The ryoknits knitting podcast: Episode 40

[Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] hi welcome to the rio knits podcast my name is rhiannon i am in knitter living in milwaukee wisconsin so i have a lot of new viewers i'm really thankful to everyone who has hit that subscribe button and who has shared my video or liked it or commented i especially love when you comment because it feels like we're really in conversation with each other versus um you know this being kind of like a one-way transaction so um again my name is rhiannon i live in milwaukee wisconsin i recently relocated to the midwest i'm a west coast girl born and bred and um you know grew up in california moved to oregon lived there for a good 20 years and now i'm here so um welcome in um i i like to start by saying i'm an intermediate knitter as well because i think that a lot of podcasters are very experienced knitters people who've been knitting for 20 30 years or you know maybe they they discovered knitting in college and now they're you know about my age so it's been a good long while um for me i've only been knitting um six years now so um i think it was uh 2016 when i really maybe like december 2015 when i really picked up the needles maybe i don't understand how time works or math and i'm saying that wrong but i i'm pretty sure i just passed my six year anniversary um so if you can do backwards math because apparently i cannot um so i have no confidence in what i just said but i tell you that because i want you to feel like um this is a space that's welcoming for people who are new to knitting and i also want to encourage you if you have any questions about anything i say or terminology that i use just ask me just comment and ask because i remember being a new knitter and not really having um people in my like regular day-to-day life who were knitters or fiber people at all and and feeling like i didn't understand half of what um you know people were saying when i would go to the yarn shop and they would say well what's you know anyway um like what weight of yarn are you looking for that's the example i was thinking of and i would be like i don't know i want to make a sweater you know like what weight of yarn do you need for that so i think that um you know one of the things that i hope to do is to provide a little bit of educational content but i don't want to do that in a way that is like replicating what other people have done or um you know creating tutorials for things that um you know someone else has done it better or um i don't want to assume what it is people want to hear from me in terms of educational content so um yeah i just started um teaching knitting at cream city yarn which is a local yarn shop here in milwaukee it's a beautiful store i highly recommend shopping there if you are in the area and you need to buy some yarn um and i had my first class this month it's it was so delightful so um for people who've been you know following me for longer you know that i had just been hired to teach at a local yarn shop in oregon before i moved here and um i didn't know exactly when i would be moving it was um you know we we moved because um there was a job offer and you know we needed to be here by a certain date so um you know i ended up not ever getting to actually teach those classes there in oregon um so it was a little bit of a oh shoot you know i missed my opportunity but then as soon as i knew i was going to be here by a certain date i reached out to this yarn shop and i said you know hey i you know here's my situation i want to teach knitting and um and they were really nice and um it happened to align with when they needed to find more teachers so um i feel really welcomed by them and um and i feel like it was pretty serendipitous that i was here when i was um so i taught a class that was cabling you know confidently and and helping people learn how to read charts and um cable with charts and i feel like it went really well so um that's a little bit more about me um i am also kind of a knitwear designer i have only published a few patterns i have a lot more that i that are in various stages of development and i might be giving a little bit of an update in some of these episodes but um that's kind of all about me um i live here with um my wife and we have a cat um i don't know what else to say about me my favorite color is blue and you'll you'll figure that out uh you'll figure out you'll figure out more as you watch um but thank you for being here i appreciate so much everybody who takes the time to watch these because i know there's a lot of people putting content out um and it you know the options are kind of endless so um it's really an honor to be part of your day um i have a pretty packed agenda and i knew this would happen because i sort of decided to um step back from doing an every two week podcast around the time that we moved because it wasn't feasible during the moving period and then also looking at 2022 um looking you know back at the last year what i did and what i think a lot of people did that i'm hearing a lot of is that maybe we bit off more than we could chew um and that you know it was a year where people started out with high hopes and you know tick tock was full of sea shanties and we were like hey you know second year of the pandemic we've got it we've got it nailed down this time and then um you know kind of the the hopefulness um wore off but the work was still there right everything all of that stuff we bit off so um yeah i think i think a lot of people are tired and that's kind of the main emotion that we're all feeling is tiredness um so i'm not putting a lot of pressure on myself to deliver a podcast every two weeks if i had something to share i would share it and that's kind of how i've always done this podcast where i don't have a lot of commitments and rules i do not intend ever to monetize it because i don't want it to become work i want it to remain uh play for me and something i enjoy um and so you know just kind of setting that other boundary of you know i think i'm gonna go back to my original format which is once a month um and so this is gonna be there's gonna be a lot of content this time around and that's what happens when you wait you know several weeks between podcasts but um you know if there's a long episode of a podcast that i'm watching um i i just pause it when i need to do something so that's pretty much you know what i what i can say in my defense if this ends up being like an hour and a half um okay so let's um let's dive right in i'm gonna be drinking tea i have my teacup from the tape museum of modern art in london england which is somewhere i got to go in the before times fortunately and just to tell you a little bit about the smug what i really love is they had a bunch of products where they got famous artists to design something like a mug but they don't tell you who it is so um this mug with the paint drips we have no idea but it was a famous artist okay and the tea inside of it is one of my favorite teas it's montana tea and spice company's evening in missoula so um this is a really nice um it is kind of like an evening blend but i think it's an all day blend when you just want to be kind of calm so it's got chamomile rose hips lemongrass peppermint spearmint lemon it's got a lot of other things but um it's a little spicy it's a lot herbal and a lot it what it really reminds me of is this the smell especially like bubble gum for children like bubble tape you know um it definitely that mint you really get that and then it's sweet um and um however the flavor is not too intense if you want it to be really bubble gummy and intense you steep it for like eight minutes and you'll get that but um in the beginning it it kind of starts out milder of course and you can brew it stronger but um i just thought i'd share i don't always talk about what i'm drinking but today um i really need fluids so okay so let's talk about um finished objects i have a lot of finished objects because i've been working on a lot of really small things so the first finished object is this pair of scrappy socks that i made um these were kind of my um combining different leftovers of different sock yarns to make a pair of christmas-esque socks um so you know not really christmassy especially but they do kind of have like a um you know pepperminty kind of vibe i guess um and um i forgot that i really cannot wear a sock with 64 stitches so i think these are going to end up being a gift for someone if i can't shrink them because um so it's gonna have to be somebody whose foot is bigger or around um and maybe not a lot longer than mine um but essentially these