Experiments in Textured Knitting

For quite a while I was so taken with knitting lace that anything else just didn't catch my attention. Then last month, when it was colder - not as cold as it could have been - but definitely colder, I kept longing for a snuggly thick and warm wrap. No lace. No holes. But not boring stockinette stitch either. So I cracked open the Treasuries and tried out all the cable patterns that looked good to me, and gave up several attempts at wraps with fiddly cable needles. I wanted something simple and easy and fun to knit, with cable-like texture. And I came up with this.....

Modified version of Twist Stitch lattice with moss stitch and small bobble-like knots at the bottom edge

Border

Summer of 2011

Pictures of what I worked on during the summer....

The Past ~10 Months.....

So what have I been upto the past nearly 10 months.....
Lots of things - too many to actually have time to write about them until now.  Early last May, when it finally warmed up here, I lay down my knitting and other yarn-related obsessions and headed outdoors to not come back in until September when school was in again. During this time I traveled (a lot and to many faraway places involving jetlag), started a vegetable patch (completely organic) and had a bumper crop of tomatoes while the squirrels harveted the rest of the vegetables, ran a lot while training for the October marathon (which I didn't eventually run, sigh), finally got my red roses trained onto a trellis so that they grew (hundreds of them on one huge, tall bush)  by the side of my front door all the way up to the roof,  cleaned out my clothes closet (which seemed to have made no dent as it needs cleaning out again), finalized the design for a kitchen remodel (not started until this week) and sewed a lot (my fabric-related obsession).

And then from September on I've been designing and knitting and designing some more. I  notice that my knitting doesn't keep pace with the design ideas that run through my head. So I have several projects started (to test out new patterns that I thought of) and then left halfway (or even quarterway) either when the concept was proven good or a failure. Usually I do rip the failures out so there is little evidence of all the effort, but....I wish I could design and just hand over the actual test knitting to someone much faster than me at knitting. But everywhere I've looked people expect you to knit the first sample and want to look at a picture before offering to test knit it...maybe I'm wrong, I hope so. This reminds me of when I used to work (for pay) when I could design and leave the actual execution of my design to the programmers. I didn't have to actually write the programs, I envisioned the end result and created the steps to get there. Someone else did the actual coding.

One of these days I'll finish the projects and not just cast off and put them away for finishing later. Then I'll take some pictures and put them up....