Monthly Archives: July 2008

My Cheating Heart

That French blue Riverstone? Beautiful yarn. Lovely to work with. But when knitting yards and yards and yards of garter stitch? Just a tad bit…boring.

The gals at Twisted sent out a twitter (do you know about Twitter?) that they received new Dream in Color Classy. Lots of it. That was enough to make me go look. Only looking, you understand. Just to make sure I had made the right choice for my February Lady.

Somehow this followed me home.

classy1

classy2

The pictures don’t do it justice. Sure, it’s blue yarn. But it has green, purple, brown…everything. It’s amazing. The colorway is called Night Watch. It will be fun to watch the color changes as I’m knitting all that garter yoke.

You’ll note that I’m a cautious knitter. I only had one skein of the Riverstone wound up into a ball. It will make a lovely something, later. The rest of it was exchanged for this Classy. And you’ll note that there’s only one ball so far, too. But I don’t think there will be any more exchanges. It’s too lovely.

And it still fits my blueberry theme!

Here’s the cobbler recipe we’ve been using (shout out to my friend Vickie, who sent me this recipe in 1987 or so, when we still wrote letters via snailmail):

For the batter:
1 1/4 cups flour
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
4 TBSP butter (I admit that I misread her 4 as a 9, and have been using 8 TBSP, or 1/2 cup, of butter. Yum. 6 is a good compromise.)
3/4 cup sugar (I reduce to 2/3 cup)
1 tsp vanilla
1 large egg
1/2 cup milk
3 cups berries

Stir together flour, baking powder, salt. Cream butter, sugar, vanilla; beat in egg until blended. Add flour mixure and milk–beat only until smooth. Spread in buttered 8 inch square baking dish; scatter berries on top.

TOPPING:
1/4 cup soft butter
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour

Combine topping ingredients and beat until smooth. Drop teaspoonsful of topping over berries. Bake @ 350 degrees for one hour–toothpick should come out without batter, and top is golden. Serve warm with whipped cream or ice cream, or both. 6-8 servings.

Enjoy!

Blueberry Forest

I just realized why I picked my February Lady yarn.

blue3

blue2

blues2

I seem to have blueberries on my mind. They’re just coming into season, and I have five bushes in the side yard. We’ve been having blueberry muffins, blueberry cobbler, and my favorite, watermelon and blueberries. I’m going to try to freeze some for later, but I usually just pick enough for whatever I’m making that day.

I swatched for the February Lady, and am 15 rows in. I’m not sure I like the increases I’m using, and am thinking of a simple yarn over increase instead, which would make a double eyelet line at the raglan corners. There’s a knitalong group on Ravelry, as well as the upcoming KAL at Twisted, so I’ve been looking at pictures of finished Ladies on Rav. As you can probably tell by now, I don’t mind frogging and re-knitting!

I finished the knitting (and reknitting) on Josephine, and now it’s leap of faith time. Will it fit? Will it look good? It’s time for the seaming, and there will be a lot of mattress stitch in my near future. And we’ll see…

Viral Knitting

There’s a new sweater pattern that’s getting a lot of attention on Ravelry. It’s called the February Lady Sweater by Pamela Wynne, and it’s a grown-up adaptation of the February Baby Sweater from Elizabeth Zimmerman’s classic book, Knitter’s Almanac. Cute!

February lady

I put it in my Ravelry queue as a joke, just to see if it would spread there. Yup. Then I heard that Twisted, my favorite LYS, is hosting a KAL (knitalong). And then they decided to have an anniversary sale to celebrate their first year in business. How could I resist all that?

I couldn’t. Last night I bought Louet Riverstone Worsted in a gorgeous color, French Blue.

riverstone

I think it will be great with jeans. Twisted’s KAL begins on July 11, but I’ll need to swatch before then. For now, I’m reading Ravelry’s February Lady KAL group forum for tips and ideas.

Side note: Emily bought some of my patterns, so they’re available at Twisted, as well as here on my blog. They’re for my felted slip stitch tote,

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entrelac socks,

entrelac sox 2

log cabin baby blanket,

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and zigzag pedi socks.
pedi 2

More pattern sales mean more yarn for me. Do you feel like an enabler? 😉

Josephine of my dreams

and the Josephine on my needles aren’t quite matching up. :sigh:

I finished one shoulder of the front this evening, held it up, and realized that the eyelet row wasn’t going to land where I want it to be (under the bustline, not on it). But in order to add some length on top, I have to take it back to the armhole bind off, and add it *before* the armhole.

So I frogged back to the armholes. Rip-it, rip-it, rip-it.

I’ll have to redo the back, too, after I finish the front. :sigh, again:

But look at all the practice I’ll get with short-row shoulders! Hey, I’m trying to find the bright side. Work with me.

Sunday’s piano party was fun. The premise of the group is that the more you play for others, the more comfortable you’ll be playing in public. It’s a small, non-threatening group. So far, so good. I also go to a bigger group that meets bi-monthly at a local piano store, but I’ve missed the last several meetings. Something about spending all my free time knitting instead of practicing!

I wore this:

cable tank front

cable tank back

I love this pattern; it’s ingenious. It’s knit smaller than body size, and it stretches to fit (negative ease). The ribbing on the back makes it work. The pattern is the cabled tank from Vogue Knitting Spring/Summer 2007. A quick knit with 6 skeins of Berroco Cotton Twist (cotton/rayon blend).