That secret gift I mentioned in my last post is a neckwarmer/cowl for Grandma! I knit it with a yak/silk blend that I spun a couple of years ago, but didn’t know what to do with it… until now. The pattern is Polyphylla, which is available for free on Ravelry. I really enjoyed knitting this pattern, not to mention knitting with my own handspun...
This project is a gift, so I can’t share pictures of the whole thing yet. But holy wow did I ever cut it close on the yarn! The project called for a long-tail cast on over two needles; I overestimated the amount of yarn I’d need and had nearly a yard of tail remaining. Laziness said “it’s 168 stitches, you don’t really want to...
The idea behind a Pi Shawl, or in this case a half-Pi shawl, is that you double the distance between the increase rounds, which double the number of stitches, and you end up with a round (or in this case, half-circle) shawl. It’s not really so much about pi as it is about geometry: a circle will double its circumference in doubling the distance...
I’m coming into the home stretch of the Dancing Cranes stole! After a dedicated week of working on it, I am more than halfway through the third and final pattern repeat. This week, too, will be mostly given over to lace knitting (or is that “knitting lace”?) so that I can have the stole bound off, washed, and blocking by the end of the...
On Monday night I sat down with the Dancing Cranes stole to knit my two rows for the day. As I got near the end of the first row, I noticed that I only had ten stitches, rather than eleven, between the markers. (The pattern repeats over eleven stitches, so to make it easy I’ve put a million markers in. I mean, one ever...
I have just two months left to finish the Dancing Cranes stole, and so I snuck away from the cats to a quiet place where I could work on it. I’m starting to feel some anxiety about getting it done in time, so I’m planning to dedicate a portion of every evening to work on it until it’s done. I don’t want to be...
The speed at which I’ve been knitting lately has given me a boost of confidence and renewed my energy for knitting. Two hats in five working days, a pair of armwarmers in less than ten hours? When I first started knitting, I never would have dreamed that I could crank out finished products so quickly. (And now, I’m making excuses like “well, it’s worsted...
Progress on the Dancing Cranes stole comes in fits and spurts. I neglected it over the holidays and came back to it with a vengeance in the last few days – this picture is already several rows out of date! Each 300-stitch row takes me about half an hour, so it feels like a real commitment to make myself sit down and work on...
There is absolutely no progress to report on the Dancing Cranes stole. I spent Wednesday after work configuring my new computer (yay, new computer!) and so didn’t have time in the evening to knit. Last night when I sat down to put my two rows on I completely misread the chart and knit, then painstakingly unknit, about 80 stitches. Unknitting the SSKs was not...
If I’m only knitting two rows of lace per day, I’m not going to have much progress on the Dancing Cranes stole to blog about in every entry, but here’s the progress so far: four rows of edging, and four rows of first repeat of the lace pattern. On the wrong-side row I discovered a mistake I’d made on the right side, and had...
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