Author: mousearmy

knitting · pattern · wool · yarn

February Hat ’22.

mousearmy

What have I been doing all February? Well, I’ve been knitting a hat. One hat. It literally took me ten days to knit a hat that should’ve maybe taken four or five

I’m never knitting another one, but…you can, if you want.

(Yeah, this is effective marketing copy.)

(Really though, while it is a long hat, if you’re not ripping back the crown decreases to make them more coherent throughout the sizing options, and then pay attention to the changes you’ve made, it won’t be onerous. I hated this hat a little bit so you can enjoy it, basically, and that’s what a significant fraction of this kind of design work is sometimes.)

(And I guess I also knit about 40% of a cardigan, but nevermind that.)

It’s got a liner option. The liner is not the same hat knit again. I couldn’t handle that.

This hat is almost three feet long from hem to tip in the adult medium size, which fits 21-22.5” head circumferences. The sizing is broad, but the pure length on these makes me wonder if a baby size is appropriate: it might be cute for closely-observed babies, as in those fancy baby photosets you do to commemorate a person being a baby, etc., but it’s not ideal for general baby-use unless your baby is old enough to sit up, walk, run, escape traps, make its own sandwiches, and solve simple logic puzzles. You just don’t want the long hat style to give a baby trouble.

And finally, here’s the link to the Ravelry .PDF. There’s a limited-time promo going on now, though that assumes you’re reading this the weekend of March 4th, 2022, and it probably won’t be the case a week or two in the future. Anyway, hat! It’s a good hat. I’m still not sure I want to knit another one, though.

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.

mousearmy

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.

mousearmy

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.

mousearmy

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.