I Am Actually Knitting

That's my cousin Coffee Jones's daughter, aka the Beanette. The blanket (lap rug?) is Brooklyn Tweed's Hemlock Ring pattern, done is Misti Alpaca. What you can't tell -- and I'm not sure why not -- is that the color is called Peacock and is actually deep navy with a slight bit of purple and an even slighter bit of turquoise in it. Here, it just looks grey. (And the Beans' furniture looks beige or taupe, and it's actually grey. Something odd about this.)

More detail.

Even more detail.

The center. Brooklyn Tweed's genius is is taking a historical pattern for a table-top lace doily and using large needles and bulky-weight yarn. Beautiful!

By the way, when I went over to his website, I learned that he's got a book coming out. Here's his blog post. (I was going to include the the link on Amazon, but it's not up yet. Sorry.) Buy it -- he's good! (And the photos are good enough to eat...)

Help May Be at Hand!

Here's the last thing I was knitting when I stopped in 1997:

Pretty, isn't it? It's a vest done in an all-over sampler pattern using various textured and cabled stitches. I have all the wool for it (a grey sport yarn, surprisingly quite nice considering I bought it in my pre-marriage years of relative poverty), but I can't find the pattern. I figure it has to be in the house, but who knows where. And I'm relatively tidy these days (cough cough) so I should be able to find it. Somewhere.

In the meantime, maybe I can find the pattern somewhere online. I tried Ravelry -- but this thing is so old (mid- to late-90s) that it predates even Interweave. But it popped into my head to ask Claire & Sandy, the proprietress and staff at Slip Knot, a yarn store in Newtown Square, west of Philadelphia. Oh, my were these women awesome! Yes, they knew exactly what I was talking about, and they knew where to get it. But, just to be sure, I would email them the photos so they could tell for sure.


Well, here it is -- this is the back (almost done) and the photo above is a detail shot. It really is lovely, isn't it? I'd love to finish it...

And if Claire & Sandy are right, I soon will be able to. Thanks, guys!

And Another Thing

I've finished knitting one of Brooklyn Tweed's wonderful Noro Silk Garden KiPi scarves (the pattern is so easy, it's scary: cast on, knit 1 purl 1 until all the yarn is used up, cast off). Here it is in process:

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!

I made something!

Hey, I finished something!

A scarf, to be precise:

It's not long, but it's essentially garter stitch (with a wave knit in; no biggie), and we all know those st-r-e-t-ch, so I am happy with the length.

You can't tell from the photos, but the yarns I used (impulse buys on sale at Yarnings, a store in Skippack, PA) are super, super soft. I don't believe there's a genuine fibre in the bunch, but I don't care, and I suspect the intended recipient won't either.

I have a LOT to learn about photographing my finished projects, but I did try to make it look nice.

And then there's the photo just to show what yarns I used:

Austermann Gina and Trendsetter's Delicious. I knitted it on #11 needles, alternating yarns every two rows in a pattern modified from one of Barbara Walker's books. The whole thing took me less than two days, which could explain why it's actually done.