The Ivy stole edging is a marathon, not a sprint, or even a mid-length training run. I’m on row 19 of 50, and those rounds are getting longer and longer – something in the neighborhood of 1700 stitches at this point. It takes me a standard-length movie to do two rounds; a showing of Planet Earth New Zealand (aka The Fellowship of the Ring) the other night was good for a whopping 3.5 (it would go a little faster if Addi would make the Lace Points in the size and length I need). I just ran out of the second ball of ArtYarns Cashmere I – thank goodness I had the foresight to pick up a third skein of the same dyelot when I noticed the new shipment at Knit/Purl was a slightly different shade! It’s pointless to show you pictures of my progress: the edging is picked up on a 47″ US #0 needle, so all there is to see is a big scum of lavender froth with stitch markers around the edge.

I’m almost done with a secret project for Shibui, so naturally my mind has wandered to what’s next. I’ve got something in the hopper for Popknits that I’m very excited to cast on, and I’ve been mulling over possibilities for the new Casbah. The confluence of the new Interweave Knits summer issue with Megan’s post about knitting cowls with doubled sock yarn turned on a light.

Look at all the complementary sock yarn I already have in the stash! Counterclockwise from the left, that’s Socks That Rock Lightweight in Amber and Mica, Dream in Color Smooshy in Gothic Rose, Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in Cedar, Socks That Rock Lightweight in one of the colorways with rock names they don’t seem to offer anymore, and of course the Casbah. All mostly superwash merino. Of course, a worsted-weight wool tank top makes no sense. But what if I shortened the body of the Confectionary Tank and wore it as a vest next fall? I couldn’t help myself. I started swatching.

The design-minded among you will notice that the sidebar’s looking a little less scraggly. I owe Mr. G for this. You’ll also see there’s a link to his company website: one of the reasons I knit so much is that my partner for social activities is pouring all his energy into launching a small business. I think you can only know what an effort that requires if you’ve actually done it yourself. We certainly didn’t comprehend what we were in for when we took the decision for Mr. G to leave his job to work on SweetSpot full time. We saw a need within his family for better communication about his father’s diabetes; we saw that Adam had the skills and the passion to do something about it and to extend the project to other families in the same situation. He’d wanted to start a company of his own for years, and we thought now was probably the time to try: we don’t have kids, I have a job, we have some savings put by to cushion us for a year or two. Neither of us fully imagined the emotional drain, or the way every conversation we have would turn to the business, or the frustration of trying to bring in the support and relationships necessary to sustain a worthy one-man project. But SweetSpot is out in the world now, and if you or someone you care for lives with insulin-dependent diabetes, you might find that Mr. G’s service can help in the daily work toward wellness. It fetches, stores, and analyzes information from blood glucose monitors, and it offers a teamwork structure to make family participation simpler and more constructive. It’s free to try it out, and if you have any questions, the CEO himself will take your call in his handknit socks. How many companies can say that?

Who knew it would be so difficult to arrange strips of fabric in a seemingly random yet balanced manner? This is not the kind of skill I’ve had a chance to develop through knitting, although if I neglected my poor Gee’s Bend meets Mason Dixon blanket a little less, I might get more practice.

Exhibits 1 and 5 were the clear favorites, with 1 pulling ahead late in the race. (The social scientist in me wonders if this didn’t have something to do with them being the first and last options, and whether they would have gotten as much love if they’d been in the middle of the group.) Actually, they were my favorites, too. And you all made me think harder about what exactly appealed to me about each one.

Number 1:

This one has the most overt balance, I think: the diagonal parallel shift of the pink flowers and brown polka dot short strips; the strong Amy Butler browns spaced wide like columns; even distribution of lights and darks, with the lights forming a capital N if you squint at them. What bugged me: the Butlers being the same height, and the short strips along the top being equal in stubbiness.

Number 5:

I liked the energy of this arrangement, the way my eye had to move over the composition. But ultimately it was, perhaps, a little too unsettling. Plus, using the squinting trick, there’s a vast past expanse at the lower center with no dark mass to counterbalance it. This is where I got to thinking that the lower edge might look funny with a dark binding.

I also realized I probably need a ninth strip for width if I want the thing to be square.

So I went back to the drawing board. I looked in Bend the Rules again and realized that Amy Karol’s version staggers the short strips in the middle of the long ones, as I did with the pink flowers in version 5. So I thought I might give that idea more thought. I also realized I’d forgotten what I was drawn to in Moonstitches’s pleasing sheets: the horizontal continuity she achieves by varying the width of the strips and keeping those with large patterns in the order they were cut from the cloth. That ability for the eye to slide sideways across the quilt gives it order, I think. Most of my fabrics don’t have a pattern that you’d notice repeating horizontally, but the Amy Butler does. I thought I’d try making use of it.

