Capretta

 

Yes!  We've had a few warm, spring-like days recently and one of them happened to be on my day off.  You know I spent the entire day outside, sitting on my butt and knitting.  It was glorious!  Okay, I did get up a few times to do about 40 loads of laundry, but otherwise, I spent the day sitting and knitting outside.  It was awesome!

I finished the pumpkin sweater and started a shawl.  I'll show you the sweater next week.  The fit is... well, let's just say, the sweater has a few problems.  (My problems, not the designers.)  I'll explain more when I show you a photo.  Before I model it, I need to gain about 20 pounds in the bust area and loose about 20 pounds in my arms.  I had a slight issue with my dpn vs my interchangeable needle gauge.  It's a good thing the pumpkin sweater is for Halloween becuase its fit is frightful.

But this shawl....

Oh my!  I'm using Capretta from Knit Picks and it's Heaven!  Pure Heaven!  The yarn is a merino, cashmere and nylon blend and, I just noticed it's also a superwash.  And now that I've noticed that, I'm headed straight to Knit Picks to buy more.  I desperately  need to knit a few more pairs of socks for myself.  Cashmere socks.  How decadent! 

Oh, and the yarn  is currently on sale!  Woo-hoo!

But back to the shawl.... I'm not following a pattern, just making it up as I go.  I knit a while, get bored with a color, add a thin light gray stripe, change colors and repeat.  My plan is to do some kind of lacy edge with the light gray and to knit each color until I run out of yarn.  Each skein has 230 yards so it should be a fairly large shawl.  

The yarn is so nice to knit with and feels so good in my hand, knitting a large, garter stitch shawl shouldn't be a problem.  It's quite meditative.

Unplanned and Forsaken

Nothing is going as planned at the moment.  Absolutely nothing.

Saturday night I spent a few hours organizing, rearranging, and generally moving stuff around in my room until I finally had everything situated so that I didn't have to get up and dig through 1,000 boxes and/or drawers to find my stapler, or a paper clip, the proper size knitting needle, or the next ball of yarn in line to be used.  Life was good and I was going to spend Sunday being productive at my desk and with the camera.

But...

Sunday morning, I woke up to water pouring all over my desk, computer, my to-do list notebook, the file cabinet, two knitting bags and of course, my old fashioned Roladex (because a wet computer wasn't bad enough...)  Somehow, the window frame had sprung a leak and the rain was pouring in. 

So now, everything that was on that side of the room, everything salvageable that is, is in the middle of the room, the stuff in the middle of the room is encroaching on my bed on the other side of the room and I'm just praying I don't break another toe tripping over everything.

Colorburst shawl

All of that to say, instead of photographing the hats I finished recently, I threw myself a good pity party, cast on a new shawl and spent the afternoon and evening engrossed in a good book and knitting while dumping the leak bucket every few hours.

I am absolutely loving the shawl.  There's no official pattern, just a triangular shaped piece of fabric forming by increasing on each side and in the center every other row.  A very simple shawl, but the yarn... the yarn is So not simple.  It's gorgeous!  The yarn is Universal Yarn's Colorburst  in the Horizon colorway.  I picked it up at my weekly Sit and Stitch meeting this past week.  (Shhh - don't tell anyone.  I broke my 'no yarn in' rule the very first week.  Yikes!)  The shawl is supposed to be a Christmas gift but... I'm not so sure I'll be able to part with it.  But then.... Maybe I can.  Did you follow the yarn link?  Did you see Earth and Sky?  OMG!  That is SO me!  My LYS wasn't offering that colorway.  I just may have to break the rules again.

The book I had my nose stuck in (Can you have your nose stuck in a book if you're reading on a Kindle?) was Forsaken by J. D. Barker.  Even if I hadn't been throwing myself a pity party and hiding out in my room, I'd have had a hard time putting this one down.  I loved that Stephen King allowed Mr. Barker to borrow a character and a location from one of his own books.  

The whole time I was reading Forsaken, I was wondering if Barker was a pseudonym of Mr. King's.  The writing style wasn't King's but the topic sure was and the familiar location....  Turns out, Mr. King read an early draft and liked the story enough to share according to Google.  Anyway, I loved the book and was quite surprised by the ending.  I did not see that coming!

And now, it's raining again.  I have to go dump my bucket.

To the beach... or UVA

We've been experiencing unseasonably sunny days and warm temperatures lately.  Normally, April is a month of rain showers with the temperature spiking crazily up and down, but this April has been sunny and the temperature has frequently been hitting the upper 80's.  It's making me crave the beach.  In fact, I'd sell my own children to be at the beach right now.  Luckily for my kiddos, Knit Picks is making it easier for me to at least pretend I'm at the beach.

Knit Picks Stroll Gradient yarn.

Last week, while I was working those crazy hours, a box from Knit Picks showed up on my doorstep and guess what was inside - two skeins of Stroll Gradient.  What does yarn have to do with pretending to be at the beach?  The colorways are Sea You Later and Lifeguard.  Unless they have colorways named Sunburn and Shark (which they don't,) it doesn't get much beachier than that!

I'm knitting a.... well, I'm not even sure what I'm knitting.  The finished piece will be some form of shawl or scarf in a triangular shape. The original plan was to knit a long triangle shape until I'd used up half the yarn then start decreasing.  But I may never do the decreasing.  Instead of making a looong, shallow triangular shawl with the point in the center, I may just make it an even longer triangle with one narrow end and one wide end.  It's a work in progress.

While the design may be a work in progress, knitting with Stroll Gradient is definitely not work!  I've knit with other forms of Knit Pick's Stroll before.  Knit Picks offers practically a full catalog's worth of varieties of Stroll.  There's regular, flat colored sock yarn, there's Tonal, Hand Painted, Glimmer, Tweed and probably a few others I'm forgetting.  But for reasons unknown to me, Stroll Gradient is the softest.  It has the same fiber content as the other yarns so maybe I'm just imagining it being softer.  Maybe it's the beachy themed colors I chose.  Maybe it's that the yarn came in ready-to-knit cakes and I didn't have to pause to wind the skeins.  Whatever the cause, I swear, this yarn is softer than the others and I am having SO much fun knitting with it, even if it looks like I'm knitting a UVA scarf instead of a beach themed masterpiece.



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