apparknitchik

cashmere. need i say more?

 

Not the best photo, but it was too cold and windy and snowy this morning to take it outside and pose it more artfully.

However -- that's the truest photo of the colour that I've taken.

The project:  the Hallie scarf, from the Cashmere Scarf for Her Kit from Jade Sapphire Exotic Fibres.

Yep, cashmere.  Which I so totally cannot afford to knit with, so I'm grateful to have had the chance -- this will be a shop sample for Shall We Knit? in New Hamburg.

The yarn is glorious.  And the actual kit is rather nicely put together -- four hanks of the yarn in a plastic case, with a pattern leaflet in on card in full colour with a choice of 7 scarf patterns.

I chose to make Hallie because I liked how simple it was, yet finished, it curls and drapes quite nicely -- it was just a little bit different from all the others, and IMO made the best use of the yarn.

A couple of caveats:  I was less than happy with the vagueness of the patterns -- given the care taken to put the kit together (which is worth it, when we're talking cashmere), I would have liked just a little more effort in the patterns.  Essentially:  no gauge is given (we're told it varies by pattern), needle sizes are given in a range (you choose the size needed "to achieve desired fabric") and measurements are approximate.

There is an errata on the Jade Sapphire web page.

One of the things I noticed on Ravelry is that the one other person (and I think there might be two now) who made this ran out of yarn.  So, I weighed my yarn as I went along, and decided that I wouldn't have quite enough to finish -- I cast off after row 29, instead of 30 as the pattern indicated.

In the end, I thought that I *might* have been able to squeek out that last row -- but with almost 600 sts on the needes, I really didn't want to try and not be right.  And I will say that I spliced the new yarns in when I joined them, and if I hadn't done that -- if I'd left ends and worked them in afterwards -- I *definitely* would have run out of yarn.

This isn't an issue with the other scarves, all of which are knit lengthwise.  But it is a problem with Hallie, because it's knit widthwise -- you cast on, and increase to make the curve in it, and cast off all those stitches at the end, so it's not quite so easy to fudge as it would be for the other scarves.

That said -- it's beautiful, and soft, and lovely, and I wish it were mine.  Despite the caveats, I still think it's So Totally Worth it.

 

back in...well...not black, at any rate

Yeah, yeah, start a new blog, and then stop posting to it.  What can I say?  After six months of furious knitting, I hit a slump, and didn't knit much of anything for months. 

And what finally broke the slump?  This:

 

It's the Daybreak Shawl by Stephen West.  In Skacel Zauberball, but for the life of me, I can't remember more details than that, and I can't turn up my notes at the moment.

A closer look:

 

Sharp eyes might notice that I added a few more striped rows than the pattern called for.  Also, some garter stitch at the bottom edge, because it just didn't feel finished to me without it.

And it broke the slump.  So there's rather a lot of knitting going on around here, I just have to remember to write about it.