Fabric rugs

I knit quite a lot yesterday on my Sundogs sweater.  But, at the end of the day I saw something really interesting.

I remember mom doing this when I was little after sewing a bunch or possibly when she was cleaning out the seasonal clothes piles.  We were pretty small.  I do recall that she sewed it together by hand though and I remember it taking a very long time.  A machine would make it all much easier though unless you had a quilting arm to extend things, the size of your rug would have to be smallish.

I am just sitting down to begin a major bunch of sewing.  A few dresses, more pants, some shirts, and even nether garments.  All are needed in my very depleted wardrobe.  And there are always scraps.  Not necessarily nice straight pieces mind, but weird stuff and bits and ends.  I am not talking about wee pieces which are really trimmings more than anything else, but larger pieces from beside a cut or the ends of things.  

I already have a ton of those kind of things now and since that I have dealt with my bag plans (though I could still make bags later) by purchasing plain ones, I am wondering what to do with the fabric ends.  I really don't like the idea of just tossing them.  

It is an interesting idea.  Even if it adds yet another thing to do to the pile of things to do. 

My kind of fun

I had a marvelous day yesterday.  Did I mention I love knitting lace?  And knitting lace with this ethereal blend of yarns?  Heavenly.

By days end, I realized there was going to be a problem.  I am two rows into the second repeat of the lace chart.  There is a lot of knitting left to do.  Unfortunately, there is not so much mohair left.

I figure I will be about three rows short of finishing the lace section, plus, I had planned to balance the lace at the bottom with a few rows of plain knitting, to match what I had done at the top.

Both of the mohair silks I have here are still in production but part of this sweater is using up things I have to make one harmonious whole.  According to my stash, I do have one other possibility.  Somewhere deeply buried is a skein of Shibui Silk Cloud in a soft cream.  If the colours are close enough, or at least as close as using a very different dyelot than my original yarns would give me, then all will be well.  If not I must put this sweater aside till I can get another ball of either the drops Kid Silk or the Rowan Kid Silk Haze.  Or both.  They are slightly different colours after all, and I am hoping that that will help me blend and extend varieties of yarn.

Meanwhile, no matter what happens, I get to touch and feel how wonderful this blending feels.  Squishy good.  Delightfully yarny.  Delicate and strong all at the same time.

Grrrrrr

Updated.  I finally made a good sized piece, lace included to put it on longer needles.  It looked awfully large.  Many of the knitters spoke of this, probably because the lace is expansive.  And by gauge, it I  too large.  So back to the beginning.  The only reason to begin again is that it really is a nice knit and I did have all the yarns in my stash, including the bit more mohair I needed.  Maybe, in a smaller size I won't need it, but I do have it.  

And a one and a two (counting Like Lawrence Welk)

Finally.  Finally.

I would like to pretend that I frogged back to where I could count stitches just before the start of the lace bit of a Love Note.  It wouldn't be the truth though.  No.  It took much more than that.

I ripped back because of a fundamental error I made in the lace.  As in I did not follow the chart at all. It is a fairly intuitive lace.  I just intuited it wrong.  That was number one.

Then I went back one row to far and had to redo the second increase row and count that.  It was wrong so I redid that till I had the right number of stitches.  That was two.

Then I knit the first row of lace and I had a weird number of stitches left at the end of the first round.  I rechecked my counts on the needles and everything looked fine so I fudged.  Stupid move butter cup.  I was merrily doing row two of the lace chart, only it really wasn't working out.  I looked and looked and it all seemed fine but it was so very wrong.  Oddly enough, the math from the  was right and the math I supposedly had on my needles also seemed to be right.  Till I read the little line of text under the chart:  Twleve stitch repeat.  Is that what I had?  Nope.  That was three.  

And then...finally, then...I got it.  

I am about to start the second half of the chart.  We shall see how that goes.  It looks good, but you do not really know till you knit it.

And just to keep it all in the loop, I did knit on my Agate Cove sweater and my pretty little Sun Dogs too.  A little on each helped take the tension out of the day.

