Archive for the 'Soft Delight Extremes' Category
I will admit up front that I am an “Ant,” not a mom, so things that strike me as noteworthy may appear a bit ho-hum to some of you. Nonetheless…
1. Ten-year-old pitchers develop speed before accuracy. In other words, those balls will come at you fast and from angles you never expected.
2. A fifteen-year-old boy can eat steak, noodles, biscuits, veggies, and three cupcakes for dinner and still be ravenous again before bedtime.
3. A teenage girl can tangle up a ball of yarn better than a kitten can.
4. Line-dried t-shirts are less desirable than machine-dried ones because they are—quote—”too crispy.”
5. When you are the spectator with the McDonald’s lucky player signature on your LumberKings baseball program you win a prize!: a coupon for one McDonald’s hamburger, valid only at a handful of participating local franchises. (Still this beats having the local-cell-phone-company lucky signature, in which case you get a foam beer-can cooler with the company’s logo.)
6. When you root for the SF Giants and your nephew’s favorite color is blue, he will pick the LA Dodgers mini-helmet to hold his sundae, and you will pay for it without complaining.
On the knitting front
I got four more balls of Soft Delight Extremes at Hobby Lobby and plan to undo the bind off on my first Easy Triangular Shawl, so that I can enlarge it significantly. (I do like a shawl that I can wrap over my head and around my body a time or two. You can never tell when the weather’s going to go all Dr. Zhivago on you.)
After some more knitting, I’ve decided I come down on the Peaches & Creme side of the Peaches & Creme versus Sugar ‘n Cream debate. The Peaches & Creme has a tighter twist, which results in far fewer split stitches.
P.S. Sparky is happy to be back from Oaktown, but behaved so nicely that he has been invited for a return visit whenever he likes. Mighty Bezoar survived her stay at Kitty Hill Resort. Apparently the shock of the new setting gave her an out-of-body experience of some sort, as the Kitty Hill folks reported that she was consistently affectionate and good-natured. We’re sharing some lovely “Home, Sweet Home” moments.
July 03 2007 | Beatrice and Cats and Easy Triangular Shawl and Peaches & Creme v. Sugar 'n Cream and Soft Delight Extremes and Spartacus | 2 Comments »
Here’s my Clementine in Malabrigo, looking a bit odd on the needles (but I have great faith in the miracles I’ll be able to work with blocking).
This pattern is a delight to knit—interesting, but simple enough that I can do it while enjoying a baseball game on TV or a book on tape. I’m particularly appreciating the feel it’s giving me for using increases and decreases to shape my finished work. I will never be one to design (let along wear) a knit swimsuit, but if you are so inclined, that teardrop-shaped bit at the end could teach you everything you need to know to make a nicely curved bra cup. (I’ll be waiting for the pics of everyone’s beachwear creations to come rolling in.)
With three balls of Malabrigo, I’ll easily have enough to make a good-sized shawl. I’m planning to use one ball for each half, then to continue knitting both at once from both ends of the third ball, so I get the most out of my yardage.
While walking on a windy beach yesterday, I got the idea to modify the Easy Triangular Shawl pattern into a poncho. I had a rectangualr shawl wrapped around my shoulders and pinned together, so the long ends were keeping my front warm, but I was really wishing for more fabric in the back when the shawl/poncho vision descended. I know the main wave of poncho fever has come and gone, but I haven’t knit one yet, so I will not be forestalled by the possibility of looking “so last year.” I’m guessing I’ll need ten balls of my beloved Soft Delight Extremes, and have put that on my shopping list for when I visit my sister at the end of June.
Last night I gave Sparky a little pompon-type ball that I’d had marinating in catnip for the past several months. You should have seen him go at it! He lunged at that pompon as if it were a particularly trecherous foe and spent a full half hour alternating between killing it and carrying it about in his jaw triumphantly. Spartacus: Mighty Slayer of Puffs!
P.S. On the evil spendthrift front (actually, it was only $11 with shipping from Rosie’s Yarn Cellar), I’ve ordered the Manos Cotton Collection 4 book. I’m in love with the back/white/grey 3/4 sleeve mosaic-stitch jacket. If you click on “View Image Gallery” here, it will be the first picture that pops up. It looks so classy and comfy all at the same time, and the washclothes have gotten me enthusiastic about the joys of mosaic stitches.
April 30 2007 | Cats and Clementine Shawl and Easy Triangular Shawl and Soft Delight Extremes and Spartacus and WIPs | 1 Comment »
Here are a few quick pics to whet your appetites.
