The Three Dropped Stitch Wristwarmers

So guys, Easter is over. I know I promised you pictures, but what can you do: when the night is dark, the wine a-flow and four people are crammed in a kitchen barely designed to fit one, sometimes there aren't any pics to show for it. I am deeply sorry.

To apologise, I decided to share with you another wristwarmer project of mine. The pattern is Amy Gunderson's Deconstructed Mitts taken from Knitscene accessories 2012. As you look at the picture below, you might wonder, if I have forgotten how many hands a normal human being usually has. The answer is no, I intended to do the normal two mitts/wristwarmers, but as I am her Wonkiness, things went a bit awry...

The mitts used dropped stitches and stitches knit and purled through back loop as emphasis on either side of the dropped stitch. I knew how to knit through back loop. So, how hard could it be to purl through back loop? No need to check for instructions, right? 

 

So, this is what happens when you don't know what you're doing: check the difference between the upper and the lower mitt.

This is not how you do it

This is how you do it

And apparently the fucked-up through back loop purls also affect how the dropped stitch unravels. Who knew! Well, now I do. And I've learned my lesson: if you don't know how to do something, check out the instructions. Don't wing it.

But these little ones were quite fun to knit, and even though I did stuff differently than in the instructions, they still turned out quite nice. They'll be a prezzie for a friend of mine, so hope she likes them :)

Don't know what to do with the third one, though. Any suggestions? //

Pääsiäiseltä ei jäänyt kuvatallenteita, sori. Yritin korvata tekemällä kahden ranteenlämmittimen sijaan kolme. Aina kannatta katsoa ohjeita, opin taas, yritettyäni värkätä taka"loopin" kautta eli kääntäen neulottuja nurjia silmukoita. Ei se menny ihan niin kun olin kuvitellu, kuten kuvista nähdä saattaa. Jos on vinkkejä, mitä ton kolmannen epäonnisen kanssa vois suorittaa niin otetaan vastaan.

With Love,
Lilje

Pattern: Deconstructed Mitts

Yarn: Malaysian weirdo

Needles: 5 mm dp and 4 mm dp for the rib

Mood: All good stuff comes in threes

The Almost Matching Socks

These socks were a work in progress before we left for our trip, and I finished them off when we returned. In these (unlike these), the Drops yarn's colour pattern surprisignly decided to actually almost match in both socks. Shock horror!

I originally knit these for myself, but as I already got the wonky ones, I decided to brighten my boyfriend's day with them.

Nice and colourful they are, maybe not the springiest of colours but hey, there's still snow here... Anyway, I wish you all a happy and warm start to the week. Hope you don't need woolly socks, wherever you are :) //

Värikkäiden sukkien langan väri mätsäsi (melkein). Aika yllättävä veto. Iloista viikonalkua ja vähempilumisia toivotuksia...

With love, Lilje

The Cotton Cowl

Due to all the icky illness-related things, this post is way overdue. The cowl of doom, as I fondly call it, was finished already in Thailand. It turned out... well, what should I say. It is a cowl, yes. It can be worn around one's neck. It even magically stretches enough so that you can wrap it awound your neck twice (as it is knit so loosely). It doesn't really look anything like it was supposed to. Do I like it? Weeeeelll... Maybe as a festival cowl.

But hey people, seriously, cowls? I don't really see their point. They're just a woolly/cottony thing you wrap around your neck, that hangs there loosely like an oversized necklace. The only ones that are really useful are the really long ones, that wrap around many times and keep you warm. But the normal ones? They either leave the neck or the throat bare. And what's the use in that? Maybe you can enlighten me? :) (Or maybe, just maybe, if this one had turned out like it should with the other end way tighter and smaller, there would be no reason for this rant.) //

Noniin, valmis on. Ei siitä kovin kaunis tullut, mutta kyllähän tuota nyt kaulassaan roikuttaa. En vaan ehkä tajua tällasten tuubihuivien pointtia: ne vaan roikkuu siinä ja jättää joko kaulan tai kurkun paljaaksi. Mikä järki? Paitsi tietty jos ne on semmoisia pitkiä joita voi kieputtaa useammin kaulan ympärille. Ne tajuan. Muita en. Valaiskaa fiksummat jos olen väärässä. Tietty jos tästä olisi tullut mallinsa kaltainen eli toinen pää paljon pienempi ja tiukempi, ehkä ei olis syytä tuubienvastaisrintamalle...

