Spring doings and my Fair Isle!!!

Today felt like spring around here- very nice- except when the hawk swooped (I believe the official term is "stooped") onto a flicker and killed it - right in front of me.
I know, he needs to eat-- but I love flickers.
I do have some photos but not sure how much any of you care to see that sort of non-knitting focus.  Bird world and all...
OK, just a couple.  Feel free to skip over them to get to the thrilling knitting content!



The good news is, my knitting has been on a roll.  On. A. Roll. 

I ordered the yarn for my Designed-by-Me Fair Isle sweater, from Janine Bajus, last night.
I call the sweater Alaska, for the stunningly gorgeous photo of an area of Alaska that inspired my color choices.  If I knew where it is I might show you.

Wait, here it is:
Alaska inspiration photo
I know, seriously girl, it is ripped in two pieces??
I'm sorry... It was in a magazine...   but aren't the colors totally gorgeous?

Most of the Spindrift colors I am using

For a while I was swatching with mini skeins but finally just sucked it up and started buying the full balls.  There are, I think, 210 colors of Shetland Spindrift. Pretty sure I now own at least 55 of those colors in full sized balls. Maybe more. Just for the planning stages of this one sweater.  
My perfectionism was definitely an issue.

This is *some* of my swatches:

Sorry- it is nighttime here, not the best lighting. They all look rather dark and sombre on my computer screen: not accurate. Oh well.

So anyway-- that sounds pretty low key-- "I ordered the yarn for my fair isle... "
It doesn't take into count the sheer volume of swatching I did, or drafting and testing a myriad of motif ideas, pondering my color values, putting it in time out... There was a lot of time-out time.
I looked at swatches, pondered sweater shapes, totally re-drew a new motif (multiple times) and, of course, threw it in a corner in total exasperation.  
For reference, I started this project when Irene trashed the area where I live, leaving me stranded in Berkeley (OK, not a hardship) where I had taken Janine's Fair Isle class with my dear friend Debbie.  August 2011.

I know. That is a long time.  
But, finally--
I have started knitting the bottom of the body of my sweater-- this doesn't look like much but so be it:
 

 I have started.  I am so excited.  Knitting is all I want to do right now.

Plus there is this:

Two friends of mine, a married couple, are having a baby girl this week-- I know this because if she is not born of her own accord by Wednesday, her mom is scheduled to be induced.
Very exciting.
But for some reason I forgot that an April due date meant the baby would be born in April.
Which it is now.
So of course I am frantically knitting up a little pale pink Koigu dress.  If I have enough yarn- I think I will- I want to make her a little hat, too.  Seriously, I have had months to knit for this little lamb and I am just getting started 3 days before her (probable) birth?  Procrastination, you are my nemesis.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not So Fast

Image
Well, that was the shortest vacation ever, hands down. At least, for this family: 20 hours. (that's minus the car time) The good news is, we have a good buyer for our house, after 4 months on the market. The bad news is we had to race home in order to figure out what we would buy instead, due to a very tight time constraint. One wonders why it had to be at the start and not the end of vacation but so be it. So guess what! Not only did I not finish those sleeves, I ripped what I had done, and started over. Here's why: Without really thinking about it, I had automatically picked up sts for the sleeve (which gets knit down from the shoulder to the cuff) the way I always do: in a stitch. Problem is, here you want the continuity from the yoke to the sleeve to appear unbroken, and that half stitch of red showed. I know, it's hard to see in this photo, but believe me, it was bad. Maybe this shows it better>> See what I mean? That bad baby got ripped out and it has now been w...
Read more

Knitting Books

Image
I am not going to show you the feeble amount of knitting I did yesterday. I have a total of 10 minutes daily for knitting, if that, and, well, it's just too dull. Since Nancy and I see eye to eye on knitting books (thanks Nancy, and I remember you quite well!)-- I am packing up my Stay With Me" knitting books box. It is almost full, and there are some Meg books not in yet. (I need to have a conversation with Meg about sizing her books to properly fit into my book carton.) And what do I do about my already-down-to-the-absolute-necessities lace books? To say nothing of the precious and challenging-to-replace AS books? (Notice I do not have Aran Knitting. I cannot bring myself to pay the prices demanded, and when it came out I was a newly married support-wonderful-DH -thru-Law School kind of gal and $39 or whatever it was was a lot of money to me. Hm. So is 300, for that matter. Anyway, my library still has it, and no I won't tell you which one since all the other librari...
Read more

Knitting Needles

Image
Not having any knitting progress to share (sorry. I did knit my sock flap but that's about all)... I wanted to get on my needle soapbox for a bit. As you can see, I own a fair number of needle gauges. I love them. They let me keep my needles logical, despite all of the manufacturers' apparent efforts to befuddle me. I trained as a scientist, which generally pursues accuracy. Thus, two needles that claim to be the same size but are in reality .25 or even .5 mm off-- well. How can a manufacturer claim to have an accurate tool, that can vary so widely? (Example: US size 6 can be 4mm or 4.25mm) Can you see a scientist accepting a .25mm variation in his calipers? I know that for manufacturers to be super accurate they'd need to really hike their prices into the ozone. But couldn't they at least agree on which mm size to aim for? Better yet, can the whacko size systems, and just use millimeter sizes exclusively. They are utterly logical. Don't get me wrong, I never...
Read more