I’ll Knit If I Want To: Episode 24

hello and welcome to i'll knit if i want to i am drea renee nuts from andrew and maury let me just going to keep going with that i'm andrew barry of dre everyday knits and i like to try to answer some of your questions every week so here we go question number one oh and i'm wearing morning rituals so this is my new sweater i just released this week on tuesday complete with pockets so i am snuggling up in it for today's episode i will of course throw a link below all right question number one do you have any tips for tensioning tubular cast on and offs i use it to cast on a worsted weight sweater and the ribbing is wavy at the bottom so for casting on it is often recommended to go down a needle size for a tubular cast on um i think it's really depends on the knitter though so some people cast it on kind of tight um so they might not need to drop a needle size but if you're getting a wavy cast on then um like that wavy deal then i would definitely go down a needle size um because it is a looser it's a less stable cast on until you work those set up rows um and then you used it to cast off the socks the toku honey socks and can barely get the socks on so too loose on the cast on too tight on the bind off totally totally normal so go down a needle size for your cast on and then go back up so cast casa and you can also cast on on a straight needle which you might find handy um just people in general when they're working in tubular cast on the cast on can have a tendency to spiral once you've done it a lot it's pretty easy to see how to put those stitches back where they need to be but a straight needle does help avoid that spiraling action and then you could just knit your setup rows right onto the actual needle size you need to use and then for the bind off yeah you just kind of do it looser um i think the tendency when doing that kitchener stitch to bind it off can definitely be to kind of give it a little crank and it will just um be too much too tight i've done it and had to undo it and it was on socks um so now i just really take my time when doing the bind off and i do it just tight enough so that it looks tidy but i will also you know give it a tug as i go along um checking to make sure i'm not doing it too tight because it can be easy to do uh but if you do it at the right tension it can be a very lovely nice flexible bind off all right do you have any tips for modeling your knits best poses when i get my husband to take photos of me i always feel like a self-conscious goofball so that is the story of my life i really don't love being in the photos um i usually get grumpy pretty much every photo shoot cause i it's hard it's hard to be um and photos it's just for me but i think one thing that's great is it sounded like um your husband will also take photos of you as just knowing that they're looking at you with love in your eyes usually really the trick is that my husband tries to get me to laugh because i get self-conscious which puts not the loveliest of expressions on my face while we're trying to do take some photos um and so he'll you know say funny jokes and you know chat about our kids and try and get me to giggle and so that is usually what helps and i do find that in the beginning it feels really awkward but if you end up looking like i'm assuming you're using a digital camera or your phone if you end up looking at a photo and you like how it looks that will always change the rest of the shoot for me because i'm like oh okay like my sweater looks good or whatever it is and then i get kind of excited and feel like i can get into a groove with it for us it's also really hard because we only ever have a really short amount of time to get photos taken so we always have our kids with us and usually we go to like a rocky coastline or even just out in our yard it kind of depends on what's going on but um yeah it's usually keeping an eye on them while trying to snap a few pictures and they love to run into the pictures so it's always kind of hectic and we don't have a lot of time to do it so if maybe you're lucky enough to also have your time like give yourself that time to just like settle into it because i think in the beginning it's easy to feel camera shy and then it gets better as you go so um and as far as posing goes i don't i don't think i'm very good at that i will say my older sister back when i think i was in middle school she must have been in high school she actually and this was pre-digital so um she made our other sister use i think it was like a disposable camera or one of our dad's old film cameras and she took like all these photos of different poses so she would know how to pose in photos like how she so she would know how she wanted to look when she had her photo taken and so you could do that too i mean i think part of it's kind of like figuring out what poses um but know if you actually go look through my pictures i have like one pose and it's usually avoiding eye contact with the camera so um yeah i wish i had more to offer there but it's not probably my strong suit okay um and you know sometimes actually we really kind of just like do the goofball thing um make silly ugly faces and that always helps kind of ease into it as well okay next question i wanted to ask how you manage your time between your business and home life since you work from home and have small children do you set aside certain hours per week that are dedicated strictly to your business without interruption or do you just find time in between all the other goings on i'm just curious how you find that balance and how you mentally switch between designer maker mom and wife while still being able to produce so many wonderful designs i would love any insight well thank you um it has been probably the hardest part of the past few years i actually see my family as coming home right now we might have a visitor in a minute um so it's been really challenging i think that for me what i learned in early motherhood was i started working from a really young age um i turned 13 and got a after-school job and i very quickly kind of gained my confidence and my self-worth through working um i was a pretty good little worker and once i had my daughter i was home with her and i just realized how much i kind of lost a part of myself my identity not working um and that was hard for me um so i realized that i needed to still have that in my life and then definitely to have a creative outlet and i can tell when i haven't had enough kind of like creative fill-up time i'm also very introverted um which you know i love spending time with my family but as an introvert who's pretty sensitive especially to noise and different things like that um i found that the chaos of home life with young children i needed like quiet creative time to fill back up and if i didn't get that i could tell my patients would be lower i would just get more edgy so i ended up realizing that by really making time for some of those important things whether it is spinning for 20 minutes in the morning before everybody else gets up or knitting or heading up to my studio so i can get some sewing in after my kids are in bed how much that helped me to be the mom i wanted to be um and i think really the biggest thing i had to learn was like the time was never just gonna happen i have to prioritize and i have to make it happen and i don't know if i would have fully been able to kind of reach a better place of balance i kind of feel like i'm getting there i you know it's always a continuous thing uh but if i hadn't gotten so sick i think that getting sick actually is what pushed me to finally be like okay i have to prioritize cooking because i can't eat out and i need to eat a certain way to be healthy um moving my body because i do i went from having a very active job to a less active job that um so prioritizing just some movement so i feel good when then i spend more time in a chair and making whether that's cooking spinning any of those things and running my business and it's definitely some days it feels really overwhelming and hard and that is actually when i try to go through like a gratitude list and that really can help shift my mindset back into a place of like okay everything is like little bits you can only hey we can only do what we can do like we only do up so much time in the day but also like breaking down things down into little tasks so like i do definitely like write lists and as i have said before like i always carry my knitting around with me and if i have a few minutes i will pull it out and i'll knit a few stitches or if my kids are like really into an activity with each other or like they're in imagination play i might trace out a pattern real quick with sewing or you know right now today i've got my slow cooker going so dinner's ready when i'm done because i also know i get burnout if every night i have to cook after working all day and i'm tired so um i'm kind of answering this is a long answer and i probably straight off the path a little bit but um i do set aside out a schedule absolutely for my work um i work i mean i work a pretty typical schedule i would say about um eight or nine to five o'clock monday through friday i do also then set myself roles so like i work during that time but i work from our house if my kids need me they absolutely come up and get me if my husband needs me he comes up against me so it's not um i'm not just locked away up here i do um set rules the other way too though where like i don't check emails um after five or on weekends or instagram things like that like i really try to shut everything else down so that i have my work time and i have my family time um i mentally switch between designer maker mom and wife um you know i i guess i would say i don't know that i switch i think it all kind of bleeds into each other a little bit um i i will say i think one of the hard things about working from home is what you don't realize when you work out of the home and i i wonder how many other people experienced it this past year i've been working from home for a while now but when i used to be a baker i would have that commute time coming home whether it was you know a short car ride or my bike ride or whatever it was where i could kind of decompress from one thing to the next and here i you know now i don't have that i just go down and it's like dinner time kid die like um so i think finding any spaces where you can if you are wanting to try and move a little more easily from like one hat to the next um trying to be like maybe telling your family like i just need five minutes i gotta like move my brain to the next thing um but yeah i feel like i went all over with that i don't know i hope it was helpful okay um next question i've seen people talk about winding their hanks of yarn twice once from the hank on a swift and a second time from the resulting cake do you think this is worth it the theory is winding only once forms too tight a ball causing excessive excessive stretching of the yarn which could potentially change your stitches per inch i've heard the yarn then could even go back to its relaxed day after knitting and washing which would then change the size of the finished net what are your thoughts so i have heard this i tried it like four or five years ago um and i did it was really interesting if you dig back on my instagram you can actually see me holding out like the two cakes of yarn um what i have also read though is that by twisting those skeins that many times can start to kind of mess with the ply a little or the twist in the yarn um and i've knit a lot and i did not have not noticed a difference or that that is