Too Much Wool

it's been so long, I can't remember how to blog...

So ... remember me?

I fell off the [blogging]wagon with a resounding thud and am just now trying to pull myself back up. There's been both knitting and spinning, but I'm going to save the spunstuff for another post (or there will be Too Much to talk about).

Firstly, a finished object:

It's the Stork Lace scarf from the January/February (2008) Piecework, Nancy Bush's pattern, made in my own handspun (from Foxfire Fiber's camel/silk blend). I started this baby in January, but lost interest for a long while - basically, until I needed the needles for something else, which lit a fire under me and got me to finish it. It's going straight into the "will be gifted for the holidays" pile, as I already have a handspun lace scarf in a very similar colorway.

Then I started ... another scarf. With the recent stress over my grandmother (she's doing much, much better - thanks to everyone who sent good wishes/prayers and emailed me privately), I needed something absolutely and completely mindless. One day on the way to the hospital, I basically grabbed what was at the top of the laceweight stash and cast on for a second go-round on the Lace Ribbon Scarf pattern:

This is kind of funny, actually. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the fiber content of this yarn was. It's from Wild Geese Fibres, and was a gift from a friend quite a while ago. I was guessing (at first) that there was some angora, then I moved on to thinking maybe it was alpaca ... but finally I couldn't handle the suspense, and I found Barb of Wild Geese Fibers on Ravelry and asked her directly. Fortunately she has an excellent memory, distinctly remembered the order and shipping it to me. Turns out? It's Icelandic lambswool mixed with a bit of silk. (Take that, you rabbits and alpacas!) It was just so soft and fluffy and incredibly lovely to work with, I had forgotten how delicious a lambswool could be. So, now I'm back to the pattern I worked on in Iceland, this time using some Canadian-Icelandic wool.

The last knitting project is ... not so humorous. On Saturday I felt an irrepressible urge to knit a sock. Apparently what I have on the needles is not giving me the kind of sock-knitting satisfaction I crave, so I went digging around and found some sportweight sock wool, thinking it would be quick, easy, and also something good for gifting.

Pretty good progress, considering I started it on Saturday afternoon, no? Well, the real killer is this: that little tiny blob of yarn on the left is all that's left of the first skein. And I only have two. When I took this picture (a few minutes ago) I'd just done the first decrease row for the toe, but ... it's going to be cut very, VERY close here.

Now, I wear a size 7(US)/37 shoe. I don't have wide feet, and I only made the leg of the sock about 11cm long (ok, it's exactly 11cm - I had a metric-only tape measure at hand when I measured it). I *weighed* the yarn as I went along, because I knew that 45g of sportweight wasn't going to go very far. It's only in the past few hours that I realized I just might (maybe) have enough to finish without tossing some other yarn in for the toe.

Seriously, though ... is it too much to ask of a yarn company that two skeins be enough for a smallish to normal sized foot/sock?

a little better

Very very quickly: my grandma is doing a little better today. A big thank you to everyone. I have to run over there now.

not so good

Briefly: my grandma fell and fractured her pelvis (in 4 places) on Friday night. She's in the hospital now.

I wasn't sure if I'd say anything here, I'm pretty down about it, but I'm trying to keep up my faith in positive thinking and prayer and whatever else.

You don't need to comment if you read this, but I would appreciate it if you could spare a moment for sending a good thought (prayer, etc.) her way.

I have some things to blog about, even a finished knitting project (no, not a sweater, a scarf) and I probably will write about it soon.

Thanks in advance,

Cassie

reality

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.

~ Edward Sapir

[Picture: 13 August 2008, Bræðraborgarstígur, Reykjavík]

seltjarnarnes

phobias - new and improved

It seems that I'm finally over my fear of sleeves. I've knit a lot of them in the past couple of months, and they no longer present roadblocks in my knitting [said with cautious optimism, I might add].

Now there's something new. It seems I've developed a fear of yokes. It started out when I realized in Iceland that the yoke of the brown cardigan wasn't going to work out quite right - the neckline was too wide, I hadn't checked my row gauge, and I started the decreases too soon.

Yesterday I bit the bullet, clenched my jaw, and ripped out over 4" of yoke. It was painful, trust me, so much so that I forgot to take a picture before the ripping started. Now the brown sweater looks like this:

See those sleeves? I knit them extra long. The pattern called for 3/4 sleeves and I knit full-length sleeves. [Take that, sleeve-phobia!] However I'm a little puzzled. It seems, when I finally measured it, that my row gauge really wasn't that far off. It seems rather that the yoke is just too wide, as written in the pattern. Ok, plus a little bit of a row gauge issue, but really it shouldn't have mattered quite that much. But the ripping is done, and now I'm stumped about when to start the decreases, if I should stagger them more (among more rows, rather than bunching a whole whack of decreases into 3 rows as the pattern says), or what. The saving grace for this sweater is that the yarn is so luscious to work with that it's going to be hard to ignore.

Further evidence of lack of sleeve phobia:

This is the moss stitch monstrosity sweater. Body - done. First sleeve - done. Second sleeve started last night. And while the sleeves are a veritable ocean of moss stitch, I'm actually considering lengthening them a bit. I already knit the first sleeve 5cm longer than the pattern calls for (22cm seems insanely short, even for 3/4 sleeves, doesn't it? Someone please tell me if I'm being delusional here.) In the meantime, I have the second sleeve to work on, which is wonderfully mindless (no shaping) and good for subway time.

Of course, there's another yoke coming up. Thankfully, not in moss stitch - I really can't convey how happy I'm going to be to say goodbye to moss stitch. But ... I haven't measured my row gauge. I'm using needles that are a size smaller than the pattern recommends, so I'm suspecting that I'm going to be screwed on the yoke, yet again.

