More Kiki Mariko

Before felting...

(Husband: You're working really hard to hold it up. Try not to look like it's heavy.
Me: But it is heavy!)

(You can't see, but the bottom edge is hitting the floor in this photo)

Cutting the steek!


(I think they call it a steek because it has the word "eek" in there.)




And after felting/steeking/trimming.

It Really Ties the Room Together

Kiki Mariko is done!

It started small, last May...










And grew...














And grew...












And then it got too warm to knit on such a big heavy wool project for a while, and there was the whole mittens craze anyway...


And then Mango totally lapped me. She started a Kiki a couple of months ago (claiming to be inspired by me... flattery will get you, well, not everywhere, but close) and actually finished it in a timely manner. FINE. I picked up mine again during the Olympics (not as a Ravelympics project, just as a "I really have to get this done and I am watching a lot of TV anyway" project), and finished the first week of March! Woo! I knit a rug, and it didn't take me a year to do it!


And I figured that, if I didn't felt it right away, I'd let it sit there for an annoyingly long time. So I finished it on a Monday morning (unusual for me to knit during the day on Mondays, unless I'm so drained I can't do anything else) and took it to the laundromat the same day (Husband laughed when I said, "I'm going to do one load of laundry... and felt that rug." Why would he laugh, do you think?). Cut the steek and put it outside to dry (Monday happened to be a gorgeous day), did a little scissor-trimming of stray bits... and voila!

It's a rug!

If I had it to do again, I'd do a few things differently. First, I wouldn't have used the black. It doesn't look quite so bad felted, but it was jarring enough during the knitting that I stopped using it toward the end. Second, I would have made a narrower steek -- four or six stitches would have been just fine, ten is excessive. Mango pointed this out to me, and I went down to eight stitches, but the whole rest of the knitting process I kept thinking about how much yarn those ten stitches (or even eight) wasted. It could have made the rug a smidge longer, right? It probably wouldn't have made a significant difference, but still. What a waste. That was a lot of yarn in the trash when all the trimming was done. Otherwise.... I'm totally happy with the pattern, and with the finished project, and I may very well make another one sometime. Fun knit!

Also, I did ~160 stitches (plus the steek) so the finished rug would be wider than the original. Finished measurements, felted: 51" x 42" I probably need to do a smidge more felting, but for now I'm too excited to have a new rug to let uneven felting stop me from putting this baby in the yellow room! Woo! Rug!

Kiki Mariko

I don't quite know how it happened. I think I must have been putting myself to sleep -- I often fall asleep thinking about future knitting projects; it's much more conducive to relaxing than thinking about work -- and I decided that what our house really needs is the Kiki Mariko rug [Rav link], in the same wacky colors as we've painted the walls. Bright yellow, bright orange, bright red. Like I said, I'm not quite sure how the idea crawled its way into my head... but it made itself at home there. It may have had something to do with the fact that the house is coooooold in the winter, and a cozy wool rug may be something of a solution.

I already had two skeins of Lamb's Pride Bulky in creme from the swap, and a partial of an orange that I eventually decided was the wrong orange (ain't that always the way?), so I hied myself to Kaleidoscope to figure out what to do with this hankering to knit a ridiculously-colored fair-isle rug for my living room.

What I got did end up matching the walls perfectly, which makes me wonder: why the heck did I pick those crazy colors for my house? I like them a lot! I love my crazy-colored house! My yellow room makes me so happy! My red room is so cozy and comforting! My orange room... well, the orange looks really awesome with the red and the yellow, and I normally detest orange, but not in this case. And I do spend most of my time there, I'd say. But together? In the living room? (that's the orange one) This rug may end up being too much.

Actually, if it's horrible, or a bad size, Kiki will live in the yellow room, which is my office. There, the rug will be slightly less in the full-on pattern of traffic (and public eye), but still serve the warmth function quite nicely. I will be very appreciative on freezing February nights when I'm up writing my sermon.

I do kind of wish I'd forgone the black, or chosen brown instead -- I really had myself convinced that I needed another neutral, but now I'm not so sure it was necessary. The truth will reveal itself in the final product, after it's felted. I don't dislike it so much that I want to take the trouble of undoing all my work.

