Knitting on commission

Great news for my knitting!

Week before last I stopped by my fabulous LYS, Mary Charles Yarn Company. Mary Charles is an awesome lady and her store has lots of very, very yummy yarn. Anyway she was looking for someone to knit some samples for the store and asked me to do it! And I'm getting paid in store credit, which means I get YARN! This is incredibly welcome news right now because Italy wiped out my bank account, and a series of unfortunate events has created a situation where I may not have cash until mid-september. I was going to have to use yarns from my stash (oh no!) to keep me busy. The horror!

Anyway the assignment was a pair of mittens in Mission Falls 1824 Wool from their most recent pattern book of mittens, cleverly entitled "smittens." If you scroll to the bottom of Mission Falls' patterns page the ones I'm doing are the stripes-with-swirls in the lower lefthand corner.


If you aren't familiar with Mission Falls Wool, it comes in a bajillion colors and MC let me pick which ones I wanted to use, which took FOREVER. Eventually I settled on a light purple, a deep raspberry and a nice cool green.



The raspberry will be used for the thumb and the decorative ruffle and swirls. I'll post more pics once I get em done. I just think these are so cute, and the wool is great to work with AND it's superwash. I haven't washed my swatches in a washing machine yet but I did use a little pantene on em (hey, it works for my hair!). I didn't have any wool wash on hand, and above-mentioned financial straits keep me from driving to the far LYS to get some. Anyway, they get SOOO soft after you wash them. I love this yarn and will probably wind up using it and maybe even the same colors on something for myself. I just love the green and light purple together.

Oh! I almost forgot! I have decided to get a little kooky. I mean, how serious does one need to be when knitting adult-sized mittens with stripes, swirls and ruffles? Anyway so on the right mitten I have REVERSED the stripes so that it begins and ends with the opposite colors. Knitting madness!

So, you may be wondering what I'm planning to use my store credit on. I am too, but I have a pretty good idea. I have for a long time been intending to knit a sweater, as I don't think I can really call myself an accomplished knitter without having one of these under my belt. I have changed which sweater this would be about six hundred times in the last year since I decided to make a sweater. I haven't actually picked up any yarn because it took me so long to land on a pattern and because I was afraid of making a big investment.

When I got back from Italy I was fired up! again, and decided on the Gatsby Girl Pullover from Interweave Knits (scroll down a bit). But then I got poor, and then I got this store credit, and MC doesn't carry the yarn and I hadn't decided yet if I was too lazy to substitute yarn and then... I saw this sweater from Blue Alvarez designs. It calls for Blue Sky Alpaca cotton, which Mary Charles sells and which I have petted on almost every visit to the store, y'all this stuff is sooo soft. I will be stopping by sometime soon to start thinking about colors and see how far my credit will get me.

Anyway so that's my good news.