Rainbow season

In Monteverde, especially in January and February, there is often both mist and sun. Something I didn't realize before living here is that rainbows in the morning slowly sink as the sun rises and rainbows in the afternoon rise as the sun gets lower. Of course one needs long-lasting rainbows to notice this. Here are a few photos I took this rainbow season, which sadly, is now over.
  From our house.

 

Over the shopping center.

  

From a farm in lower San Luis.

From a coffee farm in upper San Luis, a rainbow that is about to set.

Qiviet: yes, I know what it means!

   One day at our weekly Scrabble get together in Monteverde, a player browsing through the dictionary read out, "Qiviet, the wool of a musk ox" and said "Who on earth would know THAT word?" Happily, I am among the lucky few with qiviet experience. Qiviet is a gloriously soft and quite rare fiber. The arctic muskox sheds its thick undercoat all in a very short period in spring and it is combed, not sheared from the coarser guard hairs. Native people used to collect tufts of qiviet that had caught on plants. That was probably easier than cornering a wild animal that as an adult weighs an average of 285 kg/630 pounds. In fact, some qiviet is still collected in the traditional way.
   Friends that visited the Large Animal Research Station in Fairbanks gave me an ounce of a blend of 70% qiviet and 30% merino wool. The merino adds some spring that qiviet doesn't have, so it's an excellent blend for knitting. Qiviet itself is softer than cashmere and eight times warmer than sheep's wool.
   One ounce of my yarn was only 135 yards; we are talking a seriously rare and expensive fiber. After much thought I decided to knit a lace cowl because of the wonderful softness and because that way I won't lose it. I used a  pattern called Abstract Leaves Cowl by Deb Mulder. It's available free on Ravelry.

    Knit up, the yarn is much softer than in the skein. That's saying a lot because the skein is pretty darn soft. A sort of haze or halo develops around the yarn and according to the Large Animal Research Station website, the halo will continue to develop. On their web site you can see a fascinating video of an animal being combed. The fleece comes off in a big sheet or fleece. They also have yarn you can invest in.
   I love looking at the cowl close up. The color was called Blueberry but basically it's muskox color with undertones of bluish purple. I usually block lace but I'm going to wear this scrunched up on my neck so I didn't bother.

  While knitting this cowl I made use of my handy little electronic scale. For example I weighed my ball of yarn before and after a row of knitting and determined that one row took .5 grams of yarn. Thus I could calculate how many rows of the pattern I could do. I could also calculate when to change to the garter stitch border so that I would have enough to finish. It worked out very well because I had less than a yard left when I cast off. (I even have a project in mind for that little bit: it should be enough to make one or two knit acorns.)

 

  This cowl is probably the warmest garment you can make with an ounce of yarn. With the unusually cold weather we are having this week it's reassuring to have this luscious garment available.

Temari without a theme

  I admire people that take an idea and explore it in depth with different variations. That has not been the case with my recent temari. They really have nothing in common with each other except that they are both nicely round.
  This temari is the pattern called Buttercups in Barbara Suess's Temari Techniques book. Contrariwise as usual, I stitched in the complementary colors to her design, using several shades of purple. I like to call it Deep Purple. To fill in the diamonds I used a rayon thread from Morocco that my sister gave me some time ago. I really like the contrast of the cotton perlé and the synthetic. The latter is slightly more difficult to stitch with. (I needed to twist my needle to keep the thread sufficiently twisted. The extra effort was worth it and I plan to use it again.)

The other recent temari I stitched is from a Japanese book (ISBN978-4-8377-0395-2). It has bands wrapped on a C8 marking and then kiku stitches to make flowers in a random pattern.

It wasn't challenging figuring out the charts in the book for this particular pattern but I was grateful to a Japanese friend for translating the part that basically says stitch the kiku as the spirit moves you. Even though you can't see them all in the book, theirs has eight flowers. My spirit moved me to stitch seven.

Bee balm lace

   I just finished a lace shawl that reminds me of the common bee balm flower that grows with abundance in our Midwestern prairies.

I used the Ostrich Plume stitch pattern on page 278 of Barbara Walker's Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns. It looks complicated, but it's one of the easiest lace patterns I've ever knit. Three rows out of four you knit stockinette and the lace row is easy to memorize. I added a border of 5 stitches in garter stitch to keep it from curling.
   When knitting is in progress, the lace looks pathetic. Kind friends avert their eyes and do not question one's sanity. It's lumpy.

