A few Saturdays ago was the Black Sheep Gathering in Eugene, OR. I took a trip down for my first Oregon fiber festival. I did manage to buy a bit of yarn.

First up was a purchase from A Verb for Keeping Warm. I’d first heard about the company in a Stash & Burn podcast. They use natural dyes, and their booth was filled with beautiful colors. I had a hard time choosing a yarn. I finally ended up with the Superwash Merino Fingering in Kerala, and is lovely shades of brown with some red tones.

Apparently, the next yarn I purchased is from a vendor also in the same Stash & Burn episode, but I don’t remember hearing their name (must go back and re-listen). The yarn is from Toots LeBlanc & Co. It’s 1200 yards of fingering weight yarn in a Jacob wool, alpaca and mohair blend. I’m thinking this would make a great “rustic-style” lace shawl.

I did, of course, make a stop at the Blue Moon Fiber Arts booth. I took a cruise through and didn’t see anything in the regular stock that I needed. However, this skein on the Rare Gems rack caught my eye. For those who don’t know, the Rare gems are the mistakes or over-dyes when colors aren’t quite to the color specification.

I must admit that I’ve been a bit obsessed with chartreuse green lately, so this skein was particularly hard to resist. Plus, with the added depth of some rust and aqua colors (not colors I’d have imagined it paired with), it had to come home with me.

Finally, I purchased some lovely 100% alpaca laceweight from Crown Mountain Farms. It’s their Alpaca Lace Athena in the Stonehenge colorway. It’s 500 yards per two ounce skein, and I purchased two. I’m currently using it to knit Icarus.

I was also lucky enough to win a prize in Black Sheep Bingo, but I haven’t had a chance to photograph it yet. I’ll be sure and post it later.

I’ve been working on a variety of projects lately.

First up is the Spiraling Master Coriolis pattern from Cat Bordhi’s New Pathways for Sock Knitters: Book One.  I’m using Socks that Rock in the Chapman Springs colorway.  It’s great to finally find a pattern that this color works with.  I’ve tried it several times with other patterns, and it hasn’t matched up well.  The sock has been a bit of a challenge.  I’ve knit so many socks in the “traditional” fashion that it seems strange that the patterns will work as written.  So far, I’ve made only one major mistake.  I put the increase stitch marker at the wrong place, so I ended up with a straight line of knitting instead of a spiral.  I didn’t like the way it looked, so I ripped back and knit it correctly.  I’m at the end of the first sock, and just need to determine what cuff to put on this pair.  I’d been thinking about a picot edge, but I may just make a plain ribbed cuff.

Also on the needles is a shawl, the Icarus Shawl from Interweave Knits.  Right now, I’m nearing the end of the plain stockinette and eyelet rows that seem to go on forever.  I’m starting to worry a bit about my yardage.  Per the shawl calculator over at Rose-Kim Knits, I’ve completed 48% of the shawl.  When I way the yarn, I have about 2.1 of 4 ounces remaining, or 52.5% of my yarn left to knit 52% of the shawl.  This is going to cut it really close.  If I’m off by only the tiniest bit, I might run out of yarn in the final rows.  It would be so heartbreaking to have to rip back half of the shawl because I ran out of yarn.

I didn’t check Ravelry before I purchased the yarn. The pattern originally called for 875 yards, so I thought I’d be fine with 1000 yards.  However, the pattern on Ravelry calls for 875-1200 yards because a lot of people have run short when knitting the shawl.  The designer now calls for 1100 yards to be enough yarn for the majority of knitters.  Since I’m using a hand-dyed yarn, I don’t want to risk ordering more and having it be a drastically different shade.  For now, Icarus is sitting in the corner while I decide what to do.

The good news about these two projects is that they gave me a chance to use my new stitch markers.  I purchased the big beads while I was in Prague, with the intent of someday making myself some stitch markers.  I never got around to it.  But, recently, Allison started making and selling stitch markers, and she was nice enough to turn my beads into stitch markers for me.

It’s hard to capture their sparkly orange-ness, but I love them.

I know that posts of this sort are usually an update on what’s being knit, but this will be a bit more of an update on what’s been ripped out.

