Would you believe that I haven’t had time to write up my Pacific Northwest trip yet because I’ve been too busy knitting? Well, I have — I’m going back home to California tomorrow, and I’ve been busting my ass to finish that giant blanket before I leave. I’m going to leave you in suspense about how it’s going for now, though, because I have so much about Seattle and Portland to tell you!

Above, you see one of the knitterly highlights of my trip: my first experience spinning on a wheel at my friend Vanessa‘s house. It was hard to get the hang of it at first, but once she gave me a few tips I was able to spin a few decent yards. This is the Ashton Kiwi, which I’ve heard wonderful things about, and it seemed to work pretty well. It was a little stunning to realize how much faster I could be spinning if I had a wheel, which I guess would be both good and bad: good because more yarn, bad because more money spent on fiber.

It was lovely to see Vanessa, and she pointed us to some important Seattle landmarks, such as the statue of Vladimir Lenin, who was still decorated for the holidays:

And the giant bridge troll:

And, of course, some local yarn shops. Pat was a very good sport about all the knitting-tourism I wanted to do! The first one we hit up was Seattle Yarn in west Seattle, a neighborhood that Pat & I really enjoyed. The shop was well-stocked and the owner was friendly, and I came away with these:

The picture’s a little crappy, but this is two skeins of Berroco Alpaca Fine, in a very interesting colorway: dark blue with a red halo.

We also made it to Weaving Works via some minor hilarity. It was Vanessa’s most highly recommended shop, but we initially didn’t think we’d have time to fit it in. Then one afternoon when we were staying with my friend Miriam, our second Seattle hostess, Pat and I found ourselves sitting around her house one afternoon at 4:30 without much to do. I looked at Weaving Works again online and realized that it was only about a 10-minute drive from Miriam’s place… and that it was closing at 5:00. So we dashed to the car and got there just in time for me to be able to poke around. I got this lovely yarn:

This is Soxie from the Great Adirondack Yarn Company, in the somewhat strangely-named “copper” colorway. But perhaps the most interesting thing about Weaving Works was all the giant baskets full of fiber for sale by the ounce. It was difficult to choose, but I eventually came away with this:

This is a little more than 4 ounces of merino fiber in a stunning blue colorway that seems to have been carded with bits of pink, purple, and green. I’m super excited about it, and really glad we managed to squeeze Weaving Works into our trip.

That’s me and Vanessa. I highly recommend you check out her brand-new knitting blog — it’s already got some thoughtful and interesting posts on knit-bombing, switching from Western to Continental knitting, and sweater alterations, among other things!

After Seattle came Portland, where we stayed with my friend Jim for a couple of days. Jim was a marvelous host, treating us to craftsman whiskey and to mead that he’d brewed himself, and  showing us jazz, karaoke, and lots of wonderful restaurants. He is not, however, much of a knitter — heh. But I met up with my friend Karel one afternoon and we took a trip to Yarnia, a magical land where shop patrons get to make their own yarn by selecting single strands to ply together in a big old-fashioned cone-winding machine that I tragically did not get a picture of. After a few different experiments and swatches, this is what I came up with:

It’s three different purples — one of them a fuzzy mohair — and a strand of glittering gold. The gold was Karel’s stroke of genius; I liked the combination of purples that I’d come up with, but it didn’t feel enough like a one-of-a-kind yarn yet. I’m super excited about it!

Other Portland highlights included Powell’s bookstore, Multnomah Falls, and blacklight-pirate-minigolf, but this post is already getting quite long!

I have just one more yarn acquisition to show you. After Seattle and Portland, Pat and I came back to the east coast where I’ve been visiting my family. On a snowy trip to New York City, I began to develop cowl envy — I was wearing my Infinitude Scarf, but it seemed insufficiently snuggly for the wind and snow. So you shouldn’t be surprised that I fell head-over-heels in love with these skeins when I saw them hanging in a vendor’s stall in Union Square:

This is a bulky-weight one-ply merino from Catskill Merino, and I love it to pieces. I shall knit it into a huge bulky cowl that I will almost never wear on the west coast, but I’ll love it next winter when I come back east again!

Sorry to leave you hanging for so long — I’m sure you’ve all been teetering on the edge of your seats waiting to find out whether I managed to finish the scarf for my brother in time for Christmas. As you can see in this crappy late-night self-portrait, I did. This is actually a pre-blocking shot, but I didn’t really stretch it in the blocking process — I just washed it and laid it flat to soften and relax the fibers. It spent about 24 hours blocking (on December 21st) in the basement before my brother came home for the holiday, then I had to transfer it to a hidden spot in my bedroom so he wouldn’t see it while it continued to dry. I got it wrapped and under the tree by the 23rd, just under the wire — my family opens our gifts to each other on the 24th!

