Alright, I admit it. I have kind of a thing with Caitlin Hunter’s designs right now. I started in May last year with an innocent little Tegna sweater, and then there was another Tegna, and then I decided to try a sweater with some Fair Isle work in it (ahem… I’m talking to you Sipila), and before I knew it I had gone down the Caitlin Hunter rabbit hole. In less then 18 months I have completed 8 different sweaters from this designer, and I’m still in love with every single one of them.
Top row from the left: Tegna, my autumn hydrangea, and Sipila. Middle row from the left: Mums, Koivua, another Tegna, and Nordiska. Bottom row from the left: Sturgill, Marettimo, Zweig, and some coneflowers.
A few week ago a good friend from my old knitting group contacted me to let me know that she had a gift for me. What? A gift? This was completely out of the blue, and generated a little guilt on my end as I didn’t have a gift to give back. Since I’ve given up going to my knitting group lately as I’m staying more at home these days to manage my symptoms (more guilt!), Diane finally popped her gift to me into the mail. Completely mystified I opened the envelope to discover…
A note from Caitlin Hunter herself!!Diane took a picture of Caitlin writing the note!
Best gift ever! Diane, thank you so much!! Opening that envelope was a joyful as finishing off one of these sweaters and popping it on for the first time. I am so happy and grateful that you thought of me.
I have one more Caitlin Hunter sweater in my queue that I’m hoping to get done before the end of the year, a Soldotna Crop sweater that I will be making a little longer than crop. I have a bunch of homespun yarns that are just chomping to be made into a Soldotna. I know, I am a little out of control, but I’m having a lot of fun, so don’t judge me. 🙂 If I manage to make my yarn destash goals this year it will be partly due to Caitlin’s compelling sweater designs, so this is a good thing, right?
It’s going to cool down this weekend so I’m totally going to rock one of these sweaters. Have a great (knitting) weekend everyone.
Do you see how closely I worked with the Mother of Cats this time?
I am happy to announce the arrival of our bouncing baby Nordiska after weeks of effort. I really supervised the Mother of Cats closely this time and kept my paw on the knitting at almost all times, and I do say that my efforts have really paid off.
Looking good, huh! Now that the weather is nice again the Mother of Cats and I are starting to hang out in the yard again.
The Mother of Cats totally freaked out within hours of finishing this sweater and pulled out boxes of yarn to wind for new projects. So emotional, the Mother of Cats. She simply can’t function without me and at least 4 different projects to work on at once. I helped her with all of the yarn winding and we’re hard at work getting new shawls and mitts done now. Next time I write I’ll show them all off!
Here are some of the photos showing the entire knitting process:
The yarns!The cable detail along the raglan sleeves.Close-up of the Fair Isle colorwork. I used a slightly darker gray at the bottom of the sweater and you can see the slight difference in the gray in the colorwork.
I posted the picture of MacKenzie sleeping in the knitting to a Facebook knitting group and he already has almost 550 likes. No wonder he has an outsized kitty ego…
Do you see this knitting? The Mother of Cats and I are working like crazy on her Nordiska sweater.
She got cranky at the beginning of the sweater when she decided that she didn’t like the look of the cables that are on the edges of the raglan sleeve increases. She kept checking the pattern, knitting, grumbling, eating cookies and fussing about the look of the cable. Not always stable, the Mother of Cats…
See how the cable edge isn’t clean on the right side? The Mother of Cats went crazy about this.
I think that she should have just gotten past this little design flaw and gotten me more cookies, but NO! She had to rip everything out and started again with her own idea of how to make the cable.
Here is her revised version of the cable. Glad that crisis was over as she really neglected me something awful while she was deciding whether to rip/not rip. Once she ripped out the sweater and started over (MAJOR CAT FUN!!) she was back to normal and paid much more attention to me. About time, Mother of Cats! She is just exhausting some days.I settled down for a little nap while she worked her way through the boring upper body of the sweater…Grabbed some more nap time while she got herself organized for doing the colorwork at the bottom of the sweater…And really poured on the attention and support while she was knitting with different colors of yarn.
What can I say? I really like knitting that has more than one ball of yarn involved. The Mother of Cats keeps flipping the different colors back and forth, and then she moves the balls from one side to the other. I help her as much as I can and grab a little yarn chomp when the opportunity presents itself. Why does the Mother of Cats get so emotional about my help? I think that it means that she loves me, don’t you? But if she loves me, why does she keep cutting my claws short? I don’t understand why she doesn’t trust me more…
This is what our work looks like now. Pretty good, don’t you think?
