It's raining and I'm blocking

It's raining, raining, raining... :( But thanks to that you can enjoy a new blog entry. Instead of going to my yoga class I'm sitting here and putting something together just for your entertainment. :D

Pattern: Rebecca no. 36, originally in yellow
Yarn: ggh yarn "Tara", 72 % cotton, 28 % polyamid, 100 m/ 50 g (that's the orignal yarn, I seldom use the original yarn, but I happened to see the dress in the yarn shop and the owner convinced me that it would look good on me, so my resistance melted like icecream in the sun.)
Price: not sure, less than 50 € but since I have two balls of the orange yarn left, I should look for the receipt so I can return it. In the magazine the retail price is stated as 44.55 € for the kit.
Amount: theoretically 400 g of the orange yarn and 50 g of the white yarn, but like I said, I have two balls left and my gauge is correct.
Needle size: 5 mm
Size: 34/36

Comment: I would recommend that you use 60 cm and 80 cm, instead of 60 cm and 100 cm long circular needles. And start with the short circular needle and not the long one.

There is one minor mistake in the instructions (sorry, I just checked them, but I can't find it now), but it's not that important. I think the stitch count somewhere was wrong.

The dress is tight, not like in one of the pictures in the magazine where it seems to have more ease around the waist (the one I'm thinking of is not on the website, only in the magazine). I had to include some short rows around the bust.

Not sure why I had gone for a knitted dress. Knit with 5 mm (!) needles. And as we all know the line between uniqute and plain weird is thin! I'm not afraid of wearing knitted stuff, but I do not want to look like an esoteric-Birkenstock-wearing-eco-sociologist (I'm pissed off with a certain sociologist, so I felt like including an over-simplifying insult against sociologists. :D Even in high school I was convinced that the majority of sociologists talk too much and are weird. I also bet they don't shower very often. Some people seem to confuse eco and natural with smelly). I also don't really like tie-dye. Now, go and hate me. :D

It looked nice in the window though and it seemed to be a quick knit (it definitely is). I wanted a very mindless project and this one suits the purpose. Good ol' stockinette in the round (not much of a fan of knitting in the round though, you never get to an end, it goes on and on and on...) That was also one reason why I bought the original yarn, I simply didn't want to go hunting for the right yarn and then recalculate everything, because my gauge would be off. I think, I have a reluctance to knitting sweaters, because when substituting yarn I never get the right gauge, which means I have to do many calculations to adapt the yarn to the pattern.

The yarn is ok. I usually prefer 100 % natural yarns, but cotton is a very heavy fiber, it probably wouldn't have been a good idea to use a 100 % cotton yarn for a dress. Recently I have developed a fondness for orange and this one is a quite nice shade. The original yellow is a bit bland in reality. The yarn is also available in a couple of other colors, but in my opinion they are all a bit too bland for a summer dress.



This is another Swallotail Shawl. Follow the link for more details about the pattern. This one is quite old, but I never posted a picture of it. Having been in use for a quite a while it had shrunk a bit and needed re-stretching, so I reblocked it yesterday. It's one of my favorite knitted items.

Yarn: Misti Alpaca lace
Color: natural white
Needle size: 3.5 mm



Still on the needles: Feather and Fan Shawl by Eugen Beugler from A Gathering of Lace. Same yarn as I had used here.




That one is actually finished and I was about to block it this morning, but I didn't have enough of the jigsaw pieces that I use instead of a blocking board. At the moment it's drying outside on our balcony.

Pattern: Lilly's Leaf Shawl

More details when it's blocked.



Instead of blocking Lilly's Leaf Shawl I'm now blocking the Mystery Stole. Yeah, I'm fast, faster than a ray of light. :D I did block it already, but since I did it the lazy way, I wasn't happy with the result, so I decided to do it again. But since I somehow got less and less convinced of its wearability I put it off until now.

Finished: Swallowtail Shawl

I'm so impressed by myself - I've finished another item. :D (Humility is simply something for weaklings :D Just kidding! :D ). Truth to be told, I'm usually working on several parallel projects and now it happens that I have finished them all around the same time.

Pattern: Swallowtail Shawl by Evelyn A. Clark, in Interweave Knit Fall 2006
Yarn: Misti Alpaca Lace, 100% baby alpaca; 437 yd [ 400 m]/50 g
Color: #7120 sea mist
Price: $5.95, bought at theknitter.com
Needles: 3.5 mm
Gauge: Bah, for weaklings :D
Dimensions: 118 cm wide and 59 from the tip to the center of the bottom. I just blocked, I have no clue to what size I should have blocked it, but it looked ok as it was.
Modifications: I made a double yarn over after I made the nups, because knitting five stitches together turned out to be quite tricky for a tight knitter, which I am I think. With the double yarn over I could just slip one and loosen the stitches that were supposed to be knit together. I also changed the cast off method a bit. I used the same one as I did for the Flower Basket Shawl, which I did actually wrong by mistake. For the Japanese Feather Scarf I cast off using a method describe in an Interweave article by Eunny Jang (I think it was the Fall issue): purl two stitches, put them back on the left needle, purl them together, purl, put the two stitches back on the left needle, etc. The cast off method for the two shawls was similar: knit two, put them back on the left needle, knit them together through the back loops, knit one, put the two stitches back on the left needle, etc. What I did, was knit two, put them back on the left needle and then purl these two through the back loops, knit one, put back on the left needle, etc. I only realized it now that my cast off was different. I think it looks ok though, not too back actually. As it's still an elastic cast off I might use it again.





I think the colors are not well represented in pictures above. It's a bit more greenish, like in this picture. If I use the flash my pictures are on focus, but the colors look different. If I don't use a flash the colors look more like in real life, but the pictures are blurry.