Weave It In Wednesday

I’ve never experienced more uses for the “finish” like I have as a crafter.

Example 1.
Me: It’s finished!!!
Him: Are you going to wear it?
Me: well, it’s not finished yet. See those ends hanging out? I still have to weave in all of the ends.

Example 2.
Me: It’s finished!!!
Him: Even the ends?
Me: Yup!
Him:Can you wear it?
Me: Nope, still need to block it. See how messy it looks. It will look way nicer once I wash it.

Example 3.
Me: It’s finished!
Him: Washed?
Me: Yes, I can wear it! Let’s go take pictures. Then I can post it on ravelry and the blog.

These conversations happen so often in my house that we have created new terms to use instead of over used and generic “finished.”

LK finished – a term used whenever a project is mostly done. Ie, the knitting is complete. (named for me)

BK finished – when a project can be worn and requires zero additional work. Ie, the ends are woven in, the piece is blocked, photographed and in the closet. (named for him)

If I tell my husband his socks are finished before I’ll allow him to wear it, he just laughs at me. “They aren’t finished until I’m able to wear them.” It’s a fair point, but we often consider a project to be complete once we cast it off. It’s like when a contractor is all finished, but they still have to do touch ups, cover the outlets, clean up the mess and other projects that take another week. We feel like we are finished and the little stuff just is time consuming at the end, but not the main masterpiece.

Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where we actually finish something when we feel like the work is complete? Cast off that sweater and throw it on, walk outside and let the world praise you with the beautiful new garment. Cause ya know, people will be just waiting outside for us ready to shower us in compliments.

Back to the point. A couple of years ago, I started doing a Weave It In Wednesday. The point was to take any WIPs and weave it any ends that are already on the project. The reasoning being that when you cast off the project, you would only have that last end to weave in (or maybe a little more depending on the project). At least you wouldnt be weaving in all of the ends. I found that it made it way easier to just weave in the last ends and be that much closer to being done with the project when I felt done with it. I mean, if the contractors just did touch ups along the way, would there still be that many at the end?

All the WIPs out for a Weave it in Wednesday.

When I first started, I had a lot of ends to catch up on. I found that as I kept up with the weekly tradition, there were less ends each week and I was still able to get some fun knitting in that night as well.

So, why Wednesday? Well, no one deserves a night of end weaving on a Monday. Tuesday is a good time to get done whatever also wasn’t happening on Monday (surviving Monday is enough). By Thursday or Friday, you definitely deserve to work on whatever you want. So Wednesday was a good compromise of being far away from Monday, but not quite into the slowdown fun part of the weekend.

Also alliteration.

I’ve fallen off this bandwagon since starting my hand dyeing business and essentially occupying most of my free time with work. However, I’ve gotten into a good groove and have been more productive on the crafting front. This means more ends are hanging around waiting to torture me between the LK finished and BK finished timeframe.

Many ends on this project. Better get to it!

So, next Wednesday, what are your plans?

Introducing… Graffiti

Graffiti is the newest colorway to hit the agirlandherwool shop! It is a gray/black base with fun spots of colors. I was looking to include a darker colorway into my repertoire that would still knit up with fun bright spots too. Graffiti has teal, rust, yellow and brown splotches throughout. It also has some light speckling throughout the skein with other fun rainbow colors.

Light speckling and bright colors.

Graffiti is now in the shop! You can purchase it on any size skein, in any quantity so that you will have enough for your project without overbuying. There are also some ready to ship skeins available in 100g and 50g skeins on the sock base.

Check out my last On the WIP Side post for a coupon code just for my blog readers.

Let me know what you think!

On the WIP Side – 1.27.2020

Hello! It has been a while since I got a status of my current WIPs. I’m excited to share the projects that I am working on as they are all a lot of fun.

The active WIPs

Total: 6 WIPs (4 active)
Knitting: 4 projects – 1 pair of socks, 1 sweater, 1 shawl and 1 blanket
Crochet: 1 project – 1 blanket
Spinning: 1 project
Finished: 1 project
2020 Total Finished: 1

Charity Bumble Hat
Pattern: Bumble / tincanknits
Yarn: Cascade Heritage / Philadelphia and Valley Yarns Huntington / Black
Needles: Size 10.5 and 5
Gauge: I dont know
Cast on: 1/9/2020
Cast off date: 1/15/2020

As always, this was a fun and quick hat to knit up. After knitting the cascade yarn into my Neat Ripple blanket, I used the remaining leftovers to knit this hat. I held it double with the black yarn to make it a warmer hat. I’ll post a longer and more in depth post on the hat soon.

