Post Haste Post Stress

This work in progress is a baby sweater made from a kit from Plymouth Yarns.  The kit comes with cute teddy bear buttons. 

All too often I search online using knitting-related key words and find myself stumbling onto blogs with their most recent entries dated several years ago.  These blogs are like ghost ships resting unmoored on the water, ships with half-eaten plates of food on tables, ships with empty pilot houses and rumpled still-warm cots with absent inhabitants.  The blogs seem to just stop, with no words of farewell or explanation. 

While I do not plan to stop blogging anytime soon, I can completely understand how sometimes one avenue of endeavor that requires time and attention has to be ended or put aside.  This past week, I was engulfed by school tensions, but did manage to write a blog entry related to knitting, school, and the current stresses faces public school teachers.  Since I want to keep my knitting blog relatively light, however, I opted against sharing my essay (which was laced with lots of satire and clever discussions of the distinction between knitting—my “hobby job”—and teaching—my formal career). Anyway, after a week of finalizing grades for the marking period, preparing all sorts of online documents (so that my performance can be assessed by some mysterious authority out in cyberspace), I’m back to blogging and have no plans to end doing so in the near future. 

I found the pink yarn I needed and finished the shower sweater today.  The yarn is Cascade Superwash Sport 220.  Here the project is shown wet, without the button at the neckline sewn on. 

In addition to keeping up with career demands, I'm attempting to finish up some projects, but ran out of yarn--with one inch remaining to complete one sleeve of a baby sweater for a baby shower that is this coming week.  Of course, I had a valid excuse to visit my local knitting store yesterday, so I am actually kind of happy about this yarn shortage.  When I was checking out, I learned that I had enough holes in my frequent shopper punch card to earn $25.00 of free merchandise—an event that occurs rather  too frequently, I have to confess, so I picked out two balls of luxurious Rowan Lima yarn.  Fellow blogger Judith Hamid has a free knit-and-crochet pattern for fingerless gloves using this yarn.  You can also find some great how-to pictures, by visiting her site:  I Read, I Sewed, I Crocheted. 

I'd love to know what you call this type of yarn--I'm sure that there is a term for yarn that isn't so much plied as woven or braided.  Whatever it's called, the yarn knits up beautifully.

I’ve also been frantically knitting another Brynn shrug—a pattern I’ve discussed in the past couple of posts.  This time I’m using a heavier weight yarn—Rowan Tweed Aran.  This woolly yarn seems appropriate to use on this first day of fall, and handling it has me thinking of sitting by the fireside with a cup of hot cocoa or tea.  Of course, in North Carolina on most fall days, a sweater is appropriate to wear in the morning but shorts are more suited for the afternoon. 

This is the back of the Brynn shrug. 

 

This is an up-close view.  The vertical blue stitches are slipped, so there is no tedious running of strands behind the back. 

I’d intended to attend Vogue Knitting Live at the Southern Women’s Show yesterday, but Vogue Knitting decided to cancel its participation due to low registration numbers for classes.  I was terribly disappointed by this turn of events, but the folks at Vogue Knitting have been very generous to those of us who’d registered for classes—giving us both a coupon to use in Chicago or New York and a gift certificate for products!  I spent early yesterday morning perusing books on Vogue Knitting’s website and ordered Knit Notes by Nadine Curtis.  This title is essentially a workbook for planning design projects and includes two types of graph paper, information about yarn and gauge, as well as places to write design details.      I also ordered a copy of a volume in the Stitchionary series devoted  to lace.  As some of my previous posts attest, my relationship with lace is a bit masochistic—but I love the results of the sometimes tedious and maddening lace-making process.  Now I’ll have to figure out a way to save up some money to go to New York for Vogue Knitting Live in January.  The Chicago event, which is in late October, takes place a little too soon for me to get my ducks—and finances—in a row.