Fall Preview!

Last time I posted I promised some pictures of designs from the Fall issue. As it turned out I had to put aside the Orenburg shawl (that chart is too large for travelling) and go on the road to rendezvous with some of the samples on their way from Germany to a Trunk Show here in the US.

I joined up with Margery and the designs and we had a photo op.

First up is a soft, wonderfully drapey, dark gray stole. With all the beautiful sweaters and coats parading through the pages, you could easily miss it in the magazine. Just a stole. But what a glamorous, versatile accessory for Fall! Here's a view in silhouette:

Also in accessories, I got a closer look at this lovely cowl. It's sparkly and light and the detail of ribbons tied into the yarn is not so easy to see in the long shot from the magazine.

I could see it worn in a number of dramatic, inventive ways. It's wider than a scarf, so you could wear it like a hood, twine it like a scarf or drape it like a shawl. It will knit up quickly without a lot of technical details, the yarn will do most of the work for you and people will be very impressed when they find out you made it!








Stay tuned, the next installment will be: Coats.

Now that I'm back home, I'm reunited with the Orenburg shawl and I'm so glad I've color coded my stitch markers. The row counters tell me which row I'm on, but the design repetitions have gone out of my head. It was much easier knitting through a row to have the colors of the markers change when the lace repeat changes to remind me what I'm doing.

I've used small hair ties, they're readily available, come in a multitude of colors and one package contains enough for several projects at once. Here's how I organized them: the red one on the right and the green one on the left separate the border stitches and tell me which side is which: red for right. The orange markers mark the "pine cone" repeats around the outside of the triangle, and the blue markers the diamond shapes in the center. Not only do they tell me which motif goes where, they make it easy to find those 1-3 stitches of patterning on wrong side rows, tell where the missing yarn over is when I drop one and figure out (in case I forget to turn the row counters) where I am by counting the stitches in between motifs, since they change every other row.

Why do I need to many mnemonic devices? That's another story altogether.