Scientific Ink

Tag: Knitting

  • Spring awakening, and the world looks different

    Ah, spring. The trees are ablaze with blooms, the ponds are abuzz with frog calls, the mornings come earlier, and the evenings last longer. Time to shake off the drowse and inwardness of winter and stand, blinking, in the sunshine. At least, when it isn’t spring showers, then maybe stand under an eave, or stand right out in the soft rain, as long as you don’t have to be dry at your next stop.

    I am enjoying the blossoms of spring. I am also writing again. Some of the quietness on the blog was from my own misalignment – in the year I announced I was going to write about greener living, my husband and I started house shopping for a larger place, farther from town. Oops.

    Now, I’m just over 2.5 miles from my work, and I can bike to work, and if I walk or drive 1 mile, I can also bus it downtown. But, moving to a bigger house in a neighborhood without sidewalks and no corner store, I couldn’t blog about being green without, well, lying, and I stopped writing. And then we packed and moved, and I was busy with work and the distracting buzz in my head and body that comes with change. Oh yeah, and a surgeon opened me up and took out something (non-malignant) that should not have been there in December.

    Excuses, excuses.

    This isn’t meant to be an excuse post, but instead a flag of something new. After all of that change and resettling, I feel different.

    I loved the old place – it was the happiest most lovely place I’d ever lived, happiest most loving person I’d ever been, and I didn’t want to risk leaving behind any of that well being. I was also thrilled to walk to work….while I could theoretically walk the six mile round trip to and from work from our new place, I haven’t yet. Other changes, after a lifetime of tea drinking, I am experimenting with coffee (er, a milky mocha that has a dash of coffee, not the straight espresso enjoyed by my dear husband). But, something about going under anesthetic and losing a piece, moving house, and changing your caffeine vehicle has triggered a reassessment. I am, in essence, reading my own tea leaves and pondering the future. This happens to me periodically.

    r is for rebecca
    Exhibit A of many – “R” is for “Rebecca” mini-sweater ornament

    Maybe because I was sedentary, I spent a fair bit of my free time this winter knitting. Socks, scarves, purses…my Christmas gifts to the women in my family were homemade. I made small ornaments for my niece and nephew. I ended up with some gift yarn from a colleague, I had several of my own projects to complete. I knit and knit and knit.

    But now, facing warmer weather, when the thought of wool in my lap is a bit less appealing, I’m questioning all of that knitting. How many scarves can one person wear? Maybe more socks than scarves, but the cost of the yarn plus the hours of work…means the socks end up being multiply expensive. I’m happy to knit, and I’m even happy to spend a little on quality yarn for my free time, but I started to wonder what all of that knitting was doing for me. What I was expressing or replacing by knitting.

    After some quiet pondering, I remembered what I already knew, that it is satisfying a creative urge, one that I’m having trouble satisfying at work. Interestingly enough, this has been a theme that I’ve pondered before. OK, ok, I get it. Time to make a change in my job description to get a little more creative during my day job, let’s see if that calms the knitting drive.

  • Reusing yarn (green #10)

    Ok, so I made a sweater once. It was an early sweater in my knitting life, and I just kind of made it up as I went along. The yarn was gorgeous gipsy hand-dyed wool from Fingerlakes Yarn. I wanted a shawl collar, so I made a shawl collar. I wanted a cardigan, so I made a cardigan. I wanted the edges of the sleeves and the hem to roll up the way that stockinette stitching does, and it did. That part was fun. My sweater design skills, tho, were beginning, so the pieces didn’t flow together. Cardigan + shawl collar takes more careful construction, and may not even make sense. I never got the buttons to work, so eventually I pulled off the placket and thought I might close it with a pin. To boot, I planned it during the period where I thought I might appear shorter if I drowned in my clothing. So, it could easily have fit me and a friend inside the trunk of the sweater.

    The sweater was too expensive in terms of time and materials to let go of, yet too weird and too large to wear, so I finally decided to reuse the yarn in another project.

    recycling a bad sweater into a rug
    Reuse in action. Knitting up yarn pulled from an unused sweater into a rug.

    Well, I ripped it apart the other night, deconstructed it from sweater to several balls of yarn, and now I’m knitting it into a rug diagonally, using a basic garter stitch scarf pattern. Couldn’t be easier. Next I’m going to felt it. It’ll be something warm for near the bed in the winter or maybe near a door.

    Now I wish I’d taken a photo of the sweater, or the de-sweaterification of the yarn. But, here’s a photo of the rug in progress.

    I’m trying to decide if I want it to be a big rectangle, or if it will be a series of squares seamed together. Now I’m going to look for other never-used knitted items I can pull to bits. If I keep this up, I’ll no longer have to purchase yarn (though I expect I will). Instead I could just pull apart and redo projects endlessly.

  • Muji makes knitted items from rescued yarn (green #9)

    In honor of Earth Day, I want to celebrate my new discovery – a store called Muji. I encountered it when we visited London, but it apparently is all over the globe (including a few stores in the New York City area).

    The store stocks practical no-nonsense items with minimal packaging. I walked out with a set of 3 socks, made from reused yarn. I knit socks, so I’m now officially a sock snob. I am now very sensitive to the materials and design of socks, and so I have a hard time buying obviously imperfect ones, even though the cost and time to knit a pair of socks is…exceptionally inefficient.

