Lucy Neatby’s Udderly Divine Bag from Orange Kitten Yarns - Day 3

But wait...there’s moooore...

Okay, that was a weak “moo” pun, but I couldn’t resist.  This is a lot of cow.

Of course, a high volume of cow is a pretty amusing prospect, so it’s a lot of fun cow.   Still, it always seems to take me far longer than I want to finish each row, and each day’s knitting never seems to get me as far as I want. 

The pace may be compounded by the fact that this isn’t a highly portable project.  I can’t just slip it into my handbag and whip it out at a meeting--the four yarn balls, pattern, and all that cow just don’t lend themselves to discreet knitting.  Once I get to the end of all this black-and-white and I’m down the rows of stockinette that comprise the pink udder and strap, that might change.  But I still think pulling a two-foot cow udder out of my knitting bag won’t exactly fade into the sidelines, no matter where I am.

On the upside, I have discovered a trick to help with the tangle factor.  When I sit down to knit, I keep the black yarn to the left of me and the white (well, okay, I believe the technical term is “Natural”) yarn to the right.  Since I hold a color in each hand--colorwork is one of the best reasons to master continental knitting so you can do just that--this placement seems to keep the two colors separate.  It effectively eliminates the tangling I was struggling with earlier.  If you’ve got other tricks for wrangling yarn on multi-color projects, by all means let’s hear them.

A completely unrelated note:  I saw THE LONE RANGER last night, and there’s a fun little knitting bit--tiny but clever--in the movie.

Knit Along: Winter Wonder Mittens - Day 2

The World Beyond Stripes

I feel so impressed with myself.  These are looking so nice, I want to stop people on the street and shout, “Look at what I made!  Look at me, knitting with a strand in each hand--each hand I tell you!”  Yes, I was a theater major in college, which means by definition I am a shameless attention hog.  Just in case you haven’t yet figured this out.

Mostly, I love the whole new world--intarsia, fair isle, color work, etc--that this new skill opens up.  A world beyond stripes is now my new horizon.  Normally, I would run from curly-cues, but I LOVE these.  The selection of patterned hats and mittens out there is endless--and now I can have at any one I want.  I feel like a kid in a candy store with Daddy’s platinum Visa.

It’s not only the fat selection, it’s my fattened toolbox.  The satisfaction of an important new skill.  And really, while your fingers tangle up at first even if you are a continental knitting veteran, it’s not that hard.  The vital dynamic here is not what you see, but what you don’t.  Success here is all in how you carry the yarn behind the work.  It’s got to be loose enough so that it doesn’t distort the pattern, but not so loose that you’ll snag on loops every time you put your hand into the mitten.  And the little twisty trick to carry yarn behind when you don’t use it for more than five stitches?  The one I learned taking a class at my local yarn shop?  I smirk every time I do it.

If you think this looks beyond your skills, dare yourself to give it a try.  The world needs more satisfied smirks.

Next, we make room for the thumb.

Winter Wonder Mittens from FiberWild! - Day 1

I have met the Alpacas who will warm my hands.  I love that.  It’s like the Michael Pollan of fiber...I’ve gone and traced my way back to the origins of my food cycle or something.  I know this fiber’s origin (or at least its friends--I can’t actually say for certain that I’ve met Grant and Washington, but I’ve chummed it up with their herd for sure).

At first I was sure this yarn would be too fine.  Who wants lacy mittens?  I always think mittens must be dense and sturdy, but these Winter Wonder Mittens have a delicate quality to them.  I had forgotten the extra layer colorwork creates by carrying the second color along behind the first.  And alpaca is very warm despite feeling very light and astoundingly soft.  I suspect once these are blocked, they’ll be quite snuggly.  Right now they are promising to be beautiful.

This is not television knitting.  Attention must be paid when working a pattern like this.  You need the little post-it note trick, keeping track of you rows and stitches.  It’s like lace work in that regard. I ended up blocking the pattern into 10-stitch quadrants and putting stitch markers every ten inches so that I was only checking 10 stitches at a time, not an entire row’s worth of non-repeating pattern.

I'm excited, and looking forward to the rest of this project.