I may not be a model, but I still think the jacket’s cute. Much cuter in person than in this photo anyway:
Did I mention it has 3/4 sleeves? And that it’s not quite so Dolores-Umbridge-pink, but that’s what you get with self-photography in a mirror. Here’s a closeup of the neckband:
And the button:
Today’s random fact about me: My favorite flower is a gardenia. (Joy tagged me to do 7 facts, but I see no reason to come up with all of them at once.)
I’ve actually been somewhat busy with fiber activities, in a fits and spurts sort of way. Spinning fell by the wayside with our recent influx of houseguests, and I picked up my knitting instead. I finished the front of Sweet, and actually cast on and knit one sleeve before I had a chance to write this post. Here’s the front:
I blocked it so I could sew the front and back together to check the fit before going any further. I think it’ll do, so I’ll keep on with this second sleeve.
I will say that the Plain & Fancy single ply I’m using is an excellent substitute for the Rowan DK Soft called for in the pattern. As usual, I’ve dropped two needle sizes to make gauge, but I would’ve had to do that anyway. Also, to make the frill, you cast on a quite large number of stitches, then reduce them rapidly by working two together throughout the next two rows. I wanted the frill to have a fluid edge, so I used the single cast-on method. The bonus is that this method was also fast.
I actually even have substantial machine knitting content, for the first time in a very long time. Last month, I cleaned out a bunch of stuff in my studio. My target: stuff I don’t use that takes up space. After years of being interested in just about everything and accumulating all manner of patterns, tips, instructions, yarn and whatnot, I’ve become much more selective about what I want to spend my time knitting.
I packed all my random machine knitting tips, instructions, and magazines in a large box, and put it in the garage, keeping only the instruction manuals at hand. I earmarked several machine knitting publications for the auction block. The purge extended even to the machine knitting equipment I obsessively accumulated when Brother stopped making knitting machines. Down the road, I wanted to be able to do everything the machines were capable of, so I needed all the gadgets.
Well, you know what? I don’t need that top-of-the-line electronic 4-color changer I never used, because it’s only for jacquard knitting and I don’t like jacquard. I don’t need the pattern program device that’s been sitting there hooked up to a little television so I can design machine lace easily and just plug the cartridge into the knitting machine. I don’t need the Knitleader I never used, because I design my patterns mathematically and don’t think I’ll get around to knitting from a sewing pattern. eBay, baby. I probably don’t need my backup standard gauge machine, but I think I’ll leave it alone for now.
Having done all that, I woke up one morning last week with a dreadful urge to fix my wardrobe with a machine-knit jacket. You see, my MIL gave me a cute dress outfit from Coldwater Creek. It’s princess seamed and sleeveless, in eggplant, and looks nice on me. The matching jacket would be cute with something else, but together, they’re downright matronly. But for most dress occasions, it needs a jacket, and I don’t have anything to match.
Except for a cone of Grigna dress boucle in lilac. Just one cone, and no longer available to me, in this or any other color. One of those purchases where you want to make something with it, but you don’t know what. You swatch it, but nothing reaches out and grabs you. Here it is in stockinette:
the front
the back
Either way, the nubbly bumps don’t do anything for me in stockinette. It’s really just a frumpy no, dowdy fabric. Very Dolores Umbridge-ish, which I have more to say about later. But then, a bit of double-bed magic:
1×1 ribbing at tension 1/1
I love the way the loose ribbing travels all over, instead of being proper and linear. It’s scrunchy, it’s drapey, it’s sexy, but still firm enough to hold the garment’s shape. I was so excited I sat right down and installed my Sweater Wizard 3 software on my new computer (that I’ve had for 9 months), designed a simple jacket and translated the pattern to machine instructions (1 hour), knit the 5 pieces (3 hours), steam-blocked everything (1/2 hour), and put it all together (oh, maybe 2 hours). Okay, over the course of 2 or 3 days, but still. The design is close-fitting and cropped, with set-in sleeves and a round neckline.
One of the benefits of this ribbing is the edges are all more or less finished as is, and I like that. I think one of the things that make machine (or any) knits look homemade is this rigid adherance to always adding front bands and collar bands and welts and what have you, as if there is only one proper way to finish a sweater. Case in point: some of the genius pieces the costumers put on Dolores Umbridge in the new Harry Potter movie. I was literally cringing, and some of the designs are seared (unwillingly) into my brain forever.
