It isn't a huge deal or anything, but the Sewickley Gallery Walk IS pretty cool. Sewickley is this neat upper-class town near mine which has a fantastic yarn store, a candy shop with the largest selection of root beer in the state (I hate root beer but my boyfriend loves it) and tons of small businesses and art galleries. A couple times a year, they have the gallery walk with tons of art displayed all throughout ton and there's snacks and wine.
This year, I'm in it. When I was in high school, I took private art lessons and now help out my old teacher as a guest instructor at her summer art camps. She has a huge gallery space for herself, her students, and some of her friends and I get a little room all of my own!! I spent quite a bit of time this week selecting and framing photographs and setting everything up. I also brought two pieces from when I was a student and some knitting - a few stuffed animals, cool hats, baby hats from my handspun, a couple skeins of handdyed yarn, etc.
I was also really excited to get to wear my new cardigan to the show. I just finished knitting it a couple days ago and am freaking stoked. It's gorgeous. It is. It's so wonderful and pretty and comfy and I am so so proud of it. Anyone who realized I made it was quite impressed, as well they should be.
Check it out: It's the Simple Summer Tweed Top Down V-Neck by Heidi Kirrmaier and it's seriously awesome. I'd never knit a raglan sweater before (my sweater experiences are fairly limited) and I LOVE it. All my sweaters will be raglan from now on. Ok, probably not, but I definitely prefer top-down and raglan rocks. Can I get a button that says this? I'll need to talk to my button guy.... Anyway, definitely make sure you read the instructions because there's a lot going on at once here and you need to pay attention to all of it.
Instead of making this a sweater, however, I opted to create a cardigan by continuing to work straight after the neck instead of joining like the instructions say. I had no issue following the pattern with this change. I also added an argyle pattern at the bottom and ribbing at the bottom and the wrists. I had intended to create a button band afterwards but instead made an I-cord loop to fasten one button. This was decided because I liked that one button and my hips are really wide so it would have looked a bit awkward. I'm still debating adding a crocheted edge later to keep the edges from curling but don't mind it much at the moment.
For my main yarn, I used JerryLee Farms Two-Ply Natural. I found half a dozen balls of this amazing stuff at a thrift store (!!!right?!) a year or so ago and have been hoarding it for the perfect project. It isn't a commercial yarn; hell, the labels have had hand written notes on them saying that it's wool from his farm in Iowa taken to be spun in Vermont. The wool still has the lanolin in it so my hands were wonderfully soft. I did occasionally have to pull a small piece of straw out, but that's part of the charm of using farm yarn.
Argyle was new to me, though I was familiar with stranded work and generally dislike it. It was worth the trouble though and turned out amazing. The diamonds were made from Wensleydale Longwool Sheep Shop yarn, which is an English wool I got specifically for this project while in London in July. It's a deep purple that's almost black. I was a bit worried it wouldn't show up against the brown main color but it turned out quite nicely. For my diamond lines I used a bit of yarn which I handspun from some Romney wool the Butler Spinners and Weavers gave me at the Farm Show last month. Spinning Romney is completely different from alpaca, which is what I normally spin, but very nice. I wasn't as consistent as I know I can be, but am pleased with the result and it looks great in the cardigan, which is really all that matters.
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