I mentioned the low-budget Masterpiece Theater serial of Pride and Prejudice was four or five episodes, right? So in addition to a scarf for Edmond, I had time to weave one for myself.

The yarn is Crystal Palace Waikiki, a slubbed cotton-rayon blend. 60 ends, 7.5 dpi reed, finished size about 6″ wide by 67″ long.

I’m happy with the loose weave and texture on this scarf, but considering its decorative nature I could have gone with something a couple inches narrower. Still, it has a dressing-up feel to it that I like.

It’s been a crazy busy week this week, between exciting developments going on at work and in the evenings trying to finish my brother’s new company web site for launch. I think I would like to be knitting, and not trying to make absolutely positioned navigation sub-menus work across different browsers and operating systems. But, alas.

E. got Parallels working on my Mac a couple months ago, and over my time off at Christmas I began taking advantage of instant streaming on Netflix. The selection kinda sucks, but I ended up watching a low-budget Masterpiece Theater serial of Pride and Prejudice that stretched four or five episodes while I wove. Thus, ironically, my husband who dislikes Jane Austen has become the recipient of Mr. Darcy’s Scarf.

This is more of the Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sport that I bought from eBay. I used leftovers from the Luna Capelet for the warp and a fresh skein for the weft so there would be continuity throughout the scarf: you can see there’s a vertical strip of a beige-y color on the left, which shows just how varied the colors are in this dye lot.

The scarf was 60 ends with a 10 dpi reed, and measures about 5″ wide by 72″ long excluding fringe.

Luna was my Christmas Day knitting. Though the style is a little unusual for me, I love the picture in the book: the yarn, not so much. So I knit it from two strands of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sport, which I had purchased from eBay.

I like the way this turned out, but I did a couple of extra repeats of the lace pattern that I think now I did not need. The one time I wore it, it kept slipping down my arms. I think it may be because the yarn is stretchier than the Louisa Harding yarns the pattern called for, and also heavier, and so it is stretching when I wear it. I plan to rip out the extra rows and see if that fixes the problem. If not, I will try crocheting in some elastic under the top garter stitch band.

I also really like the buttons, which the friendly lady at the notions counter at Britex sold me on. They are stone or shell and very polished, and are a big step up from the plain plastic gray buttons I would have picked.

Trying to go in order of completion here! This is the Clapotis scarf pattern from Knitty—an older and very popular pattern. I modified mine to make it a bit narrower and longer. The yarn is lace weight wool from handpaintedyarn.com. There are about 850 yards on a skein: I used part of it on the Mockingbird Scarf and still had enough left for a scarf 13″ wide by 77″ long, blocked.

I don’t have a fancy name for this one because I knit it over a period of a few weeks. It was my plane knitting for Calgary and LA, and handwork for a lot of television watching. I finished it just before Christmas but it took a little while to get around to blocking it. My younger sister spotted it while I was in Calgary and claimed it, so it’s soon to be off to the Great White North.

This is my new favorite scarf. I finished it before Christmas, but hadn’t gotten around to photographing it until now. It is woven from Malabrigo Yarns Silky Merino, and it is the softest yarn ever. The finished size is 4.5″ wide by 54″ long, excluding fringe: 48 ends with a 7.5 dpi reed. I wear it to work, at work, at home. I lurve it even more than its namesake, the song “Home Life” from Rook by Shearwater—and that’s a lot.

I hope you are all having an excellent 2009 so far! I took some time off at the end of the year, and completed a bunch of projects that I’ll be posting over the next while, so stick around!

My coworker Emily wore pink today, anticipating me yet again. It’s getting a little eerie.

This is the Snow Leopard Scarf, woven on my Ashford Knitter’s Loom. 5.5″ wide, 62″ long, 36 ends at 5 dpi. The yarn is a Novelty Boutone yarn from handpaintedyarn.com. It is a wool yarn with a cotton thread wrapped around it, and little “buttons” where the cotton thread is wrapped around like a little cocoon around the yarn. The buttons proved a bit of a problem in warping, as I originally wanted to use the 7.5 dpi reed but the buttons wouldn’t fit through the holes. However, the loose weave that resulted from the 5 dpi reed came out with a nice drape, and I think it would have been a bit stiff with a denser weave.

The Snow Leopard scarf takes its name from the song of the same name on the album Rook, by Shearwater. I lurve it.

