Sunday, May 13, 2012

Eggplant and me

Springtime must mean I need a new shawl to wear. Well that and that basket of sock yarn sitting in the living room is getting antsy. The Malabrigo Eggplant sock yarn got the drop on me and forced me to cast it on. I was a bit surprised since it had been sitting quietly in my stash for a year or more every once in a while it would peep to me and I would take it out and hold it and think about making socks but then it would burrow its way back to the bottom of the stash for another couple of months because really it did not want to be socks. It dreamed of being a shawl but the right pattern had not yet hit my radar so it kept reminding me the it was there...

Then I found the Holden Shawlette pattern by Mindy Wilkes. And I started thinking I need another shawl, I have a wedding to attend this fall and the bride is a part time knitter so a new shawl would certainly jazz up an outfit. Plus air conditioning can be set a bit too low for my tastes and a shawl allows you to adjust your clothing without mussing up your hair. 

So Eggplant and I printed off the pattern and found some needles and we cast on and knit for a while. I was considering going up a needle size to make a tad more draping fabric and a slightly larger shawl but then I just knit on.


Wait do you see it? I made a mistake. How about down below?


My center line of stitches veers off. I think I missed a yarn over or something. I just know it looks wrong and I will fix it. But first let's do a little needle size experiment. I have moved up to 5 mm needles to see what fabric I get with a looser gauge. This way I when I frog it I will be able to tell if I need to start over completely using the larger needles or if I need to rip back to the mistake and continue on with the 4.5 mm needles. 

I think Eggplant just wants to spend more time with me and did that veer itself. It is not like I make mistakes nope knot me. What do you mean that is knot the right not? I am telling you I rarely make mistakes. Oh wait that is not me I make mistakes all the time. Well live and learn!

2 comments:

  1. Malabrigo in Eggplant messes with my head... the first time I saw it, I was totally in love with it, but it was not the colour of eggplant. It was grey with a hit of purple in it. When I saw the name, it threw me off so much that I couldn't bring myself to bring it home with me. Weird, no? Since then, I have seen so many variations of the colourway that I wish I'd bought it the first time I'd seen it.

    Holden is in my queue, too! And my current project is so full of mistakes that I've decided that it's my own pattern now!

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    1. Wow your eggplant sounds...off quite frankly. I wonder if it was a mistake?
      I sometimes let the colorway names sway me too. Sometimes you just can not get rid of the picture in your head, right?

      Long live the mistake riddled projects, it makes being a knitter more fun. Plus we get to say it is truly made by hand, of course I've seen mistakes in machine made stuff too, but we let the mistakes stay as a purely human decision. Mistakes make thing more real, we learn from them you can not get better than that.

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