It's enough to make you cry (or yell)

A lot.


2 Left Gloves :(

What a rookie mistake. I was completely deflated when I realized that I had done exactly what I tried to avoid. *sigh*

No, I didn't cry, but I did yell. I thought I had to rip all the way back to the thumb and I just didn't have the strength.

After leaving it alone for a while and taking a time out, I looked more carefully at the glove hoping above all hope that I was wrong. Maybe it was really a right hand glove.

Nope. It was still a second left glove. Darn. (deep breath)

Okay, back to looking carefully at the glove. What made it a left glove? When (and how) was the decision made?

Well, it turns out that the decision was made when the 3 motifs were chosen for the index finger. So that meant that I didn't have to rip back to the thumb, I just had to rip out the middle & index fingers. I wasn't happy about having to rip at all, but it could have been worse, much worse.

(Why is it that ripping out is exponentially faster than knitting? It doesn't seem fair.)

From that moment on I was a knitter possessed.

Fingers ripped out late 3/23, 4 fingers finished by 3/27. Take THAT!


All better
Project details on Ravelry

HKF

It's Hand Knit Friday!

I'm wearing Laced-Up socks from Stitch 'n Bitch Superstar Knitting: Go Beyond the Basics. What hand knits are you wearing today?


Laced-Up socks
Project details on Ravelry

Gig Alert--The Roger Steen Band in Berkeley this Saturday. Be there!

Art Design: Carol Sevilla, Photo: Bill Walker

THE ROGER STEEN BAND, Saturday March 26

The Roger Steen Band returns to Art House Gallery and Cultural Center for rare Concert Show.

Roger Steen, a founding member and lead shredder with legendary band THE TUBES brings his own band to Berkeley for a return engagement at the beautiful Art House Gallery & Cultural Center under the direction of Harold Adler.

Roger and his band deliver a scorching set of Jazz, Latin and old school rock to make you wiggle in your seat or pop up dancing.

Roger has toured the world many times over, performed to audiences in the hundreds of thousands, (Festival, UK.) and has performed in nearly every club in the United States. He and his band are excited to return to the beautiful Art House & Cultural center where the room was packed to the rafters.

“Roger Steen’s playing is…. perfection”

– Joerg Kliewe, Guitar International.com

“Roger’s playing style varies and shifts with the mood of the song, elements of salsa-esque rhythms, bizarre polyrhythms”.

– Ryk Weston, Ultimate Guitar.com

The band:
Roger Steen: Guitar, Vocals
Hank Gibson: Bass, Vocals
David Rapaport: Drums
Bill Walker: Keys, Vocals
Janice Kang: Vocals

The Roger Steen Band
March 26, 2011, 7:30 - 10:00PM
Berkeley Art House and Cultural Center
2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley (north of Ashby Bart Station)
$12 cover, cash only

HKF

It's Hand Knit Friday! What hand knits are you wearing today?

I have on a pair of socks made with hand dyed hand spun, but I can't show you the FO (yet).


Hand dyed hand spun

Waffles, hold the syrup

The new-to-me Gilmore loom continues to draw attention away from other projects. This may become a problem as a deadline approaches, but for now I'm marveling at the seemingly endless variety of weaving possibilities.

I bought 3 cones of Valley Yarns 8/2 Cotton a while ago in anticipation of weaving. There's nothing like advanced planning, huh? But if I remember correctly the yarn was on sale, so it's not like I didn't have a pressing reason to buy it 19 months before I took delivery on the floor loom. Oh but wait, I did have Dorothy. Yeah, that's it. I was going to weave it on Dorothy.

Anyway, I'm not feeling very confident with substituting yarns in weaving projects right now so I searched for a pattern that called for 8/2 cotton and found the Honeycomb Dish Cloth. After a bit of figuring, I worked out what size I could make, how many, and all that good stuff.

Measuring out the warp took quite a while because I needed 436 ends with color changes. I also read the draft wrong so I started out with the wrong number of ends for the first color, but that was easily fixed with the an extra warp chain.

I have to admit, after the difficult time I had sleying the chenille I was reluctant to get going on 4x more ends of thin cotton. But I finally mustered up the courage and got started. I needed 18 dpi in a 12 dpi reed so the sequence was 1-2-2. No major disasters with this step, it all went smoothly but sleying is hard on the body. Taking breaks and stretching helped.

The next step was to thread the heddles. I counted the heddles I needed before I got started (see? I'm learning) and then proceeded to transfer the cross to the other side of the reed. I know, it all sounds like Greek doesn't it? Basically it's a step to help me keep the warp strands in order. If I had one strand per dent I wouldn't have had to do this, but since I had 2 strands in some of the dents I wanted to be able to tell what order those 2 strands should be in. (That explanation probably didn't help at all, did it?) I used Madelyn van der Hoogt's Warping Your Loom DVD method to transfer the cross which made threading the heddles much cleaner.

I had a couple of "oops" during warping. Some how one of the warp chains was mucked up so it wouldn't unravel. It was a warp chain that only had 30 ends in it, so I manually undid the chain and it wasn't a big deal--I must have pulled the end of the chain through the live loop like a bind off. Oops.

Also, I crossed 2 threads in the reed. Oops. It was apparent when opening the first shed so that was easy to fix.

The loom was finally warped and ready for weaving.


Warped

Now I'm treadling and throwing the shuttle and the waffles are forming. It's magic!


Honeycomb Dish Cloth
Free pattern
Ravelry link

About the other project--the one that shall not be named--it's off the loom and stuffed in a bag. It didn't turn out as I expected so I'll blog about it when its time-out is over.

HKF

My thoughts are with those in Japan and with everyone who has friends and loved ones impacted by the earthquake and tsunami.

This makes Hand Knit Friday even more trivial than usual, but I find tangible comfort in hand knits. It's a small thing.


Petroglyph Socks
Project details on Ravelry

HKF

It's a Hand Knit Friday at home. I'm comfy cozy in my felted clogs. What hand knits are you wearing today?


Barney Clogs