This is my second round with assemblage’s sev[en]circle cowl. I wear my first one a lot, but I thought it would be fun to have one in a color other than black, since everything I wear it with is also black. I fell in love with this lovely dark desaturated teal-gray silk/merino yarn at Habu Textiles when I was in New York last winter and decided it would be perfect. And so it is!

I love assemblage’s knit designs. And the things she sews, but especially her knits. This is the Hakusa scarf, knit from Habu A-21 (silk-wrapped stainless steel) and Habu N-75 (merino).

The pattern starts with a few rows of A-21 alone, and then the N-75 gets pulled in for the rest of the scarf. Because the stainless steel holds its shape a bit when crumpled, it’s possible to get a sculptural feeling out of it.

The full scarf is an irregular triangle, and the merino and silk make it softer than you would expect from something knit with stainless steel. We’re heading into scarf weather again in San Francisco, so I expect to be wearing this a lot very soon.

I know I’ve said it before, that I didn’t think I’d be one of those knitters who knit socks, but every time I make another pair I remember it again.

These are the Diagonal Lace Socks from Socks from the Toe Up, which, if you’re counting, is my third pair from that book (the other two are here and here). The yarn is Malabrigo Sock again, which has turned out to be as nice to knit with as it is to weave with. I made one change to the pattern, which was to reverse the lace pattern on the right sock so that when worn the socks mirror each other.

I had these mostly finished in late February, but things have been a little crazy lately so it took me a while to get around to sewing in the ends and photographing them.

Once upon a Christmas I used my newly discovered mad weaving skillz to weave for my sister the Twilight Scarf.

It turned out beautifully, and is my most favorited project on Ravelry. I wanted to keep it for myself, but dutifully gave it away – and promptly bought another skein of Malabrigo Sock in Stonechat to make another for myself. A few months later I bought a second skein, thinking I would make a wider scarf for my version, and then the yarn sat in my stash for a long time while I didn’t do any weaving.

Recently I went into a furious destash mode where I tried to finish all my outstanding yarn projects, and before my current crazy work project took over my life, I made a lot of progress. In fact, I destashed down to one cone of lace-weight bamboo yarn. And I finally finished not just one, but two scarves from the Malabrigo (plus the recently posted Lace and Cable socks).

Because I bought the two skeins a few months apart, there are subtle differences in the color variegation. So you can see that the scarf on the left (the Eclipse scarf) has more of the highlight color in the weft than the scarf on the right. This makes me sad, because it turned out slightly better than the one on the right (it’s longer and the selvedges are more even), but I like the resulting fabric better on the one on the right (the New Moon scarf). Here’s the Eclipse scarf:

And the New Moon scarf:

Both scarves are 72 ends, 10 dpi reed. The New Moon scarf is about 48″ long and the Eclipse scarf is about 54″ long. In other news, Ravelry finally added weaving as a category for craft, yay!

I know, I said I didn’t know if I would knit another pair of socks. But I had bought a bunch of yarn that I planned to weave with, and the weaving didn’t use nearly as much yarn as I expected, so… Socks.

These are the “Lace and Cable Socks” from Socks from the Toe Up by Wendy D. Johnson. The yarn is Malabrigo Sock in Stonechat. You’ve seen it before in the Twilight Scarf I wove for my sister a couple of years back, and you’ll see it again when I post the scarves I wove from it before I knit the socks.

Love the color. Love the natural striping that the yarn did. Love the diamond lace pattern, but it doesn’t show up very well. Wish I had use a slightly stretchier bind-off than the ribbed bind off, as it’s a bit tight getting them past my heels when I take them off. I wore them all day Sunday (I finished them a while ago, but the light wasn’t right for photographing them – too much sun!) and they were perfect for wearing around the house on a rainy day.

I was never very excited about the idea of knitting socks, in spite of their popularity in knitting circles. I understand the appeal of a small, portable project, but I couldn’t really imagine wearing them. Socks, to me, are something I buy in the lightest possible weight, in the simplest possible style, in cotton, and preferably black.

But… I was ordering some needles from Web’s for another project, and then I started poking around the yarns, and, well, you know how these things go. I ended up with a cone of lace weight bamboo and a couple of skeins of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock from their Color Commentary series, “Cookie’s Deep Dark Secret.” The pattern is “On-Hold Socks” from Socks from the Toe Up by Wendy D. Johnson.

