New Project!

I decided last night that I really needed to start a new project for myself during knitting group... I would have worked on the spiderweb capelet, but it's so big it's kind of hard to move around... I'm afraid that I would drop stitches if I threw it in a bag and carried it around with me. I hadn't done anything with any of the yarn I bought when we went to the Stitches East convention and I really wanted to try out a modular* pattern ever since I saw the argosy scarf in the new issue of knitty. I knew I had the perfect yarn for it too, a super soft rayon metallic blend from Blue Heron Yarns here in Maryland. So I printed off the pattern, grabbed some needles and my new yarn and went to knitting group last night. After several frustrating starts and restarts I decided that the pattern on knitty is either a little too difficult for me (or rather for the impatient mood I was in last night) or there's something off in it, because the yo (yarn over) and k2tog (knit 2 together) repeats were not working for me at all. And it just wasn't looking right... in fact, I thought it looked kind of icky, to be honest.

So I modified the pattern by taking out the yo's, k2tog's and ssk's (basically there's no lacy bits between the squares) and I am actually liking the pattern even more now that I've done a few more squares. I tried to take a couple of pictures, but the lighting is very dark in our apartment and my flash is very bright so the colours are a bit off... the Blue Heron named it "blueberry" and it's a self-striping yarn that goes from a dark violet colour to a dark purple with gold flecks of metallic string throughout. The first picture shows off the pattern better, but the second picture is a more accurate portrayal of the colour.






*Modular knitting, for those of you non-knitters, is a technique that makes it look like you have knitted a bunch of individual squares together, which, is sort of true. I started with only 9 stitches to make the first square and then added on... it is sort of knit on the diagonal. It's hard to explain, but it's a neat technique and this is my first go at it.