Linen Top

I'm done with the linen top. All ends are woven in and the armholes have their crochet edging. I wanted to show a better view of the cables and diamonds so I chose not to show you a mirror picture:



Whew! I'm glad It's over. I kept on knitting the lace tee, finishing the front and the shoulder seams:



At this point, I should be knitting the sleeves, but, I tried it on and it is a bit short! I hate that. If I hadn't done the waist shaping it would be OK, but I will have to undo the shoulder seams, rip and make this longer. Because the neck requires crochet edging, I don't think I'm going to rip all the way down to the neck, only the shoulders. If the neck ends up being too low, I can fudge the crochet edging to fix it. But I don't feel like ripping just now, not after so much work. Besides, I'm going to Mexico this Thursday. I'm not sure I want to bring my knitting, because of the TSA paranoia. And bringing with me something this bulky seems like a bad idea. Maybe I'll just bring the kiri with me.

Purple thing!

What, were you expecting more pretty pink lace? I'm sorry to disappoint you with  dull purple cables. I am currently working on this long forgotten linen top and hope to be finished soon. Sorry about the bad bathroom picture and the hanging ends.



There have been soooo many problems with this project that it's no wonder it took three years.

First, it was a bad dye job (my first dye experiment ever). Then there were gauge adjustments. Then I ran out of yarn so there was some ripping involved along with some design modifications. And then I had to choose: use the rest of the yarn for seams or for armhole edging? Indecision took over and the project went to sleep.

But this late pink lace craze made me turn away from pink things for a little while, so I dug the purple thing out of its confinement and seamed it. All it needs is some armhole edging (no neckline edging for this one).

Sadly, it turns out to have an additional problem: It is heavy and thick. Did I mention that I got the yarn in a Spanish shop that specializes in espadrilles? It is soft, but it feels like wearing an espadrille on your thorax. Am I going to wear it? You bet! Think of all the time, creativity, inventiveness and effort I'd be wasting if I didn't, to say nothing of the eight dollars (cost of yarn and dye) I invested.

Boy am I cheap.

A piece of advice

The back of the lace tee is done and now I am working on the front. It's becoming a very bulky thing to carry around:



Now here's my advice: If your eyes grow tired of knitting pink lace, don't attempt to rest them by knitting even more pink lace!


It's actually peach, but still pink enough. Those are the first 19 rows of a kiri. Instead of Kid Silk Haze I'm using Crystal Palace's Kid Merino.  Like I said before, I've never used mohair and I've never made a shawl. It's beginning to sound like a bad idea. I think I enjoy knitting much more when I don't have to be reading a chart all the time. Plus, with my twisted stitches, those k2togs and ssk are inverted. ¿And the sk2p? That's just weird and doesn't look right. I came up with something I like much better but I cannot even explain it in Spanish, much less in English. Pictures would help, but I'm still stuck with a webcam.

Wavy seam

Thanks for the get well wishes, I'm already feeling better and I've had plenty of time to knit in bed. I'm a bit mad at that seam on the bottom. It's been bothering me ever since I completed it. It has an S shape,which I believe is due to the lace around it. I blocked that lace stripe before seaming, so blocking will not straighten the seam.  It is a simple three needle bindoff and I'm starting to think that maybe a regular backstitch seam would have worked better. It's too late for that, since I am about to begin the shoulder shaping.



By the way, see that waist shaping? That's my own doing, because the pattern called for a straight tee. It's also much shorter than what the pattern calls for because I am a short person. Actually, I'm not that short, but I have a short torso due to scoliosis. Hey, that S shaped seam matches my scoliosis!

Tapeworm no more

I finished the bottom border and the pattern says I should "lightly block it". I've no idea what that means. Either you block something or you don't, so I'm blocking this lace border as best as I can before I join the two ends together.



The pattern calls for a seam when joining the ends, but I will do a three needle bindoff. That's why I used a provisional cast-on. I am tempted to try a graft with my twisted stitches, but I don't want to risk runs. It's going to take some time for the lace border to dry and meanwhile, I'm a little sick, so I should stop playing and get back to bed. I met with some friends last Friday, and one of them brought her kid who was recovering from a severe ear infection. I believe I have the same bug now, incubated for a couple of days and breaking havoc in my throat (which is better than my ear: throat infections are easier to take care of).

Time for a new project!

I finally finished the tubular bindoff of the second sock. I washed them in warm water (the label says I can) and I got lots of bleeding. The water was coming out really dark gray. Is that normal for regia yarn? The previous time I used regia it was a very soft beige and white yarn, so I cannot compare.

In addition to finishing the socks, I started working on the Lace Tee I got last weekend. So far, it looks like a tapeworm:

     

Stitches West

I could not afford not to go to this event, considering I live in the area. I took a class taught by Ginger Luters, called Module Magic: Triangles. I had lots of fun. Note that I had previously made a multidirectional scarf, but I still learned new ways of acheiving a similar effect. And there were also new things I hadn't tried before, so it was all very interesting to me. I was not very satisfied with another class I took, but I know my classmates did enjoy it so I will not complain. And then there was the marketplace: a mind-blowing amount of fibery goods. I tried my best to restrain myself, but I was weak:



These are all going to be "first projects" for me in different categories. The lace tee kit is the only kit I've ever bought in my life. Then there's the Bamboo yarn, a fiber I've never tried. The skeins are a bit messy but I got them with a 30% discount. There's also some Crystal Palace kid merino which I will use to make a lace shawl. Lace is not new to me, but shawls and mohair are. And finally, silk hankies: I've never spun with real silk before, only soy silk. Not included in this picture are the buttons I got for an old jacket of mine.

So, feeling guilt-ridden after all this splurging, I knitted like crazy to finish the baby blanket, and I almost finished the socks for my friend:



I will soon start one of the new projects. Which one? Hmmmmm..... tough choice. Any suggestions?

A sock and a half

Little by little I'm making progress into the second sock: notice that I've turned the heel. I'm getting distracted because I got the yellow yarn I needed to finish the baby blanket:



Sigh. I will still have lots of horrible yellow bouclé when I'm done. Another thing that came in the mail recently was a CD from Pilar.

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She didn't want it anymore so I agreed to exchange it for a book I didn't want anymore. Now, I love Spanish sonnets and I thought that turning them into songs (having tried that myself) was a huge challenge. Mariñas (whom I'd never heard of before) does manage to spoil two of the sonnets by Gala with too much noise, but he did a beautiful job with the rest.

One sock

I finished the first sock with tubular bindoff, and I have both ends woven in. I already casted for the second one. Sandra wanted to know if these socks were for the spouse, but they aren't. They're for a friend who kindly watered my plants while we were away and also picked us up at the airport. She chose the yarn herself.


I'm looking into buying a knitting machine. While on my search, I found this link which I think is awfully funny: a lego icord machine. I found another video of the same machine in in you tube, in case the first link takes too long to upload. This lego machine only makes a four stitch icord, but it really knits!

Sock knitting

I had forgotten to show the spoils from my trip to Germany, where sock yarn is cheaper than in the US in spite of the weak dollar:



Notice that the Lia yarn I got in Spain is included in this picture (top left).You might have guessed that I have, by now, begun knitting another pair of socks:



As for the baby blanket you see under that sock, I tried in vain to find the same yarn and tried a substitution. I am not pleased at all with the results, so I ended up ordering the original yarn by mail. I now have to rip a little: