Been in a bit of a funk lately. From what I've been able to determine, there are several reasons. (Work is a bit crazy. Some nagging health issues. Significant birthday coming very soon.) None of which I can really control so I'm having to learn to offer it up to God and trust things will work out.
My knitting mojo is a bit lacking. Not sure if it is a result of the aforementioned funk, or contributing to it. There's been several days lately that I just haven't felt up to knitting, which is very unlike me. Progress on projects has been slow.
On New Year's Eve I cast on Material Girl. I used La Bien Aimee Merino DK in the Peerie Tokki colorway. The intent was to get this finished in January. It finally came off the needles on March 2. Part of the delay was due to my decision to make the body and sleeves longer, resulting in the need to buy another skein of yarn. I think part of why this ended up being a bit of a slog was that I did helical knitting for the body. It was just a bit too much yarn management which didn't make this as enjoyable as it could be.
Overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I should have cast on more stitches for the sleeves, but they don't feel tight. I made the body longer and did some short rows for the back. I also made the sleeves longer. The sleeves and body grew a bit with blocking, but not too much. The resulting yarn is soft. My only complaint about the yarn is that the black dye came off on my hands as I knit and still left the rinse water grey after 5 rinses when I blocked the sweater. I will have to be careful and not wear this with anything light colored. Glad to have this done and in the sweater rotation for the rest of the cool weather.
I've had a long-term project going since 2020. It is the Arne and Carlos Astri Floral Throw. I've probably talked about this before, but I'll recap. This throw is a crochet pattern made up of 324 flowers. 18 flowers each of 18 color combinations. I'm using a stash of Knit Picks Pallette in a variety of colors that I purchased about 10 years ago. I have 16 sets of flowers done. Just have to crochet up the remaining 2 sets of 18 and then I can start joining them. I have some green Pallette in my stash to use for the connecting bits. It should give the illusion of leaves. I've been using this project as one of my 'take a break' projects at my desk.
With Material Girl off the needles, I'm now working on the Wildflower Tee by Wise Owl Knits. I orginally thought I would make my flowers out of reds, pinks, and purples, but decided at the last minute to go with more muted contrast colors. It'll be a soft, Spring sweater that I will hopefully have done by Easter.
The first set of flowers remind me of pansies with the yellow petals and purple centers. Last night I knit the second set of flowers but didn't snap a picture of them yet. They look like pink tulips.
When we moved I became painfully aware of how much of a yarn horder I have been. I have many, many single skeins of variegated fingering weight yarn. I've asked my enabler to not let me buy any more random skeins when we go to yarn shops or events together. I've often wondered what am I going to do with all the skeins. I'm not a big sock knitter, so using them up that way is not going to happen. I'm also not a big fan of fading. I tried that on a sweater and don't love the result. Several weeks ago Stephen West reposted on Instagram a picture of someone's version of one of his designs, the Hvammsvik Blanket. I thought it looked wonderful and realized it is the answer to my stash issue. The person used two different fingering weight yarns held together for each parallelogram. A total of 23 different yarns.
I went down to the basement and pulled out the bin of fingering weight and grabbed a pile skeins. Here is what I came up with.
This is not going to be a quick project, and really won't use up all of this yarn, but at least I'll make a dent in the stash. The pattern says that each parallelogram uses about 15 yards of each yarn. My thought is that once I get through this I'll use the remainder for some other scrappy blanket. I just need to keep this on the sidelines until I finish Astri.
There is another long-standing WIP that I want to finish. It is my Yume sweater that I started last July. I haven't kept good notes on this so I don't have a lot to say about it. I grab it when I want some mindless stockinette to do. Once I get the body done I'll have to decide if I want this to be long or short sleeves. I'm sure the weather will play a factor in that decision.
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