just came out really huge and you can see that gauge is small i don't know how to make my gauge much smaller i used a u.s size 1.5 needle and i thought that would be adequate i think if i wanted to make this needle size work for me i would have to cast on 56 stitches which is something i've done in the past i've also used a us size 1 and cast on 60 stitches with some degree of success but i am not great at knitting socks and something that i um plan to work on and i like that they're small enough that i can sort of go oh well um you know i'll get better although i will say it took me like an hour to weave in all the ends on each sock i don't know maybe on both there were a lot of ends because these color changes are these this is three different yarns so um yeah it was it was rough and i won't go over what the yarns are because um i talk about these more in other episodes and um yeah i would love to know if you have any um strategies for making socks fit better um because something i struggle with is that if i go down on the needle size too much then my ribbing the top edge tends to be too tight but then the most of the sock fits really great i know that there are stretchy cast ons you can do i definitely like cuff down socks way better than um toe up i just do um and i think my ribbing comes out nicer i've talked about this before the ribbing i do at the beginning of a project always looks nicer than the ribbing i do at the end so i'm not really sure if that has to do with the weight of the project pulling on the yarn or what but essentially i yeah there's a lot of room for improvement on those socks so um okay um so you know as i've mentioned my hands are cold here because it's very cold right now i think the high today is like 14 degrees fahrenheit which is probably negative something in celsius um so i was looking for an easy pair of mittens to knit um so i found this pattern uh that a friend was teaching a class on called the miller mittens and i made these i didn't weave in the ends yet because i didn't really love how they came out um this yarn is neighborhood fiber company's studio bulky um it's really nice um it's absolutely gorgeous i think um this is one of those yarns that i bought and then i made a sweater frogged it because i was like i don't think bulky weight sweaters are right for me in this climate and so now i have leftover yarn but it was a really cropped small sweater so it's not enough to make a sweater out of now um you know and i should say if i'm going to make a bulky way sweater it's probably going to need long sleeves um and be like a full length because um i could actually wear that in this climate but i don't have enough yarn of this so it's going to just show up in other little projects so i took some of that yarn and i um made these mittens which then i i didn't love and it's not that i didn't love um the pattern i think the pattern is a really good generic starter and it's a free pattern so i think my expectations of free patterns tend to be pretty low um not in a negative way but i just don't think people need to do that much work to give you something for free i think the point of free patterns is to kind of um what they're giving you is really an understanding of like the components of a mitten which is what i really got out of it and so after knitting these and obviously i didn't even make them the same size because i did the first one and it was too small um i immediately thought you know i think i want a denser gauge i think i want a smaller um or a lighter weight of yarn i think i want a mitten with um like a little more shape in the thumb that was my um kind of biggest hurdle with this um and i wanted a mitten where the thumb gusset didn't start immediately after the ripping so this is the thing here here is you know obviously like the bottom of my hand um if the ribbing comes all the way up to here it tends to just pull up um because i think there's that little space where maybe your hand is starting to grow a little right here um but it's not quite your thumb yet so here's kind of thumb and up and then so i started riffing on this and i was joking in my head that these mittens i was making were the miller light because they are um worsted weight instead of bulky um but i live right by the miller brewing company and so you know it's just funny to me you know it's very milwaukee the miller light right um and my wife wanted some mittens that she's been wanting mittens that have kind of like a flip top where it's convertible to you know either a full mitten or a fingerless glove um and so this was kind of my prototype um i made this for my spouse it's got the full thumb and something i did is i um after i picked up stitches for the thumb i decreased a little just to give it a a snugger fit around the thumb because i think that sort of i don't like that clumsy thick feeling on my thumb um and i um of invented this fingerless glove um so because i was calling these the miller light in my mind i was very very influenced and inspired by these mittens and i decided i'm just gonna release this as a free mitten pattern because i think that um you know it's not something i didn't reinvent the wheel there's no chart to it there's no design really other than it's just a solid mitten um so again this is my prototype here um for a worsted weight mitten i um i made these kind of by trial and error and i feel like it's uh it's it's pretty neat that i can do that you know i didn't i didn't know that i could just um do that and i think that's one of those things that um if you grew up in the knitting tradition of just winging it or just understanding basic shapes and pattern blocks that feels like nothing but if you grew up in the um in the tradition i guess like me where it's like by the time i came to knitting i it was like using patterns and um you know um you know just this kind of post ravel ravelry world of there being lots of tutorials and patterns and things so you do learn a little bit more hand-holy way of knitting so to invent things feels sometimes not so approachable um but yeah so um made that and i thought it would not be hard to also release a pattern that's three in one so you can get just a fingerless mitt you can get um a full mitten or you can get the flip top like this and one of the things i really wanted it to have is um is to be button free although you could potentially you know put a snap on there i guess i should hold it up to the camera put snaps and then you know that could snap back i don't i don't think it's necessary and i think there's enough weight to it that it sits back nicely um so then here was my first kind of like test knit of my own prototype and i made just like a full mitten for myself i went down a needle size my gauge got tighter i still think it could be a bit tighter but i think for a full mitten you do want it to be a little bit loose you know you don't want it to fit um like super fitted i guess because the important thing is just that it stays on your hand um and that's where i also think having a little bit of space between the cuff and the thumb gusset helps it um so that it doesn't want to slide off your hand um i still think that because this is super washable i could go down another needle size so i'm going to be test knitting my own pattern and if you would like to test knit it um get in touch i would love to have you test it out i'd love to see what people come up with as like kind of their ideal gauge and how you know tight it is and the pattern is really it's written up now it's more of a recipe so um i do give you like a stitch count i'm using 36 stitches but i do also have like points in the pattern where i say like you know you might experiment with doing fewer or more stitches here or you might you know lengthen this area between the wrist and the thumb gusset based on your hand so it's really more of a recipe for you to just try it on as you go just try it on frequently and figure out like does this need to be longer or shorter here do i need the thumb you know to be um even narrower than what the pattern says do i need the overall mitten to be narrower and um you know my goal is just to write a solid free pattern for worsted weight mittens that will help people figure out how to make the right mitten for them and also you know give you the option again of fingerless glove or convertible or just a solid mix um so three pairs of mittens but there's more so um meanwhile my friend susan was test was looking for test notes for her own fingerless mitts pattern um the towie which is a fingerless mitt that's all ribbing and it uses a sport weight with a mohair so you get kind of like a dk weight a