shoalwater shawl in Misti Alpaca Lace handpaints

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Originally uploaded by bellayarns

’m knitting this for a shop sample. The yarn is a sample provided to me by my rep to play with before I get my shipment. I’ve used the lace alpaca before in solid, and loved it. I knit the swallowtail shawl for my mom-in-law with it. love!

the shoalwater shawl is satisfying to knit and i’m using the addi lace needles, which at first i thought were a total gimmick but now i’m in LOVE with them. holy cow is it easier to do lace with these. yay!

ruffles!

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Originally uploaded by bellayarns

I really like how this turned out. I had started to knit this same project with a different color of Solo (the purple/black) and black smart mohair but I got bored and wandered off. Eventually I scrapped that project, but this yarn has been sitting on my shelves for over a year and desparately needed a cute sample so I tried it again, this time with pure merino as the base.

perhaps it’s the sleep dep from new parenthood, but this time it held my attention and I finished it in a few days. I am not really a cravat kind of girl but i’m really pleased with the results. I’m working up another sample of the Solo next, this time fingerless gloves (also from the fall 2006 Knit.1) and a hat that I’m designing. this time I’ll pair it with the misti Pima cotton and silk. I’m excited!

Clapotis, oh how I love thee!

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Originally uploaded by bellayarns

Man, I love this yarn, and I love the pattern. It was fun to knit and something I could keep up with given that I get not a whole lot of sleep these days. At the end, I have to say, that dropping all those stitches with a mohair blend was not so much fun. It was great the first few times, but next time I knit this I’ll use something slinky that will drop easily.

of course, I want to make it next in this laceweight alpaca i just got in from J. Knits… which won’t drop easily at all. sigh. I torture myself.

the colorway practically glows from within, seriously. It makes up for the fact that the dye comes off on my hands (!!!) and I ended up looking like a corpse after only knitting for a few minutes. I definitely have to do some serious rinsing on this before I wear it. of course, it’s going to the store for a while, so I won’t have to worry about it until next winter most likely!

back from the pregnant!

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Originally uploaded by bellayarns

Hi there,






This has been a long time coming! It seems like being pregnant makes your brain foggy and having the baby makes it disappear completely! But I'm back and I'm going to try to blog a little more frequently! Now that Clara has arrived (www.flickr.com/photos/conterio_clan) I'm knitting for big people again, so it won't be endless baby sweaters and booties! I can't believe the last time I posted was in April of last year... but when I look at what we had to do to prepare for Clara's arrival, y'know, it's not all that shocking!






But now that she's napping, I've had some time to enter some projects on Ravelry and I thought I'd blog about them while I'm at it! Right now the most impressive thing i'm working on is this fantastic sweater from Norsk Strikkedesign out of Naturewool. holy cow is this thing beautiful. It's slow going because I need to be highly caffeinated and well rested to work on it, the caffeine I get daily, the sleep, well, that's another story. I'm also working on a bunch of samples for the store (which take precedence in my knitting queue, of course) so this ends up on the back burner more than I would like. I stopped knitting this when i got pregnant with the littles (Jan 07) because i was uninspired to finish something so complicated when i wasn't sure it would fit me after her arrival. Luckily, the weight loss is on target and this should fit me, provided it goes over the lacating orbs easily. I will eventually be finished breastfeeding (in a few years or so...) so at least I know I can wear it then if all else fails!




I'm thoroughly loving working the naturewool in fairisle. it is even more interesting how the colors subtly change and it really keeps me knitting. It was really the only yarn in my shop that had the right colors for the sweater. I really wanted to stay very true to the original colorway because I love blue and black. The yardage on the naturewool is amazing, i've only barely cracked into the second skeins of the two main colors. Given how much I've put aside for the project, I'll definitely have enough for the wristers and hat. yay!

Works in Progress

Well, the more exciting work in progress is the little creature that I'm growing in my abdomen. yes, blog-o-world, I am, in fact, pregnant. (whoa, a comma overload!) True to form the first trimester is basically turning me into a zombie, with the need for brains exchanged for a need for Ben & Jerry's. Of course in the first few days I began the baby knitting journey with a little sock yarn baby sweater that I designed. It's really simple, seed stitch borders, pretty yarn-over increases, not too much fuss. I love that these take relatively no time to knit and since it's sock yarn it's pretty much indestructible, which is essential for the modern infant ;)

In what seemed like no time at all, all of the unpleasant symptoms of pregnancy turned me into the aforementioned zombie, so between eating, sleeping, eating and shuffling around I haven't been knitting as much as I would like. I've started a bunch of different projects, but so far the only one to be completed is the little sock yarn baby sweater! So you get photos, and a run down of what I'm working on.

