Earlier this morning I sent an email out to my yarn shops letting them know that I'm down to my last tiny handful of copies of Curls 1 and Curls 2 and that I'm starting to run low on other titles and planning to have them all wrapped up by the end of the year.⁠ It's a little bit sad (I'm a sucker for paper books and always will be). But it's also the right choice for a whole host of super practical reasons (turns out getting a literal, actual ton of books delivered to your house a few times [...]

There we go, that should give you a pretty good idea of just how delightfully textured this stitch is. Now, normally this is where I'd tell you it's coming out in a little while. But in this case, it's not. It will come out at some point, but I'm actually not doing individual patterns for the next few weeks. Instead, I'm wrapping up a couple of my paper books. ⁠ I'm moving away from paper books (for a whole host of reasons that are sort of too big and complicated to go into). And I'm down to only a tiny [...]

There's always a slightly awkward part of these projects where I know it's going to be lovely (because I knit the swatch and because I can pet the fabric and feel how smushy and cozy it is and because I can tug on it to approximate what it will look like after blocking) but it might not be quite far enough along for you to fully appreciate its charms.⁠ So I find myself singing the praises of something that you could be forgiven for finding, well, let's just say somewhat underwhelming. ⁠ So I worry I sound like a deranged [...]

There we go, that's the fun bit. I mean, I'm not suggesting it says anything particularly flattering about my character that I find this as amusing as I do. But since it seems to be true whether it's flattering or not, I might as well enjoy it. Because really, just LOOK at that. How can you not like that. ⁠ I mean possibly you'll like it more when we get a bit more of it done, I won't hold it against you if you're not yet as smitten as I am. But I'm already taken with it. ⁠ ⁠

Look, perhaps you're cooler than me (I mean you're probably cooler than me, that's setting a really low bar). Perhaps you can knit mile after mile after mile of twisted ribbing and not lose your will to live.  Perhaps you can tell yourself that the undeniable charms of that fabric (sturdy! warm! stretchy! pretty!) are worth the clanking grinding process of actually knitting it. But I? I know my limitations. And my limitations are about an inch of the stuff before I declare it good enough and move on to the fun bits. Especially when the fun bits look like [...]

Ok, with our swatching all taken care of (remember this one was four 'do I like the stitch in this yarn' swatches and two 'do I like the fabric at this gauge' swatches, so nothing too daunting), it's time to cast on. I settled on Hypothesis Yarns' Tweed DK in Wildcat and Shibui Knits Silk Cloud in Cove.⁠ And the two held together do something suspiciously magical that I cannot quite explain but absolutely adore. At some point, I will show you the fabric with both yarns sitting on it and you'll look at it and go 'huh, how do [...]

Ok, so this is neat...look at the difference blocking makes.⁠ The first picture is the blocked swatch, the second one is the exact same swatch fresh off the needles before blocking.⁠ Look how much more clearly defined the stitch pattern is after blocking. Look at the lovely scalloped edge on the bottom of the blocked one (that you couldn't even see on the unblocked one). Look how the fabric opens up and drapes so much more nicely.⁠ All knit fabric benefits from blocking, even if it's just to let the stitches relax and even out. But fabric like this, with [...]

So here are all the ones I tried for this project. And you can see they sort of slowly narrowed in on what I wanted. I though first maybe something super bulky because that was lots of fun a few weeks ago with Semblance. But then the stitch pattern I've got in mind turned out to be a bit too big to make sizing easy at that scale. Next up I tried a yarn that calls itself heavy worsted, but that I only seem to like if I knit it at the sort of gauge you'd use for sportweight, and [...]

Alrighty, here we go! This is both the color and the fabric and the scale I was going for. Let me get it wound up and we can get started!⁠ And by 'get started,' I mean I can knit yet another swatch that's actually big enough to give me the gauge info I need, because this swatch was a 'check the stitch against the yarn' swatch not a 'make this be the size I want it to be' swatch, and those are two different things. Some day we'll talk about the different kinds of swatches and the different things they [...]