Sunday, June 14, 2015

WWKIP Day and Summer Planning

     It seems the Irish weather decided to celebrate Worldwide Knit in Public Day, too, by giving us a proper summer's day.  For us, that means it was nearly 20*C (almost 70*F) with the sunshine and the humidity, so it was a little difficult to wear the handknits.  Nevertheless, we had fun, though we were mostly in the shade.  This is Knit! had the celebratory spirit with cakes, a few offers, and a fun photobooth.  You can check out the fun on their Twitter feed @ThisisKnit.  I may have completely blown my stashdown goals and bought a skein of laceweight.  Behold a skein of teal Fyberspates Scrumptious Lace.


 It's a 45/55 silk/merino blend.  It's also a kilometer of yarn.  Yep, there went my hopes for a 10k net stash loss for this year.  I had made a little money proofreading this week and decided to splash out.  Originally I thought I would pick up spinning fiber for my first ever Tour de Fleece this summer since I joined Team Ireland, but was enabled into this beautiful skein.  I think it will become a Snow Angel by Boo Knits, though I haven't decided on what size.  I may go big and make the extra large.  Either way, it looks great with silver-lined gold beads, no?


      Otherwise, it's been a crazy month.  Between restructuring my thesis and writing my first conference paper plus preparing to move house (again!), it's been stressful.  I've been working away on three largish projects to maintain my sanity.  Two are gift knits and can't be shown here, but one is for me because I just couldn't take all the gift knitting anymore.  It's a Leftie by Martina Behm using the leftovers from my NaKniSweMo cardigan in Drops Delight and Drops 4-ply Alpaca:


The Drops Delight that I'm using is the Mauve-Vert colorway, but I cut out the green bits because they disappear into the charcoal grey alpaca.  This means that I get a purple tonal scarf, which I am quite happy with if it weren't for the wintry colours.  This is my travel project because it is so small and easy to carry.  I'll be taking with me to the conference next weekend since I'll be packing light. If I bend time to my will, I will get a large chunk of it done there, but I have my doubts about my abilities.

      Lately there has been a lot of planning going on behind the scenes.  I'm going home exactly one week from today and then onto Peru after a few days at home.  We'll be in Peru a little over a week before I come home.  Then I will be home for a few days before the long trek back to Ireland.  There will be a lot of travel time between planes and buses, so I'm planning how much I can get done and what projects to take so I don't run out.  I can't show any of them here because they are all gift knits. (I wasn't joking when I said a lot of gift knitting was going on this summer.)  Rest assured that I have planned well for all this travelling. On the home front, I'm not sure if we are moving at the end of this month or the next, but I'd rather not break into boxes unless I have to, so I have had yarn wound to make sure I am covered until the end of August.  I generally take August off and knit just for me, and this year I have planned to do a Boo Knits Shawl-a-long.  Here are the planned yarns and beads in the order I intend to knit them:

This skein of Malabrigo Sock in the colorway Indiecita will become a Love in a Mist.





This skein of Hedgehog Fibres Sock in Hunter will become a Mustardseed.




This skein of Artesano Alpaca Silk Lace in Russian Purple will be a Rainshine.




This Pearl Malabrigo Silkpaca will become a Cobweb with two different colours of beads.




Finally, this Malabrigo Superwash lace in Arequita will become an Almost Autumn.



I know this is way too ambitious, but I get that way after too much gift knitting.  I may have to take off a week in July to get all this done.  Oh well!

Oh, and there are also plans for next year.  At the moment, they look like this:



There are evil plans afoot, I tell you, evil plans.  Stay tuned!