FO: Ptarmigan

  

I finished this cowl over a year ago, right after we moved to our first apartment in Seattle, so it's kind of ridiculous that it took that much longer for me to give it a quick soak and lay it out to dry.  I had some trouble when I first cast on: I usually go up a needle size for Jared Flood patterns, so I did, which resulted in me hating every second of knitting a cashmere/silk blend.  (I didn't think this was possible.)

I ended up ripping out and re-casting on with the given needle size, which played much nicer and gave me the lovely knitting experience I was expecting.  Then, when I was binding off, I used the bind-off given in the pattern and didn't like it.  I had already cut the yarn, but it ended up being too short, so I had to join during the bind-off with less than half a yard of yarn, which made me mad, so the cowl went into a pile for a year.  Sigh.

I pulled it out a month or so ago and realized it was a perfectly good cowl out of gorgeous yarn, blocked it, wove in the ends, and voila! - it's amazing.  The moral of the story is: I am silly sometimes, and cashmere is great always.  The end!

Ravelry Page: Ptarmigan

Pattern: Ptarmigan by Jared Flood

Yarn: Handmaiden Cashmere and Silk, colorway Cedar, 1 skein

Yardage: ~185 yards

Needles: Size 7 US 16" Addi Turbo Lace

Stash Appreciation: Jade Sapphire Seeing Red

So I have a confession.

I love my stash.  I love every skein of cashmere, every scrap of merino and silk and camel and bamboo and mohair.  If one were to make a scientific study of my stash, they would see that I gravitate towards skinny yarns: my sock and laceweight stash is almost as big as my larger-weight stash.  In terms of actual yardage or number of skeins, there might be more.  I love knitting socks, and I love knitting lace, which is funny because they are so different in their usage.  Socks you can wear the minute you weave in all the ends, and wear until they have holes in the toes and heels from love.  Lace, on the other hand, is more work-intensive to care for, more valuable.  I wear my shawls every day, but I wear them with a sort of care only afforded to the most important pieces in my wardrobe.  You won't see my lace going to the washing machine, ever.  And yet they share the same space on my shelves of stash, and I look at them with the same yarn-lust in my eyes.

And if I ever really, really take a step back to look at my stash, I will find that there is almost nothing in it that I don't love.  I have stories from almost all of my yarn, from trips and people and times in my life that I can remember by making something wooly out of them.  Some things are best kept in the skein until the right moment has come along to use them.  And whenever I add something new, I undoubtedly love it just as much as everything else in my stash.  Some days I have a hard time deciding what to knit because I want to knit it all, right now.

On that note, Smith's got in six colors of glorious Jade Sapphire this week.  I bought three skeins of a deep, ruby colored silk/cashmere 2-ply, colorway Seeing Red, for a large shawl, despite the fact that I have five more skeins of the stuff in my stash already.  My love for Jade Sapphire is deep and abiding -  it's one of my favorite yarns ever, and this color is unlike any I've seen before: it's the perfect red, unphotographable in its luminosity.

I haven't decided what to make with it yet.  But just having it is good enough for now.  Because in the end, that's why I love my stash: it's full of possibility and beauty just as it is, and knitting it up doesn't increase or subtract from its beauty, it just changes its form.

Happy Friday, everybody!

WIP: Triinu Scarf

I've done it again.  Cast on for another little piece of fluff, this time using Artyarns Cashmere 1 again.  I noticed the other day when I saw my store sample of Peacock Tail and Leaf over at Smith's that my nupps have gotten much larger than they used to be!  I think it's a matter of getting comfortable with knitting this kind of lace, since when I began I had barely knit any lace shawls, much less nuppy ones.  I'm fairly sure the change came when I was knitting Crown Prince - which is still languishing, unblocked, because I'm super lazy - because there were sometimes 20+ nupps in a single row.  No one wants to purl 7 super-tight stitches together, so my tension naturally loosened.

So far this one is a dream.  I've had yet another flare-up of my tendinitis (grr) so knitting isn't the most appealing of activities right now, but I've been pulling it out and knitting a couple of rows here and there.  It's soft and fluffy and yellow as a baby chick.  Or a pygmy jerboa.

Do want, yes?  Apparently I'm all about the baby animals when finals time rolls around.



This week has been hard, difficult, and terrible with a little bit of good thrown in.  Friday I ran into an unpleasant reminder of a recent falling-out with a friend.  Saturday night I took the rotating shift and closed at my job, and pretty much everything that possibly could have gone wrong, went wrong.  Sunday I ran around all day for my various assignments and finally gave up and worked on sewing a languishing Mandarin-collared shirt project that I've been working on since spring break.  Then the news of Bin Laden came late last night, which is alternately producing shock, relief, and worry in my head.  Today I'm feeling under the weather, so I think it's back home to watch The Killing and go to bed early.

