It is still hot here and things are really slowing down. Most of the plants in the garden have stopped blooming and the cats are on strike under the largest bushes in the yard trying to stay cool. Smoke from western USA wildfires have made the air quality where I live less than optimal so I’ve been staying indoors as much as possible; this is easy because… Olympics! Prime knitting weather!! Today I’m watching volleyball (Serbia vs. USA. Go USA!!) and cranking away on the Antarktis shawl. Okay, that’s enough detail. Here are the pictures. 🙂
I’m loving the colors of my Antarktis shawlHere’s a shot that better shows my progress. I’m now at about the halfway point.I’m about half way through the Hawkshaw cowl too. I love, love, love this yarn from Spincycle Yarns.My butterfly bush has finally started to bloom, about the only color in the entire yard. Not that any butterflies are bothering to come see the bush in the heat. Even the grass has stopped growing. Mostly it is managing to stay alive. Mostly.The cats are too hot to chase any butterflies, anyway. Yellow Boy sleeps spread out on the damp ground under a shady bush.Yellow Boy: I can haz matted fur…
That right. This cat grows new balls of matted fur daily. I’ve been shaving him when they get really bad, but he can get a little scary while this is going on (growling makes me nervous, and then there are those teeth!) so we do what we can. Last night I got almost everything off except some lumps of fur on his chest. This should be an Olympic event! I wonder who would get scored… me or the cat? We could call it single-handed cat clipping. Points are deducted if you resort to using a foot or sustain a scratch.
MacKenzie: I have superior fur: no fur mats for me!
Last week I went to see my primary care physician and she ordered me the oxygen-to-go equipment and changed my blood pressure meds. Now my heart rate is up, my blood pressure is down, and my oxygen levels are better. I feel pretty good and have stopped the daytime oxygen. OK, I take the support tank with me when I leave the house, but things are still better. It’s a win!!
So that’s the cat days of summer. Olympics, heat, matted cat fur, oxygen level checks, and knitting marathons.
I’m on the home stretch of the Antarktis shawl. Time to decide which shawl to knit next.
Every Wednesday I go to a local yarn store to knit with a group of ladies who have become my friends. Okay, let’s be honest, they are one of my main support systems. I love the ladies in this group, and last week we all headed out on a road trip to the yarn stores of Fort Collins, Colorado. We visited three stores and treated ourselves to a fun lunch. It was a great (if a little exhausting) time, and it is always exciting to explore new yarn shops, but one store in particular was a huge hit with me.
My Sister Knits is located in the carriage house behind a lovely home on a street shaded with mature trees. We drove by twice before we figured out that there was a discrete sign under a tree out front; the low profile might be due to its presence in a residential section of the city. I really don’t know about that, but it is totally worth the extra time to locate it! To get to the shop you walk through a bright and inviting gate to the side of the house and…
you enter the sweetest yard with brick patios and walkways, tables and benches for knitting, sparkly lights and lovely plantings. I was struck with envy.Then there were the chickens… these pampered chicks have this lovely house for their coop, and the metal and wire structure to the right (which is much larger than shown in the photo) is their courtyard. So cute! I want chickens for my yard too. I want these trees and the decorations, and maybe that birdbath while we’re at it. Do you think a bee hive would be over the top? I got great ideas for my yard before I even made it to the yarn shop!Oh, there it is. The store is located in a converted carriage house that used to be a two car garage with upstairs storage and an office used by the previous owner. Now it is a lovely yarn shop. Let’s go in…OK, the shop isn’t huge, but everything that is there is JUST PERFECT!! Seriously, I wanted everything. Yarn that is hard to find, too wonderful to ignore, and in a great selection of colors. I felt like I had gone to heaven!and I met Julie, who is the most positive and helpful owner you could hope for. No wonder her shop is so appealing.Upstairs you find all the fingering yarn…Madelinetosh and Hedgehog Fibres in every color and weight you could wish for, along with knitted samples, patterns, and cute kit packaging. There were other yarn brands, too, but I never made it that far. 🙂 This table had kits to make Melanie Berg’s On the Spice Market Shawl along with kits for the shawls you can see. You know I bought the yarn to made one of these shawls… There was a Stephen West The Doodler hanging on the wall, with every color of Hedgehog Fibers yarn lurking nearby just waiting for you to put together a three yarn combination… The shop has a license to sell Ravelry patterns, so anything you wanted, they printed it for you and you were in business.
So I got silly and bought yarn. I bought some of the kits that were shown, the yarn for some shawl patterns that have been waiting patiently in my Ravelry shopping cart, and some yarn that was too beautiful to just leave sitting on the rack. I have put together the kits to make seven new shawls (lucky seven… can you feel a new post coming on?), and launched into some small projects that are rich in color and learning. Here is the one that I started first.
