fishie’s aquarium

I have a love-hate relationship with two-at-a-time socks. I only ever use this method when I have one ball of sock yarn that I want to use up, because it allows me to knit my socks as tall as I absolutely can. In order for my goals of maximizing socks and minimizing leftovers to work, I cannot divide my yarn up into two balls. Even though I have a good scale, it will always be off by a little bit, and tiny fluctuations in gauge between socks can significantly impact how much of each ball is used. Plus, I don’t like having count rows when I’m doing socks, and knitting them at the same time eliminates this need.

My problem is: the tangles. Knitting socks two-at-a-time from one ball requires using the yarn on the inside of the ball, and the yarn on the outside. Combined with the cord on the circular needle, it is a tangling disaster. The first time I knit socks this way, I was also doing stripes of two different colors and I swore I would never use this method again:

When the need to knit two-at-a-time was unavoidable again, I vowed to find a better way. In the past, I have kept my yarn cakes secured by placing them in a cleaned out margarine tub with a hole cut in the lid. I did that this time, except with another hole cut in the bottom of the tub. The yarn from the inside of the cake comes out the bottom, and the yarn from the outside comes out the top (this is important–when the cake is still big, I have needed to pop off the lid so the yarn has space to unwrap. The hole in the lid still keeps the yarn in place and prevents massive tangling).

My plan has worked perfectly. A week after casting on a pair of socks, I am almost two inches past the heel and I have had zero tangles! As a die-hard DPN lover, I am having a hard time coming to terms with the idea that with this modification, I might actually prefer this method!

If you want to steal this idea, make sure to smooth out your holes so there are no rough areas for your yarn to catch on and potentially break.

Hedgerows modified to toe-up in Berroco Comfort Sock, Invercargill

It’s official: I’m addicted to socks. I had picked up some S.R. Kertzer On Your Toes Bamboo on a whim, and was pondering what to do with it. Then it hit me. Socks, knit out of bamboo yarn, with a bamboo design on it.

The result is a classic 2 x 2 rib sock with a bit of a twist. The purl ridges add textural interest without sacrificing simplicity. The sock is knit toe up with a gusset that does not require picking up stitches, and the pattern is simple enough for a first-time sock knitter.

The pattern is written to accommodate three sizes, for foot/ankle circumferences of 7″, 8″, and 9″. Sizes are achieved through the following gauges:

Recommended Needles/Gauge –
Small – 1 set of five US #0 / 2 mm DPNs = 9.8 sts per inch (39 sts per 4 inches)
Medium – 1 set of five US #1 / 2.25 DPNs = 8.5 sts per inch (34 sts to 4 inches)
Large – 1 set of five US #2 / 2.75 DPNs = 7.5 sts per inch ( 30 sts to 4 inches)

The pattern PDF is available for purchase on Ravelry for $2.50:
To view the pattern page on Ravelry, click here.

Thanks goes out to my pattern testers and Shannon for being my foot model while I was stuck in a cast.

My roommate and I have made a stashbusting pact. Once we have both met our goals, which we have verbally declared to one another, we are going 50-50 on a Webs Grab-Bag. And after finishing a sweater made out of lace-weight, I have been churning out projects like no tomorrow and am actually knitting down some stash.

I have a soft-spot for Tuesday Morning yarn. It’s always cheap, and sometimes it’s actually good. I’ve had some Queensland Collection Bengali for a couple years now that I have not done anything with because it was just too cool to use. That kind of thinking never bought anybody a grab bag, so I’ve started using it up. Case in point of the type of thinking that is helping me stash bust: December 23rd. I think to myself, “You know, you should probably make your mom a new scarf.” I did make her a scarf back in the day when I was a fairly new knitter and had no idea what I was doing. It was nice from what I remember, and you couldn’t even tell all the stitches were twisted because I used two kinds of acrylic held together. On the 23rd, I was looking at my drawer of Queensland Collection, and realized that one of the colors I had three 88-yard balls of (perfect scarf yardage) was in her favorite colors.

I scanned Ravelry for quick and simple scarves, but I didn’t see anything I liked. I pulled out a stitch dictionary, found something cool, and the rest was history. I finished the scarf in two days, despite being gifted Portal and getting 3/4 of the way through the game on the 24th. I named the pattern Striata after my zebra loaches (Botia striata–yes, I’m a fish nerd. Why do you ask?) because of the striping effect of the slipped stitches and because of how the colors ended up striping. I had a bit of yarn left over and decided to do some fringe, which I normally think is quite tacky but in this case decided it was necessary to use 100% of the yarn.