Ugh and Amazing

Remember that voice I spoke of yesterday?  Well, I started working on the second half of the lace repeat and I realized I had a problem.  I had read the chart and knit it wrong.  Maybe the voice wasn't talking about what I thought it was talking about.  I was so disgusted with myself that I put it in the bag and just sat for a bit.  I really really did not want to pull back the mohair bits but I must and I know it.  Whatever else it will be, it will not be wrong.  

So, I took the opportunity as a sign that I am supposed to also have my Sun Dogs on the go.  The pattern is Laura Aylor at her finest.  Simple and yet kind of intriguing little stuff going on.  Its her First Point of Libra shawl.  It seems simple and it is but there is always something interesting to do.

I've just really got a good start on it, but that's okay.  I am really enjoying it.

I love the pattern and yarn combination.  The yarn for her sample sweater is a bit more speckled than this is.  My yarn could be said it is approaching a tweed yarn with it's tiny speckled bits  But oh my goodness this is lovely. 

Beyond the gentle spots of colour, the base itself is ... sublime.  It is just so soft.  Anyone who has read here for a while knows I really like the textures of lopi and Noro and handspun or mulespun type yarns.  I love a good simple yarn.  That does not mean that I do not love spots of heavenly softness.  I do and this base, the Comfort Sport from MidKnit Cravings is possibly beyond heavenly.

Today I must face the misery of frogging mohair.  There is no way out of it that I can see.  In consolation, I will have delights to work with that just ease my weary yarn filled heart .

In other news, I am going to give away my larger Christmas tree, a 5.5 foot nice sized tree for todays smaller homes and rooms.  It is a quick set sort of tree, not as quick as some i have seen but faster than many.  Lights are included.  I still love setting it up but it is such a pain taking them down.  It will just be me and a pencil tree from here on in.

Leaping

This morning, I opted to stay in bed after a late night.  I have jo idea why I had a late night, but I was just not tired.  It was such a waste because my hands were done for the day.  Late nights lead to late days.  

I meant to start Sun Dogs today, and I may yet, but my hands needed to find succor in something more fluffy.

And fluffy it us.  

I am questioning my choices.  I have 2 strands if mohair.  Should it only be one?  Am I crazy to do the lace in a different colour?  I have seen decorative panels in a different yarn or colour of yarn before.  What about more lace panels at the rest of the edges?  So many questions.  

I tell myself "Just knit"  Let the yarn wind its way through your fingers.  Feel it  gently gliding over knuckles, around my index finger giving the whole airy strand the smallest touch of tension. " Just feel," says I to the place in my head that questions and doubts.  

That's my goal for today, to quiet that voice that drives me crazy.  I need to take this leap of faith because my leaps are a good bet when I balance them against that voice.  

And Jump.

A Dash of This and a Splash of That

Now that my other sweater is complete, it is time to get to work on some of the things in the WIP bin.  Or not as the case may be.  

 This sweater is now ready for a try on.  Last time I picked it up I had just separated the sleeve sections so it just needed a bit of knitting time to get it so that the underarm would be stable enough for the stretch of trying it on.  I would do it right now but I left the spare yarn and the loop end needle in the living room with all the bits and pieces for knitting.  So as I am done here.

Then there is this pile of yarn.  

I did start the red stuff, some Tupa from the Mirasol project which I am using with a distinct and very striking hand dyed lace from London, that was swiped from my neice, Sasha's stash for me and some strands of soft white mohair.  

I am just two rows into the lace charts and it looks so very pretty.  I have made a few minor tweaks to the pattern and I hope dearly that it will work out. No point trying it on just yet.  Oh well.

And then this.  This is the truly stunning Pesto from Midknit Cravings.   I figured out what it is about this colourway that I love so much over an average speckle dyed yarn.  Its tiny speckes are very tweed like and I fall for tweeds left, right and centre.  

It occurred to me that like the Agate Cove blue sweater, like the Love Note Red, the pattern I have picked for the Midknit Cravings  yarn is also a simple slightly wide round neck.  Realizing this solidifies my plan to knit a henley style opening for Sun Dogs.  I was wavering a bit, but now I am sure.  I am going to need the change.  

