1. A paper (on China Miéville and Neil Gaiman and alternate Londons). Actually, I finished it and sent it off on Monday, so that's one out of my hair.
2. The final, finicky updates to this thrice-dratted book. They're due mid-month, which gives me about a week to finish them. I'm pretty much there except for the last chapter, which is going to take more major work and a bunch of movie-watching. However, this means that the last month or so has entailed me arriving home after work, sitting down at the computer and editing like a fiend until I go to bed. Typing is not compatible with knitting.
3. A major SCA event, for which I am head cook, and at which is being performed a play I have been directing for the last month.
4. The annotation of another three chapters of a Masters thesis one of my students is about to submit.
5. Moving into my new office.
Most of these things come to a grand crescendo this weekend, after which I shall collapse, panting, a mere shell of my former self, and go and buy yarn. The thing that I possibly hate most about 9-5 work is that it precludes wandering around to all the cool yarn shops. I still haven't acquired the mohair boucle I have been promising myself for ever. Not this weekend, but possibly next.
However, yarn nirvana may be in sight. Years ago, when my family still lived in poor old Zimbabwe, my dad (who is an animal scientist by trade) was involved in a project doing commercial embryo transfer with pedigree angora goats. He ended up with a small herd of said goats (who are, I have to say, completely silly animals - their little brains are more sheep-like than goatlike, lacking most of the almost feline bloody-minded independence of your true goat. Yes, I like goats) and an interest in a related project in hand-dyed angora yarn. He phoned last night and intimated that he'd sent a small gift to assist my knitting endeavours, on account of how he just happens to have several hundred skeins of pure kid mohair yarn stashed away somewhere. In various colours. Well, well, well. I shall acquire said cadeau forthwith and share its joys with my fellow knitters.
Finally, two questions.
1. Is it, in fact, normal to get halfway through a project and decide that you hate it and would never wear it anyway? I am disenchanted with the Swiss Cheese scarf. Apart from its tendency to quantum variation and the fact that I've reached the end of the wool I acquired and it's only half the length it should be, I made it too wide, in the wrong colour and wrong weight. I think I need to try it from scratch on smaller needles with lighter wool. Is this, perchance, a normal phase of knitter development, or do I just lack gumption?
2. Every now and then I open my stash drawer and fondle the dark blue banana fibre. What could I possibly make with it? I'm inclining to a thin scarfy sort of thing on really large needles - if so, what sort of stitches?
5 comments:
That banana fibre's kind of blobby, isn't it? If so, you won't be able to see any sort of stitches at all, I'm afraid, so I'd go with the normal garter stitch you've been doing. You could, in fact, knit the Swiss Cheese Scarf in it, on 5mm or possibly 6mm needles (I've never knitted with anything bigger than a 5mm, perhaps Scroob could offer advice on the broomstick needles?). I don't remember how think the wool is. It all depends on how you want the scarf to look, the thicker the needle the looser the knit.
The banana fibre is slubby rather than blobby, there's not much variance to the thickness, it just has bits of lighter-coloured fibre woven in. It is, however, a heavy fibre, I'd say as heavy or heavier than the aran I've been swiss cheesing with. I want a loose stitch on huge needles to try and lighten it a bit, if that makes sense.
How about just big needles and garter stitch? It's quite a weighty yarn, as I remember, and you probably want it drapey - just looked on Ravelry and found this:
effika > notebook > projects > Ultra Simple Banana Fiber Scarf
by effika Flickr
Ultra Simple Banana Fiber Scarf
Size
~5'5" long, 6"wide
Tags
Needle
US 10½ / 6.5 mm
Yarn
GreaterGood.com Banana Fiber Yarn
How much?
2 skeins = 170.0 yards (155.4m)
Notes
I left my knitting at my apartment when I went to visit my parents for Christmas, so no progress on Argosy. I got some sweet banana fiber yarn for Christmas, so my mom let me borrow her needles to start knitting something with it.
The yarn is very slubby and fuzzy. It is extremely soft and dense and shines like silk. (I guess it’s like just about any other cellulose fiber that way.) I tried a couple of different stitches with it, but plain old stockinette looked best. The yarn has a few extremely thin spots and spots where ends are joined that are not as strong as the rest of the yarn. It’s also a single-ply yarn, so plain stockinette has a bias to it. Throwing in some seed stitch or ribs would take care of it, but I’m knitting a scarf so it doesn’t matter too much to me. :-)
The scarf curls a bit, but the density of the fiber stops it from being too bad.
Pattern:
Cast on 24 stitches. 3 stitches of garter stitch on either end and 21 stitches of stockinette in the middle.
About this yarn
Banana Fiber Yarn
by GreaterGood.com
Bulky / 12 ply Plant fiber
2 projects, stashed 10 times
Link to Flickr pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/19877267@N07/2144827209/
No-one on Rav had done anything much more than this....
"Is it, in fact, normal to get halfway through a project and decide that you hate it and would never wear it anyway?"
Yes. Specially in the early days of knitting. After a while you'll develop an eye for colour, style etc. But even experienced knitters occasionally get it WRONG.
Frog it, steam the yarn & keep it for another project.
Using the banana yarn sounds fine. Though now you've mistressed knit, purl & casting on & off you're ready for more or less any pattern.
*Trying very hard to be happy for you & not jealous over the kid mohair!*
For the banana fibre, you definitely want to use big needles to get a nicely loose, drapey fabric. Just try out a few different needles till you like the result. You could try the broken rib stitch pattern I suggested when you started (if you're feeling reasonably confident with your stitch count and stuff), or a sea foam stitch, which is really easy (honest) but will teach you a new trick, viz, making extra long stitches. (O'course it looks a little like the swiss cheese, so depending on exactly what you don't like about that, you may want to skip this too. It's fantastic with hand-dyed yarn though, for future ref.)
And it is of course *completely* normal to get sick of a project halfway through. At this point you're mostly just knitting to learn anyway, so all the more reason to stop when you get bored and try something else. Life's too short to waste time on knitting stuff you don't really want to knit.
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