Confessions

1. I am really terrible at counting! I don't use stitch markers to separate out repeating patterns in lace or cables or whatever, but I do need them when I'm working on a very long cast-on edge to mark every 50th or 100th stitch.


2. I really hate casting on. Knitting very long rows isn't a problem—if I knit 800 rows of edging and pick up 400 stitches from the straight edge, I'm happy. But casting on 400 stitches seems like it takes too much time and causes me a lot of anxiety!

I have had ample opportunity to think about these two hang-ups over the weekend, during which I failed to cast on 513 stitches twice. It took two episodes of The X-Files and ten minutes of frenzied recounting to do it right, but now I've finally got it and am off to the races.



This will be an enormous triangular shawl with a small repeating pattern that I'm quite proud of. The lovely yarn is Juliet from Yarn Love, in a pretty new fall semisolid colour called Frosted Mulberry. I had had a stole idea for this yarn, but then it came and I swatched and it begged to be something different, and so it shall be.

(What clinched it was the way it's dyed—it has very short runs of colours that are very subtly different from one another, which means that I can put it in a triangle and it will neither resolve into stripes nor pool into blotches. Amazing! Katie is amazing.)

Because I am not a very responsible knitter, I unravelled the swatch immediately after finishing it and deciding it was worth pursuing. (It is now part of that enormously long cast-on edge.) But it's an allover pattern, which means that as soon as the knitting isn't so squished on the needles, I can show you. It me think of an enormous raspberry—or, I suppose, a mulberry—all plump circles adjacent to one another. The yarn is very round and slightly springy, and that only makes it look juicier.

I also have an exciting news item to share: the pink and yellow things from a few weeks ago are now a pattern for sale at Knit Picks! I'm happy with how that pattern idea turned out. The patterns are the same, but are differently proportioned: the stole is divided roughly into thirds, while the scarf is mostly one pattern with just a few repeats of the second pattern at either end. The stole is remarkable because of its enormity, but the scarf ended up being my favourite.