    Anyway, Muji makes items (socks, tee shirts, camis) from yarn that was pre-dyed for some use and then never used, yarn that might have been discarded. The result is funky bright informal patterns, in 100% cotton, inexpensive and well-made. Fun, good price, quality, green!  The Muji US website does not do the crazy cool rescued socks justice, but there’s the link in case you’re curious.

    muji socks
    Muji rescued/recycled yarn socks

  • My very own Nostepinde! (gratitude #51)

    What is a Nostepinde, you might ask? I asked the same thing when I was searching online for a ball winder. For reasons I’ve never quite understood (letting knitters view the yarn in a relaxed state?), yarn stores sell yarn in completely useless skeins, which must be wound into a ball before use. Otherwise it turns into a tangled ball of mess.

    Well, I’ve checked out yarn winders and swifts online, and these mechanized contraptions must be fixed to a table and seem kind of large for my cozy house and not at all portable. One of my favorite aspects of knitting is its portability. I tried weaving, but the thought of lugging a loom around with me (down to my sister’s, up north, on an airplane…) was untenable. Knitting is great, some needles, some yarn, and a bag is about all that is required.

    So, clunky mechanized ball winders and swifts wouldn’t do. Through a web search online, I found out about nostepinde (or nøstepinde or nostepinne or nystepinne), which are simple, non-mechanized ball winders. Essentially, it’s a sloped wooden wand around which you wind the yarn. It creates a center-pull ball, so that I can double up the same ball of yarn for my next project. Portable, simple, and beautiful.

    winding my nostepinde

    I looked online for nostepinde, and I found some on Etsy and around, but then it occurred to me to ask if a friend of mine on twitter, the fine custom woodworker Keith Burtis of Magic Woodworks made them. He was willing to try, and he turned the one in the bottom photo for me. Keith broadcast the woodturning live, and I was able to watch him make it. Cool!

    winding my nostepinde

    I got it and another for my mother-in-law before Christmas so I kept it quiet until now. Hers is a beautiful walnut nosty. Anyway, I broke out my lovely cherry with a streak of rosewood nosty tonight and created a lovely little football from my new Cascade garnet yarn. It’s surprisingly firm and even with my neophyte winding, the ball is unwinding smoothly as I knit.

    Go Nosty! It works great. Thanks Keith!

    My nosty and the ball of yarn it made

  • Ravelry.com has exponentially increased my knitting fun (gratitude #50)

    I love knitting. I love yarn. I love yarn shops. I love bamboo and birch needles. I love starting projects. I love finishing them. I love photographing my knitting. I love looking at other people’s knitting (commercial, machine, and hand-knitted) for ideas about pattern and color and yarn.

    My projects on Ravelry
    My projects on Ravelry

    Ravelry.com has just exponentially increased my knitting fun by providing a huge community of ideas, project photos, yarns, patterns, and stories. I’m completely and totally addicted. I have queued up projects/patterns. I have surfed photos of knitted up socks to try to determine the perfect Colinette Jitterbug colorway (I must keep surfing the photos, and testing different colorways in person, doctor’s orders).

    Ravelry might be my absolute favorite social networking site (Twitter is its close competitor). It is a closed community, so it is hard to share with my non-Raveler non-knitting friends, but perhaps my knitting bores them (you?) anyway. And, if you need a fix of my current project, you can always surf my flickr knitting photostream. Ravelry is a walled garden, but it is easy enough to score an invitation (just ask). If you knit, join me on Ravelry!

  • Size matters – a tale of two needles

    I tackled a fun project with scrap yarn this Christmas: ornaments for my sister, my niece, and my nephew. I started with an ornament for my sister with scrap yarn from the socks I made her – Raphael from Colinette Jitterbug. I kept using the size 1 birch double-pointed needles I’d used for the socks.

    OrnamentsWhen I turned to the kids’ ornaments, I moved to bright colors, and for kicks, even though the cotton El. D. Mouzakis Butterfly cotton yarn was thicker, I stayed with the size 1 needles for my nephew Theo’s ornament. His ornament knitted up quickly, and it made a nice, firm fabric, but I was really straining the needles to work the thicker yarn (note to self, pay attention, when things are hard, it might be a sign you shouldn’t do it that way). I snapped two of my precious size ones making his ornament. I finished it on two broken needles. But, I loved the way it felt – firm and easy to fill with stuffing. I finished the day before we drove to their house in Tennessee.

    I started his little sister Rebecca’s ornament in the car on the way to their house on size four double pointed needles, the next smallest size I had ready to go. Her ornament is huge compared to his. It looks like it could hold the stuffing for at least two of his ornaments….It looks fine in the photo, but the decreases in particular look open and the ball itself is squooshy and less firm than his (I also may not have brought enough stuffing into the car…). So, I think the optimum size needle is in between the ones and the fours – maybe a metal size two?

    Still, I saw her hugging the ornament, so now that the receiver is pleased, who am I to complain?

    But it is an object lesson in the influence of needle size. The two balls are made of the same yarn using the same pattern with the same number of stitches. The only difference (other than color and the initial appliqued onto the ball) is the needle size.

    Here’s a link to the free knitted ornament pattern, when you’re ready to queue up next year’s projects.