Meet Bettna

Thanks everyone for the nice comments about the Fair Isle Yoke Sweater. It helped get me over the FO doldrums. Do you ever get that? Feeling a bit down after finishing a long project? It's not really a depression - more like a little feeling of deflation, the wind out of your sails. I get the same sort of "where do I go next?" feeling after I finish reading a really long book that I liked.

Luckily doesn't seem to last long though. Within a day I had cast on for Bettna. It's Cornelia Tuttle Hamilton's design - the one on the cover of her Noro Revisited pattern book. After my experience with EZ I feel like I could knit Bettna in my sleep. In fact I have already pretty much abandoned any idea of actually following the pattern per se - it's really more of a guideline. :)



For instance, the pattern calls for using Silk Garden at a 16 sts per 4 inches gauge. Now, in my opinion Silk Garden is an 18 sts per 4 inches gauge yarn. Period. It doesn't look good at any other gauge and doesn't make a nice fabric. So I've stuck to my own gauge of 18 sts. I'm also not messing around knitting the "skirt" section in three pieces. Why? Why would you do that? Just makes more seaming later for no good reason. So I'm knitting it all as one piece.

Hopefully, this won't all backfire on me later - but for now I'm thinking "Thank you EZ for freeing me from the chains of pattern slavery!"

PS - Has anyone worked with any Silk Garden that was produced in 2006? I've noticed a HUGE difference in the quality of the yarn compared to previous years. There's WAY less "stuff" in it. I'm not stopping to pick out bits every five seconds. But mostly it's significantly softer. I mean, it's almost like they've actually started putting silk in it. ;) You don't suppose they got spooked by this whole thing do you?