lest you think that I've been abducted by aliens,

I haven't. I've been lazy. It's summer, and I can't seem to motivate to do anything. Except sew. I've become obsessed. I decided to try quilting, and it's totally addictive. Not needing or wanting any quilts for my own apartment has not stopped me from making them. I've finished a baby quilt and then started my current project, which is a set of placemats, towels, potholders, and napkins for a friend of mine who's getting married.


Unlike knitting, where you can basically do whatever you need to do with a starter kit and the equipment is not particularly varied, quilting really can't be done perfectly without an investment in some special stuff -- namely, a rotary cutter, a quarter-inch foot, and a walking foot (I haven't gotten brave enough to try freehand quilting with an embroidery/darning foot). I've been tediously machine-quilting these placemats with parallel lines about 1/4 inch apart. It is pretty boring, but it looks great! And it's less boring than hand-quilting probably would be.


I have discovered that really beautiful fabric is expensive. This Joel Dewberry fabric for the placemats, for example. And rotary cutter blades are expensive. In fact, the crazy cost of quilting supplies has made me feel a little less guilty about knitting supplies: a quilt is much more expensive than a sweater to make (unless you're making a tiny quilt or you're using only quiviut yarn or something).

Oh, and quilting is much messier than knitting. My apartment is a gigantic mess right now. There are little scraps of thread and fabric everywhere. It's nice that even when you're knitting a big afghan or something you can still pack it up and put it neatly away if you need to.

Okay, off to sew some more!

Sweetness

Finishing the Orals and the school year has made me want to do nothing but fall back on sheer relaxing pleasure knitting, which for me, unsurprisingly, is making top-down baby sweaters. I bought this yarn back in April to help sweeten a sort of miserable birthday spent alone and under the crushing stress of last-minute studying, and it actually did help.

The yarn is Sweet Georgia Tough Love Sock in "Cedar" with Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in "Andersonville" as a contrast. They looked great together in the skein because there was a little touch of the cedar color in the Lorna's Laces. I bought them intending to make the mosaic-yoke "Cardigan B" from my "Steps to Stranded" patterns, but when I came to knitting the mosaic part, that stripe of cedar color turned out to muddy the crispness of the pattern, and my pretty squares looked more like smudges. So I improvised something that would work with this yarn.


Instead of six rows of mosaic pattern in alternating sequence, I worked four rows of garter stitch in the Lorna's Laces separated by two rows of stockinette in the Sweet Georgia. The beginning of each garter stitch section is where I worked my yoke increases.

I think it looks very nice, and it's a sweet little variation on the pattern. So if you're looking for a variation on the "Steps to Stranded" pattern, I'd recommend it, especially with yarns that are just a little too close in color to make the most of a stranded or mosaic pattern.


A note on the yarn: in my previous post I had expressed some doubt about the Sweet Georgia yarn, but I rescind that comment: after wet-blocking this yarn is heavenly -- soft and sort of silky feeling with no scratchiness, and it seems to have lost the fuzziness that was making me worry about how well it will hold up. I think if I were knitting socks with it I would still knit them at a pretty tight gauge just to be sure -- and this yarn is a relatively fat sockweight, so knitting on one's normal sock needles would already be knitting it pretty tightly. But at the looser gauge of this baby garment, it drapes beautifully.