Mindless Knitting or Boring Knitting?

Sometimes you need a mindless knitting project, one you can knit while waiting in a busy place or while talking to people or at a meeting or training session. Something small and therefore portable. Like a scarf. Now, I need to make 5 gifts for friends who hosted a big luncheon for my DD#1 and her new husband. Gift #1, for the person who gave her house as well as provided a lot of the food (and kept the in-laws over the weekend) is Swallowtail (not mindless but we're coming to that, never fear).
Final thoughts on Spindrift yarn for lace: I'd use it again for 2 reasons. One, it's economical (it took only 4 skeins to make Swallowtail, and the cost was less than $20; can't really beat that); and two, the color range is fantastic. All those heathery shades! If you don't want to spend the bucks on a hand-painted or hand-dyed designer yarn, one of Jamieson's heathers can fill the bill without breaking your bank. And I love the way it softened after a soak in Eucalan, followed by blocking.

Gift #2 for a friend who helped host and shares other interests with us is Frothy, since it's her colors:

Frothy is garter stitch, once called by the great Elizabeth Zimmermann, "nothing but soothing knitting." Boring on it own, but whip it up in this hand-painted bouclé and it has a life of its own. The only attention I have to pay to it is to be sure I pick up both strands since I'm using the yarn doubled, and to be sure to knit into the main filament and not a bouclé loop. Mindless knitting at its best.

Now we have gift #3:

That's Sue Pandorf's Lime pattern, done in Fiesta Yarn's Kokopelli in Cilantro, a wool/mohair blend (really silky). It's basically purl a few rows, then do some YOs/K2tog rows alternating with purl rows. Almost mindless, but not quite. Pretty portable. So why do I find this pattern boring but not Frothy? Wish I knew. Fortunately, I have 36" done on Lime, so even if it's boring, it will be done soon. Do any of you find that mindless knitting is boring knitting? Do you always need a challenging knit?

Gifts #4 and 5 are undecided. For one friend I'd like to do another shawl, perhaps Calais, out of either Dream in Color Starry or Yarn Chef Mulligatawny. For the other, perhaps one of Elizabeth Lovick's scarves in some lovely cream Aran wool.

As promised

As promised, I have photos of my first beaded knitting project. Yes, the Shetland Triangles shawl is complete.

Close-up of beaded edging:

Excuse the lack of proper focus; the camera and I had a bit of a disagreement yesterday.

Final thoughts: This was a fun pattern; next time I'll use 6/0 instead of 8/0 beads so they show up better (and will be easier to add; no more sore fingers). I may make another one, since this one will fly with me to Los Angeles this Sunday (more on that later) to become a thank-you gift for my sister-in-law.
Carefree is really and truly nearly done; I am just about at the armhole of the second sleeve. I'd love to finish it this week to take along. We'll see.
Evenstar had been neglected but no more; yesterday was devoted to knitting Clue 2 (nearly done with that). Had the camera not been in a tiff, I would have taken its portrait to show you. Maybe the camera will behave itself today.

As for LA, we (DH and I) are going Sunday for the Passover holiday. My elderly parents are not doing well; indeed, they were unable to join us for DD#1's wedding. DH and I will spend 10 days in LA, bringing along a wedding video for them. Such bittersweet times. If I don't post again before my trip, I wish all my readers a happy holiday season. Chag kasher v'sameach, as we say in my neck of the woods.

Self-Awareness

Today I found out I'm a Cool Nerd Queen.




Aaaaand I finished the Shetland shawl! Blocking and photos coming up soon.

Bead All That You Can Bead

No, not a mangled slogan for the US Marine Corps; rather a discovery that I can knit and bead. The Evenstar KAL begins tonight. The shawl calls for 2900 seed beads. That's 3 ounces of size 8/0 beads. Initially I was going to eschew the beads, but the more I looked at beaded swatches (and my own bead stash), the more I thought, "I can do this." Indeed, with a crochet hook (0.6 mm in diameter is what I bought), it's eminently possible to add beads one at a time. Who knew it could be so easy? When my mother knitted with beads or sequins, she strung them all. With this technique, beads can be added at will, in any color order desired. How neat is that? What's even neater is the choice of lovely beads I have. Above are 2 I picked from my stash to coordinate with the Zephyr yarn. I want a subtle shimmer so I picked bead colors fairly close to the yarn color. Both are Matsuno shade 356g, called magenta-lined aurora borealis (AB in bead lingo) or Sparkling Dahlia (listed on my tubes) or Elderberry-lined AB. Maybe that should be Eldar-berry, in keeping with the LotR theme here; bad pun, I know. On the bottom are the smaller size 11/0 and at top the size 8/0 the pattern calls for. I might, just might, try to use the size 11/0; there's something about the more subtle glimmer of them that appeals to me. I want a mysterious look to the shawl, a nighttime look: subtle shimmer that resembles stars twinkling in the sky, not bold glitz and glamour. If I can't get the 11/0 beads on the yarn, well then, the 8/0 beads will have to do.

Now take these beads:

Aren't they gorgeous? Hard to capture the nuances of color, but believe me, they are stunning. This color is called Brownstone Iridescent. I think I'll add these to the edging of my Shetland Triangle shawl. The color will look super against the pale beige. I can't wait for the crochet hook to arrive from Fuzzy Mabel so I can start bead knitting!

And I'll wind up this post with some eye candy for you. Still keeping to the LotR theme, here's a necklace I finished late 2009 I named Arwen. I was inspired to make it by the headpiece she wore at Aragorn's coronation in Return of the King.

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!

Paging Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel

Thursday's New York Times covered Karl Lagerfeld's Chanel show earlier this week. This passage caught my eye:

It was Mr. Lagerfeld’s 54th couture collection for the house, a milestone noted by a man who doesn’t easily observe anniversaries or birthdays. He mentioned the fact only because that’s the number of collections it apparently took him to figure out how to make a dress that doesn’t appear to have seams.

Making a seamless dress was a goal of futurists like Rudi Gernreich and Issey Miyake, and, no, Mr. Lagerfeld didn’t quite succeed. But at least he thought about it. The method he used requires four hours of handwork to cover a length of two inches, but the effect of flat, random stitches on pastel wool bouclé dresses and jackets was successful enough to make the seams appear magically erased.

Pastel wool bouclé. Any bouclé for that matter. In other words, yarn. We knitters know how to make seamless garments, n'est-ce pas? M Lagerfeld, je peux vous tricoter les chemises sans sutures!

In other (knitting) news, I have finished Sleeve #1 of Milkshake. Voilà!

I took the photo right before completing it. It has a strange sleeve cap: all decreases from the armhole. Quite different from the body shaping.

And I did more work on the Shetland Triangle shawl:
This shawl pattern is nice and easy; I don't think my next shawl project Evenstar will be this relaxing. Speaking of which, I ought to start swatching for it soon. I plan to use the JaggerSpun Zephyr 2/18 I have in stash (I have nearly a pound of it, that's over 5,000 yards). Plenty for mistakes, frogging, tinking, and any other disaster I can think of. No joining either. And a pretty dark maroon color (maybe dark is good for hiding mistakes?). This will be my first circular shawl. It'll be an adventure. Maybe not on the order of Frodo's and Sam's; here's hoping it won't feel as if I descended into Mordor!