tangled up

quick update

after a week away there's so much to say, but unfortunately, no time right now. got back yesterday evening later than i'd planned after having to drive through much of what was left of tropical storm Gaston. and this morning, i've unexpectedly got to go to NY for the day for a meeting -- dreading having to go to the city during the Republican convention. taking the shuttle instead of the train in order to avoid the convention area, which means less opportunity to knit on the trip. since this space is for knitting and not for politics, i won't say anything more....now.

the flower basket shawl is finished!!! well, not quite, it still needs to be blocked, but i think i'm going to be happy with how it turned out and i should have enough yarn left over to make a hat. took a picture with it stretched across my back while wearing a white t-shirt (will post later) and the pattern does pop out.

also finished the red and black charlotte's web, the shawl previously known as athens charlotte, previously known as #2. my friend joannie took one look at it and renamed it Seville Charlotte, which seems to fit it quite well. turns out she has quite a talent for names that i have to admit i don't have.

visited a wonderful yarn store in Southport, NC, which i'll write more about later. a poncho was hanging in the window that i think is exactly what my mom is looking for (sorry, mini-poncho experiment), the owner was extremely knowledgeable and unbelievably helpful, and i came away with yarn to make a poncho for both my mom and my sister (a lot of attention to ponchos considering i don't think much of them myself), wool to make a felted bag that should felt better than my Kureyon did, and a pile of old Vogue Knitting, Interweave Knits and Knitter's magazines, with lots of ideas of stuff to make this winter. Joannie bought a beautiful worsted weight alpaca/wool blend called Jazz by Artful Yarn. i don't remember having seen it before and while it looked nice on the hank, i really fell in love with it while helping her wind it into a ball.

gotta get moving. more tomorrow.

heading south

just a quick post before i head down the road. it's my birthday today and i haven't been feeling particularly celebratory, but i expect this roadtrip to be just the pick-me-up that i need. top down on the cabrio, ipod along for endless choice of music with the occasional local radio station here and there and a few much-longed-for days off. time to hang with friends, time to go to the beach, time to read, and off course, time to knit.

here are the UFOs i'm taking along:
1. Athens Charlotte -- blocked and ready for edging and fringe
2. Monet Charlotte -- blocked and ready for edging and fringe
3. Vintage Poncho -- one half done, the other could be finished in one long night of Olympics watching
4. Rambling Rows -- little more than 1/3 finished, goes fast
5. Flower Basket Shawl -- i'm on my 6th repetition of the lower flower basket chart; will likely do 8 or 9 of those instead of the 7 that the pattern calls for
6. Spider Charlotte -- the all black charlotte that is the out-and-about project i always carry with me

all that, plus some colinette giotto that might become Bonnie Marie Burns' Mondo Cable or a variation thereof, and some blue and variegated blue cotton to make squares for the Mason Dixon Knitting Afghanalong. it's extremely unlikely that i'll get everything done, no make that, impossible, but i'll have a project along for every mood.

taking along a laptop but don't know about internet access so this may be the last post for a while. also taking along the birthday present i got for myself -- a digital camera!! plenty of time to read the manual, figure out how to use it and start taking photos that are a few steps up from the camera phone...

charlottes in progress

here are the two unblocked charlottes that i plan to finish in north carolina. i've been calling them by their numbers but realized that that's not going to work, because i called the third one #2, etc., it's just too confusing. so henceforth, the red and black charlotte will be called Athens Charlotte, red and black being the colors of the university of georgia, located in athens, where i went to law school quite a while ago and where my nephew is currently in college. i bought the yarn as a holiday present for my friend MT and am determined to complete it before her birthday right before Labor Day. the charlotte i was calling #3, i will instead call the Monet Charlotte because the colors recall a Monet painting. the Monet Charlotte is destined for my friend Jane in Columbia, South Carolina, but she doesn't know it yet.

Rambling Rows revisited

i had so much fun making the Rambling Rows afghan for a baby present that i launched immediately into making another. the yarn is 2nd Time Cotton, a recycled cotton i ordered from Patternworks. I'm using 142 glacier, 120 irish linen and 160 beluga blue. the rambling rows pattern calls for five colors but i think it is adapting to three pretty well. The baby this is intended for was born last week, so this project joins the Charlottes in heading South with me this week...

