the middle knitter

Ah, that new-blog smell. After hours of tinkering with Movable Type (when I should have been reading about Dionysus), I think I finally have this thing ready to roll. The layout isn't quite as nice as I'd like, but I learned web-design in 2000 and I haven't significantly updated my skills since then, so I'll take what I can get. I'd rather be knitting than studying CSS anyway.

I'm always a little uncertain just how introductory these introductory posts need to be. I'm sure most of the people reading this will be people who know me, but for anyone who doesn't, my name is Emma. As of writing, I am a rising junior at a small women's college in central Virginia. I'm a Classical Studies major with a Religion minor, and I'm currently spending my summer doing research on Greek mystery cults (thus the necessity of reading about Dionysus, see above).

The purpose of this blog is to provide an outlet for my creative endeavors and my hobbies, chiefly knitting, but also any other of the many things that spark my interest. I currently keep a LiveJournal, but I believe the format of a blog will be more suited to the kind of thing that I have in mind, which will largely be photos and updates on whatever project I currently have going. As for the knitting, I'm only a beginner. I started knitting just before Christmas, so I've been at it about five months now.

The blog is called the middle knitter for reasons that probably only make sense to me--let's just say I have an affinity for middles and leave it at that. The title is a little bit misleading, as I'm intending this as a blog for my hobbies in general, not just knitting. But calling it after my LiveJournal, the middle thing seemed too vague, especially since even with the other hobbies, this will probably stay primarily a knitblog.

Following this introductory post, I intend to update roughly once or twice a week--probably more during the summer, since it's the school year that really puts me under. I'll try to make later posts sound slightly less academic than this one came out--not sure why that happened, but I'm going to blame the mystery cults.

I am pretty much the definition of a poor college student, so when I discovered that you can buy used sweaters and unravel them for yarn, I jumped all over the concept. And when I stumbled across a few old Frankenknits columns in the Knitty archives, I was very taken by the idea of recycling old clothes and making them into something new. (By the way, I think it's really a pity that the Frankenknits blog hasn't updated since last September.)

Anyway, I started buying up wool sweaters from Goodwill almost immediately, but it took me a while to be able to identify what sort of sweaters will work out for unraveling, and which ones will produce nasty yarn that's too thin and fragile to knit with. In particular, I got this one striped sweater, which in addition to being striped (hello very short pieces of yarn!), had been worn enough that it was ever so slightly felted around the seams, which made unraveling difficult.

The sweater itself was still good, though, and I really needed a small bag to shove my keys into when I'm poking around campus. So, inspired by this Frankenknits column in particular, I set out with the sections of yarn I had unraveled and the disassembled pieces of sweater, and this is what happened:

I'm actually kind of proud of the construction. This is made from the sweater's sleeves. I took two middle sections of the sleeves and cut them out carefully. The bottom edged is joined with a three needle bindoff. Having a seam right down the middle of the bottom is really not ideal, but it was just the way the bag worked out. Fortunately, nothing heaver than my keys and handkerchief and maybe the occasional paperback will ever be carried in the bag, so it works.

Anyway, once I'd joined the two pieces, I bound off the live stitches along the top edge, and then accidentally discovered how to crochet a seam up the sides. The cool part, though, is that the shaping of the sleeves meant that the bag tapered quite a bit from the bottom edge to the top. When I poked the corners inside of the bag and tacked them down, the bag went from being a funky tapered pouch to a gracefully shaped little purse about two inches deep. I was impressed.

I'm terrible about taking in-progress pictures, because I'm usually too excited to get it done. But here's a picture of what was left of the sweater after I made the bag. I want to see if I can use the front and back of the sweater to make a larger, messenger-style bag, but before I can I have to find a better way to felt things than by hand in my dorm room sink. (Another thing about being a college knitter: laundromats are not conducive to felting.)

And here's a detail that shows off the super-fun star buttons as well as how the fabric changed after I felted it:

This marks my first felting project (although I'm not sure it counts since I didn't knit it myself), and I learned a few things, but all in all I'm pleased with the result.

Also, while I'm talking about recycled knitting, look at what I picked up in Goodwill this weekend!

The dark red sweater on the left is a super-soft angora/wool/acrylic blend that is already earmarked for presents for my trip to Rome over Christmas, and the green sweater on the right is gorgeous, soft 100% merino wool. It makes me melt every time I touch it, and if it were any other color I wouldn't even be taking it apart--I'd just wear it. But, it's a super-super-bright lime green, much brighter than the picture shows. So the yarn there is destined for Dulaan knitting. (It's like somebody commented to me before school ended, "I thought they could use some bright colors in Mongolia!")

I have developed a deep love for cabled mittens. I mean, mittens in general are enough to give me warm fuzzies, but there's something about cabled mittens that calls for extra love. Especially if the cable is combined with seed stitch:

I knit these on my break between the end of classes and the beginning of my summer research. Most of what I owned was packed up in storage, and I hadn't brought nearly enough knitting patterns, so these are cobbled together of what I could remember of Knitty's Mittens 101, plus braided cable and seed stitch (inspired by Ryan's cable and seed stitch mittens from 2005). Seed stitch is the other thing I've recently fallen in love with. <3!

Anyway, yesterday I started a pair of adult-sized cabled mittens, this time with no seed stitch, but fancier cables. Look, an in-progress picture!

I've finished the first one now, and it looks really cool. Also, I've now learned how to a) read a chart (hey, I told you I'm a beginner), and b) cable without a cable needle. I decided to learn the latter because that rope cable requires crossing every other row, and I really needed a more efficient way to do that. All three of these pairs of mittens will be bound for Dulaan by mid-June.

Also, I finally sewed together all of the fish that I spent last semester knitting! I just didn't have time during finals, so I've had this bag of multi-colored fish sitting around. The sewing was not as bad as you'd think--I just whip-stitched everything together, and since all the fish had a slip-stitch selvedge, it wasn't hard. I am amazed, though, at just how much it looks like something your grandma knit. Oy vey.

This was made with some of the yarn that was donated when I started a campus Dulaan drive. I got a huge trash bag full of cheap acrylic yarn, all of which appears to have been manufactured before I was born. Because it's acrylic, the jury's still out on whether or not I'll actually send this to Dulaan. I double-stranded the yarn to make the fish thicker (and the finished blanket weighs a ton), but I don't know how warm it will be even so. The alternative is to donate it to the local chapter of Project Linus, and I'm really conflicted. Dulaan has been my "thing", but if it doesn't meet the main goal (warmth), and it does meet the main goal of a stateside charity (machine-washablity) . . . it's a tough call. We'll see.