Sweater love.



This is about halfway through the first skein of the Araucania - I've done the knit-in-the-round garter stitch at the bottom and have progressed to the stockinette (with a garter "stripe" under where each arm will be) on the pattern.

I love making sweaters like this. Nice and meditative - you set up the pattern and you just go. And I think the finished sweater will be very wearable. (The yarn is not as blotchy as it looks in the photo. I thought for a while about whether to allow the blotching/pooling inherent in kettle dyed yarn to fall where it may, or whether to do the more involved and annoying practice of alternating rounds from two different balls. I decided not to alternate (though I still might on the narrower parts of the sleeves) because I figured the stretches of variation are short enough that they won't stack or pool too badly. As I said, it looks a lot less blotchy and "obvious" in person; it actually gives the sweater kind of a depth of color, almost making it look velvety in places).

I also started some new "simple" socks. (Right now I seem to need projects that I can just work more or less automatically on, without consulting a chart or even counting rows).



These are being knit out of some stashed-a-long-time-back yarn, some of Lisa Souza's "Sock! Merino" in the colorway called Blueflame. (I presume "blueflame," like natural gas burning in a furnace.). It reminds me just as much of a bright fall day - blue sky, yellow sunshine, yellow leaves, red leaves.

This is another yarn I thought a bit about technique with. Did I just want to knit it up and take whatever pooling or flashing I got? Or did I want to do some kind of slipped stitch pattern? Or do three rows variegated/three rows some plain coordinating color? Or do a mock Fair Isle, with some peerie pattern featuring the colorful yarn on a black or grey background?

In the end, I decided just to take it as it comes. I think it's probably going to spiral but not pool too badly - most of the colors are coming out as slightly-less-than-one-row stripes.

Perhaps there's some underlying psychological reason for my deciding in my two most recent projects to take things as they come, rather than trying to manipulate them to give a more planned outcome. I don't know.