A New Project

Now that I've finished the Devon socks, I needed a new, portable project that I could work on without needing a chart and that I could pick up and put down easily.  I'm not really in a sock kind of mood right now (possibly because when I wear shoes, I'm wearing flip flops 99% of the time), but I needed something that I could work on in auto pilot, like I do socks.  

A few weeks ago the Classic Elite free pattern of the week was this wrap.  I loved it!  It's the simplest wrap ever (seriously, if you've done a garter stitch square for an afghan or a dishcloth, you can knit this wrap), but I loved the way it draped and the size is nice, and I just loved it!  The yarn used in the original is a laceweight alpaca and silk, held doubled to give fingering weight.  Both alpaca and silk are very drapey with little to no bounce, which I knew would be important for the finished wrap to drape the way I wanted it to.  I didn't want to mess with two strands of laceweight though and decided to find a fingering weight with a similar drape.  What I settled on was Blue Moon Fiber Arts Geisha which is kid mohair and silk with a bit of nylon.  It's fingering weight, it has a bit of shine from the silk and the mohair, and while it isn't a brushed mohair, the more you mess with the yarn, the more the mohair blooms and you get a slight halo.  I had used Geisha in my Atlantis test knit and had enjoyed it, so I figured I'd get some for this wrap.  It took a while to pick a color (have you looked at all the colors on the Blue Moon Fiber Arts website lately?), and while you could easily go with a multicolored hand painted yarn with a wrap this simple, I went with Rosebud.  It's photographing a solid pink, but there are subtle variations in the yarn as it shades from a medium pink to just the pink side of white - just like the petals on a rosebud.  

The whole thing is knit on the bias (think garter stitch dishcloth) and right now I have about 130 stitches on the needle.  I'm supposed to increase to 210 so we'll see how close I get.  (With the simplicity of the pattern, you could easily change yarn weight and needle size and just work your wrap to the size you want.  This pattern is really filling the need for brainless, auto pilot knitting - perfect for TV knitting as well as short bursts of knitting  in those odd times during the day, so if you're looking for something along those lines, take a look at the link above.