Woolgathering Dot Net

My intarsia is terrible. Actually, that's not true. My intarsia is fine; it's my stranding that is terrible. I make it way too tight when the bridge is more than four stitches and it leads to quite a bit of puckering. I've done the left sleeve (sans the yellow duplicate stitching) and the intarsia for the right. Last night, I decided to do a small section of black with intarsia (instead of stranding) to see how it would come along. In general, such a small section of black would have the yarn carried over, but I was desperate to try to improve the work. It turned out pretty good! So, my intarsia good, my stranding bad. I hope that with my future experiments in fair isle will improve it.

This afternoon, I went into the city early to show Deb my progress so far with the intarsia for the flame sweater. The BUST offices were very nice and I got to see a group of very cool and interesting women. It looks like a place I'd like to work at someday. She looked at my work and said that it didn't look too bad, especially when steamed flat. She showed me the original and its bell-shaped sleeves and maroon-instead-of-red flame. I think the new sleeve shape and color improve the sweater. I can picture a beefcake of a guy wearing it.

I told Deb that I should be done by Thursday and I hope we'll make plans to meet so I can give her the completed sleeves. Then it's back to Salt Peanuts to finish those sleeves! Just call me the sleeve-lady.

After leaving BUST, I went down to Seaport Yarn to acquire the appropriate materials for my newest project: Ron's Animal Cracker Hat from Prisoner of Azkaban.

This is a still from the last trailer of Ron roaring like a lion.

Posted without permission from Warner Brothers

If you look closely, you can see his really fabulous knit hat:

Ditto

At Seaport, I wandered around for at least half an hour, checking out all the solid colored yarn. In the end, I opted for some Debbie Bliss Merino Aran. I think in regards to texture, it is appropriate in size. Plus, the colors were as close as I could get them. I think the two greens are spot-on. I believe the bottom color is a very dark eggplant, topped with a fuscha. I could only find an appropriate dark eggplant in some Zara yarn, so I decided to go with black and fuscha. Debbie Bliss' white is a bit off-white, which is good, but not off-white enough compared to the ecru in the hat. I think that's forgivable. I'll probably utilize the pattern from Stitch'n Bitch, the Hot Head Hat, for the basic structure and decreases for the ribbing. I think I've kind of figured out the pattern.

I will need to swatch it, to see if it looks correct. Hopefully. Hehe. I'll work on it after I finish Salt Peanuts. I expect to be done with the sleeves by this weekend and then I can jump all over this one. I am tickling with anticipation!

Note added June 11th, 2004: Ron's knit hat in the Hogsmeade scenes looks like a chullo, in either a very dark brown or black. I'm leaning towards the dark brown, but I'll need to watch the movie again to make sure.