It’s cold here today, and the ground is covered in snow. Icicles are hanging off the edge of my back porch. The weather forecast is calling for bitter cold and more snow early next week, and I can feel the misery of winter starting to close in already. I used to love this time of year, but lately I’m feeling the cold a lot more than I used to, and I sure do long for those days of early fall when the leaves where spectacular, the geese were just arriving in town, and everywhere I drove there was a blaze of color.
I loved this yarn so much when I bought it this fall I took its picture in my maple tree. Doesn’t it just fit in with the leaves?
It was in that spirit that I pulled out this shawl/scarf that I had started last month for some weekend knitting. I had put it aside a couple of weeks ago to get the Christmas stuff done, but now I was on fire to finish it. The pattern is called Hitchhiker (by Martina Behm) because there are 42 little teeth along one edge, and who can ignore a scarf that is the answer to life, the universe and everything? Certainly it should be the answer to my winter blues.
This is the HItchhiker at exactly the halfway point (21 little teeth). The scarf languished for a couple of weeks while other projects were finished up.
The pattern is all garter stitch, so it is really warm and squishy. It’s colorful, cheerful, and just what I need to face next week. Even better, it will match a new top that my daughter-in-law gave me for my Christmas present. Yep, time to knit like a fiend. 🙂
I knit last night while watching a movie, and then settled down this afternoon and worked pretty steady on it for a few hours. This evening I cast off and it is done!
Here it is finished and keeping me warn already. Who can be cold with such a cheerful and colorful scarf around their neck? Not me!
Last month I gathered with the other members of my family to attend the memorial services for a beloved aunt, the last of her generation in our family. The celebration of her life focused on her service to the nation (she was a WAC in WWII), her commitment to her family, church, and community, and her many beautiful quilts. Several of these quilts were displayed in the church at her service, and I think that many of us in attendance had been given a quilt that she had made. Exquisite creations with names like “Texas Star” and “Storm at Sea”, they are her legacy to so many of us.
This is one of the Holden shawls (designed by Mindy Wilkes) I knitted for Christmas presents last year.
Well, it’s not like my little knitted pieces can compete with that, but I’ve been sending knitted items out for birthdays and Christmas for several years now. I was amazed to see two of my cousins and my sister all wearing shawls that I had given them. In fact, all the women in the family had something from me except… my cousin Jean.
Oops! Kind of a big fail. Time to get cracking on a custom ordered shawl. Jean likes jewel tones, so I dug in the stash to see if I had something that would work for a shawl.
This is Interlacements Tokyo yarn (50/50 silk/merino) hand dyed by the late Judy Ditmore. Perfect!
I found a nice sport weight yarn that I bought a few years ago at the Estes Park Wool Market. It was an impulse buy that was hibernating in the stash waiting for its moment to come. Hello jewel tones.
I decided to use a simple pattern with mostly garter stitch since I learned that it displays handpainted yarns well. This pattern, 3S Shawl by Amy Meade, was perfect. Fast easy simple! I finished it in a week of knitting and mailed it off this morning.
Here’s the final shawl ready to head off to New York.
How fun is this? A little piece of me went to New York with the shawl, and with a little luck it will have a long, productive life. LIve long and prosper little guy. 🙂
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 