In particular, there was a (pink) tweedy Chanel-style jacket, with incredibly stiff front bands that appeared to be of the foldover stockinette variety. It rode up in back and flared out at the bottom and was so incredibly unflattering. Uff da. And then there was the allover diamond lace cardigan (was that StitchWorld pattern 150?), screaming homemade. Is that how everyone with a knitting machine looks?
I’ve always enjoyed the knitting subplot in the HP movies, and I thought this was an hysterical twist. Still, I don’t think IK is going to run a charming article on how these sweaters came to be. In fact, had I seen the movie prior to knitting the Grigna jacket, I doubt it would have happened. As it is, I’m seriously questioning whether machine knits should play a role in my wardrobe at all.
Back to the Grigna. The only edge that called out for a bit of finishing was the neckline. But what do to? I couldn’t add a stiff stockinette band, and it would have looked funny to put ribbing onto ribbing. Not to mention the fact that I couldn’t get this ribbing any tighter. And I didn’t want to do a crochet edging by hand. My handy-dandy machine edging tips were all packed away. I referred to a couple of books I have, and made a half-hearted attempt to add some edge interest, but it only screamed *homemade* and had to be undone. What do do?
Enter my sewing stash. From the ribbon drawer, a scrap of 1/2″ satin ribbon, many years old, in just the right length. Folded in half and sewn as binding over the neck edge. It looks fabulous. And just a single button at the bust, akoya shell in a violet hue, with a crochet loop to fasten it.
Just below the ribbon is a single strand of the Grigna, whose details are: 4-ply fancy boucle yarn, 65% viscose/35% acrylic gimp, 2462 yds per 500-gram cone, handwash only, made by Yeoman in the UK, and no longer available in the US that I know of. The bumps would have made my normal mattress-stitch finishing methods difficult to say the least, so I used slip stitch crochet to seam the entire piece.
Now, if I can just get someone to take my picture in it.
Oh, Justin, just dry up already!
I can’t believe how long it can take wet fleece to dry, even in this climate of -20% humidity. Seriously, my jeans dry in an hour on the line. But Justin is still *damp*. Yeah, me too.
I’ve read that Wensleydale is a lustrous wool, but I had no idea Justin would be so shimmering and white after his little bath:
Justin is actually drying on one of those little sweater-dryer-thing-a-ma-jigs, that I’ve never bothered to use for a sweater. But, it’s handy for moving the drying fleece around out of reach of the Kittens Who Can’t Be Trusted.
Looking ahead to the next Five Minute Activity, I think I’ve mentioned I don’t care much for roving/rolags made with hand cards etc. Mostly because the carding/pre-draft/spinning process seems to involve a fair amount of *fiber tearing*, or at least the sound of fiber tearing, that I can hardly stand. How can you possibly do spinning meditation when you have to rip and tear that fiber? Plus my yarn tends to be more uneven when that’s going on.
Okay, maybe I’m lazy and don’t prepare my fiber well enough, but even that involves this *tearing* business. No. I want the fleece to glide through my fingers easily. I like top. The biggest problem is making sure you don’t let the fibers slide away too quickly and break the rhythm.
I spent a bunch of money at the last Taos Wool Festival to buy English combs, so I can supposedly make *top* instead of *roving*. Tried ‘em once, didn’t think it was any easier than carding:
Of course, maybe I wasn’t doing it right. That’s always a possibility when you’re self taught on everything following a quick demonstration.
They came with this little 1/8 inch-hole-drilled-in-a-curved-piece-of-bone-thing that you use to pull the fibers through to make top (it’s that little black thing on the right):
Now I’m trying something else ~ the flick carder on the left. I came by it in a funny way. There’s this strange guy that goes around at Taos, I’ll say he’s obsessed with bartering/trading (much like myself). He gets a thing, and he goes to a booth, and he says “what’ll you trade me for this thing?”, and he goes to the next booth and does the same thing, and he ends up with quite a pile of stuff. Much like that guy on Craig’s List who got, what, a whole house from a pile of crap? So my booth friends saw I was interested in this thing, and they traded some yarn for it, and I traded them a pair of socks for it.
This was way before I even considered spinning. But the pack rat in me took care of it. Fast forward. Don’t like hand cards. Don’t like those stupid, over-priced English combs. Guess what? Using the flick comb is really easy and really fast:
Beauty. I think I’ll go sit on the porch and look at the view for five minutes while I wait for Justin to dry:
Uff da.