In general, my plan for the scraps this year is to knit 2 rows into the scrap blanket (there and back) and then use the remaining yarn on charity items until there is none left. I think this will be a great way to make some items for charity and use up all the scraps.

Time Trades Shawl
Pattern: Time Trades / Caitlin Hunter
Yarn: agirlandherwool / Time Trades Kit (Rose gold gradient / Golden Hour / Overnight Oats) / Sock base
Needles: Size 5
Gauge: one that works (it’s a shawl. I was on the train. It looked good)
Cast on: 1/16/2020
Cast off goal: 2/9/2020

The kit I am using for my shawl – available in the shop now!

I am obsessed with this shawl. You can see the progress in my WIPs picture at the top of the post. I think the progress has something to do with the gradient color changing. It does mark a good “hey, we’re on the next color already!” type of feeling that makes you believe you are zooming through the project. I’ve finished the gradient section, which means that I am now halfway through the shawl (I think). There are 3 charts and I’m on chart 2. Why this means I’m halfway? I don’t know. It just feels like halfway.

Ever since I dyed up the rose gold gradient, I needed to get it onto my needles. I created three different kits, the first uses the rose part of the gradient, the second uses the gold part and the third uses the 5 skein version, which have a shortened, but complete, gradient. In my kit, the contrast colors are Golden Hour (the darkest gold in the gradient) and Overnight Oats. Kit 2 is similar, but it uses Pinot Knit-oir (deepest rose color) with Overnight Oats. The third kit uses Black Hole and Overnight Oats. They’re all beautiful and if I had six hands, I’d probably knit all three versions at the same time.

This is all I’ve pretty much been working on, which is helping with the quickness of the knit. I hope to have this one wrapped up in a couple of weeks, which is great because I love having samples of my yarn.

Pavement Sweater
Pattern: Pavement / Veera Valimaki
Yarn: Once Upon a Corgi / Rodney / Aeron (tweed)
Needles: Size 5 (body) and Size 1 (neckline)
Gauge: 20 st per 4 in on size 6 needle
Cast on: 10/23/2019
Cast off goal: 1/12/2020 None

Almost finished with sleeve 1!

Since I did a write up on this project, I finished the body and most of sleeve 1. Funny story – I wrote about being up to the split hem last time – there is no split hem! Jokes on me. In any case, the body is all finished and I did like the length and fit when I tried it on. I think I also talked about having the wrong number of stitches and potentially maybe some had dropped at some point. It’s possible! I didn’t find any as of yet.

For the sleeves, I’m doing my own thing. First of all, the pattern has half sleeves, which for me, I don’t see myself ever making. So, full length sleeves for me. I also am doing my own decreases. I have larger upper arms comparative to the rest of me and so I started decreasing maybe 6 inches into the sleeve. From there, I started decreasing 2 stitches ever 2 inches and it’s fitting nicely. I also went up a needle size to size 6 needles because again, my arms are larger than the rest of me, comparatively.

That’s about it. I was working on this monogamously until I started my Time Trades Shawl, which has officially taken over my life. I #cantstopwontstop until it is finished. I’ll pick the sweater back up after that. It’s back to no expected finished date because I can’t control these gradient whims of mine. Who knows what will happen next!

January DVD Socks
Pattern: None featuring Fish Lips Kiss heel (Sox Therapist)
Yarn: Desert Vista Dyeworks / Vista / Silver Linings Playbook
Needles: Size 0
Gauge: 8 st per 1 inch
Cast on: 1/1/2020
Cast off goal: None

Slowly but surely, these socks are getting done. I’ve been bringing them to the movies and for some reason, they are going a little bit slower than socks seem to for me. I’m probably at the point where I should just knit up to the heels and finish those so they are ready for the next movie. However – see “Time Trades Shawl obsession” above. Can I knit lace during a movie? This might need to happen.

Northeasterly Blanket
Pattern: Northeasterly / Skeinanigans
Yarn: My hand dyed yarn in various test colors
Needles: Size 1 dpns
Cast on: 3/22/2019
Cast off goal: None

I have been working on my scrappy Northeasterly blanket as well. Once again, I don’t think I’ll have 5 colors finished before the end of the month, but maybe I finished two or three? I’ll check tonight and have a more complete update in the next WIP post.

Inactive
1. Neat Ripple – I’m not sure that this has been inactive since my last post. I have a few stripes in it now though. I mentioned above that I’m going to be working on this slowly as I plan to also knit charity items as well.
2. Spinning – I NEED TO DO MORE OF THIS.

What’s Next?
There’s always something isn’t there? Well for now, I want to finish up the shawl and sweater that I have going. I also will have some more charity items soon.

I also thought through how I want to use up more yarn in 2020. I have some fun self striping yarn from Gynx yarns that I want to use in a Sock Arms sweater. I’m thinking I might dye up the main color for myself to really highlight the sleeves.

I also plan to finally knit up a Drachenfels shawl with some single ply yarn from Suburban Stitcher in my stash. I’m not sure about when either of these projects will happen, but they will happen in 2020.

Shop
There are fun Ready to Ship skeins in the shop. I loaded up some 50g skeins as well that make fun projects. Not sure what to do with a 50g skein? See my post about fun projects!

A new colorway is coming soon! Look out for a future post about it, but see the sneak peek picture below. In fact – blog readers can get 10% off their order of graffiti with code “GRAFFITIBLOG.” This will be valid from the launch of the colorway through the end of February 2020. It’ll be good on your any size skein or ready to ship items. Thanks for following along.

Shop Update – Wednesday, January 22 at 8pm ET

Hi everyone! My shop, agirlandherwool, will be restocked with Ready to Ship skeins of yarn tomorrow at 8pm ET. I’m excited to offer more regular shop updates with ready to ship skeins. They will be available on the Sock base in 100g and 50g skeins. Not sure what you want to make out of a 50g skein? Look at my most recent post about projects you can make with these skeins.

There will be three colorways loaded into the shop! All three look amazing together, in pairs or on their own.

Ready to Ship Skeins

Pebbles in the River and Love at First Sight

Love at First Sight – available on the Sock base in 100g skeins and 50g skeins. This colorway is a white skein with gray, purple and pink speckles.

Love at First Sight: 100g and 50g on Sock

Pebbles in the River – available on the Sock base in 100g skeins and 50g skeins. This colorway is a blue-green base with brown and some pink speckles. It is a shop favorite, so don’t miss out!

Pebbles in the River

Shady – available on the Sock base in 100g skeins and 50g skeins. This is a great neutral gray tonal. It pairs well with most other colorways in the shop.

Shady

You can find the shop here at agirlandherwool.com by clicking on the Shop button or by going directly to agirlandherwool.etsy.com. Make sure you click on the section for “Ready to Ship!” to see these items on Wednesday. I hope to see you there!

I bought a 50g skein of yarn… Now what?

In this week’s shop update, I’ll be offering 50g skeins of the ready to ship colorways. Before making the decision to offer 50g skeins, I decided to think through what I would want to make with them and which patterns are out there that would be a good fit. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

Love at First Sight and Pebbles in the River.
50g skeins on the Sock base.

Socks
I think socks are the answer to pretty much any yarn-y question. Especially one that sounds like “what should I make with this skein of yarn I bought that time?” There are a million sock patterns out there, besides many knitters adopting some combination of heels, toes and cuffs to make their own. Now, personally, I can get away with a 50g skein of yarn and make socks for me or my husband. I have generally small feet and my husband likes short socks (which is good considering he has Mens size 13 feet).
What if you use more than 50g? Here’s what I’ve come up with.

I only used 40g of the main color to make these socks. There are some great patterns that you could use to knit even further with just 50g.
Red Robin Socks in The Gourd Place and What the Fork
  1. Buy a set and use a contrast for the heel, cuff and toe! All of my colorways come in any size skein, which means you can buy exactly how much you need in addition to the 50g skein to make your perfect pair of socks.
  2. Check out some awesome colorwork socks and combine 2 50g skeins into 1 awesome pair of socks. Here are some of my pattern recommendations (please check the pattern recommendation to make sure it will work with your size).

