my new favourite throw

This blanket was such a long time in the making, and I’m super happy that it’s done.

Ravelry and my blog archives tell me that I started this sometime last year, around July or August. I worked on it a lot near the end of last summer, and then fall distracted me with shiny, shiny sweaters, and I took a break from it.

This is another one of those projects where I thought I had a lot to finish, but actually set it aside nearly done – when I picked it back up this spring, all I had left was two more squares and the finishing, which was hardly anything at all.

The yarn is worsted-weight from Tanis Fiber Arts, worked on a size J/6mm hook, a combination of leftovers and skeins that I bought specifically for the blanket, with Natural as a background and border colour. When I originally planned this blanket, I thought I’d have enough yarn to do a really large, bed-sized throw, big enough to sleep under. I’m not the greatest at calculating crochet yardage, though, and it’s close-but-not-quite big enough. Still, it’s large enough for curling up under on the couch, and soft enough that I’d sort of prefer to use it like that, anyway.

The best part of working on this was definitely colour, and giving myself the chance to play and see what worked. I had so much fun trying different colourways next to each other, and seeing which ones went nicely together.

(For the interested, the colourways I used, in varying amounts, are: Midnight, Olive, Gold, Lemongrass, Charcoal, Atlantic, Dove, Cobalt, Mallard, and Deep Sea.)

garter stitch forever

The big brown sweater is done, but sitting in time out until I make some serious decisions about its button bands, and take photos.

In the meantime, I’ve spent a wonderful week knitting on something new. I am finally on holiday, for two glorious months, and after a long stretch of thinking and working, I was really in the mood for some garter stitch. Nothing but garter stitch. Forever.

This is Different Lines, which is a super clever shawl that uses garter stitch forever and short rows to create a triangle-ish shape, with stripes.

The yarn I’m using is Indigodragonfly Merino Sock. The grey is leftovers from my Plain and Simple, and the red is a fresh skein that’s been waiting patiently in my stash. The two colourways play very nicely together in person, and are named/dyed after River Tam (grey) and Inara (red) from Firefly, which tickles me.

yarned!

A couple of episodes of Lost Girl and a lot of plying later, my handspun is done.

This is spun from The Black Lamb 50/50 merino/silk fiber, which I bought almost exactly a year ago. The fiber was about 2/3 lime green, 1/3 black, and I decided it would be neat to try making some self-striping yarn. I split everything into similarly-sized small “bits” (each about 1 staple length), and alternated spinning green ones and black ones when I made my singles.

I chain-plied the singles (my new favourite way to ply) to keep the stripes in the same ‘order.’ After washing and skeining, I have about 280-300m of DKish weight yarn.

As I was spinning, I sort of had the idea that I’d make this yarn into socks. On handling the finished skein – which feels soft and drapey and squishy – I am thinking it might be too fragile for socks. Perhaps a nice slouchy cowl, instead.