Yarn Choice for Capecho

Isobel and I stopped by Yarns in the Farms on our way home yesterday to say "hi!", since I wouldn't be able to attend Knit Night with Peter being back (Isobel was very excited for him to come home, by the way - "Yay!" and hand-clapping when I told her we were going to the airport to pick him up). While there I helped a woman make color choices for a felted bag along the lines of the diaper bag in Knitting for Baby that she was going to have her mother knit for her. We ended up with a lovely combination of deep olive green (F29), some light green (F31), and a skein of a beautiful, springy, variegated yarn (G123) in Sheep 2.

Anyway, I realized that I could do the Capecho in Green Mountain Spinnery's Sylvan Spirit, a merino/tencel blend. I have two skeins of Luminosity (when that yarn came in the shop, I went gaga) already and would probably need only three more. I think the tencel, which gives an amazing pearly sheen to the stitches, according toClara, would give a wonderful effect and enhance stitch definition. I'll have to give it a swatch.

Speaking of swatches, I wound up a skein of Schaeffer Elaine the other night. It overflowed the ballwinder, being 600 yards, and I had to wind up the rest of it by hand. I guess I could have pulled the cake off the winder and then started from the other end of yarn left on the swift to make two cakes, but it was kind of fun to actually wind some of the yarn by hand. Man, is that stuff soft! It's also finer than it may appear in the skein. I started swatching with US8s and immediately found the stitches too open with the thin parts of the yarn. The US7 swatch is better and probably what I'll use, though I may do a quick swatch on US6s to see what that would look like.

Stockinette is fine in this yarn, but I think garter or reverse stockinette really shows off the bumpiness, so I am planning to go top-down in the round and then turn the whole thing inside-out a la Wendy's Last-Minute Purled Beret.

I've made some more progress on the Sheep 3 Shrug but am really keen on something woolly with all this super-cold weather. I had hoped to do the Jane Addams sweater on a larger needle so it would go faster, but I'll just knit as fast as I can!