plump dk weight gauge um or i guess fabric um so i have been having the time of my life knitting and planning towie mittens so um let me just uh back up a little and say that like i mentioned in 2021 i bit off more than i could chew with knitting and i was casting on every time i felt like it it seems i cast on things when i knew i probably shouldn't have and it's one of those things where it's like it's a good reminder that self-care is not self-indulgence so self-indulgence is casting on all the time self-care is knowing that future me is going to be very overwhelmed by having three sweaters on the go two of which have cables charts you know like our detail rich and one of which is a fingering white sweater so um you know there's just there's a lot there's a lot of stuff that's kind of stalled and i am just sort of taking a set back and i'm trying to rediscover kind of like the joy of knitting um which sounds weird because obviously if i didn't enjoy it i wouldn't do it um but there's there comes a time i think or times in in your knitting career where you you start to maybe um get ahead of yourself right um and that's what i was doing and i just needed just to take a step back and not take myself so seriously and rediscover like playing and um knitting in a way that's like not so serious not so intentional right it's just like i like this this is fun i want to do this so so for me the towie mittens have really given me back that playfulness um the kind of like um joy of knitting um so i i just have to show you now so this is the first pair um that i did and you can see there's kind of a color block effect what i did is um change the color of mohair so um you know it's the top half and the bottom half are just reversed on either mitten um so like i mentioned this is a fingerless glove pattern it's going to be released on saturday january 22nd so by the time this video is up it will probably be out it's called towie which is a um [Music] it's a a regional word from gosh um like prince edward island i think um some of the canadian islands um where newfoundland maybe that's it labrador anyway um susan is from a region of canada that has a lot of islands um on and it's the east coast of canada so it's a word that's like a for part of the regional dialect but tawi is something really soft and really um my impression you know a very like um just like soft fluffy thing like it could even be like you would describe a cloud that you can't physically touch but you know it's very fluffy um so these mittens are just delightful um and i think this is going to be something that i just always have on my needles i didn't have to do a special cast on or bind off i just knit ribbing the um increases are very simple it's the same for left hand and right hand so there's so much about this pattern that i think it is very simple and paired back in all the right ways so that it becomes a blank slate for you to kind of dream and imagine what you want to put onto it so like i said my first pair this was actually the first one i knit and i started out with this color combination and then i just was sort of intrigued by this color combination so okay i have a massive bin of yarn in my lap um not massive but pretty big um and so this is all the yarns and mohairs so the first is um this is a retrosaria vovo and actually i have a bunch of the tags here to help me along um so this is one of those colors that it's just called number seven you know but it's kind of a grapey um it's kind of a um [Music] grape color i guess um one must kind of color um and then i paired it with a mohair from san nisgarn which is also just a color number um tin or tine silk mohair um and the color is 5042. so obviously these are colors i enjoy as you can tell from the sweater i'm wearing um which is the astragal i um knit at the beginning of last year um so i was you know really enjoying this but i had actually bought um this yarn and this mohair together because i was going to swatch them to see if that was something i wanted to um knit into a sweater oops that's not something else so um this one is the um [Music] um mohair that's it's called like dark burgundy gray which feels like a weird name for a color that's clearly purple um and i don't know why it's called dark burgundy gray but i think if you mix burgundy gray it becomes purple so um that's what this pair of taue mittens is made with and i just reversed again i just um i just reversed it so the bottom half has more of a lavender tint and the top half has a little more red to it um then i made a pair um well actually i cast on one mitten and then i knit another mitten in another color combination in this wonderful blue that looks to me almost electric um i don't know if the light is gonna do it justice but um this is a combination of holst tides which is the wool silk blend in the colorway nightshade um so it's 70 wool and 30 silk so wool silk blends are like my absolute favorite yarns i think um for a lot of things and um the blue is the um shibuy knits silk cloud or shibuya silk cloud which is 60 mohair 40 silk and this color is blueprint so these are two pretty i would say different colors but when you put them together you get this pretty stunning um blue that again to me it almost looks electric because of the way that the the brighter blue um in the thinner strand kind of like livens up and it's almost like sparks or something so i knit like one in this color and then i knit this one and then i knit this pair um and then i had to go back and finish the others so um i still have one of the blue ones as a work in progress and um yeah i just was like having so much fun putting colors together um so this here is a combination these are actually a pair that i knit for my spouse this is a combination of um a mystery gray yarn that i had in my stash um with this mohair that has a very gentle color fade and i think it's showing up on the camera pretty well um there's kind of like shades of green and purple in this mohair and then at some points it's very light gray almost white so you get a different effect on either mitten which i really love um so this mohair is from sugarbush and it's called drizzle it's actually 76 mohair and 24 silk so it's it's got more halo and i think you can really see that um this is the one that was only um 60 percent mohair and that's the halo and then this is the one that's 76 percent so you see very very fuzzy very warm um and again this uh gray yarn was a mystery all i know about it all i remember is that the tag it was a british wall it was one of the like it it's 100 wool it's a british something um and it was it was an undyed like you know it was gray off the sheep or whatever right maybe they blended different fleeces together to get that color but it was an undyed one so uh here's the remains of it i wish i knew what this was because it kind of it kind of drives me crazy i save almost all of my um ball bands and tags because i want to remember what i used right and i will remember which ball band goes to which yarn so i have a distinct memory of this having a ball uh not a ball band but like a tag that was um like a brown paper with just black ink very simple i feel like the word kent and lamb the words kent and lamb's wool were in there somewhere i have no idea what it was but anyways um i have like a whole um pouch full of the ball bands of like all the yarns i've ever used and i started doing this a couple years into my knitting journey because it helps when you want to go back and figure out what something is so um because of that i know that um this is the dusty rose mohair from knitting for olive um and yeah i um so i have all these mohairs i tend to just kind of like buy random skeins of mohair sometimes and just wonder what i'm gonna do with it it's just a thing i do i don't know why um but i wanted to show you kind of the cool thing with this um pattern and just with like color play that um i've been doing so let me pull that chair out and put that down so um in order to kind of come up with new color combinations all you have to do if you have some leftover yarn i mean and this was one skein of the retrosaria and i got two mittens and i have probably half to a third of the of the um yarn ball left and yeah i did cake it up because even though it's one of those that it's like you could just knit off of it i don't like those um like this shape i feel like then when you pull the yarn it like does this weird floppy thing and it doesn't just like roll off easily the way it does from a cake so i end up caking those up anyway and like i cake up this mohair even though that you know um was also it was in the um it was in this shape um