Voila—the Easy Triangular Shawl knit up in my beloved Soft Delight Extremes from Hobby Lobby.
Yes, it’s acrylic, but it does amazing things on the needles. I’ll be buying more of it when I head to the midwest this summer to visit my sister. (Like a good knitter, I know to take my largest suitcase, even if I’m only going for a few days. You never know when you’ll run into a great yarn sale.) Obviously, I haven’t blocked the shawl yet and will need to do some tugging to even up the two sides, but isn’t the striping great? The chain-stitch cast off was tedious, but I like the bit of ruffle it adds to the hem. Once I find the right sale, I’m definitely going to be working this pattern up again in Noro. A thousand thanks to CatBookMom for bringing it to my attention.
And now Melissa in version 1.1 of the Tamalpais hat.
(A self-portrait, in case you can’t tell.) The patterns for all the variations of this hat will be posted as soon as I can photograph them. This tweedy green hat is knit from the original pattern, which I’d first worked in a variegated yarn. It had come out nicely, but, not surprisingly, the color variation obscured the pattern, so I re-knit the hat in this fiber. In subsequent variations I played with using two yarn colors, mixing moss and stockingette stitches, making the “mountains” larger, and working the mountains in moss stitch. Because I’ve gotten some feedback that my Santa Cruz Hat is a smallish fit, I deliberately made this pattern larger. It produces a hat that’s roomier, without crossing over into beret-dom. Since I won’t see Melissa and her camera this weekend, I’m hoping to importune one of my local friends with a digital camera to help me get the rest of the pics done and uploaded.
The Malabrigo version of the Clementine Shawlette is on the needles and looking lovely, but it will also require significant blocking. I tend to knit garter stitch borders a bit tightly, so the interior pattern balloons out until I give the garter stitches a good stretch. Does anyone else have this problem?
April 27 2007 | Easy Triangular Shawl and FOs and Soft Delight Extremes | 1 Comment »
Driving up to Melissa’s this afternoon, I passed a small, parking-lot style carnival at the local community college. It brought back all sorts of memories: going to the county fair with my family when I was a kid; my first time on various rides; the time I wanted to ride the ferris wheel and stood in line by myself only to be told I was too short when I got to the front, and the young couple on a date who invited me to sit between them so I could go; the evening at the high school carnival with a boy I had a crush on who offered to let me choose a ride, and I was too shy and too afraid of making the wrong choice and couldn’t pick anything, leaving him bewildered and with a handful of unused tickets.
I mentioned the carnival to Melissa, and she responded, “I saw it too the other night. The lights were on, and the freeway traffic was slowing down while people drove past it. Want to go?” Having long ago recovered from my high school shyness (the worst of it, at least), I was all for going.
We paid $3 each to get in the gate, then strolled the little bit of a midway and checked out the rides. I suggested we go on the Yo-Yo. Melissa countered with the Himalaya, noting that we’d be able to sit together. That convinced me.
(Note that this is not the Himalaya we rode on. We downloaded this picture from a web site that features used carnival rides for sale. Now that’s something interesting one could do with a few extra hundred grand.)
We had a lovely wild ride. We sat in a pink car and squealed and shouted “Himalaya!” over and over again, as if that explained everything. Melissa had been gallant and took the outside seat, so I was smashed up against her the whole while—I won’t be surprised if her hip is bruised in the morning.
After that, Melissa treated me to pink popcorn from the “Big Bopper” food trailer.
We did take it home with us to save for after dinner, but I confess I ended my Lenten no-desserts vow a day early in order to indulge.
Afterwards, we contented ourselve with walking another, slower lap, watching the little kids and families.
I’ve finished sock number two, and I’m working on a shawl now, while I wait for the additiomal sock yarn I’ve ordered to arrive. (The Trampoline Stretch is so nice to work with, given its bounce, that I want to do another pair or two in it before I try anything else.) The shawl pattern is from Lion Brand Yarns and was recommended by CatBookMom as a pattern she’s used multiple times.
I’m knitting mine in my favorite acrylic—Soft Delight Extremes. I’m using size 9 needles, so will have to work more repeats than called for in the pattern, but that’s no problem, since my wonderful sister sent me (at my request) a whole box of that yarn this past winter. (I know, I know… it’s cheap acrylic, but I love the colors, and it is wonderfully soft. This is going to be a very cozy shawl.) This is a great pattern for self-striping yarns with long runs of colors, the pattern is simple to follow, and working it is giving me a solid, practical understanding of how shawls knit out from the top-center work. Once this shawl is done, I’ll be able to go to my stitch dictionaries and develop my own, more elaborate patterns.
