Making Progress

 

It’s day 11 of 100 Days of Making! I didn’t have a whole lot of time to work on The Red River Wrap since last week, but I did find time to make this swatch in the yarn I’ll be using for the sample. I wanted to see how the colors would look in the lace pattern, and I wanted to play with the size a little.

Pine Lace swatch

I decided that the lace motifs were too large in my original swatch so I used a smaller needle. I also wet blocked and pinned the swatch, but removed the pins before it was completely dry, allowing the fabric to bounce back a little. The fabric of this swatch is exactly what I wanted, except for all the plain stockinette between the motifs. My charts only show the right-side rows, so what looks like 4 rows on the chart is actually 8 rows in knitting. So I played with the charts a little, removing some of the extra rows, and made another swatch.

Red River Wrap swatch 2

I like this one much better, but do you see how different the colors look in both swatches? I’m using 2 skeins of hand-dyed yarn, and each swatch was started with a different skein. I will have to alternate skeins to blend the colors together when I knit the sample, so I tried that on the top of the swatch on the left. I think it actually makes the color scheme more interesting. Alternating skeins is a bit of a bother, but it’s definitely worth it!

Red River Wrap swatches

I made some progress on the pattern too; I broke the lace patterns into five charts and I wrote the directions for each one. I still have to determine how many rows to work in each section, what type of border to add, and write the rest of the directions, but I should have time to do that next week, and then I’ll have the last week in February free to knit the sample.

Project bag from The Knotty Acorn

The project bag is from The Knotty Acorn, and it is my favorite by far, not just because of the cool Star Wars fabric, but also because it is so well made.

The thing in this bag is what has been taking up most of my knitting and pattern writing time. I have made a good bit of progress on it this week, but I can’t share many details. I can tell you that the pattern will be in an upcoming issue of knit.purl magazine, and I am using this absolutely delectable yarn from Shibui.

Shibui PebbleIt’s a blend of recycled silk, fine merino, and cashmere, and it has a softness like a vintage t-shirt, despite it’s rustic appearance. It is a pleasure to knit.

I always have a project in a my purse to for all those moments when I simply have to wait, and I did a lot of waiting this week! My current purse project is a pair of ribbed arm warmers in Woolfolk Sno.

Arm warmers in Woolfolk Sno

Sno is a pure merino wool that that is softer than any other wool I’ve felt. It reminds me a little of angora, with its delicate halo, but it doesn’t shed like angora does. I had started knitting a shawl with this yarn, but when I discovered a mistake 80 rows down I ripped the whole thing out and didn’t start it over. Then there were several days in January when I found myself walking around outside with my camera and cold hands, and that gave me the idea for these arm warmers. I had thought of doing some fancy cables, and even spent some time making the charts, but in the end I decided simple is better, and these will be worked entirely in ribbing. Now that I’ve made up my mind about the pattern the knitting is going very quickly and I expect to have these done by next week, which is too bad, because then I’ll have to revert to boring gray socks for my purse knitting.

And that is my making progress so far! More to come next week, but until then, happy making!