Blog-wise, I’m feeling particularly boring these days. It seems like I don’t have much of interest to say. Perhaps I have some sort of “Blog Malaise?”
Fortunately, a couple of you asked some interesting questions in yesterday’s blog.
Cheryl asked: “What do you do about cat hair on your yarn and sweaters? My cats love to sit on my knitting, chase and chew the yarn and generally make nuisances of themselves. I find sweaters with cat hair incorporated into the stitches and won’t come off.”
Cheryl, the same thing happens at my house. Izzy loves wool and will sit on my WIP whenever I leave the room. Fortunately, now that she’s a dignified old lady cat (will be 17 this summer!), she no longer chases or chews yarn. But I do find that I knit a little bit of Izzy into everything I make. This doesn’t bother me, and hopefully it doesn’t bother any of the people I knit for. If I were knitting for someone with cat allergies, it would be a problem. If I were you, I’d just consider the cat hair an extra special feature that makes your knitting unique.
Here is Izzy, asleep in the absolute center of my bed.
Dennis asked: “I do enjoy seeing your progress, and you’ve given me some incentive to learn how to knit with more than one color ! I’d like to do something simple first. Whats easier for a beginner to learn, Intarsia or Fairisle ? and is the somewhere that shows how to do them?”
Ah, sucking yet another victim into two-color knitting (insert evil laughter here)!
In my not-so-humble opinion, fair isle is much easier than intarsia. But then, that might because I have very rarely met an intarsia design that I liked.
If you want to get your feet wet in two-color knitting, you might want to start with a two-color Norwegian design. That way you can get accustomed to two-color knitting but not have a lot of different colors to deal with. Start small, like with a hat. Dale of Norway has lots of hat designs in their pattern books, and I know that Bea Ellis has a bunch of really great hat kits on her site. And I’m sure there are a bunch of other places you can get small two-color projects too.
If you want to dive right in to fairisle, check out Sweaters From Camp, which is available from Schoolhouse Press. Lot’s of great designs in there, and good instructions too.
Anyone else have any ideas?
Hank
Ooooh! So close . . .
No actually, I’m just messing with you. I finished Hank last night. You get the full photo tomorrow (gotta keep you coming back somehow, right?). I did take a photo last night but the light was bad. And I’ll do a photo shoot this weekend so you can see Hank on a human body.
Oh, okay . . . here’s the not-so-hot photo: