Tonight! At Joseph Beth Booksellers. 27th and East Carson, 7:00pm.

PS, The patient has successfully survived surgery. I don’t believe any further shortening will be necessary . Yay!!

Filed by Julia at 9:18 am under General
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I mean it. I am So. Close to finishing this sweater. There’s still alot to do, but in the grand scheme, alot less then what I’ve already done. I have to finish shortening it (!), pickup and knit the button bands, sew in the sleeves, and weave in a bijillion ends. No problem, right?! Right? Right? Do you want to hear about the shortening part? Sure you do. When I was about to knit the hood (which I finished this afternoon) I joined the shoulder, and seamed the side seams. Then I tried it on. It was long, so long. Bottom of the pockets on my jeans kind of long. Too long for me. I like these kinds of sweaters to end at the bottom of my belt, or just longer.

I had that impending sense of too longness while I was knitting it, but against my better Knitters judgement, I kept going. You know how it is. Then I blocked it, and it grew, and at the end of it all it was 18″(18!!) from the arm holes to the hem. This is already 2 and 3/4″ longer than the pattern. There was no way, no how, I was going to rip and reknit. I already did that.

So what to do? Why cut and graft, that’s what! I did that to the left front today, while I was at work at the yarn shop. I feel better doing these drastic things while I’m surrounded by pretty yarns, and needles, and all that. First I picked up a row of stitches with a us 4 needle, a row in the fairisle pattern. Tricky. I choose to cut out some fairisle, because there is no shaping, and I could graft the top of the cable part to the bottom of the fairisle, and it would be barely noticable. To anyone but me, that is. You notice in the photo how much shorter the left is than the right? As you would wear the sweater, that is.

I tried it on agian, and it is much better, but I won’t know for absolutely sure until I reseam it, or at least baste the seam shut. If I have to take out more I’ll take it from the bottom, before the waist shaping. I also used those locking stitch markers to join the sleeve seam, and attach it to the armhole. I needed to be sure that after all this, the sleeves would be absolutley fine. If I had to reknit any of them, I would cry, and shove this thing way down deep into my wip pile, and not speak to it for a long, long time. I rewrote them, and they are completely differant than the pattern sleeves. Thankfully, they should fit fine, on both me, and into the armholes. I want this to be a great wearable sweater. Wear-a-ble. Not something I spent a long time knitting, just for the enjoyment of it, or to have it end up at the bottom of my sweater pile. Tha would be awful.

What really gets me about all this, is if I had listened to that little knitters voice, I would have been done with the body knitting much sooner!!! Will I never learn!

Filed by Julia at 9:32 pm under Knitting,Whiskey Sweater
20 Comments

Phew. Well, it took awhile between the last update, but I finally got it together. I just posted a whole lot of sock yarn, and a huge amount of rovings. You all know I don’t normally use the bloggity blog to pimp my wares. However. I just started carrying something cool, and you must all know about it.

Remember that Sage Merino Roving I spun up awhile back? It comes from Ashland Bay. Who I have an account with. So for awhile I’ve been thinking about carrying it in the shop, but I wasn’t sure how I felt stocking something that wasn’t handdyed by me or another hand dyer. Dilemma.
Then I thought, why not get a small amount in each of a few colors? See how it goes? So I did. You can see all the pretty pretty colors here.
Then I thought it would be cool to offer a sampler set of the colors I have. So I did that too.

If you all like it very much, I’ll continue to carry it.

Also, Thank You all so very much for your awesome comments about Lou and his new sweater! You are all wonderful. I’d like to send a special Thank You out there to everybody who delurked to comment! I love “meeting” you all, and reading your new to me blogs! Delurking is something I’m trying to be better about myself! So thank you thank you thank you!!

Filed by Julia at 5:19 pm under General
10 Comments

Lou got his sweater this weekend. I went up to Michigan on Thursday, for my sisters birthday, which was on friday. So it worked out that I could fit the sweater on Lou, which is SUCH a better idea than flying blind. Dog sweaters are easy to knit, but hard to fit. If the sweater fits funny in certain places, that pooch isn’t moving anywhere. I’m really proud of this one, I’m not even going to try and be modest here, this one was a damn clever idea, (though not at all original!) and I’m patting myself on the back for an execution well done.

BURBERRY!! It kills me. I think he looks just fabulous in it too. The story is my sister loves the high end goods. For Louie’s birthday, she wanted to get him a burberry collar. So when we picked the pooches up from the kennel they stay at whenever my entire family goes away, we took them over to the Burberry store, located at a mall near there. It was great. The dogs had fun, (natural born shoppers!) and they liked all the attention. Lou got fit for his collar, and they had the right size, but while we were there, we also tried the real Burberry dog sweater on him. He did not like it. He did not move. It was a turtle neck,(!?) a dog turtle neck. While my sister is crazy enough to buy him an expensive collar, she’s not near crazy enough to spend that much on a sweater he won’t move in. Burberry or not. Then I got the fantastic idea to knit him one. I am all about the custom made goods. I was planning a sweater for him for his birthday anyways, so it just worked out well. I scrapped my original sweater idea, and went for it.

I used galway again, just like for the first sweater I knit him. I like the yarn, of course, and they just happened to have the colors I needed. Technically this does fit into knitting from my stash, as I already had the red, and as I kind of remember in the general guidelines, it’s perfectly acceptable to buy yarn to finish a project. Hee.

This time around I used the basic pattern from Dogs in Knits, which is by far the best book for dog sweaters I’ve come across, and believe me I flipped through so many of them! It’s much more toned down, and the sweaters are realistic to knit, and actually have a dog wear. So I used that pattern, and worked in the plaid, after sketching a general placement on some graph paper. I did end up ripping the body once, to make the stripes wider, so that when the vertical lines intersect, the crossover would be square. I’m crazy and picky like that. You might notice that the vertical lines are not knit in. You’d be right there. I did give a swatch a go, knitting it a combo of intasia/fairisle, to see if I could knit in all the paid. Well it looked like crap. The fabric pulled, the stitches were funny, and I was convinced that no amount of blocking would fix the general crappiness. So I ended up duplicate stitching myself silly. Seriously. I did it all on Sunday, as I was supposed to leave Monday morning, and I had to have it done. That’s over 700 stitches duplicated stitched over. 700, people. If that’s not love for my sister and her pooch, I don’t know what is. Doesn’t he look great, though? Regal, even?

One thing among some others, that I did change, was I didn’t knit the ribbing around the armholes. Lou’s got some thick dog arms, and lots of fluffy fur, so I just left them out. That’s what I did the first time, and it works great. Hopefully he’ll get some wear out of it before things really start to warm up.

In other knitting, I’ve got a couplafew inches on the whiskey sweaters hood, but I’ve hit a huge speedbump in the length of the thing. It will require some major surgery to fix. I’m determined. This sweater will not win. I will win!! I’ll save that for another post, though.

Filed by Julia at 9:00 pm under FO!,Knitting,Louie
37 Comments

Done and done. I did finish my Red light Special on the plane from Ft. Lauterdale to Detroit. I blocked it when I got back to Pittsburgh, a couple more days to get the photos, and there you have it. It took less than a week, and I loved knitting it.

The inside guts, because we all love to see the strands… Love that magenta lining!

Some Specs:

Pattern: Red Light Special, from the awesome Jared, over at Brooklyn Tweed.

Yarn: Rowan Cashsoft DK. In 3 colors, 516 Sage, 509 Lime, and 511 Madame. The fourth color, the bright green, was a minty color of cashsoft baby dk, but I overdyed it months ago. Not quite a whole ball of yarn was used for the main colors, and a very little bit was used of the lime.

Some Thoughts: This is a very good pattern, very easy to understand, very clearly written up. This would be a good pattern for the first time fairisle-r. If you can knit a hat, you can knit this. It also made for very good plane knitting. Not mindless, you have to pay attention to the chart, and not to complicated as to make me think or have to work anything out.

The pattern calls for sportweight yarn, but seeing as I’m trying to knit from my stash (trying to), I used the cashsoft dk, I seem to have aquired one skein each of several differant colors. I know that my colorwork is often tight, so I felt very confident about using a thicker yarn. I knit it with Addi Turbos, 4mm (US6) for the body, and 3.5mm(US4) for the lining, and got gauge after blocking.

So yes, you all need to knit this. I was also thinking, it would be a piece of cake to use this pattern, but sub differant fairisle charts into it. I think the next time I need a project just like this, I’ll do just that.

Filed by Julia at 7:55 pm under FO!,Right Light Special
18 Comments

Today Louie, my wonder nephew, turns two. My brother made cupcakes, my sister is having a party, I’m knitting him a sweater. He’s crazy, we love him.

If you would like to read about his first year, click here.

Filed by Julia at 9:24 pm under Louie
16 Comments

I’m in Ft. Lauterdale for the next 2 hours, waiting for the connecting flight to Detroit to get here. All this airport waiting makes me crazy. Wonderfully, the wireless here is free, and my battery is charged. My sister is bored and crazy, and entertaining us by quoting the entire dinner scene from Talladaga Nights. My parents are still in St. Thomas. They kicked us out a week early. I’m tan, I baked myself for 4 and a half days. I jumped off a 10 foot cliff into the caribbean in Virgin Gorda, after climbing up the perilous and slippery rocks at The Baths. My Red Light Special is keeping me busy, and if I knit fast enough I might just finish it before we land in Detroit.

I’ve also come prepared with 2 socks in progress,and extra yarn, just in case.

Isn’t it awesome, this world of technology? I can take photos of my wip, right in the airport, upload it immediately, resize it, and blog it with extreme ease. Lovely.

Filed by Julia at 7:35 pm under Knitting,Right Light Special
12 Comments