Playing catch-up

It has been months since I last posted any FOs here. I have been busy, not just knitting, but with life in general, so I am going to claim that as my excuse for being a bad blogger.

I have, of course, knitted more shawls since we last met and will tell you all about them shortly. But I also realized that I need to take a break from this production of wraps and stoles. I have no room for them in my drawers and not enough friends to give them to. Even though my acquaintances urge me to sell them, I can’t decide on what would be a fair price, taking into account materials (which can be quite pricey) and time (which is the truly valuable ingredient).

For instance, I test knit a gorgeous wedding shawl by Kristi Holaas which she first posted in the 12 Shawls Forever thread on Ravelry, looking for test knitters. I used a cobweb-fine yarn I bought at Rhinebeck last year, 55%/45% Silk & Angora by Skaska Designs, in an almost-white. I went down a needle size and cast on 485 stitches. The test, which was finished before I was, concluded about two months after it was posted. I didn’t bind off for almost two more weeks. Part of the problem was the sheer volume of knitting at the beginning: the rows went on forever! The yarn was superfine and if I made a mistake, was extremely hard to correct. Most of my errors actually happened when I had to tink back for something minor and dropped a stitch. Knitting up a dropped section set the tension on its head and I prayed that blocking would work its magic. As the shawl got narrower, the knitting got easier and I finally finished it, blocked it, and took pictures. The designer was delighted.

During this same period when I was test knitting Kristi’s shawl, I was also engaged in two other tests which I completed in the specified time frame. The first was for Heather Anderson, one of a quartet of shawls in her most recent series dedicated to early seasons. Hers is called First Snow Fall, but I called mine Pink Snow because of the colour of my yarn. I started out with the remaining 15th of a box of Kashmir Paint Box Gradient by Fiber Optic Yarns which I’d also picked up at Rhinebeck last fall, left over from yet another shawl for Heather which I’ll talk about soon. This lovely blend of merino (80%), nylon (10%) and cashmere (10%) made a nice soft neck edge, and then segued into the rest of the Sweet Georgia Tough Love Sock, also left over from the project I have not yet described. Unfortunately, I ran out just rows before the end, so finished it off with some dark purple Diadem by KnitPicks (50% alpaca - 50% silk) and was extremely pleased with the results. During the knitting I thought I would probably frog it after blocking and photographing, but it turned out to be such a beautiful FO that I changed my mind.

The other test knit that was going on at the same time was for Mary-Anne Mace, who recently got on the bandwagon and designed two asymmetrical shawls, this being the second. She calls hers Lacebark after a tree that grows in her native New Zealand. I call mine The More it Grows, the Lacier it Gets. For this one I chose a yarn I bought at this year’s Toronto Knitters’ Frolic, Sea Pearl by Briar Rose Fabrics, a blend of 50% merino - 50% tencel. The colour is not done justice in any of the photographs I took, unfortunately. It is an iridescent purple like the inside of a mollusc shell, or the surface of a black pearl. Sadly, all my photos came up with a steel gray. You’ll just have to take my word for it. Also, the dye came off rather badly on my hands as I knit and it took many washings and rinsings before I felt it was safe to block it. I’m concerned it will still bleed, but not as badly now. Here’s what my hands looked like while I was knitting it (and yes, I’m in my pjs and bathrobe).

The finished product on its own and being modeled by one of my knitting friends:

Prior to the above-mentioned three test knits, I had tested another interesting pattern by Heather Anderson which lent itself well to the Kashmir Paint Box Gradient by Fiber Optic Yarns. This lovely yarn is separated into 15 individually dyed skeins, traveling the spectrum from palest gray to dark pink. I’ve always wanted to knit with a yarn like this, but the ones I’ve seen on Ravelry seem to be all one thread sequentially dyed from light to dark (or vice versa). Heather’s pattern mimics the overlapping of owl feathers, with a knitted pinion end. I used all but one skein of the Kashmir for the body of the shawl, and then switched to Sweet Georgia Tough Love Sock in a colourway that perfectly continued the sequence. Here’s what I ended up with:

Finally, after finishing all these tests I said, “Enough!” and laid down a self-imposed moratorium on knitting shawls. I was able to finish a pullover I’d started months before for my son, the Merlin Sweater from Interweave’s Enchanted Knits. He chose the Lost lake heather colourway in KnitPicks worsted Swish, an excellent decision, and the finished sweater looks dashing on him. Everyone involved in the project is inordinately pleased.

One of the projects that had been on hold for months was the Hellebore Clutch from Yarn Crush’s December box. I made that in time to wear to my niece’s wedding in early June. The yarn is Zed Luxe Sock by Yarn Indulgences, with Swarovski crystals sparkling like dew drops on the appliqué rose. I lined it with leftover silk from a sam cheong I made myself years ago.

I made a hat from Manx Loaghtan wool a friend in the Isle of Man had sent me quite some time ago. The free pattern is from Knitty magazine, Déalan Dé by Ciara Ní Reachtnín. I had the perfect ceramic button in my stash.

I even made a pair of socks with the leftover yarn from the pair I made on the drive home from Florida earlier. I call them Reunion Socks because they were made driving to, during, and driving home from my husband’s annual college roommates reunion.

I could not stick to my resolve and, when Mary-Anne Mace posted another shawl to test knit, could not say no. But that is for another post.

Keep them coming!

I have two more shawls to report. One was a test knit for my favourite NZ designer which has now gone live and the other was one I was asked to test by my favourite NH designer, but was busy with the NZ one at the time. So I joined the KAL, but life intervened and I didn’t finish it on time. Too many words. More pictures!

