Knitting With Granny LJ

Good morning.

Had a great week last week.  The weather has been almost balmy — and is balmy, compared to what is happing in Des Moines (where my eldest son and his family live) and New York City (where my second son and his wife live).  We have had sun shine, not much wind, and tides that are so low, it feels like you could walk to China.  As a result, Karen and I have been getting Parker and Red out for very long wonderful walks. 

I have been knitting my fingers to the quick, though, after the walks.  Karen and I found out that we are juried into a show in March.  This one is in Yachats, at the Commons, and it is over 40 years old.  The organizers have taken trouble to keep the show pretty exclusive.  We sent out the application on a kind of a dare without much hope of getting in to it.  We got notification last week that we are in it.  What a morale boost.

Enough news.  I was recently asked how I make a cap with eyelash yarn.  I do them as inside-out (IO) caps because of the peculiar way I knit.   The IO caps started out as a bit of an accident.  I was working a varigated brown Splash yarn with a coordinating brown Galway.  I had tried to do a cap out of only the Splash and it was pretty floppy and not very good for beach walking.  So with this cap I put it with the sturdier yarn and was knitting away.  Because of the goofy way I knit (I’m self taught, remember?) all the Splash yarn was on the inside of the cap. 

Needless to say, I was pretty grumpy because I thought I would  have to pull all the fibers of the Splash back through to the outside of the cap with a crochet hook.  I had done that on a couple of earlier caps and pretty much resented the time it took to get all those fibers back to the outside.  Well, the brown Splash and Galway cap got  topped.  I put it in the basket of “to be finished” work, and went to work on a new cap. 

When I finally got to doing the finish work, I grabbed up the brown Galway and Splash cap and turned it inside-out  to start working in the ends.  And I had one of those “No DUH!”  moments.  I did not have to pull all the ends of the Splash through.  I just had to finish the cap as if the inside were the outside.  And the 7-point top-off really worked well inside out.  And thus the Inside-Out cap was born.

If you are interested in doing a cap with an eyelash yarn, I would suggest that you do a simple watch cap alternating 2 rows of the eyelash with 2 rows of the base yarn.  The two rows of the base yarn give the cap a sturdiness that the eyelash lacks and the eyelash essentially covers the 2 rows of the base yarn. 

When the cap is knit and topped, do the finish work  on whichever side of the cap has the most eyelash yarn showing. 

I have also found that  making a chemo cap this way is better, too.  When I started chemo caps, I was just making them out of the Chinchilla, a Berroco yarn.   This method  gave them a floppy, almost too soft feel.  Once I discovered the IO cap method, I started using a base yarn for chemo caps, too.  And I am more satisfied with the outcome of the chemo caps with this method, too. 

Try it. I am sure you will like it. 

Happy knitting.  Granny LJ

Good morning.

We have a huge storm blowing through today.  Most of the worst of it will hit the coast around Tillamook so down here we will be getting the edges of it, but it is still going to give us a lot of wind and rain.  My day yesterday, besides knitting, was spent ruminating about a knitting contest.  The contest was part of a monthy message sent to me by an online yarn company. 

I talked  to Karen about it.  She is a believer in contests.  Her advice was “Go for it!”  I went through all the negatives for doing it.  The entry fee, the fact that I knit “funny”  compared to other knitters, my work is not fancy or unusual enough, etc etc etc. 

Finally, I decided that the only thing I really have to lose is the entry fee which is about $25.  If the cap is  not selected for the finals or it is and it does not win, what have I lost?  The answer that came into my mind last night, while I was trying to focus on a biography of Tolstoy, was:  Nothing.  Except the $25 but that also gets me a membership to a national knitting guild, even if the cap doesn’t make it beyond the perliminaries. 

So then, continuing to try to read about Tolstoy, I thought about the cap that I would submit.  My basic tenent has always been that the cap has to be wearable and serviceable as a protection from the weather here on the coast.  So I  have really not done much in experimenting with the odd-ball designs   I have seen in books and magazines.  I have sometimes felt like Little-Johnny-One-Note.  But the caps I knit are always something to keep the ears warm. 

Then I remembered a picture I saw in a magazine several months ago.  It was a simple beanie cap with a deep body.  It was done in 2-color.  The base color and the contrast colors were done on a leftward slant .  It would not be hard to do, but was a striking looking cap.  The picture did not show the depth of the body of the cap nor the top-off, though,  but  I have  had that cap in the back of my mind since I saw the picture. 

I decided last night, as the cap issue won out over Tolstoy’s biography, that I could do it.  I did not need to look at the top off, because I would do my standard 7-point top-off and let the colors of the yarn do the talking. 

Then (and here is where Tolstoy really  met his doom) I started to figure out the pattern repeat.  The picture looked like a 2 or 3 stitch repeat.  But I decided that a 5-stitch repeat would be better.  I thought about the yarns I would use and finally decided to make a prototype in one color and do the pattern in a simple K/P to see if it worked out the way I have it pictured in my mind. 

So that will be knitting for the day, while the wind howls outside and Tolstoy  awaits my return  – I will free up some needles and pick out a single color yarn and start the prototype.  Will keep you all posted on how it is going.

Have a great day.  Good knitting.   Granny LJ