I've been discussing laundry options with Shirley via email and she says that washing soda is not recommended for use with silk or wool. So if you make your own laundry detergent, don't put silk or wool items in the wash.

I hand wash all my knitted items (along with some special shirts and a beaded sweater) with Ecover dishwashing liquid. I was reading Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping a Home by Cheryl Mendelson and she said that anything that is gentle enough to put your hands in can work for hand-washing. I started using Ecover dishwashing liquid and was pleasantly surprised with the results. It is cheaper than Eucalan and it gets our knit socks much cleaner.

Late last night I had a bit of a scare. All of a sudden I heard these odd bumping noises in one of the bottom kitchen cabinets. I debated whether or not to wake up DH but decided against it. I slowly opened the cabinet where the noises were coming from, standing as far away as possible.

And I discovered the culprit.

Fortunately I finished DH's anniversary gloves about an hour before he came home. I used Nature Spun sport weight and the pattern is the men's geometric gloves from my glove booklet . I made some adjustments for his personal preferences - longer ribbing and rounded fingertips. I also changed the thumb gusset for his wide thumb angle - more details on that on the Glove Knitting KAL.



There's more Red Sox baseball today plus I have to do some cooking. Here is our latest CSA offering - strawberries, a leek, red leaf lettuce, mangoes, grapefruit, avocados, roasted green chile, apples, an artichoke and some Swiss chard. Peaches has already started sampling the bounty.

INTARSIA

Stranded color knitting is not the only method of knitting with more than one color. Another method is intarsia knitting which is shown in the lovely sock pattern below from Borealis Sweaterscapes . (Slip stitch knitting is an additional method to accomplish color knitting patterns.) Both stranded color knitting and intarsia use color charts and have many ends in to work in after you're done knitting. Most knitters who enjoy knitting with multiple colors will eventually find themselves with a pattern that requires at least some intarsia and it is often up to the knitter to decide which technique to use for various charts.



In stranded color knitting you carry all the colors you're using along the entire row; in intarsia you do not. In stranded color knitting you end
up with a thicker fabric because of the stranding and floats on the inside of the work; with intarsia you only have a single layer of knitted fabric.

In intarsia you twist the yarns around each other every time you get to a color change (called interlocking); this is not done in stranded color knitting. Most stranded color knitting is done in the round; intarsia is most frequently knit flat. In intarsia you'll see bobbins, yarn butterflies, or long strands of yarn hanging from the back of the work; in stranded knitting there is usually just several skeins of yarn attached to the back of the work.

Intarsia is also called picture knitting . If a color chart requires really long floats or 12 colors per row, you'll want to choose intarsia. If you want to knit a large initial on a sweater for instance, you'd use intarsia. If you want to knit authentic argyle socks or knit most of Kaffe Fassett's beautiful designs, you'd use intarsia. Duplicate stitch is also often combined with intarsia for more intricate patterns.

The best way to tell if something is knit using the intarsia color knitting method is to look at the back of the work. The first photo shows the back of stranded color knitting with the ends woven in using reverse duplicate stitch; the second photo shows the back of an argyle sock with the ends woven in using a diagonal split stitch method specific to intarsia knitting.





There is definitely an art to get good tension in intarsia knitting - it isn't as simple as just interlocking yarns every time you get to a color change so to learn more here are some links to excellent intarsia information.

Borealis Sweaterscapes has an info page HERE and a free pillow pattern to get you started HERE. Check out some of their gorgeous intarsia sweater and sock patterns.

Vicki Meldrum is an expert intarsia knitter and has some info HERE.

Lucy Neatby has some intarsia tips HERE.

If you'd like to learn even more, this small self-published booklet is the bible of intarsia knitting. Intarsia: A Workshop for Hand and Machine Knitting by Sherry and Keely Stuever. It is inexpensive and last time I looked Elann sold it. It is full of color photos and diagrams of all sorts of intarsia techniques.

I am late but I wanted to do an Earth Day post. Here are most of the ingredients for my homemade laundry detergent for use in the washing machine. It is less expensive than regular laundry detergent and kinder to your clothes and septic system. Plus you can make your clothes smell incredible. I change the scent each time by changing the essential oils I add - I generally use about 20 drops of either rosemary, tea tree oil, lemon, or lavender essential oils or a combination. Also, I now use Trader Joe's peppermint liquid castile soap which is cheaper than Dr. Bronner's.