This time I’ve tried to reduce the chaos by reducing the number of darks on lights and vice versa. Seeing it on screen, I think I might make a further change: slide the brown polka dot interrupter up the Amy Butler background strip, and move the pale twiggy one down the green strip next to it. Swap them visually, so that the brown polka dots stay together and offset the pink florals diagonally, sort of as in version 1.

What do you think?

And yeah, I’m just gonna sew the dog hair right in.

Ladies and gentlemen (okay, so -men is ambitious), I need your votes! Saturday was sunny and glorious, and I spent a happy hour in the back garden cutting fabric strips for the Bend-the-Rules Lap Quilt. That was the easy part. Now I have to decide on a pleasing arrangment, and for that I could use your practiced eyes.

Exhibit 1:

Exhibit 2:

Exhibit 3:

Exhibit 4, which is just like 3 except I’ve removed the little pedestal of the sage green to the strip second from right:

Exhibit 5:

If you have a suggestion to improve the quilt beyond what I’ve proposed here, let me have it. The backing is the sage green (which has wee polka dots, as you can see better in the original picture below).

The binding will be mostly the Amy Butler at left, since I still have so much of it, unless I decide I don’t like the edges being so dark.

I worked on my little sundress yesterday, too, which means I ripped off the skirt and cut about six inches off the side so there wouldn’t be as much fabric to gather. It was way too Baby Doll for my figure. Now it’s better, but it still needs a zipper and a hem and a cute button for the ribbon ties that aren’t long enough to tie.

But the knitting continues predictable and satisfying:

I finished Ana a good two weeks ago, but I’ve been waiting for natural light and a photographer. The hat isn’t as yellow as the afternoon sun made it in these shots, but you get the idea. I don’t know about “boho chic 4 ever,” but I think it’s a good argument for bringing back the snood.

While Mr. G was in Toronto, I had to point out to him that he was in Yarn Harlot country, and that while she herself was a stone’s throw from my own home town at the time, he should really be storing up impressions of the lay of the storied land to relate to his wife. He should especially keep an eye out lest he should happen to stroll by Her LYS.

Reader, the sainted man walked thirty-five blocks to visit said LYS. And he brought me this:

I may have suffered the most fleeting of disappointments that this is a Budweiser cap and not Molson or some other brand that’s, well, Canadian. But it’s still an awesome idea, and it’s also a magnet — a pleasingly powerful one at that.

But let’s pull back for a better look at the yarn, no?

Just imagine how improved the world of knit blogging will be if they ever invent Pat the Bunny technology for computer screens. You know, so you can feel the yarn in the picture. Because this is HandMaiden Casbah: a collective 975m of 80% merino, 10% cashmere, 10% nylon. Ain’t it glorious? Poor Mr. G was a little crestfallen that he hadn’t brought me something I’d never seen in the U.S., but I assured him that he’d managed to peg one of my very favorite yarn companies, and it’s a colorway I’ve never seen. It isn’t on the HandMaiden colour card – perhaps it’s exclusive to Lettuce Knit?

According to the company’s information, this is designed to be a sock yarn. I’m here to tell you it doesn’t feel like one. And I have such a wealth of it! I do believe it needs to be a sweater of some kind. I think I’ve written before that I have opinions about the use of variegated yarns in large garments. Socks can be as rangi changi* as you like. Babies can get away with anything. But it’s tough to sell me on strong random color changes in large swathes. I need regular striping or something to subdue the chaos. I’m half considering designing a sweater made out of narrow strips of garter stitch so I can figure out the color repetitions and make them stripe. That instinct, I realize, borders on the psychotic. Think of the seaming! There must be an easier way. Miters might do it, for instance. So leave me your suggestions – what patterns do you know that might make the best use of these soft desert colors?

Of course, I can always settle for a lovely lap blanket. The yarn is machine washable, after all. And no matter what it becomes, my husband is a sweetheart.

*This is a useful Nepali word with the felicitous dual meaning of “riotously colorful” and “drunk.” Honestly, is there a better descriptor for some of the sock yarn out there? Why don’t we have an equivalent word in English? Nepali fills many holes in my English lexicon. Another is kaancho, which describes the mouth feel of under-ripe bananas.