Resurrection from The Heap

Rummaging in the stash closet for something else, I rediscovered a bagful from the Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble. It has been composting in the heap for so long, I have no idea when it was actually started, but once brought to light, it seized my fancy for some reason.

It's the Brocade Leaves Sweater by Solveig Hisdal, purchased as a kit with original yarn. The design is the cover feature of Hisdal's very popular book, Poetry in Stitches. (Yikes! I just had a look at what the book is selling for these days--$100 bucks for a knitting book!)

So why had I abandoned it to the Heap? For starters, I had converted the pullover sweater to a cardigan. No problem, really. After knitting most of the body, I discovered a big blooper: two of the yarn shades are very close, off-white and light peach. The big flower motifs were supposed to be done in light peach, and by the time I got to the sleeves I had used up a significant portion of the white in the body. The two yarns are very very close (hence my mistake), and it doesn't seem all that noticeable if the sleeve flowers are peach and the body ones are left white. You can see how close the colors are below. There's hardly any white left; the big ball is peach. So far, so acceptable.

But the boo boos keep coming. The body is 2 inches longer than it's supposed to be at the front/back divide. Now we're looking at running out of blue yarn. Gulp. No way to know for sure, but it might happen. Especially when a cropped cardigan version of the pattern shows edges finished in a light blue knitted band. (see Poetry cover) but the final thing that sent it tumbling into the Heap was the size. The pattern is provided in only one size, a rather oversized medium. At the time of abandonment, I was a very oversized XL. It wasn't going to fit, and there was no use putting a lot of time and effort in rescuing my other mistakes if the bloomin' thing wasn't going to fit anyway. Well, dear reader, I am myself now an oversized medium, and there's a very good chance that after blocking it will fit! Game on!

The Knit Goes On

My hat-a-thon for the Mountain Huts hat sale is over, and it's on to bigger things. You still can go to the silent auction if you're reading this on or before May 10, 2013. Loussac Library in Anchorage, 6-7 pm is the hat auction before the big meeting and slide show.

But planning and making the hats was so much fun, I'm already plotting what I could do for next year. A fish hat? A mountain hat? Breast hat? Another, even crazier mohawk? The possibilities are very exciting!

Meanwhile, the knit goes on. Sixareen Cape is slowly growing. It's fair isle; it's fine gauge; it's going to take a while.

So I started another project, a Kaffe Fassett-designed striped sweater. Plain stockinette no-brainer stitching, portable with only 2 balls to carry around at a time, peasy, right?

I loved the colors the minute that photo slammed into my eyes. And of course it would--Mr. F has a unique way with color, though usually his designs are crazy complicated with a zillion intarsia bobbins. But this is just stripes of alternating varigated yarns (color varigations also designed by Fassett, too, naturally). The whole thing was sold as a kit, which made it a much better deal than buying pattern and yarn separately. What's not to like?

The pattern is what not to like. I had already decided on a different neck than the cowl from the get-go. It looks fetching on the model, but she's probably 6'3", and I'll bet she's a lot neater than most people when she eats soup.  Fortunately,  I have been tricked by patterns before and learned from the experience(s). So I read the whole thing through, contemplating each instruction carefully. Good thing. Right off the bat there was the overall stripe prescription. The picture is a 4x4 stripe, that is, 4 red, 4 dark. The pattern says 4 red, 2 dark. Whaat?? I scrutinized the picture with a magnifying glass. Definitely 4x4. Scrutinized the bag of kit yarn. Exactly half and half. So if I unquestioningly followed the pattern, I would have a serious yarn deficit about halfway through.

At this point, the pattern is a mere suggestion. I've already got what I wanted from the kit--beautiful stripe effect in a stunning color combination. So--4" bottom ribbed welt? Too wide. 2 1/2" is much better. Using both yarns together to knit the selvedge stitch? A recipe for a fat column of stitches that won't make a good seam--forget it. 29" total length? I don't think so. (See 6'3" model remark above). And I've got plenty of time to contemplate the actual neckline. For sure it won't be a cowl!

