Damien Rice

God, I love this guy and his music. He's such a great musician, and there's so much passion in every one of his songs. I love this one especially - I just can't stop listening to it. It's so calm and beautiful at first, and then bam! The second part suddenly is violent and dirty and loud - but full of the same passion that you've heard in the first part. Like two sides of a coin - or two sides of a person. Just listen to it, and you'll know what I mean. But now I won't type more since I'd rather try to figure out how to play this song!

Monogamous knitting + designing? Impossible!

Designing knits totally messed up my way of knitting. I was knitting along happily on one project after another - and I still try to do that. But designing totally messed up my scedule. Now all is sorted in priorities, sceduled, and one project often has to wait a while otn. But that also means I can share my progress on several things! Remeber those socks that I talked about last time? Yeah, they are now in time-out, and will be a while. While pondering about the pattern, I started the long planned reboot of the strings, freaturing armwarmers, and a second color-placement option.

So, this is how far I got with one armwarmer - one is almost done. As you can see, there's quite a lot of shaping - and all happens in the area of the main chart, which is why it looks a little extreme off the arm. But it looks perfectly nice when worn! In case you haven't participated yet - I'm still collecting data on forearm measurements for perfectly fitting armwarmers.

 

And I started on my shawl design for DIC. The darker color, called "Indigo", is stronger variegated than I expected - but I love it. After all, that's the fun of hand-dyed yarns, right?

This is the first wedge knitted up - I'm going sideways, and there will be fun, lacy short row sections in a lighter blue. Can't wait to see how the lighter color will knit up - I'm sure it'll fit great with the Indigo. I'll share more pictures with you as soon as I'm further into the pattern.

And another design in progress - but here, I can show you nothing more than two finished cuffs which I have to rip and reknit. This will be another heavily cabled sock pattern, quite similar to my T-socks; The yarn color is not my first choice, but it has a really nice shine thanks to the silk content. My stepmom requested socks in a dark green or grey to go with her Tracht, and this yarn is the perfect match for that and I'm sure she'll love the color. This pattern is already a special first for me - I had some time today, and this is the first design that I have finished writing completely before cracking into the knit. It's so much easier if you have a similar patten to work from.

Shawl love

Let me start this post by saying: I was never a shawl person.

No, seriously. I never even remotely considered buying a shawl. Then why, you might ask, was your first design ever, of all things possible, a shawl?

Yeah, well, I needed to get deep into knitting to discover how great shawls can be. Things you can knit, you just can't buy. You can't hang around in ravelry as much as I do, and not notice how much people rave about shawls. So I had to try it. And I really loved the art-deco look of all those multi-colored shawl patterns. Thus, my Kite shawl was born. And really, I love it. I wore it every day in winter.

Despite that, a long time, I totally ignored lace shawls. I just didn't see the appeal. Yes, a lot of the lace patterns are really beautiful, but not something I'd wear. But again... you can't hang around ravelry without hearing people rave about lace shawls. So naturally, because I'm a curious person, I had to try, and started swatching. And what you don't see in the pictures - how cushy and nice garter stitch in lace weight actually is! And when I saw that Dream in Color offered to work with designers for their new yarn base wisp, the deal for me was sealed. Looking at the gorgeous DIC colors always inspires me.

Yesterday, my DIC yarn arrived! Look at the gorgeous Wisp - and so soft! Now I only need to choose which one to use for CC. I've already wound the MC.

And this is my current comfort-knit. (Easy, second knit for those times when you're tired and/or don't want to mess with complicated details) Do you believe this is my first pair ever of vanilla socks?