before so i don't really love knitting right off the ball in that shape um so anyway i i i just have been taking some yarn so this is some old like jameson and smith from a sweater i knit a few years ago and i combined it with this um burgundy gray color and i just started stranding them together and rolling it up in a ball and then just by doing that you can really get a good sense of what that color combination would look like in a mitten um so for example here is the um color combo that this part of the mitten is made out of and you can see it's pretty it's pretty accurate so um you know if you're kind of questioning if a certain color combo is gonna look good together you can just kind of roll them up in a little ball and then you get a sense so here's where i tried to take that same uh jameson and smith and combine it with the knitting for all of dusty rose because these two colors are really pretty together when i hold them like that but when i do that i don't know i feel like it kind of doesn't it doesn't make my heart sing and it certainly doesn't look different enough from that that it makes me want to cast on that so i've just been rolling up yarns together just to see what they would look like um and how the colors would look together and i recently saw on a podcast where somebody took a uh a really contrasting mohair like almost like they had like a navy mohair with a white um this is getting messy with like a white yarn um and so you know you can even you can even figure out what would that look like you know is that gonna look it's going to give you a marled effect for sure but say i wanted to take the you know these two colors that are very different i just start winding them up like this and pretty soon i have a little knot that tells me that this is actually going to look kind of gray the overall effect is going to be kind of like a blue gray if i do the blue and the white um so i think you know just if you're like me and you have a bunch of like leftover yarns and scraps and things like this is a really fun way to play with color and to figure out you know like if i wanted to make mittens that had like yellow what what color could i mix with them what happens when i put you know this yellow and this pink together like what does that look like you know i can start just rolling it up and get a sense of you know how that looks um not good in my opinion but you know just just a suggestion um if you are you know looking for something that will bring you bring a little bit of playfulness to your knitting then i highly recommend this pattern um and i have plans for so many more i think i'm actually going to be pairing this with this because i think that um it will give me a really like vibrant red that's not um too orangey i don't like orangey reds i like um pinky reds i okay a bug just tried to land on my face so um that's where we're at so moving on from that um i have a couple of other projects that i wanted to share so for um the month of january for my sort of renew and improve goal which is i said it was going to be like a make-a-long and i still want to have it be a make-a-long but i know that um the making app is doing a mend along or something um and so i want to make it low pressure i still i you know i love com contests and prizes and stuff um i love the like random winner thing because it's like it's so non-judgmental you know um and it's not like someone's subjective opinion of of who deserves to win it's just like maybe you win you know um but anyway um let me know if you still think it's worth doing this as a make along um and if not that's okay um but i just wanted to kind of challenge myself to like every month do something where i transform something in my wardrobe so it could be mending but it could also be um you know like just taking um an old shirt and cutting it up into [Music] squares for a quilt that i'm gonna use at a later date you know the point is just for me it's like how do you give things a new lease on life rather than put them in the landfill um because even if you donate clothes they often end up being more or less dumped um so yeah i it's like if we can just sort of keep them in our homes and like find a new purpose for them or something i think that would be better um but it's also about like creative expression and like you know say you knit yourself a solid color raglan and it no longer gives you joy can you um can you like embroider on it or something you know do some swiss darning to make like a cool pattern or you know like what can you do to transform that object so i had a pair of jeans and they're just like all of my jeans they are from eddie bauer i do not i do not buy like um tailor-made you know um bespoke jeans and i don't know how to sew jeans although that's a long-term goal but like a lot of things um i often have to hem my pants so i'm pretty short so um i decided that since i was gonna have to hem them anyway i was going to do something kind of interesting with them so um i took some fabric that i had bought at the pendleton woolen mill outlet in portland and i sewed it on the inside hem so here's what it looks like when i don't fold that up um it's you can kind of see that there's a line where it's sewn but if i just wore it like this then these are just regular length pants but i love to cuff my pants so i can cuff them a little and you get a little bit of a fun uh pattern of this wool um because these are just like literally the mill ends of blankets and scarves and things that pendleton makes or i can cuff it a lot and have this fabric showing my one caveat i haven't i don't think i've washed these in the machine yet so i'm curious if the wool is gonna shrink i'm a little nervous um but it's woven and it's already felted so i don't know what could happen i think i'm gonna maybe not put them in the dryer and just see if that you know um is okay like the first time i'll try you know because i always wash them with cold water anyway but you know i i'm glad i did this anyway because i just was like why have a regular boring pair of jeans when you can have jeans that have a little fun um kind of peekaboo pattern and you can see i didn't try to match the pattern because this was just a scrap end so yeah that was my first project um and my second project along those lines i wasn't anticipating doing this one yet because i set myself a goal of doing this once a month um was i um just hemmed the cuff of a sweater so um one of the cuffs of my weekender sweater weekender light got um [Music] torn and i mended it and i have a little video that i'm going to insert here showing how i did that so my sleeve cuff had torn in part of the bind off and the first thing i had to do is go back to the beginning of the bind off and rip off to the point that it had torn which is where that needle is um i just sort of hold the stitches carefully and pull gently on the string because this is a pretty rustic wool this is brooklyn tweed loft um and the stitches don't run down which is really one of the main advantages of woolen spun yarns and then i went in picked up all of those stitches on one of my smallest dpn needles and i didn't really worry about picking them up you know in the right order i just pick them up because if you get them backwards then you just have to knit or purl through the back loop essentially it's that same kind of movement um or you can rearrange them and then you know go through and get them so once i got to the point that the stitches were ripped off those are the stitches that were initially loose i actually frogged or ripped back a little bit farther so i'd have a nice long tail once i had that yarn tail um i could pick up my stitch and start knitting back now because i didn't have any more of this yarn that i had used in the sweater originally i stranded together a brown yarn and a blue yarn because this yarn has um it's a kind of smoky brown with blue tweed effect so by combining those two and then spit splicing them onto the end of the yarn i was able to get myself a good long tail to complete the bind off originally there was a tubular bind off for this cuff but i just went ahead and did a standard binding off in pattern because i really don't think you can tell the difference and i wanted this to be um you know a pretty easy repair so i had a couple of options i could have actually ripped back an entire row and bound off one row earlier i also could have done a contrasting color bind off to be sort of um a visible mend um and i just opted for what felt like the easiest way and um you know i didn't really want this sweater to have a different color on it so um i just went ahead and you know tried to match as