Knitting needles = delicious, apparently

You might want to sit down, because I'm about to blow your mind: dogs often like to chew on sticks. Second revelation: knitting needles are kinda like sticks. Especially the bamboo variety.

Again???

For reals, this is not even close to the first time this has happened. And I always just replace them. I've considered buying dpns in bulk. My favorite needle material is bamboo, but I've slowly been phasing out my bamboo circulars and substituting metal. Addi Turbos are OK, I guess. But this time, I really didn't feel like making a special trip to the local yarn shop just so I could continue my project (which ironically was a dog sweater). 

So I chopped off the maimed region with a small handsaw.  

Now to sharpen. I often fantasize about having a garage stocked with all the tools a person could need, but since we live in a condo it remains a dream.  I'm not equipped with a full selection of metal files of various cuts (YET), so I used the one that comes on nail clippers.  Classy. Slowly but surely, it got the job done.

He ended up quite a bit smaller than his brother, though.

But it's not all about the length, it's how you use what you've got that counts, right?

Necessity being the mother of invention, and all that.

Last weekend I found myself on a three-hour flight to SC armed with a knitting project utilizing cables, cables, and some more cables ('twists' really, but same concept) but no extra needle for cabling. 'Why,' you might be saying, 'don't you just cable without a needle?' I've been down that road. I've been referred to the tutorials and expected some big revelation about craftily switching stitches around--then learned that the big secret is 'just try to hold on to the loose stitches'. Apparently this works for some people, but they must be pretty loose knitters (you hussies). I didn't find this technique any faster seeing as how half the time I was picking up dropped stitches and inventing new combinations of obscenities. Pretty much any time live stitches are parted from the needle, my heart rate doubles.

So it was time for a little improvisation. Pen? Too thick. SkyMall magazine? Entertaining, but no (do people actually buy that stuff?). The only thing I had that was remotely stiff and pointy was a key ring. Since it seemed like such a terrible idea, naturally I tried it out. And it was actually pretty sweet--faster than a conventional cable needle and much more convenient for travel. I wanted to share in case there were other tight knitters out there looking for cable needle alternatives.

Therefore, I present to you:


Something in between cabling with a needle and cabling without a needle (working title)

Key ring inexplicably attached to my Wisconsin Public Radio water bottle. Carrying that bottle automatically ups my hipster cred approximately 5000 points.

Easily bent to allow access to one of the ends.

Slip the stitches to be cabled onto the ring.

Let the ring dangle in front or in back of the work, depending on what type of cable you're doing.

Slip the stitches back onto the needle (I tried not to knit too tightly, but if you do, at this step you can give the ring a gentle pull to get some more slack in the stitches).

The ring rests conveniently on your thumb as you go your merry way. This was the part that majorly sped everything up.

I think I'm going to call the ring my 'cable key'. I won't be traveling without it.

Knit and Crochet Blog Week Day 5: And now, for something completely different

Here comes the interpretive dance! Kidding. For something a little different, I wanted to try to answer a scientific(-ish) question about knitwear.

About a year and a half ago, I bought my husband a book about back-country skiing. It included a figure that seemed to imply that wearing a hat with a tassel or a pom-pom on top was advised because the tassel/pom would wick moisture away from the head and evaporate faster than a hat without. Since then, I've wondered if that was really true. The tipping point came when someone, without naming any doggie names, chewed the tassel off of one of my hats.


Was it worth the time to sew it back on? So I present to you the experiment:

TASSELS AND POM-POMS: FRIVOLOUS ADD-ON OR ESSENTIAL HAT COMPONENT?

My first thought was to do some sort of exercise with a tasseled hat and then a tassel-less hat, and see which one was sweatier. But that a) assumed I would be exercising exactly the same, the temperature outside was exactly the same, and a lot of other variables that could change and b) I would have to exercise. So I got a stand-in to wear the hat.


In order to speed up the drying time and simulate movement (i.e. exercise), I hooked up a fan to blow over our set-up.


First, I tried spraying the hat a set number of times (30),


and measured dryness by pinching the brim with a paper towel.


If the paper towel soaked through, it was still 'wet'.


But this actually dried too fast. I decided to try a 1 sec dunk in room temperature water instead.


Then I tested the brim every 15 minutes. I waited.


And tested and waited.


And waited and waited.


after three hours of blowing (both literally and metaphorically) I decided to end the test (when the batteries on the fan died). The brim was still wet, but I would try the same thing with the tassel after the hat dried (and more batteries were obtained) and see if there were any dramatic differences, or if I would feel a qualitative difference.

I gave the hat a 1 sec dunk in the water, and attached the tassel.

Three hours later and the hat was actually, surprisingly, much drier. The paper towel test yielded just a bit of moisture. I was shocked. I truly expected a negative result. One of the most exciting things in scientific research is an unexpected positive result. Who doesn't love a surprise? Well, maybe not a surprise root canal. Or surprise punch in the face. So the results are in: tassels and pom-poms are more than just frivolous flair, but actually serve a big purpose in keeping you warm and dry!

Escapades in hat blocking

I've never blocked a hat before. It never seems to be urgently necessary; I mean, your head kind of serves to stretch and even things out, eh? But it is a bit disheartening to take it off and see it scrunch back into it's shrunken fetus-esque 'natural' shape. Maybe that's just me.