Pattern: State street cowl

Yarn: Novita Hanko

Needles: 9 and 10, circular

Mood: Well, it's done...

With love, Lilje

The Most Unyielding Yarn Ever

After the owl mittens were done, I was excited to start a new project. It involved bigger needles and bulky yarn. Yay for speedy knitting, I thought. Hmmh, not so. Have you ever tried knitting with cotton yarn? I thougt when I was making the small entrelac patch that the yarn was absolutely fine. But when casting on for the state street cowl I noticed that the yarn had a mind of its own. It. Just. Wouldn't. Budge. I mean, no give at all. Zero. Zilch. When knitting with small needles, I don't think that's a problem, but when knitting with such thick ones (9 and 10 mm) with a thin cable in between you really have your work cut out for you. As the yarn is so rigid, you have to constantly pull stitches on the left needle and push them off the right one, and I don't mean gently. After the first night of knitting my thumb was really sore from pulling the stitches from the  cable onto the thick needle. Pheew! The finished knit surface seems ok, though, so I think the cowl will be wearable even though it will be an effort to finish.

The other problem were the yarn overs that were marked in the pattern. As you can't really knit tight with a yarn like this (or at least I can't), the holes the yarn overs left were HUGE. So, after doing a few, I decided to knit the rest of them from the back loop and close the holes that way. Maybe the big holes would have looked nice in the end, but now they just look like mistakes... Oh well, it's not like I'm planning of selling this masterpiece to anyone, so as a festival cowl I think it will serve its purpose just fine.

Stay tuned for the whole story after I finish the damn thing ;) //

En tiedä onko kaikkien puuvillalankojen kanssa näin, mutta tämä yksilö ainakaan ei anna periksi IHAN YHTÄÄN. Paksuilla puikoilla neulottaessa on kyllä melko työlästä kiskoa silmukoita kaapelilta takaisin puikolle neulottaviksi. Lisäksi jäljestä tulee melko löysää, kun silmukoita ei oikein tiukempaan voi neuloa että ne edes jotenkin saa takaisin puikoille riivittyä. Mutta hei, eihän tää myyntiin oo menossa ja oppia ikä kaikki ja semmoista. Tikutellaan siis menemään ja toivotaan parasta :) Kyllä tästä hyvä festarikauluri tulee...

With love, Lilje

The Horned Owl Mittens

*drumroll here please* Ta-daaah! They are done! D-O-N-E done! Pheew. And look how fine they turned out, too! Ok, yes, yes, they are lumpy as hell, but I've heard that steam ironing can do them a world of good, so I will try to de-lumpify them the minute we get home. Which is happening pretty soon, actually: it feels totally weird to think we only have a month to go. I'm wavering between having second thoughts about changing the flights to an earlier date and the sheer joy and glee of returning home and being able to see friends, bake, and steam iron all the knittings that have been done during the trip.

But I digress; back to the mittens. The pattern was the lovely Horatio and Oren by Barbara Gregory and my official first attempt to do colour knitting. And I must say, I really quite like it. Yes, it is a pain to try and get everything to go smoothly and no, I still don't understand how people manage to get a silky smooth knit surface (even before blocking or steam ironing the piece), what with all the yarns that are twisted around each other at the back, but probably this, as everything, has to do with practice, practice, practice.

