Trailing Leaves is back from my tech editor, and it’s ready for test knitting. This is a brioche bandana cowl knit in the round beginning at the neck. It gently increases down to the bottom edge. A central leaf pattern is created with syncopated brioche; syncopated brioche also makes the bottom edge pop. Trailing Leaves is knit with two skeins of fingering weight yarn in contrasting colors.
If you’re interested in test knitting, please let me know in the comments, and I’ll contact you. (Your email is visible to me, but not public.)
current sample knit in Dream in Color Smooshy
I’m currently knitting a second sample; it was perfect airplane and deck knitting this past weekend! We visited friends in Chicago and had a fabulous time.
The Bean (Cloud Gate) in Millennium ParkLive taping of Wait Wait…Don’t Tell MeChess Records studio tourBronzeville tour with Dilla of ChicagoMahogany.com 50th Anniversary Tour, Prairie Home CompanionGettin’ our kicks
And a blues show (Stephen Hull Experience) at Rosa’s Lounge, and a late night show at Second City. Whew! We also ate ourselves silly…Filipino, Cambodian, English pub, Chicago deep dish pizza. Our friends Susan and Patrick are phenomenal hosts, as is their sweet dog Luna.
Luna
Back to work for me! Let me know if you’d like to test knit!
A hot dry weekend is always better under the trees!
It was our very timely ladies’ camping weekend. We went to Panther Creek Campground in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, just north of Carson, Washington.
Rocks in Panther Creek
The water in the creek is clear and cold, perfect for a bracing dip on a hot day. The rocks are such pretty colors, too.
Panther Creek Falls
Panther Creek Falls is a twisty drive of 4.7 miles up the road, and then a very short hike. You can go down to the bottom of the falls. Stunning!
Panther Creek Falls, from the bottom
What a gorgeous beetle.
Tai chi
The tent pad at the vacant site next to ours made a great tai chi space.
I played with beads (ankle bracelets)
and I almost finished this project. We’ll see if blocking makes the brioche patterning show up better in the green section. Super fun to knit.
We also played games and just had a great time hanging out. It was a perfect weekend with friends.
How was your weekend? Hot? Do you knit when it’s hot? I always knit!
I’ve been playing with some ideas, zeroing in on what to keep, and what to toss. This first version (Knit Picks Chroma Fingering) was my attempt to spare my pooling yarn from the tenth frog/restart. It’s pretty good, just a bit longer than I wanted. I’ve got it figured out, and I’ll be looking for test knitters soon.
Trailing Leaves cowl, Take Two
This pooled version (Yarn Snob Fingering) is the right length, and I changed the increase rate to get to the number of stitches I wanted for the edging. But you can’t really see the pooling, because it’s on the sides and back of the green brioche section. Why do all that extra work, if you’re not going to see it when you wear the finished object? The leaves are really the star of the show. So I don’t plan to release a pooled version as a pattern; it’s a unicorn.
That doesn’t mean I want to give up the idea of combining brioche with pooling/algorithmic knitting.
Places you can knit: Bon Bon Vivant sound check!
There’s enough yarn left over for me to design another piece. It features that lovely syncopated edging, too. I’m halfway done…
Places you can knit: Margo Price at the Blues Fest
We had a great time at the Waterfront Blues Festival this weekend. It was HOT, so we were mostly there during the evenings. Of course I brought my knitting.
And my Lantern Moon fan, which I’ve had since 2009 (Sock Summit!). Make your own breeze!
Local great Curtis Salgado and 11 more fabulous musiciansHawthorne Bridge lift for the fireworks barge to get throughDoing our part! (We take this picture every year)
Bisquee hopes you’re keeping cool! We have central air conditioning, so she’s not as hot as she looks. She’s enjoying her bit of sunshine.
Do you knit when it’s hot? It’s always nice indoors here! But I did knit outdoors at the festival, too. At least it was a small, not very woolly project!
I took a little road trip down to Albany, Oregon on Saturday to visit Black Sheep Gathering. This year is the 50th year of this fiber festival, but it was my first time ever. I wanted to take a class with Galina Khmeleva, master lace knitter. We’ve been at many of the same festivals, but I’m usually teaching instead of taking classes. This was my chance!
