Tealday not Tuesday

After Fridays travel there was a lot of weekend left for knitting, yard work, laundry and other assorted household chores. Since yard work, laundry and other assorted household chores sound a lot more like work, I'm just going to show you the knitting part.



First up, I did a swatch of the very thick Prairie Wool from Custom Woolen Mills. This is the yarn most similar to the yarn traditionally used for Cowichan sweaters.
I did the swatch on 10 mm needles and got a gauge of 2 stitches per inch. I'm not sure if I would do it on much smaller needles, and bigger needles might be to large for the yarn. It's very lightly spun, almost unspun and it needs a fairly firm texture to support itself. This gauge feels about right. Flexible, soft and not armour, which it could very easily be if knit too tight.

Its chunky, its chubby and according to all that is holy, a big girl like me should not ever wear a big chunky yarn like this. I am going to do it anyway. After all, if you can't live to be fifty-one and wear what you please what is the point of being fifty-one? I will aim for a nice warm vest for fall and early winter, something that is outer wear that can be worn as inner wear when it gets beastly cold.


Keeping with the if it is Tuesday it must be Tealday theme, I've been putting a lot of work into my version of Shawl That Jazz. I finished the back and forth part Saturday afternoon, making it a speedy knit.


I have made a few adjustments to the pattern (here is hoping I got the scale of it right.). First off, because I mean to wear this shawl to work, I needed to make it a little smaller. I chose a slightly lighter weight yarn, Tove, and worked it on 4.5 mm needles. I cast on what the pattern calls for (I would cast on just a few less next time - it is a little wider than I wanted) and knit. Because I wanted it shorter than shown, I started to do the double stitches on each side at row 150 rather than waiting to row 99. It will be shallower than the pattern shows, but almost the same width.


Early on, I knew I didn't want to leave the edging be just a plain garter stitch band. The yarn is quite plain, good, but very plain, and all the plain dark teal needed to be offset by just a little something. I've been thinking about it, and took Saturday evening to go through all the lace edgings in my library.


I wanted a wide edging, so I wouldn't have to fuss a lot on the slightly rounded bottom shape to get the lace to lay just right. I wanted a simple edging. Tove is a toothy sort of yarn and the pattern needed to be simple lace to let the yarn show off all of its qualities. I kept going back to a pattern from Barbara Walker' Second Treasury, the Godmother's Edging. It just felt right. A simple wide lace, easily adjustable if I needed to make the lace curve on the bottom or if I wanted the border lace wider.

I think I got it right. It makes me want to dance around the room when I see how good the lace looks with the simplicity of the pattern and the toothy crunchy goodness of the yarn.


Hard to sit still and type when you're dancing!