The pattern for the scarf is Palindrome, and it’s basically a reversible version of the ubiquitous Irish Hiking Scarf. (Both are free patterns — hooray!) I’ve never knit the IHS, but I imagine that the Palindrome scarf is denser and uses up more yarn because of the reversibility, which is mostly accomplished via ribbing. That’s right, reversible cables! It was my first time working them, but they turn out to be pretty easy and I’m glad that I now know the trick. The only modification I made to the pattern was adding another row of cables — at just three cables wide, it seemed too narrow, so I did four.

My other holiday project, which I never bothered to photograph, was a beadless version of Abrazo for my mom, by special request. It looks more or less exactly like my earlier one linked there, because I even used the same yarn! So, no photo.

Besides The Great Scarf Scramble, you may recall that my other crazypants winter-break plan was to knit Jared Flood’s new Leaves of Grass shawl in bulky yarn as a blanket and to block it here at my parents’ spacious house and then mail it back to my tiny California apartment. This ran into a snag when (1) the blanket-in-progress, which I’d mailed to my parents’ house, arrived several days later than it was supposed to, and (2) I realized I’d forgotten to pack my longest Knitpicks interchangeable-circular cord. So I had to order another one of those, which took another few days, and as a result I missed out on the valuable days on and around Christmas when our house was inundated with relatives and all there was to do was to sit around and chat with them and knit. During that time, I instead made swift progress on my Port Ludlow socks, which are now almost complete:

It’s hard to tell from this picture, but I’m only a few repeats away from the toe on the second sock.

I finally was able to start on the blanket again, though, and I’m making progress. I’m a little worried that I won’t finish in time, but I have a girls-only craft night scheduled on Monday where I should be able to put in a solid three hours or so on it. From this picture, it may not be easy to tell how much progress I’ve made, but it’s been going pretty well:

Fingers crossed! And while I was busy taking this picture, Max came to the very reasonable conclusion than a furry object of this size and shape was obviously a dog bed and plopped down right in the middle of my shot:

What? This is for me, right?

I have also started yet another project, mostly because I was worried about running out of sock to knit on the plane back home, but also because I’d promised Pat some new handknit socks for Christmas New Year’s Valentine’s Day and I happened to come across the perfect yarn:

Isn’t it gorgeous? It’s Madelinetosh Tosh DK in a colorway called “Cosmos,” which I thought was interesting-looking but still quite manly. And look! I’m knitting them magic-loop style! This is the first time I’ve ever done that, and it turns out to be very easy and quite possibly less annoying than using doublepointed needles. When Wooly Monmouth, the new(ish) LYS near my parents’ house, was out of size 2 DPNs, the lovely owner Dori gave me a three-minute magic loop lesson and assured me it was a technique I’d be glad I learned. And I am! I can’t say enough good things about Wooly Monmouth — helpful staff, gorgeous yarn, Madelinetosh for miles — so if you live in or ever visit the Jersey shore, I strongly encourage you to go! The pattern I’m using for these socks is the dirt-simple Blueberry Waffle Socks, since they’re written for DK-weight yarn, easily customizable, and stretchy (so sizing will be easy).

And speaking of holidays, I’ve just come back from a week-long trip to Portland and Seattle — but I’m going to make you wait until next time to hear about it!

On the right: a cable needle. On the left: the series of items that I attempted to use instead of a cable needle yesterday. Remember that five-hour flight where I was hoping to get a ton of work  done on my last-minute cabled scarf? Yeah. I forgot to pack my cable needle. (I’ve since gotten a replacement.)

Item 1: Ballpoint pen. I thought of it first because it seemed knitting-needle-like and had a point, but its diameter was too wide and the ridges on the point made it hard to slip stitches on anyway.

Item 2: Earpiece that I broke off of an obsolete set of complimentary airplane headphones. The backpack that I use as a carry-on is used for just about nothing else in my life, so of course it contains a set of headphones that have not fit any airplane headphone jack since about 2005. I thought of this because I actually prefer hook-shaped cable needles, but the flat end turned out to be too wide and the pointy end turned out to be too full of ridges.

Item 3: I know what you’re thinking, and that would certainly have helped, but no. That is an airplane barf-bag closure, and it saved my life. It is reinforced with little wires, which made it stiff, and as you can see, I folded the ends to be pointy for easier stitch-spearing. It was not ideal, but it got the job done, and I got lots of scarf knitted on the plane.

