Saturday, March 14, 2009

Both Lismore and Shalor are progressing. The colors in Lismore are just beautiful and are working out well. They remind me of standing on the rocky coast of Maine in the fall - ocean and leaves. The white line at the bottom of the ribbing is just a cotton yarn backstitched on to keep the ribbing flat until it is blocked.



The sleeves on Shalor are almost ready to put on a holder thread. They will be put aside until the back is finished. Then I'll string them all together on a long thread and try it against Joe. For some reason the sleeves look too wide but I have to remember it is a raglan and the sleeve top is part of the upper body.



We've been discussing yarn storage on the Ravelry groups especially in the Starmore Junkies section. When we finished off the room over the garage, we built in wooden storage bins to the slope under the eaves. The top serves as great storage for books and some baskets of yarn, needles, etc. The bins were built to accomodate big tubs for quilt fabric, yarn, batting, etc. In my usual OC mode, I put everything on a spread sheet so I could find it by looking at the index rather than having to go through each bin. Cascade 220 in red in Bin 1, Blarney Spun in Bin 2, etc. The hardest part now is keeping the spread sheet updated when I use something.





The Jamieson & Smith 2 ply jumper weight yarns plus a lot of the stash already dedicated to projects are stored in canvas bags I got at Christmas Tree Shops. Very inexpensive but they still stack well. The boxes contain the yarn for the project, copy of the pattern, notes, etc. I have a large stash, but nothing like some of the Ravelry folks. This will last me way until heaven - or I'd better save some of the thinner stuff to knit if I end up in the other place.

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Catching up on what is on the needles and in progress:

DH's "Shalor Pullover" is on the second sleeve which is up to the elbow. I can knit on this while watching TV in the evening including shows like "24" and "American Idol". Those are pretty mindless, just background noise, so don't have to reference the charts very often.

Below is the progress on "Lismore" which I'm doing in J&S jumper weight yarns, not in the original Rowan yarns which are long gone. The chart is 50 rows and is like popcorn - hard to stop at "just one more row". The white thread at the bottom is just a cotton yarn sewn on to keep the bottom from curling. The top photo shows the pattern better but the colors are washed out; the bottom shows the true colors a bit better. This is a stranded work with bands of horizontal colors but has enough vertical patterning so that it doesn't appear to be juts going round and round.





I remembered starting Starmore's "St. Brigid" before the holidays but couldn't remember where it was. I'd stopped to do some holiday gift knitting. Found it today and remembered that I'd substituted one of Annie Maloney's cables in place of the generic horseshoe. It's now moved out of its hiding place and out where I can easily reach it. I like having more than one project and different types of projects going at one time.