Remember how on Monday I said that it had been a good weekend?  One of the things that happened was that we came into a small and unexpected - but very welcome windfall.  So I indulged in something I’ve been putting off for months - I placed an order with KnitPicks.  I know, I know, it really isn’t that big a deal but I’m so often scrounging in bargain bins that this feels like an incredible luxury :)

It was sent Monday (according to the e-mail I got from customer service) and it arrived yesterday!  That’s pretty darn good :) Have a look:

I’ve been drooling over this color ever since I got the first catalogue that offered it.  It’s a bright, cool, clear red = absolutely gorgeous and about the most cheerful color I can imagine.  The wool itself feels nice and I don’t think it would be a problem next to the skin.  And, for what it’s worth, the color in the catalogue is spot on.  I’ve got 4 ball of this.  I had no prior plans for it but I noticed last night that it should be enough to do Annie Modesitt’s “Backyard Leaves” scarf from Scarf Style (a very fun book).  Of course in that color, they’d have to be autumn leaves :)

Then there was this:

This came in two different style skeins - just a curiosity :) I’ve been thinking a lot about trying to expand my color range a bit.  I don’t care for neutrals and my taste lies almost entirely in the “blue” range of the spectrum.  That is, I like cool colors rather than warm ones with a serious preferences for purples, violets and lavenders.  Lately I’ve begun to wonder if I shouldn’t at least try something different.  Now, looking at the above pictures, I’m sure the astute among you are scratching your heads and saying to yourselves What is she talking about?  Those colors are nothing if not cool and purplish! Well, that’s true - but see that gray?  That neutral gray?  I grant you it will probably be used in combination with the other two colors (heaven knows for what!) but it is gray.  A baby step, to be sure, but a step none the less :)

And finally, the heart-stopping piece-de-resistance:

What - heart not stopped?  Oh well, I guess that’s probably a good thing after all :)

This is kind of a double whammy.  Please notice that these are warm colors?  I picked them specifically to be so and I must say they are pretty nice :) The campfire has a nice glow to it and the yarn has a lovely feel.  But the baby alpaca - my god!  I’ve never felt anything like this in my life!  People are paying god-knows-what for cashmere when they could get this for $3.99 a hank!  This is the softest yarn I have ever touched. 

Ever.

When I took it out of the bag, I was so astonished that all I could do for a minute was sit and make appreciative, inarticulate noises.  I was so obviously overwhelmed that Myria offered to leave the room for a few minutes so the yarn and I could be alone:) Seriously, this stuff is incredible!

The other part of the double whammy?  It’s not just that I picked these in warm colors, but they’re lace weight.  What the hell am I going to do with lace weight?  I’ve never, ever used yarn this fine before and while I have a growing interest in lace, I can’t imagine myself working with something the diameter of a gnat’s eyelash!  Well, I can actually - just not quite yet.  If any of you know of any good lace resources, I’d be grateful for a boot in the right direction :)

I have been a grown-up (sob!) and put it all away until I finish the projects I’m currently working on.  Those projects do seem a bit dimmer and duller now, but that will pass and in the mean time when I’m not actually knitting (you don’t think I knit last night, do you?  Nothing doing!  I fondled my yarn and looked at patterns all evening) I’ll be thinking about what to do with my new treasure trove - beside roll in it, that is :)

Have a great weekend, everyone!

...I confess to having a seriously empty head this morning.  Not that I didn’t knit yesterday - I did, but on things I’ve already bored you with any number of times already :).  I got about a third of the way through the back piece to the prosthetic and I began the second half of the Fern and Shell scarf.

Yeah, second half.  As I was sitting with the first half in my hands, mind wandering as usual, I suddenly realized that the staggered fern pattern has a directional tendency; it travels up from the cast on edge.  As I followed this in my mind’s eye I suddenly realized that once the scarf had gone around the neck and started down the other side, the design would be upside down.

Well, poop…

So I decided to end the first half where it was (actually, it may need a couple more rows, but that’s no biggie) and start a matching second half to which it will be joined at the center back.  Rather than using a stitch holder, I did what is kind of the cast-off equivalent to the crochet chain provisional cast-on.  Using a smooth cotton (something that wouldn’t get tangled in the mohair), I crocheted a few chains and then crocheted each new chain through the loop of a stitch until I had all 46 stitches off the needle.  Then I crocheted a few more chains, clipped the yarn, and drew the end through the last stitch to secure it.

I grant you this isn’t quite as simple as stuffing everything onto a stitch holder but it really doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes and it accomplishes a couple of other things for me.  It allows me to fold the piece small so that I can keep it in my “current work” box without it taking up too much space.  It also makes it easier to wash and block because I’ve been thinking that blocking the scarf in halves will be easier than trying to block the whole looooooong thing once it’s done.  I simply haven’t the space.  And, when I’m ready to join the two pieces, I can “unzip” the crochet just as I would do with a provisional cast-on, pick up the live stitches and go.





No, I’m not sure how I’m going to join the pieces yet.  I can tell you that I won’t be attempting to graft this mohair; the probability of mistakes is virtually certain and the prospect of having to undo those mistakes, terrifying.  So, maybe a three-needle bind-off.  There’s also a possible decorative crochet joining that I’ve been playing with.  However, I don’t have to worry about it for a little while yet.

And look who showed up at the feeder this morning!

This is the first woodpecker (on the left) to come to this feeder.  It’s a female Downy woodpecker.  Downys are only about 6” long - right around sparrow sized (and that’s a female House sparrow on the right hand side of the feeder).  Not into sharing much, this one but she was certainly a lively and curious little thing.  It was wonderful to see her; I hadn’t thought we see woodpeckers at all until the cooler weather - when insects were less available.  I hope she tells all her friends :)

...couldn’t it?

