Dithering

Here are a few photos. The first is a close-up of the blue mohair scarf. I think you can see how there are cables on one side (the bottom half), and the lace panels on the other (the top half).




This other photo is of one of the hats I knit last year. I grabbed some oddballs from the stash, double-stranded them, and started knitting. When Color A ran out, I doubled Color B and knit until the yarn was pretty much gone. It's thick, warm, fuzzy, and very red and orange. I am happy to have gotten the yarn out of my stash.


That's it for photos.

I've made rather a lot of progress on the long-stalled sweater. No photos of that, though. I've finished the lower body and both sleeves. Now it's time to unite them all and do the upper body.

Here's where the dithering comes in. What kind of upper body? The last sweater I did from handspun was a raglan style. While it's very nice, and I always enjoy doing raglans, perhaps I should do something different this time.

I'm dithering between a saddle shoulder or hybrid saddle shoulder (either from Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitting Workshop or Priscilla Gibson-Roberts Knitting in the Old Way), or perhaps a round yoke. If it's a round yoke, chances are I'll put in some nice color patterns. I've been looking around for interesting color patterns to use. I certainly have plenty of small quantities of handspun that would be perfect for this!

That's the excitement for the day. Everything else is progressing in a calm and placid manner -- socks, afghan, spinning projects, and so on.

Now you understand why I haven't been updating the blog all that much.

Other exciting ditherings are about the next sweater project. I have a couple of problems. One, I have a lot of smallish batches of yarn, and two, I am very neurotic about running out of yarn. Therefore, I am always convinced that my bigger piles of yarn are still not enough for a sweater. Of course, when I do knit the sweater, I often find that I have way more than enough. And then I have a smallish batch of yarn leftover, probably not quite enough for another sweater.

So... Do I take a chance on a smallish batch of yarn? Spin up another humongous batch that will be way too much for one sweater but possibly not enough for two? Plan on a mixed-color sweater, where the worries about Not Enough Yarn can be spread out over several batches of handspun?

You see the problem. It's good for a lot of dithering.

I have a batch of brown yarn that I'm pretty sure is enough for a sweater. Although it would be fun to turn it into a gansey, I think the yarn is too fuzzy to show off stitch patterns. I'd have to use something a bit more obvious, such as a wide rib or garter rib or moss stitch.

I also have a large batch of white yarn that I'm quite sure is enough. That would end up being knit into a top-down Aran-style sweater, drop shoulder with square-set sleeves, possibly also with saddle shoulders.

I think the white yarn I'm using now will have enough left over that I can use it as a major color in another Icelandic round-yoked style color-patterned sweater.

And so on.

Then I move on to dithering about hats and mittens. I won't bore you with that. Something should be cast on and started within a week or two. But for now, I'm dithering.