A Bluestocking Knits

Thoughts on the Vintage Velvet Scarf

I suspect that wearing this scarf a few times will probably offset most of the annoyances I've had with it.

It is of course Vintage Velvet from Scarf Style.  To begin with, the famous Muench Touch Me chenille is strangely not that pleasant to knit with.  It is extraordinarily soft, but after a while the hard core of the yarn feels stiff and unyielding.  I got so weary of it that I let it sit for -- well, I hate to say it, but at least a year at a stretch, I think.

I also found it very difficult to actually see what I was doing, although that may also have been due to the dark color and the fact that towards the end I was watching men's short-track speed skating much of the time.

Here is Lee Jung-Su, Sung Si-Bak, and Lee Ho-Suk of South Korea ahead of Americans Apolo Ohno and J.R. Celski and Canadian Olivier Jean (photo from the Daily Mail) in the 1500m finals, in Vancouver on February 13.  That was an exciting race!

But the scarf was beautifully soft once worked up, and Laura and Julia were both enchanted with it.

So then the other day I tossed the scarf into the washing machine -- had heard from a number of sources how nerve-wracking the process was, and so I was actually rather blasé about it.

The scarf was quite stiff coming out of the washing machine -- like a piece of felted wool.  I hurriedly chucked it into the dryer and left it there perhaps 15 minutes or so, which relaxed it a bit, but it still felt oddly hard when I laid it out to dry. 

Laura came across it and wailed "It's not soft any more!"

  

It did soften up considerably in the day or two it took to dry, although the cable up the center took a surprisingly long time to stop feeling like a length of nylon rope.

A number of ends worked their way out, and a couple of middles in places, worming here and there despite not doing so at all as I was knitting.

With five skeins it was just 60 in. before felting -- much too short, I thought -- and even shorter than that afterwards.  By dint of hard stretching, I did get it to 64 in. along the edge.  I was relieved to see, though, that the wonderful architectural point at the ends was still there. 

It is very nicely soft now, though, and I had to take it forcibly away from Laura this evening, or she would have worn it to bed.  It still feels a bit short to me, although I suppose it's really more a decorative accessory than functional, and its decorativeness is undeniable!

Thoughts on the "Backyard Leaves" Scarf

Here is Backyard Leaves, all finished and sewn up, ready to send off to its recipient and only a few days after Christmas!

This scarf is not exactly hard, but it certainly is complex.  It took me almost two hours to do the first repeat, and I thought I'd really gotten myself into a project that would take forever, but as so often happens with lacy patterns, once I could see what was happening, it all started to make sense.  I never did memorize it, and had the pattern next to me all of the time, but often that was just to reassure myself that it was going well. 

My gauge was quite different than it would have been with the merino of the original, and I did extra repeats in an attempt to compensate for the finer gauge -- the scarf ended up being about 4 1/2 inches wide and a rather gasp-inducing 100 inches long, but it is so fine and soft that wrapping it three or four times around my neck was in fact a pleasure, and it's warm without being stifling.  I'm not entirely pleased with the join in the middle, and I can't help thinking that it wasn't the best way of going about it, design-wise, but merely the least complicated -- luckily, with all of the wrapping that will be necessary to wear it, one little seam will never be noticed!

The Cashmere/Seta is perhaps a touch too fine to show off the leaf pattern to its best advantage, but it is certainly wonderfully soft.  I like the fact that the modified I-cord edging smooths out the edges, too, as so often garter stitch and the wrong side of stockinette make a yarn feel a bit rougher than it did in the ball.  This yarn is so soft that the leaves don't stand out as much as with the original merino, but ... did I mention how soft it is?!

Merry Christmas, Helen!

A Slippery Path

I am making pretty good progress on my Christmas present project -- I have to say, though, that it is handsome but dull.  (Unlike its recipient, who is handsome and interesting.)  So, in order to relieve the monotony, I swatched another Christmas present, which I can in fact show, since I already asked that recipient if the color was all right.  This is the Falling Leaves scarf from Scarf Style.  It is quite a complicated little thing -- the chart looks like a Rorschach blot, bits sticking out all over everywhere.  Still, it comes out like this,

which is quite nice.  The yarn is Filatura di Amigo Cashmere/Seta, a lovely squishy merino/silk/cashmere blend, that I got from Joy, who was de-stashing.

So, two new projects, on top of my Ostrich Plume blanket and Beginner's Triangle, and a Multi-Directional Scarf that was supposed to be using up the last bits of my Silk Garden #88 but stalled when I realized that it wasn't long enough and I haven't found any more of this now-discontinued color yet.  And still, my mind kept wandering ...

This is Jaeger Shetland Aran in Charcoal Tweed, and I couldn't stop thinking about it.  I told myself that I'd just feel it.  Then I told myself I'd just hold it for a little while.

Then I just swatched it, to see how it worked up. 

And last night, I couldn't sleep for some reason.  I watched the first part of "The Virgin Queen" on Masterpiece Theatre, went to bed, tossed and turned, then at about two o'clock found myself casting on for Cinxia.

Lesson: Sleep deprivation is hazardous to the WIP pile.  Still, I'm really liking those little colored nubs in amongst the gray tweed....

Thoughts on "Forbes Forest"

Here is "Forbes Forest," finished and blocked --

The pattern is fairly simple for cabling, and easily memorized.  It was nice to just breeze along the wrong side working "as presented" (that is, knitting the Ks and purling the Ps).  I did have a little trouble keeping interested, as I've said before, but I'm happy with the way it turned out.

The Jaeger is very pleasant to work with, and softened even more with just the simple rinse I gave it.  The scarf does still curl in at the edges a bit, just inside the garter stitch border.

The color is off a shade or so in these close-ups -- it's a pine-y loden green, deeper and more "forest-y" than the rather mossy original.

(Lady looked very pretty  with her heliotrope and purple against the loden.  My favorite train layouts have a lot of  S-curves, as I love the motions of the trains as they wind, so this part of the cable has a special appeal to me!)

Thoughts on the "Misty Garden" Scarf

I finished the Misty Garden scarf yesterday afternoon, after splicing on the last ball mere hours earlier.  It's a fairly easy knit, other than keeping an eye out that the mohair stitches don't get dropped accidentally.

 

I've not been much of a mohair fan, but the colors of this Rare Comfort Infusion are simply beautiful.  There was a noticeable difference in one of the balls -- despite being the same dye-lot -- in that the mossy green lengths were much shorter, working into a mere stitch or two, instead of three or even four.  The other two balls were closer to the photograph in the "Scarf Style" book.  The Old Shale pattern is a very good choice for this yarn -- stitch definition tends to disappear in the mohair, but the ripples enhance the colors and the odd row of garter not only keeps the scarf from curling, but gives the mohair another element of volume in addition to the natural haze.

(I'm not happy with the photos -- don't know what I'm doing wrong, but the focus rarely pleases me.  Will try again later -- it's starting to rain.)

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!