Just so you know, I’m managing to stay busy with a little of this and a little of that. It’s taken about three weeks of being *home* with the kids for me to refocus on my fiber projects. Of course, we’re still plenty busy running around, but I find my old *five free minutes* technique coming back to me.
I was actually most prolific when I was mostly staying home with babies, even though I felt that I had no time. Because I could never carve out a big chunk of time to knit or sew or anything, I did everything in five-minute bits, but I kept at it all day long. I mean, between diaper changes and dishes and such. Staying focused on my craft kept me sane.
Right before we got the kittens, I managed to sew this cool shell trim on the curtain in my downstairs bathroom:
It took me about five minutes, twice. I found this trim at the Orphan Yarn Shop I visited in March. The curtain is white canvas, with tab tops, and I sewed a row just under the tab tops, and a row at the bottom. This little bathroom is full of seashells and such, you see, a little beach sanctuary. Well, now it’s a little kitten sanctuary, but that won’t be forever.
And so, speaking of kittens, this is what led me to Saturday’s activity. My spinning area is in a corner of the living room, behind the couch. Besides my Louet (that I actually use), I have my walking wheel, an antique sewing machine table I store tools and supplies in, and a couple of baskets filled with top, roving, and fleece that I plan to spin. Much of this was not bagged or otherwise protected.
Now, I haven’t actually done any spinning probably since March, but I fully intended to make it a summer activity. And once the kittens got into the fiber, I had no choice but to reorganize the area. So I bagged the fiber to protect it, and that’s when I found some items I had forgotten about. Meet Justin:
Justin is/was an 84% Wensleydale lamb from Colorado (specifically, Black Pines Sheep in Eaton) that was shorn at the end of last July. I bought the 1.25 lb (covered) fleece from the Dows at last year’s Taos Wool Festival, intending to spin some yarn from a raw fleece. Even though, truth be told, I hate preparing wool, and I vastly prefer spinning from prepared top (not roving). Uff da.
So today’s Five Minute Activity is scouring the fleece, because I also can’t stand to spin wool in the grease:
Here’s Justin in an old lingerie washing bag. I just put him into some very hot water with Palmolive dishwashing liquid in my laundry sink, and pushed the bag down once, and this is what immediately rose up through it:
Now, I know it’s only lanolin, but all I can really say is “Ewww” (not Ewe)!
I plan to have 5 more minutes in about an hour, and again a few more times today.
Oh, in the last couple months or so. I really suck at blogging anymore.
1. Tie-dyeing 19 matching tee-shirts for son B’s first grade class. The dye roaster boiled over while we were playing Pirates of the Caribbean Life*, so my home (specifically the cabinet/counter/adjacent wall in the laundry room) now bear the eternal mark of joyous life with my family. When I’m an old lady I’ll trace the blue marks with my fingertips, and remember.
2. Finishing the front for Wicker. This was one of my pre-summer goals. I think I’ll wait until fall to re-learn the lace pattern and knit the sleeves. I just can’t hold it in the ol’ memory bank if I don’t knit a bit every week, and things are a bit busy right now.
3. Still working on the front for Sweet. It’s gonna be a while, maybe all summer, but that’ll probably be my only knitting project. At least it’s easy. I love the way the frill blocked out on the back:
4. Some really fun beading projects I’d had planned for a long time. A necklace/dress belt of abalone nuggets and silver rings that I adore:
.
A *sea glass* mixed necklace that’s been percolating for several years:
The large silver beads are flat, with the sun on one side and the moon on the other. Simple pearl earrings:
And, a 3-tier seed pearl necklace I’ve wanted to make since the bride wore one at Lee and Courtney’s wedding 15 years ago. No photo, not done yet.
5. Another *patch* painting for the dojo, in acrylic on 24×36 canvas. This is the second in a series, done because the walls are too rough for murals, and the instructors too flaky dynamic to make up their minds where to paint the patches on the walls. These remind me of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup paintings, although of course I’m nowhere near Andy Warhol’s league in any number of ways.
I’ll try to remember to take photos of the actual paintings, sometime soon, like before the dojo closes for good.
6. A helluva a lot of life *editing*. Stuff I’ve kept, stuff I’ve stored and forgotten about, just stuff, gone ~ sent to garage sales, given to friends, thrown out. I need to simplify – the clutter in my life is absolutely paralyzing. Do you really want to see a photo of all the trash bags and boxes?
