I haven't posted for a while. However, I have been doing stuff! So here's another boring progress report on my projects.
Appledore-ish Gansey
This is coming along. My gauge seems to be holding steady at about 4 st/in. I have a few more inches to go on the body before I start the underarm gusset.
Here is a bad photo (my specialty!). The color is way off -- the yarn is a nice dark forest green. This photo is from a few weeks ago, and I've knit several more inches since then.
I rather like this phase of a project -- lots and lots of fairly mindless knitting. I can zone out and just go around and around, stopping whenever I need to. Of course I have to pay attention at the seams, but that's why I have stitch markers. It's great for travel knitting as well as for something to do while I am in a meeting or watching a video, etc.
Hobbit Shawl
This is the feather-and-fan comfort shawl that has been my travel knitting project for the past several weeks. The name of the variegated yarn's colorway is "Middle Earth", so the shawl become the Hobbit Shawl now that it's done.
It'll grow a bit if/when I block it, but it's a perfectly reasonable shoulder shawl as is. I'm wearing it now, in fact. I used all but a few yards of my 4 50-gram skeins of this DK-weight yarn, between 450 and 500 yards of yarn.
Now I need a new travel project, since the sweater won't be a good travel project for much longer.
Good-bye to the Daisies Shawl project and maybe hello to a new shawl project
I started this a few years ago. It's the Daisies shawl, from an old pattern from the Heirloom Knitting website (Sharon Miller's website). It was fun enough, though there's some slight inconsistency in the charting as it goes from the initial set-up rows to the sets of repeating motifs.
So... It's gonna be unraveled and the yarn used for a new project. There's another old pattern linked through Ravelry that might work well for this -- it looks like a half-pi (or 3/4-pi) with bands of offset eyelets (not quite a faggoting stitch since the wrong-side rows are purled) separated by thinner bands of a more solid pattern stitch. The potential pattern is called Miami Vice, by Hilary Latimer (from threebagsfulled). If that doesn't work, I guess I'll try something else, right? I don't plan to reskein and wash/steam the yarn to remove the kinks from being part of a knit-up shawl for a few years. Hopefully that won't be too much of an issue. If I have enough yarn left when I get to the end of the pattern, I might add a sideways-knit edging. Or I might not. My guess is that I won't have enough yarn left anyway.
The yarn is from Crazy Monkey Creations, a nice gentle variegated pink sock-weight yarn (MonkeyToes, a 100% superwash merino 2-ply yarn, in a colorway Christy calls Girly Girl). I have 2 100-gram skeins of it, close to 1000 yards.
I might try the Daisies project again in the future, possibly using a thicker yarn. But it requires just enough concentration that it isn't a fabulous project for times that require mindless knitting projects.
Lavori 07/30 doily progress (charting!)
I think, fingers crossed, that I might finally have a workable chart for the hex mesh area. I will double-check the stitch counts one more time and then maybe give it a try.
This means that any errata I list will be more for the outer-fans or leaf part of the doily -- the entire hex mesh area is borked anyway given the problems earlier in the pattern. I may share my chart for my solution. However, there are a LOT of potential solutions. I don't know if mine is the best. Heck, I don't even know for sure yet if it's 100% correct. I may still go back to the approach of following the chart (with one extra hex mesh motif repeat) and ignoring the issues until they can no longer be ignored, which will be approximately where the leaf tips get incorporated into the hex mesh around round 183.
I tried to keep the outer stitches aimed in the correct direction, to mostly have double yarnovers between decreases where possible, and to incorporate the leaf tips reasonably gracefully into the hex mesh area. I looked at previous areas in the chart where the hex mesh is next to the leaves and the leaf tips get incorporated to see examples of how Niebling approached the potential issues.
There are a few spots where my potential chart fix has 2 fewer stitches per hex mesh section than the original/wrong chart. Hopefully that won't be a problem. I don't foresee a problem with the rounds where I have 2-4 more stitches than the original/wrong chart. But who knows? That whole area is gonna be a bit funky anyway no matter what I do, given all the stacked increases happening in the outer fans area.
I'm resigned to maybe having to unravel a few gazillion-stitch rounds if it turns out to be necessary to adjust my chart in a way that can't be done on the fly. I don't like using lifelines because they are too much of a pain to pick up the stitches from, in addition to the hassle of putting in the lifeline and having it not distort the stitches in a way that's noticeable during blocking.
The current photo shows the usual wad of thread, so I won't bother including it in this post.
I'm looking forward to making actual knitting progress again on this. I'm on the last chart! The last few dozen rounds! So close to done. Well, if you don't count the number of stitches left to do, which is still way in excess of 20,000 and maybe closer to 40,000. I'm looking forward to finishing so I can start thinking about the next doily project(s).
Weaving
Nothing new here, but what the heck, here's a photo of the initial Tia rigid heddle project that I was writing about last month.
I haven't started another project yet. I'm thinking about what I might want to try and what yarn I might want to use. Houndstooth or log cabin? Rig up some string heddles and do twill? Just crank out some random strips of fabric and sew them together for a blanket/throw/bag? Etc. I don't particularly want napkins or towels or runners. Scarves are not that useful, either. Rigid heddle looms are not usually recommended for rugs, though maybe they'd be OK for rag rugs. I don't want to make handwoven clothing. I'm sure I'll get inspired at some point, and then warp up something and get going again.
Etc.
I think that's it, for the things I write about on this blog.
If I have a chance, I'll try to spin a bit this week. Next weekend is Oregon Flock and Fiber, and I might be going there with friends. I don't need anything. But serendipity is a thing, and maybe something will come home with me anyway. I want to support my friends who are selling there, after all, plus the festival has all kinds of interesting things that one doesn't always see for sale elsewhere. I like being able to support local vendors, especially the ones raising fiber animals and/or making these wonderful products available to us. However, I'd like to feel like I'm more or less doing steady-state with my spinning stash. I gleefully restocked my dwindling fiber stash when everything opened up after COVID and I'm still slowly working through those purchases.
Google is offering me all kinds of AI-assisted beta features for this blog. I don't want any. I like having a dead-simple blog format and prefer to keep it that way. If any AI-crud gets inserted anyway, I'll do my best to disable it. If I can't, then my deepest apologies. Alas, I've been here on blogger long enough that I don't necessarily wish to switch blogging platforms, but I will if I have to. Well, as long as I can find something simple. No bells or whistles for me, nor any AI-assisted anything. AI is relatively useless for the kinds of things I do and I hate the effect it's had on me being able to find anything accurate and reputable for my own various internet searches.
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