knitting
mousearmy

I have revamped the website! It looks super cool, like a blog from 2008.

MEANWHILE, I’ve also been working on some sweater ideas. Sweater design feels like a bit of a luxury compared to cowls or hats, even though it’s often what I’d like to be doing—it takes so much more time, and so much more yarn, and that’s just to knit a sample to get the idea down. And you have to know how arms work. Like. How they usually attach to the body. Where they come out. Etc.

Starling Sweater. The photo shows a half-view of a half-finished cardigan. The yarn is grey wool, a little rustic. Bamboo double-pointed knitting needles stick out of the fabric of a sleeve in progress.

It’s about as slow as fashion can be, short of owning the sheep and starting from there.

ANYWAY, in the meantime, while I hope to have 2+ larger designs ready to finish out the year, there will be a few new smaller projects during the holidays! I’ll be wrapping up a cowl and a possible hat in the next few days. (I have finished the cowl, and you can knit your own (link goes to Ravelry design page). The hat is under review. I am not certain about it.)

knitting · pattern · photo posts · wool

Yes! New Cardigan & Hat.

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This is Caddis Cardigan. It’s knit in sportweight yarn—most of the samples are Malabrigo Arroyo, which is kind of a favorite of mine. (It’s soft, with a nice tonal quality to the dyeways. I think they’ve moved from having dyelots to not, which is probably fair and for the best since there’s a limit to how consistent skeins dyed this way will be even if they’re all from the same batch, but I still want to make a basic pullover for myself from it someday.)

This is a very versatile sweater/vest sort of thing. If you close the front using a shawl pin or similar (it has no attached buttons), it looks very tailored and smart. If you leave it free, it’s very flowing. The shapes are geometric and the cardigan vest overall is slightly asymmetrical, but the eyelets line up.

The shaping is unique! Knitting is easy for the first part, and then requires a little more focus at the end. But once it’s done—and it’s mostly done when you finish knitting; there are no true seams— there are so many options for wearing the finished piece: thick collar, slim collar, no collar, long, or (flipped) cropped with a broad square collar.

Oh, and there’s also a new hat design .PDF up! It’s an okay hat-hat, but a pretty cute baby hat.

So that’s it for October, so far. Pumice Hat and Caddis Cardigan/Vest/Thing.

knitting · pattern

Anning.

mousearmy

New Hat!

First person who comments with the correct namesake for this hat gets a free mouse army Ravelry .PDF of their choosing. (You have to be able to receive Ravelry gifts, so this may be limited to registered users, but I’m not sure. I may be able to work around that, actually. But I am not going to be unreasonable; no carrier pigeons, no morse code.)

knitting · pattern · The Summer Kitchen. · tutorial

The Summer Kitchen Continues With Projects 5 & 6.

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Project 5: Simple Garter Dishcloth

Project 6: Kitchen Towel

These are both extremely simple, but they have a nice cottagecore aesthetic if you work them up in rustic cotton (or weaving threads held together).

The towel pattern includes a quick (2018-ish vintage?) tutorial .PDF to help you make a button to hold it in place. You may not even need the tutorial—it’s basically two large buttons sewn together with some wrapping around the shank—but just in case, it’s there.

knitting · pattern · photo posts · The Summer Kitchen.

Planispiral Shawl & the Summer Kitchen Project.

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I feel like I’ve been getting nothing done lately, but wait! Behold!

The thing on the left is done. It’s off the needles. It’s even been finished, completely—in this case, felted/fulled.* I’m pretty excited about the result. As I come back to this post in drafts, not only is the first sample finished—but there’s also a second sample done, and the pattern is available.

There’s also a new shawl pattern out! It’s a circle, and it ended up being pretty interesting. The stitches are simple, and showcase yarns with long color transitions. Good as a fairly big shawl; I think it would also work as a baby blanket. (I may end up sending off my latest shawl and blanket samples to babies in the extended family; I am not sure.)

PLANISPIRAL SHAWL.

knitting · wool

Wool Market in a Box: Pandemic Edition (Year II).

mousearmy

So, I have two entire wether fleeces from my favorite Shetland farm, the year I completely overbought fleeces.* They were packed up in a box and the bags and tissue they shipped in. They are pristine. Despite my neglect, I’ve got pounds and pounds of usable wool to process this summer.

They are also disgusting. I cannot believe that I opened this up and felt huge relief there was no evident damage (we’re supposed to be out of range for moths, but there are carpet-beetles who eat stuff at the local museum to make a point about not storing animal fiber museum pieces properly I guess), and thought, “How beautiful,” because it’s gross and dirty and smells (although not as badly as I remembered).

*At the time, I really did buy slightly too many fleeces. Even so, I used all of it but these. Weirdly, happily, they’ll probably end up being what I had originally planned. I’ve been pretty lazy about spinning (it’s not really my thing, or rather it’s sometimes my thing but not really my thing reliably for more than a couple of months at a time), so I am not super looking forward to the washing/processing/spinning this time, but I am pretty excited about not having to spend $80 on eco-friendly low-processing-impact yarn. I like one-sheep sweaters.

knitting · pattern · photo posts · yarn

The Super-Secret Larger Project I’ve Been Working on All Month(?).

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It’s Octagon Time! It’s a blanket/basic shawl. Really, what it is depends on what you want to make, and what yarn you use.

I went a bit wild and self-indulgent on this one; it is probably the most hedonistic use of an expensive yarn I’ve ever committed. The soft blue gradient yarn making up most of the project is Cascade 220 Superwash Wave in Deep Sea; the bold near-neon-green stripe is Dream in Color City in Pickleball.

(The smaller stripes are Malabrigo Yarn Rios in Apple Green, and the subtle, thicker bands are Malabrigo Washted in Aguas and Cirrus Gray. It was meant as a scrap-friendly project, and technically it is that, but I kind of like the Cascade background and the contrasting stripes. The .PDF is written as a formula, and doesn’t really include instructions for stripes. If you’d like to knit something with a similar color pattern, I had about 16-18 garter ridges separating all the bright green bands, and stayed pretty consistent with that all through the blanket. The middle might be the smallest band of main color; it’s about 14 ridges.)

Weirdly, despite the hedonism and all my feelings about it, I really like the result, and want to keep it, and not allow the dog to steal it; something about the murky blue-greens and the shocking contrast stripes really appeals. (I will probably keep it. It’s a small throw and not really adult-sized, so something that’s a dog or a kid will probably end up with it eventually. Maybe not the dog though. She got the Garter Square blanket sample. Makes her tacky dog bed look slightly better.)