Retirement Day!

It's a soggy day in the neighborhood.

It's a perfect day for Retirement Day:  rainy, gloomy. and chilly.  What could be better than knitting, reading, drinking many cups of tea and maybe a cuppa coffee than weather like this.  I did all my errands, bread for the weekend is baked and some of it is frozen.  Going out for supper tonight.  Yep, there's the laundry, but then there's always the laundry.  So, a good day to cuddle up and be retired.

I'm making progress on the sweater, about 2" done on the body.  I'd love to finish this in March; I want to wear it!  But the knitting is slow.  Usually, when I go bottom up on a sweater, the body just zooms along; now I'm going top down and it seems to take forever.  Boredom has set in.  Very dangerous because it's at this point that I move onto another project.  Sigh.

Here's the underarm - k1, p1 ribbing.

And here's a shot of a front.

I'm thinking of the next project, another shawl because I just can't resist making them.  The yarn is a new colorway called Honeysuckle.  Pantone declared it the color of the year, and I liked it, so fooled around until I came up with this.  After all, who am I to argue with the color guru?

Isn't that a pretty color?  If I told you what dyes I used to make it, you shake your head in disbelief, but it worked, and I'm pretty much in love with it.

So, I'll wind it up and start playing around with patterns.  I love playing days; they are my favorite kinds of days.

Have a lovely weekend.  I have no idea what we are doing, but we're doing it together and that's the best part.

All you lovely folks who commented:  Turned out that I didn't have my retirement day.  My mom had a small stroke and I spent hours and hours in the ER.  She seems completely fine now, has her full strength back and is quite coherent, but she's still in the telemetry unit.  She's not hooked up to anything except something to measure her urine, but otherwise she's as bright and feisty as ever.  Me - I'm in stress-overload.  Ack.  Now I could really use a Retirement Week!

The Cardigan Continues!

I've not been idle the last few days. I've been busily working on my sweater, and yesterday I joined the fronts and back together. So, now it's smooth sailing: finish the body; pick up and knit the sleeves down; do the neckline.

I have to admit that the part I hate in sweater knitting is the part I just finished. Working the back and the fronts separately drives me nuts. All those strands of yarn always in the wrong place and also twisting with each other. Blech. This cardi is top-down, but going bottom up would still make me do the bodice. There's just no help for it; it's got to be done. So I did it, and now I'm going to happily motor along.

I decided to do a self edging on the fronts: k1, p1 ribbing. Easy, and it's finished off. No buttonholes. I don't like working buttonholes. The underarm stitches are also in k1, p1 ribbing. I'm not shaping the sweater; I'm not that crazy to do it in lace, so the ribbing will take care of the body shaping. It'll pull the garment in a bit on the sides, and that's how I'm shaping it.
Here's the back: and the next pic is the front.

I'm looking forward to many hours of pleasant no-shaping knitting.

New colorways for PennyRose Yarns!

Yesterday's moment in the dyeing dungeon.  I seem to have been in a tropical mode here.  I"m so ready for spring!

 In order, they are:  Honeysuckle, Almond, Peony, Azure, Beach Glass, and Lime

The Hubbo and I have been working on the PennyRose Yarns site. It's complex to set up buy now buttons and shopping carts and such.  He's making me focus on what is actually feasible, and not what I think is a great idea. I tend to get grandiose, so he's giving me a reality check. I'd like to open early March if possible.
What I can tell you is that these are all base colors and can be ordered in multiples, since I will dye to order.  So stay tuned.  PennyRose Yarns is coming.

Scrabblequeen - I only have an inch done below the armhole, and I did try it on, but can't tell about the side fit yet.  But, given that rib pulls in, the side ribs should give the garment some shaping. 

pendie - I really love that combination.  It needs a soft yellow perhaps.  I should do parrots and such.  They have the best colors.

Progress

Here's the back before I started knitting today.

Moving along.

I cast on for my green sweater, and knit about an inch or so and realized that this monstrosity would be big around the Hubbo, and he's no delicate little creature.   So, guess what?  I frogged.  Good thing I didn't knit up more or I would have been cursing.

