A Net with Teeth?

Not sure how to describe this scarf, but I'm enormously pleased with it.

It started with a lucky juxtaposition of yarns, as I was adding new yarns to my stash.

I had to make something with these colors! So I made one of those start-from-the-middle scarves, with the wide net as the middle (instead of the ruffle edge), the carry-along tufted yarn as the outside, and the nubbed yarn as the edging.

I cut up the nubbed yarn into bits with two nubs, and then knitted them in as I cast off.

It hangs beautifully.

It makes me think of Where the Wild Things Are.

But how does it look on?

Fabulous!

Stolen Hours?

Lately I've been interested in stoles -- long rectangular pieces. I've been using Kim Salazar's Kureopatora's Snake pattern as my basis, on size 15 or 17 needles, just under or over 40 stitches wide.

Here is the latest:

That's a yardstick, so you can see that it is over 6 feet long.

I used two of my magic balls, alternating rows, for a random but organized look.

The edging was one of those tubular yarns, mean for ruffles. I did a couple of rounds of crochet, then attached the tubular yarn in a bind-off stitch.

I don't know why I am finding making these stoles so compelling, but I do. You'll be seeing several more here.

Darn Good Scarves

I've shown these types of scarves before, but here are the latest two.

They both have multicolor silk ribbon yarn from Darn Good Yarn as the center, and then stitches picked up around the edge, with a yarnover between each middle arm.

The middle yarn does the talking, so I make the hairpin lace wide and just edge it with a couple of rows of knitting on large needles.

For the end parts, I picked up some stitches for the edge, and then increased before and after each corner stitch on every other row (the 'right side' of the garter).

These scarves are rather long, at least 6 feet. The ribbon yarn works up fast when doing the hairpin lace part. These are best suited to be worn doubled.

The edged hairpin lace scarf is now one of my go-to patterns.

Hairpin Shawl

So I kept after it.

I even got help.

And now it is finished.

That is the finished shawl hanging in my office. It seemed to take a long time, and while I never got bored, I was happy to have it done. And I am happy with the result!

It was fun to try out so many different techniques, and I feel like I have a good, although still basic, understanding of what hairpin lace is about, and what it can do.

Here are close-ups.

Now for some simple scarves.

Bloops in Triangles

I continue the exploration of Planet Bloop.

(This shows the shawl hanging in my office.)

My exploration was whether bloops would work with increases. I think it was a success.

It was knit vertically, increasing one stitch at the beginning of each ridge, and leaving a tail at the beginning and end to make the fringe. (I knotted them together as I went along.) When it seemed long enough, I began decreasing at the beginning of each row instead.

The first few ridges were done plain, and then I started a small bloop sequence with a plain row in between the bloop rows. The part that worried me was the end bloops: what would happen as the rows increased, and then decreased? How do the bloops work there?

What I ended up doing was saving the bloop nearest to the edge until the end of each sequence on the increase side, and making it the first bloop in the sequence on the decrease side, just to be sure it was accounted for. In retrospect I don't know for sure if I needed to do that, but it worked well enough.

However, on the increase side I did learn to make the bloop next to the final edge one as early as possible, because as the edge grew, it was easy to end up having to finish a sequence with a lot of bloops next to each other, which didn't help the random look I was after. On the decrease side, I had to be careful to make the ones near the top early on.

The pictures don't show it very clearly, but the top edge is again the ruffle yarn.

First Bloop Afghan

This is actually the first larger piece I ever tried with bloop knitting. My goal was to try everything I could think of, so it is far more complicated than the later pieces, and that is why I have delayed showing it until now.

That's a yardstick, to show the size.

Throughout most of this I had markers in different colors, each signifying a different bloop pattern. I even had a color for bloops made on the return row. For example, one bloop had sections of 12 with, say, a bloop of 1 2 1 3 1, and another had sections of 20 with bloops of 3 2 1 2 3. As long as all the markers were removed, it is perfectly possible to be following several bloop patterns at the same time.

I also played with yarnovers, first using them in between the bloop rows, and then using them only for bloop rows.

Finally, I did two bloop rows between the yarnover rows.

It was fun and I learned a lot, but afterwards I've just been doing a single bloop pattern in any given row because it gives a fine look all by itself, and I always make them on the front-side row because they are easier to keep track of if you have a contrast color after the stationary marker and the same color at the movable marker.

Perhaps I'll get bored with single bloops and go back to multiples one day. And then again, maybe not!

Bloop Stole

('Stole' the noun, not 'stole' the verb!)

Just like the scarf, only you do two or three repeats of the entire pattern before binding off. I used slightly larger bloops for this one.

There is a plain ridge of thin green lace yarn, almost like a thread, in between each color section, to make it lighter and more drapy.

This one had the easiest of cast-ons, a brown ripple yarn threaded back and forth on the needles, and then when I cast off, I threaded the same ripple yarn into it.

Easy and quick!