Knitting, Revisited

I told you I would be back with some knitting content! It feels so strange to me to talk about knitting so infrequently because it used to be the only textile craft I did and my entire blog was devoted to just knitting. Now with spinning, sewing, dyeing and weaving added to the mix it feels like knitting gets put on the back burner most of the time. Case in point as mentioned in a previous post, I have only ONE finished knitting project to my name for all of 2024 and I finished that all the way back in April. That feels both irresponsible and unforgiveable. And so, to right that wrong, I’ve been picking up the needles again as we apparently hurtle toward the end of the year at terrifying speed (can we have October and November back, please?) in an attempt to make up for lost time. I think one of the reasons that knitting often gets left behind is that I still haven’t quite figured out how it fits into our functional needs now that we no longer live in Minnesota. Sure, it gets cold here in the mountains, but not nearly as bad and, up until now, working my full-time job from home meant that I very rarely had to venture outside. I never even took my winter coat out of my closet last year. This winter, however, working a few days a week outside of the house may just be the encouragement I need to put my handknits back into rotation.

When we moved here in 2022, our realtor gave me a gift card to the local yarn shop as a welcome gift. It was over a year later that we actually made the trip there to see what they had to offer, and I came home with this beautiful ball of Noro Yukata – 50% silk, 25% wool, 25% nylon. Noro yarns are known for their long gradients of color, and this colorway drew my eye (any guesses why?). Knowing that the colors would obscure any type of stitch texture, I chose a simple pattern that would show off the stripes and would allow me to maximize the yardage. The Boneyard Shawl by Stephen West was just the ticket. Kyle and I have both knit this pattern before, but it’s so customizable that you can really use any yarn you want. Adjust your needle size to get an appropriate gauge for your yarn, and as long as you leave enough yarn for your bind off, you can knit until it’s as big as you want (or as big as your yardage allows).

This turned out to be a very generous size, and because of the 50% silk content it’s still incredibly lightweight.

This will be the perfect thing to wrap around my neck on chilly days for a bit of comfort. I started knitting this in September just to have something mindless on hand to work on in the evenings, but it turned into the perfect project to knit by the light of a headlamp during the week we were without power after Helene. Simple enough that I didn’t have to pay attention, but it still gave me something to do with my hands other than constantly wringing them with stress and anxiety. So this now officially makes TWO finished knitting projects for 2024, and I’m not stopping there. After I wrapped up this project, I decided it was time to knit Kyle what seems to be turning into his annual pair of socks. I went diving into my stash of sock yarn and came out with this beautiful hand-dyed skein from Muse 2320 Fiber Co. that I bought from The Yarnery about a year and a half ago. (At least I’m assuming that I bought it from the Yarnery because their email marketing always gets me and I rarely buy yarn from anywhere else, though they don’t have it available on their website anymore.)

Ok, that’s not quite correct. I actually came out of the stash with about 15 different hand-dyed skeins of sock yarn and made Kyle choose one because I couldn’t decide. In my defense, I had already narrowed it down to those 15 which was already a feat in itself. But it’s almost as if I know him, because I bought this particular skein with him in mind and it’s the one he chose. This is from a series of colorways this dyer did inspired by famous works of art. This colorway is called “Pyramid of Skulls” (Paul Cézanne), which is why I knew immediately that it was perfect for my Tim Burton-loving husband.

I started this pair of socks on election night because apparently stress and anxiety are a theme when it comes to my return to knitting and now I only have about 15 rows left of the second sock before the pair is done (although when I took these pictures last week I only had the one sock complete.)

I have fallen into the habit of doing a contrasting heel/toe/cuff because for my own socks I need to be able to extend the yardage just a bit so I don’t run out of yarn. I like that this yarn came with a separate, complementary mini skein dyed specifically for this purpose so even if I didn’t need to supplement the yardage, I still had the option to do so. I just like the way it looks, so now I do it on almost all of the socks I knit.

And as I am wont to do, I chose another very simple stitch pattern for these socks because anything more complicated would a) be obscured by the color and b) defeat the purpose of socks being what I consider a mindless project. The stitch pattern is ribbing-adjacent so it still gives a snug fit, allows the color to still be the focus, but gives a bit of textural interest. I’m caught unprepared for the second sock to be finished so soon and will need to go back into the stash post-haste to find more sock yarn to start my next pair. I almost always have a pair of socks on the needles, even if I’m not actively working on them. I’ve knit so many of them that I don’t have to consult a pattern and can just pick them up anytime, anywhere and I don’t have to worry about losing my place or being unsure about what comes next. It comes in handy if I find myself in unexpected need of something to occupy my hands.

While digging through my project bags a few weeks ago because I was finally going to get around to washing/blocking my Boneyard Shawl a month after the knitting was done, I also came across a completely forgotten project that I really should return to sooner rather than later. This poor thing has seen more timeouts than it deserves, but it just feels like pulling teeth to try to get it to work up correctly. Do you remember the vest I was knitting for myself where, after I completed 18″ of the body, I discovered I forgot to do an increase round after the ribbing at the bottom and it was 4″ too small? I had ripped all of that out, reskeined the yarn, washed it to get all of the kinks out, and the last time I showed it to you I was in the process of reknitting the body with the correct number of stitches. And I did in fact finish reknitting the body and moved on to the colorwork portion at the top.

And this is where it has been sitting, forgotten, for THREE MONTHS because the pattern I charted should have gotten me all the way up to the shoulder seams, but the armholes still aren’t deep enough. This means I’m going to have to improvise some additional patterning to account for the extra length needed and instead of spending what will likely be a measly 10 minutes doing that, I just shoved it back into its bag again to think about how it has disappointed me yet again. Maybe by confessing this to you I’ll feel the shame of public ridicule strongly enough to pull out the graph paper and get a move on. Could this be yet another finished project for 2024? Realistically that feels unlikely, but at a minimum perhaps I’ll have an updated chart and a path forward. That would still feel like success to me. (We’re not going to mention the fact that I’m practically out of the main charcoal color and this yarn was discontinued. That’s just going to have to be a non-issue.)

With any luck I’ll be back before the end of the year with some more FOs and a few plans for productive knitting in 2025. I hope you’re all staying warm wherever you are.