Mohair-ity

Mohair-ity. Rhymes with rarity. Also hilarity. For what it's worth.

Wow, so Friday's Starbucks Knit & Chat was really different for me yesterday. I got there early! But still not early enough to see Saffity (who had a prior engagement) in person. Saffity was making a donation to my modular wrap. I have put together a package of stash findings for her in exchange. Luckily another knitter who usually rolls in later in the morning also made it in early this time, so Saffity had someone to leave the mohair with. More on the "new" mohair later.



Starbucks was all about the magic loop yesterday. I had made an arrangement with Cmeknit to learn magic loop to finish the wrist ribbing on my cardigan sleeve. I had a terrible time with the DPNs, trying unsuccessfully to wrap the yarn in all the right places to make seamless, unpuckered ribbing. After ripping back my second attempt, I used my 47" Addi Turbo Lace needle to do the ribbing using the magic loop method.



The 47" cable is a little long for magic loop, but still works. I had originally bought it for making a moebius, before I had my "revelation" about simple knitting. (I will one day come back to moebius, when I am looking for a challenge again.)

As it turned out, TraumaQueen was also working on the sleeve of a baby cardigan, struggling with DPNs, and next thing you know, C. is teaching her the magic loop method too. This was in the early afternoon, when C. had been home on an errand and came back with some circular needles in the right size for TQ's project.

Then one of our newest members, an experienced knitter who is very adept at using DPNs but was curious about magic loop, got a lesson too. So you see why the Friday Morning Knit & Chat (which really ought to be called the Friday Morning, Lunch, and Early Afternoon Knit & Chat) was all about the magic loop.

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When I finished the ribbing on my sleeve, C. taught me about knitting-in ends on my shawl. It's a bit fiddly to do, but the result is neat and tidy.


I also did some show-and-tell with my project bag. A few of the knitters are also seamstresses (a so much nicer word than the ambiguous-in-print "sewers"), so I mentioned the pattern available here. By the way, if someone was looking to make a felted version, the bag is similar to the Lucy bag (scroll way down the page).

Now, for those of you who are interested in the Knitting Gang Wars (you know who you are), we seem to have won the turf war for now. Our rivals usually don't show up before 10:30, so the space in front of the fireplace is well-filled by then. But their arsenal is not yet depleted and they've recently escalated the violence to "dirty looks" whenever one of our crew passes by them on the way to the washroom. I tell ya. Hell hath no fury.

Oh, and if you are musically inclined, Saffity has found us a theme song [MP3 version]. Here are the lyrics [parental warning in effect]. Just to reiterate, this is not my find -- it's all thanks to Saffity's incredible knowledge of internet knitting arcana. Props, sistah!

(Okay, sorry about that. As you can tell I have zero street cred. I am a suburban SAHM, fer Pete's sake!)

Moving on now...



The only "new" mohair I used on my shawl while I was at Starbucks was some pink. For the rest I wanted to wait until I was home to look through the offerings and see what would work. So I finished a square (seen in the previous photo) with my current colour scheme and the new pink, and started a new square at the SWK Knit & Chat in the evening, using the purple mohair.



I love the deep, rich purple colour so much that I am currently able to ignore the tweedy bits that the manufacturer decided to enhance it with. (I may one day be forced to grab my tweezers though, just to see if I can pluck those suckers out whenever they happen to show up on the right side of the shawl.)



So I got four new colours for my shawl from Saffity's donation: the purple, and a similar tweedy teal (which I also love for its rich base colour), a light blue that will need to be held double (seen at the beginning of this post), and the new pink -- a warm, slightly orangey pink (seen on the left in the following photo).



The pink is so near in colour to my existing pink that I can't really put them side-by-side on the shawl, but the effect of the warmer colour on its surrounding colours will be a nice effect to experiment with.

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But, it's time (really, it's TIME) to finish up this post now. So I will show you the sleeve of my cardigan, just waiting for EZ's stretchy sewn bind-off.



And finally, the newest squares of the shawl, which is getting difficult to photograph in full now with my favourite 50mm prime 1:1.7 fast lens. (From now on I guess I'll have to switch to a zoom lens so I can get a wide-angle view of the whole thing.)



And that, my friends, is about all I have the energy for today. Ciao!

P.S. I have already replaced that green with another colour, and finished that square. I am three-quarters of the way through the next square after that. I have used all the new colours, too.