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Two years after I first learned to knit in order to recreate our childhood stockings, I finally recreated the stockings.
I reverse engineered the pattern from my own stocking, adding a few improvements, like joining the stocking in the round at the color change from green to white so it is less noticeable, and making the i-cord "hook" significantly sturdier. This December found me making three of these - one for Dan, one for my mom's wife, and one for my sister's partner. December also featured a collection of knitting mishaps, from the grossly misshapen sock to the far-too-big sweater, to drive home the lesson that I can not get away with being lazy about swatching, measuring, and trying things on in the process.
After months and months of never posting here, I've decided to try to re-commit to using this blog more, especially as I embark upon my latest Knitting Challenge. I couldn't really tell you what it is that makes me want to tackle overly complicated projects on very tiny needles, but the attraction is strong. So, I am planning on knitting the Venezia Pullover from Interweave Knits.
It is a little difficult to see in the photo, but the gist of it is that it is a ten-color all-over Fair Isle sweater knit out of fingering weight yarn on size 0 and size 2 needles. I wasn't planning on knitting this when it came out because the colors are not particularly appealing to me, I've never really done Fair Isle before, and believe it or not I do actually have a brain in my head that alerts me when something is going to be unnecessarily arduous. I read Eunny Jang's blog, though, and I read that someone had actually completed this amazing task, and I went off in search of pictures and stumbled onto a Craftster thread. This is how it started. The completed sweater was like the one in the magazine, but with red instead of yellow and suddenly it was much nicer to me. Other people had pictures of grays and pinks and autumn-y palettes.
The first step was not colors, though - the first step was whether or not I could even figure out Fair isle. Where better to start than Eunny's Endpaper Mitts? It turns out that I can, in fact, figure out Fair Isle.
So now I get to think about colors. I wanted to try to stay within the range of KnitPicks Palette since that makes this a $20 endeavor, and considering the likelihood of my never finishing this...
I hemmed, I hawed, I used crayons and photoshop and a demo of some chart software, and I think I have picked a color scheme:
I have one other combination to try once the yarn gets here, but since it is just the same colors in another order I can just figure that out in a yarn swatch.
Here's to new crazy knitting adventures.