Mid-Year... Wait! What??

Sad but true. 2024 is more than half gone. You'd think someone were throwing clocks, time is flying by so fast lol 😂 

When last I popped in and wrote, I was restarting my sample of Cherish the Ladies. It was going quite well too. Until the circular needle's cable snapped that is.

I confess: I cried over this one. Fortunately, I was able to act quickly and I didn't lose any stitches. Or beads. 

But I'm afraid this little mishap has impacted my work knitting a lot. I'm trying to track down a longer circular needle in the required size. The one that the cable snapped on was a 32 inch/80cm length. To prevent another snapped cable I want to locate at least one of a 40 inch length; I'd prefer longer but anything longer than 32 inches should distribute the weight better, preventing another snapped cable.

My issue isn't actually *finding* a longer needle. At least online. But shipping costs are an absolute nightmare. A circular needle isn't exactly the heaviest item, and most shipping is equal to the price of the needle itself, if not more! That's just not feasible for someone on a limited budget.

That said, I will be in Town Friday to Sunday, so maybe I'll luck into finding something suitable. If it doesn't interfere with your crafting, cross your fingers for me and/or send along some needle finding vibes, please.

Here's the photo I took not long before my circular needle gave up:

It was looking so good! Hopefully I'll be back at it soon!

With this little hitch in my plans, plus an unhealthy dose of brain fog preventing me from writing up the instructions for my Countess Cathleen cloak, I've had to focus my energies into a personal project... or 2.

I finished my second Harvest cardigan (pattern by Tin Can Knits🔗; this link goes to the pattern page on their website) last evening! For this one I used 9 colors of yarn, and my shiny math rocks. To say it's colorful feels like a large understatement! And very random considering each stripe was chosen by rolling a D10 (for the color) and a D8 (for the number of ridges on the body, and number of rounds on the sleeves). Roomie got 2 photos of me modelling the finished sweater; one of the front and one of the back:

Of course I blinked right as she snapped the first one 😆 I love how cozy it feels, and how colorful it is. It's definitely one of a kind!

So yay! A large finished project in the books for me!

I may have mentioned it before but I had decided that 2024 was going to be my Year of Going For It in regards to my knitting, both personal and designing. Bringing some of those large and/or potentially over the top projects out of my head (where, I confess, my mind likes to tell me these big ideas are "too much" or "too loud" or "no one but you will ever want this thing"), and into reality. My multicolored Harvest was a jumping off point. So is my Cherish the Ladies wrap; I had talked myself out of using the beads. But then I remembered the advice someone gave me on Discord. It can be summed up as: You'll never know if there are like-minded knitters out there if you don't show off the projects that will attract them. Which makes a lot of sense, and it's not like I'm at a loss for big ideas! My design list has 24 ideas in the planning stages, and 3 more besides Countess Cathleen and Cherish the Ladies in the sample/writing stage. (Plus a dozen or so titles without firm enough ideas to really flesh them out just yet.) Of those, 7 definitely fit my idea of over-the-top/larger than life designs. 

When I look at my personal projects, I've got a couple... ok, there are several. Including one I started just the other day. 

As some of you may remember, I love double-knitting. And because I have a love of reading fantasy books, leaning towards urban fantasy (Oh! Author plug! Are you familiar with Seanan McGuire? Her October Daye series is awesome! If you're voting for the Hugos, and don't know what to pick for Best Series: vote for October Daye/Seanan McGuire!!! You won't regret it! She also writes the Incryptid series (on my tbr list, the Wayward Children series (super good!!), and a few others I'm blanking on. She is phenomenally prolific, and talented. Check her out if you haven't!), and like shiny things like math rocks, I discovered the designs of Tania Richter, aka AetherFang. In 2017, she introduced us to a Yarn Quest, a DnD style knitting experience. One of the patterns is for a blanket. A 20 square/chapter adventure involving double-knitting the charts that correspond to the dice rolls you make while reading through the tale she wrote for us. 

