nupps on a plane

I was really excited for our ten plus hours worth of flights back to the States, because I love knitting on planes and was hoping to get through my much neglected Swallowtail Shawl, which I started on the plane ride to Peru and then pretty much didn't touch for three months. I was making pretty good time, too, until I hit the dreaded nupp section. I'd never knit nupps before, but figured I could just follow the instructions and everything would be okay - right? Which was fine, until I got to the purl row, which literally took me an hour. I had to pick up the stitches with my fingernails to purl them. 

Fortunately, we landed in Houston for a connection not long after, and I was able to look up nupp techniques on my cell phone. The most useful one I found was, while making your nupps by K1, YO, K1, YO, K1 into the same stitch, just YO twice for each YO; then, on the purl row, you can slip those YOs into one really loose stitch, which makes the purling insanely easier. After that, I was actually looking forward to making nupps, though this shawl is still littered with mistakes - so here's hoping they're not too noticeable in the end? 

FO: ishbel

It's done, it's done! It took me way longer to finish this once I'd gotten off the plane and was too busy eating and saying hi to everyone in Oakland, but it's finally done, and I'm so happy with it :) 

I always shied away from lace, in large part because many of my lace projects - include three earlier attempts of this shawl - all ended in disaster. Knitting on an airplane somehow really helped me get over the lace thing - and this pattern is so beautiful that I totally want to knit more lace shawls now. 

Other thoughts on the pattern (Ishbel by Ysolda Teague): I will forever love this pattern for making me love lace. Once I figured out the mistake I'd been making in earlier attempts, the lacework flew by! Just make sure your Sl 1, K2togs, PSSOs all line up, and this pattern is remarkably forgiving of mistakes. I had 400+ yards of sock yarn, so I made a smlarge shawl, knitting the stockinette as if for the small size, and the lace as if for the large. The resulting size is just right, I think - I can wear this over a fancy dress or kind of bunched around my neck in the autumn. 

and the yarn (Juno Fiberarts Alice Sock in Canopy): oh my god, this is the most beautiful yarn I have ever touched. I know knitting bloggers are probably prone to hyperbole when it comes to this sort of thing, but I swear this time I'm serious! I love how soft it is, and the gorgeous variety of colors it comes in - though, tragically, the price (I paid nearly $36 for a skein) and the international shipping (I've only found it in the UK) make this a bit prohibitively expensive.

yet more wayfaring (a little bit of knitting)

The last month or so has been lots more living out of a backpack - great fun, but not always conducive to knitting. While I wasn't getting much knitting done, I was riding a moped over roads of various quality in Northern Vietnam:

And then visiting India for the first time! After dreaming of visiting for most of my life, I stumbled across some cheap Air Asia tickets and decided to go for it despite the time constraints, because who knows when I'll be in Asia again. I only had a few days, but I saw a little bit of Kerala...

... and also Mysore in Karnataka, where I became obsessed with all the insanely gorgeous colors: 

I wish I'd had more time in India, but I had to hurry to Scotland in time for a friend's wedding: 

Throughout all of this, I did have an increasingly crinkled WIP in my backpack - a very slow-going Ishbel shawl, knit in madtosh prairie in Oxblood, which looks far more luminous in this photo than it does in real life. 

To be fair, living in a crumpled up Citimart shopping bag for six weeks is probably not the ideal condition for any yarn. I finally made it to the lace section in India, and since then it has started to move a lot faster. It was hard to work up enthusiasm for knitting in Asia's 40 degree early summer weather, but Scotland - with it's cold, rainy June - is much better knitting weather, so here's hoping I can finish it before I head back to the States (and to all the yarn I sent home from Japan months ago).

2011 knitting resolutions

I'm pretty bad at New Year's Resolutions, typically, though I did manage to keep up my goal last summer of knitting six sweaters in the last half of 2010 (though I didn't manage to finish that Vivian sweater). I guess goals related to something I love doing are a bit easier than my annual promise to start jogging regularly, but in any case, here are my knitting-related New Years Resolutions for 2011:

1. Finish the Vivian sweater that I started way back in December 2009. For real this time.
2. Finish the February lady sweater that's been sitting in a sad pile next to my bed for four weeks now.
3. Seven sweaters fit to be worn in public. (I love making hats and cute tiny accessories, but I really do love knitting sweaters more than anything else.)
4. ... at least one of which that I've designed myself.
5. Finish the reading/viewing for the Design Your Own Shawl class, for which I have woefully fallen off the wagon during the craziness of the holidays.
6. ... and then actually design a shawl using the information from this class.

above: I swear I'll finish this eventually..

And, finally, one stash related resolution, and really the entire point of writing this whole post, because if I post it here, then it's official, difficult as it will be: 

7. No buying new yarn until I've used the yarn that's accumulated in our tiny apartment - with only 3 months left before we have to pack all of our belongings up and hit the road for a good 3 months of suitcase living, the last thing I need to do is collect more stuff. There is plenty of gorgeous yarn lying around to keep me occupied. 

So that's it!  What are your knitting related New Year's Resolutions? 

swatch!

I've been randomly busy with a lot of things lately, the most of exciting of which is definitely the Design Your Own Shawl class I'm taking from Stefanie Japel.* The material is self-paced, which is really great for my randomly insanely-busy one day, quiet the next schedule, and while I've been too busy to get as far as I would have liked though the videos and the readings, I still feel like I'm learning a lot. Above is a shot from a proto-swatch - not sure if this will be the stitch pattern I eventually use for the shawl, or not, but it was without a doubt the biggest swatch I've ever knit. I do, grudgingly, knit swatches for other projects, but I rarely make them as big as I'm supposed to - so I appreciate that the class is allowing me to move more slowly, rather than run off too fast, as I am often otherwise prone to doing :-) 

* Which makes me feel a bit star struck, if I'm honest; hers was one of the first knitting blogs I ever read, and I backpacked all over the UK two years ago with a copy of her v-neck sweater pattern in my oversized backpack. I didn't knit it, because the yarn got tangled up in the zipper of the backpack, but I will someday, I swear. 

Simple Things

Finished! This is a beautiful pattern that looks even nicer when worn, though it did come out quite small, even with an extra repeat of the garter stitch eyelets - very much a shawlette rather than a shawl. Still, I think my mom will like it - this was my first time using yarn from the Sanguine Gryphon, and the color -  Bog Fritillary - is absolutely gorgeous.

With this shawl done, I am quite close to being done with the meager amount of Christmas knitting I set out to do this year - I don't gift a lot of knitted objects, mostly because I'm too self conscious and want them to be absolutely perfect. But my perpetually cold mother always makes a point of wearing whatever I give her (she models them for me whenever we have Skype conversations!) so she's most definitely on the list :-)