Monday, August 4, 2008

Sparkly

As I was knitting the same socks I've been knitting for a month now, my gaze has been increasingly drawn to a tube of beads that was sitting beside my chair. I picked it up some weeks ago with the thought that it would go with a ball of yarn that's been in stash for a while.

This is yarn with a story- it came to me with a past shrouded in mystery (yard sale box lot), and there was quite a lot of it. In retrospect, probably about 600 yards. Fine gauge, most likely wool. But I was knitting mostly mittens and hats at the time, so I had no idea what to do with it. Eventually I used it for my first pair of socks (of which thankfully no photographic evidence exists). It was terrible yarn for socks- it has almost no twist, and very little give. Also, I had a pattern sized for something else which I attempted to rework on the fly. There was endless ripping and re-knitting and it worked better than it had any right to, which is not actually very well. So I finished them, gave them away, and abandoned sock knitting for a couple more years until I discovered actual sock yarn and books and well, yeah, I'd been leading a sheltered life, knitting wise, up until then.

Anyway, I still had one ball of the stuff left, not enough for another pair of socks (heaven forbid *shudders*), but far too much to throw out. Fast forward a couple of years.

I started reading about lace knitting, and suddenly I knew what this yarn was intended for. So I started looking for patterns. And last week I ran across one I thought would work. The Optic Waves Shawl from The Knitter's Book of Yarn. Not enough yarn for a shawl but a scarf- that could work. So I swatched, to get a better look at the pattern and play with bead placement.
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And then cast on:
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I made a couple of changes from the shawl pattern- adjusted the edging to a two garter stitch border, and changed the K1,P1,psso for an SSK (mostly because I've been using them a lot in socks and I keep defaulting to it).

I'm not sure if I'd want to do a sweater sized project with beads, but the scarf is proving a fun and diverting knit. So much for solidarity with Toni and her merry band of WIP-finishers. (Sorry, Toni! It was the beads! They made me.)

1 comment:

  1. Ha! Ha! I got sucked in by beads this weekend too, but when you have enough WIPs, one of them is bound to have something with beads. But it at least got me motivated to work on a sweater that's been languishing for about 8 months.....

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