UFOs

spent some time this morning working on the flower basket shawl. i'm on the 6th repetition of the lower flower basket chart and it's starting to shape up nicely, the pattern is discernible to me, though, it probably still won't photograph well, i've learned it well enough to correct my inevitable mistakes, and the yarn choice/color scheme is starting to feel less sketchy. i'm not even half way through the skein and am now thinking about whether i might want to go beyond the 8 repetitions i was originally thinking of (the pattern calls for 7 before doing the final edging chart). now that i've gotten so far, i'm eager to keep going.

it's time, though, to finish the three Charlottes in waiting. i'm going to spend a few days at the beach in North Carolina next week and I want to take them with me to edge and fringe. that means blocking them this week. putting a striped sheet on the bed in my guest bedroom worked well before, and i'm tempted to block one of them on a 5X7 dhurrie rug that seems to hold the T-pins pretty well. photos to follow.

i've got several other projects in various stages of completion that are going to enjoy the ocean air. Now I just have to figure out which ones.

a picture is worth...

a thousand words only if you can take a decent photograph. my next task is to figure out how to take photos that better represent these knitting projects and to learn photo shop well enough to correct the color for posting to the web. these photos of my second charlotte's web shawl capture a little bit of what is my favorite charlotte, but don't really tell its story. i made this charlotte to dress up an outfit for a January wedding at an inn north of new york city. i never got there because of a death in my family but the setting seemed like a fairy tale, the people getting married were both very special to me and i just had to have something realy special to wear. intended to be worn over black velvet, the deep greens and reds had a winter-y, heirloom quality to them. i don't keep many of the things i knit, but even if i had intended to, this one i couldn't give away.

sad thing is, you can't really tell it from the photos. they were taken with a great camera borrowed from my friend Charlotte (no kidding), so i can't blame the camera phone. i just ordered a digital camera as my birthday present to myself and hopefully, when it arrives, i can learn to do better. thing is, between tinkering with photos and knitting, i'd rather be knitting.

update on my flower basket shawl: it's recovering from a rough week. i noted earlier that i did a repetition of each chart on US8s and wasn't happy. i then did a repetition of each chart on US7s and wasn't happy either. so i frogged both. i dragged my entire stash out of the attic for a long overdue organization and to see if i had anything else fitting so i could start working on it immediately. i thought a lighter colored, singled hued yarn would work better b/c it would show off the pattern. i now have a much better idea of what's in my stash and much of it is better organized, but there wasn't a substitute on hand. i was determined to get started so i went back to the Sierra and started again on the US7s. i'm now through the third repetition of the lower flower basket chart and i believe that when it's blocked, the pattern will emerge. thanks for your encouragement, sarah elizabeth. i'll try a camera photo over the weekend, but it might have to wait until the new camera arrives.

mini poncho experiment (cont.)

the knitting is finished and i still can't decide what i think. the pattern is made up of 4 mitered squares and i didn't anticipate the degree to which the yarn would stretch, so that they're now mitered rectangles. not surprising, I guess b/c there's so much give in the stitches knitting on size US11 what would usually have been knit on a US6. live and learn. question is -- can this poncho be saved? i've pinned it now so that the neck opening is about right and will probably do a round of single crochet around the neck, but it may be that the front dips too much and the shoulder pieces stay too short. maybe i should stick to knitting from patterns? this is certainly incentive to finish the Vintage poncho....

araucania age of aquarius

I wrote at the outset that knitting blogs have been an inspiration to me, both in my knitting and in starting my own blog. The first one I came across was Chicknits, which I still read religiously. Bonnie Marie's list of links and the knitting bloggers ring led me to a world I would have never imagined existed. Now, serendipitously, I've solved a knitting conundrum thanks to reading one of my favorite bloggers, Savannahchik Knits.

Here's how it happened. Savannahchik wrote on Sunday that she was thinking of using Araucania Nature Wool for a project. I love Araucania, it's very inexpensive, relatively soft and has beautiful color variations. I was prompted to comment, though, because in my first experience using it, I didn't realize how much it varied within dyelots until after I had knit a wide swath in an unvarying shade darker than the rest of the piece.

A word now about that project -- it's a sweater called "Age of Aquarius" from Interweave Knits Fall 2001, also in the Knitter's Stash book.

I started it in the spring of 2002, my longest ongoing WIP. I decided to start with the sleeves. I was pretty familiar with cables but I wanted to nail the pattern on the smaller pieces before I moved on to the body. The first sleeve went smoothly. Two thirds of the way through the second sleeve, I changed yarn and ended up with the wide swath of olive much noticeably darker than the rest of the piece. I didn't have the zen approach to frogging that I do now, and kept going. After a few inches, I added a second skein and started alternating rows which took care of the problem. At the time I decided to leave the sleeve as is, rationalizing that it would add "character" to the sweater.

