sweetgeorgia

Blackwater Abbey Yarns

I received my tiny order of three 1 oz. balls of Blackwater Abbey yarn a few days ago. I’m test driving the yarn for the future St. Brigid from Alice Starmore’s Aran Knitting (I just managed to buy a copy — for way too much — on Ebay!). This yarn comes in gorgeous colours but is really, really scratchy. Much scratchier than Jamieson’s Soft Shetland. In fact, it’s like exfoliating your fingertips when you knit with it.

I’ve heard it’s often difficult to get gauge with AS patterns and it was funny, I got 20 sts/34 rows for the St. Brigid double moss stitch swatch where the pattern requires 21 sts/27 rows. I’m also using 4mm as opposed to the suggested 4.5mm needles to try and get a smaller gauge, but it’s made my stitch gauge bigger! In any case, I’ve also heard that there’s quite a bit of flexibility with blocking and that you can resize up or down quite a bit.

Ah, decisions decisions. Which yarn? BWA or Soft Shetland? Which colour? Pink Heather (almost the same as Jamieson’s Raspberry) or Iris (almost the same as Jamieson’s Iris). Agh. I don’t even have the energy to write about my “Meg’s Fair Isle Cardigan” angst.

Blocking Baby

Blocking is genius. It takes bubbly, nasty-looking knitting and makes a beautiful smooth and even fabric…even on the backside! I wet-blocked the body of the norgi by soaking it in cool water for about a minute, blotting away the water with a towel and then pinning it to my blocking board. I steamed it very lightly so that the hem would (sort of) lie flat.

If you look closely, there’s a darker line in the background of the moose/trees picture. Why? I got curious and tried to “weave” rather than “float”. Bad idea. The woven colour tends to peek through and show on the right side. Even when the colour doesn’t show through, it’s positioned so close to the cream colour that you and kind of “see through” the cream.

Why did I try weaving? Well, traditionally in fair isle you don’t carry a colour more than an inch (7 or 9 stitches or so). In this pattern, there are some pretty long floats that I thought would look wonky, so I tried to secure the floats better by weaving. I don’t know if Norwegian patterns have this rule against long floats, but in any case I won’t be weaving anymore.

I started the tiny tiny sleeve and I’m using magic loop rather than DPNs. I think the magic loop may be distorting the fabric a little because the circumference is so tiny. Some DPNs might be on the shopping list now.

Tricotez-vous un bel automne!

The new Fall collection for Phildar landed in my inbox this morning. See the new “l’Automne Femme” magazine here…

Sadly, I was a little underwhelmed… Out of the entire collection, the only thing that I’d like to knit is the massive long cabled coat on page 17. Yum.

I bought the spring Phildar and didn’t make anything either — bubble gum colours just don’t look good on me! But it wasn’t just that — looking at the past few issues of Phildar, it seems that many of the patterns are so similar to each other: wider collar, slightly wider collar, asymmetrical zipper on the right side, asymmetrical zipper on the left side. You could probably buy one Phildar mag and then extrapolate out all the other patterns from there!

The main focus of these magazines is to push yarn sales (oh, and by the way, there are “9 new yarns to discover”) which is fine, since Phildar makes some nice yarns, but somehow I expect more… More thoughtful patterns — not just knit four flat panels and seam them up. More timeless — I don’t want to spend a month knitting something that I’ll wear for another month and then toss. Ah, I don’t know, maybe I’m asking too much. But then again, Rebecca seems to be able to put out more creative patterns for their GGH/Muench yarns and Rowan (if only they could stop including intarsia pieces) puts out some beautiful and elegant items.

Ok, enough negativity and blasphemy for this morning. I’m a stasher and hoarder by nature (you should see me buy cereal) and after all that blather, I might still go out and get this mag. After all, can’t change human nature.

Baby Norgi

The Baby Norgi is on its way! I’ve done nearly 6 inches of the body — but at 36 sts and 40 rows per 4 inches, it’s taking a while. Yes, I know I’m knitting tighter than the recommended gauge in the pattern, but I’m just doing this to learn the steeking stuff — I’m sure I can find a tiny baby to wear this tiny sweater!

Soft Shetland, I mean Shetland Heather

Anne, the super helpful owner of She Ewe Knits, was nice enough to send me a small skein of Jamieson’s Soft Shetland to try out… I love this yarn! — it seems a little scratchy and hard at first, but then I swatched it up with the Na Craga swatch pattern, washed it and blocked it. The yarn blooms a little and softens up nicely while still being substantial. Here’s my little swatch:

Now, the only thing is picking a colour! Anne says that Jamieson is coming out with new colours for “Shetland Heather” (the new name for Soft Shetland) in the Fall, so I might wait until then to order the yarn. In the meantime, I’m going to order some BWA yarns for myself!