April 07 2007 | Socks and Soft Delight Extremes | 2 Comments »
I know it’s not the sort of thing we talk about in polite society, but I’ve fallen in love with an acrylic yarn—a cheap acrylic yarn ($3.99 for a 218-yard skein). Soft Delight Extremes by Yarn Bee, which is the house brand for Hobby Lobby. I picked it up when I was in the midwest last summer visiting my sister. It looked like any number of other yarns on the skein: kind of hairy, but definitely not an eyelash, some color variegation, but nothing that cried out “I will be your new obsession! You will succumb to my powers and become helpless like a child!” Still, the price was right, so I bought a skein.
This winter, when I was experimenting with tam patterns, I pulled it out, figuring it might make a rawther interesting tam. The tam itself came out rawther more interesting than I’d planned. I was following a pattern, which I rarely do (see my previous entry), but I failed to notice that at one point the decreases increased from every other row to every row. As a result of my lapse, I wound up with a hat that began something like a tam, but then collapsed a bit in the middle, and finally rose up to an odd little point. Sort of like the fancier kind of mathematical bracket { or an onion dome. I convinced myself the hat had “flair” and left it as it was, naming it “Czarina”—though it did not have enough flair for me to knit another like it.
But my point here is the yarn, not the hat suitable for smuggling large gourds and other oddly-shaped vegetables. I immediately phoned my (non-knitting) sister and begged her to get me another six skeins, which she did. (I have THE BEST sister in the world. Don’t even try telling me that many other sisters are just as wonderful. I will not believe you.)
The yarn was gorgeous: gorgeous to touch, gorgeous to look at. It’s actually two separate strands twisted together. The main one is a fuzzy, acrylic-as-mohair ranging from a sweet, sweet cream to an almost-black brown and back again, with longer sojourns at the darker end of the run. The second strand is thin and shiny, with very fine threads coming off it every quarter inch or so, and this is variegated in a spring green to pink to bright red-violet range. When it knits up, it’s positively Noro-esque—if it’s not blasphemy to say that about a $3.99 acrylic.
So Wednesday, when I was crabby as all get-out because I’d been knitting the same darn hat (subject of a future posting) repeatedly for the better part of two weeks, I dramatically swore off kniiting, at least briefly. “I can’t knit another stitch,” I told Melissa. “That hat has frozen my brain to the point that I’m incapable of thinking an original thought. I’ll just have to stop for twenty-four hours to clear my mind, then start a completely new project.”
That resolution, of course, lasted long enough for me to walk upstairs and see the winter issue of Interweave Knits on the bedroom floor. I’d been lusting after the Wine and Roses mitts since I’d seen them worked up in a lovely rose (what else) shade on All Tangled Up. I looked at the pattern and lusted some more, but knew I wasn’t ready to take on something quite that fiddley given my tenuous state.
So then I asked myself a what-if question. What if I knit up some simpler wrist warmers using some of that nice yarn from my sister?
I knit a quick swatch to figure out what my gauge was, measured my forearm and hand and cast on. The crabbiness fled, contentment set in. I was knitting. I was knitting something that was not a hat. In three hours I had wrist warmer #1. The next evening I knit wrist warmer #2. Joy! Right now I’m only taking them off to eat and bathe.
See what I mean about Noro-esque? (And the identical color variation on each one—complete luck.)
If you like them, you’re welcome to knit your own pair:
Yarn: Yarn Bee Soft Delights Extreme or ~175 yards of any heavy worsted-weight yarn that gets ~4.5 stitches to the inch.
Needles: U.S. #8 double points.
[Note that I originally omitted two lines of the pattern. They have been added here in bold.]
Cast on 45 stitches, distributing them evenly among three double-points. Place a marker and close the circle.
Work 4 rounds of k2, p1 rib.
Knit 6 rounds.
(K1, K2tog, K12) 3 times. (=42 stitches)
Knit 6 rounds.
(K1, k2tog, k11) 3 times. (=39 stitches)
Knit 6 rounds.
(K1, k2tog, k10) 3 times. (=36 stitches)
Knit 12 rounds.
(K1, k2tog, k9) 3 times. (= 33 stitches)
Knit 15 rounds.
K 1, bind off 4, k28.
K1, cast on 4, k28.
Knit 8 rounds.
Work 4 rounds k2, p1 rib.
Cast off and weave in ends.
January 19 2007 | Basic Wrist Warmers and Basic Wrist Warmers and FOs and Patterns and Soft Delight Extremes and Yarn Reviews | 27 Comments »
