Pretty Ribbons II aka Putting Stuff in Shows

 I have been banging a drum lately on changing people's attitudes into entering stuff into shows. Trying to convince people to stop worrying about being judged, and submit eyecatching stuff to appeal to the public. Let the judges have the worry of picking out one instead. Anyways here is my story

Last year I decided to put a few things into the local regional shows around the Sydney Area, Blacktown, Castle Hill and Hawkesbury. I got some ribbons.

This year I decided to put a few things into the same shows plus try my hand at a bigger show - so I decided to enter the Royal Canberra Show. I was intending to put something into Sydney, but they moved their date forward and I wasn't confident that what I had planned to do would turn out. Sometimes it doesn't. Next year I will do better.

So.. onto Canberra. It has just had it's 100th celebration, and they had the Great Scarf Competition. You had to put in why it was relevant to the centenary. I decided to combine a method popular in the late 1890s to early 1900s - pre threading beads/pearls onto the yarn and knitting it into the fabric, which I did both ends by hand, then did the middle bit by the KX350. Mixed methods were permitted. And it won first place.

Alpaca Storm Scarf

Next was a baby jacket I made as part of our Passap Model book challenge in the Passap Ravelry group, one of the girls made the baby jacket out of book 19. And it won first prize.

Passap Baby Jacket

Lastly comes another Kate Shawl, It won First prize, Non Professional Champion more than 2 yrs experience and Overall Reserve Champion which is what the two rosettes are. (I know I thought of the cows too!!) This was apparently put on and paraded around the judging area (I did say this was OK). They loved it. And it took them a while to figure out how I did it. This is exactly why people should be putting things into shows. This is a relatively new technique, but this isn't the first time they should have seen it. I do not expect to be so honoured in the future. I'm just thrilled I got this result this time.

Kate Shawl

Lastly I'll show you what DIDN'T win at Canberra, zilch, nil, nada nothing, there must have been a few things to choose from in this category - my Passap hand manipulated socks that took me a week to make! And were in cotton and I thought were brilliant - just goes to show - you just never, never know...

Passap socks

I've also put in Diana's Beret, which one a first prize in the Blacktown show, and a First for the Mohair Scarf in Castle Hill. No photos of these yet, they still have to go to into Hawkesbury and St Ives, then I'll put their photo in.

And the most wonderful feedback I got was from a brand spanking new machine knitter who saw my Kate Shawl at the Canberra show and was inspired to get herself a machine! How Good Is That?

So my fellow machine knitters - These things I have I learnt:

• have the article made well before the closing date, so there's no pressure,
• baby items can be donated to charity if you don't have babies to knit for
• keep your labels - some of the big shows like them
• don't worry about being judged
• give the judges something to worry about instead
• pick something that looks good to the public
• you will always win if you are the only entry

And good luck in promoting machine knitting as a wonderful craft that's still alive and kicking..

Shoulder Seams on the Machine

I came across this youtube video for putting in a shoulder seam in two parts. Worth looking at but that's not how I do things.

Finished side straight off the machine: not yet washed, blocked, press or anything.

No. So this is what I did:

Knit my back and took it off with a long circ needle.

knit the front and put the shoulder onto decker combs, (a garter bar would be OK too)

Back goes onto the needles, wrong side faces the machine, public side faces me, BEHIND the latches.

Front goes on to the open latches

Flip the decker to vertical while holding the work so the stitch all roll onto the needle

Add a little weight on both pieces. Pull ALL the needles back so the back stitches are now on the front

just like this

I did bind off around the gate pegs

As with everything, how different people do the same thing always interests me. Depending on how firm the shoulder seam has to be, how stretchy the fabric, will determine as to how to finish off the live stitches, back stitch, make the last row MT+1 or 2 and latching off, lots of scope for what the design dictates. And it was easy with the decker comb and if the back was taken off with a garter bar and flipped, then it would be really quick.

The photo of it finished was very blurry, so I'll take another one and come back and put it in tomorrow. Which I've just done. Here they are straight off the machine, not yet washed, pressed or anything but I think it is a nice tidy and quick seam.

Finished underside

Fixing my Lace mistakes, dropped stitches and weight fixes

I'm doing a run of lace projects on my SK280 + LC2 and I've been experimenting with fixing dropped stitches. I had done.. maybe 16 rows and I noticed a dropped stitch 4 rows back and decided to see how difficult it would be to rip out 4 rows of 100 sts.

So.. If that happens - rip it back to the start and begin again. Time to undo and fix - V - time to go back to the beginning and reknit has to be considered, but checking every 2nd row worked really well, especially essential to check where there are 4 + transfers in a row.

By the time I was working on the last piece, with no more dropped stitches, I made sure I had evenly distributed weight along the entire width and moved them up every 20 rows. No dropped stitches at all in the pieces knitted.

However if it's at the end of a piece, I think it would be less effort to rip them out. I did try to drop down and reknit - it would be OK in certain circumstances, but I noticed that the dropped stitches were mostly on the multiples of 4 transfers close together, not very helpful place to drop stitches, so ripping back was better.

I decided to take photos of exactly what happens when rows are being knitted, to make it easier to rehang correctly.

Row 1:  travelling right to left- stitches are transferred first, the yarn trails and knits AFTER. The stitches are only transferred to the left and the empty needle has the single thread on it.

Row 1

 Row 2: travelling left to right -stitches are transferred first, the yarn trails and knits AFTER. The stitches are only transferred to the right and the empty needle has the single thread on it.

Row 2

the card in the reader is all ready to knit the next row and needs to be memorised.

For reference Rows 3 and 4.

