oops.

So I haven't updated in a while. Darn finals.

Right now I'm with the fam on vacation in San Diego, where my dad's brother lives.

Some momentous knitterly moments to occur on the trip: yesterday I finished the second sleeve for Thermal! and the button placket. So now I need to pick up stitches and knit the collar, and weave in approximately 11,232,435 ends, block, and I'm finished! Wild!

I also tore out the Thermal-patterned kneesock I was working on. As I got further up the leg it became clear that I had a tighter gauge on the Valley Yarn Franklin than I did on the Gloss from KnitPicks, and that the way the pattern stretched out around the leg was pretty dissastisfying.
So I yanked that sucker out and am going to do something else with the yarn. A LOT of something elses, because I have a hell of a lot of yarn in that colorway. And maybe I will knit the Thermal socks at some point. I'd certainly like to, Candice's are super cute.

In the meantime, though, yesterday we were wandering around La Jolla and I just happened to stumble upon a knitting store. (and when I say "just happened" I mean that I looked up all the yarn stores in the San Diego area before we flew across the country.) Anyway, they had the Kureyon Sock yarn and it looked SO PRETTY. I mentioned to one of the women working there that it was so beautiful but I didn't really like the way it felt, and she told me it softens up when you knit it, and pulled out a half finished fingerless glove made out of the stuff, and it WAS softer! It was really nice!
Then I blacked out, but when I left the store I had a ball of it and some vintage Susan Bates doublepointed 1s. (they had a basket of vintage knitting needles selling for the original price, so these were $1.35, and also PINK.)

...picture quality is crap, for which I apologize.


Anyway, I'm thinking Jaywalkers.

tam!

I'd been planning on knitting a tam for a friend before the December Knitty came out. Then Knitty came out and there were three tams there! Perfect! And they were designed to be a little smaller than the elephant tam that I knit for Ari, and since Naj is a pretty small person, this seemed perfect!



I knit Tam B using Noro Kureyon and Valley Yarns Sheffield (the exact same color Sheffield I used for the last tam, incidently) and it was super fun and fast! Started it yesterday, finished it today!
Mmmm, knitting. Especially instant gratification knitting.

Now, back to Thermal. (SIIIGH)

Ssh! Don't tell Thermal!

But I'm working on SOCKS too! Tasty cute beautiful kneesocks made from Valley Yarns Franklin in Pinecone - they look like earth! They are what would happen if you took earth and turned it into yarn, and then knit that yarn into socks! (The color's prettier in reality than in the picture)

Plus, they're with the Thermal pattern. I can't seem to get enough of that pattern. Hooray kneesocks!

Also, still working on Thermal, about ready to divide for the armholes! Holla!

Oh, and last post when I said the math on Thermal didn't add up? I was totally wrong.
It does. Way to not read ahead, me.

progress! and finally a picture!

I made it to the neckline placket!
I know for my size it said "at 13 inches" but...I may have slightly less than 13. But it's okay, I'm short, and I've heard that the combination of the yarn and the stitch pattern means the piece grows significantly on blocking.

I was doing so well up 'til now with following directions. Well...I did do the decreases on the sleeve differently - I waited until around the elbow to work most of the decreases, then worked them slightly faster, so the sleeve was more fitted to my arm.
But anyway, I tend to not-quite follow directions for things. I always end up making adjustments or modifications.

Where this tangent is going:
I was none too fond of the idea of working two different rows of the stitch pattern at once on each row, plus sometimes working the pattern starting with the RS and sometimes with the WS (aka sometimes doing two purl rows in a row!) so instead of placing the placket 59 stitches in, I made it the eight stitches before the beginning of the round.

However this led to some alarming math...I'm knitting the 36" Thermal. 252 stitches.
252 / 2 yields 126 stitches for the front and 126 for the back.
Subtract 8 (the number of stitches initially bound off for each underarm) gives 118, the number initially given for the back, but the pattern calls instead for 110 on the back and 126 on the front (minus the 8 for the placket that is) but why would it be uneven? That makes no sense to me...
so instead here's my plan:
When I get to the armpits (armscye? I can't remember how to spell the fancy word...don't judge me!) I'll knit across 55 in pattern (the ...left front? right front? I can't remember), bind off 8, knit across the 118 of the back in pattern, bind off 8, and go across the last 55.

I haven't yet decided if I'm going to work all three pieces of the top of the sweater at once or seperately.

But either way once I get to the armpits I'm putting the body down and knitting the second sleeve. Otherwise I might be inclined to have a one-sleeved thermal, haha.
Well, probably not. But who knows.

hooray for finishing things!

Yesterday I finished the Elephant Tam for my sister (although my friend Chelsea made noises implying that she might be keeping it for herself). I even blocked it!
I have this bad habit of not blocking things. I can't really explain why it is. It's like, I know that stuff looks super nice when you block it. It always makes knitted stuff look better. And yet, somehow, I rarely do it anyway.
But the tam definitely needed the blocking, so block it I did. The best part about it was that it called for being blocked on a dinner plate. I had a little trouble understanding what that meant, but it was AWESOME - you pull the hat around the plate, and the plate gives it the right shape! How cool is that?
So anyway, without further ado,
the top of the hat:


side panel closeup:


and here it is again, looking super cute on Chelsea:

Funny joke, past me.

Did I say "once I hit the placket?" Because what I really meant was "right now." and when I said "chullo," I meant "one really bizarre and questionable tam, and one (hopefully totally adorable) tam with elephants on it for my sister."

On that note, I started the questionable one last night, and it looks like this:


It is from a lot of stash yarn - I think the black is Rowan Felted Tweed i meant to knit a hat for my dad out of last year or so, and the green and blue are Valley Yarns Amherst, and the pink is Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran. I love stash adventures.

I got the yarn for the second one today, and immediately cast on (well, I'm in the process of casting on.)
It's Noro Silk Garden and Valley Yarns Sheffield. I've never used Silk Garden before, though on principle I love all things Noro, and let me just say: it is SO SOFT. I cannot believe that I get to knit something that looks like Noro (only maybe even a little classier) but that is also so soft I just want to swallow the stuff instead of knitting with it. ...is that weird?

So I'm still working on Thermal, don't think I'm not. I'm just also taking sanity breaks, and my sanity breaks are expressed with the instant gratification of fair isle hats. Specifically, tams. Apparently.

oh, thermal.

No new pictures. The thing about thermal is, while I really am loving knitting on it, it is pretty slow going...I feel like I knit and I knit and I don't really see progress happening. This is probably because I knit one of the sleeves first, and honestly it went by faster than I was expecting it to.

So I'm bribing myself: First off, I will knit to the buttonhole placket. Once I get to the buttonhole placket, I will reward myself in two ways: I will allow myself to use the leftover lopi from my yoke sweater to knit a chullo (at Hampshire College the other day I saw a girl wearing a really neat one, and I spent dinner reverse engineering it - my plan is to knit it in the spare lopi, then knit it again in a super soft solid color at a tighter gauge to use as a lining, so it would have the organic look of the lopi and also be soft, and also be double warm.)

Secondly, once I hit the placket, I will knit the second sleeve.
This is part reward but also sort of Becca-Sensible - once I finish the body I'll probably be exhausted and will just want to be able to sew in the sleeves and finish, so by completing the sleeve before then I'll prevent that. Muhuwahaha.

So that's what's going on. Not the most interesting of posts, I know, but it's all I have to offer.