Colorwork Mittens
I’ve knit a few pairs of colorwork mittens out of two 50g balls with leftovers. Again, small hands, but I think you can make it work with many patterns.

Lotus Mittens. I modified the pattern because I have small hands.

Baby Knits
Fast patterns and low yardage! There’s really nothing better than baby knits.

Hats
For adult patterns, I do think colorwork is another great option here. I especially love brioche as well.

Ice Time Hat in Whisper and Rusty

These are just some of many patterns you can use or combine to make some really amazing projects. Let me know how you use your 50g skeins.

Project Highlight – Neat Ripple Blanket

If you read back to one of my first posts, I discussed wanting to rip out my Cozy Memories blanket. I just wasn’t a huge fan of it and knowing that the squares might not all align well was driving me crazy. I decided I wanted to crochet a blanket instead, thinking it would go faster. I decided to do the Granny Stripes blanket because I didn’t have to worry about how much yarn I had for each color. I wouldn’t mind swapping in the middle of the row.

My Cozy Memories blanket with the matching shawl

I was hanging out with my husband and his mom over the holidays and thinking about how I wanted to do this. When I start the Cozy Memories blanket, I bought a lot of black yarn so that I could outline each square. I liked the separated look better than all of the colors together. Translating that into the striped blanket, I considered striping the black in between the colors, but in the end felt that if I didn’t have enough yarn to finish a color row, I’d get as annoyed as I was at the last scrap blanket. Another option I have is that I can do a black border around the blanket if I want when it is done. I also have the option of not using the black at all and finding another purpose for it, which is also fine.

Right before I started the Granny Stripes blanket, I browsed a bit more on Ravelry and saw the Ripple blanket. My husband liked it immediately and so I cast it on right then and there. I’m not using any black in it for now and will decide if I want a border on it later. I actually started off with a sample so that I didn’t have to cast on so many stitches and then decide the pattern was too hard. It went fairly easily (the instructions are soooo good) and so I cast on a foundation chain of 199 (196 + 3) and crossed my fingers that I had the right amount. I figured if I didn’t then I could increase or decrease and no one would notice that in the first row. It actually worked perfectly, which was very nice.

The start of the blanket!

I’ve decided that for now, I’m just going to use the same color for 2 rows (there and back) and then move on even if I have enough yarn left to keep going. For a lot of these leftovers, I have about 1/2 skein left and I don’t necessarily want to use that much of each color. I figure I can always reuse the same color later on if I want to. What I’m thinking of doing is that after I crochet the two rows, I’ll find another project for the leftovers and make some charity items with it.

Current progress – on the 3rd color!

Gnome Zombie Socks

I love to knit while I’m at the movies, if you haven’t noticed at this point. When I’m out of random stockinette projects that I can take with me, I bring a pair of socks. I started these socks earlier in the year for that very reason with plans to just leave them available for the movies as needed. Oh, some background.
Pattern: None – my own vanilla sock, featuring a Fish Lips Kiss Heel
Yarn: GnomeAcres in I dream of Zombie on the Bungalow Gnome base (BFL/Nylon) – discontinued
Heel/toe/cuff contrast: Valley Yarns Huntington in Seagull

I bought this yarn when GnomeAcres was closing shop as I wanted to try her colorways for a bit. I love the BFL base. They are soft but so sturdy and I think these socks will last forever. I don’t honestly have too much to add about this project. They were vanilla socks that were a great easy project to work on randomly throughout this year. The colors are fun too.

I will say that going into my holiday break, I was up to the heel on sock #2. I knit the heel before I thought we were going to the movies one night (we didn’t end up going) and ended up finishing the sock the following morning. I had just finished up the DVD socks and was on a finishing kick. I didn’t think I could knit half of a sock in a morning, but I did! I’m not sure how proud I should be on this skill, but there it is anyway. It did feel nice to finish up a second pair that day. It also meant that when we did actually go to the movies, I didn’t have anything to work on and so I cast on another vanilla pair. So much for that.

After washing, the sock did bleed a bit onto the heels. I don’t mind since it is a sock, but I thought I would share! There’s no fading though in the sock, which is more important to me.

