300th Post Contest

Happy Easter to everyone! This is also a significant personal milestone for me, as this post marks my 300th blog entry. Blogging has brought me lots of personal fulfillment, strengthened my writing skills, and given me wonderful, new friends I never would have known otherwise. I was so heartened by the response to my Friday post; it is an excellent example of how blogging allows us to connect with each other across the miles and trials of our lives. Check below for details about my 300th post contest.

First, a bit of knitting news:

As you can tell from the button over on my sidebar, I have been participating in the Mountain Lace KAL. While Mountain Peaks has been a challenge, and is currently languishing, here's the latest on Mountain Stream:


Mountain Stream only needs a top border!


Here is a close-up of the unblocked scarf; I love this pattern and will probably make it again in a different yarn, once I figure out why I can't get the top border chart right.

I have put out a call for help to my fellow KALers and to designer Susan, but HAD to keep knitting something:


These are two samples I made last night to check for gauge before starting my ruana. This pattern is in Cheryl Oberle's Folk Shawls book, and is a great exercise in color creativity.

Cheryl gives a very precise formula to obtain the correct number of stitches based on the length you want and the gauge you get out of these trial samples (which is good, since I am shorter than average and needed to modify the pattern so it wouldn't drag on the ground). From there, you are pretty much on your own color-blending, which I absolutely love.

I am a fan of stripes in plain knitting. Over the years, I have made a feather and fan afghan, a circular calf-length skirt, a vest, and my felted traveling bag, all in stripe variations derived as I knit, pulling from a bag full of yarn selected to meet a specific color scheme. The results are always delightful and the knitting entertaining, as I can't wait to see what will happen next.

The piece is made all at once, a 45' by 70" rectangle in the end, with waste yarn used midway along to be opened back up into the neck/front edge while finishing, so there is a LOT of plain knitting ahead. The fringe technique employed has you cutting a specific amount each time you change colors, and that avoids tying on a lot of fringe at the end, but also will relegate this project to a knitting-chair one, with quilt ruler balanced on one of the wooden arms, ready to measure each fringe, which is then tied to the previous one. I finished my calculations last night, and decided that I preferred a varying, somewhat random row sequence of 1-3-5-3-1-1-, etc., rather than a three-row sequence or something more precise. The colors blend better together that way, and keep with the tonal, light-purple-as-a-neutral, effect I am going for. I have a great collection of various types and weights to work with and got off to a flying start this morning. This is not a project that will lend itself well to pictures, so I doubt I will be posting much about it... just the same, old rectangle, slowly getting bigger, but I will share the results when they start becoming something noticeable.

If you live in California, you don't need me to tell you that it is STILL raining, and even snowing in lots of the state for Easter Sunday. A few weeks ago, I decided one sure-fire way to get it to stop, and finally become spring, was to order the rainboots I had been admiring in Smith and Hawkin's garden catalog. If I started wearing them, it would stop raining for sure:


I was happy to get to wear these great new boots yesterday and today!

300th Post Contest

I wanted to commemorate my 300th post by holding a contest all week. The prize is this lovely, spring/summer-colored Cotton Fun sock yarn by Lana Grossa. Just send me an email to knitinhiding@hotmail.com sometime before midnight next Sunday (note: modified late tonight to explain this means Sunday April 23rd), and you will be entered to win!