The Kureopatora snake scarf continues. It's longer, but otherwise looks the same. I will probably finish it up tonight and post my how-to thereafter.

In the mean time, here's another of the embroideries that litter my house. This one is another doodle - a sampler in the true sense, done to try out patterns that ended up in my book. It's done in a single strand red linen on a linen ground, at about 15 stitches per inch on linen that's about 30 threads per inch. The long dark band at the bottom was done in long-armed cross stitch. The lion, the knot at upper left, the narrow diagonal band next to it, and the dark band at the left edge were in more standard regular cross stitch. THINK was stitched on the count using chain. The rest of the patterns were worked in double running (aka Spanish Stitch, Holbein Stitch).




The dense rose corner surrounding the lion is original, the rest (except for THINK) all have historical precedent, and are all graphed out in The New Carolingian Modelbook. In general I'm not that fond of this one. Done as a true sampler as it was, placement of the motifs was very haphazard. I stitched whatever I felt like trying out, and if the pattern didn't fit - I didn't care (the leggy grapes are truncated at the bottom edge). I didn't plan anything, and the imbalance of the whole thing reflects that.

THINK ended up hanging in my husband's office for a time. That company he was working for in '89 used the heraldic lion as a logo element, which is why THINK and the lion both ended up on the thing. He's no longer there and has another, better embroidery at work now. THINK along with its obsolete logo has been exiled to the upstairs hallway.

In answer to so many questions - yes, I did finish the halfie mittens I showed last week:



Except for darning in the ends, that is. You'll note that the thumbs are on the same side in the picture above. That's because I'm trying to show the palm (stockinette) and the back of the hand (textured) of the pair. A little ending off, and they're ready to go into my hamper of potential holiday gifts. Or if it gets cold here before I get around to distribution, being pressed into immediate service.

My snake scarf continues to grow:



It's just at the point of Scarf Length Viability, but not really long enough yet As you can see I'm just about done with my first full ball of yarn. That leaves just one. I don't think I'll be able to save out my second for edging. It's going to get consumed just doing scarf body. Some have pointed out that I really don't need edging, but I haven't abandoned the idea. Getting more of this yarn is of course impossible, but perhaps something in black.

As soon as I end off the top end, I'll write up a how-to on this one.

Yesterday's entry on the KFI/Noro Kureopatora Plus provoked much curiosity about that yarn. What I have is left over from my Taco Coat. I bought a bag of about 12 balls at a seasonal clearance sale at my local yarn shop back in 1996. It sat for a half year waiting for a project idea to ripen. It ended up being the color accent in my original Taco Coat. The other two yarns used on this project were Cascade Lana d'Oro alpaca blend in black, and Reynolds Tolouse, an ancient black Astrakan textured yarn.



I used about 9.5 balls of my original 12 Kureopatoras. The 2.5 shown yesterday are all that remain. I don't remember the yarn as being particularly cursed with knots. Maybe one or two balls had a knot in the whole lot, and no ball had more than one. I do know that at the time it was available in a couple of color sets, with the one I used being the most eye-popping. Two others I remember were mixed browns, khakis and olives; and another that was a set of various blues.

Another question was on softness and full/felt-ability. Having now tried it, I can say that there's enough wool content in this wool/cotton blend to spit splice. It is possible that it would full. Experimentation would be called for, although with limited availability I'd prefer not to spend my yardage doing so. Also, while it is less scratchy than Kureyon, it's not Merino soft - not by a long shot. This is an outside the coat scarf, not something most people would snuggle up next to under their chin.

All in all, Kureopatora Plus was ahead of its time. It was sold under the KFI (Knitting Fever) label, not the Noro brand. It came out well in advance of similar yarns today, with very little exposure or pattern support compared to its later siblings Silk Garden or Kureyon. In fact at the time people were rather mystified about how to use it, and appreciation was limited. As a result it got added to many people's stashes but wasn't knit up. You can still find it stash aged Kureopatora every now and again on eBay, although I have to say I rarely see any in the color #982 screaming rainbow mix I'm using.

