DesigKnit

Two posts ago, the title was “Reawakening.” Last time, “Backlog.” And here I am, 5 months later, with another backlog of items that has built up while I’ve been doing things that are not blogging. So, let’s just go ahead and admit that it will probably be a while before the next post, and maybe we can all be happily surprised.

I am still very much in a scarf phase (small project, practical to wear at work, uses stash, don’t have to think much before casting on), though I have branched out a bit from the endless garter stitch in the past few months.

This scarf is a tiny bit on the short side, but I love the color, and it’s all I could squeeze out of 1.5 balls of Hazel Knits Entice (colorway Blacklight) that I bought at Madrona in 2019. The other half ball was used in the gradients scarf from the last post. The color is actually much darker than it shows here; a very rich, deep eggplant that looks almost black in most lights. Definitely happy with how this one came out, even if it took me three tries to get the balance of width and length right (thank goodness for kitchen scales). The stitch pattern is the Openwork Leaf lace from Barbara Walker book #1.

This one was knit with a single skein of Sun Valley Fibers that I bought at The Sow’s Ear just before leaving Madison in 2011: it’s a rare skein that I buy for weaving that ends up making its way into a knitting project instead (usually, it’s the other way around). Artemis insisted on posing with it for the picture. The stitch pattern is Diagonal Spanish Lace, again from BW#1.

Next up is a single skein of handpaint that a friend brought back for me from Michigan this spring. The yarn is called Desmos Sock from Icemelon’s Stash, and the colorway is Spanakopita. It was a nice, cheerful dose of spring while waiting for the leaves to come out (you can see that they’re just starting in the background on this picture). Pattern was Cellular Stitch, again from one of the Walker books.

I’m a little fuzzy on the timing here, but somewhere in the line up was a baby sweater for my cousin’s second: a little girl who just arrived a couple of weeks ago. This was a last-second knit, as we only got about a week and a half notice on the baby shower, which was sometime back in March, when we could still gather and move around in the world. I started from a pattern for the Baby Sideways Cardigan by Rhona Larkin to get stitch counts, adjusted it to be knit all in one piece, and then just kind of made things up as I went along. Yarn is a mix of different things that I found at my LYS: they don’t carry Cascade 220 anymore, so I went with the closest substitute – JoJo something and Berroco Ultra, I think? The original pattern had a skein of handpaint to create stripes, but I didn’t find what I was looking for, so just mixed up multiple skeins for the body section instead. There were a total of 5 different colors in the project, and I just randomly striped the garter stitch sections in the center as I went.

And finally, I just finished this one, another single-skein wonder from the stash. This is a handspun yarn, made from a yak-bombyx mix that I bought at Rhinebeck in 2013 and spun up into yarn in 2016. It had a companion skein of gold that I thought would be part of the project, but they didn’t play together as beautifully in the swatch as they did in the skein, and so I opted to use just the silver alone. The stitch pattern is a diagonal trellis from one of my Japanese stitch dictionaries. The photos don’t really capture the shine, but the silk makes this look almost metallic in some lights.

I have (surprise) another scarf started on the needles, but it’s not really far enough along to say much about it yet, so I think I’ll leave that one for the next post.