(Not entirely true to color, but close enough!)

Pattern: Forest Path Stole by Faina Letoutchaia, published in Interweave Knits Summer 2003

Yarn: Jaggerspun Zephyr in Bottle Green. It’s wonderful to work with and has a lovely sheen to it. I used just under 2520 yds/8 oz.

Needles: US3 Crystal Palace circulars and DPNs

I really enjoyed knitting this! Normally stoles bore me to tears, but the entrelac and the continuous switching between charts kept things interesting.

The stole looks like a more intimidating knit than it actually is. This was the first time I’ve done entrelac, but it’s not a difficult technique. The lace charts aren’t too hard, either, but if you ever knit this, don’t forget to check the errata first!

I never managed to get the selvedge stitch count to work out for the left side triangles, but that wasn’t a big deal – I just picked up one less stitch along those triangles and adjusted the next row accordingly.

If I could have done anything differently, I would have figured out a way to attach the side borders as i went along. Because the lace was the fun part, and the seed stitch border was a bit monotonous and anti-climatic afterward.

Yeah. Wasn’t expecting the stole to be that much of a bleeder.

So, I broke out the vinegar, added some to a new batch of water, and soaked FPS for a little while. Unfortunately it didn’t help enough, as FPS insisted on bleeding through the following couple of rinses. At least the color was lighter, but still, serious bleeding going on. Back into a vinegar rinse it went. And the cycle repeated until the water was finally close to clear.

You’d never know how much it bled unless I told you, though, because the color of the yarn still looks pretty good.

Here’s a detail of the stole while it’s still on the blocking board:

It turns out that my length estimate was quite a bit off, because I’d forgotten how the seed stitch and selvedge edges would limit how much I could block this out. Without borders, the stole was ridiculously stretchy when dry; with borders, I was lucky to get five feet of length when damp. It’s still longer than I am tall, so it’s a perfectly reasonable size, though I would have preferred it to be longer.

I’ll be heading out of town for the weekend shortly, so I won’t have time to take finished photos until Monday. Look for a happy FO post then!

Until this week, I hadn’t had time to knit outside of the weekly SnB. Unforeseen changes at work led to overtime for the bulk of this month. Lots of overtime means little energy, and little energy means lots of sleep, and lots of sleep means little knitting.

So while I’ve barely touched any of my other projects, hey, at least I made fantastic progress on FPS!

I’d just finished the left border before leaving Rebecca’s this past Saturday, so I spent the past couple of nights working on the top border. I finished the actual knitting Tuesday night and completed the bindoff last night. (I did the sewn bindoff called for in the pattern, and while it looks nice, it takes forever).

All I have to do now is block. I’ve borrowed Jessica’s blocking wires, so the latter process should be relatively painless.

Needless to say, I am very excited about this!

I rewound the leftover yarn, just for kicks, and this is what remains of the 8 ounces I started with:

Makes me even more glad that I stopped knitting the lace and entrelac part when I did, instead of knitting two more tiers. Because man, what a close call!

Eris:

The sleeves continue. Slowly. This project has been hurting my hands, so I’ve been keeping work on it to a minimum, but I should still be on track to finish by the end of the month.

No pictures yet, because they’re not particularly interesting, but just know that the current sleeves already fit better than their predecessors.
 

Forest Path Stole:

I pinned out a section of the stole to see how large it would block out, then did some math. Stopping at the end of tier 15 should give me a stole just under 6′ long, give or take a couple of inches, which is a good length for me.

I’ve almost completed the top seed stitch triangles.

Next up, the uber-boring seed stitch borders!
 

Pomatomus:

One sock down, one to go!

Don’t let the picture fool you – the stitch pattern is actually a little less clear when it’s stretched out over a human foot. That’s variegated yarn for you. Oh, well. At least the colorway’s pretty.

I decided I’d try a Dutch heel with this sock, as the round ones seem to be too loose for me. This heel fits okay (and will probably fit even better after blocking), but I’ll have to keep playing around with different types to see if there’s another one that fits me better.
 

In other news, I’ve been absent from local knitting meet ups lately. It’s not because I’m deliberately being antisocial, though! A couple of weekends ago I was sick, and the weekend before last I was up in the Bay Area visiting family (which is my excuse for forgetting to hit East Bay yarn stores). And this past weekend, well… I just forgot. Oops! Hopefully I’ll be there this Saturday, though.

