OhSewCrafty Blog

Something about spring inspires me to knit lace, which is why I wanted to cast on Alice.  Alice is done, blocked, and super cute; hopefully a photo shoot opportunity will arrive soon.  I’ve been rather busy and the weather has been chilly.  Anyway, I digress…after a few days working on Alice, I decided I needed something that required a bit less attention for my “background knitting”, so I cast on Mehndi by Fiona Ellis.  Mehndi has pretty lace accents, but it’s mostly stockinette.  I’m using Ella Rae Silkience, which has resided in the stash for years.  This is a really lovely yarn, pity that it’s discontinued.  Mehndi is mostly finished,seaming is in progress… and I’d like to buy some pretty glass buttons for it.  I should probably shop for buttons locally, but I found these at fabric.com which are tempting.  

Somewhere along the way I finished Alice and got bored with Mehdni, so I casted on the Acorn Camisole by Shirley Paden.  This project is pretty much the antidote to boring stockinette, shaping in the allover lace pattern requires some thought.  I’m using the original yarn, Filatura di Crosa Millefili Fine.  I’m a pretty “standard” knitter, tending not to work particuarly tightly nor loosely.  So, the gauge seemed weird to me- 6.5 st/inch in stockinette on US 7’s with a sportweight?  I had to go down to 4’s to get anything near that.  I knit a fair portion of the back piece on 4’s before frogging the entire thing… let’s just say that getting gauge in stockinette doesn’t mean you’ll get it in the lace pattern.  Lesson learned, I swatched the lace chart on 6’s.  The measurements are correct with a gentle stretch, hopefully this is it.

Disheartened by the frogging, I decided to cast on something new, the Leaf Tank by Fiona Ellis from an old Vogue issue.  I’m using Cotton Bamboo that I picked up from the Lion Brand Studio store in NYC, and went down a needle size with the expectation that this fiber blend will grow easily when blocked.  The pattern is very simple, though I added waist shaping and a bit of length.   The pattern knits up lickety-split; here is the back piece which was finished in just a few days.