I seem to be having a productive period.  Horrors!  Whatever shall I do?  Heheh… It’s just that I’m not used to having ideas, actually being able to implement them and truly getting something accomplished.  It’s kinda fun - but I don’t want to make a habit of it :)

First up, the front piece of the prosthetic is complete.  The pattern is a bit vague on the finishing details so I haven’t quite decided what to do yet.  I’m considering a three needle bind off (once the back piece is complete, of course) which would certainly be sturdy and neat.  But there is also the real possibility of a crocheted, slip stitch seam.  This would also be sturdy and neat but would have the added advantage of being easy to remove and redo when/if stuffing needed to be added or replaced.  I should be starting the back tonight or tomorrow.

Then, there’s the chunky wool scarf.

This is about 5” wide and about 70” long, worked in chunky yarn on US size 10 1/2 needles.  I cast on 17 stitches and worked stockinette with a seed stitch border - one of my favorite simple designs.  The middle section there is a strand of Tahki New Tweed and a strand of Lionbrand’s Fisherman’s wool held together.  I have another two hanks of the chunky wool and I will definitely use them but boy, this isn’t a yarn weight I’d want to be working with all the time!  Still, the scarf is nice and thick and should be very warm.  Into the Dulaan bag it goes :)

Next: I figured out what the error was on the mohair scarf and tinked 6 rows to get back and fix it.  And, in all honesty, it wasn’t that bad.  It took quite a while, going slowly and carefully, but there weren’t any serious problems.  What had happened was a dropped stitch.  Arggghhh… Because of the fuzziness of the yarn, it just sat there, blending in with the scarf and being very hard to find while I knitted merrily on wondering what the hell had happened to my stitch count and why the pattern was going all wonky… When I finally did find the little bugger, I put a stitch marker through it so it wouldn’t run down any more and then started tinking back (you don’t want to frog, as in rip, mohair because it will just tie itself in knots and you’ll have a real mess then).  Once I got that under control and had sussed out where I was in the pattern repeat I was good to go.

Finally, and this is a doozy folks, finally I found this:





Anyone care to guess where it was?  It was languishing in the back seat of my car - which probably tells you more about my car than I’d comfortably like you to know :) I had apparently brought it out to show someone and then forgotten all about it.  I don’t know why it even occurred to me to look in the car - except that I had looked just about everywhere else.  The reason I was motivated to search for it was because I got a lovely letter requesting the pattern.  I had thought many times about writing the pattern up, but without the bag to refer to I figured it would be a lost cause.  Now I have the bag back and the pattern can be accessed from the Knitting Patterns section of the sidebar, over there on the left.

I’m not sure that isn’t all the excitement I can stand for one week!  Heh…

It was a pleasant and productive weekend here.  And because the temperatures were in the moderate range instead of way up in the too-steamy-to-breathe area, I decided to do a little neatening up yesterday.  You see, my work area had gotten a bit out of control…

One of the problems of the individual plagued with chronic startitis is that things accumulate.  I had no idea how much things accumulated until I started digging through this pile.  And it’s funny, some things were in plain sight - well, parts of them were - I had just stopped seeing them.





The knitted prosthetic, of course, stays and is current work.  I’m nearly finished with the front and yes, there are 6 DPNs around the circumference.  No, don’t ask.

The scarf also stays.  I’m embarrassed to report that it has a bad error about three rows down and I have been ignoring it for quite a while now as I’m loathe to start trying to tink mohair.  But I do want to complete this and that means getting back to work on it.

The Mourning Dove Tee is also current.  I gathered the swatches into a pile and sort of pinned them together with a stitch holder (one of the big safety pin sort of things) to keep with the project as a hedge against the possibility of needing more yarn :).  There were a lot of swatches; I didn’t realize I had done quite so many.  Any more and an intervention would have been required so I guess I started on the Tee just in time :)

And there’s the scarf I started last week.  Of course that’s current - it’s almost done!

But then there are these:

Reluctantly, I am setting aside the Kimono for the time being because it’s just to big, bulky and hot to work on when the ambient temperature is anything over 65ºF.  I look forward to the return of cooler weather for many reasons but also so I can return to work on this project which has been very interesting to figure out and pleasant to pursue.

The socks...well, I just don’t know about these socks.  Logic would seem to dictate that since I have one and a half socks already done, I should carry on to the end and finish the second sock.  But I swear to you that second sock is evil.  Evil! In addition to having serious difficulty getting the heel turned (something I breezed through on the first one) I have twice pulled a needle out of about 26 stitches.  So it’s getting put away for now.  I’m giving myself until like mid-September?  If I haven’t decided to finish it by then, the whole kit and caboodle gets frogged, the yarn washed, rolled and stashed until kinder days (and probably more sock expertise) ensue.

Finally there was the bad-idea, unsalvageable, waste-of-good-yarn, or just practice stuff.

It was a little depressing to see how little time it took to turn the pile in the left-hand picture (a small pile, granted) into the pile in the picture on the right.  On the other hand, the yarn is all there now, ready to be used for some worthy project whenever the need arises.  I guess that’s not so bad…

Odds and ends got put away (instead of just shoved aside) and my needle jar got a new cover.  In the end, order of a sort was restored:

Myria wouldn’t have posted the before and after pictures of the coffee table.  She would have been a bit embarrassed had it been her accumulated stuff.  I told her that you folks would all understand, being knitters yourselves and besides, the after picture has no impact without the “before” picture :)

I also made scones :)

Happy Monday!