best i could i think it worked the end result is pretty subtle and not super visible but very sturdy okay so um in addition to the um make along i am hosting a cal just year long knit something blue that's all you have to do to enter knit something blue use the hashtag knitblue2022 on instagram tag me in it if you're not on instagram comment below and we'll find a way to include you because i'm not trying to exclude people by having it on that platform that's just the easiest way for me to do it um so my goal this year with blue is just i've accumulated a lot of blue yarn it's my favorite color most of my summer clothes and like warmer season clothes are um blue like i love wearing blue all day every day um and i do a lot of like blue with like black or white or gray you know pairing it with neutrals i i do blue and red a lot i do um you know just blue has to be in like every outfit i wear and that's why i wear blue jeans a lot honestly because they're blue and they're pretty comfortable i mean you know in the before times i thought they were incredibly comfortable but you know elastic waistbands have been more and more prominent in our lives in these last few years so um there's that um so yeah so knit blue 2022 for me is just about kind of celebrating that i love this color and i should knit with it more because i found that i was buying a lot of blue yarn and then not actually knitting said blue yarn so the first obviously is i'm doing these towie mittens um but i also started a project that i've been wanting to do for a really long time and even though i have plenty of things on the needles that i could and can work on um i wanted to cast on something for this cow that would be kind of like start start the ear off on the right foot so i cast this on this is the sole verve shawl by skander knits and it's a really beautiful garter stitch crescent shaped shawl that's worked from end to end i really like how that's showing off the lace right there and it's worked at a very loose gauge and when i block it i'm going to be blocking it really aggressively so it's going to be even looser of a gauge and i love the way that this pattern has um a pretty minimalist i would say um lace pattern um where it's it's a you know it's a pretty simple repeat um you know but you get this really beautiful edging from it and the edge goes from one end to the other i think that's really cool and you're not having to pick up stitches or anything it's knit all in one piece so i love that and i also really love how it has this really great loose gauge with garter stitch because what you get is almost like an accordion like uh effect if you look at the fabric up close i absolutely love it so i'm knitting it with um not the suggested yarn which is um not unusual for me to kind of make maybe some questionable choices with yarn substitution but i think this one's actually turning out really great i mean look at that it's beautiful um so rather than using a very rustic woolen spun sport weight yarn on a size 10 needle what i'm doing um is using a very very very thin lace weight yarn held double this is veil by brooklyn tweed the color is sashico it's this really deep deep blue um that looks like if you dip something in an indigo pot 400 times it's it's really deep that in certain light it almost looks black um but when the light's on it's definitely blue um and i love the way this yarn feels so i bought a whole bunch of this yarn at one point because i was like oh lace shawls i'm going to make so many lace shawls um with lace weight yarn and then you know kind of swatching it and playing around with it i found that it really works up nicely held double the strands almost like just melt together so i want to talk about like what information is on this tag so um just to give you a sense of what i'm working with here so this what i what i was drawn to is that this is a really like soft springy um lace weight yarn it's very lightweight i mean for 50 grams you get 450 yards so i have like i have lace weight yarn that is like half of that or i don't know um you know i think 450 yards for 100 grams would be a very light fingering weight right so this is like twice as light as that you would need 900 yards of this essentially to make up 100 grams like a that's that's nuts um and it's uh american rambulay wool um it says it blooms a lot when you wash and block it and i am going to be blocking this um pretty aggressively like i said just to kind of stretch out that garter so i went down to needle size because i felt like it was giving me the fabric i wanted and you know as i as i learn more about knitting yes you can change your gay the gauge of the project as long as you understand what the consequences are and as long as it's what you're going for so because this is something that um i you know i will wear this shawl really like a scarf more than anything else it's not going to be um draped artistically around my body while i pose it's going to be wrapped around my neck while i am you know outdoors in the cold so um and i might wear it around my shoulders on a summer evening with a light dress but chances are it's really going to be more of a winter scarf for me um and so i really love the um having something that's very lightweight and airy and lacy but like wool and it traps that warmth because you get kind of the look of the bulky scarf but not the feel right it feels real it feels very good to me to have something kind of light and airy around my neck um and so i um yeah i mean this says it's worst it's fun but i i swear it's so fine i don't know how you would know um i also wanted to talk a little bit about how i made this cake so when i do a double stranded project i strand them together in a cake and i know that maybe a hot take um some people will tell you to never do that um but i i made it happen and here's a photo of how i made it happen so i have an amish style swift and um what i did is i just basically i caked up the two individual skeins and then i put each skein kind of behind the swift with the strand running between those pegs and then use that so that they were evenly tensioned they were both the same distance and angle from the from the winder and i have also heard and found to be true that the first wind so the first cake that you make from a skein of yarn is going to be too tight and so you need to re-cake it so you so i've been doing that now so i make you know i cake up the yarn and then i from that cake i just wind it again because what happens is that there's so much tension and pulling for it to come out of that skein that you get that's why you get like the yarn bar in the middle that's why you get those um cakes where it's like almost conically shaped and then the farther you you know pull down it becomes more and more like cone-shaped instead of um you know like a um i don't know a cylinder you know puck i don't know so this one you can see it it's not like bulging out of the top or bottom it is a little bit um leaning this way um but it's really pretty uniform and you have a lot of definition without things being very tight on this skein so yeah i've uh caked it together i'm working on my scarf um i think that's all i have to say about that but um yeah the final project work in project i wanted to share is just um the um a little update on my new blonde shawl so it probably doesn't look much bigger to you than it did last time and that's simply because i entirely frogged it and um started over um i wasn't enjoying the baubles i i wasn't enjoying making them and i wasn't enjoying the look of them so i went ahead and just frog it and started over and i'm making a very very minimalist um little um bobble that is just it's so small that i think it just it just does the job of filling that space in the pattern without being like this thing that's protruding from the fabric so um i'm happy with that this pattern has um you know kind of like long stalks of leafy material which is what i'm working on and then it has big flowers at the top so i'll do like big bobbles up on the top flowers i think but um i'm finding a lot more joy with it just a little more minimal and finally another tale from the frog pond i was working on the pattern de merknin which is a pair of fingerless gloves that were two color color work and i just robbed them i realized that i had too many things i wanted to change or fix about the pattern and it just wasn't bringing me joy and my color combination was not doing anything for me that i wasn't getting out of these delightful blue mittens and um i would much rather make another pair of these than um stick with a pattern that you know i'm just having to adjust and um i