So now that I’m pretty much settled in in Paris, I thought I’d try to blog more regularly. Since I wasn’t able to bring my knitting machines with me, I’ll be focusing mainly on hand knitting and life in Paris as an expat. Right now the leaves are falling, and those that remain are a gorgeous blend of yellow, orange, and red, so it’s a pretty time of year.

Yesterday I ventured out to Paris’s biggest (only?) Japanese bookstore, Junku (ジュンク堂).It’s down the street from Paris Opéra, which is gorgeous even on a cloudy day:

Anyway, the knitting & crochet section was so crowded, I couldn’t even reach the books. Lots of interest in Japanese patterns in Paris, it seems. Eventually I got through and picked up the new winter issue of Keito Dama (#144):

I don’t know about you, but I think that cover pattern is hideous. You can’t see it in the picture, but inside there’s a picture of the skirt, a bizarre number with tiered ruffles. I can’t see how it could flatter the wearer at all. The hat doesn’t help, either. Luckily, though, there are many good patterns in the rest of the issue. The winter issue always has even more patterns than the other 3 issues each year, so it’s quite a bargain. You can see thumbnails of all the patterns here on the Nihon Vogue Keito Dama website. Don’t know which patterns in it I’ll tackle yet.

Speaking of Keito Dama, these gloves are the first Keito Dama pattern I ever tackled. They’re from last year’s winter issue (#140), designed by Mayumi Kawai (河合真弓). Had a wee hickup when I realized 3/4 of the way through the second glove that, hey, I don’t have two right hands. After a bit of frogging, all is well.

Now I’m working on a lace crochet tablerunner for my mother-in-law’s Christmas present. Hope I get it done in time. The pattern is another Japanese pattern, 29-44 Motif Tablerunner.

Just realized it’s been forever since I posted here. I’ve just been so busy for the past year that I post projects only on Ravelry and don’t mention them here.

Here are some things I keep meaning to post about:

• I bought a Studio SK360 for $7.50 at a thrift shop a few months ago. So far, haven’t had time to test it out. At that price, though, you can’t just walk by and leave the machine sitting there.
• I’ve been knitting and crocheting almost entirely for stash for 2 years now. I don’t buy new yarn unless I don’t have anything suitable and it’s something that I need (such as for a gift). If it’s not needed, I just change my plans to use a yarn that I do have.
• I got married (!) a month ago, and my new husband and I just moved to Paris. Unfortunately, we couldn’t bring knitting machines with us, so they’re in storage at my parents’ house. This means I won’t be doing any machine knitting for a while.

Here’s one of the projects I made last semester on my Passap Duomatic 80. I’ve also done quite a few small hand-knitting and crochet projects, but this one I really liked. It’s pattern #2053 from Passap Babybook.

checkered baby blanket

About two weeks ago, I started a lap blanket using a double-bed tuck pattern on my Passap Duomatic 80. Things were going along fairly well, and I love the texture created by the tuck pattern. This is what it looked like about halfway through (assuming a 36″ long lap blanket):

Nice, huh? It doesn’t curl, either, so it’s perfect for quick projects.

Anyway, it was going well until pushers moved and I didn’t notice it. On the right side of the front bed, pushers moved out of working position a few at a time, gradually forming a big messed up spot on the edge of the blanket. Curses!

Not sure if you can see it in the photo (sorry, my camera’s in its death throes), but there’s no saving it. I’m going to frog it and try again, this time watching the pushers after every row to make sure they don’t make a run for it.

Wow, I just found this draft sitting around in my blog dashboard. Oops! It’s been several months now since I finished Casquette (hat picture and pattern down on the 8th row of that page). It’s a free Japanese pattern from Clover Japan and quite easy to follow once you figure out the brim. The brim is knit as a big stockinette tube, and at first I couldn’t see how that shape would possibly yield the hat shape in the pattern photo. It’s only at the end when you sew the brim into place that it looks right.

