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Thursday, February 24, 2011

Hmmm... I seem to be failing on the photo front.

I knit up the boathouse row pattern from stitch poet design by "champagne maker." I'm rather pleased with how it turned out. It is a small capelet/shawl knit in the round with a few simple cables and bobbles. The decreasing makes a shallow V-neck in front and back. The strangest thing about it is the yarn: a discontinued yarn by Cascade called "fascination."

There is a modern fascination that is a sock yarn. This one, I think, is called fascination because it is 50% linen and 50% rough alpaca. It is a dry-spun, loose single that is spun up in a bulky weight. Can you picture it? I bought it at a garage sale of a woman who owns a yarn shop... Yarns from her personal stash she thought she'd never get around to. It was already wound into a yarn-cake, and still a little crunchy from the linen content.

As I knit with it, it softened. When I had to rip a row (or-EIGHT-from-casting-on-a-bloody-moebius-strip-don't-get-me-started) and reknit, it had relaxed quite a bit. Actually, it made me worried, because as a loosely spun single, I was hoping the relaxing was a blooming of the yarn and not weakness. Then to further worry me, the cast-on tail broke off after picking up and turning the piece, oh, about 20 rows.

After I completed it, I steam blocked it, and tried it on. I will have to be careful what I wear it over, because it seems to want to mark its territory. "Who was that well-clad woman? " "I don't know, but she left a clump of ivory colored hairs!" Tufts of alpaca worked their way out while knitting, and, by golly, they aren't finished, yet. In fact, I was able to follow my route from refrigerator to knitting chair pretty easily both with my eyes when the sun was up, or by feel when it set.

Maybe I'll re-spin the left-overs.

1 comment:

twinsetellen said...

hmm, I would love to see a picture of this. But you did create quite the image in my mind's eye of the breadcrumbs of fiber.