Monday, April 5, 2010

A new project

This weekend I lucked into two days off in a row so it was the perfect time to cast on a new project. I tend to find starting a project takes more time than knitting it. First yarn and a pattern need to be found and matched. This can take me months, especially since I tend to want to design my own patterns.

After yarn and pattern are chosen needles need to be found in my stash. Then the gauge swatch needs to be knit and measured and washed and measured and sometimes reknit on different needles and measured and washed...

The larger the project the more time this seems to take. I can decide on a sock pattern and get it started in about an hour unless I really love the yarn and am waiting for the perfect pair that will be worthy of it. Sweaters take me much longer in part because I am more likely to want to use my own design or because I have trouble finding the perfect yarn for someone else's design that I have fallen in loved with. The delay can be so long that the appropriate season passes me by and the sweater gets set aside until next year. This is why I have sweater quantities of yarn in my stash that should have been sweaters some time ago.

This year I am going to challenge myself to knit as many of these up as possible. I'm curious how many sweaters I can knit up in a year if I really put my mind to it. So far this year I have knit one sweater. I need to pick up the pace.

To this end I cast on for a Habu sweater that I bought in kit form when it was on sale. The yarn is two strands held together; one is a laceweight stainless steel wrapped in silk and the other is a 'paper' yarn made of linen. Needless to say this sweater will be like nothing else I own. So far I have knit about half of one of the sweater fronts:
I think this is going to be a very cool sweater. I fear it will be impossible to photograph well, though. The fabric has such an interesting hand and photographs just don't capture it. I'll keep trying so stay tuned.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

The first of many

Since I have a bit of a blog backlog I thought I'd start with the oldest project and go from there. This project was actually knit early September 2009 but I couldn't share it then because it had to remain secret until the pattern was published. The pattern is appearing in the April 2010 issue of Yarn forward so I can now share:
The pattern is Entrelac Gloves designed by Sarah Sutherland. They are knit using Noro Silk Garden sock and if you pay attention to the colour repeats it is quite easy to make a matching pair of gloves. I was really pleased with the way these gloves fit and I was sorry to have to hand them over when they were done (the fact that it was a warm September did help).

This was actually my first entrelac project. I'll admit to doing some early swatching to make sure that I wasn't getting myself into something I couldn't finish but that was a simple flat piece. The pattern is well constructed and I would recommend it to anyone looking to try entrelac.