A Bluestocking Knits

With Heigh, Ho, the Wind and the Rain

This afternoon, the view from our bedroom windows was this --

The photo doesn't even do it justice, the intensity of the green lushness on the hills, the clear cleanness of the air, and the movement of the clouds after the rain.  (This is Aberdeen to the left, Mt. Nicholson in the middle, and Central and Wan Chai to the right.)

We went back to Paris Cotton Singlets in the afternoon, looking for this Jaeger booklet,

but it was apparently the only one they did not have, so I ordered it online later from Woodland Woolworks.  I've coveted the cardigan version of this cover pattern for a long time....

And here is Ostrich Plume so far --

Sorry for the rather ghoulish lighting, but in fact by the time I took this photo, the scene from the same window was pure white.  We are truly up in the clouds here.

Next!

Now, on to the "Ostrich Plume Lace Throw" from "Vogue Knitting Baby Blankets".  This pattern is really charming.  I want to make something for the end of our bed, or for the armchair that I hope to get (soon!) for our bedroom at home.

I have a great many balls of Rowan "Calmer", a lovely springy cotton/microfiber blend, in #462 Chiffon, a soft mauve.  I don't know how far this will go in the ostrich plume pattern, so I have to work a kind of sacrificial swatch -- knit to the end of a ball and calculate the area of the swatch, so that I know how big I can make the throw.  (I brought this yarn from home.)

What do you know, that high school math does come in handy sometimes!

Thoughts on "Ene's Scarf"

Finished "Ene's Scarf" yesterday morning.  All things considered, it is a fairly easy knit, for lace.  The main pattern is easy to memorize, thus I found myself daydreaming and adding a yo where I wasn't supposed to, but the mistakes are easy to catch (the pattern will be obviously out of sync at the exact point of the mistake) and easy to fix.

It's a little difficult to visualize how the scarf will come together at first, but when you understand that the garter stitch "edging" is actually the top edge of the shawl (the hypotenuse, if you will), it becomes clear.

 

The Merinogold is very pleasant to work with, very soft and springy.  It splits occasionally, but not enough to be annoying -- it doesn't splice very well, but I was just working with Silk Garden, which makes a really sturdy, practically invisible join (the clingy mohair or the silk?), so the merino had a hard act to follow.  It does have a strange mothbally smell when wet, but that shouldn't be a problem once it is dry.

I like the cast-on, the knitted method (as opposed to the usual cable cast-on) used with yarn doubled.  This cast-on usually looks a bit limp, but with the doubled yarn it has an interesting almost braided twist look.  I wasn't terribly impressed with the sl 1 knitwise, K2 tog, psso combination -- my psso stitches always look a bit straggly -- and would recommend trying sl next 3 knitwise, K3 tog tbl as a possible alternative.  I would also recommend swatching on the lace pattern instead of st st, as I tend to knit a lot looser in lace (why did I forget this?), and my scarf came out a bit bigger than the original.

One of the most fun things about this pattern is that even though it starts off with a rather appalling 375 sts, the decreases come thick and fast, so by the time of the second repeat of Chart 3, it felt like I was really sailing along.  It was amazing, how much quicker the chart repeats became!

"Ene" Half Way

Went to Cheer Wool this afternoon, to get more of the merino for "Ene's Scarf" -- don't know what happened with my math, as 125m x 6 = 750m, which should have been plenty for the 320m x 2 = 640m of the lace weight silk blend in the original, but it was not, by far.  Anyway, there were four balls left on the shelf, so I hope that it's enough.  The girls were absolute terrors -- I keep hoping despite all evidence that they will be calm and well-behaved enough to let me browse in a yarn shop for ten or fifteen minutes.  Luckily there were at least three salesladies there, and they whisked me through buying and bagging in about a minute.  I don't know if they were sympathetic or just worried about their shop, but the end result was much the same!

Hard to believe that these little sweethearts were the same screaming monsters of less than an hour before!

[This photo has been removed.  Sorry.]

So this is where "Ene" is, nearing the end of the second repeat of Chart 3.  It is a bit of a slog at the beginning, with so many stitches to get through just to finish one row, but it's much faster now, not only with the lacier pattern in the main section, but also with the advancing decreases.