I finished the first sock (pictured) and I’m about to start on the heel gusset for the second. The needles are tiny (2mm!) but there’s something about the precision of small, neat stitches that I find appealing — I hear people get bored and have trouble finishing the second sock, but I’m not hitting that. And I’ve learned some new techniques: Judy’s Magic Cast-on for a perfect, seamless toe; and knitting socks in the round using two circulars rather than double-pointed needles, a technique I’ll probably use everywhere I used to use DPs because there are no ladders between the stitches that were on different needles. I like the two circulars in conjunction with the toe-up method of knitting socks because it’s easy to try on the sock to check the size, because the cables are flexible and the stitches don’t slide off.

So the whole sock experience has been surprisingly fun! I still don’t know if I’ll wear them or knit another pair, but I’m glad I tried it out. See my Ravelry project for more details and photos.

I finished knitting my Upstairs Shawl in July, but I didn’t get around to blocking it until last Sunday. (I also blocked two hats and a pullover. It was that kind of day.) Though I blocked it to 20″ x 58″, it eased back to 18″ wide after I took the pins out — the final size in the pattern is 22″, so maybe I need to block it again? Or maybe I can live with it.

In this fog-diffused San Francisco morning light, you can see the subtle striations in the yarn color. It’s my favorite thing about this piece.

I started this project as plane knitting for my trip to Calgary in May, and now it was also plane knitting for my trip to Las Vegas. It’s the Upstairs Shawl from Ravelry (requires an account to view the pattern, but if you’re a knitter, you need a Ravelry account!), in handpaintedyarn.com lace. It’s a simple lace pattern repeating over 11 stitches and 32 rows (with 105 stitches per row, including a garter-stitch border) and I memorized it quickly, but with the lace-weight yarn it’s going very slowly. I’ve knit about 36″ so far, and I’d say I’m a little over half-way through the ball, and that’s probably about 44 hours of knitting time (it takes me about 4 hours for a repeat). Fortunately, not all of that was in airports or on planes. At my current rate, I figure I’ll finish it around September.

This is the same yarn I used for my sister’s Clapotis scarf and the Mockingbird handwoven scarf. Great yardage (850 yards per skein) with saturated colors and lovely subtle shifts in the deep blue. But there are many places where the yarn is so finely spun that it’s little more than a thread, so I’m always afraid that I’m going to break it. That could just be from the Mockingbird experience, when I foolishly used it as a warp thread – I’ve never actually broken it knitting.

In the interests of (trying) not acquiring new stash until I’ve used up what I already have, and also being crazy busy and so doing the smaller, simpler projects first, let me present the Kusha Kusha scarf from Habu. I bought it as a kit from Knit Purl when I was in Portland last September. It’s a simple stockinette pattern, with a few stitch decreases at the beginning and further tapering about two-thirds of the way through that is achieved by gradually decreasing the needle size rather than the number of stitches. The main point of interest is that it’s knit with two lace-weight yarns held together throughout, one stainless steel and one merino wool, and then felted slightly to finish.

The results are (1) interesting texture and waffling along the edges, caused by the wool yarn shrinking during the felting while the stainless steel does not, and (2) if you crunch the resulting fabric into a ball with your hand, the stainless steel yarn holds some memory of the scrunch, so you can get some sculptural texture.

I didn’t fully follow the pattern: after the first transition to smaller needles the instructions say to drop the merino yarn and only continue with the stainless steel. I tried it, but I didn’t like the abrupt change in color (the merino is black, and the stainless steel is about the color you’d expect from stainless steel) and I had a lot of the merino left, so I decided to just keep using both yarns until I ran out.

I had a full skein (plus a bit) of Cascade 220 left over from last year’s Christmas knitting, so, inspired again by Kirsten, I decided to use it on the Destroyed Cowl.

I have mixed feelings about the result. I like the pattern, but I think the yarn was wrong for it. The Cascade 220 is prone to felting, so after blocking there’s not a lot of stitch definition and it feels sort of soft and mushy. For this pattern, especially for the “destroyed” parts, I think more structure would have worked better. (It also might have worked better with a tighter gauge–I used 5mm needles.) More structure, or alternatively more drape–this middle area is just kind of bleah. The dropped stitches tend to roll under and hide, so it requires a little coaxing to show off the detail.

I still like the pattern, though, so I might try it again with a different yarn. (I also may just be being overly critical–one of my coworkers thinks it’s still very pretty.)