fo: #rightbrainmutany project

I may be weird, but I actually like doing the year end inventory at the shop.  Well, the counting bit at least.  Gives me a chance to spend some quality time with the yarn, when I barely have a chance to glance at it most days during the holiday season.

This year, I was chatting with one of my volunteers and glanced down at the Briggs & Little Heritage shelf, and saw three skeins of yarn sitting side-by-side.  And then I felt like I got smacked in the face with them.

Sometimes a yarn will misbehave and appear to disagree with anything you try to use it in, and us Knitter's and Crocheter's will have to resign ourselves to leaving that yarn alone until it tells you what it wants to be.

These three skeins SHOUTED what they wanted, and no matter how much I fought it, I couldn't ignore their demand.  They wanted to be this:

The image I got in my head was narrow but deep gradient cowl in some sort of textured stitch, where the three colours transitioned from one to another.

Natural White, Ragg, Sheep's Grey

To get this, I held two strands together throughout the whole project.  First, I held two strands of the natural white together, then one strand of natural white and one strand of ragg (itself a marled yarn), followed by two strands of ragg.  To transition to sheep's grey, I repeated the process, holding one strand of ragg and one sheep's grey, followed by two strands of the grey.


I found the transition from the natural white into ragg was sharper than the image slammed in my head,and the transition from ragg to sheep's grey nearly invisible.  But I can't bring myself to care because the end result was stunning!

The textured stitch was just a simple Irish moss (k1, p1 around for two rows, then p1, k1 for two more).  I cast the sucker on at our last Fibre's Guild meeting with 6.5 mm needles, but after knitting a few inches, realized the fabric was too tight. 

So I ripped it out and started fresh with 8 mm needles.  Much better!

I'd originally planned this cowl to be something like 30" long, but then I realized that was a ridiculous length, and also I would need more yarn - probably just an extra ball of the ragg, but I wanted to keep this within the three balls.  It's actually a perfect size (about 18" long and 30" around).  Easy to toss on and artfully fold in whatever way I need, whether as a fashionable cowl or obscuring most of my head and face when we hit -30C temps.  And the textured stitch locks in heat, so I'm always nice and cozy in this sucker.

Why do I call it the #rightbrainmutany project, you ask?  Folks, I'm not a monogamous knitter.  I just realized the other day that while I own approximately 30 cords for my interchangeable needles, I only have 2 in my knitting case.  I have a lot of wips.  But this project?  It DEMANDED my attention.  I tried to work on other projects, but this one wouldn't allow it.  My right brain took complete control and didn't let me go until this thing was off the needles.

I had this project done in 3 days, so I guess there's something to be said for monogaknitting.  And let me tell you, it was a battle between brain sides when I had to be Not Knitting at the shop.

(Right brain often won.)

Have you ever had a project take over your brain?  Or had a part of your brain mutany and take over you?  And I've only just noticed that I've been spelling "mutany" wrong all this time.  Oh well, I've been hashtagging it wrong as well, and I'm not going back to change any of it! 

A Long Overdue fo: Whitehorse 2015 Year in Temperature Scarf

I don't even want to go dig up the old posts on this project.  The fact that it was knit and (nearly) finished in 2015 should say enough.  Though to be fair, the sewing in of ends only just got finished a couple of months ago, and not by me either but a friend who was tired of seeing it with it's sporadic fringe.

Without further ado, here is my finished Year in Temperature Scarf!

Yes, this is the slatwall chalkboard in the shop.  It makes for a fun display!  For those who don't know, this is a conceptual project, where you choose colours to represent different temperature ranges, and knit rows for each day in the colour that represents the temperature that day!

If you look closely, you can see each of the months labeled, the black deep colds at the beginning and ends of the year (which represents average temps of below -30C), and the swath of light pink that represents my trip to Mexico in June of that year (it was my only chance to use light pink!).  My favourite bit is the change from deep cold in early February to above zero temps within the week.  Oh Canada.

Here's the temperature ranges I chose:

I used Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Sport.  Most people who knit this chose a palette that follows the standard colours used to represent temperatures ranges on weather reporting (red orange yellow green blue purple).  I wasn't a fan of how they came out though, so I picked my own colours!  I love blues and purples and burgundy, so of course that had to be my range.

I knit this sucker in a 1x1 rib and did two rows of each colour for the average daily temperature for each day.  Ravelry tells me I cast on 44 stitches and and I honestly can't remember anything else about it. 

The whole thing measures just shy of 10 feet.  This scarf only really gets broken out when it's super cold, since I can wrap this thing around my head 3 or 4 times!  Makes me laugh every time I put it on, and even more when I try to take it off and boggle at the amount of wraps.

Anywho, now that Christmas Retail Insanity is over, I'm hoping to get back into blogging.  There may be a flurry of posts in the next little bit, as I've been mentally composing a ton of them in the last month or two.  I'm glad to get this one off my list at last!  It's always nice to get an old, long-term project finished up, complete with a post. 

Have you ever tackled a conceptual project like this, and would you consider it?  Where would the temperature range sit on my chart above in your area?