Fiber Fool

entrelac addict.

I do not know why I hadn’t tried entrelac before. I’ve adored all of the Lady Eleanor stoles (Ravelry) and market squares bags (Ravelry) I’ve seen around blogland over the years. But, for some reason I never jumped in until now. But now I’m sucked in thoroughly. I even *adore* knitting backwards to avoid having to constantly turn my work. I may find myself knitting backwards on other things like heels! Who would have guessed?!?!?

If you’re wondering what I photographed above, it is a slight variation on Kathryn Alexander’s Peak Brim Flare Crown Star Top Hat (Ravelry). Amanda knit one recently. She upsized it slightly by adding one extra triangle/square to the circumference, but it still didn’t look good on me stretched that much. So I’ve increase my gauge to 4.5 sts per inch (I believe, though I haven’t rechecked since swatching) and also added one round of normal entrelac to increase the depth before beginning the dimensional entrelac. I’m knitting it from Noro Silk Garden Lite and now I’m dreaming of coordinating gloves and wishing Noro weren’t quite so expensive so that I could also knit a matching scarf! LOL!

I am really glad I have had Amanda to tap for info and her hat to reference though. It is not an intuitive pattern for me. Perhaps it would go smoother if I had knit a traditional entrelac pattern first. But you know me — jump in with both feet! At this point I’m mostly working off of the pictures in the pattern and Amanda’s hat and how I know the flat and dimensional entrelac to work more so than the written pattern.

The pull of entrelac has made me put some deadline knitting on the back burner though. I need to instate a bribery system I think. That said, I want the hat done by February 29th for the mad hatter tea party we are attending. It’s an odd group that gathers so I don’t know if I’ll take the prize for craziest hat, but it will quite likely be the craziest handmade hat around the tea table!

This weekend, Hannah, one of our SnB members was back in town and DH and I hosted a dinner for her and Amanda and Ashley on Sunday night. We went for kind of an antipasti or tapas approach to dinner. DH did a *ton* of th cooking, making cheese gnocchi, zucchini fritti, and yummy eggplant tartlettes. I made a couple sauce options for topping his goodies - my own lemon artichoke pesto and chimichurri. Ashley brought her yummy molasses bread and fresh veggies. Amanda brought a fantastic tiramisu. I was unpleasantly full at the end of the evening, LOL!

It was fantastic to catch up with Hannah and just sit around and talk knitting and life in general while enjoying great food and some wine. I’m thinking those of us still in FtC should do it on a bit more regular schedule, but perhaps with a bit less fanfare ;-)

1. Foccacia, 2. Lemon Artichoke Pesto, 3. Eggplant Tartlettes, 4. Cheese Gnocchi

Just over two weeks ago now (gah, I can’t believe its taken me this long to post about this) I went down to Denver with a friend to help Laura of Textiles a Mano set up her booth for the Denver Creative Festival. Laura used to live here in Fort Collins and her shop was practically in my backyard. Okay, it was a good 15 minute walk. But it was a 15 minute walk! Now she is based out of Missouri so I only get my Textiles a Mano fix at Estes Park usually. It’s quite sad. Laura’s yarns never pool, flash, or stripe and she does rather large put-ups so even *I* can make a sweater at a reasonable cost.

While helping her set up she kept encouraging us to take home whatever we wanted. What you see above is what I brought home. The two dusty plum skeins are for a vest-like object based somewhat off of a pattern in the Winter Knit Simple. The yarn is her merino, La Paz (ravelry link) The variegated one is Wuxi (ravelry link) a 50/50 wool/silk sport weight for some design work I’m doing for Laura. And the textured bulky yarn, Rocky Road is going to grow up into an Urchin as a shop/booth sample for her. All four skeins are now balled up and ready to go and I can’t wait to dig in!

I have a few more design considerations to make before I jump in on the vest project, but I think that is going to be one of the non-work knitting projects at the top of my queue right now. I even got a great button set for it and everything!

Most of my days since about Christmas have revolved around this picture… Lots and lots of utilitarian, fairly economically priced wool yarn. What have I been knitting? Lots of swatches using Cascade 220! Hopefully I’ll be getting some word back on some of the swatch work in the coming weeks.

I am so glad I had learned to embrace and appreciate the task of swatching before all this happened though. I had come to realize many months ago that swatching can germinate new ideas or help you discover areas for improvement etc. That has made this process of knitting for hours and hours on things that will never be an FO easier to bear.

After a fantastic breakfast at my fav breakfast location we hit one of the local nurseries for seeds. This weekend, amongst knitting and further garden reading (we’re looking at doing a lot of companion planting to aid in pest management) we’ll be starting to make our starter pots with our handy dandy pot maker and getting ready to start some of our seeds. Last weekend while taking the weekend off from knitting we started sketching out what and where to plant things. This planning stage is kind of fun!

This year I’m going to try using a Ravelry-esque website to track our garden progress - MyFolia. You can join in on the fun as well!