think that's just you know that's reality and that's growing up is knowing when to cut your losses right okay so i've given you a couple of um i've shown a little couple of tutorial um video and photo snippets just showing you know how i make a cake out of two strands um with even tension um how i'm like mixing colors and and just you know doing color play work for my towie mittens um and how i mended that sleeve cuff um but i have one more thing to kind of um maybe give you some inspiration um it's not really a tutorial but um i wanted to talk about something i've been doing so um a lot of times you know people create like make nines or um or they have like big you know pinterest boards or something for like wardrobe inspiration and i saw um so i'm part of the slack group that um mckenzie of empty third yarnco has and one of the other makers on there um was showing how she just drew pictures and like illustrated some of the things she wanted to make to kind of visualize how they would go together or go with other things in her wardrobe and i thought that was such a great idea because i think um you know one of the reasons i'm making so many blue things this year is that i have so much blue in my wardrobe and blue looks great with more blue um and that's what i want to wear all the time and lately i feel like i only want to wear like blue purple and like some neutral colors and like you know maybe some shades that are adjacent to it but that's sort of where i'm at and um so i took out some colored pencils and i started to um just kind of draw some of the things that i wanted to make in the in the future i don't know some of them are things i've already made some of that like here are my pants and here's the sweater that i'm wearing right now here are the towie mittens here is a wool skirt which we won't talk about because it came out very badly um and then you know here's just like a ready to wear dress that i own um and then here's some projects that i already have the materials for here's my cell there right um i have some fabric for a dress that i'm you know considering which pattern to use but essentially i just kind of drew them all and and it really gave me a lot of insight into like how i could combine these so my next step i think is i'm going to actually do like individual drawings and then cut them out like paper dolls i'm gonna make a paper doll of myself and i'm going to make paper clothes of the things i already have and then some paper clothes of the things that i'm considering making because i find that a lot of wardrobe activities require you to like pull everything out throw it on your bed start pairing outfits take photos and that feels like way too much work and then you have to put it all away so what i'm just gonna do is make essentially a paper doll and some paper clothes and then i can start to choose and whittle down from all the projects that i want to make whittle down based on what would i want to have first and what do i think will be most important to um you know make as it goes with the other things so for example um one of the other reasons i am working on my selver shawl first is that even though i always see sweater patterns that i want to cast on i actually have a lot of sweaters you know i have ready to wear sweaters i have my hand knitted sweaters and then with my hand knitted sweaters the favorite ones i tend to wear again and again and again like this one i wear a lot um i have a gray cozy classic raglan that i wear a lot i wear my weekender light a lot you know so if it if it was you know really about what do i need in my wardrobe and what do i want to be able to have i think i don't need sweaters right away so even though i have sweaters on the needles like they can wait right i'm going to focus on getting my shawls done because what i don't have is a lot of um you know like scarves and it's so funny because i feel like you know scarves get such a bad rap as like a beginner project but i've almost thought about like why don't we keep knitting like a garter stitch scarf after we become experienced knitters right why do people become what makes a person decide oh i'm only going to knit sweaters now because i see that a lot i see people who make just sweaters maybe they make sweaters and shawls or they make like um sweaters and socks and i can understand making a lot of socks because you need a lot of socks i can understand making a lot of hats if you live in a cold climate or mittens or something you know where it's like you can never have too many mittens right you just you can't because they get dirty they get beat up they wear out faster um but sweaters i feel like if you are taking care of them they last for a very long time um and uh yeah i don't know i guess i don't understand like why do people get sort of stuck on something where it's like you know yeah i don't know um and i find that scarves and cowls bring me a lot more joy than hats in terms of keeping my ears warm keeping my head warm um i don't know so um so yeah so paper doll it up if you are trying to figure out like how do i narrow down my cue essentially or all my favorite things that i want to make um and and i think maybe you'll start to see like these are things that could go um with you know what i have and then you can also start to look at um you know what do i have the yarn for and what you know what do i need first and so that becomes another way if you're trying to stop yourself from just stockpiling stuff because it's so much of course you can dream knit faster than you can actually knit all right it's time for book talk i have been listening to a lot of audiobooks because i've been wanting to give my eyes a rest from the blue light so um i have concealer on and i still have like dark circles under my eyes and i take vitamin d so it's definitely a phone looking at my phone looking at my computer screen thing um and just probably needing to get outside more get some fresh air and sunshine even though it's five degrees or whatever um so i've been listening to audiobooks more and i intend to keep doing that um i've also found and i've talked about this before audiobooks are a great way to get through the the kind of heavy duty or more academic non-fiction stuff that i like to read so the first audiobook i read which i have the paperback of but i just wasn't reading it is the color of love by richard rothstein this is a really great book um for me it was kind of a mindfulness thing because residential segregation is a very um serious very intense thing here and we're lucky that we landed in one of the few neighborhoods that's very diverse so yeah so i've been interested in the idea of redlining and residential segregation set for a few years and it's something that i think about more as we want to become homeowners in the near future um and also um just a few years ago i realized that the neighborhood i grew up in was very very um redlined very um you know the sort of neighborhood and neighboring neighborhoods were very much divided by um race ethnicity etc um so i lived in the neighborhood that was like all um either mixed race families or mixed ethnicity families or immigrants or we were kind of like the neighborhood of all the people who didn't fit neatly into the other categories and i always just thought we were very interesting and it was like only a few years ago that that kind of like light bulb went off that i was like oh okay that's what happened right um so i read that book it's it's not a happy book but i think it's a hopeful book because the author is actually a lawyer who's making a legal case and so when you actually hear him out it's like this is like this is an actual case this could be um you know people could really benefit from this legal argument and from i think he defends his case admirably and it you don't come away with you know any doubts whatsoever that he's correct so um yeah i i wanted to get into some like mysteries and maybe like cozy mysteries so i i i started reading or listening to a book called a is for alibi by sue grafton and um you know it's this alphabet series of mysteries and i thought she was a pretty good writer because i um read one of her essays in a collection about knitting but i found that there was some fat phobic content in this book and i wasn't like the first time around i went okay right um but then it just kind of like kept happening and also um there was some stuff that's like i don't mind like heteronormativity but what i really don't like is when um gender stuff is like kind of creepy so for instance there's a character who's consistently described as sort of like this animalistic male who just exudes sexuality