Just a Little Catching Up Here

Wendy’s making stockings out of Blue-Faced Leicester from the Sheep and Wool Festival—will it ever be cold enough to wear them?



Sherry is beginning a belt made out of hemp:



Dorlynn finished this first sleeve of a Calmer sweater from last summer’s Rowan—



--but then discovered she’d left the smaller needle at home, so she couldn’t start the second one. These are the sorrows of the mobile knitter.

Amy is using Manos to make the yoga-mat bag from Stitch ‘n’ Bitch,



Cheri is making a sock,




and their friend Elisa is making a light-blue baby blanket, but the photo didn’t come out well.

Awhile back, I mentioned swatching the pencil roving from Chester Farms in a “real” pattern. Here’s how it looked:



It was my first thought for the Big Cable Hat that became the Project of the Month:

And there wasn’t anything wrong with it from a knitting standpoint; I just realized how hard it would be to put kits of the roving up to buy online, because the stuff is sold by weight, and each disk varies in size. It turned out that I kind of loved working with the Eco Wool anyway, so no harm done. But the roving was neat: the warnings on the packaging about how weak it is, and how you should double-strand it, are unduly alarmist. Yes, it’s soft. You can’t unravel and re-knit it at all. But it didn’t drift apart as I was knitting, and my tension is pretty average. I was also deliberately using a pattern that had cables and slipped stitches, more or less to test it. It held up fine. It looks and feels a bit like the late, lamented Waterspun from Classic Elite—light, fluffy, soft, dry, almost cotton-ball-like.

The hat was a quickie. Just so you’ll know I wasn’t kidding about starting a new shawl when I’d finished the last one:



This is Summer in Kansas, from Two Old Bags, in Grignasco’s Merino
Silk, a yarn I’ve been dying to get my hands on. The pattern calls for Icelandic laceweight on US #7 needles at 4.5 sts per inch. I’m getting the 4.5, but on US #3s—such are the marvels of lace, such is the mystery of gauge, and such is the bounciness of merino.