It's Finished!

At 9:30 pm Thursday night June 3, I grafted the lace edges of Evenstar together and proclaimed her complete. Techknitter's COWYAK provisional cast-on worked like a charm, leaving me the correct number of stitches to pick up as I unlooped the cotton yarn. The graft is not quite invisible, but who will notice it (I am not the best at Kitchener stitch)? I had to go looking for it and I know it's there.

Blocking in progress using the string method, with much help from DH. Some people curve their blocking wires around for circular shawls, but I didn't want to put an arc in my wires. Also I don't think I have enough wire for the circumference, which I estimate will be 188.4" or 15.7 feet. DH was dear enough to locate some nice unused plywood in 4 x 4 ft increments, to create a platform. And he brought up from the basement a spare round table we use when we have a lot of company to dinner. That'll keep my collie, his visiting brother, and occasional wandering bird off the shawl as it blocks. I set up a fan to speed the drying (the humidity hovers around 90% some days here). So that it might dry some time this summer.

Some new yarn found its way home to me.

First, some Sundara sock yarn in Creme de Menthe, perfect for Evelyn Clark's Twining Lace socks (they need a green yarn, IMO). Next, more Sundara yarn, sport merino in Reaching Out, a deep coral over salmon. I love the entire family of coral/salmon/apricot/shrimp colors; I might just look at this yarn forever. Last, some Yarn Chef Mulligatawny in Bramble Rose, which is more brown than rose. Likely I'll whip up a couple of lacey scarves as gifts for friends out of this.

Now the question is: finish more UFOs or start a new project from my Ravelry queue? Decisions, decisions!!

Good Deeds Can Be Rewarded

Last month, Southerngirlknits posted a challenge on Ravelry to entice knitters to donate to Doctors without Borders. Look what yours truly won from the challenge:


Such luscious yarn, super-wash, and 464 yards of it, enough for a lovely shawlette-type scarf. The corals are my favorite color in the universe too. Thank you so much Allison.

On the knitting front, I seem to be knitting Zeno's paradox here with Carefree: no matter how long I knit (and I usually work on it for 2 to 3 hours at a time), I'm still stuck at 3 inches away from the armhole.
Today I mean to conquer the armhole, though I also need to knit my swatch of Evenstar.
Correction: I knitted my Evesntar swatch, ha!


It's a knitting times like this that WIPs can go into hibernation. Not that the Carefree pattern is hard (it's not), not the yarn isn't a great yarn (I love it), it's the feeling of "the hurrieder I go, the behinder I get," as a folk saying has it. I like knitting to defined milestones (though I'm a process knitter; however I must finish garments because they are needed). And I want to have this sweater ready to wear next month, because the week after DD#1's wedding, there will be dinner parties every night feting the young couple for a week (Orthodox Jews do not go on a honeymoon right after the wedding but go away some time after this week of parties). I'd also like to finish my Shetland Triangles shawl, if for no other reason than it's such a fun knit and I'm about halfway done with it.

Speaking of the wedding, it's one month from today. That is a sobering thought. Response cards have begun flooding in. Some are amusing to read: some just say "yes"(and we have to scramble find the envelope it came in to figure out who didn't put names on the card), one says "We'll try to make it to the ceremony and ..." That's a quote. I'll take that as regrets. And some come with gifts in the form of checks for the couple. Lovely gesture if the checks can be negotiated. You see, the groom's parents gave him a legal name, but then always called him by a nickname. And insisted the nickname, not the legal name, be on the invitation. So the invitation reads something like this:

Experimental and Dear Husband Knitter
Robert and Isabelle Morton
request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of their children
Victoria Regina and Al.

Checks have arrived made out to Mr.and Mrs. Al Morton. Al Morton is not on the bank account; legal Name Morton is. Other checks have come to Mr.and Mrs. Victoria and Dear Husband Knitter. I think DD#1 can deposit that one. Tomorrow, DD#1 tells me, she and fiancee are going to open up a joint account, with nickname of fiancee included. A good solution. Why didn't we put Al in parentheses after legal name, as is correct according to Emily Post, Miss Manners, Letitia Baldridge, and all sorts of wedding mavens? The in-laws don't want people in their town to know their son has a legal name. This is the true reason; if I were a Girl Scout, I'd write "Scout's honor." **sigh** As I tell DD#1, this should be the worst stuff you have to endure, forever!

