Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Shows what reinvigoration combined with tooth-gritting can do for you: there will be 16 dinosaurs in the end, and I’ve now finished six of them. They go quite fast once feet get merged into bodies.

I don’t think my repugnance for this job has anything to do with the Home Industries Tent judges, Stash Haus. After winning the Glen Isla Shield last summer with Sam the Ram, there are no more heights for me to scale. And I haven’t much hope anyway, this year, because the schedule clearly says “sweater with motif”, not “sweater with 16 motifs”. They tend to stick to the letter of the law.

But one feels one is doing one’s bit for the community by competing – it’s a pretty small affair. At the very, very least, the more entries there are, the more the winner will have the satisfaction of beating. I’ll enter “three potatoes” and “collection of four vegetables” in the same spirit.

Yesterday’s internal monologue, apart from questions of what to feed all these people so soon to be with us, concerned what to do with Franklin’s Panopticon yarn. The Bog jacket? A shawl? (My husband said once, of me in one of my shawls, that it made me look like a crazed social worker.) Socks, no, too small. For a couple of hours I settled on the idea of an EPS sweater in sock-weight yarn, decide about the yoke when I get there.

But I began to worry about how I would look in such a garment. Just because it looks great on Dolores – see link – doesn’t mean it would do the same for me. That’s why these super-models earn so much money.

The current fave is the Trellis Jacket from Jamieson’s Shetland Knitting Book 3. (There is some good design in those books, according to me.) I don’t dare show you for fear the copyright police would come round, but the general idea is mitred garter stitch knit side to side. Think Baby Surprise. I did a day of learning how to use handpainted yarns at Camp Stitches once, with a designer whose name you’d recognise if I could remember it. Ginger Luters? Maybe. And what I remember is, get it off the horizontal. It’s good advice.

The one in the book is striped with lots of different colours. I’d use the shape and let the Panopticon yarn do what it wanted.

Maybe I’ll go ahead and work out quantities and get in touch with Get Knitted. This jacket would required worsted-weight which would get the job done relatively briskly.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:54 AM

    There's a link showing all the designs from that book here:
    http://www.camillavalleyfarm.com/jamiesons/jamiesonsbook3.htm
    The Trellis jacket looks very wearable, and absolutely ideal for self-patterning yarn. the book isn't currently on my shelves but I love the Annesbrae sewater as well as the Trellis jacket and the bags (which would be easy enough to re-interpret on the fly, I feel). The info is 50 balls of 25g each in 12 colours for a 50" chest. So you could probably lose at least 6 balls, and maybe 8, leaving you a total of 1100g (or 1050g) of DK. Which ends up as 10 hanks of Worsted (115g/hank). I'll be interested to se how it turns out.

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  2. Anonymous10:56 AM

    Oops, tinyurl version of link.
    http://tinyurl.com/5ql58r

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  3. Anonymous1:30 PM

    Ruth Sorenson (of Kauni fame) has just finished a side to side cardi--an idea that might work.
    There'll be no holding Dolores now that you've acknowledged her supermodel status!

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  4. Anonymous5:11 PM

    I know they've been giving you fits, but those dinosaurs are awfully cute.

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  5. My G-d! Those dinos are far, far worse than I had imagined. I shudder in sympathy. Sure you couldn't just whip straight up in the cream colour and and then maybe a dino at the yoke?

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