Tag: Eyelets

Seas Shawl

Thick and thin yarn to make some waves.

In my last big undyed yarn purchase, I included 10 skeins of ‘Thick and Thin DK’-weight yarn. It’s single ply but it varies in thickness along the length and therefore has an interesting sort of effect. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but I was intrigued by how it worked. So I set off to dye it with some soft yellow and green sprinkles on 3 June 2023.

Once it was dry, I had to figure out what to actually do with it. I tried several patterns until I ran across the Seas Shawl by Puff Updater. It seemed like a fun, slightly involved pattern that wouldn’t mind the uneven nature of the yarn. You can still lightly see the waves made by increases and decreases, hence the name, I guess. I started on July 23 and finished it on November 19. It traveled with me a lot, together with an ever more crumpled piece of paper with the instructions on it.

After blocking and pinning out some points, it turned out a bit smaller than I hoped. I knew I would never really wear it as it was. So I decided to ask one of my colleagues if she was interested and it has now found a nice new home. The end result is only a small part of what I enjoy about knitting. It’s mainly the relaxing nature of knits and purls that keep me coming back to the needles.

Grey-diation Shawl

Adding some details to stave off endless repetition.

To be honest, I don’t remember much about this shawl. I finished it a couple of months ago and from what I can recall, the knitting was very boring. However, it does have good colours, grey, white and black go with everything! And I have worn it out a few times since, so lets try to recap anyway.

My Ravelry notes indicate that I started this new shawl on July 1st, 2023 and finished it on 11 October 2023. Not too bad of a turn around. The pattern is Aranea by Erika Wine and I later incorporated Asscher by Christina Danaee into it because I was so bored. The yarn was the ‘grey-diation‘ yarn dyed in December 2022. The pattern is fairly simple, the only thing to remember is to make the ‘spokes’ by effectively knitting i-cord along the edges and three other spines. In the beginning, a stitch is increased on each side of each spoke every fourth row. Once you pass 40 stitches between two spokes, you start increasing every other row.

This is a lot of knitting stockinette and for some reason, my yarn didn’t want to run out. The shawl is supposed to end when there were 80 stitches between the spokes, but I still had a lot left when I hit those 80 stitches. So at some point, I wanted something, anything else to do but knit-stitches for an eternity. I found the Asscher pattern, which has a pretty cool eyelet pattern on the back and started incorporating those instructions in between the spokes. I deviated at some point and made an extra triangle. I also needed to keep in mind that the i-cord binding still needed to happen, so I kept weighing the yarn to make sure I had enough. Once I reached the end, I followed the bind off instructions and wet blocked it.

Since I wanted the lace design to stand out a little more, I blocked it with straight edges instead of the spiderweb intention from the original pattern. This was probably not the best idea because what I liked most about the Aranea pattern was the spiderweb effect. However, I’m definitely not making this by hand ever again. I had to force myself to finish it. It has turned out a pretty decent size and it’s definitely wearable. I now also know how that gradation effect in yarn will play out when knitting. I have learnt (again) that endless stockinette is not my forte and will try to keep this in mind with future projects.

Fall Shawl

Making a Pirate Scarf for a Kayaking Friend

Last year, when Karen and I dyed different kinds of yarn, one of them was colour-mix that has sat in my stash since. I do find that yarn very interesting and I thought it would look good with browns, so when I had some red-brown yarn leftover from the Fringe! scarf, that set my brain in motion. I put them next to each other and I thought they looked good together. I wasn’t sure I would have enough for something wearable, so I dyed another skein some lighter brown (and later overdyed it with even more brown) and started planning.

I found the Pirate’s Cove for LK150 by Christine Welsh on Ravelry when looking for machine knit patterns. It also had a video tutorial attached with it, which was really nice. The main idea for the original Pirate’s Cove was to use a thicker yarn and increase one stitch every second row on one side to create an asymmetrical triangle scarf. Because I used thinner yarn and my bed wasn’t too wide, I opted to increase one stitch every four rows to create a longer triangle. Different stitch or colour patterns were suggested at intervals, but the knitter can make their own choices of course. I chose to do the first section in the red-browns, then some striped red-browns & colour-mix. Next came some thin red-brown, brown and colour-mix stripes with eyelets and without eyelets. Some flat brown after and then increasing width stripes of colour-mix and red-brown. In the last section of colour-mix, I knit some triangles with eyelets. The final section was some straight brown.

Since the straight edges started curling, I followed the directions for a decorative edge in the pattern. I chose to do the edge in the brown. I was very worried that I did not have enough yarn, but I tried to do one side in a different colour and it was awful. So I pulled it out and just .. kept my fingers crossed. I did lose yarn chicken by about 10-20 stitches on the bottom corner, so I used some leftover red-brown to finish those last few stitches. You’ll only notice if you know, so ssshhh. This shawl has now made its way to Karen, as it should suit her Fall colours.

Purple Eyelet Scarf

Flower eyelet pattern for a purple scarf.

After the success of the knitting machine eyelet scarf, I figured it was time to finally knit up a skein that has been in the stash for years. I’ve held on to the yarn since it was bought during the closing sale of a yarn shop. The intention was to make a scarf for a former colleague whose favourite colour is purple. I forgot what kind of yarn this is and I didn’t dye it myself. I did not use a pre-written pattern for the scarf, I initially just started knitting over 51 stitches and would see where it would end up. It wound up being too short so it was frogged for a second attempt.