And need I say that there was AGAIN a problem with the gauge/tension? Oh my God, that thing is driving me absolutely stark raving mad! I just DO NOT understand how that works. Here's how it went (wrong) this time: the yarn weight was supposed to be 113 m / 50 g ball and the yarn I bought was 120 m / 50 g, so I figured (wrong) that instead of using the 3 mm and 3,25 mm needles that are called for in the pattern, I would get away with using a 3,5 mm, as the yarn was a bit thinner. Thinner yarn, thicker needles, right? Well, turns out that the 7 m difference is not big enough to justify the 3,5 mm needles, and silly me didn't get the 3 mm ones (the shop didn't carry half sizes so the 3,25 was a no-go anyway). I don't remember actually how the gauge knitting went, but I do recall that I got a larger gauge number with the 4 mm needles than with the 3,5 mm ones (!). This defies all logic, I know, but what can I say? Things in wonkyland tend to be, well, a bit wonky.

There was also the matter of the thumb gusset. After figuring out I needed to start it straight away I still didn't get where the one stitch in between the first row of gusset increases came from. I scoured the internet for info and asked my mother-in-law-to-be for advice, and finally found out that indeed, the first half of the motif only has 23 stitches instead of the 24 I had counted. Urpo laskit väärin, as we say in Finland. A lesson learned, once again!

But with luck the mittens turned out ok. They are a bit small for me, but as they are going to a friend, it's ok. I remember she has small hands. If not, I imagine her daughter who was born a few months ago will eventually grow into them... I'm also not quite sure if I like the fact that the thumb gusset starts immediately after the cuff, so I might add a couple of rounds of garter stitch in between when I'm making my own pair of owls. Yes, there is more to come, just you wait :)

There have been lots of other versions of these adorable mittens around the blogging world, and I can easily see why. The mittens are fun and relatively easy to knit even for a colour knitting beginner and the result is so sweet that you immediately want to cast on another pair :)

Have you made you own Horatio and Orens? I'd love to see your pics! //

Nää on nyt valmiit! Säätöä oli taas varsinkin tuon peukalokiilan kanssa, mutta valmista tuli silti melko sukkelaan. Eihän nämä nyt Vuoden Neuloja -palkintoa saa, mutta ehkä höyrytys tekee ihmeitä? Kiva näitä oli ainakin tehdä. Nämä menee kaverille, pitää valikoida omaan versioon sitten vähän eriväriset langat, pinkki ei oo ihan mun juttu. Oottekos te tehnyt omia Horatio and Oreneitanne? Kuvia kehiin! :)

Pattern: Horatio and Oren

Yarn: Linie 110, colours Timona and Burgundy

Needles: 3,5 dp

Mood: *boogie*

With love, Lilje

The Colour Knitting Disaster

Hey, I have an idea! Why not jump straight in the deep end and learn colour knitting with a somewhat challenging owl mitten project? And how about not finding out exactly what a thumb gusset means before starting to follow the chart, surely that's a good idea too?

Try #1

So yeah, this is how far I got. It's not a completely horrible mess, but it is lumpy as hell, what with all the too tight floats at the backside. So I am secretly pleased that I totally ignored the instructions of starting to add stitches for the thumb gusset straight away... This way I had an excuse (or a reason even) to rip away and start again. 

I also spent half the night scouring YouTube and all kinds of knitting related sites to try and find out what I could do to stop the ugly puckering. No instant help was found, other than remembering to stretch out the stitches on the needles all the time (or trying to learn how to have one yarn on the right hand, English style, so that the tensions of the two yarns would be more even. After half an hour of trying to get at least some kind of tension going with my right hand and failing miserably, I gave up). I also found this video of a new type of way to hold the yarns in your left hand but couldn't for the life of me understand how she twists the yarn over in the beginning. 2 am might have had something do with the lack of brain function, so maybe I'll try again today.

Meanwhile, if anyone has good tips to share on how to achieve a perfectly smooth and lovely surface when colour knitting, please please please let me know! The owls and I would be ever grateful! //

Kannattaa aloittaa kirjoneulonnan opettelu vähän hankalanpuoleisesta mallista ja jättää tsekkaamatta miten mallin mukainen peukku tehdään. Purkuhommiksi meni... mutta onni onnettomuudessa sentään: ärsytti tuo jäljen epätasaisuus muutenkin. On muuten vaikeeta yrittää saada niitä lankajuoksuja olemaan tarpeeks löysät ettei menis ihan kuprulle tuo neulos! Jos on jollain hyviä vinkkejä tähän niin otetaan ilolla vastaan...