Anyway, new things are afoot.  Project photos need to be taken of completed things but first, before any of that, before anything else at all,  my Christmas trees have to come down.  Scott and Amy and their bunch of boys, all of them came,  and we had a great afternoon playing holidays. Carter did questions the tree thing but I told him Christmas was still happening in my heart till I could see him. 

Just a little of the Christmas cheer, and holiday naps that happened around here this weekend. 

But now Christmas is done and it is time to get the trees down.  and to restore order into my sewing room.  Its been such a weird Christmas season this year.  Keith's surgery.  Then the brutal cold.  Then worries about covid as Omicron reared it's head, then possibly, though to me doubtful, having a very mild case of covid, though it sure would account for the excessive, and I do mean really excessive number of hours in the day that I slept in January.  

  

Arrivals!

My new storage bags for my sweaters and large WIP projects has arrived.

Large tote bags.  I think this will work great. These have a zip top that is fairly decently secure from critters, though I am going to search and see if there is anything to be done to close off the end better, or if I just need to do what I have always done, which is keep the sweater chest and the yarns clean and well stirred, no matter the season.  

The only problem is that I cannot see which sweater is which.  They are all exactly the same.

For now, I am going to make some tags and atttach them to the bags for identification, but in the long run, I hope to sew a small vinyl pocket on each to tuck a picture in so I can tell which garment is where.  

In other fantastic news, my sweater is complete.  The only thing I have to do is add buttons and that will happen today.  I know which ones I am looking for this time so no struggle there.  There are no complete photos yet, but after this weekend, there will be time.  I am wearing it to the last, and slightly late family Christmas on Saturday.  I can't wait. 

Otherwise I am shifting WIPs around into various excess tote bags.,  I have a dozen sweaters and ordered 18 bags.   Once that is done, I will see what else I need and deciding what will work best for those projects.  

On the reupholstery front, almost done.  One more small step and we are good to go.  

I did a lot of weird diverse things yesterday but everything is landing right to make next week perfectly lovely for knitting.

Stuff and Nonsense

I had really hoped to have the ribbing and the sweater done by days end.  Like most plans I make, it didn't happen.

I am about half done what I hope for so there still is a ways to do.  

I did make some progress on my rolling chair reupholstery but that isn't going as well as the knitting.  The glue that was supposed to hold the foams in place did not, so before I can go ahead, I have to fix that.  It's okay though. Everything about the fabric part of the job is a job that needs two hands and that means I have to wait till Keith comes home.  

I have a day full of stuff. I hope to find a wee bit of nonsense too.  

Moving Right Along

Mid afternoon, I put down the needles to check and see just how much of the multi Aulavik colour yarn I had left.  Most amazing.  I could make one more stripe but that was it.  And so I did.  I measured the sweater as well.  Perfect.  

I decided to go ahead and start the ribbing immediately.  As I knit, it came to me that if I bowed to having one short seam, I could speed up my knitting a lot.  

See that tiny v shape?  I changed to essentially flat knitting.  It worked out just right.  I had one extra stitch for a selvage stitch at the end so sewing the seam will be completely invisible.  

Why faster? Because in my yarn scooping, wrapping my purls the wrong way style of continental knitting this is faster.  It means that one quick scoop on the front and the purl is done, versus in the round, where the scoop has to happen from the back of the purled stitch.  It isn't a huge amount of time until you look at time over the whole of the ribbing.  It will save at least a half an hour on this fairly long ribbing.  Long for my usual ribbing for sure.

I also am redoing the seat of my rolling chair.  Keep your fingers crossed for me that this goes well.  

I will finish today, one way or another and that feels really good.  Second Christmas is coming this weekend and I will have new clothes to wear!

Doing Much Better Now

Yesterday made me happy.  As I said in my previous post, I did not have to reknit the sleeves so finishing sleeves was the order of the day.