And hopefully, tomorrow will be better.

WIP: Miralda 2.0

That's right.  Another Miralda (rav link).  The color is showing up kind of strange.  I think my computer can't handle the ridiculous saturation of this yarn, which is a mixture of deep magenta and rose.  It's a little more variegated than my first Miralda, but I like it.



(Miralda the First)

I think I've already said everything there is to say about this pattern.  Perfectly balanced, fun to knit.  Genius, yada yada.  Of course it looks like dog food right now, because it's unblocked.

It looks like nothing right now, but I'm getting more and more excited as I knit to have my favorite scarf back, because in my opinion, pink goes with everything.  (Pink is the new neutral?)  On that note, I cast on for my second Lilac Leaf Shawl in that pink Silky Alpaca Lace.  It's taking serious willpower not to drop everything and work on it.

Forgetful

Today I knit for the first time in almost a week.  It was strange.  Forgetting is a funny creature - no matter how many times you say a word or make a nupp or tie your shoes, there is a distinct possibility that one day, you will have a moment where you look at the thing in front of you and go, "Huh.  I totally knew how to do this at some time in my life."  Today I picked up my most recent project and started knitting, and it felt foreign and awkward and clammy in my hands.  I think I'll blame it on the cold.

As far as projects go, it's a pretty one.  Madli's Shawl, from both Knitted Lace of Estonia and a back issue of Interweave.  This was the kind of thing that I used to look at pictures of and sigh, because I didn't think I could do it.  And aside from my distracted hands, I've certainly proved myself wrong on that front.  It is, however, a long project - I have two 500-yard balls of laceweight, and I just finished the first ball.  The repeats are pretty short, so it makes for easily memorized knitting.

The yarn in particular is gorgeous - it's Artyarns Cashmere 1, an unbelievably soft single-ply that feels like cashmere and shines like silk.  It's the same yarn as the turquoise scarf below it, which has gotten a lot of wear so far this trip.  The lavender yarn in particular also smells amazing.  Every time I pull the scarf out of its bag, I catch a distinct whiff of a strange but intoxicating mixture of hard candy and some sort of aromatic hydrocarbon.

So, if you happen to see me walking around mumbling happily with a blob of lavender shoved in my face, that would be why.

You are my sweetest downfall.

Those who want to know about Japan and not yarn may want to look away now. Just sayin'.

Exhibit A.

Dear yarn,

Why are you so awesome? I mean really. I already had red sock yarn two months ago: Shibui Sock in Chinese Red. I bought it last summer at Hilltop Yarn East (RIP) and it is pretty. It is the color of a Wong Kar-Wai film, or the silk robes from the red scenes in Hero, or the signal lanterns from Raise the Red Lantern. Socks made out of this yarn will be like fireworks for my feet.

But then I went to Santa Cruz and found this yarn. And it said, "Look at me. I am a completely different red. I am the color of lipstick and Louboutins and cherry-flavored candy." It's from an indie dyer in Oregon, although the name escapes me and the yarn itself is back in Seattle, waiting for my return.

Exhibit B.

Color is something that I get stuck on. The attention to color and design is something that I really appreciate about Japan - whenever I go, there are season-themed stationary kits, cotton fabric hair flowers, crocheted lace scarves in a thousand different shades of pink or grey, dangly kimono-inspired earrings of yellow, pink, and orange. The cup that I drink coffee out of in the morning is brown clay with a wash of dark blue dripping down one side. The coaster that I put said mug on is shaped like a cat, navy with red whiskers. The sky is pearl grey in the morning after it rains, some roof tiles on my walk to school are cobalt blue instead of brown or terra cotta, and packaging for bath products is usually white, pink and baby blue. It's nice that no matter where you go, color is a constant. And it helps that I brought a little of my own for good measure.


Handmaiden Silk Lace in an amazing, Balinese ocean turquoise. Hopefully it will become Laminaria or some other pattern like it.

And lastly but not leastly, I got more cashmere on my trip out to Los Angeles about a month ago - Jade Sapphire Mongolian Cashmere in colorway Green Apple. At first I thought it would be overkill to knit another Miralda, but after her tragic disappearance, I can't think of a better contender to fill her shoes.

On a side note, I can't believe that another week of school is almost over. The days have been full with knitting and class and studying, and the nights full of knitting and eating and socializing (and more studying). Friday I'm planning to go out for karaoke, Saturday I'm making traditional Japanese food at school, and then I might get to see a textiles exhibition out in Kyoto on Sunday. Waa! So busy!

Danger, Will Robinson!

Recently, Smith's received a new shipment of Art Yarns Cashmere 1, a hand-dyed laceweight cashmere. These three colors are the top contenders for my heart.

And without further ado, yarn pr0n.