So as I’m sure you may have suspected, I’ve been really busy over the past month or so (well longer than that actually) and beween me deciding to give up on National Blog Posting Month after missing that one day and my life being crazy, I just haven’t posted.
That is 4 oz of Allspunup (surprise surprise). It spun up to a very dense 3-ply at 173 yards. Its around DK weight and right now I have a swatch knit up on US3 needles on my table. It’ll probably turn into socks (of course).
And this was spun up from the Ashland Bay merino that I bought at The Yarn Tree some odd weeks ago. I asked a friend of mine who also spins for ideas and she suggested that I do a singles yarn. Now I haven’t spun a singles yarn in…I guess almost a year primarly because I mainly spin sock yarn and a singles yarn doesn’t really do super well knitted up into socks (and I tend to be somewhat hard on socks). So yea, this was the result after washing and reskeining. The ends actually felted together when I was finishing it. I felted it a bit on purpose (and I’m glad I did) and after spending 15 or so minutes attempting to find the ends, I gave up and just cut it. It ended up being 290 yards at 12wpi. Its either going to be turned into fingerless gloves or a Koolhaas hat (though I already have one in brown handspun….).
The same day that I washed the singles and the Allspunup, also washed this 50/50 yak merino blend. Its a 3-ply at 280 yards and fingering weight. I’m going to buy another 4 or 8 oz spin it up, and knit it all into this scarf.
I also went to Downtown Yarns a few weeks ago to get yarn for the Woven Bands Pullover that is in the currently Interweave Knits. I had origionally bought the yarn at Jimmy Beans but they were out of stock and I was impacient and thus…None the less, while Downtown Yarns isn’t a store of spinning bliss, they do have some Fleece Artist (and some Lopi like unspun yarn in 100g cakes) so what did I do, buy 50 grams of Fleece Artist wensleydale sliver. Its lovely.
Oh but there’s more…I bought some Zen String merino top in the Malkah colorway from the Loopy Ewe last weekend with the credit that I had on my paypal account (I had to return a Ravelry T-shirt because it was too big).
What? Knitting? So that’s where I was this weekend on my Woven Bands Pullover. I’m about half way done right now and its going really quickly. Unfortunatly my row and stitch guage is amazingly off so I’m having to do more math than I wanted to but its working out fine thus far. I also lengthened the sleeves because the designer designed this with 3/4 length sleeves which I’m really not in favor of.
Here’s a close up of the linen stitch section of the arm. I think what I really like about this sweater is the simplicity in its design elements. The linen stitch is the only real texture that the sweater has, and its obviously not striped either. It really makes for a nice simplistic design that I think looks good on a lot of people. That being said, the construction of this sweater isn’t very typical (or at least I don’t think it is, I could be very wrong and feel free to point that out if I am). It’s knit horizontally from the right to the left. You start with the right arm, cast on additional stitches for the front and back sides (with in a row of each other), split for the neck working the front and the back seperatly, connect the to together again, and then knit the left arm. Oh and this is also knit flat so the schematic looks like a some what misshapen red cross symbol. While I generally crave non-traditional constructions (ie. Cat Bordhi’s designs), this horizontal construction made my guage problem a frustrating one because it wasn’t as clear cut to me on how to deal with it. That being said – I did deal with it and it looks like it’ll fit fine. I’m mainly worried about it not being long enough, but after measuring it countless times I think it’ll work out fine.
