Fancy things

I love elegant, fancy clothing. Even though I really don't have much of an opportunity to wear it in my own life, I love to knit it - hence a project I finished about two weeks ago - Eunny Jang's "Ladylike Gloves".I knitted these on size one needles with Alpaca with a Twist Fino, an alpaca/silk blend. The silk in the yarn gives it such a gorgeous sheen, making the gloves look as if they were knitted out a fine silver thread. The pattern itself was very interesting to knit - I got to try out a lot of different techniques I'd never tried before, like an I-cord edging around the bottoms of the gloves. It was also somewhat of a challenge - it was very difficult to work with laceweight on dpns without feeling frustrated at times. I'm very pleased with the results, however, and have enjoyed wearing these on cool spring nights.

I've been working on the sweater Thermal (from Knitty.com) for the last month, and was needing a fresh project, so I decided I'd try knitting a beret. These are my favorite kind of knitted hat - so much more elegant and perky than regular caps. I fell in love with "Belle" by Ysolda Teague, discovered I had two balls of Rowan Wool Cotton in a basic black in my stash and enough purple ribbon for the bow, and two days later I had a hat.

(Sorry the pictures are sideways, guys - I didn't notice until now, and now I'm too lazy to do anything about it). Anyway, this was a pretty interesting pattern, too - it's almost entirely made up of dropped stitches! I'd never done dropped stitches before, so this was a good chance for me to try them out. I tried using bamboo circulars on this, but switched over to Addis after one repeat because the dropped stitches proved almost impossible to pass over the join on the Clover bamboos. I LOVE this hat!