DesigKnit

Well, here we are a year later, and I don’t have much knitting to show for myself. Certainly no finished objects, though there has been something of a proliferation of unfinished objects since I finished grad school in May.

From November to May, this scarf was the only project that I worked on. It is beautiful and I love the yarn (Blackberry Ridge from when we lived in Madison), but 6 months is a really long time to work on just one scarf, and I have to admit that I’m rather sick of it at the moment.

And then I had a two week sleep reset thingy that I had to do, which plunged me into darkness for 16 hours a day just after I graduated. To preserve sanity and allow for knitting in the dark, I cast on for a big garter stitch rectangle. (Sorry for the awful pics…today we’re going with the better done than perfect philosophy…) And yes, it is still waiting for its ends to be woven in, 5 months later. Why do you ask?

I really liked the way that worked out, so I cast on for a second one for a cross-country road trip this summer. That one fizzled to a stop when we got back from the trip and I discovered that it’s too big to fit in my bag. It’s really just a few evenings of knitting at home time, but, well…

And then I had a conference to go to in August, right after our road trip out to the Midwest, where I bought a couple of skeins of Juniper Moon from Darn Knit Anyway while hanging out with Ellen for a few days. They were beautiful, and fine gauge, and seemed the perfect option for a week with 7 hours of seminars a day. I had originally planned to just make a huge garter rectangle, but then I realized that I didn’t have enough yarn to make the size I wanted. And so, it morphed. The way things do. 

The current version looks something like a manta ray all laid out like that, but it’s really sort of a cross between a shawl and a poncho. Those green stitches on the holder needles are going to get picked up and knit into a shawl collar when the rectangle part is done.

Unfortunately, I seem to have had a slight change of gauge somewhere around the middle of the project, and the yardage calculations I made didn’t quite hold. I’ve been playing yarn chicken all week, but had to bite the bullet yesterday and admit that I wasn’t going to make 100 rows (even very short ones) with 5 g of yarn.

And so, we ran out to Yarns in the Farms in Beverly, and picked up another skein of the dark gray. I know the fate of single skeins in my stash, so I also picked up a raspberry sort of color to go along with it. Because I’m going to have something like 93 grams left when I’m finished with the manta ray project, and we wouldn’t want it to turn into the immovable stash category.

I also picked up a couple of skeins of ShiBui Silk Cloud. The white and the teal were given to me several years ago now, and I’ve pulled them out a million times to try to knit with them, and it just wasn’t quite working for me. I don’t do much with white, so I’m hoping that the other colors will help pull it a little closer to my usual color range and get the wheels turning. Hopefully adding two more skeins will help to get the other two out of the stash a little sooner. Or something. At least that’s what I’m telling myself…

So that’s it. And I’m back! Today, anyway, and I hope going forward. Things haven’t really slowed down since graduation, but I’m hoping to find a bit more knitting time in the moments in between. By the looks of it, it seems I may need to find some finishing time first!