A Bluestocking Knits

I’ve joined the Kaffe Fassett knitalong over at Blithe Dance — will be using that famously reclusive Yorkshire Tweed and Rowanspun, for a Toothed Stripe Waistcoat, one of the patterns in Glorious Knits.  Haven’t swatched yet, but I think I will need more wool.  (Still no satisfying answer from TypePad as to why the photos don’t show up.)

I was also very happy to see the Winter 2005 Interweave Knits in my mailbox yesterday afternoon, as I’d asked David (who was in Hong Kong when the preview came out) to pick me up a stash of Jaeger Extrafine Merino DK for this —

the Pearl Buck Swing Jacket.  It’s an elegant design, deceptively simple-looking, I think, and I look forward to the challenge.  The wool David bought is the same shade as in the magazine photo, elderberry — my photo is a bit bluer, but the close-up shows something of the beautifully subtle mottling of colors.

And the other day, I ordered some Sheepswool 2-Ply from Schoolhouse Press for the Aran cardigan in Elizabeth Zimmermann’s "Knitter’s Almanac" — I have been tossing around the thought of working my way through the whole book, and have decided to start it next month.

This is not a particularly original idea — I find now that other knitters have done it, although I’ve decided not to explore on other people’s blogs just yet — and my inspiration was a similar project done with Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julie Powell, who started with a blog and now even has a book about it.  But I’ve been enjoying so much the fact that I’m learning new things simply by blogging — the discipline of writing about my knitting is leading me to explore new things, techniques and patterns and yarns, things that I wouldn’t have bothered pondering a year ago — and I would like the challenge of exploring something, in this case, Zimmermann’s mentoring through her book, more fully than simply by doing any one piece or two from it.  I like the structure of the almanac, and it is obviously set up perfectly for this kind of thing!

New skill for next month: steeks (cue terrifying music)….

And just to show how easily distracted I can get sometimes, instead of knitting or even planning my knitting, I was playing around with PhotoPlus and came up with this! —