Knititude

I still can't believe how beautiful it is here*

I took this photo a couple of weeks ago, looking from the village of Torno across Lake Como to Carate Urio and Moltrasio.  It was 60 degrees Fahrenheit--not bad for January! 

Ho fatto questa foto due settimane fa; e` una vista di Carate Urio e Moltrasio, da Torno.  16 Celsius--niente male per gennaio!

A few days after I took this photo the rain and fog moved in.  I couldn't even see the other side of the lake (I'll spare you a photo of that).

Alcuni giorni dopo ho fatto questa foto, sono arrivati la pioggia e la nebbia.  Allora, non ho potuto vedere l'altra riva del lago.

I've never lived in the mountains before, so the phenomenon of the sudden waterfall is new to me:  after a good heavy rain, waterfalls spring up everywhere, and
run for days.  And then, two days ago, snow--the first we've seen this winter.

Non ho niente abitato nelle montagne prima, quindi non ho conosciuto il fenomeno della cascata subita (dopo una pioggia...pesante?).  E poi, due giorni fa, la neve--la prima volta di questo inverno.

(Not a lot of snow, true, but it is there, if you look carefully.)

 

*Non credo ancora che bello e` qui.

Swatch out!

Here is the swatch for the Traveling Leaf pattern from my last post.  Do you recognize it?   It looks somewhat different than the book version, I think because the needles are smaller in relation to the yarn gauge.  Still pretty...but I'm not going to use it for this project. 

Ecco, "Traveling Leaf"; lo conosci?  E diverso che il foto nel libro, ma ancora bello.  (Come si dice "swatch" in Italiano?)  Ma non lo usaro` per questo progetto.
I love this stitch pattern!  Love it.  Although I didn't love the asymmetry of the central double decreases, and started experimenting midway; I think the decrease direction either needs to be alternated, or  changed to a vertical double decrease, where the center stitch is on top. I'm not going to use it for this project, but I already have other plans for another sweater using it, along with the perfect name:  "Sorelle," the Italian word for "sisters," since the pattern stitch is "Four Sisters."

Amo questo disegno!  Ma non amo la mancanza della simmetria nelle diminuzione; io faro` un po` diverso.  Usaro` questo per un' altro progetto; chiamaro` "Sorelle," perche il disegno e chiamato "le quattro sorelle."  Perfetto, non e' vero?

As for the Fan Shell pattern, I decided it had a little too much  openwork for my purposes.  Here is the stitch pattern I chose; next time, the swatch and perhaps, a little progress!

Ho deciso che "Fan Shell"...non so, come si dice "openwork" in Italiano.  Ecco, il disegno ho scelto; la prossima volta, magari un po` di progresso!

Better now/Ora meglio

(I've decided to start adding some Italian translations; I thought it would be good practice for me, plus I just joined the Knitters in Europe webring, and, I don't know, multilingual is good.  Please feel free to correct me if your Italian is better than mine!)

Ho deciso di scrivere anche in Italiano, quando posso.  Se parli Italiano (siamo tutti amici--o amiche-- qui, non avero?) meglio di me, ti prego, mi correggi.

Anyway.  Allora.  O forse, Beh.  It probably took about a week after I finished all of my projects for publication--did I ever say which publications?  Two for Maternity Knits, one for the summer 2007 issue of Interweave Knits.  A week of relief, and then I started itching to be designing something new.  Unfortunately the Sherwood jumper for me, while still on the needles, and somewhat new, was not enough.

Ci ha voluto (can you say that, in the past tense?) una settimana, e poi ho duvuto disegnare qualcosa di nuovo.

So I started perusing my favorite stitch dictionaries--all of the stitch patterns in today's post are from Barbara Walker's A Treasury of Knitting Patterns--and sketching, and then swatching, and swatching some more.

And here is the yarn I plan to use, the Jo Sharp Desert Garden Aran cotton-microfiber blend I used for the Beaufort Hat.  I have six balls left.  I think (I hope) it's enough....

Ed ecco, il filato usaro`.  Ho ancora sei palle.  Penso (spero) e abbastanza....

 

Litany of petty complaints

(I'm in that kind of a mood today.)

This is the only ruler I could find with inches as well as centimeters.  Guess I'd better stop letting my son play with my tape measure.  (But at least I scored some "Vertmont" maple syrup.)

The water in our shower is merely tepid; to get it to the temperature I like, I have to get out of the shower, drip across the floor, flush the toilet, and then hop back into the shower to enjoy a few hot minutes.

Italian potato chips seem to be uniformly slightly stale.

Few of our Tupperwares have matching lids, and of those that do, the lids still don't stay on.

At the supermarket, plastic shopping bags cost a few cents each.  It wouldn't matter, except that hardly anyone seems to buy them; they bring their own, or they just pile everything into their cart without bags, and then pile everything into their car trunk in the parking garage--or else they buy one bag and stuff it to overflowing.  Which makes me feel like a spendthrift for spending ten or fifteen cents on a few sacchi di plastico.  (I don't throw them away!  I would re-use them, but I keep forgetting to put them back in my car after I put the groceries away.)

A drawer in our kitchen is overflowing with plastic shopping bags.

My husband bought me the Malo cashmere sweater pictured at left.  I love it--that's not the problem.  But look at how horrifically it's pilling! 

My pocket-sized camera, a Canon PowerShot SD20 (don't buy one!) thinks it's a computer and keeps freezing up.  I have to take the battery out to reboot it.   Sooner or later I'm sure it will break down completely.

