Tiger Lily Pullover - Redux - Finished

I finished the sleeves this past Thursday.  I like the pooling of the red on the bottoms of the sleeves.  Definitely better than the first version of this sweater with regard to the pooling, and also the fit.  I am really enjoying knitting this pattern, especially with the yarn - Boomerang by Fiesta Yarns.  I love the colors, and the yarn is really wonderful to work with.  The pattern itself is super easy, just a simple top down raglan and I have a fair bit of it memorized.

The first time that I worked for my sister Virginia in her Beadcats booth was at the 2000 Convergence (Handweavers Guild of America conference), held in Cincinnati, Ohio.  During one of my breaks I was wandering the floor and ended up talking to an Amish woman at a fiber booth who was knitting a sock.  It was a simple sock, and I think she was knitting from the cuff down.  When she had to help a customer, she would stick the sock in her pocket, pulling it out again when she was done.  We chatted for a few minutes (I had not yet started knitting, but I made my first purchases of fiber at that show) and she explained that she always had a sock on the needles.  It was a simple easy knit that was eminently portable, as well as being something that you always need more of.  Now, my sweaters are definitely much bigger than socks, but thanks to the size of my knitting bag, they are still quite portable.  And given all of the beautiful colors that Boomerang comes in, I will be knitting many more of them.  Can you have too many sweaters?

Yarn - Fiesta Yarns Boomerang, 3 skeins in Tiger Lily (May 2010 Flower of the Month Color)
Needles - Size 5 (ribbing) and 6
Pattern - Top Down Raglan from Sweater Wizard software with modified neck and body shaping.

Here is a picture of the first version of the same sweater.  The pooling is quite...dramatic...This version was knit on size 8 needles.

Tiger Lily Pullover - Redux - Body Finished

I finished reknitting the body of the Tiger Lily Pullover this week and have started on the sleeves.  Easy, mindless knitting.  It is amazing how much difference changing the gauge can make in the pooling.  Here is what the sweater used to look like.

The striping of the green, pink and red of the new version, as opposed to the pooling of those colors on the old version, really tones down the wild colors.  The scale of the pooling is also more consistent in the reknit version, which just makes the sweater look more like, well, a sweater, instead of some psychedelic hallucination.  It also fits much better.

Tiger Lily Pullover - Finished!

I finished this up tonight.  I have gone back and forth on this one, and even considered re-knitting it and trying to get the colors to pool in a more coherent fashion, but in the end I decided to let it be, as the Beatles said.  Some things just have to be free to express themselves as they are.  It is pretty wild and crazy, but there is an order there, there are patterns in the waves that remind me of interference patterns - maybe if we adjust the rabbit ears...This is the May Flower of the Month colorway from Fiesta Yarns, Tiger Lily.  The yarn is Boomerang, Aran weight, 100% Merino.

Tiger Lily Pullover - Body Done

I finished up the body today.  The colors are wild, and fun.  It will be interesting to see how the color pools on the sleeves.

Tiger Lily Pullover - Neck and Body Shaping Done

I finished up the shaping, and the back and forth knitting and have started on the body.  You can see how the yarn has started to pool.  This yarn is interesting because the color changes are not symmetrical, and they seem to have shorter runs than the Marigold colorway.

This is my easy knitting project, good for working on while reading on my Kindle (Sharpe's Triumph, by Bernard Cornwell), or watching TV that actually requires you to pay attention (like The Sandbaggers).

The Richard Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell are really good reads.  Great characters, well-written, well-plotted.  They have also been made into movies starring Sean Bean, which are also worth a look.  The Sandbaggers is a Brit series that I first watched many years ago on PBS.  I am happy to say that it stands up well to time and to a second viewing.

Tiger Lily Pullover

One good sweater deserves another.  Having finished up Marigold, I cast on Tiger Lily.  The May Flower of the Month from Fiesta Yarns.  I have to travel next week for work and needed an easy airport/airplane project.

I really hate flying these days.  It was bad enough with the airlines cutting back and treating passengers more like cargo than humans, but now with all the security theater I dread walking into an airport.  I really hate being treated like a criminal in my own country, and it isn't even as if these measures are really effective.  Governments always use times of war to expand their powers, and the "war against terror" is perfect because it can never be finished or won.  The same also applies to the "war on drugs."  They provide an excuse for government to intrude into the lives of its citizens and erode our civil rights.  Rights that are enshrined in the Constitution that it seems most politicians never read.  George Orwell was right.  It appears that we are doomed.  For myself, I will opt out of the new body scan and endure the pat down.  I don't believe that the scanners are safe.  Exposure to radiation never really is.  At least the pat downs won't give me cancer.  Been there, done that, no thanks.