Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Ptarmigan Made a Peacock

Proud as a Peacock is finished, plenty of time to git 'er done while waiting for what I swear is the last resupply of yarn for greedy Viola.

Here it is in all its beady glory:


Yarn is (as you might say of your kitty cat) a rescue from a kit project that I finally decided was too fiddly to actually make. It would have involved a terrible rats' nest of bobbins and colors difficult to discriminate in dim winter light. The yarn was Knit Picks Palette, background color Opal Heather as per pattern, but the contrast colors are Blue Note Heather, Pool, Bluebell, and Tidepool Heather. There's not as much contrast between the Tidepool and Opal as with the original green, which led me to make some changes from the pattern's top:

I repeated the sequence of the blue contrasts and added beads instead of a plain stitch for the "eyes" of the feather shape. I like the hat and this interpretation of it just fine. The model, by the way, is Louisa May Alcott at the library.

What's up with Viola? I couldn't finish the last few squares without yet another resupply of 3 more colors of yarn. It's just a few ridges missing for each color, and I did consider faking it with substitutions of near-neighbor colors. I don't even think it's the fault of the pattern's yarn estimation. I suspect that if I had been less liberal with the starting and finishing tails for all those colors in all those squares, I probably could have eked it out with the original quantity. Too late now.

Don't ask me to explain why I'm such an improvisor on one project and a pattern slave on the other. It's just the way the fiber flops for me. Thank goodness There Are No Knitting Police!

Friday, November 9, 2012

Portable Peacock

Here, take a peek at the new portable project:


Proud as a Peacock hat by Deborah Tomasello.  It's lovely, absolutely lovely. The colors I'm using aren't the prescribed ones, but the palette is similar, and I have the satisfaction of using some yarns for a kit that I decided was just too fiddly to go on with. The green yarn barely shows up at all, being too close a cousin to the Opal Heather background color (the only color that matches the pattern prescription). Because of the lack of contrast, I have my own plans for the crown pattern. Let's just say that beads will be involved.

What of Viola? She continues, slowly but surely. Only a few squares left now, but wouldn't you know it--I've run out of another color! Rats! I suppose if I were a bit more somethingorother (organized? anal? methodical? thrifty?) I would have knit until I had done all the squares possible with the original yarn quantity, and then ordered all the additional balls needed at once. Lucky for Knit Picks, I'm not that methodical etc. Lucky for me, this is cheap Knit Picks yarn and not baby bison/virgin cashmere/angels' navel lint yarn. (Although that stuff would be pretty soft, wouldn't it?) Anyway, awaiting resupply of Hollyberry this time.

And actually, taking a look at the photo with so many squares bagged up by page awaiting blocking, actual blocking on the board by page, so many squares awaiting page completion in labeled serried rows, I don't think I'm so disorganized, after all!