If you've been floating around the knitting blogosphere for a while, you may have come across Anne's shawls. You know, Wing o' the Moth, Morning Glory, Casino lady. On Tuesday, she posted her Bee Stole pattern for sale.
If you haven't seen this pattern yet, go look now. Go ahead. I'll wait.
OK, are you back? Caught your breath yet? Yeah, that's how I felt too. I needed a few minutes to get myself pulled together, and in those few minutes somehow I found my way over to Paypal and forked over my $8 for the pattern. And now here's the dilemma:
What do I knit this with? I've made it 7.5 months in TGYD2007 without buying any yarn, and before Tuesday, I was damned if I was going to break the trend. But I must start this project immediately! The only lace weight in the stash is some Knitpicks Bare, but only one skein, at most two, which is definitely not enough for this baby.
One solution presented itself yesterday when Iron Man returned from Peru with 30 skeins of approximately fingering weight Baby Alpaca for me! Bless him, he went in to an actual yarn store to get it - the hives have almost completely faded. Two colors, a sort of light camel and black. Neither is what I would necessarily choose for this project, but it is so soft and yummy. There's definately enough of the black for this project. And alpaca is good for lace, in my opinion, since it's pretty warm as a full-on fabric. But I feel a bit meh about this solution.
Another possiblitiy is to (gulp!) spin the yarn for this myself, since there is no moratorium on fiber acquisitions. I am nowhere near being able to produce lace weight by any stretch of the imagination, but I might be able to do fingering weight. However the prospect of spinning 1400+ yds of fingering weight any thing is enough to make me crawl under the bed for a few days until it's safe to come out. Then the next issue is what to spin it out of? Merino? A blend? Aaaaaaargh! I don't know enough about what fibers are good for what to have any clue where to go with this (other then to say it will not be done in anything coarse).
And what colors? I'm torn between something honey colored, or something darker (dark blue, purples, etc) - yellows and oranges aren't colors I wear too often. I could get some already dyed fiber, but I'm more inclined to dye it up myself to make sure I get what I want. If I do that, this project could conceivably take the rest of my life and I want it NOW! Or at least, I want to be knitting it now.
I told Iron Man yesterday that this pattern might be the downfall of the diet, and he just shook his head. Any suggestions you may have are greatly appreciated! What would you do?
1 comment:
Hi saw your Blog on Ravelry... Might I suggest... doing a sample in the black Merino and see how you like it once you start on it. You may go Whoaaaaaaa thats nice. Or you may not but at least you'll know. If you don't like it, perhaps you have something in your stash that you can trade with others for something you like. I KNOW ravelry folks have huge stashes! :-) Good Luck!
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