To and Fro
This is going to be awesome. This is going to be awesome, and it's all for me. The cable (way easier than it looks) and the yarn (Alpaca Silk by String Theory, now sadly discontinued, but there are other alpaca/silk blends out there) are vying to see which is most awesome (always a good sign). I'm going to sit back and let them duke it out.
Nets
I sort of love nets. Like I may have actually watched youtube videos of how to make your own fishing nets (note, I do not fish...I do not even eat fish), just because I like how they go together. Now the likelihood of me ever actually making a fishing net is low, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate a bit of knitting that happens to look a bit like a net... That's Serena by Manos del Uruguay, and it's a lovely cotton and alpaca blend (very much unlike fishing nets). It's going to be delightfully orderly once it's blocked, [...]
Acquisitions
We've been away for a bit. We were up in Maine. (Yes, again. No, I'm not at all sorry. Yes, we are actually considering just moving there and saving everyone quite a lot of driving time.) Rather than bore you with the details (water, oh so many rocks, sea treasures, cocktails, pumpkin fest, beer week), I thought I'd be all noble and restrained and mostly just flash some yarn. Because no one actually wants to hear about anyone else's vacation. It's almost as boring as hearing about someone else's dream. Yarn on the other hand, everyone wants to know about [...]
Precise
So the cuffs are done (yes, both!) and will be showing themselves off with proper photos any moment now. But before you can take the pretty photos, you have to block the knitting. Blocking flared cuffs can be a bit perplexing. You want the wrist nice and round, and the bottom all spread out. You can put them on a mitt blocker (if you're lucky enough to have such a thing) and then lay them down on a mat and pin out the flare. But that takes forever to dry and leaves you with a crease where it was folded [...]
Inevitable
Sigh. I have knit two curls, two sizable curls on straight needles with no problems at all. I just bunched the stitches up (and eventually whacked a rubber band around the fabric to keep it smooshed together). It worked perfectly. But that's just not going to work for this one. The yarn is both astonishing fluffy and hideously delicate, and it just won't take being smooshed too much. Stitches are popping off both ends of the needles, and I'm pretty sure if I tried to rubber band it, the band would chew right through the fabric like a chainsaw. So [...]
Graupel (plus giveaway)
You know how the right yarn and the right stitches can come together to make something that's niftier than it has any right to be? That's totally what happens with Graupel, and I'm so excited to have them back out! The leg has a little sample of everything (a bit of cabling, a bit of lace, and a bit of ribbing), all in a four row repeat. Yet somehow, it manages to feel calm, not busy. Then when you get down to the foot, stitches come swooping in from the side to wrap your foot in soothing stockinette. Now of [...]
Kinked
Once I decided that the initial incarnation of the gray socks had to give way to a new version, the next step was to free the yarn. Now this is actually surprisingly hard for me. I loathe ripping. I always feel like I'm throwing away all that time I spent knitting. But in this case, there was absolutely no way I was ever going to use (or even finish) the socks, and the yarn was too pretty to waste. So out came the darning needle and the swift. I picked out my ends (why on earth am I so thorough [...]
Shapely
So the cuff is done. It is adorable (and comfy, and soft, and warm, and all the other things you'd want a cuff to be). But it is also weirdly hard to photograph (that it is a bit damp doesn't help, but sunset comes early these days, and if I waited for it to dry it would be dark, so I'll take what I can get). Eduardo helps give a sense of the proportions of the thing, but his wrist is rather wider in comparison to his hand than is mine, so things look a bit elongated. The actual proportions [...]
Unearthed
A recent toss of the secondary knitting basket (don't look at me like that, I know some of you have them, too) revealed by far my oldest WIP. As far as I can tell, I put that down some time in the summer of 2011 and haven't touched it since. For those keeping score at home, that's one whole sock and pretty much the whole leg of another sock. That should, in theory, be the fastest path from me to a shiny new pair of socks. Alas, in this case, the theory doesn't quite hold true. The first sock truly [...]
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