necessary so i do not do that um i think if you want to do it that's fine but i didn't find it to be necessary all right next question i'm knitting my first shawl um i am using brown needles or knitting for your fade which i inherited and i think by round they are meaning circular um i am finding that the triple yarn overs are getting caught where the needle and cord meet would this happen if i purchase charging needles for example is the join more smooth my knitting isn't tight but i'm worried that trying to get the yarn overs over the joint will cause some fraying or friction on the yarn yeah totally so um i do that's one of the reasons i love chow goo is that they have one of the smoothest joints um that i've experienced with interchangeable needles there are a couple brands that it's really there's like a lip that and it just drove me bonkers trying to get my stitches up over that little ledge and like you said especially if it splits your plies apart a little bit snags your yarn you don't really want to have that happening um so yeah i highly recommend chowgu interchangeables for a nice smooth join from the cord to the needle i i've been very happy with them all right i have a bonus question i don't know why i call this the bonus question sometimes they're funny like random short little not to do with knitting questions but sometimes it's really just a sixth question but i'm doing it so um i thought this was a really good question i am curious about adjusting the bicep i drop shoulder sweaters i have knit two drop shoulder sweaters and each time the bicep where i pick up the stitches is always too tight can this be solved by picking up more stitches or is there another way i can modify the pattern so they fit me better thank you for reading my question so i'm actually wearing a drop shoulder sweater right now so if you look here is where i picked up my stitches and knit down my sleeve and so yes this um i think is a great question with a pretty easy solution you could just pick up more stitches the only issue with that is if you pick up more stitches than that circumference maybe can handle is you're going to have like a ruffling thing happening coming out of the sleeve which i've seen before on sweaters um which personally it would bother me if it doesn't bother you you could absolutely do that it would be the easiest but it really wouldn't be challenging to go one step further so depending on the sweater sorry quick sip of water depending on the sweater um if it's knit top upper bottom down it's really actually going to be kind of the same all you want to do is typically your directions what they do so for this sweater for instance it's bottom up and you knit in the round until you reach what i call like the yoke which is where we start working back and forth flat so that we create these openings for the arms so all you would want to do is knit that opening longer or begin it earlier depending on if you want to add um how much if you would be bothered by that extra length also being added to the full sweater if you want the sweater to stay its intended length then i would just start your opening earlier in the directions and that way you have more space at that arm opening to knit up to pick up the stitches that would feel better for you how you want your sleeve to fit um the way that you would determine how many stitches you're and try that again how many stitches to pick up and how long to make that opening is what i would do is i would decide what your ideal bicep circumference would be so you might already know with those two sweaters now that you've tried those on you could be like oh if this just had one more inch i'd be really happy with this circumference so let's just pull out a random number let's say i'm going to say 14 inches because it's easy it's an easy number so let's say i wanted my bicep circumference on my sleeve to be 14 inches i would want my arm opening where i'm gonna pick up to be seven inches on the front and on the back because then when i pick up around that that would give me 14 inches and so you would just take your stitch gauge for how many stitches to pick up you would just take your stitch gage per inch and multiply that by 14 and then you know how many stitches you need to pick up and then you will want to adjust your decreases you'll probably just need to work um them a little quicker to get down to whatever cuff circumference you would then like or to get back you can also look at the pattern and if they have a arm size sleeve size that would feel better for you let's say it's that 14 inches you could look at what size has that 14 inches and then once you've made the adjustment here you could then follow those sleeve instructions and the decreases there if there are worked from um yeah it would be worked from the top down because you're picking up stanches so i hope that makes sense all right thanks for joining me this week since i'm wearing my new sweater i don't have a shoulder show this week but i will be back with a shawl next week and i'll show you how to wear it at the end um but check out morning rituals this was a very fun collaboration between myself and wolf folk yarns and ritual dyes um this is actually made out of woolfolk yarns flat which is a boucle which is makes this amazing textured yarn but it's 100 percent merino their ultra merino and then ritual dyes indie dyer dyed it so um it's this beautiful lilac color i don't wear a lot of purple and i really like this like lavender so anyways i hope that y'all have a great weekend happy knitting sewing spinning hiking dreaming relaxing whatever you're up to this weekend i hope you enjoy it and i'll see you again next week bye

Channel: Andrea Mowry

Views: 31,789

Keywords:

Id: fd5heuREQDs

Length: 20min 27sec (1227 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021