Sweater Progress and Making Do

 Tegna sweater lace hem in progress.

Hello there!  How are you all doing?  I'm pretty happy and content these days.  I have even been adding long daily walks with my Black Labrador Easy to my mental health regime.  She's such a sweetie as labs generally are, but even more laid back and easy going hence her name.  It's funny that when you are well mentally doing the things that add to your mental well being are no problem, but when you are depressed can be a Herculean feat.  A few months back taking a walk around my block would have been more than I could handle, but now I'm up to walking 10,000 plus steps a day!  My hope is that by establishing a walk as part of my daily duties during these warm summer months I'll be able to keep it up during autumn and winter.

On the knitting front, I have been making slow and steady progress on my Tegna sweater.  I fussed with the gauge, as I seem to be doing lately, trying to get the yarn I already have on hand to work.  I knit up and washed a large swatch of the Charlemont fingering weight yarn on US size 5 / 3.75 mm needles and got too many stitches.  Realizing I would have to go up to at least to a US size 7 / 4.5 mm needles to get gauge, made me also realize that the fabric would be quite loose and too sheer to wear the sweater by itself.  So, since the Tegna pattern had a good selection of sizes I was able to do some math to pick which size would get me the closest to my desired amount of ease.  I'm hoping to get about 8 inches / 20 cm of ease at the bust which makes the ease at the hem a wild 27 inches / 68.5 cm by knitting the 2XL size.  If I would have gotten gauge I would knit the L size. 

Let me tell ya there are quite a few cast on stitches for the 2XL!  I followed the advice of another knitter and placed my stitch markers for the lace repeat as I was casting on to make the counting simpler.  It was such a good idea!  Good luck was with me and I didn't twist the cast on when I joined in the round.  Woohoo!  The lace chart is very clear, but with so many repeats I made any number of mistakes as my attention waned.  Some mistakes I fixed and some I just left alone as the sweater will fall into folds with so much ease that no one should be able to see them.  There are still 6 rows of lace left, then it's onto the stockinette stripes that I can knit easily while I watch a movie.  Since I talk to myself when knitting lace to keep on pattern, I haven't been able to watch or listen to any podcasts for quite a while now. 

Not being able to watch or listen to anything has made my time knitting more focused and actually more relaxed.  Thus, I am enjoying my knitting even more  This need or desire we have to multitask I think robs of of this enjoyment of being in the moment with our knitting.  Hmm, maybe I'll rethink how I want to knit the stockinette section?

As I mentioned earlier about making the yarn I have on hand work I have also been trying really hard to make due with what I have around me for other things such as my wardrobe, sewing, making dinner etc.  This brings me to having some success of turning a "wanting new" into  a "I can do that myself."  For a while now I have wanted a Fringe Field Project Bag.  I see them all over, but quite frankly they are too expensive for me.  It dawned on me while I was looking online at said bag that I could sew one myself.  It wouldn't have the leather handle, but I had thick red canvas (cira 2008) thread and got some cotton clothesline from the hardware store for cheap.  So, I embarked on an afternoon of making a project bag for myself with no pattern just a general idea from the pictures I've seen.  Below is the result.

Homemade Field project bag.

My only disappointment, if you can call it that, was that the bag doesn't close completely as the fabric is really thick.  Otherwise, I am thrilled with it!  It has 3 inside pockets, double thick sides and bottom and it stays open on it's own.  It is also big enough to hold all 4 skeins for my Tegna sweater!  A wonderful achievement for an afternoons work.  How are you finding ways to "make do" with your crafting?

Some Knitting

 

     Hey there.  I thought I'd pop back in for another entry to tell you how things are going.  Basically, it's better, not great yet, but waaaayyyy better than where I was in early Spring.  I believe we found the right mix of medication and certainly having a wave of beautiful sunny days which had me walking my dog around the neighborhood is helping too.  Getting out and moving my body has been really wonderful after our long snowy winter when people just gave up shoveling their sidewalks as we continued to have snow until the end of April. 

     The question then is - is my creativity coming back along with my better mood?  Well, yes albeit much slower.  I did purchase this lovely skein of naturally dyed yarn to tempt me into knitting, hoping to turn it into a lightweight summer scarf with this pattern, but it is not what's calling me back to knit.  What is speaking to me, oddly enough, is my bag of sock yarn scraps.  The rather clean slate I accomplished by selling off most of my stash was not enough for me.  So, I decided to knit up my sock yarn scraps, leaving only a small bag of bits and bobs for sock darning, to shrink my stash even more.

     Over the years I've started and stopped a lot of scrappy knitting projects.  Do you remember when "hexipuffs" were all the rage as well as the mitered square blanket?  In the past I've started both of those patterns, but lost interest and drive along the way.  They were basically too epic.  Having a penchant for scarves, I decided to try this very simple linen stitch scarf as the way to use up all my sock yarn.  The means with which the slipped stitches blend all the colors really appealed to me.  There was the hurtle though, of the humongous amount, 500 in total, of cast on stitches (this scarf is knit lengthwise instead of the usual widthwise.) It took me a few days to complete casting on all those stitches, as well as a kind husband to check on my counting skills.  Finally, I got to the fun part of trying to blend the yarns in some aesthetically pleasing manner.  In my first attempt, I switched yarn every two rows picking a contrasting colorway each time.  This method turned out a bit muddy looking.  So, I switched over to grouping the yarns in like colors i.e. there might be 10 rows of blue, then 8 rows of yellow etc., this method made the colors stand out and shine much better.

     I'm knitting a bit each day, but only for short stretches.  There is no hurry.  After all, it's now Spring and the weather is warm.  I might not even keep this scarf for myself as I have enough cozy scarves for Winter already.  Luckily, my local knitting guild takes donations for charities each year so it will find a home with someone who needs it.

     This brings up an interesting topic which I think about often:  how do creatives create with out amassing huge amounts of knitting, clothing or whatever your end product my be?  Now, I believe creating is vastly important.  For me, it's an actual need and I feel a hole when I go long stretches without making something.  But, when does it become too much?  Have a bit of a think on this and I'll talk about it more in my next post.