Well, hooray! A day that doesn’t start with me putting on three layers plus a jacket so I can take Purl for her morning walk. Maybe spring has decided to come at last. It’s almost time for me to start bitching about the heat – that’s the official start of summer at my house.
Anyway, the extended cold weather prompted me to knit like a crazy person. I love to knit, period, and yet there are times when it feels more like a have-to rather than a want-to, if you know what I mean. For some reason, though, just lately I’ve been on a tear. Maybe because I finished a weird project that I wasn’t sure would turn out well. That always makes me a bit tense because I could spend my time in other, more productive ways if the thing is going to be a failure. So it turned out okay, not spectacular but okay, and that has freed up my knitting mojo.
I’m still having fun resurrecting old in-house patterns. This time It’s for a Summer Poncho that was done in some crazy novelty yarn years ago. The old instructions began, hatefully, “Cast on 240 stitches, join into round, being careful that stitches are not twisted around the needle.” Well, we all know how that goes, 13 cast-ons later and everything is twisted again, and the pattern is torn into a million pieces and those pieces are in the trash under a pile of coffee grounds. So I re-wrote it to work from the top down with simple yarn-over increases, and used a nice light Noro yarn called Uchiwa, a blend of cotton, viscose (rayon), and silk. Its abundance of texture allows it to hold its shape even when knit on a 10.5 (6.5 mm) needle,
so it’s a fast knit and nice open fabric for warm weather. You can wear it with increase points at the front,
or like a raglan sweater:
I popped it on one morning when it was chilly in the shop and it was just enough to warm me up a bit. It takes one gigunda ball of Uchiwa, and we have all these great color ways:
And here’s another look at the colors:
It’s our YOW, Yarn of the Week, and it’s 25% off!
Now, on to the next…
