Look! Up in the Sky!

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...

Knitting content!

I blogged about this one way back here. It's been done for a while and I've been wearing it regularly. In fact, it needs washing, so I decided to get some pictures before I put it in to soak--because, you know, I'm always convinced my knitting is going to hit water and dissolve. It hasn't happened yet, but I'm still on the alert.

This is the one I've named Flame D'Amore. It's based on Francis Revisited, which is a lovely pattern all by itself, but I'm not one to follow a pattern. I worked this from some handspun merino and merino tencel which I plied together for a fingering-dk weight yarn. I knitted it at 19 stitches to four inches for a light, drapey fabric. I added plenty of waist shaping using darts both front and back.

I did this one as a top-down raglan and knitted the cowl neck on afterward. I picked up stitches and worked the sleeves top-down in the round, so there was no seaming at all. We love that!

I left the edges to roll for a light, casual finish. They rolled a bit too much initially, but after a little steam blocking, they relaxed nicely and gave just the baby-roll I was hoping for.

The fabric is surprisingly warm, considering the light weight. I've even worn it to work under a suit a couple of times. It looks great with a black suit; the reds and blacks add a nice pop of color. Since I wear black suits several times a week, I'm always on the lookout for flattering bright colors to wear with black.

How Yarnhog Got Her Groove Back

Note the lack of resemblance to a black, fingering weight camisole. (Or a green angora lace shrug. But we will not speak of that.)

A week or so ago, my knitting get-up-and-go...got up and went. I've been struggling ever since. Not just with knitting, either, as you can tell from my last post. It seems that when the knitting ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. Logically, then, finding my happy place with my knitting should bring back the happy to the rest of my life, right?

And this is my knitting happy.

I have a sweater's worth of this gorgeous (if I do say so myself) handspun, which has been maturing in the stash for a while. I had a design in mind for this, but my interest in the concept waned during the spinning and I never did cast on. After spending an entire morning perusing my Rav queue, and then everyone else's Rav queues, and feeling nothing more than a passing flicker of interest in any of the patterns, I decided what I really needed was yarn inspiration. A quick trip to the stash reminded me of this beautiful yarn and I was off and running.

This will be a top-down, raglan, cowl neck pullover with elbow-length sleeves, similar to Francis Revisited. It would actually BE Francis Revisited, except that I don't want to knit this yarn at the very open gauge required by the pattern, so I had to rewrite the pattern to accommodate my worsted weight handspun, and while I was at it, I made the cowl a little smaller, shortened and narrowed the sleeves, and decided on rolled edges rather than seed stitch trim. So the pattern is more of an idea than a set of instructions. I'm okay with that.

After a plain grey tank top and a plain black camisole, I'm loving this nubby, soft, variegated, red yarn. I'm also loving the fact that a round is something less than five million stitches. As soon as I cast on, I felt like I had exhaled. It felt like that moment in yoga class when you've done all the exercises and you finally get to the part where you close your eyes and relax, and you take a deep breath and feel your joints loosen and your bones sink into the mat. Just like that. And that's a good feeling.

So the rest of my life should be smoothing out any time now...right?

Forest Petunia

I have some FOs to show you, including my Spring Folly project (Unmentionables) and a spring sweater I finished weeks ago but never got around to blogging. I'm almost done with my GGSSC; I just need to do the border. It's more than seven feet square now, and it's a beast! But my oh-so-generous children shared the plague with me, so I'm not up for live modeling today. Or even getting off the sofa. But I did do this:

About 170 grams and 570 yards of dk-ish weight handspun 2-ply. One ply is spun from my Petunia Roving. The other is some merino roving from handpaintedyarn.com that I spun quite a while ago. I don't know the name of the colorway, but it's a combo of dark green, burgundy, and blue. This is the third time I've attempted to find another colorway to ply it with, and I think I've finally found one I'm happy with!

I think this is destined to by my first Clapotis. But then, I've said that before.

Knit, Rip, Repeat

You'll notice there is no picture of my progress on Swallowtail today. That is because, despite several hours of knitting, it looks exactly the same as yesterday. I knew I shouldn't have taunted the Knitting Goddess.

I happily knitted quite a few rows with apparent resounding success. I was even marveling over how quickly it was going. I was thinking, maybe I've finally kicked my lace knitting curse. And then I noticed I had one stitch too many at the end of a row.

Now, a sensible knitter would look at that, see that the error wasn't obvious, knit two together, and move on. At least, that's what I now think. At the time, I thought a sensible knitter would spend three and a half hours trying to track down the error, discover an extra yarn over, carefully tink back, realize the yarn over was actually two rows down, ladder down to the extra yarn over, remove it, work back up, discover that the stitches were far too loose, carefully tug the extra yarn from stitch to stitch, distributing the extra over the entire row, finally smooth out the work to see how it looked...and realize she had removed the wrong damned yarn over. Guess which sort of knitter I am?

Of course, when I moved on to the actual wrong yarn over, and attempted to repeat the procedure, a hole opened up in the space/time continuum and the universe collapsed in on itself, taking my knitting with it.

By the time I extricated it, half the shawl had been ripped back and my husband was giving me his wary lion-tamer look and suggesting I "just put it down...just for a little while. You can have it back tomorrow."

And now it's tomorrow, and I'm back to where I started yesterday. Somewhere in there, I must have crossed over the International Date Line.

Still Alive!

Yes, I'm still alive, but I don't blame you if you wondered. Blogger didn't even recognize me when I signed on. The kids are on Spring Break this week, and if you have kids, you already know where I've been. Between feeding them (and all their friends, who have also been here all week), shoveling laundry, breaking up fights, and running Mom's Taxi Service, I haven't had time for much else.

