Sunday, October 16, 2005

yarn botany

warning: nothing Rhinebeck here. Not a whiff!
What I meant to say at the end of my last post was to see if the aggravating ebay yarn would be better when it bloomed, not blossomed. I did the scientific thing, soaking and airdrying a swatch from an earlier scarf start.before . Better but several degrees short of miraculous. after I wouldn't make anything that you wear on bare skin but a scarf that goes over a layer of clothes might be fine. This is now,officially, one of those get back to it when I feel like it deals.

I won't be feeling like it this week, because the Elann cashmere arrived, and I'm Branching Out.branching I'm showing tremendous discipline by knitting it plain white. Accordingly, I'm only swigging colorless beverages while working on it, which is cramping my early morning caffeine & knit style. I think I figured out why lace patterns & I don't always get along. I knit through the back loop and that makes some lace maneuvers slant the wrong way, unless you modify some specifics on how to do the stitches. I was feeling all out of step about this until I happened to visit Annie Modesitt's site and learned that 1) there's a name for what I do, its combination knitting and 2) that's the way she does it. And Annie Modesitt is pretty damn cool. She also says she writes her lace patterns explaining the effect you want (like a slant to the right) not the specific way to get there. Because (say it with me) in knitting , there's more than one way to do it right.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Drinking vodka while trying to knit a lace pattern is an interesting M.O, Gale...

Zarzuela said...

You are not alone. I knit through the back loop too and had all sorts of problems with some patterns until I figured out what the deal was thanks to some of my SnB buddies. Glad you are figuring out how to make it work. :)

Jessica
http://zarzuela.blogspot.com