Progress on the snake-like scarf:



It does a bit of the side to side salsa slide than do most other scarves of this type. The biggest reason for this is my working this up in ribbing rather than the more usual garter or stockinette stitches. Ribbing draws in. You can see how it fans out like a lotus flower where the entrelac attachment "seams" stretch it. I like the effect.

Jury is still out on whether or not I'll end up edging this piece. If I do it will be in a very narrow sawtooth or point edging - small enough that the colors of the edging will change every point or two. In terms of yarn consumption so far, I've finished the third to half ball I had left over, and I've cracked into the first of my two untouched Kureopatoras. We'll see how long the scarf is after I've finished most of that ball. If it's long enough, I'll do the edging with the remains of it plus Ball #2. If not - someone is bound to appreciate a Dr. Who length rainbow squiggle.

Thank you to all who saw something redeemable in yesterday's blanket. I think the most telling thing of all is that the entire time I was working on it, my parents smiled sweetly and offered up yarn leftovers and encouragement. At no time did they grimace, giggle, or point. That sort of unconditional support must be something one learns in Secret Parent School, because I find myself smiling sweetly at earnest yet flawed first attempts made by my own kids.

On the knitting front, I'm still blowing the cobwebs out of my brain. This weekend past we narrowly averted a minor flood, and in doing so learned yet another advantage of keeping a large yarn stash stored in plastic boxes. What we see here is several tubs of yarn, dumped out on the projects table in the basement, and an "after" shot of the flood site, with the now empty and drying tubs perched on top of the sump they helped drain.


Had I not had a bunch of tubs lying around the house I would not have been able to stem my mini-tide.

In the course of the whole thing, I ran across two and a half balls of Noro's Kureopatora Plus. This is a multicolor wool/cotton blend yarn that's about six years old. The label calls it out at 23 st = 4 inches, but it knits up more like a heavy DK or even a worsted. It's long since discontinued which is unfortunate.

Although it won't full like the Noro multis popular right now, Kureopatra's cotton content makes it softer than they are. The colors are distributed not through dying but through spinning. It's double ply in construction. It looks like the spinner did a thick/thin thing on each ply, starting with one color and introducing fiber of the second in the thinner sections. Change is gradual (with occasional slubs) from color to color. Then two strands were plied, with the thin strand of one matching up with the thicker section of the other, so that the contrast color of the thinner strand is very evident against the puffy part of the other strand.

I started my latest bit of gratification by working up another of my Kombu scarves. Hey - it worked with a multicolor before, right? But I didn't like the look. The rainbow of this yarn is too strident for the textured Kombu:


So I ripped it out (hard going with this loosely plied fuzzy stuff); and began again. This time with my own off the top of my head variant on the single repeat entrelac rooted multidirectional idea. Mine is done in ribbing on 30 stitches. Provided I have enough yarn, I intend on finishing it with some sort of edging knit on after the main body is done:



I like this much better. Thank goodness my color sense has matured since 14.

Yes, it's true. I made this:



My excuses:

• It was 1970
  
• Limited yarn budget, using whatever I could find in the 25-cent bin, or beg or borrow from friends, relations and people with a grudge against me
• Unlimited time
• Not yet knowing how to knit
• Hating the seaming and end-darning common to standard issue granny square blankets
  
• Having no concept whatsoever of what a useful size might be
• Being 14 years old at the time

I came across it on Saturday, at the bottom of a box of first apartment leftovers I rescued from a narrowly averted basement flood. I did actually use the thing. I did most of my Junior High School and High School homework while wrapped in it. It also accompanied me off to college, where it kept other people from sitting on my bed, or provided a modicum of insulation when hung up against a very cold cinderblock wall.

I will say the haphazard design and awful colors sort of grow on you after a while. Kind of like fungus, or a particularly gruesome looking pet. My kids want to use it as our TV room sofa throw. Maybe you have to be pre-adult to appreciate it. Plus it's absolute proof that Acrylic Is Forever.

