Friday, October 02, 2009

Pinky and The Brain

Insufficient sleep has resulted in toasty brains recently. With severely limited brain power, when I *do* manage to knit, I want *simple*. Like icord. (Anyone need sparkly icord garlands for their Christmas tree? I'm happy to convert balls of yarn into yards of garland for you.) I made a red sparkly icord garland for myself last spring/summer. Predicting I'd need more icord-level knitting, I bought a sparkly teal ball on clearance for $2 at Ram Wools before term started. (I wanted silver or white, but those were around $7-8 per ball. If I can find the time, I'll visit Michaels with a 40% off coupon.) I'm trying not to go through it too quickly, but I've already knit somewhere between a yard and a half to two yards of icord.

I can also handle seed stitch. So I'm back to working on a hand towel out of linen yarn that I frogged a while back when the original hand towel suffered a break at a weak spot in the yarn, and I decided I didn't like the gauge I knit the towel in anyway. (Sorry for the run-on sentence. If I wasn't in a hurry to go to sleep, I'd attempt a re-write.) The original towel had a fancier pattern out of the first MDK book, but I can't handle that level of fancy right now. I did put a couple of stockinette squares in the seed stitch near the beginning, but the rest is just plain seed stitch. I'm around half-way done the hand towel out of the old yarn, so I picked up another skein of linen at Ram Wools yesterday. (At full price. Ouch. However, I am essentially working three part-time jobs right now, so I felt justified.)

New linen tends to be stiff, so I decided to use Pinky to quickly knit it up into a form that I could wash several times and then re-ball.
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Pinky has got to be the crappiest knitter I know.
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I got better at making pinky not muck up as much after a while. However, I'm still using the thickest yarn it can really handle, and would you look at that loose gauge? Sheesh. Yes, it was faster than I could hand knit an entire skein of linen... but it still took about three hours while vegging in front of the TV, and was also awkward and tiring to hold and crank. Oh well... it'll do. I just need something where I won't end up with a tangle.

Time for bed. Good night!

2 comments:

Deneen said...

Andrea, knitting the i-cords seems easier than crocheting them or using the corker and I may need some done for handbag/purse handles. I will keep all this in mind.

I gave a "Pinky" as a gift to a girl last year for her birthday and I wondered if she ever used it, now you have me thinking...

noricum said...

I think it was designed to be used with fun fur... the fur would be useful in hiding the large gauge and places where the knitting looks like crap... but it's likely not as fun and useful as what you intended. (Assuming she even figured it out. the original child recipient of this one couldn't make it work.) I still have the skeins of fake fun fur that came with it... I'll run those through, and give you a report on those. ;)

And remember... it's the thought that counts. ;) (You might want to let her know that you found out that it wasn't as good as you thought it was, and it's okay if she admits she doesn't like it and/or gets rid of it.)