Sunday, March 04, 2007

and it turned to spring without me noticing!

Hello, dear readers! If... if there are any readers left out there? (Imagine me squinting out through my computer screen, but too bedazzled by the unexpected spring sunshine to be able to see any of ye.) It's been a month, and a ferociously busy month at that: new job, new town, new temporary life. The first three weeks were spent in such a frantic frenzy of trying to locate photocopiers, remember names and forgetting to eat that the very thought of a knitting needle was laughable. But the other feature of my job is a long, long bus ride home and back nearly every weekend, and the best way to spend a bus ride is, of course, with an absorbing audiobook and a pair of knitting needles and... a little bit of stash yarn. Just a little.

titania yarn

This is the first eBay yarn I ever bought. I can't remember how much I paid for it, but I thought it was a bargain at the time; only when the box arrived did I realise just how much a whole kilo of fine mohair actually was. Clouds and clouds and clouds of silvery grey yarn, with French labels; I suspect, from the styling, it's vintage yarn from the 1970s. For reasons best known to an earlier, more knit-ignorant Glitz, I decided to double the fine, fancy yarn and knit my first jumper, Cowl and Howl from it; this resulted in a floppy, seethrough, chilly, huge garment, that I tried to wear, but eventually binned. The mighty failure barely made a dent in the stash. My flat is still coming down with the stuff; I tried to knit a cardigan with it a year later, but got the tension utterly wrong; abandoned that, and then finally thought, hmm, Ivy, there's a fabulously curvy cardigan that is just begging for a soft, drapy, sparkly yarn.

ivy cable

So here's the cast-on, fussocky tiny cables that took forever to get through, and made me wonder if this project would ever get off the ground...

but once you're through the cables, you're stocking-stitching away, just perfect for reading simultaneously. Here's the back, and I'm on to the second front now:

ivy3

Sparkly, fine and drapy, if a teeny tiny bit itchy; just as I had hoped. Have you noticed the larger problem, though? ...the above photo is black and white, and it makes little difference to the image. I don't do monochrome, really; I'm a red-head. Kind of. Of sorts. Look, I haven't seen my original hair colour in about ten years, so it is really quite plausible that I actually HAVE gone red in the interim, right? So I'll knit it up, try it on, and see if I can really imagine a silvery grey top in my wardrobe; if not, I'll dye it dusky purple. Or what do ye think?

I have lots and LOTS of knitting stash and planning news, but in this entry, I'll confine myself to Cold Hard Facts. Stashes and plannings are the exotic spices and trendy cookboosk of the knitting world: it's all very well buying them in, but the proof is late at night when you get in shattered from work, and reach for the pasta and pesto again. Or something. In other words, it's all very well me planning, but give the hours in the new job, I'll believe it when I see it.

2 comments:

marykmac said...

Girl came back! Hurray!

Diane said...

welcome back to the blogsphere...hope you are settling in