Oh, and I have no willpower. I went to Common Threads on my lunch break yesterday, just to get size 3 DPNs (for the FPS borders). I came away with not only the needles, but with two skeins of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in Mineshaft. It’s a good thing that they only stock one other colorway that I like, because otherwise I might have come away with even more yarn.

The goal is to make the get-together a weekly thing, but this weekend is also a Whistlestop weekend. I’m trying to decide whether I should go to both or just pick one.

I will hopefully have a new project on the needles to work on by this weekend, because lately, the Forest Path Stole has been my only knitting-in-public project.

It’s a lace and entrelac stole, so it doesn’t look particularly simple. In fact, it’s apparently somewhat of a minor miracle that I can still pay attention to (and occasionally participate in) conversation while knitting FPS.

However, I’m on the 15th tier.

This means that I’ve knit each chart at least 16 times. By this point, I’ve long memorized each chart’s internal logic, which means that I don’t have to refer to my printouts very often.

So FPS is actually the easiest project for me to tote around right now. Neither of my remaining WIPs is as suitable for knitting in public. Eris is a bit too large and fiddly for me to tote around (trying to knit sleeves in the round when they’re already attached to a sweater body is not so fun). And my toe socks have a non-intuitive striping pattern, so I can’t just mindlessly work on that in public either.

I’m getting fairly close to the end here. I’m done with the lace either at the end of this tier or after tier 17, and then I’ll only have the seed stitch borders to do.

I am taking full advantage of my ability to knit back and forth. I’m a bit slow at purling back with laceweight yarn, but between this project and Lotus Blossom, I’ll be getting lots of practice.

The wrong side rows of the Lily of the Valley chart call for p5tog, and that’s something I have trouble doing no matter which hand I’m using. During the first WS row, I did a k5tog back (remember, I didn’t turn). Didn’t work quite so well, so when I got to the second instance of the decrease within the row, I turned the work around and tried the p5tog right-handed. That was even more of a fiddly failure than the lefty k5tog. So now I just slip 4, knit 1, and pass the slipped stitches over, which works well.

I’m going to have to put this down and try to ignore it for a few days, though. I really need to finish painting my living room; it’s been in sort of a half-done state since my parents visited.

On an unrelated note, I’m currently looking for a good yarn to use for the Channel Pullover (the next sweater in the pipeline). I tend to overheat, and I’m generally fine in regular old sweatshirts down here in San Diego, so I’m thinking that a 100% wool yarn might not be the best thing for me. Not for a pullover like that, anyway. My question is, would that be a safe assumption?

Anyway, back to knitting.

Well, I lied.

I started the Forest Path Stole two nights ago. It doesn’t look like too much right now, because right now I’m still doing all the setup. You start off with a seed stitch border and triangles, and those are kind of a pain. Even so, it’s going fairly quickly. One reason is Norwegian purling. The other is that the yarn (Jaggerspun Zephyr) is lovely to work with, so it’s more fun than it might be with some other yarns.

I should get to the really interesting part within the next couple of days. Lace plus entrelac should be a fun experience.

And just so you know that I haven’t completely forsaken my other WIPs…

I restarted Lotus Blossom the night before starting FPS, and I’ve finished the first chart. It’s a much faster knit than I’d thought. So, that one goal about Lotus Blossom? Easiest goal ever.

I’m much happier with it now that it’s on 2s.

I’m almost finished with my left glove, but I think I might have made it a little too short now. Just an itty, bitty bit. I’ll see how I feel about it after I block it.

The charts, unfortunately, are a tad squint-worthy. And I like highlighting charts as I work on them, and I wasn’t about to do that in the magazine. Especially not when I have an average of 22 repeats for each chart (taking into account my adjustments for size).

So I ended up redoing the charts on my computer. I don’t have a knitting font or anything, and I don’t even have Excel on the computer I used for the charting (why I decided to use that computer for this is a mystery to me), so it took a little bit of time with a graphics program.

“Why didn’t you just scan it?” you may ask. Simple: the effort it would’ve taken to scan the whole page, clean it up, crop the charts out and resize them legibly is probably equal to the effort it took to recreate them. Really, it wasn’t all that hard for me.

It’s awesome, because now I can print up a page for each tier. Which is helpful because the chart you start with changes with each new tier, and all charts have rows you only need to work on odd- or even-numbered tiers. And I can highlight! I don’t know how dependent I’ll still be on the charts by, say, tier five, but it’s nice to have the option to print multiple copies.