Once again, life gets in the way :) I guess we’ll just smile and take it, eh?

For those of you interested in the noir genre, you might want to add Renaissance and Brick to your must-see film list.  The former is a black and white animated (though adult) film set in the Paris of 2054 and the latter is set in a contemporary California high school.  Renaissance (limited release, not yet available on DVD) has some exceptional visuals and some intriguing symbology to recommend it.  Brick (available on DVD) has a decent story and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s incredible performance.  Neither are perfect films (and I have to wonder if a perfect noir film wouldn’t be entirely beside the point) and both are very much worth seeing. 

Chatters is definitely on for Thursday night - please drop by if you’re in the neighborhood :)

It wasn’t a big knitting weekend here; I barely looked at the Seeds sweater.  I did do some Dulaan knitting though :)

This started as a collection of little, tiny balls of yarn leftover from other projects.  I basically pulled together several colors and tones that I thought might work with each other and began knitting on size 9 needles with two strands of yarn.  When one strand ran out, I introduced another yarn - usually in another color.  This ends up with the colors changes sort of overlapping so there isn’t really a sharp dividing line between them.  Changing colors this way provides the same sort of visual segue as the effect that is produced with the seed stitch in the watercolor scarves (scroll down a bit).  Otherwise, it’s just your basic, bulky watch-cap :)

I also ran across a lone hank of Inca Alpaca - my goodness that stuff’s soft!  So I got another pair of socks started last night - small ones :)

This yarn declares itself to be worsted weight and recommends using a size 7 US (4.5mm) needle but I really can’t see it.  I would call this yarn DK weight at best.  I’m using size 3 US (3.25mm) needles for the socks and I think I could have gone down another size without too much difficulty.  For all that though, this stuff is really, really soft.  I have heard alpaca referred to as poor man’s cashmere and honestly - given the hand of this stuff - I can see why!

And I also found, in my prowling about, a bag of sample skeins that I’ve had for a quite a while and from which I have made many things.  But there was still enough left to make one, maybe two more items and so I began another One Row Scarf which will consist of 4” stripes of assorted colors. 

I know I’ve bored you all a lot with this scarf, but there’s just something about it.  Its looks are dignified but casual and my hands just seem to love the working of the pattern - every time I start another one, my hands act like this is the work they were born to do!  LOL!

I hope to get back to the sweater soon - it doesn’t need much more length before I can start the bottom treatment and then go on to the sleeves.  Cross your fingers, there’s seems still to be a good possibility that I may actually get to wear it this winter!  Of course I have shawls on the brain (but that’s a constant anyways) and now have two different colorways to think about.  Also, I have found myself thinking a lot about the Valentina Devine coat pattern that got me involved seriously in knitting in the first place and wondering if now isn’t the time :) All very pleasant speculation for a grey Monday. 

Time to light a candle and cheer things up!  Hope you all have a spectacular week:)

Good morning all :)

We seem to have finally arrived at winter, where much of the rest of the country has been for a while now.  Not that we’ve arrived in a big way…

I do realize that many of you have (and have already had) a lot more snow than this - but it’s the first in this area and so is special to me :)

The Autumn Seeds sweater is now waist length and I’m trying to decide how to terminate the body.  Forgive the silly pose; I was just trying to hold my arms up so you could see the armscyes :) This is not intended to convey any kind of attitude what-so-ever except that it’s early and I haven’t had my coffee yet!

These are the things I’m considering:

1.  Tunic sort of style.  I’d work the sweater down another 4 or 5 inches and then split the front and back to create side vents.  The borders of the front and back flaps would be done in seed stitch and would probably be worked down another 4 inches or so..

2.  Start the flaps (vents) now, just below the waist and work them in seed stitch for around 8 inches.

3.  Knit the whole base of the sweater in seed stitch without splitting the sides - though I’m pretty much convinced that would make me look like I was standing in a barrel :)

4.  Increase stitches and do ribbing such that there are enough stitches for the ribbing to hang straight down from the body without cinching in at all.  Larger needles might help here too but I would prefer to do this by increasing stitch numbers than by increasing needle size.

5.  Incorporate a series of knitted in gores, varying symmetrically in length and probably also knit in seed stitch with the increases done in the center rather than on the edges.

Hopefully I’ll be able to come to some kind of decision over the weekend and start to proceed accordingly.  But if anyone else has any bright ideas, I’d love to hear them :)

Have a great weekend! 

Note:  Maureen - after you left last night, Nat remembered curly-Q thingies (technical term!) in the IK Holiday Gifts and I told her I’d pass the information along - If this works out for you, Nat totally gets the credit :)

Oh well...I had to be out early yesterday and wound up being out all day.  Unfortunately, I can’t drive and post at the same time :)

I did make a fun find though…

The thrift shop had arts ‘n crafts stuff on sale.  Okay, more on sale than usual.  So after going through a huge bin filled with mostly acrylic remnants (no slur on acrylics - the Seeds sweater is being made out of Red Heart) I wound up with 11 balls of Columbia-Minerva Loop, a 75% kid mohair, 25% wool boucle, washable and mothproofed.  The ball band says the weight is 1 oz., and my rough determination of length is probably somewhere around 50 yards. (Aha!  I did find a reference for Loop here at Vintage Knits.  It doesn’t say when the yarn might have been manufactured - and I’m really curious! - but does indicate that my rough approximation of length was about right - 53 yards) These were pretty dingy and the outer layer of most of them was in bad shape - as though, maybe, a cat had used the stash to sharpen its claws?  But, the yarn didn’t smell (nothing had been using it as a nest or a toilet) and once the outer few yards had been removed, the inner part of the ball was in decent shape.





