Kaleidoscope: December 2005 Archives

A Lovely Basket and the Beginnings of a Vest

This picture is really just an excuse to show off one of the beautiful new Longaberger baskets that I acquired with Julie's help. This lovely round basket is the "Darning Basket". It is unlikely that I will ever do any darning in my life, but it sure makes a nifty project basket for the Kaleidoscope vest.

I started the vest with a tubular cast on. I'm always kind of mystified and amazed by this cast-on -- it's like some wonderful knitting slight of hand that anyone can do with a little patience -- and it creates the most beautiful stretchy edge for K1 P1 ribbing. When you combine it with a wonderful DK weight wool yarn like the Jo Sharp wool that I am using, it makes the perfect start to what I hope will be a beautiful garment. I want my dad to have something truly wonderful to add to his cool weather wardrobe. And that means pulling out all the stops to make sure that the detals really are thought through -- using the tubular cast on, adding selvedge stitches at the edges to make seaming easier and more neat when I mattress stitch the edges together.

And I'm a bit embarrased to admit this, but I love the idea of a project that doesn't involve sleeves! I get all the joy of working on something colorful and happy, but none of the pain of having to deal with sleeves. And I really do think the pattern is lovely (and very easy to work -- it looks like two-color work, but every row is really just one color). I'm looking forward to getting the next couple of intervals on there so that I can give everyone a really good look.

I guess yesterday's swatch and hints were pretty obscure -- that, and it's pretty hard to compete with both the arrival of a new Knitty online and a new Interweave Knits in the mailbox (at least, I got mine yesterday). So here's a bit of the start of the project -- along with a little paper star art courtesy of the Paper Source.

Sable Ribbing and Silver Stars

That esoteric bit of swatching is for Kaleidoscope from Jo Sharp's Knitting Bazaar pattern book. I wish I could find a picture to link to for vest. No doubt, since this book was published in 1999, and there's been several interations of yarn distributors and color palettes, there's probably not much interest on the part of internet vendors on making pictures of these garments available. Oh well. Hopefully it will be just that much more interesting to watch it come together.

And, as a quick review of the paper stars -- these are easy to make, but time consuming because there is a lot of precision scoring and folding that has to occur. And not likely to be small person friendly because of the amount of fine motor control required. With a little patience, I think it's not too difficult to get nice results, and I'll be making a few more as window accents for my party. However, right now, even I don't have the patience to make 40 of them!