Hopefully by the time I've published this, we all have submitted (or resubmitted) our project proposals and had them approved by me. We have so many different types of projects: gardens, cooking, building, engineering, making, songwriting, song learning, short story writing, language learning, physical challenges. It's going to be a good month. Project Update #1My MaterialsIn my experience, the yarn usually comes before the project. There’s this super weird store in Houston called Texas Art Asylum. It’s like a thrift store designed for artists. You can buy yarn there, and it was from this higgledy piggledy stash of donated yarn that I first found and worked with Cloudborn. It’s a Peruvian Highland worsted weight. Nothing super special, although nicer than the yarn you can find at Hobby Lobby and places like that. I love the texture of the wool, and the way the stitches look when they come together. Last December, I saw that Cloudborn was discontinuing their product line, so I bought some more worsted for myself online, enough for green sweater (Moss) and a variegated blue sweater (Delphinium.) One of my favorite essayists these days writes essays on color and culture for the Paris Review. Her name is Katy Kelleher, and one of her essays is on Hooker’s Green, which is basically the color of my sweater. I’ll also be using 5mm bamboo Takumi circular needles and 4mm and 5mm double-pointed wooden needles for the sleeves. The most important notions for this project (the name for the little things) are the multi-colored plastic stitch markers that tell me when to change or add stitches. (Isn’t notions a great word for this?) My ProgressI began knitting my sweater last Monday, May 3rd. In the beginning my sweater didn’t exist except as six balls of yarn. This is my progress as of Monday May 10th. This is a top-down sweater, so as you can see, I’ve knitted 7 inches of the yoke. I’m just a couple of inches shy of the place where I will separate the sleeves from the body of the sweater. I’ve done three different types of stitches so far: ribbing, stockinette, and garter stitch. I’ve also done increases in a triangular raglan pattern to shape the neckline. Initial DeadlineThe different parts of the sweater take varying amounts of time. The body, for instance, will take much more time than the yoke or a sleeve. Instead of using my progress on my sweater to estimate my remaining time, I’m going to use the total yardage. It took me about a week to knit one 200 yard skein’s worth of sweater. My finished sweater will be composed of a little less than 6 skeins of yarn. So, factoring in some travel I have scheduled for June, my hard deadline for my completed sweater will be Monday, July 5th. New Skills, Obstacles, MistakesI never had to just increase a round without any specific guidance or spacing before. It took a tutorial and some low level math, but I figured it out in the end. And, although I’ve knitted front and back (Kfb) before with increases, I do not consider this a stitch that I completely understand, so I consulted YouTube. I made some mistakes in the initial ribbing and created something that looks like a moss stitch. Even though it departs from the pattern, this is an example of a mistake that I like to make. It looks cool and I learned something.
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AuthorI'm a Houston high school teacher. Welcome to my adapted, socially-distanced, quarantined AP English Literature and Composition classroom. Archives
May 2021
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