A Pair of Wings

Here's the latest progress on Butterfly. I'm knitting both bodice panels at once. That's why there are two balls and a big split in the middle of my knitting. It's actually two pieces. Don't they even look a little like wings? No? Must be my overactive imagination taking hold again.

The cast on edge of these pieces will be the seam across the midriff. The cast off edges, when I get to them, will be the seam across the back, running right about parallel to the bottom of the bra back. The split in the middle is where my head will go. It's an interesting construction technique. I can't wait to see how it works out in the end.

There is a third piece, a big body tube knit in the round that joins to these two bodice pieces. I've knit two balls of that but didn't take a picture. It's not much to look at. Just imagine something that looks much like the picture above, except circular and on cable needles. Anyway, that means I've knit four out of nine balls and am working on balls five and six.

I'm still a bit concerned that I will run out of yarn. This is a fairly rare yarn, too, so it could end up being a problem. I'm going to play ostrich for now and hope my half-assed math will hold true enough to get me through to the end.

The yarn is Wick from Knit One Crochet Too. It's got a lovely, slick, cool feel, and it's very stretchy. It's so stretchy, in fact, that I have to watch how I hold the yarn while knitting. If I pull it in my patented death grip, it can really distort the stitches and mess with my gauge.

This is the one I'm knitting with the Jane Austen fans over on ravelry. We're reading/discussing Persuasion while knitting. I've read ahead of our scheduled chapters because -- well, how can you not? Especially knowing about that beautiful payoff when Anne and Wentworth finally get together. This book always makes me a little sniffly, especially that incredible love letter at the end. All I need is the first line, "I can listen no longer in silence," and my heart begins to leak out of my eyes. Great stuff. We should all get a love letter like that now and again. ...sigh...

I love this book, and I'm happy to say that it's restoring my reading mojo in some small way. That recent string of meh books was a bit of a downer. But I've got Persuasion and the Iain Pears book on my bedside table, and they're both satisfying in that meaty, emotional way a well-written book can be sometimes.

In fact, I think I might have to go read myself to sleep now. Tuck me in with some Captain Wentworth, baby!

PS. to Dreamsweaver. You think that's strange? You should read my slush pile! Seriously, though, Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for lit-rah-chure. He doesn't suck.

Something Old, Something Blue

Here's the Jojoland Merino-Cashmere sock in progress. This yarn was purchased at Stitches Midwest for the insane bargain price of $6 a ball. At that price, I figured I should buy enough in every colorway to make a pair of socks (or anklets, in the case of the lone ball of pink-red-fuschia). And if the colorway doesn't satisfy, I can always dye them black.

I'm kind of wishing I'd bought enough to make a sweater. A nice, close-to-the-skin, cloudsoft turtleneck. I don't know how this stuff will hold up as socks, but I can tell you it feels like a dream when you're knitting it.

This is my carry-around sock right now. I'm not doing a whole lot of sock knitting right now this week because I am sick of socks. I am so sick of socks after knitting nothing but socks for two months that I literally can't stand to work the double points anymore. Even at stitch and bitch Wednesday, with my much-beloved STR -- a yarn which has the power to instantly drain my wallet and max out my credit cards -- I kept setting the needles down and just looking around.

I never put my needles down at SnB. Things have reached a pretty pass if I'm not knitting at knitting group!

So I started something new to try to counteract the sock doldrums. It started off innocently enough. I'll just make a gauge swatch, sez I, so I'm ready to hit the ground running when the Persuasion KAL starts.

Of course, once you get gauge, who can resist the urge to cast on?















This is the beginning of Butterfly, a Katie Himmelberg pattern out of the Spring 2007 Knitscene. I belong to the Jane Austen readers group on Ravelry, and we've decided to read Persuasion together and knit something a lady or an officer might wear. My first thought was to knit a red horseshoe lace duster with a sailor collar -- red coat, get it? I've had the yarn stashed for a year now and haven't even swatched it yet.

But then I realized...Fulmar. I've already got one very large knitting project on the calendar for this fall. Everything else should be simple, a pressure valve when I need mindless knitting and a break from the complexity of that very complex Starmore pattern.

So, Butterfly it is.

Butterfly is a simple short-sleeved shirt with an empire waist, a V-neck with a small 3-button placket, and sleeves that look like cap sleeves but are actually just the drops from the wide shoulders. It's a clean, simple, easy piece with Regency-inspired shaping. I think Jane would like it very much indeed.

This pattern has made me do math -- ick! ptooey! -- including calculating square inches and redrawing pattern lines to accommodate the yarn I have. The pattern calls for an amount of yarn which is clearly hypothetical. grumble, grumble....

Details on my adventures with the calculater will follow.