Keeping Up

It's not as though I've done absolutely nothing, though apparently I haven't said anything about it.

I made a bracelet with aquamarine beads. 

I know that gem quality aquamarine is clear and flawless, but I kinda like this inferior type too. I find the variations in colour and translucency charming and interesting, and to my mind they bring a bit more emphasis to everyday jewellery than would an almost-colourless perfectly clear bead. 

Last Saturday I went to my first-ever meeting of the local bead society at which they taught a stitch that I already knew and had no desire to use, so instead I made a pendant. When I got home I wanted to make a relatively simple chain, so I found this daisy-chain variation in the white Russian book which worked up quickly enough, compliments and matches well without being overpowering. It was pleasant enough to do, and might lend itself well to experimentation in terms of both colour and texture (by varying bead sizes, shapes and counts for the different sections of each repeat).

I'm making knitting progress, though with only eight days until SOAR, I'm not very hopeful, even though the flight there will no doubt be a windfall in terms of knitting time. The yoke is complete and I believe its shaping is useful and appropriate - and by that I mean that the neck is neither too tight nor too loose, and the same for the bottom edge. 

I've shaped the body of the sweater using short-rows such that the back neck is a few inches higher than the front, which is always useful on the body of a human in which the same is true. The positioning of front neck versus back, not the short-row thing of course. If our back and front necks were identical though, it'd be easier to maintain better posture and avoid that unattractive head-poking-forward stance that one relaxes into when slumping out of shoulders-back-tits-to-the-wind.

Since as usual, now that I appear to be beyond undoing every couple of days, such that sweater growth looks steady and better them merely incremental, I'm concerned about yarn quantities (I have somewhere around twelve ounces that must do the body and sleeves, minus cuffs and bottom band), and since I'm a little uncomfortable with the visual balance of a multi-coloured yoke and completely solid body and sleeves, and also since in this instance I do not love the idea of the starkness of circumnavigational stripes, I'm making short-row stripes.

Let me just say that were the yarn finer (three plies at 21 stitches to four inches using 4mm needles to give a fabric that is firm enough to wear well, but not so firm as to even approximate stiffness), I might be more carefree in the running-out department, but since it is neither fine nor incredibly light - tencel adds density, there's no getting around that - I'm inclined to not disregard the possibility.

What this means is that, while knitting in the round in my main colour, I randomly (well, probably semi-randomly, as my decision is based more on "I think this would be a good place to change colour" rather than "purple, purple, purple, purple - oh let's try something else") start knitting with another colour, work part-way around the body, wrap and turn to knit back, but continue to wrap and turn well before I reach the last wrap-and-turn, and do this for some number of rows.  Then I go back to purple and short-row to make the purple as tall as the other colour, work a few rounds , and then start again somewhere else with another colour. 

I think these landscape stripes (think of pouring piles of coloured sand every now and again as you fill a jar with regular sand) will serve well to both break the starkness of the solidity of the body and sleeves, as well as unify the random striations in the yoke, with the additional advantage of insurance against the dreaded Running Out Of Yarn.

In theory.