Saturday, January 01, 2011

New year, new yarn

I was in Old Town Alexandria (Va.) this week and stopped at Fibre Space to look at yarn for a couple of new projects. I would like to make a sweater using bulky yarn and I have been eyeing Geodesic, knit using lace-weight, for quite some time. Well I found a gorgeous lace yarn from Dragonfly Fibers called December Baby. How appropriate, I am a December baby! It's a rich, deep blue with very slight variation. This is my first lace-weight project so I am excited to see how it goes. It will take some time to knit, but I am already enjoying watching the color unfold. The selection of bulky was not great, so I will look around online for that.

The Koala sweater I have been working on for TWO YEARS is still lingering. I love Ravelry, but now I can really see how long it takes to finish a project-that's good and bad. Bad for Koala, my jaw dropped when I saw that I started it in Dec. 2008. It was supposed to be a quicky sweater but has not turned out that way. I watched this very helpful seaming video on You Tube (thank you Ilina) and had inspired me to finish seaming the sweater, the part I like the least.

The problem all along has been that I don't feel comfortable sewing the seams, like I am fudging it. This video put me at ease because much of what I have been doing was right! The other problem has been with the fabric curling a lot. In my mind, this is a quicky sweater so blocking before seaming was out of the question. Not anymore. It was an obstacle I just was not seeing so this afternoon I washed and blocked it all and tomorrow I tackle the rest of piecing and seaming.