I couldn’t take a good picture of myself wearing it (trust me, I tried), so I used the glass head. Very handy, that glass head.

Anyway, the knitting took only about two evenings to complete, but then I let it sit for months before sewing the brim in. I used a piece of flexible plastic from an office folder and it’s working nicely. I followed the pattern dutifully except that I left off the pompom shown in the pattern. Not a pompom type of woman, that’s all. Oh, and I added an extra pattern repeat to make it large enough to fit my huge noggin.

My great-grandmother (hi, Momo!) taught me how to crochet when I was 5 or 6. I loved sitting right next to her watching her hands and then trying to copy it. Recently, though, I’ve had the knitting bug much more than the crochet bug, so I haven’t been crocheting all that often. Until about two weeks ago, that is! I’ve been especially interested in learning how to crochet from charts/diagrams, and with the plethora of cute Japanese patterns that use them, I’ve got a queue a mile long.

Here are the things I’ve crocheted the last two weeks or so:

pattern: Honobono Baby Shoes by Clover Japan
yarn: some unknown cashmere/ramie blend I got from unraveling a thrift shop sweater

pattern: Hana Hana Cotton Summer Bag by Pierrot
yarn: Lion Brand Cotton Ease, in slate blue and gray; I used one strand of each color held together

pattern: Pretty-colored Bag by Clover Japan (several patterns on that page – it’s the green bag)
yarn: Lion Brand Cotton Ease (the rest of the slate blue stuff)

Right now I’ve got this cute lace slouch hat (another Japanese crochet pattern) in progress, but it’s slow-going. Once I finish packing up my apartment, I should have a bit more time. Perhaps I’ll crochet this on the plane.

I didn’t mean to abandon my blog, but I’ve been really busy with grad school. The past few months, I’ve barely had time to knit or crochet, much less try to learn how to use my Passap Duomatic 80. This past week, though, I’ve been playing around with it (when I should be packing up my apartment!).

Thanks to lots of encouragement and advice from folks who’ve posted here on my blog and over at Ravelry, I’ve had some success with the machine. Thanks, everyone!

Here’s my first finished product, a scarf that I knit for a charity drive (organized by the Knitters for Obama group on Ravelry; to be donated to homeless veterans charities). I used four skeins of Lion Brand Magic Stripes in the Denim Stripes colorway, purchased for $1.50 per skein at Big Lots.

It’s a simple fisherman’s rib scarf (lock settings EX/EX), done over 40 needles and for about 1300 rows. I love this machine now! Still can’t get the pushers to move, but I suspect that’s because a deep cleaning is in order.

A day or two before that, I sat down with my clunky old Corona machine to whip up a shopping bag:

This was done with less than half a cone of kitchen cotton and Eileen Montgomery’s Drop Stitch Mesh Bag pattern. Because the pattern is for a mid-gauge machine and my Corona is bulky (8mm, actually), I knit a few more rows. I think that was a mistake, because now it’s enormous! Oh well. I’ll likely use it as a laundry bag or a carry all for bigger items I might have to tote around.

Now I’m eager to play around more with my Passap, but I’m in the midst of moving and have to pack it up very soon. Figures! I look forward to learning more about it later on.

In January, I started a wrap sweater for my soon-to-be-born nephew, but never seamed it up. This past weekend, I did all the seams and wove in all the ends. Looks like it needs to be re-blocked, though:

Even though I already blocked all the pieces, they’re curling like nobody’s business. (Maybe because I left them untouched in a bag for nearly two months? Nah…)

• pattern: Crossover Top by Glenda Overmann
• size: 3 months
• yarn: Regia 4-ply Color, “Rainbow”
• machine: Brother KH-860

The only things left to do are to put on some kind of border and make some ties. Crab stitch crochet around all the edges? Garter stitch? Not decided yet, but I think the ties will just be i-cord. Gotta finish it soon, though, or the kid won’t get it on time!

