Shawllapalooza: Looking for a Mind at Work

My love for the musical "Hamilton" is too much for one shawl alone...
Luckily, there are shawl designers who share my leanings:

The Schuyler Sisters [Rav] by Theresa Bandy; knit with over 500 yards of madelinetosh Tosh DK in colorways Arctic, Brick Dust, and Deep

The design is full of connections to the characters of Angelica Schuyler and her sister Eliza Hamilton, with the added presence of Eliza's husband Alexander, pulling them together and apart:

I chose the colors specifically to be reminiscent of the Ravenclaw colors found in the HP books (rather than the movies); if I had to do it over again, the darker blue would not be so very very dark, but the end result is still pretty great, bold and comfortably cozy.

Shawllapalooza: Purple Emperor

I tried very quickly to look into the history of the term "laceweight" and the precise origins of that designation-- as far as I can tell, "lace" happened first...

The word lace is from Middle English, from Old French las, noose, string, from Vulgar Latin laceum, from Latin laqueus, noose; probably akin to lacere, to entice or ensnare.  (thanks, Wikipedia)

...and "laceweight" thread/string/yarn naturally followed as the material one would use to make holey net-like garments, shawls, &c.

Blue Morpho [Rav] by Natasha Sills; knit with a skein of Verdant Gryphon Mithril in colorway Ravenswood

This shawl pattern was designed to look like butterfly wings, with subtle beading around the very edge of the border.

It has a great drape and it's light as anything and it's very easy to roll up into a tidy bundle for traveling and it's a little bit fancy... 
makes me want to take it on a trip to Venice or something.

Shawllapalooza: Practical Tactical Brilliance

I'm not going to pretend I'm anything less than OBSESSED with the Broadway musical "Hamilton"; by now it's a cultural hurricane, and I was an early adopter, so right now I'd just like to say
I TOLD YOU SO.  :)

Ev’ryone give it up for America’s favorite fighting Frenchman!

Lafayette Shawl [Rav] by Julie Farmer; knit with 3 skeins of madelinetosh Tosh DK in colorway Spectrum

Let's be honest: I knit this solely for the pattern name...  it was a simple, satisfying knit and I ended up with a great shawl that's practical (tactical brilliance) and ingenuitive (and fluent in French).

Shawllapalooza: Lost in the Stacks

Prior to my accidental sabbatical, I featured the first two of this year's twelve shawls (here and here)... 
and then I fell down.
SO!  What about the next four I've finished?

One a day for four days straight BOOM you're welcome

Lost in the Forest [Rav] by Cath Ward; knit with 2/3 skein of madelinetosh Prairie in colorway Carnation

Blocking really is a magical moment in the life of a lace shawl; the negative space is as important as the stitches themselves, and pins are fun for poking.

I knit this shawl for a library colleague on the eve of her retirement, to celebrate her long career of being just the nicest person I've ever met.  I hope right now she's on a beach somewhere, sipping a fruity drink while her grandchildren get knocked over by the ocean waves.
And reading a good book for fun.

In Which I Navel-Gaze a Little

I used to fill journals, scribbling page after page,
like writing down words was a battle to wage.

I didn't mean for that to turn into poetry, but since it does rhyme,

Imma leave it like that.  :)

But it's true, I wrote without saying much of substance, just to be heard, whether it was by Future Me (in my diary) or by my best friend (who lived an hour away in the pre-internet days).  It was a lot of sound and fury fear, if I'm honest, mortifying stuff to remember as the adult I've become.

The only reason I bring my scrawling childhood up now is because, as it turns out, my adulthood has been full of carefully chosen words arranged very specifically.  A college education focused on literature and an introverted nature have combined in maturity to make me a woman who consumes many, many more words than she produces.  To constantly parse language takes energy, even when it's done habitually.  I speak fairly often (gotta get my words out!), but my writing tends to be work-related now -- this or that work email, each picked apart and pieced back together in passive voice to present an impersonal professional package -- so at the end of the day, I'm tired and my words are "gone."

This amateur knitting blog has suffered the ups and downs of my natural energy cycles, but I'm going to *officially* commit to writing more in this space: I have stuff to say!  About knitting!

And also pretty pictures to share.

 

 

Hey, thanks for reading this.  :)

Mot-less Monday: Yeah, Still Here, Doing Stuff

Blankety Stuffs

I have been busy and tired and full of allergy brain and blah blah blah, excuses.

But I have also been making blanket things!

This one is for a baby I know-- I've been planning to make it for about five years, and still I managed to mess up some of the patterning.  I don't think it's too obvious, though...

