Warm and woolly

August suddenly turned rainy and cold, which kicked my sock-knitting instincts into high gear.

Here is a Susan Lawrence pattern from the Vogue sock book, knitted from Socks that Rock. This is my first time! with this yarn, and I'm torn about it! I was a Socks that Rock holdout for the longest time because I think the colours are garish and I can't stand pooling and flashing because I'm basically a Type A control freak and a conservative bore who only ever wants to wear black and grey. But then! They introduced some colourways that are downright subtle, for the most part, and it was right there in front of me at the store, neatly arranged in racks, and I couldn't resist.



Points in its favour: this colourway ("Thraven") looks like an oil slick, which is rad. The skein weighed 10g more than it said on the label, so I have no fear of running short (and plenty of warm fuzzy thoughts toward Blue Moon). Points against: the colours are still a bit too contrasty for my taste. And it's awfully dense and it feels a bit like knitting with spaghetti, which makes my hands ache. This is also a point in its favour because I imagine the finished socks will last a lot longer than e.g. the socks I've made out of Louet Gems Fingering, which are getting pretty felty around the edges. We'll see!

There's spinning going on, too; it's just in the background.

1:



This is a poplar and beech and elm spindle from Kevin Rhodes. My favourite things about it are that it has a finial like a grandfather clock and that the whorl is a bit translucent. It weighs 23g and spins for a long time with nary a wobble. The browny-grey stuff on it is Louet Gotland top, which is turning into yarn fit for a hair shirt or mittens that will stand up to some abrasion and won't felt right away. We'll see?

2:



A Greensleeves Vixen in tulipwood, got from Spunky Eclectic a few months ago. I'm working on some Shetland top, Louet again, and it is coming out fine enough for 2-ply laceweight. This is my "commuting" spinning: it lives in my (giant) purse in a Ziploc bag and gets busted out whenever I'm feeling too stupid to knit, which is often.

3:



A little Butterfly Girl Designs spindle that is so so so perfect for silk I can't even believe it. For 2-ply laceweight again, only way finer than the Shetland stuff; I plied a little sample bit and it is actually the sort of yarn I would seek out to knit with. The fibre is tussah silk top from Treenway, which had apparently been in a bin in a closet for quite a while? Anyway, it's unearthed now, and I'm pretty excited about spinning the rest (and finding more silk in more colours to play with).

Hold me accountable, please

I've been thinking about Hazel Carter's square Shetland shawl in A Gathering of Lace for, oh, five years now? But the part about seams has always turned me off, and then I get distracted by something else, and then and then and then.

This time, though, I've started it and am blogging about it so that the Internet will judge me and find me wanting if I don't finish. Also: I'm knitting the central square first, then picking up stitches around it and working the trapezoid borders upside-down, then knitting on the edging. I haven't decided whether I'll do all four borders at once and purl alternate rounds to keep things in garter stitch, or do them one at a time back and forth, joining each to the one previous as I go (like you'd knit on an edging). No seams at all for me, please, is what I'm saying.

Anyway, here's what I've got so far:



This is cashmere/cotton from Colourmart, the same as I used for Lyra and this poor sad Nieblingy doily. The same cone still! I have 105g left, out of 150g to begin with. The cone was $24, I think? Which makes all of these projects so inordinately cheap I can barely believe it. The needles are 2.25mm, which means the solid areas are relatively sturdy and untransparent, so it'll even be pretty warm in the end.

The only issue: it'll look like a tablecloth, on account of the whiteness. Maybe I'll dye it black once it's finished?

I only ever make scarves, you know

I haven't been neglecting lace, either! A couple of months ago when Knitpicks introduced Gloss Lace, we ordered one hank of each colour to play with. (And one ball of each colour of Palette. The box it all came in is enormous and satisfying in the way that a new box of 64 crayons is satisfying, but more, because it's yarn.) That makes eight: Natural, Cypress, Mermaid, Port, Raisin, Sterling, Aegean, Chipotle. Whew. (They've since added four more colours, but I kind of still like the first eight best.)

The hanks are 440 yards each, which is awesome yardage for the price but not that much for a project, and it's heftier laceweight than I usually choose, so I dithered about them for a long time. Then I looked at Victorian Lace Today again.

Scarves, you guys.



This is the Scarf with Unwieldy Name from p. 100. When I stretch it out a bit to simulate blocking, it's two feet long; I've got 31g of yarn still to knit, out of 50g total. This means that unless I screw something up, I will have five feet of scarf at the end.

And then seven more to make!

The need for tweed

I've been knitting! Lots and lots! I've just also been distracted by delicious books, is all. Anyway. So I don't like knitting cables, right?

I asked my love interest what seasonally-inappropriate thing I could knit for him, and he suggested a scarf, black.

It took me a while to figure out how to knit a black scarf that was interesting enough to hold my attention without losing the pattern in the dark. After a couple of weeks of knitting a few inches and tearing them out and switching up the pattern and trying again unsuccessfully and casting it aside in frustration lather rinse repeat, I settled on Grumperina's "Shifting Sands" pattern. It has enough cables to be fiddly—ten on every right-side row—but is repetitive enough that I could watch Alias DVDs while knitting. The yarn is Silky Wool that's actually more charcoal than jet black, on 3.5mm needles; it took two and a half skeins to make a scarf six inches by six feet. I am ideologically opposed to fringe so I ignored that part of the pattern, and I'm pleased with the result.