The actual laundry detergent recipe is HERE in an article I wrote along with some other of my nontoxic homemade cleaning recipes. NOTE: This recipe contains washing soda which is not recommended for use with silk or wool. While I'm at it HERE is an article I wrote for some fun herbal iced tea concoctions. The Hibiscus/Jamaica tea is my fave.



I have so much to do this week and the most important item is finishing a pair of gloves for DH in time for our anniversary Friday. Fortunately I have Jack the cat helping me with any excess yarn.

How can you tell it is going to be a great weekend? First, your handsome husband is home from a trip to Montana. Second, the Red Sox and Yankees are playing and you actually get to watch 3 of the games despite losing the Extra Innings package. Third, you have plenty of good knitting projects to keep you going during all the baseball.

In the basket are the geometric gloves for DH - all I have to do are the fingers. Also, I'm starting those gorgeous Selbu mittens on the cover of Selbustrikk in red and black Palette. I do think that might be the most beautiful Selbu pattern ever.



For other baseball fans, check out THIS web site for some free .PDF charts for most of the teams you can add to your knitting projects. For other Norwegian knitting fans, Nordic Fiber Arts has 3 new cool booklets of knitted accessories to go with the Selbustrikk booklet. They're in Norwegian but they offer a translation of some common terms.

Now I'm really sure spring has arrived in New Mexico. Here is a lizard sunning himself on the window screen.

Marina, an incredibly talented Fair Isle knitter, wrote in the comments yesterday that J&S is unfortunately discontinuing some of their colors of Shetland yarn - here's a list of the actual numbers being discontinued so stock up while you can.

While I'm at it, here are a few more recent blog posts of interest to other color knitters - OfTroy offers some great ideas for using small amounts of leftover yarn, KnittingonImpulse has an excellent post on optical mixing, and while I'm at it, HERE's an older blog post with some great photos of knitting with two colors in your left hand.

My best stash color selection is in worsted weight yarns. I'm perfectly happy with Peruvian Highland wool, Wool of the Andes, and Cascade 220 and am building up my color choices.



The container at the bottom holds just purple yarns. In the past two months I've been buying all the purple yarns I could find from those three sources for a project I'm beginning. I plan to knit a bunch of thick socks using at least 4 shades of purple (hopefully 2 or 3 times that many) for myself.

The snows have melted and spring has returned. This is especially good news for fluffball house rabbits with a serious love of dandelions.

I have a large container of sock yarn not photographed (mainly things like Essential and Kroy - I wear out socks too quickly to use the expensive stuff).

Here's my container just for Knitpicks' Palette. I bought some years ago and then added all of the colors recently while writing the glove booklet. I just love it for gloves and want to try it for socks soon. I did a little test with the new skein of red Palette and an old skein of red and it turns out that only the old skein of red was bleeding dye. Go figure.



I have a container of Shetland jumper weight yarn (aka fingering weight) but I don't use it often. I find it scratchy to wear so anything I knit with it goes to someone else. I have noticed I have a lot of red and green in this container so I hope to knit something Christmas related with it.



In this photo Peaches seems to be thinking, "I'm large and in charge."

This week I thought I'd do a tour of my yarn stash. Try to contain your excitement! The photo I last showed was from several years ago and here is the current incarnation.


There's one other large Rubbermaid container of sock yarn not included in this photo. Still, I think the stash has shrunk. I really am trying to "manage" my yarn more to ensure I have enough colors in the weights I use.

I rarely use multi-colored yarns so I am trying to stop buying them. This isn't always successful when I see a big sale. I also rarely use DK weight yarns so I have stopped buying them. Last year I only bought yarn for the glove booklet but this year I may increase my color selection. I don't really have many heathered colors except in my Shetland yarn stash.



Here is one container full of vintage Brunswick Nylamb baby & sock yarn which is almost impossible to find anymore. It is one of my favorite yarns - soft and durable as it has wool and nylon. The color selection wasn't great but I do enjoy using it for non-colorwork projects like lace or cables. I bought a few bags of the dark green color on Ebay a few years back with the intention of making the Starmore Cape Cod sweater from Fisherman's Sweaters. I need to live somewhere colder to knit sweaters though.

Yesterday we visited one of my happy places, Ta Lin World Market. My challenge was to find some fun stuff while spending less than $1.50 for each item. I bought a big bag of baby bok choy, enough shallots to last me a few months, Mexican oregano, asadero cheese, fideo noodles, dried shiitakes, Oriental chili bean sauce, some tomato sauce with chipotles, dried passionflowers (I like to make my own herbal tea concotions) for 69 cents, Mexican hot sauce and a weird malt beverage DH chose that tasted like carbonated molasses. My favorite bok choy recipe is Rice Noodles with Tofu and Bok Choy from Cooking Light. It is a terrific simple meal for a busy day.



