Wednesday, August 29, 2012

What to do...

...when you have a spinner in the house and her accumulated stash of 10 years of spun roving that she just had to have?  The answer of course is a lot of small and not so small skeins of colorful yarn that clog every nook and cranny in the house. One solution could be to insulate the walls with the yarn, but that would make the walls way too enticing for the mice that populate the woods around us.  The only practical solution is for the knitter in the house to knit with it.  And since winter is not too far around the corner in these parts of the world, the first item to be knit was a Ruana Style Wrap for the spinner.  The original pattern was knit with Boku yarn by Plymouth.  The pattern #1061 is probably the worst written pattern I have ever come across.  The only redeeming factor was the schematic, but it too had its shortcomings since it did not contain the measurements of the finished piece.  What to do?  Forge ahead, of course with no particular plan, different yarn and different sized needles.  Since not all yarn was of the same weight, I doubled yarn or combined yarn at times.  The shrug contains Shetland, Alpaca, silk, a bit of the late Captain Crunch (a Romney and who knows what else mix), Blue Faced Leicester and some yarn from long forgotten sheep varieties.  I used US 7 (4.5 mm) needles. The spinner loves the wrap and all is well with the world.




 
Knit on Merrily!

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Working on...

...various things, including these socks.  The pattern is by Claudia Tietze called East Meets West given to the German sock knitting group KreaSock . While the pattern looks quite involved, it is fairly easy to knit and easily remembered.  The second sock is waiting to be finished.




Other things on the needles or almost finished are a cardigan and shrug knit with all the odds and ends of yarn spun by my youngest daughter and accumulated over the past ten years.  The cardigan is awaiting its zipper and the shrug is about 3/4 finished. 

Knit on, Merrily!