My fall edition of Love of Knitting magazine had this beautiful Falling leaves hat pattern, made out of Berocco Boboli, which I just happened to have four skeins of sitting in my stash. Fate! I used one for the hat, which knit up in about 4 days, and then decided to modify the pattern to make a matching scarf, which I haven't photographed yet. It needs to be blocked, and probably never will be. Just after finishing the scarf, I wandered into my favorite local yarn shop and discovered they were carrying Boboli Lace in virtually the same colorway, so of course I needed to make matching gloves...... This ate up about a month of prime holiday knitting time. Which I feel a little bad about, but then I note that it will be a wonderful set to keep someone warm, and this is New England so this project was necessary. Totally.
Way back in June we were in NY for my cousin's youngest son's christening, and my other cousin's husband asked if I would knit him a hat. He has always wanted a hand-knit hat, you see. He rides the Long Island Railroad every day to work in the city, and apparently there are several women on the train who knit (hello sisters!) and he asked one of them who was working on a hat if he could buy it from her. She kindly explained to him that most knitters are working on something for a particular someone and suggested he find someone he knew who was a knitter and ask for a hat. My mistake was working on a pair of socks in front of him, although I don't think it's much of a secret in the family that I knit, as I have knit his sister-in-law three baby blankets in recent years. Anyway, he wanted a black hat. Snore. So I found this cute pattern by Jennifer Burt called Changing Seasons Men's Hat, and knit it with that. It only took a couple of days. The photo makes it look grey, but it is most definitely black.
In addition to the knitting, I have just finished an 8-week class for 4-harness weaving. I liked the weaving, and my classmates and teacher, but oh boy, do I hate warping that type of loom. Our first project was a sampler, using scrap yarn for the weft, to try out different patters:
I am not crazy about some of those colors, but it was a practice piece, so you don't want to spend a lot of money on yarn when you're just starting out. I didn't have too much of a problem following all of the different treadlings to make the patterns, so I probably could have used more of a coordinated color scheme, except that it would have been against our teacher's directions.
Our next project was called a Rose Path Sampler. For this I chose a rayon-cotton blend warp, in three separate colors, and a contrasting weft to make the patterns stand out:
I love the colors, and a lot of the patterns, but the blocks of pattern are not all the same size and the asymmetry of it bothers me a bit. I had thought about turning it into a gift scarf, or maybe two, but the end piece, which is all one pattern, is not long enough and I can't do much fringe for either end of the scarf. I guess that means I'm a pretty efficient weaver with not a lot of waste, which is the silver lining here.
There are about 40 days until Christmas, and the project list for gifts isn't getting any smaller. I think I will get over my dismay about the asymmetry on that woven scarf rather quickly as the calendar counts down.....
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