25 March 2007

Spring Scarves

I've been knitting spring scarves for my goddaughter and her dorm-mates at Penn State. Knitting 14-stitch-wide scarves 0f Fun Fur in garter stitch isn't exactly challenging and I'd been doing a little Web surfing as I knitted. The packages have started arriving and I've been very pleased with some of the new scarf yarn. There's always a little risk, particularly in color, when ordering off a monitor, but the colors seem to have been fairly accurate.

I like to use hand-painted yarns for scarves. It makes them dramatic and unique and, because one skein is usually enough, isn't likely to bankrupt me. The best value seems to be sock yarn, followed closely by sport yarn. I've fallen in love with Great Adirondack's Bahama Mama colorway, much to my surprise, and managed to convince myself I needed two skeins in sport weight superwash merino for a shawl and another two in worsted weight for a small baby blanket. Smaller blankets work better than big ones when baby's in the car seat/carrier.

Only one of my purchases seems a bit foolish. I bought three skeins of Twisted Sister mohair and silk(70/30) lace yarn. It's Lust Monochrome Variegate in Lemongrass (pale lime) and there are 460 yd in each 50-gm skein. That's just a titch over a quarter of a mile.[1] I don't have the faintest idea what pattern I'm going to use. In fact, I don't have the faintest idea why I bought it, except that I fell in love with it. All I know is thats it's going to be my lace whatever it turns into.

Still lots of airplanes today, but not so many biz jets. The weather is just beautiful for flying and everyone with a recip seems to be out flying today. There was just a little too much of a breeze or we'd have had a flock of hot air balloons drifting overhead, too.

[1] I used to go to a lot of track and field events, like the Modesto Relays and the L A Times Games, and knew, from that experience, that the 440-yd race was a quarter of a mile long. Now that track and field have been metrified, it's the 400-m race, but it's still close enough to a quarter of a mile to think of it that way.[2]

[2] Didn't expect footnotes, did you? Using them is sometimes the only way I can get through a topic without zinging off onto multiple tangents.

2 comments:

S said...

I have a deep, irrational love of footnotes.

(Hi. Random lurker here. :D)

Mary the Digital Knitter said...

You're my kind of person. Terry Prachett, too