Mixed WIPs

I haven't blogged for a while, but I also haven't finished anything for a while!

But I do have a truckload of WIPs. First my Noro Bohus vest. It's coming along, I'll be at the underarm quite soon. Meanwhile, the patterns and color combinations are proliferating in unexpected ways



I've also had some good progress with my Bog Jacket. I'm past the critical point - the point where you remove the thumb trick stitches and graft the two ends together. Quite nasty, but it came out... not invisible, but not that frankensteinian either



Some other TV knitting (and lots of episodes of The Wire) is my Cobalt Jacket. A top-down raglan of my own design. The earlier version was knitted on bigger needles, but the most recent incarnation is on 4 mm, relatively small for the thick mystery yarn I'm using



Last, but not least, I've knitted most of my Aeolian for Vibeke, shhh! My first and probably last piece of beaded knitting. But it does look good, and I'll be done soon (just unraveling several rows tonight, but that's a temporary step back. Lifelines? No)

One More Vest!

After my recent self-proclaimed success with the Thistle Vest, I've jumped straight to another fair isle vest. I must have been bitten by some kind of bug?

This one is made from my stash Noro Kureyon Sock, that I have been experimenting with earlier, but was never convinced the experiments were going the right way. So the new deal is fair isle, heavily inspired by Bohus patterns. I love the Bohus style, the only complaint being that the patterns only cover yokes or front panels. It looks beautiful, but it means you have to knit almost an entire sweater in plain stockinette! So I zoomed in on the color pattern itself, fusing and modifying different Bohus designs. I think it's going well so far:I really like the way the dusty colors blend but still stand out.

Noro Love

This project has been hibernating for a while. I initially bought the Noro Silk Garden for edges on a planned black jacket, but after a good amount of swatching, I was never happy with it. So then I stumbled on Brooklyntweed's post about a Silk Garden scarf, and the decision was made.
It makes for wonderful knitting, so suspenseful! Which color combination will be next???
I finished it and cast off, and then the big sleep came. The cast off edge looked like this:Yuck! Not only does the color change to pink in an unfortunate way, the cast off edge is also too bulky. Fast-forward some months, I finally unraveled this edge, and tried a sewn cast-off from the Fall '08 Interweave magazine. This did not work out at all! Mostly because of the knitter, I think, not so much the method itself... Then, removed some of the pink, and cast off in the standard way a bit tighther, and it looks much better. The two ends now look similar:So I'm happy now. Some other details: 37 stitches wide, 4 skeins Silk Garden total (2 each of colorways 270 and 84), 4.5 mm needles. Used shadow knitting edge according to Vivian Høxbro's book, it results in a smooth edge where the color changes are hidden:

Noro madness

In one illustration of chaos theory, the flutter of a butterfly's wings can start a hurricane on the other side of the Earth.
This story is in some way similar. After recieving one skein of Noro Kureyon for my birthday, I ran off and bought 6 more. So now I have 7 (seven!!). And the headache of figuring out what to do with them. My first 3 or so swatches were about finding the right number of stiches for the full circumference of a cardigan, knitting back and forth on a circular needle. It looks like this:
I love the colors, but I think the stripe is too massive. And this yarn repeats the colors in the same sequence over and over, so the cardigan would just have wide stripes.So in the next try, I striped two skeins together, knitting one from the inside and one from the outside. This means that the colors will "meet" at some point, it happens twice in this picture (the black stripe with light green on both sides, and the dark green with cyan on both sides). But besides that, this is so much better, and does more justice to the wonderful Noro