My photo experiments posted last Friday record the beginning and ending of a frogging project. Last year I offered to knit Andrew's girlfriend a sweater. We decided on this one from Knitty:
After much e-mailing back and forth and visiting of yarn shops and discussion about color and softness on the skin, I bought yarn and started knitting. Swatched, washed same. Gauge = happy. Knit the back. Sent it to her to check on the sizing. Received request for additional length. Time passed. They broke up. Sadness. Indecision. Should I still knit the sweater for her? Um... no. The project stalled, never to be completed, while I pondered what to do with the yarn.
It wasn't suitable for charity sweaters -- too expensive, too soft/unlikely to survive hard wear, plus the machine washability, something I specifically looked for for this sweater, would not be useful in Mongolia or Afghanistan.
I had combined two strands of the worsted-weight Gems with one strand of Socks That Rock in the color Carbon Dating to achieve the gauge and tweedy nature of the yarn called for in the original pattern. I was extremely pleased with the result; too bad it wasn't gonna happen now.
I pondered incorporating the STR into my own sweater but eventually decided against it. This yummy stuff is now on the needles for a Baby Surprise Jacket for a coworker's possibly-yet-to-be-conceived baby.
But there wasn't enough of the Gems for a sweater for me. What to do, what to do?
Then another blogger, either Juno or Cara, destashed this lovely stuff:
Exactly the same yarn in a gorgeous garnet that -- to my eye at least -- would go very well with the heathery grape Louet Gems I had. Sold!
Now the problem was the pattern. Eventually I decided I wanted a big ol' wrap-myself-up-in-it kind of sweater to envelope me when the winter winds blow and the house is chilly. At first I assumed I would use a basic pattern from Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns; specifically a shawl-collared cardigan.
[digression] I'd like to insert a plug for this book, plus her other similar title, A Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns, which has, in addition to a basic sweater, patterns for basic gloves, mittens, hats, and scarves and multiple sizes and gauges. These books are to a knitter what an encyclopedia and thesaurus are to a writer. [/digression]
I pondered how best to combine the colors and decided that the lower half of the body and sleeves would be garnet and the upper half grape and that there would be some possibly Fibonacci-type stripes at the transition.
So it was settled: all that remained was to determine proper size and stitch count, wind the skeins into balls, and cast on. As soon as I had finished the fund raising knitting for the library that I had committed to over the summer and early fall, this sweater would be the next thing on my needles. And then there was the Red Scarf Project. That took some time, too.
In the interim I toyed with instead using Norah Gaughan's tilted duster pattern from the latest IK but eventually decided that its construction, clever though it was, might be difficult to adjust for proper sizing and flattering fit for my ::cough::ample curves::cough:: I also wasn't quite sure how it would work in two colors.
Somewhere in the interim I saw and immediately ordered this book.
What? you say. Kimono are nothing but rectangles sewn together. Where is the knitting joy in that? But my favorite kind of knitting is the mindless kind. Miles of ribbing? Bring it on! Pattern stitches? Boo, hiss. Oceans of stockinette? Sheer bliss.
But the real appeal is deeper than that. I found in college that I had a deep love of Japanese art. Prints, graphics, whatever, their utter simplicity and elegance spoke to my soul in unexplainable ways. They just felt... right.
Hiroshige and Hokusai in particular were a delight to my eye.
This love of Japan expanded for a while into everything Japanese, but after we hosted a Japanese foreign exchange student for five months in 1988 I found that I had some serious problems with certain aspects of Japanese culture. My professor for various Chinese and Japanese art history classes had summed up Japanese art as "profoundly superficial," which is wonderful in a visual medium but as a value system? It sucked rocks. Perhaps it was just our student; who can be more superficial than a teenage girl?
But the visual appeal has remained strong these 20 or 30 years. Even though the garments in this book had apparently little in common with the beloved Japanese prints of my college years, they shared that same elegance and economy of form. And they would be simplicity itself to fit.
A couple pieces in the book appealed particularly:
The author also included a 2-page section just for me.
I'm on my way!
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NaBloPoMo = National Blog Posting Month.
I'm on my way on that, too!