It’s come to my attention that the version of my pattern Susitna that appears in the Oct/Nov 2007 issue of the Machine Knitters Guild of Pennsylvania newsletter contains a very unfortunate typo. The diagram as they rendered it shows exactly what you should NOT do. If you follow the instructions there, you’ll just get a big mess of tangled yarn.

I asked MKGOP to send out a correction so that people won’t be frustrated by a pattern that doesn’t work, but to my knowledge, they haven’t done so. Click here to download my original PDF version, which shows the correct needle placement.

Here’s the mistake: at the beginning, where the needle arrangement is shown, the MKGOP version shows the needles lined up (i.e., the needles on the main bed are directly over the needles on the ribber bed). This will not work! If you do it this way, the entire bag will unravel, and all your work will be for nothing.

Instead, the needles on the ribber bed need to be between the needles on the main bed, as shown in the original version of the pattern. This is what the diagram should look like:

My apologies for this, but I have no control over MKGOP’s newsletter and its formatting. I was under the impression that they were just going to provide a link to the original pattern, not paste my entire pattern into their newsletter, but apparently there was a miscommunication.

If you have any questions about the pattern, please do let me know. Likewise, if you spot any more typos, either in the MKGOP version or in my original, please give a holler.

I keep forgetting to update here, so it’s about time to get caught up on what I’ve been doing since mid-December.

The Soy Cardi is finished at long last! The hems, neckband, and button bands are in hurdle rib, which I dug up from Epstein’s Knitting on the Edge book. I had a tough time finding buttons locally that were a) ugly, b) so cheap-looking that they’d fall apart in five minutes, or c) in some god-awful color. Eventually I found some light blue-green buttons that’ll do the trick, though.

My camera’s focus is getting increasingly fuzzy after I dropped it out in the field this summer, so this picture was the best I could do:

Two weeks ago, I spent a few hours working on a Dale baby sweater that I started in the summer of 2005 and never finished. Now the body and first sleeve finished, but I put it aside for a while to work on the Soy Cardi. I knit a few rows here and there on the second sleeve, so eventually I’ll get it done. Then I just have to sew in the sleeves, knit on a neckline, and sew on some buttons.

The pattern is from Dale of Norway, baby book #110, pattern #11001. The yarn is Microspun and I’m using US 3 for the body (US 1 for cuffs).

I also crocheted another Tawashi, this time using scraps of pink and blue kitchen cotton:

One of the other things I’ve been doing is tinkering with my knitting machine, making lots of swatches and testing out techniques. The only useful item I’ve made lately is a preemie hat, using a pattern kindly given to me by a fellow knitter.

It was very quick to knit, but that’s not too surprising since it’s absolutely tiny. I used some leftover bits of Dale Baby Ull (probably less than 1/4 of a skein). I think I’ll just knit these caps up with spare bits of yarn every now and then, and then just donate a bunch of them to the NICU.

Now I’m working on mitered squares knit from scraps of leftover sock yarn. I got the idea from Susy Ranner, who made a very helpful video showing how she’s making striped mitered squares. I’m not going to do stripes, but I think it’s a very nice way of using up sock yarn leftovers. Once I have enough squares, they’ll be seamed into a blanket.

So, that’s about it. I’ll write more about my knitting machine experimentation later.

I keep forgetting to post a picture of my completed Tawashi (タワシ), the Japanese crochet pattern I mentioned in my last post. (Tawashi just means “scrub brush” or “scrubber” in Japanese.)

The pattern calls for some Japanese antibacterial acrylic yarn, but I’m planning on using this as a face scrubber in the shower, so I just used cotton.

I just used some Peaches’n Cream cotton from my stash and a 5.5mm Tunisian crochet hook. It’s a bit bigger than the hook called for in the pattern, but for some reason I can’t find my crochet hooks anywhere. They’re hiding from me! The only one I could find was the Tunisian crochet hook, but it turned out ok despite being bigger than called for.

It’s quick and easy, but a bit small. So after finishing, I cast on immediately with more stitches and made a bigger one. Great, quick project for skeins leftover from other projects.