Saturday, April 30, 2016

Springtime in North Carolina

Hi there,








It's the last day of April so to document for my Wyoming and Nebraska friends what spring looks like in the South, here are some pics from our backyard from the last couple of weeks.

Steve has planted his garden.



















Our pond frog survived another winter, and he's started to sing/chirp a little more loudly each day.



















I'm beginning to think about summer knitting, meaning warm-weather knitting, which is about eight months out of the year in North Carolina. One of my favorite things to do is to knit on my deck in the natural light.





































One project I'm looking forward to is the Churchmouse Bias Before & After Scarf. I've chosen two skeins of Tahiti cotton in Breeze (7616), and I ordered some Sunstruck 10" straight needles from KnitPicks for the project.



















Funny thing is that I chose almost the exact same colors as the Color Affection Shawl I made in Manos Serena a couple of summers ago.



















I had purchased a luxury skein of Handmaiden Sea Silk in charcoal several summers ago to make a Clapo-Ktus, but I ended up frogging it. That pattern has a lot of M1s, both right and left, in it, which is my least favorite stitch. I was delighted to discover another pattern that this yarn is made for, the Montego Bay Scarf. It's a lacy, easy to memorize pattern.



















I found this how to use a lifeline video from WEBS very helpful for placing waste yarn along a lace pattern and then how to frog back to that point if necessary. It is sort of like having an umbrella--it won't rain if you have it with you. I probably won't need to rip back since I have the lifeline.

I tend to gravitate toward the same blue-green colors both inside and out. I spruced up my kitchen table for spring with some new place mats from Target.



















So in order not to be too matchy-matchy, I cast on a ballband dishcloth in salt & pepper / ocean coral as an accent. Yolanda said she'd like to KAL--she and I have some history with Peaches & Creme projects.

What I'd also like to tell my Wyoming and Nebraska friends is even though spring is beautiful here, every time I hear about the spring snowstorms out west, I get terribly homesick. I remember the beauty of those heavy snows, sometimes clear into May.





































HAPPY SPRING!!!

xoxo Tammy

Monday, April 4, 2016

Inclination Cowl























Hi there,
The two-person knit-a-long for the Inclination Cowl with Sharon has been a lot of fun. But if there was ever a demonstration of what a slow knitter I am, this was it. Sharon messaged me that she was 29 rounds in before I had barely gotten started, and she received her yarn order after I did. Normally, there is no rush, it is not a race, I will take all the time I need, but when knitting with a partner, I want to keep up!  

photo by shoofography.com



















I recently had to pull out our marriage certificate for an insurance policy validation--34 years of marriage, and oh boy, he gets to style and photograph my knitting, who would have known?! The photos of me are taken with the camera on Steve's new Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphone.

I will definitely make this cowl again, it was a wonderful, easy one-skein pattern. I cast on 120 rather than the recommended 100 because I didn't want it to feel tight around my neck. Hindsight, I think the 100 would have been just fine, but I had plenty of yarn to squeak out 70 rounds, which was plentiful. I used Clover bamboo circulars, size 8, 24”. Addis or HiyaHiya circulars would have been so much better/faster with this yarn, but I used what I had to get started.



















FROM SHARON:
Thoughts about my cowl.....it isn't blocked....motivated to finish with 14 inches of fresh snow at the end of March with 4 more the day before Easter...I love the reverse stocking with Malabrigo...and remember reading your email which forwarded the Yarnery ad while in line at our drive through coffee shop! Nice simple pattern that has you wanting to do one more row, after one more row.

I think she chose the perfect colors for both of us. That is how Sharon and I first met on Ravelry. I admired the colors she had picked out for her Stole (also a project from The Yarnery), and she helped me choose the nine colors for mine. I now ask her opinion for practically every project I even think about making!

As you can tell from our photo backgrounds . . . 




















. . . I'm in North Carolina, where the grass is green and the trees are in bloom.



















. . . Sharon (@abbysitznmomanitz) is in Nebraska, where there is still snow on the ground!


Malabrigo Merino Worsted in Kaleidos




















Malabrigo Merino Worsted in Milonga



















Thank you to Scott Rohr (@rohrknits) at The Yarnery for this fabulous pattern!  


















xoxo Tammy