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Knitting Friday

I spent the early morning hours collating all the clues for the CreAL KAL on Ravelry. There are 6 shawl clues in all but you must double that number because each clue can be knitted with or without a lovely central spine (which is what drew me to this KAL.) So with an average of 5 pages per clue x 2 you're printing out 60 pages here. Plus the swatch, grafting and abbreviations pages. Plus the 7th clue with is 4 different ways to put on the border at 6 pages each for 24 more pages. Now you're pretty close to 100 pages. And this is a free KAL! (Free when it started, $6 now.) I did find some time to work up the swatch which is good because you get to practice all the types of stitches like the upside-down, backward 4 stitch cable (joking.) But there are a lot of different stitches. There is no way I'm going to get to this beauty for quite some time; but I'm ready.

#1 Is this going to work?

Remember last week I mentioned that I was experimenting with this shawl:

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/two-face

which was done in two colors in stockinette but I wanted to work it in R1: *YO, K2tog and R2: K. What you see in #1 is just that. You can see that the peach side has vertical columns and the green side has horizontal ones. I sort of like it and I'm thinking about plowing along with it or else changing it slightly so that one color would be *YO, K2tog* and the other color would be *SSK, YO*. I have no idea if this variation would tweak it straight but making another swatch to find out will be easy.

#2 Sleep Sofa throw

Now that I have redecorated the family room/kitchen, created a fifth wall and decided to keep the never-used sleep sofa covered because it's part of the fifth wall and 9' from the kitchen stove, I have to hide the worn spot on the arm of the slipcover. What to do? I'm going to use the hues of gold/golden yellow from the 100 skeins of KP Palette yarn DH got me for my b-day and make an very light throw to cover the arm.  (The sofa is dark green with a touch of gold.) #2 shows the throw so far. It's this pattern:

http://www.redheart.com/free-patterns/crochet-corner-corner-throw 

My variation is that I make a rectangle, not a square. How?, you ask. Once you get to your width, keep increasing on one side (and be sure to mark this side) and only decrease on the other. Continue this way to your length and then just follow the pattern directions for decreasing on both sides. Easy as pie. But filling in that "hole" when you start decreasing both sides takes a lot of yarn. Oh, and I'm using an L hook on fingering weight yarn.

#3 Reversible Scarf - RS

#4 WS of #3

And finally, on the left, #3, is a prototype for a beige, wool DK weight scarf. What I did was search for reversible knitting stitches. Here's a good site:

http://www.knittingonthenet.com/stitches.htm

I copied out 3 pages of reversible stitches and I'm working down my list doing every other one, but not doing any of the really simple ones like seed. This swatch started out on US 13 needles but the stitch definition was lousy. #3 is on US 10 and I think I'm going up to US 10.5 for the final project. There are 4 rows of K at the beginning of the scarf (and the end, of course), 4 rows of K between each pattern (patterns are about 24 rows each) and 3 stitches in K on each side of every row. Here's the reverse side in #4 which unfortunately decided to rotate itself (sorry about that) but you can see that there is really no right or wrong side to this scarf.

That's it for today. I really see no new knitting projects ahead for a while. I have that Lion Brand Barbizon Lace scarf and the Groovy Lace scarf to finish. And just a few more rows on a wool vest which has been hanging fire for ages.

#5 Miss A before she fell in love

 So, for inspiration I'll end with a picture of Miss A. who is going to NYC for a training session and may be seeing her love, Mr. O.

See you next week. Happy knitting.