Christmas is not ruined. Yet.

What you see here is 1800 yards of pure, unadulterated crazypants. Let me count the ways:

1) The pattern, Jared Flood’s brand-new Leaves of Grass, is written as a shawl in fingering weight yarn but I am knitting it in bulky-weight yarn (Cascade Eco+) to make a blanket. It’s the second coming of Girasole, right? Surely it’ll be okay to just estimate yardage on this much-larger-than-a-shawl blanket before anybody else has posted such a feat on Ravelry, right?

2) There is not enough room to block the finished blanket in my apartment, so I am mailing it across the country while very much in-progress so that I can finish it at my parents’ house over the holidays and block it in their large, roomy basement. I will then, of course, ship it back to myself in California.

3) There is a distinct possibility that my mother will demand one of these for herself when she sees its full blocked-out glory. Assuming that everything works out and I don’t run out of yarn, of course. And, you know, this is a huge project and one that I’m not especially eager to undertake as a gift for somebody who doesn’t quite understand the immensity of it all.

Okay, so there are only three ways in which this is project is totally crazypants. But they are significant. And there is yet more crazy!

You see this? This is a Christmas gift. I have knitted exactly one row on it, and Christmas is 10 days away. My mother texted me yesterday with orders that I am to make a light gray cabled scarf for my brother. And as the lady at the yarn store reminded me while shoving this yarn into my hands, if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. So my brother is getting a cabled scarf for Christmas and I will somehow knit it in the next ten days. Fortunately, there is a five-hour plane ride in my near future. The yarn is Classic Elite Portland Tweed, and it’s gorgeous. I’m not going to link to the pattern until this is done, on the off chance that my brother reads this blog. I think he’ll like it, though, and not just our mother.

The third project that I’m bringing home for the holidays is much more sane:

This is a Port Ludlow sock: mellow, intuitive Anne Hanson knitting and a much-needed stashbusting project. The yarn is String Theory Caper Sock that I’ve had sitting around forever. It seems very similar to Sanguine Gryphon’s Bugga and might even be the same yarn base; I think it’s got the same fiber composition. Before Xmas-scarf-o-rama came into my life I was sure that I’d be able to finish these puppies before the end of winter break, but now I am less sure. Wish me luck!

Ever since I took that picture of this scarf with the whiskey bottle, I’ve been fixated on calling the color of this yarn “whiskey.” It looks more orange here because of the light, but in some of the pictures below you’ll see what I’m talking about. The colorway does not appear to have an official name, but the yarn is a sport-weight alpaca from Twist: Yarns of Intrigue in Manhattan Beach. It looks like you can’t actually buy their in-house yarns online at the moment, which is too bad, but if you’re in southern California I highly recommend that you check out their shop and their hand-dyed house-brand yarns.

Here I am checking out some orange flowers in the courtyard of our apartment complex. Despite all the tropical greenery, I was pretty chilly in this tank top — but I chose to suffer for fashion, because this outfit seemed like a good way to show off the scarf.

The pattern is Anne Hanson’s Monkey Bread Scarf, a simple and satisfying arrangement of big fat cables. I just knit straight through to the end of the skein, and as you can see I ended up with a rather long scarf — which was the goal. I was stunned at how quickly this knit up, too!

Here it is on the blocking board. Now you can see what I mean when I say that it’s whiskey-colored, right?

I also just recently finished spinning and plying that Jacobs wool I was working on. Here, you can see it overlaid with a tiny sample of yarn spun from that fleece I got from my friends’ farm last year:

Since Shannon uses the wool from her sheep for needle-felting and not for spinning, I wanted to make sure that it would spin decently well before I committed to it. And it looks like it’s working fine! I’m going to spin a bunch more of it and make something striped with it and the blue yarn, since they’re both Jacobs wool. I’d been a little reluctant to spin that fleece, because there’s just so much of it and I thought I should save it for when I have a wheel and can make a whole sweater or something, but I’m happy about finally taking the plunge. I won’t use even close to all of it for what I have planned, but that’s just fine — I’m sure I’ll figure out something else for the rest someday.

I’ve finally finished my Leaving Cardigan! I started it way back in April, finished knitting it in June, and then couldn’t find the time until about a month ago to actually do the seaming and weave in the ends. But now it’s done!

This pattern, like all of Anne Hanson’s, is lovely — but it was definitely a learning experience.

