A Good Weekend

It was a good knitting weekend.  First, here are some photos Peter took of my alpaca lace shawl:

I love how it turned out!  The thing I liked most in the picture in the magazine was the tranlucent quality of the shawl, and it really did turn out that way!  It's very lightweight, but the alpaca is much warmer than you'd think.

I also got to go to the yarn shop this weekend.  A nice little place in Eldersburg called the Knitter's Nest, which K1Frog2 will recognize as the place with the good sushi restaurant next door.  Do you remember that when we were there, a woman I know who is a spinner showed up?  Well, last week I helped her husband, who works at the College, with a computer problem which had really stumped him and made him a little desperate.  Being a nice guy and knowing the weaknesses of fiber addicts as he does, he bought me a gift certificate from the yarn shop.  It made my day to get that in my mail at work.

In preparation for my visit to the yarn shop, I spent Saturday morning organizing the stash, balling up what needed to be balled up, and figuring out what I already have and what just needed a little more to go with it to make a complete project.  You know, trying to buy things I actually "need" rather than just more random odds and ends that catch my eye at the moment.  The startling revelation was that I have 10 projects for which I have all the materials waiting in the stash!  I alternate between being stressed out that I really need to be knitting more, and being happy knowing that I will be well supplied with projects for quite some time to come.  The only real dilemma is what to pick first.

But really, I've already made that decision.  It's the green EZ sweater with the gauge-change decreases with which I have already regaled my faithful readers.  I worked on that over the weekend and have already made my first modifications to the plan.  It starts at the bottom, and a few inches into it I realized that the somewhat tight knit (to get the gauge I want) of the stockinette in the bulky yarn causes it to curl up pretty badly.  I tried putting a row or two of garter stitch at the bottom edge, but wasn't happy with it until I broke down and started with a couple inches of ribbing.  I don't usually make sweaters with ribbing at the bottom edge because I don't like the way it pinches in and makes it look balloon-like (not a flattering shape for some of us), so then I decided to just rib it all the way up.  Normally I also don't think the clinginess of a completely ribbed sweater is flattering on me, but I think the bulky will counteract the clinginess and it'll look okay.  That's the theory I'm sticking with for now.  So I have a few inches of the body done.

But then in working with the stash I also unearthed a couple of UFO's which are so close to done I couldn't resist.  One is the blue EZ sweater I made last year.  Photos were posted.  All that was left was to weave in the thread ends.  And it's just the right weight for this early fall weather we are having.  How could I not do it?  See how much I hate finishing work?  It took about 10 minutes.  The other UFO is the brown Moonlight Mohair shawl made with EZ's pi are square pattern, also described previously in this blog.  It was about halfway around the last row.  Unfortunately, the last row has upwards of 350 stitches, I'm making a picot edging which means I'm knitting 8 stitches for every two that are bound off, and I'm pretty sure I don't have quite enough yarn to finish it.  Now you see why I put it down.  My one hope is that my sister-in-law, who was with me when we found the mohair for $2 a ball and bought about 3 times as much as I did, still has a ball of the brown in her stash.  If she doesn't, I'll have to figure out how to fake that last 8" or so of the edging.  Dang, it's going to be close.

If only every weekend could be so full of knitting!