The few weeks before SOAR I was assiduously making earrings to take along, to give to my friends at SOAR. I'm not sure how many pairs I gave out, as I already had earrings in my Etsy shop and earrings which I'd made months or years before and left in a drawer which were taken with me, but there were only two pairs left over.
Most of the earrings were one of a kind only in their colour (the styles were often repeated), but one of the leftover pairs was a singleton, made in the moment with no planning or notes, and I was not sorry to bring them back, as I really like them and wanted to work that motif again.
The large beads in each earring are spice jasper rondelles, and while they're close in size and proportion to some of the faceted Czech rondelles, they are by no means always interchangeable (when I tried to use the stone beads in a design which originally had used the Czech beads, it just looked messy and ill-fitting, but not in the good way that some girls look in boys' jeans, more like that creepy way that boys look when they wear girls' jeans, especially those high-waisted jeans from the eighties). While I have a respectable stash of the stone beads in a variety of different stones, they're not widely available, and I wanted a design for which the materials were not impossible to find.
It's a very pretty bracelet with fabulous height (not so fabulous at a keyboard mind you), but it's decidedly straight and thus not suitable for neckwear, which ideally should curve. I do have some ideas about that.
Every time I return from SOAR I want to memorialise my joy while there, and I wonder which story I should tell (the door prize that Denny didn't win? It's just not as hilarious here in the Real World somehow), but discard them all when I realise that there's magic in that Shangri-la that just can't be captured and somehow doesn't quite make sense in any other place.
Instead, I'll show you a sleeve, one of almost two (I have three stripes to go on the second).
It's been a while since I've wanted to work with natural colours, and these are so lovely that I'm really enjoying it. I'm sinning with multiple fibres, but they all seem to be cooperating nicely, so I'm hopeful.
They're all handspun.
The darkest brown is a lovely bouncy wool that could be a coarse merino or a superfine corriedale. The garter stitch cuff is lama and silk, the white has a ply of merino/silk/angora and two more plies of other things I can't remember. The medium brown is brown blue-faced leicester and the taupe is polwarth. I think one of the honey-coloured yarns is either polwarth or merino, but the other one? No clue.
The design of this sweater thrills and delights me in the way that only non-standard sweater construction can do, although I have previously done something similar.
Starting at the cuff, I'm working the sleeve up to the underarm, shaping a set-in sleeve cap but instead of casting off the underarm stitches, I short-rowed them, and came back to short-row some more for the side body panel, which was worked down to the hem of the sweater.
When both sleeve/side panels are complete, using a somewhat heavier yarn, I'll pick up and knit stitches along both sides of each piece, starting at the hem, working up the side body panel, over the shoulder via the sleeve cap and down again, and then I'll knit back and leave the live stitches.
Once both sleeve/side panels have live stitches along their selvages, I'll cast on stitches for the front (or back) and work back and forth in a solid colour, joining the front (or back) to the side panels as I go. I'll be able to work waist shaping in the front and back pieces, resulting in a (I hope) flattering hourglass silhouette.
At least that's the plan.
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