It’s been a spell. The past twelve-month has been many things, none of it business as usual. (Except for my long-standing tradition of not developing this website—that has carried on without interruption.)
I haven’t checked in here for some time because my world shrank considerably with the start of the pandemic and making knitting-related content wasn’t anywhere on my top-50 list of things I needed or wanted to do. Don’t get me wrong—I totally agree with people who feel that the pandemic is a great time to knit (please stay home and avoid sharing particles with other humans!)—I just had a long list of things that suddenly jumped the queue. I did knit a whole scarf in the fall when I was sidelined by an injury (nothing serious, just maddeningly persistent) and as much I love to knit, this past year I wanted to be too busy to knit.
I have been perpetually putting off building up this website into what I had planned and it seems I’ll be continuing on the same track for a little while longer. So while I haven’t been doing much in the way of knitting lately, here are a few photos of things I knit pre-pandemic but haven’t shared here:
(I’m sorry if the captions are difficult to read. I have never taken the time to work some CSS magic on this straight-out-of-the-can template.)
The oldest yarn in my stash
This was the deepest of deep stash. I bought this yarn at a Michael’s (from their clearance bin) because I was a student and couldn’t afford to buy yarn at the one nice LYS I knew about in Toronto at the time. This yarn was so old that it could legally buy alcohol by the time I pulled it out of my stash. Note to self: if you are keeping yarn for more than two decades before you knit it, you did not need to buy it no matter how good the deal was.
DIY hand-speckled yarn
Because the yarn had almost no value to me and I clearly wasn’t going to use it for anything else, I was more than willing to sacrifice it to my first (but hopefully not my last) yarn painting experiment.
Thief of Time
I had just enough yarn to crank out this sweater. It’s a modified version of Camilla Vad’s Magnolia sweater pattern from Laine Magazine, Issue 4. I had a whole post near completion about how I speckled the yarn without using dry pigments (and therefore, did not put my future lung health at risk) and how I modified the original pattern but I never published it because I never got around to taking decent FO photos (as you can see). And with all things that linger too long, the moment for it passed.
I love/hate variegated yarn. I love the yarn while it is in the form of a skein and I hate knitting it—all that unpleasant unpredictable pooling and general mess of colours. Then I realised that it could be made to behave with planned pooling.
Taming of the yarn
I won’t lie, it takes some work to keep the colours in line, but it was rather satisfying being the boss of a variegated yarn for once.
The Beginning of the Ends
The number of ends I had to deal with because nearly half of the 18 or so balls of yarn I used were riddled with knots, was not even the worst part of making this sweater, which was a years-long saga.
I might possibly privately consider this one sweater a testament to my stamina when it comes to knitting and my sheer obstinacy to make something work, come hell or high water. Or rather, come knots or innumerable froggings.
I’m quite astonished that the yarn survived not only the countless froggings, but the entire pandemic so far. I have been wearing this cardigan like a security blanket since it was completed just before lockdown last year. This photo was pre-pandemic (which is why there isn’t any pilling from the constant washing and wearing) and I can see now that the hanger (cool, Danish, and designed for a Viking-sized person) was not the best choice for showcasing my sweater. It definitely fits me better than it fits the hanger but only one of those two models was made to be in front of a camera.
All’s well that ends well
I’m going to toot my own horn here: I slayed the details on this sweater. The smocking, the garter-ridge pocket edge, the visible raised seams (which I didn’t photograph because then I’d have to explain how I did it to curious knitters and it would have melted their brains, as it very nearly did mine in the process. It involved the intentional dropping of edge stitches all the way from top to bottom). I felt like Gandalf emerging from his battle with the Balrog by the end of it—I even had more white hair. Don’t trouble yourself about the pattern. It’s not really the same sweater now since I reworked most of it after wasting several attempts at knitting the original pattern. I sound embittered because this project and I battled it out for years. (But I won, so I ought to be more gracious about it, I know.)
I’m signing off for the foreseeable future but as always, I wish you and your loved ones good health, both of the body and mind!
A Y