A New (School) Year

As Kate says, summer is over. Time to get back to blogging! And what a summer it has been. Vacation was had, company descended, living rooms were renovated (at least mine). I felt shell shocked by the end of it. Now, work is picking up, home life is settling down, and I'm breathing a sigh of relief.

On the knitting front, I am about 90% done with two different pairs of socks. Ooh, that's bad, more unfinished projects. The weekly knitting group at work will be starting up again next week, so I'm hoping that will take care of them. When I knit at home in the evening, I sometimes tackle ambitious projects, but at knitting group there's too much fun. If I work on anything complicated there, I'll mess it up for sure. So I almost always fall back on a good sock project.

The ambitious project for the summer was my first piece of lace knitting. A simple one, but still, it's lace. It's a half circle shawl made from lace weight alpaca in a variegated purple color which I bought at the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool festival just before I moved East. It was knit from the edges in, so it started with almost 700 stitches on size 10.5 needles and 14 rows of garter stitch. Then the stitches were decreased by half -- the garter stitch is a slightly "gathered" border at the bottom edge of the shawl. The rest is mainly stockinette stitch, with a little bit of YO/k2tog fancy work to give a little pattern, and decreases to make the half circle shape. The lace effect comes mainly from the large amount of stretching out you're supposed to do in the blocking. In the end, though, the shawl is very translucent, it's almost gossamer in the magazine photo. So pretty. It's pinned out on my cutting table right for the blocking. With luck I'll finish that this weekend.

Now I'm starting on the EZ sweater that the blue Cotton-Ease sweater (pictures posted last year on this blog) was a trial run for. For this sweater I wanted to see if I could do the decreases in the EZ pattern using differences in gauge instead of actually decreasing the number of stitches. I have a bulky LanaLoft in a spring green which is working out to about 3 stitches per inch, a worsted weight called Shannon in variegated green and brown tones at 4 stitches per inch, and some medium brown Noro wool/silk in a DK or fingering weight at 7 stitches per inch. My plan is to start at the bottom with the LanaLoft and knit the body and sleeves. At the first decrease, instead of decreasing, I'll switch to the Shannon, which should decrease the size of the work by the right amount. At the second decrease I'll do an actual decrease, since I only have the three yarns, but then at the last decrease I'll switch to the Noro, which should take it down by the right amount again. I don't know, for some reason it tickles me to do this. Wish me luck!