Originally published Friday, November 21, 2008
Today we had our first snow fall of the season. It didn’t amount to much, but it sure was pretty coming down. I took a picture from our back deck after the squall had passed. Beyond the trees is the neighboring golf course. One might think it would be nice to live beside a golf course, and it is in many ways, but when your house is frequently hit with golf balls and your aluminum siding is full of dimpled dents, you tend to long for the good old days when the golf course was a dairy farm. The occasional cow in the backyard sure beat hearing the Twack! of a golf ball impacting the aluminum siding. LOL
I had hoped to have my Dale of Norway sweater, Gjende, completed by the first snow, but, alas, it wasn’t to be. I’m still working on it, and it is nearly finished. See?
I keep running into little annoying problems. I finished sleeve one and went to work on finishing sleeve two, but I had to undo a little of sleeve one in order to cannibalize some of the navy blue yarn. I explained in a previous blog entry that I was running short of navy blue yarn and ordered another ball from Knit Picks. Of course, the new ball is from a different dye lot, so the color doesn’t match the old yarn exactly. It’s pretty hard to tell the old from the new when the balls are placed side by side. But there is a difference.
There is a section of the sleeve above the snowflake pattern that is solid navy, and I didn’t want to change to the new yarn during the solid section, so I unraveled the purl sleeve facing of sleeve one to complete the solid section of sleeve two with the old navy yarn. I then added the new navy yarn in the patterned section at the top of the sleeve where there is a lot of white yarn. That way, the slight difference between the old and the new navy will not be noticeable at all. I hope. ☺
After I finished sleeve number two, I discovered that somewhere along the line, I ended up with either extra stitches in sleeve number one or too few stitches in sleeve number two. So now I’m going to rip back sleeve number one to the snowflake section and reknit the solid navy section, adjusting the increases so that I will end up with the same number of stitches as for sleeve number two. The extra stitches appear to have happened in the snowflake section, but there is no way I’m going to rip that out and reknit it. Yikes!
The gansey that I’m knitting for the boy is on hold for the time being. I have the body and neck done, and one sleeve is knitted to the cuff. But I want him to try it on before I do any more work on it. I want to make sure the body fits okay and that the sleeve is long enough before I start the second sleeve. It has been a very enjoyable sweater to knit and has knitted up quickly. I’ll take some pictures of it eventually and share them with all three of the people who read my silly little blog.
In the meantime, I naturally started another sweater. Never mind that Starmore’s Kinsale is sitting untouched in my knitting pile, or that my Szabo Shawl Collar Aran has been languishing three-quarters done for months now, or that my Orkney Pi shawl lacks only the knitted-on edging to be complete. I just had to start yet another project. This time I am making Beth Reinsel-Brown’s White Gansey in Knit Picks Merino Style in Nutmeg. The yarn is probably a very poor choice–it will probably pill like crazy–but it is very soft and nice to work with. The boy’s White Gansey was made in dark gold Dale Heilo. It’s quite lovely, don’t you think?
Heilo is a great yarn that softens with every wash, and the sweater actually looks better with each washing. No fuzzing, felting, or pilling. I seriously doubt the Merino Style will wear so well.
I really need to get these WIP finished. There are so many other sweaters and shawls and socks I want to knit.☺
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All Kinds Of Knitting 