7. Sewing a brocade jacket, but that’ll be the next post.
8. Adopting a litter of four, yes four, homeless kittens. WTF was I thinking????? Actually, I was thinking that four would be no more trouble than two. I was wrong. We do have a high cat mortality rate here on the mountain, but these babies aren’t nearly ready to go outside yet. My downstairs bathroom now a cattery, Febreze a constant necessity, a box of litter lasts 4 days, and we scoop three times a day. Son B named his *Puss in Boots*, son D named his *Stripes*, and JR and I named ours after scientists. His, *Feynman* for the famous Manhattan Project/Caltech physicist. Mine, *Grafenberg* for the German gynecologist most of us simply refer to as *G* (as in spot).
one like this, and three like this:
*Voodoo priestess Tia Dalma is my absolute favorite. Before we play, I dot eyeliner all over my face, like her tattoos (it freaks son B out). Guess who I’m gonna be next Halloween?
Doesn’t that sound like a major excursion? But the small alpine lake that I paddle my kayak in straddles the Colorado/New Mexico border. I always put in in New Mexico (the lake is not accessible from the Colorado side), and I almost always paddle to the north end of the lake. They even have signs up when you reach the state line, mostly because you’re not supposed to fish in Colorado with a New Mexico license.
I’d love to take one of those corny straddle-the-state-line photos there, but my camera’s not so waterproof and I’m generally on my own. So I’ll substitute this one:
That’s pretty much what they do at the lake, too.
I knit only a couple of rows on Wicker last week, and not at all yesterday, since I was busy, ahem, paddling to Colorado. I’m also busy reorganizing my studio, getting rid of a lot of old knitting patterns and publications and yarn and fabric that I’m just not going to use anymore. I find that with less time on my hands than ever, I’ve become incredibly selective about what I’ll make. It used to be that if something looked even remotely interesting or different or challenging, I wanted to try it. No more.
…or sew, or spin, or anything. Uff da.
I did finish the kilt hose, and a pair of *matching* socks for the bride from the leftover yarn (not for the ceremony, of course). But that was a while back. I put them in a gift bag with a tag that said *to guard against cold feet*. I forgot to take a picture of them.
I did some knitting on *Wicker* a couple of weeks ago, and I (futilely) carry it with me every day. My goal is to finish the front before summer truly begins, because I’m sure I won’t remember what the hell I’m doing next fall, otherwise. I also hope to finish the front of *Sweet*, but things are looking doubtful.
You have to understand, the ice is melting and the dam is spilling at the lake. Paddling season is not far off, and then there is no place I’d rather be than in my boat.
I’m planning to get back to sewing in a serious way, truly I am. But this may have to wait until kids get out of school in one month, because then I think I’ll be home in the daytime a bit more. The only reason to believe that I may actually make something is I have a few events this summer for which I’ll need proper attire. Or at the very least, something drop-dead gorgeous yet at the same time understated. My specialty.
The bridegroom was at first excited to see the popcorn top kilt hose I was making, but really liked the picture of *John Anderson’s Kilt Hose.* (I linked to those, too ~ they were the ones with the cabled cuffs). I couldn’t see any way that I could do those exactly without spending way too much time, but thought I could approximate them on the knitting machine.
Enter the trip to the Orphan Yarn Shop (not its real name). I knew I needed a finer yarn than I was using, and really just wanted some quality sock yarn in natural white. So I went to the yarn shop in Orange near my sister’s house. Now, I like this shop. They got yarn. It’s crammed every which way into aisles of bins. None of this pretty showcase business. You’ve gotta dig, but there’s always the possibility of finding treasure. Only problem? There’s never enough of something you love for a whole sweater.
I scored big. Before I got to the official sock yarn, I happened to stumble onto some beautiful Gems 22 micron merino yarn, in fingering weight. They had five or six skeins, but luckily three were the same dye lot. At 3.5 oz each, I should have been able to get a normal pair of socks from just one, but I knew I needed 10 to 12 ounces. (Oh, and can I just mention now that when I got to knitting and needed to start that third skein, I found the color was markedly different! Someone had taped the wrong ball band onto it! Luckily, I only needed enough to do the ribbing that’s hidden under the cuff ~ barely noticeable even when the cuff’s turned up.)
Now it was onto a book I have but rarely use ~ Susan Guagliumi’s Hand-Manipulated Stitches for Machine Knitters. There, I found instructions for a beautiful braid. The only cabling I’d ever done on the machine before was very simple. The braid was easy to knit, but more labor-intensive, since it required making alternate crossing patterns every two rows.
