Designated Penguin III

I rise to the challenge.

Today I did two cast-ons. The first one is for Mondnacht--a stunning scarf from New Style of Heirloom Knitting. As far as I tell, the New Style involves wickedly complex garments knitted with bizarre construction techniques, such as short-rowing to shape Shetland shawls. And all these fun ideas are carefully wrapped in a teeny-tiny kanji font, just in case you thought you had a clue.

Information about ordering the book with this pattern can be found here. It's in the book with the Mountain Ash shawl, for those who might be contemplating knittiing the latter.



Stunning, isn't it? I cast on the required 100 stitches on a #3 needle using Zephyr--about half the weight of the original yarn (which I calculated to be about 2200 yards/pound). Here, for posterity, are the first three rows.



For those of you not familiar with Hazel Carter's Spider Queen shawl, I present this slightly Photoshopped image, which represents what the shawl should look like when I have woven in the last loose end, broken open the champagne, and retired to the Possibly Happy Home for Lunatic Knitters.


Here we have 179 stitches an a #2 needle for the center of the Black Widow Spider Queen shawl. I am using the Gentle yarn described in an earlier post. It's 5% cashmere, 95% merino, and soft as a cloud. The yarn was shorn from Elmer here, who is posing with his late hair.


Here's an interesting comparison between the two cast-ons. Notice how much thicker the Zephyr looks compared to Gentle. There are three rows of the Zephyr knitted up, but the row lengths almost the same. Scary, isn't it?


You probably won't hear about these two projects until I finish the Dragone. I will start chart 4 tomorrow, so it won't be that much longer until you can lift your coffee cup, breathe a big sigh of relief, and say to yourself "Better her than me."