Lara is from Debbie Bliss's Alpaca Silk collection and the largest size is a little bit small for me, so I made it first in Noro Kureyon, which just sized it up nicely. I made this last year. It's shade 150.
The colours have a lovely misty Hebridean look, and the stripes remind me of the endless horizons you see up there. The turquoise is the sea, and the grey and lavender are the mists and mountains. I took up knitting in my twenties, having not been a great success with it at school, after a holiday in South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. I was living in London at the time, a city which seemed no have no horizons at all, and when I went back there I was obsessed with reproducing those watery horizontals, shading endlessly between blue and green and grey and brown.
Since I can't draw or paint, it occurred to me that one way of achieving the effect I was after, was with the lines of knitting. I got some wool from somewhere and started knitting a Hebridean landscape which turned into, I think, a cushion; when I got to the top, I couldn't remember how to cast off and had to look it up in a book. Then I made a bag, and then a sweater, all with sea and sand and sheep and little white cottages. I did them all in a mixture of colour stranding techniques which I made up as I went along. I think I must have started looking at patterns while I was making the sweater, but only for the shaping. If I had been able to buy shade 150 of Noro Kureyon at that time, I maybe wouldn't have learnt how to do all of that.
This year's Lara is in Silk Garden, shade 8. I bought a couple of balls to make a curly scarf for a friend, and I was lost. With the leftovers I cast on at one cuff, and the next time I was in my LYS, I bought another ball. I have this idea that if I buy the yarn one or two balls at a time, the cost will be more bearable, rather than facing up to the cost of a dozen balls of Silk Garden, eek.
This is more like a Caribbean landscape. The colours are quite dull here because I took the photo on Sunday morning before I had opened the blinds; in reality they sing and dazzle. The first green is a little harsh. I'm toying with the idea of taking it out in the rest of the cardi, but I don't really believe in messing about with the colours in variegated yarn and perhaps the blues need it. It will have to stay like this until next pay day when I can get the next instalment.
Meanwhile I shall return to the Kauni and some baby hats that I haven't told you about.
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