October 2007 Archives

alternatively entitled, the post that took 3 years to write

It's finally done, and I find myself at a loss for words. I've been done for a full week now, and I still can't quite believe that it's true.

I knit St. Brigid

There were many false starts (including one I never documented). I'm not quite sure why this time did the trick. The color? Maybe. The deadline? Maybe. The encouraging comments? Most definitely.

I have so many people to thank, and I'm positive I'm going to forget some of them. Thanks to Katy for hosting the KAL, Vicki for finishing hers almost 3 years ago and being an awesome cheerleader for my own, Marnie for encouraging me to consider retaining the saddle shoulder, Christy for knowing the right amount of good-natured ribbing to keep me on course (because she knows how fickle I can be!), Jessica and Kristy for enduring our Thursday night get togethers with endless whining about my boredom, EZ because without her I may not have had the courage to consider modifying this sweater as much as I did, and to Maggie Righetti because her chapter on sleeve shapes kicks ass.

I knit this sweater in under 10 weeks, and I don't recommend it. My hands hurt. I was bored. I was hyper-focused every weekend and I was up until 2am the Sunday of Rhinebeck just so I could wear it in 75° heat. In my ideal world I would have taken a break after the body was done, but maybe in my ideal world I never would have finished at all.

specs

pattern St. Brigid by Alice Starmore from Aran Knitting
yarn Cascade 220 Aporto. 9.5 skeins
needles Knit Picks options size 6
mods tons, read my archive for a full list

sleeves and hood

The sleeves came out rather nicely and pretty much as planned (thankyouverymuch Maggie Righetti). There's a lot to share on the sleeves so I'll write that up as a separate post. The quick scoop is that I changed them to a set-in style (but retained the saddles) and knit them 2 at a time because I was afraid I wouldn't take good enough notes to knit them individually.

The hood worked out pretty well too. I knit 4 repeats of the chart up each side and then grafted the 2 sides together (they're mirror images of each other so they grafted together perfectly). My grafting is a bit tight in a couple places so I may go back and loosen that up a tad.

thoughts on the sweater

I never expected this to be a shapely sweater. Having said that, it's still a bit more bulk-adding than I expected. I probably could have gone down an inch or two more in the body and still have been OK, but I wasn't sure because bulkier sweaters need more circumference to fit right.

I love wearing it and love the fact that I finally made it. I've hit a milestone in my knitting that I thought I might never hit, and in doing so I've learned a few new things about why I knit and what it means to me. It's going to take some time to gather my thoughts, so I'll leave that to my next post.

For now, will you excuse me while I pop around town in my new sweater!

Oh how nice it is to not be knitting something cabley, heavy, and green. My fingers have been aching for something different. I really thought I'd want to start some colorwork mitts I've been coveting, but after getting back from Rhinebeck, this little scarf was just begging to be knit.

I have to admit that I wasn't terribly excited to knit these scarves. I wasn't dreading it, but they didn't seem all that appealing -- just some garter and stockinette stitch with a few increases, decreases and bind offs thrown in for good measure.

But once I started I couldn't stop. Knitting this scarf is *fun*. It's the most fun I've had knitting something in a very long time. I'm sure at least some of my take on this is because of the marathon St Brigid knitting sessions, but I think I'd enjoy it either way. I can't help myself. With each little scale I find myself wondering what the next one will bring -- will the scarf drape? will the scales fall to the side or stand straight up? will the yarn be non-knitter soft? how long will it really be? (since they only list stitch gauge and not row gauge)

I do have two complaints though:

1. What's up with all the VM in this yarn? I seem to be picking out something foreign at least once per row (and the rows are only 27 stitches long at this point).
2. I am fairly certain there's an error in the pattern. I've checked on the Morehouse site, I've googled and checked on Ravelry. No one seems to mention any errors, but I don't believe you can knit those scales the way they instruct you to do so. In the end it wasn't very hard to figure it out, but I'm really curious to see if I'm right. I think I'll email Morehouse tonight to see what they say. I'll let you all know if I hear anything.

BTW, am I the last one to know that Evelyn Clark has her own web site? The Autumn Lace Scarf and the Twining Leaves Lace Socks are calling my name.

Rhinebeck was great. Re-entry was really hard last year -- 6 hours of driving on Sunday after a long weekend, so I took today off too.

