In Which I Throw Technique to the Wind

I am officially obsessed with my Vega beret.

The project began with a bit of trepidation: first the mathy acrobatics involved in getting gauge. I always need to go up a needle size for everything (use a 6?), but ribbing is usually knitted on needles 1 size smaller than the body of the project (use a 5!), but the ribbing on Vega is rawther snug to begin with (5 not working!), so I ended up going up to a size 6 needle.

With size 6 needles, the yarn finally felt right, so I sped through the ribbing with renewed confidence.

Then it was time for the Fair Isle. I will admit, it had not occurred to me until that point that I don't really do colorwork. A quick scroll through the blog archives will bear this out: I am largely a monochrome knitter, with occasional forays into (gasp!) striping.

So I stared at the pattern's little Fair Isle chart for a minute, wondered whether I should hit Google, and then remembered: I am me. Every single knitting technique I know I have learned from a combination of reading books & articles and ample fudging. Some time, in the distant past, I had done Fair Isle. I thought about it and sort of began to remember. Then I fudged the rest, and amazingly, my hat is looking quite a lot like the ones in Jared Flood's pictures.

And I simply adore it.

Good things in a Small Package

I simply love getting things in the mail. (We've discussed this before). The anticipation, the package, the return address to someplace far away with a name that evokes far-off hills, and sheep, and people in sweaters wrapping bouncy skeins of wool in cream-colored places and sending it to the far corners of the country (in this case, Portland, ME)



And then there's the opening. Yep, that's a Brooklyn Tweed logo. And a Brooklyn Tweed thank-you note.



For the purchase of Brooklyn Tweed yarn. (a treat for my completing a reviled and feared task: submitting job apps).



Here we begin Part One of my quest to Knit American. The seed of this idea was planted a few years ago with Blue Garter's praise of the wools of the Pacific Northwest. Crafting is yet another arena where consumers can use their purchasing power to guide the modes of production into sustainable channels, and have a lot of fun doing it. There are not really any wools truly local to where I live now, but buying yarns produced in my own country, or even on my side of the Mississippi, is a lot more local than buying yarn from half the world away. The idea of "Knitting American" expanded a bit with my joining a yarn CSA. And then both Quince & Co. and Shelter yarns hit the market. The idea became a PLAN: sample the yarns of a selection of companies that produce yarn in the US from American wool, make a vote for American shepherds and mills, and see how they compare to yarns spun who-knows-where out of wool sourced from who-knows-where.

As you can see, I'm starting slow, with a hat. But I have heard good things about Beaverslide Dry Goods' sales, and there are some sweater-dresses in Modern Top-Down Knitting that put me in mind of Quince and Co.'s aesthetic...

The beauty of knittinglessness is that it never lasts long.