Pictures At Last

Here are pictures of completed items. Yes, they are all green. Green really is my favorite color. The sweater is Ariann and I love it. The hat is the Sunflower Tam from Knitting Nature. I finished one in orange but love green more. I used Lopi as the pattern specifies and it is a little big but very comfortable.

Here is the new sweater I am working on, the Rams Horn Jacket from Knitting Nature. I know it looks green too, but it really is a tweed of blue and white (for Project Spectrum) combined with green and yellow. I’ve completed the back and am doing the two fronts together. The pattern calls for knitting the button bands last and sewing them on but I am attaching them to the fronts and they seem to look all right. I found the yarn in my stash, Plymouth Encore Colorspun Knitting Worsted Weight. It is 75% acrylic and 25% wool but it feels soft and is machine washable and I am using some very old stash.

Finally Some Finished Objects

I’ve wanted to take some FO pictures and post them for a while but it has been so frigid outside and so dark inside that I have given up for now and will just tell about them. First, I completed Ariann. I don’t know what it is about this sweater that makes it so much fun to knit and then wear. It is a little smaller than I would have preferred and I think it is because it is hard to block a heavy wool lace sweater and get it really open like a scarf or shawl. But I love it. I am looking forward to making another one in silk with ¾ sleeves for spring. I also finished another Sunflower Tam from Knitting Nature, this one in a color I might just wear, dark green. Also, I finished my first EZ Baby Surprise sweater. I’ve wanted to try this strange knit for a long time and now have a lot of friends whose daughters are having babies so I will need a few gifts. This one is in beige left-over sport weight wool to suit either a boy or girl. It seems to be a newborn size. I will definitely make a few more and probably use worsted weight so it is a little larger. It is another fun project that goes really quickly.
Project Spectrum is on and the colors this time are very seasonal. Wintry blue, white and gray just don’t appeal to me, even though blue seems to be everyone’s favorite color. I’ll have to take some photos with those colors. I do have two skeins of some heather gray and may make another Baby Surprise so I do something for Project Spectrum. Now the next colors are more “me.” I have just started the Ram’s Horn Jacket from Knitting Nature in a mixed yellow, green and blue tweed yarn and I may still be knitting it in April. If not, green is my favorite color so I’ll have no trouble finding something to knit with it. Both Ariann and my new Tam are green. Yellow and green are such nice spring colors. At this point, with winter here with a vengeance, I just can’t wait for spring.

Knitting and Yoga

Last weekend I went to Kripalu Yoga Institute for the first time. They were having a Joy of Knitting weekend with Karen Allen of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” fame. It was a great weekend. I loved the yoga, the fantastic vegetarian food, the beautiful grounds, relaxing in the solarium and the Dancekinetics classes. The knitting just wasn’t me but it was still fun. Karen does intarsia and knots and weaves in the ends as she goes. It is an interesting technique but something about knotting yarn bothers me and I never actually got the weaving-in technique. Using so many colors was confusing. I guess if you graph out and really plan your knitting it wouldn’t have been so confusing but doing it on the fly on a weekend was hard. All the women and the one man in the class were very nice though and it was lovely to meet, talk to other knitters and see other people’s knitting. There was just enough snow to make the place picturesque and it wasn’t so freezing that I couldn’t go for a wonderful woodsy walk.