I've been brainstorming on the best way to proceed with hat blocking. I know some people have those decapitated mannequin heads, some of which are faceless and totally creepy. Some do try and replicate human facial features, and are also totally creepy.


Always smiling, watching, judging.

I'm not getting one of those. We don't seem to have any balls in the house...wait, my husband might disagree. (He has a tube of tennis balls...what were you thinking?) No appropriately sized ball, shall we say.

Then something at the market caught my eye:


Mmmmm. Pie pumpkin/potential hat blocker.

That's about the size of my head, right?




Aww, it looks just like me!

Time will tell how this bright idea pans out.

Adventures in blocking

Confession: I'm terrible at blocking my knitted work. Explanation for my non-knitted readers - blocking is a 'finishing' process for a knitted item. When you knit something by hand, the stresses in the fabric may not be entirely equal; this can result in curling, twisting, and any other number of unfortunate side effects that can make your lovely item look like a wrinkled old piece of garbage. Blocking usually involves wetting the item with water, pinning it in the desired finished dimensions, and letting it dry. Doesn't this seem like a stupid part of the knitting process to be bad at? Does anyone else consistently have trouble with blocking, or is it just me??

I came to a sudden realization last Wednesday: the wedding that I was knitting Mystery Wedding Project for was only three days away. Now I'd long given up on getting MWP done in time, but I did want to finish my shawl so I could show off the hand-knits a little bit. All I needed to do was block.

I collected some advice from some of the ladies in the shawl-KAL, and based on their suggestions a (half-baked) plan began to brew - instead of using a million pins, I would make a wire frame. First, I picked up some low-gauge stainless steel wire from the local hardware store:


I washed the heck out of it, since it probably had residual oil and grime from the production process. I couldn't resist playing with it a little bit:


Fun for a girl and a boy! And a dog, apparently.
The first setback was the fact that the wire did not want to keep any shape but a coil. I applied my materials engineering knowledge to something useful (for once): the wire needed to be 'work hardened' before it would be useful. Basically, work hardening is the concept that a metal becomes stronger when you do 'work' on it.

In this case, I used my hands to bend the wire back and forth, and when those got tired:


Wrenches! I used the wrenches to pull small sections of the wire straight. With the wire primed, I bent it into a rectangle measuring 60" x 20". I fed the shawl onto the frame in a 'running stitch' style - basically passing the wire over/under the selvage stitches:


Voila!


I did break down and use a few pins to hold the frame steady.


I moistened the fabric using a spray bottle filled with water. It dried within the course of a few hours.

Did it work? It did!


I couldn't really believe I had produced something so delicate (me = bull in a china shop).

Would I do it again? I would, but with the caveat that I'm really glad that I don't have to do the work hardening of the wire again--it took a while, and if I was to do it again, I would work with the wire long before I was ready to actually block the shawl, just to break up the tedium a little bit.

How stretchy is your cast-on/bind-off?

A while back, in the course of making my copilot a neck gaiter for skiing, I decided I wanted to know what cast-on and bind-off would be best for something that you want to s--t--r--e--t--c--h (see what I did there?). Thus birthed some CO and BO tutorials (which you can find on the sidebar of the home page), and some k1p1 swatches that I never seemed to have time to test. During this week, I was doing something very productive (read: watching the tube) and some herb drying going on over my head got me to thinking.

"Heh. It wouldn't be hard to suspend those swatches from that line."

Let me apologize up front for the crap-osity of the photos. With only 18 hours of daylight, I couldn't seem to manage to do this in natural lighting. Also, if you're only here for the results and not interested in the method, you can skip to the chart at the bottom.

Before any stringing up, I measured all of the swatches at rest in two points:

The resting length of the cast-on/bound-off edge (green line) and the resting length of the 'bulk' (red line--the bulk represents 'normal' knitting, with no edge effects).

I then suspended the swatch from the herb drying line using high tech clipping technology:

The technical term is "paperclips". The same advanced technology is also suspending the herbs.

I hung a ~250 g plum bob from the corner of the swatch, the idea being to pull on the edge with a uniform amount of force.


This is NOT testing the maximum stretch (the bob is not heavy enough to pull them to the maximum), but rather the 'ease' of stretch. I also tested the maximum stretch, albeit not so uniformly--I stretched the edge with my hands until it would stretch no more. Now to crunch the data. We're not interested in the absolute change in length, but rather the relative amount of change from the original state. The following equation gives us the percent change from the original length (aka percent difference):

The nifty vertical lines indicate "absolute value", which means if the difference between the two values is negative, we ignore the negative sign.

Three values were calculated: The percent change given a uniform force, the percent change to the maximum stress, and the percent change from the 'bulk' knitting to the edge. All swatches were made with k1p1 ribbing. Note that the Knit CO, Cable CO, and Knit BO were done with a needle three times larger than the bulk in order to create a 'loose' CO/BO.



So the conclusion? It depends (the usual hair pulling answer of experimentation). The picot CO and BO certainly have the greatest maximum stretch, but varied wildly from the size of the bulk knitting. If you're interested in a little ruffle at your hemline/neckline/sleeves/etc., that's not a bad thing. The Tubular CO/Kitchener BO pairing had adequate stretch, while also being the closest to the bulk knitting size. For my money, that would be the way to go if you're looking for a professional looking edge with room to stretch.

Got a cast-on/bind-off that you'd like me to try?