• Lesson 1: “I’ll just knit a sleeve as my gauge swatch” is a cute idea, but when you finish a whole sleeve in fingering-weight yarn and then it doesn’t block out to the right dimensions, it has NOT saved you any time. Just knit the damned 4″x4″ swatch like you’re supposed to.
• Lesson 2: Zero ease is a bad idea when knitting a cardigan that’s going to button all the way down the front. This basically fits, but you can see it straining at the buttons over my bust, and I really should resign myself to knitting at least one size up from my actual bust measurements from now on.
• Lesson 3: Due to my long waist, I should always always always add at least an inch or two of length to a sweater’s body. This looks fine, but it’s supposed to hang longer and I think it would  be more flattering if it actually did so.

I’m not entirely to blame for Lessons 2 and 3 — these are things I already knew, but I thought that the mythical “growing” properties of superwash yarn would make up for both the length and width problems. Unfortunately, this didn’t grow nearly as much in the blocking stage as my Leitmotif Cardigan did.

This is still pretty awesome, though. The yarn is Madelinetosh Pashmina, and after knitting two sweaters in Madelinetosh yarns I can say that I am officially an addict. Their yarns are both lovely and durable, and their dye jobs are incredible.

And have you checked out the sleeves on this thing??

I seriously considered just knitting the sleeves with the rib going all the way down to the bottom and omitting the lace pattern on the forearms because I thought it was a little busy, but I’m very happy that I decided to follow the pattern. It’s an amazing detail that really sets this apart from other sweaters.

The only real problem here is that this was meant to be a light-gray sweater — the colorway, believe it or not, is called “composition-book gray” — but as you can see, it’s entirely purple. I fell in love with its unexpected non-grayness when it arrived in the mail, but my wardrobe still needs a light-gray sweater. So at some point in the near future I’ll be starting yet another sweater!

Yep – that’s me with Michelle aka Fickleknitter, showing off my fresh-off-the-blocking-board shawl from October’s Fickle-Zen KAL. Try not to get too excited, but I finished and blocked this thing mere hours before last week’s Southern California Handweaver’s Guild Weaving and Fiber Festival, with the express purpose of stalking Michelle and getting this photo. Michelle was lovely in person, and my shawl got tons of compliments at the festival — and everyone was delighted to learn that the designer was local and was vending at the festival.

I wasn’t able to do a proper photoshoot of the shawl until this afternoon, though:

The yarn, to remind you, is Zen Yarn Garden‘s Serenity Lace II. It’s lovely and soft, and the dye job is gorgeous. (The colorway is “raspberry.”) Both the pattern and this colorway are exclusive to the KAL for now, but I’m guessing they’ll become publicly available eventually.

The thing I like best about this pattern is its wide and shallow shape — it’s a canny way to get a useable shawl out of a single skein of yarn, because the width makes it very wrappable.

The stitch patterns of the shawl are probably best seen in this somewhat crappy blocking photo:

Knitting this was quick and fun, with a nice result. And unlike last year, I showed some serious restraint at the fiber festival. These two lovely skeins of locally-ranched alpaca yarn are the only things that came home with me:

The ladies of Alpenglow Yarn were lovely to talk to, and I highly recommend their yarn and fiber if you’d like to support a small farm with natural dying methods. (This, of course, is undyed yarn — but their naturally-dyed stuff was beautiful as well.)

And speaking of small farms, I don’t think I’ve shown you my current spinning project:

This is Jacobs wool that I received in a Ravelry swap about a year ago. It’s a lovely color — the wool is sort of heathered gray and black, and it’s been dyed blue on top of that. My plan once I finish plying this is to finally start spinning up some of that Jacobs fleece that I got from my friends’ farm last summer, and make something striped gray and blue. I’ve been hesitating about using it just because there’s so much of it, and I keep thinking “maybe I should save it for when I get a wheel and can spin it all and make a sweater,” but that day is a long way off, so I really should just start using it now. Updates forthcoming!

What you see here is what I’m doing with the lovely hand-dyed yarn that my friend Heather sent me from her home in Bainbridge Island. I’m knitting it into linen-stitch pillow-covers for two currently-hideous pillows in our living room. There’s no pattern here — I just knit a swatch in linen stitch and measured the pillows and cast on accordingly. I figure I have enough yarn to do the front of each pillow in linen stitch like this, and their backs will be in plain garter stitch in some leftover blue yarn that I have in my stash. There will definitely be before-and-after pictures at some point! I just love the way that the colors of this yarn are mixed up by the linen stitch.

