Miss Match

I am liking my Yummy Fable gloves, but... I do find the cuff is quite long as the pattern is written. And it turns out that I will be several grams of yarn short of the Fable yarn judging by the amount of yarn left thus far. So I decided that once I finish the right hand glove, I would knit the left hand glove using the yarns I intend for my second pair - and eliminate one of the charts to decrease the cuff length by about 60%. My plan was to use some green anonymous sock yarn I had bought some time ago together with the green Yummy yarn. I gave myself points for using up some stash yarn... But unfortunately, the solid yarn disappears into the handpaint yarn at the lighter parts of the handpaint. So, I took a trip to Romni Wools and picked up 2 skeins of Fable - one was THE LAST skein of the coral (whew! Good thing I didn't just wait until I ran out!! Obviously this was a sign from God that you should never postpone a yarn purchase). I also got this skein of teal: The colour combo seemed kind of familiar... I cast on for the second glove that evening: It's looking pretty good, although if you take a look at the part of the cast on that overlaps my ring finger, the contrast is much less at that particular point of the Yummy colourway: It's a little more obvious sans flash: Apparently I still have a ways to go in embracing the colourwork concept of not matching too closely. BTW - I fully intend to wear the gloves as a pair once I have a right hand and left hand glove. Hey - the pattern will match, right? It's like the Steven Wright joke: "My socks DO match. They're the same thickness." In the last month or 2, my posting frequency has dropped off because it has been INSANELY busy at work. So next week, we are taking a well deserved Beach Holiday. I'll be back in February - stay warm!

Feel the Glove

I have finished the cuff on the first of the Yummy Fable Gloves. I'm loving the mix of alpaca yarn and wool yarn - the outer surface of the gloves feels almost silky. So far, the inside doesn't have the same effect - it may be tempting to wear them outside in. The alpaca yarn is pretty fuzzy, but that's toned down nicely by the smooth sock yarn. I had expected the Yummy to be more of a sportweight yarn - the yardage is less than I'm used to for fingering weight. But it knits up like fingering. Maybe they use particularly heavy dyes. It's interesting to see what happens in terms of pooling with this pattern - I don't have a clue what a sock knit with this yarn alone would look like. I am definitely feeling the stranded love - although I do have to concentrate when reading the charts, because she uses dark squares for the MC, which in my case is the lighter yarn. Our Xray imaging software has a function that allows you to reverse black and white on an image - too bad I can't do it on a PDF. (I realize that it may be technically possible to do it, but I have no idea how to do it - I treat my computer like my brain and generally use only 2% of it's actual capacity at any given time)

Bright Shiny Things

One project is never enough. I have to wonder - do painters start planning their next work before they are halfway through a painting? Do songwriters end up humming completely new melodies as they are sorting out an arrangement? I have worn the same pair of black leather gloves almost every non-warm day this winter and last - never change them. But before I am even finished the first cuff on this pair of gloves, I'm already starting to debate what contrast colour would work when I knit the next pair with the green Yummy yarn that I bought at The Naked Sheep . Pattern: Handpainted Gloves by Karendipity designs. You have to love a pattern that includes the following instructions: "At this point, put down your knitting and go into the kitchen. Eat an entire bar of chocolate"

You say Stasher like it's a bad thing...

You know how every so often you come across some obscure piece of information that you find fascinating for entirely inexplicable reasons? This weekend I was reading some information from our provincial Poison Control Centre - it was regarding the appropriate treatment of overdoses. There was a phrase that made me laugh: "Whole bowel irrigation is appropriate for the management of drug stashers, but not drug stuffers" I freely admit that part of the humour was probably derived from the fact that it was around 3 AM, and I was starting to get a bit punchy. Since I'm not hip to cool toxicology lingo, I had to do an internet search to find the following information: Stashers are people who pack their GI tract with bags of heroin in order to smuggle the illegal drug from one country to another. In these persons, the drugs are carefully packaged for safe passage. Stuffers on the other hand, are people who ingest all the drugs in their possession in order to conceal the evidence from the police. Because these packages are typically not designed for safe GI transport, they easily rupture and frequently cause poisoning. Tee hee. Stashers. Oh man, I really have to get some sleep...

The things you find on the Internets - genetics

I wonder if one of the parents works for Colinette.

First FO of the year!

Since it seems everyone and their dog has a slouchy beret (OK - I may be exaggerating on the dog berets. But given that there are cat sweater patterns out there, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine someone has knit their dog a beret to match their doggie sweater) I used the multi-lot iona yarn to knit a One Day Beret - for my purposes, it is christened The Bandwagon Beret. The pattern is top down, and works for any gauge; so if you are both afraid of running out of yarn and too lazy impatient to knit a swatch, this is the perfect beret pattern. On New Year's eve we were boring and vegged out in front of the TV decided to spend some quality time together. I cast on for the beret at the start of the Canada-US hockey game, and had gotten almost to the point of doing the ribbing by the time we were ready to go to bed. I decided to try it on to see how it was looking: Isn't it funny how you often don't notice stripey pooling as you are knitting, even when it is blindingly obvious if you look at the project in its entirety? Even the monkey perched on my head doesn't distract you from the stripes (I guess this would be a Bellini Beret). Since the nice people at Colinette had so kindly separated my skein of yarn into 2 parts, on New Year's day I frogged it, and re-knit it alternating the 2 yarns: Even though I went down a needle size, my ribbing is pretty loose. Sadly, I suffer from "the first purl stitch after a knit stitch is loose" syndrome; 1x1 ribbing is probably a bad idea because of this. It looks like the ribbing is stretched out, but the beret really just slips on as is. I even did a simple crochet purl-wise cast off to try and tighten things up. Since I would hate for it to blow off in a strong wind, I think I'm going to rip the ribbing back and re-knit it in 2x2 ribbing with an even smaller needle. If worst comes to worst, I'll knit some elastic into the ribbing. The sordid details are: 5 mm needle (4.5 for the ribbing). I knit the top until it was 9 inches diameter(16 stitches between markers), did 2.5 inches of straight stockinette, and 1.5 inches of ribbing(12 stitches between markers). I had 11g of leftover yarn, so it used about 130m. Now if only I could keep up this pace of one FO per day - I could finally make a dent in my stash!

Letter from the Iditor, New Year's edition

Dear people at Colinette: You do make very lovely yarns, and your colourways are inspired. I know that it's very important to make certain that you buy enough yarn in a single dyelot to complete your project in order to prevent having noticeable differences in the finished product. However, you'd think that this shouldn't be a problem with a single skein project. Apparently, I was lucky enough to stumble upon a 2 for 1 special when I bought a skein Iona a few months ago - 2 dye lots in 1 skein. You see, there was a knot in the skein about 1/4 of the way through, and there's a definite difference in how much of the lighter colours are present in the two parts of the skein. Now I realize that you probably dye the yarn in small batches. However, if you ran out of yarn from one dyelot while winding up a skein, it's somewhat poor form to just make up the rest with a second dyelot. Unless you then toss it into the mill end pile rather than the "Those Canadians are too polite to complain" pile. Happy New Year, LLD