Month: April 2014

Four Things

1.  This pretty yarn is Calder from Abstract Fibers.  It’s on sale right now.  You’ll wait a few weeks for them to custom dye it for you, but oh you’ll be happy when it arrives.  It’s 886 yds in sport weight.  Anyone else feel like making a little girl’s sweater?

2.  Simple Things Shawl.

 A quick, simple shawlette in a springy color.  The yarn is Lisa Souza Hardtwist fingering weight in Aqua Fresca.  I started this in April when we still had 3 foot drifts of snow in our yard.  I’m happy to report that we just have little piles of snow left in the shadiest part of the yard.  The kids are finally running around today playing outside without coats.

3.  pasOdoble shawl

Lily helped me pick out this pattern for a 460 yd skein of handspun gradient yarn.  I’m not alternating colors, just letting the gradient yarn do it’s job.  I’m supplementing the handspun with three partial skeins of solid color.  You can see just the beginning of this shawl in the photo above.

4.  WordPress is really getting difficult for me to use.  For some reason the photo inserting has become extremely touchy.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes it insists upon putting two photos together into one frame.  It’s impossible to insert photos from my iPad.  I can upload them, but not insert them.  Is this an issue for anyone else or is it strictly an AreaVoices issue?  Or is it a browser issue?  I might have to play with this a bit.

 

Why Didn’t Someone Tell Me?

Pretty Stripes

Why, oh why didn’t someone tell me how much fun self-striping socks are to make?  I’ve done lace socks, cabled socks, plain jane socks (although those bore me), ribbed socks, you get the idea.  I’ve even done socks with yarn that kind of sort of stripes if you squint at it just right.

All this time I’ve been hiding the three skeins of self striping yarn that I own in the bottom of my sock yarn drawer waiting for it to be something else entirely.  I can’t really tell you why as they’re all beautiful colors, I just didn’t think I liked them as socks.  A shawl, maybe.  Fingerless mitts, maybe.  Kind of like the kid who won’t try any green vegetables because they don’t think they’ll like them.

And then this post from the Yarn Harlot happened. And this one. http://www.yarnharlot.ca/2014/02/wham-bam-thank-you-maam/  A friend texted me to see if I could find that yarn in Superior, since she couldn’t find any
Little Women castlocally.  So I went on a yarn hunting expedition.  I didn’t find any of the Trekking XXL in colorway 550 that she was looking for.  But I found other colorways, beautiful, less rainbow-y colorways.  Not that there’s anything wrong with rainbow colored socks, it’s just not my style to wear that bright of socks.  See, they’re the green vegetable of my world (except I really like green vegetables).  So I bought one skein.  Just one.  Because I was afraid it would get buried in that same drawer.

And Little Women came along.

I spent much of the play backstage helping the lead actresses with their costume changes.  Since it was dimly lit and I needed to listen for cues, I needed something stupidly easy to knit.  Something so easy I could literally do it in the dark.  Enter the Vanilla Sock from the Knitmore Girls.  And lo and behold, a sock was born.  Then two.  In the two weeks that the play ran, I finished two socks.  This may be a personal record for me.  They were even sized larger (to fit a friend) than I normally would make for either the girls or myself.  And here I thought I was a slow sock knitter.

Why didn’t someone tell me?