Downstairs on a high shelf these little kits were on display: brioche knit cowls. Hey, I always wanted to learn how to knit brioche…Look Mom! I can knit brioche!! Look at how nice these two colors go together. Even the little stitch marker came with the kit. This is the Hawkshaw Cowl by Kate Burge and Rachel Price. That yarn is a single worsted weight merino yarn. Yum!I even learned how to do the i cord cast on that Julie recommended I use. Thank you You Tube!
Today it is cool, overcast and threatening to rain. The Olympics starts tonight, and I have lots of yarn on hand and visions of shawls dancing in my head. Forecast: major knitting.
It’s been a kind of tough few weeks and I’ve been missing too much knitting. Last week I pulled myself together and returned to my weekly Wednesday knitting group at my favorite yarn store, Colorful Yarns in Centennial, Colorado. How wonderful to return to my peeps. How great it was to catch up on the new yarns and books. It was a little like coming home after a trip away… there was even a commotion going on between rowdy shoppers towards the front of the store. As shrieking and laughing continued I finally wandered over to see what was up.
Looks pretty innocent, doesn’t it. This yarn, which I wouldn’t have ordinarily given a second glance to, was the trigger for a major yarn event at my local yarn shop. It is Bamboo Bloom by Universal Yarn. The color I bought is called Emperor.
It was a yarn feeding frenzy!! Having caught the scent of blood in the water a great yarn, ladies were digging through a tub of artsy looking yarn on the floor. Huh? Nice yarn, but what was the big deal? It makes a cowl, one of the frenzied yarn diggers told me. A second shopper waved the article in question at me… and I froze. Hey, this is kind of cool. I kind of want it. I need some of this yarn, but by this point there were only a couple of disappointing orange/tan colored skeins in the tub. Sniff.
Wait… Why are there more ladies pouring through the door to get this yarn? Answer: A new shipment of the yarn had arrived and the calls had just gone out. The first yarn sharks had pulled up and more were on the way. Oh, no! There was no way I wanted to miss this action. I suddenly realized that the bags of newly arrived yarn were on the floor by the cash register where a couple of unprincipled fearless shoppers had ripped them open and were busy handing out skeins in all the possible colors. Skeins were flying through the air! You know where I ended up… yep! Behind the register where the main action was occurring. After making some yarn tosses myself (go long, go long!) I gathered up examples of all the colors, plus the cowl in question, and carried them back to the other knitters in the group. Oops. That was that. A major yarn feeding frenzy and knit-along commenced. Woohoo!! I hoarded three skeins of the stuff myself for at least an hour before I calmed down enough to put two of them back into the tub.
So, here is what all the fuss was about.
The yarn is a single ply bamboo yarn with 6 inch strips of unspun wool inserted every three feet or so. The barber-pole sections are where the connections between the two fiber types were made, Wow. I think that I need to spin me some of this yarn. With beads!!Here is the yarn once I had it wound up into a cake. Looks more interesting, doesn’t it. The puffs stand out, but actually there is about 10 times more bamboo yarn in length.and this is what the yarn looks like knitted up into a cowl. Woohoo!! Talk about fabulous. This is the Simple Rules Cowl that is a free download on Ravelry. I knitted it a little bigger than the pattern; I cast on 100 stitches with a size 10 needle. All the stitches are knitted until you come to one of the puffy strips; those are purled to make the puffs stand out. Too easy!
I finished the cowl this morning. Fast, easy, almost mindless knitting that was perfect for catching up on television that I missed over the weekend. Luckily there was a little action to break things up when I heard another (but not yarn related ) commotion occurring at the back door…
Mom took away my snake…
The cats had cornered a little garter snake out back and the commotion was Yellow Boy trying to bring it inside while MacKenzie fought to get the snake for himself. Yikes!! No, no, no! No snake frenzy! There was an intervention of the “release the wildlife” type. Cats in, snake out, and me knitting the rest of the cowl.
Tomorrow it is going to be a lot colder. I have a powder blue sweater that will be rocking my new cowl when I go to the Wednesday knitting group at Colorful Yarns.
I think I should just declare October the month of the cowl. I made a fun cowl early in the month that reminded me of autumn leaves, and then dug into the stash to make another cowl of the same pattern with a difficult yarn that had been placed into time out after behaving badly. While digging out the ill behaved Watercolor yarn I found another forgotten yarn that I had been saving for the right project. Hey, Christmas is coming. Cowls are fun and fast to knit. I already have a long cable needle put together: time to make another cowl!
Look at this gorgeous yarn! I decided to cast on and see what I could get.
