Let the Summer Begin

How appropriate to get your first farmer tan of the season on Memorial Day. What may not be so seasonally appropriate is to finish the knitting on a wool scarf. I'll post a proper summation after I weave in the ends and block it a bit, but just had to share the fun of beading and profess my love of Karabella Aurora 8. If you're shopping for a yarn splurge, you've gotta try this stuff.

There's a great article here which talks about plies and gives a good picture of the yarn. There have been reports in the blogosphere about pilling, but I've been dragging around this stupid scarf for years (no, I'm not exaggerating) as well as pulling the beads over the yarn and so far, it looks great. We'll see how it wears, but I definitely think it's worth its price tag.

Well, we'll see how it wears when it gets cold enough for scarves again. In Buffalo, that may be later this week.

Oh, and beading... the jury is still out. It produces a great result, but it's fiddly. You have to move the beads down the yarn with every row and when you're a glutton for punishment and decide to do beads down the entire length of a scarf, well, let the tedium begin. I know there are various ways to attach the beading, but I prefer to string them all on my yarn and then bring one up to the stitch where I'm going to place it. Again, this was a class I took and never finished the project. There's a reason why I haven't signed up for classes this spring! I still have several unfinished class projects on deck. We won't talk about this as a sort of bad student fantasy where I'm pretending to not do my homework for once in my life.

One good thing about all these classes (except for the money my credit card companies make) is coming home with lots of tips that aren't really related to the specific project. It's hard to see in the picture, but our teacher told us to use the plastic clips from bread packaging as mini-bobbins to wind up the excess from your miscalculated long-tail cast on. It keeps the tail from getting tangled in your yarn until you have a chance to weave it in.

As with all crafty supplies, I started collecting those little tabs and passed the word along to others to collect for me. I'm pretty sure I have enough tabs for the entire knit-blogging world. Let me know if you need a couple!