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.