I decided to do the cuffs with the striping in them.  The bottoms and the top of the sweater only will be outside of the stripe mandate.  It came down to there being a lot of the striping left after finishing the sleeves but for the cuffs.  I could have easily done long sleeves with the yarn I had, but long sleeves are not what I wanted for a comfy cozy who knows what I will get up to sweater.  I am past the stage where I like to push up sleeves and think that is cool to do it every ten seconds.  Three quarters is a much more practical length for me.

I have taken the last healthy third of a ball of the striped and am using it at the bottom.  I have similar amount of the blue left from the sleeves as well, so those yarns are being worked now, and then there is one lone skein of the Stellars Jay colour to use at the bottom of the sweater to balance the luscious collar.

If I work hard all day today and put in another good day tomorrow, this marvelous beastie of a sweater ought to be done.  I am missing it already.

Or I would, if I wasn't wearing it instead.  Onward we go.

In spain

A Time of Devastation and what happened next.

Yesterday afternoon, just for the heck of it, I threw the sweater on.  I wanted to see if the sleeves were a length I could live and work with.  

And I was devastated.  The armscye on both sides seemed to bind and pull.  Here I was, almost finished sleeve two and planning out what to do about using up as much of the yarn as possible and this. 

I put the sweater down and just stopped knitting altogether.  It took a few hours but I finally reasoned out that number one, there was no sign of binding armholes when I tried it on the first time and none the second.  Number two, I was in my pjs as I often am Sunday.  Number three, if I had to do it, well, it was going to be done but there would be at least one more try on when I was dressed properly. Number four, I wasn't touching it till Monday morning.

And...

 

 No binding.  I made Keith take a photo so I could see if it looked right and it's fine.

I am breathing easier now.  Later today, I will finish sleeve two.  There is just a few rows and then the nice long cuff and then a wee bit of pulling back the plain blue, to use up the rest of this ball of the Aulavik colourway and then on to the last ball of solid blue.  

I want every bit of yarn to be used.  Every lovely gorgeous warm cozy bit.  

Acting like a three year old.

The first thing I picked up this morning was my sweater and very quickly, it was at the end of the ball of yarn.  I have two balls of Stellars Jay and one ball of Aulavik National Parks colourway remaining.  In my head, I like to keep a ball of yarn for each sleeve.  In this case,  I have striped sleeves so I need a ball of blue and a ball of the more multi Aulavik.  

It is complicated a bit by my wanting a bit more of just the Stellars Jay at the bottom than just the cuffs.  I am was going to weigh the yarns so I could make sure that I had the same amount available for each sleeve, but the battery is dead on my scale.  I will have to just wing it.

I am sure it will be fine. 

Maybe.  We all know how that goes.

I also wanted to show you my pretty cowl.  

I did not get very far along it yesterday.  I had a really long nap, as in I pretty slept the day away.  I also had a really good sleep last night so I figure one of two things is going on.   I am getting another cold or it is time to see my doctor to get an assessment done for depression.  

I am actually leaning towards the first of the two.  I have been struggling but a lot of that comes from being so very very tired.  Even to myself I sound like a toddler who has just been through too much. I had a good talk with myself yesterday evening about expectations and reality.  If I wasn't so tired lately, perhaps my ability to recognize when I am allowing my expectations to rule the world without allowing for a healthy dose of reality to be in play as well, would be better.  My prescription for myself is more naps.  And switching back to the slightly older blogging routine.  

If a week of focusing on intentional napping and tracking if I feel more myself in my world is not helping, then a visit to a health professional might be in the offing.  Maybe not even a doctor.  There are some great resources out there to help you through pandemic mental health issues.  And that is absolutely part of my struggles this year.  

For now, back to work on my sweater to get sleeve one underway and much more knitting before my nap.

Going back a step

As much as I love the knitting I am doing, I find myself struggling.  Till now I have been managing to keep my spirits up and to lift them when I went through a bit of a valley.  But the past few weeks, I have been struggling.

I am going to make a few changes to the general routine of my days again and go back to what I used to do.  I will write in the morning and if that means plans I never do, well, so be it.  I am finding that I am just so tired in the evenings that it is hard to write sensibly and my will to edit for is completely gone.  It is possible that you guys don't notice it, but I sure do.   