Welcome to my world of yoke-impaired sweaters. At least it's a change from the sleeveless ones of yesteryear.

The longer I put this off the harder it's going to be

... to write about my feelings about Iceland.

To start - several friends asked me if Iceland "met [my] expectations". To tell the truth, I didn't go there with any expectations. Yes, I've heard a lot and read a lot about the place but I wasn't really expecting anything in particular. I know this is probably hard to believe, but it's true. I just ... went. I had bought a guidebook, read some stuff but then purposefully left the book at home when I flew there.

The very first day, Sigga took me to Hallgrímskirkja, which is probably the most notable landmark in the city (ok, one of them). Unfortunately, they were doing extensive work on the facade and it was covered with scaffolding, so I didn't take any pictures of the building itself.

This is one of the views from the observation deck at the top. The water you see there is Tjörnin, "the pond", which is one of the other notable physical landmarks in the city. The first couple of days I was there, the weather lived up to Icelandic reputation and rained intermittently, and I didn't go back on a sunny day to get another picture.

I guess it depends on where you stay in the city, but staying with Sigga Sif allowed me to walk everywhere downtown. And I walked a lot. I think I clocked several days in a row with five hours of walking per day. Now, I'm a NYer, without a car, and I walk a lot here at home. But walking in a new city, a different city, and a city as charming as Reykjavík was an absolute pleasure.

I think walking around the city was one of my favorite things about the trip. I went to several museums, and missed a few (I'm saving them for the next time I go), but I absolutely loved wandering through the streets and just getting a feel for the place.

We'll just skip the issue that I have zero sense of direction and, apparently, had a wacky idea that downhill means south, and so perhaps wandered just a bit more than was necessary on my first solo foray in the city. There are a lot of hills in Reykjavík, and they do not all head south. Trust me on this. Fortunately, it's not a big city at all, and so getting "lost" is just a matter of a few blocks, really. I prefer to call it meandering.

I had a thought one day, one of the last days I was there. I thought quite distinctly to myself that "I couldn't live in a place this small". Having visited all the downtown yarn shops, twice, and most of the bookstores several times as well, I thought that I'd miss NY with it's nearly unlimited shopping/entertainment/exploration quotient.

Having some distance now, I'm not so sure. I'm back in NY and have done almost nothing along the lines of unlimited entertainment - as per usual. I think the sense of limitation that I feel in smaller cities and towns is unrealistic (and I might add, I've often had the same thought in small towns in the US, so this isn't exactly a condemnation of the size of Iceland's capital). Reykjavík is a fantastic city - every single musuem is amazing (well, the ones I made it to) and there's something about the vistas you can glimpse that add something incalculable.

And I have to tell you, looking at these pictures again makes my heart ache. I miss it. Granted, it was a vacation. Having no cell phone, leaving my laptop at home, having no TV, and no work to do (not to mention Sigga Sif's fabulous cooking almost every night) was a real treat. But coming back to NY and going to Manhattan, our downtown, just kind of made me feel a bit sad. It was filthy in comparison, crowded in comparison, and there just isn't a sense of ... beauty?  majesty? ... just on the horizon.

And in retrospect, there are hundreds of things that I wished I'd taken pictures of, and didn't. Silly things like the grocery store and more pictures of the streets. People hanging out on the grass on a warm sunny day, hordes (small hordes by NY standards) of tourists with their guidebooks in one hand and their videocams in the other. But I've never really liked to live behind a camera, and steadfastly refused to walk around with my camera out at all times [I might add, the little "meander" I had one day also stemmed from my refusal to look at a map in public - I'm like that.] I prefered to just ... feel it. See it and feel it and .... experience it.

So, that's a bit about the city. I'm not sure how clearly it comes across but I ... I think I fell in love.

tastes like ...

... lots of ull

Just a quick post, since I'm trying to get started on the Iceland topic again.

I bought a lot of eingirni. My very first shawl was made from Icelandic laceweight, and I still like knitting with it.

Add to that the newest lopi book -

and I perhaps went a little bit overboard. Yes, I do have two copies of the book. Sigga was badgered into buying and sending me a copy (in spite of her logical statement that it was entirely in Icelandic, I insisted). And then, while I was there - the next to the last day I was there, actually - the book suddenly appeared at Handprjónasamband Íslands in English. [Maybe they knew I was coming?] So, for the time being, I have two copies. I've convinced myself this is useful because I can compare notes on the two different versions of the patterns and "learn" Icelandic knitting terms thusly.

So, there you have it. Icelandic wool purchases, Part One. [Of course there's more - what blog do you think you're on anyway?]

at the speed of ... moss

I was going to write about how this new cardigan is going at a glacial pace, but with glaciers melting and breaking off right and left, I had to go with moss.

There isn't much to say. I'm knitting on it. Continuing with the Norwegian purling, getting faster at it. But, let's be real - moss stitch is moss stitch. [Unless you happen to call it seed stitch, in which case .... it's still moss stitch.]

So I'll treat you to two bad pictures, the overall:

and the wonderfully exciting close-up of acres of moss (stitch):

Thrilling, no?

How about a real glacier? (I'm getting desperate.):

See the white? That's a glacier, with a picturesque Icelandic horse who just happened to be in the foreground. Not sure of the name of the glacier (Langjökull? - it was visible from Gullfoss), but there you go.

Sigh. One more inch or so of the moss stitch and then I can start sleeves. With ... you know, more moss stitch.

PS - I seriously owe a post (or five) about Iceland. It's been hard for me. I've missed it terribly since I left - the city, the food, the people, the weather, the sky. I'll try to work on it.