ideaphoria

HOLD THE MARMALADE, PLEASE

If you haven't already heard of it, the Modern Quilt Wrap is a hot project right now. The MQW was designed by Mags Kandis and was published in the new book from Interweave Press, Folk Style. It's a very large rectangular scarf that uses modular knitting to create a sort of patchwork-quilt-looking block design. And, best of all, it uses what is probably my favorite yarn of all time, Kidsilk Haze. You can tell how fond I am of Kidsilk Haze just by glancing at the banner for this blog.

Now, I mean no disrespect to Mags Kandis or the folks at Interweave Press. But when I first laid eyes on the pattern, I wondered why it uses the set of Kidsilk Haze colors that it does. It uses an older set of colors . .. . the color Meadow being the most-recently introduced one and it dates from Spring 2006. It doesn't use any colors introduced in Fall of 2006, or Spring of 2007. And there were some great colors that were introduced at those times! And then there is the matter of Swish. The pattern calls for Swish; no color of KSH has been discontinued recently, except for Swish. I do have some Swish in stock, but I do not know whether I would be able to re-order any.

Here's the original set of KSH colors, as per the pattern:

Left to right, these are Drab, Swish, Jelly, Marmalade, Liqueur, Blushes, Dewberry, Trance, Meadow.

Now, one of the great things about KSH is that you can pick just about any nine colors of it and they'll work together in your MQW.

When I was temporarily out of stock of the color Swish, for example, I discovered that many customers were substituting the color Elegance. Although not as bright as Swish, Elegance works well with Drab and helps to set off the other colors. I had some knitters over to my house last weekend, and we had out the colors and discussed the relative merits of substituting Elegance or Bronze (a Kidsilk Night color) for Swish. (It was a dead-even tie, by the way.)

I've often been contacted by customers who want to make a MQW but one color or another of the original set doesn't appeal to them. (A lot of us are leery of Marmalade.) The photo below shows the color set that would be my choice for the MQW:

Left to right: Drab, Swish, Fern, Jelly, Trance, Candy Girl, Splendour, Violetta, Dewberry.

This color set makes excellent use of Fern with Jelly, which I think go so much better together than do Meadow with Jelly. And this also incorporates Violetta and Splendour (Violetta being one of my favorite colors).

If that is a little too bright, consider this set:

Left to right: Drab, Elegance, Fern, Jelly, Trance, Blushes, Splendour, Violetta, Dewberry.

That's the great thing about KSH -- pick any nine colors, and it's hard to go wrong.

FELTED TWEED SWEATERS

About a year ago I received the promotional materials for the Rowan Studio series. My response was that the designs were just a little too trendy for my shop's focus on traditional knitting. I didn't choose to carry Studio.

But by now, a few months later, I've witnessed Wendi from Feral Knitters make

the Martha sweater from

Rowan Studio Two.

There's not a person in Ferals who wouldn't say that this is an adorable cardigan! And the Martha sweater that Wendi's wearing in that photo -- that's the second one she's made. The first was a gift for her sister. And Wendi is now making a third Martha, for a friend. And I think she's planning to make a fourth Martha, converting the short sleeves to long, for herself.

The small or medium sizes of Martha take only 5 balls of Felted Tweed!

That made a pretty compelling case for me to get in some copies of Studio Two. Supplies are limited -- Westminster actually thought they were sold out, but managed to come up with a set of five for me -- so if you want to join in on the Martha madness, order the pattern book from Two Swans while you can.

* * *

I'm using Felted Tweed for my top-down raglan that's one of my homework assignments for the Nihon Vogue class. I have completed the body of the sweater and half of the first sleeve. And I still have homework on the other two projects to complete before class meets again on November 3-4. I'm keeping a positive attitude that I can get it all done. I'm imagining all of my blog readers cheering me on: Lean to the left! Lean to the right! Go, Karen, go -- knit! Knit! Knit!

Postscript, April 12, 2008: Studio 2 was an extremely popular bookl! Two Swans has sold out its supply. I have heard that Rowan is supposed to make the pattern available as a dowloadable pdf -- will let you know when that happens.

THE VIEW FROM HERE

So Scott took a business trip the first week of October and I got to go along, as my vacation. Here's the view from our hotel room:

the Eiffel Tower! Well, almost. We stayed at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas. We had a marvelous room with a view, as far down the corridor from the elevators and ice machine you could get, and overlooking:

the Bellagio and its water fountain show. It was a cool room and I was always looking out the window and taking photos, but I'll let these two photos speak for themselves and not inflict more shots of the same on my Dear Readers.

