Closer to My Goddess
What was my big push over the weekend? Getting both side panels of my Goddess Capelet finished. By the time I had gotten both of them finished, I had one full skein and most of a second left, but with my yarn shortage paranoia running high, I made a quick phone call to Ruhama's to see if they had another skein in the same dyelot that they could send me.
Credit cards are a good thing. By the time I get home from Texas, the last skein should be waiting for me and I can get on to knitting the fun parts of this project.
The side panels aren't really much to look at, but to provide proof of completion (mostly to myself -- even on size 8 needles this knitting was a little bit of a slog), here's a picture of the project.
One thing that I couldn't capture well on digital film was the subtle differences in color in the skeins. This is not to say that Phoebe is like Arucania Nature Wool or something like that. If you look at the skeins they are most definitely solidly the same color. This is just enough variation to give the fabric a little depth, without screaming incompletely dyed. Either that or it is just a trick of the light in the room with my blocking board. I'll try to get natural light pictures when I get back from Texas.
Now that I have gotten the lion's share of the knitting done on this project, I feel like it's a good time to talk more about this yarn. On the overall, I like it a great deal. It is incredibly soft to the touch, has the most phenomenal hand and makes for a truly blissful knitting experience.
However, this yarn did make me crazy in one very specific way -- it splits like nobody's business. I suspect that this is related to it being alpaca, but I haven't knit with enough alpaca yarns to be sure. I don't want to tell how many times I would look down the fabric to realize that of the 6 or so strands that are plied together to make this yarn, on a stitch 10 rows down, I had caught only 4 of the plies and there were two extra ones swinging in the breeze. I did the "drop a stitch and re-knit back up" routine so many times I thought I was working on an alpaca version of Clapotis! Obviously, this is my fault, not the yarn's, but what this means is that I had to pay attention to this project more than I would have expected to for a long stockinette slog.
Speaking of long slogs... I have an airline story that fits that bill as well. But I'll save that for tomorrow.