With love, Lilje

The Mismatched Socks

Yay, they are done! Pheew, this was truly a learning experience once again. Although honestly speaking all projects are learning projects as I'm still very much a beginner... But they are done, they are warm and I like them, although there were numerous things that went wrong...

Space-dyed (liukuvärjätty) yarn isn't the best for socks, some say,
but I like the mismatched look. It's like something Pippi Longstocking (Peppi Pitkätossu) would wear :)

So, what did I learn? First, learn how to count tension/gauge (tiheys), girl! How I managed to mess it up so royally, I still don't know. But hey, there's always the next time. Second, with my style of knitting I just cannot have multiple purled (nurjia) stitches in the beginning of the needle. They stretch out beyond recognition, pulling the previous knitted stitch from the previous needle with them. But once you move them to the end of the needle, ta-da, no trouble at all.

Then I also noticed that 3 p 3 k rib (joustinneule) is so not my thing. Well, maybe if the needles had been thinner the rib would have stayed in shape, but even so, better change that to something else the next time I see that in a pattern.

I apparently also cannot count stitches when it comes to doing cables. As you can see from the pictures, nearly all of the motifs are of different size. They were supposed to have 5 rows between all "cables", but some now have four, some five and some might have six. Oh well, wonky is the way to go...

You can also tell the difference between me knitting normally and me trying to really knit super tight to make the socks a bit less big. (Also my shoulders noticed the death grip I had on the needles. Ouch!) There are 12 motifs on each sock but because the sock without the neon green stripe was knit tighter than the one with the stripe, the last motif (that might look like a leaf?) is bigger than in the other one. I don't mind, though :)

The pink stripe in the ankle is almost in the same spot in both of them!

Do you also think when you're knitting the foot of a sock that it's not possible for anyone to have such long feet? :D I always find myself doubting halfway through whether the instructions in the pattern were meant for Goofy, especially with socks that have such a low leg (varsi) as these ones.

Oh, and this is hilarious: After I'd done the second, tight-ass sock and noticed how much nicer the rib looked, I decided to rip the first sock starting from the ankle/cuff. I'm pretty sure that everyone else knows that when you rip the "wrong" way, things get way more complicated. How on earth can the yarn twist and turn in such a way that it's impossible to rip the stitches without pulling the yarn through every single knitted stitch by hand? Is this normal? Or did my socks just have a life of their own? Oh well, I managed to get a couple of rows ripped and knit them then again, tighter. And it did help a bit. But I still think I might need to buy some elastic cord for the leg... And I also came up with a brand new (?) term! If ripping by knitting backwards is called tinking (knitting spelled backwards) and ripping in general is called frogging (frogs say ribbit... get it?) then by ripping "backwards" I just gorfed these socks! Ha! :D

Pattern: DROPS short socks

 Yarn: Drops Big Delight

Needles: 5 mm

 Mood: Yay, they didn't turn out so bad!

In other news: the holiday starts NOW! Tomorrow evening we will be in Ubud, Bali. Stay tuned :) Oh, and for the benefit of some of my Finnish readers, I added some Finnish terms in the mix. I don't know if you need them or not, but the linguist in me always wants to help everyone. Hope that doesn't get everyone even more confused ;)

With love, Lilje

The Waste Yarn Patchwork Project

KotoLiving magazine started an interesting project: to learn new knitting patterns by knitting batches with waste yarn. Two batches with each pattern will make altogether 92 patches, and the instructions for compiling these all into a jacket will be found in the Autumn issue of kotoLiving. I'm not sure about the jacket part of this, but knitting small things and combining them into something new sounded like fun. So, here are the first two, made in moss stitch (seed stitch, helmineule).

Do you have any ongoing patch projects? :)

With love, Lilje

The Epic Gauge Failure and Happy 2013!