Knitter's ADD

Why do I do this to myself? Why? I must have knitter's ADD, that's the only explanation for why I have to have multiple projects going at once (my mother never did that, she knitted one item faithfully at a time). And to add insult to injury, I have to go and fall in love with a new pattern. Never mind I have books galore by AS and Debbie Bliss, and 20 years' of Vogue Knitting, and 5 looseleaf notebooks full of pattern booklets. No. I took one look at this beauty by Dorothy Siemens at Fiddlesticks Knitting and I was lost. I just ordered it from Sarah's Yarns. I even (for shame!!) ordered 2 cones of JaggerSpun Zephyr 4/8 DK yarn from the Weaving Rainbow because they have the best price for JaggerSpun Zephyr around, $44 per 1 pound cone (that's over 1100 yards of DK-weight wool and silk, folks). Most people are selling Zephyr DK for $60 to $70 per pound cone, and over $10 for a 2 oz hank. Color I chose: Blueberry, a denim blue.

How do you justify your yarn purchases when you have a sizeable stash? Me, I'm going to tell myself that all the worsted/Aran weight yarn I have archived is for family (except for one lot of Magpie to make Mendocino for myself, since I gave the Soft Lux one to daughter #2). All the CE Tapestry is for vests for DH; now that I'm acquiring a son-in-law, I have a new person to knit for, right?

Spring Will Spring and I'll Knit Socks, Part 2

In searching for a new sock pattern, I found out that Evelyn Clark, a designer whose socks I enjoy knitting so much, now has her own website. On which is this pattern called Twining Leaves Socks. This makes the third sock pattern with a leaf motif (of course I had to buy it) that will sit because I cannot find the right green sock yarn to use. Oh sure there's green sock yarn a-plenty out there. But my soul craves a yarn that won't bore me yet will stand up the the demands of a sock. Be variegated enough so I'll knit 2 of them but not too variegated that the pattern will be lost (Lilacs socks I made a while back come to mind). On a whim, I Googled for green handpainted sock yarn and found:



That's hand-painted Fyberspates Blue-Faced Leicester fingering/light sport weight, from Wales, UK no less. You can find it here. Just what I need, another sock yarn addiction.



Say hello to Belle in the foreground (yeah, say hello to Duke too, sulking there in the back). Belle is a baby cockatiel (to be accurate, she's a cinnamon pied pearl cockatiel and we are not entirely sure she's a she-but we're hopeful). We bought her just this Sunday, because DD#1's dear 14 year old cockatiel hen Scooter passed away last week. Fourteen is a respectable age and Scooter led a charmed life, having survived pneumonia twice and another respiratory infection. She'll be missed. Duke though stopped eating and was frantically looking for her. So as not to lose him (he's only about 8 1/2), we went and got Belle. When I say it's a zoo around here, I'm not joking.

And Speaking of Spring - Look What Came

Twenty, count 'em 20 skeins of Classic Elite Mistral, DK-weight cotton-alpaca blend in the luscious dusty plum color, from a fellow Knitswap member who was kind enough to include the Classic Elite pattern too. In case you can't see it, the patterns are for ganseys in child to adult sizes, and a nice cabled cardi. There's a Norah Gaughan pattern from Knitter's that calls for this yarn. I had made it in Reynold Rio when the pattern first came out, 1994 I think it was, but the Rio cotton blend pilled so much I got disgusted and gave the sweater away. All that work, and you get a pilled sweater - grrr. I 'd rather spend more on the yarn up-front before I invest the time, and get a real quality yarn that won't pill under the arms or where the arms rest along the body, or from friction from a jacket. The Rio was really bad in that regard, but not as bad as other yarn that pilled while I was knitting with it. I won't name names, but when I mentioned what I was using for a pattern to an e-mail group, another member asked right away about how much pilling was I seeing. Sadly, the pilling diminishes my pleasure in wearing that garment, and it is a coat - a lot of money spent on that yarn and a lot of time, too. So I've taken to buying tried-and-true yarns instead of trying out new yarns, for the most part. I don't have a lot of time for knitting and I really do not want to buy single skeins to knit swatches to decide if a yarn will work or not. If major yarn manufacturers don't want to hear from knitters like me, who knits a lot for family and needs hard-wearing yarns for them, I'll keep on haunting the artisanal yarn sites and look for yarn made of sturdy fibers spun tightly enough to suit. If you know of a great yarn, please let me know? I'm dying to find the next Rowan Magpie and the next Classic Elite Tapestry (but like when it first came out; the later stuff falls apart fast).