Tag: malabrigo

knitting · pattern · photo posts · Uncategorized · wool · yarn

Knitting Content Time!

mousearmy

Wait a minute, I’m supposed to be promoting my knitting patterns!

This is BeesBeesBees Cowl. It’s knit in little pieces and then seamed. (I don’t think that’s too much detail. I think it’s fairly obvious from the finished piece. The .PDF pattern for the design goes into possibly too much detail on how to connect the hexagons to get that little line effect between them, which I like a lot. It also includes a .PDF tutorial for the unique cast-on method used, which is another technique I like a lot.)

I find this strangely satisfying, even though the basic idea had me stuck for a while—I wanted to use shapes that don’t tesselate as well (and I still might for a future design! Stay tuned!) and I wanted to avoid finishing seams, but ultimately my (attempted and discarded) solutions for that felt a lot more fiddly and potentially frustrating than the technique I ended up with. The handspun yarn really lends itself well to this. I’d like to be able to use superwash commercial yarn here, but I think it might not hold up as well; it’s best to use soft wool with a little bit of natural texture.

Dracula · knitting · photo posts · yarn

aw yis

mousearmy

The new yarn is already here! It is splendid. The reds are earthier than I expected, which makes them much more up my alley. (Relatedly, I’m now a couple of days behind in Dracula—I’d been a few ahead of the serialized version, and kept wanting to write about these little moments, so I stopped to keep myself from spoiling it, and now have the opposite issue—but this section is just intense for its turns of phrase. Got a bit heartbroken over Mina’s last few lines in the 2 October journal entry:

I hope I have not done wrong, for as sleep begins to flirt with me, a new fear comes: that I may have been foolish in thus depriving myself of the power of waking. I might want it.

I also like it a lot when Van Helsing says something on the lines of Quincy’s head being on a plane with the horizon. Yes, that is how you describe it in Texas. What a good, sensible guy. I wish my head seemed reliably on a plane with the horizon.

This seems like quite the departure, but it’s relevant! I needed the red colors to be spooky/deep/earthy for upcoming shawl purposes. It is very important for this yarn to tie in, at least obliquely. I am trying pretty hard to do a spooky season theme this year, and I had enough done and set up in advance of, well, now that there’s no excuse to just fail completely, per tradition.)

Anyhow, this yarn is directly the result of the late September sale. It’s going to immediately result in a more coherent shawl sample for a pattern that’ll be up this month. So: pretty exciting, immediate, tangible results! Goal achieved! Yarn purchased and acquired! Thanks very much to anyone and all who contributed, on purpose or coincidentally!

The red colors also have just enough of that purple undertone. Plus orange. I like it a lot.

I usually get a little self-defeating regarding goals or advancement, and I really didn’t expect much from a last-minute sales pitch, so I’m genuinely pretty stoked about this. I’m hoping to be able to wind this and cast on this evening.


knitting · pattern · photo posts

Salt Post.

mousearmy

I never actually made a Table Salt post, so here goes:

Table Salt is a cowl that uses a similar textured motif to the large one in the Salt Cowl & Hat. It takes the same idea, but makes it smaller, more fine-grained, for a different textured effect.

The pattern is meant to be done in light sockweight yarn, but I’ve also worked it up in sport/dk, partly to check my math and partly to see what happens. It’s all right at a bigger gauge, but this experiment did take every functional bit of an entire skein of Malabrigo Yarn Arroyo, and I haven’t blocked it yet, so I’m not sure if it’s just a roomier cowl or if it might be mini-cape material. It should open up at least a little bit, and it’s already considerably larger than the original.

knitting · photo posts · yarn

a few things.

mousearmy
  • remain terrible at blogging/this whole thing
  • working on some shawls
  • also hats
  • also some others things
  • plus kids’ clothing so
  • I feel deeply unproductive, but 2/4 yarns in the photo have been knit up, and projects have been started with the others.
collaboration · knitting · photo posts

a kit option, new things.

mousearmy

Beach Bunny Yarns now offers a kit for Morpho! This is pretty exciting: I’m not super strong with variegated yarns, and the samples are gorgeous in a way that almost baffles me. The dyeways and the design work remarkably well with each other.

MEANWHILE, on the personal knitting/design front, I am having the entertaining experience of really really liking my current work, and kind of hating the fact that I do. The finished product is better than I’d hoped for—but that means I don’t get to go back to rip it back and redesign it, and in fact the part that I found kind of stressful and tedious makes the design. It’s very possible that I found it stressful and tedious only because I had worked that part three times before I liked it and I was behind schedule because of it—it doesn’t seem as unpleasant now, on the second sample—but objective facts: it’s going to involve a moderate to long section of uninterrupted garter stitch. A moderate to long section of garter stitch is not everyone’s cup of tea.

I can’t show the finished design yet! So. This is Malabrigo Yarn Sock in the darkest version of Indiecita I’ve ever seen.

knitting · photo posts · stay-at-home auxiliary

Definitely too many stitches.

mousearmy

There are going to two ways to work the finishing/border on the Stay-at-Home Auxiliary Scarf, because if you do all 14 squares and pick up stitches to knit the border the way I had planned it, you are going to have something like 902 sts crammed on a 48”-60” needle, and that is not the most fun knitting I have ever done. (I’m doing it, because it is wrong to tell people it could be done without trying it and finding out how potentially frustrating it really is, but I think the alternate method also looks nice, and you probably don’t have to be painstakingly careful about how you set the knitting down to keep 20+ sts from coming off the needle just because there is No Room.)

The first step for this project went out on April 2, so the official end date, if you’ve been doing a square a day, would be April 15th or 16th, depending on how you approach it (is the border part of Day 14, or something you do the day after?). The finishing step should be live within the next couple of days, so please watch this space. Take care!