and to me that sounds like a sexual predator like when i hear animal it's like oh here's a person who doesn't control himself or doesn't accept responsibility for his actions right um and so that's really a turn off for me um i don't i don't you know i don't know i i feel like this is a common thing and a lot of romance and stuff and i and i suppose maybe um heterosexual women you know enjoy the thought of a man being like a beast who has no um moral compass but to me that sounds like a criminal um so i'm not super into it like yeah it's just so i had to like stop with that book and then i started reading another i found another audiobook that was a detective book but it just wasn't it just wasn't for me so then i remembered that somebody had told me about the cozy knitting mysteries and so i listened to knit one kill two by maggie sefton and that was freaking delightful and i have to say portions of it were almost like like yarn porn in a way where it was like there would be these long descriptions of just like the inside of a yarn shop and the way that it was like so over the top was like if you weren't a knitter you would be like so bored but if you love fiber then you're like yeah oh i can visualize it and i think it's sort of um it yeah it was just kind of funny um in the way that it was a little bit um pornographic in the kind of the broadest sense of the term um i've also been reading um just like as my nighttime read um the bone clocks by david mitchell so this is another one of his um books that's got kind of like weird um time travel and um like multiple narrative threads that are like going to like pull together like you know different people having different stories that are kind of intertwined um and you just have to kind of go with it and then it makes sense at the end um so if you have seen the movie cloud atlas that's based on a novel that he wrote um but it's that sort of um you know like there's all these just different stories across time and space and they're gonna like wrap together um and the final book oh and i should say i'm really enjoying it i've i've read another book of his i've read cloud atlas and i i don't know if i've read anything else but um you know i i'm enjoying it a lot i'm taking my time with it i just started the audiobook a little devil in america by um hanif abdurakib who's a poet and music critic and it is so good so far um so it's about um dance and music black art joy and sort of um you know it's kind of a an ode to um black creators in america who are using dance as like art for art's sake right in this like um the beautiful or just the beauty of um self-expression and the way that um you know he talks about one of the one thing that really struck me is the difference between showing off and showing out right that showing off is really about um making an impression on other people and getting something in exchange for um your talent or whatever um whereas showing out is really like that celebration of the art form um so it's a it's so good and because he's a poet of course like his writing is just really lyrical and like beautiful and it it's like um i feel like i'm walking through a museum or something and he's like a docent who's taken me by the hand and is like describing everything with love right like it's it's um yeah if you if you enjoy this format where somebody who's obsessed with the thing talks about it then you'll really like this book um so yeah um that's all i've been reading lately um and i it's been it's been really nice i think i'm going to continue with the knitting mysteries even though they can be a little um you know surface level and kind of campy i i like when things are campy like i like when they're self-aware of what they are um so it's kind of like um mid-summer murders you know it's it's like it knows that it's dumb but it's also great and brilliant because it's just that it's just the genre right and it's doing what it needs to do well so often on i've done a series um or a portion of the show that i call the handmaid's tale where i talk about handmade objects that are sometimes made by me sometimes not just something that has significance in my life or maybe had significance in someone else's life and today i have such a special treat for you um i am the proud i guess i am the humbled recipient and honored custodian of a collection of handmade objects from satya jones so um satya is somebody who unfortunately passed away when i was a child i never knew her um i never even knew of her until i happened to work with her son at a company a few years ago so um her son is not the kind of person that i would expect to come from background of raising sheep spinning you know knitting all of that kind of stuff but um satya and her husband were um i guess kind of hippie-ish back to the land sort of people and um they raised their kids on a sheep farm in oregon um in the 70s and 80s um and she was the founder of the black sheep gathering which is an annual fiber festival celebrating rare sheep breeds and celebrating um natural undyed wool so um the whole point of this gathering was really to you know like many fiber festivals bring people together who are involved in fiber um you know or sheep raising agriculture animal husbandry etc um and it it's something that i didn't even know existed until unfortunately you know about 2020. when all the festivals started being cancelled um but just to give you a sense of who she was um she was a shepherdist and um spinner and weaver and knitter who created this newsletter called the black sheep newsletter and um it and then the black sheep gathering and um you can i think order back issues of this newsletter um i'm going to get in touch and i'm going to be ordering the book that is like the collection of the first 20 newsletters and then i'm also going to be ordering the cookbook because i just want i want to know like what what's in there you know um but so you know i kind of like didn't know about her until i knew her son and we worked together and then um you know kind of like as he was like getting ready to leave that company we had lunch and then he just like was like oh did i ever tell you that i grew up on a sheep farm and my parents were back to the land hippies and i grew up spinning and weaving and all this stuff and i was like what who are you how how have i known you so long and i never knew any of this um but you know then we had and he's not a fiber person at all like as far as i know he hasn't handled a fleece or a scan a yarn in many years but recently he got back in touch with me and he said you know my father is has been hanging onto a bunch of old handmade hand-knit things for a long time and we don't know what to do with them so do you want them so these are like sweaters and things that his mom made in the 70s um and i was like okay well now that i know who your mom is and i know she's a legend and i know that you know the gathering she created ended up being like an international phenomenon and like yes yes i want them absolutely i will find a purpose or a home for them whatever yes and so um i think when he offered that maybe he had forgotten that i had moved to wisconsin so i gave them my address and then i wasn't really expecting them to arrive but then they did and i have these sort of treasures that i don't really know exactly what to do with other than celebrate them but i'm going to show them to you so the first is this is my favorite piece um this is a vest knitted um what i love about it that i think is really clever is that it's knit in a very coarse like i think this is like icelandic wool or something it's something um it's something real sturdy right um but all of the ribbing all the edges are knit in a softer wool that feels um you know a lot softer and i thought well that makes perfect sense because you want like a workhorse garment that actually um is soft on your neck um and it's got this beautiful like free hand i don't know if she drew her own charts or what but it's got like tools on it um that like a ladder a hatchet a hammer some nails um i don't know what this thing is called a compass no a protractor i don't know anyway um and it's all i think these are all undyed because that was her whole thing right it was undyed wool so this is all undyed wool hand knitted this thing is probably older than i am okay because she died when i was two or three so um you know she would have made this maybe before i was born probably before i was born um and it's just like so amazing to see like what good shape it's in right um it's obviously a very rustic wool because it doesn't it there's like no pilling even though the gauge isn't super super dense