Talk about simple and two “stockinette in the round” FOs in a week!

This cowl celebrates color and fabric.  I started with the Nuance Cowl from Shibui, but with 5 instead of 3 colors.  That meant redoing the math somewhat.  I used Shibui Silk Cloud in Juniper, Cove, Caper, and Pollen.  Pollen has a  bit of green and I wanted gold, so I added La Bien Aimée Mohair-Silk, color Yellow Brick Road, to move to pure gold at the end.  The size went from 18×51 inches to a blocked size of 13×60.

I really love it!  Wear it long or short:

PS to Wendy: I am with you!  My jaw dropped at $10 for a stockinette tube in the round which I completely reworked anyway!  I was livid, but bought it anyway…aaarrrggghhh. 🙁

Sometimes you see a design and you know you have to make it.  Sometimes it’s a complex masterpiece, or something simple that speaks to you.  This is the latter!!  The 27 Color Snood by Blue Sky Fibers.

The original was knit in Woolstok Worsted.  I used their 27-color mini-bundle with Cascade 220 in color Vashon for my main color.

This was a fun, super quick knit!  It looks weird, like a skirt, but fits like the picture.  I made mine larger by adding 30 sts and still had plenty of each stripe color.

Sally used Woolstok Thyme for her main color and it’s gorgeous!!

ETA: Surly has been super busy and will add a photo when she can.  Sorry we have been off the grid a while!  Summer is take a break time. 🙂

Just adding this link because I referred to it elsewhere! Susan Rainey’s Improved I-Cord Cast On

Each year I look forward with anticipation to the launch of the free Shetland Wool Week hat or kep pattern. In fact, this year I even stocked up on some jumperweight wool so I would have more variety in my colour selection — and it paid off!

This year’s hat is the adorable Bonnie Isle. Loved it right away! Checked my newly plumped up stash and had ample yarn for the pretty pink version:

So here is my cute hat! I love it!  It was a fun knit, it fits, and it’s different than my usual darker color palette!

It’s been over a week and I think I can finally bring myself to write this post.  My knitting bestie, Kim, died last week of cancer.  Loyal readers would have read about Kim many times over the years.  I did share this news on Instagram, so those who follow me there already know.

Taken January 2, 2020 as we model our newly finished weather scarves. From left to right: Kathy, Mary, Me, Kim, and Beth.  Ellie is the photographer. 

I met Kim several years ago when I was teaching classes at my [then] LYS.  She was funny and quirky and I just plain liked her right away.  It’s hard as an adult to make friends outside of work, so I asked Kim to meet for coffee and knitting.  No coffee for Kim, but there was knitting!  Eventually she started coming to our weekly knitting group at Panera’s.  The rest is history!

In 2011, we decided to go to Meg Swansen’s Knitting Camp.  I had gone a couple of times and it was her first.  First timers are supposed to attend Camp 1, but we went straight into Camp 2.75.  We attended every year after that, until COVID shut things down.  Every year but one.  That year was 2013, when Kim announced that since her DIL was expecting their first grandchild, she just couldn’t risk missing the big event by being at Camp.  Sally stepped in and then attended several camps after that.  Really special times.  We would get so inspired that on several occasions we stopped to shop on our way back through town!

Besides Yarnover and other Minnesota Knitters Guild (MKG) events, our annual tradition was going to opening day of the Great Minnesota Get Together, aka the Minnesota State Fair.  We would get there by 0900 so we could be at the Creative Activities Building as the doors opened.  We made it most years!  Especially nice when my husband John started dropping us at the main gate!

We would enter with eager anticipation and look for our knitted items.  Some years that was quite a feat!  But our real interest was in the ribbons.  What ribbons had we won??

We never looked at the results ahead of time — we wanted to be surprised.  2017 was truly the best year ever.  We walked into the building almost smack dab into a large glass case.  In it was Kim’s masterpiece, her Kauni Damask blanket, festooned in ribbons!  I also did well, winning two sweepstakes (in linens, and seniors).  We were beside ourselves!

We were shameless.  We would kind of lurk around close to our award winners and wait for comments.  If they said something nice about Kim’s blanket, I’d say, “Oh, my friend Kim made that!”  Ooooh, ahhhhh!!  She would do the same.  Then we would go eat our faves: corn dogs, Tom Thumb Mini Donuts, fried cheese curds, and Big Fat Bacon.  All to kill time until we could go back and look at the knitting again.  I looked forward to it all year long.  And then COVID took the last two years away.

