A Wonderful Season for Knitting

It’s November! Time to be scared if you’re a turkey!

Typepad (which I use for my blog) was acting funny a couple weeks ago, getting worse until a couple days ago when it was hit with a big Distributed Denial of Service attack, which took down the whole site. They are working hard to get everything sorted, but it won’t look right for a bit. Please bear with us.

So, I abandoned my yellow hat I was knitting out of the last skein of Aunt Mildred’s mohair. I actually threw the yarn away, because that skein was too brittle to knit with. It was a good thing that I didn’t start with that skein, because I would have thought that it all was bad and thrown the whole lot away. 

I started a shawlette out of a skein that I don’t remember where it came from. It was a navy blue hand dyed tonal yarn, which I think had nylon in it, so it must have been a sock yarn. The pattern I chose was Easy Goes It by Michelle Higgins. It was pretty fast to knit, and I added a couple inches to the pattern, because why not.

Then … oh my goodness, look at this beautiful yarn:

It’s gorgeous. I love this yarn! This is the yarn I spun from the 112 grams of hand dyed merino fiber. I wish you could feel how soft it is, how the colors blend together, how perfect this ball of yarn is. 

I decided to knit a hat with it. After perusing the many, many hat patterns available, I decided to knit the Dean Street Hat by Nina Machlin Dayton. I put this hat pattern in my queue before I had my stroke, so over 12 years ago, but never got around to knitting it. Somehow the thought of doing all those cables threw me off knitting it because I thought it required too much attention.  Oh was I wrong.

If I had bothered to simply read the pattern, I would have found that the cables are actually a pattern stitch that is easily done which leads the eye to believe that it makes cables, but it really doesn’t. 

This is now one of my go-to hat patterns. It’s fun to knit, it’s easy, and I love it. And, it was a free pattern.

While I was on a handspun yarn high, I grabbed my skein of lovely goodness that I finished before the yummy brown skein, which was a beautiful rosy golden color with bits of purple and blue. 

I started a pair of fingerless mittens with it. I only have two pairs of fingerless mittens, and I need more, since our house is set to a much lower temperature than in the past due to the high cost of fuel. 

I’ve caked it up and started a pair of Bamboo Field Mitts by Holly Terrell. I’m about halfway up the cuff of the first one. I chose this pattern because it has some texture, but not enough to detract from the beautiful yarn. 

In my last post I said I was going to knit one of the sweaters that has been burning a hole in my stash: Silver Birch by Stacey Warner. I’ve knit it before for Stacey, but I loved the pattern and the yarn so much that I needed to make one for myself.

The yarn is Fleece Artist Chinook, a 100% superwash merino that is just Y*U*M*M*Y. I adore this yarn. I set about to knit a gauge swatch even though I had knit a gauge swatch before for the same exact sweater; I found in running a yarn shop that different skeins of same yarn can vary slightly in weight, especially if they are hand dyed, as this was. Plus I needed a new coaster for my coffee cup. I chose the color Marine.

 

I’m about halfway up the back.

I love the color.

I hope you’re having a good November and staying reasonably warm!