Row 3

Row 4

I dropped a great deal of stitches on the back, so I workshopped the sleeve to see how to work more weight.
I noticed that the action of knitting was dislodging the bar weights, so I tried putting them on from the back, tried out the triangle weight with the small weight and the caston bar from Bev.

The triangle weights added on the back worked so much better, no dropped stitches at all on the sleeve, so I redid the whole lace section of the back - well worth it, as there were way, way too many to fix. However, one stitch that isn't out of position and hasn't got any dropped stitches, it's just as easy to catch it up from the back. I've done just a few on my Zora, that popped up after wearing.

I tried out using the little orange men in a row so it didn't knit the stitches on the left that I wanted to take off for the initial armhole shaping.

Motif Placement Notes

I liked this lace design, but I thought it would be too much all over. It has columns of single stitch running through it and I thought it would be a good candidate to work out how to do motifs and how to put it where I want it in a project. I decided to do this bit of it.

Working out where to put the selected part of the card into the position on the garment.

 Position of the card in relation to the needles on the bed. Marks on the card reader

Correspond to marks on the needle bed

Then all I had to do was work out which parts of the card, it could be anything from .. say 6 to 24sts or more so it repeats .. say in the centre, all depending on the required design and where it is placed in the project. On this project, I used L1 to R12 and positioned the piece 6 needles off centre - L86, R74 instead of L80, R80, so the motif and gutter stitches were where I wanted them - this time on the right. Maybe next time a centre piece, or on the left, or without a gutter, it certainly works well.

Settings:

Carriage - on the LC exactly as usual plus the magic cams screwed on the sides, levers back

Card reader - set and memorise row 1

Back bed - put the magic orange/white markers on - L on the left, the white side is included in the knitting pattern the orange side is exactly what the little orange markers usually do, R on the right, here are all the settings and add ons when in work.

Bed -Orange markers on the front of the bed are unnecessary to the function, but I left them there so I could easily identify the needles I was dropping and latching back the 2 sts relatched gutter.

Refresher:
To memorise the pattern: side levers forward, card on row 1, white lever next to the card reader - forward.
To commence the pattern: side levers back, white lever next to the card reader - back.
Put the panel on the left next time.

More Berets? More Beads? Nooo it's a Tam with beads

Over on Rav we are having a MKAL for Diana's Tam. It comes with video instructions, is done on a standard with lots of things for our newbies to play around with.

If only life was that simple, wouldn't it be loverly. So, problem we had and this isn't just this, but many, times, there will be things that just don't quite work as planned. You follow the directions and pffftt, as soon as you blink it doesn't work. One way to check on Rav for handknitting is - how many people have actually knitted and finished it, without incident. If everyone is saying nothing but "finished" you are on a winner, it's fine. But machine patterns are so few and are between, machines and yarns can vary so much.

But back to problem solving a pattern. Well our Knit-a-Long is going and we are finding that the fabric and band is too loose or big, it's come out too slouchy for some. Then we have a maths problem with the band, it's 12 sts too short. So some of us decided to make adjustment and start the short rows on needle 12, making two stitches each segment out or making the crown two stitches less and keeping the short rows commencing on 10. The problems with the band .. hmm, I thought, how about I try a 11.11 rib, which will reduce the distance the yarn has to travel to still get 199 stitches needed and make it tighter.



So this is what I decided to do, after one false start:
Crown: Cast on L21/R22, on T5 not 6 and as the yarn was a little drab, add 3mm pink glass bead every 3rd stitch starting on stitch 11 from the left.
Band: Cast on 198, L75/R75 = 100 on front bed and 98 on the back bed (of the Passap) 1R N/N T1, 5R CX/CX T3, 20R N/N T3.
Joined by 3 needle bind off. Next time I'd use sew as you go to join instead.

All in all a lovely Tam, with some very small modifications to make it just right. Very happy with it.

Berets

I've been hand knitting some berets all from Luxury 10ply, I bought with the Murano I needed to finish off some felted slippers.
And here they are

Dreamy inspired by Snow's Beret on Once Upon a Time

A lovely beret - Brambles - a pattern on knitty.com the colour is correct in Dreamy

And lastly a big disappointment - don't bother with this one, the instructions don't match the model, I did a lot of modification to make it like the photo and when I put the comment that it didn't match on the Rav page for it, it got deleted. So. Can't delete this. Don't bother - if she can't be bothered providing accurate instructions don't bother knitting the dodgy version in the instructions.

Starting off 2013

Starting off 2013 again with the intention to going cold sheep - meaning to buy some things that I need to finish projects, and one or two things in September at Fairfield Yarns near Manchester. I know, last time I said cold sheep I really meant frozen sheep meaning not buying a thing. However I ran out of cotton and bought enough to finish the cardi, so in the end I decided that cold sheep for me meant buying a little bit but using up so much more.

Here is my Ravelry stash tab totals

Anyways this is from my Ravelry Stash page. the 44 used up are the ones I've set aside to make projects.

I want to do some lace projects first. I've been busy swatching and tomorrow I'll try to finish off one project and start winding the 4ply cotton.

the little messy bit at the bottom is what happens when weights come off and you don't notice. Nice even weight if so important for successful lacemaking.
Tuesday is forecasted to be a very, very hot day, so I'll try my best to working out all the patterns for the swatches and finish winding all the cottons. Ready for Wednesday, when if they are right, will be cooler again.

I'm hoping to use 50 x 200g of those Bendigo balls this year.

And before I go off to measure my swatching efforts, this is how I finished 2012:
No of  Projects: 33
No 50g balls deemed used: 328.9
No of metres knit: 33,548m

And I've decided that's not too shabby.