textile dreams – fibery wake up

Now, that’s nothing new around here, isn’t it? After writing that glowing review for Victorian Lace Today a few weeks ago, of course I had to try my hand at one of the patterns. I’m going to make the Maltese Shawl, after finding the appropriate yarn, of course. Thanks to the perfect service from Jürgen Weidner, I soon was in the possession of this:

Three skeins of Malabrigo Baby Merino Lace in Bergamota. The first skein is already wound using my shiny new ballwinder, which I acquired at the same time. The yarn feels really yummy, and it’s a joy to knit up, as you can see here:

I made a provisional cast-on over a spare cable of my Addi Clicks, and acquired a 4.5 mm Addi lace needle after a few rows, since I want to make my life with this as easy as possible, or I’ll never finish. The pointier tips of the lace needles are just what I need here. I have the feeling the gold-coloured finish of the lace needles is a bit less slippery than the normal Addis, but this could well be my imagination.

The picture was made after 3 pattern repeats from 88 comprising the main panel of the shawl, so I’m into this for the long haul. You can also see some big bulky metal rings in the picture. Those are my sorry excuses for stitch markers currently, since my open plastic ones were driving me to distraction with catching the yarn in all the wrong places. I’d like to have some closed rings a bit smaller, but for the moment those will do.

So, don’t expect to get updates of this venture very often, this is definitely not TV knitting, being “real” knitted lace, meaning every row is a pattern row, no dreaming while purling back across the wrong side allowed. But I think the look of the finished lace will be so worth it.

There’s been a challenge to design a 30*30 cm square for a knitted blanket on Ravelry: Verzopft & Zugedeckt. The deadline was April 30, and even if you’re not on Ravelry, you can admire the results here. The requirement to participate was to design a 30*30 cm square that includes some cabling somewhere. Being in love with cables right now, of course I had to play. Can’t be that difficult, right? Sure, only if you insist on making your life more difficult than necessary.

Since the start in February, I’ve been playing around with lots of different possibilities to knit a square. I was trying to get a complicated construction to work, and nothing worked in practice as well as on a piece of paper. So I frogged my sample square, more than once. Not getting anything to work, I gave up and forgot about it for a time, being more than busy elsewhere in the meantime. But the challenge kept nagging me. I didn’t want to give up so easily, and a week before the deadline I finally remembered what I usually forget when I try to design something: that there’s nothing lost by keeping it simple. Designing is as much about leaving out the superfluous as it is about putting features in. So, over the weekend, I finally got to work on a much simpler pattern than all my previous ideas and came up with this one:

I like the effect that the cables seem to be woven in at the top and bottom by horizontal stripes. This really came out like I imagined, which makes me happy.

It always amazes me how even designing something so small and simple ends up taking quite a lot of time. Collecting and discarding ideas, trying things out, working the design and writing up the instructions always takes way longer than I anticipate. A big thank you goes to all the designers out there who do all the work so I can do some mindless knitting without thinking whenever I feel like it. I appreciate their work all the more since I’m trying, little by little, to get into designing my own projects.

A friend of mine asked me for a simple pair of fingerless mitts, nothing too fancy. I wanted to have some fun knitting, so I needed someting with a pattern. Every pattern I looked at had too much patterning, though, so I decided to make up my own as I went along. Here’s the result:

The mittens have a small cable on the back of the hand that’s positioned asymmetrically towards the outside of the hand. The cable grows out of the 2×2 ribbing and is a bit asymmetrical. The effect isn’t as strong as I’d like, since I wanted to emphasize the asymmetry of the design by making the cable asymmetric as well. You can see it a bit better in this progress picture:

So, while I like the result, I’m taking notes for the next time. I’d like to make the asymmetry within the cable stronger, so it really looks intentional and not just a bit wonky. Having the cable pattern run through the ribbing might add some further interest to a fairly plain pattern. Maybe I’ll make another pair, I’d like to have some for myself!

Until now I’ve pretty much successfully avoided projects that needed to match a certain gauge to work, so I never knit any swatches before diving into the project proper. Now, while currently trying to finish up all those wintery projects so I’m prepared when spring finally comes around, I’m dreaming of summer knitting.

After some browsing of the magazines at my LYS I think I made a decision for a cardigan from the current Verena. The model I’m thinking about is the one on pages 6/7. Since this model isn’t available in my size and I want to use a different yarn, I needed to knit some swatches. I’m simply amazed how much difference needle size can make!

The upper swatch is worke with a 3.5 mm needle, the lower one with a 4.0 mm. The lower one hits the target gauge precisely on number of stitches, although the row gauge is still off. But I think I can work around this. I like the way the yarn (Online Linie 214 Senta) knits up with the larger needles, so although I’m currently doing another swatch in a different yarn, I think I’ll go with this. I think I might hate myself for ever deciding to knit something with that many cables before finishing, though.

Now I just need to do the mathematics to make the model fit my size, which will be an adventure for sure. But nothing a few hours with a calculator can’t solve, I guess!