Posts in category 'knitting'
My Cup Of Tea Socks (Reversed)
A quick write-up of my process for converting a cuff-down sock pattern to toe-up as part of my most recent project.
I absolutely love making socks. As a project, they’re relatively quick, by now very familiar, a small canvas for a bit of experimentation, and in the end, always useful. After all, who doesn’t need another pair of socks?
Unfortunately, that’s also caused me to amass quite the collection of sock yarn over the years. In fact, I spent a good part of 2019 making sock after sock after sock thanks to our indulging in a Michael’s Boxing Day sale back at the start of last year.
But, I’ll be the first to admit, the stash has been building up for a long time, now.
As a result, the yarn that I used in this project–a lovely, variegated yellow yarn who’s label I’ve apparently lost–has been sitting in my collection for a couple of years now, having been pushed down the queue by more recent acquisitions. However, I finally decided to do something with it!
Now, as a toe-up sock knitter, it’s always a bit trickier to find patterns, and so I’ve often settled for coming up with my own designs. However, this time, I decided to try my hand at converting an existing cuff-down pattern to toe-up.
These socks are based off of the My Cup of Tea Socks pattern (hosted on Ravelry), which I then altered, both to convert the pattern to toe-up, and to make the motif a bit larger.
Continue reading...- (https://b-ark.ca/A2yaQQ)
Another pair down! This yarn had been in my stash for a couple of years now, so it’s nice to get them done. Post to come with details, including how I converted this cuff down pattern to toe up.
- (https://b-ark.ca/OUKkUS)
That moment when you realize you apparently knit too fast because you overshot the length of the sock you’re working on and now you need to tink a bunch of rows…
Intarsia in the Round
Yeah, another knitting post, and so soon, too! Okay, so this is a post all about Intarsia-style colour knitting in the round, as the title might suggest. See, when I was working on my pacman cap, I had this problem: when you knit Intarsia-style, you basically have colour strands for each “section” of the piece. So, if you’re knitting flat and you’re making a black field with a big yellow section, you’d knit with black, switch to yellow, knit across, then switch to a new strand of black and knit to the end of the row. Going back, you’d do the same thing, and each time you change colours, you do a little yarn wrapping trick to make sure there’s no gaps. The result is, on the back, there is no black carried across the yellow section, which is very nice as it means you have to worry less about puckering and tension, etc.
Problem is, suppose you’re knitting in the round. So you knit in black, switch to yellow, knit across, switch back to black, knit around… and then you’re back to the yellow section. Problem: you now have two black strands, and the yellow is way over on the other side of the yellow section. What do you do? What do you do??
Well, in my pacman hat, I basically cheated. When I got to the section of colour, I switched from round knitting to back-and-forth, and when the coloured rows were done, I switched back to knitting in the round. Then, during the finishing stage, I just sewed up the little seam. Pretty simple, really, but it left a bulky little seam there, and a) I hate bulky little seams, and b) I just hate seams.
So, what’s the real answer? Well, I could explain it, but instead, why don’t I leave it to Sara to answer that question? In an explanation that’s much better than anything I could compose, she outlines three different methods for dealing with the issue, one involving carrying strands around the piece, one using gapless short rows, and a third, far more ingenious technique that I really must try some time…
A Long Overdue Knitting Post
Here I am, part of the Men Who Knit webring, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I posted about knitting. “Who cares, no one reads this anyway,” you say? Okay, yeah, you’re right. But who isn’t up for a little linguistic masturbation from time to time, eh? If anything, at least it keeps my writing (read: rambling) skills bright and shiny. And, hey, at least Lenore probably reads this thing occasionally. Right?
Anyway, where was I? Oh, right, knitting. So, yeah, I haven’t posted about knitting in a while, but I figured I’d share a little project I whipped up recently. It’s a hat. Yeah, fine big deal, a hat. But it’s a special hat. Wanna see it? Of course you do! You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t, right? Okay, here it is:
Pretty cool, eh? Cooler yet, I actually designed this thing myself! Though, admittedly, I didn’t actually go through the effort of grabbing the graphics out of the game… a little search for “pacman ghosts” turned up this link, and voila! I was off to the races (oddly, that link is to a website called Sprite Stitch, a, quote, “Video game inspired craft weblog”… apparently I’m not the only one who had this idea). Once I had the graphics, it was a simple matter of charting out the pattern on graph paper, finding some yarn with the colours I needed, and then whipping the thing up.
Of course, charting the pattern did take a bit of effort. The trickiest thing when translating an image into a knitting pattern is altering the images to match your row/stitch gauge. You see, my knit stitches aren’t perfectly square. In fact, they’re a little wider than they are tall. But the images in your average video game are designed to be presented on a display with square pixels. The result is that, if you convert the images directly to a pattern, they come out distorted. So you have to either alter the images to stretch/squish them as necessary, or alter your row/stitch gauge. I opted to alter the images, squishing them horizontally, which was actually a bit challenging, as they’re already very low resolution. But I think the result is pretty nice.
But the question now, is, what next? I’m thinking another classic video game of some kind. One of the Mario Bros. characters, maybe? Or maybe something a little more obscure… Opa Opa, anyone?
Some Knitting Projects
Well, I finally have some photos of my latest knitting projects uploaded. First, we have Michelles Scarf, which was actually completed and shipped off months ago, but only now have I gotten to posting a photo:
This is, without question, my favorite piece. The cable pattern is reversible, which is very cool, and the yarn Lenore helped pick out looks really fantastic in pattern (it’s got a glossy, satin-ey finish… very nice, given it’s just off-the-shelf stuff from Michael’s). It was also a heck of a lot of fun to put together (I really love cabling).
Secondly, we have Abigails Baby Blanket, which I just recently completed. It’s a pretty simple pattern, just a nice shell-and-cable deal, but it looks great in the green yarn Lenore, again, helped pick out:
‘course, with all the work on NetHackDS, I’ve had little time to pick up the needles lately. Which is unfortunate, as I really need to begin working on a project for our now-quite-pregnant receptionist. Oh well, I’m sure it’ll be done… you know… a couple months after the baby is born. Ish.
