Made from these two Noro Silk Garden colors:
Number 8, above, and
Number 246, pictured here.I'll post photos of the scarf when it's finished, i.e., ends woven in, washed, blocked, etc. It'll probably be a gift, but for whom is not yet settled.
I am working on some rainbow socks -- the yarn was beautiful gradations of Roy G. Biv, but when knit up, of course, it comes out stripey and (frankly) a bit boring. So they're being made up to fit the Starman, i.e., longer up the leg and slightly (but only slightly) longer in the foot. here's a picture of the first one:
And in process:
I am starting to decrease for the toe, but I made a mistake, so I have to tink back a round or so to get things as they should be. (I was knitting at the opera, chatting with the knitter sitting to my left -- I picked our seats based on seeing her knitting away! -- and forgot to reallocate the stitches on the needles before doing the decrease.)
I'd like to teach myself the magic loop method -- I've seen it and it looks easy enough, and I've read the tutorials on line, and they look easy enough. But I don't hate the double-pointed needles, so who cares...
Because, I've started something new. With old stash, no less! I have yarn from decades ago (literally) and it makes no sense to buy all new yarn without determining which of the old stash can be used for something else. Among that old yarn is some 100% alpaca in natural shades: cream, tan, brown and dark grey. I thought maybe I'd make a fairisle vest for the Starman, but he seemed less than keen with that idea, so after I discovered how fine this stuff is (fingering weight -- I did a swatch on #2 needles, and I was getting roughly 7 sts/inch, which is appropriate for socks, but no way was I making a dozen alpaca socks!), I switched to the idea of a Shetland lace shawl/blanket. I found the perfect pattern in a book of British Isle knits: a plain square surrounded by sides of stripes in a wavy lacy pattern called Shell. I started the border first -- it's what the pattern told me to do -- and plan to keep working on that while I secure some large #8 circular needles for the body.
Here's the irony -- I would love to do this in the round, but as the entire thing is done in a variation of garter stitch, and that would mean purling every other round. No {expletive deleted} way! So instead, I can either follow the directions slavishly (which involve knitting two adjacent sides, then attaching them along the mitred corners), or knit all the edging at once, and all four sides at once, but still going back and forth. Decisions.... Of course I don't have to decide right now -- I've only done about 8% of the edging so far!