So back to the older routine to see if it helps to support my sturuggling self.  

Yarns that Whisper

I knit for a very short time on my sweater this morning.  sometimes you just have to give your hands a rest.  So being it was my zoom knitting day, I had a good long think about what I was going to knit.  I am trying not to start a hundred different things so I was restricting it to what was in my WIP chest.  I dug around for a bit and came up with a very pretty shawl that I was working on.  

I was knitting Carina Spencer's Brush Creek Shawl with some Truly lovely delicate Shilasdair yarn that a friend, Rae gave me a few years ago.  The yarn is gorgeous stuff and while I liked the design, I wasn't really committed to it.  I am very committed to the yarn though.  It is a soft blend of merino, angora, cashmere and baby camel and it deserved a pattern I really liked.  Here it is in its shawl incarnation.

I do wear shawls here at home.  They cover the back of my neck if I am not wearing a turtleneck.  I appreciate them, but the ends kind of get in the way when I am doing things.  What I really, really like to wear is my cowls.  The one I made of Adam and Eve and some Shibui Silk Cloud is in constant use.  I also use the Topsy Turvy Moebius made from a Skein of Silk Mini Maiden from Handmaiden. That has been in constant use since I finished it.  I also wear the cowl I made for keeping in my car for emergencies except it is out in my car.  For emergencies.   Clearly I need more soft delicate cowls.  I did knit one the other day but that is going to be one for the car.  It is too long and a bit bulky for in the house.  It is nice though.  

It struck me that what this yarn needed was a cowl pattern for 3colours with some interesting stuff going on but not too much patterning.  The angora in this gives the yarn its flair and show so you don't want to hide that with lots of lace or cables.  This is one of those yarns where it just needs to speak its own truth.  And I just happened to remember Joji Locatelli's 3 Color Cashmere Cowl.  That was exactly what I was looking for.

That deep orange red madder colour will do the showy bit and the other two softer tones will be doing the alternating dance.

I just finished the first plain section.  Plain is not really the right word.  There is an alternating openwork pop every few stitches and rows to keep you focused and on your toes.  I have just added the second colour and then that whole repeats again, first in the mushroom, then in the natural.

The stitches are just utterly perfect as they go round and round.  The yarns whispers.  It doesn't flow or drape.  At the end of this, I know it is just going to whisper and settle into soft folds around my neck and I can hardly wait to wear it so I can whisper back.

Irritation and Solutions

I am not sure you can see it here.  There are two rows of dark blue, then a row of white and light blues and then, active on my cable and tips is another row of dark blue.

That row of dark blue I am actively knitting?  Wrong colour.  Undercurrent is a two row striped sweater based on Jared Flood's long ago, two row striped scarf.  Since I am almost at the end of that round of dark blue, it is kind of a pain.  Each and every day, I do this at least once.  If I would have tracked the extra rows I knit just because of wrong colour rows, I would have finished the body of this sweater. The blues are in some places stunningly close.  If you look at the bottom of the photo you can see one patch where the two yarns are really very close.  So, yet again, I took back an almost complete row.

I love this sweater, but it is not without issues.  

I did something else that I wanted to write about.  For a long time, I have been planning to sew project bags and sweater bags so that I could stop using ziplocs.  I have fabric scraps and there will be more as I sew up the fabric I bought last winter.  I am particularly interested in bags to store my completed sweaters.  The ziplocs fill my big sweater chest with air and the last two years, ziploc seals have not been very reliable on the 5 to a box bag size. I am tired of replacing them after just a few uses.  

I wanted zipper bags over bags with a tie.  It will be the best option to keep bugs out of my things. So today, I merrily went looking at zippers.  And I started thinking of zippers and sewing zippers.  I hate sewing zippers.  It brings out all the things about my sewing that is not good.  It is fussy and fiddly and I just am not a big fan.  I will if I must but...