 

Baby Chalice Blanket [Rav] by Karen S. Lauger; knit with almost 3 skeins of Primrose Yarn Whirl in colorway Fluorite

The colorway is really pretty (though the greens in each skein are very different) and it's difficult to capture the variations; here's the closest photo I have:

Then I dyed the remainder yarn and made a blanket square, but not for any of the blankets I'm supposed to be working on, because of course:

 

Banyan Tree Practice Dishcloth Afghan Square Block [Rav] by Margaret MacInnis; knit with less than 100yds of Primrose Yarn Whirl, dyed with KoolAid

Getting better at cabling, but it's still no fun.

OK, time to work at the job where they pay me -- high fives to you, byeeeee!

Mot-less Monday: Soft as a Stone

Confection

So I've been working on this pankity pank pank shawl:

The yarn is a laceweight single and it's so very light, knitting it up feels a little like making cotton candy, adding layer by layer until there's quite a bit to see that doesn't weigh much.  Every stitch I make seems like it stands alone... until I hold up the work to see an obvious structure that's really striking in total.

Knitting's really cool, you guys.
And now I want cotton candy.  Or leftover jellybeans or something.

FO: A Tapestry from Harrods

SO!  This is what I made with Tart:

gentlemen prefer chevrons [Rav] by bunnymuff; 

knit with madelinetosh prairie in colorway Tart

I loved knitting this pattern, a whole lot.  In fact, I tried to find a way to make the shawl larger, but an embiggening plan was less than obvious, even for an experienced lace shawl knitter.  Plus I get tired at night and "math is hard" (lol).

Still, the final shawl is beyond lovely:

And I have extra yarn left over!  The mind boggles!

Dream Team

Sometimes a yarn is so fantastic, it can live only in the stash of my imagination.  It could be that the yarn is rare enough that next to no one has seen it in person (I'm looking at you, Pearl Yarn).  But more often, I'll see something extra specially pretty and I won't be able to narrow down the realm of project possibility; it gets overwhelming, so I admire from a distance.

So let's flashback, shall we?  New Year's Eve, 2015, I was just slightly tipsy enough to take advantage of a really good WEBS sale: a "colorway surprise!" two-pack of madelinetosh prairie yarn.  Since I'd used the yarn base before, I knew that I'd easily find laceweight shawl patterns that could work well with it; what I didn't know is what colors I would get.

One was a very light pink, Carnation, that I've very recently cast on...

pankity pank pank

...and the other?  Well.  The other was Tart:

its majesty cannot be captured with current photographic technology

I've been in love with Tart for years.  I've long felt that I could not do Tart justice.  But here is Tart, showing up at my door, unbidden.
Tis a sign!

I made A Thing with Tart and it's purty and I'll share it later this week.  :)

FO: The Islands Speak to Her

When I played Yarn Chicken with that ombre skein, it didn't work out precisely as planned...  but it still looks really darn good:

The sea speaks to me [Rav] by Athanasia Andritsou; knit with a full skein of Knitwhits Freia Ombré Lace in colorway Metropolis

I love this shawl.  Luff it.  Sew mush.
Pretty pretty pretty pretty
Seriously, I'm going to stop talking.  The pics say it all.

Happy Easter weekend, everyone!

It's Pi Day! 3.14

This message has been brought to you at 3/14 at 1:59am...

image credit: Wikipedia

Yeah, it's dorky to celebrate Pi Day, but there's a whole thing at the National Institutes of Health ("Celebrating the Intersection Between the Mathematical & Biomedical Sciences"), so we might as well join in the fun!

First I made a dishcloth based on the pi shawl formula for making a knit circle from the inside out...

 Pi Dishcloth [Rav] by Nettie DiLorenzo; knit with approx 50yds of Debbie Bliss Pure Cotton in colorways Spruce and Pale Green

Then I decorated a store-bought apple pi(e), because this weekend was busy and I didn't feel like baking a pie...

HAPPY Pi(E) DAY!!

Mot-less Monday: This Thing is So Weird-Looking

Ombrelieveable!

As you may have gleaned from a previous post, I've got a zazzy ombre handpainted shawl on the needles...

 

 and I forgot to weigh the yarn before I started, which in my world means there is no way for me to tell how much yarn is getting used.  My evolution as a knitter has led me in a very spreadsheet-and-scale-based direction; for someone who doesn't like math very much, I tend to depend on it in my crafting, even when faced with harsh non-theoretical realities (I'm looking at you, swatches, you lying liar liefaces).