After the overland slog on the Mystery Project, I felt the need for some instant gratification. I did a couple of pairs of booties (already distributed to the deserving, and not available for photographs). Then I took that beautiful hand-dyed sock yarn I mentioned the other day and started in on another pair of halfie mittens. I started (more or less) with the Fingerless Whatever pattern written up here earlier, but went free-form pretty early on.



To start, I'm using a traveling twisted stitch instead of ribbing. It goes all the way around the cuff portion, but when the thing gets to the heel of the hand, the palm side switches to plain stockinette.



After the heel of the hand transition, the twisted traveling stitch pattern drops a half-repeat at each cable crossing, and ends up forming a slave bracelet sort of triangle on the back of the hand. The thumb gusset is worked in the plain stockinette part, and is exactly the same as the one on Fingerless Whatevers. The hand and thumb bit end off with a bit of plain old K2, P2 rib.

Yes, the patterning would be shown to greater advantage were I not using hand-dyed yarn. But I like the seaweed-like effect of the mottled greens and blues, and the way the colors play with the highly embossed texture vs. the flat stockinette part. I'm pleased with my minor diversion, and as this yarn was a gift, thank yous are in order. (Plus I'm sure the giver would be curious to see what her offspring ended up becoming.)

Another postscript

Strange intersections of my professional employment and personal avocation keep cropping up elsewhere. I will soon be forced to knit my own robot.

At last - my Hazel Carter Alcazar finished, blocked, dried, and unpinned - placed on a plain white sheet so you can see it better:



My Alcazar (post block) is about 41 inches (104.14 cm) square measured from picot point to picot point across the center. All in all, I found this pattern to be easier than Hazel Carter's Spider Queen:



Working Alcazar without the diagonal seams in the corners helped. The charts are a bit easier to follow than SQ's. Alcazar's charts are presented in both half-width (mirror repeat) and full width formats. SQ's are done in with significant mirror repeats. SQ is significantly larger, and in general Alcazar's consitutent lace patterning is less complicated than SQ's as the patterns are more repetitious and there are fewer of them. Still, I didn't have any problems with Queen either, and rate both as excellent projects for those who are comfortable working from charts.

I touched on my biggest lesson learned yesterday - fiber choice. My piece is supple and soft, and a wonderful arterial red, but being rayon was not optimal for this particular pattern. Look at this corner:



See that cupping just inside the edging? The pattern was good, but the piece did not block out flat. That's my fault. A lace weight wool would have stretched to accommodate working around the corner. I should have anticipated the no-stretch factor and changed the rate of attachment along the entire border, perhaps adding as much as one or two entire points per side. That would have given enough ease for the piece to block out flat. A minor disappointment to be sure, and an object lesson in fiber choice. So it goes...


Postscript

And proof that I'm not the geekiest stitcher out there. While this proof is not quite as elegant as June Oshiro's DNA cable scarf, in certain circles it would be intensely appreciated.

At long last, here it is. My Alcazar, knit in red faux-silk rayon - blocking out on my makeshift blocking board, all thanks to the Columbus Day holiday.



What I've got here is a kids' area rug, topped by some bath towels with a checkerboard flat sheet thrown on top. Over that goes the shawl, pinned out by the points. The checks are nice, even 2" (5cm) squares, and make keeping things even much easier.

I had wanted to do this bit of blocking the Curmudgeonly Way - using my blocking wires to stretch out the central square, then pinning the points out from there. What a brilliant idea! Unfortunately, the stretch coefficient of this rayon is not very high, and I ran into all sorts of problems at the corners trying to even things out. So I winged it, pinning out just the points. (Memo to self - if most lace is knit using soft, supple, and elastic fibers, there's probably a reason why people are doing it that way.)

In any case, here's the piece. Dripping a bit red, no surprise there as red runs and red rayon is infamous for running even more than other reds. But it's mostly rinsed out. I still like it, flawed fiber choice and all. Now to decide whether I keep my Alcazar; or give it as a gift, or donate it to an upcoming charity auction and make myself something else.

Pix tomorrow of it nice and flat and dry, without the eye-popping Peter Max background.