LaLa

I've set myself up for the next few weeks of blogposts with a tidy little backlog of photos.

First, gratuitous Steuey:

Second, the LaLa Scarf from Greetings from Knit Cafe.

It's a quick little knit, the bulk doable in a evening, with the picot edge done the next. It went so quickly I made two. Suzanne, who helped me pick out the colors, received the second and calls it her "fairy wings." I loved the orange, but didn't want the end result to look too halloweeny, which ruled out adding purples or greens, colors I'm particularly fond of. I love the finished combo of the slate blue, deep burgundy, and bright-bright orange.

This summer, my Indian students loved it too, even stayed after class to tell me so.

The finished scarf is only slightly larger than a bandanna size. I've been wearing it with just a tiny knot at the tip (as in the photo above), so the scarf follows a deep v-neck. Now that I look at the Rav projects, I remember that I was initially drawn to it worn close around the neck.

I had spotted the book, Greetings from Knit Cafe, in the past and kind of blew it off. I had seen a lot of name-dropping, look-at-how-glamorous-knitting-in-Hollywood-is books and this one in particular didn't impress me. The projects were really basic ("Let's pretend we're designers and add a few stripes to a basic knee sock pattern"), and the felted saddle blanket (yep, for an actual horse) made from fourteen balls of Kureyon kind of pissed me off.

Fourteen balls! Kureyon!! Fourteen!!! for a horse blanket!!!! I'm not quite as pissed as I was about the cat sweater made from three balls of Prism angora, but close. Plus, there were lots of knitted skirt or slip dress patterns too. Knitted skirts and slip dress patterns piss me off too because I can never ever wear them. Worse, the girl modelling the mohair slip dress pattern (which is adorable) in this book is posing with a giant cake. Who are they kidding? I can provide personal evidence that one cannot combine mohair slip dresses and cake eating.

Thanks to Ravelry, I gave the book a second glance when I was trying to find a pattern for the Haiku. There's some cute stuff in there after all. Part of what I liked on second glance were the yarn choices: Rowan Denim, Blue Sky Alpaca Silk.

That said, get the book from the library. Greetings from Knit Cafe is worth the cost of overdue fines, but not necessarily $25.