Where I Won’t Be This Summer

I was sitting around minding my own business, when the Knitting folder in my Inbox lit up. I get a lot of knitting emails, most of them from yarn companies or online stores. I don’t even read the ones that use! an! exclamation! point! after! every! single! sentence! (That would be you, Tahki Stacy Charles. Just stop it, would you.)

This email was from the British yarn company, Rowan, that always sends out good stuff with appropriate punctuation. Beneath a photo gallery featuring some of their beautiful, moody models (I would so love to see that red-headed girl modeling one of my sweaters), it told me about:

A wonderfully relaxing knitting holiday in the beautiful Tuscan countryside, with leisurely knitting days, spectacular scenery, wonderful food and wine—and learning new skills with Rowan’s Head Designer, Marie Wallin.

“Knitting and La Bella Vita” they’re calling it.

La Bella Vita means Too Bleepin’ Expensive in the parlance of my times.

Prices start at £1,310 per person per week, which is about US$2,200. They’ll supply the yarn, but we have to bring our own needles.

Marie Wallin is one of my mostest favoritist designers in the knittiverse, but I have plans to pay off my mortgage within three years.

So, I’ll be cabling and slip-stitching in the beautiful Texas countryside, enjoying carrots, cauliflower, and cacao as I watch cardinals, roadrunners, and white tail deer out my window.

I might even knit up some of these silly little chickens from Rowan.

Esther, Ernie & Enid are in my budget.

A Knitted Poem

My BFF turned half a century old this month, and I wanted to do something special for her. I don’t have a lot of money, so I couldn’t subsribe her to a pickle-of-the-month club. She would have loved it, though. In college, whenever we stopped at a convenience store on a road trip, I bought a can of Tab and a yellow bag of peanut M&Ms, and she got a Diet Pepsi and a pickle. They would fish it out of a big barrel of pickles that had been sitting on the counter since before Texas joined the union.

I have a lot of yarn and a lot of patience, so I knitted a scarf for her. But not just any scarf. It’s a scarf of her life thus far. It’s based on the My Favourite Things infinity scarf. I included her name and date of birth, her kids’ names and nicknames, life themes, and inside jokes.

This took forever.

I charted or recharted everything in Excel, then knit from my charts. I started with the dice, which worked out to 92 stitches, then split each designed into two “sides” to fit 46 stitches. If I did this again, I would cast on a number that had more multiples to make designing easier. Pretty much nothing divides evenly into 46 or 92, and any border patterns I use were interrupted.

This scarf got heavy and unwieldy toward the end, and the final notebook paper motif was quite a bit tighter than the the first dice motif. If I made this scarf again, I would probably knit a few motifs at a time, then kitchener the sections together.

Because there are two distinct sides to this scarf, I decided not to join it into an infinity scarf. I did a three-needle bindoff at the ends and left it flat. It means that half the motifs are upside down when worn, but that would happen with an infinity scarf.

All yarn is Knit Picks Wool of the Andes worsted. Love this yarn. I make a lot of my designs in this yarn, so I have a bunch of colors. Sometimes it took me longer to choose the color combo than to knit the section.

The scarf would look better if I wet blocked it to even out the stitches, but I was afraid the colors would run and ruin it, which would be the end of me after all that work. So, I steam blocked it with my iron. It looks fine.

Ravelers can go to my project page to see more pictures and project details, including a list of the charts I used.

I mailed it in time for her to open it on the day of her birth, but thanks to the Polar Vortex of 2014, delivery was delayed and she didn’t get it until the next day.

She was gobsmacked.