happiness

Mom asked for a scarf with a hood in "winter white". If my mom asks for something knitted, she gets it. I was nearly finished sewing the pompoms onto my fantastically gorgeous yet-to-be-blogged Advent Mystery KAL shawl and in need of a fresh project (I think Mom can sense these things), so I spent a happy half hour with Ravelry's supercharged pattern search and decided to knit this one by Lisa Ellis. It calls for worsted weight wool. Since I have an embarrassingly large stash, you might expect that I have plenty of worsted weight yarn to choose from...but you would be wrong. I have very little worsted weight yarn and none in superwash, which is a requirement for my itch-sensitive family. However, I do have enough fingering weight yarn for several knitting lifetimes. Fingering weight held double nearly always makes a good substitute for worsted if at least one of the strands is Wollmeise, so--phew!--I didn't have to break my six-day streak of not buying yarn.

This is where it gets fun. I thought I might get bored knitting the whole thing out of plain old white (the creamy white of undyed wool), but I didn't want to stray too far from Mom's request, either. I decided to combine one strand of Wollmeise Twin in Natur with one strand of a fabulous new yarn in my collection, Peepaloo Fields Standard Sock in the splashy speckled colorway Tough Cookie. I love this colorway! I couldn't imagine how I would use it, never having used a yarn dyed quite this way, with the random non-repeated splashes of color on a mostly plain ground, but I bought it anyway. It was just too cool.

This is how it looks:

I love the subtle random specks and chunks of color, and I love this squishy half-cable stitch pattern. I haven't used it before. I'll probably use it again. I'm knitting with size US8 needles as recommended in the pattern, but expect it would make an equally lovely fabric on size US9...but believe it or not I don't have any 9s (I probably have 100 sets of needles, so I don't know how this has happened). I usually go down by one or two needle sizes, so perhaps this designer is a loose knitter like I am.

And a closeup:

Love, love, love. It's hard to stop knitting because I want to see what the yarn will do next! 

I've been sitting by the Wintermas tree knitting this lovely thing (for my darling mom) while watching holiday movies. And there's snow outside. And my son will be home soon. Doesn't get much better.