Showing posts with label Jane Addams Sweater. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jane Addams Sweater. Show all posts

22 March 2007

The Joy of Knit Night

I am so glad to be able to attend Knit Night regularly again! How amazing are these women? I had such a good time visiting with everyone and checking out their WIPs that I hardly knit at all. I did shop, though! If you're in the neighborhood, be sure to grab a new Bamboo Sisterhood 3/4 sleeve t-shirt - I got my asphalt one last night with red and silver printing and am wearing it today. My colleagues remarked upon my fantastic rock 'n' roll appearance today. Ha!

I also bought the Interweave Knits with Icarus. The directions seem clear here, so I may be OK without Miriam's help that would come with buying the pattern from her directly. BUT I saw Carole's gorgeous Seraphim on her blog this morning. Doesn't she look fantastic? And, as if the shawl weren't lovely enough, she knit it from her own handspun in two weeks! "Impressed" doesn't even begin to cover it. So, add Seraphim to the queue. [I feel a post about the queue coming up.]

My destashed KSH in Heavenly arrived yesterday in the mail. It is a heavenly shade of blue. What will I do with it? You mean, besides pet and look at it? No idea yet, but I couldn't pass it up.

Oh, and the Schaeffer yarn? It is Nancy, not Elaine. Did I get that right? It doesn't really matter. The bumpy yarn (both worsted and bulky weights) is great! I need to wash that swatch, so I can figure out that sweater.

08 March 2007

Yarn Choice for Capecho

Isobel and I stopped by Yarns in the Farms on our way home yesterday to say "hi!", since I wouldn't be able to attend Knit Night with Peter being back (Isobel was very excited for him to come home, by the way - "Yay!" and hand-clapping when I told her we were going to the airport to pick him up). While there I helped a woman make color choices for a felted bag along the lines of the diaper bag in Knitting for Baby that she was going to have her mother knit for her. We ended up with a lovely combination of deep olive green (F29), some light green (F31), and a skein of a beautiful, springy, variegated yarn (G123) in Sheep 2.

Anyway, I realized that I could do the Capecho in Green Mountain Spinnery's Sylvan Spirit, a merino/tencel blend. I have two skeins of Luminosity (when that yarn came in the shop, I went gaga) already and would probably need only three more. I think the tencel, which gives an amazing pearly sheen to the stitches, according toClara, would give a wonderful effect and enhance stitch definition. I'll have to give it a swatch.

Speaking of swatches, I wound up a skein of Schaeffer Elaine the other night. It overflowed the ballwinder, being 600 yards, and I had to wind up the rest of it by hand. I guess I could have pulled the cake off the winder and then started from the other end of yarn left on the swift to make two cakes, but it was kind of fun to actually wind some of the yarn by hand. Man, is that stuff soft! It's also finer than it may appear in the skein. I started swatching with US8s and immediately found the stitches too open with the thin parts of the yarn. The US7 swatch is better and probably what I'll use, though I may do a quick swatch on US6s to see what that would look like.

Stockinette is fine in this yarn, but I think garter or reverse stockinette really shows off the bumpiness, so I am planning to go top-down in the round and then turn the whole thing inside-out a la Wendy's Last-Minute Purled Beret.

I've made some more progress on the Sheep 3 Shrug but am really keen on something woolly with all this super-cold weather. I had hoped to do the Jane Addams sweater on a larger needle so it would go faster, but I'll just knit as fast as I can!