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....

Pictures of the Paisley Shawl

Main Body

I like the way the paisleys turned out in this part....just as I imagined....The two paisleys mirror-imaged on the center stitch and radiating away from it.

Here's a picture showing the detail of the right side of the shawl.......

Main Body - Right Side closeup

And here's the left side ......up close...........

Main Body - Left side closeup



Finished and Blocking!

And here's a picture of it blocking.... I hate how the large paisleys in the border look like lopsided diamonds. The two swirls in the extreme tips below the border paisleys don't show up right either.

 Next I'll try and get some pictures of it in use ..... with better lighting .....maybe it'll be fine and I won't need to undo and rework the border and edge.

Paisley Shawl

The light blue paisley lace shawl done with sock yarn is done! It is blocking right now so pictures will be up in the next few days.
As some of you may know (or not) I love paisleys - in anything and everything. And as knitting lace shawls/wraps is my current favorite thing to do, I had to do a paisley lace shawl. So, after several wasted hours searching for something that would work, including pouring over the Walker treasuries, I found nothing that looked like what I had in mind. So I designed my own.

The results of the design are mixed.....the main smaller motif that is the body of the shawl/wrap is a distinct paisley shape but the larger border motif loses that swirly curve of the paisley. Maybe because it's a lot more open and lacy and the columns of plain stockinette which pull the yarn overs to define the paisley's edges are no longer there. The border pattern looks like a badly done large diamond. Maybe it just needs to be re-blocked.

I am thinking now that I probably should frog this effort back to the point where I started the border paisleys and instead of making a bigger design in the border, make it a smaller paisley with scallops maybe, to echo the swirls of the paisley.
I don't know - the long hours spent knitting the large border - seems like a waste to undo so much work. But then again, I want this to look like what I thought it should, in my mind, not what it turned out to be.

I think I'll leave the question of undoing the border for now. In any case I would have to spend some time designing the alternate border that would work before I frog anything.

Meanwhile, I have some ivory-ecru Alpaca Lace yarn calling my name, to be dyed a dark red/wine color. This was the result of the search for dark rich red lace weight yarn which was semi-successful - I found the yarn I liked but not in the color I wanted. Apparently no lace weight yarn, which is easily available in any LYS here, is made in that color. So now I get to try my hand at dyeing some yarn. Maybe even today!

Noro Silk Garden striped scarf...and more lace

After reading about and seeing several pictures, I tried the Noro Silk Garden scarf alternating stripes from two different colorways. But it was quite a let down. The yarn, for all it's hype was just so ... disappointingly ordinary....in fact, bad. Scratchy, no real sheen, yet expensive. All these I could put up with if the things about it that people raved about - the colors and their transitions - were as expected.
That was the ultimate disappointment. The colors did transition really well for about 4 inches of the scarf and then there was an abrupt knot! And a completely different color joined at the knot! So I went from charcoal grey to a muddy ivory at the join. That was a jarring color change and it would have still been all right if that happened once or twice in the scarf. It happened 6 times until I gave up on the scarf and went off to design and knit some more lace in some pale blue sock yarn.

There are no pictures of the lace shawl yet but I am at a part where each row takes about 20 minutes to knit in pattern....and I ran out of yarn. Luckily the yarn I am using (part of the stash reduction resolution for this year) is easily available at Joanns. Looks like a trip to that store is needed tomorrow....

Then, when this lace project is done, a trip to a real yarn store to buy some burgundy/dark rich red/maroon lace weight yarn for another lace project that I have in mind.

Somehow I don't think the stash reduction resolution is working....

Ethereal triangular shawl

After working on several experiments on designing a triangular shawl or wrap, here's the one that I actually finished (unlike the others that were frogged..). There were several stages in the middle when I was tempted to give up on this one too and send it on to hibernation. But, after several pattern enhancements, when I got bored in the middle, and for whatever other reasons (nothing to do when it's snowing and bitterly cold outside, late nights staying up with a middle schooler doing homework, excuse to avoid exercise of any kind now that the marathon is over.....) this made it to the finish line. Here it is:

The pattern for this will be made tech ready (after I figure out what I meant to say in the scrawled bits around the hand-drawn charts from 3 months ago) and available here.....soon....