meandering through picture quality, knitting potato chips and a brief history of my stash

Today it's finally sunny here in Vienna after days and days of grey fog. I quickly whipped out my camera and took some pictures of my almost and recently finished objects on my window sill. Not the most charming background, at least compared to the balcony I used to have at my disposal, but it's the only place in my room that has enough light for my camera to not need flash - comparable to Turtlegirl's top of the washing machine. Except the sill only works when it's sunny.

Two projects belong in the "knitting potato chips" category. I had to stop myself after the second one (which still isn't done, because the jumble on my couch has swallowed the green yarn I need for the bottom edging), otherwise I think I'd knit about three, four, five ... six, seven, eight ... nine ten?

The potato chip pattern is the Telemark Pullover by Erika Flory. Top-down raglan, very easy, infinitely customizable, done in a flash and gender-neutral. The pattern is very clearly written, but as mentioned in many other project descriptions on Ravelry, once you're switching to knitting in the round, cut your yarn and add it or a new ball at the left underarm, otherwise the end of the garter stitch placket will not add up in the middle. If you don't care to finish the placket, no need to switch.

Here's the first one I made:

Made with my favorite workhorse yarn, Lana Grossa Cool Wool 2000. There's a lot of history in this little sweater. The wine red yarn is from my first and to date last pair of real gloves with fingers, the apricot is a lonely ball of yarn I rescued from the sales pile a while (years) back and couldn't find a project for and the coral ... oh the coral.

The coral used to be piggy pink. Yes, really. I used it to make gloves for my mother (shown at right). I had lots of piggy pink yarn left over and it lived in my stash for many years until my friend told me of her pregnancy. I looked through the whole stash and picked out all the yarn I could use for baby knits. But this yarn was too piggy pink. Overdyeing it seemed like the best option, so I bought wine red dye and went to work. The yarn looked lovely coming out of the dye, a muted wine red. Then I put it in the fixing bath and it turned coral. I just hope it doesn't turn back into piggy pink in the first wash. It also lost weight - it's significantly thinner than the apricot and wine red yarn, which is the reason the sweater looks uneven.


The Telemark Pullover can also look like this:

More Lana Grossa Cool Wool 2000 leftovers, this time the green from my mother's gloves and some of the insanely bright variegated Cool Wool that I used for her wrist- and legwarmers eons ago when I got back into knitting (so, 2005). It is quite alright for kids, though, since it will make the child easy to spot. I intentionally left the arms short - this pullover turned out bigger than the other one, so it will fit longer, probably even into spring 2011, when it can be worn over a long-sleeved shirt.
And that's the end of the Telemark pullovers for me. No more! No more Telemark pullovers until all the rest of the baby knitting is done! Otherwise I'll never get to the baby socks.