I kept going long enough to make a minimum scarf length before giving up on the broken warp threads and finishing. The final scarf is about 52″ long by 6″ wide and it’s amazingly lightweight.

This morning my coworker wore a green jacket. It’s like she anticipates what I’m bring in to show off.

This scarf is called the Mockingbird Scarf because I listened to To Kill a Mockingbird in audiobook form while I made it—penance for all the teenage vampire romance listening.

I ordered this beautiful yarn from handpaintedyarn.com a little while ago, and somehow, over navigating around the site and ordering a few different yarns, got it into my head that I was buying double-knitting weight, when in fact I ordered lace weight. I had misgivings about using it for weaving, but I was so inspired by another Ravelry member’s project with it that I decided to go for it—even after reading, on that same project, that she’d had one warp thread after another break.

Don’t get me wrong, this is beautiful yarn and I think it would make an amazing handknit lace shawl—in fact, I’ll probably knit one, since I bought another skein in a different color. But it is not meant for warping. 10 inches into my current project I have already had three warp threads break. Every time I pull the reed down I can see it shaving little bits of wool from the thin, single-ply yarn, and every once in a while just a little too much wool is gone and the warp breaks. But oh, it’s pretty! The colors are more saturated and darker than in the photo on the web site, and even with a 12.5 dpi reed the weaving is open and airy. It might even be worth all the aggravation. Maybe.

The Magnolia wrap takes its name from the album Magnolia Electric Co. by Songs: Ohia, which I listened to somewhat obsessively during the wrap’s construction. My coworker and fellow music afficionado Grant hopes that the wrap’s recipient won’t become depressed just wearing it, with that kind of legacy! But I was in love with the slide guitar and violin, the urgency of the lyrics, and the glorious fuzz of the arrangements, and the resulting album is complex enough that it requires a few listens to grasp it all. (In fact, I’m listening to it again as I write this.)

On to the wrap. I used every slot and hole in the 10 dpi reed, so I had about 120 ends (the loom is only 12″ wide). The yarn is Alice Starmore Scottish Campion, a 2-ply sport-weight Shetland yarn. My mother had purchased a bunch of it for a Fair-Isle sweater that she never got around to knitting, and gave it to me when I was home a year or so ago. There were at least 12 colors, and more than 20 skeins—I had one to four balls of each color. These are not so much my colors, although I like the heathery tones in several of them. The yarn is loosely spun and I was able to break it easily by yanking on it, so I worried that it wouldn’t be strong enough for warping, but it held up. The biggest problem I had was that this yarn is prickly: the warp threads kept sticking together, and it was hard to beat. Even after the finishing wash the fabric is still a bit itchy.

I made up the plaid pattern as I was warping the loom, starting in the middle and working toward the sides. I had more of the heathery purple and the dark teal colors than anything else, so I alternated these, the deeper colors, in the larger areas to try to anchor the pattern. There is so much going on with the multiple colors that I wanted some structure to the pattern. So I used 10 ends for each purple section and 6-8 ends for the teal, and separated them with 8 mixed ends chosen from the remaining colors. I tried to limit the amount of what I considered outlier colors, like the pale yellow, to a few highlights, and stick mostly with the mid-range. When I had finished warping, I wove in the same pattern.

Since there were a lot of color changes in this pattern, I wove in the ends in each time I started or ended a color, alternated the sides where the colors started, rather than trying to carry strands along the sides. It worked out pretty well—the extra threads are only an inch or so long—but I wish the piece were wider so there was more middle area. I also wish it were wider because after taking it off the loom and the finishing wash the wrap is only 11″ wide, so it’s really more of a scarf.

Time for a new naming convention! I’ve decided to name my pieces after whatever I’ve been listening to while working on them. So this is the Twilight scarf, because I made it entirely while listening (I’m embarrassed to admit) to that goofy teenage vampire romance in audiobook form.

Scarf is about 5-1/2″ wide by 72″ long; 64 ends on a 10 dpi reed.The yarn is Malabrigo Sock in Stonechat. This is my first time using Malabrigo, and I see now what the fuss is all about: this yarn is soft! And smooth! There’s no friction at all on the loom. I had to be careful not to mash it down—the last yarn I used was Alice Starmore Scottish Campion and it kept sticking to itself, so I’d gotten into the habit of beating hard, and the Malabrigo doesn’t require that kind of handling.

I think I’ve finished all my Christmas presents now!