Weekend with Friends

The Outer Banks, North Carolina

I had a lovely weekend with my college girlfriends: knitting (the pink Marseilles back above is mine), quilting, drinking wine, soaking in a hot tub under the stars, goofing off in the surf. I'm so glad to have such wonderful people to surround myself with, if only once a year. Now it's back to the grind. Man, I miss that hot tub.

Knitting, Spinning, Family

The Knitting:

Swallowtail shawl in merino tencel handspun: far and near.

It's going well. I thought that I might be a bit short on yarn, so after I finished the tenth repeat, I weighed the yarn I had used (40 grams) and the yarn I had left (75 grams). Then I made a spreadsheet to determine how many total stitches a full swallowtail shawl would take (18,583), and how many stitches I could expect to get out of 115 grams of yarn (~15, 900). I determined that if I took out two budding lace repeats I would have enough yarn, and that if I simply added two rows with 4 yarnover increases before changing to the next lace pattern, I would have the correct multiple of stitches for the following lace patterns. This shawl was actually pretty ammenable to tweaking, so I really lucked out. I'm sure that what I wrote here sounds pretty complicated, but it's doable. If enough people are interested, I'll write up a tutorial on adjusting this type of shawl sometime. You never know when you'll need to double-check yardage and re-adjust. It sounds dull as dust, but I'm happy to forego the excitement of running out of yarn close to the end.

My adjustments may very well make the shawl too small to be practicable to wear, but I've decided I'm enjoying it so much that I don't really care. If I can't wear it, I'll frame it. It's a lovely pattern and a really nice use of the yarn. I'll let you know if it's wearable or not, though, just in case someone else has 290 yards of fingering that they're considering using this way.

The red sparkly Christmas beret is almost finished, right on schedule.

This is an easy knit. No thinking, no tweaking, nothing. Perfect for a gift, and completely season appropriate. Normally I shy away from sparkly, but this really appeals to me, and the person it's for does sparkly quite well.

The Spinning:

Heart's Content: 80% merino, 20% bombyx silk from Chameleon Colorworks.

I spun this at the spin-in at my house on Saturday. It's only 57 yards, but I should eventually be able to incorporate it into a project with some other handspun. I love the colorway, and especially after washing, it is really soft.

The Family:

The crew, hanging out in bed the morning after the spin out.

We never used to allow the dogs (we had two) in bed, but now that Caia is an elder, we just put an old quilt on top and let her sleep wherever she wants. The night of the spin-in she insisted on sleeping with me, and when I finally woke up, exhausted and dazed, I found that I was under a pile of furry love. I slept in that little corner at the top! It's amazing the way the kitties pile on when Caia is in the bed. They find the tiniest crevasse and wedge themselves in. Not much sleep, but a lot of love.

I love a beret! Or, 1 down, 3 to go...

Christmas started in September this year over here at chez Mind of Winter. I have realized that if I wait until I am in the mood for knitting Christmas presents there really isn't sufficient time to finish them all, and it becomes a chore to try to cram them all in at the last minute. This year I have six items that I'm making for family for Christmas. This may sound like a lot, but the family, it is big, so six is pretty minimal. Since my side got knitted gifts last year, this year I'm hooking up part of Moxie's family. It is simply not possible to hook up all of Moxie's side in one Christmas. That would make it not fun, and fun is really an essential part of the Christmas knitting spirit. The best part is that I don't have to finish anything, because all the gifts are for people who have stopped growing, so they'll keep. Plus I never let anyone believe that I am knitting a Christmas gift so that the pressure is off. Ah, the things we do to keep ourselves from procrastinating.

I feel so positively French.

The first knitted items on Santa's list this year are four berets. Which means a beret a month until the BIG DAY. I was inspired by this lovely beret, which was a knit cafe store model for about two seconds, before Suzan generously allowed me to keep it. (This might have had something to do with the fact that I kept trying it on and sighing "It's perfect.") The pattern is the beret designed by my friend Kat Coyle for Greetings from Knit Cafe. The yarn for this one is Katia Gatsby, which Knit Cafe carries in abundance, and which I plan to use in two of the four berets.

Here's the first one, which I just finished, in Valentina di Roma's Angora Print, an expensive little confection that I really enjoyed working with:

If you want to appear cold, bundle up, look serious, and pretend to be sipping hot tea!

I'm going to leave project notes on this one until all the berets are done, but I can say this: there are no mistakes in the pattern, it is simple and fun to execute, and the results are great. You might want to take the rim out a little further than the original if you are knitting, as I did, with a yarn that does not drape. The original and the Gatsby version are drapey, so the pattern is perfect for them. It works well for the angora, but it could be a teensy bit drapier and a wider circumference might accomplish that. I used US 3 needles and exactly three skeins of this yarn, which has rather limited yardage (55 yds/skein). Other than the snippets cut off from yarn tails, there was less than a yard left.