What I Did On My Pre-Inaugural Vacation

[akirlu]

Look, it's a finished garment:



Okay, it's only one of a pair, so it's not like it's a finished project or anything, but it's a thing and I made it. I won't tell you how many times I took it apart to finally get to a finished thingy (mostly because I have lost count) but along the way I've learned to gauge my long tail cast on pretty well, I can tell the difference between a knit stitch and a purl stitch by how they look, and I'm increasingly comforatable with tension. And the second project I started has made the green wool in the fingerless mitt seem very easy to work by comparison. So there is progress.

There's another picture of the mitt and one of the scarf beneath the cut .

Comments

[auntysocial.livejournal.com]

I think you're doing very well. The mitt would have been very appropriate to wear to the inauguration, but I guess you would have needed two of them.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I get the sense that I'm actually making quite good progress even though I didn't do the mitt projects in the round as originally planned. It may be that picking up one or two techniques at any given time is the better part of valor.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thanks! It's nice to have a finished thing to point at.

[off_coloratura]

Oh GOD, I just finished my first and last ever project with bouclé. That is EVIL stuff. I was cursing it constantly.

It'll be harder to pull off with the yarn you're using, but I recently discovered this neat visual tutorial about how to weave in ends as you go when knitting with two colors. Saves a heap of time.

Love the mitt. I've taken apart/restarted/ripped back every single project I've ever worked on, so do not feel ashamed on that score. You did a great job on it and the next one will be easier.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the bouclé yarn was perhaps over-ambitious for my second project ever. It's functionally impossible to see what you're doing, so if you drop a stitch or do an accidental yarn-over or split the yarn or whatever, good luck spotting that, or fixing it when you do. Which would be fine if it weren't nearly impossible to rip back without creating Gordian knots as you go. I finally decided to just do a deliberate decrease whenever I put in an accidental increase rather than try to back up because I got tired of having to cut the yarn to pull the thing apart.

On the other hand, the knitted result is wonderfully soft and fluffy and has a marvelous hand, so there's that. And you can't possibly tell the difference between knit2 purl2 and just knitting all of every row, so there's no need to waste precious time practicing my purl stitch. On the whole, I'll probably do it again some time, but not for anything more complicated.

Thanks for the link!

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Yes, in a way it's nice to have the visual evidence of progress. At least for a while. Until something *really* goes wrong.

Eventually, I hope to get practiced enough to tackle Bohus stickning, since I have a local teaching resource.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Very sensible. Good to get progressively better skills before tackling something really complex.

[19-crows.livejournal.com]

Pretty! I especially like the way they look with the purple sleeve.

If you decide later they need a thumb, you could add one. I did that with a pair of mitts.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have a borrowed book on finishing techniques, and one of the things it shows is how to knit onto a finished section, as when adding a collar band. Probably won't for these guys, though, as they're mostly for being able to do typing and hand-work when it's too damn' cold in the house and the heat hasn't kicked in yet.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

That is gorgeous wool on the mitt. Love it.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Me, too. I almost bought a skein of the same yarn in purple, also, but decided I should probably achieve proof-of-concept by finishing something before I bought more of the spendy yarn.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

Very nice. Those are very handy (no pun intended) things to have made. I certainly wear the ones I've made quite a lot. I have a pair of "fingerless" (they actually have fingers, but they only come half-way up the fingers) gloves that I can easily type in. (I'm wearing them now, in fact.) And I have gauntlets (longer past the wrist and which stop at the base of the fingers) that I wear when my sleeves are bit short. Very worthwhile things to have knit.

The scarf is lovely, too.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was the sheer practicality of keeping my hands warm when the office temperature was down in the low 50s that finally inspired me to go get the needles and yarn so that Susanna could get me started.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I seem to remember -- from early childhood in Northern Ohio -- that fingerless mittens just didn't work. They scruntched back and wouldn't stay in place. Mostly-fingerless gloves -- with about an inch of the fingers knitted -- worked fine. How much of the problem was inherent in the mitten form and how much was the result of single-digit age is unclear.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I suspect that it had more to do with what, as a kid, you were trying to do with your hands than it had to do with the functionality of the mitts. I've borrowed a pair of the design I'm working, and for typing at the keyboard, they work fine.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Very nice! And excellent work with the boucle!

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I seem to have leapt in at the deep end to some degree, but so far it's working out.