January Roundup

What have I been up to? A lot. January was one of those months where I found myself doing more and posting less. But hey, that means I can dump a whole lot of pictures into one post! Yes folks, this is the January Round-Up. It's been an introspective month of explorations and personal projects.



Carve Charlie is almost finished, but I'm really not sure if I'll list it. I worked it on size six needles so the tension is nice and tight. It fits me perfectly, and after blocking will get a little roomier, but I'm starting to think it would be too small to be classified as 'one size.' Rather than indicate this in the item description and risk a potential return, I might just keep it instead. Or maybe I'll frog it and start over. Not sure yet.



One of the sweaters I disassembled recently was a cotton/ramie blend which got me thinking: "What the heck is Ramie anyway?" A quick skim of the wiki indicated that it's a natural fiber native to Asia. It's highly absorbent, much like cotton, so the two are commonly blended. So after frogging down a hefty amount of this cotton/ramie multi-strand, I figured I'd do a dish cloth out of it. The pattern is nothing spectacular, I decided to try moss stitch since I've never done it before. It'll be a gift to my sister since she uses these more than I do (and plus it was her sweater).

That blue thing up there is pretty much a "stitch doodle." I do these once in a while to explore new techniques. Most of the time they get frogged, but I decided to take a picture this time. I've been exploring cables with this one in preparation for a pattern I'll be starting soon, once I decide on which yarn to use.





There have been some great additions to my yarn stash this month. Hover over them for yarn details, or just click over to their respective flickr pages. Now that I have a swift I can get through these much faster, especially the thread weight stuff.

Once I get through these personal projects, I'll be able to focus more on the shop again. For the moment I'm just getting selfish with the 'me' time. Somehow I don't think my work would be as good without it.

Duality Bravo

Duality Bravo is a statistical illustration of the ecological relationship between predators and prey. When a predator is eliminated, prey populations boom, resulting in ecological disaster.

The pattern can be seen in the relationship between wolves and deer, where humans decimated wolf populations resulting in over-grazed river banks. This over-grazing in turn displaced insect populations, so the fish and amphibians dependent on these food sources disappeared too. The absence of plants and grasses lead to erosion, and the whole ecosystem went right out the window. In short: don't mess with biodiversity.



This yarn was interesting to work with. It consists of four strands of thread held together, so initially I thought it would be too splity to work with. It wasn't. In fact it worked up very smoothly. The cotton/nylon blend has a nice sheen with subtle puffs of lighter greens over the darker olive drabs.

The piece starts with garter stitch rows in a single direction chase, then one side terminates while the other side maxes out, then the maxed side spills over into both sides. I wonder if I could take this biodiversity concept further in terms of knitted construction and color. It would be interesting to incorporate disintegration somehow.