La Petite Tricoteuse

It would seem that the secondary technique of letting the yarn soak on cold in the Kool-Aid gave me more coverage than letting soak in just plain water and heating with the color.  You can see the results here (from left to right): black cherry, strawberry, tropical punch, and watermelon/cherry.  The black cherry  resulted in a brick color, which does not look great on me. The watermelon/cherry was a pale dusty rose; quite pretty, but not really what I was going for. That left the two middle skeins. I overdyed the strawberry with the extra cherry packet. It now looks very similar to the tropical punch, yet more vivid. Both are pretty close to a blood red. I have a friend bringing me back some more tropical punch from the states. If I can get the tropical punch as vivid, it would be easier to dye that at double strength than to dye everything strawberry then cherry. With the number of dye batches I am going to need, I am a bit worried about variations in the color. I hope to swatch up the strawberry/cherry in the meantime to see how it looks and get a first stab at the gauge.

In two days we are off to Madrid. I have never been to Spain before, so I am  looking forward to the tapas.  Luckily we have a friend house sitting, so the ferret will not be lonely. Any recommendations?  We plan to mostly hit up the museums near our hotel and eat a bunch of food. I have brought the baby on vacation to visit family before, but have never tried sightseeing, so we don’t want to overbook ourselves.

Thanks to my wonderful sister (who mailed me the Kool-Aid), I got to start my Epic Sweater project yesterday. The lovely natural brown alpaca yarn I have seemed too brown for an entire coat, so I am working on making it the perfect red. I had never dyed yarn before, so I hit up the internet for some tutorials. The one at Knitty.com is great because they show a bunch of different flavors on white yarn. The Piper and Snowangels were helpful as general how-tos. I am recording my method here for posterity.

Since I am experimenting with color, I wound 4 smaller hanks of about one ounce each. Notice the really high-tech glass bowl method.

I received five Kool-Aid flavors in the mail: strawberry, watermelon-cherry, black cherry, tropical punch, and cherry (not shown). I am going to keep the cherry as a backup in case I want to experiment with over dyeing one of the colors. The base yarn is a pretty rich brown, so it will be interesting to see how the red reacts.

The first method I tried involved soaking the yarn in a stainless steel pot of hot water for 30 min, then putting the dye in and simmering for a further 30 min at about 180 F. I used this method for the black cherry and strawberry flavors. There was still some brown spots showing through after the process was complete. I was afraid of agitating the yarn too much while it was hot (for fear of felting it), so I think the dye was not incorporated as well as it could have been. For the tropical punch and watermelon-cherry flavors, I instead let the yarn soak in cold water with the dye already mixed in (1 packet per ounce of yarn, just like the others) for 30 min and then heating the whole kit-and-kaboodle. The yarn for those two are still drying, so I can’t attest to whether this method provides better coverage or not yet.

Darning egg inside holey sock.

Hand knitted socks are one of life’s small pleasures. Particularly if you have non-standard sized feet, wearing a sock that actually fits the way it is supposed to in a luxurious fiber to boot, is simply heaven. There comes a time in every sock’s life (commercially made or otherwise), however when a hole forms. With a cheap commercial sock it is easy to just toss it out, though some of the more frugal among us may try to sew up the hole. This invariably leaves a pucker in the fabric and makes ill-fitting socks even more uncomfortable. A hand knitted sock is not a commercial sock. A hand knitted sock has taken some soul hours and hours and thousands of stitches to construct. Even with all of this work, there are still those who ascribe to the Yarn Harlot method of standing over the trash and exclaiming ‘Darn Sock’ as one drops the poor knitted dears into the trash.

I cannot bring myself to do this. I am not a prolific knitter who owns a pair of socks for every day of the year, so my precious 7 pairs shall not be subjected to such harsh treatment until they are beyond salvation. Unfortunately, sock darning was not a skill that was taught to me in my early years. So armed with a darning egg, tapestry needle, leftover sock yarn, and my wounded sock I trolled the internet for a guide. What I found is that there are probably as many darning methods as there have been knitters in the world. Some are quite clever, while some I find are not much better than just sewing the hole shut. In this mini-series I will try to outline my favorite darning methods.

So check your closets for any knitwear that needs some freshening up. Find some matching yarn, a needle, and something to use as a darning egg. And old style halogen light bulb works pretty well, so do billiard balls. Part 2 will address how to repair knitwear that is still in the threadbare stage and not quite to the full-blown hole in the heel phase.

Knitting Madonna Meister Bertram von Minden (1345-1415)

Knitting has been around for centuries — perhaps even longer than that. However, the exact era when knitting began is hard to pin down. Most likely knitting evolved from a technique involving a single hook called naelbinding. Artifacts of this type have been found in Egyptian tombs and other archaeological sites. In a completed piece, it is often hard to distinguish naelbinding from what we think of as modern knitting. As early as the 14th century, iconography of the Virgin Mary depicts knitting in the round using long double pointed needles. These knitted tubes were probably the earliest form of modern knitting; the development of the purl stitch came later. To create flat textiles from yarn knitted in the round, the tube was simply cut (a technique termed steeking).

