Shelter in Place: Day 7

Shelter in Place: Day Seven

Current Mood:  At least there’s still toilet paper.

And knitting.

I’ve bound off the body of my sweater.  I’m still bowled over by all this green.  I love it.  I also love the simple details of this edging.  Nothing complicated just a garter stitch edge with a few slipped stitch details and a tidy i-cord bind off.   Everything lays flat naturally, no worry about blocking that shit out.  It’s perfect!

Next up, Sleeves!  I took a little break though.  I have trouble as a monogamous knitter.  I don’t even pretend.  Plus: a week at home and no new cast on??  That’s just not right.

Pro Tip:  Keep an eye on Ravelry’s Hot Right Now list.   There have been loads of generous designers offering new, free patterns for the quarantined & locked down.  The Hot Right Now list is just like it sounds…a snapshot of what Ravelers are looking at right now.  It’s a great feature on a normal day.  It’s been even better over the last week.  It’s got high turnover, nothing stagnates.  It’s been a wide variety of designs by an even wider variety of designers.  A lot of them have even been free.

This is how I found Nancy Marchant (Brioche Queen’s) latest design, the South Beach Cowl.  It’s a Double Tuck Stitch cowl.  I’m down with brioche but I’ve never ventured into the broader tuck stitch family.   It seemed like a fun palate cleanser.

If you’re familiar with brioche, imagine a modification that works each row twice…row 1 is and since brioche already works each row twice, I guess this means we’re really passing each stitch four time to ‘work’ one row?  That sounds dreadful but it’s actually kind of fun.   Each Sl1Yo gets worked twice so when you come back to BrK (or BrP) you’ve got three strands to knit (or purl) together, instead of two.   POW!  Mind Blown!

It’s fun to mess around with.  I’m continually amazed how many variations there are for the humble knit stitch.  That’s not what I ended up casting on though. Turns out, I don’t need that much excitement in a new project.  The swatching was fun but this cowl calls for the stitch to be done over six stitches,  sort of 4 tuck stitches and 2 ribbed stitches.  It was too uneven.  It’s like K3, P2 ribbing…my brain just can’t.  The asymmetry is more than I can handle.  I can never find a syncopated rhythm like that when I knit, so it ends up being a fight and I nope out.

Ultimately I went for a plain brioche cowl but I picked some fun colors!  It’s rejuvenated me enough to tackle at least one sleeve!

And, I found a little cross stitch suggestion I wrote down and stuffed into a pocket a couple weeks back.  I have definitely not run out of craft projects yet!