We celebrate both Passover and Easter (both this week), and--oh, yeah--our good friend is turning 60 on Saturday and my parents' 50th wedding anniversary is next week, and guess who gets to throw the party? Remind me to tell you all about that family drama sometime...when it's all over.

This morning I had a doctor's appointment I scheduled last month that absolutely had to happen exactly today...so of course, my husband got an emergency case two days ago that went to trial when? Yep. This morning. I left my children alone together for the very first time. I have left them each home alone individually before, but never together (they're nine and eleven). Today I just didn't feel like I had a choice. I posted my cell phone number by the phone and held my cell phone in my hand through the entire appointment (although what I could have done for them with my feet in the stirrups, I don't know). And then the doctor was unable to complete the procedure, and I have to go back this afternoon to try again (nothing serious, I assure you, but rather time-sensitive). I'll have to take the kids with me, too, since one of them has to be at a violin lesson less than an hour after my scheduled appointment time...

Just to demonstrate how crazed I've been, this is what I cast on last night:

LACE!!!

If that isn't proof of my complete loss of control, I don't know what is. That's Swallowtail (do I really need to link to it?)--again. I think this is my third attempt at this pattern. The others are best not spoken of in polite company. This time, it only took me four tries to get the cast on right. *sigh* But the yarn is sort of my reward for the struggle. The picture does not do it justice. This is my own handspun, and, at the risk of throwing my hubris in the face of the Knitting Goddess, I can tell you this is the best yarn I have ever made (which admittedly is not saying much). It's the only yarn I've ever been able to spin that might actually make decent lace, although it's really somewhere between fingering and dk weight. But Swallowtail is a tiny shawl, and I wanted something bigger, so that's okay. So far, I seem to have slipped under the KG's radar with this one, but it's still early in the game. Stay tuned for the rest of the saga! And now I have to run. The doctor is waiting.

FO: Wisteria

Next up in the FO Parade is Wisteria:

The Details:

Pattern: Wisteria by Kate Gilbert from The Twist Collective. I love this pattern. I had a few problems with it, mostly from misreading the pattern (which I still hold was not entirely my fault). Mostly, though, I was able to knit from the pattern. I did lengthen the body and sleeves, and used front and back darts instead of side decreases for shaping. I also did an extra repeat of the collar pattern to make a higher collar--mine's more of a mock turtleneck than a high crewneck.

Size: 37"-ish

Yarn: My handspun, from Ashland Bay roving, 70/30 merino/tussah silk in the Autumn colorway.

Needles: Knit Picks Options circs (natch!), size 6

Thoughts: This project holds a special place in my heart. It's not the best sweater I've ever made, and it's not my first handspun sweater, but it is the first sweater for which I have attempted to deliberately spin yarn. I've blogged about this process several times, although I realize I barely mentioned the knitting part at all. (That's because I knitted this sweater during our Tahoe vacation, and I couldn't blog.) The yarn turned out maybe just a bit heavier than it should have been, but I was able to get gauge by knitting just a little tighter than I would have liked. This worked in my favor, actually, since the yarn grew more on blocking than I anticipated, and would certainly have grown more had I not knitted it rather firmly.

I haven't actually worn this yet; the weather hasn't been cool enough for such a warm, heavy pullover. But I am looking forward to finally putting it to use...next winter.

Swallowtail

All the recent knitting and finishing has left me with nothing on the needles except for one lonely purse sock. So yesterday, I did a little stash diving for a new project. And I found this:

This is hard to photograph, but really quite lovely and soft in person. It is alpaca/silk that I spun a few months ago from a commercial roving. The weight is somewhere between fingering and dk (I think), and I thought it would work well for a heavier weight Swallowtail shawl. Now, my only other experience with a lace shawl was the infamous Icarus, and I've been avoiding casting on for another ever since. But it's not exactly sweater weather here (over 100 for the third day in a row), and I figured, there's no deadline for this, it looks very simple, and with heavier yarn, it should go really fast, right?

And it would be going fast, if I didn't have to tink back half of every other row. I don't know what's wrong with me, but I keep ending up with the wrong number of stitches at the end of the row. See how the needles are in the middle of a row? Yeah, well, that's because that's how I left it last night, after tinking back that half row six times! Each time, I checked the previous row against the chart, and each time, it was perfect. Each time, I carefully followed the chart for this row, and each time I ended up with the wrong number of stitches at the end. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. The real kicker is, this is the fourth repeat of this chart, and every other repeat has worked out. So there's nothing wrong with the pattern. This is purely a matter of operator error. I'm hoping that it will magically work out this morning, with no children or guests around to interrupt my counting.

I'm also not entirely sure about this yarn/needle choice. Being handspun--my handspun--it's not terribly even. I'm a little worried that it is too rustic for a lace pattern. And I'm not sure I picked the right size needles. The fabric looks a little open to me. I don't know if this is good or bad. It may be okay, since the yarn is heavier, and knitting it tighter might make for a stiff shawl. I would probably rip and reknit on a smaller size, just to see, but this yarn is a little fuzzy and doesn't rip well at all. (Think mohair.) I don't have any extra, so I'm pretty much committed.

But one little shawl isn't much in the way of knitting. I think I need another project. I'm not that interested in socks, and I don't want to start another shawl, but I need something that won't be uncomfortable to knit during this heat wave. Nothing in my Ravelry queue is exciting me at the moment. Any suggestions?