Definite signs of progress

After the great swatch disaster of last post, in which I was cruelly deceived by a malicious tension square, I set aside the cotton stuff and took refuge in wool.

And I just kept knitting and knitting and knitting.



In keeping with the theme of geeky knits, this is a video-game-inspired shawl. Not as obvious as the Ood, but perhaps even more dorky. The inspiration came from this guy:



...who also goes around looking like this:



That, of course, is Huepow. Klonoa's best buddy, masquerades as a Wind Spirit, prince of the Moon Kingdom (that's where the colors come from). Even in his humanoid form, he does a fair bit of floating. That gave me some trouble, because the HPKCHC assignment I'm making the shawl for requires the depiction of the magical creature's tracks, and what kind of tracks does a floaty wind spirit leave?

Well, I'll tell you.

Beaded ones.



Instead of prestringing beads- because that's just annoying- I added the beads as I knit, pulling each stitch through the bead with a #12 steel crochet hook. (And if you're wondering how big a #12 steel crochet hook is, just imagine how many angels could dance on the head of a pin... and cut that number in half. That's how many fit on the head of a #12 steel crochet hook.)



After my first successful go at beaded knitting, I was feeling pretty confident in my abilities. That swatch had played tricks, sure, but I am a college graduate, and I'm pretty sure my yarn is not. I could outsmart this thing.

Having played by the rules of swatching and been mercilessly beaten at the gauge game, I threw away everything I ever learned about swatches, picked a needle size that sounded good, and cast on the number of stitches for the size smaller than I wanted. In a logical world, in which the normal rules of swatching applied, this would have given me a piece of knitting either three or fifty inches wide. Instead?



22.5" on the freaking dot.

Now all I need is for someone to reassure me that this:



...will be resolved with a good steam blocking.

HPKCHC: February Wrap-Up

February went fast. I suppose that shouldn't come as much of a surprise, since it's the shortest month of the year, but it gets me every year.

On the knitting front, progress was somewhat slow. I accomplished three knit projects for HPKCHC, but nothing nearly as monumental as last month's stash cleanup project. Still, I can add this little guy to my list of achievements:



He's an Ood, and I'm enormously proud of him because I knit the whole thing without referring to any kind of pattern at all. That little brain is even crochet, and I figured the whole thing out on my own. It turns out that if you understand how to knit a garment to fit a part of the human body, you also have a pretty good idea of how to knit something that looks like that part of the body. Go figure.

I feel the need to address one point of last month's HPKCHC accomplishments: the 12-month plan. Now, I knew full well that I was never going to follow that plan. I am just not that kind of knitter. I get distracted. I am unfaithful. There's a reason I never posted that plan here, and that reason is that I only ever half-heartedly (maybe only quarter-heartedly) intended to follow it.

With that disclaimer, I think I can feel pretty good that I even picked up something off the list at all: those pink cable socks that I was going to knit while I was in North Dakota. I did in fact start them while there, but size 0 needles and splitty Tofutsies got old after a while. This month I did actually pull them out of hibernation, finish up those blasted cables on the ankle, and turn the second heel. Currently, these socks are the purse socks, and they are roughly mid-gusset. That is much more progress than I made on them in the last several months, so I'm giving myself a (small) pat on the back.

As far as HPKCHC goes, the secret project will remain secret from the blog for the time being, as will the song I wrote for History of Magic, because I'm totally embarrassed to be one of those people who writes filk and then posts it on the internet. Also, mine is nowhere near as cool or funny as Tom Smith's, so if you want to listen to filk from an Ann Arborite, go listen to his.

I don't know what next month will bring, knitting-wise. I'm hoping to do some knitting to sell on Etsy, as a small financial experiment, and I have a commission to finish up. But I won't know what the HPKCHC assignments will be until the month actually begins, so I've lined up a few interesting things in my Ravelry queue, just in case they happen to fit the assignments... stay tuned.

Greener

I've spent a fair amount of time marvelling at the Yarn Harlot's way of knitting, which she calls "Irish Cottage knitting", though the rest of the world seems to know it as "lever action knitting" or, more picturesquely, "armpit knitting" (or "crotch knitting"). It's a variant on English knitting that keeps the right needle stationary, and though I don't fully understand how it's worked, that's probably because no one has ever been able to slow down an armpit knitter enough to see what they're doing.



She's fast. Really fast. But then I stopped to consider how fast I knit, in terms of stitches per minute, and I found that I wasn't that much slower. If I'm concentrating, I can whip them off the needle at about that speed. (Stopping to scoot the stitches along the needle every ten stitches or so is what slows me up.)

So why does my knitting look so slow and hers look so fast? I think it's because she uses such big motions to work the stitches. It's counter-intuitive- you'd think that to go faster, you'd want to minimize motion. So I thought about this a little bit.

The Harlot and I knit at about the same speed, stitch per stitch. The difference is that she can keep it up for a long, long time, whereas I get tired easily. It turns out that it's the little motions- like the small motions I use when knitting Continental- that cause repetitive stress injuries. By knitting with those large, sweeping motions, her hands are getting less tired.

So now I'm weighing the costs and benefits of switching knitting techniques again. I know that I'm running up against the grass-is-greener principle here, but really, what can it hurt? If I try it and don't like it, I can switch back. All I have to lose is a few hours of feeling clumsy and uncomfortable at something I'm pretty good at. It's just a matter of steeling myself to survive those hours, which sounds silly, but feeling like a total beginner again is rather stressful. The question is, is it more stressful than having to lay off knitting and ice my arm for the days after Christmas?

Happy Halloween

I'm quite sad David Tennant is going to be leaving Doctor Who, but that didn't stop me from making him into a decorative vegetable. (Template is from Pink Raygun.)

Happy Halloween, y'all.