I didn't buy a lot this year. I'm getting much better with my festival purchases. Pictured above are 2 of the 4 purchases I made:

• morehouse merino dragon scarves in red (for my sister-in-law) and green for my nephew. Matching scarves!
• Shelridge Farms soft touch wool/cotton in charcoal (on order) with tangerine accents (I'm thinking of piping along the zipper and armhole) for this vest from knitting classic style by veronik Avery.
• laceweight from Sliver Moon Farms in denim blues for a pullover inspired by Lolly's from last year.

My only regret of the weekend is that I missed at least 5 people that I was on the lookout for all weekend -- Glenna, Kate, Katy and her mom, and Vicki. The festival just isn't that big -- how does that happen? And just like last year when we couldn't stop running into Katy and her mom, I kept running into Ann (who finished her cabled sweater and it's awesome!) and Elspeth (who finished her knitted dress and it's awesome too!).

I'm sure you're all curious about St. Brigid. Did I finish in time?

I sure did!

I finished the final grafting at about 2am Sunday morning, just in time to wear it around on Sunday. I wanted to give it a full wet block before its FO pics, so look for them this coming weekend (it's drying now and it's going to take a while). I will say this for now though -- I'm so happy I finished it, I'm so happy to be able to wear it, and I'm so certain I won't make something else big and cabley like that for a very long time.

After a marathon knitting session yesterday, and a marathon seaming session this morning, all that's left is the hood.

I'm feeling a big relief now that:

• the sleeves are knit
• the sleeve caps fit
• the saddles are knit and look good
• i've tried it on without the use of pins and it still fits!
• i have almost 3 hanks left so i can't possibly run out of yarn
• the only finishing work that remains is to graft the hood -- and I like grafting!

Someone must be on my side because I finished knitting the sleeves at 11:30 last night. By the time they soaked and got rung out and on the blocking board it was midnight. I left the ceiling fan on high overnight, and by 6 am they were bone dry. No kidding, they were completely dry.

I'm looking forward to knitting the hood -- two "small" cables and a huge span of stockinette. My hands will certainly thank me (I think cabling without a cable needle is harder on my hands).

I have lots more to share about how I calculated the sleeves, but I've already taken a 2.5 hour break. I'm still hopeful I'll finish the hood tonight, and since I still have some shopping to do as well as getting a hair cut, buying a pair of prescription sunglasses, laundry and dyeing my hair myself, I best finish tonight or I'll have to start crossing things off my list. We leave for Rhinebeck Thursday after work, so there's not much time left.

The payoff though -- a full day on Friday at the cottage with the girls.

I'm taking a break from my St. Brigid posts to tell you about a new site that's launching today -- KnittingFriends.com, and to share with you an interview with Vishen Lakhiani -- the co-founder of MindValley.com (the incubator for KnittingFriends.com).

I'm excited to be announcing this today because it reflects the convergence of my personal passion (knitting) and my professional life (as some of you may know I'm in web services management).

KnittingFriends.com is a free daily service to help you get at some of the highlights of current knitblog content (more on just how this works below). If you're like me, there have been times when you just couldn't keep up with your blog reading -- maybe you went on vacation, maybe there was a big life event, maybe you were sick, or maybe you were too busy with work. How many of us have done a "mark all as read" in our RSS reader just to dig out from under the slew of blog posts that were written during that time? Or, maybe you've pared down the list of blogs that you read because you just couldn't keep up with it all. And even though you knew you'd miss out on something good, you had to do it because there just wasn't enough time to fit it all in.

This is where KnittingFriends.com can help. By doing a little math it will present you with a list of the hottest knitblog posts. You can get a quick update of what's happening just by reading the highlight page. Then, if you find a blog that interests you, you can get a list of other posts from that blogger that were highlighted as well.

That's why this excites the knitter in me. As for the web professional in me, I'm thrilled to see another Web 2.0 effort targeted at knitting. Given the stereotypical images of a knitter that often come to mind, I expected it to take longer for us knitters to get to take advantage of Web 2.0 features and functionality.

What is Web 2.0?

While there is some controversy over how to define Web 2.0, for the purposes of my post I'm referring to social-networking, collaboration, blogging, all while continuing to acknowledge that content is still king. (yes, ravelry is a Web 2.0 site)

And that's really what make KnittingFriends.com so interesting. As the number of knitblogs increases, it becomes even more difficult for us to wade through everything that's out there.

