parade of wips

Last week was rough. I couldn't pull it together enough to post.

But I've been a busy bee...because in the words of EZ: "knitting, as you well know, is therapy too."

I finished the little purple sweater for our friend who has just turned 3. I had enough yarn (Caron Country) to make the body full-length (size 2-4 years), and the sleeves ended up about 3/4 length...and I had about 1 foot of yarn left after casting off each cuff. Talk about cutting it close. The buttons are purple see-through with purple glitter in them. Perfect!

The party is not until next month so I still have time to make up a matching sundress out of this butterfly/floral fabric. (Sweater color is really off here...the top pic is more accurate.)

Last year sometime I bought one of those $5 "mystery bags" of yarn at AC Moore - they are one pound of yarn, never labeled, but they mostly come from Listowel, Ontario, Canada. That's where the Patons factory outlet is located so I can often make a decent guess about the yarn in the bags. I've found Patons Classic Wool in those bags, as well as kitchen cottons, and plenty of acrylics. But one bag caught my eye because the yarn looked like fingering weight and you never see that. I bought it, it marinated for a year, and then I finally figured out it must be Kroy sock yarn. Now that the AC Moore potpourri smell has faded I can definitely smell wool/lanolin and it feels just like the skeins of Kroy sock that I have in my stash. The color is just a little off, so I am betting this was a mis-dyed batch that they wound into skeins, bagged up, and sold as mill ends. 

I have one pound, which is just over 450 grams. That's the equivalent of 9 fifty-gram balls of sock yarn. At 187 yards per ball, I have 1683 yards of fingering weight wool-blend yarn. Unless I wanted to make matching grey-ish socks for everyone in my family, I had to think of another project. I chose the Faux Russian Stole from A Gathering of Lace. I've never made a lace project on a garter-stitch background before and this one is a nice, simple pattern for summer knitting. Also it is narrow, less than 100 stitches wide, so I can work on it while I watch my kids. Unlike.........

......this Shaped Triangle shawl from the same book. I've been working on it here and there since last fall. It's laceweight yarn on size 4 needles and each row is over 400 stitches now. If I can find a quiet 20-30 minutes I sit down and knit two rows. It's coming along, but it's definitely slow-going.

I love these lacy projects. They are just difficult enough to be challenging and hold my interest, and when life feels absolutely beyond my control I can use my own two hands to create something really magnificent.

"Now, let us all take a deep breath and forge on into the future; knitting at the ready." - EZ, The Opinionated Knitter