Three of my four watches need new batteries.

I hate working out.  Especially that infernal leg extension machine.

I hate wearing mascara, but my eyelashes are short and sparse.  Usually I still don't wear mascara.

With no impending deadlines, I'm not getting anything done on the swatches and ideas I have percolating. 

At least I've made a start on my own Sherwood.  I'm not sure yet whether I'll make it into a sweater, or into a sleeveless jumper; I'm tempted to do  the latter, but remain dubious about knitted skirts in general.  I wish I could knit faster.

Cinnabar Scarf V2*

Hey, even lichen-locked cherubs need to stay warm.  Click the link below to download the Cinnabar Scarf pattern in Adobe Acrobat format.

Download cinnabar_scarf_complete.pdf

*It's not different, just the corrected version of this.  Edited 4/9/08:  Magknits is no longer online.

Blissful no more

A confession:  When I was working on the Cinnabar Scarf for the December 2006 issue of Magknits, I ran out of time, so when I judged the length to be long enough to photograph, I bound off, weaving the tail in very loosely, and took my pictures, figuring I would undo the bindoff and finish the last couple of repeats when I had more time.  So what?  So nothing...until I undid the bindoff a few days ago, started knitting, looked at what I had just completed, and said, "Hmmm, that doesn't look quite right."   I had printed my own pattern from Magknits to refresh my memory, and was following the directions there....  Uh oh.

The photo at left shows the correct version, and the one at right shows the error.  Can you see it?  No?  Oh, well never mind, then.

Okay, I have to admit it's not a glaring error, but it IS there.  If you examine the "Seafoam" stitch portion of the scarf--the horizontal waves-- you will note that two purl ridges separate the dropped stitch sections from each other, and for the sake of symmetry, I wanted two purl ridges to separate the entire "Seafoam" section from the "Double Ribbed Mock Cable" section, both top and bottom.  And that's how my sample scarf looks--except for the first section I knit following my WRONG instructions.  In that section, the top of the "Seafoam" section is separated from the "DRMC" section by only one purl ridge.

I haven't heard from anyone who knitted the scarf and noticed anything amiss, which is why I was tempted to just leave well enough alone; ignorance is bliss, right?  (Feel free to toss in your own favorite cliche here.)  If it were me, even if I was pleased with the scarf before I found out it wasn't quite right, it would be hard to look at it in quite the same light after I had realized the STUPID designer goofed when she wrote up the pattern.

At left is Cinnabar's backside, with the section with the error  near the bottom of the photo.  You can also see the backside (sans errors) in the top photo here; you can tell back from front because there are two knit stitch ribs forming the "spine" of each Mock Cable, instead of three; also, there are three purl ridges at the bottom of each "Seafoam" section, instead of two--I couldn't figure out how to avoid that.  So now it is also clear what I meant when I said the scarf is "very nearly" reversible.

This has been a long-winded mea culpa, but if you're still reading, I want to make an offer to all who have completed (or partly completed) this scarf, and in their newly non-ignorant state are now less than happy with the result:  send me an email, and I will send you free of charge any one of the patterns available on this site, along with the corrected Cinnabar Scarf pattern.  ( I've already notified Kerrie at Magknits, so hopefully the pattern there has already been updated.)   

Edited to add:  I checked Magknits today and the pattern has not yet been corrected, so also email me if you would just like the updated pattern.   

To block, or not to block

Have you ever knit something and as it progressed, found yourself liking the unblocked texture so much that you wanted to leave it that way?  I'm not talking about the lace that just looks like a lumpy mass until it's stretched and tortured into its cobwebby beauty, but something like this, which almost looks like ruffles.  I'm afraid no more info will be forthcoming just yet, as this is a project for a book and must remain anonymous.  Maybe I shouldn't even have said this much, or posted these photos...although they are really incognito, as blocking radically changed this garment's appearance.  Yes, I had to block, or play havoc with the gauge...but now that I think of it, what an interesting way to solve the problem of making something that you can wear before AND during pregnancy, without making you look pregnant all the time; almost like getting two projects while only knitting one.  (Oops, I guess that was more info!)

Poor neglected blog

This is the longest I've gone without posting since I started this blog; having three knit projects due in the space of a few weeks which also encompassed Christmas, the New Year, hauling the family from Italy to Boston to Cape Cod to Florida and back, and choosing tile, cabinets, countertops and paint colors for two building projects may have had something to do with that.  Maybe having all that over with is the reason I feel more relaxed than I have in a month, in spite of being jet-lagged and arriving home to no heat this morning.

Anyhoo...(anyone see the Daily Show's Samantha Bee's advice to Al Jazeera on how to appeal to an American audience?  We get Al Jazeera here in Italy so it cracked me up.)...ANYhoo, this photo, taken in early December, shows "Filo e filo", a yarn store in Lucca, a lovely walled city in Tuscany, between Florence and Pisa.  It's fairly small but has a nice selection of yarns and patterns, and it has an unbeatable location:  Piazza Dell' Anfiteatro, a piazza built on the site of an ancient Roman amphitheater.  The piazza is completely walled in, with several tunnel entrances, and retains the oval shape of the amphitheater, as you can see in this photo.  I was so delighted to find a nice yarn shop in a totally cool spot that I bought some totally unneeded (but gorgeous) yarn, Filatura di Crosa Zara, extrafine merino, in a delicious chocolate brown.  I'm sure I'll find some use for it someday!