If you're curious about everything that Web 2.0 has to offer, here are a few links to get you started:

• Web 2.0 on Wikipedia
• O'Reilly's What is Web 2.0
• Web 2.0 search on google

What Vishen has to say

Vishen took some time out of his very busy schedule to talk to me for a bit about today's launch.

[savannahchik knits] Today is a big day for SocialRank – KnittingFriends.com is just one of 30 new communities that are launching. Congratulations – that's a huge undertaking. What made you choose knitting as one of the subject areas for today's release?

[Vishen Lakhiani] Well, when we were researching niches to pursue, we discovered the knitting was a BIG niche on the net. Not many people know this, but it's one of the hottest niches on the net and has a very loyal following.

[sk] Well, I don't think you'll have to convince many of us knitters that this is the case.

Tell us a little bit about the service – what does it provide and why will knitters and knitbloggers find it useful?

[VL] On the internet, there are literally thousands of blogs dedicated to knitting. It's wonderful to have all this choice, but it also causes a problem. On any given day, several hundred new blog posts on knitting go up.

If you were interested in knitting, but have limited time, how would you find the hottest knitting stories and articles? It's difficult to identify what posts are great, and what are poor or mediocre.

Think of television. We have several hundred channels to choose from. But we know what to pay attention too thanks to TV guides, Nielsen Ratings or critic reviews of TV shows. All these things act as filters to help us separate what's good from what's junk. They allow us to better spend our time in front of the TV as opposed to random channel surfing.

The same applies to books. We have NY Times Best Sellers list, Amazon recommendations and book reviews to help us find the best reads from the thousands of books published annually.

But what about blogs? Particularly knitting blogs?

Sites do exist to help people find great content on blogs. Sites like Digg or Redditt that allow users to vote on hot articles. But these sites have a very specific audience. Young males. Any stories on knitting that a site like Digg would quickly dissappear due to lack of interest from Digg's mostly male audience.

This is where KnittingFriends.com comes in. We provide a filter to help knitting enthusiast easily sort through hundreds of daily stories on Knitting and quickly find the best and most important news.

Every day, we'll reveal the 15 hottest Knitting stories for the day. Some might come from prominent knitting blogs, but other may come from sources you may never have heard of. You find better content, faster and easier than before.

[sk] The service is currently free to users. Do you plan to generate revenue just via ads, or are there long-term plans to offer some kind of pay-for premium service at some point?

[VL] It's completely free and is ad supported, just like Google.

[sk] Today's featured blogs and blog entries – how did they get on the list?

[VL] We started out by asking a few prominent knitting bloggers to help us build a list of noteworthy knitting blogs. These blogs then get analyzed by SocialRank. We monitor their posts and identify the most important content for the day.

We'll grow this initial pool of blogs soon to perhaps 1,000 knitting blogs.

[sk] How often do these lists change? Daily? More often?

[VL] The lists change daily. Although sometimes a particularly good post may remain on the list for more than a day. But typically the lists change daily so you're always discovering fresh, new, knitting articles.

[sk] Do you offer an RSS feed?

[VL] Yes, we're still in beta. But RSS is coming soon!

[sk] What if someone notices a favorite blog of theirs is not being listed – is there a way to submit it to KnittingFriends.com?

[VL] Absolutely - we'll be unveiling a system to submit new blogs soon.

[sk] Some of my favorite blogs are multilingual or not in English at all. Will they be included in KnittingFriends.com, or is this service only for blogs written in English?

[VL] Right now, it's only for English blogs. We do have some multilingual socialrank sites launching in the coming months. If we find for example, that knitting is also a hot category in say France, we may launch a site for French knitting blogs.

[sk] Is there anything else you'd like to add?

[VL] Yes. You may be wondering why a bunch of computer geeks like us picked knitting. Well, I just became a father. My wife and I have been at home for the last 12 days with our newborn son Hayden, who was born on September 18th. Kristina (my wife) started knitting again upon becoming a mother. She finds it very relaxing and it's really nice to be able to make our own winter clothing for Hayden.

[Here] is a picture Kristina's latest creation. A doll outfit. :-)

So when we were coming up with categories to launch, I added knitting and motherhood to the list.

Speaking of which, our site for mothers also launches on [today]. It's called TheMomsWorld.com.

Thanks, Vishen, for giving us a little background on KnittingFriends.com.

I encourage you all to check out all the topics areas that socialrank covers. You'll find subjects such as photoblogs, mathematics, entrepreneurship, and celebrity gossip and news. note: some of these may not yet be available but they're all scheduled to launch today