Aria All Done

I finished Aria last night. I made it to the end of the sixth ball of Natural Silk Aran: it's 64 inches long just now but I expect it will stretch. I've hung it up so that it can.

The drapeyness of this yarn is just heavenly: it's soft enough to fold over double so that you get twice the frills on one edge. (My spell-checker didn't like 'drapeyness', but doesn't suggest anything else. It doesn't really like 'spell-checker' either, but I insist on hyphens.) It's worth clicking on the photograph to get the full glory of the yarn, and the frills.

I caught the end of My Cousin Vinnie, when I was finishing off the ends. It's one of my favourites; if I catch a bit of the courtroom scenes, I'm hooked. I always forget that it was directed by Jonathan Lynn, after he'd written Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, and then I look it up and remember again. It's difficult to come up with quotes from it because most of the funniest bits are exchanges rather than one-liners; the scenes between Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei are a joy, even although they consist mostly of them bickering. Vinnie on being given breakfast on his first morning in Alabama - 'Sure, I've heard of grits. I just never actually seen a grit before.'

Blugger won't let me load any more photos of Aria tonight: it must be doing something more important. I'm not here tomorrow, but I'll post again properly on the weekend. Meanwhile you can go over to the Knitting New Scarves KAL and see what everybody else has been doing.

Scarves, But No Bears

I'm afraid I haven't fulfilled the earlier promise of the post which asked you to identify a small pink piece of knitting. It was intended to be a teddy bear's ear, but after I'd knitted four of them and began to assemble the pieces, I was eventually filled with a fit of rage and disgust, and I threw all the bits away. Well, perhaps rage and disgust is putting it a bit strongly, but I got fed up with it. I like sewing, but I don't always like sewing knitting, and that particular piece wasn't ingenious enough to hold my attention. And I had sewn the teddy bear's legs together by mistake.

So the pockets on the little scarf will remain empty, unless I find another teddy / rabbit / pig to take the place of the discarded one. The little scarf is cute, though.

It's from Knitting for Children and their Teddies, and is actually meant to be scarf for a bear, but I sized it up a little bit. Here you can see it on Sylvester, who is being very patient given that I haven't knitted him a scarf for himself yet. Rowan Kid Classic in Feather and um, something else.

After all this fiddle faddle, it was a great relief to return to Aria. I completed another ball of Natural Silk Aran and today I would have finished another, except that I made a mistake while I was watching Startup.com, which was on BBC4. I don't think the film was that gripping, I just kept thinking it was going to be gripping so I knitted a purl row by mistake. Since it would have been at the back of the neck, I pondered leaving it but for once my better self won out and I ripped it back.
I'm nearly half way through the yarn, and I think I'll use it all.

The ingenious Vivienne answered my question about putting functioning buttons in the sidebar, so you can now click on the Knitting New Scarves Knitalong button and be whisked magically thereto. Oh, and there's a new jigsaw too.

P.S. The reason there were four teddy bear ears is because each ear consisted of a front and a back, not because the teddy was a mutant.

Overture

I have started Aria and am at the end of the first ball of yarn. It's Rowan Natural Silk Aran, which is viscose, silk and linen.

I think describing viscose as 'natural' is a bit controversial: it's produced from natural materials, wood or cotton, but the method is very industrial. I can remember it being called rayon, and before that 'art silk', which was short for 'artificial silk'. These names reflect changing fashions in how the fabrics have been sold to us - which of course is influenced by how we want to see ourselves - artificial silk was an attractive idea in the 1920s but artifice then became unfashionable; space-age names ending in '-on' were glamorous in the '50s and then became tacky, and now we're back with it being desirable to be natural, or at least appearing to be.

Speaking of space-age names, does anyone else remember Orlon? I thought it had vanished altogether but I've just checked and it's an acrylic fibre which apparently is still in use for clothing, amongst other things. I certainly haven't seen the word on a label for a very long time, so maybe it's just included under the general term, acrylic fibre.

Anyhow, back to Aria. I think the yarn works perfectly with the pattern. The linen in the yarn makes it look very crisp, but the silk makes it very soft, so it folds flat. It can be folded double, so that there are two rows of frills.

The colours you see here aren't good, although the second one catches the sheen better: the light is so bad just now, it's like photographing mud. The shade is 461, Flax, a very pretty pale blue with silvery and gold lights, and it drapes beautifully. If you've ever done short rows, the pattern is easy peasy; I had it memorized after one repeat. I find metal needles too slippery for this yarn, so I'm using Scottish Fibres' lovely rosewood dpns, the 5mm size.

At the end of the first 50g ball, it measures 9 inches, although I think it'll stretch in wear. I have 6 balls but I don't know whether I'll use them all. There's only 71 yards in a ball and I don't suppose that's enough for a hat, even for a person with a smaller head than mine, which is most people.