There is no way that the Mother of Cats could have done such a good job without my help.
I’m such a good boy.
Can I have some cookies now?
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
I’m still not sure if the issue with the edge of the cable was me or the pattern, but I have to say that I just love, love, love how this sweater is working up. I put my notes on the change I made to the shaping increases in my project notes in case you are interested.
I did take a picture of the whole sweater the way it looks right now.
Can you see the V-neck? It is there…
I am using a different dye lot of the light grey yarn at the bottom of the sweater; it is a little darker. I made the switch when I started the colorwork and plan to finish up the bottom ribbing with the darker color. I’m saving the lighter yarn to do the V-neck ribbing, which I will do next, and then to start the sleeves until I get them down to the colorwork that will allow me to switch to the darker grey.
The Estes Park Wool Market is in two weeks and I have hopes that this sweater will be done in time to wear there (and that it will be cold enough in early June for a sweater…). I’m on a deadline, people! Must knit faster!!
Last week I cast caution to the winds, jumped into my car with my BKB (Best Knitting Bud) Deb, and headed north to the Interweave Yarn Fest in Loveland, Colorado. It was a beautiful day and we were looking forward to our adventure. I brought some skeins of yarn that needed matching, a couple of patterns, a cocky attitude and an absolute conviction that I wouldn’t buy even one skein of yarn that I couldn’t use this year.
Here’s the background on my yarn stash: I’m working on reducing the stash this year by at least 50 skeins. As I headed up towards Loveland I was lulled into a false sense of progress as I had just totaled my knitting efforts and knew that I was on a great pace to reach my goals: 21 skeins of yarn had already been knitted out of the stash. I could afford to splurge a little, right? I am a knitting machine and I will pull off this resolution with one knitting hand behind my back. No problems!!
Oops!
Right. No plan ever survived contact with a knitting marketplace. After cruising and shopping the marketplace at Yarn Fest, Deb and I scooted on up to Fort Collins to visit My Sister Knits, a favorite LYS. By the end of the day I had bought 11 new skeins of yarn.
But look at what I scored!! I took the gold and magenta yarns up to Interweave with me with an idea of making a Nordiska sweater from them. I just needed the yarn for the body of the sweater. The perfect yarn was hiding at the end of a rack at My Sister Knits: look at those sprinkles! I bought 2 skeins of the grey (Construct) and I have two more in the stash. I have plenty of yarn now for the sweater with an elongated body, matching arm warmers and socks. Total win!!I have three skeins of this pink variegated yarn in the stash just wailing to be made into a Koivua sweater. What they needed was a nice earthy but calm yarn to play nice with them. The perfect candidate was this light grey tweed that I found at the Western Sky Knits booth. Okay, this was less of a win. I bought 5 skeins of the tweed yarn to use these three pink skeins, but I get a fabulous Koivua out of the deal, so it is still a win, right?
So, I bought 7 skeins of yarn with a definite projects in mind for them. The other 4 are more of a “I need to buy these now or I will regret it later” type purchases. I mean, look at that mohair!! I will combine it with another yarn and produce a fabulous cowl or shawlette that will still be using up yarn from the stash. That’s good, right?
The last three yarns will become a three-color shawl of some type. Something beautiful that won’t count towards depleting the stash, but will be worth the knitting anyway. Something that I will treasure. (My Precious! sang in my mind as I grabbed the yarns to my chest… I just ignored the look that Deb shot my way as I tucked the yarn into my basket and skipped to the checkout counter…I don’t need an intervention. Really, I don’t. Move along, now. ) I wonder if I can get the mohair involved somehow? The colors all go together. Sometimes it is best to just go with the serendipity. I wonder if I can find more of that mohair?
Do you see how my stash got into such a state in the first place?
I was also lucky enough to find these two publications that I have been looking for. Just beautiful knits that have me plotting lots of new knits. Socks. DK weight sweaters that I can produce by fading fingering yarns together. Lots of plotting ahead…
All in all, I came home with 11 skeins of yarn and I suddenly have a stash removal total of only 10 skeins. Well, that is less than optimal… Still, not impossible to overcome if I buckle down and get to work on my projects. I’m all fired up again and casting on like crazy. Socks, sweaters, shawls… I am on it!
Yarn, Books & Roses 