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Thursday, July 10, 2008

Moebius scarf done? Well, no, not quite...

Yep, I was all sure of myself last night...I was in the cast-off mode to finish my first Moebius scarf.
But it was going slower than I expected. Then I thought about it a bit...
The cast-off for a Moebius is the Applied I-cord. (Just learned it - it's pretty spiffy too!) And the way that works, you end up creating a couple of stitches before you knit a couple together and move on. Kind of like an extra couple of steps from a regular cast off.
(This is providing I'm actually understanding how this works...it's reallllly more like magic than anything else.)
Hence why it's "tomorrow" and the first Moebius isn't done yet.
But...I'm better than half way!!

And I did a little bit of my Tri-fold Knitter's bowl home work. As suggested by the clever knitting teacher, I knitted up a little swatch of the wool/sari silk yarn I wanted to use in the bowl to see if it will felt. So, I'm off to felt that swatch and the mystery-yarn swatch my knitting teacher kindly knitted up for me. (Gave her something to do as I kept losing count of my bowl cast on...)

More magic!!! When you're faced with monitoring something you're trying to felt - this can become semi-unadulterated knitting time. (When you're not pausing every few seconds to scroll down on the blogs you're exploring. ) AND....the Moebius is done!! Ta-da!!!
OK, save for the Applied I-cord graft. (More lessons learned - attempting your first grafting of an Applied I-cord whilst huddled over the running clothes washer in the dimly-lit Laundry room, whilst balancing "A Second Treasury of Magical Knitting" by the inestimable Cat Bordhi...is probably not the a shining example of my better judgment. So...let's hold off the grafting until daylight...at a table like a civilized knitter.

The felting results!!! The Mystery Yarn is.... Not felted.

As I paced the floor of the Laundry Room (i.e. walking around a 3 foot circle) I began to wonder if it could be Superwash Wool? Would Superwash burn like acrylic? It would answer the question of why it burned quickly/fizzled up to kinda black nubs...but also showed clear signs of being spun in the vicinity of a haystack or maybe not entirely carded free of hay the sheep....you get the picture. So - not a good option for the base of my Tri-Fold Knitter's Bowl project.

The Wool/Sari Silk mix - seems to have felted reasonably. (I think I knitted it on too large of needles.) The garter stitch bit felted rather well, and it did seem determined to felt into a wad of fiber in the washer...




























So - the wool/sari silk is an option for the I-Cord on the bowl.
But I need to re-visit the bowl-base yarn situation. (Something that would felt would be nice...)

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