It’s Furious Balancing

It is finished! ¹ I wound up using three skeins of the KnitPicks Swish Superwash (color = Fired Brick). After blocking, the scarf was 5 inches wide and 70+ inches long.

I must admit that I am not completely enamored with this yarn. It was easy to work with, and had great stitch definition, but I discovered that it lost its memory when washed.² After knitting, it was 4 inches wide and 58 inches long. When blocked, it was 5 inches wide and 70-some inches long, and I didn’t stretch the scarf when I was pinning it. I would hesitate to make anything fitted with this, like a sweater.

Now that this is done, I can move back to my Tempting sweater in the fuchsia Malabrigo. I cast on the second sleeve during my lunch break on Friday, and I’m about 10 rows into the 60 needed before I join all the pieces together. I’m still up in the air as to whether or not I will put the Dorky Bow on it. I did go ahead and buy some 7/8-inch white organdy ribbon, but the bow part of it looks… dorky. Yes, four years at a private, liberal arts college majoring in English Lit and dorky is the only adjective that springs to mind.³

The other current project on the needles is a pair of mittens made with the KnitPicks Panache yarn. Lest you think that I’m a nutter for using KnitPicks after my disappointment in the Swish Superwash, I must say that this yarn is completely different. It’s utterly luscious — 40% baby alpaca, 20% cashmere, 20% silk, and 20% extrafine merino. I want to roll around nekkid in this stuff. Seriously. I’m thinking on doing a sweater with it at some undetermined point in the future.

But that’s a ways away. I’ve got too many other ideas for things to knit this fall/winter⁴, and I’m going to finish what’s on the needles now before I start anything else, dammit.

I’m told this builds character.

1. If you click on the picture, you’ll go to a separate page where I typed up the knitting pattern — all one line of it. [↩]
2. Even with hand washing. Since it’s a treated, “superwash” wool, you can, technically, throw it in the washer and dryer. I did that with a small swatch and was quite unhappy with how the yarn stretched out and started looking ratty. I wound up hand washing this, and when I send it in to the OFA, I will include instructions for hand washing. [↩]
3. Visual Thesaurus helped me out some here. Other possibilities are ludicrous, laughable, ridiculous, idiotic, and absurd. [↩]
4. Although it’s not like I let the weather determine my projects. I spent a lot of time in the blessed air conditioning this summer working on Tempting and My So Called Scarf. [↩]

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.