FO: Graham

Being a monogamous knitter can have its drawbacks. While I knit sweaters, I will usually have a portable project going as well, but when I finish I decide that it's time to focus my energy and finish my large project. As a result, I haven't tended to have another project going when I finish my sweater, leaving me with knitting hangover. Predictably, when I finished my Gemini tee last week, I had a bad knitting hangover. I wanted something to work on, but I just could not find anything that really caught my attention. It's summer and I don't have many "summer" yarns; there are few items I will need this winter. I thought about working on some Christmas presents, but I wasn't ready to give a project the attention to detail a gift needs. I needed something mindless and quick.


Thus I present, the Graham hat:

The yarn is Malabrigo worsted. I lost the ball band, but as best I can tell, the color is Periwinkle. I bought this yarn all the way back in 2011 to make a hat for a friend, then decided to use some Knit Picks yarn instead. I love my Rikke hat, knit in Rios, but it's starting to look a little ragged (it needs a date with a sweater stone), so I decided to make another hat. It's really slouchy and the color is a really nice jewel tone purple. I'm trying to add more cohesion to my wardrobe by paring it down to neutrals and jewel tones, so I think this hat will be a go-to for me this winter. It also did an excellent job of curing me of my sweater hangover, and I immediately cast on for some Jaywalker socks when it was finished.



The yarn is KP Felici in Tiki and I have also had it since 2010-2011 as best I can tell. I have a lot of self-striping yarn in the stash so I am attempting to use up some of it. I just completed the heel turn, using the Fish Lips Kiss heel method for the first time. I haven't tried it on yet, but it looks promising! What are you working on today?

FO: Summerflies

I hope that everyone had a lovely start to their July. We spent the weekend of the 4th in Oregon camping in the Columbia River Gorge and my birthday on the beautiful coast.

Over the long weekend I finished a shawl! Since I haven't blogged much I hadn't talked about it before, but I cast on a Summerflies shawl to avoid working on my Gemini tee. Before this year, I really thought I didn't like shawls. I had knit one, The Age of Brass and Steam shawl, which has been worn exactly twice. But boredom with large projects and seeing beautiful shawls on other blogs has created an inexplicable urge within me that I am still loathe to admit. Just like the Oscilloscope shawl earlier this year, I had been feeling the urge to cast on for something with some beautiful plant fiber yarn, but I kept trying to rationalize my way out of it. I don't like shawls. I don't like knitting them and I don't like wearing them. Then I found myself at Fibers, Etc, looking around for the perfect skein. I settled on Sublime Baby Silk & Bamboo in Roly Poly.

This yarn is gorgeous. I was drawn to it because it was cool to the touch in the store and I liked the shiny cool grey color. I tried to put off casting on, but later that day, I found a Summerflies shawl on Ravelry in a similar-looking color and it was all over.

The shawl itself was a pretty quick knit. I left out the "butterflies" in favor of plain stockinette and added some extra rows of the latticework. The bind off felt like the longest knitting hours of my life, though. After the last stockinette row, I had 17g of yarn left. Each row at that point was taking 5g of yarn (400 stitches is a lot) and I assumed that the picot edge might take twice the yarn of the normal row. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I realized about halfway through the BO that I was going to run out. So I ripped back and added an extra BO stitch between the picots here and there. Still not enough. Tried again. Didn't work that time, either. Resigned to my fate, I ripped all the way back and bound off twice the number of plain stitches between the picots (from 3 to 6) which worked like a charm. It made binding off quite a bit faster, I like the look, and I had yarn to spare at the end.

I finished my bind off on the car ride to the gorge and wore the shawl all through the long weekend, despite the ridiculous heat. I admit I'm quite taken with it and am thinking about some other shawls I would like to knit... if I ever finish this Gemini (I started the bottom ribbing today, whee!)