It's got that glow

Hey there!

It's been a few weeks since I last posted, and boy have I been productive!

I referenced some yarn that was coming, for a project for the friend who is driving my daughter home from school these days.  Well, yarn acquired, shawl cast on, and shawl finished!

And it really happened that fast, too.  I knit this baby in six days!

The yarn is Freia handpainted yarns in the Denim gradient colorway.  The pattern is Love Is... by Boo Knits, one of my very favorite lace shawl designers.

I do have notes about this shawl.

It was my first lace shawl in a very long time, I just remembered the last one I did was right around the time I moved here last year. My mind blanked on that till just now, I was about to say it's been years since I knit a lace shawl.  To be fair, it's been years since I knit a traditional all-over lace shawl out of actual lace weight yarn.

The actual knitting was quite exciting and fun.  I had 75 grams and 700 yards in the original skein, and the pattern called for 650 yards.  In an effort to use up as much of the gradient as possible, I went up a needle size for most of the pattern.  This makes the stitches just slightly bigger and thus use up just slightly more yarn.

I was playing a very riveting game of yarn chicken for the whole second half of the shawl though.  I used my yarn scale to keep track of yarn usage, but there were a few places where the stitch count leaped from one chart to the next.  I was getting rather nervous by the time I got to the final chart, and in fact had to stop 4 rows early in order to save enough yarn for the picot bind off.

In the end, I had 2 grams remaining, and I think it's fabulous the way it is!  I'm excited to gift it to A.  She's seen it, and is thrilled about it, too.

In fun yarn acquisitions, I got a mystery box of yarn last week!  A pocket friend was doing a major destash, and offered up flat-rate boxes of yarn for the cost of shipping and a small fee.  Essentially the cost of 2 skeins of yarn, I got the most exorbitant amount of yarn I've ever gotten in one day.

There's a lot of fun skeins here though, including a few self-striping yarns, yarns from indie dyers I've never tried before, and a skein of targhee sock yarn.  The leftmost two pinky orange yellow skeins are actually paired, and were the first to call out to me.  They are from Birch Dyeworks in the Party Monster colorway.

After I finished the shawl, I decided to cast on a tee shirt for Hazel.

This pattern is the Zinone top by Andi Sutherland.  I can't really recommend it, because it's written rather poorly. 

I reviewed it on my project page, thusly:

"I give this pattern very low marks for clarity.  It's written row by row, which is nonsensical, how often do you match row gauge AND stitch gauge?  I had to add over a dozen rows to get the measurement to line up with the pattern schematics.

On top of that she has you repeat a number of rows X times more.  It's needlessly confusing. For the back of the shirt, I nearly only knit 20 rows of lace before I realized it said "repeat the last 2 rows X times more," which doubles the amount of rows knitted. It would be much clearer if it were written "continue lace pattern for X inches ending  on Y row" or "continue in pattern till piece measures X inches".

Even the waist and hip shaping, which I've omitted, are in the style of "repeat last dozenish rows Y times more" rather than "dec/inc every X rows Y times."

The edgings on the sleeves are also super tight, it's essentially a 6 stitch i-cord, and it is tight.  I did that for a few rows, but switched to a 1x1 rib to give it some ease. Sleeve holes are not the place for tightness.

This pattern should be super simple, there's nothing very complicated about the design, I don't know why the pattern writer made it this way."

So, I'm basically through the complicated part of the sweater.  I didn't pick up and knit the fronts, I just cast on and I'll seam it later.  I couldn't get it to look very neat at all, because of the sleeve edgings.  It'll look fine with the shoulders seamed.  Also, it'll give it a little more structure.

Next, there is cross stitching.  I finally got a good picture of the entire piece as of this morning:

This is super exciting to me. Yesterday, I finished the bottoms of the N and T.  Today I'll move on to the tops.

There's not a lot to talk about with that, I'm enjoying it.

Finally, there's spinning.  I've spent a little bit of time spinning on Ariel, my e-spinner.

I jokingly call this 'void' spinning, since it's so dark.  I have to use a piece of paper on my thighs so I can see the single as I draft.  I'm enjoying the e-spinner still.  It's relatively quiet, and works like a dream.  I am halfway through this fiber, but I'm not eager to spin it just to spin it, if you know what I mean?  I could spin all day long, but then I wouldn't have time to do any other crafts.  Also, I would use up all my fiber and have to get more. When I was deep in shawl knitting, I forgot about other crafting, and I do prefer mixing things up and making bits of progress on lots of things.

I suppose it depends.  I have become quite a prolific knitter these days focusing on one project at a time.

Regardless, I'm not going to police my crafting.

And that is where I'll leave you.  If you're wondering about the fire gradient socks (there's a lot of gradient in my life these days!) I am almost through the gusset decreases of sock number 2, but now that I am to the body of the t-shirt, it's taken the place of socks in my evening knitting repertoire.

I hope to be back in a few weeks.  I'm sure I'll have made a ton of progress on all sorts of things.

Cheers!