Download Striata for Free

The pattern is both written out and charted, and easily adaptable for any weight of yarn. The chart reflects my using aran weight yarn, but the written directions will accommodate any stitch count that is a multiple of 6. The slipped stitches add an interesting texture, as well as making this a VERY fast project.
Ravelry page is here.

Stay tuned and I might actually make a real blog post!

I’m sure I say this every time I make a post: Yes, I know, I’m neglecting this blog. I have many good excuses, though. For one, I’m sick of the bastard bots submitting comments. Luckily I have it set so that ANY new commenter gets filtered, but it’s frustrating when ALL the comments are spambots. I probably just need to get off my ass and update my WP version and maybe the newer version has SOME kind of way to prevent bots, but damn if it doesn’t and I have to move all my posts or resign them to the black hole of blog-dom.

Second, I’ve been “busy”. Last post I made was a few weeks after I started my new job. I got a new cat, impulsively moved a few months afterwards, and have generally been not so motivated blog-wise. I’ve still been making stuff (some pretty awesome stuff too, if I might add), but most of my time has been spent on one (actually, a few) major project(s) since August.

I present to you the best thing in the world (please excuse youtube’s fetish with darkening all my videos):

This is a planted 55 gallon freshwater community aquarium. As it is at the moment, I have 2 dwarf gouramis, 6 glass catfish, 3 zebra loaches, 9 tetras, and a clown pleco. I uploaded a few more aquarium pictures in my youtube account, so feel free to watch to get some better video of some of the fish. This isn’t my only aquarium, but it is by far the largest and the most labor-intensive. I also have a 5.5 gallon tank that has 5 white cloud minnows and a ghost shrimp, and a snail tank that has more hydras (seriously!) than snails in it. I might move the snails to the minnow tank and have a hydra tank.

Plecosaurus Rex

This beautiful snail fell victim to the loach-pocalypse :(

This is Stumpy. Yes, I’m naming my fish, and I am able to tell two of the glass catfish apart from the others (I can also tell the gourami apart and I’m working on the loaches, although the minnows are collectively named Phinneas.)

Also, since discovering the manual focus feature on my otherwise mediocre waterproof camera, I have been able to take some pretty sweet pictures. Here are some pictures from the Seattle Arboretum I took yesterday, on a lovely wet afternoon that turned into a retina-scorching bright afternoon before turning back into a “holy crap it’s pouring so hard the water is overflowing over the curb onto the sidewalk” afternoon:

It should go without saying that I’ve been kinda stressed the last few (many?) months. Not having a job through two entire seasons can do that to you. I got a lot of knitting done, but that’s pretty much the only good thing about it.

Fortunately, I have a job now and have finished my third week. Unfortunately, working until 6 pm every day and needing to go to bed early makes it so that I’ve gotten hardly any knitting done (I’m working on the Karma Tank from the Custom Knits book). Even more unfortunately, I don’t know if I’d be able to knit if I did have time because my right wrist has been bothering me. I went to the orthopedist, but she said I don’t have tendinitis and my x-rays showed perfectly healthy bones. I’m still getting occupational therapy for it, but it’s not comforting to know that a specialist has no idea why my wrist hurts.

I’m way behind on the designing I wanted to do while I was unemployed, but since that’s all stuff I’d be self-publishing, I’m not too worried about missing my “deadline.” Then I remembered, as I was taking a bath to relax a few minutes ago: I submitted a design proposal to a yarn company in the beginning of March. Two months have passed. I don’t know how quickly they go through submissions, but I feel a little uneasy that I haven’t been contacted yet. Typically, you find out pretty soon if you didn’t get picked. You find out later if you have. I don’t doubt that I could come up with a pattern pretty quickly… the problem is when am I going to KNIT it? Especially if my wrist isn’t better by whenever I’d need to start knitting. I’m thinking I should start on the beginning designing steps: write something like “CO 5 inches, knit in pattern A even for 3 inches, decrease to 4 inches in width over 2 inches in length” etc. I don’t know what yarn I’d be using so I can’t exactly write up stitch counts at this point. In any case, I think writing a pattern in this way is probably my best bet in the first place: it will make sizing SO MUCH EASIER. I’ve tried to use the spreadsheets people have talked about to calculate everything, but doing it that way just seems backwards to me.

Anyway.

STRESS.

I shouldn’t be NOT wanting a design submission to get rejected. I need to get myself in order and submit designs AFTER I’ve written them up and knit them.