We left on Monday, October 1st. The entire week before I spent filling backorders for Autumn Rose sweaters, having finally gotten in more stock of Old Gold, and literally filling orders right up through the Saturday afternoon before we left. I planned to pack and get ready on Sunday. Sunday I got up at 6:00 AM. I was going to run the clothes dryer and the dishwasher, and just generally begin getting ready for the trip. I had the lid open on the dishwasher, just about to pour in the soap, when boom! The electricity went out. It was out for 14 hours. I still managed to get ready for the trip, and even cook dinner (because our stove is propane) but the power outage certainly forced me to think differently about how to organize my day.

(And as I am writing this blog entry, there is a windstorm on the horizon, and there's already been a momentary outage this morning, long enough to shut down the computer and mess up the clocks. But my car is gassed up, the earthquake water is ready, and I've put water in the bathtub.... But, I digress.)

The point is, I was packing for the trip to Vegas in a sort of haphazard way. So when we were in Vegas, I spent a lot of time shopping for clothes to wear for that night's cocktail party or dinner engagement. Too much time shopping. I didn't do nearly as much knitting as I would have liked. But one thing I did do, which is de rigueur for vacation travel knitting, was this: I bought myself a new swimsuit and sat by the hotel's pool on two days, and knitted in the sunshine. (Unfortunately, the Nevada winds had picked up, so this wasn't quite as comfortable a way to spend an afternoon as it could have been. Imagine me with my working yarn flapping in the breeze, my pattern clamped under my leg so that it wouldn't blow away, determinedly knitting.)

Here are my vacation WIPs:

I was really disciplined with myself. I didn't take every project I own. I took only two projects. At left is the Swallowtail Shawl, a design by Evelyn Clark that appeared in this issue of Interweave Knits. I have been meaning to knit a Swallowtail Shawl ever since person and after person came by wearing one when I had my booth at last January's Madrona Fiber Arts retreat. (While knitting the felted slippers that I made recently, using worsted weight yarn and slightly chunky needles, I found that I longed for a compensating project, something in fine yarn on tiny needles.) I'm using Zephyr, which is a new arrival at Two Swans Yarns.

The partially-knitted sweater at the right in the photo is my most recent iteration of the top-down raglan sweater we are supposed to be knitting for Nihon Vogue class homework. The earlier incarnation, you may recall, had a center cable and a cable down the center of each sleeve. I loved that project in the beginning, but the more I worked on it, the more I hated it; the cables were driving me nuts. The more I worked on it, the more I thought Melinda had gotten it right: Plain stockinette, let the tweedy yarn show itself off; plain stockinette, and just get the thing done. So this trip to Las Vegas was also my time to start the top-down raglan over -- I am the Queen of Starting Things Over, after all -- from swatching, to crunching the numbers for size and fit, to commencing the knitting. I'm using Rowan Felted Tweed in the color Midnight.

I was delighted to see another Zephyr Swallowtail Shawl at Feral Knitting this week:

Margarite is wearing her recently-completed Swallowtail (it was not yet blocked, so it looks short in the photo). She's doing the finishing touches on her embroidery of her Jacobean bag. (In the background, Andrea is knitting on her Project 3 for the Nihon Vogue class.)

Evelyn had designed and knitted up a scarf in the new Elemental Affects fingering weight yarn, and it's a beauty:

I'm not sure whether you can really tell from the photo, but there are larger leaf motifs that are all surrounded by smaller leaves, all over the scarf. You get a cute little wave at the ends. The pattern is available as a PDF download at Evelyn's new site: EvelynClarkDesigns.com.

And at Ferals I got to admire Janine's bravery, as she was grafting the yoke of her sweater onto the body:

I don't know that I will ever attempt that much Kitchener stitch!

Another of Evelyn's new designs available as a download from her site is a pattern for these guys, who will make cute use of leftover sock yarn:

That's Wendi posing with them.

Gail brought her sock monkey, and hers came to meet Evelyn's gang. I heard Evelyn holding up one of her monkeys like a puppet and asking Gail's monkey: "Are you really related to us?"

It does look like a sock monkey on steroids, doesn't it?

Well, that's the view from here, for now. With Old Gold Spindrift back in stock, with Kidsilk Haze in the color Swish back in stock, I've got to get back to work. And there's plenty of homework knitting ahead of me, too!