Using a closed cast on, and skipping every second needle, I cast on 31 stitches. Then I knit 10 rows and hand-ribbed them. While keeping two columns of rib on the outsides, I started with an eyelet pattern down the center. The eyelet pattern was:

  • 4 rows knit
  • Transfer the first stitch to the left of center to the previous needle on the left and transfer the first stitch to the right of center to the next needle on the right.
  • 4 rows knit (to create 2 eyelets on the first row).
  • Transfer the second stitch to the left of center to the previous needle on the left and transfer the second stitch to the right of center to the next needle on the right.
  • 4 rows knit (to create 2 eyelets on the first row).

Repeat until there is just about enough yarn left to do 4 rows of finishing knit and 10 rows of ribbing. Then weave in the ends and block the scarf to a width of 15 cm on your pool-floor foam pieces. Next, hope that the intended recipient actually likes it.

And she does like it!

Knitting Machine Scarf

Dyeing and knitting a stripy scarf.

Since the knitting machine entered my life, I’ve been looking for things to use it for. Recently I watched a tutorial about knitting a very pretty scarf on a knitting machine. It’s by Ingunn Hvatum and can be found here. The pattern itself is not very difficult, so it seemed like an interesting challenge. It did take a little bit of learning to achieve the eyelet edge smoothly, but that’s what practice is for!

You start with three stitches and every second row you create an eyelet and make the scarf that little bit wider. This is done until you are halfway through your yarn (in my case), or if you follow the instructions until you have engaged all needles. Once you are halfway, you knit 4 rows and then start decreasing one stitch while still creating an eyelet. Once you have three stitches left, you bind off.The last instruction is to crochet a chain and thread it through the eyelets.

For this scarf, I used one skein of self-dyed 100% merino wool (Quarter round by Chester Wool), which is around 400 meters. The skein was dyed a light grey while keeping a small section out of the dyebath. After the grey had set, the white area was overdyed with a mix of navy and green dye which resulted in a sort of petrol colour. Some orange transfer can also be found from the rainbow skein that was dyed at the same time. The aim for this one, though, was to do dark green, but I do like this end result. At some point, I accidentally cut through a thread so I ended up with two balls of yarn, one about 97 grams and one 10 grams. After knitting the scarf, any yarn that was left over was dyed with the petrol stock to make the crochet chain for the eyelets. All in all, a happy accident.

Once the scarf was knit, I had to block it because it was rolling over on both the eyelet and the neck edge sides. I thought it would be a right angled triangle, but while blocking that turned out to be wrong, so the point is a little more obtuse than I figured it would be. I still like it a lot. Once the crochet chain was attached, I still had a little bit of yarn left over, and I decided to add tassels to the points. Not sure how they will do if this thing ever sees the washing machine, but that’s a concern for some other time. For now, I’m just going to enjoy wearing this cute triangle scarf.

Mud Holes

After finishing the Snow Season sweater, I immediately cast on the same sweater (Mud Season by Elizabeth Smith) in grey. The plan was to create a sweater with holes in a wrap around pattern and fix the fit issue of the Snow Season.

I started out by plotting my holes in an excel sheet to figure out where I wanted them to be and how far apart they needed to go. Then I got on with the knitting. I got stuck just below the bottom holes on the front because I wasn’t sure how long the sweater needed to be and was too lazy to put it on and see how long it already was. It took me a few weeks to get myself back into action and determine that it was already long enough and just needed ribbing. I chose 1×1 twisted knits rib for the bottom and finished my skein with that.

The neckline is improvised, it’s a collar with 1×1 twisted knits rib with short rows to fill out the neckline. When I started on the sleeves, I decided they needed a spiral holes pattern too. It gave knitting the sleeves a little more interest and kept me motivated. I did have to rip out a quarter of a sleeve when I figured out that I’d miscounted at some point. However, that didn’t dampen my spirits since I was in the train (with the cactus facemask) and felt it was a good use of my time.

I enjoy wearing this sweater. Even if the holes are not very obvious from any form of distance, I know that they are there and that is the most important part. What I didn’t take into account when making all the holes, was that there would be one on each sleeve that would fall DIRECTLY on my elbow. When I first put my elbow down on the table and it was, cold, I was very shocked. Still, it doesn’t bother me really and I think it’s quite funny even. I look forward to wearing this one more often.

Snow Season

While Spring has officially started a few days ago, I got the itch to do something with snow at the beginning of March. This paved the way for the Snow Season sweater.

It started a while ago when I’d purchased the yarn for the Pocket Coatigan. I got some more in different colourways; 3 balls of blue and 2 of white. I’d thought about making some sort of dual coloured sweater. The exact plan was not decided. So I went off to scour Ravelry some more. I stumbled across a sweater called Scatter by Þórunn Vilmarsdóttir. While I liked the idea of a gradation in my sweater, I didn’t exactly like the execution. So I continued to search for a raglan base in the correct gauge, which I found in Mud Season by Elizabeth Smith.

The cast on was on March 2 (this is the project description), and this was a very quick knit with size 5.5 mm needles and quite thick yarn. Just below the division for the arms, I started incorporating some white yarn. There was some vague rhyme and reason to the design but the plan was to make it look random. At some point I decided to reverse back to blue and did the whole snow storm again. For the arms, I wanted to end those with the white too, so I snowed the bottom. Once it was finished, I wore it for a day and the sleeves shrunk by at least 5 cm. So I took out the ribbing, added more white and then redid the ribbing. I’d already taken pictures, so just imagine more white at the bottom of the sleeves and it’ll be fine. Funnily enough, the length as I wear it is now exactly the same as in the pictures. It’s just that it doesn’t migrate to above my wrist when worn for some time.

So far it’s nice to wear. I like the little holes and it just makes me happy. Once I finished the original, I cast on the same pattern again. Now in grey. I hope to incorporate some of the changes that came out of the first version and then we’ll see if I can get this one finished in less than two weeks. With the travel time to work reduced to zero, there may be some options..