It is now April. Three full months have passed so far this year. Last night, I finished weaving in the ends of Sweater #6 for 2009.

This is Road to Golden from the Fall 2007 Knitscene, knit with Manos Cotton Stria. It’s great yarn: soft, lofty, and warm. Unfortunately, it’s also a little nubbly and wasn’t the best choice for a fair isle sweater, but I am content with the results and have more than 8 balls of it left (I bought 16, guess I didn’t need quite that many!). I knit the pattern exactly as directed until the neckline, where I did more rounds and more decreases than stated, and then did 4 short rows around the neck to drop the opening in the front and give me a nice crew-neck.

Why have I knit six sweaters in three months? Besides having way too much free time, I joined NaKniSweMoDo. It’s like NaKniSweMo–National Knit a Sweater in a Month–except it’s a dodecathon. Knit a sweater a month for a year. Unlike most of the others in the knit-along, I’m seeing it as a competition. Who can knit all 12 sweaters the fastest? Me, of course. Bwahaha.

I do feel like I’m cheating, because I counted the corn shrug I posted about earlier, as well as my second ribbed shrug from Fitted Knits.

However, I also feel a little like I’m not cheating, because that fair isle sweater up there was a week’s worth of knitting. My second sweater for the knit-along was the Owl Sweater, which calls for bulky yarn, but I used worsted yarn and knit the second-to-largest size to fit my measurements with the smaller gauge. The owl sweater was completed in 5 days:

The two shrugs still make me feel a little dirty, and as a result I’ll probably not consider my participation in the dodecathon complete until I’ve done 14 total. I’ll consider that my handicap.

I decided to take a break from writing up the pattern for the corn shrug and write up the pattern for a beaded lace hat. Hmm… the lace pattern kinda looks like fish scales…

Scarlet’s Dark Secret is a beaded lace hat worked in the round from the rim up. Skills needed for this pattern are the ability to knit in the round, knit with beads, and read lace charts. The pattern is provided in three sizes and available to purchase from my etsy shop. CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE PATTERN.

Size
S (M, L) to fit head 20 (22, 24) inches around
Pictured in size M

Yarn
Alchemy Bamboo, 1 skein
Shown in 64f: Scarlett’s Dark Secret

Needles
Size 5 (3.75mm) 16” circular
Size 4 (3.5mm) 16” circular
Optional: Size 4 (3.5mm) DPNs

Notions
Seed beads, size 6
stitch marker
tapestry needle

Gauge
5 sts x 9 rows = 1” on smaller needles in 2×2 rib slightly stretched

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Also, marginally related, guess what I found at a used bookstore while I was selling back some books? None other than Barbara Walker’s Treasury of Knitting Patterns, first edition. For $15. SCORE! I’ve already found some stitch patterns that I’m in love with and will be using for some up-coming designs.

… that’s the opposite of a sneak peek, right?

I finished a design, woo hoo! I still need to type up my notes, do the sizing, and get decent, non-bathroom-mirror pictures, but the sweater is done. If you can call it a sweater, that is. Only one thing remains elusive to me: the name. I’ve played around with the anagram dohickey, but nothing has really struck me. Well, besides “Husk,” which is perfect because the yarn is 100% corn fiber AND it seems to describe what the shrug is doing pretty decently, but I don’t know if I could seriously name a pattern “Husk” after that one Ren and Stimpy episode.

Which is exactly why I’m posting before I have the pattern done. I can’t finish a pattern without a name, dammit.

I haven’t been knitting a whole lot lately. Instead, I’ve been dyeing yarn. I’ve been meaning to post my new colors, and making my first sale today has broken my blogging-block.

Lionfish	Plankton
Iceberg	Giant Squid

The thing I’m proudest about? A couple nights ago, I redid all the photography for my shop. I think I’ve found myself a good item photography theme. And to think, the fish decals were a complete impulse buy. Best $0.69 I’ve ever spent.

Remember that cropped sweater from my last post that I was going to make? I finished it. And it’s not cropped. To spare myself too much redundancy, I’m not going to repost the contents of my Knitting Community on LJ post or my Craftster post, both of which are identical with the exception of LJ being HTML and Craftster being UBB.

Instead, I’ll just say, hooray! and post some pictures.

Hooray!

