Knit Sisters

On Saturday I met my friend Deb at the local Borders for some knitterly camaraderie.  We had a lovely couple of hours:  knitting, chatting, and making fun of some of the more horrifying designs in the new knitting mags. 

 

I worked on (and am continuing to work on) a new design which I am hoping to submit to Knitty.  Unfortunately, since I am hoping to submit it, I don’t feel I can or should offer photos on the blog.  So I offer you the following pictures and discussion of a UFO which has been languishing in a bag for several months. 

The yarn is Classic Elite “Studio” 70% viscose, 30% linen, which I purchased a few years back at The Studio in KC.  It was on sale, so I bought all I could of five colors.  The yarn has a beautiful sheen and is very soft; in fact, being a soft-spun single, it is almost fragile.  I thought for a long time about what to make with this yarn.  It had to be something multi-colored, since I didn’t have enough of any one color to make an entire sweater, but I did have more of the light green than any of the other colors.  What I finally settled on was a patterned yoke sweater in the style of a Lopi pullover.

 

In fact, I stole the yoke pattern from a sweater in The Best of Lopi.  Of course, the gauge on this yarn is smaller than the Lopi yarns; I think I’m knitting it to about 5.5 stitches per inch.  (This is one problem with setting projects aside for so long–you forget the vital statistics.  You have to hope that you had the foresight to write them down somewhere.  Then you have to hope that you can find the place where you wrote them down.)

I was a little worried that translating the yoke pattern to a much smaller gauge would throw off the decreasing rate, but actually, it has seemed to work just fine.  Actually, in my case, it’s an increasing rate, because I’m working from the top down.

It took me a little while to get the hang of stranding with this yarn, since it has no elasticity whatsoever.  (I wouldn’t recommend that for a first stranding project!)  I’m still a little worried that the yarn really is too fragile for what I’m asking it to do, and that once the sweater is finished it will just pill and abrade itself into nothingness as it’s worn.  But it’s too late to turn back now.  Ripping this stuff out is just the kiss of death for the yarn.

But it sure is pretty, no?  Maybe if I can’t wear it I can hang it on the wall.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 28th, 2006 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Heavy sweaters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.