And so I started to chart. I’d taken measurements. I’d knitted a gauge swatch, and the yarn was performing like sock yarn at main tension 6. I didn’t want to deal with adding stitches for the cabled cuff (one stitch for each cable leg) and then having to reduce down for the ribbing, so I decided to knit the cuff at tension 9. Clever me. As it turned out, this also made the cable easier to work and prettier to boot.
However, I was still using the mistaken assumption that I should make the socks at less than 100% width so they would stretch and cling. I proceeded to cast on 80% of the width and make the time-intensive cuff. Here’s the detail on that:
I scrapped it off before rehanging the stitches for ribbing, so I would have a lifeline if necessary. Then I knit the ribbing, but when I started to knit the leg, I realized I needed to have an odd number so the middle one would *continue* down the leg. Of course, I had an even number. Oh well. And so I proceeded to knit the ribbing and then the whole rest of the sock tension 6. It was much harder to make the braid transfers down the leg, and when it was done, the braid actually looked different.
No, I don’t have photos of that, or of any of my other mistakes. The other problem with this version was that I wanted to have purl lines running down the leg every few stitches. The easiest way to do this on the machine is to drop the stitch in question, run it down to the beginning, and reform it with the latch tool into purl stitches. But I hate running it down, and I discovered long ago that if I simply took that stitch out of working position at the beginning, I could just reform up the ladders at the end. So I did that, and I found that at this tension the purl stitches were so tight as to be invisible from the front, even when stretched.
I really should have cut my losses right then and there, but no, I finished the sock and sewed it up. And tried it on. Luckily, it was still too tight at the cuff, giving me the opportunity to correct everything I’d done wrong so far.
Next version, I cast on at 100% width, making sure I had an odd number of braids. I knitted the cuff, scrapped it off, and tried it for fit. See? I’m learning. I think it stretched too far to be flattering, so I started over yet again, charting it with two more braids. Aaaah. I put in another lifeline. I knitted the ribbing, and then did the rest of the sock at the same tension as the cuff. I didn’t take the purl stitches out of working position, but waited until the end of the purl row, dropped them back down, and reformed them. I should point out that those few purl rows took me as long to work as the rest of the leg and foot, braid included.
I sewed it up. I took it to the recipient for fit. The foot was more than an inch too long. I undid just enough of the seam to rip the toe back a dozen rows, then reknit the short rows for the toe. I sewed it all back up. I knitted the second one just like it. I wet blocked them, and steamed them when dry.
Uff da! They turned out so pretty, and so soft, and so comfortable. These will of course be a wedding gift, but here they are on me:
I
I like a challenge, but I’m so glad this project is finished. Now that I’ve got a killer machine-knit kilt hose pattern, I think I’ll just sit back and wait for the orders to pour in!
Uff da, I’m not even sure I can remember everything that’s *gone wrong* while developing a fusion/machine knit pair of kilt hose. I’m not even sure where I left off in the story.
I think I already said that I made a fusion knit pair with popcorn tops in the bright blue/green handspun. I did a successful stockinette swatch, and decided to just follow the pattern as written and see where it led me. I cast on as directed and knit the four-inch popcorn top (the foldover cuff) by hand. And as I knit, the cuff kept getting narrower and narrower…. And the popcorns stopped lining up in diagonal rows…. And…something was wrong.
I finally had to stop and determine that the popcorn pattern requires a multiple of four stitches, plus two. Unfortunately, the published pattern I was using (the one I linked to) called for a cast-on of 61 stitches. I was decreasing one stitch at the end of every other row, and then the next row would begin in the wrong place.
So I ripped, and started over, and I might have increased the width a bit, I don’t remember. And after I had knitted four inches of popcorn top, I knit the four inches of K1P1 ribbing (that’s 1×1 for machine knitters) that’s hidden underneath it. And then I put those stitches onto the knitting machine, straight off the needle. I guess when I did my swatch, I knew that I was working at a comparable gauge.
And then I knitted the leg, but I didn’t decrease as often as called for, and I knitted the foot according to the machine knit sock pattern I always use for comparably sized yarn, and then I grafted and sewed, and it was a damn fine sock. I thought it might even be mine, since I rather liked the mismatch between color and form. But I have a rather large, muscular calf, and the leg was too tight.