A Fix For the Fickle Finger

When we last met, I was telling you about my poor blistered finger, an overuse injury from a weekend's worth of knitting. And how I found knitted help for it on Ravelry, the Finger Protector. Well, here it is:

Made not in cashmere, as I initially planned, but in a tiny remainder of a sock club yarn. Merino, I believe. As you can see, you don't exacerbate your injury much in making this solution, and it really works!

And so, with my digit safely girded, it's onward to the next project--the Sixareen Cape for which the Kep was but a swatch:

414 stitches around this rascal. Three vertical repeats of the fair isle pattern. This is not going to be a fast knit. But I've got a long time to work on it, as I intend it to be a keeping-warm-around-the-house-in-winter type of thing. Warm shoulders while knitting or reading in bed is my motivation. And big piles of snow outside the windows to the contrary (this is late April, right?),  it will be a few months before I seriously need it.

Meanwhile, a photography footnote. This is the first picture I took:

See how messed up the colors are, especially the brown edging? I took the picture close to the window in the best daylight I had on this cloudy day, but the camera refused to meter anywhere but the light center of the circle, making the brown look blue or maybe navy. So a brown background made brown yarn look better. Not my first intuition. And a real life example of how colors on your screen may not represent the actual colors.

HAT, Two, Three, Four.......

'Ten-SHUN! (oooo, knitting pun! 'tenshun, tension, geddit?)  Hats for the Alaska Mountain Hut auction are on the march! Here is my second one:

A Sixareen Kep, (almost) as designed by Kate Davies, and made in the specified yarn, Shetland Heritage. It uses all the current colors of this new yarn, made of 100% Shetland fiber, and spun in the worsted manner instead of the modern woolen, then dyed in traditional colors to recreate the material of historic knitted items in the Shetland Islands.

To explain the "almost" above: In the fair isle section, 3 rows too late, I discovered that I omitted a change from the brown to burgundy. Rather than rip that far back, I just carried on, repeating the error in the top half of the pattern in order to stay symmetrical. To me, this seems to look ok and not a big deal. 2 other changes were intentional. The lozenges at top and bottom of the fair isle were one stitch off of symmetry with the center design. I pondered and pondered the situation, and could see no purpose, aesthetic or structural, served by this offset, so I moved it over one. And then to balance my color blooper, I made the i-cord bindoff at the bottom in burgundy. (It was supposed to be brown.) All in all, I think it looks very much like the designer's original intention, but I hope Ms. Davies can find it in her heart to forgive me if it's not.

I learned some things in making my kep--never done Turkish Cast on before, but I really like it. It made it very easy to extend the lining when it proved too short, and seems like it would be good to use with toe-up socks, shawls, and in other situations. I had used attached i-cord before (see Viola), but never for the edge of a hat. Works great!

Best of all, making the hat was a sort of exaggerated swatch for what I really want to make for myself, a Sixareen Cape. And I not only have got gauge (or 'ten-SHUN!), but will be more wide awake with color changes.

But before I do that, there's at least one more hat to make for the auction:

Can you guess what it is?

P.S. What's a sixareen? Look it up and see one in action.

Effing Moose Hut Hat

Herewith on its blocking ball, a hat created for The Hats for Huts auction, a silent auction to take place in May, a fundraiser for Alaska Mountain and Wilderness Huts Association. Check them out--their ultimate goal is a string of huts around Alaska that are a wee bit posher than your average public use cabin. They've started with Manitoba Cabin, and if you want to make a personal acquaintance with an Alaska Mountain Hut while knitting a Hat for Huts, there will be a knitting and spinning weekend at Manitoba Cabin April 26-28, 2013. If you're interested, leave a comment, and we'll connect you with the organizer.