December DVD socks

Well, I finished my December socks without a hitch. I knit the Oh, Hello sock pattern by Deb Buckingham. When I use sock patterns, I just use the stitch pattern and otherwise do my own numbers with a fish lips kiss heel. There’s probably more to this pattern than the stitch pattern, but I think it’s very similar to the Blueberry Waffle pattern. I wanted a simple textured pattern and this was in my library so I figured I’d give it a go. I think I got it for free at some point.

The final finished pair!

For those interested, I plan to have a post with my vanilla sock pattern, what I do for my husband and general thoughts about knitting socks.

Overall, this 12 month knit a long has been very rewarding for me. I knit a lot of pairs of socks and found that I can knit a pair of socks in a week when needed. While I didn’t have sock mojo for most of the year, this kept me productive and I am happy that I have these socks ready to wear this winter. I did receive a free skein at 6 months and I also will receive one for completing all 12 and so there are more DVD socks in my future. I also have plenty of leftovers that should become stripes in my new scrap blanket and potential charity items in the future.

I will also say in regard to the colorway, when I look at the dyer’s photos online, it looks like there should be a dark pink stripe and a light pink stripe, whereas I have two very similarly colored stripes. I do not mind at all, but if you are interested in the colorway, I would keep that in mind.

On the WIP Side – 1.5.2020

Happy New Year everyone! Back to reality, I guess. My awesome break/craftcation was so wonderful that it made it that much harder to go back to work. Since I’ve been back to work, I’ve without a doubt not been as productive plus I did my last On the WIP Side post a bit late. That means there’s most certainly less to share. The good news is that since I cast off so much, this will be about some new projects. I also have some plans to share as well.

Total: 5 WIPs (4 active)
Knitting: 3 projects – 1 pair of socks, 1 Sweater, 1 blanket
Crochet: 1 project – ohhh yeah I started a crochet project – 1 blanket
Spinning: 1 project
Finished: 0 projects
2020 Total Finished: 0

Pavement Sweater
Pattern: Pavement / Veera Valimaki
Yarn: Once Upon a Corgi / Rodney / Aeron (tweed)
Needles: Size 5 (body) and Size 1 (neckline)
Gauge: 20 st per 4 in on size 6 needle
Cast on: 10/23/2019
Cast off goal: 1/12/2020

All right. This sweater. It’s currently my “main” focus even though I haven’t worked on it in a few days. The body is finally long enough (thank you 1 month of movies) and so I’m ready to move onto the split hem. Here’s what happened. I sat down after work last night to work on this and it has some short row shaping “for the back.” I followed along the directions and I was knitting around the whole sweater. There was a section later on called “for the front” and so I knew I should only be on the back of the sweater. There was a part of the pattern earlier on where you remove markers and I started feeling like maybe I removed too many? I removed the wrong ones? I don’t know. I was also trying to watch TV (Survivor anyone? We are behind, so don’t get nervous that it’s not currently airing) and so my concentration wasn’t exactly what it should have been. So instead of royally making it up myself, I put it aside and moved onto something else. My goal for tonight is to get it back on track. Right now, I have two stitch markers, one on each side. I think the missing one is in the middle of the back, which would make sense based on how these short rows are working.

OH! The other thing is that I don’t have the right number of stitches. This doesn’t really worry me because there’s more than enough ease and so it will still fit. I’ll just fudge some of the short rows to make it work. What does bother me is thinking there are 4 dropped stitches somewhere in this thing. I really doubt that I knit stitches together and so it’s gotta be dropped stitiches. The only other possibility is that I didn’t cast on enough at the armholes so let’s hope for that. I stretched out the sweater to see if any dropped stitch fell any further (is that how you do it??) but did not see anything. Who knows. It’ll be fine. It will be fine.

Now that this is no longer a random tube of stockinette, it is my main focus, which means it now has a cast off goal. I just have to do the hem and two sleeves, so I’m hoping it will be done by next weekend? We’ll see how much progress I make this weekend.