Below you see it during the blocking process, pinned to a sheet on top of my bed. The sheet is so I can see all the pins and remove them all. I used an entire box, doubtless hundreds. Using lots of pins reduces the waviness of the edge. Unblocked, the shawl measured 4 feet by 14 inches. Blocking made it magically grow to 5 1/2 feet by 19 inches. (1.7 meters by .5 meters) Because it is so thin a yarn and open an pattern it dried in a couple of hours, even in the summer humidity.

I am looking forward to wearing it. It's going to the opera!

Knitty gritty: I used an Italian yarn, Cashwool by Baruffa in lilac. It's 100% extra fine merino with 1350 meters to 100 grams. Apparently this yarn is no longer available in the US. This particular yarn went back and forth to Costa Rica not once but twice!

With one stroke of the needle

  I love learning new techniques for stitching temari. Recently I've been working on hito hude gake in which an entire motif or series of motifs can be done with a single stitching path. (There is a good explanation of the technique in Temari Techniques by Barbara Suess.)
   To create these balls I stitched kiku herringbone motifs in a spiral around the ball from the north pole to the south pole and back. Some of each motif is done on the way south and each motif is finished on the return trip. Traditionally one color is used going from the north and another going from the south to facilitate keeping track of where you are. I'm not crazy about the way that looks because I like things to be very symmetrical. Therefore on my first attempt, on a 27 cm circumference C10 ball, I used very similar colors and then I reversed which color went south and which color went north. This fools the eye so it's hard to notice differences between the stars. In this picture, it's the smaller ball.

  The second ball, with a circumference of  37 cm, is marked with 32 centers. Barbara suggests this pattern for multicenter balls that are less than perfect because it disguises the irregularities. My ball is a good proof of that concept as the marking was sort of wonky. For this ball I used the same colors in both directions. By having little papers with numbers pinned in each of the areas I could follow the path just fine.
  Because this ball was quite time consuming to stitch, I tested a few different color combinations on partial stars by stitching a few rows and leaving the ends dangling so it was easy to take the threads out. This helped me decide to add more blue. Eventually I decided on outlining in green.

I'm excited about my socks

  I've knit a lot of socks, even though sometime in the past I said something like "I would never spend all that time knitting something that no one would even see." A few years ago I realized that besides preventing inundation by sweaters, knitting socks has much to commend it. It's easy to take a sock along, even one that is almost complete. That's not true of sweaters. Also, hand knit socks are really, really comfortable since they actually fit.  One-size-fits-all is a cruel joke to someone with long feet.
      I've knit lots of fancy socks with interesting patterns such as these from a free pattern called Pomatomus.

  Lately I've been knitting basic socks with various easy stitch patterns that I can knit during Scrabble games or while watching a video. My most recent pair use a stitch pattern called Stansfield 12 from a book called More Sensational Knitted Socks by Charlene Schurch. While I found the author's instructions for knitting socks to contain some errors, the collection of stitch patterns is very useful.

  It really surprised me that when I put my new socks on, the stitch pattern looked completely different than when it's not on the foot. It's a subtle kind of excitement that I'm not expecting anyone else to notice, but I like it.

This season's temari crop

  During the dry season in Monteverde, I've stitched quite a few temari. Now "winter" or the rainy season is upon us, so on this sunny morning I  gathered up this season's crop for a group photo.

I've been learning more about reading patterns and learning some new techniques.

The temari above and the following one use continuous paths for part of their stitching. Learning how to read diagrams for these paths has been a bit mind-bending, especially as I found a small error in the Japanese book I used to learn the one above. The yellow flowers with French knots convinced me that I want to do more free embroidery in the future.

I love the way this large quilt style ball came out. It's not what I thought I was going to get but sometimes there are surprises because as you wrap you cover up things. This is the first time I've let the ball itself show through windows of the wrapped threads. There are many possibilities to explore in this style.

I wanted to try putting some beads on temari, so I tried that on this really little one. I think it's an embellishment that has a lot to offer. I think I'll soon have a bead stash as well as a thread stash.

I'm looking forward to learning new techniques and improving ones I've already tried.