Meanwhile, back at the hat:

It's one of the many, many interpretations of the Fornicating Deer Chart altered to look a bit moose-ier than the original caribou (thicker antlers on the male, none on the female) and, what the heck, some beaded snowflakes/stars in the sky. Dale Hielo yarn with Cashmerino lining band. Instructions said provisional cast on, make the hat, rip out the cast on and make the inner band. Nuts to that. I reverse engineered it to start with the band, then keep going, turn the purl edge and do the hat. Why knit and rip if you don't have to? Works out fine.

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!

Ptarmigan in Pneu Mexico

My travel was rescheduled, but here I am, finally, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Guess what I brought along to work on?

The Kirman fair isle sweater.  The bottom hem was done in a scheme I have never encountered before.  Cast on, knit 4 rows, reduce the number of stitches by 10%, knit 4 rows, purl a row, knit 4 more rows, add the 10% back in, knit 4 more rows and then start the pattern.  It will be interesting to see if, when blocked, this method cures the flip-up tendency of your average foldover sweater hem.  Bottom border is done and I'm most of the way through the first pattern repeat. Really pleased so far. The yarn is softer than your usual Shetland, the pattern has enough challenge to keep it interesting without making a knitter want to chuck the whole works into the nearest cactus patch (except for beautiful photographs, of course).

I also brought along the silver scarf for those times when I want to do something simpler. The pattern is easy to memorize and I can keep one eye on the tv.  Wish I had put more beads on the cast-on edge, though, but I guess I could add them later.

Anyway, it's a lovely vacation from the Alaska snow, and great fun to sit outside in the sunshine knitting on the warmer days.

A propos of nothing whatsoever, here is a batch of vegan cupcakes I'm very proud of.  The cake part is marble, frosting is ganache with a dab of vegan "cream cheese" frosting topped with heart sprinkles.  Recipes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World .  Made for Grandboy's day care valentine party so that the coolest goodie there would be something that he could eat.  Loved the amazement on the teacher's face after a bite.  "This is actually GOOD!"

Packing Up

Sorry I haven't been around here for a while.  Yeah, it's the old story--busy, busy, busy.  But still knitting.  I've got a bunch of things in progress, but not much in the way of Finished Objects.  Something of a bout of startitis and no finishupitis. And now I am packing up for a 2-week trip in which I anticipate having a lot of knitting time.  What to take? Here's the menu:

Winter Flame, a free scarf pattern from Knit Picks (also downloadable from Ravelry) in a cheap silvery yarn, Vanna's Glamour, bought on super sale at Joanne's.  And a few beads for trim.  Intended as a prize for my H2O class promotion next fall.  Just goes to show, I will knit with acrylic if I really fall in love with the look of it.

More of Vanna's Glamour, this time in Ruby Red, a simple long K1P1 scarf to donate to the Red Scarf Project next fall. For some reason the sparkles show up better in the silver than the red, but trust me, they both have a beautiful subtle twinkle.

The big project is Kirman, by Nancy Shroyer for Nancy's Knit Knacks LLC. The pattern is not on Nancy's site.  The copyright is dated 2002, and I think she's forgotten all about it and moved on to hats and ball winders.  It was a kit I bought long, long ago that has mouldered away in the stash until recently resurrected.  It's a fair isle pullover "inspired by the Symmetry and Colors of Oriental Carpets".  I changed a couple of the colors from the original--just couldn't stand the crayon yellow and green.  They've become a light blue and a light teal respectively.  I guess if I take that one, I need nothing else.

Last are Ringo and Elwood.  Well, just Ringo so far.  These mittens are soooo darn cute, but less fun than I thought to actually make.  The long carries call for careful tension.  Yarn is Knitpicks Stroll  sock yarn in Agate Heather and Fedora.  The plan is to make Ringo for one hand and Elwood for the other.  The Grandboy is not very impressed by Ringo, so it's hard to get motivated to polish it off and go on to Elwood.  Still, once I have two mittens I intend to connect them with an i-cord and string them up in his coat and to heck with the child safety mavens.  I seriously cannot recall
a single child back in the "bad old days" who was garrotted with his/her mitten string.  Not even cautionary tales from moms or grandmoms.  I wonder how many of those mavens have spent hours hunting lost mittens or being harangued by daycare providers who can't find them either.

