][ a wildly selfish interlude

It's gotten cold, which has made me want to be knitting twenty-four-seven, but when I actually get my hands on the needles it's a different story. Mostly I've just been soldiering away on Yet Another Washcloth, a wholly ideal project for riding the subway but not a very exciting one. (And it doesn't help that the Candy Dishcloth pattern I'm using, the freebie from the wrong side of the yarn label, is really not to my tastes. It's an interesting enough technique that I don't mind it, but it's not a thrill.)

Other than that the only things on the needles are R's Sekrit Holiday Knitting, which I can't work on (obviously) if she's around, and the Doom Blanket, which is too bloody big to carry at this point, though it's fantastic knitting for laying in bed or watching TV-- since I can throw the bulk of it over my legs to keep warm :3

I decided to stir up a little knitting mojo by casting on something new-- something for me, unlike the Sekrit Project and the bajillion washcloths, which are destined for gifting to someone sometime.

I decided to play around.


So I did.
I grabbed this mysterious handspun given me as a gift a while ago, looked at some cowl patterns, and decided to whip up my best approximation of a Bubble Wrap cowl in a completely wrong yarn. What I've got are two skeins of indeterminate size, in very similar colors, save that one is plied with itself and the other is plied with a much darker strand. Since the ball of lighter yarn looked to be smaller than the skein of dark, I'm using that for the "backing" and the dark for the "bubbles."

I'm loving the results-- the similarity of the colors of these two skeins means that the pattern is not as bright and noticeable as it would be if I were actually knitting... you know, the thing I was inspired by... but it gives the fabric an interesting sort of self-patterning illusion, since the "bubbles" are overall darker than the background, and they are indeed textured, though due to the thick-and-thin quality of the yarn it's a bit less pronounced than I'd hoped. Still, it's working up very prettily.


This is where I was at about two minutes before starting this post, and I cast on and knit lazily yesterday-- so it's pretty quick to boot!
It's much more interesting than striping, uses less yardage than proper colorwork (even accounting for the dropped stitches that make the texture happen), and still shows both colorways in a way that pleases me.

If I were to do this over I'd use smaller needles and maybe shrink it to 80 or 60 stitches instead of the 100 I'm doing. My only worry now is how the yarn's going to work out-- I really have no idea how much I have, so it's anyone's guess. I'll deal with it when I run out of one or both, and maybe use the leftovers to work something on the edging. Right now, it's got a few stitches of stockinette which I intended to let curl, but I wish I'd done more-- I didn't because I didn't want to waste yarn, though. Something will present itself, I'm sure. I'm not worried!

Anyway, if all goes well I expect I'll have a cowl by the end of the week at latest. Maybe sooner-- depends how much TV we consume, I think.

A few more details on my project page, as well as some other photos because I love progress photos. It's a sickness. Deal with it.

<3