Girl on the Rocks » Complete Disasters | Girl on the Rocks

I am still alive and knitting

karrie — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 18:20:24 +0000

Though I haven’t posted in a while, I have still
been knitting. I finished a tivoli shirt (designed by grumperina)
and have started a rogue hooded sweater from the girlfromauntie. I am making the cardigan-ized version which means that i can’t knit it in the round so it involves more purling than I would like.

And for a fun read you should visit Ashlee. I just finished sending her gifts for the Secret Pal 5 program.

Too bad my only pets are fish

karrie — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 23:39:02 +0000

you have to click on this just to read the
subtitle.

Gifted

karrie — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 16:47:47 +0000

I got a gift my from my secret
pal!

Chocolate and Koigu. aaahhhh….
perfect. What do you think I should make wiith it? Socks? It really seems too
nice to use for socks.. Thanks secret pal! And tell your dad I said thanks
too

Last night was cheryl’s
last night at the Mel-O-Dee. She will be missed. Check out this picture – she
doesn’t look sad to be moving to
Alaska!

More perfect timing…

karrie — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 16:57:50 +0000

After just learning to crochet, I have visions of
crocheted doll dresses stuffed with toilet paper adorning my bathroom. i know
my roommates would commit me if i actually completed that project, so it will
have to wait a few months until we all go our separate ways. Until then, I
think I can subject them to just a bit of crafty torture with
this:

It is a dress for a bottle of
dishsoap. This should get nice and gross next to our
sink.
brought to my attention by the crafster.org blog, where there are a couple more
links.

To felt… or better yet not to felt.

karrie — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 16:26:44 +0000

A tale of felting woe. Why is that when we try to make something nice for a baby, things start to go so wrong?

I am a big fan of the book Knitting for Baby. I have used it to make baby blankets, baby hats, and even little furry animals. So when my roommate, wanted to make a gift for her best friend’s new baby, I threw the book at her. “Everything in here is great,” I said. Since the projects I knit from this book were some of my first projects and I had no problems with them, I still think the directions are well written (heck – this book taught me short rows!). My roommate chose to make a
felted diaper tote with two large pockets on the outside. I doubt that I will ever get around to scanning the photo in the book so i will just describe it to you. It is shown with its two short handles slung over a woman’s shoulder. It looks to be about 24 inches long and about 18 inches high. The contrasting colored pocket on the outside is almost as big as the entire side of the bag, and there are pockets on each end of the bag.

So my roommate started searching high and low for an affordable, feltable yarn in good colors. She decided on some reynolds Lopi bulky in green and yellow and ordered it from Yarn Forward. It arrived, and to our disappointment the yellow was a oldy-greeny-yellowed tarnished kind of color. So she traded that away to a friend and ordered some bright yellow. The colors looked good.

For the next several months it was her only knitting project*. She brought it to knitting circle, worked on it in front of the TV, and plowed ahead even though she was really really sick of seed stitch. It was really a lot of knitting. Finally, she had all the pieces made to the dimensions required in the pattern. she sewed it up and was ready to felt. Amazingly, she took before and after photos. Now i know this is something i would have done, and i probably urged her to do so, but i don’t remember, i think she might have just done it. and lucky for us, too because now we can witness the tragedy.

Before: Notice how the bag covers the entire chair, and is approximately
square.

so she threw it in the washing machine a few times, added a ton of detergent, put it on hot. all the things you are
supposed to do (and all the things you need to do to felt in our friend’s machine). but nothing was happening. “Oh, just throw it back in,” I told her. “My booga bag took forever to felt.” (because it did ). then, it finally felted a little bit, but it seemed uneven. “Throw it in again!” I told her. It came out looking a little weird, but was still definitely too big. so… that’s right… she threw it back in. After an unknown number of iterations, the bag looked hideous. “Should I just felt it some more?” she asked me. At this point I was thinking that the felting was really just making everything worse. And though i never
told her this, at this point i thought that maybe i shouldn’t have been so zealously telling her to keep felting it over and over. But that’s what I do – make myself part of the problem.

After:

The bag did most of its shrinking in the vertical direction. It did almost no shrinking around the top, so that the idea of actually containing something in it is almost laughable. even the handles felted unevenly. they twist up, and are no longer the same length as each other.

my roommate never sent the bag to her friend. i think she just didn’t have time to write the accompanying
letter explaining what it was supposed to be, and how it got the way it is. I am all for sending the thing as far away from our house as we can get it. When we bring it out to gawk at with our knitting friends, the conversation usually goes
something like this:

knitter: What kind of bag is it supposed to be?
roommate: A diaper bag for my friend who is having a baby.
knitter: well you could certainly carry babies in it, but i don’t know about
diapers.< here it is "in action" ( the action would refer to the only thing it does: sit around and be really disproportionate):

It is hard for us to look at this bag, because it just reminds us of the other unholy baby gifts we have knit (for
example the horrific baby booties).