I'm going to have a very warm and colorful blanket to remember my character's Quest when I get it done :) I'm using the remnants from my super colorful Harvest cardi to start with. Chapter 1 is underway in red and black. You can find Tania's designs in her Payhip shop, Knit1 Roll20🔗. And as a teaser, here is the result of my first 2 dice rolls:

I'll keep you updated as I knit along the Yarn Quest. 

On a side note, I'll be teaching a basics of double-knitting workshop to an online group of friends in August. I'll be updating, and adding to, my double-knitting resources here in preparation for that. 

And that, my fiber friends, is everything I have to tell you about today! I'm looking forward to the trip to Town tomorrow, and my friend's wedding on Saturday.

Until next time, I remain

Yours in yarn,

Síle 

Spring Hasn't Quite Sprung

I said it wouldn't take me long to get Countess Cathleen done once the knotworks were underway. It's not quite done yet, but I'm over halfway through the knotworks now :) Here's the photo I put on Insta yesterday:

I love how it's coming together :) And only 25 rows to go!

Of course this means I'm going to have to turn to writing the pattern soon. Which I confess isn't always my favorite part of designing. But if I don't write it then I can't see how it looks when other knitters knit their own, and that is one of my favorite parts of designing. As with any thing, there are fun and not-so-fun aspects. So, I'll be pattern writing pretty soon, followed by tech-editing, and then test/beta knitting. I'll have more news on that as I get closer to having the pattern ready. The test will definitely be held on Yarnpond again. So if you're interested, stay tuned this spring.

Speaking of audience, I was checking the stats here recently and noticed I'm getting a lot of interest from Singapore and Hong Kong the last while. Hello, and welcome *waves* :) I'm not sure if it's my knitting or Irish Dance content that's bringing you to visit me but I'm happy to have you along for my adventures :) And hello to anyone else who's new, or not. The more the merrier, in both knitting and dancing :)

In Irish Dancing news: CLRG Worlds start in Glasgow tomorrow!! Squeeeee! I'll be following coverage via Instagram all this coming week. Best wishes to all the dancers!!

My next knitting adventure should be underway in a few weeks! I've narrowed down the bead choices for Cherish the Ladies, and will be casting on in April. With sport-weight wool, I'm going with 6/0 seed beads, and I've learned of a few Canadian sources for them that are very reasonable in both prices and shipping. I'll let you know how I get on once I've got them. I confess it's totally down to color at this point; not surprisingly at all *insert cry-laughing emoji here*. I think my love of color is fairly well documented ;)

That reminds me! I started a new personal project recently, and I'm using a lot of color for it. Some of you may remember that I knit a Harvest cardigan (pattern by Tin Can Knits; link to their site🔗) a couple of years ago. I love it, and wear it around the house quite a bit but... quite honestly, I messed up the size choice. It doesn't like to stay on and I can't close it because when your full-chest measurement is 47 inches, knitting the size with a finished measurement of 47 inches is not a good choice for a cardigan you plan to wear over light tops (usually a tank top but sometimes a tee if it's a little chillier) *facepalm* As I said, totally my goof up.

So I decided to knit a new one in a much more practical size. And I decided that I wanted a colorful sweater. Like all the colors. No, seriously. All the colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, dark blue/indigo, purple, pink, and black. 9 colors. And I toyed with rainbow order stripes, and maybe using the Fibonacci sequence for the number of rows, but then I got a much more... random idea.

Are you familiar with "shiny math rocks", aka role-playing game dice, aka D n' D dice? I just happen to have acquired a set of these lovely items last fall. And you may remember I knit a particularly epic scarf by the lovely designer, Aetherfang (aka Tania Richter) that involved rolling rpg dice to decide which chart in the adventure to knit. What would happen if I used my D10 for the color, and say the D8 to decide the number of ridges to knit? (If you're not familiar with the Harvest cardigan pattern, the front bands are knit in garter stitch while you knit the body in stockinette) Well, I can show you the first bit:

Fun, isn't it? I love it, And it's all been decided by dice rolls, which is very fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants knitting. I'm having a lot of fun with it :) Almost as much fun as I had using a random number generator to place the beads as I knit Romi Hill's Celaeno shawl. Hmm, there's an idea...

