Furry Sweater for My Sister and the Elusive Roscalie Picture

My sister asked me to knit her a sweater. The design was from an older knitting book--it has a monochromatic diagonal stripe pattern of a textured and a plain yarn on one sleeve and the upper diagonal half of the body. The other sleeve and the lower diagonal half of the body are plain. The yarns have long been discontinued. She prefers garments that do not need special fussy care. So I went to WalMart and found some Red Heart eyelash yarn (Foxy)on sale--in white, with a mind that I had something in my stash to go with it.

I found some white Bernat Catalina yarn (that may give you a clue how old my stash is, and a hint about how old I might be) , and proceeded to knit. Had I followed the pattern, the eyelash yarn would have been too furry, so I knit more plain rows in between, and it worked out very nicely. Sleeve finished, I started the body.

We attended a our new grand-nephew's baptism a few weeks ago, and she happened to mention that she never wears white because it makes her complexion look sick. So, I went home, went to my stash, and be darned if I didn't have the same yarn in a lovely peach shade. I did not rip it out. Just started from scratch. The white eyelash with the peach is OK.

I've been re-reading my earlier posts , and in my début post it sounds like I had some nasty friends who poked fun at me because I was poor--not so, what I meant to say was that they poked fun at me for spending class time copying the stitches on their sweaters.

Don't you get annoyed when you find knots in yarn? Particularly in pricey sock yarn with a large pattern repeat, and they don't tie the new end on keeping the pattern's continuity. I'm kind of fussy about matching my self-patterned socks. That takes us to the Mary Maxim bamboo sock yarn--it comes in lovely colors, it's a gem to work with (splits a bit, but manageable), the socks feel sinfully smooth and cool, it's not too bad a price ($9.99 per 100 g), but it has a large pattern repeat and both colors that I used so far had a knot. The ball band says "Machine Washable--look on reverse side for complete washing instructions", except there aren't any instructions there.

My first hand-knit socks (I think I own about 20 pairs) that are now 7 years old --and I wear them constantly from fall to spring, are showing signs of wear. I had saved all the little scraps from all the socks, thinking to knit a patchwork of some kind to use them up. But I never did. Now I'm glad, because I intend to knit in new soles--at least the heel and front part. That's something my grandma taught me--and I'm glad she did. If anyone inquires, I will try to show in a future post how that is done.

Sorry about the small red font in last blog. On Blogger can we underline or strikethrough? I can't find a font menu or a keyboard shortcut that lets me do that. And I'm curious why my profile picture took just seconds to upload, while the post images take so long. After this post is finished I want to go and send some pictures to my Ravelry site. I'm curious how that will go.

Roscalie is here. It took 16 minutes on the 4th try. The first 3 times,I lost the connection to Blogger. Funny, because my profile picture uploaded in no time, the fuzzy sweater picture uploaded just fine, but this one didn't. So I went and saved a new copy of the picture, and there were no problems. Perhaps there was a problem with the picture. This is just to show you the colors I chose. Will post a picture of the whole thing when it's finished.

Till next time:"Grandmas are just antique little girls" (on a wooden heart-shaped wall hanging which I bought for my mom).