Orenburg lace is knit with 10 different motifs, combined in many ways. It’s usually on a garter stitch background. Some motifs have patterning only on the right side rows, and some have patterning on both right and wrong side rows. All the stitches are either knit, yo, k2tog, or k3tog. There’s no directionality to the decreases; the work is so fine that it really doesn’t show.
We didn’t have time to knit through all the motifs, but the magic is really in the combining. We knit our swatch samplers with Jaggerspun Zephyr, a laceweight blend of wool and silk, 1120 yards/100g. Skinny, but not hard to knit with. I knit my swatch on US 2 needles, and I loved the stitch definition.
Handouts!
Galina gave us enough handouts to keep us busy for years to come. And she regaled us with many stories of the history of Orenburg lace, and more.
Orenburg shawl
Gossamer web, indeed!
Orenburg warm shawl
The Warm Shawl is a heavier version of Orenburg lace. Simpler patterning, but it’s not really that heavy, either. It’s knit in pieces and grafted together with a special grafting method, which was the subject of the next day’s class. Alas, I was not staying over.
I did visit with the sheep in the barn, and also viewed the fiber work exhibits.
Sorpresa, a Valais Blacknose sheep
Look at this beautiful wool! This is Sorpresa, a Valais Blacknose sheep from Honey Hoof Ranch.
Even horns are beautiful.
There was a sheep to shawl exhibit from 9 am to 2 pm.
Carding, spinning, plyingWeaving!
And the fiber work exhibits were beautiful.
This shawl by Lucy Swift was my favorite piece in the exhibits.
All right, back to knitting! I’m knitting another sample of the leafy brioche cowl now that I have it figured out. I need to decide if I want to publish an assigned pooling/algorithmic knitting version in addition to the regular one. More on that later…
When you want a snack, but you don’t want orange dust on your knitting, chopsticks are the perfect snack tool. Just sayin’.
Dropped stitch, oops!
I tried a different brioche 4 stitch decrease on this project. It’s a lot faster. But it’s also prone to dropped stitches, so I’m not going to recommend it. Which means I don’t have to make a video tutorial after all! My tried and true slowpoke method is a better choice for me.
In case you’re daring and want to try this one: Slip 3 stitches as if to knit 3 together. Knit the next two stitches together. Pass the 3 stitches back over the k2tog. (Don’t forget to pass the yarn overs along with the stitches when slipping/knitting/passing.) That’s it! But I found 3 dropped stitches in that round, so I won’t be doing that again.
I did manage to fix the dropped stitches, and I just finished binding off. Now it’s soaking. Looking forward to seeing how much this grows (I hope) with blocking!
As I said in the previous post, yarn still surprises me.
This is where I left you in the last post. The further I knit, the more the ribbing biased. I think it’s because this yarn is a single ply, rather than a plied yarn. It wanted to lean hard to the right. I didn’t have another project going, so I soldiered on, figuring it would block out…or not. A science experiment!
Fresh off the needles. Quite a lean, and also a loose column at the beginning of the round.
The front was quite askew, and the the leaf pattern was wonky at the bottom, too. Place your bets!
Blocking is magic. This project is essentially a big swatch. It’s longer than I want it to be, but it’s the right general idea. I did some math, and I’ll knit another one. Remember, as a designer I make the mistakes so you don’t have to!
I’ve been knitting outdoors all week; the weather has been spectacular. Not too hot.
The hydrangea is coming into glory; it’s going to be a big year for these blooms.
I’ve been reading while I knit; it keeps me on task. I highly recommend Things Past Telling by Sheila Williams (I also read her Dancing on the Edge of the Roof which was good, but not as good as Things Past Telling). I also read The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl; her descriptions of food are incredible. I just finished First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston…so twisty! I enjoyed all of these. Now I’m starting Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. Our library system uses Libby, and I read all these as e-books on my kindle.
I’m so happy with my current WIP (work in progress). It’s brioche knitting with Knit Picks Chroma Fingering in Drawing Room and Bare. I love the gentle color shifts in Drawing Room. This was yarn I found in my small stash.