Happy new year, one and all! May all your wishes come true and all that jazz. Me, I'll stick to knitting weird and wonky projects. Here's one good example:

As my mother-in-law-to-be was kind enough to add a lovely ball of multicoloured Drops Big Delight in my knitting first aid kit, I pondered what to do with it. It is so colourful that maybe I wouldn't wear it as a hat. And being 100% wool it also seemed a bit itchy for wristwarmers. So, socks!

Yummy colours

I found the pattern from the yarn manufacturer's site. The instructions suggested using 4,5 mm needles, but as I only had 5 and 6 mm, I knitted a gauge (tension, tiheys) swatch with the 5 mm first. Hmm, 10 sts on 5 cm means 20 sts on 10 cm, the instructions wanted 18. What, I need bigger needles? Tryout #2 with 6 mm needles: 9 sts on 5 cm means 18 sts on 10 cm. Perfect!

But here's where the perfect ends: after casting on the required 48 sts for size 38/40 and knitting the 3n 3p rib (mental note: looks bad, don't do this again) for a couple of cms, the sock looked like it was meant for a giant. WTF?! What went wrong, help? How was my knitting suddenly so different than in the gauge swatch? Ripping it all I started again with the 5 mm needles and hoped for a miracle. A minor improvement, yes, but I'm pretty sure that the socks will still be too big for me. Well, colourful socks for the boyfriend! Just need to get some elastic cord to get those ribbings to stay in form.

Also the fuzziest yarn ever

Still huge

 But seriously? What do you think went wrong here? Now I'm scared of messing up all my future projects by counting the gauge wrong....

Wonky Socks

Yarn: Drops Big Delight

Needles: 5 mm

Mood: WTF?!

With love, Lilje

The Entrelac Project

Browsing the blog world once more I found another delicious e-magazine called Knitscene Accessories. After seeing a pair of mitts done in entrelac knitting, I had to try myself. The yarns don't really match, as the green one I was used was about double as bulky as the brown one, but the tryout was supposed to be just that: a tryout. But hmmm... when I get home and have my sewing machine handy, I might just add a lining and turn this into a small pouch. Stay tuned! :)

With love, Lilje

The Owl Wristwarmers

After getting a severe case of knitting fever, I started scouring the web for all things knitting related. While reading the lovely Villakettu blog I stumbled upon these lovely little dudes taken originally from the issue 21 of the awesome crafts magazine Mollie Makes and it was love at first sight. I don't know what it is about owls that makes them so adorable. I don't usually go with the fashion fads but I have to admit that you can sell me pretty much anything (or at least get a swooning "ooh") if it has owls in it.

So yes, I worked out how to use Zinio, bought the e-version of the magazine and... and nothing. I was miles and at least one ferry trip away from the nearest place where they sell yarn and knitting needles. The only knitting needles I had managed to buy from Kuala Lumpur on our last trip there were circular needles (what was I thinking?) that weren't suitable for knitting wrist warmers. So I had to wait. But I had a cunning plan: my boyfriend's relatives were coming for a visit over Christmas, and they had suitcases just for transporting me some yarn and needles! Well, not quite, but you get the picture. And after a text message to my boyfriend's mom and a couple of weeks of excruciating waiting, I finally had my 5 mm double pointed needles and lovely 2 balls of green Drops Big Merino. Yay!

The wrist warmers were pretty easy to knit and they were my first project with cables. The only problem, that also Anu from Villakettu had noticed, was that the wristwarmers were meant for a person with really tiny hands. I could get them on, but the poor owls looked so bloated that I decided it was better to give them to my boyfriend's cousin as a christmas present.

But they were so cute that I knew something had to be done to get a pair of my own. I decided to add 6 stitches to the suggested 24 and make the owl in brown. Big mistake than ended in the trash bin... But with 3 added stitched (and sticking to the green colour), success! The poor owlies are still a bit stretched when worn, but they still look ok. Or what do you think? :)

Owl Wristwarmers, Mollie Makes 21/2012

Yarn: Drops Big Merino

Needles: 5 mm

Mood: Yay for owls!

With love, Lilje

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