Anyway, after just a month of knitting (and the labyrinth rug has been a couple of years and I'm only halfway!) I'm pretty close to where I want to be. I think I want to knit the tube about 7' long, and I've probably got about 5' now. (My hope is that the length will be around 5 1/2 feet when its felted.) It's been a satisfyingly quick TV-knitting project, good for the end of a long day. And great for getting used to stranded knitting. I've really gotten the hang of the tension in my left hand, and my speed with two colors is almost what it is with just one. All in all, I'm feeling pretty proud of myself with this one.

Flurries Mittens -- Felted!

Dear Laundromat Washing Machine Repair Guy,

Okay, so I know it's not really all that nice of me to felt my knitted items in a machine that is not my own. That's why I put the mittens in the pillowcase. I checked faithfully, but the pillowcase kept opening and the mittens kept swishing themselves out as the machine agitated. I am terribly sorry. Next time, I promise I will use safety pins to keep the pillowcase closed. This is the way it's going to have to be until we are able to get our own washing machine. Monday was laundry day.

Please forgive me,
HolyKnitter

p.s. but aren't these mittens so wonderful?!!?!? love love love!

Knitting up a Storm

I'm a bit behind on my picture-taking, and therefore a bit behind on the blogging, too. Then again, when have I ever bothered to worry about that before? There are tons of things I've made and photographed that I haven't gotten around to blogging yet...

The shop was having a closeout sale on some older Tilli Tomas yarn. Now, that's a yarn that is firmly out of my price range, even now that I get an employee discount, but closeout yarn is even deeper discount, and so I figured that this would be my only chance if I ever were to buy any. So I went for it. After a long and tortured decision-making/bullet-biting process, I bought four skeins of navy, and decided to make a hat and mitten set for myself.

The yarn is called Flurries, a worsted-weight singles merino yarn with glass beads spun in about every four inches. Beautiful. The company changed the yardage of a skein (from 130 yards to 70 yards!), which is why we had to close out the older (larger!) skeins. Otherwise, Tilli Tomas does not go on sale. Period.

I had a random ball of a lavender/pink-y Rowan Cashsoft 4-ply laying around (another sale bin purchase), and decided to use that for the inside cuffs of the mittens. I cast on 52 stitches, using size 4 needles, and knit stockinette in the round for 2.5 inches (20 rounds).

(gauge for the Cashsoft: 26 sts. = 4 in.)

Then I switched to size 7 needles, joined on the Tilli Tomas, and decreased down to 46 sts. at the same time: k2tog, *k8, k2tog.* Next round, I purled so the cuff would turn under nicely. I knitted in stockinette for a couple of inches and realized that the mitten was going to be too big around -- but that frogging would be a horrible experience (even more than usual) because of those beads. So at that moment, I decided that these were going to be felted mittens. (GASP! Felting Tilli Tomas! My heart did skip a beat for a moment, it's true.)

(gauge for the Flurries before felting: 18 sts. = 4 in.)

I kept going, knitting the cast-on edge into the Flurries when I got that far, and started increasing for the thumb gusset at 4 inches (28 rounds after the purl round), doing paired M1 increases every other round until I had 13 thumb stitches (yes, I messed up in there somewhere and added an M1 when I shouldn't have -- so I did the same thing on the second mitten). including the two "center" stitches around which I was increasing. Then I put those 13 sts on a holder, rejoined in the round with two added stitches for the hand (to make up for the loss of the two "center" stitches that became part of the thumb). (So, still 46 sts.)

24 rounds after the thumb-hole/rejoin, I began decreasing heavily for the top of the mitten, and after a few rows made it down to 10 stitches, then cut and pulled the yarn-end through those last ten. This is also where I stopped taking pictures, apparently.

I did make a thumb. I did make a second mitten to match the first. I did felt them. At some point, I will post finished-object photos.

Just not today.

Also, I will make a hat to match at some point. But I haven't done it yet. Fodder for future posts!