Doug and I are in Beirut this week. We are attending a conference on language policy and refugees. We are also visiting cousins and eating far too much delicious Lebanese food. I didn’t bring my knitting with me, but I did manage to get some knitting done before I left. For those of you following my efforts to pick a colour scheme for my newest project, I include a little preview photo:
Happy Halloween! This year we don’t need scary costumes to frighten us: we can just watch the news instead!
Are you worried about how much your knitting habit costs? More to the point, are your spouses/parents/children/friends worried? Do you find yourself trying to explain away the boxes of expensive hand-dyed artisan yarn, beautifully-tooled exotic wood knitting needles, shelves full of pattern books, trips to wool festivals, etc? Then this post is for you!
Yesterday I received a promotional email for Selfridge’s (a department store) advertising “seriously smiley knitwear”. “Hmm,” I thought, “Let’s check out this season’s designer knitwear!” It made me happy! I was especially happy to see the prices! (Prices were quoted in pounds sterling; I have given US$ equivalents at today’s exchange rates. The photos are from Selfridge’s webpages.
1. Rag & Bone (£495; $650)
2. Altuzarra (£950; $1,247)
3. Balenciaga (£815; $1,069)
4. A F Vandevorst (£800; $1,050)
5. Alexander McQueen (£840; $1,102)
6. Calvin Klein (£900; $1,180)
7. Thom Browne (£1,160; £1522 – this one is sold out!)
My oh my! We have two things to cheer about fellow knitters!
1 – RED!!!!! Just because.
2 – The magic all-purpose reason why your knitting habit is cost-effective! (“But you know, honey, that by knitting this 100% cashmere chunky turtleneck, I am saving around £500 on yarn costs alone! We should definitely be drinking some champagne while I knit to celebrate my thriftiness, darling! Even better, we should be drinking it in Fiji!”)
I have knit two more swatches to look at different colour options for my new project. (See my last post for info, although I have been purposely vague regarding the pattern). Here is Swatch #3:
And here is Swatch # 4:
This now gives me a total of four swatches to decide from:
Clockwise from top left, this gives us:
I have a total of seven shades of the yarn (Gilliat de rerum natura), and there are at least 6 design elements (given that the background will be navy). This makes for many, many more combinations of possible colours. I have still not decided what I want, but I am tired of swatching. I want to get on to the sweater knitting!
I think that if I were to order these swatches from best to worst (for me), I would say: 3, 2, 4, and 1. I find Swatch #1 feels a bit too childlike, Swatch #2 is pretty nice although subtle, Swatch # 3 is pretty good and almost nails it but still seems a bit stark to me, and Swatch # 4 is very interesting but gives a totally different “feel” to it. Swatch # 3 feels Norwegian to me, while Swatch # 4 feels rather Central American.
It has been many years since I have indulged in this level of swatching. The last time was for my beautiful sweater Ormolu, which I blogged about here (way back in 2013). Here is a photo which shows off it’s beautiful colourwork:
and here is a photo of the swatches I made:
What to do now? Well, I am thinking very positively of making the sweater in a cross between Swatch #3 and Swatch #2. It would involve basically using the colour plan for Swatch #2, but switching out the middle pattern (the 3-row horizontal bar) so that it was in red with blue accents. Choices, choices….
I’ve gone about three weeks now without knitting anything. I can’t seem to pick up the one project I have on the needles – a very chic Hanne Falkenberg jacket. I love the jacket and am enjoying knitting it, but for some reason it’s not working for me now. I am stressed with a very demanding new role at work and I can’t seem to find a project to hold my attention.
I do, however, have some new yarn to play with. I have noticed a number of knitters on Ravelry – people whose knitting I follow – using a worsted weight wool from France by Gilliat, called ‘de rerum natura’. I have thought about buying it for a while just to see what it is like. I did some research and saw that it was frequently cited as a good substitute for Brooklyn Tweed Shelter. That sold me! BT is expensive here in the UK and I prefer to buy more locally when I can. (I have many projects made from BT yarns, but I enjoy having some options.) The similarities are in the way the wool is spun, which makes for an incredibly light yarn, with an amazing yardage. I found a local distributor (Wild and Wooly in Hackney, London), and ordered five different colours:
(Note that I am going to call these colours navy, red, cream, beige and light blue. They are actually called Nuit, Pavot, Poivre Blanc, Poivre et Sel, and Lagon, respectively.)
Today I have a rare day free and I decided to do some swatching. I imagine that many readers of this blog will immediately know what sweater I am swatching for, but as it is that time of the year when a knitter’s heart turns to presents, it will be called The-sweater-that-can’t-be-named for the time being. Here is Swatch #1:
I have only knit half the rows, so this is just part of the pattern (and includes the bottom half of a band of flowers which I have mercilessly cut asunder). The interesting thing about the pattern is that it can be knit with 3, 4, or 5 colours, and these can be high contrast or rather subtle. This means there are infinite possibilities. The swatch above was knit with a US8, which might be a bit too big – the swatch is still damp so I will hold off on determining the exact gauge. I also, in a very stupid move, knit it back and forth – even for a swatch, this is crazy!
Here is the second swatch:
This one I knit in the round, so to speak. In other words, at the end of every row I cut the yarns and then slid the swatch across to the other side of the (circular) needle and knitted again. Thus, every row is knitted as in circular knitting, but it makes for an awful lot of cut ends – which then can’t be ripped out and used again if you are playing yarn chicken. I knit this one with a US7 needle. It’s a bit hard to make out in the photo, but this sample uses both the cream and the beige shades. (I also inadvertently added an extra row of beige into the pattern.) Now, I need to decide. Here are some of my options:
Here are some thoughts:
Help! I can’t decide! What should I do?
I only know one thing for sure: swatching is grand!
Kelly: “I have the opposite of start-itis, Doug.”
Doug: “What does that mean?”
Kelly: “You know: start-itis is the very expensive compulsion to keep casting on new knitting projects without finishing any of the ever-growing number of knitting projects that you have already cast on!”
Doug: “Yes, I know what start-itis is. I want to know: what is the opposite of start-itis?”
Kelly: “That’s what I have!”
Doug: “I got that part; what does it mean?”
Kelly: “It means that I can’t cast on anything. I try and try and nothing happens. I’ve been trying to cast on something for weeks. I can’t do it. It’s the opposite of start-itis. What would you call that? It can’t be called ‘end-itis’, which would be something else entirely.”
Doug: “Okay, Kelly, break this down for me. Why can’t you cast anything on?”
Kelly: “I don’t know.”
Doug: “Do you have yarn?”
Kelly: “Yes.”
Doug: “Lots of yarn?”
Kelly: “Yes.”
Doug: “Do you have patterns?”
Kelly: “Yes.”
Doug: “Lots of patterns?”
Kelly: “Yes.”
Doug: “Do you have an enormous variety of knitting needles and other knitting paraphernalia, overflowing throughout the house, inhabiting every room and potentially procreating?”
Kelly: “Yes.”
Doug: “So you have, realistically, thousands of potential projects, perhaps tens of thousands, with the necessary yarn, patterns, needles, and other accessories that you need in order to cast on?”
Kelly: “Well, I guess so, if you want to put it that way.”
Doug: “But you can’t cast on anything?”
Kelly: “No.”
Doug: “I know what the opposite of start-itis is.”
Kelly: “Really? Fantastic! What is it?”
Doug: “Procrastination!”