While in Progress, it was a very appealing Cat Bed:

Ta-da! Countless hours were spent unraveling, skeining, weighing, removing the elastic strands, reskeining, dyeing, reweighing, reskeining again, and designing labels. Dyeing recycled yarn is officially a success! The colorways, from left to right: Salmon, Sea Anemone, Phyllidia, and Algae. The algae was my test attempt, and since I used scraps to dye it, I don’t have enough for the two 50g skeins. As a result, it’s MINE! The other 6 skeins, two of each colorway, are up for sale in my etsy shop. I rewrote my public profile in celebration and my sleep deprived brain thinks it’s hilarious. You should check it out.

In the midst of my dyeing frenzy, I overdyed some wool I got in my mystery yarn grab bag thing.

Ick. What would I do with THAT color?

This? Infinitely better. I actually want to use this yarn for something now.

In knitting news, I’m working on too many lace scarves. They take forever. I really want to be knitting something like a sweater that I can just finish in a couple days, jeez. I have been itching to knit the Textured Circle Shrug from GlamKnits, but I am absolutely adamant about NOT buying any more new yarn after my 80-skein Tuesday Morning binge. I don’t have enough of any given yarn to knit the shrug. So what did I do?

I unraveled a sweater. It’s 55% Acrylic, 45% Cotton, which is pretty close to Cotton-Ease, the last yarn I used to knit a shrug. Best part: I paid $6 for that sweater. I had every intention to cast on for the shrug as soon as I was done with my yarn dyeing project, but I got a newsletter from Knitpicks in my inbox last night.

Love at first sight. Yes, I don’t like cropped sweaters or elbow sleeves. BUT, I love purple, I love the cable pattern, the model is a cutie, and the pattern was $1.30. How could I say no? I intend to cast on for this as soon as I can. This requires… unraveling another sweater. And since the sweater I’m going to unravel is the same exact color as the yarn for the circle shrug, I’m going to… dye it first.

And on and on and on. This dyeing this is kinda addicting.

I got off my ass and finally started dyeing yarn from that sweater I unraveled a couple months ago.

I decided I absolutely HAD to dye some yarn last night, after drinking half of my vodka/rum/caffeine free coke last night, so I had to walk up to the store and ended up walking home with two gallons of vinegar.

Apparently vinegar is the magic ingredient for getting the color to stick, because after only a couple minutes after I dumped in the color, the water was clear–meaning the yarn had sucked up everything.

I’m using this awesome tutorial from Knitty, and right now I’m doing the hot pour dye method just to test to see if the yarn will dye well.

It will. I’ve already named this color “algae”. Guess what theme I’m going for. If all goes well, I’ll have some yarns up on etsy and MAYBE HOPEFULLY make some money from yarning around.

Yes, I’ve been bad about posting. But I haven’t been as bad about knitting, at least not in the past month or two. I got back from the Fiber Arts Retreat I signed up for, what, two? Three? posts ago? Anyway, I’m back. And instead of actually posting about it like a good girl, here’s a pattern for something I haven’t even finished knitting.

Kananaskis Shawl (Self-hosted PDF)
Kananaskis Shawl on Ravelry (Rav-hosted PDF)
Both links go to the exact same pattern. If you download the Ravelry file, you can save it in your library on the site.

Here’s a picture of it that I took the day after I cast on, while still at the retreat. Amy from Knitty taught the class, and boy can she make designing easy.

And now I go before I actually start putting content in here.

PS: Oh yeah, and this yarn isn’t in the pile the next post down. Since I took that picture, I have accumulated somewhere around 80 new skeins of yarn. But I swear I’m done now! ;)

I just moved from a 5 bedroom house with ample storage to a 2 bedroom apartment with … none. Until the move, my stash was easily hidden in a closet (not joking, that’s where I kept it), and my yarn diet was more of a joke than anything.

Now? It’s serious. In order to prove to myself WHY I don’t need to buy more yarn (and also to organize it better so I can actually put it somewhere), I pulled every ball, skein, hank, and sweater to be recycled out and arranged on my bed.

Somebody, PLEASE tell me why I’m still compelled to buy more yarn.

In the original storage containers

Me in PJs for size reference

That is a double bed. Also, the pile in the back is not propped up by a pillow. That pile is a pure pile of sweaters, Red Heart, and other nameless thrift store atrocities. There are also 11 cones shoved in there.

Close-up

It’s hard to tell from the pictures, but most of the yarn is piled. I guess if my skeins were epithelial cells, they’d be pseudostratified.

Now, time to start re-organizing it. If doing that doesn’t convince me I don’t. need. more. yarn., nothing will.

I wish the reason I haven’t updated in a month was because I was obsessively knitting. Unfortunately, life has been happening so the knitting has been a little stalled. I think getting so emotionally invested in getting accepted for publication, and then having the book canceled has also affected my knitting mojo quite a bit. Spending money on knitting, however, has been going in full force, in spite of my *cough* yarn diet.