First, is a sweater I'm designing for The Sheep Shop Yarn Co. They have a fantastic new yarn, Sheep Three. It is pretty sick, 30 silk, 70 wool, knits up on a #4 needle. So the sweater I'm making is absolutely enormous and mostly in moss stitch (or double moss for those of you across the pond) It is taking me forever to finish, mostly because I decided to knit it all in one piece to avoid sewing because it is such a large sweater. I am in love with it, and I would have given up a lot sooner if it wasn't so nice to knit on this yarn. Oh how i love it.

Second, is another baby sweater, from Debbie Bliss Simply Baby. A book that I've had in the shop for quite a while and had sadly never even looked at! (bad yarn shop girl, no pint of iced cream!) It has some of the most adorable baby stuff I've seen and now I have a long list of things from that book I need to knit for the porkbun. I'm working on the Ribbed Jacket in Louisa Harding's Grace, one of the most drool worthy yarns I have in the shop. I'm doing this in a cream and brown colorscheme for gender neutrality, and it's turning out really well... there's a sneak peak in here somewhere.

Third, I'm working on a shawl from Victorian Lace Today in some Lorna's Laces that a friend gave me. I don't carry the yarn in the shop, but it's knitting up really wonderfully. If I had that with me I'd give you a look, but like most lace, it really doesn't look like much until it gets stretched all to heck and back... so maybe I'll just give you nothing until it's done! I'm hoping it will be a pretty and relatively discreet nursing shawl. The colorway is red/yellow/orange/purple, so it's pretty wild looking. Considering my normal black with grey wardrobe, it's a bit of a stretch, but I still love it.

Fourth, is a modularly knit shawl. The pattern is from the ArtYarns collection, the yarn is Ritratto from S. Charles. I think it's a nice combination, but frankly once I found out about the wee one, I lost all interest. It will make a great store sample when I get around to finishing it.

Those are the current UFOs, there are more, hiding in my closet, but we only drag them out when we're really desparate for a finishing fix.

I promise more posting as I'm coming through the fog of the first trimester and should have more energy soon. If my knitting progress in the last week is any indication, I'm very nearly back on track. phew!

summer?

Well, no, not really. We've just had an ice storm, but you see, the yarn shop girl always has to be one season ahead so her samples are done for the appropriate season! Which means I'm constantly knitting cottons and slinky things in the middle of february (which is actually more pleasant than say, heavy woolens in July...) This particular piece is from Louisa Harding's Spring/Summer accessories collection from last year. Yes, I'm a year late with this little number, but to encourage my intrepid knitter's I'm teaching a class on this little number in May. It is the 2nd easiest lace pattern in the universe, Feather and Fan, in an entirely manageable number of stitches. You can slide the yarns up the side and tie on the extra sparkly ribbon as you go which makes doing all of those stripes really not so bad. It took me forever (tm) to knit this. Probably because I started it during a super bowl party and messed it up so many times that I got annoyed with it and therefore had negative associations. I'm quite happy with how it turned out, especially my color choice. Originally I had chosen to do it in an entirely different colorway of darker pinks and purple and changed my mind at the last minute into this much more delicate and feminine version. I was half way through it before I realized I had chosen a silver metallic and a gold metallic, but I don't think it detracts. The button is an older brass button from One World Buttons that hasn't sold particularly well for me, but I love the spiral on the button with the wave of the lace pattern. All in all, I think a nice sample. Next, I'm thinking either a lace poncho from the Artyarns collection of modular patterns, or a felted clutch. It will probably come down to what needles I have in the shop.

cowl!

Another sample, another yarn I adore that hasn't sold very well. The yarn in question is Misti Alpaca's "worsted" 4ply 80% baby suri alpaca/20% silk. I put the worsted in quotes because there is absolutely no way that stuff knits up to a worsted gauge... but it is gorgeous nonetheless. People mistake it for cashmere all the time because it's so freakin' soft. Now, I know it's not cashmere because cashmere feels soft in a different way. This stuff is really slippery soft, probably because both alpaca and silk have that slippery soft feeling to me. Anyhow, I love this yarn, but up until this year when most knitter's decided that they could use smaller needles (bless them!) it really wouldn't have been what most people would want in a sweater yarn. Now, it's right up their ally, and the colors are beautiful and rich and the stuff knits really easily. I thoroughly enjoyed the cowl even though I chose to do it in seed stitch and it was really boring. It felt nice while I was bored doing it! ;)

The finished product came out really well, as you can see from the photo. Most orange colors frighten me, but this one is so nice I put it on one of the models in the front window. I actually knit the thing on #8 needles (because I was lazy and those were within reach... and 20/20 hindsight, I do like seed stitch knit at a slightly loose gauge) 145 stitches, 2 skeins, do seed stitch until you run out of yarn.

PS. I'm so thrilled with the quality of photos that my camera makes. :)