Branching Out into Lace

Okay, so all you knitterly people know the title's a pun. But, it's true!
Yesterday I started my first 'real' lace project, Branching Out[R] from Knitty, Spring 05. I'm using my Fibre Company Organik which I'd bought for just this project.

The color of the yarn is hard to see fully in the picture - it's a duo tone with a base of green and an overlay of brown. The colorway is 'Jungle' and it reminds me of forsythia shoots in the spring. It's a single ply, and it's amazingly soft and pleasant to work with. I'm very glad I got this yarn for this project - it's perfect, to me. It's a thick enough yarn that I suspect it makes the pattern easier than if I Douceur et Soie. but it has just enough life and variation to make it more interesting than the Silky Wool versions I've seen and not loved. The stitch definition is is nice, but not overdone.

As of right now, I have five pattern repeats done. The pattern is harder than I hoped it would be, but, easier than I feared it would be after reading some horror story forum posts on Ravelry. I had to frog my first row and a half and start over. After that, I put in a lifeline. In theory I wanted to move the lifeline every pattern repeat, but I haven't been doing that lately. I have been undoing all mistakes, which is somewhat new for me. I think that the final product will be much nicer this way, plus it's a useful talent to be able to unknit as well as knit! Other than the first time when I frogged everything, all of my mistakes have been fixable by unknitting a row or two. For some reason I keep having a problem leaving out one of the yarn overs in the first row, but I've lately been overly cautious, and that helps.

This scarf does not yet have a place in my imagination. Some projects, like La Vie de La Boheme, I have an image in my mind of either the kind of person wearing it could make me or an outfit I could wear it with or some other vision of the object in use. Branching out has no such associations - all I imagine is the finished scarf, hovering magically in mid air. I'm not too worried about the wearability; once it's done I'm sure I'll think of some excuse. Until then I just have to keep knitting! I think getting better at lace is going to be one of my knitterly resolutions for 2008. That, along with the standard of knitting from ones stash. (Don't worry, this isn't my resolutions post quite yet...that'll have a little more thought put into it. =] ) My stash hasn't grown out of control by any means, but there are enough planned projects that have yet to be actualized that I could afford to fix some of them before starting ALL that many more. Of course, I'll have to knit the hats for my step brothers, but, the story of that gift to to them will come later. For now, it's approaching past my bedtime. I just wanted to express my excitement over my new branching out. =]

Winding Time! (and a bonus yarn review)

So, after all my difficulties the other day trying to decide whether or not to wait until my winder came to wind the second skein for socks I wanted to make...the winder and swift came!

The swift is gorgeous. It's much larger than I expected somehow, but I think that's just because I hadn't been thinking properly. It's only as large as it needs to be to do its job, after all. Well, I put the swift together without even looking at the directions, it's that intuitive and beautiful. (Once it was together I did look at the directions just to make sure I got it right. =] ) The yarn winder was somewhat less intuitive, and I was panicking it was broken until I read the bit about how the yarn feeder (or whatever the metal doohickey is called) needs to be snapped into place. Ohhhhh...suddenly it all made sense.

To test my swift and winder combo, the first skien I wound was a red skein of Cascade 220 I've been using for the flower pins I've been making. I'd been knitting 'delicately' from the skein and re looping after I was done each flower...as you can imagine, it was a bit of a mess. But, with swift and winder to the rescue, I now have a lovely beautiful yarn cake! After winding that skein, I promptly wound all the windable yarn in the house....except for that second skien of sock yarn I'd been really really really wanting to knit. Why? Because I can't find it! Argh! It's not that my stash is that big, it's just horribly unorganized. I remember this had been in *a* bag, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what kind of bag or where. Not a good thing. On the upside, this gives me motivation to work on cleaning up a little more!

One interesting discovery in winding was the nature of my Organik yarn from The Fibre Company I bought at Purl earlier this fall. I had chosen three skeins all in the same colorway and they all looked the same. Unfortunately, each has a very different character when it comes to how it was spun. The first skein had a lot of little things that at first I thought were knots, but that were really just over twisted bits. Once I untwisted those, this was a very even skein. The second skein had some bits that seemed not to have been spun at all followed by places where the yarn was almost threadlike. The third skein was much like the second skein, but the unspun bits were even fatter and the thread bits were even thinner. I'm a little dissapointed. This yarn I bought for the lovely dye job. I've looked at the yarn on the company's website and I can't find the colorway I have; all the colorways Purl has of this yarn that drew me to it seem to be Purl exclusives. It also seems like (and I could be mistaken here) these Purl exclusive color ways are different sized skeins. Ravelry tells me this is a bulky yarn that gets 85 yards to the skein, where as my yarn says it's worsted and gets 100 yards...odd. Either way, 100 yards for almost $13 is a bit much to have these large variations in ply. I'd bought the yarn originally planning on knitting a Branching Out, and I'll probably still do that, but this probably isn't the best yarn for lace. If only it wasn't so beautiful!