For those of you thinking 'Wait. She's using a D10 and only has 9 colors...?'  I have the colors numbered 1-9 according to good old Roy G. Biv with pink = 8, and black = 9. If I roll D10=10 I use the next color in the sequence. Say the last stripe I knit is orange (aka color 2), and I roll D10=10 for the next stripe, that stripe is then yellow (aka color 3). If I roll the same color number back to back, I re-roll the D10; it doesn't matter if the same number of ridges comes up in a row so the D8 doesn't need re-rolling ever.

Between my very colorful Harvest cardi, and getting through the final rows of my Countess Cathleen (740 stitches per row at this point), that's all my knitting time lately. I did a bit of swatching for Cherish the Ladies this week, just to confirm the needle size I had recorded in my design notebook. All systems are a go, as soon as I have the beads in hand :)

What's on your needles this Spring, fiber friends? We're still getting flurries here on the Island, so we'll see if Spring actually reaches us before June this year lol! I have a feeling I'll be getting a lot of wear out of both my cloak and my cardigan when they're finished! 

That's it from me for now!

Yours in yarn, and dice rolls,

Síle

Hello, June!

Little did I know when I wrote my last post that I had over 3 weeks more to my frozen-up arm. As you can imagine, that's put me waaay more behind on my various projects. Slowly I'm getting caught up while also working with a new strategy of breaks while working to keep my arm from going out again. 

What's going on here at KDRD? I'm currently editing my final tutorial for the Hornpipe Bag and, weather cooperating, photos should be done later in the week. I'm thinking the tutorial should be up on the weekend, with the pattern release next week. We'll see if it gets there!

The Four Hand Reel will be in test/beta knitting around July 5th. This is my log cabin square totebag. I'll be lining my proto soon; I had mislaid the fabric for a bit. The test/beta knit will be run on Yarnpond, which I found excellent to use when I tested the Hornpipe Bag last year. I'm thinking 10 weeks for the test period based on the yardage (5 colors/shades; about 200 yards each of 4 of them and 65-70 yds of the 5th one)

I'm continuing to play with my knotwork motif idea for the Countess Cathleen cloak. And I have a couple double-knitting ideas that I'm playing with too. And at least one other cable rich design. It's been very cold and blah here so I've been bringing more color into my work.

In my personal crafting, I'm well into the first sleeve of my Twist Again sweater. Finally I have the rhythm of the pattern down and the knitting is easy again. (Twist Again by Robynn Weldon on Payhip)

Does that happen to you? Find a pattern a bit of a struggle until you find the proper rhythm and then it just glides along. 

I've decided to change tracks on my bright colors sweater. Instead of crocheting a number of blocks (that truth be told were not lining up right), I've decided to make another Harvest cardigan using the 9 colors (8 bright ones with black) and knitting in alternating bands of the Fibonacci sequence, using ridges instead of rows. If you're not familiar with the Harvest cardigan, the front and neck edgings are knit at the same time as the rest of the top-down sweater, and the edgings are done in garter stitch. Hence using ridges. My plan is to knit 1 ridge in black, 1 ridge in Color 1, 2 ridges of black, 3 ridges of Color 2, 5 ridges of black, 8 ridges of Color 3, etc, keeping the colors in order and cycling through them as needed. That's the plan currently anyway. It could change again! lol (Harvest cardigan by Tin Can Knits on TinCanKnits.com)

 

I'm planning to get a new proto of my Single Jig Mitties on the needles soon. This is both a KDRD project (I want to update the photos when I get the pdf updated) and a personal project (I need something on my poor frozen hands. While the rest of North America is sweltering, we're experiencing Juneuary here on the island. It's 8°C and raining currently (46.4°F). We're living up to our Iceberg Alley nickname this year). I like when things work out that way. Single Jig Mitties on this site

And that's all I have that's fit to print this gloomy Monday! I look forward to getting the final Hornpipe Bag tutorial up this week.

I hope your crafting is going well. What are your plans for summer knitting? A light top perhaps? Or a lacy shawl? Maybe you prefer smaller things like mittens and hats so you're ready when the weather turns back to the cooler side of things. I'd love to hear about your plans :)

Your in yarn and wet weather,

Síle