bottom is my version of a ‘cheater’ garter stitch for the knitting machine – the yarn is Wagtail 12 ply mohair/wool  from Australia that I had leftover from KW#39 – in true, lazy, machine-knitter manner, I wasn’t into making swatches first, I just used  my original tension and gauge and hoped for the best – after all, legs come in all sizes, they’ll fit someone!!

This combo is using Rowan felted aran tweed and the stitch pattern border from KnS #182, Dec ‘12 (Lace Medley tunic) – I thought they could be worn either way with the top folded down over the boot or just straight up to the knee, depending on how tall the boot is. I did decrease after the purls and eyelet rows (which creates a nice fold) so the inside part (just stockinette with a narrow band of 1X1 rib to stop it from curling) would be narrower than the top cuff part.

How’s that for recycling - the patterns, I mean…

Oh, I have an idea for the standard gauge…