Prime Time Knitter

Summer Wrap Up: Part 1

I somehow imagined that on the first day of fall it would be cool enough for me to immerse myself once again in knitting with heavy wool and resume my stranded knitting—specifically, Sirdal’s second sleeve.  But my summer knits were far from done, and aside from one wonderful fall-like week in September, the temperatures have been so warm that I was glad that I still had lightweight projects to work on.

And, in fact, Rhinebeck came and went this year without a Rhinebeck sweater.  The forecast was for rain, and I wore a light jacket that would repel any raindrops.  It did not rain.

But this week promises to cool down (and be rain-free!) and I can resurrect Sirdal and the other projects abandoned last June.  In the mean time I’ve converted two WIPs to FOs.  Fiori di Sole is finished:

Here are some details of the motifs:

I’m not a gifted crocheter, and the edging pushed the limits of my ability (and vocabulary).

The pattern is by Rosemary Hill (Romi), and it was a pleasure to work with.  The charts are error-free, and the instructions are clear.  I also loved the Exquisite merino-silk yarn, available from Fiddlesticks Yarn.  I have enough left for a small scarf, and I will take advantage of that once I’m done browsing the shawlettes on Ravelry.  Now that it is stash yarn, I won’t feel so guilty about knitting with it.

Shawl #2, Wing of the Moth, is off the needles and ready for blocking, and modeling shots will be forthcoming. 

And I’ve already planned ahead for next summer.  I have some true laceweight in my stash (Baruffa cashwool will probably be my yarn of choice for a shawl from Victorian Lace Today).  But the silk content of Fiddlestick’s Exquisite yarn really captured my heart because it makes the shawl glow.  One Rhinebeck purchase was this hand-dyed, all-silk cobweb yarn from Long Ridge Farm:

 

Disconnected, Discharged, and Discombobulated

This past weekend has not been the most conducive to knitting or modern life in general.  On Friday afternoon my neighbor packed up his van to transport his wife and three kids to some vacation spot.  He is a bike rider, and his bikes were mounted in a rack atop the vehicle—where they caught onto my fiber-optic cable and ripped it from the side of my house as he drove the van out of his driveway.  In an instant, I had no phone and no Internet.

I can tell you from personal experience that the allure of being unplugged is not the delight that one might suppose.  In fact, it is a huge PIA, especially when one is supposed to transmit finished work electronically.  The other issue is that Verizon is on strike, and getting a repair scheduled is a rather daunting experience.  After an hour on hold (my red-faced neighbor allowed me to use his phone for this negotiation), a repair was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.  And by Tuesday evening, I was back, happily, in cyberspace (reading, not so happily, the 100 or so email messages that had collected). 

I can now state without hesitation that I have a serious Ravelry addiction.  Four days without looking at FOs, new yarns, old yarns, and visiting the forums has been torture.  And I’ve missed my blog reading too.  I couldn’t check the hourly weather (although it hardly mattered since it rained almost every minute of Sunday and Monday and I could see exactly what was going on) or news.  

But, I figured we could live our disconnected life almost normally, until I tried, on Sunday, to make the two-minute drive to the knitting group I joined recently. I turned the key in the ignition and nothing happened.  My neighbor told us that if we could piggyback on his network connection, we could use it until our connection was restored.  This appealed to my son, who is a devotee of online word games, and, because you can’t see their front door from our house, he decided to wait in our car for our neighbors to return home from a dinner out prior to their departure.  He turned on the car lights to read, and waited for an hour.  It also appears he forgot to turn the lights off.  And it turns out that our neighbor’s signal is too weak, so the whole thing was a waste of time. Part of Monday was spent getting a jumpstart for our car—not something on DH’s to do list.   

This also was the weekend I decided to take photos of yarns, so I could finally post some stash pictures on Ravelry, and pictures of my WIPs so I could formally qualify for the Summer of Lace KAL prizes.  The torrential rain (only about 4 inches for us, as opposed to a foot at points south) made that impossible because there was no light, and a stupid mistake eliminated several days of presumed progress on my shawl.  The pouring rain was also the reason I couldn’t walk to the knitting group. 

I finished the shoulder flower area of Fiori di Sole with only one minor glitch, but now that I’m in the easy, repetitive part, I’ve had six rows to rip to fix the dumbest of mistakes.  It took me an evening to tink back, and now I think it is time to pay a bit more attention.

What should I do to express my pleasure at being online again?  Well, posting more regularly certainly seems in order.  

 

Laced Up

I really should start planning for summer projects when snow is on the ground and I have my wits about me.  As soon as the temperatures warm up, and when they hit 90 and beyond, I lose all reason.  I had an amorphous plan at the start of the year to knit lace this summer, but I intended to do so with stash yarn.  After all, this is my year for stash busting.  In particular, from among the lace yarns in my stash, I settled on this yarn, purchased in around 1978 when nice yarns were hard to find in the U.S.

This is not a joke, and I did not Photoshop this picture.  The yarn apparently was manufactured by this Danish company, and I think it was intended for weaving. 

So after many happy hours on Ravelry, going through all the lace shawls (and I mean every one of them—I am thorough), I settled on Rosemary Hill’s Fiori di Sole shawl.  How enchanting would this look in that lovely orange?  So I purchased the pattern and began to swatch.  Disappointment kicked in at once.  I didn’t have to go very far with the swatch to see that the yarn was scratchy and it would never have the drape that Fiori di Sole demands.

So back to Ravelry for many more happy hours of looking at lace yarns.  I also decided that the orange would be a bit too much, and the light yellow of the pictured shawl was just about perfect.  Now, I have to say that I don’t look particularly good in yellow.  A decade or so has elapsed since gray replaced my chestnut brown hair, and in that time yellow became a color I can no longer carry off.  But I was fixated on doing a shawl like the one in the picture, and I’ve rationalized this by thinking that I could make a dress in a color that is more flattering for me and the shawl would give me a golden glow around the shoulders.  (More hours were spent going through my fabric stash—but that is a subject for another post.)  We will see how that works out at some point in the future.

The yarn I finally selected was Exquisite from Fiddlesticks Knitting in Canada.  And so one night in mid-June I placed the order, only to discover that there was a Canadian postal strike.  So after a bit of waiting, the yarn arrived—and it was well worth it.  This yarn truly is exquisite, and it will have the look I’ll want in the finished shawl.  In case the color doesn't look as it should on your monitor, it has the aura of spun gold.  It is proving somewhat elusive to photograph the color.

So far, I’m about three-quarters done with the large flower motif around the shoulders, and then it will become (I hope) routine to finish the diamond area for the body of the shawl.  I say that now because a simple mistake took me two nights to fix, and I’m ready for a little less of a challenge before I get to the border flowers.

This is turning out, despite that setback and the lapse in my “knitting from stash only” vow, to be a perfectly fine summer project.