Back to the drawing board.  Originally I thought of this as a bottom-up sweater, with my usual picking up the sleeves and working down.

Original notes.

My swatch, bottom up.

 Well, the entire concept got tossed.  I wasn't happy with it at all.  So, I changed gears and decided to do this sweater from the top down.  I haven't done something like this in maybe 20 years, but it's not hard to figure out, and I'm just finishing up a top down dress for Miss P's dolls.  The problem was fitting in the pattern.  In stockinette, I had a gauge of approx 5.75 sts/inch.  One multiple of the pattern was approx 1.75".   How to get this to fit into a sweater with a circumference of 38" was the problem.

Graph paper to the rescue.  I literally plotted it out, and came up with a great pattern.  I could center the pattern on the back and use a small border of k1, p1 rib on the armhole edge.  On the front, I could do a wider border on the edges, and not have to pick up and knit anything.  But how does the pattern look upside down?

OK, I'm happy with it.  I cast on the right amount of stitches using an invisible cast on, so that I can pick up the stitches and work down on the fronts.  I like Barbara Walker's invisible cast on, so that's what I used.  It's easy and fast and the crochet cast on just never works for me.

To be continued....

Wall-to-wall books - It is a lot of work, but I like doing it.  I like the challenge.  Heaven forbid I should ever do anything the easy way.

Big News! PennyRose Yarns is getting her own website!

I'm on a learning curve.  I decided to start selling my yarns on my own website.  You can read about it here: 

  http://pennyroseyarns.blogspot.com

Now I have to figure out the buy now buttons and stuff, and how to do a custom order form, and so on.  This process is called aerobics for the brain.

Sweater news:  Did about an inch, realized that it could fit an elephant, so frogged it, and am not thinking about doing it top-down.  More details eventually.  Gotta go and think about that order form.

pendie - Well I don't know if things are actually progressing, but I'm doing a lot of researching and thinking.  My poor little brain is really tired.

Wall-to-wall books - I'm pretty excited.  No needles, however. That would put me over the furry edge.

A Sweater Journey

 Green Penny yarn

Would you like to go on a sweater journey with me?   I thought I'd take you along, and give you my thought processes. Who knows?  Maybe you'll want to take the plunge with me.

So first decision:  What yarn and what color?  I do my best work on skinny yarns.  I want to use my Penny sock yarn.  Lots of yardage, wears very well, is soft but strong, nice stitch definition.  Perfect.

Color:  the trouble with being a dyer is that I can make any color I want, so the choice is endless.  However, I've been doing a bunch of greens for Sock Madness Forever, and loving them, so GREEN it is!
Needles:  size 3.  Why?  Good gauge and I like working on them. (plus they were handy at the moment.)
Gauge:  approx 6 sts/inch on stockinette.  Not terribly important at the moment because I want to do some patterns, but will become important if I decide to do the sleeves and bodice in stockinette.

Pattern:  At first I wanted to do cables, but lace is so my thing these days and very easy on the hands, so I'm off to play with lace patterns.

Shape:  a cardigan with a somewhat flared bottom, not ruffly, just a wider A-line shape.  Sleeves:  3/4 and also gently flared.  Armhole:  my usual dropped T. 

Size:  38" or 39" at the bodice and ? at the bottom.  I want this to go over a turtleneck so I don't want it fitted, but neither do I want it oversized.  When I get to the armhole, I'll decide whether to make it 38 or a bit larger on the bodice.  I can easily do that by taking off less stitches at the underarm.  I have a Coldwater Creek sweater that I love, and I'll get my measurements from it.

Neck:  Maybe scoop or square.  Don't have to decide until I get to the bodice.

Buttonholes:  No.  I hate making buttonholes and sewing on buttons, so I'll close it with a pretty shawl pin, or maybe I'll bite the bullet and put in one buttonhole at the top and find a gorgeous button.  At any rate, I don't have to decide this now since it would go at the top of the garment.

Trim:  no ribbing.   A few rows of garter and then start the lace.  I may do seed stitch or garter on the bands.  Have to decide this before I start knitting, of course.

A really bad way to take a gauge over my knee.

Off to measure my CC sweater, and then start playing with lace patterns.