When COVID hit, no Camp, no Yarnover, no state fair, no weekly knitting at Panera’s.  So, Kim and I texted constantly.  We would also share a lot of Instagram stories that we liked.  Even now, I see something and think, Kim would find that funny or ridiculous or interesting.

The most important thing in Kim’s life was her family: she left behind a husband of over 40 years, two sons, two grandchildren, loving parents, and a brother.  Her life revolved around her family.  Period.

I will miss Kim every day.  She was a special friend and a wonderful person.  This picture really captures Kim — I saw her make this face many times!!

Here are some more examples of her beautiful knitting.

Bohus Scarf

Shhh!

Widdicome Fair

Alfur

Kim is still on Ravelry under the name Luckydogknits.  And, no, I don’t know what it means! 🙂

Farewell, my dear friend.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SUSAN!!!!

Today is Susan’s birthday and it’s a milestone one (but shhhh I won’t tell).

As everyone knows by now, Susan is:  my sister, my best friend, my partner in crime, my confidante.  We live thousands of miles apart but talk for hours almost every day.

I don’t know what I’d do without her.

So Happy Birthday to my big sister.  It’s the big one we love.

I just made another Rikki hat using the no-line helix method and fabulous yarn.  Everyone who sees it wants it!  So I added a meaningful tag:

The yarn is Trippin’ with Dixi Travelin’ Tweeds DK, color Splotch.  It was a one-off yarn, so cannot be found!  I should have bought more.

I do love this hat!!!  But, remember — it’s MINE!!

Hey, peeps!  I just finished a little impulse project called the Adelphia Bag.  The knitting was pretty speedy.  The finishing was pretty intense!

The colors reverse!  The yarn is Malabrigo Arroyo, in Vaa and Neverland.

The bag is lined and is supposed to have a zipper.  I’ve added zippers to bags, but just didn’t feel like it!  I used a magnetic snap instead.

I also added a leather strap.  I bought the leather at a store I call the “fire trap.”  Other people call it S. R. Harris — bought the lining there, too.  They sell leather scraps for $10/pound!  I owned some rivets and bought a nice set of leather punches.  The small punches are so tiny I think they are for SMALL wires!

I added i-cord around the top edge as well.  I thought it added strength and stability.  All in all, I think I love it!!!

Kathy mentioned our group “lemming project.”  It’s a shawl designed by Romi Hill called Artesian.  There are hundreds of projects on Ravelry, many of which share the same advice: forget the charts and dump half the markers!

I found a stunning fuscia yarn in stash…what it is, I do not know!  I only managed to get the smallest size out of my skein – five sections.

It’s a nice pop piece for summer. Rather more like a scarf than a shawl, but I like it!

A couple of months ago, I jumped on the bandwagon for Metamorphic, a then new sweater design by Andrea Mowry.  It’s an exceedingly simple design; the star of the show was the yarn.  Two yarns by  Spincycle Yarns — Metamorphic (hence the name) and Dyed in the Wool — are alternated every other row to create a colorful blended effect a little more subtle than if Dyed in the Wool were used alone.

I wanted a dark, subdued look so I chose Metamorphic in Marl #6 and Dyed in the Wool in the color way Absolute Zero.

As I said, the sweater pattern is simplicity itself: ribbed neck (2 x 2 ribbing) with slipped stitches going down the center front, back, and sleeves.  (The ribbing is done in the Metamorphic yarn alone.)  I modified the pattern so that the slipped stitches flowed out of the ribbing.  At the 4 center points (front, back, and each sleeve) of the neck ribbing, I put a single knit stitch flanked on each side by two purl stitches.  It was easy to figure out, and didn’t require major changes in the overall number of stitches to cast on.  I incorporated the few extra stitches into the yoke increases.

My only other real modification was to lengthen the sweater.  Many of Andrea’s designed are just a bit too cropped for me.  I purchased an extra skein of the Metamorphic yarn to be on the safe side and was glad I did — I needed it for the second sleeve cuff.  If I hadn’t lengthened the sweater, I would have been fine.

It took me a while to knit this because I kept being interrupted by other sweaters.  I reserved it primarily for TV knitting etc.  Sadly, I finished it just as it’s getting a bit warm for sweater weather.  But I’m in Colorado — so who knows?  I may get to wear it sooner than I expected.