Of course it can’t be just plain brioche rib, right? So there’s some syncopation going on, plus some increases and decreases to make it pretty and engaging to knit. Because this yarn is single ply, it’s knitting up to be a fluffy wonder, but probably too warm to wear until this fall. I think the plied version is going to be be perceived as lighter weight, even though they’re both fingering weight yarns.
Side craft: I saw Romi Hill do this on Instagram, so I wanted to try it.
Crafty pouf time!
You know those bath poufs for scrubbing? They’re made of a long tube of nylon net, which is pretty much the same as a very long yarn sleeve. I had a pink one at home, but decided that I wanted a more neutral color. This pale green was as close as I could get to neutral. I snipped the string that held the center together, and was rewarded with 3.5 yards (3.2 meters) of usable tube.
Yarn sleeves!
I like mine to be about 5.5 to 6 inches long; they shorten up when stretched. I’ll get at least 20 sleeves from this inexpensive (less than $2) pouf. I’m finding that these are a little looser/wider than the commercial ones, but they’ll do. (Edit: Romi says that steaming them can make them a little narrower/tighter.) Why do I like these sleeves? They keep the ball tidy, no yarn unwinding from the outside of my center pull ball.
Knit Picks Chroma in Bare and Drawing Room
Do you prefer a center pull ball/cake, or working from the outside? I usually like center pull. But I’m knitting one of my projects with Knit Picks Chroma, and it’s easier to knit from the outside of those balls, no sleeve needed.
This monogamous knitter just said “one of my projects,” haha! I kind of have two right now. They’re related; the green one is an brioche and assigned pooling project but I made an math error in my decrease rate, whoops! It was bottom up, so while I was re-figuring, I also decided to make it top down. And to save the yarn from many more froggings while I work things out (it’s holding up amazingly well through several different design ideas), I decided to do a non-pooled version with the Chroma.
I’ve just frogged the green project, so I really do have only one project on my needles!
Well, I didn’t manage to knit in public on Worldwide Knit/Craft in Public Day, but I did knit at a baseball game last Thursday. I’ll knit anywhere, on MY schedule. That piece of knitting has since been frogged; I decided I wanted it to be narrower. Each cast on is a swatch, until it’s not!
The previous cast on went along for quite a while until I realized that I made a math error on the decrease shaping. Along the way I decided to flip it from bottom up to top down because increases are prettier than decreases, and I’d start with fewer stitches. Bonus! That’s what I was experimenting with at the baseball game.
Marine Drive, Columbia River
No knitting while bicycling! DH and I went on a bike ride along the Columbia River. We had great views of the river, birds, Mount Hood (see it at the top of the picture?). This is an urban ride on a path alongside Marine Drive, which is very busy! I’m glad we could be off the road for most of it.
Fundraiser for Parkinson’s support
We’re participating in a fundraiser for Parkinson’s Resources of Oregon this month. DH was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease last year (early, mild symptoms, doing great). Parkinson’s Resources of Oregon has very helpful programs including informational seminars, activities, and support groups. If you’d like to donate, here’s my link. Thanks for considering it! And here’s a link to DH’s Parkinson’s blog, if you’re interested.
We’re making the most of a string of perfect summer days. Not too hot, not too cool. I hope your weather and knitting are…perfect!
Purple was the overwhelming favorite pick for comb and wattle, and I think it looks great. I chose green eyes to pick up the green in her tail feathers. And I didn’t bother washing/blocking before seaming; her stitches are pretty even, right off the needles. Git. Er. Done.
Eggatha joins her big sister Henelope Aubergina Featherington. I used a US7 needle for Henelope, and a US5 for Eggatha. Eggatha is smaller and stuffed more firmly, which is what I wanted for Emotional Support Chicken #2. Do you ever knit something more than once, because you have an idea for how you’d like it better if you changed something about it?
Henelope and Eggatha, size comparison
And now I guess I should get back to work knitting! I think I’m going to frog my brioche/assigned pooling project and start over, because it’s not quite what I want. Almost there, I hope? The chickens have been a nice diversion while I ponder what happens next. Procrastiknitting for the win!
Find my patterns on Ravelry: Michele Bernstein Designs
Here are some of my favorites, and the newest. Many of my designs are also available through my Payhip store.
PDXKnitterati 