Spring will come.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Two sizes of socks
On the tiny side: Little baby socks, pattern sized down from WendyKnits gusset sock pattern.
On the giant side: Elizabeth Zimmermann's Harf/Scat in Knitpicks Shimmer in Eucalyptus.
You make a headsized sock toe, knit a scarf, make another sock toe. Then you have a scarf that is a hat, or a hat that is a scarf. Mine is a short scarf. I reached a point where I realized that I would need to buy another skein if it was to be a long scarf, or I could have about a 4 footer, that would fold into a nice "4 layers of alpaca over the ears" hat. Then I realized that the yarn had perfectly striped into 3 colour 2 row wide stripes. And, lets face it, a new skein wouldn't continue the pattern, besides, a new skein would be Buying Yarn. So I went for the hat.
On a side note - when I was kvetching to TAO about the striping *What IS it about yarns that pattern?* He said that it's not the yarn, it's my eye. I'm so trained to look for thrombus that my eye picks out patterns to match up, and that's why I can see colour repeats. Okay, great for work, but really...not so much for the knitting.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
I quit
Enough Already.
Back in Oct 2006, I cast on the Feather and Fan Shawl from the Gathering of Lace. It takes about 2200 yards of spider fart yarn. I picked up a beautiful skein from Black Bunny Fibers. (And let me interrupt myself to say that woman's colour sense is amazing. She used to have one called 70s carpet. I love her colours.)
Okay...back to the Summer Garden Laceweight. It wound up into a 2400 yd ball about the size of a seedless watermelon. (ie:not very portable). From there it went to it's own project bag, and traveled around the country with me. Sometimes spending months hibernating untouched, or indeed, not even taken to whichever state I was headed.
In the spirit of Frog or Finish I pulled her out again...uncomfortable spot...too much invested to frog, but still about 1300 yards to go. Row count in the 140s is roughly equivalent to 3 inches on a sock for each row of the shawl. Nevermind that there are people on Ravelry who have knit it in less than a month. This shawl was becoming my own Sisyphean challenge. Then the small misfortunes began. The hole caused by a dog claw, the huge miscount that resulted in 18 rows having to be ripped and reknit, the paranoid delusion that the frog was sneaking out of his tank at night and tinking back rows.
The true death knoll was TAO. 2 days ago he looked at my orange octopus body and asked "Why are you knitting that?" I launched into some explanation involving challenges, this book, EZ saying lace was good because you got alot of knitting for little money. Then he asked "What is it? It looks like a rasta hat gone awry" And something about the fact that he asked first "why" not "what" made me realise that energy-wise...I'm over this project. I finished the last 2 rows of the repeat, and spent nearly 6 hours doing a crochet cast off.
The first photo was the unblocked shawl on the floor with camera at hip height.
This photo is the blocked shawl on the floor with the camera held above my head. Good thing I stopped; can you imagine how much bigger it would be with another 42 rows added?
And...I still have about 1250 yards of pretty yarn to knit something triangular or rectangular out of. (in a couple of years)
Back in Oct 2006, I cast on the Feather and Fan Shawl from the Gathering of Lace. It takes about 2200 yards of spider fart yarn. I picked up a beautiful skein from Black Bunny Fibers. (And let me interrupt myself to say that woman's colour sense is amazing. She used to have one called 70s carpet. I love her colours.) Okay...back to the Summer Garden Laceweight. It wound up into a 2400 yd ball about the size of a seedless watermelon. (ie:not very portable). From there it went to it's own project bag, and traveled around the country with me. Sometimes spending months hibernating untouched, or indeed, not even taken to whichever state I was headed.
In the spirit of Frog or Finish I pulled her out again...uncomfortable spot...too much invested to frog, but still about 1300 yards to go. Row count in the 140s is roughly equivalent to 3 inches on a sock for each row of the shawl. Nevermind that there are people on Ravelry who have knit it in less than a month. This shawl was becoming my own Sisyphean challenge. Then the small misfortunes began. The hole caused by a dog claw, the huge miscount that resulted in 18 rows having to be ripped and reknit, the paranoid delusion that the frog was sneaking out of his tank at night and tinking back rows.
The true death knoll was TAO. 2 days ago he looked at my orange octopus body and asked "Why are you knitting that?" I launched into some explanation involving challenges, this book, EZ saying lace was good because you got alot of knitting for little money. Then he asked "What is it? It looks like a rasta hat gone awry" And something about the fact that he asked first "why" not "what" made me realise that energy-wise...I'm over this project. I finished the last 2 rows of the repeat, and spent nearly 6 hours doing a crochet cast off.
The first photo was the unblocked shawl on the floor with camera at hip height.
This photo is the blocked shawl on the floor with the camera held above my head. Good thing I stopped; can you imagine how much bigger it would be with another 42 rows added?
And...I still have about 1250 yards of pretty yarn to knit something triangular or rectangular out of. (in a couple of years)
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