Current and Future Knitting

What with all the swatching and illuminated yarn posts, I'll bet you guys thought I wasn't actually doing any knitting-related work. Well I have, and I also spent three days dying yarn for another project that I will talk about in another post.

Panache Sweater
I was rootling around in my yarn stash the other day and ran across 14 balls of KnitPicks Panache. It's a bulky yarn (40% baby alpaca, 20% cashmere, 20% silk, 20% extrafine merino) that they no longer carry. Too bad--it has a fabulously soft hand and excellent stitch definition.

It felt so nice that I yanked it out of my stash drawer (leaving a nice big hole to fill) and made this, with the design help of my KnitWare program:






The sweater is patterned after an old Annie Blatt design that I made 30 years ago. I never wore it--they yarn turned out to be too itchy for me--and I had to give it away. I made quite a few changes from the original--different gauge, yarn, ribbing, collar...but it's the same color and the puffed moss-stitch sleeves follow the original concept.

At 4.5 spi, it only took a week of pickup knitting to finish. I loved everything about the yarn except the quality control. Each ball of 68 yards had at least two knots. And these weren't your common tied variety either--the ends were glued together. Never encountered glue globs in yarn before.

Lyra
I reserve the early mornings for complicated knitting, and for the past month or so, have been working on Niebling's Lyra. This morning, I hit row 113. Of course, you can't see anything pretty in this red blob, but I assure you that it looks really cool when I hold it up to the light!


Socks
As always, I have a pair of plain socks for car knitting. These will be dress socks for Roy, which will go nicely with his tuxedo, assuming he gets around to buying one. The yarn is Adirondack Soxie--I don't remember what colorway.



Never Enough Nieblings
Finally, I started thinking about my next Niebling. Unfortunately, Harry is thinking about his next Niebling. This means that all the patterns are in a drawer under the waterbed, which Harry has fitted out as a luxury apartment, complete with an electronic lock that only responds to his legprint.

He emailed me a short list of choices and a long list of yarn that he wanted. As always, his choices are impeccable.

Lotus Flower

Adelaida

Pomegranate and Palm

Harry told me that he gets first choice, but I am welcome to choose one of his rejects and any yarn that he has tossed out of his apartment. How did this happen to me, reduced to groveling for patterns and knitting leftovers?

Fortunately, Harry knows nothing about the Princess shawl, as he has been immersed in decorating his apartment, ordering expensive food items from Balducci's, and scaring the figlets out of the UPS guy. Princess is mine, all mine!