um and it's all um you know natural and so i believe that she spun this as well i believe she sheared it and skirted it and grated it and spun it and carted it and all the things um so that's the first one um this is a weaving that she did which obviously there was some kind of dye used in this yarn but it's it's a little you know worse for wear of time but it is actually again in pretty remarkably good shape that's the reverse side of it and i think with a cleanup this will be really nice on my wall um the next thing this was really mind-boggling to me because the more i studied it the more i understood it this is a coat that i will stand up and put it on actually because i think you really need to see it to appreciate it this is a coat that's made from panels of fabric that were woven so these are woven panels of fabric um woven wool and then the panels were sewn together to make a coat which then was kind of given this like leather edging i don't know if this is leather in the sense of cow leather or if it's sheep or what but it's some kind of leather um and it has some holes in it you know it's not like i'm gonna wear this and it doesn't even really fit me that well but i just wanted you to really see it to appreciate it um it's this incredible coat and it's yeah i i mean just like wow okay um and then there's this sweater which is a again like all hand spun undyed natural wool it's knitted it's got some holes i think some moths at one point probably even decades ago um ate through bits of this but this is a sweater which would totally fit me i could wear it but i i don't know it's it's not really the kind of thing i would wear but more importantly than that even is that um it feels like a piece of history almost like a historical artifact and so i don't want to just like wear it you know um which i don't know i mean i i a lot of people are telling me oh you got to wear it you know just repair it and wear it but um yeah i don't know it just feels like too precious especially when i have things that it's like you know if if something really bad happened to this i'd be sad but like i can buy this yarn any day um you know it's not that special um this piece my friend said that um this was one of the last things she worked on and when he told me that i almost started crying because it was one of a set of i think this is punch needle [Music] and there were two of them and so he has the other one um and um it's like this just design of a fan i don't know um if she was following a pattern or if she freehand designed it or what but it's very pretty it's just like um even more meaningful to know that um this was something that she was working on towards the end of her life she died kind of young and unexpected because of illness so you know just knowing that that was something that maybe was bringing her peace or solace or comfort at a really difficult time that's powerful um here's another vest that um honestly i think this was worn for a long time i think it was worn a lot for a long time it definitely has um some killing and some like kind of um like like it's been used you know um but what's amazing about this yarn is that i can tell that you could just de-pill it and it would look brand new i mean it's solid stuff you know it's really solid um and i wonder too you know if these were something his father was hanging on to if they were made for him and then he just stopped wearing them when he stopped raising sheep or when he i don't know but they look like work wear you know i mean that's the thing is that i think other than that coat everything seems to be like workwear you know it's it's something that looks like you could go out and like muck about with farm animals and like it would be it would stay and and the fact that these things are nearly 40 years old and they're in such good shape really tells you that they are um that it's like durable right and so here's the last one and this one's probably the one in kind of the worst shape so um this is another vest but i almost i almost wonder if this was um i don't know i well i thought maybe it was a sweater that didn't get finished but i i think no i think it was a vest and i think it was a ladies vest actually because there does appear to be a little bit of waist shaping it's starting to unravel in places it has um like a purple dye stain on part of it that looks like maybe um almost like an ink stain or something um but yeah uh that's uh my that's my segment the handmaid's tale um so what an amazing thing to be gifted all of these um artifacts of wool industry and oregon history and i don't know exactly what i'm going to do with them yet but there will be something that is more i'm leaning more towards display versus usage um and i certainly am not going to unravel them or anything like that um you know that was something my friend was like well i don't know could you unravel them and use the wool but i'm like you know i can get wool anywhere anytime this i can't get um so i want to get in touch with the folks at the fiberfest and maybe if you have any suggestions i'm just really thinking what would clara parks do and it feels like on the one hand to a non-knitter these are just some old hand knitted things that don't you know they're just they're just old things that someone made once um but they feel to me more significant than that um yeah i um i think the historian in me is like these are special these deserve to be like honored and so i'm gonna give them each a really gentle wash i'm gonna try to repair what i can repair i think i'm gonna try to do like more visible mending so that it's clear what's you know her work versus mine and i'm only going to repair them to stabilize them and somebody recommended to me um kate from cream city yarn actually who's really knowledgeable about fiber things recommended that i use the tuft woolens bar soap because it has lanolin in it so that will kind of condition the wool so i'm going to be doing that and i think i'll probably do a gentle wash before i try to repair because then i want to see how the wool is going to be in its like um best possible state um so yeah that is that is that um well this has been a long and winding journey um thank you so much for watching and for um being part of this um podcast community um if i dare call it a community my ultimate goal with this and with every video i make is that you know someday when travel becomes a reality again i will be able to go anywhere and meet up with another knitter and you know go to a yarn shop with somebody and go to a fiber festival with somebody etcetera i love making friends in the knitting community i love knowing what other people are working on and yeah if you are participating in either cal please let me know and let me know how you want that to show up um i had talked about doing maybe creating a slack workspace so people could chatter and share what they're working on and i might do that but i really need people to show interest in it because i don't want to waste my time and i don't want to try to make you get on another platform that you're not enthusiastic about so um yeah you know um and i wanted to just let you know that um i'm also starting to plan another video series that would be either segments in my regular podcast or as i suspect separate videos so i want to interview some makers i've been wanting to do this pretty much since i started i've wanted to interview other makers but i don't again this is not a professional endeavor i don't have podcasting equipment aside from a cheap tripod i got off the internet um my phone you know i i i'm not all about like professionalizing this but i do think that i want to showcase other people in their work um so those two goals maybe feel like a little at odds with each other but i'm trying to reconcile them yeah on on that note i i will bid you a due i think i've um talked long enough but i like i said i had a lot to share so thank you for being here thank you for watching um thank you to everyone who said i am a natural on camera i really am not um i i had to study myself and i had to study other podcasts to figure out like where to look when i'm talking to the camera and how to um manage my tendency to gesticulate wildly and all of that and it's it's a learning process every day but thank you for thinking that it it comes easy to me um that's a really sweet compliment to get um so yeah um you know uh stay playful stay creative um i love you all and i will see you next month bye

Channel: ryoknits

Views: 177

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Id: 3HIWAo_WpJ8

Length: 94min 56sec (5696 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 22 2022