There's a word for that?

I am a hobby knitter. I'm not great, but I'd say I'm comfortably intermediate level - I can do most lace and cable stitches (though I tend to get bored) and I've successfully completed at least ONE sock. I've knitted hats, and doll sweaters, and I'm in the middle of my first real-person sized sweater. I've knitted enough to have opinions about brands of needles and types of yarn, so yeah - "intermediate".

Back when I was a smallish kitten - say, late middle school, early high school, so maybe fourteen-ish? - I first picked up knitting. I taught myself out of those "how to" basic instruction pamphlet books that you find in craft stores, along with a set of Susan Bates needles and some Red Heart yarn. I had recently, back then, been exposed to Doctor Who - specifically Tom Baker's fourth Doctor, and the infamous Scarf Of Doom. So I sat down over summer break with my cheap craft store supplies and taught myself to knit the basic garter stitch and proceeded, very quickly, to knit myself a striped reddish Doctor Who scarf that was twice as tall as I was. Satisfied with my contribution to my early cosplay efforts, I promptly retired the needles and stopped knitting.

Not as nice as this, but I tried!

(For the record, I'm pretty sure Susan Bates needles and the old school scratchy Red Heart yarn were a large portion of WHY there wasn't nearly as much of a boom in the hobby/cottage knitting industry back in the '80's and '90's. Those were pretty much all you could find and they're enough to make anyone give up knitting.)

Fast forward to somewhere around 2010, when more and more people I knew on the journal blog-sphere were knitters and talking about (and showing off) pictures of their fabulous hand dyed yarns and pretty bamboo and wood needles. So, I figured why not - I picked up knitting again. I'd forgotten everything so I had to start over from scratch. I went back to starting with a scarf, this time knitted on wooden needles that slid like butter compared to the craft store kind, with Paton's Bohemian yarn which feels like fluffy soft fuzzy caterpillars and makes you just want to roll around in it. And this time I taught myself - courtesy of the wonder that is instructional videos online - how to purl as well as knit, and viola, a hobby knitter was born.

So, what's the point of this long-winded reminiscence?

I am, right now, an English knitter - I tension the yarn in my right hand and "throw" it over the needle (actually, more like "flicking" - it's all in the index finger). However, particularly when knitting with lace yarn on needles under US #3 sizes, this tends to aggravate my carpal tunnel. I can knit for half an hour or so before my right thumb starts going numb, and if I ignore it and keep going then it goes completely numb, along with the index and middle fingers, and stays that way for an hour or more. Annoying, and also very distressing, and more than a bit painful when the feeling is coming back. Slows down my knitting substantially since I can't do it for very long.

So I've been trying to pick up Continental knitting - tension the yarn with my left hand and "pick" the stitch. I can, so far, manage a knit stitch in this style. Purling is right out, but it's useful for looooooong stretches of stockinette in the round, knit knit knit forever. And it's kinder on my hands - I can do it for half an hour on the morning commute and only have some tingling and stiffness in my thumb and fingers, easily shaken out.

But you know what it's not? It is NOT faster than how fast I knit that silly Doctor Who scarf back in the day. Neither of these knitting styles are. Even with needles that scraped and stuck and yarn that was like twine, I knit that thing blazingly fast. And today, while looking for tutorials about continental knitting, I came across something I'd never heard of before - Lever knitting, where the right hand needle is either braced in your armpit (long needles) or held in the junction of your thumb like a pencil (short needles).

'Lo and behold, that is exactly how I first taught myself to knit - I thought it wasn't "right", it wasn't how the pictures looked in the tutorial I was learning from, but it was fast and efficient so that was what I did. Then, when I picked knitting back up, now with video tutorials, I studiously taught myself how to do it the "right" way and I've had numb thumbs ever since.

GO FIGURE.

Lever knitting is apparently one of the older (pre-industrial) styles of knitting quickly and on-the-go - something people could do while walking or other chores, with the aid of a knitting sheath or knitting belt to stabilize the right hand needle while they're moving. This sounds so much better and easier to me, and omg I want a knitting belt. Really. Do Want. I may have to figure out how to make some sort of facsimile of one, because it would be so much easier on my hands.

Pattern Markers

I'm a cat of small attention span and even shorter short term memory. This is the inherent problem with multitasking - I'm doing so many things at any given time that I if I put something down to come back to it later I can't remember what I was doing.

Knitting patterns? Stitch patterns that require extended repeats over multiple rows? DOOM.

So for the two sweaters I have on the needles right now (one human sized, one doll sized) I made stitch pattern markers, decorative little things that help me remember where I am in the pattern, which double as the place marker for the start of the round.

Simple, yeah? The larger one just has decorative bead spacers and is meant to count every 10 rows (the number of rows between increases/decreases in the human sized sweater).

On the smaller one I didn't bother with spacers - it's charting a specific stitch pattern for the cable running up the center of the doll sweater. It's the OXO cable, where the plain rings are just knit as normal and the rings with the beads are the cable crossovers. The blue beads mean I should start with the "hold cable needle to the back" and the purple (fuschia) beads mean I should start with the "hold cable needle to the front". Blue = back, fuschia = front, and the little heart dongle at the end reminds me it's the XO hugs and kisses cable. Even on my least caffeinated and most braindead days I can remember that!

On row 2 of the stockinette between increases

The entire things took me an hour to whip up this morning, using jump rings (5mm and 7mm) and eye pins with assorted beads for the connector bits. Quick, simple, and now I know where I am in my patterns even if the knitting sits around for a month or two unworked.

