I didn’t manage to turn as much yarn into sweaters as I’d hoped to this summer, mostly because it was just SO hot, and without air-conditioning in our new house, knitting with wool was a bad idea. But we’ve had a couple brief bursts of cooler weather, and I’ve been able to make some good progress on my next sweater: a cardiganized Tensho sweater.
I’m using yarns leftover from the sweater I made for my husband nearly a decade ago, back before I had a good sense of how much yardage husband-sized sweaters actually needed. When I saw the Tensho pattern, I immediately had the idea to use these yarns. The inspiration was this mug:
I bought that from a local Fair Trade shop where I’d been performing Bach as part of a fundraiser for my daughter’s school a few years ago…I just fell in love with the colors and the design. So I’m looking forward to having a sweater that matches it!
I went back and forth about whether to knit Tensho as a pullover (like the pattern says to do) or to cardiganize it, but ended up deciding that a cardigan would probably be more useful to me, especially if I ever get serious about learning to sew, because I want to make a bunch of dresses and cardigans definitely work better with dresses than pullovers do.
I’m now getting close to finishing the first sleeve, thanks to some knitting time at the first Rochester Knitting Guild meeting of the year, and more of it in the car on the way to the Finger Lakes Fiber festival:
We haven’t been to the Finger Lakes Fiber Festival since Fall of 2011, when I was pregnant with my daughter! All of the years since then, we’ve gone to Rhinebeck instead, but we just can’t make that happen this year. It’s much, much easier to do a 35 minute drive than a 5+ hour one!
At the festival, we got to say hi to the alpacas:
And my daughter fell madly in love with an angora bunny:
She pet that bunny for a good 15 minutes straight! I didn’t end up buying anything at the festival…between the current over-full state of my stash, and being too frazzled by the heat and managing my daughter’s impulse-control challenges to make any decisions, purchasing yarn just wasn’t in the cards. It was lovely, though, to get to touch and explore yarns that I previously only knew from the internet, especially Jill Draper’s yarns. We did end up making a couple of small purchases for my daughter, though…
A peacock feather, and a bunny toy, to commemorate her encounter with the angora bunny. Her bunny, which she named “Bunbun”, joins Ellie the Llama and Baba the Sheep in her collection of fiber-animal toys purchased as fiber festivals.
We’re having what I hope is one last blast of heat, and by the end of the week, we should be in more knitting-friendly temperatures. Thank goodness!
whit::knits 