Dear Readers,
 First of all,
Gail completed husband Dan’s hat, with the last
two skeins in the county of Brown Sheep’s discontinued Loden
Leaf, juuuust making it with the addition of the contrast brim
edging and band. And his smile says everything, doesn’t it? It
looks great!
And I sent off my
Red Scarf Project
scarf, with an envelope attached to it,
holding gift orders for dinner and movie tickets for two.
There’s still time to do your contribution and get it in.
Now, to what I did with a generous
Christmas gift of yarn:
It was a pound and a half of hand spun,
hand dyed wool/mohair,
Roxanne’s Mohair, in a weight a little heavier
than worsted. As I wound it into balls, it seemed a strange to
me: full of vegetable matter, prone to breakage, and a little
dull. As I swatched it, it was prone to splitting. It’s
deepest color was a lovely, deep blue-green, but, in the
streaking and blothing one sometimes gets with hand-dyed yarns,
parts of it faded to pale in some stretches, and others were
brightly aggressive.
What to make? A huge shawl, I thought,
since I gave one away last summer to my friend Katie, who was
moving. Straight knitting, nothing that would stress an already
fragile yarn.
I make my simple shawls by casting on at
the top, in this case 261 stitches, and working downward, so
each row will be shorter than the last. First a simple top
edging in garter stitch, six stitches of which on each side
would become the side edgings, which would taper to the point as
I decreased next to them on each right side row. I added, on
each side edging, two garter stitch rows every ten rows to avert
that streeetched look that comes about because garter stitch is
shorter than stockingette. It took about a week from cast-on to
bind-off, between bouts of snow shovelling. And it didn’t look
good.
Then I washed it, in the machine, with a
full tub of cold water, a little mild detergent, and some
vinegar, on “delicate.” I blocked it on an old bedspread laid on
the basement carpet. The yarn softened enormously, consolidated
well, and assumed a quiet sheen, but it stretched. When it was
barely damp, I tossed it in the dryer on moderate heat.
When it emerged from the dryer, it had come
back down to gauge, the yarn had fully bloomed, the vegetable
matter had washed out or surfaced so it could be picked out, the
colors had softened , clarified, and blended, and the yarn had
softened. I’m thinking of designing a plain shawl, on the same
lines, for embroidery later. But after something of a wrestling
match, I like this one as is.
 The model is my neighbor, Eve, who, like
her two little girls, likes dressing up, and loves fanciful
things (she has knit twelve pairs of lambie mittens, among other
things!).
Next up was to finish was the red sweater
when the yarn for its second sleeve came in at
My Sister
Knits.
I taught it several new words as I worked
out the sleeve caps, but eventually I got them right, and this
is the outcome. Again, Eve was kind enough to model it,
looking a little like a heroine in a Russian novel, partly
because of the shawl, a gift from my daughter. I made the color
selection from the
Cascade Cloud 9 range specifically to go with this shawl.
This is a wonderful worsted weight, soft, even, and firm.
I am now trying to work out the pattern directions for this
sweater in a wide range of sizes, because I think it will become
many figure types, but that is a chore demanding any amount of
arithmetic and some testing, so it’s going to take a while.
We’ve had plenty of winter here in Colorado
already, as you will know from the news. Nothing cheers up
winter—where we’re actually having winter, and we’re sure having
one here--like bright colors and warm and pleasant yarns.
Best,
Pat
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