Art & Books: April 2011 Archives

A few years ago I got within two rows of the bind-off on the Swallowtail shawl when Goldie, in a fit of madness, grabbed my knitting from the coffee table and ate it (nobody was home, she was anxious).

This year I decided to reknit it, since I think the pattern is really lovely.

This is also a moment to show off my new modeling dummy. It's pinnable and the height is adjustable, so in theory you could use it as a dressmaker's dummy, but I got it for modeling finished knitted and sewn things I want to photograph. So much easier than dressing up the dogs or messing with the timer on the camera.

While we're here, let me take a moment to tell you that nupps are not that hard to knit -- I find them quite fun, actually, and they really do look better than beads. The trick is to put two yarnovers instead of one, then let those extra yarnovers out when you go to purl the whole thing together.

This shawl was knit with one skein of Malabrigo lace, in "Sunset," of which there was a substantial amount left over. I didn't like the yarn, myself, but many people love it to tiny pieces and swear by it. I just don't like the feeling that the yarn might pull apart, it is so loosely spun. YMMV.

I haven't been doing very good logging of my knitting lately, or spinning, for that matter (though I've been doing less of that because when I try to spin at home I end up with cats in the wheel).

This is a scarf I've been working on, very slowly, for Noel. It's knit from the Blue-Faced Leicester I spun at the Black Sheep wool judging last year, and I call it my $4000 scarf because of how much time has gone into it. I'm about halfway done, but the pattern is very fiddly (I'm using a couple of Alice Starmore cable patterns) and scarves are inherently boring to me, so it's taking forever. I've been carrying it around in my knitting bag while I work on other things, which does not actually work to get a project finished.

This is a pair of gloves I knit up over a couple of weeks. I've been playing around with glove design and while my experiments were interesting, I finally just decided to just use a pattern, at which point it went much faster. I still need to weave in the ends on the right glove, and sew the buttons on, but they're pretty much done. I got the yarn at Madrona this year, and it is a much nicer colour than it appears to be in this photo. I like knitting gloves, and I have some nice orange yarn I will probably use for another pair, though not with the button detail.

This is my second go at the Swallowtail Shawl. Goldie ate a big hole in the first one I made several years ago, while I was working on the edging. This one is going much faster and I am keeping it well away from animals. The yarn is Malabrigo Lace, which I really don't like at all, because it feels too soft. I know it has its own strength but I dislike feeling like the yarn I'm using might not survive blocking. I love the colour, though.

And last night I decided to play around with the Turkish cast-on, which is a seamless round cast-on for toe-up socks. I have several balls of Knitpicks Essential sock yarn a friend gave me, so I'm going to make a pair of knee socks. Since I'm going to Sock Summit in July, I felt like I should knit a pair of socks (I knit one pair when I was a teenager and was not enthralled). So far so good, and the cast on was nicely fiddly, but I am kind of dreading the dull expanse of the leg. I am liking theses little 4" needles, though; they are a lot easier to handle on small projects than 6" double-pointed needles. I bought a whole set of them from Knitpicks a while ago; I don't think they sell them any more.

The reason for all this productivity is that a month or so ago I spent some time organizing my piles of yarn (I inherited a bunch of yarn recently), and I hate having piles of unused materials hanging around. I decided that I should actually sit down and work on knitting projects more often to use up the yarn, and oddly that has meant I've been finishing projects rather faster than I was before (I'm not sure how that works, really). I want to use up an entire bin of yarn this year, but we will see how that goes.