So I started looking at bags online.  I love some of the ones my favourite vloggers make.  They are fun and creative and sadly out of my price range.  Plus they really aren't quite what I need for size and they are far too lovely to just bury in my old sweater chest.  I don't really even need fancy ones for projects.  I don't go far enough to need more than a couple pretty bags and I have two or three small projects bags already.  

I thought about need versus want and settled on purchasing a basic cotton tote style bag with a zipper.  The cost is affordable at under six dollars each.  These are plain unlined with long shoulder straps that will likely come off.  And did I mention that they already have a zipper sewn in?  

So yes, I caved but if it gives me more time to knit and solves a problem with my current storage, I am game for it.

Eucalyptus dreams

I never quite got round to trying on my sweater for the second time.  I had the urge to clean and since that is such a rare feeling, I listened to it and did a bit of cleaning and putting.  I did however take a photo of said sweater.

It is looking more and more like the sort of thing I dearly love to wear.  It is twelve inches from the underarm at the moment, so it is going along at a reasonable pace.  It isn't going to be a ten day sweater but that is just fine with me.  All the more joy in the knitting.

The biggest job I did today was to wash all the sweaters I love to wear.  You can wear sweaters a long time if you have a bit of a sleeve underneath but since I am a spilly talker, they usually end up needing to have the coffee and food stains cleaned after a bit.  A good soak in my small washer and a spin to get them almost dry and now, they are hanging around my bathroom and all over the rest of my room I can smell the lovely scent of warm wool and eucalyptus.  Heavenly.

 

It will accompany my dreams.

Knitting away

Me and my sweater are just hanging around knitting being the best of friends.  That is really all that is going on knitwise and I am in love with it.  

 I love the yarn.  It is a 90 percent merino and 10 percent rayon blend, though I think the nubs are the biggest part of the rayon.  It just is so smooth coming off my needle tips.  And it is bouncy somehow, though it doesn't strike you particularly as bouncy in the way a cable plyed yarn is bouncy, but it has a real sense of its own space.  And it is warm and weighty, but not heavy weight, just warmth weight.  It radiates warm as if you were sitting in front of a fire.  

It is very easy to stay faithful to this.  I love everything about it still.  

Tomorrow morning it will get its second try on just to be sure that my gauge used for my calcuations is actually true.  I have taken and retaken gauge and some out the same each time and yet gauge is not something i trust without some backup.  So cross your fingers for tomorrow that this very pretty knit will reach its full potential.

2020 Too

The other day I read a reply to a friend's post on Facebook that explained better than I ever could, how I felt on New Years evening.  

Friend of Friend:      Well, there was 2020.

                                    Then 2020 won.

                                    Now we're starting 2020 II.

This may be the most brilliant thing ever written about the last couple of years and a very large part of my fears...I don't like that word...concerns that it will be accurate about the coming year.  I was working up some worry till I read this.  It injected just a little funny into the whole darn mess.

I have not minded the quarantine so much.  I have found benefits to staying at home and I found many new things to interest me. Much of it has been a weird sort of fun, including finding that zoom knitting could very easily be one of my favourite ways to socially knit. Do I want to do it yet another year?  No.  Who would.  And there it is.  I survived so far, but come on already.

 

In the end though, accurate a forecast though it may be, the only thing we can do is just take each day we get and live that day as completely in that moment as we can.  We cannot control this virus, only our response to it.  We cannot control the weather either and well, we deal with it.  We cannot control the sunrises and sunsets but we just get on with it.

That really is the only way to deal with this.  Live each day as it comes.  Just see what it is and respond  to it.   Don't fill your inner space with worry about what the virus will do to this year, just get on with it.

Wow

The more I work on this, the more I love it.  

I have gone full Undercurrent with the stripes and the way the collar sits at the neck line.  It makes the collar widely open and I have gone with a nice deep placket ala Romys wide button bands, to keep that very open feel.  There is a button on the collar though, for those times when a nice close fit is needed.  

