At long last

My latest design has been a long time coming.

I fell in love with a stitch pattern in my Japanese stitch dictionary a couple of years ago. I swatched and sketched and charted and plotted and schemed but just could not figure out exactly what I wanted to do with this stitch pattern - I just knew that I wanted to use it somehow!

I finally gave up on the idea of somehow making a triangular shawl out of it. Eventually I took the main element and charted out the mirror image. Then I added a column of alternating eyelets in between repeats. I took the tiny cable pattern that had been between repeats in the original stitch pattern and used it for an edge stitch.

Choosing the yarn was difficult too. Initially I thought I'd use DK weight - I had swatched in tosh dk and liked it. I had this lovely tosh merino dk and a rich russet color that would be gorgeous.

Unfortunately I discovered that purling two together through the back loops is quite difficult with single ply yarn :P I also considered some beautiful deep orange sport-weight from Yarn Chef and even wound it up.

But this wrap just demanded a luxury blend of fibers, so I finally settled on madelinetosh Pashmina in a lovely golden color.

Once I started working on what had become a rectangular stole, I realized it was going to need fringe.

I'm so pleased with the finished stole!

Winter Woolies

I just released this very warm and wintery sweater which means that spring is probably going to come soon :)

This is Woodsmoke - it's knit top-down, seamlessly, and the sleeve caps are knit along with the body - the same basic construction that I used in Serra.

It's knit in madelinetosh alpaca sport and I've enjoyed wearing it during some of the cold weather we've been having. I hope winter isn't quite over!