I’ve been plugging along on the Arequita Tunic, and while I know I’m only a few inches from the end, I feel like I’ll never get there.
I’ve been on staycation all week, which you might think would lead to spectacular knitting progress. But it’s been bloody hot, and also we have a new kitten. So let’s just say I’ve been distracted, whether it’s playing with the kitten, working on inter-cat relations, or just trying to keep the kitten from playing with the yarn and chewing my needles. Kittens are fluffy, but I’ll mostly stick to the crafting sort of fluffy here. If you want to kitten pics, head over to Gooselanding to read about him.
But progress has been made, and I know I will get it done!
I am getting rather short on the pink yarn though, so I rather think I need to sew up the parts in pink soon before seeing just how many more rows I can get with both colors before doing the final few rows in the purple yarn. Ideally, I would like 2 or 3 rows with just the pink after phasing out the purple. But we’ll see.
I can tell I’m ready to be done with this project in part because I keep eyeing other possible projects. Two new patterns were released this week which caught my eye.
The first is The Audacity Shawl by Transmutation Knits. Actually, I’ve been waiting for this one since a preview was posted earlier this summer with a call for test knitters. Stupid time zones… by the time I woke up and saw it on Instagram, no more test knitters were needed. So I had to wait until it was released today to get my hands on the pattern. It looks like a fun little knit for a single skein of fingering (and I have a bunch of those), plus I loved the Alanna books which inspired the shawl when I was a kid. I’ve always loved dresses and skirts, but I also liked roughhousing with my brother, pretend sword fights, and wandering around the woods as a kid. I wasn’t much good at sports (particularly anything involving balls) and preferred crafts. In short, I didn’t feel feminine enough to be a girly girl, but I also clearly wasn’t a proper tom-boy. I felt weird, and like I didn’t fit. So a book in which the was a woman who wanted to be a knight, but was terrible at first with a sword, and comes to love dresses even while still kicking ass… they were my kind of books. They said “you can work to be the person you want, even if it’s not like everybody else.”
I am going to use my skein of Pod from Hedgehog Fibres. It has orange for Alanna’s hair, and green for the region of Tortall she originally came from.
The other pattern which was just released just looks like a lot of fun. It’s Frazey by Bristol Ivy. It calls for 500yds each of two colors of fingering weight yarn. But I think I’m going to use three Hedgehog Fibres skeins instead: Vengeance, Pheasant, and Dragonfly. It’ll alternate which two are contrasting throughout. It was designed for Bluebrickish yarn, which comes in 130g skeins, so I like the idea of using three 100g skeins, each in a different colorway, instead of needing four skeins, but only using a little of each of the second skeins.
Funny thing? Between these two patterns I’m going to use up most of the Hedgehog Fibres skeins I bought back in early 2019.