On the first stockinette row after the first cable cross

Micro Sweaters

Let me tell you a tale of happiness and woe. The happiness? Simple! The cat and the dragon, united at last, sitting around playing WoW and knitting during our vacation. LOVE IT. Perfect. (The knitting, the playing, the vacation, and definitely my dragon!) 

The woe? Knitpicks is no longer my go to place for online yarn shopping. Why? Because the yarn is gone.

"But WHY," I hear you ask, in your best Jack Sparrow voice, "is all the yarn gone?"

Aren't those gorgeous? [sob] Shadow Shimmer, RIP

Beats me. But Knitpicks, in their recent revamp, has axed almost all of the lace weight yarns I used to buy. Specifically the Shadow line, 100% merino in lovely colors, including some tonals which are hard as heck to find in lace, much less find reasonably priced. I am a sad cat. SAD, I tell you. SO SAD. Fortunately I have a stockpile of the decommissioned yarn lines, but I am still so sad that when I use those up they will be GONE.

This is the Bitlet, my Hujoo Nano Freya. She's itty bitty - fits neatly in the palm of my hand, and therefore took up no room at all slipping her into my carry on luggage to come on vacation with me. As you can see, it's hard to knit anything for her that doesn't look bulky. Fortunately, I also brought a ball of the KP Shadow Shimmer in the orange-brown spice, another in the blue-green bayou, and some US #0 DPNs.

The first attempt involved a simple tube dress - about the size of my thumb - with some eyelet holes that I threaded a sparkly yarn through. The second attempt I got more ambitious - sleeves! and little bits of colorwork, alternating the bayou and spice yarns. Completely knit off the cuff, I just kept holding it up to her and guessing if I needed less or more stitches. It came out pretty cute for an impromptu attempt at knitting in micro size. :)

Scrap Yarn Sweater Dress

What do you do with your beginner sample works? You know the things I mean - the lumpy swatches of awkward knitting or the even lumpier over and under twisted chunky bits of homespun yarn, the mangled bits of jewelry wire, and the tensionless bits of weaving. All the things that scream "Hello! I just started this craft and I'm not sure what I'm doing and I'm making a lot of mistakes!" Yeah, those bits.

Trash bin? Usually. But in the case of spinning, well, I'm loathe to discard any actually useable bits of yarn. Even if it's overspun chunky.

Fortunately, there's always uses for scrap yarn. Even better, dolls will never complain that you've dressed them in something that looks like your first knitting project! Particularly not when the doll in question has been sitting around naked for months because nothing I have in doll clothes will fit over her abundance of curves.

Shadow: Finally, clothes!

Shadow again, my Iplehouse EID 1/3 girl, and the scrap yarn sweater dress made entirely of bits and bobs handspun from roving by yours truly. At the top there's what I call "Alliance Boyfriend" (being a handful from my "Heroes of the Alliance" roving bag mixed with a handful from my "Boyfriend Sweater" roving bag). Around her waist is some "Alchemy Flambeau", and the skirt part is "Optimus Prime". Optimus and Alliance Boyfriend were spun around the same time when I first got my spinning wheel, with Flambeau coming several months later when I had learned some better technique.

Alliance Boyfriend - merino/silk/bamboo

Here's "Alliance Boyfriend". It's made of rovings from Paradise Fibers - Ashland Bay Merino/Silk in "Autumn" and Ashland Bay Bamboo in "Aegean Blue". It's a chunky worsted weight, 2ply, about 16 yards.

Alchemy Flambeau - polworth/BFL

Swatched on US3

This is "Alchemy Flambeau". Still a bit on the thick and thin side, but look at the weight difference! 2ply sock yarn. The roving is a mix from BlueMoon Fiber Arts - a handful of the "Flambeau" in Polworth (the grayish side) and "Tea and Alchemy" in Bluefaced Leicester (the reddish side).

Optimus Prime - silk

OP again

Lastly, there's "Optimus Prime", which was the first thing I spun on my wheel. It's pure silk mawatas, Knit Picks Hanks in the Hood in "Warm Spring". I peeled each layer apart and spun them together with the colored ends butted up against each other (blue to blue, red to red) so that the color gradations were longer, and then I plied it to itself into a 2ply chunky worsted. Having tried several cheaper silk hankies from other places, I definitely recommend trying Hanks in the Hood - the brilliant color and smoothness is to die for. Excellent quality, and at that chunky weight I got 26 yards from it.

Cast on and free form knit with US8 needles, and viola! Something useful out of My First Spun scrap yarn.

Tiny Balls of Yarn

So last time I raved about the itty bitty mini Turkish drop spindle. The real question is, of course, how much yarn can such an itty bitty spindle make? And what do you DO with it?

This is the ball I pulled off of the spindle - I could have kept spinning, but I was curious how much I already had. It was probably roughly the size of a dollar (US) coin. No bigger than a cat toy.

Since it was a center pull ball, done in a few different stretches of roving, I took the center and the end of the yarn and tied them back on the spindle, then plied the single of yarn to itself. This gave me a tiny ball of roughly sock weight yarn and I thought to myself, well, why not knit something for one of the dolls?

This is Shadow. She's an Iplehouse EID 1/3 girl, Asa sculpt, and currently sans faceup/eyes/wig in prep for doing some major mods to her, so please excuse the bare bones look! I cast on enough stitches to go around my smallest circular needle and then just did four rows of random yo/k2tog lace to make a little cowl scarf. I actually could have done another round or two - I had yarn left over.

So, THAT's what you can do with a itty bitty ball of yarn. I'm suitably impressed with the mini spindle, and hey, now Shadow has a totally hand made, handspun and knit, cowl scarf! ^_^