Diana Sullivan Facebook Seminar
I am attending a virtual seminar with Diana Sullivan on Facebook over the course of the next two weeks. She sent the materials list in plenty of time with instructions to be ready for the seminar. Knowing I've got thousands of cones of yarn available, I procrastinated on choosing my yarns till the seminar began.
The first session was for two projects, a Slider Lace poncho, and mukluks. I cast about for a suitable yarn and found a random beige cone which I think is cotton, and decided to spice it up with a lace-weight skein that has been calling to me every time I walk past saying "knit me, knit me"! The lace weight is by Premier Yarns and it is wool-free Lace. The color is Limestone Glow. It was in my sock yarn basket, so I assumed there were two skeins.
The two yarns complement each other very nicely. I knit a gauge swatch and found that the "slider" in the stitch pattern tended to slide a lot with these smooth yarns, losing the definition. Diana had warned us that this could happen, but she also encouraged us to use our stash yarns. Her yarn choice was "shawl in a ball", which I've used before. It has a "hairy" texture. The original technique was to leave two needles out of work between each vertical column of stitches, and move edge stitches from one column to the next. Here's my swatch.
I decided to modify the stitch pattern. Instead of just moving the stitch to an empty needle, I "pegged" it to another stitch by hanging it on the needle that already had a stitch on it. I knit a row, then "made" a stitch by lifting the top loop from the butt of the adjacent stitch.
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| Slider 2 lace with anchored stitches. |
I am pleased with this stitch. The poncho should not take too long to make, as it is two rectangles. Unfortunately, now that I am half done with the current rectangle, I realized I cannot find the second ball of Premier Wool-Free Lace that I thought I had in my sock yarn basket. Did I only buy one? It's possible. I have begun a search for another skein of this yarn. My first place to look was on Ravelry. They have a feature where people can enter their stash and indicate whether it is for sale or not. I did find several people who have this yarn stashed. I sent off messages to them, in case they are willing to part with their stash, but to date I have not heard back from anyone. I also did a google search, and found a listing for WalMart. Unfortunately, no stock. Same with Mary Maxim, Herschnerr's, Yarn Barn, JoAnn Fabrics, Michael's, Hobby Lobby, and a bunch of other yarn stores. I looked on ebay and Etsy. I looked on Craiglist. I looked at Letgo, only to find out it has been acquired by another company.
In the process, I discovered a few sources that had the same yarn but in different colors. I ordered three skeins of lavender-colored yarn. If all else fails, my poncho will be color-blocked, or I may decide to frog what I have done and re-knit a solid color, use this yarn for something else.
Bicycling in the Mountains Hats
In the meantime, I have completed my etsy orders for hats. This one was inspired by another Ravelry user, but I used my own hat shape and her stitch pattern.
I was asked to knit a sweater in this pattern. There are a lot of possibilities. I did a few designs in Designaknit, with a bottom border, a top border, an all-over pattern, and also gave the person a photo of a similar round-yoke sweater. I worked up some pricing. We'll see if anything comes of the request.
Setersdal Sweater
This week I photographed some punchcards from Rowan's book of designer machine knits for the Setersdal pattern. I knitted this sweater long ago on a punchcard machine, in Yeoman Yarn 50-50, a blend of 50 percent acrylic and 50 percent wool. This yarn DOES shrink. Especially if it gets washed with a bunch of jeans in the washing machine and dryer. And because I made it a cardigan, with a zipper, the zipper buckled. So although the design makes me happy, I cannot wear the sweater, at least in public. I really should just take out the zipper for recycling and throw the sweater away or use it for a dustrag.
This time I intend to knit it in a Wool-rayon blend I purchased from Made In America yarns. The design is classic and timeless. Here's a link to a photo published in Ravelry. Setersdal Sweater
I was able to successfully use the graphics import feature in Design-a-Knit to import these photos into stitch designs. I had to do a little touch-up editing. Because my photos were not 100% flat, I had to use the checkbox to "move corners independently" to capture the dots. I corrected the third punchcard, which I believe is missing a dot in rows 1 and 2, the XO row of the design. My original sweater also had this mistake, because I was faithful to the punchcard as given in the book. If you look carefully at the photo from the book (shown in the Ravelry picture) it appears that possibly these stitches were duplicate stitched after the fact. But I have them now! These stitch designs may be useful to incorporate into other designs sometime in the future.
