Thursday, May 25, 2006

Clap If You Believe In Stash Knitting

I bought a skein of yarn at the Sheep and Wool Festival, to make Suzanne a scarf. The yarn was dyed by Roz Houseknecht of Dyed Dreams and is half wool, half silk. I chose a nice simple chevron stitch, planning to vary it with occasional random purl ridges:

It looked nice enough, but those blasted purl ridges were giving me fits: the amount of work it took to space them "randomly" was going to kill me. (Was this one too close to the last? If the next one is going to be in the third column, can I put this one in the second?) So the project . . . kind of . . . waited.

Did I mention that this was Sheep and Wool Festival '97? Or possibly '98. But I'm pretty sure it was before Diana was born (1999).

Along comes the Clapotis. And a couple weeks ago, Robin

and Wendy

brought in skeins of 50/50 wool/silk from Dyed Dreams that they were planning to use for it.

Insert image of lightbulb popping on here.



Technical notes: I took out several repeats in the width (my long straight section was 84 sts wide, not 112), but I added a couple in length. (I wanted a scarf, not a shawl.) I was surprised to see how much longer it got when the stitches were dropped, not just how much wider. The pattern is very well written and the knitting proceeds completely without fuss. But. There is some danger of dying of boredom. At about 60% through, I realized that I might never be able to look at the thing again if I looked at it much longer, so I sprinted through the rest. (The last corner was knit on Sunday night, largely in my sleep. I've never done that before, kept knitting even though I was dozing off every two or three stitches.)

In other news, Wendy finished her Pi Shawl

and found a way to wear it that pleases her. (Circular shawls are maybe a little trickier than triangles or oblongs in that respect. One must practice the art of the fling, and perhaps acquire a shawl pin.)
Marissa is making a Star Cluster Shawl

using two strands of Koigu.
Sherry is making Staggering Fisherman socks out of Anne, and Hannah has a sock doing something amazingly spiral with a bright pink-red-purple skein of Koigu, but those pictures were totally out of focus. Maybe I'll do better next week.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! I feel like I'm in the "in crowd". I've finally made it onto your blog!

I love Wendy's shawl, it's gorgeous!

R said...

Wow. Amazing stuff. I know someone who does that same stuff and was telling her she should open some sort of online storefront for it.

Ryan
www.ryandickinson.com/brainwrecked