The Scarlet Knitter

Too-late-for-Christmas gifts

I love the days after the feast, where cooking is minimal and time is spent either visiting good friends or collapsing at home on the sofa. No trip to the mall for me or mine, no movie-theater excursion just yet. I have been watching my favorite classics on DVD and making progress on two projects intended for post-Christmas gifting.

 

 

The first is another of my cowls knitted on the bias, in heavenly warm and delicate Rowan Kidsilk Haze. I have had a couple of skeins in this particular colorway for years. In their stash drawer, next to other, more vibrant colors, I worried that this shade of pink was too pale and almost washed out, but on its own, it really is a thing of beauty. No one does colors like Rowan yarns and the color card for Kidsilk Haze is just exceptional.

I have been working hard at shrinking my stash over the past year, and now it really is down to a more manageable size and to lovely yarns that make me happy and that I have every intention of using up to the last inch. My hodgepodge of a stash is now a classy and pretty wonderful pile, and best of all, I am done feeling guilty about my years of wild acquisitions. There!

 

 

This time I did start with a provisional cast-on so that I can kitchener the edges once I have reached ideal cowl-length. I just grabbed a length of sock yarn that was handy, and it occurred to me that this style of provisional cast on in contrast yarn could make a cute embellishment on a scarf some day. Or perhaps not!

 

 

Finally, as my New York daughter noticed how comfy and pretty my own hand-knit socks looked when I had them on (which is to say, all the time, this winter), I offered to knit her a pair of her own, which she gladly accepted. I had a couple of skeins of sock yarn stashed away (no guilt: see above). She chose this one, Lang Yarns' Jawoll Color. It's my second or third time knitting with this sock yarn and I am very pleased with the quality;  a spool of coordinating polyester (I think) is included inside the skein and intended to reinforce strategic parts of the socks.  I forgot to use it on the heel but will definitely add it as I get to the toe. This colorway is especially pretty, I think. The New York daughter leaves by the end of the week so I have just a few days to whip out sock #2.

Noël

It has been a lovely holiday here: feast, family, and a glorious, sunny day that we were able to share together. I wish you all the best for this short, bright season, including a little bit of time to play with yarn and needles at your leisure, and good company to entertain you as you progress stitch by stitch, row by row. Joyeuses fêtes!

Extra-extra-small

Lopapeysas, the traditional Scandinavian pullovers, have been all the rage over the Internet this past couple of years. They are yoke sweaters, knitted from the bottom up in three cylinders: a large one for the body and two thinner ones for the sleeves. When the knitter reaches armhole level, the three tubes are reunited into one large cylinder, and this is where the fun really begins as this huge amount of stitches lends itself especially well to pretty designs executed by stranding contrasting colors round after round.

(Photo borrowed from the blog Iceland24).

In between designs, there are plain, non-patterned rounds in which the knitter radically decreases the circumference of the cylinder in order to shape the bust and shoulder line all the way to the base of the neck. I first read about this type of sweater in Elizabeth Zimmermann's "Knitting Without Tears" and I got to practice the technique on a couple of sweaters, although I skipped the pretty patterns and replaced them with simple stripes in contrast colors.

 

 

Typically lopapeysas are knitted with Icelandic wool which is at once very lightweight and substantial, and by and large unwearable here in California (outside of ski resorts, that is), which is why my yoke sweaters were all destined to Afghanistan, where I hope they went on to keep someone warm.

 A couple of weeks ago, I thought it would be a nice challenge to knit an actual lopapeysa, with patterning and all, only in doll size. So I did.

I followed a pattern designed by a fellow Sasha doll lover, up to the yoke where I ended up improvising some colorwork on the needles. The pattern actually calls for raglan-style decreases done every other round right before and after shoulder markers instead, but it was a fun, quick experiment, and one that I plan to repeat some day. It would be fun to strand bits of very special yarn like angora on the yoke and wrists. Next time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Log Cabin Light

There was an unexpected twist to my travels this summer, so that I found myself packing at the last minute and without much time to consider my options for travel projects. Fortunately, I knew that I would find a familiar yarn shop within walking distance once I arrived at my destination in Paris.

Once there, surprise! The yarn shop in question was about to shutter its doors. This would have been very sad, if not for the fact that a massive close-out sale was going on. This was summer in Paris so warm, heavy and chunky were all out of the question, but I promptly fell in love with the yarns above, both from Lang yarns. The pink colorway is Jawoll Magic and the grey is Jawoll Magic Dégradé, both of them sock yarns, made of a very soft 75% superwash wool and 25% nylon.

I bought a couple of skeins of each impulsively, without any precise plan. For a while I contemplated making a simple shawl out of the grey alone, but I liked the color combination too much to keep them apart, and I wanted to come up with a project that would showcase the light to dark variations in each yarn.  I settled on a very simple, lightweight version of the classic log cabin we all know and love -- and knit. Never mind that I have already knitted this pattern here , here , here, and again here, not to mention a few variations like this one or that last one . There are so many ways to make it entertaining:  a knitter could change the number of garter stitch ridges in each log, use many colors or, on the contrary, stick with a monochromatic palette, or even change stitch patterns for some of the logs.