And last but not least, I’ve been participating in a mystery knit-along that is a collaboration between Fickleknitter Designs and Zen Yarn Garden. It’s my first mystery KAL, and it’s been fun! The yarn is just gorgeous; it’s ZYG’s Serenity Lace II, a heavy laceweight that is 80% superwash merino, 10% cashmere, and 10% nylon. It’s beautifully soft, and with a composition like that I expect it to be very durable. I actually just finished knitting this last night after motoring along as fast as I could for the past few days, because I plan to block it tonight and wear it to the Southern California Handweaver’s Guild Fiber Festival on Sunday where… wait for it… Michelle aka Fickleknitter will be appearing! So my plan is, of course, to stalk her and make her pose for a picture with me and my finished shawl. I explained to Pat that this is considered knit-blogging gold, and he told me that I live in a very strange world.

Finally, the last of my summer projects. This is an Infinitude Scarf, made from the yarn left over from my Leitmotif Cardigan. I finished this in approximately July, and envisioned a blog post called “Right Trend, Wrong Season,” but as we know, the crush of dissertation-finishing, job-finding, and apartment-hunting meant that no knit-blogging happened at all this summer. Instead, I’ve cleverly titled this post with a line from a Dar Williams song called “The End of the Summer.”

If you paid attention to fashion and/or knitting magazines last winter, you know that big chunky cowls were the “It” accessory. I was skeptical of this trend at first — doesn’t connecting the ends of your scarf together limit the number of ways you can wear it? — but I slowly came around. When it’s wrapped up like in the above photo, a cowl is very snuggly and more stable and secure than a scarf. And I’ve even started liking how cowls look when worn in this less-actually-warm manner:

This (free!) pattern is pretty great — it’s easy-breezy knitting, and the result is a cowl with some interesting texture and structure. It also used up the 300 yards of Madelinetosh Vintage that I had left over from my sweater with stunning accuracy — after knitting the large size cowl, I had maybe three yards left over. And the colorway – “ink” – goes perfectly with jeans. Yaaaay.

Now that the parade of summer FOs is over, you may be wondering what happened to the Leaving Cardigan that I was working on last spring. Well, it’s still a work in progress:

I guess you can’t tell very well from this picture, but I still have about a million ends to weave in. I finished all the actual knitting on this sweater in June or July, but I never found the time to do all the seaming during the Summer of Stress. I’ve only just picked it up to do the seaming in the last few weeks, so I’m crawling toward the finish line. To tell the truth, having no time to seam was only half the problem — I was also terrified that after all that work knitting it, this sweater might not actually fit after I sewed the pieces together. The last few sweaters I’ve made have been the try-on-as-you-go variety, so by the time I got to the finishing stage I was pretty sure they were going to work out. I haven’t knit something in pieces in years, and none of the ones I knit that way in the past quite came out right. Hence, the stalling. But now that I’ve finished the seaming, I’ve confirmed that it does actually fit, so I’m excited to finish up!

Next time on Doublepointed: I (finally) reveal what’s actually on my needles right now!

I’ve finally finished my Autumn Arbor Stole! It’s my first stole ever, and I love it. I was worried that stoles would be weird and hard to wear, but I think it’s actually easier to pull off fashion-wise than a shawl. For one thing, you can just treat it as a really large scarf:

But you can also wrap it around your shoulders in a variety of ways for extra warmth, which makes it a pretty excellent autumn accessory:

So I’m pretty delighted. As usual, Anne Hanson’s pattern was lovely and intuitive. While the pattern is complicated enough that I wouldn’t say I ever quite memorized it, it was easy to anticipate what was coming next and to spot mistakes. The problem with any stole project, though, is that they take a million billion years and can get very repetitive — which is why I hadn’t knit one until now. I started this in December of last year, if you can believe it, and I picked it up and put it down a whole lot throughout the past nine months. I don’t think I’d have finished it at all — or at least, not anytime soon — if I hadn’t had to move to a new apartment in August. This was one of only two projects that didn’t get packed away during the move, so I had no choice but to focus on it throughout most of August and September. And lo.

The color is a little off in this close-up shot — it’s really the bluer green you see in the earlier photos and not so yellow/brown — but you can see the awesomeness of the lace pattern here pretty well. The yarn I used is Squoosh Fiberarts Sublime Lace, a superwash merino lace yarn that I highly recommend. And at $25 for 970 yards, it’s a steal — I made this whole thing in the petite size from just one skein!

If you’re planning on knitting this, I highly recommend bookmarking my Ravelry project page – I built off of another Raveler’s brilliant idea of how to knit the stole straight through without grafting, and I streamlined her modifications so that you end up with many fewer ends to weave in.

I still have one more summer project waiting in the wings — at this rate, it’ll be winter before I’m done telling you about summer!