Delta may be down, but I'm not! Despite the 4:30 am notice that my flight was canceled, I'm making good use of my time while waiting for rebooking. This is my Oak Park in Plucky Cachet. I'm about half way.
Author: elliebelly
Knitting Families
I'm enormously grateful for my maternal grandmother who, among many other things, taught me to knit. I'm grateful to my Mom, who has nurtured my love for knitting and other crafts at various stages along the way. And, I'm enormously amused and proud to be part of a family of knitters. All of my cousins knit (belated shout out to my cousin Ann who knit me the most gorgeous cabled aran when I was in college in Maine), but undoubtedly my favorite family knitting photo is this one of my Uncle, happily knitting himself an afghan. He learned to knit as a public school child in Britain during WWII.
Vacation Knitting — A Wrap Up
Knitting on vacation is a joy. And an agony, when you don't have the right tools. Midway into our trek through Glacier National Park, with nary a yarn store in sight, I realized that the 6" DPNs I have brought along to knit Vitsippa, my fairisle hat, on, were going to be too short to accommodate all the stitches once I finished up the ribbing and added additional stitches called for in the pattern to begin the stranded portion of the hat.
So here I am, rather unattractively sweating and knitting away, trying to recover from the hike up the Highline Trail, whilst coming to the sad realization I'm going to have to put Vitsippa away until our return to civilization. The view was compensation (and if you've read my earlier post, the knitting really liked the view too).
Next, I pulled out my Oak Park, renamed Glacier Park in honor of the trip. Oak Park is a triangular shawl, knit in a devious pattern that is constantly shifting. I had been looking for a pattern for my three skeins of The Plucky Knitter's Cachet (aran weight cashmere) in Slumber, my most prized yarn, for a really long time and was so happy when a friend suggested this pattern. I was one repeat in when we emerged from hiking the Swift Current Trail in Many Glacier and made our way on up to the Prince of Wales Lodge on the Canadian side of the park, only to discover that they served a very nice tea.
I knit away on Oak Park/Glacier Park for the rest of our hiking time, and ended up just shy of three repeats in at the end. It's an absolutely lovely pattern and precisely what this yarn wanted to become. I'm going to be so happy with it as soon as it isn't 90` that feels like 100` degrees with the humidity in Alabama. (Let me digress and say it was 40` when we flew out of Kalispell, Montana, and I really wish I was still there!)
Amazingly, there was a yarn store when we made it to Whitefish, Montana, our last stop. And, a day of rain that was perfect for exploring town, eating some delicious crepes, watching the huge logging trucks roll in filled with freshly cut timber, and stoping by the local yarn store, Knit 'n Needle where the lovely proprietress encouraged me to pick out a circular rather than longer DPNs. I fell in love with the store yarn, Polka Dot Sheep, and engaged in a little stash addition. And we discovered that the fabulous Huckleberries we had been picking and eating along the trails were used for all sort of pastries in town. What a wonderful place to end our trip!
Armed with my new 16" circular needle, I returned to Vitsippa on the flight home. After picking up a few stitches that had dropped off the overloaded DPNs, I was back in business. Sorry about the bad airplane lighting on the picture, but I'm so excited about the colorwork on this one that I can't wait to share it. That's The Plucky Knitter's Oxford in Waxing Poetic (the gold) and Bedrock (the gray). I love knitting fairisle and am really enjoying this one!
Truth be told, I love my day job and our life in Birmingham, but there is a little part of me that would love to remain under Montana's Big Sky, knitting and hiking. It was a wonderful vacation and it reminded me of decades ago trips with my grandparents, which not too surprisingly, featured hiking and knitting, along with some fishing. It's fun to come full circle like that.
I can't end this post without a few trip pictures. First off, this lousy camera phone picture of a BEAR who was swimming casually across a LAKE about 40 feet away from us as we drove to the trailhead to hike Bertha Lake in Canada. It was a moment — we could see him skimming through the water, magnificent and large.
Hiking in the alpine meadows was spectacularly beautiful.
And being able to see the waterfalls and lakes, as well as the animals and flowers, made it worth several of the more challenging, steep portions of the trails. I would do it again in a heartbeat, knitting and all!
Adventures in Knitting
The arrogance of a sedentary desk-worker, hiking seven miles, a good bit of it straight up hill and at 7000 feet is sort of astonishing. The fact that I hurt all over and I'm exhausted? Not so astonishing. And it's only day 2 of summer vacation.
But knitting at the top of Montana's Highline Trail was really worth it. Really, really worth it.
Not a lot of progress on Vitsippa, but I'm liking Waxing Poetic and Bedrock, both on fingering weight Oxford 2.0 from The Plucky Knitter, together.
Knitting in Montana
This week we are hiking in Montana and trusting on our grown kids to keep the home fires burning in our absence. We don't have a lot of Internet but we've got something even better, this gorgeous view. Featuring my just started Vittsippa Hat.
Dyeing Roving For Spinners
Dyeing roving is a little bit magical!
The colors always seem to play so nicely. Roving is carded fiber that is reading for spinning, in this case, a very fine Merino. The addition of color makes it beautiful, but can be a little tricky. Roving requires very careful handling to avoid felting the fibers, and a nice, slow drying time, followed by some gentle fluffing to loosen up any fiber that has become compacted while wet.
This roving is going off to a friend for spinning. I can't wait to see what she does with it. It's always unpredictable — you can't quite imagine how the roving will spin up (see an example here). Handspun yarn is so pretty that I often keep a skein on my desk just for its looks. But it deserves to be knit with and one of my knitting resolutions is to knit with my handspun more often. The results are always wonderful. I have some of this yarn sitting around, waiting to become something.
And I'm hoping to use the yarn from the roving pictured at the top to trim a gray hat and mittens set.
I Knit A Sweater!
It's an exciting day for me as a knitter. I knit a sweater in just over two months and it fits. It even looks good. I wore it out to dinner tonight! Like so many of us, I struggle with never-enough-time-to-knit and not always being able to translate a pattern into something that fits well and looks good. I feel like I've made a lot of progress in the last couple of years and I'm really happy with this one.
This is Mithril. It's knit in my own yarn, Elliebelly Chemise, a silk linen blend in a sport weight. I used five skeins, down to the last little bit. But, if I had followed the length suggested in the pattern, I could have done it in four. I opted for a longer, tunic style. This little twist is all of the yarn I had leftover. So happy to have a win at yarn chicken!
The pattern is well-written and very straightforward. Mithril is a sweater a beginner could knit, but the sweet cable detailing was enough to give me something to look forward to and keep knitting despite the miles of stockinette.
This is the perfect "wear it with everything sweater." I had it on tonight with a long, white silk skirt but it looks equally good with jeans and leggings. I like it enough that I would consider knitting a winter wool version, possibly with a higher neckline.
This sweater is so comfortable that I really don't want to take it off — in fact, as you can see, I've already gotten one good nap in while wearing it. It feels great to have knit something I know I will wear over and over. The original idea for this sweater came about because I had a similar white linen sweater, minus the cables, that I had worn since college and it finally wore out. I'm guessing this one will last as long as the original. Linen wears like iron and even with a gentle steam blocking, the fiber has already softened and opened up.
The original yarn was very pretty, but I'm even happier with the finished sweater. It's good to be a knitter.