A Light Bout of Startitis

I've been ruminating on what to do for a posh tropical wrap for the upcoming trip to Tahiti. A seacell/silk shawl or stole seemed right, and white was the first choice, but it was next to impossible to find white seasilk.  When I got some from a place that supplies it for dyeing I found out why.  It's natural color is a kind of yellowy brown-tan.  It's the color of white things that have aged from too much sun exposure (paper, cloth).  It might be an ironic match for yours truly by the end of the voyage, but I don't think we'll go there.  I quickly understood why it is mainly available in beautiful handpainted colors.  (I should get myself hand-painted?  I think it's called tattooing, and it's a specialty of the South Seas, but I don't think I'll go there, either!!)

Then I had a thing for fancy sea island cotton, which only comes in white, but the yarn was extremely thin and would have to be doubled, which would double the expense, and I just wasn't in love with it somehow.

 The skeins of seasilk actually look creamier in the photo than in real life.  Think dirty cream.  The cotton is laid on top of the seasilk for size contrast.  It seems more of a thick thread than a yarn.

And then I was evaluating the micro area of my closet devoted to dress up clothing suitable for the tropics and realized that aqua would be a cool color that would go with everything.  Eureka!  A new quest began and ended with a kit that contains a pattern and this:

Handmaiden seasilk in Blue Lagoon.  I just had to wind the balls and cast on.  I love how the pattern is lace, but with cables on the borders.  And I think the stole shape will be more versatile (a mega-scarf?) than the traditional triangle-y traditional shawl shape.  I don't even care if I don't get the thing done before we go in July.  What with the small amount of yarn and its light, slippery feel, it would make a good take-along project for the trip.

Meanwhile, the neck and front edges are on the Winter Sunset.  Ends are being woven in; facings tacked down, and then, I think, the ends of the sleeves will need to be whacked off and the cuffs re-knitted to make a more reasonable length.  Great thing about having cut your sweater up the middle from stem to stern--you're much less shy about taking the scissors to it again!

Good News and Bad News

So I've been beavering away on Winter Sunset. The good news is that I've completed one whole sleeve! Hurrah! Sleeves seem to be the bane of the knit-in-the-round sweater maker. You feel like it takes the same amount of time to knit a sleeve as it did to knit the whole body although there are obviously many fewer stitches. Maybe this is because you have to keep flopping the whole bulky sweater around and around as you go. Maybe it's because it's getting on for a gazillion times you've knitted the motif and although you're proud of having memorized it, it is getting a little boring. With all of it to do again on Sleeve #2. So imagine my pleasure at finishing the first sleeve and picking up and getting going on #2. Toodling merrily along until--uh oh--dun da dun dun--the bad news:
What you are looking at is the armpits of the sweater, the place where the fake "seam" is and the decreases take place. Finished sleeve is on the left; Sleeve #2 on the right. What's wrong with this picture is that on #1 there is an extra 1/2 of a motif. Eight extra stitches that don't belong there! Rats! Rats! And other cusswords that don't belong in a nice granny's knitting blog. [An aside: I learned to cuss at my mother's feet while she made our clothes on the sewing machine. Perhaps fiber work and cussing are natural companions.]

So my choices are:

1. Frog the new sleeve and re-pick up with the same number of stitches as #1. Make the mistake symmetrical.
2. Frog the first sleeve and pick up the correct number of stitches and re-do the whole thing. Make both sleeves without the mistake.
   
3. Don't frog anything, rejoice in the fact that the goof is most obvious in the armpit where nobody's looking, and try to adjust the shaping of #2 (fewer decreases).

The Yarn Harlot says, "Knitting is a human activity. It's OK for it to look like a human did it." That makes a lot of sense to me, so I'm choosing door number three. One advantage of this alternative is it's a potential boredom-canceller. I'm going to have to be on my toes all through Sleeve #2 to make sure the shaping is right. I could easily screw up the shaping--I'm only human after all....