The listings over there to the left listing what’s on my needles.  It’s not accurate.  I’d cast on for the Little Child’s Sock [Ravelry Link] from Knitting Vintage socks.  I was using some Trekking XXL that I purchased a while back.  After knitting about 4 inches of the leg, I decided that I didn’t like the combination of yarn and pattern.  I ripped it out right then; I never even got a photo of it.  I determining now if I’ve got another yarn that will be appropriate for the pattern, because I’d become fairly excited about knitting it.

As for the Orenburg lace shawl in cobweb weight yarn, it too has been ripped.  I was working on it on size US0 (2.0mm) needle, but neither of the size 0s that I own seemed small enough or pointy enough to deal with the yarn.  It’s funny because one of the needles usually seems much too pointy to me for its usual duty of sock knitting.  With the fine lace, it just seemed as if I was trying to force huge, blunt ended needles through the knitting.  I was considering trying a smaller needle to see if my results were any more successful.  The idea of knitting with a 000 or 0000 is a bit daunting.

Even with the needle dilemma, I hadn’t planned to rip out the small piece of border I’d knit (about four inches).  However, fate intervened as I was knitting one evening. I’d been sitting in my chair, the one that I like to knit in.  I decided to get up and get a drink from the kitchen.  Somehow, in this process, the yarn got wrapped around my leg.  As I moved away from the chair, the fine yarn snapped under the tiniest bit of pressure.  Since I’ve got extra yardage on that yarn, I decided to put away the project and start the shawl over on the tinier needles.

That’s it.  There’s no photos or interesting knitting.  Hopefully the new yarn/pattern combination will work well for the Little Child’s Socks, and I’ll have knitting to talk about.

Today, I finally got around to blocking the Handsome Triangle Shawl from Victorian Lace Today. Once it dries, I’ll find a way to take some nicer photos of it.  In a previous post, I’d hoped to have this shawl blocked more than a week ago, but life threw me for a loop that I wasn’t prepared for.   

When I started the blog, I swore that I’d keep it to mostly knitting content, that the world didn’t need commentary on my daily life.  But, the last ten days have been tough, and I think it would be helpful to get it out. So…

Warning - no knitting content follows.

(more…)

I’ve never really been one of those knitters with eight million projects going at the same time.  I tend to be faithful to one “big” project and maybe a pair of socks.  Items in my works in process pile usually get finished before I begin a new project.  Usually.

Back in early January, I cast on for the Handsome Triangle shawl from Victorian Lace Today.  I raced through the shawl.  The pattern was easy to memorize, the yarn wonderfully soft.  It was such enjoyable knitting.  The yarn was handling the texture of the lace nicely.

Within a few weeks of knitting, I made it to the last pattern row.  I consulted the book to see how the bind off should be handled and there it was…*ch8, sc into next shawl stitch, ch4, sc into next shawl stitch*.  How had I missed this?  The shawl called for a looped crochet bind off.  Now, I have some basic crochet skills, but my crochet is not as even as my knitting.  I did not want to ruin all of my hard work with a wonky edging that wasn’t to the same quality as the rest of the work.  The best thing to do, I thought, was to set it aside for a few days while I decided what to do about the edging.  That was back in January.  Tuesday night I dug through my knitting area trying to find my chibi to graft the toe ends of my Monkey socks.  While looking, I found the shawl hiding in a box.  It looked like this.

There it sat, still at the last pattern row, on live needles, waiting for the bind off.  Five months of sitting in a box, not being worked on.  I decided to do something about it.  Last night I started weaving in all of the ends.  Sure, it’s a bit more procrastination before working on the bind off for the shawl.  But, see all of the messy ends in the corner of the photo?  There’s quite a bit of work to be done on this thing.  My goal is to finish the bind off for this shawl and get it blocked this weekend or early next week.  Making my goal public makes it more likely to be finished.

In the spirit of confession, I’ll also confess to the following.  What could it be?  It’s tracking information from UPS.  I’m receiving two boxes today, 19 pounds each.  What on earth could this have to do with the knitting blog?  It couldn’t possibly be yarn…could it?