Commonly, ancient knitted pieces were done in fine gauges; 17 to 20 st/in was common. That man’s sweater that you are working on with size 1 needles would not get nearly the same amount of ‘oohs and ahhs’  back then.’ Larger’ gauges (7 st/in) were more often used for wall hangings or carpets. Just to put this into perspective, the socks I am currently knitting on size 1.5 needles (2.5 mm) with fingering weight wool are 9 st/in.

What about the yarn (they ask with a desperate longing)? Spinning fiber into yarn began with a simple spindle and whorl. Spinning wheels were not put into use until the middle ages (think Sleeping Beauty). Cotton, flax, wool, silk were commonly available fibers in the early centuries of knitting. Wool, as is still true today, was the workforce yarn used for everything from sweaters to blankets. Silk was reserved for the nobility and their fancy silk hosiery, whereas cotton and flax were only popular in areas where it was available. Rayon (think acrylic and other synthetics) did not hit the scene until the late 19th/early 20th century.

Wool is still probably the most popular fiber. It can be felted or fulled, made ‘superwash’ to resist felting, dyed a wide array of colors, and has a texture that ranges from dense and scratchy to fine and lofty. Like most animal fibers, wool can hold many times its weight in water before it feels wet — a feature that makes it great for cloth diaper covers. Unlike many softer animal fibers, it holds its shape very well.

Luxury animal fibers include such wonderments of snuggle-tude as alpaca, cashmere, and llama. Llama is probably my most favorite (with cashmere a close second), but I would say I knit most with alpaca. It has all of the wonderful features as wool, but is warmer. It is a bit more drapey than wool, so as for llama and cashmere, care must be taken to knit utilitarian items at a tighter gauge. You wouldn’t want your nice fitted alpaca sweater to be a dress by the end of the day. Cashmere is a clear favorite between knitters, friends, and commenters. I have to agree with the sheer indulgence of laying in a pile of cashmere (only vicuña would be better), but I feel that it is a bit too fragile to make it a great everyday fabric.

Then there are the plant-based fibers. I include silk in this category, not because it is derived from a plant, but because it shares many of the same characteristics. Plant fibers are, in general, smoother and less elastic than their animal fiber cousins. Cotton, flax, silk, corn, soy, bamboo — the possibilities are almost endless now a days. Garments and accessories from plant yarns make great dishcloths, baby clothes, and blankets due to their strength, durability, and ease of cleaning. I have knit quite a few things with plant fibers, but I curse them every time. The lack of elasticity and my knitting posture make for sore fingers and achy shoulders. I soldier on because often the yarn is perfect for the task at hand, but I always long for my alpaca.

To round out the major division of yarns are synthetics. Many plant fibers (like bamboo and corn) are technically synthetics, in the sense that many chemical processes are required for their production, but I feel that characteristically some synthetics deserve a category of their own. Everyone that I know has secretly or openly knitted with Red Heart. Some people don’t like to admit it. Some people try to stay as far away from acrylic/rayon as possible, but in all honesty, there are times when it is the best thing for the task at hand. I have knit stuffed animals for children using a mix of Red Heart, Pound o Love, and Caron Simply Soft. Sure, it hurts my fingers just like cotton does, but I am not handing a 2 year old a Piglet crocheted out of cashmere. I want Piglet to be taken to the park, by the river, shoved in a bag, dropped out of a stroller, and ultimately into the washer. Hands down acrylic wins in my mind for this brutal treatment. Plant fibers are sturdy, but I don’t think they will quite handle that kind of abuse (as demonstrated by my linen dishcloth that just gave up the ghost).

There are many more yarn types and blends than I have outlined here, but I think these are the three major categories. For more information about the history of knitting, I direct you to:

This is a foodie blog, a baby blog, a friend who lives on a different continent blog, but it is mostly a knitting blog. I found my mojo again, and have been knitting up a storm, but mostly I want to talk about the science and history of knitting. There is a wealth of information out there on this topic and my research has just begun.
The emotional aspect of knitting (the obsession, the humor, and the heartache) is a niche nicely carved out by the Yarn Harlot and the Panopticon. The mechanical side of knitting is explained in beautiful detail (in both words and illustrations) by TechKnitter. She does such a perfect job of describing the hows and whys of a knit stitch that I would not deign to follow down that path for the surety of failing miserably.

La petite tricoteuse means ‘little knitter’ in French. I especially feel little next to the enormity of the history and science of knitting. It is much to take in at one time, but lets start with the building blocks of a knitted textile: fiber.

Fiber throughout much of history was obtained through animal (e.g.,sheep) or plant (e.g., cotton) sources. Modern knitting has blown the door wide open on the fiber content possibilities. Wool is still the gold standard, but yarn can be composed of things as conventional as alpaca or silk, or as exotic as corn, metal, or chitin. In the coming weeks we shall talk about all of these fiber categories and the pros and cons of each from both a historical and scientific perspective. In the mean time — what is your favorite fiber to work with and why?