found objects—unearthing the past

as usual, sunday is spinning day here and we had a nice session . . just anne marie and me today; linda was AWOL and susan works retail, so december is just not a good month for her to come to class.

i worked on my briar rose BFL fiber (chris finally has it listed on her site—run!)

which is spinning up a treat—my main challenge with this project is remembering that i’m spinning for a 3-ply yarn, so i need to keep the twist on the lighter side. it’s the kind of fiber you just sit and sigh over while it practically spins itself.
which is what anne marie did all morning (how beautiful is that sweater she’s wearing??).

she got some of the same fiber in two colorways this week and has been chomping at the bit to spin it, so she brought it along. ok, now i have fiber envy . . . i am lovin’ that colorway (number 110, i think, or maybe 118?)

doesn’t it look like a pool of fire? i’m squirming, i tell ya.
so the two of us sat, silently spinning and periodically saying, “wow.”
it really is that nice.

(linda, we decided you absolutely need some of this fiber to cure your recent run of dissatisfying experiments).

yesterday was dark and snowy all day here and a perfect day to knit. i listened to a book i just loved reading, astrid and veronika, by linda olsson. it made me want to move to a lonely farm in the arctic circle.

just kidding.
but you’ll know what i mean if you read it.

anyway, i worked on several projects throughout the day, some of them for gifts.

here’s an old favorite—the multidirectional diagonal scarf by karen baumer.

while we were in albany, we had an afternoon of carousing with my mom, driving all over creation after the cemetery visit, sightseeing through small historic areas as we made our way back to the shopping area. we ended up on shaker road, where stopped in at the trumpet hill yarn shop to poke around a little. my mom had never seen noro yarns before, and they had several things made up in them which caught her attention. she couldn’t get over how the yarn changes from one color to the next (don’t you just love standing back and watching this kind of epiphany??).

so, while my brain stews over a couple of other projects i have to make decisions about, and since i have a few balls of noro on hand in one of the colorways she was admiring, i thought i’d start something for her in it. i know what everyone else is knitting right now in noro (and i love that project), but i don’t think the stripes are her style. plus, this project shows off noro’s traits to equally quintessential effect.

i worked on the lacunae sock and got it to the point where i can begin the heel . . . all is well there—the pattern is written and a test knit is underway. so far it gets rave reviews from male spectators in the vicinity.

i also started these denim blue-gray socks for my nephew in araucania ranco, which i find to be almost identical to lorna’s laces shepherd sock (though i don’t know yet if it wears as well; we’ll find out this winter). my nephew wears black almost all the time so these are a little light-colored for him, but i think they’d be nice with jeans. or i might have time to dunk them in a black dye bath when they’re done. the thing is, i had the yarn in the house, so this is what i’m using. there are very few yarns around here that i would send off to a relative as a gift—i like to give them things that don’t need a lot of special handling (it’s a gift, not a penance), and this yarn fits the bill.

so, the other night when i went to look up the noro yarn in my stash, i checked the box in my workroom where i’ve kept some FOs from previous years to see if maybe i had one of these scarves already made up.

i didn’t. but i did find something i’d forgotten about entirely.

i’ve had this thing in that box for years; it’s an old experimental project that i wasn’t satisfied with then, but now i can’t remember exactly why. it’s a kind of scarfy thing, but big enough to wrap around my shoulders, and i eagerly pulled it out because i think it’s just what i need to keep warm around the house.

i knit this about eight years ago and i know for sure the main object here was to play with the contrast of solid/sheer fabric.

it’s knit from gorgeous K1 C2 yarns—the sheer parts are douceur et soie, my very favorite
kid mohair/silk blend, and the opaque parts are knit in the now-discontinued richesse, a merino/cashmere/silk blend (to die for).

i think when i finished it, i wasn’t happy because the triangles on the ends were asymmetrical and the whole thing was a little more over-the-top than i’d planned. i was managing a graphics department in an investment bank at the time and maybe the surrounding affected my opinion?? i just can’t remember. i do see a mistake in the stitching in one small spot that i must have noticed only after binding off—it’s the kind of thing i would correct if i saw it in time to fix it.

you can see it in this photo but i’m not gonna tell you where. i never even wove the ends in or blocked the piece. when i saw it the other night i thought, hmm—let’s do something with this. so yesterday morning i soaked it and pinned it out (that’s when i finally saw the mistake).

today when anne marie came over we unpinned it (sorry, i meant to take blocking photos this morning, but we got greedy) and i’ve been prancing around the house in it ever since. it’s perfectly warm while weighing just about nothing. nice.
it might even work with my new purple ski jacket, though i think i’d also like a multi-colored scarf to go with that (after the christmas knitting is done)

i always find mohair to be what i call “the real warm”. it doesn’t itch me, thank goodness, though i know a lot of people find that to be a problem. it’s light, but whenever i drape even a sheer mohair fabric over my lap, i feel a cocoon of warmth right away. not sticky, hot warm, but nice warm. just-right warm.

it reminds me that i’ve had an idea in the back of my head for years to make a sort of bathrobe-type mohair garment to wear in the house. don’t laugh—i just might do it.

now, i was gonna do a yarn parade today, too, but this post is already long enough. i’ll show you yarn starting tomorrow—i’ve gotten some new things in the mail this past week from our wonderful dyer friends and i want to show them off.
off to do more knitting now.