Here are my knitting projects in progress. I am making a pair of geometric gloves from the Glove Knitting booklet for DH in Nature Spun sport weight. I am making some modifications to the sore thumb gusset chart to fit his wider than usual thumb angle. Also, you can see a sock in progress in the basket although part of it is going to get ripped out until I come up with a better color chart.

The purple colorblock gloves are done. Next I want to make a pair of colorblock gloves in Christmas colors for a girlfriend - I'm going to change the cuff chart which I'll post on the Glove Knitting KAL.



I've also started a pair of Geometric Gloves for DH in Nature Spun - I have to finish those by the end of the month for our anniversary. Plus, I plan to make another pair of Peace Gloves in a different colorway (black background) but most importantly, I plan to get started on the purple sock experiment with my stash of purple worsted weight yarn this weekend.

Apparently the weather will be perfect here for knitting this weekend.

My yarn stash is never the right size. I usually think I have too much yarn but on the other hand I often can't find a certain color. For instance, DH recently informed me that spruce green is his favorite color. I decided to make him some spruce green socks but couldn't find anything spruce green in any weight in my stash.

One thing I do want to stop doing is trying new brands of yarn. It is better for my type of knitting just to have several main brands in as many colors as I can muster in my budget. In fact I just bought a skein of Cascade 220 in all the brightest colors at the Webs anniversary sale. I think it goes through May so I'll probably do another order next month. It is currently $4.89 a skein which isn't too bad. I'd use Cascade 220 (the non-superwash version) exclusively because of the rich, saturated colors but it is more expensive than other worsted weight wools so I only buy it when it is on sale.

Here's another pair of colorblock gloves in progress - I just bought a purple jacket so I hope they match.

I have been pouting because we have been denied the baseball game package through our satellite tv provider. We had it last year and enjoyed it greatly. Baseball is such a perfect accompaniment for knitting and I already can tell that I'm getting less knitting done with fewer games to watch. Oh well - at least I get to see Dice-K pitch for the first time at Fenway tonight on ESPN2. Go Boston!

Here is our enfant terrible chewing a book cover. If you look behind her ample bunny derriere, you'll see the book on the end of the shelf has a ripped cover. The book? I kid you not - Curtis Aiken's Guide to the Harvest: A Produce Lover's Cookbook. Apparently since we limit her veggies she has taken to eating books about veggies. The Victory Garden Cookbook in red has also been nibbled on.



Here is an outdoor photo of the quilt my friend surprised me with last week. The colors are almost perfect although in real life the lighter sections have more yellow. I forgot to take a photo of the back but it is solid fabric.

Here are the Peace Gloves knit in 6 colors of Knitpicks' Palette - you need one of the main color (white) and small amounts of the other five. I tried various means of embroidery but ended up with only a small amount on the picot cuff. The pattern is available in print and as a .PDF download HERE.

Next on the agenda is to see how many fun colorwork socks I can knit in my worsted weight purple wool yarn collection. Also, I have photographic evidence of Peaches misbehaving terribly.

I should have houseguests more often - I got more knitting and blogging done this week than when I don't have visitors.

I recently took out Vogue Knitting's Stitchionary Volume 3, Color Knitting from our library. I was surprised this book is only charts and photos of swatches without any technique information. The chapters are Two-Color Knitting, Fair Isle/Multicolor, Intarsia/Motifs, Slip Stitches and Texture Added. I'm not quite sure how they're defining the type of color knitting in each chapter; all the 2-color traditional Norwegian star charts are in the intarsia/motif chapter and there is a headband in the Fair Isle/Multicolor section that I think belongs in the intarsia chapter. But since they don't even define or talk about the difference between stranded color knitting and intarsia, I guess it doesn't matter. I was more surprised they didn't block the swatches before photographing them.

I estimate about 80% of my color knitting needs blocking. This is partially because I prefer 4 dpns to 5 for the speed. I did get a photo of my current gloves to show the difference between unblocked on the needles and blocked.



I hope to finish the gloves this week although I may run out of the white Palette before my next order arrives. I plan to add embroidery on the cuffs, on the women's skirts, and on the fingers. Nicky Epstein's Knitted Embellishments has a good chapter on adding embroidery to knitted fabric which I'll use for guidance.

I put some photos up in the Glove Knitting blog that show reverse duplicate stitch used to deal with holes between glove fingers. Because each finger is a different color, it may be easier to see what I'm talking about than in my previous posts.