fussy AND time-consuming!

It is not all blankets and sewing all the time around here, I promise. (Except for I have maybe, a little bit, been fantasizing about English Paper Piecing and all of the beautiful fussy handwork I could do.)

I’m about to embark on a fairly stressful three weeks for Real Life, and it’s going to involve a lot of travel. Going in, I wanted to make sure that I had enough knitting to hold me through the whole block of time, and for that to happen, I had a few criteria:

1) Bigger project – something that would take more than two weeks of substantial knitting time to finish.

2) Portable – I need to be able to travel easily with the half-finished project and all the yarn I might need for it in a carry-on bag.

3) Easy. There is a time and a place for complicated heirloom lace shawls; this will not be it.

I’ve settled on Paulie. It’s a fine-gauge cardigan, in fingering-weight yarn, because apparently one sweater was not enough to get that out of my system.

After washing and hanging my swatch, I discovered that my gauge is much smaller than the original pattern gauge (7.33 spi instead of 6.5), and having learned a valuable lesson about not listening to gauge swatches, I decided to trust it. I kind of love the fabric I get when I knit this on the needles the pattern calls for, and didn’t really want the extra drape I’d get by going up a needle size or two.

Modifying this involved doing a bunch of math, but I think I’m a better person for it.

It’s given me some fairly daunting stitch counts – and I plan to try it on a lot to be sure that I haven’t made a mistake in calculating them, because big numbers make me instictively mistrustful – but I think it’ll work out the way I’d like.

And it’ll definitely take me longer than three weeks, which is the important thing.

cozy-wozy

Apparently late 2011/early 2012 is the time of the blanket for me.

I started this while I was away over the holidays, and it’s been growing ever since I got back. The pattern is the Hourglass Throw, which looks complicated, but is actually fairly easy to remember after the first repeat or so (I don’t have it memorized, but I’m at the ‘quick glances at the chart’ stage). I’m using Custom Woolen Mills Mule Spinner 2-ply, which is the sheepiest yarn I’ve ever worked with, in the best possible way.

finally!

Snow! I don’t have time to play in it today, but I sort of wish that I did.