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October 04, 2005
Belated Weekend Report
OK so I did quite a bit this past weekend. I finished the body of my sweater and decided to pause before doing the math for sleeves. During the pause I restarted the Celtic Dreams Pullover in Black Water Abbey yarns previously refered to as RS:
I decided, in the interest of making this a nice relaxing and relatively speedy knit, to not mirror image all the cables. Here we have a closeup of one of the saddles with the non-mirror imaged twists flanking center braid:
Wow what a craptastic picture! Actually some might question my sanity with the knitting of cables in dark heathered yarn. I personally feel that if you are close enough to put money into my panties then you get rewarded with beautiful knit views. Apologies for bastardising whoever it is that says something like: if your close enough to see the mistakes you better be putting money into my panties.
I plan on taking this with me when I go to visit Liz so that I can set up the body cables without children distracting me. Or maybe I will do the set up rows and just knit on it while I am there. Who knows.
For some reason I thought it would be nice to take along my Lendrum and spin a bit as well. When I purchased my Lendrum it was marketed in part as a good traveling wheel which met the carry on standards of most airlines. I no longer see this claim when looking at it on various websites but I will still try to take it with me. With a wheel one needs some fiber and I came accross this beautiful 50% Merino/50% Tencel handpaint no longer available from artist. Believe me I called and asked for more just today. Oh wait no picture of fiber itself rather a picture of a bit of spindle spun fiber~ isn't it beautiful?
The brown strand over the purpley bit is Jaggerspun zephyr for comparisons sake. Yep I managed to spindle spin a wee bit finer than the most common non kid mohair aka crack lace weight around. This is what my yarn looks like knit up in a semi gauzey fabric with 3mm needles:
See why I wanted more? I thought of maybe spinning up my bit on my wheel with Liz assisting me on technique so that I might be able to do a sweaters worth in less than a lifetime. Alas, as mentioned, no longer available but I am eying various other handpaints in the same fiber blend such as Blue Moon Fiber Arts offerings. Either that or trying my hand at dying some natural colored 50/50 Merino/Tencel blend. Lori Lawson, the dyer of the original roving, tells me it is an Ashland Bay fiber that she no longer works with but so far I haven't found any place that offers it online. Plus my dying experiments to date have not been very promising....
Ok I also started on a sock for airplane knitting. I recall getting quite a bit done on a pair of socks last time I flew to and from Maryland. Hopefully I can get one sock done so that the other requires the counting of pins instead of measuring with tape. Here she is in all her glory:
Now that I am fully set up for vacation knitting I can sit down with pencil and paper for sleeve math. Oh and bad news. After 2 full months of nonsmokedom I purchased a pack last Friday. I get to go through withdrawel hell again starting in the morning. I hope it doesn't mess with my gauge.
Happy knitting
Posted by Elka at 10:06 PM | Comments (2)