I'm good with that.

As you'll recall from a couple of posts ago, I was quite enamoured of the Charmed Floral Fantasy Shawl.  And it's a gorgeous thing, indeed.  But I am NOT a lace knitter; not for large-scale shawl-like projects, anyway.

I've had some gorgeous pinkish Araucania Nature Wool worsted hanging out in my stash for the longest time.  I originally purchased it along with some gray to be a Ribby Cardi, but I think it's just not a heavy enough yarn for the Ribby.  The Nature Wool was the right gauge, I think, for the Floral Fantasy Shawl - but it's just not working for me.  It's just not doing it for me.  I just can't knit lace.  I can't follow charts well; I always have to check on the meaning of symbols.  It's just not intuitive to me.  And, let's face it - I'm not a lacy person, and I'm definitely not a shawl person.  Here's as far as I got before I ripped it all out:

Look down there in the lower right - can you see those loops - just . . . hanging there.  That's part of what made me say - aww, eff it.  Big huge loops that were supposed to have been a purl 15 - and I missed about five of 'em.  Sigh.

So - let's go ANTI-LACE and pick something 180% different - Giselle.  Tons and tons of stockinette, which I thankfully LOVE.  And I'm going to PROPERLY swatch this one. 

Normally my swatching consists of knitting a few rows of stockinette, checking it while still on the needle.  Close?  Good - take off the swatch and let's go.  This time, however, I'm going to do it right.  At the moment I'm knitting a swatch on the recommended needles, US6.  I cast on 35 stitches, knit 4 rows of garter stitch (knit every row) and then started in stockinette stitch (knit one row, purl one row) keeping the first four stitches of each row in garter stitch.  Checking gauge NOW, with the swtach still on the needles, I get 23 sts/4" when I need 21.  BUT - I'm not going to just change needle sizes at the moment - I'm going to continue to knit the swatch so it's long enough that I can accuratelyl check row gauge over 4" and then before I make any final decision - I'll wash and block the swatch.  I want this sweater to be REALLY really wearable and, as such, it needs to fit perfectly.

I *heart* this yarn.

Oh, and I have a finished object to present.  Unmentionables, for my 21-month-old niece who lives in Las Vegas.  My mom is visiting my sister in a couple of weeks and will be taking these out and my sister's promised me pictures of the kiddo wearing them.  Until then, let's admire from afar - because they're just THAT cute:

I think I have discovered that I love stockinette stitch, because this project had miles and miles of it - and so does Giselle.  Ahh . . . stockinette.

Stolen from Not an Artist (doesn't she have THE most gorgeous photography?) who, in turn, borrowed it from tapeheads - -the Most Unread Books meme:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canturbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Foundtainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Hopefully pictures and actual knitting progress later this weekend.  I gave up on the shawl - I am NOT a lace knitter - and took up Giselle.

until now.

The Charmed Floral Fantasy Shawl has me absolutely captivated.  I don't know what it is about this pattern but I came across it today, first in the Classic Elite Yarns e-letter, then on Ravelry, googled the yarn, found out that it's $33 a BALL (CRIKEY) and am now desperately mulling over my stash in my head wondering if there is anything there that would work.

I'm sick, I think.

I am avowed lover of all sock yarn.  Or, until this latest pair, almost all sock yarn.   I am now declaring my dislike of Opal sock yarn.

A couple of years ago I bought some of the re-issued Opal Rainforest in the Tiger colorway.  When I knit with patterned sock yarn, I like to match the pattern - and the Tiger was no exception.  And the second sock matched the first perfectly.  I was so proud of myself until a few rows past the gusset - the pattern suddenly didn't match anymore.  Something in the way the yarn had been dyed caused a large gap in the pattern.  I just chalked it up to a freak accident with the yarn during the dying process.

I bought another skein, later of some pretty blue Opal - Rodeo 1159 - and my niece picked that for her Christmas socks (yes, I gave her a choice of a ball of sock yarn for Christmas and these are the socks I owe her).  So the first sock was finished in record time.  Standard ribbed top stockinette sock:

And then I started on the second sock.  I always make a mental note of what point in the colorway I start the sock so I can duplicate that on the second and come up with a matching 2nd sock.  And, unforunately, this color way worked out so that I had quite a large amount to wind through before I got to the starting point for the second sock.  I cast on and immediately could tell that the socks would match perfectly.

And, then - disaster:

Something happened in that lighter blue part under the faux fair isle - it small, then melds into a white strip not in the original colorway, then into that blue completely skipping the large faux fair isle part.  What the hell?  This is just annoying.  Maddening.  And frustrating.  But this far into the pair, I"ll just keep going and hope that my niece doesn't mind TOO much.  I don't think she will, yet still it's cool when the socks match and when you EXPECT them to and they don't - it's just disappointing.  Sigh.

There was actually SUN in northeast Kansasa this weekend, too - sun like I haven't seen since last summer.  FINALLY.  It's been so cold and windy and wet and dreary - not spring-like at ALL.  But it finally was this weekend and, as a result, I was able to get some natural light photos.  I've been trying to get some way for the colors on this Trekking sock I'm working on to show up but, as is normal with dark objects, detail is elusive.  But not so in bright, bright natural light.  Look:

Mmm. 

And I finally, finally finished weaving in all the ends on my niece's Unmentionables; now all that remains to be done is to cut OFF the woven-in ends, get some elastic and ribbon for the waist, and hope for a cute picture from my sister.

And, speaking of my sister - I have some baby knitting to do:

W00t!  I'm gonna be an aunt again!!!!!!

I no longer subscribe to Interweave Knits but that's not through any design but is rather through sheer laziness.  I just never returned the subscription card when it came and the subscription lasped; now I simply buy a new issue when I see it on the grocery store magazine shelf.

I was very excited to see Eunny Jang take over as editor.  I loved everything she did when she blogged; her aesthetic, color choice, sense of style and detail were amazing for one so young.  One of the first things she did was to rearrange the layout of the magazine to group all the photographs for the patterns together in the middle of the book; thereby moving all of the actual pattern instructions to a later portion of the book.  Needless to say, changes often raises a hue and cry and, in knitting circles, this was no different.  I failed to see what all the hubbub was about and now, after several issues in the new format, find that I like it.  I don't buy the magazine for its formatting, either - I buy it for the patterns:  the number and the strength. 

And it's the number and strength of the patterns this time that I just don't find particularly appealing.  There are only nineteen patterns and, honestly, if you just glanced through the patterns quickly you'd think that quite a few of them were duplicates of each other.  This MAY just be the natural result of spring/summer knitting patterns.  There is just so much less to knit for the spring/summer months than there is for the fall/winter months.

In this issue, though, there are a few things I DO really like.  The Aleita Shell by Bonne Marie Burns is one.  And several knitters around blogland have already cast on.  Check out the finished version - with added underbust ribbon by Boffcat.  A multicolored version by Twig.  And four pages of the shell in various stages of finish on Ravelry.  Most of the finished shells on Ravelry look woinderful - so naturally this one is going into my queue.  Thanks again, Bonne Marie!

I really like the quirky, colorful Chameleon Scarf, too - and there are nineteen in progress on Ravelry.  It just requires so much . . . finishing.  And I detest finishing.

I also like the two stole patterns but knitting shawls and stoles is just NOT my thing.  I don't care for the peasant blouse at all, and I have yet to see the woman who looks good in a knitted skirt.

So, generally, the patterns just don't thrill me. 

Maybe I should read it for the articles?