Spring Hasn't Quite Sprung

I said it wouldn't take me long to get Countess Cathleen done once the knotworks were underway. It's not quite done yet, but I'm over halfway through the knotworks now :) Here's the photo I put on Insta yesterday:

I love how it's coming together :) And only 25 rows to go!

Of course this means I'm going to have to turn to writing the pattern soon. Which I confess isn't always my favorite part of designing. But if I don't write it then I can't see how it looks when other knitters knit their own, and that is one of my favorite parts of designing. As with any thing, there are fun and not-so-fun aspects. So, I'll be pattern writing pretty soon, followed by tech-editing, and then test/beta knitting. I'll have more news on that as I get closer to having the pattern ready. The test will definitely be held on Yarnpond again. So if you're interested, stay tuned this spring.

Speaking of audience, I was checking the stats here recently and noticed I'm getting a lot of interest from Singapore and Hong Kong the last while. Hello, and welcome *waves* :) I'm not sure if it's my knitting or Irish Dance content that's bringing you to visit me but I'm happy to have you along for my adventures :) And hello to anyone else who's new, or not. The more the merrier, in both knitting and dancing :)

In Irish Dancing news: CLRG Worlds start in Glasgow tomorrow!! Squeeeee! I'll be following coverage via Instagram all this coming week. Best wishes to all the dancers!!

My next knitting adventure should be underway in a few weeks! I've narrowed down the bead choices for Cherish the Ladies, and will be casting on in April. With sport-weight wool, I'm going with 6/0 seed beads, and I've learned of a few Canadian sources for them that are very reasonable in both prices and shipping. I'll let you know how I get on once I've got them. I confess it's totally down to color at this point; not surprisingly at all *insert cry-laughing emoji here*. I think my love of color is fairly well documented ;)

That reminds me! I started a new personal project recently, and I'm using a lot of color for it. Some of you may remember that I knit a Harvest cardigan (pattern by Tin Can Knits; link to their site🔗) a couple of years ago. I love it, and wear it around the house quite a bit but... quite honestly, I messed up the size choice. It doesn't like to stay on and I can't close it because when your full-chest measurement is 47 inches, knitting the size with a finished measurement of 47 inches is not a good choice for a cardigan you plan to wear over light tops (usually a tank top but sometimes a tee if it's a little chillier) *facepalm* As I said, totally my goof up.

So I decided to knit a new one in a much more practical size. And I decided that I wanted a colorful sweater. Like all the colors. No, seriously. All the colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, dark blue/indigo, purple, pink, and black. 9 colors. And I toyed with rainbow order stripes, and maybe using the Fibonacci sequence for the number of rows, but then I got a much more... random idea.

Are you familiar with "shiny math rocks", aka role-playing game dice, aka D n' D dice? I just happen to have acquired a set of these lovely items last fall. And you may remember I knit a particularly epic scarf by the lovely designer, Aetherfang (aka Tania Richter) that involved rolling rpg dice to decide which chart in the adventure to knit. What would happen if I used my D10 for the color, and say the D8 to decide the number of ridges to knit? (If you're not familiar with the Harvest cardigan pattern, the front bands are knit in garter stitch while you knit the body in stockinette) Well, I can show you the first bit:

Fun, isn't it? I love it, And it's all been decided by dice rolls, which is very fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants knitting. I'm having a lot of fun with it :) Almost as much fun as I had using a random number generator to place the beads as I knit Romi Hill's Celaeno shawl. Hmm, there's an idea...

For those of you thinking 'Wait. She's using a D10 and only has 9 colors...?'  I have the colors numbered 1-9 according to good old Roy G. Biv with pink = 8, and black = 9. If I roll D10=10 I use the next color in the sequence. Say the last stripe I knit is orange (aka color 2), and I roll D10=10 for the next stripe, that stripe is then yellow (aka color 3). If I roll the same color number back to back, I re-roll the D10; it doesn't matter if the same number of ridges comes up in a row so the D8 doesn't need re-rolling ever.

Between my very colorful Harvest cardi, and getting through the final rows of my Countess Cathleen (740 stitches per row at this point), that's all my knitting time lately. I did a bit of swatching for Cherish the Ladies this week, just to confirm the needle size I had recorded in my design notebook. All systems are a go, as soon as I have the beads in hand :)

What's on your needles this Spring, fiber friends? We're still getting flurries here on the Island, so we'll see if Spring actually reaches us before June this year lol! I have a feeling I'll be getting a lot of wear out of both my cloak and my cardigan when they're finished! 

That's it from me for now!

Yours in yarn, and dice rolls,

Síle