 

 

For this blanket, my goal is to end up with a rectangle large enough to cover a twin bed, which means that the blanket needs to be much longer than it is large. I also want the center rectangle to be significantly off-center. In order to achieve both of these results, I have made the following modification to the original pattern from Mason-Dixon Knitting: instead of being all the same size, my logs are all multiple of threes (that's just a personal quirk but I think it yields a more eye-pleasing result), going in width from 3 to 12 ridges each. By now I have placed enough narrow logs on one side and much wider ones on the other, so that that very first dark pink block is already significantly off center. By the same token, I have started, and will continue, to place more 9 and 12-ridge logs at the top and bottom of the blanket, in order to achieve significant length. It is a bit tricky to keep the appearance of randomly-sized logs as opposed to one homogeneous size, but I like the challenge.  After all, what else would there be to obsess about while knitting this particular project if I was operating completely on automatic pilot?

The blanket got my full attention earlier in the Fall. These days the denim cabled cardi is feeling the love more frequently because, well, even I get tired of shapeless blocks of infinite garter stitch, but when I am knitting in company, it is the ideal project. I enjoy seeing how the ombré effects of each yarn show up, and the light weight of the yarn makes it quite pleasant even as the project slowly grows on my lap.

 

 

 

 

Twisted, in more ways than one

I still have a few recent FO's to share, but today I thought I'd wander off from accessories and into real, honest-to-goodness sweater-making. After knitting a whole lot of scarves and blankets lately, I felt nostalgic for fronts and backs and sleeves and button-bands. This coincided with the massive undertaking otherwise known as cleaning the garage, which doubles (rather poorly these days, but that's another story) as my knitting and sewing "studio", with huge quotation marks. The garage is where I store my stash as well as my sewing-machine and most of my patterns and books when I am not using them. We won't go into why they keep migrating into the house, especially by my bedside and on the coffee-table by the TV. They are not supposed to do that. They are supposed to live in the garage until the moment when they are pressed into duty, and not a minute earlier.

So, puttering around the stash corner recently, I found a box from long ago, with a shipping label from Elann.com. Inside the box were bags of Elann's own denim cotton, a very close cousin to Rowan's own famed denim yarn, which I had snapped during a rare sale. For years I had held on to this yarn while studying various patterns and failing to make up my mind.

This wasn't my maiden-voyage with denim cotton. I had made a pullover, Seahorse , from the first Rowan denim book about ten years ago. I still wear this pullover frequently because denim cotton is practically an all-season yarn when one lives in California, but the sizing is huge all over, by design, and feels a bit too retro for that reason. Also, the shade of cotton I had used, a medium blue, simply doesn't look very good when worn with blue jeans, which tend to be my uniform.

This stash yarn, on the other hand, was all the more precious because I had been able to secure the darkest blue denim cotton, which looks good with anything, and which was available only sporadically from Elann. I remember how I had pounced as soon as I had received an email notifying me that the yarn was in stock at long last. Even though I often see my stash as a problem to be solved, in this case at least, there was no buyer's remorse, ever, and these many years later, I am thrilled to find myself in possession of such a treasure.

 

As for a pattern, I wanted one with a more fitted style than those offered in the first Rowan Denim book. After hours spent on Ravelry and poring over my stash of patterns, I settled on "Haven", a cabled cardigan designed by Kim Hargreaves specifically for this yarn and published in "Rowan Denim People". By now the book is out of print but the pattern is now available as a PDF. I am going to skip the belt because that's just not the way I would wear a cardigan, but otherwise I am following the pattern straight through with no adjustments.

By and large, this is a classic design, with ribbed cables practically popping off the background and the seed stitch edging so typical of Kim Hargreaves's designs. I should note that the pattern was designed specifically with the shrinking rate of denim cotton in mind, so that each piece is extra long -- the underarm decreases only occur past 23", so knitting the back has been a long slug. It didn't help that there appears to be a mistake in the pattern instructions, on the row where the cables cross. Unfortunately, this is a rare Rowan pattern with no chart, only worded instructions, which meant that I had visual information to help me sort out  the confusing line-by-line instructions.  I did eventually find my own way (and I will spell it out clearly when I write project notes on Ravelry once this sweater is completed) but not before frogging and reknitting yards and yards of denim cotton.

One full month later, I feel I have finally hit my stride with this one, to the point where I am reluctant to pick up other projects still on the needles. But I still have sore feelings about our difficult beginning and I am wondering if "Twisted" wouldn't be a more appropriate name than "Haven", given the utter absence of serenity involved in the early stages of this project. The final project had better be worth the trouble -- she said, sarcastically.