Etherknitter

Alpaca Baby Shawl

This knitter's sock rut has taken a summer vacation.

The mindless knitting substitute was the Alpaca Baby Shawl.  Although it is neither alpaca, nor a shawl, the busy knitter will not hold these inconsistencies against such a delightful pattern.

Old Shale (Feather & Fan) seems to have taken over the world as defined by Ravelry. 

Yarn:  Tess Designer Yarns Superwash merino  ~880 yards
Needle:  Knitpicks Harmony #7 on increasingly large cables after initial Lantern Moon #7 dpns

Size:  34" x 34" blocked.  It could have gone slightly larger or slightly smaller.

Mods:  I closed the hole in the middle from the cast-on with the yarn tail.  One could also have started with Emily Ocker's cast-on. 

Rejected mod:  One knitter on Rav insisted that M1 was the only correct increase to use.  Barbara Walker uses the KFB increase in her Stitch Dictionary pattern for Old Shale.  That's authoritative enough for me. It looked fine.  

I had enough yarn to do another stockinette section repeat.  But it would not have been much larger, and the WIP was telling me that it needed to be done.  I also didn't think that adding more weight to a baby blanket was necessarily a good thing.  And the points would not have been as decoratively pointy.

I loved this yarn.  It was smooth and soft, and felt wonderful as it slipped through fingers.

Finishing the mindless knit forces me back to the mindful knits.  I've accepted the challenge of a mini-KAL with Manise and Knitigator.  They persuaded me to pick up a woefully and long-neglected Leaf Lace shawl.  That slows down progress on Swallowtail, but she doesn't mind.  Much.

Noro socks RIP

The before and after pictures are always satisfying.

Noro Kureyon sock yarn hurt my hands.  It took months for the ache to resolve.  There were knots in the yarn as well as in the muscles.  They have lived in Time Out for over a year.  Then I found a damning post in Knitter's Review forums.  Tales of sock yarn woe and deceit included a story of early holes in Noro sock yarn socks. 

The only task left is to wash and reskein.   This shawl (Rav) has been knit with the yarn.  I needed both pushes to do the deed, and now the deed is done.   (Frogging is a very difficult reality for packrats.)

I've thought about this picture for awhile.  The John Hancock building  presents itself as a building with no edges.  The blue sky confirms this.  I was on Newbury Street, with late 1800s and 1900s buildings with slate turrets in the foreground. 

Pavlov's dogs, summer, 2009

The kids know EXACTLY where the water splashes when the mouth spits.  They gather, huddled on the target zone.  They have no respect of personal boundaries at a time like this.  Push, shove, then screams of delight at being on the right spot at the right time, and from the cold shock of water, and from achieving some important definition of childhood success.

Wash, rinse, repeat every thirteen minutes. 

Crown Fountain, Milennium Park, Chicago, designed by Jaume Plensa.

I am knitting, spinning nonstop. 

Swallowtail, halted in midrow.  (Bad knitter!  Bad!)  Alpaca Baby Shawl in the round, 415 stitches per row and increasing.  

Spinning Amy Boogie's Thunderstorm roving, BFL.  Prosaic naming...how do our fiber vendors do it, hank after hank after braid?  I see the colorway as Bruised Spinner, or Postsurgical Wound.  Good thing I don't sell fiber.

What I did on my summer vacation, part II

Monday:  The Art Institute of Chicago, the new Modern Wing.  The collection is perfect.  Pictures without flash are allowed. 

Picture of niece knitting:

Etherniece has waited a year for the second knitting lesson.  She holds the needles herself.  She forms her own stitches.  We reconvene several days later.  She wants me to fix the snaggles in her knitting.  I hear my teaching coming from her six year old lips:  "All knitters make mistakes.  Even experienced knitters make mistakes." 

She looked at my ball of Smooshy Pansy Go Lightly, and asked how much it cost.  I told her about $25.  She looked thoughtful.  "How many of those balls do you have?"  I laughed.  "More than you can count."  She guessed a thousand.  "I don't know, Etherniece, maybe more than that."  Her second guess was a thousand billion.  I realized I have no idea how many of those balls I have at home, so we compromised on a number that gave her some practice in counting upwards.  How does one so young already understand the concept of stash?

The pink swatch, bottom part, is hers.  (I fixed the snaggles on the top 2 rows so that she could keep going.)  The blue swatch is all hers.  I am humbled by how fast the young brain learns.  The pink yarn is donated from Auntie's stash.  The blue yarn is from a LYS.  I took her in the store, wondering if I was giving her a gateway drug.  ("The first time is free, honey.")  I wanted her to be invested in the yarn choice.  She had a choice of Encore or Mission Falls wool.  She chose wool.  And the blue was without input from me.  Really.

She looked at the yarn on the counter,  as I trotted out $7 plus change.  Then she looked up at the woman at the cash register, and asked, "Do you make money here?" 

You just have to laugh.  I told her that might not be a polite question to ask people. 

We ate:

EtherMere took us to Spiaggia Cafe, and to the restaurant in the Modern Wing at the Art Institute, and the Pierrot Cafe.

We relaxed:

We laughed until our tummies hurt:

EtherMere took us to LookingGlass Theatre's production of The Arabian Nights.  The play starts with two drummers who commandingly gather your attention, force you to the edge of your seat, and keep you there for the rest of the play.  We know what happens to Scherezade.  That matters not a whit as the stories within stories took us to other times, other lives, into other hearts.  Go, if you can.

I knit with the swiftness of many hands:

Since I am working on many projects, none were finished.  (I forgot to mention that minutes after I wrote the Kitchen Sink post, I cast on for the Swallowtail shawl.)  The yarn (SeaPearl, from BriarRose Fibers, Rhinebeck 2008) is fingering merino/tencel.  It holds shape well, and drapes beautifully.  That means the WIP looks less like a lace snarl than usual.

The last photo cracked me up.  The Art Institute has an exhibit that featured architectural drawings by famous people.  The Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum concept sketch (1990) was created by a man who had to have been a closet lace knitter:

Who?  Frank Gehry, of course.