This post does contain knitting, but also mention of terminal illness and death. You may therefore wish to skip it.
You may have read my last but one post about Flowers in the Air. I made it from a yarn I was winding as I sat by my friend’s bed in hospital. I didn’t have any blogging in me in the run up to her funeral, which was on Monday. We all respond differently to times like these. For me, I didn’t want to blog – but I did want to finish off this scarf. I tried not to make it load-bearing – ie if I wasn’t finished I didn’t want to have a meltdown over it – but in the end I got it done in time to wear as I stood and read out the tribute I’d written for her at the service.
I found that the amount of yarn perfectly matched the pattern in that I had nothing but a tiny scrap leftover, once I was finished knitting eighteen rows of flowers (thirteen repeats of the pattern after it splits so you get a plain middle section) then binding off, plus a few strands for fixing one dropped stitch and a hole where I’d joined two broken bits of yarn together.
The pattern suggests that this number of repeats should take 530 metres, but I did it with just 430. The tightness of my knitting means that the finished size is considerably smaller than predicted – mine measures just 53 inches across, which doesn’t even match the predicted width of the smallest version.
As you can see, I wet and wire-blocked it, and it’s shrunk back from there. I am considering giving it a light steam to increase the size and show off those wee flowers better. Can one steam block baby merino wool? The internet says yes but I was afraid to ruin the thing I’d been pouring my heart into for the past fortnight. I’m soaking it now as I write to see if another block might give me more expanse, in particular I’d love the flowers to be more obvious with all those lovely wee glass beads.
Using beads in knitting is oddly fun and I love the end result. It’s also very footery and requires a teeny crochet hook, less than 1mm wide. I got the hang of the pattern pretty well and eventually worked it just by reading my knitting and seeing where the beads had been on the last row. Two together, two apart, two together, plus some increases and decreases that slipped easily into routine over time. Plus figuring out the best way to hold the crochet hook as well as both knitting needles (and the answer is not ‘in your mouth’, since the skin on my lips wasn’t enjoying the cheap metal…)
In the end I wore it as a bandanna and actually really like it – it looks great peeeking out from inside my coat collar.
What a time, my friends. What a time.
The pattern is Flowers in the Air (Ravelry link) by Sachiko Uemura. The yarn is Malabrigo Lace (Wool Warehouse link) in Cypress. I’ve added this post (two days late) to the Unraveled Wednesday linkup hosted by Kat.
The Crafty Yarnster 