Yesterday, I started playing with some yarn that I have been eyeing all summer. It was three hanks of a soy yarn from Kollage that someone gave me in a Ravelry swap and two skeins of Southwest Trading Company's Bamboo which I bought last may from Rhonda Kraft at the Yarn Attic in Hillsborough. The colors harmonize well -- shades of turquoise and purple -- and the soy and bamboo fibers are like rayon, so they will launder together well. I have been thinking for months that they would make a good shawl together, and I had visions of using the solid Kollage yarns as stripes among the variegated Bamboo.
I played with these yarns all morning yesterday and came up with a design that is very different from the one I started with.
I started with the teal Kollage (no surprise there) and cast on 5 stitches. Somehow, I kept getting more stitches on one side of the triangular shawl I was making than on the other. This clearly was not going to work. After casting on several times and ripping out by the 12th row, I tried casting on 7 stitches, and everything worked perfectly. But after I had knitted about 12 rows and switched over to the Bamboo, I also tried to do a lace pattern, and I got woefully bogged down.
In the end, I decided to start with the Bamboo (it's softer) and to knit it in garter stitch (the color changes make it interesting enough). And then I will knit a thin stripe of the teal, since there isn't much of it, followed by a thicker stripe of the solid purple, since there is twice as much. The solid colors will be a lace pattern because they'll show the lace off better than the bamboo would. And we'll see how it comes out.
I had to rip about 8 inches out of this sweater last week, but I have knitted all that yarn back now. I am rather pleased with how the sweater is coming out.
The Mixed Feelings striped sweater that I've been working along is coming along, too. I discovered a few hours after I last wrote about it that it was indeed way to big, though. So I ripped out about 8 inches of it and began decreasing on the back much sooner. I also started decreasing on the front at the same time. I'm now knitting the back above where the armholes begin, and I'm making good progress. I think it's going to fit.
One place where I went seriously wrong was the cast-on. I did a long-tail cast-on, knowing that the bottom of the sweater would curl up because I'm knitting stockinette. I had planned to go back and knit an i-cord edging at the bottom to make it lay flat, and the i-cord would cover up the long-tail cast-on.
This technique worked fine on my Beebalm sweater, also known as the Cables & Lace sweater (designed by Fiona Ellis), when I made that two years ago. But it's not working on my Mixed Feelings sweater. When I went back and looked at the Cables & Lace sweater, I realized why. The Cables & Lace sweater has fields of lace that are more like ribbing than stockinette. I'm going to have to go back and put some kind of ribbing or a hem on my Mixed Feelings sweater because it's solid stockinette. For that reason, I should've used a provisional cast-on, not the long-tail cast-on. Live and learn!
I had a lovely time at the North Brunswick library last night. Only one person came, a woman named Suzannah who is from Egypt. I helped her with Continental knitting, especially purling, and she made a lot of progress. She complained that she's kntting much more loosely as a Continental knitter than she did when she was wrapping the yarn as a British knitter, but I think once she gets more proficient with Continental, her stitches will tighten up.
I'm committed to being at the North Brunswick Library once a month, and I expect it will be the second Monday of the month, at 7 p.m. So if you are living in Middlesex County, watch for it. I would love to meet you.
My next library appearance will be 10 a.m. next Monday at the Warren Township Library, followed the Monday after that at 7 p.m.