Another thing! This is the "Tilly" scarf from A Fine Fleece, in Grignasco Tango (a.k.a. fake Felted Tweed). It's only three-quarters done, but I think it will be pretty awesome. I can't argue with anything about this pattern. Mirrored cables on either side! Little rolled edges! It's a bit wiggly and uneven because it is as yet unblocked, but I'll probably finish it soon.



Maybe I don't mind cables after all.

Dilettantism

I've never been able to stick to a project without getting distracted partway through. So what.

Here's a scarf to distract you!



It is the "Twilight" scarf from A Fine Fleece, which is a marvellous and inspiring book. It's mostly full of cables, but there are a couple of simple lacy interludes; this is one. I think it's about perfect for this yarn: laceweight llama from Americo, which is not soft exactly but kind of slippery, and with a bit of a hairy halo, and a bit stringy and not blocking out perfectly evenly (and in reality a bit more green than this). Anything complicated would've been lost in the rustic.

It reminds me of a counterpane, actually. The wavy raised shell-like lines in garter stitch.



To make a 6"x60" scarf it took exactly one-half of a (100g) skein, the other half of which is destined for another ripply lacy scarf. But which one?

Overload

Hello, internet! I've just gotten back from a series of epic shopping excursions in Toronto. We went to Romni and Americo (halfway by accident; stopped for coffee and there it was across the street) and ended up with a daunting amount of yarn and fibre. And then my friends took me to an enormous number of bookstores where I bought an enormous number of nerd books. And then I came home and there was more fibre waiting for me, and spindles for spinning fine, and and and.

I'm actually still a bit shellshocked from SHOPPING OVERLOAD, too much to make a list of what actually got bought, so instead I'll leave you with a picture of the parts that I am most actually genuinely breathlessly excited about. A hundred thousand books to read only some of which are jokes, and a very light Butterfly Girl spindle, and some Falkland wool top from Hello Yarn that wants to be spun into yarn for a shawl.

There are no yak in the Grand Banks

It's done!



Structural recap: I knitted a strip of edging and a mitred corner with wrap-and-turn style short rows for neatness, then picked up stitches along the long edge plus the stitches from the cast-on, then mitred another corner. This way I could work the edging on the long sides at the same time as the stole's body, which made me a much happier camper at the end (with no endless knitted-on edging to accomplish). The body is divided into lengthwise thirds: the first section of a pattern with "trees" and hexagons, the second section with only hexagons, and the third section as the first. Then another mitred corner, a strip of knitted-on edging, one last corner, and a lazy graft: I did it the way Galina Khmeleva describes in Gossamer Webs, pulling stitches from the opposite edges to be grafted through each other until there was only one loop left.

All of the patterns are modified versions of things found in Heirloom Knitting. I detached the edging from the elaborate panel it was attached to:



The border trees-and-hexagons I amended so that they'd be symmetrical end-to-end (after being driven completely insane by their asymmetry when I knitted the Unst stole from the same book):



And I made the motif in the centre of each little hexagon into a spider, to more closely match the hexagons in the border (the original pattern has the middle row worked plain, so that it comes out looking more like a bead).



The transition between the pattern sections is not terribly elegant, and next time I knit a stole of this type I'll pay more attention to what happens there. Here I just stopped knitting one pattern and picked up the other (their repeats are the same width: 12 stitches), where I should have done an extra tree or diamond or something to make the transition smoother. Next time for sure.



The yarn is 50% yak and 50% silk, got from Twist of Fate (100g hank, of which I have 38g left—apparently there was more here than I thought?). I knitted it on 2.5mm needles. It came out to 2'x6', which is my favourite size for a stole but was also a stroke of good luck, as I was pessimistic and half-expecting it to be smaller.

I put it away for a month or so because the central section was never going to end. There are around two hundred little hexagons with spider motifs inside them, and I was bored after twenty. Someone thought they look like flowers; I think they look more like scales attached with rivets to some type of mechanical fish. It's also got fins and a wavy edging and it's a shimmery browny silvery stone colour and during the knitting I listened to this beautiful CBC Radio interview about the collapse of the cod fishery, so I've nicknamed it the Grand Banks stole.


This was the first time I'd ever blocked something with wires instead of hundreds of pins; the bits-of-string method as a middle ground has never appealed to me. Reader, my eyes were opened! It was so fast and painless!* I didn't run out of pins and I always run out of pins! (T-pins, at any rate: no matter how many I have on hand, it's always about twenty too few, and I end up sustaining many stab wounds to my fingertips trying to manoeuvre tiny steel dressmaker's pins into position.)

The floor I blocked it on is in a bit of a draft, and the shawl was bone-dry within half an hour. No kidding. I had to mist it with water halfway through stretching it out to keep it damp enough that it would hold its shape once unpinned. Drying speed might be the real reason I love knitting very fine lace.



Speaking of fine lace, I think I'll knit a doily or several out of the leftovers, as part three in my continuing series "Knitting Doilies from Stupid Stuff". Stay tuned.


* Except for the part where I felt cheated out of fun and defiantly pinned out one long side anyway.