Generally I have a spreadsheet, and in that spreadsheet I precisely estimate the total stitch count for the project and set it up to automatically calculate completion percentages; I can then weigh the remaining yarn as I go to evaluate and figure out oh, I have used 50% of my yarn to complete 75% of the estimated total, I can make the shawl bigger than originally planned.

But without that system?
Flying blind!  Who even knows?  Magic!  Unicorns are real!

The yarn arrived already caked up and pretty:

More art than science!

so in the face of my poor planning, I absolutely stabbed a guess that each color segment was roughly a third of the yarn...

Turns out: not true.  I ran out earlier than budgeted and skipped straight from 86% done to OOPS BINDING OFF NOW:

Thank goodness I found Jennifer Dassau's tricks for predicting how much yarn one will need for a bindoff row.  Two inches left at the end.

Anybody have a middle ground for estimating yardage, some reckoning midway between vanilla computation and a reckless shot in the dark?

Seams Like It Will Never End

I started a crocheted "granny pixel" blanket in March 2015, making tiny tiny proto-granny squares for  eventual assembly into an 8-bit rendering of an anime character...
I'm only 46% finished with the blanket right now.
Almost a year later.  Yeah.

My friend Honeyspoon and I had a discussion last year about the merits of seaming-as-you-go for a giant project like this one, and I still believe that biting off small chunks of the finishing work is preferable to trying to do it all at once at the end...  but sheesh, is it tedious.

This morning, I added lots more squares to the evergrowing mass of pixels, and what it amounts to is this:
his hair. is ALMOST. done.

AND his body looks like a coral reef:

It is a bit exciting to see the thumbnail of the photo and immediately see the resemblance to the original inspiration, a fuse bead creation by Etsy's ChaotikFalls.  So I dunno.  I really really want to give this to its recipient, so right now that's my only motivation.

Mot-less Monday: Shawl Valentines

 

2015: The Year in Shawls

As is my New Year semi-tradition by now, let's talk about scads of shawls, shall we?...

TWELVE SHAWLS IN 2015?  Did not quite happen. 
I almost did eleven.  That's a lot, right?  Why do I feel bummed?

Shawl	Project	Pattern [Ravelry links]
1	Purple Orchids (for Overthrowing Asgard)	Golden Orchids [Rav]
2	Faerie Queen's Floral Wing	Rosebud [Rav]
3	Cleverest Witch of Her Age	Neckerchief For A Young Warlock [Rav]
4	Golden Garden of Canary Creams	Moss Garden [Rav]
5	Fractaled Fairy Tale	Sierpinski's Triangle Shawl [Rav]
6	Valor Aid Society	test knit; incorporates Oceanspray [Rav]
7	Armor for Battle	Passe-partout [Rav]
8	Bloodstone Island	Rock Island [Rav]
9	Catalonian Fireball	test knit
10	Ryblink	Eyeblink [Rav]
11	Refuah Sh’lemah	Pollikeet Shawl [Rav]
12	NOPE NOTHING NADA	:(

Since I spent the entirety of 2015 not posting on this blog, I'll be going through these shawls and writing about my faves, because they're just so darn pretty.

Probably a Bad Idea

I just made an excellent decision to go to bed at a reasonable hour...
right before logging onto Blogger and writing this post off the top of my head instead.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm in the throes of a nebulous WIP;
the boundaries of which are as yet uncharted --
unexplored by me, that is, rather than improvised or unpatterned--

The pattern is very patterned and very much FREE!:

Eliza [Rav] by Avid Knitter

A garment for me that doesn't contain a whole lot of body conscious shaping: exciting!
Even more exciting?  The yarn I'm using:

LUFF.  LUFF IT SEW MUSH.

It's Malabrigo Sock in the coveted Archangel colorway and it's the perfect match for this pattern, in my highly biased opinion:

And NOW I'm going to bed.  I promise.  Because while I'd much rather be knitting on this glorious enigma, I left it at work.
Soooooo g'night.

[Enter, pursued by a bear]

Hello?  It's me.

I was wondering if, after all these years, you'd like to meet

I'm kidding, of course, though I do heart Adele,
and that was totally overdramatic and factually inaccurate...
but the truth is

~ ~ I'M BACK ~ ~

and thinking of ways to fill this space up with my words again!

2015 was quite a year of crafting and I won't be able to do it justice in one post, so please feel free to check back for the inevitable garble of memories and photos as they appear.

There were shawls (oh such shawls).
There was pretty pretty yarn.
There was even a personal design challenge.

Stay tuned.  :)