Knitting@roosterhillfarm.com

Working on a pair of Dashing for …someone .. for Christmas. I am not too experienced with cables yet and may be pulling these just a little too tight. We’ll see how the finished mitt looks, then judge for frogging and starting over.

I finished a pair of Maine Morning Mitts for …someone else… but am going to redo one of them. I guess my tape measure was working properly when I completed the first one and then stopped working when I was working on the second. The distance between cuff and thumb hole is off. Oops. Easily fixed. I am happy that the colored stripes worked out to match – I worked hard on that using just one skein.

The yarn for both is Patons SWS, a wool/soy blend. I like its Noro-ish morphing from color to color. The yarn has a nice halo and the colors are great. I picked the pink scheme to complement a hat I knit last month. I do have the tendency to poke the yarn with my needle instead of cleaning pulling it over as I knit. If this is not a single ply yarn, it is *very* loosely plied. I have it on good authority (hi Melodie!) that this yarn does pill.

The brown mitts are to accompany this hat, in progress. The hat is Reasonably Hip in the recent MagKnits. I still need to purchase some plastic mat to create the brim, so the hat is stalled and brimless until then. The yarn here is the workhorse Cascade 220. It’s one of the Heathers line and is a combination of purple and brown, depending on the light.

What’s scarier – that my niece wants a fun fur scarf for Christmas, or that I _did not have to buy any supplies to make her one_ ?

Me? I am going with option #2.

With this mystery project (HoHoHo) I am doing my first colorwork. The first few rows, colors were alternated every other stitch so I just pulled the yarn along behind the stitches (purple and pink part).

The pattern is more intricate with the dark and light pink yarns, so I carry the second color along as I knit with the first. This leaves less loose yarn exposed. IMO it makes for a denser fabric too.

But I have a problem.

A tangled mess. One way around it, I guess, would be to cut the yarn into workable lengths, and move these small balls back and forth as opposed to the working end of the yarn as I am now. But I am adverse to cutting the yarn. So far all I have been doing is knitting a couple rows, then untwisting the tangles, and starting over. But there has to be a better way.