Encouraged, I set right out to spin up a bunch of yarn in natural white. And I tweaked the pattern so it would be larger. Well, I knitted up the now-flawless popcorn cuff, and decided to do the ribbing on the machine. Of course, the new yarn was quite a bit firmer than the first yarn, and the stitches weren’t forming off the needles, and I was having to do quite a bit of machine manipulation, not to mention swearing. Here’s what that looked like:
So I took it off the machine and picked up the stitches at the end of the popcorn section, and knitted the ribbing by hand and then put it back on the machine, where I continued to have a devil of a time. I almost couldn’t shape the toe, and I was dropping stitches during the short rows, and cursing like a sailor and so forth.
I really did know better, but for some strange reason I thought that blocking would relax the yarn. So I continued on to complete the stiffest, heaviest, tightest sock you have ever seen. Completely unwearable, unless you were truly desperate. I’m not sure I would wear this thing even north of the arctic circle, even if it were the only sock there.
So now, here are the first two attempts, and now I can rip them and use the yarn for something more suitable:
Now, somewhere around the time I was finishing the second attempt, the person that was interested in having these made announced that he had just become engaged, and furthermore, that he would be married in a formal ceremony wearing a kilt. And shortly after that time, I happened to make a quick visit to California and an even quicker visit to the Orphan Yarn Shop, where I was able to purchase yarn more suitable for kilt hose.
And there I will leave you for now. Instead of saving this post with the intention of adding more later, I think I will just publish it, and continue where I left off next time.
Mostly what I’m doing these days is adding to my pile of projects. The only thing I’ve finished is camo print, army print, and jungle print tab-top curtains for my sons’ rooms. The good-mom merit badge is kind of important to me.
But I have a funny story about one of my two current handknitting projects. I’m making Willow Wicker (I just can’t keep that name straight!), from Rowan Number 37. Except I’m using my own handspun, hand-dyed, two-ply silk instead of whatever yarn they called for.
It’s a pullover, and the stitch pattern is a sort of lacy rib, with a laced panel up the middle of the front, and (I adore this last detail) unmatched sleeves. What I mean by that is they both have plain ribbing and lacy ribbing, but not in the same places and amounts. If you don’t have the book, you’ll see as I get to that part. By the way, this is a really crappy picture of the back:
Anyway, I wanted to dye this silk a sort of dove gray using the dyes I had on hand, but as you can see, I got more of a steel blue. Still very pretty and very wearable, in a wardrobe-y sort of way. I used a dedicated electric roaster to dye the yarn, and it was my first time with silk. I found some instructions at a blog I like for removing the sericin from the silk so the dye will penetrate. (The sericin is a sort of gummy substance that I suppose is part of the worm’s spinning process.)
Well, I had no idea if the fiber I had spun had sericin on it or not, so I followed the instructions. They went something like this:
To remove the sericin, add soda ash (a base) and a squirt of dishwashing soap to the water, and heat for three hours. No need to rinse afterwards. Just add your dye and a bunch of vinegar (an acid) and heat for three more hours.
Sounds simple. I just wish I’d remembered one of sons’ favorite science experiments, the acid-base reaction volcano. That one goes something like this:
Add baking soda (a base) and a squirt of dishwashing soap to the crater cup in the painted plaster volcano, then pour in vinegar (an acid) a little bit at a time until the explosive, foaming eruption stops. Be sure your volcano is in a dish pan before you start.
Well, I think it’s funny anyway. There’s a lesson here somewhere, I think it has something to do with not always believing everything you read in blogland. The mess is cleaned up now, and the knitting is proceeding in spurts. However, I won’t knit on this design if I’m tired, in a hurry, have only a wee bit of time, or have had something alcoholic to drink. Because I can’t fix lace to save my life, and the ribbed nature of it means any little missed psso screws the whole thing up.
So if any of those scenarios are true, I knit on this instead:
It’s Sweet, from Rowan Number 26. Just a simple little pullover with a frill along the lower edge. It’s the thing I’m knitting from Plain & Fancy single ply, on size 4 needles. The frill was a bitch, but then it’s pretty much straight stockinette, with side and dart shaping. I like that.
I have updates on the kilt hose saga. I’m sewing what I hope will be a gorgeous sequined dress and brocade jacket (because we’re so fancy here in mud town). I ordered the yarn to make the 29-color Kathryn Alexander fingerless gloves from a few years back in IK. I have top to spin. I have a painting to finish. I have beads waiting to be strung. I have no idea how I will ever catch up on all these projects, but I guess that’s the fun of it. Uff da.
