Mandate

This was originally supposed to be a doily blog! What is the deal with all this sock-knitting nonsense.



Here is a doily from an old Ericas Handarbeiten leaflet that I found. (Only a piece of it though, so alas, I don't know what leaflet exactly or when it was published.) It's Zephyr knitted up on 2.75mm needles, and it ended up being about nine inches across. (My blocking job is not as shoddy as it looks; it was a perfect octagon a few hours ago, really!) I started it with Rosemarie's circular cast-on (but with a lot less ado, I just knitted a scrap of i-cord with the same yarn in a different colour, then increased at the last to accomodate the number of stitches I wanted to begin the pattern with), and ended by crocheting off stitches in clusters of three.

I haven't decided how I feel about doilies made out of wool—I still feel a bit guilty about knitting them because of that little notice at the beginning of that Marianne Kinzel book where she says that non-cotton non-linen doilies are Just Not The Done Thing, So Don't Even. In favour of non-cotton doilies: oh man, the drape, when they stick off the edges of tables and things! The sheen, when there's silk in them! The stretchiness of wool, which takes care of a lot of binding problems in e.g. Niebling doilies without my even having to do anything! Where is the downside!

The real reason I picked this yarn is because I have almost an entire cone of it sitting around, and it is a good doily colour.

Secret knitting

Not really, although this is a gift. Another shawl:



The pattern is MacGyvered from a border pattern in Heirloom Knitting (repeated forwards and backwards, from the beginning of the chart to the end back to the beginning, for end-to-end symmetry) plus a knitted-on edging invented on the fly—it's like the plainest edgings from Galina Khmeleva's shawls, but with six-hole teeth, so each repeat consumes 10 body stitches (handy, since I cast on 101). Every wrong-side row is knit plain, which means it went very fast and was also very boring. However, garter stitch has a really satisfying sponginess and solidity to it—



It's a very squishable shawl, even though it barely weighs anything. The yarn is Ornaghi Filati Merino Oro in a red I've used before! and I knitted it on 2.5mm needles. Its finished dimensions are about a foot and a half by five.

Everything in its place

First: Melly sent me this sweet thing:



Thank-you! :D Its rules stipulate that I should pass it on to four people whose blogs I love, but, um, I am about a month behind the curve and I cherish basically all the blogs I follow through Ravelry, so. Keep writing them, please!

Second: Look! I got a shelving unit:



And it's full of yarn! I'm actually pretty excited about the opportunity to organise everything: now laceweight, fingering weight, DK, and worsted-or-heavier have their own little boxes. There's also four (four!) sections of spinning stuff, organised roughly into "sheep-coloured" and "not", and a space for cones of silk and a space for knitting-in-progress and a space for odds and ends of leftovers and and and



a BOOKCASE. I can't tell you how excited I am about this; all of these books have been in teetering piles on the floor for months. I've been gleefully arranging and rearranging them all day. Alphabetically by author! No, by original language! No, by era! No, by subject! (This is a tiny Foucault joke that was hilarious in my head.) That's roughly where things have ended up so far, but it will probably change as I track down more books.

I've also been knitting! Just not talking about knitting, so I have a bit of a project backlog to work through. Here is part 1:



Stephanie van der Linden's Esther socks, from the Socken Kreativ Liste yahoo group. I made the large size (over 70 sts) to fit over my monster heels, and worked cable crossings on the second sock in the opposite direction from the first, so that each is the mirror image of the other.

The yarn is Classic Elite Alpaca Sox, and it's so soft. I can hardly believe it, I keep putting the socks on my hands to feel them, I knitted and unknitted two halves of socks before I settled on a pattern that would do it justice. It would make the most fantastic sweater, I want to make a sweater out of it and I don't like to knit sweaters. That's about the highest praise I can come up with for a yarn.

The only (only!) thing I'm worried about is how it will wear—it's got some nylon in it, but it's still mostly alpaca, and maybe it will get felty and fuzzy faster than I'd like? I'll report back.

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.