The following ramble is brought to you by 4 hours of sleep, and the Heat Wave of 2011.

I have an assortment of milestones associated with my Phoenix Jacket. The first one was just getting cast on, since that required figuring out how many stitches I needed. The rest kind of shift as things go, and I learn something is easier or harder than it had seemed. The intarsia is one of those things. I had hoped to finish the intarsia before I went on vacation. In fact, I wanted to have the whole body done, except the borders, by the time I left. I now see that is not going to happen. Although changing bobbins has definitely helped, it’s still roughly 30-45 minutes per intarsia row, depending on the difficulty. Well, I’ve reached a milestone: the tail section is complete. I haven’t even colored the graph in for the body of the phoenix, so that is something I’ll have to do tonight or tomorrow. In order to finish this jacket by the end of August, as is required by Nerd Wars, I will have to take the phoenix with me on my vacation. Until then, I’m attempting as many rows as possible every day. Today I spent nearly 6 hours, and completed the last 9 rows of the tail. I’ve got roughly another inch of only 3 intarsia stitches — a wonderful break from the more complicated intarsia — before the bird’s feet. When I start the feet, I will also be binding off the underarm stitches, and then decreasing for the armhole. Since intarsia in the round requires working back and forth anyway, I won’t be steeking the armholes. This is going to make the body of the phoenix much quicker. If I didn’t have other things to do and jobs to work, I’d be knitting non-stop in order to get to the armholes! Well… here’s the picture of the current progress:

Actually, I think I might forgo sleep tonight and get some work done… both on the phoenix, and otherwise. If I can get to the armholes, I think I just might be able to get the phoenix done before my trip, and only have to finish the front while on my vacation. Leaving bobbins and four extra colors at home sounds like a very good idea!

When knitting with the intarsia method, you’re knitting only a few stitches out of the many in a different color. In complex intarsia, you’re knitting a lot of those few stitches, and with a lot of colors. My Phoenix Jacket currently has 29 bobbins and six skeins attached. When you haven’t knitted with that many bobbins all going at once before, you don’t realize that the style of bobbin means a great deal. With the wrong style of bobbin, your bobbins begin to look a little like this after three rows of knitting:

The rows also get impossibly time-consuming to knit, because each time you come to a new bobbin, it’s gotten tangled in the yarns surrounding it… or it has become unsecured and has unwrapped down to the floor, not only wrapping around other bobbins, but the skeins strategically situated on the floor. After three rows of knitting, you stop and untangle the mess. It looks a little better, but it promises to become a headache the minute you pick it up again:

Yeah, that doesn’t look very orderly to me either. 29 bobbins in less than 100 stitches of knitting gets a bit crowded. Those bobbins that are squares or have odd angles like to catch especially. The easiest time I’ve had is with the round ones. What are those, you ask? Excellent, excellent question.

They’re Bryson’s EZ Bobbins. The size small comes in packs of 10. They’re plastic, disc-shaped like a sewing machine’s bobbin, but it goes a step further. It has a flexible plastic “cap” that folds down and locks the yarn onto the bobbin. Even wrapped two or three times, it won’t unwrap.

I went out and bought 30 more of them — everything the store had in stock. My favorite part about them? They lock together, allowing you to force them to lay in a neat nice row, in the order in which they need to be worked. This is what my knitting looks like now:

Just thinking about it makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

…

Let’s just not mention the ends that need to be woven in, yeah?

So, my hiatus got a little lengthy. Actually, I started knitting on a larger gauge item, for some instant gratification, and it was the therapy my hand needed. So over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on the sleeves – the last remaining portable portion of my jacket.

Later I’ll pick up stitches around the cuff and create the double-knit border. Right now, I’ve got to go knit 16 rows on the body. A friend and I have self-imposed and otherwise deadlines to meet for our current projects. I want all but the borders knitted by the time I leave on my vacation. She wants to get knee-highs done. we’re both doing about an inch a day. She has the socks, I have the jacket. I should’ve knit 8 rows yesterday, but I finished a scarf for a friend and deconstructed a mystery stitch on a store-bought hat.

I’ve also written a pattern for a lace kerchief; once I’ve got pictures, I’ll post the pattern here and on Ravelry. That should be no later than this weekend.