So I sat down last night and proceeded to unravel and sort out the stuff.  I lost about half of one ball and a few yards from most of the others - maybe 30 yards all together.  Then I got out my trusty and beloved swift and wound two hanks…





...which went into the sink to soak.  They were then washed, rinsed and hung up to dry :)





I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with this stuff.  I have worked with boucle before (many, many years ago) and it can be a real bear.  But this is such nice stuff that I’d like to find a project for it.  There is also the possibility of dyeing it, though I imagine I’ll leave one hank in its original color.  See how nicely it goes with The Jade Sea?

Chatters is on this evening!

Hope to see you there :)

This seems to have been a weekend of transformations - well, a Sunday of transformations anyway :) I didn’t do much of anything constructive on Saturday…

But on Sunday, I turned this…

...into this!





It’s called The Jade Sea and you can find out more about it at The Dye Pot.  The first link will take you directly to the new yarn’s page and the second link will take you to the home page of The Dye Pot where you can click on any of the thumbnails to see the dye procedure for that yarn.  The new one is at the bottom :)

I also turned this…

...into this :)





In case you’re wondering, the variegated yarn in the first picture is lace weight and I decided I didn’t want to use it in a shawl - at least not in combination with other things so it got set aside.  I noted with some amusement that all these yarns (all the ones that got wound, anyway) are Classic Elite.  The pale pink is Wings (wool, alpaca and silk), the hot pink is Waterspun (wool, sadly discontinued) and the maroon is Inca Alpaca (um...alpaca).  There are a couple of other things as well, a single ball of Knitpicks Wool of the Andes and a couple of balls of Cashmerino - but they didn’t need to be wound so they didn’t make the glamour shot :)

Have I mentioned how much I love my swift?

On Saturday, I received a small package in the mail from dear Maureen at Irishknits.  It was a tremendously pleasant surprise!  Imagine how warmed I felt when I saw these…

...which got turned into these!





Maureen just thought it would be nice to surprise me :) She was right; I was surprised and thrilled that she’d thought of me.  These are the famous Fuzzyfeet which she made out of Lamb’s Pride.  I couldn’t believe how thick they became during the felting process and I know without a shadow of a doubt, that we (the slippers and I) are going to be inseparable!  Thank you Maureen for your generous thoughtfulness!

Today I need to get some shopping done and I hope to get a few more inches worked on the Seeds sweater.  We’ll see - despite the aggressive greenness of the newly dyed yarn, it seems to be calling to me! 

We did it - as in me and the sweater!  The operation was a success and the patient is doing fine.  The doctor is slowly recovering :)

You all probably know by now that when I haven’t done something before or can’t quite wrap my noggin around how something works, I approach it with a fair amount of trepidation.  I’m not sure why - the moon isn’t going to fall out of the sky, nor the oceans boil dry nor are all the little rodents going to grow 12” fangs and turn the tables on the cats if I don’t do something correctly.  But there you have it…

Yesterday morning I finally got to the point where I could separate the sleeves from the body on the Autumn Seeds sweater.  It was about time too as there were 352 stitches on the needle and it was taking half forever to do a round!  So I threaded the first sleeve, all 86 stitches, onto bright yellow cotton yarn as a holder.  Then the pattern said. “Cast on 4 stitches”.  That caused another round of dithering - cast on how?  Cable?  Knit on?  Backwards loop?  Ack - sometimes I hate making decisions.  I finally decided the backwards loop gave me the most flexibility since these stitches are going to picked up later on for the sleeve and that’s what I used.  It seemed to work out fine, though I did twist a couple of stitches after a couple of rows just to snug things up a bit.





And then I capped the ends of the needles and, with much fear and trembling, went and tried the thing on.  And guess what - it fit!  Actually it’s kind of big but I figure that for a casual sweater that’s not such a bad thing.  What do they call that kind if fit?  Relaxed?  Yeah - that works :) It’s not ridiculously over-sized but if/when I do this again, I’ll probably scale it down a little.  I suspect that some part of my brain had me making this closer to the size I was a year ago rather than to the size I am now even though I would swear to you that I do know the difference!

I have worked the body down a couple of inches now and man - what a difference it makes, setting aside 162 stitches!  I feel like I’m just whizzing around the needles.  Oh and speaking of needles, I moved the sweater from the 60” needle it was occupying to a 32” circular after separating the sleeves out (and trying it on!).  I tell you, I’m glad to have that long, long circular - it makes doing some things actually possible that I would have just not bothered attempting otherwise.  But it was lovely to be able to condense things some.  Now I am going to have to start thinking seriously about what to do about the bottom of this thing - not that I’ll be there for a while, but I can see it coming :)

I started another fingerless glove last night during Chatters (which was excellent, as always - thanks everyone!) to go with the other dark red Cascade 220 stuff (shawl, hat and the first mitt) and I think there is going to be more than enough yarn to do a cuff treatment of some kind.  I expect this to be what I play with over the weekend - when I ‘m not working on the Seeds of course!

As it’s rather grey and gloomy (although surprisingly warm for the first of December!), I have candles going which always makes things feel warm and pleasant.  I thought I’d share them with you in hopes that your weekends are likewise warm and pleasant!