I cast on 180 stitches (size 8 needle) using the Moebius cast-on posted by Cat Bordhi (which meant that I actually had 360 stitches on the needle. Moebius knitting can mess with your head…), which I knew from my previous knitting efforts would give me a nice length. The yarn that I pulled out of the stash for this project was Malabrigo Silky Merino in the colorway Piedras. The yarn had a lot of plum mixed with golds, pinks and greens. When I bought this yarn years ago I had a plum colored coat that I loved to wear on winter days that weren’t too cold. I thought that I would make a scarf to match the coat, but never saw a pattern that appealed to me. The coat is long gone, but the yarn’s time had come.
I had learned from the previous Moebius cowls that garter stitch is a good way to present hand painted yarns, so that is how I started the scarf. After 6 rows I switched to the stitch that my mom called “popcorn stitch”, but I think also goes by Trinity stitch or raspberry stitch. (Since this scarf has plum colors in it, I choose to think of the little berries as blackberries) I continued on in this stitch until the scarf was getting close to the width I wanted, switched back to garter stitch, and ended up with a picot cast off (CO 2, BO 4).
Finished cowl. The blackberries to the left are right side up, and the ones on the right are facing down. Since I was using kind of big needles the berries are a little lacy looking.
Here’s the fun thing about Moebius knitting: you start knitting in the middle of the scarf, and your knitting takes you around both edges of the scarf until you get back to the beginning. What I kind of knew but didn’t understand was the knitting is reversed on the two halves of the scarf. One side of the scarf has the blackberries facing up, and the other side is looking at the bottom of the berries. Hey, that means the scarf is totally reversible. I’m on board with that.
Finished cowl is long enough to wear draped like an infinity scarf.
Ta-daa. Finished the cowl yesterday. It drapes really nicely and is long enough to double around my neck comfortably. I’m happy with the lacy look of the berries.
The weather forecast is for snow on Monday. Bring it on, I am ready!
I bought this fabulous yarn one day while shopping at a yarn store that I love in Denver. It was in colorway called Watercolor, and it does have that look that comes with the watercolor prints that I like to hang on my walls.
How can skeins like these be left in the yarn store? Of course they had to come home with me!
I wasn’t sure what I would do with it, but the colors sure looked like ones that would go with a lot of the things in my wardrobe, so I bought it to add to my stash. I don’t quite know why I do these things, they just happen. The yarn stash gets hungry, and I feed it. 🙂
So here’s the yarn once I opened up those skeins.
Once I got the skein opened i could see how the dye had been applied to the yarn.
Hmmm… this could be something of a problem for me. This yarn is one that has been hand painted in discrete areas. I like the pink and the purple, but the other colors will occur twice for each time I reach one of my favorites. I really have been disappointed by yarn painted like this pooling in the past, so I decided to try the yarn out in some crazy dragon scale mitts that I wanted to make for fun. (I bought this pattern at Mew Mew’s Yarn Shop while doing Yarn Along the Rockies last year) The magenta in the yarn matched my dragon scaes, so how could I go wrong? The ribbing pattern will break up the colors so that they don’t pool. That’s cool, isn’t it?
Here’s the mitts, The scales worked in really cute and you can hardly see the yarn,It’s a good thing that the front with the scales is cute, because I really think that this ribbing does not display the yarn well!
Well, that was something of a disaster. I wanted to break up the colors, but this is a mish-mash of all the colors at once! I bought this yarn for the magenta and purple colors, and what I notice most while wearing it is the gold and tan. I hunted around to find another pattern.
How fun are these? These mitts are knitted sideways and use short rows for the shaping,
These mitts are knitted sideways in garter stitch, and I like how the colors are displayed better. With this yarn I do want some pooling after all. The garter stitch makes it a little broken up, but in a good way. I still had a couple of skeins of the yarn left, but without a good pattern for them they hibernated in my yarn stash all this year.
Last weekend I knitted a cowl in a fall colorway (my post Weekend in October Cowl if you would like to check that out), and as I finished it I kept thinking that it would be a good project for the Watercolor yarn. There is a lot of garter stitch going in the cowl, and the areas of wrapped and crossed stitches highlight colors well. Since the purple and magenta areas of the yarn are longer, they will display more in the openwork sections of the knit. I put on a picot bind-off again to add a little more color pop to the work.
Look at how the garter and wraps show off the colors of the yarn. No pooling allowed!Finished object on my favorite model. The cowl is long enough to wrap twice around my neck.
Happy, happy, happy. Can’t wait for the weather to get colder so I can wear this cowl and the one I made last weekend. Yesterday we set a new heat record, but this is Colorado, so maybe by next week…
Yarn: Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Worsted Multi (18: Watercolor)
Yarn, Books & Roses 