I am a couple inches below the underarms, and it is time for a try on.  I should have done that this evening, but my bed is calling.  This cold I have,  mild though it is, is tuckering me out. My blankets are warm and my bed is oh so comfy, so crawling in and sleeping is easy to do. As eager as I am to crawl in in the evening, I look forward to getting up to knit deliciousness.  

I look less forward to household chores and laundry, but they are the price of things. So...

A Good Day

I felt unsettled this morning and my hand needed a break after working so much on my pretty Fleece Artist sweater.  So I took a break and pulled out some boxes I have been meaning to check into for a while now.  

I have a stack of square cube boxes with lids, all of which are labeled but for one.  One of them is where the bits and ends of sock yarn goes when a pair of socks is finished.  Another is stuffed with leather bits.  One box has bobbins for spinning.  Another has my handspun finished yarns.  And there there is a box labeled yarn to put away and another box labeled other yarn.   It was these last I wanted to see.  

On opening, it was revealing and yet not so revealing.

There was a half completed shawl that I was never going to finish.  I love the yarns.  Both are silk and wool blends and would make a lovely cowl.  I think that is what these will be.  I packaged them up and tucked them aside.

Then there were various bags and bits of yarn, but as I was going through them, I realized here was another pretty thing for a cowl.  It's a small part of one of the prettiest colours of Kauni 2/8 and two and a bit skeins of white white baby yarn.  Cowl of something surely. Tucked aside in a project bag, waiting.

Yummy.  Two skeins of Kathmandu Chunky and a few ends, but plenty for a pair of mittens.  This yarn would make the best mittens.  Packaged up and set aside.

And this lovely red and orange and yellow left over from a pair of wrist warmers needs to be a cowl or mittens or maybe even wrist warmers for me for bed.

And here were some yarns I was thinkin of just the other day.  I think I can use these along with some of my Debbie Bliss Donegal Luxury Chunky Tweed to stretch things out just the smallest bit so that I can make a sweater exactly as I want from both of the greens I have of that really cozy yarn.

This is a bit lighter weight than the Debbie Bliss, but it has a very similar look.  If I beef up this with a bit of laceweight or with some fingering if needed, it should work.  Packaged up and set aside till I do a big stash dive to sort out the yarns.

And then with all that cowl thinking and other stuff, I decided to pull out one of the yarns from my handspun stash. It is easy to leave it as a finished project and never knit with it, but this is a good year to take it out and use it. 

Right from the get go, I felt this bouncy unflappable yarn would make a great cowl.  

If I seem to be cowl obsessed, it is because I am.  I have been chilly so far this winter, and having something warm cozying up to the back of my neck makes me ever so much warmer over all.  I have been wearing my Huj Tub and a really lovely lace mobius from the Rainey Sisters,  TopsyTurvy, because they both snuggle perfectly for defeating chilly.  Need more cowls.  Also need more wrist warmers, but that is for another day.

I took all the really small parts of yarns, the walnut sized balls, the part skeins, the stuff that I don't want to see again, but may need one day, and put them in a box all their own and put the project things in a box and called it a good day.  

Keith's toy for Christmas and for all the helping he does.

And in action.  It's kinda cool.

The perfect way to start.

This was the last thing completed in the old year.  It always makes me feel warm and cozy inside when socks come back to mark significant things in life.  They are so ordinary so regular, so routine that they are a reminder that even as the big days and special holidays flow through our life, it is all the little ordinary things that really make a filled and wonderful life.

And this is the new thing for this year.  I started it with my birthday yarn, a mashup of Romy and Undercurrent.  The spirit will be Undercurrent with it's wide open 'should have been a hood' collar and it's two row striping but its construction will be Romy with it's knit on collar and buttonbands and its contiguous shoulders.  

I am not a hundred percent sure it will be a cardigan though.  There are a lot of reasons to join the front bands together right around the depth of the sleeves.  Pullovers end up being the sweaters I wear most and where there were once cardigans in my wardrobe, all but one,  they are now pullovers. I simply like them better that way.  

I am having a marvelous time knitting and am going right back to that after I finish here.  There is a special coffee with my name on it waiting and a good book too.  It is the perfect way to spend the first day of the year.