Special Delivery

I ordered some yarn from Serendipitous Ewe a little while ago. In addition to some of her Sock Summit colourways, I also got a custom colourway: Hmmm - what's this? There's something about this colourway that looks familiar...

Call to Arms

Last weekend I had 2 days that I could devote chunks of time to knitting. This was the result: It's now resembling an actual garment! Only the sleeves remain. As the pattern is written, I should be knitting them from the cuff up, but I am going to try pickinng up stitches around the armhole and knitting them top down using the technique described in Wendy Bernard's book Custom Knits. My only concern is that it involves short row shaping at the top of the sleeve. Since I have at least 4 different dyelots (it is entirely possible that each of the 6+ skeins I have comes from a different dyelot), I am going to have to figure out how I can alternate skeins while doing short rows. Then there's that whole matter of all those ends at the bottom...

Picking up Poppy

Next week my parents are coming to visit us. Visits from my parents are always a great incentive to try to tidy up our place a bit. On Friday The Gambler decided to attack our loft, which functions as our office and also stores many books. It's also where I have a few plastic drawer units that contain yarn. Non sock yarn tends to go up into the office. When I came home (the joy of my new position is having to attend meetings at work that are held on my days off), he pointed out that there was much yarn in the loft which was not in a drawer. There was yarn in bags, yarn in the closet, and yarn in bins in the closet. Sigh. I don't want to count how many sweaters I have the yarn for that are just waiting to be knit up. So I am really really really going to make an effort to curtail the aquisition of new yarn, and start using up what I have. I hung out with Glenna yesterday; we had lunch and then went to The Purple Purl. I mentioned to her that amongst all that yarn up in the study was the bottom panel of a Poppy I started 2 years ago. She pointed out that if I had completed the bottom, that was a huge chunk of the sweater already completed. So last night, I picked up Poppy for the first time since we moved. The body was knit with Cascade 220 and Mission Falls, and the remainder of the sweater is being knit out of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted in Black Purl. Now, there is a bit of a story behind the Shepherd Worsted. Initially I got 2 skeins in exchange in a swap through the knitty board - it was a bit of a screwup, because I sent the other person sock weight yarn not realizing that she was trading worsted weight yarn. I subsequently sent her more yarn to make up for the difference. When I decided to knit Poppy using the Black Purl instead of Silk Garden, I tried to find more Black Purl. That was when the colourway was at the height of it's popularity, so I ended up doing another swap or 2 through the knittyboard, and one person was kind enough to send me several balls that she had leftover from a previous project. Needless to say, the yarns come from many different dye lots. So I am going to be switching between skeins very regularly (sometimes every row), and am going to have to try and balance out the amounts of some of the outlier skeins to keep some degree of homogeneity in this sweater. I guess it could be worse - it could be a solid colour yarn! I did promise some yarn pr0n; this was some yarn that I picked up in Italy at a little yarn shop in a small town called Monte San Savino. 1400 metres of laceweight wool for an astoundingly low price - I think it cost about 5 euros. The colours are great - purples with blue, red, and some bronze and green thrown in as well. I will have to find a nice place in the loft to store it.

Slow news day

Nope, nothing of note happening today... No siree Bob.

Have your toddler bring his driver's licence...

Oh dear, another one of those "Yes, almost a whole month has gone by since my last post, and even though there has been travelling and knitting and cute cat pics, I am quickly posting a picture I took with my Blackberry" posts. I do have a bit of an excuse - I have been promoted at work to Lead Intensivist, which translates into the person who makes the call schedules, attends all sorts of meetings, and tries to recruit new people to join our team so that I can have more time to knit. It also involves putting up with a not insignificant amount of crap from the person who was recently fired from the position, but that could be a blog unto its own. Will try to get some Actual Knitting Photos and even some yarn pr0n up this weekend.