A Rummage in the Rubble

My first FO from the Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble! It is the Rainbow Yoke Sweater from Knitscene Spring 2009 using Noro Silk Garden instead of Kureyon for the yoke (same effect, fewer itchies), and an old old Adrienne Vittadini yarn, Maria, (and by old I mean purchased at the Knitting Frenzy going-out-of-business sale years ago!) for the main body. I love the Maria even more than I thought I would. It's 48% merino, 48% acrylic, and the portion that makes it truly amazing is the 4% Lycra. It's made by winding the wool and acrylic threads loosely around a Lycra strand giving an extremely stretchy yarn with a rough boucle sort of look. I had been afraid that the stretch would make for an unflattering second skin fit, but knit in the right gauge it just gives ease and comfort.

Now why would I abandon such a beauty with all done but the stitching up? Here's why:
I got all clever and changed the neck from a plain stocking stitch foldover to K2P2 ribs with a stst rollover top. Consumed with my cleverness, I didn't realize until I was done that the place where the purl stitches take off from the Silk Garden looks absolutely awful. And that's where I lost interest and got seduced by another project, chucking this on the Heap.

The resurrection entailed ripping out all the brown neckband and knitting the first row of the neck (or last row of the yoke) in a final stst row before starting the ribs. Hey presto no more ugly pink bumps showing through!

Ain't she a beauty now?
So now I have a great new sweater with a fancy yoke that was done with a single yarn--no bohus, no fair isle! And what, you ask, has become of the Winter Sunset Cardigan? Why, I'm up to the top of the body, ready to 3-needle bind off the shoulders, sew & cut me some steeks, and start some sleeves!

Sunset in the Daylight

There weren't enough people to show off to at knitting group on Sunday, so TA-DAAA:

I'm really cranking along on the Winter Sunset Cardigan and loving the way it's turning out. Only 22 more rows until I start the front neck decreases! And it's about time for something to change, as I've got the pattern down pretty well now and make mistakes only when I'm watching foreign language movies and have to look at the subtitles a lot.

Feel free to post paeans of praise in the comments.....

Blinding Insight In the Lamplight

In the depth of winter in Alaska one thinks a good deal about light. There's plenty of darkness to think about it in. Cranking along on the WSC, it suddenly struck me that much as I adore seeing the subtle colors of this thing as it develops, it's easy to work on because there are only two strands in each row, Light and Dark. And as long as you can keep your eesit for this row distinct from the ball of cream for that row, it's 3 lights, 1 dark, 1 light, 1 dark, 5 lights and no bother as long as you've got the right yarn balls for the right rows.

Now, the Shetland Islands and Fair Isle, where this brand of knitting was concocted or perfected, is on a similar lattitude to Alaska. And for sure it was developed in a world that was lit only by fire, right? In wintertime knitters were sitting by a peat-burning fireplace, an oil or a kerosene lamp. Less light even than all the bulbs and tubes burning in my house. (And I still can't see the colors properly except in daylight.)

Here comes the Blinding Insight, which I'm sure has occurred to you by now, too: The majority of knitting time would have been in the winter when there were fewer outdoor chores to do. Wouldn't it have been a natural thing to limit your colorwork to two per row, a Dark and a Light, so that you could carry on without daylight and have fewer chances for mistakes?

This idea is suddenly so totally obvious that I don't want to check knitting histories to find out who has already thought of it. I don't care. It came to me independently, as it did to the first fair isle knitters (probably), and I like to feel a kinship with them as they sat before the fire, chatting, telling and hearing stories, or singing, and I sit before the dvd film with an electric lamp on my work, while we all create a dance of color in wool.

PS: Scandinavian knitting. Two colors, dark and light. Think about it.

PPS: I'm now halfway through the second pattern repeat!

My Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble

I am a process knitter. I love assembling the project--falling in love with the pattern, finding the right yarn, figuring out how the pattern and its techniques work, adapting the pattern to my needs/wants/desires/whims/fantasies, knitting merrily away on long winter evenings while my Netflix play on tv or computer. This means that when all the knitting is done I lose interest (or am seduced by the next project) before a product is produced. My dirty secret is that I have a huge pile of completed knitting that is not yet a product. That is to say, it has not been sewn up or finished into an actual garment. The collection I have amassed of this stuff I call my Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble. The phrase is one I cribbed from elsewhere. It's from the title of a book published by these guys. Go ahead and read some of the sample articles on their site. I promise they will make you laugh.

Back to my Heap. Here it is:


Now, aren't you feeling better about the two nearly-finished sweaters and the single mitten languishing in the middle of your stash? I thought so. Glad to be of service. The even greater embarrassment is that this isn't even all of the Heap, but when I started hauling stuff out of the stash closet a shelf collapsed, dumping books, sewing and knitting stuff all over, and I was frightened out of further excavation. What if it's only knitting that's holding up the rest of the shelves?

Back to the Heap again. You see how easily distracted I can be? I have recently realized that one of the uses of this blog could be to embarrass myself into diminishing this thing. Say, at the rate of one a month. If the result is a sweater or whatever that's wearable--swell. I have an addition to my wardrobe. If it doesn't fit, then I donate it or give it to someone and somebody has a new garment. Sound like a good idea? I thought so.

We'll see. Good intentions are all very well, but the road to hell is paved with couches.

Progress in the Afternoon

When the light got bright this afternoon I just had to mark the progress of the WSC. Crunching on toward the end of the first pattern repeat. And once I got outside with camera and knitting, it filled me with a crazy amount of pleasure to see how great the colors are and how totally appropriate the Winter Sunset Cardigan looked set in the snow against the spruces in the late winter afternoon. Melanie Elizondo, all is forgiven.

Department of Corrections

I nearly called this post "Smack Upside the Head" or "Duh". Why I didn't think of looking for the errata for this book I can't imagine. Head to the publisher's web site and there it is, a pdf ready to download. And confirmation of the flubs in all 3 charts, and a bunch of fixes for text that describes the armholes and armhole steeks. Goodness, am I glad I found this before I got any further!

So--lesson learned. Check for errata before beginning a complex project. This should tone down the dialogue a good deal, but it's still no substitute for thinking through the instructions of a pattern and having a little mental chat with the designer anyway.

And take a look--I'm out of the border and into the main pattern!

Dialogue in the Bleak Midwinter

These bleak midwinter days sure are hard on an Alaska knitblogger's photography. There are only about 3 hours in the middle of the day when it's bright enough to take photos that, even with a flash, show your knitting decently. So it's not always possible to get a picture of every stage that you'd like to illustrate. Ponder the irony of a pattern called Winter Sunset.


Reader, I've cast on. 346 stitches. And I commenced the 16 rows of bottom facing. And then I contemplated what the pattern had asked me to do and cussed at it. (This happened at night, ergo no photo.) What the pattern wanted was a 2-color checkerboard garter stitch. Really? I checked the book and rechecked it about 43 times. Can you think of a FATTER fabric than 2-color checkerboard garter stitch? For a facing? Melanie Elizondo (the designer), are you kidding me? What you want in a facing (well, certainly what I want) is something slightly smaller than the outside of the sweater, knit possibly in a smaller gauge (check) with fewer stitches (check) that will lie flat inside out of sight, doing its job of stabilizing and weighting the edge without calling attention to itself. If ever there was a formula for a foofy flaring bottom edge it is this garter stitch inside with stocking stitch outside. So rip it, rip it, rip it and cast it all on again and do it in checkerboard stocking stitch. I was tempted to be really radical and do an even thinner single color stocking stitch (or stripes?) but decided on this middle path.

Next I realized that the pattern does not call for what always serves turned edges well, namely a purl row to define said edge. At about this point I realized that Winter Sunset Cardigan is not going to be a pattern, but a dialogue between Melanie E and me. She will present her ideas and I will evaluate them for reasonableness and liklihood of good results, and then proceed with what experience tells me is a reasonable course. This is not going to be a quick knit.