Northeasterly Blanket
Pattern: Northeasterly / Skeinanigans
Yarn: My hand dyed yarn in various test colors
Needles: Size 1 dpns
Cast on: 3/22/2019
Cast off goal: None

I don’t think I’ve ever actually talked about this blanket. I started it because when I took up hand dyeing, I made a lot of 5g skeins to test dyes, techniques and new colorways. I’m a practical person and decided I wanted to make a scrap blanket so I would use them. The Northeasterly blanket was pretty popular at the time and it was a great choice. This project is my before bed project. I typically knit a few rows on it before dozing off. Generally, I have a goal on 5 colors each month (see picture above for my January plans – wound balls and 2 minis) so that I keep making progress. I have already finished one (left most column at the top). The idea is that this is a lap blanket for while I am on the computer.

Now for the new cast ons!

January DVD Socks
Pattern: None featuring Fish Lips Kiss heel (Sox Therapist)
Yarn: Desert Vista Dyeworks / Vista / Silver Linings Playbook
Needles: Size 0
Gauge: 8 st per 1 inch
Cast on: 1/1/2020
Cast off goal: None

IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK! THIS ISN’T WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE! (image of me backing up slowly towards the door with my hands covering my face).
Okay okay, more seriously, I am not participating in the Desert Vista Dyeworks monthly sock club this year despite me actually kind of doing so. Here’s what happened. Over Thanksgiving, my husband’s father asked for a pair of socks. I actually don’t mind knitting something for someone (once) and then judging their reaction to see how many more hand knit items they will receive. I thought at the time I would dye up a color he would like, but he kept pointing to my husband’s socks are saying “I like those. Those are nice.” Eventually my mom said “Lauren! I think he wants socks in that color.” To which I said “OH! I can do that. I have plenty leftover from his socks.” My husband likes short socks, so I have enough. I could add a contrasting color for the cuff if they are coming out too short.

So there you have it. I’m knitting another pair of socks with this yarn, but I’m not participating formally. These are my current movie theater project. I’m knitting them two at a time (it was already divided into two balls) on size 0 needles. I don’t really have a deadline, but I don’t want to drag them out either.

Neat Ripple Blanket
Pattern: Neat Ripple / Attic24
Yarn: Scraps
Hook: E/3.5MM
Cast on: 12/30/2019
Cast off goal: None

It’s a snake!

So what happened here, right? I started a crochet blanket. I will have a highlight post published shortly with more detail here. I’m on the second colorway and loving this project so far. The instructions were written out so well that I didn’t need to look anything up at all. Can I remind you I’ve never crocheted anything before. I definitely recommend looking at the pattern. Below is my progress so far!

Spinning (Inactive)
No progress as I was away and did not bring my wheel. I’m planning on getting back into 3x per week starting this weekend.

What’s next?
This post is getting long and so I’ll leave it at that. Don’t be surprised if there are more cast ons in the next coming weeks!

Shop – Rose Gold is now in the shop. It is a glorious variegated colorway and a gradient set. I actually have some more ideas for kits with these colors, so keep a look out! Check out the previous post for even more details!

I hope your year is off to a great start!

Did somebody say Rose Gold?

There are three new colorways in the shop that you can order in any size skein and quantity. They are:
1. Rose Gold: a variegated yarn with gold and rose tones throughout. (Pictured above)
2. Pinot Knit-oir: The deepest rose in the gradient set. (Pictured below)
3. Golden Hour: The deepest gold in the gradient set. (Pictured below)

I can’t stop with the Rose Gold. No seriously. That’s not all. I love this kit and skein so much that I immediately had to start thinking of what I can make with it. Meanwhile, I was also thinking about how I want to knit a Time Trades shawl and so why wouldn’t I put them together? Instead of keeping it all for myself, I created some kits for all of you as well.

  • Kit 1 uses the Rose portion of the gradient along with the deepest Gold (named “Golden Hour”) and Overnight Oats.
  • Kit 2 uses the Gold portion of the gradient along with the deepest Rose (named “Pinot Knit-oir”) and Overnight Oats
  • Kit 3 uses the 5 skein version of the gradient set (also listed in the shop) with Overnight Oats and Black Hole

To say that I’ve decided which kit I’m going to use for my own is definitely a false statement. I honestly cannot decide.

In addition, I also created some two and three skein kit options as well. As always, you choose the size of your skeins and you can mix and match. Looking for a sock kit or shawl kit has never been easier!

Check out the shop for more details!

I just can’t stop. Let me know what you think and be sure to check out the shop on Etsy. Links at the bottom of this page or on the homepage!