Saturday, September 28, 2013

Picking yarn by smell

Tettegouche sample knit #1 went very well. I love the color variation. But I am very well aware that the color variation will not photograph well and represent the stitches and texture of the shawl.

So I must knit the shawl again - mwahahaha!

I traveled to my local yarn shop for the purpose of finding that special skein of yarn that MUST become this shawl. I looked, I hunted, I asked for help. Both lovely gents at the store pointed towards different yarns. One started pulling skein after skein down and piling them on a table for me to dabble in.

As we picked yarns and created a larger and larger pile on the table I realized I had a problem. All the yarns were in aqua, blue, teal, emerald and seafoam. They all matched previous knits: Leaves & Trellis, twin leaf socks and Flores Gloria! ALL OF THEM! GAH!

The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. I put down the twisted sister and three Irish girls. I admitted I had a problem and the lovely gents came to my rescue. Among a box of glorious blues and oranges was a solitary skein of Dragonfly Fibers in Ye 'Ole Chestnut.

Pine, Lake Superior, fog, campfires, hikes along dirt paths, moist earth - I can smell all those when looking at this yarn. It is Tettegouche in essence. At 475 yards it will make a glorious second knit.

The yarn is glorious. The snarly terrible mess that was winding the yarn was painful. It's like they has wound separate sections around different niddy-noddies and then combine them all together in random clumps. As you wound you would sometimes be pulling from the top section, sometimes from a winding further down ... And then to the top again. The strands were crossing! GAH again!

After several breaths and a round of a game with hubby I returned to the skein and found a solution in putting the hank around my knees and slowly pulling it apart by hand and then using the winder. An hour long process - but it worked. Knitters are nothing if not steadfastly determined to use beautiful skein.

The wound skein is sitting in the project bag waiting for the pattern to be written and testing to begin. Again, hopefully mid-October. The charts are about done, I just have to determine on garter or interesting edging. Interesting always wins, I just have to find the shorthand for a single stitch cabled over two other stitches. C1F2? Like the edge in the picture below?

Once I figure that out the rest will write up really easily and then if the fun of testing! Fun!

Be excellent to each other!

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