This poor little blog only seems to have been abandoned. I knit feverishly … I just don’t give myself much time to post anything here. There’s a veritable avalanche of things to log, to block, to photograph and write about. There’s just the time continuum that gets in the way.
So I happily break my longtime silence today to talk about a pattern that comes with its own soundtrack.
As a sample knitter, more often than not, I knit patterns quickly and move on to the next. Once in a while, I will encounter one so enjoyable that it’s worth knitting again to make a FO of my own. Such is the case with French Cancan by L’Atelier de Mademoiselle C.
The pattern starts with a garter-stitch crescent and afterward, a cable suspended in lace mesh is applied around the edge. I used 2 skeins of Spirit Trail Fiberworks Birte in the colorway Crete. Although the pattern will take you to a crescent that has 201 stitches, you are only limited in size by the amount of yarn you have on hand, working with the ratio that you’ll need 40% of your yarn for the border. With two skeins of
the same weight, there was precious little math involved: I knitted garter until I ran out of yarn – a garter section with 217 stitches. I started the border with a new skein. When finished, I had 32g of Birte remaining.
I did follow the designer’s note to slip the first stitch of every row knitwise to produce a stretchier border edge.
A note about blocking: I ran a crochet cotton lifeline through the last row of garter stitch before blocking. Pinning this area allowed me to limit the stretching of the piece to the mesh/border area without losing too much of the bounce in the body. My final finished size was a 59″ wingspan and 16.5″ depth at the center point.
Now, about that soundtrack … the only downside to this wonderful pattern is that it comes with an ear worm. You will catch yourself incessantly humming the cancan and picturing Toulouse Lautrec images. A small price to pay for such a lovely final product.
This is a simple piece that delivers big bang for easy knitting. I look forward to making up my own, and I’ll do it in Birte myself, because the yarn and project make for a terrific project marriage.