1 Comments:

Good progress on your cotton top! Have you seen the Shalom Cardigan? It is a free pattern on the blog www.involvingthesenses.com and looks very similar to the shape of your top. Maybe her shaping would be of some help to you? The pattern only comes in one size so anyone wanting to knit a different size has a little work to do on it. Your top will be very striking when it is finished!

By  KathyR, at 5:50 PM  

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Yes! She lives!

Though it may not seem that way from the paucity of posts emanating from TheCastle. For months now work has been a juggernaut of activity and blog posts haven't been high on my list of TTD. Then there was a scare one week, deep in the throes of Mercury in Retrograde, when I actually deleted the whole place - including my access to it. I couldn't have been the only one to eliminate myself during this recent astrological regression because the Google folk were able to restore TheQueen, TheCastle and TheAccount in a twinkling. But I was truly still too busy to post.

Happily I am on vacation this week and though the days have been full, they aren't so full I can't, at last, bring you up to date on at least the state of my knitting. Which is moving, if slowly, towards the completion of what may be the only cotton garment I ever knit.



Yes. It is brown stockinette. with a colorful garter hem, of course, but mostly - brown. I'm nearing the end of this plainness - there is the section of short rowing to be done across the front to make a bust dart and there will be a little short rowing across the back shoulders to lift the collar area - perhaps 3 or 4 more inches of brownness.

Then begins the Egyptian cap sleeve collar area. I think I will have 60 rows to work with. I'm leafing through the art books to decide what the color sequence will be and I will have to find some graph paper to block it out but I am inspired by the (heavily copyrighted image of a) collar worn by the woman depicted here, only, of course, I'll use green instead of turquoise.

So that is the state of TheQueen's knitting. I am still not a fan of knitting cotton, although I have at least accustomed myself, a bit, to it's unyielding nature. I'm knitting this stuff up on #2 needles. It took something that small to even approach a gauge tight enough to hold up to cotton's insistence upon stretching. I may not banish cotton forever if it holds up under wear but I will be deeply happy to get back to nice springy conforming pliant wool again.

Maybe this delicious sock wool,



picked up at a darling little shop in Irvington VA, The Bay Window, where BD and I stopped yesterday, on a ramble through the Northern Neck. We had planned to go to the ocean but it was just too rainy yesterday. We'll head off today - and even if it isn't very warm, I am going into the ocean. Too many years go by between one dip and the next. This will not be one of them.

Another discovery we made was a source for magically delicious coffee! Locally roasted by the folks at Mobjack Bay Coffee. Yum. We picked this up at a darling little sandwich shop in Deltaville but I forgot its name. Cafe on ___ ____. dang. Had the best ham and pineapple sandwich for lunch, sitting on the beach looking across at Windmill Point.

In Kilmarnock we stopped at The Book Nook (isn't it nice that we are both book hounds?) where BH got a book of poetry and I got a birdsong identification book. I'd been leery of buying one of those because most portable digital animal reproductions are pretty dreadful. This one is not. In fact, it's very realistic and I've been playing with it already this morning.