Darker shade of pale

This is old news, but I still want to show off, so bear with me. The items above were my contributions to the faaaaabulous prizes in the attendance promotion for one of my water aerobics classes. The prizes have to be something you've made yourself or gotten for free. Scarves are a synthetic pink/blue/silver ribbon yarn, two furry ones (they are so fluffy they almost look like real fur) made from and elann.com eyelash, and a black kettle-dyed merino one. Also in the group is the linen string bag you've seen previously, plus a water bottle from I can't remember where, a cookbook that I got as a prize elsewhere, and a pair of commercial snowman socks that are cute, but wouldn't fit my clodhoppers. They are all by now gone to their new homes, to ladies who have been maintaining their committment to fitness!
On to the real reason for the post. More swatcherama for the Winter Sunset fair isle cardigan. I took Lori's advice, bit the bullet, and got me the original background yarn. You see above the three tan colors I have now swatched. On the left the KnitPicks Palette in Oyster, on the right KnitPicks Palette in Camel heather, and in the middle the winnah, Jamieson's Shetland Spindrift 2-Ply in Eesit, all photographed on a background of snow for best contrast with the ultimate white. It even looks like the gauge will still work with the mixed yarns; I will know for sure when the washed and blocked new swatch is dry.

Nerdlinks: Eesit is one of the wonderful Shetland names for natural fleece color. Others are Moorit, Shaela, Awt, Emsket, Mooskit, Sholmit. The yarns are here; examples of the fleeces here.

I promise that the next time I bore you with this sweater I will have actually cast on! Aren't you thrilled?

The Ptarmigan Goes Fibrous

For a long time I have followed knitting blogs, laughed at, learned from, been appalled by, bored by, frustrated by, energized by, inspired by, and enlightened by knitting blogs. For almost as long a time I have itched to have my own. Now that blogs are becoming passe and twitterbook and inyourfacespace are all the rage, here I am finally knitblogging. Thank goodness my self esteem is not founded on being the vanguard of the latest trend.

I pledge to myself (and you, O mythical reader) that I will post at least once a week and that said self-imposed structure will surely help me document my projects and egg me on to challenge and achievement with this craft.

For starters we have my Big Project To Be, the Winter Sunset Cardigan from Jamieson's Shetland Knitting Book 1. I have been inspired by FAIR*ISLE to do another big fair isle project. Trouble is, I am too cheap to use the original real Shetland yarns. That would be at least $130 plus shipping, I figure. Only about $30 (plus shipping) to use Knit Pick's Palette yarn, and Palette is softer, not as scratchy as Shetland wool. But of course, Palette does not come in the same shades as the original yarn. That and potential difference in gauge mean serious swatching. So I have swatched. Seriously. That's them in the photo at the top.

The big problem is the main background color--none of the Palette options are really satisfactory. The original Shetland is a color named Eesit, a heathered tan named for one of the many natural color variations of Shetland sheep. Clockwise, from upper left, I have tried Oyster Heather, Marble Heather, Camel Heather, and Iris Heather. The photo makes Oyster look like a match to the photo, but it's not. Oyster is not different enough from the Cream contrast stripe (despite what the photo makes it look like). What I need is something between Oyster and Camel, but it's just not available.

Swatching has helped with a couple of things, though. I know I need to go one needle size down to get gauge, and I like Oyster for the light contrast stripe in the darker colors. I still haven't made up my mind about the main color yet. Camel? I really don't want such a brown sweater. Iris is ok, and I really like the variation in the heather, but the other contrast colors (aquas) don't work well with it. Marble is probably the best of the lot. Knitted up it looks more of a steel blue-grey, darker than I'd like, but the aquas really pop with it.

Thank goodness I'm not in a rush--I can let this all marinate a little while longer. There's plenty of pre-Xmas knitting to be done before I can even think about casting Winter Sunset on. What do you think?