Autumn Whine

I just finished my March socks and I'm part way through my April socks. It's all very dull. I completely blew off the "knit a pair of socks per month" thing that I was enthusiastic about earlier in the year. After these are finished, I will still knit socks, ordinary, occasional, and only because I like to wear them.

My red Vitamin D cardigan is almost finished too. I've started on the last 24 rows. Each row has 330 stitches of stocking stitch. Yawn. After that, there will be a lot of i-cord. I believe that it fits and am crossing my fingers that it will suit me and that I won't have to give it away. It's knit from the top down so I've been able to try it on. I am not, however, been able to tell whether the fronts will drape attractively. 

I'm not good at sweaters. Sometimes I select a pattern or a colour that doesn't suit me. Sometimes I make the wrong size, or I think that I can knit without a pattern. I have given away a cardigan and seen it unravelled and returned to me in the form of balls of wool. I said "oh no you must keep the wool," and saw again it later, knit into yet another cardigan. I think that my daughter has it now. I have had an enormous sweater mailed back to me after 4 years of lying in a drawer unworn. I did my first steek on it and made it into a coat. When asked, I claim that it has dolman sleeves. Another cardigan I made was only ever worn under a coat as a layer of insulation. Those are the ones that I know about. Poor things.

Of course, I have had a few successes. I have a black wool sweater that I knit for myself with yarn that I bought from the back of a truck in the market in Sienna, Italy. I knit the same pattern with Icelandic yarn for my sister and a third, pullover version for myself. We wear those and get compliments. I think I will knit it again. I have some lovely grey yarn from Longmeadow Farm in Freedom, New York. 

So, what have I been doing for fun? I've been playing with three skeins of lace weight that I bought from Jill Draper at Hemlock. The swatch below is made with 4 patterns from Heirloom Knitting. I knit the dark green edging and insertion first and then picked up with the pale green and gold. After blocking and admiring, I pulled back to the dark green and have kept going with that. I'll make that as long as I can with the one skein. After that, I envisage picking up all along the edge with the pale green and knitting the diamonds in a kind of reverse Faroese way until I run out of that and I'll switch to gold leaf lace. This could take some time.