Snow Day WIP

Another Big Snow has descended on the greater metropolitan Seattle area in the last week or so, and because of it, I've stayed at home all week.  Yesterday I watched a car try in vain to drive up the little hill you see pictured here: it kept on sliding backwards, tires spinning, and after 15 minutes of this business the poor driver limped it back to its parking space and went back inside.



On the bright side, I've gotten a ton of knitting and pattern-writing done!  The Salt Creek (rav link) pattern has been written up and is currently being vetted for errors, and as of 7 pm last night (after these pictures were taken) the knitting is finished.  I like how it looks like a sea urchin without spines when it's flopped out on the porch.



This yarn, Anzula Cricket MCN, has been a dream to work with.  It's really squooshy and lovely, although it behaves more like a DK weight than the sport-weight it advertises.  I am finding that this pattern eats yarn like crazy: so far, the gauge I've measured for the garter trellis pattern of the body is about 6 stitches per inch (pretty normal), while the row gauge is just about 11 rows per inch (yikes).  Compared to the 9 rows per inch - on the same size needle - of Little Things, that's quite a bit more yarn being used up.  I can definitely blame that on the density of garter stitch, but a side benefit is that this hat is much more substantial and warm than it would be in stockinette.



I've been working on some alternate decreases, too; the last Salt Creek I made had a double decrease in the center of 3 columns of twisted stitches, which gave it a nice line in theory, but in practice made it fold strangely at the beginning of those decreases.  I've been messing around with twisted decreases, and have come up with single decrease alternatives that maintain the same lines that I wanted for the decreases, but distort the fabric much less.  I've already ripped back the decreases once to clean up the left-leaning version of this decrease (as many knitters know, the left-leaning decrease is notoriously sloppy) and hit upon a solution I like.  With any luck I'll get the pattern out to my test knitters sometime in the next week!