Something Old, Something New ...

I'll have my something borrowed, and here's my something blue:


Pattern: Knitted Lace Wedding Garter by Diane Willett
Yarn: DMC Baroque 100% cotton crochet thread
Needles: US 0 (2 mm)
Started/Completed: July 28/August 13

Sorry about the extreme whiteness of my leg -- there's a reason I'm wearing a long gown to my wedding!

This was a quick, relatively easy, satisfying knit. Aside from the lace pattern, it's all in stockinette, so it rolled as you would expect. To get the pretty lace to stay open, I soaked it for several minutes in some water (with just a little Woolite to get it nice and clean) and used lots of pins to block it on a towel -- one pin per outer eyelet, plus a couple at the end. Then, I sprayed the whole thing a few times with some spray starch. It seems to have worked perfectly; it's holding its shape, but it's not too stiff.

For finishing, I used two lengths of 1/4" blue ribbon through the center eyelets and threaded some thin elastic on the inside. It's not especially grabby or tight, which is both good and bad. On the one hand, it won't cut off my circulation; on the other, it may not stay up, so I may have to excuse myself a few minutes before the garter toss to sneak it on.

The shawl continues, although it hasn't seen too much action in the past day (I had to pay full attention to the movie I started watching last night to know what was going on). It will be coming with me to knit night tomorrow, however, so I hope to see you there!

Technical Difficulties

I have been trying to post for several days now but kept running into power issues. You may have heard that we had some pretty severe storms here in Western Pennsylvania last Thursday. It took me an hour and 15 minutes to make the nine-mile trip home from work -- only to discover that there was no power. I packed a bag quickly and then turned around to stay at my parents' for the night. The power did come back on at home at about 4 in the morning, but then last night we came home from dinner out only to discover it was out again -- and somehow neither of us had managed to remember to bring our house keys (we'd gotten out through the garage), so we were completely locked out. Fortunately my parents were still awake, so we spent the night in my brother's room. Now everything appears to be back to normal, and I can finally tell you about the most recently completed pair of socks:

Pattern: Embossed Leaves Socks by Mona Schmidt (Interweave Knits winter 2005/Favorite Socks)
Yarn: Koigu KPPPM (100% merino), colorway P531, two skeins
Needles: two US 1 (2.5 mm) 12" Addi Turbo circs
Started/Completed: June 21/August 8
Mods: same as the last pair

You probably remember the story of the first sock of this pair, so I won't recount it for you again here. It took me a little while to locate another skein of this (as far as I can tell) discontinued colorway, and you can see that the two skeins were clearly from different dyelots:

I'm pretending I don't really care, although I'm going to wash the darker sock a few times to see if it'll lighten a bit so that the difference won't be nearly as obvious.

This was the third pair of Embossed Leaves I've knit, and I think I'm done with this pattern for the time being. I still love it, especially how fast it knits up, but I'm pretty sure I could knit this pattern in my sleep now and I'm ready for something a little different.

Guess what else is done and is blocking?

That there is my garter, knit in crochet cotton. I washed it, pinned it, and sprayed it with a little starch so it will hold its shape. Once it's dry, I'll sew it together and put in the blue ribbon and elastic so I can give you a truly final report.

Knitting on the shawl continues (and I've spared you another picture because it looks much the same as it did the last time you saw it, only larger). I'm now in the middle of my 13th repeat of the main chart; I made it through approximately 11.5 repeats with my partial skein, which leads me to believe the pattern vastly overestimates the yardage needed for this shawl. For laceweight yarn, it specifies 750 yards for a small shawl (12 main chart repeats) and 1200 yards for the large shawl (17 repeats). I had nearly enough for the small shawl with a skein that was less than the 437 yarns it would have been had it been complete. I'm now much more hopeful that I'll have enough yarn for 18 repeats (18 being a significant number in Judaism, so therefore quite appropriate and symbolic for my wedding).

Now that I have power again, I'm off to catch up on my e-mailing and blog reading. Hope you've had a good weekend!

My Something Blue

So. I finished, it was fantastic, and that's all there is to say about that.

And now we return to our regularly scheduled knitting, already in progress ...

J was out late on Saturday night at his bachelor party. Even though I knew he'd likely be home at a ridiculous hour, I couldn't get to sleep at the normal time. Instead, I put a movie in the DVD player and cast on for my garter:

It's a bit slow going (the slowness of knitting lace is compounded here by the cotton thread fighting against me), but you can see I've already got a decent amount done. I think I'm going to wind up making two garters -- one to throw, one to keep -- and as I bought two varieties of crochet thread (this is the thicker of the two here), I think what I'm going to do is knit one out of each kind of thread.

I also think I've decided to try to knit myself a Flower Basket Shawl for the wedding using a laceweight Soysilk. I have 34 days to go -- think I can do it? Or am I just nuts?