I know there there are other knitters with felting horror stories…. If you want to read/see another one, I found this yesterday. AND…. i have one more felted
bag tale of horror, but you will have to wait for another day.

*I don’t know how she does it, butI have never seen my roommate have more than 1 knitting project at a time.
weird.

Fry-up

karrie — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 20:24:28 +0000

It’s ugly, but i want one. i just can’t bring
myself to knit it.

A friend of a friend
directed me to this pattern

The fry up. it totally fascinates me.
Wearable knitted food! I instantly knew that i had to have one. I also knew
that i was not going to spend more than $5 to make it. That meant amassing some
acrylic yarn, which i was pretty successful
at.

i tried to follow the pattern for
the purse and started on a pair of long, straight #8 needles. Then i realized
that there was no way 153 stitches were going to fit. so i went out and got a
really long set of #8 circulars to do the job. i think that i decided it was
supposed to be knit flat, and that i would be knitting some weird pie-wedge
shaped thing that could be easily shaped into a circle (there is one point where
the directions say to join up the seam). i must have started over 3 times. The
first time, i dropped a stitch on the third row and lost control. The second
time i had twisted stitches all over the place which really stood out in the
crappy acrylic fabric. i have blocked out why i had to start over
again.

There she is. the current state of
the fry up. I think there are about 4 rows. I hate it now. i will probably
never finish it. I don’t even want to take the needles out of it because i
don’t want to deal with it.

Does anyone
know of someone that has completed one of these?

One custom bootie complete

karrie — Wed, 18 Aug 2004 00:04:03 +0000

While I was out of town, I finished one
bootie.

I tried to customize the baby bootie pattern in
Knitting for Baby
and this is what came
out.

i think that it is pretty cute. There
are some issues, like how big the ankle is – i omitted the eyelets so there will
not be a tie laced through. i thought it wouldn’t look right for a mary jane to
have a lace around the ankle.

When I
returned from my trip, I was happy to find a gift from my secret
pal.

it is yarn, handmade soap, and
chocolates. i love it!

The continuing saga of the baby booties…

karrie — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 19:02:57 +0000

i bet you thought you were never going to have to hear about our hideous booties again

you might remember that a little while ago sarah and i knit some really awful booties (you can refresh your memory here). During the baby shower we pulled them out to try and give them to the parents-to-be. everyone got to play the game of figuring out what to do with hideously over- and under-sized baby booties. the best suggestion for the large bootie was to use it as a washcloth-mitt for
washing the babies. My favorite suggestion is this:

A mitten for a hitch hiker. Too perfect.

Non absorbent, heat conducting rag

karrie — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 16:52:22 +0000

Pineapple Hat

karrie — Tue, 06 Apr 2004 17:09:19 +0000

This is what happens when a beginner tackles a project that is way too
hard.

There used to be a really great yarn store in Berkeley, CA called Straw
into Gold (I think it may have been owned by Crystal Palace Yarns – based
nearby). When I had just learned how to knit a few years ago, I heard they were
going out of business. Not one to pass up a going out of business sale, i
headed over. in my opinion, this was a really interesting plan since i had only
ever knit 1 thing and barely had any idea what i was doing.

Turns
out, i didnt get much yarn because i didnt know what to get. i did get a bunch
of really oddly sized circular needles for really cheap (most of which i have
yet to use). I think i was having delusions about making tons and tons of hats.
i also picked up a bunch of cute patterns that were half off. One that I was
particularly excited about was for a pineapple hat. it had cute green leaves
around the bottom, a patterned stitch in yellow that made it look like a
pineapple, and a funky pineapple stalk coming out of the top.

I
realize now that there are several things about this pattern that were just too
hard for me then. luckily, i didnt get very far before i had to quit. the first
step was to knit little green triangular leaves that would be the brim of the
hat. this required using 2 strands of yarn, and a really small circular needle.
then something happened where you had to switch to a smaller circular needle.
Since i knit very tightly it wasnt long until i had totally seized up the
stitches. thats right – they were so tight i could not get them to move on the
needle at all. i am still not really sure what happened. It was so
discouraging that i quit. which is probably good because i probably would have
lost my mind doing the yellow pineapple stitch.

I saved this little piece of the pineapple hat to remind me of how much it
sucked and not to try again for a while. Dont let this story discourage you
from trying the pineapple hat though. i was just too inexperienced and
impatient to make it. And now i have a mental block against it, so i am not
going to try it again for a few more years.