Sunday, August 3, 2008

A Day in the Life will be right back after...

a short break for some knitting news.

I have been knitting quite regularly, maybe inspired by all the lovelies at Camp. First of all, I finished the socks I started back in February at Madrona. I've named these Boysenberry Waffles. You've seen them before. Here's the pair:
A close up of the broken rib pattern.
A closer look at the heel. You can see the little gussets I make so that I can work eye-of-partridge st on the heel and make it deeper. I purled the gussets so I didn't have to keep track of them. You just increase till you have the correct number of purled sts and decrease till all of them are gone.
I also made a beaded beret in Rowan Wool/silk in the Bramble colorway. I thought I would knit this at Camp and I swatched for it there but I didn't have enough beads. This is for a class where I'll be teaching two different beading techniques. My usual beading class involves about 10 different techniques but that involves just a sampler. Students wanted a real project so I came up with this. The brim has the beads threaded on and that was why I couldn't start without all the beads on the yarn. I use a Big Eye needle to thread beads as some of you may have seen when I was making my necklace. One can also use a floss threader but I find it too floppy to pick up the beads. This is a close-up of the finished brim with the shadowed diamonds pattern that I designed. The blue diamonds have a green shadow.
On the top, I put the beads on the st via a crochet hook. The crochet hook that fit the hole in the bead was too small to grab the yarn without splitting it. So I struggled with fixing the splits. I remembered that vanessa had mentioned that Oral-B Superfloss could be used for the same purpose. So I went out and bought some and voila! it worked beautifully. The Superfloss is not as fast as the crochet hook when it works well , but much faster than fixing a split st when it doesn't work as well. Yes, the photo is out of focus. But you can see the result. I'll take a better picture next time I pull out the camera.

I'm working on the Wild Apple. It has been slow going because I am increasing after the yoke. That means the rounds are getting longer and longer. I am up to over 500 sts between the front, back and two sleeves. But I am almost done. Once I divide for the underarms, the body is one long mindless knit. I knit really fast when I'm just doing mindless stockinette so it doesn't take as long as it might for others.

I don't win things. Or so I said till I went to Camp last year. I won two raffle items last year, a lot of vintage Rowan yarns and the Natural Knitter by Barbara Albright. This year I won some lovely skeins of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sport Mill-ends in Motherlode. Frequently, folks bring items they've knit with winnings and prizes for show-and-tell. The vintage Rowan is very precious and I want to do something really beautiful and unique with it. However, I have a plan for the Lorna's Laces.

I am debating whether the Lorna's Laces project or a pair of mittens from Latvian Mittens or a ch'ullo inspired by Andean Folk Knitting by Cynthia LeCount is going to be my next project. I am failing miserably at coming up with a color scheme for the chu'llo (more in a future post) but I think I have a good one for a pair of mittens. So one of the first two will be next.

Now we return you to your regularly scheduled programming...

2 comments:

Nancy said...

Maybe considering that you seem to be in a purple mode, you would considering some shade of purple with blues and greens and winter white for either project and you're working toward a coordinating set (oh, horrors! coordination!!!) If you did the Latvian mittens then you'd be able to pick up a mirrored pattern or the same pattern in the chullo...? Now there's the scarf or something similar for the outfit!

Dot Com Mom said...

Lovely work! Your blog is terrific. I'm going to visit again.