I've been knitting on the body now intermittently for the past, well, two years. There's always a reason to put it down. particularly in summer, but in winter, too. It was only after reading Savannahchik's post prompting my comment that I had the revelation that the reason I've left it unfinshed is that the off-color sleeve is NOT okay. Now I know what I have to do -- finish the body and frog the offending part of the sleeve. Thank you, Jody!

sweet charlotte's web shawl

My dad was lovely to take these photos in Atlanta and email them to me so i don't want to delay in posting them (thanks, dad). i became a devotee of the charlotte's web shawl last december. i was going to a wedding in january and i didn't want to buy a new dress. i thought i could dress up an old black velvet dress with a new shawl. the wedding was out in the country at an inn and it all just made sense. i had been ogling the Koigu hanging up at Yarns International for a long time without knowing what to do with it. my search for shawl patterns landed me on charlotte and the rest is history.

this was my first charlotte. i probably frogged the first six inches ten times, but in the process my fingers "learned" the pattern, and i learned how to correct every mistake (and it's impossible not to make mistakes). as it turned out, it didn't go very well with the dress. drunk with the power of having completed it, i decided with two weeks to go before the wedding that i would just make another. (that one's for another day)

i gifted charlotte's web #1 to my mom (she's modeling it in the photos). it looks much better over beige than it did over black.

what i liked about this charlotte: something about the combination of colors makes it look, in person, like an antique. what i didn't like about this charlotte (besides the fact that it didn't go with the dress): the second and third colors are a little too close in tone and don't stand out enough from each other. when i selected the colorways, i was excited that the color change would be subtle, but it turned out a little too subtle.

i'm now in the midst of knitting charlotte's web #6. charlotte #2 is the only other one that's actually complete. #3, 4 and 5 are off the needles, sitting patiently waiting to be blocked (i joined the charlotte knit behind for incentive to finish them). Only one of them follows the classic charlotte striping pattern; the others are variations on the them. #6 is actually solid black; it's my "travel" project -- the pattern is so ingrained in my hands that i can do it anywhere.

time flies

i sat down at the computer at 9:00am and am just now writing this post after messing around with photos and other stuff for what turns out to be 2 1/2 hours. where does the time go?

at the end of a nice afternoon yesterday, i wandered into Knit & Stitch = Bliss, which has the benefit of being close by and staying open until 5:30 on Saturday. i was looking for space dyed yarn to possibly use to make the pooled color scarf in the new Interweave Knits. Didn't find anything suitable for the scarf but a very helpful and knowledgeable salesguy pointed me to some beautiful Great Adirondacks 100% alpaca in Sierra Copper. I already have several skeins of the Old English colorway in my stash waiting to become a sweater this winter, but the deep coppery brown and aubergine combination, touched with gray, was really appealing (see the flower basket shawl photo album). an expensive impulse purchase, but what the hell....

when i got it home, i looked through piles of books and magazines to see what it should be and landed on what had been my first thought, the Flower Basket Shawl in Fall 2004 Interweave Knits. because the skein has 600 yards, it's about perfect for a smallish shawl. there's a flower basket shawl knit along started by Sarah Elizabeth at Knit One Spin Too (still need to figure out the linking thing) and i thought it would be fun to be a part of that.

winding all 600 yards at once made me grateful to have gotten a swift and ballwinder this summer -- two knitting tools i'd highly recommend. some small doubts crept in when i swatched it. to get the right gauge, i had to move up to US8 but the stitches looked a little loose to me. US7s were getting me 18st/4 inches rather than 16st/4 inches. i went with the US8s.

i went though the first chart and the first repetition of the second chart pretty quickly. the photo posted here is just of the first chart because that seemed to be closest in terms of color (i'm back to the camera phone again). the yarn knits up beautifully, is unbelieveably soft, but because of the way it's dyed, the pattern is almost undiscernible. that might work itself out as i get farther along, but it might not. i'm going to try starting again (without frogging the current piece) on the US7s to see if that makes the pattern any cleaner looking.

separately, i haven't abandoned the mini poncho experiment. if i can make up for the lost time sitting at the computer, it will be complete today. i'm about 85% finished. problem is, it doesn't look right now like it's going to be a success. there may be an option or two to salvage it, but i've got to complete the primary knitting first. photos tk.