Tosh Merino Light – Yarn, Books & Roses

Updates from the Knitting Front: The Sweater Upcycle Project

Do you see this sweater? I really liked this pattern, knit it in a non-conforming fashion, and then engaged in a hack to make it wearable. I blogged about it at the time.

This sweater is the Lace and Fade Boxy, by Joji Locatelli, and I was trying to make it work with the yarn that I had in my stash. I was really pleased with it when it was finished, but I never wear it. The sleeves aren’t comfortable. I don’t like the lace on the bottom any longer.

I’ve been watching upcycle videos lately as I consider making a coat from an old quilt (that is a whole other post…), and I thought of several sweaters that I no longer wear. Hmmm… time to upcycle some knitted items.

I knit a lace with a color that would go well with the original color of the sweater. This is why my stash is soooo large. I never, ever throw any old yarn away!

I ripped out the lace at the bottom of the sweater; I had added the original lace to make the sweater longer, but it didn’t look all that, well, lacey. This is what it would look like with this new lace, slightly purple, knitted lace substituted for the original stuff.

Oh, yeah. I decided that this lace looked better. I mean, purple, right?! Feeling pretty encouraged I ripped out the lace band on the sleeves and swapped in the new lace. Then, wanting to pull the look together, I ripped out the edging around the neckline and reknitted in the new color.

I will wear this sweater!!

I’m kind of fussing about how to knit some arm warmers to go with the sweater. Lace? No lace? Use some of the lace from the body of the sweater? Which color????? Yeah. I have parked all of those ideas in the corner for now, and I’ve gone back to knitting on my Weekender Crew sweater while I ponder my options and consider what to do with another sweater that I unhappy with and never gets worn.

This sweater is being knit from the bottom up and inside out. I know that it messes with your head, but it does work. The body of the sweater is purl stockinette, but I’m knitting.

The cat themed arm warmers are still parked in a corner but not forgotten. I keep fussing over colors and the order of the colorwork bands. Hannah is anxious to see what I come up with. I think that I will next knit mice, but I am reversing the direction that the mice face.

Sometimes the Mother of Cats can be exhausting…

Notes about the knitting:

That yarn is Tosh Merino Light by Madeline Tosh.
The pattern for the lace is from Juju’s Loops, and the original sweater that used it was called Swoon.
My original sweater was knit in a limited issue color called Ironwood. Since I could not locate any more of the original color I hunted for something that would work with the sweater and my wardrobe. Enter Penumbra, that dark dusty purple layered on grey.
What is a penumbra? That is the part of the shadow cast by celestial bodies like the earth or the moon. When we see an eclipse of the moon, the penumbra of the earth is on the moon. This yarn captures that color.
This new sweater is, obviously, now called Shadow of the Ironwood Moon.
The yarn that I am knitting the Weekender Crew with is from Spun Right Round in a colorway made specifically for the local yarn show where I go. It is called “September”.

Shawl Study: A Trio of Fades

What can I say? A few months ago I was sucked into the “Find Your Fade” (by Andrea Mowrey) vortex and spent days and days dreaming of color combinations for shawls. I shopped the stash over and over putting different color combinations together. I agonized over strategies to make the colors work in the shawl; should the colors be connected across the shawl (like a quilt) or just cleanly feed into the next color in the sequence. What would happen if I used monochromatic colors? Would it work to use colors more than once to continue to anchor the shawl? Why did I not have more speckled yarn in my stash?

This got to be really bad. I would get out of bed in the night to hunt for a skein that I suddenly thought about. I settled on color sequences again and again only to abandon some of the yarns that I loved the most. I took yarns to the LYS to get help from my friends. More skeins were bought and I finally settled down with three sets of yarn hopping up and down demanding to be made into one of these shawls.

I took pictures of the yarn sequences and wrote the knitting order onto the labels of the yarn. I started the Ravelry project pages and committed to the Fade study project. Early in February I cast on the first one, and late last week I finished the three shawl project.

So what did I do different with these three shawl? Check out each shawl’s story below.

Shawl Collage — The first Fade out of the gate…

This shawl really put me through the wringer. I had some great fall-colored yarn from Dream in Color, so I decided to use it to center the shawl. Every yarn that I used matched to the Dream yarn (the middle yarn between the red and purple in the close-up shots above), and to make it all work I used two skeins of that yarn to make two sequences. I started knitting with a lovely brown, and then ripped it all out, bought a dark red Tosh merino light called Heartheat, and used that instead. Later on I tossed out another yarn that I just loved and used the Heartbeat again in the middle of the shawl to keep the continuity with the Dream yarn. At the end of the shawl I had used only 5 colors of yarn and tossed out even more contenders. I think I needed to stop thinking about the concept of a “Fade” and did better concentrating on what would make a truly lovely and useful shawl for me. My Ravelry notes and yarn sequence is here.

