Ruthless Knitting Archive

I spent a great deal of yesterday finishing up the secret project , and oh! how lovely it turned out. I will look forward to unveiling it when I can.

In the meantime, I don’t have a lot to show for myself. On Friday, my package arrived from Knit/Purl, and I set about swatching. I first swatched the Sea Silk for the Swallowtail Shawl pattern (Fall 06 Interweave Knits; see a photo here). I was a little underwhelmed by the Sea Silk at first because the skein had all these teeny whitish pills on it that made it look slightly shopworn, but I Googled “sea silk pills” and found that the indomitable Clara Parkes of Knitter’s Review fame had noticed the same thing in her skein and found it not to be a problem. The yarn was redeemed for me when I knit the swatch, which came out very nicely, if a little small. I will have to try again with a larger needle (I used a size 4), though I’m a bit worried about running out of yarn. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Next, I swatched for Cookie’s Red Herring socks with my new Nature’s Palette yarn. The Indian Paintbrush turned out to be a different shade of red than I had expected (more blue undertones than orange), but I like how it combines with the Dark Teal. I found the Nature’s Palette rougher than I anticipated, but only because I’d read somewhere that it was Koigu-like. I think that person must have meant that it’s sproingy like Koigu, not that it’s as soft as Koigu. It’s not at all unpleasantly rough, though, and I liked working with it. These are going to be excellent socks. I swatched on size 2 needles, but the yarn bloomed enough that I’ll probably go down to size 1 for the project. I was glad about this, because I’d rather knit socks on 1s than on 2s.

Speaking of colors, apologies for the color quality of today’s pictures. The light in the living room when I took these was interesting but not especially friendly for accurate photography, and thus none of the colors are particularly true.

At any rate, having swatched my new yarn and then having finished my secret project, I was ready to start something new. Though I’d been itching to work on the Endpaper Mitts, the itch disappeared long enough for me to flirt with beginning my next sweater project, which involves some beautiful Artfibers Golden Siam that my parents bought for me in San Francisco. I have two colors, one a deep blueberry (color 37) and the other a sort of cocoa brown (color 38). There’s enough of the dark blue for a sweater and slightly less of the brown, so I’ve been envisioning a blue and brown sweater set — something classy that I can wear to holiday parties. I’ve sketched the blue sweater in a variety of incarnations, and I’ve also built up quite a little pile of swatches for the project.

I started with the plain stockinette swatch and then began imagining some lace — not an entirely lace sweater, but a mainly stockinette sweater with small vertical panels of lace in it. I swatched the two lace patterns on the bottom and decided they were both too fussy for this yarn, but I really liked the lace pattern on the top right, which I think is called Shell Lace and is from Barbara Walker’s first Treasury of Knitting Patterns.

Later, I got to thinking that the cardigan should fasten only at the top, and then I realized I needed some kind of plan to keep the fronts stable so they wouldn’t roll. Last night, I found the Daisy Stitch, also from Barbara Walker’s first collection. It’s on the top left in the picture. I liked how that looked, so I did the drawing and math for a cardigan that had one repeat of the lace on each side of the front and was otherwise stockinette except for a 1.5″ daisy stitch band. When I cast on this morning, however, I felt only lukewarm about how the design was shaping up, and when I somehow lost 4 stitches (where did they go?) and had to tink five or six rows (the tedium!), I drew two conclusions. One was that this yarn, lovely as it is, does not like to be frogged, so perhaps I shouldn’t make something with it that’s likely to involve a lot of frogging. The other, related conclusion was that this yarn was going to get fairly fuzzy fairly quickly, likely obscuring anything fancy. After ripping out the swatch, I decided that I was going in the wrong direction and that what I really needed was a stockinette cardigan with Daisy Stitch bands.

That’s the direction I’m going to go with it next, but I don’t have quite the head of steam up that I did last night, so I may put the yarn away for a bit and get on with my Endpaper Mitts. We shall see.

I’ve been working on a secret project this past week — well, not that secret, just a secret from the person I’m going to give it to, who may or may not check this blog, so I can’t post about it until I’ve given it away. Which could be weeks from now. Rest assured that the project is coming along swimmingly, some pieces are blocking as we speak, and I hope to wrap it up in three or four days.

Meanwhile, I have been easily distracted. Yesterday in particular, I sat doing work and my mind kept wandering off to the million things I wanted to knit right then even though I was working, not knitting, so the point was moot.

I try to be, and for the most part am, a fairly monogamous knitter. Sometimes, I give way to temptation and begin a new project — or two or three new projects — before I have finished the one I’m working on, but it tends to knock me a little off-balance to be trying to finish more than one thing at a time. As I work on one project-in-progress, my mind keeps casting about frantically to the other thing, screaming helpfully “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SOCKS?! WHEN WILL YOU FINISH THE SOCKS?!” I don’t enjoy this mental berating, and so I try to confine myself to one project while allowing small distractions, according to these self-imposed rules:

(1) If I am knitting something that takes a long time, like a sweater, I’m allowed to do a small project, like a hat, between finishing pieces of the sweater.

(2) I am allowed to knit a swatch or two for a future project whenever I want to after the yarn for that project is purchased — usually more or less immediately.

Which brings me to today’s knitting content: the swatches I knit for Eunny Jang’s Endpaper Mitts.

I bought four balls of Knit Picks Palette to knit two pairs of these mitts, though as you can see from the swatch on the bottom left I also briefly abandoned the Palette to try out some Mountain Colors Bearfoot in one. (And oh how it bled! And I kind of knew it would but did nothing to prevent it!) It’s been an interesting exercise in color doing these four swatches, and I could do about a million more except I’ve experimented enough to figure out my gauge and I’m ready to get going on the mitts as soon as my current project is complete.

An aside: This is my first time using the Palette, and I like it more than various comments on the Internet led me to expect I would. Not that I can recall the source or exact nature of any of those comments — I just had a vaguely negative impression. Is anyone else extremely tempted to buy the “Palette sampler” every time they look at the Knit Picks site? I always think, “Oh, how great it would be to have all 30 colors!” Followed immediately by “Oh my God, I do not want 30 more balls of yarn!”

Anyway, I’m thinking I’ll start with a pair in the light gray and some dark green Mountain Colors Bearfoot I have in the stash, and then I’ll probably do the other pair in brown and pink. Or light gray and brown. We’ll see.

With the Endpaper Mitt swatching taken care of, I should have been pleasantly anticipating doing further work toward the completion of my secret project, or at least looking forward to starting the mitts afterward. Instead, I started thinking of creating thumbless baby mittens in the Fair Isle pattern from the mitts to give to a particularly adorable baby of my acquaintance. I was ready to cast on for them right that second, but I held steady. And then I cast on and soon after abandoned an afghan square in Thorn Stitch (from the second Barbara Walker stitch treasury). And then I ordered some yarn: a skein of Handmaiden Sea Silk in Sangria for a lacy shawl, two skeins of Hand Jive Nature’s Palette sock yarn (one in Dark Teal, one in Indian Paintbrush) for a pair of Red Herring socks, and the Icosa Ball pattern (to be made with stash yarn), all from Knit-Purl in Portland.

Because, you know, I needed more projects.

Good grief.