Before I gush about all the yarn I bought at The Fiber Gallery’s anniversary sale, or the fact that I just registered for the Make 1 Yarn Studio Fall Fiber Arts Retreat in the Rockies outside of Calgary, I has to show you this hat:

Yarn is Noro Silk Garden, the pattern is Coronet from Knitty, although I modified it a bit. I didn’t feel the need to have a double layer where the brim folded, and I wouldn’t have had enough yarn for it anyway. Instead, I picked up stitches for the crown with the right side of the band facing, and did a row of purls before I dove into stockinette. I did the decreases a little too soon, so I plan to unravel the crown, spit felt the remaining yarn on, and do a few more rows before starting the decreases. I knit the whole hat in two days. Until I fix up my Styrofoam head to be the same size as my head, it will remain unblocked. But I’ll live.

I’ve also been working on a tank inspired by the Drawstring Chemise in the Spring ‘08 issue of Interweave Knits. I really like the look of it, but if I followed the pattern I’d look like a freaking pregnant woman. Instead, I used it as inspiration. I cast on this tank in mid-March, and I’m just now starting the lace bits on the bottom.

Progress a week ago

Made with three skeins of Rowan Calmer, knit from the top down. It fits reasonably well, although I really should have started doing decreases in the back sooner than I did. I’ll throw it in the dryer when I’m done and hope it shrinks a little. In the beginning, I was doing a great job at keeping notes so I could ultimately write up the pattern for what I was doing… but I’ve gotten lazy and bored, so I stopped. It’s not perfect and there are definitely some things I’d change knowing how my choices in decreases affected the direction of the fabric, but it’s really good practice for when I actually start writing patterns (I SWEAR I will actually do the dress that was going to be in the new Sensual Knits before they canceled it).

Now that I have all that boring knitting talk done with: YARN SALE! I got to the Fiber Gallery Saturday morning, right after they opened, so I could get some good sale merchandise before it was all gone. And I spent WAY more than I’d like to admit, but I made sure to only buy yarn that I had projects in mind for. In fact, I have a cheat sheet I bring with me when I go yarn shopping:

The last time I brought this sheet with me, I bought some Cherry Tree Hill Cotton to make the Yoke Pullover. This time, I bought some Cascade Fixation to make the Basic Slip (I’ll be using the Trellis hanging off the bottom of the sheet for the dropped stitch details), and a ton of Manos Cotton Stria to make Road to Golden. I’m really excited about the color combo. Here’s a general idea:

I do buy yarn for projects not on the cheat sheet. For instance, I bought some SWTC Amaizing, which is 100% corn fiber and some SWTC Bamboo:

But I made sure to buy enough of the Amazing to make a shrug (3 skeins) and enough of the Bamboo to make a sweater (4 skeins). I’m really excited to use my new yarns, even if that means finishing my WIPs.

The real reason I’m making this post isn’t because I felt the need to keep it updated with what I’ve been making. Oh, no. Really, it’s because holy carp. I’m going to the Fall Knitting Retreat in the Rockies. I’ve been dealing with massive amounts of stress in the personal life, and nothing erases all of my worries better than travel. The urge to just buy a plane ticket somewhere and be anywhere but here has been phenomenal lately, but the things causing all of my stress are things that make it necessary for me to stay where I am. Just like I spend hours looking at knitting patterns instead of actually knitting, I’ve been looking up places to go and reasons to go to them. I’ve been especially interested in knitting retreats. I don’t remember how I heard about this one. Maybe it was just through a google search. Who knows. But when I first saw it, I thought, “OH! I want to go! I shouldn’t.” My contract at work ends the week after the retreat, and I really shouldn’t take days off then. Also, I maintain my status as a part time college student to keep my massive student loan debt deferred, and I really shouldn’t miss class, whenever that would be in early November. Also, I would be going by myself, and I’ve never flown by myself before (I’ve actually only gone on two round trips in my life). And I won’t know anybody at the retreat. SCARY. But you know what, all those are just excuses. I want to go to this SO bad. Classes by Stefanie Japel, Cookie A, Amy Singer… The first thing I ever knit from a pattern was the One Skein Wonder. And 7 of the 11 garments I’ve knit have been from Stefanie’s patterns. After seeing Stefanie’s post with the map saying it was 1.5 hours from me to Calgary…

The e-ticket is already in my inbox.

Yeah, it’s not until November. BUT I’M GOING!