Let me preface this post by saying that very little of what you're about to read below is typical for my crafting life.
So I've started knitting another Daenerys. It's not that I'm not a re-knitter, I've knit several things more than once, it's that I'm not usually one for essentially chain knitting the same pattern. Especially when that pattern happens to be a rather large shawl. However, I've been wearing the other one around and gotten many, many compliments on it. During one of those wearing/compliment sessions, a long-time friend of mine who's really helped me out and who is also crafty (so understands that crafting takes time and energy) and is a freelancer (so understands that people need to be paid for their crafts) asked me if I would be willing to make her one. Because she is who she is (knitworthy, a good friend, someone who will appreciate it, someone who has done a lot for me, etc.) I said yes. We settled on a price (much lower than if just about anyone else asked me, but I'm the one who set it so I'm obviously fine with it) and she picked some yarn.
Pattern: Daenerys by Valerie Johnson
Yarn: Knit Picks Chroma fingering in the Drawing Room colourway
She wanted a gradient like mine, but didn't think she was going to like the feel of Kauni, so we settled on knitting it in Knit Picks , which was the first reasonably inexpensive gradient yarn that wasn't Kauni that I could think of off the top of my head. Because she tends to wear a lot of greys and blacks and neutrals, she knew she wanted something that would complement, so she decided on the Drawing Room colourway, which is described on the Knit Picks site as "an elegant group of pastels". I don't disagree with that statement. I will say that this is 110% NOT my colourway, but I do think it will look lovely on her and I admit that it is knitting up rather pretty.
I've worked with Chroma before on my Frostfangs hat and mittens, but they seem to be sourcing it from somewhere new, since it has a different feel to it. It's a bit more slippery feeling, as though it had acrylic or more nylon in it, but according to the label the fibre blend is the same. I definitely like it less than it's predecessor, which, sadly, seems to be the way of many things with Knit Picks these days. It's also different in that the colour repeats mirror one another instead of simply repeating in sequence, so that's an added bit of fun. My biggest concern is that the colour repeats aren't that long, so as the rows get longer there are fewer rows of each colour (which is logical), and I fear I may get to a point where a colour only takes up one row or, worse, part of a row. I bought 2 balls of yarn since she said she'd like hers bigger than mine (and it's fingering weight instead of sport), and I'm nearly through one and the colours are really only taking about 2 - 2.5 rows, so we'll see how things go. I'd like to not have extra yarn since I will never do anything with this colour, but I also know I need to stop before I get to a point where the colours get muddy.
The pattern is easy now that I've done it one and a half times, and I've memorised the main chart. It's still a lovely shawl pattern, really. Not much more I can say about it that I haven't already said.
No comments:
Post a Comment