Here’s Mary-Anne Mace’s Lotus Pond in Neith, an exquisite alpaca-silk lace blend by Raventwist, a Canadian west coast yarn company. I bought this skein at last year’s Knitters Frolic for the colour, and have called my version of Mary-Anne’s beautiful shawl Dragon Scales.

I took this shawl with me to Panama when we vacationed there at the beginning of February. It was a perfect accessory in the evening over skimpy summer dresses.

The second shawl is Heather Anderson’s Quantum Leap. Like her Turtle Beach which I tested last fall, this one starts as three cast on stitches and then increases at one edge while decreasing half as quickly at the other. It makes for a lovely curved triangle shape which drapes beautifully. I knit the garter section with Julie Asselin’s Leizu Fingering, a merino-silk blend, then switched to KnitPicks’ Gloss fingering for the patterned section. The two colours really went nicely together and my husband liked it so much, he asked me to give it to him for a scarf. So I did. Here it is all laid out, and on its happy recipient.

I brought that one to Panama, too, but as an unfinished project. It was very difficult to knit as it was so very hot there. I couldn’t stand having the wool touch my skin. Luckily, I also had a sock project with me which was easier to manage.

Enough! I cried, then heeded myself not.

As I mentioned in my previous post, 2015 was the Year of the Shawl. I had joined the “12 Shawls Forever” group on Ravelry and been inspired to produce at least a dozen wraps of one sort or another to qualify for the various draws (I won a pattern one month, so chose another shawl, of course) and to see if I could actually do it. When I’d bound off and blocked my last shawl for the year, I breathed a sigh of relief and said, “That’s it. No more shawls, at least for a little bit.”

The first part of January was spent finishing a pair of gloves for the husband which I had fully intended to be a Christmas present but somehow missed the deadline. His doctor had told him to wear thin, woollen gloves to bed to keep his hands warm at night so that his joints would be more supple in the morning. We are getting to that age, you know. I have had my fair share of pain with knobby bits on the first joint of my right index finger. I used a 3-ply 100% merino from Sweet Paprika for the gloves, whimsically named Messa di voce, which works quite well in a musical family, in a pattern of my own devising (i.e. winging it). They turned out quite well for something I never intended the public to see (although I post it here for the public to see) and they fit my husband’s sizable hands quite adequately. They are, needless to say, very warm.

I also have a pair of socks on needles which I started the day after I bound off the gloves, and they will be travelling with me to Panama (A man! A plan! A canal!) as holiday knitting (along with more sock yarn to start another pair when these are finished, which they will be before we leave to come home). Why did I not finish the socks? I started them almost six weeks ago. That’s inexcusable!

Okay, I’ll tell you. I made another shawl. The “Envision” group on Ravelry hosted an international shawl exchange. In order to participate, one had to fill out a rather detailed questionnaire to determine likes, dislikes, allergies, and various other parameters pertaining to knitted shawls. The organizer (and what a job this must have been!) then matched up partners in groups of four so that we knit for the person in front of us and received from the person behind us. My recipient is a lovely woman from New Brunswick who winters in Florida and, while I had specified that I did not want to send a package out of the country, I got matched up with her anyway. It all turned out fine in the end, just so you know.

We chatted through Ravelry messages to come up with a shawl-yarn combination and I suggested that I knit Madli’s Shawl from Nancy Bush’s Knitted Lace of Estonia in a 100% silk I had languishing in my stash. She agreed. I cast on immediately after New Year’s thinking I would have lots of time to knit this in a leisurely fashion, as the end date for the exchange is March 15.

Madli’s Shawl is a lace stole of the typical Estonian style: There are two edge pieces, one of which is knit and left on a needle, and the other is the foundation for the rest of the piece. When it is time, the two are grafted together to make a seamless whole. I’ve done this with a number of Estonian scarves now and think it is a very clever construction. A friend of mine had recently made the Oroya Shawl from Yarn Crush’s August box and had leftover beads in a blue-green hue which matched my silk perfectly.

I made the second edge first and left it on a straight needle. Since the beading was so tedious, I decided only to add them to the edges, which was plenty. They lent a subtle sparkle.

Then I knit the second edge and kept going with the main pattern. It’s a pretty easily-memorized design: six knit rows of symmetrical lace festooned with nupps, purled on each wrong side. The knitting was actually very easy and went more quickly than I had planned. It did, however, keep me from working on those socks.

I must explain that it was not a full ball of yarn I had started with. A couple of years ago I had made a necklace using three grams of this silk, and I feared I would run out. Luckily, my friend Bonnie had an extra ball she had obtained from the same supplier around the same time, and came to the rescue right at the end when I was halfway through a repeat and out of thread. As it turned out, I probably could have eschewed that last repeat altogether as the stole came out quite long enough when blocked. Bonnie’s yarn was slightly paler than my own. If I hadn’t said that, you wouldn’t notice it. But since I did....

Here’s the finished stole all nicely pinned out on my daughter’s bed.

And here she is, in -20°C temperatures, in sharp contrast to the crisp snow all around.

It took just over five weeks to finish. If I had not added the beads, it would have taken less time. The beads were problematic: extremely tiny (size 10 or smaller) with unevenly-shaped holes, inconsistent in size and shape, and one even had a sharp edge that sawed through my yarn at one point and I had to do a quick repair job. Pulling them over the beading wire caused many to break, and I was a very happy knitter when I was done with them. In spite of all the issues I had with them, they were the perfect beads for this yarn.

I sent it off by courier on February 17 with a pretty card and a packet of flavoured tea to my new friend in Florida and it arrived the next day. She was thrilled, which made me very, very happy.

I used my powers for good!