Like The Queen
Whatever happens to strike my fancy, but surely some sort of fiber content.

1 Comments:

Dearest Bess,
Ah, we Virgos are having a time of it, aren't we?
Re the sweater & the pattern & the number of repeats, your description painted a vivid picture in my mind. Look forward to hearing more about it.
Good luck w/the auction. And, my dear, anyone would be a lucky duck to have a pair of your socks ^ .. ^
XOXO

By Blogger Marfa's Mewsings, at 7:22 PM  

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Sunday, September 17, 2006  

I have time. The Internet via dial-up at 6:30 on a Sunday morning is relatively quiet. My household is asleep. My house itself is freshly scrubbed with that Sunday sparkle to it.
So.

I could post a nice long catch-up post here. I sit with my hot coffee, in my special hot coffee cup, and the mind just drifts. I realize I am boring. No. no. shut down. That’s the DootifulResponsibility angst, wiping out my brain cells faster than they can replenish themselves. Plus the fact that much of my life this month has involved other people, about whom I really have no right to chatter. I’ll be sharper next week. I may not be any more interesting, but I’ll have more control over the tongue - and fingertips.

But for my beloved blogfriends who wonder what’s going on - here is the news from TheCastle:

I spent yesterday a.m. with BH at the storage unit where we are gathering things for the library auction. That was a two hour stint during which 2 people brought in items. I had wisely taken my bad fairy cursed Auction Sock #2 with me and finished it up nice and tidy. But I am having second thoughts about even bothering to put that knitting basket in the auction. We have 86 items already in the storage unit and I know there are at least another 10 things still out there. I’m not sure I really want to add to the pile. I don’t want this event to last into the wee hours of the morning.

I am not an auction attendee. I am at that stage in life when I have, already, vast quantities of things to dust and clean and put away already. New stuff for me has to target specific areas of my life, not good bargains. Besides, there is seldom spare cash around the house for shopping activity. But I know that auction hounds are no different from any other enthusiastic stash builders. They love the thrill of the hunt, the excitement of the chase, the glow of victory when they strike a deal. It’s just that, I don’t know who they are in my community. There are auctions at least three times a week within a 30 mile drive, so obviously this is a very trendy pastime.

Bah! I ban my brain from thinking about this stupid event for the rest of today.
Instead I will talk about knitting! What?!? Knitting chatter on a knit blog? Yes. At last!

I began fiddling with the stash busting sweater last night. I’ve never knit feather and fan/old shale before but I get the idea of how it works. I’ve been envisioning this sweater as a sort of tunic shape, no ribbing at cuff or hem. I’m using #7 needles and trying to knit it in the round. Since I’m working with stripes of different yarns and an 18 stitch pattern repeat, I’ve decided to just do an EZ yoke sweater with 3 decrease rows, to minimize the math needed to make it work, though, now that I think about it - I could leave off the feather and fan patterning somewhere around that first decrease and just go with stripes - or even a solid top - and have an easier time with the sweatermath. Hmmmm. A little stream of consciousness design rambling here, folks.
I’m doing my swatch on the sleeve. Of course, that entailed sweatermath right away. How does one go about increasing the sleeve width with an 18 stitch pattern repeat. I decided to put in about 6 rows of seed stitch at the edge and cast on 41 stitches to have a band of seed stitch along the underarm seam. (18+18+5) I’ll increase 2 stitches every inch or so and when I have enough stitches to begin another pattern repeat - No - better yet, another half pattern repeat - I’ll do so.

I knit the seed stitch band and a 4 row repeat of the pattern in a solid color, then switched to a different yarn and knit the next 4 row repeat. I had to stop then because most of these stash yarns are in skeins, not pull-out balls. It was almost 9 o’clock anyway so I put it aside till today. But I am thinking that a 4 row repeat is too narrow. It may look too busy. The color changes won’t be distinct enough to give each yarn its opportunity to shine. I’m going to rip out that second pattern and experiment around to see if I’d like a 6 row repeat better or maybe even two 4 row repeats.

So. Even though the concept is there in my brain, there is still a lot of engineering to do before I can really claim to be knitting a sweater. Happily - that is a fun part for me. Actually far more fun than the slow steady progress and stick-to-it-to-the-end knitting that is a real sweater - which we all know is the only real knitting, right? (Wrong, I know. Humor me, please) I’ll keep working on the sleeve today - my only thinking knitting day this week - and switch to mindless sock knitting if I do any other needlework the rest of the week. I hope I have made both some design decisions and discovered an amalgamate gauge by the end of the day. That way I can leap into a Project next Sunday, when I will be ... On Vacation!!

Happy knitting to you all - and for my Virgo Friends - just suck up the week. An eclipse of a new moon in Virgo means you are in for a wild ride. It all works out next Sunday. We can laugh about it then.

posted by Bess | 8:17 AM
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