The second shawl was so easy to put together. I had three amazing silk/alpaca yarns in shades of gold, brown and deep red that I bought at the Interweave Yarn Fest last year. They went nicely together, but they were really monochromatic. Digging in the stash I quickly found a blue that wanted to play with the golden-brown yarn, and the dark gray yarn linked cleanly to the blue. Great. I had 5 yarns, and wasn’t quite sure how to link them. Oh, wait. Speckled yarns!! I looked at Tosh Merino Light online and realized that skeins of Yoko and Marfa would make the transitions work cleanly. Ta-daa. Not a gradient, but every yarn gets along with the ones next to it. This shawl is great with almost everything that I wear, and even better I never questioned my color choices while knitting it; no struggles or dashes back to the LYS. My Ravelry notes and the yarn order are here.

My last shawl is the one that is most like a “Fade” in that the colors cleanly connect from each skein to the next, but there is a lot of continuity between the colors across the shawl. The difference in the textures of the shawl yarns became another type of study as I knitted. The Alegria was wonderfully squishy and bouncy. I loved the way the Dream in Color Jilly showed off the lace (the detail in the picture above with MacKenzie’s paw on it) and while the color of the Hedgehog Fibers yarn was beautifully rich, it was a nightmare to knit as it had the life of string and was splitty to boot. The Ravelry notes and yarn order is here.

So, there they are.

Yep. Time to get to work on finishing up all my little (emphasis on little) abandoned projects that have been lurking in a basket waiting for me to get back to them. No more shopping the stash for awhile. No decisions. All I have to do is pull out a bag with the yarn, pattern and half finished item and get to work. Even better, these are quick to finish projects like socks, mitts and scarfs. Woohoo! Compared to knitting these shawls it is almost like instant gratification.

MacKenzie is looking forward to having my lap all to himself again, too.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Solaris Shawl: The Blue Lips Special

I’ve really been dragging lately. I’m out of breath, my arms and legs just don’t want to go, and every now and then my chest hurts. This has been going on since around the first of the year, and so far my pulmonologist and rheumatologist haven’t located a definitive cause. It’s a scleroderma thing, they tell me. I’m on oxygen overnight now, my immunosuppressive drugs have been increased, and I’m just maintaining.

That was until I noticed that my lips were blue one morning while combing my hair. Blue lips? That can’t be good. I did some google searches, scared myself silly and then began to check the mirror more frequently during the day. Two weeks later it was pretty clear that I was rocking the blue lip look every time I came up the stairs. I bought a pulse oximeter, and began to record my blood pressure and oxygen levels throughout the day. Finally, admitting to myself that this was a true phenomenon, I called the doctor.

Of course everything went out of control as soon as I made the call. Now I’m in the middle of testing and doctor appointments. Monday was an especially ugly day; I flunked the 6 minute walk test in 2 minutes flat and was put on oxygen in the hallway. Darn!! It’s a sure thing that I will be lugging an oxygen tank around in a backpack in the near future as soon as I finish the current round of doctor visits and testing. My next doctor appointment is Tuesday, and I think I won’t be able to put off the oxygen trolls any longer after that.

So how have I been handling all of this? Well, when everything is falling apart around you, it is best to just knit, knit, knit! Seriously, knitting is positive, productive, meditative, never talks back and consumes very little oxygen. Perfect! I’ve been just cranking out my Solaris shawl over the last week and the end is now in sight. It is going to be beautiful. Check it out!

Shawl — I’m in the final edging; I just have a few more rows of color to go.

Edging Detail — Check out the stitch detail of the edging.

Yarn Detail — The colors that I am using all come from one ball of Crazy Zauberball. You can see how the colors change in the ball in this section of the shawl. I just pull off yarn from the ball until another nice color emerges for my next strip of edging. The project details are here on Ravelry.

So, next week should be a big one for little ol’ me. I’ll be seeing my primary doctor for a breathing needs evaluation, hopefully I’ll be saying goodbye to the blue lips, and my Solaris shawl will get finished up.

I’m not sure how this is all going to turn out, but I’ve got a big shawl queue all ready to go.

It is good to be a knitter!